Free Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet by Adam Howe Page A

bucket, slopped over my boots.
    “Damn it, Eliza!” I kicked the shit off my boots. “Watch where you’re going!”
    “Sorry, Mr. Levine.” She gave me a sheepish smile in the rearview.
    With an angry glance at Lester, I considered waking him, letting him take his turn on bait detail. He was sprawled across the kitchenette’s bench seat, snoring like a bear gone down for winter. “Mind if I ask you something?” I said to Eliza. “What exactly do you see in this clown?”
    She gazed adoringly at Lester. “Oh, you don’t know him, Mr. Levine. No one knows Lester like I do. He’s my knight in shining armor.”
    As if on cue, Lester scratched his nuts, cut a long fart like a sheet being torn in half, rolled over on the bench seat, and then continued to snore.
    A chivalrous knight? I couldn’t see it myself.
    “Lester rescued me from the mongoloid hospital,” Eliza explained.
    “Oh …” I managed to say.
    I wondered if Walt knew about this. There had to be a law against hiring mongoloids as strippers, and if there wasn’t, there ought to have been.
    Reading my expression, she giggled. “I wasn’t a patient, silly! I was a comfort nurse.”
    “You’ve got a nursing license? Then what the hell are you stripping for?”
    “Comfort nurses don’t need a nursing license.”
    “Comfort nurse … That’s like, a hospice worker or something?”
    “Oh no,” she chortled, “nothing like that. Nope, I was jacking off the mongoloids.”
    “Come again?”
    The bait fumes must have been making me heady, because it sounded like she’d said—
    “Remember Melvin Stott?” Eliza went on. “When he escaped from the mongoloid hospital? They found him out at Planter’s hog farm?”
    I remembered, alright. The kid had butt-fucked five hogs before the squealing woke Herb, he went outside to investigate, discovered Melvin balls-deep in Bessie, his prize sow, and put him to sleep with the stock of his scattergun. Herb never recovered from what he witnessed that night, sold his hog farm and took to the bottle, drinking himself to death under the bridge on old Highway 9.
    “After Melvin Stott,” Eliza said, “the hospital chiefs put measures in place to ensure nothing like that ever happened again. They hired me on as a comfort nurse to take the steam off them boys.” She rolled her shoulder, as if her arm had stiffened at the memory of the labor. “And I’m happy to report that we never lost another one.” She raised her chin proudly. “Not on my watch.”
    Jesus H. Christ … First dopey Ned in his baboon costume, now card-carrying mongoloids. And this was the girl I’d figured was out of my league.
    She must’ve seen the way I was looking at her because she said, “A mongoloid’s got needs just the same as any other man, Mr. Levine. And it really wasn’t as bad as you think. We just strapped ‘em down to their cots. Double restraints. Cuz that retard strength, it ain’t no myth. Then I pulled on the rubber glove and had at it. And not to toot my own horn, but I got real good at it too. I could finish ‘em off in just a few short strokes. Shoot, sometimes they’d pop their cork as soon as they saw me pulling on the glove. The doc said it reminded him of Pavlova’s dog. Said he might like to write a paper on it someday. Anyway, when I finished ‘em off, they were calm as little lambs, all sweet and subdued and good as gold.”
    I shook my head. “I can’t believe the hospital has a practice like this …” I also couldn’t believe Eliza made being strapped down in the mongoloid ward sound like an appealing proposition.
    She rolled her eyes at me. “They don’t exactly advertise the fact. Well, apart from the want-ad I saw in the Bugle . And the want-ad was kinda vague about what the job actually entailed. Like a cryptic crossword clue …
    “Anyway,” she said, “Lester was working at the hospital as an orderly—”
    “Lester Swash was gainfully employed?”
    I found that harder to believe