Drag Thing; or, The Strange Case of Jackle and Hyde: A Novel of Horror. Victor J. Banis
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night. Somewhere in the distance an F car rattled noisily on its tracks, preternaturally loud in the pre-dawn stillness. Faint snippets of a Beastie Boys number faded in and out on the wisps of fog. The city curled up to sleep for the night.
“You guys smell that dog poop right alongside her?” Tom asked, grinning. “I almost sat in it.” He had actually put his hand right in it but he didn’t tell them that. Remembering, he brought his hand up to his nose to sniff at it.
Jeez. He could still smell the dog poop. He wiped the hand surreptitiously down the leg of his jeans. People are such shits, he thought, disgusted. There oughta be a law.
“I thought that was her perfume,” Archie said.
“Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk.” When he laughed, Tom sounded like he was gagging, in Hector’s opinion. Worse, like he was gagging in falsetto, which Hector personally thought was disgusting. Totally girlie man, he thought, and said aloud, “I love this town.”
“You got that right,” Archie said.
They stopped in a doorway to smoke the crack. Archie took it out of his pocket and carefully unwrapped the paper it was in. “What the fuck?” he swore.
“What?” Hector leaned close to look over his shoulder. “What?” he asked again.
“This ain’t no crack. It’s—it’s—”
Hector reached over his shoulder and poked at it with one finger. “Fuck! It’s bubble gum,” he said.
Archie brought it up to his nose and sniffed. Peppermint. “Shit. Why the fuck would a guy carry chewed up bubble gum around in his pocket?” he asked. Disgusted, he flung the gum into the street.
“I oughta go back there and bust his other knee cap for him, the dumb fuck,” Hector said.
“Dudes...,” Tom said.
“Plus, I should have fucked her again.”
“Dudes,” Tom said again. He pointed down the street, to where a woman a block and a half away walked in their direction. Except for hookers, you didn’t often see a lone woman on the streets of the Mission and for sure not at this hour of the night. “Check it out.”
“Jesus, what is that?” Hector asked, squinting.
“Looks like some kind of freak,” Archie said.
The Moes stared as she strolled nearer. The woman—if she was a woman—was like no woman they had ever seen before. She was tall, for starters, very tall—at least a foot taller than Archie, maybe even two feet taller, and at six foot two inches he was the tallest of the bunch. Her legs beneath her skirt looked like tree trunks and her arms were massive. Everything about her, in fact, was grotesquely outsized, like some comic book mutant.
Tom was the first to realize what they were seeing: “It’s a drag queen,” he said, astonished. Drag queens were even rarer on these streets, at this time of night, than real women. A drag queen strolling the Mission in the wee hours was practically begging for trouble.
“No shit. It’s the ugliest fucking drag queen in the world,” Archie said.
“Jesus, it’s that Hulk guy in a dress,” Tom said.
“Hulk Hogan?” Archie said, puzzled.
“The green one,” Tom explained.
“Oh, I get it,” Archie said, nodding sagely. “The Green Hornet dude.”
“Sweet,” Hector said, grinning. “Dudes, this is gonna be fun. Come on.”
He stepped from the doorway and began to saunter up the sidewalk in her direction, the other two trailing in his wake. Still unaware of the Moes, the approaching dragster smiled up at an almost full moon as it drifted in and out of the clouds and hummed tunelessly to herself. She had the look of a woman with nothing more on her mind than an ordinary late-night saunter to enjoy the lovely evening.
She was not, however, an ordinary woman. Not even, Hector thought as they got nearer, an ordinary drag queen. Up close, she appeared even more bizarre than she had at a distance. Her dress, a flowery print wrapped around her sarong fashion, looked as if it had recently hung at someone’s window. She wore a fanny pack on one immense hip and on her head a sort of turban fashioned from a towel, the kind found on rollers in restrooms. A makeshift, an adlib kind of drag, then, but the Moes were no specialists in fashion, drag or otherwise. All they knew was that she looked weird, really weird.
They were no more than eight or ten feet from her when she finally looked in their direction and caught sight of them. She stopped in her tracks and peered nearsightedly down her nose at the threesome.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” she addressed them. She did not sound worried. Which, Hector thought, was pretty dense of her, considering.
“Hey, you know, we need to talk to you,” Hector said.
“Yes?” She smiled politely.
“Well, see, like, we’re The Moes, the three of us, you dig, and this is our turf,” he said.
She gave him a cautious nod. “I am so pleased to meet you, Mister Moe. And Mister Moe, and Mister Moe,” she said, nodding to Archie and Tom in turn, and turned back to Hector. “Now, then, how can I help you, gentlemen?”
Hector gave his crotch a meaningful grab and made smoochey-smoochey noises with his lips. “To tell you the truth,” he said, grinning, “we was thinking we could help you, Momma.”
Her smile vanished and she planted her ham-sized hands on her hips. “Don’t call me Momma, Mister Moe,” she said in a firm baritone. “I’m quite sure I am no relation of yours.”
Hector was not at all intimidated by her considerable size. It was his opinion that all queers were sissies. Even the gym bunnies with the pumped up arms and the massive chests could be counted on to turn into weeping Jell-O when confronted by a real man and he was sure this freaky looking drag queen would be no different. Besides, he was emboldened to see that while he was chatting with her, his two companions had slunk into positions on either side of her.
The drag queen saw them too, and turned toward Tom. “Go away,” she said in an imperious voice. “I command you to vanish.”
“Now, Momma, that’s no way to talk to a man.” Hector took advantage of her distraction to give the vast acreage of her fanny a pat.
Kapow! The next second he was in the air. He flew like a rocket and landed on a nearby garbage can with a bang. A foot-long rat that had been enjoying its supper in the can squealed an indignant protest and darted for an alley.
It happened so suddenly that Hector couldn’t quite grasp how he had one minute been patting her fanny and the next he was sitting on the sidewalk in a mess of stinking coffee grounds and banana peels. He shook his head, dazed and temporarily at a loss for breath.
“I said, don’t call me Momma!” she said emphatically. “And keep your filthy hands to yourself, creep.”
Stunned, Tom and Archie froze in place. In the slow-working machinery of his mind, Tom had just decided that it might be prudent to back away a bit, but he was too laggardly in getting the message to his feet. A hand the size of a catcher’s mitt grabbed the front of his jacket and another one started slapping his head from one side to the other. Whack! Whack! Whack!
“Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” he cried.
To his credit, Archie moved as if to come to his friend’s aid with one of the karate kicks that had served him well in any number of street brawls, a kick aimed straight for the dragster’s crotch.
The kick never reached its target, unfortunately. In something less than the blink of an eye, the drag had let go of Tom’s jacket and instead seized Archie’s foot in midair. Like Hector before him, Archie found himself suddenly aloft, soaring in an orbit about the head of their would-be prey, while his leg felt as if it were being ripped out of its socket.
“Hey,