Skeeter Dillon Lives!

Twangy country song lyrics ricocheted off the hospital’s sixth-floor ceiling and bounced up and down the hall.

“Tell me you don’t love me no more, darling. Make it hurt so I’ll remember you,” the patient sang at the top of his lungs.

Head nurse Tammy Willows rushed to the single room and almost fainted when she stumbled inside, tripping and crashing into the IV unit standing like a lone pall bearer beside a coffin. After eight months in a stone cold coma the patient had opened his eyes in bed and started singing just like that.

“Mr. Dillon, Mr. Dillon,” Nurse Willows said, sounding like Chester on the old “Gunsmoke” television show reruns she watched on MeTV.

“Call me Skeeter,” he said with a smile.

One week later Nurse Willows and Skeeter Dillon were living together in the comfortable disarray of his double-wide trailer with a faded foreclosure notice still in the window. Absolutely convinced his latest tune would be a bigger hit than “Hello Ma,” they prepared for fame and fortune – a surprise miracle if there ever was one especially since the coroner had pronounced Skeeter dead after the tow truck accident that left his face looking like rare ground beef on a bed of crushed tortilla chips. Lucky for Skeeter the pill-popping morgue attendant detected a pulse when going through the deceased’s coverall pockets looking for cash.

Little did Skeeter know after lying stiff in bed like a stiff all those months that the two chiseler record producers in Nashville thought he was dead, too, after reading the news online in a local country chat room. Looking to make a quick buck they released Skeeter’s song “Hello Ma” without authorization, promoting the tune as a tribute to Afghanistan combat veterans out there in America fighting PTSD. The song went viral and soon made it onto countless country western bar jukeboxes and local yokel radio stations across the South. That quick, quicker than you can say spicy possum jerky, the song shot up the charts on its way to going gold.

Skeeter’s sister Twyla, line cook at the truck stop, had sold the publishing rights for $500 as soon as the record producers called her. As Skeeter’s next of kin she seemed on firm legal ground. During those eight months when Skeeter hung on to breathing by a dollar fishing line, everybody in the record business made money cept’n Skeeter who the music industry “executives”
 expected to die at any moment.

Then like the Lord rising from the tomb the way them Phoenix birds from Arizona do, the old boy came to.

Skeeter got himself a real good lawyer who had been disbarred during the disco craze in the 70s for snorting cocaine off the lime green sleeve of his leisure suit. The attorney was now back with a vengeance practicing law part-time under the table at his Assembly of God church and counseling needy rural senior citizen opioid addicts as a Medicare-reimbursed drug counselor. The old folks loved Skeeter’s hit song, by the way.

All Skeeter needed to get the show back on the road was more words for his new number.

Popping a seventh can of Double Yellow Line Lager he sat alone at the kitchenette table in the mobile home with Tammy working the graveyard shift which almost always ended in a graveyard for some poor soul. Skeeter wrote slowly, crafting heartbreaking lyrics for his next gold record, the words bubbling from his soul like leaky transmission fluid on a sweat-soaked summer day.

“Stick a Buck knife through my broke heart, darling. Twist it like a drywall screw.”

Then he put the two lines together, singing at the top of his voice.

“Tell me you don’t love me no more, darling. Make it hurt so I remember you. Stick a Buck  knife through my broke heart, darling. Twist it like a rusty drywall screw.”

So thrilled with himself he jumped from his wheelchair, Skeeter toppled onto the sticky linoleum floor dappled with dried white lumps of spattered bacon grease. Rolling in Double Yellow Line Lager suds he crawled to his knees and dialed a number he knew by heart on his phone.

“Connect me to Raylen John,” he said.

One minute later the best hillbilly disc jockey this side of the New Buffalo Diner came on live.

“Line two, you on the air, boy!”

“This here’s Skeeter Dillon.”

“Well gawddamn and call me crazy, we all thought you was dead.”

“I’m already readying up the B side for the new song,” Skeeter said.

“Might as well give us a little taste of that sweet sound, too, boy.”

Skeeter began to sing.

“Kiss my ass and buy me a beer. Drunk or drunker I have no fear.”

Then he yodeled like a singing Perry County muskrat trapper. And whistled like a back road country mother with Jim Beam on her breath calling her little boy home to supper after a hard day shooting ground hogs in the head with his BB gun. Then Skeeter yodeled some more.

“Wooooooie,” Raylen John said.

Now Raylen John joined in yodeling and whistling and Skeeter Dillon yodeled some more, this time in harmony with Raylen John, the two of them squealing like a couple of losing muskrats in a death match swamp hunt.

Skeeter never felt so alive, the adrenaline rushing from his need-to-be-clipped toenails – or tow nails as he called them – up through his hunting socks before striking deep into the gray brain matter like a lightning bolt slamming into an electric barbed wire fence.

“Sumbitch, partner, you still the best worst country singer/songwriter I ever heard, but this time I do believe you’re on your way to the Grand Old Opry,” Raylen John said.

That night Skeeter and Tammy celebrated at home with a fresh case of Double Yellow Line Lager returnable bottles he put in the freezer until they almost exploded and then took out to drink “ice cold” although he forgot sometimes. Tammy put her foot down last week, though, and refused to clean up the glass when the bottles exploded.

“I work in a hospital all day cleaning up after dementia patients and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to clean up after you when I get home. I’m a professional,” Tammy Willows said.

“A professional pain in the ass,” Skeeter said.

“I saved your life,” she said.

“You just happened to be there when I woke up,” he said.

“Why you ungrateful wrinkled redneck you,” she said.

“OK, be like that,” he said.

One day soon Skeeter Dillon planned to get himself a new girlfriend – a country music queen who loved him for his mind.

On Monday morning Skeeter set out again for Nashville on a spanking new used 1987 Harley-Davidson Evo Softail he bought from a widow in Duncannon, PA, for $2,500 he put on his only credit card, heading South to take back what rightfully belonged to him. Heading back to the scene of the tow truck accident that almost clipped him for good, he easily located Lester’s cowboy boot, fetid foot included, that had rolled and landed in a stagnant gully. Burying the remains and saying a little prayer, he wiped off the money he had stored in a freezer bag and shoved in the boot. Pocketing the cash he took off on the long trip through rebel country.

Yesiree, 44 year-old Skeeter Dillon was gonna be a star.

So was psychic Earline Pickett, though she surely didn’t know her future at the time.

Now she stood on the verge of a new career, this time as a backup yodeler to an up-and-coming country legend who never quite figured into her crystal ball.

You’da thought she would’a seen him coming.

The Taliban Women’s Society: A Short Story

Sliding the folded Scranton Times-Tribune newspaper across a small puddle of spilled beer, bartender and college dropout Mikey Hoyle began his lecture about foreign policy and international politics, topics on which he considered himself well-versed.

“Look at this story about Afghan women marching in a pro-Taliban parade in Kabool.”

Timmy Kelly shook open the wet page and looked at the picture in the paper.

“Covered head to toe with their faces hidden and everything,” he said.

“Hundreds of women marching to support men,” Mikey Hoyle said.

“That’s what we need here,” Timmy said.

Mikey blew on a mixing bowl loaded with hard boiled eggs he just took off the bar kitchen stove in the back.

“The Scranton Society of Irish Women would march to support us,” he said.

“Go on, get out, they would not,” Timmy Kelly said.

“But we don’t need them,” Mikey said.

“The Taliban don’t need them, either.”

Mikey Hoyle raised his right forefinger like a tenured Dublin professor lecturing at Trinity College.

“The Taliban uses them to make the case women like being told what to do. We don’t have to use female help because nobody questions our right to ban women from our all-male Lackawanna County Friendly Sons of St. Patrick dinner,” he said.

“My sister says the girls at the Irish Women’s Society started their own dinner because they don’t want to come to our dinner, anyway,” Timmy said.

Picking a hot egg from the bowl, Mikey juggled it from hand to hand.

“Of course they don’t want to come. They don’t want to come because we say they can’t. So they have to bullshit themselves into thinking they don’t want to come to justify obeying our orders,” he said.

“My wife says she won’t come even if we let her,” Timmy said.

“Nobody wants your wife or your sister at our dinner.”

“Say what you will about the Taliban, but you’ve got to give them credit,” Timmy said.

“Yeah, they brainwashed their women so they don’t even want to go to school with men. No  female firefighters or cops taking men’s jobs in Kabool, either,” Mikey said.

“Just like Scranton.”

Mikey dug a soup spoon into a horseradish jar, pulled out a glob and mixed it with yellow mustard he squeezed from a plastic bottle into a quart container he used for the clam chowder the bar sold during Lent.

“We got a girl on the fire department now – one out of 135 – and a couple on the police force,” he said.

“Don’t forget that first woman mayor.”

“Politically correct women’s lib affirmative action shit,” Mikey said. “We even got Shawna working here tending bar on Saturday night.”

“That’s because you threatened to quit unless they gave you the night off to drink for free,” Timmy said.

 “Still no girls in our Notre Dame Club, though,” Mikey said.

“Thank God,” Timmy said.

Mikey gently cracked the egg on his forehead and looked at his best friend.

“You marching in the “Half-Way-to-St.-Patrick’s-Day-Parade” Saturday?”

“I took Monday and Tuesday off next week to recuperate,” Timmy said.

“I’m marching with the Friendly Sons,” Mikey said.

Timmy Kelly grinned.

“Who’s the COVID virus marching with?”

“Don’t be a smart ass. Scranton’s back to normal. No mask for me, either. What am I, a looter?”

“Guinness is my vaccine,” Timmy said.

“The Irish Women’s Society will be marching,” Mikey said.

“Just like the Taliban women,” Timmy said.

“To show support for us guys,” Mikey said.

Mikey peeled the egg and dipped it into the sauce.

“Maybe our colleens can invite their colleens to The Irish Women’s Society dinner,” he said.

“They can call themselves The Taliban Women’s Society,” Timmy said.

Chewing with his mouth open, Mikey dripped horsemustard – that’s what he called the concoction, horsemustard – from the side of his mouth. Then he cracked another egg, this time on top of his head.

“Gimme one of them eggs, Mikey,” Timmy said.

Mikey offered the bowl.

Timmy reached in and grabbed an egg.

“Yeah, then that pack of Kabool ladies can march with ours in next year’s parade,” Mikey said.

“Down Biden Street in Scranton, Kabool’s sister city,” Timmy said.

When Timmy cracked his egg on his forehead a sticky, raw double yolk poured from the shell and down his chin.

“Ahhhh, goddammit, Mikey.”

Mikey blew up laughing.

“Surprise! The yolk’s on you, Timmy.”

“That’s not funny, Mikey.”

Mikey Hoyle stopped laughing.

“Neither is women thinking they’re as equal as us,” he said.

Timmy used the wet bar rag to wipe his face.

“Ain’t that the truth,” he said.

Taliban Rock: A Short Story

Even with the bar door closed you could hear the bass pounding from the car idling at the stop sign.

Mikey Hoyle slammed down his beer glass and snapped his head toward the noise.

“You hear that?”

Timmy Kelly looked away from the Yankees game on TV.

“What?”

“That music.”

“Oh, yeah, that.”

“Taliban music.”

“Sounds Indian to me.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Talibans live in Afghanistan, Mikey.”

“They’re all over the place.”

“In Scranton?”

“Absolutely.”

“C’mon, Mikey, there’s no Talibans in Scranton.”

“That’s why they call it terrorism. You never know when they’re going to strike.”

“In Scranton?”

“I got one word for you: nine eleven.”

“That’s two words.”

“The 20th anniversary’s right around the corner.”

“Those weren’t Talibans, Mikey. They were Saudi Arabians,” Timmy Kelly said.

“Like Osama bin Laden?”

“Yeah.”

“Al Qaeda, Taliban, what’s the difference?”

“Saudi Arabians are on our side, Mikey.”

“Then why did they chop up that Washington Post newspaper reporter?”

“He was a media spy,” Timmy Kelly said.

“Maybe we should start doing that to our local media.”

“Chop them up?”

“Off with their heads.”

“On Courthouse Square.”

“The cops can set up one of them guillotines in the middle of Biden Street.”

“I’d go,” Timmy Kelly said.

“Me, too.”

Mikey again snapped his face toward the door.

“You hear that?”

“What?”

“More Taliban music.”

“That sounds Puerto Rican.”

“Same thing.”

“Better than that Black rap shit.”

“A dog getting run over by a beer truck sounds better than that.”

Timmy Kelly looked confused.

“I thought Talibans hated music.”

“They’re big hard rock fans,” Mikey Hoyle said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, they’re always stoning their wives to death for committing adultery.”

A Taste of Home: A Short Story

Undercover cop Brandon, whom Mike met at the American Legion, spoke confidently, the way you do when you usually get your own way with or without a warrant. Just making conversation Mike had casually mentioned how unpatriotic it is that Pizza Hut restaurants do business in Hanoi, Vietnam.

“Germany’s one of our biggest trading partners,” Brandon said.

That set Mike back on his barstool.

“What’s that mean?”

The young detective addressed him the way a college professor might talk to one of his more mediocre students.

“I get it,” Brandon said. “Germany is now our most important trading partner in Europe. People born after 1980 aren’t invested in Vietnam like Boomers are. For reference, way more people died in the U.S. because of drug overdoses just last year, during a pandemic no less, than all of the Americans combined that died as a result of the Vietnam War during the entire conflict.”

“Boomers?” Mike said.

“Baby Boomers like you,” Brandon said.

Born in 1947 Mike never thought of himself as a Boomer. Sure, he heard the term and saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on TV and tapped his foot to the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. But to call him a name, a Boomer, hurt his feelings. Mike was much more than that.

Stunned, he came back with what little bluster he had left.

“Col. Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken is in Hanoi, too,” Mike said.

Brandon laughed.

“Bet you could have eaten some KFC when you were in Vietnam,” he said.

Mike flashed back to the time he ate leeches and cold greasy rice gruel during the four months in a tiger cage at the hands of the Viet Cong (VC) team that captured him before he escaped. A small unit had wiped out his squad. His captors quickly told him they were the few who fight the many, the weak who fight the strong. Winners in the end, the Vietnamese now even owned American fast food franchises.

One month into his imprisonment, during a forced labor work detail in the sweltering jungle sun, Mike found a half-inch red thread buried in a puddle of red mud teeming with mosquitoes. A second piece of string, this one white, turned up a month later in a shovel full of dirt piled on a fresh grave. The blue twine appeared just days after that, tangled in a bamboo stalk.

Why Mike kept all three pieces of fiber was anybody’s guess – a vision made of hope, perhaps, or maybe a method to his madness.

A month later he gazed defiantly at the tiny ragged symbol of his nation he somehow wove to create a miniature American flag facsimile that kept him from giving up, a vaguely recognizable symbol of liberty.

At night he’d insert the flag into his rectum. During the day whenever he could he’d retrieve the flag and recite to himself the words he could remember from the Star Spangled Banner. He’d then stick the flag up his ass all over again, a terrible thought, but one that increased the odds that the flag was still there when he needed it again.

Now the enemy wouldn’t break him even if they killed him. He knew what he was, what he stood for and why he was fighting. He didn’t know shit about the Pentagon Papers or the intricate political machinations of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon’s war but he knew why he was fighting.

Mike wanted to live.

He wanted pizza and fried chicken. He wanted a cold couple of cans of Schmidt’s beer and a carton of non filtered Chesterfield Kings. More than anything Mike wanted to be free. And one day he was.

Two Huey gunships roared over the trees as the door gunners opened fire. Mike’s VC guards went down in a row although Mike somehow survived. The crew had him up and out before he realized what had happened.

“You are one lucky sumbitch,” a laughing Black soldier on board told him.

“Coming in we didn’t even see you,” said another.

Mike asked for a cigarette. The Black soldier lit and gave him a Chesterfield. Then he gave him the pack and his Zippo lighter imprinted with a skull and crossbones on the front. When Mike reached for the smoke he realized his right fist was clenched. When he uncurled his fingers he saw his little flag.

That’s what Mike always called it, his little flag.

The Veterans’ Day parade fifty years later dawned hot, 85 degrees by noon and heading to triple digits by early afternoon. With lights flashing and sirens screaming, fire trucks and police cars slowly drove the packed parade route. High school bands played. Cheerleaders cheered. The Chamber of Commerce marched with elected officials who waved their most patriotic waves to the patriotic crowd.

Then came the corporate sponsors led by a woman dressed as a huge bucket of chicken, her legs kicking up at bended knees. A half dozen people dressed as dancing pizzas followed.

Brandon stood across the street laughing and clapping his hands in time to the melodious sounds of the marching band that made the crowd feel better than children do when they hear music from an ice cream truck.

The dancing pizzas did it for Mike. Dancing pizzas put Mike over the top.

Just the night before Mike had Googled “Pizza Hut Afghanistan.”  Of course Pizza Hut served pizza in Kabul and Kandahar.

Time Magazine reported back in 2011 that Gen. David Petraeus reversed a decision by Gen. Petraeus’s predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In March 2010 McChrystal called for an end to junk food culture on U.S.-led coalition bases, and banned food outlets including Pizza Hut, Burger King and Dairy Queen. One of his top deputies said in a written statement at the time: “This is a war zone – not an amusement park.”

Time also reported that following Gen. Petraeus’ reversal of this decision, Pizza Hut said it was “proud to be serving the men and women who serve in Afghanistan.”

Sitting in front of his computer in his underwear and battered boonie hat left over from the war, Mike’s eyes welled up.

“The Taliban probably owns the franchises,” he said.

Now looking into his palm into which he had pressed his little flag, the badge of courage that got him where he was today, Mike stood alone on the sidewalk, hearing the cheers, watching the waves, feeling his heart pound inside his chest.

Kneeling, Mike bowed his head.

People thought he was praying.

Mike wasn’t praying.

America was preying, victimizing the sacrifices of the nation’s war dead and wounded – losses, actually, not sacrifices – that resulted from corporate lies, Pentagon generals’ and defense contractors’ duplicitous deceit and the cold actions of White House criminals. These self-absorbed bastards cared nothing for peasants who suffered and died in Vietnam, poor men, women and children napalmed, shot and bombed, collateral damage drowned in blood and pain.

Afghanistan war was no different.

Why? So the privileged there could one day escape as they did in Saigon? So the Afghan president could run away with $169 million in American taxpayer money and suffer no consequences? So American 19-year-olds could never make it to 20? What about Afghan civilians with no connections to the American government, who spoke no English and couldn’t read and write in their own language? They, too, wanted out. They, too, wanted to run – and not for the Pizza Hut buffet.

Pulling his cherished Zippo lighter from his pocket, Mike flicked the wheel that chipped the flint that lit the flame fed by the lighter fluid in which he soaked the Zippo that morning. He used to light his cigarettes by snapping his fingers to turn the wheel that set the fire in motion. Back then everybody laughed at the trick. Holding up the lighter in one hand and his little flag in the other, Mike began to cry.

A woman shrieked.

“He’s burning the flag. He’s burning the flag.”

Mike lit the underside of his sacred symbol that quickly burned and disintegrated into smoking, black, curly ash.

Picking up speed as he raced across the street, Brandon already had his handcuffs out as he threw a full body block that caught Mike above the waist and knocked him off his feet and into the gutter, cracking his skull on the curb that soon ran red with blood.

A meaty man with a bulging belly flushed angrily and pointed to Mike splayed unconscious in the street.

“That’s what’s wrong with this country,” he said. “Guys like him.”

Kiss Me, I’m Taliban: A Short Story

Mullah Mateen sat in an oxblood leather chair at a massive glass-topped desk in former Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani’s office, taking his turn posing for triumphal cell phone photos with other Taliban commanders who took Kabul without even trying.

 Don’t smile, he tells himself. Taliban commanders aren’t supposed to smile even though a couple of the younger fighters have started to lighten up, wearing basketball sneakers and baseball caps they picked up when the American infidels got out of town. Almost all devils are gone now, except for deadly CIA mercenaries and their traitorous allies.

Mullah Mateen stopped the victory party as soon as he asked the question of the day. Always well-mannered, as the name Mateen signifies in the Pashto language, he spoke in a firm, yet soft, voice.

“Now what?”

Nobody wanted to answer because nobody really knew. Those leaders who thought they knew stood at odds with other men who thought they knew. But nobody really knew.

“The Afghan government robbed us,” Mullah Mateen said.

The men grumbled, raising into the air newly-confiscated American M4 carbines, fully-automatic M4A1s, M249 machine guns and rocket launchers.

“The Afghan government robbed American taxpayers, too,” he said.

The men cheered.

“So we’re broke, just like most Americans,” Mullah Mateen said.

Now the men went glum, their already creased and hardened faces falling like the Great Buddhas of Bamiyan the Taliban used artillery and explosive charges to blast out of a mountainside in 2001. Blasphemous idols Mullah Mateen called the statues at the time from his camp in the hills. Twenty years later, the battle-tested insurgent victor kept going, expressing strategic transitional concerns.

“Where will we get money to run our own government? Even with all the trucks, guns, ammunition and even helicopters the enemy left, we don’t have money for upkeep, repairs or maintenance. We don’t have money to fix potholes, make electricity, pick up the garbage or provide unclogged sewers. We need American cash and credit to buy on the open market.”

At a loss for answers, the men shot holes in the ceiling.

Then Mullah Mateen laid bare his ancestral soul, dropping a bomb with his outrageously masculine proposal.

“I have studied the American President Joe Biden. Like us, he favors tribal rites and ritual. He’s American of Irish descent. Many American Irish men think like we do. They call themselves the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.”

Mullah Mateen unconsciously stroked his bullet belt.

“These men scorn women. Oppress women. Discriminate against women. Harass women. Ban them from events. Put them in their place. These men agree with us that a woman’s place is in the kitchen. Not like here where we can throw them in the stove but a place for them to slave over a stove preparing great dinners of meat and vegetables like the ham and cabbage they cook on the one big lineal observance when American Irish men and boys gather together and celebrate.”

The fighters stopped shooting and started to listen.

Mullah Mateen pulled on his unkempt beard.

“Paddy’s Day, these men call this custom, a feast day to honor this holy elder in his long beard and tunic. Millions of people parade in Paddy’s honor, worshipping a green three-leafed shamrock plant that grows wild and free like our opium poppy plants.”

Armed commanders started to chant.

“Paddy’s Day, Paddy’s Day.”

Mullah Mateen held up his hand, regained their attention and continued.

“This Saint Patrick as they call him enraptures President Biden so much Biden appeared three times as featured speaker in the rural province where his hometown Scranton is located for the yearly Friendly Sons dinner that Imam Patrick’s followers hold to honor their bearded commander. The men in attendance benefit from meeting each other, politicians and businessmen, vowing allegiance to the male cause that upholds gender segregation.”

“Important as she is to democracy, Black American Vice President Kamala Harris is banned from this sacred banquet,” he said.

“Powerful elected officials like United States Senator Bob Casey Jr., another drowsy, big-feeling Democrat from Scranton, support this bigoted male supremacist group. Casey has a wife and four daughters he prohibits from attending the dinner unless they want work as waitresses for low wages to serve men. Lethargic Casey’s only concern about attending the dinner is that he might fall asleep at the table.”

One young adherent snickered.

“We have long hair and beards. Casey has no hair or beard. Biden has expensive hair plugs. We’re tougher, too,” he said.

Mullah Mateen picked his teeth with the sharpened point of a dagger.

“Yes, we are tougher. We all remember what happened when handsome Shameer touched and sniffed my sister’s hair,” he said.

“The way Joe Biden touches and sniffs,” the young fighter said.

“We cut off Shameer’s nose and fed it to stray curs in the street,” Mullah Mateen said.

Then we ate them,” the young fighter said.

“And ISIS calls us liberals!” Mullah Mateen said.

His men nodded as he went on.

“Biden identifies as a Democrat, sensitive and empathetic. He will quickly understand when we say we need America to give us money to feed the poor the way they gave money to the corrupt Afghan elite who stole the cash. Afghan’s traitor president loaded three cars and a helicopter with dollars before taking off for his mansion in Dubai. Now it’s our turn. But we will ingratiate ourselves to the heathen American scum without losing our core principles.”

The fighters became agitated.

One old man screamed.

“Can we still abuse women?”

“Of course,” Mullah Mateen said.

The young fighter wanted more detail.

“Ingratiate how?”

“We start a Friendly Sons chapter here. We hold a St. Patrick’s dinner and invite President Joe Biden to be our first guest speaker. We dye our turbans and beards green for Paddy’s Day,” Mullah Mateen said.

“Biden will love the Friendly Taliban of St. Patrick,” the young fighter said.

“So much that he might make Kabul a sister city to Scranton,” Mullah Mateen said.

The young fighter beamed.

“St. Patrick reminds me of Osama bin Laden.”

Mullah Mateen could no longer help himself and had to laugh.

“Kiss me, I’m Taliban,” he said.

Hello Ma/The Final Chapter

Mole stood grimacing at the bar and blocking the waitress station at Clayt’s Horseshoe Tavern. Taller than a gun cabinet and just as broad, his stringy, greasy hair the color of fresh-poured asphalt hung below double-wide shoulders. The beard looked like a bramble bush with dead sparrows trapped in its branches. Mole’s nose looked like a snout that protruded small, sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes.

The colors he wore on the back of a cutoff frayed denim vest identified him as president of the Crushers, a ragtag bunch of outlaw bikers from California trying to expand the club into Pennsylvania. The Crushers were undergoing a restructuring after their last president quit the gang and the club enforcer died when a giant coyote tore his ass up outside a Shell Beach liquor store on the Central Coast. At the time it never crossed Mole’s mind the Pagans would kick his ass as soon as they heard he was in town recruiting prospects.

Andy Liddick gave the big man a smile.

“What can I get you?”

“My brother Lester’s foot.”

The bartender backed up.

“Is that like a Tom Collins?”

“You trying to be funny?”

“No sir.”

Mole leaned over the bar and whispered.

“Lester totaled his GTO last week coming here on club business and died in a pile a mile down the road from here. His left cowboy boot and matching foot is missing. My mama can’t bury his personal parts without his foot. Mama says you got to be whole to get to heaven.”

“Sounds like a Skeeter Dillon song,” Andy Liddick said.

“I’m gonna ask you one last time. You seen Lester’s foot?”

“Skeeter towed in the GTO. I’d ask him.”

“Where’s this Skeeter bug live at?”

“We had a party for him here last night. He left for Nashville this morning.”

“We’ll just go get him.”

“We?”

“Welcome to the Crushers, brother. You’re our first member on the East Coast.”

“Cool.”

“You got a motorcycle?”

“Nope.”

“Me, neither, I left mine back in California to fly here. We’ll steal a couple when the bar closes. Now let’s rip the sleeves off your Wrangler jacket and let me spray paint CRUSHERS and PENNSYLVANA across the back.”

By that time Skeeter was crossing the Mason-Dixon Line heading for Virginia singing his song:

Hello Ma

I hope you’re well

Don’t worry ‘bout me cause I’m going to hell

I’ll know a lot more people there

You might go too

So you better beware

Singing so hard he started to choke, pounding the steering wheel to catch his breath, Skeeter knew he had a hit. That’s what he had on his hands, a living, breathing hit song that would take the country scene by storm whether they knew it or not down there in the grit-sucking South. One thing about being from up North is that you always came away a winner. The Civil War settled all that. The North won. The South lost. End of story. Northern rednecks hated Southern rednecks. You didn’t hear much about that rivalry.

Southerners he called “rebnecks” ate grits with their eggs. Northern Pennsylvania Dutchmen rednecks ate scrapple with ketchup. That’s all a Perry County boy needs to know about American history.

Skeeter hated everything from the South – even South Philadelphia – especially Dr. Pepper. He once told a state trooper at the scene of a triple fatal accident that the driver died because he was drinking Dr. Pepper. The guy was just holding a bottle of that soda when he hit a 10-point buck and the deer’s antlers smashed the bottle and sent shards of glass into the man’s brain.

Dr. Pepper killed him, Skeeter told the cop who wrote that fact in his official report.

All Skeeter needed was a cooler loaded with cans of Reading beer. Normally a Pabst drinker, the Reading was on sale. After 12 beers Skeeter lost control of the tow truck on a curve when he stared too long at a faded chewing tobacco ad painted on the side of a barn and wondered too long why these crackers in the Confederacy or anywhere else for that matter chewed the stuff.

The truck rolled and rolled some more, crumbling like a Reading can, a dozen of which flew from the cooler and rolled with ice cubes down a dirt and gravel hill on the other side of the guard rail. Lester’s boot, foot included, that Skeeter placed gently for safekeeping on top of the beer and the ice in the cooler, landed in a stagnant gully, killing a frog that was so sluggish from pollution he just couldn’t jump fast and high enough to escape its maker – just like Skeeter, whose head squashed on the windshield like a mashed West Nile Virus mosquito hitting a Mack truck grille doing 90 miles per hour.

Back up North, Andy Liddick couldn’t get over his good fortune to be chosen the newest Crusher vice president. That night after work he stole Candy the barmaid’s Harley and met Mole at midnight on the highway. Hiding something behind his back, Mole smiled a barbarian smile and asked Andy to come with him because Mole had something to show him.

Andy complied. After all, Mole was the president. When Mole said “look up, Andy, there’s a bald eagle in that tree,” Andy didn’t even think that it was midnight and how could Mole with those heavily-lidded squinty eyes see America’s big bird symbol of freedom even at noon let alone at the darkest time of night. So Andy looked and Mole whacked him in the back of the head with an ax, knocking Andy Liddick out colder than a couple of leftover pizza slices in the freezer at Clayt’s. The plan came to him when Andy Liddick told him about the brand new black Tecova cowboy boots he bought for the trip down South. Andy’s boots didn’t match the beauties Lester wore, but Mama was losing her eyesight and wouldn’t know the difference.

Raising the ax over his head, Mole swung, first hitting soft leather, cutting past unwashed white sweat sock, pale, pimpled flesh and right through the bone at the ankle. The body part easily separated from the leg, dropping like a felled redwood at the hands of an expert lumberjack.

That scum Skeeter had a day’s lead on him and Mole would never find him anyway. Mama was still crying her eyes out waiting for her boy’s foot so she could find peace of mind with one last piece of body for one full dress funeral. With Andy’s foot replacing Lester’s, the shoe was on the other foot, so to speak.

Mole rode fast into the sunset heading west with one slightly used Tecova and a foul-smelling tootsie wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag tied around his waist. He and Mama would have a big California biker funeral for Lester. Mole would recruit dozens of new Crushers from the mourners’ ranks.

Screw the East Coast.

He was afraid of them Pagans anyway.

Hello Ma Part 2

Sopping up a puddle of spilled beer with a week-old rag, the young bartender heard a gravelly voice and thought the customer had lost his mind. Skeeter sat on his barstool repeating his name over and over.

“Skeeter Dillon. My name is Skeeter Dillon. Hi, I’m Skeeter Dillon. Skeeter Dillon’s my name. Outlaw country music’s my game.”

The bartender expressed genuine concern.

“You OK?”

“My name is Skeeter Dillon.”

“Like Bob Dylan?”

“No, like the marshal.”

“You playing here tonight?”

“No, I’m just drinking here tonight.”

“So why you got your guitar case with you?”

“You never know, do you?”

“Marshal Dillon’s your stage name, right?”

“That sounds real good, son, but I’m sticking with Skeeter Dillon, my born-at-home Christian name.”

“Skeeter’s your real name?”

“Yessir, my ma says mosquitoes coming in through holes in the screen door buzzed all around her head while she was giving birth to me on the kitchen floor.”

“And you’re still buzzing right along,” the bartender said with a big grin.

“Got that right, boy. I’m planning on making it big at the Grand Ole Opry. I’m practicing how to introduce myself to the audience.”

Despite the record company brush-off, Skeeter was still trying to figure out how to get his first gig.

He told the bartender about the record company executives and how they didn’t care about hurting his feelings when they told him his song was no good and that he shouldn’t quit his day job.

“Damn, I got a day job and a night job,” he said.

Skeeter always showed up with his tow truck. No wreck was too big or too small on the back roads or on Route 11 & 15. Persistent to a fault, he just kept going.

“Let me buy you a drink, mister,” the bartender said.

“Thanks, partner.”

Four beers, two shots and nine Slim Jims later, Skeeter was back in the truck looking at the cowboy boot he wrapped in a black garbage bag after finding it in the back seat of the vintage gray GTO the driver wrapped around a telephone pole the night before. Mangled and mashed, the dead man’s body took a lot of extracting with a piece here and a piece there.

Cutting through the side of the boot with his Buck knife, Skeeter opened up the fine black leather with purple stitching and exposed the human foot. Intact and discolored in hues of yellow and blue, the first responders missed that fresh body part when they were picking up the pieces after the wreck.

Skeeter only found the expensive hand tooled western wear by accident. Why he didn’t just call the cops he didn’t know. Maybe because the radio in the car kept going on and off, a short in the wiring probably, and Skeeter took the loud country music as a sign that maybe he should keep trying, keep singing and writing songs about life as he saw it, maybe one day making it to Nashville after all.

The last song he heard reminded him of a tune that came to him like a religious vision in the shower a week or so ago, a song about dying and asking God in heaven for a two-headed hound dog so the pooch could lick Skeeter’s face with twice as much love as the dog gave him here on earth.

Skeeter knew “Double Dog Dare You, Jesus” would be a hit. He just knew it. Those shit-kickers at the record company already knew his name so he might as well try them again.

That’s when he saw the green roll of bills thick as a moldy cinnamon bun. Not bloody but secure inside the boot, the cash showed a crisp hundred on the front. A gold money clip with the ace of spades engraved on the exterior secured the folded money snug as a bug in a rug.

When he got home he counted the greenbacks, spreading out thirty 100 dollar bills on the table in the kitchen in the double-wide he got to keep in the divorce. Popping a fresh can of Pabst, he sat alone with his thoughts for about an hour. Then he grabbed the notebook he bought six months ago at the Dollar Store and picked up his plastic pen he stole from the finance company when he borrowed money for the T-shirts to promote his first song, “Hello Ma.”

Skeeter began to compose.

“Ain’t asking much, Jesus, just a two-headed dog

To lick my face in heaven

Double dog dare you, Jesus, a two-headed dog

To give me twice as much love in heaven.”

When he finished, Skeeter jumped up from the table and ran to the refrigerator for another cold one.

He grabbed two cans – one for him and another for him, too.

“Sonofabitch, I think I’m on to something here,” he said.

“Nashville here I come.”

Hello Ma

Skeeter sat in his tow truck and wrote the lyrics to a country song on a ketchup-stained Bunny Burger wrapper from the Red Rabbit Drive In. Titled, “Hello Ma,” Skeeter knew the tune would hit the charts. Singing softly to himself in a voice that sounded like rust looks, he put the finishing touches on the battle ballad that honored the trials and tribulations of suffering Afghanistan-induced PTSD.

Partial to baseball caps, Skeeter planned to buy himself a black Stetson with a rattlesnake skin band when he sang onstage at the Grand Ole Opry. Skeeter would step to the microphone and say, “This is my song about my living and dying in America.” Then he’d dig into the meat and potatoes of the matter.

“Hello Ma I hope you’re well

I need a bus ticket home

My sanity’s gone and my old lady, too

Got nowhere else to roam

Hello Ma I hope you’re well.

Sorry I ain’t called you in a while

Been on a bender for 13 weeks

The sober life’s not my style

You remember my pit bull? Well she just died. My best buddy Clay died too.

Outlaw bikers want the money I owe

Looks like I’m really screwed

Hello Ma I hope you’re well

Sorry I missed daddy’s wake

Totaled my motorcycle that same week

I sure could go for a steak

When I get home I’ll make it up to you

We’ll dance two-step in the bar until dawn

I promise you my words are true

You’ll feel like I never been gone

Hello Ma, are you still there?

Can’t hear your voice no more.

C’mon Ma please talk to me

I’m wounded from the Taliban war.

C’mon Ma, please don’t hang up

Don’t think I’m gonna last”

C’mon Ma, please talk to me.

You little boy’s sinking fast”

A month later Skeeter got a letter from a small record company in Nashville telling him the song was too depressing for the current genre of country music fans. The record company vice president wrote that Skeeter would be better off staying in the tow truck business. The song wasn’t very good, either, the VP wrote.

Skeeter had to admit the song wasn’t very good.

Now he had no idea what to do with the 1,500 red, white and blue T-shirts he borrowed money to buy with “Hello Ma” printed across the front and “Remember Our Afgan Vets” printed across the back.

Guess he’d just have to wear them to work.

At least he wouldn’t have to spring for a Stetson.

Playing Chicken

Playing Chicken

John ate chicken wings until his heart blew up at the best table in the American legion. Pouring Pabst draft beer down his gullet that night as fast as sea water must have rushed into the Titanic, he only took a breath to shove one spicy morsel after another into his mouth until he choked and oxygen stopped circulating through his clogged airway.

His wife Jane jumped into action just like she learned at the YMCA CPR class, pounding on her hubby’s chest even before he slid off his chair to the dance floor. Trying to remember the cadence to the Bee Gees song, she mixed up the group’s hits and applied pressure to their first recorded song and not the theme song to the disco movie she watched every time it was on TV.

John didn’t budge. Neither did the chicken bone lodged in his throat no matter how hard Jane slammed her soul mate’s fat belly or how many times. That bone wasn’t going nowhere. John’s chicken wing eating days were over.

The bartender pulled a tablecloth over John’s head and kept serving drinks until the paramedics arrived. Three former Marines shooting pool said he had to keep up morale no matter who died on the floor.

Oorah.

Keep the juke box going, too, said a 75-year-old former M-60 machine gunner in Vietnam.

Goddamn, said the bartender, John never did that before.

Jane ordered a double tequila.

No, he didn’t, she said.

Pee Soup

At his end of his retirement party, Shorty stood onstage at the microphone and tried to be funny.

No, he said, I’m not giving away my stock portfolio.

The crowd roared its appreciation.

Samantha and Jason, his children, clapped the loudest.

Soon they would run their father’s pea soup empire.

Soon they would know the secret.

CNN and all three networks had scheduled interviews for the weekend. Shorty promised producers to “spill the beans” even though no beans appeared in the legendary concoction he sold in stores nation-wide that drew tourists to his original restaurant location in Scranton, PA, “PeaYaay,  as Shorty pronounced his home state’s name in the crazy television commercials he made famous during his 30-year career.

A multi-millionaire ten times over, Shorty looked forward to retirement.

He had wanted to get even for years.

His kids needs a good kick in the ass and Shorty looked forward to the long-overdue comeuppance. Maybe he should pull the rug from under them on national TV in one last over-the-top commercial as he exposed the secret recipe to the world.

But why wait?

“C’mon up here you two,” Shorty announced from the stage.

Pea soup aficionados in the crowded theater erupted in cheers, applause, hoots and whistles.

“Pea soup, pea soup, pea soup,” they chanted.

Oh my God, Samantha said.

I am not ready for this, Jason said.

But up they went into the spotlights that bathed their stylish finery in hues of blue and soft amber. Hipster Jason wore a custom-made green tuxedo with stripes down the leg that looked like flames. Sultry Samantha wore a see-through gown that made her breasts look like jumbo water balloons. Both siblings stunk of alcohol. Jason rubbed specks of cocaine off his right nostril as he climbed and tripped o the steps to the stage. Samantha scratched inappropriately.

Let’s hear it for my two little sweet peas, Shorty said.

He cleared his throat.

When I started this company I didn’t have a pot to piss in, he said.

All I did was work. My wife Midge died when an early batch exploded because the kids were both stoned and left the gas on in the kitchen before they lit another joint. Of course they escaped unharmed.

Samantha blushed.

Jason chuckled.

Nobody wanted to buy our soup. I was pissed. Then one night I stood on a chair and peed into the kettle. Don’t ask me why. The release just felt good. For some reason that batch took off. So I peed into the next batch. That shipment did even better. For the next three decades I peed into each shipment. Nobody knew which one got my salty surprise seasoning. But the soup got me on the cover of last month’s Grub Magazine as the most famous “souper” chef in America. The rest is history. Or shall I say “pisstory?” People don’t realize how accurate my motto “Real P (with a capital P) Soup” really is. The moral of the story? It’s always better to be pissed off than pissed on.

Take it away, kids, it’s all yours.