by Edweird Lytwer-Bulton
(Sometimes knows as Russell Hoisington)

Copyright© 2004 -- All rights reserved

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

It was a bright and shiny day; my wood-frame house shook like a stressed-out crack junkie in the pangs of withdrawal as I stumbled from between the rumpled sheets of my comfortably lukewarm waterbed, grabbed freshly laundered jockey shorts from the clean-laundry basket, and, staggering with drowsiness, got them properly oriented the second time I pulled them on, before finally reaching for my comfortably shabby, knee-length, plaid, flannel robe, the one I normally wore only inside the house out of sight of the general public because it had more variegated stains defiling it than has a whorehouse mattress, but I had no other choice since it was the only robe handy, and I had to get to the front door before the pounding sent the neutral beige Sears Best Easy Living interior latex paint on the gypsum board walls fluttering to the floor in small chips, like a bland snow storm of mediocrity.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

Grumbling like a frustrated spinster with bad false teeth I jerked open the front door and beheld the entire defensive line of the Broncos on steroids--to include the developmental squad. I blinked and they coalesced into one beefy, red-faced man sporting shoulders as wide as the flight deck of the Nimitz. It was the incredible Hulk's bigger and far meaner brother. Menace swirled around him as thick as electrons about a uranium atom. He was drawing back either a small Celebes ox with a bad complexion or a well-battered fist.

"Hey!" I said, jumping backward and slipping on one or two dropped sports sections of the Rocky Mountain News, but managing to remain as upright as a Baptist preacher thinks he is--and in the path of imminent danger.

Okay, so "Hey!" wasn't a grandiloquent speech, and you'd expect better from a famous author. Or from an infamous one (I always get those two words mixed up). I didn't have time to reinvent Hamlet's soliloquy, okay? Let's see how inventive you are when you're life's about to go the way of buggy whips, Edsels, and eight-track tape players. But he lowered the fist to his side, though he kept it clenched tighter than Great Grandpa Macleod squeezing a buffalo nickel when the collection plate passed.

The man--I reasonably assumed from the narrow, ratty beard that crawled around its jaw line like an unpressed caterpillar, the Schwarzeneggeresque physique, and the seventeen tattoos on each of its upper arms that it was male--was a gall-swollen redwood growing out of my front porch. Try to imagine a redwood topped by leaves the color of recently tarnished brass and possessing a face like a rabid buffalo with its balls caught in a bear trap and you'll be close. "Your name Hoistigon?" he snarled, displaying half-dissolved sugar cubes in a cup of cold French roast Folger's as his concept of teeth.

"No." I decided I would show the fearsome brute no fear, even though he was tougher than a Welsh spelling bee. He obviously was the type of thug who, even as an adult, roasted ants in the noonday sun with an eight-inch magnifying glass just to watch them explode. But I instinctively knew that he would respect someone standing up to him. Okay, I was silently and fervently praying to every major and minor deity I could name that he would show me that respect because I knew that slamming and locking the door would offer me as much protection as a starched kleenex in a Tokyo tsunami.

I crossed my arms across my chest to hold my robe closed, and to pin my heart between my ribs lest it burst forth like the Alien. I hoped he wouldn't realize that a wet, yellow patch now stained my formerly-clean, white, cotton underwear the way gangbang semen stained the virtue of a Catholic girls' school Honor Student.

He blinked. Slowly. Like someone who routinely has to blink via conscious thought. A primitive frown of puzzlement sprang to life on his blood-red face and slowly evolved into abject confusion. "I thought this was the Hoistigon place," he rumbled, and I suddenly knew how Roman marble statues tumbling in the drum of a runaway cement truck with a defective power take-off would sound.

"The Hoistigons live about three counties over that-a-way." I started to point, but I was afraid my quaking hand would imply that I was either terrified or offering to jack him off. Neither indication promised less than a trip to the emergency room--more likely to the city morgue--for me. I nodded vaguely past the escarpment that was his left shoulder, and I wasn't surprised when he twisted to look. With the shifting of his weight the boards of the porch groaned like oarsmen on a slave galley learning the Captain wanted to go water skiing. "My name's Hoisington."

He turned slowly back to me, as inexorably as a continental glacier scraping Canada off the map. "Close enough."

I was afraid it would be. The man was as pissy as a twelfth-hour diaper and certainly no more pleasant. Keeping my courage from scattering like children at recess took more effort than was required to lift the turret from a tank, or to hurl a space shuttle into orbit, or to keep a priest off an altar boy. "And what brings you here, Mister... ?"

"Collucci. I'm looking for my daughter, Nykki." He gave me the kind of look most frequently used by policemen when a man wearing a mask and holding a gun and a overstuffed bag runs out of a bank and into their midst. "You just get out of bed?"

I stroked my unshaven chin with a thumb-and-forefinger pinch and looked down past a recent pizza sauce stain on my robe to bare legs and feet scarred by multiple accidents while playing mumbletypeg as a teenager. My breath was worse than an armadillo that had lost a game of chicken with a Peterbuilt outside Del Rio in August. Although I'm over six feet tall, he could easily look down at my tangled hair that was indistinguishable from a nest built of cheap grey yarn by a schizophrenic rat in a government drug research lab. Clearly I was in a battle of wits and had the superior weaponry with my intellectual howitzer versus his BB gun. But was I sufficiently awake to aim?

"As a matter of fact, I did." That was Plan A: confuse him with facts until I was coherent enough to think of Plan B.

One bloodshot eye, its sclera displaying a map of the interstate system in red, closed a little more and began twitching erratically, as if telegraphing his alleged thoughts in Chinese Morse code. "Whadda ya doin' in bed this time of day?"

I shrugged and tried to pinch off another dribble of urine through conscious effort while maintaining a face as calm as the corpse I could easily become. "I work nights. I have to sleep sometime."

The twitching became a flutter, not unlike the wings of a hyperactive butterfly with its feet caught in an Okefenokee swamp sundew. Suspicion dripped from his voice with the annoying predictability of a leaking faucet at three in the morning. "On a Saturday?"

I subtracted another five points from my already low estimate of his IQ. "Last night was Friday. I got off work three hours ago. Why are you looking for your daughter here?"

As if he had finally made the Friday-Saturday connection he grunted, a drawn-out occasion accompanied by malodorous breath still saturated with last night's garlic and beer. "I figure she's been foolin' around lately. You know--by the way she'd been actin'. All moonstruck eyes 'n' giggles? I found where she hid her diary under her mattress. It says she's been doin' some guy named Hoistigon."

"Oh, well, then that's not me. They live about three counties over that-a-way," I said with a directional nod and an unsuccessfully restricted milliliter of urine.

He turned like a sorghum molasses tornado in a Siberian winter to look over his right shoulder and then twisted back, one Jimmy Dean Sausage thumb emerging from a fist the size of a 1996 four-door Buick Century to point over his left. "You said they lived over that-a-way."

Ulp! "Until you told me about your daughter I thought you meant the southern branch of their family. Couldn't be them, though. They're Celibate Baptists. Haven't had a single stroke of sex for over three generations."

"Oh," he said with a slow, contemplative nod of his head. Clearly each of his thoughts, small though they were, threatened to overflow the banks of the mental stream in his cranium like the Han River in monsoon season, so I subtracted five more points. "Billy seen her coming up your sidewalk."

I was as clueless as an Amish bride on her wedding night--unless Billy Forrest had traveled seven thousand miles just to give that message to Collucci as revenge for my mentioning his name in the author's comments, which wasn't all that unlikely. "Billy?"

"Yeah." To him that was self-explanatory. It couldn't have been more final if it were a speeding ticket in West Point, Kentucky on Easter Sunday.