Burning Desires
by Kerry Joyce
illustration by James Corwin
The garlic eaters of Sangre Diablo are a most extraordinary case,” Dr. Stanford Reekey assured me. Who was I to doubt it? He was the great Dr. Reekey, the world’s leading authority on human obsession in its myriad of forms. The “idee fixee,” as he called it, was his life’s work, and work was his life.
I, on the other hand, was merely a doctoral candidate from a deservedly unprestigious Mid West diploma mill. My Master’s degree was earned with a concentration in the harvest and feritlity dieties of Central and South America as well as the distilled spirits of Central and Eastern Europe.
Call it fate. Both Dr. Reekey’s mother and my Dowager Aunt Sally were founding members of an Indianapolis psychoactive garden club. “It’s time you started thinking about your academic career again,” Aunt Sally admonished, as I chewed a minimum of 25 times each bite of her unsurpassed mushroom casserole.
Not that I needed convincing. It was actually with little hesitation that I quit my job as shift supervisor for the second largest bowling alley in Dayton (third largest in the state), to serve as Doctor Reekey’s assistant, on his expedition, when the opportunity presented itself.
Reekey scarcely hid his annoyance when I insisted upon giving my employer the customary two weeks notice. This was only the first of many occasions in which my principles were put to the test as they clashed with the Doctor’s darker side.
Also accompanying Reekey and myself was the eminant physician Willard Crittendon. A man of international repute, Crittendon served as team podiatrist for the U.S. women’s gymnastic contingent at the Summer Olympics in Moscow in 1980. Later he would have a tropical ailment of the pelvic extremities named after him, although what the disease came to be called invariably slips my memory.
Crittendon had a habit of twitching his rather resplendent black moustache if something annoyed him or whenever he spoke with me in particular, througout the time I knew him. We had become fast friends.
Despite the noonday equatorial sun beating gently down upon us, my first sight of Sangre Diablo filled me with a sense of foreboding.
“Our young friend here seems filled with a sense of foreboding,” the ever-perceptive Doctor Reekey observed. His face oozed sun block quite futiley from every glistening pore.
“Let’s find out,” Crittendon exclaimed with a love for the scientific method that bordered on the maniacal. At once he took flight, like an errant barracuda, to my side of the rickety craft. Everything whirled. I was certain he had managed to overturn our barely sea-worthy bandarilla.
With serpentine strength, Crittendon had me held fast in an overpowering headlock. The spiny knuckles of his hand pelleted my unyielding squash with remarkable rapidity.
No less brutal was the cruel assault to my nostrils from the good doctor’s dampened underarm. Stars circled my bulging eyes, which seemed poised to abandon ship. For a moment, Crittendon stopped, but then quickly resumed this good-natured ribbing.
He rubbed his fist vociferously against my aching pate like an Ice Age Neanderthal building a fire with the last two dry sticks on earth, then finished with a flourish of sharp pokes to my already offended kidneys.
Dr. Reekey’s subtle mind was pleasantly engaged by these antics. “What about it Hal, is he filled with a sense of foreboding or not?” he demanded with a wry smile.
“Well, I’m not a phrenologist, Stan, but my guess would be he’s about a quart low,” Crittendon replied officiously, as I proceeded to vomit on my white high top sneakers.
I must admit I was less than a good sport about this friendly hazing. Sulking, I longed for the sight of foot long rotisserie franks, black striped and sweating,
in their plexi glass wienerarium, the smell of buttered popcorn erupting by the gallon in magnificant waves, and the sound and the fury of a seven-ten split – all from safely within the confines of Wayne’s Bowlerdrom, conveniently located in the heart of downtown Dayton, with plenty of free parking.
“Please excuse my companion,” Doctor Reekey said while pointing in the direction of my wretched feet. “This journey is something of a new experience for him.”
I watched sidelong the enormous hands of the pilot manning the helm. He sniffed indifferently, and dismissed the Doctor with a wide smile and a friendly wave. Sunlight winked from dozens of gold earings pinnned across the front of his black San Antonio Spurs tee shirt. His arms were as gnarled as an old oak, rooted anciently in the cove and secret covenants of Sanre Diablo.
I dozed fitfully, as passengers filled with a sense of foreboding have done in all the greats works of literature since pre-historic times.
Rising to stretch, the isle of Sangre Diablo announced its looming presence with a sharp jolt from its shoal bound coast. A knock that brought me to my knees, and with it, a strangeness in the air I’d come to know too well.
Next Month: Part II of Burning Desires, “Running Against The Wind”
