Hold Some Warm Gas in Your Cold Hands

My new job was to help haul off large racks of barrels - 50 gallon drums in sets of eight that had been welded together with pipes to make large, wall-like sections. The guy I was working for, Jerry, had been using them as fencing for his property. He lived in a tiny town called Marbit, which had a population of only 100 people or so. Jerry had grown up there and gradually bought about eight blocks of the entire town. He used the sections of barrels to line his expanse of property, since he thought it was a unique idea and somewhat artistic. Except it made the entire town look like a multicolored garbage dump. Jerry had spent years collecting the barrels and had done a lot of work to weld them up and now all eight blocks of his property were surrounded by walls of barrels. It seemed as though everywhere you looked you saw a red, green, black, white, or blue barrel. Many people started calling the town, 'Barrel City' because of Jerry's efforts.

Finally, after about a year or two the city of Marbit started to complain. Jerry's neighbors started griping too, but he just ignored them. Finally the town passed a new ordinance in which no one could store 50-gallon drums on their property inside the "city" limits, or any containers that had previously contained some type of toxic chemical, since they didn't know if the barrels could leak and contaminate the land or local water supply. But the real reason the city passed the ordinance was that the numerous multicolored barrels looked ugly, ridiculous, and tacky. Anybody could tell that the barrels were no danger to the land, simply by looking in and seeing that each one was bone dry.

Nevertheless, Jerry was forced to move the barrels off his land. And he needed some help. So he hired me. And another guy about 50 years old. The job didn't pay much. But it was better than making zilch. My job was simple, help them take the racks down, load them onto a pickup truck so that the sections of barrels could be hauled away to a junk yard or a dump, whichever happened to be open that day.

So one afternoon we're working away, the weather sunny and humid with enough moisture in the air to resemble being inside a green house. It was just Jerry and I working since the elderly gentleman hadn't shown up, probably too hung over from drinking. We had already loaded several tons of barrels and deposited them at the dump. Then, just as it was almost quitting time, we picked up another rack of barrels and it shifted somehow and slid over and smashed my hand against the side of the truck. I ran around hopping and yelling; the pain was excruciating; like hot acid traveling through my veins up to my brain.

"Are you all right?" Jerry said. "Did you break your hand?"

"Nah, I'll be okay in a minute," I said, still shaking my hand around waiting for the pain to subside.

"Well, take a rest for awhile, let your hand recuperate. Take as long as you'd like."

Jerry was a pretty good boss. About six foot three, in his late 40s, his hair was brown and curly, he had a large handlebar mustache, broad shoulders, but his legs were rail thin and bowed backward against the joints; he told sex jokes all day, and his eyes were always glazed over like he'd been smoking big "hog legs" all afternoon. I heard from the older guy I worked with that Jerry liked to go to the city and pick up prostitutes and act like he was their pimp.

I shook my hand some more and went over to a wood pile a few yards away, unzipped and urinated for a long time. My bladder had been full for hours and I realized only then how badly I had needed to pass water. When I was walking back toward the boss's truck, more pain started shooting through the lower part of my hand and I thought maybe I had really broken it after all. I winced and squeezed it near the wrist.

When I got closer to the truck, Jerry was leaning over the side of the bed with one hand held behind his back, and I could see a big pouch of chewing tobacco protruding from his back pocket. His face held a somewhat strained look. For a second I thought he was struggling to pull the pouch of tobacco from his back pocket, but then he turned around and came toward me. He stopped within a few feet and held out his hand, almost making a fist, the fingers slightly curling into his palm.

"Here, take this," he said, getting closer, his forehead wrinkled and his mouth puckered shut.

"What is it?" I said.

"Just take it," he said. "Don't be afraid."

I thought maybe it was a some gauze, or a piece of hanky to wrap my hand with. Or maybe it was a small container of Icy Hot. I reached out to take whatever it was with my good hand, but just as I was within reach, Jerry suddenly brought his hand right up under my nose and released his fingers. He waved them close to my nostrils, and a heavy rich odor of fart stench floated directly into my nose.

I cranked my head to the side, closed my eyes and started gagging. A powerful odor of sulphur and asparagus ignited my olfactory senses, and the neurons in my brain blasted awake and the sensations were almost overwhelming.

At first it took me a while to realize what had happened. Then I understood that my boss had trapped a fart in his hands while I was urinating, and then released the odor into my nostrils, for some unknown reason.

"Ha ha ha ha, ho ho ho, hee hee, ha ha ha ha ha, ho ho," Jerry laughed, doubled over, holding his stomach. "Ha ha ha, hee hee, ho ho ha."

I hadn't noticed that Jerry was a practical joker of the sicko variety before. This was a total surprise to me.

"I got you on that one!" he yelled. "Haven't you seen that old trick before?" he said. "Ha ha ha, ho ho, hee hee, ha ha ha. Oh man, that was really a good one. I can capture them pretty good, huh?" Still chuckling, he took out the pouch of chewing tobacco, plucked out a big plug and plopped it inside his cheek with a deft swipe.

"That was a rotten thing to do," I said.

"Yeah, it was. But I just thought you might need some cheering up after that bad hand injury," he said, sliding the pouch back in his pocket. "Seriously though, the sulphur mixed with asparagus you just inhaled will help your hand heal much faster."

I looked down at my hand. I shook it around. The pain had mysteriously vanished. But I didn't think it had anything to do with his fart trick. I stared up at Jerry. A small stream of tobacco juice was dripping down his chin. He was grinning. I debated walking off the job right then. But I decided not to. Maybe he was really trying to help me. Who knows. You never know about people, and especially bosses with various financial and city ordinance troubles. I worked with him for the rest of the day with no further injuries. But the smell of his fart stayed trapped in my lungs for the next few hours. When I finished that day, I never worked for Jerry again, the bastard.

-end-

Jason Earls is author of the books Heartless B*st*rd In Ecstasy, Red Zen, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Cocoon of Terror, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); } and 0.136101521283655... available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover's books, Wretched & Violent, Mathworld, Chiaroscuro, Switchblade, Dogmatika, Neometropolis, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG's Speculative Fiction, AlienSkin, Escaping Elsewhere, Werewolf, Recreational and Educational Computing, Thirteen, Theatre of Decay, Nocturnal Ooze, Prime Curios, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, Swallow's Tail, and other publications. He currently resides in Texas with his wife, Christine.