Falling Watermelon Story

The fact is that a heavy watermelon, 10 pounds or so, if dropped from a sufficient height, will kill a man. Those of you who have hefted watermelons in the fileds of central Florida can vouch for this. The problem with what I am about to tell you, is that it does not hold true in every instance. For instance, when we dropped one on Charlie from the balcony on the second floor, it broke open on his skull, broke open his skull, and as a result he came up to our apartment to kill us. It was, of course, an accident on our part, and we explained this, and it seemed to pacify him.

Charlie was about six-one, with dark hair and lots of tattoos. He bought weed from us on the second of every month, which was when he got his settlement money from his wife, who had at one point after he got out of the service, tried to kill him. She was in prison, but very wealthy. He was good looking, with a cleft chin and dimples that were there, visible through his beard, even when he did not smile. Imagine a young, bearded Cary Grant with tattoos and muscles to show them off on.

My wife is a certified nurse's assistant and she had a stethoscope with which she listened to Charlie's heartbeat that night when we hit him with the watermelon. She found out that he had no pulse, and was in fact dead, even though his flesh was warm and he was in our apartment hinting at a freebie for the pain and suffering caused by our 15-pound fruit missile. We were more interested in the death thing. I was convinced that there had to be a rational explanation for it. How the fuck did the redneck walk around all day with no heartbeat?

Erkine was the man to call for this kind of shit. He was homeless and I had no idea where to find him after dark, so I made notes to ask him when we ran into each other next.

"How long have you had no heartbeat?"

"Don't know, man, ain't seen a doctor since I left the service."

"What did the last one you saw say to you?"

"That I was functioning fine.That's the word he used, 'functioning'."

"What branch of the service?"

"Was in the special forces, then they switched me over to some kind of new thing they had. Gave us some meds and sent us into the desert to fight. You got any aspirin? My head sure does hurt."

"Ever been wounded in battle?"

"All the goddamned time. Don't get scars though, bullets go right through me. You're tellin' me you don't have no kind of pain meds 'round here at all?"

"Charlie, you mind if perform an experiment on you?"

"What kind? Some new shit you want to try out? You got the man right here, my lungs can take anything."

I reached under the sofa for the 357 Magnum I keep to deal with people who know where I live and try to take advantage of this. I brought it up quickly and shot Charlie once in his face.

For about one second I could see the back of the room. Then he started to heal. This was when it occurred to me that he might be a little pissed about me shooting him, and that it was somewhat rash to discharge a heavy caliber weapon in one's living room.

"Look, baby, we might have to kill this motherfucker for real." I said to Denise.

I thought about shooting him again, decided against it and went looking for the machete I usually keep in the hall closet. When I got back to the living room with it, he was looking pretty pissed off. I got the feeling that the healing process was nOT exactly painless. Something interesting I noted: The blood spatter from the gunshot had disappeared. I filed it away for later consideration. Then I began trying to cut his head off.

Contrary to what you might glean from popular fiction on the subject of decapitation, it is not an easy task. It is virtually impossible to do on a normal person with a single stroke, and in Charlie's case, the wound kept closing up around the blade, it required a great deal of force to do so. It took close to twenty strokes to get it clean off. All the time he was stumbling around, especially after I was able to hack though his vertebrae. This was about the time he started knocking things over and trying to grab hold of the blade. The body lost its balance when the head was off, and promptly sat on my carpet and shat in its pants. The head, however, stopped healing.

The following night I drove the body, which was still alive, by the way (and shitting sporadically),to the local landfill and dragged it into a heap of hospital waste. The severed neck had healed and it looked like it was in the process of throwing up a new skull. I kept the old one to show to Erkine when next I saw him. It has survived three weeks now in my freezer with no apparent ill-effects. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it on the off-chance that it will talk back. You never know.