Excerpt: Continental Drift

It is late October in Wyoming. I do not expect any Trick or Treaters to come to my door. It is too cold for most of the children dressed like Superman and Cinderella. In this climate, the only acceptable costumes are Eskimo or Tsar Nicholas. These costumes will be walking around Jackson Hole in small numbers begging for candy. They will not come to my house, though. The parents all grew up hearing stories of ghouls and monsters. The stories they tell their children about me are much worse, I’m sure.
“Don’t go to Old Man Doorbuster’s house. He killed 100 people with a German pistol! Maybe more! They never find the bodies until the snow melts away in July!”
I’ve killed more than 100 people, I’m sure. But not the people they think. The state of Missouri now says that I am innocent of those murders. All of the people I have killed, save for one, were killed from an altitude of a several thousand feet.
When I was in England, there was a shortage of fresh vegetables. The one vegetable they had plenty of was cabbage. I lived off of cabbage and potatoes for my first two weeks at the base. It was after these two weeks that the Army stopped serving cabbage to the bomber crews.
Cabbage causes terrible intestinal gas.
At high altitudes, the intestinal gas expands while still inside the intestines. This is quite painful. A tail gunner in one of the flight crews in our wing died from cabbage ass, as we called it. The gas caused his intestines to rupture, spilling shit all over his insides. His death was the most horrible that I would ever see up close.
His name was Mike. I don’t remember much else about him. I do remember that he told me the dirtiest joke I had heard at the time.
"Hey, Howard", Mike said. "What's the last thing a pubic hair hears before it hits the ground?"
I told him that I did not know.
The answer, he told me, was, "PFFT PFFT PFFT!"
The last thing he said was, “I’ve really shit myself, haven‘t I?” Then he made a sound that sounded like "PFFT PFFT PFFT."
When I was convicted of murder, I said to my lawyer, “I’ve really shit myself, haven’t I?”
Thunk!
A bird just struck my window. I looked out the window and saw a slightly dazed Bohemian Waxwing hopping on the snow. None of his friends are around. They went off to find berries. All they will find around here is pine needles and snow. Maybe he got some bad berries.
I read a while back that the leading cause of death for Waxwings was eating fermented berries. They would get intoxicated and either die of alcohol poisoning or from flying into things.
A group of Waxwings is called an earful. I did not make that up.
If I could walk, I’d put on boots and a parka and rescue my drunk friend.
I just looked out the window again. My friends is gone. Hopefully he has sobered up and flown away. I wish him warmth and fresh berries.
Today is my wife’s 82nd birthday. I wished “bon anniversaire” to her ghost this morning. I am also a ghost. I’m just dressed as an old man.
Trick or Treat?