White Trash Willy in a Strange Land

Willy pumped the brakes feverishly on his cherried-out 1979 F100 pickup with a hydraulic suspension system on rims from a newer Chevy Nova. The problem is it needed a part they don’t make anymore and so the 1979 front disk brakes were about to fail completely and the rear drums had to work twice as hard. Sometimes the rear wheels would lock up and skid mid way through the second brake-pump and sometimes it took 5. Ernest Willy never knew many pumps it would take. It was a rough ride.

When the brakes finally caught poor Garbage girl would have been thrown to the floorboards to wallow in old beer and dirt again, but the seatbelt held. The original NHTSA approved replacement seat belt installed by the original owner to accommodate his 600 lbs of flab had been removed by the second owner to make room for the very last gun rack that made it to the Big River warehouse.

Willy was not about to let that happen to his best girl twice so he knew he had work to do. He did the work by starting with two of his outsized belts fastened to new bungee cords that were less than 10 years old on the outside and nailed to the seat frame with several concrete nails on the inside of the seat.

“You’ll be thanking me for that since it will have to be really tight." Willy was practically glowing with pride at the unveiling. “All there is now is this lap belt, and I know you don’t want to get thrown to floor like last time which could happen as a result of all of your bouncing around on the seat with a loose harness.”

“I kind of feel bad. Old Tank was a pretty nice guy.”

“I think I would know better than you. He taught me to fish. You know I hated feeding him to the zombies but it was either him or the pizza dough,” he said. “Must you continue to pick that scab?"

“Okay, I'm sorry." It still makes me sad. Hey, I’ve got a question.” That was followed by a really long pause.

“Okay…,” he gestured for her to complete the thought.

“Did the scientists ever figure out why the alie...er...zombies would only accept Phat Chester’s raw dough as a substitute for brains? It was the oleo, right?” she asked, trying to cultivate some semblance of a cogent thought process in the barren, dystopian landscape of Willy’s brain.

“Also which star did you say those things are from? I think that if they come from space like they say then how did they even breathe before they came to Earth?”

“They’re zombies.” he said. “You really need to stop with that conspiracy alien crap. Now where were we? ‘The Gun Rack That Never Came to the Rightful Recipient Who Got Eaten by Zombies’ sounds like an awesome title for a book,” Willy suggested.

“How would you know what a book title should sound like? And no, that doesn’t sound like a very good title for a book,” she was finding it hard to be soothing. “I know that I wouldn’t read a shit-titled book like that, and everyone knows that you’d never read it.”

“In fact,” she raised her voice another pitch, “Since we are the only two people left on this god-forsaken planet that means that nobody will read your damned book.”

“Oh yeah. Good point.” He conceded again, knowing that was the way to her heart. About that belt,” he continued. “Tell me what you think after you try it, because I’m thinking that it could look, to the untrained eye, a tad worrisome.”

“Tad?” Seriously?”

Willy barrelled full steam ahead. “Now You might be worried that this is somehow unsafe since it’s partly made of tired elastic,” he explained when seeing the worry on his companion’s face, "But let me assure you, it is not unsafe. The top belt is of a fine Corinthian letter and the bottom one is really high quality canvas. The belts are nailed to the outside of the seat with some heavy nails we had left over from when we put in the hot tub, right before the zombies. And I welded a couple of steel loops on the inside of the belt so as to be adjustable with the bungees.”

“I thought it was a water feature,” she suggested.

“It was going to be a hot tub, and that’s final,” he snapped.

“I really liked my Korean car.”

“Well I’ve lost 40 pounds, and if we stay near the skunk cabbages we hardly see any of those mangy brain-eaters anymore. We have a pizza franchise in the middle of an enormous strip mall as our home. The creek is actually clear enough to avoid all the garbage we used to throw. Now we can swim, and the fish are back when we get out. I realize that we’ve lost everybody that meant anything to us, but all in all I think we came out of it all right considering this: so far I've laid five good things on the table to only one bad one. I know you liked that little rice burner but without any rice to power the fuel converter that antique is pretty much useless.

The Willy began to grumble again, and Verletta rollled her eyes. "Mumble, mumble...those damned zombies really put one over on humanity with that converter invention. The joke is on on. We thought they were dumb!”

Garbage girl wiped her face. "Quit spittin' so much when you talk y'old drunk."

“But they were just normal door-to-door salesman,” Willy sang out in a mocking and childish tone.

“Look,” she was getting irritated, “Everything I’ve ever bought from a traveling salesman has worked great, so you can shut up about that right now. And these were were just regular people selling this one. Besides, the zombies seemed nice at the time, and I had to get it for the planet. How was I supposed to know the supply chains would break down during the crucial window of opportunity? And besides, those aren’t even real fish. They’re zombie mud-dobbers.”

Willy worked hard to change the subject. “I don’t know. 2023 does seem like a long time ago, but really it’s only been a couple of months, right?”

“It’s been 6 years,” she said. "But if you want to get technical it seems like an eternity of you telling the same shitty stories.”

Willy rubbed his scalp. “Here we go again,” he muttered.

“Yeah whatever. Just don’t get me started about the block chain. All the art I bought off the internet, which also worked great f.y.i., is gone too. “

“Hey. Take it easy Verletta.”

“I’m sorry but you hurt my feeling there. The salesmen were just normal door-to-door guys trying to make a buck. How was I supposed to know the slime balls would take jobs from the zombies?”

“You said they were salesmen.” While Willy was never known as the sharpest tool in the drawer even he knew this life lesson.

"Don’t you remember? The zombies were acting reformed at the time. There were only a handful of slayings before they made a public apology and began pretending to work for the good of humanity.”

“You mean they had their salesmen make a public apology. Zombies can’t talk, Garbage Girl.”

“Good point,” she conceded. “And now that I think back on it wasn’t one of those guys making the public apology the same one that sold me the converter?”

“Fuck me runnin’...” said Willy.

“So it’s your fault.”

Her retort felt like fingernails across a chalk board because he knew she was right and he still carried a fair amount of utreated guilt. “Maybe at the beginning it was my fault, but then when everything started going south, we still would have had it made it to the island in that little rice burner, which was a super-easy conversion by the way, if you hadn’t dropped your phone in the creek on your biweekly drunken fishing escapade and used the last of the rice to draw out the water.”

“I didn’t drop it. Tank was showing me how to use the phone as a lure for fish. Besides, I was trying to secure us some provisions for our trip to the island. Remember? In Victoria the remaining humans live like royalty in the zombie-free utopia." Willy’s short span of attention provided the ideal distraction. “But you know they won’t let this rig on the ferry and now the island is closed to boat traffic.” I’ll never figure out why the human race didn’t catch on to the trick when the zombies started buying up all the rice distributing facilities," Willy pondered aloud.

As the brakes finally caught and the old Ford shuddered to a stop a sigh escaped from Garbage Girl that was intended to sound like contented joy but instead reminded him of when they were packing to go to her sister-in-law’s funeral those many years ago. Nothing gets by the sensitive Willy who had to fight back tears.

His struggles were obvious to Garbage Girl who thought fast and apologized for the sound blaming it on gassiness from the leftover Phat Chester’s pizza. That much was not a lie as their acre of solar panels were only able to provide enough auxiliary power to charge the batteries to fire up the oven once a week for 8 hours and this was day 5.

Willy jumped out stooped down and picked up a golden locket lying on the side of the road. He brought it over and handed it to Garbage Girl. She tentatively grasped it by the broken chain and briefly examined. Out of nowhere a ferocious squeal of joy erupted. O.M.G.! You found it! My hero!”

Verletta only used acronyms like that when she was genuinely excited, so old good old Willy knew that he struck the jackpot.