Your Papa Wants His Dupont Back

The wet face Jonny Foster wore telegraphed a slackjawed simplicity that could be seen across the street. He wobbled on the sidewalk, the puddle beneath him widening like some spreading spore. A red Speedo cradled his overlarge cock with little success, the meat of his spilling loins shadowed by his swollen gut.

“Jesus, Jonny, go back inside!”

Chiquito Yurik jerked his head east and saw some strawhatted schmuck walking her dog. He had nearly finished emptying the truck.

“OK, Chiqui, you don’t have to yell at me, you know.”

“This isn’t yelling! Your goddamn pecker is falling out.” Those last two words barely made it past the pearly cage of Chiquito Yurik’s gritted teeth, more spit than syllable. “Just go swim some more, huh?”

“OK, Chiqui.” Jonny Foster turned without lifting his feet and the languid scrape of his Birkenstocks scraped Chiquito Yurik’s raw nerves.

“You’re right, Jonny, I was yelling and I’m sorry,” he called out while combing back a springy tangle of hair with his dark hand. Already the woman had passed, led by her oafish Saint Bernard. Chiquito Yurik watched her go and enjoyed the pistoning progress of her ass.

He could use a smoke.

A retaining wall divorced his new property from the city of Glendale, a fief bought in full. White roses bloomed in that narrow trough and seduced honeybees with their sunstruck mouths. Below the fleshy petals of such mating sat on smooth brick a pack of cigarettes. Chiquito Yurik had promised himself a restorative stoge only when the day’s labors concluded, but he’d broken bigger promises. Besides, there wasn’t much left. Jonny had lugged most of the equipment and all of the worms to the grow shed after breakfast, before deciding to show off his insane wang to the whole neighborhood.

“Fuckin guy.”

As he grabbed his Parliaments, Chiquito Yurik surveyed the road’s every direction and saw a distant fella dressed in a boxy green suit surveying him. They locked stares, neither blinking, neither breaking. Something nipped at Chiquito Yurik’s feelers, a different kind of déjà vu that squirmed up and down his spine like a great vermis that bothered his soul that gnawed awa-  

The cigarette twitched out of Chiquito Yurik’s suddenly cold lips and fell prey to a raptor wind, like some faroff man pirouetted by hurricane. It hit the pavement with a tap and unfroze Chiquito Yurik’s sight. He looked down at the rocking cigarette. Someone in 1997 had etched their name in the cement.

“Everything cool, Chiqui?”

He looked up to find Jonny Foster, robed, sipping from a small box of fruit juice. The straw was straight but Jonny had kinked it and the liquid sorta stuttered on its angled way up.

“Where’s my lighter, Jonny?”

Jonny’s Adam’s apple worked as he gulped and swallowed. “Your lighter?”

“Yeah, Jonny, my lighter. The Dupont. The S.T. Dupont.”

“That’s a nice lighter, Chiqui. The one with the spinny thing?”

“Yeah, Jonny, the one with the spinny thing.”

“Your daddy’s lighter, Chiqui?”

“Yes.”

“A nice lighter.”

“The nicest. You seen it?”

“I don’t smoke, Chiqui.”

Chiquito Yurik took a big breath and let it out, fists battened on his bony hips to maybe prevent a firesome launch.

“If Papa weren’t dead he’d kill me.”

“Good thing he’s dead then, Chiqui.” Jonny Foster smiled, encouraging, cheerful, oblivious to his unintended barb. The insane buzz of a circular saw competed with the jeering caw of a crow and further frayed Chiquito Yurik’s fiber.

“Well,” began Jonny but paused for a swig. “Well, when’d you smoke last, Chiqui?”

Chiquito Yurik loosened and so warm a buoyancy cupped him that he felt like weeping there on Stocker Street. “The diner! You beautiful swinging dick, the diner!”

“Before breakfast, Chiqui, you’re right! In the parking lot.” 

“Go get dressed, Jonny, we gotta find that fuckin lighter.”

Chiquito Yurik rummaged through the moving truck like a dump-ruling raccoon just to be sure. He found a blue BIC, but finding a BIC of any tint for your cigarette was on par with drowning a French omelet in ketchup. When he hopped back out onto the sidewalk, the fella in his boxy green suit remained sentinel and elusive fear made Chiquito Yurik want to fuck him up.   

“Can we eat, Chiqui, after we find your S.T. Dupont? Swimming gets me hungry.”

Jonny Foster’s frame obstructed Chiquito Yurik’s point of view, the former’s sense of personal boundaries nonexistent, especially as regards his oldest chum.

“Yeah, buddy. First things first, huh?”

The familiar stranger shrank in the rearview.

Chiquito Yurik parked his Wrangler beside the sign which advertised Conrad’s to commuters 24/7. He got out and stretched, though the drive lasted less than five. Knots slackened, vertebrae crackled like bubble wrap, and amorphous bursts became the face of his father on the black scrim of closed lids.

“I’m checking the floor, Chiqui,” announced Jonny Foster.

“Good idea, bro, thanks.” 

The friends sought a rectangle of ribbed gold, its ignitor a flawless oblong which buttressed the Parisian lighter’s cap. The spinny thing, as Jonny had dubbed it. Chiquito Yurik loved the sonorous ping it produced upon each opening flick, had grown accustomed to its euphony and now feared the prospect of its eternal silence.

Where the fuck was it?

WHERE THE FUCK IS IT, YURA?!

Had he and Papa been parked in this very spot when first the lighter disappeared? The red fury of his father simply redacted every other memory of that tremendous moment. Chiquito Yurik feigned ignorance at the piece’s vanishment and helped Papa search while the pilfered Dupont scorched his Lakers joggers. 

WHERE THE FUCK IS IT, YURA?!

He never did smoke in front of Papa.

“I’m not seeing anything but litter, Chiqui. Oh, and a sock.”

“Let’s go check inside. Maybe the booth, you know?”

“Yeah, stuck in the seat like a french fry.”

“Bang.”

“Then we can eat.”

Chiquito Yurik opened the door for Jonny and followed him in. He was always opening doors for Jonny Foster, ever since he’d found the poor boy and his bike smeared on the family lawn, grass sponging up Jonny’s shattered skull and a part of what lay therein.   

They bypassed the inquiring maitre’d and headed straight for the morning’s booth. Torn seating sutured by wilting duct tape, rising aroma of decades off a carpeted floor. In the corner, beneath a framed photo of a ruined boxer, somebody’s granddad was counting out cash.

“That’s where we were sitting, Chiqui.”

“Right as always, Jonny.”

Chiquito Yurik knuckled Jonny’s shoulder and it made the taller of them smile, as it did each time. The senior citizen looked up as they advanced side by side across the heat-hushed restaurant.

“Hey, sir,” said Jonny.

“Hiya,” he replied.

“What’s your name?”

“My name? That’s Olson.”

“How are you, Mr. Olson?”

“Me? Fine, I guess. Full.”

Mr. Olson chuckled and patted his flat belly.

“Surely very full.”

“What’d you eat?” asked Jonny.

“Big guy, I had me a helpin of the best steak and onions wit-”

“Mr. Olson, I don’t mean to be rude but do you mind if I kinda feel around the booth? I’m thinking I left something here this morning and just wanna really double check.”

Mr. Olson massaged his mustache while giving Chiquito Yurik an up and down.

“What are you, Armenian?”

“Russian Mexican.”

“Christ, like that's any better.”

“I’m just American, Mr. Olson.” offered Jonny Foster.

“Well, that’s a little bit of alright, isn’t it?”

“Did you hear my question from earlier, Mr. Olson, or do I need to repeat myself?”

Mr. Olson’s gaze roamed around the table, plates and utensils heaped in a neat pile. His mouth moved like it was chewing.

“You refer to the lighter?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah.”

Mr. Olson reached into his checkered shirt pocket and brought out the Dupont. Chiquito Yurik wobbled, but no one noticed except Jonny Foster, who stepped forward ever so slightly for support. Reassuring ore glinted in Mr. Olson’s arthritic hand.

“I was gonna keep this, you know, finders keepers.”

“You know how much that’s worth?”

“I do. Do you?”

A waiter swooped in and grabbed Mr. Olson’s money.

“Are you listenin to what I’m sayin?”

People didn’t talk like this to Chiquito Yurik anymore, like he was some idiot teenager. Not since someone sent Papa to hell. He sensed the day’s desire to shrink him but shook it off.

“Come on,” said Chiquito Yurik with a beckon and Mr. Olson tossed him the lighter after a judgemental huff.

“Take better care, son” said Mr. Olson.

“Thanks.”

Mr. Olson nodded.

“Can we eat now, Chiqui?”

“Sure, pal, we can eat now.”

“Go ahead and take my place, lads, I’m just leaving.”

“Stay,” suggested Chiquito Yurik. “I owe you something.”

“Uh-uh, not me. I won’t be eating again till breakfast tomorrow.”

Such was the jollity coursing through Chiquito Yurik’s singing sinews that he would’ve been amenable to nearly anything the oldtimer desired. He was tough but fair, unlike Papa, who was just tough. A warmness settled atop Chiquito Yurik and a whisper informed him that things would be OK. His move, his business, his standing. The affairs of Chiquito Yurik would fall in place, find their rhythm, and fatten. He and Jonny Foster ate like kings and played footsie under the formica table.

When the twosome exited Conrad’s, copper color clouds sailed across the evening sky.     

“Wanna watch a movie tonight, Chiqui?”

“Why don’t we go to a movie instead of watching it at the house?”

“Oh, what a great idea! Hey, Chiqui?”

“Yeah, Jonny?”

“You have the lighter, right?”

Chiquito Yurik laughed out loud, filled and content. The weight of the Dupont pressed upon the tightness of his jeans.

“Yes, my man, I’ve got it i-”

“Yura!”

It was a scream, plain and simple, the ferocity of which glued the companions to the welcome ramp.   

“Come your ass here!”

The fella in the boxy suit stood across the lot. The westering orange of the sun mixed with the garish green of the fella’s clothes and rendered his aspect a vile brown of old forgotten blood left to dry.

Jonny Foster croaked from the corner of his mouth.

“Chiqui.”

“What?”

“Isn’t that the man who shot your daddy?”

“Now that you mention it, Jonny, I think it is. I think it is.”

Night was coming fast.

“But Chiqui.”

“What?”

He knew what Jonny was going to say next but he let him say it anyway because stating the obvious made Jonny feel smart.

“Your daddy shot him back.”

“Yup. Shot him dead.”

Whatever well-being had pumped Chiquito Yurik now hissed out as from a pricked balloon.

“Hustle, kid, or do I need to hoof it?”

So they went closer to a face that Chiquito Yurik used to know, a face that had been pulped by an ultimate bullet.

“You still hanging around with this dumbbell?”

“I’m no dumbbell, mister,” answered Jonny.

“No?”

“No. I am brave, I am kind, I am smart, I am loved. I can do anything.”

The fella cackled and that ripping sound polluting the immediate air around Chiquito Yurik stung his proud tears. It had taken Jonny Foster a long, long time to stand up for himself, to really believe in those affirmations.

Chiquito Yurik loved him all the more inside those seconds.

“Hey, shithead, didn’t my dad put you down because of your running mouth?”

“Sure he did, but not before I put him down. Funny, if you think about it, him sending me up now.”

“Unsurprising. Cocksucker was always a little too busy.”

The darkness of a cinema was what Chiquito Yurik needed, not all fucking this, whatever this was.

“Your Papa wants his Dupont back.”

The fella removed his hat and held it out beggar style, giving it a jaunty wiggle. Liquid sloshed inside the malignancy’s hairless wrist as it did in Chiquito Yurik’s roiling bowels.

“Was he wearing a hat before, Chiqui?”

“I don’t- God, I don’t know, Jonny.”

“Put it in. Being back here isn’t best.”

WHERE THE FUCK IS IT, YURA?!

Again the lighter scorched like filial guilt in Chiquito Yurik’s pocket.

“He never thought you were clever enough to take it but now he knows you’re not clever enough to keep it.”

“Ah, fuck off, the two’a you.” Chiquito Yurik dropped on all fours and hollered, “But especially you, you bastard!” The heavy hand of Jonny Foster lit on his groveling neck.

“You lost it, Yura. You lost it, and so have lost it. Put it in before I get angry.”

“OK, chief, bend over and I’ll shove it up your culo.”

The fella raised his sudden hat and moved it toward Chiquito Yurik’s head, making like he would fit it on, but Jonny Foster swatted it away and the fella lashed him with his nasty leer.

“You wanna try for size, numbnuts? Once on, won’t ever come off.”

“I don’t like this, Chiqui, give it to him. You can buy a new one! We got the money.”

“Listen to the moron.”

Chiquito Yurik would hear no more. He swung at the revenant and his square fist struck what felt like a dense block of wet cheese, moving through this obdurate mass as fights in dreams. As Chiquito Yurik’s coiled hand coursed across the fella’s waxy cranium, a wriggling tickle attacked his flesh, curious and unholy worms tasting the skin of one alive. 

The melting fella smirked at Chiquito Yurik’s confused disgust.

WHERE THE FUCK IS IT, YURA?!

Chiquito Yurik’s arm completed its violent locomotion and caught up to speed, spinning him around via delayed momentum. The fella’s face had revealed itself by then, a blasted destruction which no mortician could hope to repair. Closed casket cinders.

“Your Papa wants his Dupont back.”

The fella scuffed his patent leathers toward Chiquito Yurik, slurring the instruction through a cratered mandible, spitted globules of bile fizzing upon the blacktop.

“Your Papa wants his Dupont ba-”

“Fine! Fine! Take the fucking thing, man, fuck!”

Chiquito Yurik fished the lighter from his pocket and relinquished it into the downside up hat.

“Now get the fuck outta here, would ya?” asked Jonny Foster.

The fella regarded them through the slice of his single eye which remained stringed.

He put the hat on his parted head quickly to preserve the surrendered talisman and evanesced. There wasn’t anyone else in the parking lot and the moon had arrived in the starless dome like an early guest at an empty party.

“I don’t think I wanna go to a movie no more, Chiqui.”

“Me neither.”

“Chiqui?”

“Yeah.”

“What just happened?”

“I think we got food poisoned.”

“Do you have your lighter?”

“No, I lost it. Remember?”

They made the five minute drive home in four and parked in the driveway. There would be a ton of work tomorrow, lots of set up, planting, piping. Getting the operation on its feet. Chiquito Yurik thought of all those worms then writhing about each other in their slippery tenement and such a loathsome radiation coated his body it was as if the vile maggots were not safe in the garage but indeed undulating on his very person his chest his arms his legs his groin his back assessing judging deeming-   

“I’m gonna go to bed, Chiqui.”

“OK, Jonny, I’ll be in soon. Leave the light on.”

Jonny Foster kissed Chiquito Yurik’s stubbly cheek and went inside.

There, in the thankful quiet, Chiquito Yurik drew a cigarette. There was no sign of that curvy dogwalker, too bad, and no sign of the Dupont. Eh, it was always trouble, that thing, his secret trouble. He searched and found a tiny blue BIC. With a click he lit the cig and sucked.

Chiquito Yurik blew the curative smoke toward a small palm tree, a nuisance that he’d soon root out, its ugly fronds held forth like the hands of some demanding corpse.     

Papa loved palm trees.