Blood & Tacos #4 Read online

  Blood & Tacos

  Issue 4

  Spring 2013

  Published by Creative Guy Publishing

  ISSN 1929-011X

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  Contents

  WE’RE BACK!

  FATHER DUKES in DOPEHOUSE INFERNO (Abridged) – By Milt Walsh (discovered by Bart Lessard)

  BROWN SUGAR BROOKDALE in TITTY TITTY BANG BANG – By Chester Olden Earnest (discovered by Thomas Pluck)

  THE SANITIZER in THE POTOMAC PENETRATION – By Marion Hillberry, writing as Stack Grannett (discovered by Nick Slosser)

  APACHE BLOOD in A GOOD DAY TO DIE – By Edward T. Johnson (discovered by Brad Mengel)

  L.A.N.D.B.O.A.T. (The Boat That Goes on Land) in L.A.N.D.B.O.A.T. (The Boat That Goes On Land) – By Chase Verdugo (discovered by Oren Brimer)

  THANKS!

  WE’RE BACK! THE COVER IS BLACK! AND WE’RE BETTER THAN EVER!

  Issue #4 might have taken us a little longer than our usual schedule, but after you read the stories, we hope that you’ll think it was worth the wait.

  WE’RE MAKING SOME CHANGES HERE AT B&T HEADQUARTERS!

  You may notice that the newest issue no longer has any reviews or nonfiction pieces. Johnny has decided to dump the essays and concentrate entirely on the forgotten men’s adventure stories that all these great writers continue to find in the strangest places. It’s always been the heart of the magazine and we want to keep it that way.

  This also marks the end of our first year (Happy Anniversary, us!) and the beginning of a new era. In 2013, there will be a few changes and additions. The magazine will go from being a quarterly to a sporadically, probably twice a year. Don’t fret though, we will make it beefier with more stories. We have always paid our authors, and by making this change we feel we can potentially increase the compensation for the authors (one of our main priorities).

  In late spring/early summer, Blood & Tacos will expand to a book publishing imprint of Creative Guy, our first publication being the print-only annual of the fiction from the first four issues.

  From there, the plan is to start publishing novellas featuring the characters that you’ve seen in past issues. All authors that have appeared in the mag have been invited to write a novella featuring their character if they are interested. Authors will retain the rights to their characters and royalty percentages will favor the authors. We see the imprint as a partnership, mutually beneficial and fair to both parties.

  We at Blood & Tacos would like to specifically thank Roxanne Patruznick, Michael Batty, Sean Norris, John & Polly Pospisil, and all the authors for their efforts in helping us bring this ridiculously awesome business to life.

  FATHER DUKES

  in

  DOPEHOUSE INFERNO (ABRIDGED)

  By Milt Walsh

  (discovered by Bart Lessard)

  The street-tough priest and heavyweight boxer Father Dukes graced several softback originals stuffed into ferry terminal twirly-racks of the 1970s. But owing to the publisher’s noncommittal efforts with glue binding and a soda-pulp paper stock that might best be described as “twiggy,” only one fragmentary copy of this particular outing is known to have survived. BART LESSARD found it tucked into the dirty insulation behind his broken water heater. He painstakingly reassembled the gist of the missing parts by posting a question thread to the “pefo” forum on Craig’s List, then trying again under “libtards” and “over 50.”

  West 44th Street, Delaware City. On a map, a simple line. On the ground, the brink of hell. Once it had marked the edge of the meatpacking district. But the cattle trains had stopped coming in, the A & P began to stock wheat germ, and the breed had changed along with the times. Gangs, pushers, junkies, hookers, pimps, longhairs, immigrants, radicals, catamites, welfare cheats—these were the new flesh. With something like pride they had kept the old nickname for their new haunts: the Killing Floor.

  The border was clear even without a map to mark it. On the far lane of West 44th, long cars cruised by slow—candy-colored cars with furs inside, cars with gleaming hubcaps, cars with chandeliers, cars that bounced. The stoops held a crowd, colored men in suedes and furs and pegged pants and purple fedoras. A purring crew of whores and punks met their every whim. Men in stained raincoats roamed the concrete in between, eyes cast down, seeking a chance, a fix, a woman, a pretty boy, an exit. Every car stereo and pocket hi-fi blared the savage thrum of disco.

  But none of this netherworld dared cross the fading paint that marked the middle of West 44th. Not one pimp sedan ever made a left across the other lane. Something held them all back. Kept them in check. Told them, here, and no farther.

  Nowhere was the gutter stench stronger than in the loom of the burnt-out tenement. It stood in the center of the block, and it had no right to stand at all. Like the furnace of hell had in the time before time, it had caught fire. And like hell promised to, it had people in it yet: shadows glimpsed through the broken windowpanes, mysterious comings and goings. At any hour day or night the walks around it teemed with the lowlife, peddling dope and lust, preying on the weak. The building should have been condemned, scrubbed clean with a wrecking ball, but building inspectors never came—scared, bribed, both.

  Inside the blackened tower, near the entry, was a ground-floor apartment. Here a short swart man strutted in, followed by a mouse of a woman painted up like a billboard. The man was Big Baby—a quarter Puerto Rican, a quarter Turk, two-fifths Negro, the rest miscellaneous. For a look he kept a pacifier in his mouth and curlers in his hair. He set his takeout chicken and jelly donuts beside a bare mattress. He lit a Sterno can for ambiance. A puddle of light spread from the wick.

  “Please, Baby,” said the harlot. She ran her shaky press-on nails over her arms. “I’m hurting real bad.”

  Wet gold flashed as Big Baby smiled. He drew a fat knife and stabbed a wall. The handle took his cheetah coat. At the window he parted the Hefty bag curtains and threw open the broken sash. In came a draft of filth. A garbage strike was on. To Big Baby it smelled like payday.

  Big Baby turned back around, his gold teeth tight on the sucker. He reached down. A zipper spoke. The harlot’s eyes went wide.

  “Feast those eyeses, child,” he said. He held his asset out to the Sterno light: a paper twisted at both ends, the load within no fatter than the snout of a rat. Also, he had taken out his dick. “The fo-real deal. Aca-ma-pulco Gold. Straight froms the Promised Land.” He meant Mexico. “Ninety-nine and foaty-fo one hunnerts percent pure, know what I’m saying?”

  This was all a mumble through the sucker, and a speech impediment, but the whore was all eyes and few ears. And two knees, which she now went to. It showed initiative, Big Baby thought. “Oh yes, please, it’s just what I need,” she said.

  In a fit of giggles, Big Baby missed the uproar right outside. Dopers and dope dealers breaking into a run, shouting, screaming. A honking horn, the swoop of a trash can in flight, a shatter of glass, a gush of malt liquor. It was the sound of a coming storm. A storm that walked on two feet like a man. A man with a right like a wrecking ball. A wrecking ball long overdue for the demolition.

  Big Baby said, “Let’s us opens the flo to a bit of ... negotiation.”

  “So a blowjob?”

  The window burst. Big Baby spun around and the whore fled, scuttling into the dark. What the dim light first made a wet sack of garbage was actually Sir Weasel in his bespoke velvets. A member of Big Baby’s own street gang, the Ladykillers. He had been left outside to keep watch while Big Baby got his checkup—him, Man Sam, and Poppin Snake. A shard had cut Sir Weasel’s throat. The lifeblood shot out onto the boards in f
arting pulses. Phbbt! Phbbt! Phbbt! His hand went limp. A .38 tumbled free.

  Big Baby tucked himself away, but his sudden soft-on had done most of the work for him. He took up the gun and ran into the hall. He thought twice, came back in, threw on his furs, pulled the knife, primped his curlers, and ran out again.

  Too late. There in the unlit and blackened entry stood a shape. A figure cast tall and broad by the flickering street lamp in the background.

  Big Baby ignored the animal fear and brought up the weapons. He spoke through the pacifier. “Just got yoself a discount. Don’t you know where you at? This Pipe’s house. This where the Pipe play. And now you gonna pay too. Pay to play.”

  Without a pause to ask for clarification but slow enough that Big Baby could finish his thought, the figure stepped in. A patch of light from a lamp in the stairwell crossed the beefy chest. The clothes were pitch black except at the very front of the collar. A single square of white. A white now flecked with red, a windowpane where the blood of atonement showed in the dark.

  Big Baby thought, A priest? Couldn’t be—

  But the man came on, the patch of light moved up past the collar, the iron jaw, the copper mustache. To the eyes, where it held.

  Father Dukes!

  The rubber nipple fell from Big Baby’s mouth. The .38 shook in one hand, and the knife in the other. His knees had turned to warm water. Actually he had pissed himself. His polyester socks squished as he took a step back. That fierce blue, that fire. This mother be crazy!

  And that was Big Baby’s last thought before a fist knocked the curlers from his hair.

  Atta boy, Mick! a raspy voice said. You showed dat schwartze what’s what!

  Lefty Sofer had been his cutman back in the prizefighting days. The crusty yid had gone to glory not long after, or to a cozy nook of hell. But death hadn’t stopped old Lefty from chiming in.

  And watch the footwoik!

  The Reverend Michael Muldoon, better known as Father Dukes, stared down at his limp and bleeding handiwork. He plucked a tooth from the callus on a knuckle and threw it over a shoulder.

  The priest was in a fury—a rage as red as the hair atop his head and fanned out upon his lip. He hadn’t felt an anger so deep since his final bout as “Dukes” Muldoon. His famed “sucker hook” had given the challenger brain damage. Wally “Twos” Phelan had been a gentle giant and a swell guy—not bad for Black Irish anyway. And though he had never been too sharp—he took “Twos” because he could count no higher— he hadn’t deserved a diaper and a padded ward.

  The champ had thrown down his gloves in disgrace. He had sworn to his dying mother that he would enter the seminary to make amends. She hadn’t asked him to—had met the suggestion with a silent roll of her stroked-out eyes—but it had seemed the right thing to do. He couldn’t remember a seminary, but he was punchy himself and that was beside the point. He had the collar, the book, and a flock to tend, there in the seamy streets of Delaware City.

  Father Dukes had served as an ambassador of sorts for the neighborhood families. The gang lords of the Killing Floor knew his name, his past, and better than to cross the paint at West 44th. And the priest had let himself feel content—to let the scum bubble as long as it kept to its toilet, a toilet being optimal placement for bubbling scum. But somehow Jenny Stupek, five years old, the cutest Polack you ever saw, had gotten her hands on the “product” and taken it for makowiec. Now she lay in a hospital bed, a tube up her nose, while bags dripped into her and a heart monitor peeped like a sickly bird.

  Rage. Rage!

  The priest reached down. With a single hand he hauled Big Baby upright and floppy, a leisure suit full of chewing gum. He held him against a charred wall and slapped him awake.

  “Where is the Piper?” Father Dukes roared. The Piper, the mystery man, Delaware City’s “King of Boo.”

  Big Baby had reached up to his hair. “My treatment!”

  “The Piper! Where?”

  “O.K., O.K., holy rolla. Pipe be upstairs, alls the way ups top. But you never make it.”

  “And why not now?”

  “The flos, they guarded. Each one mo thans the last. Mo guns, mo weapons.” Big Baby smiled short of teeth, working up the nerve. “Mo pain.”

  A swoop to the chin put Big Baby through the cindered wall. His lifts dangled from the hole, shivered, went still in the sift of ashes.

  You gotta step it up now, boychik! Lefty said from eternity. Timin’ is everything!

  Twelve floors. Like the Stations of the Cross. And at the last came the nails, right? His mustache took a curl and his eyes a feral glow. He could hardly wait.

  [On the next three floors, Father Dukes faces the last of Big Baby’s gang, a zombie-like horde of junkies, and an evil rock and roll band, in that order. —Ed.]

  …but the fire hose held. A last lunge got Father Dukes up and over. He crashed through the upper story window in a burst of glass, rolled, halted in a crouch.

  As his head cleared he stood, coughing, patting out the flames on his clergy shirt. Absently he yanked the drumstick from the wound in his thigh. When the bloody shaft fell from his grip there was no clatter, no ring of wood on bare wood. It was then that he noted the carpet at his feet. Brand new. An undyed and slubby wool pile. Tasteful, some might say. That much was lost on the street-smart priest, who slept on under-washed rebar with a cinderblock for a pillow, but the pattern in the brocade was not: cocks and cherubs in a frolic. There seemed to be some kind of subtle message in it.

  I gotta bad feeling about dis, said Lefty, and he wasn’t alone.

  The priest took a jolt from his hip flask as he looked about. There was no sign of old smoke, no char, only fresh paint and a minimally furnished open floor plan. A sea of low shag, sprawling marble countertops at an island wet bar, recessed ceiling lights, a pit with a circular sofa. Conversation pieces, floral arrangements, very important works of art. Someone had not just rebuilt, but ... redecorated. At the perimeters were window treatments—a lace of sorts—one of which he had knocked loose with his crashing entry. It lay on the carpet like a spurned bride.

  Father Dukes thought it looked like an airport lounge, where fancy jets flew fancy people to parts unknown. So at first he took the three slinky figures lounging in the pit for stewardesses. They were sprawled about a glass table loaded with wine spritzers and plates of crab rémoulade with rocket and endive. Father Dukes saw only low tide on rabbit food with a side of sissy. But then the three stood, and even for all the vamping fuss of their movements, the priest saw that they were no ladies.

  The three formed a delta, fists set high to hips, elbows out. The one in front wore a double-breasted silk frock and took pursing sips of smoke from a cigarette holder, theater-length. His glossy black hair bore a bolt of witchy white, curlicued at the end. The two behind him wore tight striped jersey shirts, capri pants, no socks, and side-gusseted dress loafers.

  He in front took up a quizzing glass on the end of a waist chain and gave Father Dukes the once-over, pinkie akimbo. “Black, before Labor Day?”

  Nancies! Lefty said.

  One in back said, “He’s made a dickens of the drapes.”

  “I’ll fetch the club soda,” said the other, looking at the carpet behind the priest.

  “Hold off for now, Beauregard,” said the leader. “We’ll be needing more than just a spot treatment.” The three had fanned out.

  “Mama told me not to pick on girls,” said the priest. “So why don’t you show me the stairs and swish yourselves on down to confession at St. Mary’s?”

  “Where do you think we started?” said the leader.

  “I’m here for the Piper,” Father Dukes said. “Stand clear.”

  The priest made to walk between the leader and the man to his left. He found himself flat on his back, the print of a loafer in the side of his face. Father Dukes sat up, shaking light back into his head. The three tittered.

  “You’re no garden-variety finook, are you?” the priest asked.

>   “I see what you did there,” said the leader. On the priest’s blank stare he sighed. “This is a dojo,” he said, rolling the j like a grape in his mouth. “I am Master Anton, and these are my disciples. Scott, Beauregard, bring me the mustache.”

  “Yes, sensei,” the prettyboys said as one, and the sound was like a calliope leak.

  “I’ve fought kickers before,” Father Dukes said, jumping upright.

  “How about twirlers?”

  As Master Anton said this, his disciples brought out weapons from behind their backs. Like the batons of majorettes but broken in half and rejoined with fine chain. And lacquered vivid pink. These they spun fast, changing hands, eyes and smirks locked on the priest through the flesh-toned blur.

  Take care, pisher! Lefty said. Dese faygeles, dey got a talent!

  Father Dukes could take a punch as well as he could dish one out. So he simply raised his forearms, covered up, and let the beating begin.

  The queers swooped in, a wind ruffling the cuffs of their capris. The pink nunchucks caught the momentum and struck all the harder. The blows stung to the core. And again. And again. If the priest hadn’t kept so thick a brace of muscle through clean living and steak dinners, bones would have shattered, organs burst. But he tensed up and took it all, a human fist. And in his clench he let his uncanny pugilist’s sense study up as the assailants leapt and swung, yelping like minks in a pique. Each blow, each angle of attack went into the primal machine of the fighter’s mind. He listened through the drum of their weapons on his own body to where their feet landed, to the speed of their leaps and swings, the rhythm of it all.

  Father Dukes stood up, straighter and straighter, dropping his guard, inviting the killing blow to his head, proud, red, and unprotected.