Naked Pueblo: Stories - Mark Jude Poirier - Hardcover - 1 ED

From Son of the Monkey Lady Chigger has been lying about the raised lollipop-shaped scar on his neck since the day after he got it, back when he was twelve or thirteen. What really happened was he ran into a barbed-wire fence because the Petronis' dog chased his perverted ass out of their yard the night we were trying to see Mindy undress before she got into her big pink girlie-frilled bed. All Mindy ended up doing was brushing her hair and talking on the phone, and then their dog--his name was Lover Boy--came churning from around front and chased us out of there. Chigger got clotheslined on the barbed wire that separated their land from his mom's, and it cut into his neck. Lover Boy caught up and humped him. The wound was deep. You could see the slimy white of his windpipe like a fish belly--shining, in a bloody hole. Chigger's mother was too drunk to wake up, let alone take him to the emergency room, so we doctored up the hole ourselves. We found disinfectant-laced petroleum jelly in the medicine cabinet next to a box of crispy old condoms that had belonged to Chigger's dead daddy back when his daddy was alive. I packed some of the ointment into the bleeding neck hole, made the blood stop. Chigger didn't cry. Probably because I wouldn't let him see the hole. I put a Band-Aid over the jelly, and he forgot about it until the next morning, when his hungover mother pointed it out. "You did it to me with the nail-pulling end of the hammer last night," Chigger told her, "right after I called you a man-at-the-dog-track-screwing whore." "You deserved it," she said. "I'm your mother. Always remember, I'm your mother." "Monkey Lady." "You better zip it, or I'll make another hole in your neck," she said. "Just try it," he said. "I hid the hammer." I could only stare into my Raisin Bran. I always ate Raisin Bran, no milk, when I slept over at Chigger's house. They never had any milk that wasn't almost cheese. "I'll use this." She held up a turkey thermometer and slammed it back on the counter. Then she looked down and started smoothing her fake-tan pantyhose, pointing one toe like a ballerina and pulling her skirt up a little, like she was sexy. She wasn't, and that was back when she had both of her legs. She was Planet of the Apes Monkey Lady with creases that ran from her lips up toward her nose and down to her chin, like her mouth had once been stitched closed with wire. "You'd take my temperature?" Chig said. "Stupid." "I'll stick you good," she said. "Stupid." The whole argument was stupid. Chigger was six feet two, 225, even back then in eighth grade. Monkey Lady couldn't have done shit to him even if she had tried. He went through puberty before anyone else and reached physical adulthood at age thirteen. In gym class, if Chigger was on skins when we played shirts and skins basketball, no one would go near him because of his size and because of the thick growth of red fur he had all over his body--even on his back. His team always won. I was always on his team. just last week, we were out at Hotel Congress, sitting in the Tap Room, getting drunk on fifty-cent Coors and celebrating my good grades. A girl sat down with us, squeezing up against Chigger in our booth. "All this and hairy, too," Chigger told her over the crackled Johnny Cash from the jukebox. She had said her name was Montaigne, but I'm sure her real name was something more like Susan or Anne or Rebecca or Linda or Jennifer or Sara. Her eyes were beautifully dark--like little bowls of chocolate pudding. "Hirsute," she said. "Sexy." She scratched her bony elbow. "I must admit I like your hair color." She pushed his bangs off his forehead. His hair was Bozo-red, like his fur.[read more]