The Pinkerton property was a dump. The front yard was a veritable junkyard full of dissected car parts sporadically cast asunder and abandoned to rot and rust wherever they lay. These were just a sample of the “projects” Mandy’s father obsessively channeled his madness into during his notoriously rapacious meth binges, which could go on for years at a time. The family abode was scant anymore inviting. It was just a dilapidated box from a bygone era of ugliness, serving well as a reminder of exactly what had made the depression so depressing. Termites had devoured so much of the decayed wooden edifice of the decrepit house that it looked more like it had been sprayed down by bullets delivered by machine guns than the work of tiny bugs.
Chez Pinkerton was a notorious death trap, masquerading as a home. The dirt-streaked windows fuzzily displayed pitifully stained floral curtains. The curtains were slightly drawn back to reveal a revolting glimpse of soiled furniture and greasy walls splattered with depressing mall art that should have been burned. Portraits of sad clowns and children with enormous, teary, pleading eyes stared back at Bvrenda from the walls inside the living room, tacitly imploring her to run for her life, causing her to falter, once again. But Brvenda (with a “V” for valor) refused to be waylaid from her mission by petty distractions.
Mustering up the courage to persevere with her heroic agenda, Bvrenda braced herself psychically before ringing the doorbell. Hovering on this momentous decision, she noticed that the front door was cracked and hammered haphazardly together by scrap wood, which, unbeknown to her, Mandy had stolen from a construction sight nearby. The twisted crack, which was shaped like a lightening bolt, was a telltale remnant from a police bust. A squad team had forced its way into the house during the most recent arrest of Mandy’s illustrious father, Uncle Rex. Bvrenda knew that Mandy had called the police and turned in her father herself, in retaliation for a multitude of sins she refused to discuss but implied were unpardonable. It looked like Mandy had attempted to repair the door herself, which gave the crack the doctored appearance of a Frankenstein scar, sewn up haphazardly with stitches made of scrap planks and rusty nails.
A single bare bulb hung from a hole directly above the twisted door, illuminating the violence that had been acted upon it. A tiny chorus of gypsy moths fluttered about the garish glaring bulb in a morbid frenzy of fuzzy wings, tempting death salaciously as they danced in the crimson glow. Just as Bvrendah heaved an enormous sigh and rang the doorbell again, one of the moths embraced the bulb, sizzled and fell abruptly onto her nose.
Was this an omen of horrible things to come? It was too late to turn back. The door jolted open. Mrs. Pinkerton peered out at Bvrenda, holding a Virginia Slim cigarette that had burned all the way down to the nub in her tremulous ochre stained fingers, which were slightly burned and smeared with charcoal ashes. Nervously jittering with inebriated agitation, she peered out at Bvrenda through her deathly cadaver green, jaundiced, watery eyes, squinting at her mean and cockeyed as if she might be a potential harbinger of doom. Then, as her blurred vision came momentarily into focus, she recognized Bvrenda, and staggered back half a pace, before sucking desperately at the tip of her dead cigarette. Then she snarled and cast the dead cancer stick aside, choking back a sob, as she looked up slowly at Bvrenda with tears streaming down her tragically pale windows into a soul that had stepped out long ago and never returned. The hollow holes in her face meant for vision belied a blank and hopeless expression of frozen pity and fear.
“Are you an angel from heaven, or a demon from hell?” She whispered almost inaudibly. Bvrenda stared back at the “ghost” of Mrs. Pinkerton, utterly gob stopped by the mammoth monument to victimhood that quivered and quaked before her unbelieving eyes. Mrs. Pinkerton broke the uncanny silence before Bvrenda could pull herself together and think of something appropriate to say. “I don’t care anymore,” she whimpered. “… Just take me with you, please! Get me out of this cursed place!” Upon this exclamation, she thrust her nearly liquid arms about Bvrenda’s neck and collapsed like an lifeless jelly fish.
Bvrenda’s knees nearly buckled as she caught Mrs. Pinkerton and clutched her body to her tiny bosom. The diminutive bottle of vanilla from the kitchen spice cabinet, which Mrs. Pinkerton had just consumed in a gulp, fell out of her withered hand onto the molting vinyl floor with a pathetic tinkle. Bvrenda made a mental note to herself that knowing Mrs. Pinkerton, this was a clear indication that there wasn’t any more boxed Gallo Wine left in the house.
It was almost Christmas. Struggling to maintain her composure, Bvrenda looked around the living room and noticed a tiny fake Christmas tree nearly buried in Budweiser cans on top of a lopsided coffee table. The table stood slightly askew in front of a green and brown plaid man-eating sofa that looked more like a stationary biohazard than a couch. The Christmas lights from the tree blinked menacingly, like the mesmerizing eyes of a cornered cobra ready to strike. There was also a strange hissing sound in the air, which made Bvrenda wonder whether or not the gas had been left burning on the stove in the kitchen nearby. A permeating smell of death filled the air, due to all of the dead rats stuck between the walls that no one had ever bothered to remove. A whiff of this stench caused Brvenda to choke back a little involuntary reflux, compelling a drop of vomit to burble out of her grimacing lips and land on top of Mandy’s mother’s head. At that very moment, Mrs. Pinkerton resurrected. She stared straight into Brvrenda’s very soul with her dead eyes.
“I should have grabbed a coat hanger and yanked that demon seed out of my uterus and flushed her down the toilet myself while I still had the chance! Why did I let other people chose for me? WHY?” She howled inconsolably. Primordial tears oozed up from deep within her, as if her personal suffering encompassed all of the pain in the world since time immemorial. Ranting, raving, and violently incalcitrant to the suggestion of calming down, she bleated in-between gasping sobs, “I knew -she was Satan’s child- from the moment she was conceived! BUT NO ONE CARED! No one believed me!” A wail of abject misery billowed up from her heaving chest. The poor woman was no more than a hollow shell of debauched, plundered, defiled and completely used up hopes and dreams that had been reduced to an unquenchable black hole of self perpetuating grief.
Not surprisingly, Bvrenda paused internally and wondered for a split second whether or not she might already be out of her element and in way over her head. What did she know about codependency, alcoholism, Stockholm Syndrome, betrayal bonds, incest, parole boards, the prison system, or the shadow government? More than she should, but not enough. Refusing to give up, Bvrenda girded her strength by anchoring her thighs to act as buttresses to support Mandy’s mom as she grunted and lunged with all her might to put her upright again. Bolstering the collapsed gelatinous form of a ruin of rotting flesh that smelled of nearly all things rancid and disgusting, Bvrenda reminded herself that this unseemly train wreck with no survivors had once been a woman named Hortence McGhee.
Hortence McGhee had once been a pretty little Irish girl with eyes that danced in the moonlight and lips that begged to be kissed. Bvrenda knew Hortence’s story better than her own. She had heard it so many times before. How many times had Hortence passed out with her head in Bvrenda’s lap on the man eating couch, after pouring her heart out to her for hours of intoxicated self pity. As she struggeled to console the inconsolable wretch in her arms, Bvrenda wondered why she had returned to this house many times before. It was almost always against her own will. Somehow, she was propelled compulsively to revisit to this house of horrors again and again, just as a dog returns to its own vomit. She knew it was a manifestation of trauma based mind control that had been systematically programmed into her since her first harrowing encounter with “Uncle Rex,” so many years ago. Before she had lost her innocence…
Bvrenda knew that Mandy Pandy was the product of a rape and a shotgun wedding. Rather than allow for any chance that Hortence might abort the unwanted fetus that grew like a festering cancer in her womb, her parents had bombed all the women’s health centers in her home state. With a community of homicidal “right to lifers” breathing down her neck, Hortence didn’t stand any more chance of surviving her fate than Mia Farrow could have escaped the Satanic cabal that consumed her life in Rosemary’s baby. It didn’t matter to her family that her husband also happened to be her uncle. That kind of thing had been going on in the family for years and it “never hurt nobody no how.” The Pinkerton’s believed that incest strengthened family ties and preserved their racial purity.
As a consolation prize for her predicament, everybody in the family let Hortence know that she was in their hearts and that they were praying for her. Hortence knew instinctively that, by way of passive aggressive subtext, what they were really telling her was to shut the fuck up and do what she was told, or else. Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, she did as she was told. And so it came to pass that she gave birth to a child she never wanted, gifted to her by a man she never wanted or loved, but was forced to marry against her fragile will. She drowned her sorrows in rotgut booze and tried to pretend her life wasn’t a total train wreck. When she and her husband were high on the crank he cooked up in the bathtub with liquid Drano, he didn’t seem so bad after all. As a matter of fact, when the two of them smoked that shit together, he actually turned into something that she had to admit was kind of a mesmerizingly evil sexy beast.
But Uncle Rex was in prison now. Hortence’s vile daughter was turning into her father more and more every day, and there was absolutely nothing she could do to put the sun up in the sky again. Not after all of the years of pain and disappointment that had turned her custard heart to stone. Not after realizing that her hopes were dried up and her greatest fears were all coming true. Not after her daughter’s failure to fulfill her dreams of becoming a local pageant queen. Not after her husband had been dragged away, cursing, in handcuffs by the police after being busted for cooking up bathtub meth and selling it to elementary schoolchildren. Brvenda held the sobbing wretch in her arms, trying desperately to comfort her, while plotting her escape, and wondering just exactly how she was going to stage an intervention with whatever was left of Mandy Pandy Pinkerton before she turned into an unstoppable monster wreaking havoc on the world at the velocity of The Swine Flu.
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