The Winner: Part Twenty-Three

Five days later, I’m sitting in some uncomfortable plastic chairs across from the duty-free stores at the airport. According to the arrivals monitor, her flight landed forty minutes ago, but there’s still no sign of her anywhere. I unenthusiastically pick through a copy of Penthouse I bought at the newsstand, just to pass the time. The goatee guy is standing across the concourse, acting like he’s reading a copy of Harper’s. Why does he even act like he isn’t following me? He might as well just handcuff himself to my arm, it’ll make it easier. I’ve seen this motherfucker every place I go. He knows it, I know it. His presence annoys me more now than it scares me.

Of course, my presence at the airport probably isn’t raising any red flags with them. It wouldn’t be too hard to find out today is the day my mother is returning home. Besides the money I was ordered to donate, I haven’t bought any plane tickets, withdrawn any large sums of cash, or even spent anything besides renting a minivan for a couple days so I can drive my mother home from the airport.

After I recovered from the shock of seeing that dismembered baby arm (and threw the damn thing in a dumpster several blocks away from my house while wearing gloves to make sure my fingerprints were nowhere near this thing since they’re on file with the state) I found a liquor store, bought a bottle of whiskey and went home. I’m not much of a drinker, but I did three shots in a row before my gag reflex started working. I don’t know how alcoholics can guzzle this stuff like water. I followed the instructions on the piece of paper the fake FBI agent gave me (or perhaps he was a real one who was yet another mole for Van Hertzwelder’s conspiracy) and wrote a check out for half a million dollars to the Republican Party, along with a letter that coyly insinuated that I’d like to meet the President when he came to town in the next few weeks for a round of golf. I’ve never even played golf in my life. Not only will I die, I will die looking like a douchebag.

So now I’m back to square one. No, more like I’m back to square negative one. Or maybe negative one-hundred; I doubt the malaise I feel can even be expressed mathematically. Three months ago, I had more money than I could even dream of earning in a lifetime of working the shitty, dead end jobs I always seem to end up in. Not only am I going to die, I’m going to die broke. A loser. A nothing. Over the past few days, I’ve tried not to think about it. I try to keep myself wrapped up in my routine: eat, sleep, shoot Apple up with more heroin to keep her quiet, maybe go for a walk, eat some more even though nothing tastes good anymore.

In the last few days or so, I mulled over what Burke told me in the limosine a few weeks ago. That I’m a piece of shit and this is my one chance to make a mark on the world. There could be worse fates than dying and taking the life of one of the most hated presidents in American history with me. I started to take perverse joy in my impending notoriety. My entire life would be picked apart, psycho-analyzed. Every place I’ve gone, every person I’ve known would be considered a piece of a puzzle to conventions full of conspiracy nutjobs for decades to come. Kids would learn about me in school. They would have to those annoying interview assignments where they go to their parents and ask them, “Where were you when you first heard that Poopy Peanutz blew up George W. Bush?” I’m seriously thinking of trying to write a “manifesto” in my last few weeks on this Earth, knowing that my words will be dissected for a long time after I’m gone.

Of course, my ego is always brought back down when I realize that I won’t be around to enjoy my notoriety. I guess if I believed in some sort of afterlife, it might seem less cold. But since even with my end coming near I still can’t bring myself to believe in any of that religious bullshit, any pleasure I can take from the aftermath of the assassination just rings false. I try to make my peace with the inevitable, but I can’t.

Maybe I should start using my middle name. It seems like all proper president killers should have three names…

A porter walks up to me and asks, “Are you Mr. Peanutz?”

I’m zoning out on all my thoughts, so he has to ask twice before I snap out of my funk. “Yeah, that’s me. Mr. Poopy Patrick Peanutz. I’m him. Yesseree…”

He looks at me weird since I’m acting weird. He motions his arm behind him. “Your mother has just cleared the concourse. She’s ready for you.”

“Okay, thanks,” I say. I roll up the Penthouse, stick it in my back pocket and follow the porter over to where my mom is waiting.

“Poopy,” my mother whispers in a dazed voice. “It’s so good to see you again.”

At first, I wonder if this is supposed to be some sort of joke. The thing sitting in that wheelchair looks more like a mummy than my mother. In fact, I wouldn’t have even thought it was my mother if I hadn’t recognized her voice. She is wrapped up in a layer after layer of gauze, with just small holes for her eyes, nose, and mouth. Some clear, yellowish substance is weeping through the layers of bandages like she’s sweating Vaseline. She has the crisp odor of institutional cleaning products all over her, the kind they use to overpower nasty things just underneath. Fuck a mummy, she looks like a goddamn third degree burn victim. Mummy, burn victim, whatever; at least she looks about two hundred fifty pounds lighter than she used to be.

Slowly and weakly, she raises her arms up towards me. The bandages around armpits make a cringe inducing slurping sound as she moves them. “Here my dear Poopy, give me a hug…”

“Hi mom,” I reply nervously. There’s no fucking way I’m giving her hug, so I give her a pat on the shoulder, and even that is pretty unpleasant since it feels unnaturally squishy underneath and my hand comes away with a film of…something on it. I wipe my palm off on my slacks, then pull out my wallet and hand the porter a twenty. He thanks me and scurries off, then I feel like a schmuck for giving him so much since for the first time in months, I’m on a budget.

I push her wheelchair out to the baggage claim. Since it has been so long since the plane unloaded, her one bag was one of the few still circling around the metal ramps. I snatched it away from some wetback airport employee who was about to stick it in the unclaimed section before the load from the next airplane was about to start rolling off the conveyor belts.

“Here we go,” I drop the bag on my mother’s lap (she let’s out a surprised grunt), then I grab the handles and start pushing her out to the short term lot. I’ve been parked there an hour and it costs about twenty bucks every fifteen minutes, and I don’t want to have to shell out for another fifteen minutes. Christ, I’m becoming a cheap bastard again.

But despite being a cheap bastard, I would have given the valet another twenty bucks if he would have come out here with us and put my mother into the rented van. The squishyness of her skin just under the gauze, combined with the medicine smell of her body was unnerving, especially since I had to get her arm over my shoulders to lift her up with her bandaged tits barely inches from my face.

I guess I should put this in perspective. This isn’t nearly as bad as sticking my arm up another man’s ass. And also, even though it isn’t pleasant to lift my mom into the car, it is easy. Before her trip, lifting my mom into anything would likely fuck up my back for life. Now, she weighs about as much as Apple does. Good, because I’d be severely pissed if the hundreds of thousands of dollars I spent for her to go to that overpriced fat camp only shaved off thirty pounds.

Once she’s inside, I fold up the wheelchair and stick it in the back and toss the bag in afterward. “Poopy,” she moans. “Before we go, can I have a pill? I’m starting to feel itchy again, and the doctor says if I scratch myself, I’ll pop my sutures.”

I grab her bag again and unzip it. There’s several different bottles of pills inside, as well as other containers and another huge roll of gauze. “Which pills do you want?”

“The ones with the yellow top. I can take those in the day time.”

After prying open the child-proof cap, I put on her hand. She looks at me expectantly. “Do you have anything to drink?”

“No.”

“I need something to drink if I’m gonna take my pill.”

I zip the bag back up. “I’m not walking all the way back to the terminal just to buy you a Coke to wash it down with. Either dry swallow it or wait until I get you home.”

“You’re mean,” my mom pouts. I get into the van and fire it up and start driving towards the parking lot’s main gate. My mom starts to make some hocking noises, like she’s trying to summon up enough saliva to swallow her pill. I look in the rear view mirror and am disgusted to see drool running down her chin as she pops the pill into her mouth and makes an overstated gulping noise.

“Oh God, Poopy. That was so hard. I hope I don’t choke to death just because you couldn’t get me something to drink.”

I groan. “Mom, if you were choking right now you couldn’t whine about how you were choking. Now shut up.”

When I get to the window, I search around for the ticket I took from the machine when I came in. I can’t find it anywhere, even after turning my pockets inside and out. I look through the entire glove compartment twice before the car behind me starts honking his horn. I end up having to pay the Mexican booth attendant fifty dollars for a “lost ticket fee” before they’ll lift the gate to let me out. Fuck. I think of all the things I could have used that money for.

I try not to think of how in a just a week, I won’t need any money.

My mom makes small choking and gagging noises on the entire drive into the city. She isn’t really choking, she’s just trying to make me feel guilty. I drive her down to the shitty part of town, where the Lucky U Motel is. Sergei is gonna let my mom stay here and out of my hair while I try to figure things out. Besides, it’s probably not a good idea to have my mom around while I had Apple tied to my bed and shot up with a bunch of heroin. Sergei was eager to do it, trying to curry favor with me anticipating more high money favors from me. I’m sure if he knew I was pretty much broke now, he’d probably tell me fuck off.

I park in the lot next to a pickup truck that’s more rust than metal. “Poopy. Where are we?” my mom mutters.

“Um, you’re gonna stay here for awhile. Don’t worry. I know the owner. He made sure to give you a room that doesn’t face the freeway.”

“But Poopy, I thought you said you bought a house? I thought I was gonna stay there with you.”

“It’s not a house. It’s a loft. Besides, you can’t stay there. I…I hired some fag interior designer to fix up the place. I having the whole place renovated. There’s shit everywhere. You don’t want to stay there.”

I open up the side panel, pull out the wheelchair and then proceed to lift my mom out of the car. It’s not quite so bad once you get used to doing it I guess. I have to push her down to the end of the row of rooms to get to the handicapped ramp. Her room is on the first level, just next to the Pepsi machine that has been broken for as long as I’ve known of the place. I get the key Sergei gave me and open up her door.

“I don’t see why you can’t get me a room at the Marriott,” my mom grumbles. “Or maybe even the Brown Palace. It isn’t like you can’t afford it.”

“No, this is better,” I say, wedging the door open with my hip until I can pull the chair inside. “This is closer to where I’m staying, so I’ll be able to see you regularly and you’ll have your own space.”

“I bet you’re staying someplace nice…”

“Well, if you don’t like it, feel free to check out and find some other place for yourself.”

“But I cannnn’t,” my mother whines. “I’m still in recovery and you’re the one with all the money. Can’t you get me a credit card or anything?”

I’m half tempted to just blurt out to her that I’m broke because I’m being extorted by a conspiracy to kill the president and that the quality of her fucking hotel room ought to be the least of her concerns. But telling her might get her killed. Then again, if she keeps this up, that might not be such a bad thing.

Once she’s completely into the room, I go back to the van and get her bag. She’s still sitting the middle of the room when I get there, gagging and choking again after a brief respite to whine about where she’s staying.

“Poopy, please can I have some water now? I’m dying…”

I drop the bag on the bed, grab one of the Styrofoam cups off the counter and go into the bathroom to fill it in the sink. I notice a used condom dried to the edge of the toilet and peel it off, tossing it into the bowl and flushing it. Thankfully, I caught that in time before my mom saw that. I’d never hear the end of it if she did. I think about washing my hands afterwards. Instead, I stick my fingers in the cup of water, hoping at least a few particles of dead dry sperm, or bacteria, or germs float off and make it down my mother’s throat. It would serve that bitch right.

After letting my fingers steep in the water for about fifteen seconds, I wipe my hand off on my pants, go back into the bedroom and hand it to her. “Here you go, mom.”

She takes the cup and doesn’t even say thank you. She gulps down the water, crumples up the cup and drops it on the floor. “Thank God,” she gasps. “I think I’ll be okay now. A little longer and I would have passed out.”

I roll my eyes. “Good then. Well, here’s forty bucks. The number for Pizza Hut is on the ad on the cover of the phone book. I’ll call you in a couple days to see how things are going. Later…”

“Poopy,” my mom calls out before I can reach the door. “Don’t go yet. I need your help.”

I slowly take my hand off the doorknob and say through gritted teeth, “Only if it’s quick, mom. I have places I need to be.” I didn’t really; I just didn’t want to hang out with my mom any more than I had to.

“I need your help changing my bandages. The doctor says I need to change them twice a day for the next week or I’ll get an infection.”

Fuck. If I still had any money left, I’d just hire a nurse to do this for her. I guess the task is now on me once again. “Fine, as long as it doesn’t take too long.”

My mom slowly gets up out of her wheelchair. She’s as wobbly as a doe that’s just been squirted outta momma deer’s cunt. She starts pulling at the metal clasps that are holding the bandages shut. She hands a few of them to me. “Don’t lose those.”

The bandages make a sickening slurping sound as she peels them off. She lets them drop in a heap on the floor. Underneath, she’s naked. My mom no longer looks like a mummy, she looks like fuckin’ Frankenstein. There are purple scars where her excess skin was cut away and sutured together. Even with the skin tightened, it still looks unnatural. I don’t know if it’s the weird jelly she’s been packed in, or just the fact that her skin has been stretched out for years, but her whole body has this weird, shiny sheen about it.

She does look thin though. Thinner than she’s looked in, well, since I’ve ever known her. Hell, if it weren’t for all the scars and the unnatural skin, she might even be hot. She looks like a beast that’s been stitched together from the chopped up parts of dead supermodels. If anything, that makes this experience all the more worse.

“Poopy,” she says, pointing at her bag on the bed. “Get the jar of medicated Vaseline out of there. I need to put a fresh layer on my stitches so they don’t get inflamed.

I get the jar and hand it to her. She twists off the cap and scoops out a big handful. She starts slathering it all over her shoulders, arms, tits, and stomach. She hands the slimed jar over to me. “Can you rub this all over my back and legs? I can’t quite bend down very easily…”

I shudder. I take a finger dab and start rubbing it into the flesh of her thigh.

“No, no. You have to use more. You have to cover all my skin or else it will dry up.”

Dammit, I can’t half ass this. I take a big scoop of this nasty smelling goo and knead it into my mom’s thigh and buttocks. This is worse than fist-fucking that faggot back at Alley Cat’s when you factor in the extreme Oedipal shit going on here.

I rub some of shit into small of my mom’s back and accidentally tear open a small blister of skin next to one of her stitches. A small bit of pus squirts on my mouth and I jump backwards, spitting it out on the carpet and wiping my whole face with the back of my arm.

“Come on Poopy,” my mom says. “It’s not that bad.”

“Jesus Fucking Christ mom! This is in the top ten nastiest things I’ve had to do in my life!”

“Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain, praise be.”

“Not with the Jesus shit again!” I groan. “I thought the people at the spa convinced you that that stuff is all bullshit.”

“Oh no, Poopy,” she says. “Yes, they tried their best to strip me of my faith. They locked me in rooms and gave me drugs trying to get me to renounce the name of my Lord. They said that unless I gave up such superstition, I would never be able to be truly thin, in body as well as soul.”

“Whatever,” I say, going over to the sink and drinking some water right out of the tap to wash the pus taste out of my mouth. “It sounds all creepy and culty, but it’s essentially right.”

“No it isn’t,” my mom says calmly. “The counselors there did their best to convince me there was nothing but this world. I even had to renounce the name of my Lord in front of everyone to end their torments. But it just made my faith in God stronger. I learned that speaking the name of the Lord is one thing, but keeping him alive in our heart is another. If anything, it made my faith in God stronger. More real. That was probably more important than the transformation of my body. The experience, the tribulation, the thing it transformed the most was my heart.”

I shrug. “Well, whatever. I paid for you to get thin and I guess they did that, so I’ll mark satisfied on the comment card.”

My mom looks at me and shakes her head. “Poopy, I really wish I could show you what I know. That there’s something beyond this world, something larger than all of us.”

“Mom, I’m not getting into a religious discussion with you,” I bark. “You know how I feel and I’m not changing my mind just because you think some asshole with a beard lives in the sky.”

I wipe my mouth one more time, hoping that I’ve got all the pus out of there. “Okay, you’re covered in goo. Can I go now?”

“Well, the part I really need help with is putting my bandages back on. Otherwise, I’ll dry out and I can’t do that until I get full blood circulation back to my skin.”

“Once I put the bandages back on, can I leave?”

“Oh, and I can’t eat Pizza Hut. I have a very specific diet of greens, kale, and sea weed I need to consume every few hours to stay healthy. After you spent so much to make me thin, I can’t go back to my old ways.”

This just keeps getting better and better. “I’ll find some vegetarian restaurant you can order that crap from.”

“It’s not crap,” my mom protests. “You just have to train yourself to believe that vitamins are yummy.”

“Did Jesus tell you that?”

“Don’t blaspheme, Poopy.”

It takes another fifteen minutes to get my mom wrapped up in fresh bandages and looking like a mummy again. After I’m done, I deliberately neglect giving my mom a kiss goodbye on the cheek and take the sodden, pus and goo covered bandages out to the dumpster behind the motel. The dumpster smells like a dog crawled in there and died. I toss the bandages in there and back away. If there was one sense I wish I was without, it would be my sense of smell.

As I walk back to the van, Sergei dashes out of the office. “Hey, Mr. Poopy! How it hanging G-loc?”

“What was that Sergei?” I say, annoyed. “I don’t speak nigger.”

“Hey, my uncle wanted me to ask you; have you heard from Hirsch lately? He has some business associates that have a case he needs to look into.”

Hirsch is probably chopped up and buried deep in a landfill somewhere, but of course I can’t tell Sergei that, so I just say. “I haven’t heard from him in a week. He was supposed to call me about my case. If you hear from him, tell him I need to talk to him.”

“Versa vice, Mr. Peanutz,” Sergei says. “Why you driving this soccer mom piece of shit, Poopy? Where’s your Mercedes?”

“It’s in the shop,” I say. “I’m getting some work done on it.”

“Terrific,” Sergei says. “Hey, I have a friend that can get you some neon-trim on it, as well as a spoiler. He can do it cheap, only a few thousand. You interested?”

“No Sergei,” I say. “Besides, who the fuck would put a spoiler on a Mercedes S-Class?”

“I would,” he says instantly. “You know; ‘Fast and Furious’…”

“Right…” I say. “It’s been nice talking with you. I but I gotta run.”

“Cool homey,” Sergei says. “Don’t you worry about your momma. I take good care of her, like she was my own momma. Don’t worry about a thing!”

I think snidely, if she was your mother, you wouldn’t be some Rusky who thinks it’s cool speaking Ebonics. You’d be a fucked up piece of shit like me.

I wonder if I should warn Sergei to get out of town. Go back to whatever cold, gray Russian town he hails from. After all, he has helped my ass quite a bit. I’m sure if this whole assassination plot goes down the way Burke and Van Hertzwelder want it to, Sergei is gonna get snapped up and sent to Guantanamo Bay where he’ll never be heard from again. But he’s already asking questions about Hirsch. Telling him to get out of town will make him even more suspicious. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find some way of warning him.

I drive the van back to my apartment. I have it rented out for the next two weeks. I don’t imagine I’ll be alive after that.