Zombie Bitches From Hell by Zoot Campbell Page A

game and half even though the lanes and gutters had crickets
crawling or hopping or dead all over them. The skinny guy behind
the counter near the cubby holes filled with old smelly bowling
shoes told me that that every now and then the town gets a plague
of crickets. It doesn’t last long and then they just up and leave.
So I had in my travels seen a flood and a plague and I’m beginning
to think biblical. But I am no Bible boy. I’m not. I killed two
people who were trying to convince me to spare them by reciting
something out of the Bible. It didn’t work for Jesus on the cross
who started reciting scripture. It didn’t work for these people
either. When my mind is made up, it is made up. I guess that’s the
way God is. He makes up His mind, it’s made up. Don’t do this,
don’t do that. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Or else. I’m now
believing that the GaGa is the Else.”
    Something is making me agree with him.
Something is wishing I had never met this degenerate creep.
Something is saying “Any port in a storm.”
    He goes on, “The trucker with the twelve
pimples and seven hairs picked me up in San Angelo on the road to
El Paso. He told me he was tired of seeing so many Mexicans
hitching rides, he called them ‘wetbacks,’ and befouling the
highways with their squat looks and greasiness. He actually used
the word, ‘befouling’ so I was pretty certain he was a regular
church-goer, like my father, fat like him, as well. I slept a lot
of the way, the oily sun blasting in through the bug-smeared
windshield as the day wore on. It felt like lying down in a tanning
bed the size of a barn with the dial turned up to ‘Extra High.’ He
turned the radio on and it was country music, Tammy Somebody and
Billy Rae Whoever and Jim Bob Watchamacallit and so on and so
forth. That racket bored its way into my brain like a cable guy’s
drill, the kind with the auger big enough to go through a wall. You
know the kind of bit I’m talking about, don’t you?”
    “Sure. Those cable guys have great tools,” I
say, thinking I am the biggest idiot whoever drew breath.
    “Well, friend, that caterwauling music and
his index finger tapping on the steering well thirty-nine times
made me tense up like when you think your pal, if you have one, may
be hiding around the next corner to jump out and startle the
Bejesus out of you. I don’t usually blaspheme or take the Lord’s
name in vain but I tensed up real tight, real tight and I could
feel the handle of my knife creeping out of my pocket toward my
hand. What is this I see before me, a dagger with its handle toward
my hand? That driver, fat as he was, saw me and asked me if I was
all right. I said yes, I was, but he turned the radio off and
commenced to telling me he was a father of twin boys and the sole
support of his two elderly parents, one of them blind, like it
would make a difference to me, which it would not. He saw a truck
stop up ahead and pulled right in with barely enough roadway to
slow down like he was relieved. He told me this was the end of the
line and I needed to get out, which I did and thanked him. He was
lucky, real lucky and real fat. Don’t you agree? Don’t you?”
    “Well, sure. It’s not easy hitchhiking and
all. Sometimes you can spend all day…”
    “Who gives a shit about your hitchhiking
days, Kent?”
    “I just thought you were asking, is all.”
    “I usually never have to stand by the
roadside for more than an hour or so. My thumb is magic and
charming and has never let me down. I’m hoping a nice girl will
give me a lift, neither fat nor skinny, someone pleasant, someone
understanding, someone my own age, someone that will not have
parents, someone that will say nice things about me at my funeral
because they are true and not because I am dead, someone who will
carve a perfect epitaph for me on a granite headstone that might
say, ‘He was a good man, neither fat nor skinny, who tried to do
right. He will be missed.’ And she