Dan, “The Man”, Can - Christmas Twenty-Nineteen Special: “Broke Backhoe Mountain”

1

 “I know! So, like,” the bald man said, sporting a wide baseball cap and waving a white cigarette before the backyard bonfire. “The fucking, uh,” he paused. “We start riding back down the hill, and I’m haulin’ ass.” He paused again, miming the gripping of handlebars with his calloused hands. “And I hear behind me, ‘Ron! Lauren!’, so we look over, and he’s tipped over on Ron’s yellow quad, and, fuckin’, it starts rolling down the hill. I mean, that fuckin’ thing, it went all the way down. Smashed a boulder at the bottom.” He animatedly clapped his hands. “Bo-om!” 

 Ron Shore shook his head with bemused agreement. His drunk eyes glowed against the backyard blaze like soft candles. 

 “Yeah,” he chuckled. “Lauren and I look down and there’s Gerald at the bottom of the hill.” He stopped and laughed with harmless evil. “Handlebars got all bent up and the seat got torn bad. I thought, ‘Man, he really almost hit those rocks.’ He tells me later that he drank some ‘liquid courage’ before we went out that morning.” Ron glanced downward, his eyes growing distant with the sobering recollection of the crash. “I mean, he must have been, forty-five, fifty-years-old at the time. I was just thinking, ‘How are we gonna get this guy to the hospital?’” Ron drank deeply from a silver can. The dry November night they all presently huddled in was twenty years later.

 Before Lauren could elaborate further, his cellphone began chirping. He transferred his beer to his cigarette hand and picked the phone out of his pocket and squinted at the screen. He answered.

 “Bean? What’s good, man?”

 A muffled voice responded from the loud earpiece. Lauren talked to the voice for two long minutes while the rest of the party looked into their beers in a polite silence. 

 “That was Bean Lourgaynco,” Lauren said after hanging up. “There’s a job up in Leftwood he said he needs some pipe laying done at.”

 “The man’s timidity and aversion to profanity is almost palpable,” Ron said. “His innocence knows no human limit. It’s a wonder how a man working in construction all these years could remain so much like a quiet, studious child.” 

 Lauren laughed.

 “For real. He doesn’t say shit.”

 The party stood hunched around the fire and talked about strange old days of various hue and tone beneath a half moon and the mist blowing past each pair of lips was warmed by the words to be forgotten soon thereafter beneath the harsh sun of the following day of headaches and bad sleep.

2

 Three days passed and Lauren held the wheel of his commute van in his lax right palm. Thousands of cars inched ahead and behind him across the gridlocked morning highway. Lauren anchored his left elbow in the armrest and held his chin. 

 “Fuck!” He yelled over the melodic punk rock bleating from his stereo. “The fuck are you idiots slowing down for?” 

 Lauren leaned up to the windshield to peer around the hill beside the winding highway and read the green exit sign slowly turning into view. He squinted at its reflective white letters.

 “Troutmin Court?” He hollered. “Fuck!” 

 Lauren flicked on his blinker and peered over his right shoulder. It took nearly ten minutes to merge into the exit lane. 

 “California is a fuckin’ shithole,” he muttered amidst the swelling traffic. “Fuck!”

 The white commuter van stopped at a liquor store a quarter of a mile off the freeway. Lauren bought a pack of cigarettes, a dark cola, and a cold submarine sandwich.

 “How you do this morning,” the old cashier enquired.

 “Nothin’ much, same ol’ shit,” Lauren replied before idly checking his cellphone. A text message had arrived three minutes ago.

 “Have good day.”

 “You too.”

 Lauren scooped his change from the counter into the left pocket of his work jeans and cradled the purchases in his other arm. He turned around and pushed through the front door with his rear-end and restarted the van. The ancient CD that played in his trusty changer was skipping and glitching. 

 “Fuck!” Lauren cried after flinging his breakfast items across the empty passenger seat. He jammed the faded “skip track” button on his plastic stereo with an accusatory finger. He pulled out and onto the street. He finished the soda just before the drab job site came into view and threw the empty can on the floor after crumpling it. Bean had texted him at the gas station.

3

 Bean Lourgaynco was waiting in a huff. Lauren pulled up nearly ten minutes late and took another five minutes to gather his tools from the van and begin to work. Lauren burped loudly as he walked the site with a length of pipe straddled across one shoulder. Bean winced at the vulgarity before greeting his cousin-in-law near the dirt hole.

 “Good morning, Lauren,” Bean sang while extending a hand to shake. Lauren winced and shook his head in disgust.

 “Fuckin’ carrying pipe over, man,” Lauren spat. “Gimme a sec.”

 Lauren lobbed the pipe beside the long hole they stood beside and shook Bean’s hand. Bean described in detail what he felt the most efficient plan of action was for this banal day of hard labor. Lauren crushed his finished cigarette into the brown earth and began rolling the pipe into the hole as Bean started his backhoe up and began rotating the claw closer to the hole. It crept lower into the hole just as Lauren reached the bottom and began rolling the pipe into alignment with the fittings in the walls. He bent over the pipe. Bean tapped Lauren’s bottom with the big claw and Lauren stumbled forward.

 “Ha-ha, you fuckin’ fag,” Lauren jeered. 

 Lauren hopped out of the dirt hole and up into Bean’s backhoe.

 “A,” Lauran said. “Let’s be fuckin gay.” 

 They began tearing their clothes off. Bean tossed Lauren’s hardhat against the grated metal floor as he raced to untie the work boots caked in clay. Within minutes, the view inside the crystal clear windows of Bean’s backhoe was utterly obscured by the steam radiating off the homosexual passion unfolding from within their hold. A small crew of middle-aged Mexican men approached the backhoe to ask their manager, Bean, what they should start doing. They stopped after hearing the rhythmic clapping and seeing the slight rocking coming from the backhoe’s sinful confines. They leaned against their shovels and murmured to one another in soft Spanish gossip.

4

 Bean stared straight up at the same old hospital lights that he’d been staring up at for nearly six weeks now. His wife and two young daughters stepped quietly into the hospital room. Thin green curtains separated the patients.

 “Bean?” Bean’s wife cooed.

 “Yeah,” Bean replied quietly, turning with great effort in his bed. 

 “The girls came to see you,” she said smilingly. “Here’s daddy.”

 “Hi, daddy!” Bean’s daughters sang slightly too bright.

 “Hi, Berbina! Hi, Squawdingarto-Spunky-Squat-A-Poopface!” Bean croaked. A thick cough ruptured from his weak throat.

 A doctor stepped into the dim room with the tail of his lab coat floating behind his urgent stride.

 “Ah, Bean Lourgaynko?” He enquired from behind a coral-green paper mask.

 “Yep,” Bean replied.

 “Diagnosis is mass AIDS,” the doctor stated. “Just another careless infection of the gay plague AIDS. It’s ruined your blood. It’s killing you very, very fast. I hope your life insurance policy isn’t a crock of shit. At least for your family’s sake. You’re going to die quite soon.” The doctor looked at his tablet. “And quite gruesomely, to boot. Gay sex. Gay sex is what happened here, to repeat.” The doctor fiddled with the tablet with furrowed brows. “In English. Bean has a penis, so Bean has clearly fiddled about with someone of another penis. They, these two-plus same-sex individuals, beyond a shadow of a doubt, laid atop of each other. Hard anal penetration. Sexually” He shuffled out of the room. The three televisions all played different inane programs simultaneously. Bean coughed like a retired coal miner.

5

 “Gay sex, Bean?” The wife screeched. “You have a penis, and I have a vagina." She clasped her hips, jutting her face down threateningly close to his. “If you have contracted the gay plague AIDS, then you cheated on me with a gay man!” She repeatedly jammed a pointer finger into the artificial sphincter created by the curled thumb and pointer finger of her opposite hand. “Some of this, then? Huh?” She yelled behind her thrusting fingers. Big salty ears formed in Bean’s pained eyes.

 “I don’t even know what that means,” he whispered hoarsely.

 “Homosex! Homosex!” She belted. The daughters joined in.

 “Homosex! Homosex!” They squealed in unknowing unison.

 Bean began slowly weeping as his vision blurred with growing sickness.

 “Beard! Beard, they’ll all say!” Bean’s wife shrieked. “False marriage! False daughters! They'll wreck me!”

 “We’re real, father! We’re real, father!” Bean’s daughters droned. “Don’t be gay and die of it!”

 The door opened and a bouquet of blood red roses held by Lauren Shore came into the room. He tucked his black sunglasses into his black muscle shirt.

 “Bean! Kids!” Lauren said with awkward enthusiasm. “Mrs. Lourgaynco!” They hugged. “Berbina! Squawdingarto-Spunky-Squat-A-Poopface!” Lauren hugged a daughter with each arm. “You little stinkers!”

 Bean’s daughters laughed until the beeps of Bean’s heart monitor stopped beeping. The small group froze and looked at Bean’s still, paling face. A dry tongue leaked from the side of Bean’s frozen mouth.

 “Ah-ll. Gh-rll-rll-kagh-ll.” Bean choked and seized.

 The doctor raced back inside.

 “Avert your eyes! He’s dying of homosexuality, folks,” the doctor cried sternly. “God has exacted his will.”

 Lauren tossed the flowers onto Bean’s softly throbbing chest and ran away from the scene, sobbing with his head in his hands. 

 “I’m so sorry Bean!” Lauren wailed.

 “You killed my father with homosexual acts!” Bean’s daughters chanted. “AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!”

 “Your faggotry murdered my straight husband!” Bean’s wife shouted. “He’s dead now! Completely deceased!”

 A wet fart dribbled from Bean’s moribund backside. Lauren head-butted the door, being blinded by stinging tears.