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

Porno Rabbit was having a good day.  He was nothing if not organized.  Generally he kept meticulous records of his business dealings (otherwise he feared somebody he was associated with would use some information related to their “mutual business practices” against him somehow), including who he paid off to do what, how much, what sort of personal info he might have regarding that person in case they tried to come back on him and bite him in his bunny ass – that sort of thing.  Of course now that he was living in a car with a corpse, his filing system amounted to whatever paper he could get crammed in the glove box.  Not much space for a filing cabinet in the Volare’.

So he was poring over his records.  Cracky hadn’t been around for hours so he had taken advantage of the chance to air out the Volare’ and get rid of the stench of decay and death that always pervaded the vehicle – well, he couldn’t entirely get rid of it, but he cleared it out enough that he could stand to sit in the car for prolonged periods of time (with the help of about fifteen dimestore air fresheners of course).  Everybody in the loop had been paid; the wheels had all been greased and within a day or two he should have in hand a couple dozen prints of his new film, “Ladies and Gents, Jizz on Her -- The Mayor!” – in full color, with sound (mostly overdubbed but some of it actual grunts, snorts and filthy talk coming from his new star, the soon-to-be bad boy of City Hall).  Things were set up for “distribution” with the bikers, other porno dealers (both local and around the state) and a few select other sources.  It was kind of tricky to get it spread around strategically before confronting the mayor with the quote-unquote, Original Print.  But Porno had been down this road before and he was confident he had things under control.  And his costs so far were just a little over $4100, so he still had most of his “nest egg” stashed away.  Maybe he should even consider opening a bank account.  Naah . . . no need for such complications; no need at all.

A shift in the wind brought the stench of rotting flesh to his sensitive bunny nostrils – telling Porno that Cracky was back from wherever he had been all day.  He was in such a good mood he wasn’t even going to let Cracky’s stinky corpse and the accompanying gibberish get him down.  Not today.  This was a good day.

Cracky looked either alarmed or confused as he approached the car.  Porno knew the dead-as-a-doornail dimwit had only a few different emotions that he could dip into, and there was some overlap on the expressions that he wore with each.  That was good ol’ Cracky – a semiconscious stiff in search of a slab, a mixed-up dead body with, literally, a pea sized brain.

“Porno!” he said as he ambled towards the car.  “Porno!  Guess what?”

Porno didn’t look up from his figures and calculations.  “No idea,” he said.

“I spent the money you gave me! All of it I think, except for what I accidentally dropped down the toilet at the library.”

“Mmmm-hmmm.  Were you checking out some books, some research materials perhaps?”

“No, no, Porno.  That’s silly; I was there to check and see if any of them people who are always sitting around motionless at tables were dead yet.  It seemed like there had to be some, but I didn’t find – Oh, but wait!  Guess what, like I said!”

Porno put the stack of papers down on the seat next to him.  “Oh, for Christ’s – Cracky, I give up, okay?  Tell me what you are talking about, or whatever . . . .”  He waited for this to soak into Cracky’s ruptured noggin.

“I spent that money on Mystery Dog!” he said, very pleased with himself.  “I could have bought some food for me but I hit the dumpsters instead.  And I used that cash to buy Mystery Dog some houses.”

“That’s nice, Cracky.  Wait a minute – houses?  You bought more than one dog house for that smelly old moldy carpet bag of a dog?”

Cracky nodded his head with great enthusiasm; so much so that his lower jaw fell off.  It bounced across the pavement and he had to chase it for several feet before he caught up to it, and then proceeded to reattach it so he could continue to talk.  This was far from the first time this sort of thing had occurred and the joints were pretty loose.

“Three of ‘em, actually,” he said thoughtfully.  “I got him three houses before one would take.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Take’ I mean,” Porno said with kind of a morbid interest now growing in his rabbit skull – the novelty of a conversation with this gibbering idiot of an animated corpse could be worthwhile, if one was in a good enough mood to endure it.

“Well,” Cracky began, “that first one I put right next to the slough in the bottom of the pit, and it kind of sunk into the mud and was gone, real quick like.  I bought another one and put it in the same place, and, you know?  It sunk in again!  I thought it would just sit up on top of the first one.”

“Great, Cracky, great.”

“But then the third one I put up the bank a ways and it works good!  Kind of slanted though, but I put the side with the hole facing sideways and not up or down, so Mystery Dog can spend time in his house and rest up without falling out.”

“Yes, yes, of course.  Rest up from his long day of hard work being a stinking, filthy, wretched, mangy, rotten, cemetery-haunting boil on the ass of local humanity,” said Porno.

Cracky frowned.  “Do you really think he has been boiled?  Anyway but listen - I don’t think he went in the house, though, not while I was there.  In fact – wait a minute - - -"

Cracky looked more than perplexed, then his peeling, melting excuse for a face changed again, to reflect some other enigmatic revelation.

“He didn’t go in because I ain’t seen Mystery Dog all day,” Cracky observed.  “No wonder he wouldn’t help me pick out the color scheme for his houses.”

Porno was trying too hard to make this conversation make sense, and he knew it.  “Okay, then.  You bought him three houses, and he likes them, but he hasn’t seen any of them and he doesn’t know that you bought them for him, and two of them are buried in the mud.  Is that about right?”

“Hmmmm . . ."  Cracky rubbed his jaw thoughtfully with his hand but one side of it fell loose again so he had to stop messing with it completely.  “Yeah . . . . yeah.  That seems – hey, wait, did I tell you about the church lady with the rotten teeth and the red eyeballs?”  He was excited again.  The ever-changing, ever-rotting brain provided almost endless opportunities for new or newly-remembered experiences.  Sometimes Porno kind of envied him that.

“Church lady, eh?”  Porno thought he might want to pay attention to this.  “No, you didn’t.  Tell me about the church lady and the eyeballs.”  He settled back into the driver’s seat, prepared to wait this out while Cracky tried to give him this information.

“Red eyes!  Glowing red eyes!  And she flew; she flew down from the sky all dressed up like that statue thing up on the mountainside over town!  Only I don’t think the statue has fangs,” Cracky reported.

“Fangs?”

“Yeah like in the movies, or that one biker who was drinking everybody’s blood around here last year, remember that?  I wonder what ever happened to him . . . ?” Cracky was drifting away again.

“Cracky . . . .”

“I like motor bikes,” Cracky said.  “And Jughead.  I like Jughead comics. I asked the vampire church lady if she had any but she just used her mind to bore more holes into my skull.  She never did answer my question – or actually say anything, for that matter.”

Porno’s eyes were now open wide.  Cracky had just dropped the “V” word.  “Are you saying she was a vampire?” he cautiously asked his friend.  He had figured the fang remark was just a fluke, up until now.

“A vampire?  What’s that?  Do you mean like an umpire?  Or a van tire?  Do you like Reba McIntyre?  How about Dick van Dyke?”  Cracky was decomposing pretty fast now.

“The church lady,” Porno said.  He knew he was about to lose Cracky’s attention and he had better work fast if he was going to get anything useful.  “Flying with the red eyes and vampire teeth and she bored holes in your mind.  What else do you remember?  Think, Cracky!  Was she trying to find something in your so-called brain?”

Cracky rolled his eyes.  One disappeared completely into the cavern of his ruptured skull.  “I think she was looking for magic and then she saw the money,” he said.  “I don’t know what that means or why I just said it.  That’s what I remember her leaking into my head though.”  He now had his index finger buried up to the knuckle in his eye socket, fishing for the missing eyeball.

“Oh, Holy Shit!” Porno exclaimed.  This was trouble. This was real trouble.  Maybe he should have done a little more research to try and track the source of this money, before he started spreading it around.  But it was so easy to just not look the gift corpse in the mouth, to just go with it.  Right before Cracky had shown up, Porno had even been thinking now was probably a good time to see if they could get a room at the War Bonnet Hotel, to move up in the world a little bit, to start living the high life (for hygienic reasons Cracky would have had to stay in the Volare’ down in the parking lot, naturally).  But if there was a crazy vampire who had some interest or some connection to this money, he was now thinking about going with a much lower profile – and maybe even getting the hell out of Butte for a little while.

Just as Porno mulled over this information, trying to plan his next move, there was the sound of a tremendous crash and breaking glass – all Hell was busting loose and it seemed to be happening right on the roof of the Volare’!  The sedan’s top crumpled down far enough to be touching the tips of Porno’s ears.  Something – something HUGE – had just landed on top of the car.  This frightened Porno into total distraction.  His foot was thumping the floorboards like crazy.  Cracky hadn’t noticed and was now trying to fit two fingers into the same eye socket.

You would have had to be a supernatural being of some sort to even see it – but if you were, and you were in the area, you would have witnessed quite a display, here in the parking lot across the street from the Montana Tech Administrative Hall.  You would have seen a dilapidated and now crumpled Plymouth Volare’ four door sedan (two tone paint), with the roof crushed partway in and one of the side windows popped out by the pressure.  On the roof of the car, doing the crushing, you would have seen a seven foot tall broad-shouldered female figure, complete with flowing blonde hair and a pair of somewhat disheveled wings.  Ralphie looked unsteady, like she was a bit staggered by the impact of her landing, but she had managed to keep her balance as well as keeping ahold of the fifth of Old Grand Dad that she was gripping with her left hand.  In her mouth was a joint.  A big, fat joint.

“Whoa Nellie!  YEEE-HAH!!” she exclaimed, and then burped.  “Zooka-rooba, where the hell are ya?  I think I found your pigeon for you!  Or rabbit, rather,” she added as something of an afterthought.  She pulled on the joint and the ember on the end of it glowed.  She held her breath and then exhaled loudly.  “And Jeeee-sus, good buddy!,” she said.  “This is some righteous reefer!  I barely landed without killing somebody!  Where did you score this stuff?”

Inside the car Porno was trying to get his leg to behave, and his ears were tangled up in the tattered headlining.  He heard Ralphie’s exclamations but didn’t entirely understand them.  He knew one thing though:  that somebody, the rabbit was thinking, the one who was nearly killed – that would be yours truly.

It sure as hell wasn’t Cracky.  He was already dead, for one thing.  And besides that, he had staggered around with his finger in his eye until his bony foot became jammed in a gopher hole.  Now he was twisting in circles with one hand stuck in his eye socket and the other one flailing about for balance like some kind of unskilled tightrope walker.  He was going round and round but his foot was stuck and his ankle was twisting impossibly, like somebody winding the rubber band on a balsa wood airplane.

God damn, Porno thought as he watched this.  I wish his foot would just hurry up and twist the hell off so he could fall in a heap in the dirt and be done with it.  This is just too painful to watch.

Porno thought just for a second about the gopher hole.  But it looked too small, too tight.  He would never be able to scamper down it, even if Cracky’s foot wasn’t blocking his path.  He wished he could take a hit off the big galoot’s reefer.

There was no way this was going to go back to being a good day for the enterprising rabbit pornographer.  No way at all.