Chuck followed Alice through the disaster-area front yard, past General Lee, who seemed very melancholy, and up the steps to the front porch. The dog began howling before Alice knocked. They heard the dead bolt slide, the tinkle of a chain being unlatched, and then the door swung open and a large, mannish woman in a lumberjack shirt and paint-splattered overalls appeared. She was nearly Chuck’s height and at least fifty pounds heavier. The Great Dane was at her side, barking its head off. After taking in the dog’s huge head, Chuck noticed that the animal only had three legs.
“Well, well,” Jan said, her voice a whiskey and cigarette rasp. “Look what the wind blew to my doorstep. What the hell are you doing in South-fucking-Carolina, Alice?”
“Running away from the ruin of my life, sister dear. What happened to Milo?”
Jan slapped the dog on the head to shut it up. “My asswipe neighbor ran him over, on purpose. The SOB thinks I poisoned his precious cat. What he refuses to accept is that his precious cat died of purely natural causes. I had no part in it. If I wanted to kill his cat I would have slit its throat and left it on his doorstep.”
Alice cocked her head at Chuck. “This is Chuck Miller, a fellow runaway. Picked him up in Florida. He’s got a good line, though it sounds like a load of crap to me. Claims he’s running away from the circus, but he’s obviously hiding something. He’s a natural born liar, not unlike my husband. Why are men so terrified of the truth? What have you got to drink, Jan?”
They followed Jan into the house. When the Great Dane bumped into the tattered sofa, and then banged against a floor lamp, Chuck realized the dog was blind as well as crippled. Not that a blind dog could do much damage to a house that looked as if it had been the site of a month-long party for a thousand frat brothers. Chuck was no stranger to sloth, but as he related to me several years later on one of his rare trips through Santa Barbara, Jan’s house was in a league above and beyond anything he’d ever seen.
“Tang, there was dog shit on the rug, empty tuna cans, moldy cottage cheese containers, pizza cartons, newspapers, magazines, cancelled checks, empty beer bottles, cereal boxes – it was like the woman had never seen a friggin’ trash can. The joint smelled like a cesspool. Now you know me, I’m a first-team all-world slob, a pig to the core, but this place stretched my tolerance for filth. No way was I going to sit down. Hell, it was all I could do to keep from stepping in dog shit, particularly when the damn dog comes over and starts sniffing my crotch. He smells like piss and liverwurst, and even worse, he’s got a boner the size of a Dodger dog. If Jan hadn’t been built like Mike Tyson I’d of clocked the dog with a bottle.
“Anyhow, Jan comes out of the kitchen with a bottle of peppermint schnapps, takes a belt and passes it to Alice, who takes an even bigger belt before handing it to me. Alice is already tipsy and it occurs to me that unless I keep my wits we’re going to spend the night in this shithole. I take a wee sip and hand the bottle to Jan. ‘Pussy,’ she says to me, pulling a Sherman from behind her ear and a Zippo from her pocket. She’s eye-balling me as if I’m some kind of alien. Of course I’m thinking that she’s certifiable, a nuthouse refugee. I’m a tolerant guy but I can see why the neighbors want to run Jan out. She’s the classic neighborhood freak, the crazy lady that all the kids avoid. She looks at me through a cloud of smoke and says, ‘You planning on sleeping with my sister?’ I say, I’m just trying to put some distance between myself and a bad situation. ‘Why should you be any different,’ she says. ‘Every last one of us is in a bad situation called life. Death is the only happy ending.’ ‘Oh, Jan,’ Alice says, ‘you’re so dramatic.’”
They polished off the schnapps. Alice passed out on the sofa, her head thrown back, mouth parted. Jan ordered two large pizzas with everything on them and told Chuck to run down to the street when he heard the delivery boy honk. None of the boys would come to her door. Bunch of wimps, she called them, every last one. Piss-ant boys afraid of their own shadows.
It was almost an hour before the pizzas arrived, an hour that passed for Chuck like the last hour of life on Death Row. When she wasn’t ranting about men, her neighbors, her ex-husband, lesbians, white trash, the government, Chinese-Americans, African-Americans, Serbs, Muslims and soccer moms, Jan bitched about Alice and how their father had always favored her.
Milo followed Chuck out the front door and down the walk, much more at home outdoors than in. The pizza man was a young Hindu with dark skin and wary eyes. Chuck handed the kid a $20 in exchange for a ride to the highway. “Ten dollars more for the dog,” the kid said. “I wasn’t planning on bringing him along,” Chuck said, “but what the hell. Let’s go.”
Five minutes after the pizza boy dropped them beside the Interstate, a faith-healer and self-proclaimed mystic driving a Ford station wagon with Kentucky plates picked Chuck and Milo up.
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