The strange sound was as familiar to him as the sound of summer rain to normal boys...
kreeeee-CRUNCH!
—and out that horn came, like pulling a sweet potato from moist earth.
Dean didn't care. Not about the animal, not about the pain, not about the torment nor the objective cruelty of the act. He just did it. He cranked those horns out of those steer heads a mile a minute. It was his job, and Dean Lohan quailed at no task.
He was a horn-cranker.
Some towns had oyster-shucking contests, or pie eating contests, but DeSmet, South Dakota, had something far more unique. In 1988, at the age of eighteen, Dean entered the annual state horn-cranking contest, not only competing against the best in the land but against the very man who'd come in First Place in this esteemed competition for nine years in a row.
His very own father.
Muscles bulging, mind set, and torque-plier in hand, Dean had embarked on this gladiatorial event. The most horns cranked fully out of their seats within a one-minute time-limit would be declared the victor. The previous record was forty-three.
That's a lot of horns to crank.
The sun blazed and the crowd cheered, and the day was split open by the hellish howls of the steers being de-horned.
Spittle-speckled and arms gorged with blood, the end of the day found Dean the easy winner. The coveted trophy—two genuine gold-plated horns—was passed to him by a teary-eyed woman in a red, white, and blue swimsuit and a MISS HORN-CRANKER banner as the audience went mad in their applause.
Dean not only won this year's state contest, he also set a world record. In sixty seconds he had expertly divorced an even fifty horns from the steer-heads they'd naturally grown in.
Hence, Dean would have his name in Guinness for some time to come—decades, in fact. His father, teary-eyed himself, embraced Dean after the match. "Boy," he sobbed. "Would you lookit that pile of horns? My God, you've made me the proudest father to ever walk the earth."
Exuberance surged through Dean's chest. He shed a tear or two himself, seeing his father so happy, and when he turned to the crowd and waved, their applause threatened to rock the entire county.
I'm the best horn-cranker... in the world, he realized.
Later, he fucked the dog-shit out of MISS HORN-CRANKER. Indeed, he fucked her so hard she fully lost consciousness in the backseat of Dean's finely rebuilt '72 Mustang Fastback. Then he swigged a beer, pinched some Skoal, and fucked her again.
For the hell of it.
««—»»
"What the hell is this!"
Dean grunted, then slowly opened his eyes. He'd fallen asleep on the couch, hadn't he? Yes, after a few shots of Johnny Black to mellow out. And now—
"What the hell is this!"
—his beautiful wife Daphne was screaming in his face.
"What the hell is what?" he griped. "Christ your voice is louder than a truck horn."
"This!" It was a disk she held between her fingers, the size of a hockey puck.
A can of Skoal.
"It was on the coffee table!" she continued to yell, "next to your whiskey!"
Still groggy, Dean shrugged on the couch. "It's a can of dip. So what? What are you bitching about?"
"So what? Is that what you said to me?" Rage pinkened her face, her eyes bulging like a cartoon. "Bitching?" She threw the can at him; it bounced off his chest. "You promised me that you'd never use that shit again! You promised me when we got married! It's filthy! It's dirty! Only rednecks and slobs use that stuff! It's—"
"It's time for you to shaddap," Dean replied, and in a reflex like instinct, he—
CRACK!
—slammed his fist into the side of her face. Daphne flew backwards, turning, her Bally shoes flying off her feet. As the inertia transferred from fist to face, Dean saw her eyeballs criss-cross. She thumped to the floor, unconscious.
Yadduh yadduh yadduh, Dean thought. That's all they do, run their mouths, bellyache, bitch. He poured another shot of Johnny B., slugged it back. That he'd just knocked his wife unconscious didn't faze him, nor did the potential assault and battery charges. "Fuck it. Women." He picked up his can of Skoal, put a pinch between his lip and gum.
There it is! he thought.
Nicotine rush abuzz, he looked down at his very unconscious wife. In her fall, she'd landed on her belly, her classy creped black skirt flipped up. Beneath the see-through pantyhose, her ass sat there like a pair of succulent dumplings.
"Fuck it," Dean said to himself.
Back in the old days, back on the ranch in DeSmet, Dean's far larger than average reproductive member had taken up residency in many a backdoor. But he'd never done "the anal thing" with Daphne. He'd never even broached the subject, knowing his wife regarded the act as unnatural and degrading.
"Fuck it."
He knelt, yanked the pantyhose right off like peeling a condom. Saliva tinted brown with high-grade nicotine dribbled from his mouth and fell precisely into the furrow of her creamy buttocks.
Dean plugged The Captain right in, and plungered her "star" but good. Spitting in her ass-crack seemed sufficient foreplay—all any woman deserved—he just went to town for a quick one. After all, the bitch hadn't put out in two months!
Dean's spooge drained in volume. He thought of squeezing the innards out of a fat lizard's mouth.
"There's one for ya, sweetheart." He wiped his sullied cock off on the pantyhose, then leaned back against the coffee table and took another hit of the good Mr. Black. Eventually Daphne revived, raised her head sluggishly, and brought an errant hand back to her buttocks.
"What... What did you do?" her words slipped out, incredulous.
"You looked like you were running a fever," Dean replied, then ejected a thread-thin stream of tobacco juice between his teeth. The stream landed on the plush beige carpet. "So I took your temperature. With a big thermometer."
Her words wheezed with her breath. "You-you-you—SODOMIZED me! How-how-how—COULD you?"
"Easy. My dick was hard and your ass was on the floor."
She began to crawl up, teary and outraged. "I'm-I'm-I'm gonna call my father, I'm gonna call the police, I'm gonna press charges—"
Dean just calmly shook his head. Sometimes they just don't get it, do they?
He grabbed her not by the hair but by the face, taking a handful of already bruised cheek, and lifted her to her feet. She squealed like a mouse in a vice the whole way up. "No," he said, "the only thing your gonna do is cook me some dinner. Now." He shoved her recklessly into the kitchen. "Something good, otherwise I'll have to get violent"—
—and then it happened again, the cacophonous drone in his head like water pouring into a sewer inlet and his vision shifting through cloud-blossom blurs and his heart like a water balloon about to pop—
—again—