Leprechaun in the Hood: The Musical: A Novel Page 11

  “And what’s going to stop him from taking his stuff back and shutting down the show?” Lucas said. “Permanently.”

  “Us,” Trinie said. “And this,” she added, holding up a perfect four-leaf clover, its stem pinched between two fingers.

  “Holy shit,” Mark said, hopping to his feet and rushing toward her. He took the clover from her quivering fingers and inspected it. “It’s real. It’s a real four-leaf clover! Trinie, you fucking did it!”

  “You just have to believe,” she said as she stood and wiped her hands off on her jeans.

  Mark tried to hand it to Lucas, but he waved it away.

  “All right,” Lucas said. “We got one. One. What do we do now?”

  “Let’s get to the theater,” Mark said. “And let’s pray it’s enough.”

  Marvin woke up in a bed as soft as iron. For a moment, he imagined he was on Byron’s floor after an all-nighter of beer and horror movies, that everything else had been some kind of fucked-up nightmare.

  But then he saw the bars, saw the officer glaring at him from the other side. He held what looked like a golden flute in his hands.

  “Awake, huh, shithead? Too bad. I was hoping you’d bleed out and fuckin’ die in there.”

  Bleed out?

  Then it all came crashing back in, the leprechaun disguised as Byron sawing the bars, then sawing his hands. Marvin shot a quick look toward the barred window, but the metal was intact, whole and unharmed.

  His hands, however, weren’t so lucky. Bandaged stumps was all he was left with, the gauze soaked with green blood.

  My blood. A leprechaun’s blood.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you did to your hands, you murderin’ midget freak, but you ain’t gettin’ outta this cell. You hear me, fuckhead? I don’t care if you hang yourself with your tiny little dwarf pecker, you’re stayin’ your murderin’ ass in that cell.”

  There was a shred of the old Marvin left, and as he stared at the golden flute in the officer’s hands, that shred fell away like the last dead leaf on a tree.

  “What’s that you’ve got there, me lad?” Marvin hopped off his bed and waddled toward the bars.

  The officer didn’t even flinch, squatted so he could look Marvin in the eye. “Took this off you when we tossed your ass in the car. Looks valuable. I’m thinkin’ me and the wife sure could use a vacation. What you think, Lucky Charms?”

  “Give it back,” Marvin said through a wide grin. “Just toss it right in, and I won’t tear your face off through your arse hole.”

  “That right?”

  “It’s bad to steal, it’s bad to cheat, it’s bad to be so greedy. Now give me back me gold, me boy, or suffer profuse bleeding.”

  The officer snickered, stood back up, and placed the flute to his lips.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Marvin said.

  The officer blew into the flute, but only for a few seconds before quickly pulling it away and spitting on the floor.

  “You been fuckin’ yourself in the ass with this thing? What the fuck is that?”

  “Magic has an acquired taste.”

  From down the hall, a horde of officers shambled toward the cell. The men in the cells opposite from Marvin’s pressed their bodies against the bars so hard that their skin began to split and blood trickled over the floor.

  The officers drooled, their eyes blank and their mouths hanging open.

  “What the hell are y’all doin’?” the flute-playing officer said. “I got this…I…”

  The bandages fell away from Marvin’s arms, and where there were only stumps minutes before now wiggled two tiny hands. The size of squirrels’ paws, dark green and slimy, the fingers contorted and misshapen like broken twigs. Swampy liquid dripped from the hands like cooked spinach. He wiggled them at the officer, and the man squealed and backed away.

  The men in the cells, their faces torn and bloody, reached out and seized the officer, pulled him closer and grabbed fistfuls of cloth, skin, and hair.

  “Get the fuck off me, goddamnit! Help…help me, you fuckin’ cocksuckers!”

  But the man’s fellow officers responded by surrounding him and gripping limbs or handfuls of fatty flesh and loose skin.

  “No…no, you fuckin’…nooo!”

  Blood splashed and intestines uncoiled onto the floor. Through the shower of gore, Marvin spotted the flute rolling away.

  “Ah. Come to daddy.” Marvin waved his dripping hands and the flute twirled through the air and into his clutches.

  The jail bars glowed a radioactive green, warping as they melted and plopped to the floor in molten chunks.

  Marvin stepped out of his cell, played a small tune on the flute, and led his minions out of the station.

  “I’ll find you, I will. Oh you will be found. There’s only room for one leprechaun in this fucking town.”

  “These are heavy as shit,” Mark said, curling up the wrought iron spear like a barbell. “You should have had the guy just make spear tips, not the whole fucking thing.”

  “Stop whining, these will work,” Simon said, shrugging on Marvin’s leprechaun jacket, his stringy muscles hulking out the sleeves. He was their new leprechaun. It was possible that Mark knew the part just as well. He was a few inches shorter than Simon and his singing voice wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t going to volunteer for the most dangerous part in the musical.

  No, let Simon paint that target on himself.

  The director was going to have to hobble through the whole performance on his knees, but they weren’t expecting the show to make it through intermission before having to fight the real leprechaun.

  “Think fast,” Mark said, tossing the spear to Lucas, who caught it, only to drop it to the stage as if it had burned him.

  “Oops. Sorry, I’ve got butterfingers,” Lucas said, his voice flat and defiant.

  They’d snuck around the back of the theater, cutting through the police label with Byron’s keys and only turning on enough house lights to see by. There were no cops inside when they got there, but there were numbered evidence placards laid down in front of the stage.

  There was one far enough away from the rest that Mark knew that was where the ear had been photographed, swabbed and then bagged. He’d seen enough cop shows to guess at the process.

  They mashed up the clover and smeared its juice on the tips of the spears—adding a bit of water to help stretch it out—then hid one in the Impala, one under the crushed papier-mâché stump, and one behind the curtain. The stashes formed a rough triangle, the idea being whenever the leprechaun showed up, someone would be close enough to a weapon to get him.

  Byron doused the stump with lighter fluid, then groaned, hoisting the pot of gold inside of it.

  “This should be a last ditch effort,” he said. “I’ll keep the lighter on me, but I’m pretty sure that if we light this fucker, we’ll be taking the whole theater with us.”

  “Will it even get hot enough to melt them?” Trinie asked, applying her character’s thick makeup. She was playing multiple parts now. All of them were going to have bright pink eye shadow, apparently.

  “It will eventually,” Byron said and Mark got the implication. The iron pot would melt the coins as the theater became an oven.

  Simon stood up from his knees, the tiny shoes that he’d sewn onto his pants coming up with him. “I’m going to go sneak a look and see if anyone’s lining up for the show. I hope we at least have some kind of turnout.”

  “Why?” Mark asked. If Simon came back with something like “I want everyone to see my hard work” then Mark was going to stand up and walk out, but he didn’t.

  “Because I worry that the bastard won’t show up if there’s no audience for the show. If we’re playing it to nobody, we’re not profiting off his likeness.”

  “If a tree falls in the forest,” Mark started, but didn’t finish. Lucas was pushing past Simon, through the doors and out into the rainy late afternoon.

  “Wait!” Trinie said, but Lucas was go
ne.

  There was a lump in his throat, a sick sense of dread that made it hard to breathe, like a whole pot of coffee was hitting him all at once. Volunteering for the musical had never been his idea. Despite being a small business owner, Lucas was a reclusive guy. He mostly kept to himself during non-business hours. Over the past year, his natural reclusiveness had been compounded by seasonal affective disorder. The gray, wet winters of the Pacific Northwest made depression a natural fit, like a favorite bad sweater you trotted out every Christmas. But the sweater of seasonal depression was a thing you packed away by February, March at the latest. This year, Lucas had worn the sweater all year long. Through spring and through summer. Back in July, when he woke up one day and realized he hadn’t opened the comic shop in a week, hadn’t even gotten out of bed except to use the bathroom in that time, he decided to call someone. He googled “therapist” and called the one that appeared to be closest to him in Google Maps. A week later—another bedridden week of bad thoughts and isolation—Lucas’s phone rang for the first time in how long? He let it ring until the caller gave up, but when they tried again a second, third, and fourth time, he answered. It was the therapist. Lucas was late for his appointment. Would he still be showing up? He dressed in some dirty clothes picked up off the floor and shuffled twelve blocks to the therapist’s office. “Luckily you’re my last appointment for the day,” she’d said. “Otherwise we’d have had to reschedule.”

  Lucas had nodded at her. He sat on a brown loveseat that faced her white leather chair.

  “Brown signifies reliability, white signifies purity,” Lucas said.

  A stock photo of a forest was framed on the wall behind her.

  The therapist glanced at her watch and then smiled at him. It was a smile he knew well, and he hated it more than he hated himself. Before she could utter any of her stupid fucking kernels of professional help—he’d been on the couch before, he knew they always tried to buddy up at first, get you to trust them, open up—Lucas stood and made for the door. She called something after him, but she couldn’t stop him. He cried the whole walk home as the dam of shithead feelings inside himself burst. He was free, and for the first time all year, he felt like himself again. He returned to his apartment and set about repairing his life. He gathered up the hundreds of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans that lay in crumpled heaps. He threw them away, filling the blue recycling bin out back of his apartment. Then he scrubbed the bowls half-filled with milk gone rancid. Warm, chunky, mold-festering milk. Finally, he tossed out every cereal box in the house, both the empties and the ones in the cupboard. He was done with the beer and cereal diet.

  Late that night, after folding his last load of laundry, he’d walked to the comic shop and took the pile of mail by the door into the back of the room, where he sorted bills by the ones that needed to be paid immediately and the ones that could wait. He checked the business bank account online and discovered that miraculously enough money remained to pay most of the bills that needed to be paid. Shit maybe got a little fucked, but Lucas wasn’t out of the game. Not by a long shot. He wrote checks for the bills he could pay and walked home in the warm air under a bed of stars and in bed he thought of the years to come. He had to laugh a little because this version of himself—comic shop owner and perpetual bachelor—had seemed like the ultimate dream back when he was sixteen. At thirty-one, he was living it. Maybe it seemed like hell some days, but the heart wants what the heart wants. And Lucas’s heart wanted one more thing. He wanted to be an actor. As fate would have it, the very next day, a scummy-looking dude in a Misfits t-shirt entered the comic shop with a stack of flyers publicizing open auditions for a play called Leprechaun in the Hood: The Musical.

  Three months later, Lucas was marching past that scummy-looking dude—Simon—out of the theater where Leprechaun in the Hood: The Musical was supposed to debut in a mere two hours. He hopped in his truck and sped away, hoping his hunch proved correct.

  While they’d run all over town, scrambling to collect four-leaf clovers and commission wrought iron spears, a thought itched at the back of Lucas’s brain. Something they were forgetting about the leprechaun. A weakness, a strength, a secret. He didn’t know, and with time running out and the thought remaining just out of reach, as if taunting him, he’d sort of acted like a dick to everyone. He didn’t mean it. He was only trying to think. Finally, standing in the theater-turned-crime-scene, the thought shat itself into his conscious mind. Or at least he knew where to look.

  As he sped through stop signs and whipped around corners like his name was Tokyo Drift, Lucas cursed himself for not thinking of it earlier. In 1993, coinciding with the release of Leprechaun, a small number of copies of a zero budget rip-off from a bunch of unknowns appeared on the VHS rental market. The film, LepreKhan, was a horror/sci-fi/softcore mash-up in which a crew of big-breasted bimbos aboard a shitty cardboard spaceship face off against an evil time-traveling leprechaun genetically engineered to provide the ultimate pleasure to big-breasted bimbos . . . death! The only reason Gene Roddenberry, Paramount, or Trimark never sued was because so few copies ever existed, and because LepreKhan fucking sucked.

  Lucas had only seen LepreKhan once and he’d been too stoned to remember much of it now, but that’s not why he needed to get to the comic shop. Not exactly. Someone behind LepreKhan must’ve predicted the film would become a hit because, in anticipation of its release, they sent a bundle of a tie-in comic titled How to Kill a Leprechaun to every comic shop in America, which comic shop owners were supposed to give away for free. Clearly, giving away a comic to mostly children (this was still the early nineties, when comic books carried the cultural cache of jack and shit) was not the best way to promote a borderline pornographic film, so the few copies that weren’t trashed ended up in swap meet bins, neglected, passed over, hardly a bargain at the cost of a quarter, which is how Lucas came into possession of one. In fact, the comic was the only reason he knew of LepreKhan at all. He still kept that comic in the back room of the shop, in one of several large boxes reserved for comics with no collectibility, no artistic merit, and of no interest to the public, yet fascinated Lucas for inexplicable reasons. For the moment, How to Kill a Leprechaun felt like the most important comic on the planet, because it would show him just how to do it.

  The light at the intersection turned red and he gunned it.

  A bicyclist crossing the intersection passed in front of his truck and he slammed down on the brake pedal but the crunch of metal under his tires, the silence that came next, told him everything.

  Gripping the steering wheel, he prayed for the best, braced for blood, and got out of the truck.

  He crouched down on his hands and knees and peered under the truck. The mangled bike, though a ruined wreck, was not slick with the cyclist’s blood. No bike helmet, no messenger bag. No sign of the cyclist anywhere.

  “What the fuck?” he said, wondering if the cyclist stumbled off, concussed and delirious.

  A car door slammed shut and he stood, squinting against the headlights of his truck, ready to greet whoever was getting out of their car to help. But there were no other cars around. The streets were empty except for his truck. And the driver’s door was closed.

  “Shit!” He’d left the keys in the ignition and the doors were self-locking. He reached into his pocket, planning to call Trinie to see if she could swing by and pick him up, help him find How to Kill a Leprechaun before high-tailing it back to the theater. If his truck got towed, so be it. But his phone wasn’t in his pocket. He’d set it on the bench seat beside him. “Fuck me.”

  “Looking for this?”

  Lucas squinted against the headlights and saw the last thing on earth he ever wanted to see. The leprechaun sat behind the wheel of his truck, the window rolled down, dangling Lucas’s cellphone out the window. With a flick of the Leprechaun’s clawed hand, the phone took flight and landed at Lucas’s feet. Automatically, he knelt to retrieve it, realizing his mistake only too late.

  The leprechaun ho
wled with laughter as the truck roared forward, the bumper smashing against the top of Lucas’s head. His head was thrown down instead of back, and his body folded in half, the front of his face slamming into the concrete, a knee on either side of his head. His mouth was filled with the taste of blood and oil and pavement, and from the explosion of pain, he knew his back was broken, snapped. He didn’t have much time to think about the agony as the front tire spun over the back of his head, shredding away skin and hair and spraying it over the undercarriage.

  Lucas only screamed for a second before his head was pressed flat into the blacktop, his brains squeezing out through the cracks in his skull.

  And on the news that night, there would be reports of a hit-and-run accident that left one cyclist dead in Southeast Portland.

  Parked in the driver’s seat of the SWAT van, three phone books under his ass so he could see over the wheel, Marvin tried to remember why he had been so upset about losing his humanity.

  All this power, it was totally worth the green blood and bad teeth. It had even been worth losing Brian. The cat had been kind of an asshole, anyway.

  His hands were nearly full-sized now, regrown and better than ever. He snapped his fingers and the engine of the van revved. He snapped again and the sound was echoed behind him, a small fleet of squad cars and police motorcycles warming up their engines.

  Unfamiliar with the layout of the van, Marvin’s leprechaun eyes searched the dashboard. Leaning over, coming perilously close to toppling his stack of Yellow Pages, he hooked a finger around the cord for the radio and pulled the receiver to himself.

  “Adam-12, this is dispatch calling One Adam Twelve.” He giggled into the handset.

  There was silence on the other end and he imagined his hypnotized police officers, their hands on the wheels and green spittle foaming at the corners of their slack jaws. They weren’t going to get the reference.