Breeds 2 Read Online Free PDF Page B

with bottle caps for markers, each one valued at a nickel. The lads had decided long ago that the stakes would be cheap but the laughs and sense of camaraderie … priceless.
    “Whaddaya got there, Johnny?” Cory LeBlanc asked of John Willis. Both men wore heavy-metal T-shirts already stained with various dips, the cotton material resembling the messy palette of a chemically enhanced artist.
    “Ain’t got nuthin’,” Johnny Willis replied, his face covered in a graying shroud of a beard best suited for scrawny sorcerers. His belly touched the table’s edge, even though he had leaned back.
    “Whaddaya got?” Cory asked again. He sniffed hard enough to clear all the dust collected by his brain over the years. He then regarded Johnny with a wholly sober expression that seemed borderline miraculous, given his present orbit amongst imaginary stars. His bald head gleamed with sweat against the overhead incandescent light.
    “Told ya, I ain’t got nothin’.’” Johnny plucked a nacho shard out of his beard and ate it immediately.
    “I said whaddaya got , y’fuckin’ chunky-assed monkey.”
    “Y’wanna know what I got? I got this,” and Johnny proceeded to scratch at his junk below the table, same fingers he’d been feeding himself with all night. “Got some for your wife too, if she wants it. Plenty to go around. Chunky-assed monkey style with a complimentary serving of dick cheese and taint-tickling. Butter up them giblets too while I’m at it. Give ’em a moo-cow squeeze guaranteed to please. Make her dairy white go all chocolate.”
    Those still conscious around the table exchanged looks of what the hell? No one knew where Johnny came up with his lines. They suspected it was frustration from his job finally bubbling to the surface, like the magma underneath Keystone National Park. They did know that the reserved banker usually delivered his odd euphemisms and metaphors after his eighth beer. When the dead soldiers ran into double digits, anything came out of that furry mouth.
    “Don’t know where you get your muse, man,” Dale said. “But that woman is fuckin’ unstable.”
    “Don’t know where she came from,” Johnny said and tossed out two cards. “But I hope she sits on my face.” He motor-boated. Spit flew. “We do our best work them times.”
    Heads shook around the table.
    “How many, Cyrus?” Dale asked, correcting his listing to the left. He was smoking some of Pictou’s finest pickled shit along with his beer and while he dealt out cards he suddenly knew, just fucking knew , that the recently discovered monster black hole at the galaxy’s center was a cosmic pipeline to some serious undiscovered civilizations. He also wondered what aliens did to get high.
    Cyrus didn’t answer. The middle-aged mechanic studied his cards at arm’s length, one eye widening while the other narrowed to a slit in a continuing, alternating pattern. Cyrus, with his ash-colored hair and stylish goatee he habitually groomed with his front teeth, appeared one more magic puff away from leaving reality’s highway and waving, queen-like, at passing planets.
    “Cyrus?” Dale asked again.
    No response.
    The action within Cyrus’s orbital cavities increased, to where the man’s upper face resembled a half-baked but still functioning accordion.
    “Cyrus is out,” Dale announced in a sedated voice, relieving his zonked friend of the social burden of answering. In the state Cyrus was currently experiencing, anything might have come out of him if he’d talked. Stoned fucker might have started reciting Shakespeare in perfect Portuguese.
    “One,” Blake said as he tossed a card into the table’s center. Blake Reeves rubbed his black-stubbled chin which, coupled with his naturally dark complexion, made the dentist resemble an axe-murderer. He inspected his cards with a grim consternation as if they were prophetic tea leaves. Of them all, Blah-Blah Blake was the least conversational. And the scariest-looking