American Tropic - By Thomas Sanchez Page 0,50

the deer lying on the blacktop. “You little midget shit! Should be locked in a zoo! Messed with my ride!”

A high-pitched, eerie whistling comes from the pine forest at the edge of the highway. Hard’s head snaps around. He looks belligerently into the trees, shouting toward the sound. “They be more of you midget fuckers in there? Come on out! I’ll put my pit bull on you! She chase you down and chew your asshole out!”

The strange, eerie whistling stops. Hard sees no movement among the trees. He shrugs his shoulders impatiently and climbs back into the SUV. He slams the door and rolls down his driver’s-side window. He cocks his head out the open window to listen. He hears nothing. He rolls up his window and restarts the SUV.

Next to Hard, the two party girls stare wide-eyed through the windshield at an apparition emerging from the dark forest. The girls shudder and lock their arms tightly around each other. Hard sees the apparition. His words spit out in surprise: “Fuck me! What be him?”

Walking out of the forest into the SUV’s headlights is the Bizango skeleton, encased in tight rubber and skull mask. Bizango stops in the center of the road and holds up a speargun loaded with a sharp, cocked spear.

Inside the SUV’s back cab, the pit bull sees the black-and-white skeleton. The dog’s deep, murderous bark reverberates in the cab as it hurls its body against the iron cage bars, thrashing to break through and attack Bizango.

The girls scream hysterically. Hard shouts above the screaming and barking: “Everybody shut up!” He glares at Bizango through the windshield. “Don’t mess with me, mo-fo! You be doomed! Time to let the dog out!”

Hard jumps from the SUV and runs around to the rear hatch door; he yanks the door open. The pit bull—inside its cage, behind bars—howls at Hard to be freed. Hard unlatches the cage’s steel lock and swings the door back. “Go, you hyena! Rip his asshole out!”

The snarling pit bull leaps from its cage, knocking Hard aside. The dog hits the outside pavement running, its clawed paws digging in as it propels its muscular body upward and hurls furiously through the air at the skeleton standing in the middle of the road.

Bizango whips up the speargun, aims, and pulls the trigger. The gun’s C2 cartridge fires in a whoosh. The spear springs free in a blurred trajectory, its flight meeting the opposite rush of the dog in midair. The spear pierces with a crunching thwack into the bone bulge of the dog’s rib cage. The dog howls, but its body keeps hurling forward through the air at Bizango. The dog’s weight falls from the air, drops with a bouncing thud at the skeleton’s feet. Bizango looks down at the dog, its barrel-shaped body inert, its bloodied tongue hanging out onto the asphalt, its startled, dying eyes staring up. Bizango reaches down and rips out the bloody spear from the dog’s rib cage.

Hard jumps back into the SUV’s driver’s seat. He peers through the windshield at Bizango outside and grits his platinum teeth. “You killed my bitch! Nobody lives who kills my bitch!” He grips the steering wheel tight with both hands, jams his foot to the floor on the accelerator pedal, and yells above the whining engine, “Mother-fuckin’ spook! You die!”

The SUV roars straight toward the skeleton. Bizango quickly reloads the gun with the bloody spear and reels back from the SUV as it speeds by, just an inch away, in a rush of wind. Bizango fires the gun. The spear shatters the glass of the driver’s-side window. It flies right behind Hard’s head and smashes out the window on the opposite side of the cab. The SUV keeps going. The snarl from its engine fades away into silence.

Bizango walks to the small deer lying on the blacktop. The deer gasps for breath; its eyes bulge. Bizango’s black rubber fingers wipe blood away from the deer’s nostrils. Its body jolts with a life-releasing electric shock, then becomes deathly still.

Bizango stares at the deer. From the surrounding forest, a throb of insects starts, crickets chirp, frogs croak. Bizango gently lifts up the deer in skeleton arms. Bizango’s masked skull head swivels up to the sky as the dead body is raised toward the stars above.

Cackling bantam chickens scratch and peck in the dust outside the front door of a flimsy boarded shack beaten gray by weather and time. The chickens scatter as Noah walks between them and