The M.I.L.F. Man

Gumbo ya ya

People like Tuck became people like Tuck partly because they felt like they'd been abandoned and betrayed by their own people. That's where that "owning the libtards" thing came from.

I heard it on some talk shows. Not the ones you hear driving down some lonely highway that appeal to people who watch old Westerns and soaps and game shows on those nostalgia channels.

Those ones are dangerous, too, of course. Cooing millions of decent, God-fearing country folks into a kind of stupor. Telling them they're sooo much better off than us godforsaken city folk who'll be left behind to die some kind of horrible death when the Rapture comes next week.

But I was listening to the batshit crazy, chest pounding dudes who get people all hopped up on fear and whatever snake oil they're selling for $100 a bottle. They're always hawking some kind of miracle cure for everything that ails you.

Including the "low testosterone" they claimed was keeping white men from making enough babies to keep us brown people from taking over the world. Did you ever see that testicle tanning contraption one of their TV compadres tried to get guys to zap their balls with?

I shit you not. The "ads" were kinda homoerotic, if you ask me. This muscle man standing with his legs wide open, crotch aglow.

But I felt like those ones were just a bunch of fugly white dudes who didn't get laid in high school. Puking out all that pent up frustration and fear out over the airwaves.

But actually, half the goddamned country was feeling abandoned, neglected and insulted in some way. Angry that they were supposed to feel sorry for all these "colored" people marching around, demanding things when white people had suffered just as much.

Oh, yeah. I heard that all the time from people screaming at us at marches, or when we went door to door trying to register people to vote and all that.

One woman got all in my face when I was handing out sandwiches to these Black guys in the park. "My grandparents didn't have a pot to piss in back in the Old Country--came over here with $10 in their pockets! Where's our reparations for alla hard work we did that nobody else wanted to do back then? We got treated just like they did when we first got here. But you don't see us askin' for handouts!"

Those are the ones who lined up around the block to vote for the guy who said what they felt. Their Woodstock moments were Trump rallies. And that pent up rage went back Woodstock far, too. From those "Swingin' 60s" that their parents and grandparents didn't feel part of, either.

They were the cannon fodder kids who couldn't beat the draft because they couldn't afford or qualify for college. Every now and then some homeless Nam vet would go off on me about it. Flashing back to when kids who looked like me treated them like shit after they'd come back from those damned jungles with broken bodies and fried brains.

One guy slapped a bottle of frozen water back at me so hard I saw stars. Apologized afterwards, but his PTSD had kicked in just from looking at me with my bare feet and tatts and ripped up jeans.

Tuck wasn't a Nam vet, but he'd grown up in a goddamned cult that taught him that people like me were responsible for all the sin. I think they hated people like Chas, too, but also admired them, deep down. Wanted to be them. Be loved by them.

I'm sure you've noticed that, too. Tuck fighting the "love\hate" he felt whenever he looked at Chas. But instead of killing The Enemy on a screen, he recruited a bunch of angry, gun toting guys to grab up some real people and throw them in "coffins."

Had they thrown My Love into one of those damned snake pits?

My heart started thumping like crazy again when I thought about that...

And then Tuck barked, "Listen up! We're gonna move out around 2 a.m. or so! Gail'n' Willis made it over there already—nobody followed, far as we know. Women folk over that way have been lookin' out, walkin' the fences. Ain't seen nor heard nothin'. But we're gonna have to call upon some friends over the next few weeks. Keep mobile. So eat up'n' then start loadin' up! May be the last real meal we have for a while, so get it while it's hot!"

I started unscrewing the door hinges with a butter knife as soon as I heard those boots clumping past the closet. I hoped Colleen had laid things out right. And I hoped the guy they sent over to wherever Chas was had taken enough soup at least, if not everything else.

I heard one guy say the soup was "spicy as hell but damn good." Only one guy complained that there was "too much o' that damned Mexican cilantro-type stuff."

Seemed like hours passed before I noticed they were slurring their words a little bit. I heard somebody stumble and fall, too. Talking about "muh legs is crampin' all up," and some other stuff I couldn't catch.

And then I could hear them lumbering and stumbling around, tripping balls and cramping up so bad they finally just hit the floor. That's where I found them when I snatched that door all the way off the loosened hinges. Laying there writhing around, gagging and gaping and gurgling with their arms and legs bent all kinds of wrong ways.

Maria hadn't told me exactly what those herbs would do to me if I took too much, but from the look of it, at least one of them made your muscle squeeze up—probably the one I'd had a little of, that made my uterus contract after only a few sips. It had also made me a little loopy, so that along with all the other "mood altering" substances had those guys cross-eyed high.

Colleen and I threw all their weapons in some sacks we'd found in the closet and took off yelling our asses off until we heard people screaming and beating on the top of the dugouts.

Alls that held the hatches down from the outside was a couple of big iron rods stuck through some loops in the lid. So we pulled those out and cut the zip ties off everybody as they came inch worming toward us.

But Chas wasn't among them. Nobody knew where the "coffins" were, but we figured he would've yelled if he'd heard us.

So I went running back to that Airstream and just as I was about to leap up the steps somebody grabbed my hair and snatched me backwards.