Contributor: Robert E. Petras
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According to Mackey, no news was good news because happiness was merely a neutral state. Anybody who said that she was happy, as his ex-wife Katie always claimed, was simply lying through her Botox. Besides they were simply too
busy beings assholes.
According to Mackey, society these days basically produced two personality types: A and AA—asshole and double asshole. The nice guys, such as Mackey, were on the endangered species list. That nice guys finished last was a misstatement; most of the time nice guys didn’t even finish.
Mackey’s own mood swings, his doctor attributed to a chemical imbalance, the primary chemical being alcohol. He was sitting on his front porch swing, contemplating recent events and sipping on a glass of Shiraz. The wine had a fruity taste, like Fruit of the Looms, putting the triple exclamation point at the end of a shitty workweek. Through the mail on Wednesday, he received a rejection slip from a small magazine. Thursday, the Postal Service greeted him with a certified letter as the defendant in a lawsuit, stating his incompetence as a furnace installer led to the destruction of a 3500-dollar unit and another five-thousand in damages to the residence. Friday, he received a restraining order prohibiting him from coming within a quarter-mile of the home of the Bungers, the family suing him.
He was feeling such a strain from the burden of all these assholes Mackey was feeling like Atlas’s balls. Then he remembered revenge was the motherfucker of invention.
He recalled viewing a CNN broadcast of an Air Force ground crew loading bombs onto jets. These bombs had painted onto their shells “To Saddam with Love” and “Happy B-day Bagdad Bob.” Not so much as a cherry bomb could be found inside Mackey’s house, but outside sat plenty of two- and three-foot diameter log stumps at the woodpile for splitting. Into the stumps he could carve the names of the Bungholes and then roll the stumps down the 700-foot hill in the woods behind his house.
If Mackey could not have immediate revenge, he could have it symbolically.
In the coolness of sunset, he hacked into a red oak stump “Rod Bunger and Marianne Bunger” with a slash running through the names and repeated the effort upon the other side with “Phillip Stainer,” his old high school principal, who had wrongly paddled him in seventh grade. “There’s one for old Shit Stain,” he muttered while staring at the engraved log. “Here’s one for old Ass Hole Stein,” he said upon finishing carving the name of the high school baseball coach, John Holstein, who had cut him from the team during tryouts.
After Mackey pried the stump upright with a two-by-four, the log stood three- feet tall and 18 inches wide. With its jagged bark, the red oak stump looked like a dull circular saw capable of smashing saplings and boring a path through the thickest briars once unleashed down the 35-degree slope. Where the edge of the tree line met the sparse grass of his lower lawn, Mackey noticed a healthy patch of poison ivy growing. He twisted the stump so that it edged toward the noxious plants.
Thanks to his Boy Scout troop master, Mackey knew this toxic weed was covered with an invisible wax called urishiol, the substance with which skin contact meant an ugly, itchy, blotchy rash, and, in some extreme cases, hospitalization and even the eternal ten count.
Not everyone who contacted it suffered an allergic reaction, like Scout Master Jackson, forever referred to by Mackey as old Jackoff, who once demonstrated this fact upon a camping trip by plowing through shoulder-high poison ivy and did not so much suffer a red freckle during the weeklong event. “But don’t you dare go near poison ivy,” old Jackoff said. “Leaves of three let them be.”
“Leaves of three let them breed,” Mackey said thirty years later, shoving the stump until it rolled on its own, picking up momentum through the ivy patch; then he heard wood snapping along with a staticky waterfall sound intermingled with a glissando of wood conking into wood, and then all sound segued into solemn quiet, like the aftermath of thunder.
The spores of creation settled in Mackey’s skull while he washed his hands with Irish Spring, the green soap reminding him of the color of poison ivy. He could rub the colorless ivy wax urishiol onto green stationary and send an unaddressed letter to the Bungholes and maybe they could contact a nice rash. The necessity for revenge was indeed the motherfucker of invention.
He opened a bottle of cheap merlot and toasted his brilliance. He would send the poison ivy on a chain letter.
Hands dried, Mackey composed these words, simple and terse: “Send a copy of this letter to ten people and good fortune will accompany you. Fail to do so and you will soon suffer misfortune.”
The following evening after work, he stopped at a pharmacy and bought green stationary, a box of surgical gloves and a pair of tweezers. Returning to his car, Mackey encountered Joe Walters, one of his few former high school classmates, who wasn’t a stuck-up prick. “Did you hear about old Shit Stain?” Walters asked.
“The school board finally fired him?”
“Nah, even better, somebody rear-ended him last night, put him in the hospital with a fractured neck.”
“You know,” Mackey said, “He treated me like a member of his family, the red-headed stepchild, but nobody deserves that.”
“You were always the nice guy, Mack. A little sufferering will do him good; he’ll be wearing a plaster lifesaver around his neck for a long time.”
After supper and wine, Mackey printed ten copies of the chain letter onto green stationary. Now came the tricky part of the project.
Mackey was one of the 15 percent of people whom poison ivy did not affect. He was not taking any chances while working the bushes growing along the tree line. To him the emerald leaves appeared greasy and bloated. Hands protected by surgical gloves, arms Saran-wrapped, he sheered the leaves with hedge clippers, arms fully extended. After delicately collecting the leaves with a nail extending from a broom handle, he deposited them into a plastic bucket. With tweezers he rolled the poison ivy leaves into cigars and swiped them across the printed, pre-folded green chain letter, all the time being cautious not to smear them with a green slick from the skin of leaves.
Ten copies he had doctored with poison ivy wax—ten lethal letters ready for insertion into envelopes addressed to ten AA personalities. Mackey addressed one envelope apiece to the Bungholes and even one to their twelve-year-old daughter Missy, who already had a heart as cold as a witch’s tit in a brass training bra. Another he addressed to Scout Master Jackoff for believing he was King Shit of Grand Turd Island, one apiece to his two ex-wives, and one to his ex-mother-in-law, Erica Show. “People who live in mud houses should not throw water balloons,” Mackey said to himself. “This one’s for you, Tit Show.” Another two were going to bitches who had given him the flick and one was designated for Shit Stain, just for good measure.
Mackey had always scoffed at people who bought lottery tickets, but paid a dollar for an instant ticket from a convenience store and scratched off a one-thousand-dollar winner. The way his day was going, he would not be surprised if he shit gold nuggets.
At night, under the cover of darkness, he pulled up his Jeep Compass beside a drive-through mailbox outside the post office. “All assholes are going to get their due,” he said while stuffing the letters down the chute. Mackey knew plenty more assholes. One thing about assholedom, it was indiscriminate. This was certainly one asshole friendly town.
The ensuing day he laced another ten letters and deposited them in a different mailbox after encircling the block three times until he was certain the street was deserted and then waited for another tidal wave of luck.
Three days later, he got lucky—physically—while adding a fan to an inside air-conditioning unit. First, he felt the shadow sweeping over him. The practice of people peeping over his shoulder while he worked was one exhibited by assholes, but when he turned he saw that this particular asshole was the bull’s eye of a tattoo of a white and red circular target.
Later in the day, he learned his former baseball coach, Asshole-Stein, suffered a stroke and was hospitalized. “Damn, that log roll has some kind of powerful voodoo,” he said to himself. Even his cheap box wine tasted better, with hints of strawberries, chocolate, oak, roses and a strong finish of revenge. He poured himself a glass of cabernet and picked up the evening paper, the headline reading “POISON IVY EPIDEMIC HITS TOWN.” The article even mentioned a mysterious case of former high school principal Phillip Stainer contacting poison ivy after seven days of recovery at the hospital.
“Could things go any better?” Mackey thought. That evening he mailed ten additional chain letters, including four to magazine editors who had rejected his short stories, three more to the Bungholers, one to a nun named Sister Leona Utsinger who had once tailgated him for a mile on the highway. “Butsinger!” he had yelled out loud through the window as he flipped her off. The other two laced letters went to girls who had rejected him at a seventh grade dance.
The following day, the satisfied customer called him back to take a look at her best friend’s unit, the call coming over his cell phone moments after he picked from the bottom of a Crackerjacks box a pack of condoms. Mackey was feeling so lucky he decided to check out the tan lines at the beach. His luck was almost too good to be true, because there laying prone upon the sand were the Bungholes. But that was not calamine lotion Freckle Tits was rubbing on the back of Slobbo but 30 SUV Coppertone.
Back home in the late afternoon, Mackey collected his mail. Leafing through it, he noticed an unaddressed envelope and opened it; sure enough in his exact words printed on white paper was the chain letter. He shredded it with his fingers and sprinkled the confetti into a wastepaper basket.
Two bottles of wine later, he was carving the Bunger’s names on both sides of a log stump. Maybe the original stopped shy of the creek, failing to impart the full power of the voodoo. That had to be the reason. Not only was Mackey brilliant and lucky, he was the champion of anti-assholes, a crusader to wipe out ass clowns such as the Bungholes. This stump was even heavier than the first, so much that Mackey had to pry it upright with a ten-foot plank. As he prepared to give the log a running shove, Mackey felt an itch upon the hairless part of his wrist. He stared at his wrist and saw the red blisters characteristic of poison ivy.
He would tend to his wrist later. First, he had work to do.
Like a brakeman on a bobsledding team, Mackey thrust the stump out as he hit full stride, but an unseen tree root stopped the momentum of the log, causing him to somersault over the stump and to land upon his back a body length downhill, knocking the breath from him.
First, he heard the root snap and then the sound of his own skull crunching by the runaway monster. There was ringing in his ears, but he could still hear the log stump bounding down the hillside—a lifetime--the cascading noise becoming fainter and fainter until he heard and felt only the quiet coolness of still water, and for the first time in his life, he felt happy.
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Robert E. Petras is a graduate of West Liberty University and a resident of Toronto, Ohio. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Razor Dildo, Yesteryear Fiction, Death Head Grin, Haunted Waters Press and Heyday Magazine.
