Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts.
The facts is... Some people are born under a bad sign. Some people have no luck. And then there's cats like Orlando, who are just plain fucked. Just like li'l Stevie Miller said. Take the money and run, son. Take the money and run...
The facts is... Some people are born under a bad sign. Some people have no luck. And then there's cats like Orlando, who are just plain fucked. Just like li'l Stevie Miller said. Take the money and run, son. Take the money and run...
Lizard People by Gary Clifton
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His mama had no idea who the hell his daddy was, so nobody
knew why Orlando Bonfiglio Bronski III became a "third.” One would have
been a full load. At twenty, Orlando was a dead ringer for the Creature from
the Black Lagoon—a smooth clone of the monitor lizard from hell. Daddy may have
been an alien.
When Orlando's useless ass wasn't in jail, he lived with
mama Eunice out in Pleasant Grove. Dallas cops were frequently called to
fistfights between Orlando, Eunice, and whoever happened to be around. Normally,
the law of progression would dictate that as the maggot grew older he'd be able
to duke it out with Eunice, man-to-man so to speak.
That didn't happen. She kicked the dog shit out of him three
times a week. A scrawny little rat who went about a buck twenty after two Big
Macs, Orlando was a hell of a lot more bark than fight. Years of smoking the
linoleum didn't make him stronger. During one Sunday afternoon scrap, she
popped him in the skull with a croquet mallet—seventeen stitches and a
concussion worth two nights in Parkland.
Orlando had been burning and blowing up things since he was
four—sort of an add-on to being a sorry psychopath. Orlando hitched from
Parkland back to Eunice's place, found his stash of fireworks beneath the front
porch, made a little black powder bomb, and blew the front porch all over the
neighborhood.
Cops drug Orlando out of a tree a block away. He confessed
in six minutes and got two years in the Texas Department of Corrections. That
translated to a lot of picking cotton and spending the next two years as an
alpha con's wife—crisis mode for the sphincter muscle.
Orlando paroled out, returned to Dallas, found more
fireworks, and this time blew down Eunice's whole damned house. Only she didn't
live there anymore. He did manage to splatter parts of the two existing occupants who did.
Homicide cops interviewed him in the Parkland burn unit,
where he lay naked on a rubber sheet, skinny carcass smeared with an oozy,
menthol salve, surrounded by "Caution Oxygen" signs. The explosion
had been severe and a shade premature, evidenced by both of Orlando's arm-stubs
bandaged off just below the elbow. The blast had taken off both. Now instead of
resembling an iguana, Orlando was more in the nature of baked haddock.
"Am I gonna die?" he whispered hoarsely.
"Am I gonna die?" he whispered hoarsely.
"Damn sure are, dude...and with a little luck that
would be today," one of the homicide dicks said at last. "You live to
go back to TDC you're gonna have a tough time jerking off."
