“I hope y’all get parvo,” Rambo said, completely defeating the purpose of the contraction by making y’all two syllables. Why couldn’t Pa understand. He luv’d Jewely. Yesterday when he’d whistled and yelled “Hey hottie,” she’d actually crossed to his side of the road. That’s when he knew she was the one for him.
Her folks didn’t think he was good enough for her and had come here to convince his Pa to forbid him from seeing her (and to get him to release her from the cage in the backyard). He was Rambo Penicillin Jones. His Pa ran the biggest dog fighting ring this side of the Ole Miss. They lived in a double wide for Christ’s sake. If anything Jewely wasn’t up to the standards his Pa set for him but that didn’t matter to Rambo.
“Y’all can’t keep me from seein’ her,” Rambo screamed at the people conspiring to keep him from the love of his life.
“Listen here boy. I’m your Pa and you’ll do as I say,” his father said. “Besides she’s a zombie. Ya can’t be with her. That’s like necra, necra,” Pa started to get flustered. That happened when he tried to use those big words. “Well it’d be necrafilthia. I know there aren’t many women left, but if you’re that hard up, there’s always old Betsy. She ain’t much to look at but at least she’s alive.”
“Pa, Betsy’s your gal,” Rambo said. He didn’t want to hurt his Pa’s feelings by telling him that Betsy wasn’t very good, just standing there the whole time and occasionally letting out a distracting moo at the most inopportune moments.
Jewely’s parents took that moment to interject. “Now look here Mister Jones. My wife and I take offense to you referring to our daughter that way. She might have caught the virus that spared the rest of us in this room, but she’s still our daughter and we love her.” Mr. Store smoothed his Cardigan of imaginary wrinkles and looked over at his wife, Fancy.
“Mister Jones,” Fancy said smiling. “I’m sure we can come to an arrangement that’ll be mutually beneficial.”
“Whoa. Don’t go throwing those highfalutin words round here. Ain’t gonna impress no one.” Pa wasn’t one to let people get the upper hand. “Y’all said something about payment.”
“We did.” She reached into the large pink paper bag sitting next to her chair and pulled out a stack of albums. “Would you be interested in any of these? They’re not really our taste in music but I thought they might be something you could appreciate.”
Pa reached out to take the records from Mrs. Store. “Let me take a gander at those,” he said. His eyes had lit up when she pulled them out of the bag but being the shrewd negotiator he was, he quickly put on his poker face. Pa had a great poker face. No one could ever tell what he was really feeling when he had it on. They just thought he hadn’t had a bowel movement in a week.
Rambo glanced down as his Pa rifled through the records, then slowly backed up to the door. While everyone else’s attention was on the albums, he exited the trailer, his hopes for a life with Jewely fading. Pa had an old crank operated phonograph but the only two records he had were Lawrence Welk and the Sound of Music soundtrack, neither of which Pa considered good music. Jewely’s parents had brought a stack that included Hank Williams Jr., Johnny Cash, and Conway Twitty. Any one of those would be worth far more than one girl, no matter how hot she was.
Rambo went straight to the fighting cage that Pa had stashed Jewely in. As soon as she saw him coming, she reached out through the bars, yearning to get to him. The toothless smile she bared for him reminded him of the last woman he loved, his cousin Rosie.
“I know babe,” Rambo said, touched by her desire for him. “They just don’t understand our luv. To Pa you’re just a zombie. To me you’re a hottie. But you know what, them’s just words.”
Jewely continued to strain to get to Rambo and let out a low moan, “Uuhhuuhh.”
“Uuuhh huhh,” Rambo said in response. “I know just how you feel.”
Unable to bear the sight of his love in the cage any longer, Rambo ran and retrieved a pair of bolt cutters from the storage shed.
“Pa’s gonna tan my hide for this,” he said as he snipped the padlock off the door of the cage. “Follow me,” he told Jewely and then began to weave his way through the trailer park with Jewely shambling along after.
Near the back of the trailer park was an Airstream trailer, its dull aluminum bread-loaf shaped body supported by its one axle and four concrete cinder blocks. It had belonged to old Miss Walters before she had become an hors d’oeuvre for some not very discriminating zombies. It still smelled like she did, cheap perfume and wet cat, almost a year after her demise, which is why the surviving members of the trailer park avoided it.
Rambo, in a flash of inspiration never before experienced by his fifth grade educated brain, decided old Miss Walter’s trailer was the perfect place to stash his love. He led her there and then coaxed her inside where he was hoping to consummate his love with her.
Once inside she surprised him with the ferocity of her desire for him. Her hands were all over him, tugging and pulling at whatever she could get ahold of, while she leaned forward and gummed his neck and face. It didn’t take long for Rambo’s body to respond to her advances.
He was struggling to get out of his overalls, having a difficult time with her hands in the way, when he heard a metallic bang from outside the trailer.
“Hold up a sec,” he said. “I heard somethin’.” She didn’t pause in her efforts as he listened intently. After a moment he pushed her into the bathroom section of the trailer and pulled the partition closed. “Wait here. I’ll check it out.”
He slipped out of the trailer as Jewely fumbled about in the small space he had confined her in. She didn’t know where the tasty morsel went, but the taste of him had awoken a deep hunger inside her. She thrashed about the little space she was in, looking for something to eat and knocked something off the edge of the sink that caught her eye as it fell. The pink color of flesh pulled at the hunger Jewely felt so she picked up the two pieces and put them in her mouth. They shifted as she tried to chew them until they were maneuvered next to the bottom and roof of her mouth. There they stayed.
“I’m back,” Rambo called out, “T’was just a raccoon knockin’ over a trash can.” He pulled open the partition, already out of his overalls. As Jewely turned toward the sound of Rambo talking, he reached out for her, a distinct bulge in his tighty-whities revealing his expectation of their encounter. Unfortunately for Rambo, he was about to discover that Jewely’s feelings for him were different than his feelings for her.
She grabbed his shoulders and pulled him toward her. Believing she wanted to gum on his neck some more, he let his hands wander to places that usually got him slapped for trying to touch. The sudden pain in his neck surprised him. “Hey baby, not so hard,” was the last thing he ever said before Jewely, with a little help from old Miss Walters dentures, chewed through his carotid artery.
In the last moments of this life, Rambo stared at the star filled crisscrossing stripes of the confederate flag that covered most of the wall. Silently he raged against the injustice of the world (Silently because his larynx was currently being chewed up by the woman he loved). He raged, not because his life was ebbing away. He couldn’t fully grasp his own mortality. He didn’t even rage at the tragedy of a woman using the love a man feels for her to eat him alive, although throughout history, many men have lamented that very fact. No, Rambo raged at a much simpler, yet no less painful truth. He had finally figured out that he wasn’t going to get any.
END.