Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (motivational novels .txt) 📕

“What’s going on, Kevin? What’s going on? Is this part of the game?” Turning slowly in the harness attached by nylon straps and steel carabiners to the ceiling mount, Cathy O’Dell is in shock. And because she is in shock, her bladder lets loose all its contents in one gushing stream all over Kevin Trout below her.

The two intruders stand over by the tiny lap pool, transfixed, speechless, rapt, bug-eyed.

“Enough with the pissing, honey!” Trout pleads. Dressed in a Walt Disney version of baby garb, a huge, comical diaper fixed around his nude paunch with big plastic safety pins, his Little-Miss-Muffat baby-bonnet crowning his thinning pate, he shakes the moisture from his ruddy face like a wet dog.

“Um... yeah.” One of the intruders, a big olive-skinned thug in black, who looks sick or drunk or just plain disoriented, takes a step toward the big bed. “Playtime’s over, kids, let’s all—”

The big man trips suddenly, his boot catching the edge of a big fake polar bear rug.

The behemoth falls headfirst onto the bed. His massive weight makes Trout bounce off the edge and onto the floor, and his beefy shoulder bangs into Miss Piggy’s hanging feet. The poor woman, still urinating profusely, begins to spin like a giant ceiling fan.

Or—more precisely—a giant sprinkler.

“HOLY CHRIST, LOOK OUT!”

Gerbil hits the deck—a graceful, lurching dive—and her fall is skillful and elegant considering the fact she’s holding a gun and completely grossed out.

She lands on the shag carpet on the other side of the bed, near the glass door to the Swedish sauna, and she instinctively covers her head as though caught in a terrible Blitzkrieg air raid back in 1940s London, only right now the only ordnance falling from the sky is of the warm, yellow, misty variety. It comes in great lovely gouts of glistening fluid, ejaculating across the room, shimmering in the lascivious red light, not unlike the dancing waters one might encounter at the entrance of some lavish amusement park.

“GRAB HER, OZZY! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GRAB HER!”

Across the room, Oswald is balanced precariously on the cushiony surface of the bed, staggering back and forth on the mattress, trying to grab the whirling dervish of a woman affixed to the ceiling. “I’M TRYING!” Oswald bellows. “GODDAMNIT, I’M TRYING! I’M TRYING!”

The girl in the Miss Piggy get-up is shrieking now, and the Doppler effect of her voice creates a siren-like rhythm with the urine spray, which is coating everything in the room now, every surface, every person.

Especially Oswald. He’s getting a urine bath as he finally manages to grab the woman’s ankles and bring her wild rotations to a violent halt.

The last of her stream trickles away like a gentle rain sluicing down a drain-spout.

“Holy fucking shit,” Oswald utters, wiping his face with his upper arm, his sleeve soaked.

He stands there a moment on the bed, clutching the woman’s ankle, his gun on the mattress, his free hand clenching and unclenching. He’s at a loss. He cannot find the words. He gazes around the room, and then gazes up at the mortified Cathy O’Dell in her fuzzy, pink ears and ghastly expression. “You done, honey?” Oswald asks her in a strange sort of paternal tone.

The woman nods.

On the other side of the room, Gerbil holds her .38 with shaking hands, aiming it at the boyfriend. “Don’t you dare fucking move.”

“Please don’t kill us,” the boyfriend moans, cowering on the floor, his hands shielding his face as though a light is shining into it.

“Don’t tempt me,” Gerbil snarls at the giant infant with the hairy ass.

28.

“Next weekend’s no good, Candy.”

“Whattya mean no good?”

“Next weekend’s not gonna work for me.”

“What—you got something to do? You got plans?”

“It’s no good.”

“Dawg, I’m telling you, this here thing is in the bank. It’s going down next Saturday night.”

“Next weekend’s too late, I gotta find somebody on the hit list in the next three days.”

There’s a pause on the other end, and Oswald continues pacing along the scarred concrete island between the Departures gate and the cabstand, gripping the cell phone a little too tightly. The air outside O’Hare Airport’s Terminal “B” is redolent with carbon monoxide, jet fumes, and the shouts of Red Caps calling for baggage handlers and Metra porters.

Night has rolled in over the polluted horizon of towers and hotels to the west, and now the yellow harvest moon is high in the sky, a big, buttery orb, slightly flat on one side, but bulging menacingly toward fullness. Every few moments the distant silhouette of an airliner slices across its luminous cornea like a scalpel slowly slicing an eyeball.

Gerbil is inside the terminal, putting the lovebirds on a cheap Southwest Airlines flight to Mexico City, and Oswald is getting fidgety. She’s been in there too long. Oswald told her not to give any speeches, or hand out any brochures. Just tell the two dirt-bags this is their only chance of survival. Just get rid of them.

“Okay, lookit…” The Candy Man’s strained voice returns over the line. “I’ll see what I can do. Awright? You sit tight, awright?”

“Whatever, Candy, whatever.”

Oswald thumbs the connection off and stares at the moon. The noxious wind feels cool on his sweaty face. His fever has diminished, and he feels slightly better than he did back at the love nest—despite the fact that he’s still damp with nympho-urine.

The epiphany—brewing within him since they left the Sheik’s Harum—is now a full-blown revelation, the forlorn words of Alberta Goldstein echoing in his scrambled brain. He knows what he has to do now. For once in his miserable life, he can see his destiny. Maybe getting pissed on actually is a baptism of some sort. Maybe he should write a book on the cleansing quality of golden showers.

“What are you doing?”

The voice shatters Oswald’s reverie, and he whirls around to see Gerbil approaching the cabstand. He gives her an expectant shrug. “How did it go?”

Gerbil reaches the cabstand, then pauses