Floating the Balloon Bombs Read online

  Chapter 2 – Decay in the Swamp

  Max, a mutt mixture of German shepherd and Akita, urinated in his favorite corner of the trailer, as he always did when his master slept too long through his morning hangover and neglected the outdoor needs of his loyal canine. Max then navigated through the refuse and junk that carpeted the trailer’s floor to finally arrive at the couch, where his tongue licked at his snoring keeper’s nose.

  Dan Blankenship moaned into consciousness, and he grunted as he languidly swatted at Max. The little sunlight that seeped through the trailer’s thick curtains already pained his skull, and his stomach turned from the liquor he had consumed the night before.

  “Go crap in the room at the end of the hall, Max. I’m not ready to open my eyes yet.”

  Max, however, possessed principles, one of which was never defecating in his den, no matter how much cardboard, detritus and junk his old and stinking master dragged through the trailer’s door. Max snarled. He ducked another swipe from his master’s hand and commenced his barking.

  “Dammit, Max. You could at least learn how to bring me the medicine I need to get off this couch if you’re going to be so damn committed to waking me up with the sun.”

  Dan Blankenship seldom ever removed his work boots anymore, so his feet were always protected from whatever rested below all the newspapers and pornographic magazines scattered across the floor. He still wore his pants, but some dream had motivated him to squirm out of his jacket and shirt during his sleep. Thus the morning was cold, with goose bumps bristling all along his thin arms as he shuffled to the three vintage refrigerators gathered in what remained of a kitchen. He opened the last one still humming with electricity and drew from within a can of tomato juice, half of which he poured down the sink before replacing what swirled down the drain with more vodka from the bottle always kept close on the counter.

  Max waited quietly at the trailer’s door for his master to finish the long gulps he required each morning from his medicine. Dan wiped his forehead, tapped his stomach and opened the door to Max after a long, satisfying belch.

  “Keep your nose to the ground, Max, and maybe you can find all that beer. I swear I hid a case of cans somewhere on the property a week back. Memory’s just not all it used to be, Max, so help your old master out with that nose of yours.”

  Dan Blankenship’s plot of property could not be called an estate. His plot could hardly be called a home. Perhaps, it could best be described as a compound. He slept in the driest and most structurally sound of five trailers perched atop concrete blocks gathered on the property. All of the mobile homes brimmed with salvage and junk, all of which Dan described as vintage and antique. Broken washers and dryers popped out of the weeds like mushrooms. Stacks of televisions, their screens fractured and dark, teetered randomly about the yard. Two-stroke engines scavenged from weed-eaters and lawn mowers formed a maze of sparkplugs and pull chords. Empty chicken coops provided shelter to the possums and raccoons chased out of the mobile homes. Old plows and bedsprings corroded orange in the middle of untamed blueberry bushes and poison ivy.

  It all smelled terrible. Even to Dan’s numbed senses, it all smelled foul – a combination of rot and waste that the season’s unusually heavy rains had pulled up from the ground. Dan frowned in that stench as he watched Max bound for the line of trees that marked where his property transitioned from a junkyard into a swamp of stagnating pools the thunderstorms continued to replenish. He always held a breath as Max entered into those trees, worried that some venomous snake might bite his dog’s paw, or that some kind of horrific heartworm might settle in Max’s gut after the dog sipped from the water. But Max would not be satisfied, would not give Dan the peace he needed for recuperation from his drinking, until he crapped in the most awful spot that dog could find outside of the trailer.

  “Hurry up Max! It’s cold out here!”

  The dog hesitated just beyond the tree line. Dan limped through his yard’s junk towards Max just as the dog began to bark and growl. Max didn’t bark at rabbits, or at shadows. Max saved his growl for when he needed it. Dan cursed himself for leaving his gun in the trailer as he slowly made his way to the edge of his property to peek into the swamp to see what so raised the ire of his loyal dog.

  “What do you smell Max?”

  The wind gusted, and the trees swayed. Something else shifted in that swamp, something pale, something a shade of sickly-stained white. Dan swallowed to keep his nerves from upsetting his stomach any further. Max barked as Dan stepped into the trees, and Dan felt the chill water seep through the holes in his soles to chill his socks. He could see more of the thing that swayed upon the ground, floating on the film of swamp water, entangled in branches and roots. It looked like some kind of shriveled carcass of a giant octopus, and for a moment, Dan’s nose thought that sickly, white skin in the swamp might have been the source of the decaying odor hanging so oppressively over his property. He stepped closer, and Dan saw that what he had first believed to have been tentacles were in fact dozens of ropes trailing from a deflated and wrinkled sphere made of a strange type of canvas, or paper. His eyes moved to the end of those ropes, where he discovered each line knotted into a steel ring brimming with roughly two-dozen dark eggs. Dan gasped. Those eggs were corroded and were splotched with freckles of rusting orange. But he knew instantly what those eggs truly were.

  “Come back to me, Max. Let that thing in the swamp be. We better call Sheriff Conrad.”

  Max barked one last time at the thing in the trees before wiggling his butt and pooping at the edge of the trees. His business done, Max turned and followed his master through the tombstones of post-war appliances into the trailer that served as home for both man and dog.

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