Saint Oswald Jay Bonansinga (uplifting books for women txt) 📖

Oswald shakes his head. “That I love her? Jesus Christ, you dead people are so full of shit. I don’t love that little snot-nosed kid any more than I—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.” The ghost fixes her sad eyes on him. “And you know it.”

Oswald looks away. “Look. What you’re talking about—it’s complicated.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, I mean, the rest of it is—”

“The rest of it is what?”

Oswald looks at the ghost. “It’s basically on a need-to-know basis.”

“And what you’re saying is she doesn’t need to know?”

“That’s right.”

Alberta Goldstein nods, her dead face sinking inward with sorrow. “You’re gonna get her killed, you know.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Sorry, but the fact is, you will.”

“No. I won’t. I won’t get her killed.”

“Yes, actually, you will,” the dead woman says with chilling certainty. “That’s the one benefit of being over here, you find out things.”

Oswald gazes into that dark hemorrhaged eye, which glints with otherworldly knowledge, and he is starting to say something else when Duffy’s voice suddenly breaks the spell.

“Okay, folks, we got a ruling!”

Oswald turns and faces the spirits, who now stand in a perfect semi-circle around the fire, all six of them, the tribal council, all of them gazing up at their Chieftain, their sage, their leader, the Great and Powerful Ball-Busting Badass Matilda of the West Chicago Prairie. She stands at the mouth of the semi-circle, transformed into a luminous demi-god of gossamer white robes, her sculpted face painted in ceremonial colors, her headdress so vivid and bright with plumage it looks almost radiant.

She lifts her birch-wood scepter and spear and booms with celestial authority, her voice as deep and rich now as a waterfall. “The Man-Killer will be granted five lives thus far!” Orange light flickers off her angular, alabaster face, gleaming along her flaxen braids, shimmering in the downy fluff of her raven feathers, reflecting in her sapphire eyes. “You must save three more lives by the full moon.”

“Go team!” Duffy cheers, taking off his John Deere hat, waving it, and spitting a gob of chewing tobacco into the ceremonial fire.

The fire erupts suddenly, exploding into a ball of blinding magnesium-white light.

“WHOA—!”

Oswald snaps awake, soaked in sweat on the cold ground, in the shadows of emaciated poplars, behind Building 12-A.

Blinking away the shock, his head pounding like a tribal drum, he tries to sit up. He hears the jangle of metal, and a nearby voice madly cussing and cursing, but he can’t focus on anything.

He manages to sit up and rub his temples. “Judas Priest,” he groans. “The fuck are you doing?”

Gerbil comes into focus twelve feet away. “What does it look like I’m doing?” She has the metal jimmy-stick from Oswald’s pocket, and she’s trying to pick the dead bolt on the bungalow’s back door. “I’m trying to get in there before they finish up and take off.”

“Let me do it.” Oswald struggles to his feet, and wavers for a moment, and then falls back onto his ass. The impact sends shooting stars across his vision. “Oh Jesus,” he moans, shaking off the disorientation.

Gerbil pauses, glances over her shoulder at him. “You okay?”

“Yeah, great.”

“You sure?”

“How long was I out?”

“I don’t know, maybe, like, ten minutes.”

“Holy crap.” He takes a deep breath through his nose, then breathes out his mouth. He actually feels a little better. His fever has broken, and now his clothes are adhering to his slimy cold skin like black paint. He gets up again, and he lumbers over to the door. “Get outta the way, Gerbil.”

She hands over the jimmy, and Oswald thrusts the edge of the tool into the latch-plate. A couple of quick yanks, and the cylinder surrenders with a click.

Gerbil grabs the knob and she starts to turn it, but Oswald grabs her hand and stops her. “Where’s your gun?” he asks in a low voice.

“Oh yeah.” She hurries over to the trees and finds her .38 Police Special in the weeds. She scoops it up and comes back to the mat. “Okay, ready.”

“Let me do the talking,” Oswald whispers. He pulls the Beretta from his belt. “You just back me up and shit, look dangerous and scary with the gun.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah, I mean—whattya mean?—yeah.” Oswald looks at her. “Stop worrying.”

“Okay, whatever.”

Oswald thumbs the hammer back. “You ready?”

“Absolutely.”

Oswald takes a quick breath and then kicks the door in, and the thing busts open on screaming hinges.

At first, they notice nothing out of the ordinary as they storm into the dimly lit rear vestibule, guns raised and eyes peeled for the two lovebirds. Before they even get a glimpse of anybody, Oswald calls out at the top of his lungs, in a voice better suited to a professional bank robber: “OKAY, FOLKS! PARTY’S OVER! EVERYBODY OUT OF THE POOL!”

They push their way through a beaded curtain and into the main pool area, and find themselves in a candle-lit, perfumed, womb-like suite adorned with fake ferns and shag carpet and leopard-print wallpaper, and a long oval pool like a giant amniotic sac.

For a single millisecond, Oswald and Gerbil freeze like a couple of statues, paralyzed in an almost comical tableau, their heads turning slowly to their immediate left, where the massive circular bed sits in all its purple velvet glory. What they see on that big pedestal bed—suspended from the rafters over the mattress—strikes them dumb for a moment.

“Whoa.”

The word comes out of Oswald almost involuntarily as he gapes at the woman hanging from the ceiling like a giant pink bat.

And the man in the baby costume on the bed with his thumb in his mouth.

And the trickle of urine coming down in glistening rivulets like a baptismal font.

* * *

“Oh, dear—oh my—oh my God what’s going on? What’s going on? What’s—?” Cathy O’Dell cannot stop urinating, despite the fact that strangers have barged into the sex-den with guns and dumb-stuck expressions. She wears a fuzzy pink Halloween costume—a cartoon Miss Piggy.

“Okay you can stop now, honey, you can stop peeing,” Kevin Trout gurgles beneath her, the piss-stream in