Devilcountry Read Online Free

 Thunder booms.  The drop is
straight down.  The Iceman is alone on his Masada, talking dirty to a
concubine.  The ice under his desk begins to break away and crumble.
 He doesn’t notice.  He falls into the canyon beneath, the phone
still at his ear.  “I think we can get you a speaking rooooooole……” The serpent returned grabbing him up in its beak.  Crunching down hard on
his ribs and pelvis. Stomaching its prey quickly, blood spurting everywhere.
 A slight muted shriek followed by a deathly silence and a breeze.
 The orange sky stays with me.  
    I was back in his office, standing there.
 I couldn’t be around him for another second.  Sometimes the visions
are a bullet between my eyes, ripping clear all that stands in its way.
 Iceman lived on an icy pillar.   A pillar that was
now crumbling as he phone-sexed his way to his next divorce.   Somewhere, long ago, the Iceman was decent.  Maybe back in
college when he was just a bartender in love with the waitress who would later
become his first ex-wife. But a hundred shitty TV movies later, he was lost.
    I walked out.  His eyes bulged out at my
premature evacuation.  He wanted me there at attention to bear witness to
his phone rape.  I wasn’t going through with it.  He slammed the
phone down and came after me as I made it into the hallway.  “Don’t you
ever leave before I am done! ”   He looked hurt. Like it was his
basketball and now he was going home because he was losing.
    “I’m done,” I said.
    “You’re not done till I’m done!”
    “You’ve been done for a long time, Iceman.
 Think I’m gonna stand there and watch while you harass someone?”
    “Damn right you are!”
    “Fuck you, Iceman.  Sorry to use language
that you can’t say on TV.  Your life is a crumbling glacier with a
solar-flared sun melting it down.   Built on ego, low self-esteem,
and infidelity.  You sit atop a fiery Mount Rushmore carved out of blood
and the sweat of others.  Your world is evil, your career is trivial at
best and you are lost.  I’ll have no part of it.” ” I turned to Jennifer
whom Iceman had grabbed at more than once.  I realized I was saying this
for her.   She knew I was right, but
she looked angry, like I was making her look bad.  She pointed to the
door.
    “We’ll mail you your check.  Just go.”
 She was calm.  I walked the eight floors down to the lobby.
 Each floor crumbling quietly behind me, as an imposing glacier made its
way tectonically snapping back into its place.  I made it to my shit car,
which had been sandwiched in by two black Mercedes Benz 750s.  I squeezed
between them and slammed open my door, dinging the car to my left.
    I was four parking floors down, at least 150 feet below the surface, deep
in the bowels of an underground parking garage .  Life was
perversely still.  Should a massive earthquake be triggered by the always unstable San Andreas Fault I would be encapsulated in
an eerie sarcophagus, the lone human remnant of a cavern that housed every high-end
automobile ever created.   Millions of dollars lay parked around me,
with the only human specimen encased inside a crappy 1980 Honda Accord
hatchback, both hands on the wheel, an old Johnny Cash “Best Of” tape still in
the deck.   My head looking up, stuck in a teary gaze twelve stories
beneath Jennifer’s perfect bottom, a glacierized tear coming down my cheek.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    HOW I GOT THE TV

 
    It
was the only thing I owned.  Maybe that’s why I listened so close.  I
had grown up in this room.   In this house.   In this valley.   This hot, stinking
valley.   This porn-filled swill pit.  My valley.  My home. My parents had moved here before I was born.
 I had no choice.  Thirty minutes north of the city none of it was
mine, except the TV.
                  Bury me with it.  Submerged beneath
Mother Earth, together, wrapped around each