Slapnuts

Slapnuts was a weird kid, no doubt, but I never dreamed he’d kill his own father in law. The father in law, Rick, was the one who’d named him Slapnuts. Now, Slapnuts certainly was no prize, but Rick was a real piece of shit.

Rick ran a warehouse on my delivery route and had hired Slapnuts soon after he’d married Rick’s youngest daughter. He was only 21 years old and had already done time for felony car theft, been kicked out of the army, and gotten married and become a father. It wasn’t easy for a 21 year old ex-felon to find work and Rick felt sorry for him so he’d given him a job and soon after, let he and the daughter move back in with him after they’d been evicted from their first apartment. Slapnuts spent most of his workday lying around on the stacks of flattened cardboard in the back of the warehouse and regaling the other employees with stories of his misadventures. This would have been a problem in most workplaces, but Rick was in a different world up front in the office.

Rick spent hours and hours hiding out in his office having x-rated webcams with various online sluts. Several times I’d walked up front to refill my water bottle to find Rick pushed up against his desk with one hand underneath while a nasty old woman danced in shitty lo-rez on his computer monitor. Apparently, he had a thing for real-life S&M as well, the shipping guy, JonJon, told me he’d come into work early one morning and found a naked woman tied to a table with Rick fisting her. Upon being discovered, Rick’s reaction was not one of shock or embarrassment, instead he calmly turned to JonJon, still buried wristwatch deep in this unlucky tramp and asked him, “Do you want some of this?”

I’d seen Rick’s wife there a couple of times. She ran a dog kennel, and was one of those women who looks like she ran a dog kennel. Kind of like how you can tell a woman who works with horses for a living just by how she LOOKS. Rick’s wife was short, dumpy, and mousy with a vile disposition and filthy mouth. Rick himself was no looker, either. His redneck demeanor was accentuated by his stringy mullet, slouchy posture and constant smoking. He also wore huge eyeglasses with brown tinted lenses, like ladies glasses. He was the most vacant looking man I’d ever met.

By some grace, however, Rick’s daughter/Slapnuts’ wife was absolutely beautiful. A short, dainty girl with fire engine red hair and earnest eyes. She was a woman who didn’t know she was beautiful, probably unable to recognize her own beauty having grown up with such ugliness all around her. I had a little fantasy about her, about meeting her earlier in life and running off to Appalachia together and keeping her barefoot and pregnant and braless. She flirted with a charm and innocence that it made you wonder if she was flirting at all, or was instead reaching out in some small emotional way for something.

Rick was one of those guys who answered the question ‘hey, howyadoin?’, but actually answering how he was doing. I hate that. Thing is, having grown up in the Midwest, that’s how I greet everybody. So I ALWAYS heard about how Rick was doing. I’d try to train myself not to address Rick like that when I went up front to fill up my water bottle, but usually forgot and would have to stand there and listen to this asswipe, silently cursing myself and this slimy bastard and his fucked-up problems.

As the weeks went by, his fucked-up problems became more and more about Slapnuts. Slapnuts stole this or Slapnuts broke that. He’d holler insults at him through the open office door and Slapnuts would just smirk, pull his baseball cap down over his eyes as he lay on the cardboard.

Rick started getting really worked up about Slapnuts after a while. I’d mindlessly ask Rick how he was doing while bent over the water cooler and he’d just start yelling shit at Slapnuts.

“That broke-dick motherfucker over there owes me for bailing his ass outta jail!” or “I gotta ulcer cuzza that piece of SHIT!!” The fact that Rick was married to an awful harpie and smoked about fifty Parliament cigarettes a day were not to blame for Rick’s problems; Slapnuts was. Rick’s poor performance at work wasn’t due to his perverse distractions; It was that lazy fucken Slapnuts. I couldn’t say anything just stayed neutral in my short comments while I imagined smashing him in the face with a baseball bat.

Then, one day, Slapnuts killed him.

Kind of.

JonJon met my truck outside one afternoon as I pulled up. He hollered that they were closed. I turned off the truck.

“Rick died.” JonJon said.

JonJon couldn’t believe it either. He’d come in that morning and found no Rick so he let himself in and got to work. An hour or so later the phone rang, it was the corporate office and Rick’s wife had called them. It seems the night before Rick and Slapnuts had really had it out. The fight went on for a while and finally Mr. and Mrs. Slapnuts grabbed their kid and stormed off in a huff. Rick chased them outside and he and Slapnuts continued to scream at each other while they loaded up the car. As Slapnuts was about to get into the car, he snapped and took a swing at Rick, popping him square in the face and shattering his creepy Elton John glasses, slicing up both Slapnuts’ hand and Rick's face. Slapnuts then jumped in the car to make a break for it and they scuffled for a minute through the car window. Slapnuts began to speed off with a white-hot angry Rick chasing him down the street. Rick stopped in the middle of the street joined by his wife and screamed obscenities after them. Then he dropped dead. Right then and there. Heart attack. Broken ladies frames still hanging awkwardly off his face, dead at the end of his own driveway.

Slapnuts and his beautiful wife drove off, towards Appalachia and freedom…