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By Al Bruno III
April 1st: Ah, Delaware. The First State, the Diamond State, the Whoops-I-Made-a-Wrong-Turn-and-Now-I’m-in-Maryland State. The home of the very haunted Pea Patch Island, the murder-soaked Lum’s Pond, and the mischievous cryptid known as the Pukwudgie.
It is also home to a sad but inexpensive row of roadside rooms called the Fosdick Motel. As it was April Fool’s Day, I assumed the complete lack of clean towels in our room was some kind of prank. But no. Sara had to go down to the front desk and ask for them.
The surly clerk manning the desk gave her one towel and one washcloth. When she asked for a second of each, he gave her a look like she’d asked him for a picture of his grandmother’s taint.
That’s my embellishment, not hers.
We tried to crash for a few hours, but our bodies were still shaking off the aftereffects of a long drive fueled by Jolt Cola, Skittles, and damp egg salad sandwiches. Our bodies were practically vibrating, so instead we spent the time vibrating in our own way, if you get what I mean.
And you probably did get what I mean if you’re not in grade school or Detective Bradshaw.
Yeah, yeah, I’m still salty that the man tried to turn my best girl—my only girl—against me. I’m even more salty that he revealed my middle name is Lyle.
After we’d exhausted ourselves, Sara and I lay in our rented short-term bed and made small talk as dawn broke. We knew that in a couple of hours we’d have to head to the local courthouse and try to bail out Cousin Roy. What would be more trouble? The local authorities or some collector of mystical tomes hiding in a local mobile home park?
To pass the time, I told Sara about my research into Bridgeville, Delaware. I told her about Patty Cannon, who in the early 1800s, along with her son-in-law, headed the Cannon-Johnson gang, which kidnapped free Black people and sold them into slavery in the Deep South. They were believed to have abducted hundreds of people, and their network stretched as far south as Alabama and Mississippi.
Cannon was eventually captured and imprisoned in Sussex County after authorities uncovered evidence of murders and multiple bodies. She died in her cell in May 1829 while awaiting trial for murder. It’s generally believed she poisoned herself, although the exact circumstances of her death remain a matter of historical controversy.
I like to think she did. And whatever poison she took, I hope it fucking hurt.
Then I told her about Pea Patch Island, a shoal that supposedly became an island after a ship carrying peas crashed there and the plants took root. It’s not really much of an island, maybe a kilometer across and mostly swamp, but in 1794 Pierre Charles L’Enfant decided it was exactly the sort of place where you ought to put a fort. It took the government a little longer to get around to it.
Fast-forward to 1862, and Fort Delaware was serving as a prison camp for Confederate soldiers. It didn’t take long for disease to start claiming prisoners. In an attempt to head off the growing mini-pandemic, they hired a civilian doctor named Dr. Charles L. F. Reynold.
According to the accounts I found, both the Union soldiers and the prisoners took an immediate dislike to him. Letters described him as emaciated, with what one writer called a “death-like visage.” Then he started treating patients with his cutting-edge medicines, and they started dying even faster.
It became something of a scandal. Reynold was dismissed within a few months. Some people wanted him charged with negligence, but apparently the man had some very high-level connections.
I was just about to start talking about the prickly-haired, lightly murderous cryptid called Pukwudgie when Sara asked, “I looked up Harker & Huld. They’re pretty pricey. Shady, too.”
“Well, they’re Albany’s only combination law firm and bail bondsmen,” I said. “They should add a dispensary and really clean up.”
She raised an eyebrow. “How do you afford them on a pawn-shop salary?”
“Madam,” I said, “I will have you know I am Internet famous and have a PayPal account.”
“Come on… there’s got to be a story.”
“You got me. I make erotic content on the side. The website is called Brian’s Filthy Feet, and it has a very dedicated and sticky fan base.”
“Oh, really? These feet here?”
Sara dove for my toes. I had a moment to think, Oh, what a heavenly view, and then she was tickling my feet and asking me which piggies were the most popular.
Then we were laughing and tickling, and it was all so mundane and wonderful. But the tickling didn’t stop until I told her how I’d earned free legal services for the rest of my life…
###
…what follows is a tale of things that happen in dark and private moments, a tale of emotional needs supplanted by physical desire. In other words, a tale of fucking.
It begins with Rosanne Gluckman, a woman unlucky in love but skilled in the field of law and a high-ranking attorney at the Harker & Huld Legal Group. That is not an easy feat to manage, by the way, because Harker & Huld has been mostly a family affair since 1983. But Rosanne was just that good. And her specialty? Divorce.
If you could afford her, it wasn’t a matter of whether or not she was going to rake your ex over the coals. It was a matter of how hot you wanted those coals to be.
My involvement began in the spring of 2011. Rosanne was 36 years old, and she had not been in a serious relationship for very nearly a decade. She hadn’t even had a one-night stand. Maybe it was her being too jaded from her day job, maybe she was looking for love in all the wrong places, or maybe it was her reputation. There are a lot of guys out there that would shy away from a woman who could destroy the most ironclad prenup with a single well-penned tort.
Surprised? Don’t be. Cranky guys living in their mom’s basements aren’t the only ones who can find themselves involuntarily celibate.
Since women have needs just like men, Rosanne found a workaround, an expensive and preternatural one, but a workaround nonetheless. She nicknamed him Fritz; he was high on maintenance and low on personality, but he got the job done, and he was always ready for more. He made her feel things she’d barely been able to imagine feeling before. Sure, she always felt a little guilty afterwards, but that wasn’t enough to make her send him away, not when she was in a relationship with so few rules or expectations.
2010 me used to think that every relationship came down to rules and expectations. Now? Now I think it’s all about hope and faith.
Speaking of expectations, one thing Rosanne knew she had to accept was Fritz’s complete silence; he would never ask questions, make complaints, or ask about her net worth. He was a blank slate she could overwrite with her every fantasy; he could be everything she ever wanted.
Then he started humming.
That faint, almost tuneless sound turned her warm post-coital sweat ice cold. She realized what she had done with a scream, a scream the shape beside her in the bed ignored.
She ran from the bedroom and locked herself in the bathroom. This was bad. She had broken the rule—THE rule. She had committed a sin far worse than breaking a roomful of mirrors or feeding a gremlin after midnight.
The hum became a voice, almost too faint for her to hear.
“Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?”
It was four days after this turn of events that I was brought into the situation. Apparently Rosanne had brought up her situation to the senior partners of Harker & Huld Legal Group with a plea for extreme secrecy about this strange and disturbing matter. She did, of course, edit out the more salacious and supernatural details.
The secret lasted for about 24 hours, but then a strange man started calling in over and over again, singing the same song.
“Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?”
And then a low-level paralegal named Michelle Bittner spotted a strange man in a blue trench coat loitering near the parking garage at midnight. Two things about him disturbed her. First of all, he did not appear to be wearing anything under his trench coat. Second, his face was just too damn perfect and too damn stiff.
As a frequent watcher of creepy YouTube videos, she immediately tagged this individual as a skinwalker. And, as she had amazing taste and read my blog, she reached out to me.
It took some convincing from Ms. Bittner and me to get Rosanne Gluckman to speak with me. But eventually she did, and we had a frank and productive conversation. I told her that a sign-carrying panhandler known to stake out the Clifton Park exit of the Northway had been found strangled to death. The State Police listed the motive as robbery, but the only thing stolen was the blue trench coat he had been known to wear no matter the season.
Rosanne told me exactly what she had gotten herself into, and I got to work.
Two days of research later, I got a call from her begging me to come to her McMansion in Saratoga Springs.
If you only know Saratoga via that Carly Simon song, then let me explain that Saratoga is the closest thing upstate New York has to Beverly Hills. Except, of course, it has a near-complete lack of celebrities, glamour, and decent weather—but it has a nice racetrack, so it’s got that going for it.
I brought my laptop and improvised survival kit in a satchel. When I got there, she told me she got a call from Michelle Bittner that lasted just long enough for her to hear the woman’s terrified scream.
Erring on the side of caution, I barricaded us into her spacious study. Rosanne was loading the gargantuan revolver she’d just purchased. She’d said it made her feel safe.
That was one of us.
My MacBook was in the corner of the room. Atwater’s round and deeply expressive face, defined by its heavy jowls, broad nose, and hooded, penetrating eyes that had a default setting of condescension, was in the chat window.
He said, “Foster, this is without a doubt the most ludicrous situation you have ever involved yourself, and by proxy myself, in.”
“Oh, like you had anything to do,” I said as I struggled to move another one of her mahogany bookshelves in front of the door. Legal tomes dropped to the floor. “What do you have for me?”
Atwater held up a sheet of paper with Hebrew lettering on it to the camera.
“It is the word ‘truth’ in Hebrew,” Atwater explained. “Legends say the Maharal of Prague inscribed it on a man of clay to create a simulacrum of life.”
Rosanne looked at the screen. “So it’s not a skinwalker?”
“A skinwalker?” Atwater’s voice rang with exasperation. “Should we be on the lookout for leprechauns as well? I am talking about facts, my good woman, and the fact is that you, in your libidinous folly, have somehow managed to turn an anthropomorphic intimacy device into a golem.”
“A golem?” I scanned the room. The study entrance was blocked by shelves and chairs. There was a pitiful-looking log burning in the fireplace. The fireplace poker was beside it, the business end buried in the hot coals. “She turned her sex doll into a golem?”
“It is not a sex doll,” Rosanne said frostily. “It is a Macho Manikin Fully Articulated Love Companion.”
“Nevertheless,” Atwater’s voice said from the MacBook, “it’s a golem now.”
“It cost twelve thousand dollars!”
“Then it’s a twelve-thousand-dollar golem. Congratulations.” Atwater started shuffling through his notes. “The thing is, the word ‘Truth’ is supposed to be on the golem, not the golem’s owner.”
“That damned leper…” Rosanne held her forearm up for us to see. The Hebrew lettering was there. It wasn’t a tattoo or a birthmark, and it had started to appear the night the singing had begun. It had been growing darker and more pronounced by the hour. “Zurama did this to me.”
“Zurama,” I said. “I meant to ask about that. Atwater, where have I heard that name before?”
Atwater’s face reddened, which my MacBook’s screen showed in all its 4K glory.
“Foster! Have you suffered some catastrophic impairment of your neocortex? We discussed him in the pinned thread on the board about the veracity of reports of immortal beings!”
I stopped and stood there for a moment. “Oh yeah. The son of Iram, right?”
“Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. He is called the Favored One, the Son of Grootsland, the Old Man of Iram, the Repairer of Reputations…”
“Okay! Okay!” I waved my hands. “And why would he be helping Rosanne to… to do… to do the thing that she did?”
“He’s the Devil,” Rosanne said.
“I sincerely doubt that,” Atwater’s exasperated voice crackled from the MacBook screen. “And it’s not like you sold him your soul.”
“No. All he wanted was an antique.”
“An antique?” Atwater and I said in unison.
“It was a 1941 Keeler-built handheld orgone accumulator.”
I sighed; I had no idea what that meant, so I looked to Atwater.
“Orgone is a pseudoscientific concept. Supposedly it is a universal life force or vital energy which can be used to extend the lifespan, expand the mind…” He sighed, his sour expression deepening further. “And produce orgasms of preternatural intensity.”
I looked to Rosanne, and she shrugged, “It didn’t work.”
“Of course it didn’t!” Atwater sputtered, “It is pure hokum from the pre-war occult fringe…”
“Focus people!” I said, “So you traded him this accumulator so your ‘doll’ would come to life.”
“Jeoshphat! It’s like frying an egg with a rocket engine!”
“ATWATER!” I shouted.
Rosanne continued, “The deal was that Fritz would come to life and… take care of my needs until the day I found true love…” Her voice trailed off.
“And?” I gestured for her to continue.
She sighed, “And if I ever let a single teardrop fall onto Fritz, I would become his true love.”
There was a long pause. I looked from Rosanne to the MacBook; Atwater just stared out of the screen at both of us. Finally he cleared his throat, “This is the highest form of insanity…”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “She is not… Wait. You cried on him? On it?”
“Yes, I did,” Rosanne said, “but not on purpose. Do you think I wanted to end up spending my nights getting off with some kind of magic robot? That night I was so disgusted with myself that I started to cry.”
“I’m sorry.” What else could I say?
“I got a gal who’s always late,” a syrupy, Prince Charming voice interrupted us. It was making its way up Rosanne Gluckman’s driveway. “Anytime we have a date…”
“And here we go.” I closed the MacBook lid. Atwater had time for a single shout of protest.
Meanwhile, the serenade was continuing. “I’m gonna walk up to her gate, and see if I can get it straight…”
There was a crash that could only be the sound of the house’s front door being kicked in. The home security system started going berserk. A stern-sounding operator began issuing stern-sounding warnings from the intercoms, but all the while Fritz kept singing away.
“Cause I wants her, I’m gonna ask her—Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?”
I turned back to look at Rosanne. The paleness was spreading out from the word on her forearm. Something about it made her flesh take on an artificial tone.
She cried, “You said you had a plan!”
The singer was getting closer now. I could hear his footsteps on the landing.
“The way you’re actin’ lately makes me doubt…”
“I do have a plan,” I explained, “it just happens to be an awful one.”
The study door crashed open, and I got my first glimpse of Fritz.
Imagine, if you will, Zac Efron’s head perched atop the hairless body of a romance novel lothario. He wore only a torn blue trench coat, and it fit poorly, revealing the main selling point of a Macho Manikin Fully Articulated Love Companion.
It wasn’t so much a penis as it was an assault on all sense of proportion and sanity.
“You is still my baby, baby,” Fritz’s mouth opened and closed like a puppet’s. “Seems my flame in your heart’s done gone out…”
His doll eyes zeroed in on Rosanne. She made a small terrified sound.
I approached the thing. “All right now. Easy, big fella. Let’s talk about this.”
“A woman is a creature that has always been strange…” Fritz took another step forward. I moved forward again, quite literally cock blocking him. “Just when you’re sure of one you find she’s gone and made a change…”
“Listen to me!” I shouted. “I’m not sure what you are, but I know you’re not a monster. And I know you know what’s going to happen to Rosanne if you don’t stop this. And you can stop this, can’t you?”
Fritz paused.
I said, “If you really care about her, you won’t do this. Come on. Think. You’re not a monster. You’re a lover.”
The pause stretched on, measured in nervous breaths and heartbeats.
“Come on,” I said. “Is she is or is she ain’t your baby?”
Was Fritz listening to me? Was there an actual soul of some kind that could have understood what I was doing, or was he just a wish and a curse made manifest?
I’ll never know because that was when Rosanne decided to shoot him.
BLAM!
It was like a bolt of lightning crashed over my shoulder. A hot breeze blasted past my cheek. My right eye was flash-blinded. My right ear was deafened. The bullet hit Fritz dead center in his smarmy smile and lodged deep in one of the steel joints that held his PVC skull together.
There was a long pause. I think Rosanne said, “Sorry, Brian,” but the ringing in my head was so loud it sounded a lot like “Starry fryin’.”
Then Fritz started singing again from what was left of his mouth.
“ITH you iTH or iTH you ain’t my baby? Maybe baby’TH found THomebody new…”
He picked me up by the lapels of my leather jacket and threw me into the oak bookshelf we’d been using as a barricade. I hit it with enough force to send it pitching forward, pinning me. Sharp pain exploded in my torso. I would later learn I had broken two ribs and had a concussion.
Rosanne kept firing. Fritz kept singing.
BLAM!
“Or iTH my baby THtill my baby true?”
BLAM!
“ITH you or iTH you ain’t my baby, baby?”
BLAM! BLAM!
“The way you’re actin’ lately makeTH me doubt…”
BLAM!
“THee here, who’TH been cuttin’ me…”
Fighting through a fog of pain, I half-squirmed, half-crawled free of the bookshelf and staggered to my feet just as Rosanne threw the empty revolver at him. It bounced off his jaw, taking out a faux tooth before it hit the floor.
She was backing away. It might have been the concussion talking, but it looked like her movements were getting stiffer, her face losing the ability to hold its expression of terror.
What was it Rosanne had been told? If she ever let a teardrop fall onto his silicone flesh, she would become his true love. What would a Pinocchio with a priapism like Fritz want? Another living doll, of course.
There was no choice. Reason had failed, if it had ever had a chance. It was time to implement my awful plan.
I scrabbled across the study and grabbed the fireplace poker. It had been sitting in the fire for almost an hour, so it was good and hot.
“You’TH is THtill my baby, baby. Baby boy, it seemTH my flame in your heart’TH done…”
I charged, crashing past Fritz and bringing the red-hot metal down onto Rosanne’s forearm. She screamed. Skin sizzled. The ‘Truth’ marking and the surrounding flesh were reduced to a blackened ruin…
###
“…then what?” Sara asked. She was sitting on the far side of the bed. Her tickling had turned into a foot massage, and nothing dulls the pain of remembering the time you were nearly killed by a robot with a priapism like a nice foot massage.
“The Saratoga police burst into the room about thirty seconds after I’d given Rosanne her life-saving third-degree burn and ten seconds after Fritz had collapsed lifelessly to the floor,” I explained. “And I hold no grudges about the tasering and arrest.”
“Ah-ha.” Sara smiled as she pressed her thumb into the arch of my foot. “And that is why Harker & Huld Legal Group are your go-to guys.”
“Yeah. At first it was just that Rosanne Gluckman was going to not press charges, but a certain Albany defective detective pushed them into finding something to charge me with.”
“Bradshaw.”
I nodded. “Bradshaw. Once she saw I was looking at a little jail time, Rosanne begged one of her close friends in the firm to help me out. She told her everything.”
“And that was Lucy Harker.” She shifted position and plopped her piggies in my lap. “Do me now.”
So I did. “I’ll make an investigative blogger out of you yet.”
Sara laughed. “I think I’d rather run a meadery. Maybe even make our own honey.”
“Sign me up.” I pressed my fingers along her instep and watched her arch her back delightfully and coo.
“So whatever happened to Rosanne?”
“Ah, well, it turns out that the whole mess made her realize the person who really cared about her was right in front of her,” I explained. “She and Lucy have been living together for about a year now. They let me know about their engagement and explained why there was no way on Earth I could be invited to their wedding.”
“Awww,” Sara said. “I could have been your plus-one.”
“Of course Atwater made some snarky comment about her being driven into ‘the arms of Sappho’ by the trauma. He’s a jerk like that.”
“You think someone that smart would know we’re all basically bisexual.”
“You think so?”
She winked and wriggled her toes. “I know so.”
“Oh, really?” I tried not to objectify this revelation and get all hot and bothered by it. I failed.
She came back around to my end of the bed so she could kiss me. “You’re not the only one with stories. I’ve got plenty.”
I kissed her back. “Truly, you contain multitudes.”
“Brian Foster, you don’t know the half of it,” she kissed me again but for a moment before she went in for that kiss, and it was just a moment mind you, there was a flicker of something in her eyes. Something serious and sad. I understood it, at least I thought I did. She wasn’t tell me everything but that was fine after all I didn’t tell her that my sources told me that six months ago there was a break in at the evidence storage facility used by the Saratoga Police Department. The only item that went missing was one heavily damaged Macho Manikin Fully Articulated Love Companion.
And that was fine the story deserved a happy ending, we have to take them where and when we can in this world.
Sara grabbed my straw pork pie hat off the nightstand and put it on her head, “So how much longer can we stay in bed?”
I smiled, “Well, we don’t have to be there first thing in the morning.”
And then we did exactactly what you think we did.
And she kept my hat on the entire time.
