Wayne Wightman - The Attack Of The Ignoroids.pdf - Wayne Wightman - widez2

WAYNE WIGHTMAN

THE ATTACK OF THE IGNOROIDS

I, DERRIK RAMSDEN, DO NOT rattle easily. So when old pal Vreedon emptied my

bank

accounts, leaving me exactly $8.73, did I weep? Did I moan?

Hardly.

I did, however, contact two junkies, give them his address, and tell them that

he had five and a half pounds of crack hidden someplace in his apartment.

Vreedon, however, is no sloth. He moved too fast for them; he had already

vanished, and the junkies, pathetic skinks, got six months for trying to steal

the doors and plumbing fixtures.

A month before, Vreedon had told me, "C'mon Ramsden, I need investment capital

and I know from hacking around that you've got $9,000 stuck in miserable

savings

at something like 2.1%. This is heavily big. This is, in short, a deal!" He

sprawled on my plywood-bottomed sofa drinking my last generic beer and doing a

little absent-minded tap-dance, crushing various bugs as they skittered across

my floor.

"I'll make us a killing that'll set us up for life. This one, my friend, is a

sure thing, and since we've known each other longer than we've known anyone

but

family, I came to you. You, of all people, I came to. You, who live like a

roach

in this dump. I thought you'd like the chance to move up. Have, you know, like

heating, like when you worked at Madame Helga's."

His reference to that singular blot on my employment history was gratuitous

and

not appreciated. "You have five or six sure things a year, Vreedon, and you're

still riding the bus. So what's so majorly big about this one?"

"Trust me. The less you know about it, the better. But the return will be a

hundred to one. You give me your $9,000--a month later, I give you $900,000,

minimum. Never work again for the rest of your life."

It tempted me. Selling tombstones to welfare recipients for the last six

months

dragged down my soul. It made me ask annoying questions about the purpose of

life and how to more deeply screw the relatives of the dead. It was immoral,

but

it was legal. The $9,000 I'd saved plus another year's savings was supposed to

be my ticket out of this roach motel.

"No deal, Vreedon. It's too good to be true, however illegal it is."

He lurched forward and sat on the edge of the sofa. "Have I ever screwed you

a deal, Ram?"

"Not since the business with the Hitler sex video, no."

"Jeez. You got no spirit of adventure, Ramsden."

"Right. Poverty ate it."

My next bank statement indicated a total balance of $8.73. He even emptied my

checking account.

However, a month later, a package with a lot of strapping tape around it

arrived

with "Educational Material" stamped several times on the outside.

Inside, in crude bundles of well-used twenties, fifties, and hundreds, I found

$915,920. First I was robbed, then I was rich. It took days to sink in. I kept

opening the box and studying the bills.

I, Derrik Ramsden, no longer had to look for angles. I could have a life just

like before I was disbarred. I was rich.

So I moved into a house with coherent wails, actual electrical wiring, and

water

that came from faucets instead of a garden hose stuck through the kitchen

window. And I re-hired the one surviving junkie for my houseboy as soon as the

Honor Farm released him. His deceased partner, during a religious seizure, had

boiled a Bible to get the ink off the pages and had then mainlined the

distillate in order to get closer to God, which he did.

Cleetis worked furiously at whatever he did, his little crewcut blond halfwit

head devoid of the slightest thought, and he worked for practically nothing

except the revolting food he ate in tremendous quantities and the two-room

cottage he lived in behind the house.

Life was good. Life was wonderful.

I even had enough life in me to put a few lightweight moves on one Vera

Kamchatka, high-school nurse and part-time real estate agent who'd sold me the

house.

Then, one morning, there were three dead spots in the front lawn.

"Cleetis! You take a leak on the grass?"

"No boss! Nuh-uh. Not me. I'm a clean guy. I like white porcelain, boss."

"So what's the deal?"

True to form, Cleetis rushed to the front yard and on his hands and knees

began

poking, smelling, and prodding the dead grass, the little brain in his blond

head popping along full speed on a cylinder and a half.

"Burn spot, boss! Done been burned." He stood up and wiped his hands on his

pants. "Wumme reseed it?" His little blue eyes jittered inside their sockets.

"Do it now, boss? Get some seed and --"

"I want you to keep an eye on the front yard tonight. You can --"

"I get a lawn chair, stay outta sight, they come back, I tap-dance on their

jewels, boss, you better believe it, that's right."

"Right, right. You ever sleep Cleetis?"

"Huh?"

About five that afternoon, Vera Kamchatka called to tell me she'd rented my

old

house, the roach breeding colony. "What? Why? Vera, the deal was to leave it

empty a month and see if someone would burn it down --remember? You're in real

estate, you're supposed to understand these things."

"There was a good reason. We need to talk about it."

When she spoke, I could visualize those legs of hers, coming out of her body

about three feet below her voice.

"I've got three burn holes in my front yard, still unresolved fears that the

IRS

is going to ask how I can afford to live in this house, a houseboy who, at

this

very moment, is out screaming at dogs or something in the front yard, and I

need

simplicity, Vera, not to be a liable landlord responsible for some human being

living in that trap. I could be sued."

Her voice lowered. "Ramsden, I need to talk to you. There have been anomalous

occurrences."

I loved it when she talked to me like that.

Still, from the front yard, Cleetis's shrill voice whooped and yapped

incoherently.

Enough was enough. I'd fire the half-wit. I didn't need any more strangeness

my life. He kept the place clean but I didn't need someone who stood in the

front yard and screamed.

"Vera, I need to go see if Cleetis has hurt himself or if he's just longing

for

the old days."

"Can you come over this evening?" she asked. "Seven o'clock."

Visions danced in my head. Vera stood an even six feet tall and in her real

estate clothes looked like a Detroit parole officer--hair back in a tight

black

bun, eyes the color of frozen slag, and her thin lips the color of an

aluminized

rose.

"I'll be th -- "

"Boss!' Cleetis exploded into the room in a flurry of waving arms, fast

breathing, rolling eyes, and a spew of incoherence. "...outside!

...yard!...whoof!... jesus! You gotta get out here!"

"Bye, Vera. I'll bring wine."

A dozen steps out the front door, I saw her. A petite dark-skinned woman,

standing on my lawn, holding a small bouquet of gardenias in her two hands.

She

had on some kind of brightly colored wraparound sarong.

"Jesus, another one!" Cleetis screamed, grabbing his face as though it might

peel off.

"Misser Ramden?" she said in a thin and reedy voice.

"Look out, boss! Stay back! Don't let her get close to you!"

"Yeah, I'm Ramsden." I couldn't figure why Cleetis was going moron on me. The

little kid probably weighed all of ninety-five pounds.

In the slowly gathering gloom of the fall evening, I saw her grin broadly, her

teeth very white with a few gold fillings. "A flower for you, sir." She picked

out one of the gardenias and tossed it toward me.

Then little wisps of white smoke started trailing out of her hair and out of

the

folds of her ankle-length wraparound skirt.

"Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" Cleetis screamed at her. "Stop! Don't do it!"

"Cleetis, what's--"

"Stay back, boss! Stay back! She's gonna whoof on us!"

"Goo'bye, Misser Ramsden, goo'bye." Small tongues of flame spurted out of her

blouse. One of her gold teeth glittered in the flames. "Goo'bye, Misser

Ramsden."

The next instant, her fire billowed out of her clothes and her hair

flashburned

with a sudden whoof.

I, Derrik Ramsden, do not rattle easily, but neither have I ever seen a person

self-combust.

I lunged for the garden hose, turned the valve, and when I turned back to

spray

her, she had vanished.

Dark billows of smoke rolled up into the darker sky. No ashes even. And on my

lawn was a fifth burn hole.

And one uncharted gardenia.

CLEETIS RAVED for a few minutes till I hosed him down. He became marginally

sober. "Go clean up. When you stop gibbering, we're going to Vera's."

"Uuuuh...uuuuh ...."

As an exemplary shallow person Cleetis's emotions run with equivalent depth.

Fifteen minutes later he came back out, his little driver's cap on, tossing

the

car keys in one hand, and humming. "Gotta get grass seed while we're out,

boss."

I got in the back seat of the Buick and decided to stop thinking. Vera would

distract me.

"Here, boss, this make you feel better." He slipped a cassette of country and

western music into the player. Two chords into "Lick My Chops" I threatened to

report his three parole violations I'd kept track of, and he turned it off.

I do not sympathize with suffering cowboys.

"Ramsden! You're early. And very pale."

"A woman just combusted in my front yard," I said sullenly.

"Two of 'em," Cleetis corrected. "Went up whoof, just like that."

I looked at him.

"I'll wait in the car," he said.

Inside, Vera snuggled up to me as much as a six-foot woman can to a guy who's

five-ten. She'd taken off her real estate uniform and now wore something that

looked like a very expensive poncho, blue-black with a high black embroidered

collar. She wrapped her arms around me and breathed in my ear, "Patience dear.

Would you like a drink to take the edge off? You do smell a bit smoky," she

said.

"Vera, a woman went up in flames in my front yard."

She planted a swift kiss on my sun-cracked lips and left for the kitchen. "I

have just what you need. Something without subtlety."

Along with selling houses, Vera was the nurse at a place she referred to as

Hormonal High. Her background was nearly as Byzantine as my own. Her degrees

were in DNA protein synthesis, but once upon a time she had accepted a job at

the infamous Ortho-Nuclear Chemical Dynamics Corporation and been given a

fabulous salary. But when a certain presidential candidate was in the

death-throes of his campaign and needed a public service scandal to boost his

ratings, he revealed the story of Ortho-Nuke's "Project Frankenstein" and Vera

ended up selling pieces of quadraplexes to white trash and bandaging

bite-wounds

on juveniles.

I flopped on her black leather sofa. This evening, what with having witnessed

death by fire, it was hard to focus on that which stood before my eyes -- the

semi-transparent silk poncho she wore and her loose hair that seemed to fly

around her head like weather patterns.

Money was supposed to make life make sense, not make me mental.

"You rented my old house to someone," I called to her. "I was hoping the

neighborhood kids would burn it down. Only way I'll get any money out of it."

She came out of the kitchen with a huge goblet half filled with pale green

slush. A sheet of paper covered the top and she carried it very carefully.

"Here." She held it under my nose and slid off the paper. "Breathe deeply."

I did.

Everything changed. The world brightened. My cares became less world-shaking.

even managed to notice as she stood with the light behind her that the

blue-black thing she wore was the only thing she wore.

Wayne Wightman - The Attack Of The Ignoroids.pdf

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