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The Adventures of the Pisco Kid
Michael Standaert's debut work of fiction is
so out there, so peculiar, it's hard to believe he spends most of his
professional hours crafting incisive non-fiction on world affairs and
other decidedly not-fanciful subject matter. But it's his keen eye for the
points where culture and politics intersect with the common man that makes
him so skilled at developing characters, situations and landscapes that
skewer society's hypocrisies and absurdities.
The brand new, fully industrialized ‘L’ destined for Revered Phil’s Happy Trails Evangelica Center arrives and is hoisted into place. Giant cranes buzz and cough as they arrange the letter on the blank façade of the gray building. Today the honorable Rev. Phil is a happy man. With the raising of the letter, he is now finally able to see his church become a fully realized evangelical center, his lifelong goal. As he makes gestures of praise with his hands, I stand devilishly idle by his side. I’m a bit repelled by his obsession over the exact placement of the letter. He’s barking at the workmen, issuing threats, shouting commandments. Watching the scene I can’t help but think the insertion of this letter into his life somehow won’t fill the hole that is his lack of congregation. But maybe they’ll come now. I’ve often wondered if it’s the location. Not even his pyramid scheme bake sales had brought in as many as he’d hoped. Former Father John claims it’s the scent of dog food from the musky moaning smokestacks across the river that leaves this section of town devoid of souls yearning to be saved. “Iss dagod fud!” he yells “Ya deeablos! Ya deffals!” The scent of death. Today there is one less soul among us to do anything with except bury, one more soul to pay our last homage and respects toward. Every day is a dastardly act of apocalypse laid bare. It is true. But no one mentions this awkward thought. They continue through the motions. Continue at their daily struggle. This is why while Former Father John and Rev. Phil prepare the center for the funeral, I try to lend at least a small hand. There’s no way out of the circle, out of that ravenous and gnawing cycle. Rev. Phil remarks that rain will soon fall and we all agree. Rain will soon fall. There had lately been a death in the neighborhood. An average, ordinary, everyday death. Two days ago near noon, Mr. Putty, the maintenance man of our apartment complex Lubberland Heights, had passed away. What luck would have for Putty is the luck of us all. You go one way, you go another, you go, go, go. Cement was his final damnation. That was the Putty way. A natural man to the stripe. He was always sticking things together. Fixing, hinging, fastening, gluing, screwing. It would never end. He would keep the whole apartment complex on edge with his constant screwing. Now, Putty was the one who was screwed. As far as I know he’d been meaning to redo the front walk of the apartment complex for awhile now. Decades, even. I’d only moved in a couple years back and wasn’t much in the neighborhood gossip loop, but I’d heard he’d been mulling this plan for quite some time. So, finally, Putty had ordered the cement. And the mixing truck came as scheduled. It must have been a joyous day. But how these things never turn out the way we’d like. During the lunch break, that very first day they’d begun to construct the walkway, Putty had to show off and continue plowing forward. He’d toiled through lunch unlike most normal men that day, likely wanting to get the project finished before nightfall. He always seemed to be in an agitated mood if a project was left undone. Yet, Putty, like most normal men, met his death rather suddenly and unexpectedly. The cement silo had shifted when he wasn’t looking, knocked him on the block, and poured fast over his body. If the breaking workers had been more aware—they had been hunkering at the corner diner stuffing their snouts, viewing afternoon soaps—perhaps Putty would have been saved. This we’ll never know. Poor Putty, all blue face and butterflies. Poor me. I’d have to attend his funeral and take half-a-day off. “Pisco!” I remember Putty shouting one day. “Hand me that hammer?” I’d passed the hammer into his paw, saying “Hereyago!” That was all I could recall having spoken to him these past two years. Even if our meager dialogue would suggest differently, I had a certain affinity for Putty, being in the trade I was in. You see, I was a working man just like him. Blue-collar. Me, a regular rodent exterminator. A good, solid job. Yes, people laugh when I tell them what I did, it can’t he helped. A ratter never gets any respect. It’s not that I took great pride in my job, like most people seem to do. It did pay the bills. I hadn’t always been a rodent exterminator, but it paid the bills.
The clouds are ominous today. We all stand about, waiting for the rain to come. As I look back and forth between Rev. Phil and Former Father John, a feeling similar to one I’ve gotten from accidentally walking into a taxidermy shop forms inside of me. Though I do enjoy taxidermy, and have been known to practice the preservation of species with some of the better specimens I’d found through the years, I’ve never gotten used to the morbid ache that arises when I walk into a shop like that. It’s a mongrel sensation of serendipity. They say hobbies are a minor attempt to control fate. What a cheering thought. Poor Putty. Did he have any hobbies? Did he feel oppressed by ominous clouds? I’d peeked into his apartment once—he’d left the door open, I wasn’t just snooping around—and it seemed normal enough. Television. Couch. Magazine rack. No, he must not have had any hobbies. Reading, maybe. I did see a book under the foot of the recliner. And there were the magazines too. But reading isn’t a hobby. Everyone reads. He did have a dog though, I remember this distinctly. It had one of those faces, a stare that says, “If you ever die in the alley, I will eat you.” “So where’s the dog? The small whippet?” I ask Rev. Phil as he eases his aged bones down the ladder. The brand new “L” is magnificently in place. “I’m not sure. What was its name?” “I don’t know. Putty’s whippet. I never heard him call it by name. He just grunted or whistled at it like he did with everyone else.” “Didn’t know he had a dog,” he drags out, premeditated and murderous. “He did have an altruism that I’d seen in few men, though. A fine man, bless his dead soul. Now, don’t stand there like a dope. Help me with this ladder.”
Rev. Phil had been the
first on the scene. A crowd gathered rapidly, creating an ugly commotion.
Men and women with spears, pitchforks, brandishing flags, slinking like
slugs around dead Putty, now enclosed in a mound of drying cement with
only a white clenched fist gasping from his coffin of rock. Phil had
checked the pulse and found the altruistic Mr. Putty was no longer of this
earth. As they say, he was now not. I watched as a gust of
wind blew the hair up straight on the dead man’s wrist. If only the
workers had arrived a few minutes earlier. He still would have been dead
of course, but perhaps they could have wrenched his suffocated body from
the wet cement instead of having to chip him from hard concrete. The soap
opera had been very good. The workers hadn’t come back soon enough. The
result wasn’t pretty. Having to chip him away like that, they’d badly
marred his body. It was to be a closed casket, with Putty buried in the
sitting position...
The Adventures of the
Pisco Kid
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