Beezlebub Dayz

“This one’s actually good”

Out of all the stories I’ve posted here, I think I like this one the best. It was the one that I mentioned way back at the beginning of the summer as being my best story, the one that I said was literary and not genre fiction. It isn’t the only literary short story I’ve written, or even the first; that honor would go to “Bye Butterfly,” probably. But this is one of my favorite stories that I’ve written, and probably the best so far. It also got me named as a finalist in UIUC’s undergraduate writing contest, so I’m pretty happy about that, too.

I especially like this one because it lets me mix literature with environmental science in a way that, I think, isn’t too overbearing. So it appeals to both of the fields that I’m majoring in. I also like to think that it’s just a good story overall. You’ll have to tell me what your favorite story of the summer was, especially now that I’m back at the University of Illinois and have internet connection again. I’m looking forward to your feedback.

“Beezlebub Dayz,” by Andy Sima (2019)

            It had been hot for three months when the air conditioner finally broke down.

            “Useless piece of shit,” Clyde said as he kicked the metal box on the side of our rented house.  It gave a rumbling protest and a loose screw fell out of the side.  I picked up the tiny iron piece and stared at it in the boiling sun.  Clyde kicked the box again, his tan legs nearly putting a dent in the machine.

            “Kickin’ it ain’t gonna fix it,” I said.

            “Can’t make it any worse, can it?” Clyde said.

            An indignant gasp of black smoke belched out of the side of the ancient machine.  It swirled up into the summer sky and was gone, carried away by the winds.  I sniffed.  It smelled like the highway.

            “What’d we do now?” I asked, raking my hand through my hair.  I kept it long, and it had piled up on my shoulders, trapping the sweat against my neck.  I momentarily considered cutting it short as the sweat trickled from my neck to my chest and dampened my t-shirt, which clung to my chest.  The shirt’s demonic skull logo was distorted logo into something soft and wet.  That didn’t bother me too much, though; this shirt had seen worse and it would clean fine.  It’d been through last summer’s festival, Beezlebub Dayz, where I bought it.

            “Ain’t much to be done.  Call the landlord, I guess?” Clyde responded.

            “It’ll be December ‘fore he gets out here,” I said.

            “That’s the truth,” Clyde said.  “But might as well call anyway.”

            I pulled out my cellphone, swiped through some contacts until I got to the one that just said ‘Landlord.’  The screen was slick with moisture from my jeans pocket.  My legs were boiling up in this heat but going inside wouldn’t help much now.

            The phone rang a few times, on the other end.  Clyde stared at me, bushy brow furrowed and small eyes tight.  He had a face for chewing tobacco, I supposed.  The phone continued to ring until I heard Mr. MacNeil’s voice, but it was just the voicemail message.

            “It’s MacNeil.  Can’t come to the phone right now.  You know what to do.”  There was the single tone and that gap of silence into which I was supposed to speak.  I just hung up instead.

            “Didn’t he say he’d be in Florida this week or something?” Clyde asked.  We had begun to walk back inside just to get out of the sun.  The dry grass crunched beneath our feet, and in the distance, cars zoomed past on the highway.  I could smell the fuel exhaust all the way over here as they drifted up and over the highway wall.

            “Yeah, helpin’ his mom move,” I said.  “Her retirement home flooded.”

            “Hmph.  Serves him right,” Clyde said.  He threw open the heavy door with a slam and walked inside, swatting at a mosquito that had landed on his neck.  He didn’t bother to close the door.  There was no point.  We would use the screen door now.

            Clyde disappeared into his bedroom, but I went over to the windows in the living room and threw them open, one by one.  The screens on most of them, but not all, were still intact from last summer.  In a few places the iron grating had been worn away, eaten at by the sun or clawed out by one of the neighborhood’s feral cats.  Gaping holes in the mesh, like so many wounds, would let in bugs.  I sighed and grabbed a role of duct tape off the table nearby and began to patch them up.

            “Any news?” Tony said from the couch.  With his big skull balanced uneasily on gangly arms and legs, he reminded me of a life-size bobblehead.  He stared absently at the baseball game on the TV, his Cubs hat tilting sloppily from his head.  The last trickles of the air-conditioned coolness fled through the open windows, taking with it any hopes of a comfortable evening.  Tony had begun to sweat, too.

            “AC’s busted,” I said.

            “As predicted,” Tony replied.  “MacNeil ain’t had it checked since we started renting the place last year.”

            “And it’ll be December by the time he gets out here, I tell you that,” Clyde repeated, stepping around the corner from his bedroom.

            Tony snorted through his nose.  “You got that much right.”

            “Hey, how’s Nick doin’?” I asked.

            Tony’s gaze left the TV and flicked from my face to Clyde’s, and then to the floor.  He sighed.  I’d known Tony for a while, but nothing kept him as hung up as Nick.

            “He ain’t too good, man,” Tony said.  “Can’t barely move at all.”

            “Lemme go see him,” I said.

            “All yours,” Tony responded, and jerked a thumb down the hall to his bedroom.  I stole my way deeper into the house and, once I reached Tony’s room, gently opened the door.

            “Hey, bud, it’s me,” I said.  A half-groan, half-bark came from within.  I pushed the door further and stepped through, where I was immediately greeted by the smell of piss.  It had started to amplify in the heat since the air conditioner had broken, and Tony’s room was already so cramped, anyway.  In the muggy air, without any open windows, it felt downright claustrophobic.

            I knelt among the layers of dirty socks and underwear that made up the floor of Tony’s room and gently petted the decrepit dog on the floor.  Tony’s dog, Nick, grimaced at me and wagged his tail weakly.  His eyes were milky and blank, and his nose dripped a salty mucus.  Lumps, like medals in the dog’s war against aging, grew on his ribcage.  His matted fur, once that of a golden retriever, was now closer to that of moldy straw.

            “Hey, Nick,” I said and scratched behind his ears, mindful of the unhealed sores on the top of his head.  The summer had not been kind, and it would be worse now.

            I sniffed again and felt something wet sneaking its way through my jeans.  I looked down and realized I had knelt in a fresh puddle of the dog’s urine.

            “Damn it, Tony,” I yelled.  “Nick’s pissed himself again.”

            “It’s my room, ain’t it?  The hell you want me to do about it?” Tony yelled back.

            “Clean it up!” I said.  But I stood back up with a sigh and wiped my hands on my pants, glad I hadn’t been down there for too long.  I opened the windows and left the door ajar on my way out, hoping the breeze would be good for the poor dog.  Nick whined at me as I left the room.

            “The whole house gonna smell like piss ‘n shit in a few days if you don’t clean it up,” I told Tony, who had now removed his baseball cap to wipe his face.  “Heat’ll only make it worse.  And I’ll be damned if I gotta spend the whole summer smellin’ dog piss.  I pay rent, same as you.

            “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it,” Tony said.  “It wasn’t my idea to rent this crackhouse.”

            “MacNeil’s blow a gasket if he finds out,” I added.

            “What’s he gonna do, sue us?” Clyde said.  “That asshole don’t know anything.”

            “He might jack up our rates,” I said.  Clyde waved his hand at me in dismissal.

            “He might jack up Tony’s rates,” Clyde said.  “You oughta put that dog down, man.  Fucker ain’t good for nothin’.”  Tony rolled his eyes.

            I sat down on the couch, next to Tony.  The game wasn’t very exciting.  Cubs down, five to two.  Sixth inning.  Same thing we’d been watching all summer.  It used to be that we’d all watch the games with the same sense of intrigue.  Now it was just Tony.

            The heat had fully intruded our house by now, air conditioning be damned.  It was oppressive, as if an invisible hand had settled over all of us.  My shirt was soaked through now, darkening the demon’s skull logo of the Beezlebub Dayz Punk Festival emblazoned on it.  I’d get a new one at the festival next week if this one went bad.

            It used to be, too, that we’d go to the festival every year.  Our town put it on to try and drum up some money from the students at the local university, the one Tony and I had graduated from just two months ago.  And the one Clyde had dropped out of senior year.  But we’d already signed on the lease by then.

            We sat in silence, underneath that blanket of sweaty, hot air.  Tony got up to grab a beer between the sixth and seventh inning, saying, “Goddamn, it never got this hot when we were kids.”

            “News channel says this summer’ll be another record high.  Fifteenth year in a row,” I told them.  “It’s just gonna get hotter.”

            “Hot damn,” Tony whistled.

            “Hot damn is right,” I said.

            “Bullshit,” Clyde said.  “Those numbers don’t mean nothin’.”

            I made eye contact with Tony, who just stared at the TV.  He shook his head.  I said, “You keep sayin’ that, but you’re feelin’ the heat same as us.”

            “It’s hot, so what?  Summer’s supposed to be hot,” Clyde said.  “News don’t mean anything.”

            Tony sighed and got up.  “Dumbass,” he muttered as he disappeared into the kitchen.  At least the refrigerator still worked. 

“Who you callin’ dumbass, dumbass?”  Clyde called after him, eyes still glued to the TV, but then added, “Get me a Busch, would ya?”

            Moments later, the lanky figure returned and tossed a metal can at Clyde’s head.  He caught it without even looking up.  “Thanks,” he said.  And we lay there on the couch, lethargic and unable to even argue for the rest of the game.  Like a kiln, the house warmed up.

            “So, Tony,” I said after a while.  “You comin’ to Beezlebub with us?”

            “I guess,” Tony replied.  “Nothin’ to do around here.  Might as well catch the first few acts.”

            “Steel Souls are playing Friday night,” I said.  “And Lily’s Hypeshow after them.  You ought to see it.”

            “I’ll see how hot it is,” Tony said.

            There was a sound of stumbling and a distant groan, and then the whisper of Tony’s door scraping open.  From down the hall, Nick trotted out towards us, hair dripping with sweat.  He ambled over to the kitchen and gazed at Tony, expectantly.  The old dog gave a semi-formed whimper and nudged his water dish, which was bone-dry.

            “Yeah, I hear you,” Tony said.  With a crack in his knees, the tall man unfolded himself from the couch and dripped his way over to the kitchen.  He filled up the dog’s water bowl and put it at Nick’s feet, pouring in a splash of beer for good measure.  Leaning against the wall, the old retriever’s lapped contently at the metal canister.  Tony made his way back to the couch and sat down.

            “Even the damn water’s warm,” he said.

            We sat in sweaty silence, the massive orange sun sinking into the horizon.  The very air around us seemed to heat itself, and our sweat never left our bodies; it was too humid to even think about doing anything.  We sat there, in front of the TV, and the sun dipped below the horizon.  The scent of our sweat mingled and hung in the air, with the long fingers of ammonia and feces wafting out of Tony’s room.  And even in the darkness, made orange by the streetlamps outside, it didn’t cool down.

            A week later it was still just as hot, but I wasn’t wearing jeans anymore.  There was no way I wanted to go to Beezlebub Dayz with my legs liquifying below me.

            I stood, sweating, on the scorched, grassy lawn just inside the community park with a cheap beer in hand.  Clyde and Tony were with me, since Tony decided to come to the festival after all.  Even though the sun had set an hour ago, it still felt like noon with the fire high overhead.  But now the only lights were the massive limelights of the metal stage.

            There had been two or three other bands since we got there.  I couldn’t really remember who they were; I was started to feel the effects of the alcohol, and probably dehydration.  My head was woozy, and it was hard to focus, but my chest was hot in a good way.  Unlike my skin, which was burning up in the crowd of a few hundred people.

            “When’s Steel Souls start?” Tony asked me.  He checked his watch every other minute, as if it would make the band come out sooner.  I couldn’t tell if he was excited for the show or just wanted to get out of the crowd.

            “Should be out in a minute or two,” I said.  I downed the last of my warm beer.  We were just on the edge of the crowd, so I tossed it into a nearby garbage bin.  No recycling here.

            “Goddamn, it must be over a hundred degrees,” Clyde said.  “I’ve never been so hot in my fucking life.”

            “Fifteenth year, man.  Beezlebub Dayz last year was like this, too,” I said.  “The lights are the same.  The people are the same.  The location’s the same.  The-”

            “Shut up,” Clyde said.  But we all knew I was right.  Tony and I locked eyes again.  We were swimming about in a sea of sweaty bodies, clothes clinging to our skin and the skin of others.  The humidity was intense, and my head felt light, as if I were going to pass out.  Moving about in a wave-like fashion, the audience ebbed back and forth between the front of the stage and the exit.

            Finally, though, I heard a familiar roar from the front of the crowd, and I began to cheer, too, not even seeing the band as they finally came on stage.  They were all shirtless, dressed in black skin-tight jeans and carrying instruments.  The lead singer threw his fist to the air in salute.

            “Alright, it’s fuckin’ hot!” the Steel Souls front-man shouted.  I didn’t know his name, and I didn’t know their newest album.  Hell, I wasn’t sure if they had a newest album.  I couldn’t make out any of their faces through the heat, so I wasn’t even entirely sure it was them.

            “You guys are fuckin’ hot, too!” the bassist shouted.  The crowd went bonkers.  Someone tossed a cup of beer into the air, and it rained down on us, a brief, frothy relief from the omnipresent heat.  I stuck out my tongue to catch a few drops.

            “Thank y’all for comin’ out to see us tonight on this night of nights, this heat of heats, this day of Beezlebub Dayz.  Let’s rock!” the front-man shouted again.  I threw my fist up to the sky and shouted, voice drowned out in the mind-numbing roar of the crowd.  And then the band started to play, and I was sucked into the middle like a rip tide.

            It happened naturally.  I think I partially threw myself and was partially thrown by the bearded man behind me.  The vortex of people swallowed me whole, and the center of the crowd formed a heavy ball of energy like a summer thunderstorm.  The band played, smashing chord after chord against each other as the lead singer screamed into the microphone.  The bass was turned all the way up, and I could feel it pulsing through my chest.  I tumbled a bit and fell into the person next to me.

            “I love this song!” the girl I had fallen into said and shoved me further into the mosh pit.  Then I was spinning, running in a ragged circle, bouncing from edge to edge, star-like, as we spun in one unit, a tornado tearing up the earth.  I saw Clyde somewhere, at a distance, as he fell back into the edge of the crowd and was thrust back forward, a pinball hitting a bumper.  The hot, hot air circled around us, a vortex of heat.  And my head spun, too.  Had I drunk enough water?  I didn’t really know.  And we continued to move in waves and circles…

            “WHEN THIS NEXT SONG COMES AROUND, I WANT YOU TO FUCKING KILL SOMEONE!” the front-man screamed.  There was a deafening roar of the hive-mind crowd, and the speakers blasted something through my head, taking my brains out with it.  I let go and fell into the beat, stamping and shuffling and flinging myself in all directions.  I saw faces of people I knew, faces of those I didn’t.  One song bled into the next.  There was screaming, and I raised my fists to the sky in righteous fury.  I ended up in the wall of people, and threw myself back in to the spinning, dragging along someone who turned out later to not be Tony.  Someone was being thrown in the air by a huge, muscled man.  The crowd carried her, surfing, to the front of the stage and she dropped into the arms of festival security.  And above it all, the heat rose like a mirage, steamy updrafts to the sky carrying our emotions with them.  And up, and up, and up.

            Suddenly the music stopped.  The general momentum of the mosh kept itself going until one of the security guards came in and grabbed me by the shoulders.

            “Show’s over,” he said.  “Go home.”

            “The hell, man?” I said.  “Show just started!”

            “Rest of it’s cancelled.  Get out of here,” he said.  And then he moved on to the next person, leaving an anger to well up inside of me.  But it dissipated when I turned to the front of the crowd.

            I heard the sirens before anything registered, and then I recognized the gleam of the stretcher as the paramedics loaded someone onto it.  They were moving quick, with fluid motions, and it was good they did so because whoever was on the stretcher flailed about spasmodically, alternating between all his muscles clenching and relaxing.  A row of security, aided by sober festival goers, had formed a protective ring as the bloodied body was carted off.

            I looked to the ground, now a trampled mess of beer, sweat, mud, and blood.  My forehead was glistening, and the salty liquid dripped from my eyebrows to my cheeks.  I wiped it away and spat out my excess spit.  I felt like I was vibrating back in forth, unable to focus.

            “Damn, we didn’t actually want you guys to kill someone,” the front-man said into the microphone.  Then he, too, was being ushered away, presumably by stage security.  I turned to look and found that Clyde and Tony were at my side.

            “The fuck?” I asked.

            “Someone got trampled,” Tony said.

            “Fucker was dried out, trying to crowd-surf.  Got dropped,” Clyde added.  “It’s his own fault.”

            “It ain’t nobody’s fault,” Tony said.

            “Shit, man.  It’s too damn hot for this,” I said.

            “Let’s get out of here,” Tony said.

            Dizzily, we made our way back to our house.  It wasn’t a long walk, and I felt like I was at the festival one moment and then at the house the next.  I didn’t remember crossing the train tracks or walking by the river.  Not that the river was flowing, anyway.  But when we got back home, we saw that the screen door hung from its hinges, mosquitoes buzzing in and out of the open space.

            “Oh, what the fuck is this?” Clyde shouted, and ran inside.

            I blinked, first one eye and then the other, and followed Clyde at a distance.  Tony trailed after me, just an uncomprehending.  But we saw the broken door, and when we got in the house, we saw the window screens that had been torn from the wall, and we saw the drawers, all pulled out and ransacked.  We saw everything flung open, the contents of the house spilled out on its inside as if it had all tried, at once, to fly away.  The air swirled, thick and orange, around us.  My head was heavy.  I needed to sit down.

            “They took the fuckin’ TV!” Clyde said.  “The fuckers took everything.  Goddamnit!”  Clyde kicked the wall, smashing his foot against it.  He toppled backwards from the recoil but retained his balance.  There was a low moan from Tony’s room.

            “Nick?” Tony said, wading through our upturned life.  We followed him and came to his room, which was messier now than it had been.  Curled up in the corner was Nick the dog, sitting in a pile of his own waste and blindly grinning up at us.  Clyde got to him first, unsteady on his feet.

            “Some guard dog you are.  Useless piece of shit,” Clyde said and kicked the dog.

            There was a yelp and one last indignant wheeze, and Nick was dead.  It was so hot in that room that I thought for a moment, stupidly, that the heat must have killed him.  He must have been dead before we got there.  The hot summer air, having a mind of its own, had finally reached into Nick and squeezed his heart until it popped.  But we knew that wasn’t true.

            The three of us stood there, Clyde, Tony, and I, and we stared in disbelief at the ratty body of Nick.

            “You killed my dog,” Tony said.  His voice was soft, almost hard to hear over the droning buzz of the heat.

            “Oh my god,” Clyde said.  “I… I didn’t mean to.”  He stumbled and sat back, heavy, on Tony’s bed.

            “You killed my fucking dog!” Tony shouted, grabbing Clyde by the arms and dragging him to his feet.  “You dirty motherfucker, you killed Nick!”

            “It was an accident, man, I didn’t mean for him to die!” Clyde said, eyes spinning.

            “You kicked him!  Why the hell would you kick him?” Tony said.

            “Listen, give me a minute, I’m drunk, the house got broken into, the concert…” Clyde said.

            “Fuck the concert, man!  My dog is dead!” Tony was borderline hysterical now.

            “I said give me a minute!” Clyde responded.  “I didn’t kill him!”

            “No, fuck your minutes!” Tony said.  And he hauled back and gave Clyde a strong left hook to the jaw.

            Clyde stumbled back, feeling his bruised chin, and wiping back the blood where he had cut his lip on his teeth.  “You bastard,” he said, and then he threw a punch at Tony.

            They crashed to the floor, rolling about in the heap of rancid clothes that festooned the room.  The screen on the window shook with the force of their violence, and the air itself began to cook.  I turned around and walked away.

            There wasn’t anything I could do.  I tottered out of the front door, drifting from side to side like a tree in the desert.

            The door fell to the ground with a clang, and behind me I heard Tony and Clyde screaming at each other and making the house an even bigger mess than it already was.  I walked, and when I got to the street at the end of the driveway I turned and kept walking away from that house that none of us wanted.

            I walked onward towards the highway with the sky like an oven overhead.  The pavement beneath my feet radiated out heat that it had been soaking up all day, and I kept walking.  Even though the sun was beating down on another part of the world, it was still hot here.  That wasn’t going to change, I thought.  Not now.  Not anymore.  And at the base of skull, my head beat like a drum, and I could feel the sun there, too.