Nazi Sharks! Page 9

  “How so?” Edwina asked, expecting to be flattered, but sensing something was wrong—ass-over-tea-kettle wrong.

  “The way you make me feel,” he explained, the soothing waves adding a poetic meter to his speech, a pentameter or something, one of those. “I get to see plenty of good-looking girls, what with my dad’s competition and all. They do nothing for me, Edwina!”

  “You’re gay?”

  “No! Of course not,” he quickly disagreed. A little too quickly. But then, at what speed does a straight man deny being gay? “I find them all sexy, desirable. But they never arouse me. Looking, touching—I remain as limp as a dead monkey.”

  “And I’m different?” she inquired. She hadn’t been prepared for this sort of confession. She had left her cassock at home. But somehow his opening up made her feel more rooted, more real. She could stay here. She could not flit away to the next notion. Unless this itself was another one of her wacky ideas! Oh, Edwina, you’re a riddle to yourself. At least you have a killer bod.

  “You make me as rigid as a dictator’s rule,” he admitted bashfully.

  “If anyone else were saying this,” she said, after some consideration, “I’d probably kick him in the balls, spit in his pain-gaped mouth and leave before I’m tempted to do worse. But somehow, I know you’re sincere.”

  “I am,” he agreed, holding Edwina’s hand to his chest so she could feel the authenticity in his beating heart. A good, healthy heartbeat; he clearly kept his sodium levels low. “And it’s true. Last night I erupted like a marshmallow volcano thinking of your beautiful body intertwined with mine. It’s been… years, maybe my whole life, since I felt like that.”

  “But why?”

  He let her hand drop and turned away, his Mexican fire building like an overheated jalapeno.

  “This curse, Eddie! The Curse of Burt Reynolds!” he held his hands out like claws, the fearsome claws of a Mexican soap opera star. “I’ve always felt like a nancy boy, no better than a crumb hanging obscenely from Burt Reynolds’s mustache. But you—you make me feel like more of a man than any Reynolds, even Debbie.”

  Edwina walked away from the shore toward drier land, leaving Reynolds in the mire of anxiety, suspense, and the need for approval. He’d once lost a horse in that mire and didn’t like it one bit. She kicked at an abandoned beach fire, the blackened driftwood rolling resentfully away.

  “Well,” she said at last, “while we’re on the beach, we might as well break out the marshmallows.”

  “I didn’t bring any—oh!” he gasped. “I see what you mean!”

  The time for hesitation was over and this Hispanic Hamlet seized his beloved not as a monkey, not as a Reynolds, but as a man. He kissed her passionately, so passionately she could taste the guacamole, and they fell to the sand with entwined legs.

  Edwina bent her arms beside her head, permitting Reynolds free access to her chest. He took the opportunity almost instantly, as though they were linked, mindless members of a sex-crazed cyborg hive. His delicate fingers opened her blouse efficiently and had her bra down in seconds, revealing the most exquisite set of breasts he’d ever laid eyes or hands on. Not oversized melons, as his father liked, but handfuls of flawless density and perfect, full shape, like God’s template for all boobage. He couldn’t contain himself; he had to take them in his hands, squeeze them together, caress them, feeling the dainty nipples tickle his palms—as the Good Lord intended. For a moment, he thought he saw something marring those immaculate white mounds, but he knew it couldn’t be. It made no sense. His father’s face! One on each breast, mocking him. He shook his head violently, still caressing the perfect tits. Edwina moaned beneath him as he rubbed his hot face over them, darting his tongue out at surprising intervals.

  Edwina’s hand moved down to the zipper of his red pants, looking for a burrito in all the salsa. At last, she unleashed the Chihuahua, which wagged happily and slobbered a bit against her leg.

  Reynolds ripped Edwina’s panties from under her skirt, and threw them away in horror, after seeing Burt Reynolds’s macho mustache on their crotch. Angry and scared to lose the moment, Reynolds shook his head again, seized Edwina’s soft, slender legs, and prepared to penetrate her.

  “Nooooooo!” Reynolds shouted at the moon, from which his dad and Burt Reynolds stared at him with disapproving judgment. ‘What? Is this pussy gonna put his dick in her or is he gonna give us more Sophocles?’ Burt Reynolds seemed to ask his dad. ‘What’s a Sophocles?’ his dad seemed to wonder.

  “No, no, no, no, no, not again!” he shouted, releasing the magnificent, silken legs.

  Edwina jumped up, her heart racing, wondering if she had forgotten to trim her pubic hair, “What happened?”

  “It’s gone!” he exclaimed, his head and arms hanging as limp as his dick. “I’ve never been so close, but it’s gone—look at it, hanging like a gorilla with advanced depression. All I can think of is Burt Reynolds, Burt fucking Reynolds and how much better he would be than me. I’m a virgin, Eddie! How many women must Burt Reynolds have had? One hundred? Two hundred? Three hundred thousand women?”

  He stared at her, as if expecting some solution to the conundrum, some surprising proof that Burt Reynolds was actually a pregnant sasquatch.

  “Well, I don’t see how he would’ve found time to manage his fairly impressive film career and still have that much—”

  “Four hundred thousand women, Eddie! How can I compete with that? I can never please you like he can!”

  “Don’t do this to yourself,” Edwina pleaded. “It’s you I want. I don’t want to be one in four-hundred-thousand women—even if that number seems extremely exaggerated to me. I’d rather be your one and only. Right now, only you can please me.”

  Reynolds seemed lost in a daze, an alternate universe comprised of chest hair, mustaches, and biceps, where words and reason could not penetrate—only Burt Reynolds did penetrating in that world, apparently. In this daze, Reynolds fumbled in his interior pockets and pulled out a bottle and a rag. Edwina hoped it was lubricant, but she sensed it wasn’t. Reynolds soaked the rag with whatever fluid was in the bottle and looked at it in obvious agony.

  “What are you doing?” Edwina asked.

  “What I have to do,” he answered, with growing panic, like a cornered chupacabra. “I’m sorry, Edwina, but I have to. It’s women’s fault! You brought the sharks here! You make men have to be supermen, or worse, Burt Reynolds! Now you will see the power of The Shark.”

  “You’re scaring me… You’re also confusing me.”

  “I could have loved you, Eddie,” he said, with the hateful eyes of a ghost pepper.

  Edwina pushed herself clumsily to her feet in an effort to escape, but tripped over the semi-burnt log of driftwood—her nemesis of old. Before she could say, ‘Aha! So Burt Reynolds was the killer all along!’ the bastard clapped his chloroform-soaked rag over her mouth. She surrendered her consciousness and her hopes of giving up her flakey lifestyle. The universe seemed against it. Edwina’s final sight before plunging into darkness was Reynolds smiling with grim satisfaction and shuddering with pleasure as his controlgasm reached its peak.

  Chapter 25

  Yogurt Time!

  Andrea relaxed on the hotel bed, a tub of yogurt resting between his breasts. She hadn’t taken a spoonful in minutes. The other girls grew disconcerted, their own tubs being nearly empty by now.

  “You okay, Andrea?” Steph asked, talking through a mouthful of delicious, vanilla yogurt. “We’re all taking it hard.”

  They had changed into tank tops and sweats—appropriate female yogurt attire—and began consuming the cultured dairy product to girl their grief out. So it was okay; this was what it was for. Get it out; get yogurt in.

  “I’m getting a premonition!” Andrea announced suddenly, her yogurt spilling over her right breast onto her pant leg.

  The girls gasped and gripped their yogurt containers as they drew closer to Andrea. What the hell was she talking about?

 
; “Eddie’s on the beach,” she said. “Burt’s with her. He’s…he’s on top of her. Yes. Her breasts are basking in the moonlight like engorged walruses digesting on an untouched shore. His pants are around his ankles, rubbing against her Disney Princess panties. He’s gagging her with something. He’s straining. There’s a look of concentration on his face. Now pleasure. And relief… and… and… that’s it.”

  “Huhn, never thought Eddie would be into that sort of thing,” Nikki pondered.

  “It’s always the quiet ones,” Steph said.

  “As long as they’re having a good time, I guess…”

  Andrea felt uneasy, but she had a cleanup on boob one.

  The girls shrugged and returned to their yogurt. It wasn’t going to eat itself.

  Chapter 26

  Debrief

  Kevin Costner regarded the stains on his wifebeater with a certain degree of shame and humiliation, though the stains on his briefs matched quite well and, in that sense, were fashionably correct. His monster slippers shifted nervously under the table. He couldn’t even see the FBI agents over the enormous mountain of underwear piled on his kitchen table, but he knew they were judging him—and he deserved it.

  “Well, that’s the last of them,” Warren said with audible relief, dropping the final pair of ancient, rotting once-white briefs on the kitchen table with a gloved hand.

  “You’re sure that’s all?”

  Costner nodded solemnly. “The dirty. The clean. You been through it all. Except these.”

  He pointed to the underwear he was wearing. They were fresh. He’d only been wearing them for a week.

  “Check ‘em,” Warren told Walker.

  To Walker, life wasn’t unlike a filthy underwear band crusted with sweat and fecal matter. It didn’t make him want to examine the still-worn briefs any more. He reluctantly examined the band as Costner leaned forward, like a child waiting to be wiped, and found the tag present.

  “I told you!” Costner exclaimed. “My underwear’s been disappearing lately. I don’t know why. I’ve never thrown away a pair of underwear in my life! I thought maybe I was crazy—a strange kind of crazy that makes me think I have way more underwear than I really have. But now you’re here, so I know I’m not underwear crazy.”

  Costner stood up and angrily tore a pair of briefs in half with almost no force. Mostly because they were only held together by filth and undiscovered laws of quantum mechanics. “Some pervert wants to sniff my package—that’s what it is!”

  Warren tried very hard, for his own sanity, to ignore what Costner just suggested.

  “Do you live with anyone, Mr. Costner?” he asked.

  “Just my boy…”

  “And his name?” Warren asked.

  “Burt Reynolds.”

  “Of course.”

  Walker shrugged and returned to admiring the pile of dead flies at the bottom of a Virgin Mary statue.

  “Do you know where Burt Reynolds might be?”

  Costner threw up his hands in a display of Latin emotional intensity and growled. “He creeps out most nights,” he explained. “He says he has a ‘hidey-hole’ when I ask him. And you know what I tell him? I say, ‘What kind of talk is that? A hidey-hole? That is what grandmas and pedophiles say. Burt Reynolds, the real Burt Reynolds, would never say hidey-hole. Even Tom Selleck would never say hidey-hole. What are you talking about, hidey-hole?’ What is a hidey-hole? That’s not in my vocabulary, sir.”

  “Well, where is this place?” Warren asked, not wanting to say ‘hidey-hole’ himself. While belabored, he had to admit the filthy loser had a point.

  “I don’t know. He runs away after that.” Costner took a swig of tequila directly from the bottle and hissed his appreciation for the beverage. “Because he’s a faerie, that’s why he runs away. My boy’s a little faerie. He was supposed to be a big man like Burt Reynolds. Hah! Couldn’t grow a mustache if his My Little Pony collection depended on it. In his room? Not one poster of tits. Only He-Man. He-Man! What kind of gay-gay stuff is that? Me? I got pictures of tits everywhere. Not in this room, because the Blessed Virgin would be offended.” Costner crossed himself in reverence and to ward off all thoughts of Virgin Mary’s Heavenly bosoms. “But I got them everywhere else. I love tits! Just like Kevin Costner. Burt Reynolds. Even Tom Selleck loves tits. Loves them!”

  Warren listened to the half-drunken babbling of the tit-crazed man with growing detachment. The abusive, pig-headed words of the Faux Costner came together in his mind and formed a sudden realization. He knew who the Shakatitt Shark was. He raised his hand to his mouth in shock, then realized, to even greater horror, that he hadn’t removed his rubber gloves.

  He turned to Walker and strove to express his chain of reasoning. “Tits… Reynolds… Faeiries…the Blessed Virgin… Great Caesar’s Ghost, Walker! Don’t you see? Call all local law-enforcement. I have a hunch we’d better find Mr. Burt Reynolds. Or should I say, Mr. Shakatitt Shark, and his hidey-hole. And soon. As soon as ASAP!”

  Chapter 27

  Excerpting the Hell Out of Researchmeister Sigmund Sigersbaum’s Diary

  The first brain was successfully transplanted. We only got a little bean dip on it. The shark who received the Commandant’s brain quickly showed himself a Fuhrer amongst sharks, except with fewer rambling speeches. The man who received the shark’s brain, moreover, has shown great progress in law school. The other sharks’ intelligences were synchronized just by the shark Fuhrer’s presence, shared brain-cells, and possibly hypnotism. They have become an army. They have become Nazis. And they have always been sharks.

  But they are not yet laser-blasting robots. Therein lies the age-old problem.

  Hitler’s demands have become excessive and unreasonable. I am frightened.

  “He wants to know why a shark isn’t cooking his vichyssoise,” I told my wife. “I survived only by convincing him sharks are allergic to leeks!”

  “What’s excessive about that?” she asked coolly. “I have been wondering the same thing.”

  I found this strange. She does not like soup of any kind, let alone French soups. I decided to spy on her. Not just in the bathroom, but everywhere. That was when I found she had taken a keen interest in my sharks. When I slept, she would sneak past the banana pile, careful not to slip on any of the peels, and out the door of our apartment that leads to the lab. There she would disrobe, douse her big, white buttocks in krill oil, and slip into the pool.

  Although not specified in our vows, I would not stand for a wife who has intercourse with marine life forms. We all must have boundaries. Besides, how will the sharks ever respect me now? I knew I must re-assert my dominance. Somehow.

  “We need to reprogram the sharks,” I informed my assistants after careful consideration. “They must hate not only American divers and baguettes. They must also hate women, especially beautiful women with immense mammaries.” I used such medical terminology with my underlings.

  My assistants had ceased asking questions at this point and began the programming using the Cerebrotron 200, the most advanced brain-to-abacus interface on the planet. I only hope my lack of forethought doesn’t land a sexy, American synchronized swim team in trouble some day.

  Chapter 28

  Transcendental Mastication

  Edwina had the dream again. The one where she’s diagnosed with advanced colorectal cancer and begins beating her grandchildren with a penguin known only as “The Nomad.” Then she had the other, much more reasonable dream, in which her parents tell her she won’t amount to anything and that she might as well rely on her pretty face and ‘okay’ chest. She’s buried to her neck in a solidified glob of nacho cheese all the while and her dad keeps tossing empty beer cans at her head. Her mother cackles, “Missed her this time, Charlie! Stupid girl’s not even good at target practice!” and her dad very inappropriately comments, “There’s a girl’ll only be good for suckin’ cock.” Her parents were never quite that white trash—that was one of the few things she had to say in
their favor. She struggled to extricate herself from the unhygienic dairy solid, but succeeded only in realizing she wasn’t bound in cheese, but kite string and duct tape.

  A reality of beer cans, discarded fast food, and photographs of forgotten honky tonk artists faded and blended with the realer and yet less probable reality of shark movie memorabilia, shark figurines in a variety of mediums, and dozens of votive candles lit before the shark paraphernalia.

  “I’m more than tits,” Edwina muttered from her drool-wet lips.

  Initially she figured she had muttered on deaf ears, the illusion having been dispelled. However, the giant shark figure in the center of the room moved suddenly into a prostrate position, then lifted itself back up. Her eyes focused in on the peculiar figure. It was an open-mouthed shark mask, resting on a man with skin the color of refried beans. He was clothed only in a disgustingly saggy pair of white briefs with such heavy, blasphemous staining it could only have come from the noxious Outer Realm of R’lyeh.

  A gleam of incandescent light across her eyes brought the final piece of the puzzle to Edwina’s attention: the foot-long, curved blade in the figure’s hands. The events of the evening came flooding back. She knew she was in the terrible fins of the Shakatitt Shark. And worse, he almost got to fourth base with her. How had she not known such madness lurked beneath the surface of the charming Mexican man known as ‘Burt Reynolds?’ Her friends’ extremely lateral use of logic had been right and she’d ignored it. Maybe her parents were right after all. Maybe Reagan really had been a time-traveller come to set the world back on the right temporal course. And maybe she really was no good but for tits and ass.