The Abysmal Adventures of Porno Rabbit and Cracky the Corpse - Lesson One

Hard times fell in Butte like a turd from a tall cow's ass.  It was hit the street or go under six feet; those were the choices for the intrepid pair.  Cracky was OK with it either way but he got outvoted, one to one.  Consequently they were living in a Plymouth Volare' which Porno had won from Whiskey Moe by betting on a dog fight - basically Porno bet Whiskey that they could stand on a corner in downtown Butte for three hours and no dogs would show up and ask them to fight.  Although Butte was as rough-and-tumble as any town you could name, it was a pretty safe bet that you wouldn't get called out by some passing pooch at the corner of Main and West Iron.  Whiskey was pants-pissing ditch-digger dumb when he was drunk.  He was asphyxiated copper miner dumb.  He was glue-sniffing plow horse dumb.  He was burnt cord wood dumb.  He was stump-broke milk cow dumb.  He was blind and deaf box elder bug dumb when he was drunk.  But only when he was drunk.  He was always drunk.


Summer was a bad time to share a residence inside of a 1977 Plymouth automobile with a living corpse.  Porno would huff and blow and try to put himself into a cosmic nose plug trance but still Cracky was there, all mangy and ripe with a toothless grin and chunks falling off onto the floorboards.  A normal corpse will only rot for a certain amount of time.  But a living corpse is a regenerating dead thing and new dead flesh replaces the old dead flesh that dries up and blows away.  It's confusing if you are a scientist but if you are a pornography-peddling buck cottontail with a grudge against society and a bad limp from an impromptu beating administered by a disgruntled gay cement truck driver - well, then it's exasperating and beyond.  


Things were desperate.  It was crunch time; it was what Porno called "eat dog or die" time.  Whenever he said it though, trying to buck up - "Eat dog or die!", Cracky got all excited and started looking around all drooling and lip smacking and whatnot.  Porno didn't have much sympathy.  If Cracky really was hungry he could just reach down and snap off a leg bone and start gnawing on it.  His own leg bone, that is; not Porno's.


The Volare' had only a couple of gallons of gas in it.  Consequently it was not a mode of transportation.  Basically it never moved except when Porno and Cracky got badgered by the Butte cops into moving it - they had kind of a circuit involving parking near the Berkeley Pit, or the Bert Mooney airport, or on an approach across from the entrance to Montana Tech, or near Father Sheehan Park, or in the alley near the old Dumas Brothel.  The Dumas location had the added benefit of affording Porno a chance to do some unauthorized filming through the windows to procure material for future porno films.  He was not currently in possession of the necessary funds to make any of his usual high quality movies, however.  So some good footage involving the mayor, as well as a foul-mouthed one legged dentist, ended up just sitting in the can for the time being.


It got to the point where Porno was about to just give it up and see if he could hitchhike to Anaconda and get hired on with the night shift at the snoose recycling factory.  But then a funny thing happened.


Cracky came limping back to the Volare' one evening carrying a duffel bag with fifteen thousand dollars in it.


Porno was overjoyed at this upturn in their fortunes; however, he was a bit suspicious and so he went about trying to find out from Cracky exactly where this windfall duffel bag had come from.  Cracky didn't seem to be able to follow the line of reasoning involved in this question.


"Where did you get it?"
"Ummm . . . . okay."
Some time passes.  "Well?"
"What?"
"The bag full of money, Dry Rot - where did it come from?"
"It's a bag of money.  And it's mine.  Or ours, I forget which."
"Whew.  Will you please stand downwind?  Damn it, did you find it? Did somebody give it to you? Did you take it from somebody? Did it fall off the Continental Divide, straight out of the arms of Our Lady of the Rockies?  Where!?"
"Yeah, that was it, I think."
"What was?  Which one?"
"Which what?  Which witch? Geez Porno I didn't take the money from no witch!"


This went on for some time.  Porno was used to this sort of thing except usually he didn't really need any information from Cracky so it wasn't really important that he didn't know cock from hen, buck from doe, Fat from Slat.   But this was different and Porno was about to crap out a little pile of pea sized rabbit pellets right on the driver's seat of the Volare', he was so frustrated.


"Went to Mountain View," Cracky said matter-of-factly, as if he had forgotten that they had been discussing anything at all.  "The Mystery Dog wasn't there today, he maybe got stuck in the mud down on the edge of the Pit again."


Mountain View Cemetery was one of three graveyards in Butte.  Cracky liked to hang out there; he would lay down on a grave and then attempt to start a conversation with whoever was buried in it.  This didn't work very often - not because the dead person interred there couldn't hear him (living corpses, talking to the dead, you know - that's how these things work).  It was because Cracky was such an inept conversationalist that nobody wanted to go to the work of having a talk with him.  Sometimes dead people wanted to know something about some living relative, or rival, or pet, or just about anything - Did Josie Anne go ahead and marry that goddam lowlife Pothole Pete, even though the closest he can come to honest work is hustling a pool game down at the De Luxe? - but even if you have the patience of a dead man, it's pretty tough to wait it out with Cracky, trying to get any actual information from him.  So most of the dead spirits just pretended they were sleeping when he came clumping along.


Porno perked up when Cracky volunteered this information.  "Did you find the money there?  Did you find it in the cemetery?  Think, Cracky, for Christ's sake!"


Cracky did in fact try to think.  Most of his brain had rotted away, and when a little bit of it grew back about the same amount on the other side turned to dust and fell off - so there wasn't much to work with at any given time; it just depended which part was currently "in service" when you wanted to get him to focus on something.


Suddenly he brightened up.  He snapped his fingers as if to indicate that he had just thought of something - when he snapped his fingers one of them snapped off, but this didn't matter much to either Cracky or Porno.  "Mystery dog!" he said with a semi-toothy grin.  He had grown back a couple of yellow teeth today.  "Mystery Dog at the Berkeley pit!"


There was a mangy, filthy, half-starved old cur that seemed to live in the briny muck that surrounded the Pit.  He was sighted once in awhile and even got written up in the paper as a human interest story once or twice.  Cracky was technically no longer human but he did have some interest, and he managed to seek out the mongrel and more or less become friends with it.  He gave it bones to chew on (don't ask), and eventually it would come out of the brush to see him when he went down by the scummy water's edge.  He also ran into the dog at the various cemeteries from time to time.  Porno thought the dog might just be a ghost - although that didn't explain his interest in the bones that he was offered.


Porno was excited and rapidly thumped his back foot on the ground several times - then cursed himself for it.  It hurt like hell and was undignified.  Stupid Walt Disney.


"What about the Mystery Dog?  Does he have something to do with the money?" Porno asked.


"His money!" Cracky shouted, then got a serious look on his face.  "If it's his money why do I have it?  Why do we have it, I mean."


"Did the dog find the money?"  Cracky didn't seem to quite understand what this meant.  Then he perked up.


"He gave me his money, that's it!  Mystery Dog gave me the Mystery Money!  Maybe he wanted me to use it for a mystery date . . . ." Cracky's voice was trailing off as his focus drifted a bit.


"The dog had the money?  Was he carrying the bag or something?"


"Yes, oh yes.  He was carrying it and he gave it to me.  He told me to spend it wisely.  Then he ran into the reeds by the water to take a Mystery Crap."  Sound effects followed.  Porno tried to redirect his attention and shut off his imagination.


The damned dog must have found the bag, Porno reasoned.  Then Cracky took it from him.  What would a bag with all this money in it be doing down by the Pit?  Or maybe he found it at the cemetery.  Or somewhere in between - hell, he could have gotten it anywhere.


Porno felt better.  Whatever the explanation, he was starting to see it as "finders keepers"; it was easier for him to make this kind of a moral judgement on the situation when he thought about how empty his belly was, how stinky the Volare' was, and how totally penniless he and his decomposing pal were.  This was quite a break.  He could probably finance a new porn flick starring the mayor now - call it something like "His Horny Honor Gets Dismally Dishonored" maybe.  He would have to think on it.  Once he got it made he could drop off a copy at City Hall and when the mayor's secretary gave it to him, Porno could just sit back and wait for the bribe money to roll in, in exchange for the original print of the film.


Porno took the bag of money and stashed it under the front seat.  Cracky was now in the back bouncing on the springs in the seat and using both hands to try and get his head unscrewed from his neckbone.  He had obviously forgotten the whole incident - maybe the part of his brain that was aware of it had just crumbled off onto the carpeting or something.


Porno glimpsed some strange writing on the side of the bag as he was sticking it under the seat.  "Chinese, maybe" he thought as he looked at the unfamiliar characters.  He didn't really know what it was, and he didn't really care.


It was too bad, really; if he had only known he would have probably had to rethink the whole situation.  If somehow he had been able to read those symbols, to interpret their ancient meanings, he might have taken that bag right back down to the edge of the Pit and tossed it into the greenish yellow slime.


The symbols were not written in Chinese, or Japanese, or any other modern language.  They were written in a forgotten language that had not been used by anybody anywhere in hundreds, more likely thousands, of years.  Porno had no possible way of knowing what the symbols meant.  But if somehow he had been able to magically read them, this is (more or less) what they would have said to him:


"Sacred Property of the Most Highest Rocky Mountain Celtic Druid Master Priest of the Butte of Montana  --  If Found Please Return, or else, Man oh Man, We Are Going to Have to Eat Your Dog and Rat Out Your Cat and Then You Die!"


Or something to that effect.  Nobody around Butte could actually translate that writing nowadays, not very accurately.


Except for maybe the Most Highest Master Butte Druid.  If he just happened to be in the neighborhood.