Slim realized he'd come to the wrong town.  In his many travels,
Slim's unique affection for pigs had made him the object of ridicule
and disgust when his porcine preferences finally came to light, as
they always eventually did, forcing him to move on to the next town.
However, Slim never gambled that it would ever jeopardize his life
(unless, possibly, one of the sows slipped and fell on his head during
the use of a particularly kinky position).

  Beads of sweat rolled down his brow, seemingly in flight from the
double-barreled shotgun he found himself staring into.  The sheriff
grinned from behind the safe side of the cold shafts of parkerized
steel.  It was a sickening grin.  Not because of the one or two
festering, yellowed teeth poking out of the lawman's varicose gums,
but because of the utter sadism and perversion apparent in a grin likethat.

  "Looks like we caught ourself a pig-fucker, Horace", the sheriff
drawled.  "Maybe we should just shoot him right here in the mud with
his britches around his little faggot ankles."

  "Can't do that", said the man in overalls (apparently Horace) in
between chews on a piece of alfalfa.  "The noise would scare my pigs!"
 "Well I reckon you've got a point.  I say we go find the judge so as
he can convict him and we can dispatch the sorry son of a bitch with a
good old fashioned hanging."

  Slim was marched, pants still around his ankles, several blocks to
the local bar.  The sheriff's grin grew all the while, as he savored
the delicate snapping noise all seven vertibrae in Slim's neck would
soon be making once they found Judge Hangum.

  Hangum was in his usual spot at the bar, enjoying a tall glass of
Jim Beam on the rocks.  One of his grey eyebrows raised noticeably at
the sight of Sheriff McKinley leading in a mud-spattered and
half-naked newcomer.  "What ya got there, Sheriff?  This guy exposehimself?"

  "Nope", came the reply, "I caught him out behind Horace's barn
administering oral pleasures to the hogs."  "S-s-sows", stuttered Slim.

  "What was that, you hog-blowing bastard?", demanded the judge.

  "I s-s-said that they w-w-weren't hogs.  They were s-sows", Slim
managed to choke out, so overcome with fear that a thin stream of hot
liquid diarreah began to dribble it's way down the inside of histhigh.

  "What the fuck is the God-damned difference, boy?", asked the judge,
not noticing the hershey-squirts camouflauged by the mud on Slim's
legs. "I mean pig-fucking is a hanging offense in this town and it
don't much matter what kind of pig it were."

  "W-w-well, sir.  I just w-wanted you to know that t-they was female
pigs that I was y-y-you know... uhh... pleasuring.  I mean, I don't
want n-nobody to think I'm some kinda f-faggot or something."

  "Ya know", said the judge, "I think our friend here has a bit of a
point.  In fact I think we owe it to him to at least give the
misguided little sumbitch a sporting chance to not end up on the
gallows this evening."  Sheriff McKinley's grin retreated a notch.

  "Oh puh-puh-lease", begged Slim, "I'll do anything Your Honor.  Just
p-please don't st-st-string me uh-uh-up!"

  "Well tell me what you think of this, Sheriff.  I reckon this
disgusting bastard ought to a have pretty disgusting punishment, don't
you agree?"  "Oh yes sir!"  The sheriff was beginning to like the sound of this.
"What do you have in mind?"

  "I say we let him go... if he can bring himself to drink one tiny
sip... from the spittoon."

  At first Slim didn't understand.  He watched the sheriff's maniac
grin become increasingly wider.  Slowly, Slim turned his head.  He
began to trace the imaginary line running from Sheriff McKinley's eyes
to the opposite side of the room.

  There, at the back corner of the bar sat a gang of Hell's Angels.
Not one of them could have been less than 300 pounds and their doughy
folds of bulging white skin seemed to ooze from every break in the
leathers they had somehow strapped themselves into.  Huge, pendulous
bellies spilling over belts that seemed ready to break were glistening
with sweat and other bodily secretions.  The areas of their
leather-clad bodies that weren't fishbelly white were covered in
coarse, filthy hair.

  The bikers sat in a drunken stupor, their mouths feebly chewing at
some foul-smelling variety of tobacco that dribbled down their
multi-layered chins and congealed in their beards like rivulets of
black, clotting ichor. The smell coming off of them was worse than
corpses in the sun.  It was the scent of fermented sweat and piss
caught in their bodyhair.  Flies surrounded them like a cloud,
crawling on their faces and lips, drinking the saliva-spit mixture
that oozed from the corners of the toothless orifices that passed for
their mouths.

  But Slim noticed another smell.  It was distinct and separate from
the gut-churning aroma wafting off the drunken party of Harley riders.
This noisome stench seemed almost alive as it wriggled its way into
his nostrils.  It was emanating from the brass jar on the floor besidethe table.

  Slim was struck dumb with realization.  This was THE SPITTOON.  Such
a simple word like spittoon could not begin to do justice to this
physical embodiment of nausea.  The rim was surrounded by a
multilayered residue of tobacco-juice, saliva and mucous.  Small
clumps of some hairy brown mold somehow managed to grow in the sludge
dried on the lip of the container.  Slim could make out the dried
corpses of flies who had been foolish enough to land on that swamplike
surface and had adhered there forever.

  The silence was broken by a sound that came from deep within one of
the bikers.  It was a low rumbling in his bronchi that seemed to rise
slowly up his throat towards the fat glop of black vegetable matter
lodged behind his lip.  The wad of lung butter picked up speed and,
mixing with the tobacco juice and pus from his oozing cankerous gums,
traveled though the air in a slow, lazy arc that ended with a
reverberating stacatto "SCHPLORT!" in that horrible, rancid spittoon.

  NBA Champions could only dream of such precision.

  Everything from that second on seemed as if it were in slow motion.
Slim knew that his very life depended on being able to force his body
to ingest a tiny drop of whatever festering gelatinous mixture lie in
wait for him in that spittoon.  His first step towards it felt much
like walking underwater, slow and pronounced.  There was no sound.

  As Slim came closer to the spittoon, his arms beginning to raise
from his sides and reach for it, the bikers seemed to shake themselves
out of their stupor enough to realize that someone was reaching for
the spittoon.  It didn't make sense, but they didn't care.  The Hell's
Angels were falling out their chairs to get away from this disgusting,
mud-and-shit covered creature that waddled, pants around ankles,
towards possibly the most unpleasant object ever to touch the light ofday.

  Now his hands were gripping the cold brass spittoon.  It was much
heavier than he was expecting and, for a moment, Slim feared he might
drop it due to the slickness of the residue that coated most of it.
The Harley riders all stared in silence from a safe distance.  The
Judge and Sheriff's mouths dropped in unison as the lip of the
spittoon touched Slim's mouth and he began to raise the back of it.

  Slim already had the taste of tobacco in his mouth.  The residue of
dried juice on the lip of the spittoon had a bitter taste but it paled
in comparison to the stench that hit Slim full in the face as the
brass jar was tilted fully horizontal.  It was like opening a coffin.
No.  It was like opening a corpse.  A fat, bulging corpse puffed and
bloated from the decomposition gasses which became trapped inside it
would smell just like this if one were to suddenly slash open its
belly like a leather balloon.

  Slim's entire digestive tract made a sudden jerk as if a jolt of
electricity had been run through it.  With an effort comparable to
that of mighty Atlas holding the world on his shoulders, Slim choked
back the hot bile and remains of this morning's ham and eggs that
attempted to escape.

  He could now see the lump at the bottom of this cuspidor of doom.
It was about the consistency of moldy cottage cheese.  Primarily a
translucent brown, the mucous-pudding was flecked with bits of blood,
a few drowned insects, and even what appeared to be a rotted tooth
with a silver filling in it.

  The putrid ball of pustulent festering spit slid down the jar
towards Slim's open mouth so slowly that it seemed it would never
reach him. Slim was briefly reminded of a popular television
commercial for ketchup.

  He couldn't stand to look at it anymore.  It was nearly touching his
nose.  Slim closed his eyes tightly and stuck out his lip to contact
the surface of the blob.

  All four bikers, the Judge and the Sheriff held their breath as a
faint sound broke the silence.  It was the sound a straw makes when
trying to suck up the last droplet of soda in a glass.  Slim took a
tiny, tiny sip from the spittoon.  The spectators continued to hold
their breath, waiting for the sipping noise to stop now that some
tobacco juice had entered Slim's mouth.

  But something was wrong.  The sucking noise grew louder and soon
became the sound of someone trying to chug a large quantity of liquid
without stopping for breath.  Gulp... Gulp... Gulp... Glorp.  Exhale.

  One of the bikers ran outside to vomit.

  The spittoon hit the floor with a dull metallic thump, very
obviously empty and Slim began to stagger back towards the Judge and
Sheriff.  Slim looked like he was going to make it all the way back to
the bar but suddenly dropped to his knees a few feet from SheriffMcKinley.

  To say that Slim merely vomited would be a gross understatement.
His whole body convulsed and his eyes bulged from their sockets so
hard that it seemed they were going to pop right out of his head and
dangle by the optic nerve.  A torrent of hot, acidic liquid poured
from Slim's mouth and splashed across the floor, spattering thesheriff's boots.

  If the sludge from the spittoon had looked bad before Slim swallowed
it, it looked ten times as bad now.  Slim's puke was a sickly syrupy
color, speckled with bits of bloody phlegm, dead insects, and even the
tooth Slim had seen floating in it earlier.  Slim continued
dry-heaving long after his stomach was empty, and finally collapsed
into the pool of regurgitated spit, exhuasted.

  The Judge and Sheriff looked at each other for a moment.  Finally,
the Judge used his boot to roll Slim over onto his back.  Slim's face
and shirt were smeared with vomit.  He was hardly recognizable as
human anymore, what with mud and his own vomit and shit smeared on
himself. His pants were still around his ankles.

  "Why, boy?", asked the Judge, "Why didya drink the whole thing?  We
toldya ya only had to take a tiny little sip!"

  Slim managed to choke out an answer: "It was all in one strand!"--

"When they're flying-high, a pack of crack-crazed    | -AllenWintermute-
squirrels can chew a man's leg off in no time."      | P.O. Box 4827
-----------------------------------------------------| San Jose, CA
finger astuart@netcom for PGP public key.            |95150-4827----