Tales of the Dusty Bucket: A Satire of Secondhand Americana: Dusty Bucket, #1

By Jim Fredrick and Matt Zigan

Most folks worldwide have visited a flea market, swap shop, or bazaar, but few take the time to get to know the variety of vendors peddling their lightly used or dubiously acquired inventory every weekend. At the Dusty Bucket, a self-described "androgynous pansexual with no more ambition nowadays than making a living as a flea market 'artist" sets up a table with their recently-deceased mother's unremarkable collectibles. The booth neighbor sells discount cigarettes and has a tale of bluster for every occasion. High Strangeness captures the narrator's attention and that of market regulars with a penchant for seeing the supernatural where it probably doesn't exist. Then again, an apparent caveman does appear out of thin air, and the narrator senses a song-like vibration in their feet rather than hearing it. By the final tally, a misfit team of muddied merchants might be the world's only protection from an ancient existential threat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HappyFat Labs
• Release date: Feb 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224619498

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Copyright © 2024 by Jim Fredrick and Matt Zigan

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, simulated, or poorly recounted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, occultism, remote viewling, automatic writing or Everettian Quantum paradox without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. If we find out you have, we reserve the right to concoct all manner of nefarious schemes by which we will exact our revenge...or knock on your door and ask for $5. For permission requests, contact [e-mail].

The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. Unless it’s very apparently satire. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased or egregoric in nature), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred. Except for what’s very apparently satire.

Book Cover by Harry Flores of Harflo Creative (www.harflocreative.com).

Photography by Al Goodstein.

First edition the year of someone’s lord, 2024

Chapter Title

1.  Overture - Dim the Lights   

2.  The Reptilian Escapades of the Lizard Pimp 

3.  The Uncanny Carlboros   

4.  Creepy Curses of the Knife Nazi  

5.  The Intolerable Teapot Lady   

6.  The Mysteries of One Dusty Carmichael 

7.  Forbidden Tales of the Info-Murderer  

8.  The Inscrutable Arrival of Thog Thogblatt

9.  Foreboding Follies    

10.  Aggressively Masculine Escapades 

11.  A Death, a Ritual, and a Dime Store Dick 

12.  The Improbably Pathetic World of Ozzy Belinski

13.  Assembling the Triune    

14.  The Perils of Convening The Council  

15.  Super Psychic Sunday Spectacular  

16.  Ozzy and the Haunted Spoons   

17.  Cracking the Lingus Mirror   

18.  Assembling the Triune (Part Two) 

19.  The Saga of the Shhh at Dawn   

20.  The Otherworldly Business of Possessions 

21.  Why Some Places Are Forbidden  

22.  Meeting the Invasion Balls Out

23.  The Savage Stick of Thog   

24.  Confronting Demons Both Foreign and Domestic

25.  The Final Tally

One. Overture - Dim the Lights

There used to be a cheap bordello run from the carny trucks parked back there in the market's storage lot. Vendors’ wives called the cops after their husbands started disappearing and the tills were $20 lighter. They called it a ‘sting operation,’ mostly because taking a piss after banging a flea market hooker stings really bad. – Frank Bud Canada. Frequently. To anyone who would listen.

When I think of my early days at the Dusty Bucket, the camera in my mind descends through billowy, pristine clouds and into a giant dingy flea market with a dilapidated amusement ride graveyard and self-storage lot butted against a county landfill, located off an otherwise barren highway.

Early mornings, the sunlight glistened off the dew that dripped from the cheap tin roofs over the stalls upsold as inside (although the cars between the rows were still in muddied channels and exposed to the elements, so the dealers were miserable when it rained).

My brain lens then sweeps past the brilliantly green fake plants and the colorless migrants unpacking boxes of genuine fruit, past the stall of nothing but oversized women’s panties and bras and the ever-smiling elderly shoeshine man who positioned himself in front of that stall as often as possible, and the coconut water college-drop-out guy who stole his inventory from his next door neighbor’s trees every Saturday morning, and the vinyl record woman who used to be a DJ and took a chance on damaging her inventory each mercilessly hot day she was there, and the framed silkscreen vendor, and the Knife Nazi, and the Teapot Lady, and the guy who sold discount cigarettes, standing in his cloud of second-hand cancer, telling it as he saw it, and he had seen some weird stuff.

Imagine burying a football for sixty years, digging it up, then shaping a human being from that weathered leather and inflating it with cigarette smoke. That was him. That was Bud, but only to acquaintances he could tolerate.

He sometimes said his name was Frank Canada, but he mostly didn’t like to give out his name, so that was probably just one of many pseudonyms he regularly used. He made his living selling discount cigarettes at the flea market. He declared this to every person he encountered multiple times, in a voice so reminiscent of parking on a gravel driveway that you expected to see whole rocks erupt from his mouth instead of the occasional cloud of spittle.

People making cash deals under assumed names are not generally chatty, but Bud had a seismic approach to conversation. Between seeming eons of smokey dormancy, he would erupt with a voluminous geyser of hot, molten (and random) monologue. Maybe not truly a monologue, but not a dialogue. Mostly, he expounded upon tobacco-related minutia and the virtues of particular global currencies.

Occasionally, he felt compelled to enumerate the secrets and finer points of the flea market ecosystem.

He would artfully punctuate his historical diatribes with a pregnant drag off the eternal cigarette jutting from the craggy desert landscape of his face. The cigarette was always there and always looked freshly lit. The man was unerringly smoking, although I have few memories of him putting out a butt or lighting up a new one. It was as though he had stumbled upon some long-forgotten alchemical tobacconism that revealed the secret of an endless, mobius-cigarette.

I long suspected that somewhere in his second-generation mid-70s VW bus was a painting of a cigarette growing shorter year after year. This imagery might seem weird until you realize the sheer frequency of bizarre, extra-normal, and vaguely menacing crap that happens at this sort of place virtually every weekend.

He would emphatically point out to those who asked that he did not have to tell anyone his name.

This ain’t the Y. And even if it was the Y, I wouldn’t be telling a pansy like you.

He was the unreliable discount cigarette narrator, spinning yarns about himself and the Dusty Bucket, almost pathologically. He’d tell a few people, You can call me Bud, but when someone followed up with, So your name is Bud? he’d say, Prove it. Prove it, pal. You writin’ a book? Keep askin' and you’ll be hearin' from my attorney...in fact, you’re hearin' from him now, and my client doesn’t have to put up with your harassment. Cease and desist or there will be an injunction filed against you forthwith...and then your wife and kids will be selling my discount cigarettes here at the flea market.

He took pride in working for no one but himself. He was entirely self-made (not including the little Chinese dudes that got him the raw rolling materials).

He had no enemies, nor did he claim many friends. He called it like he saw it and, there in the Lots (as the weekend regulars nicknamed the flea market), You see a lot of shady shit.

Like the time a neighboring vendor’s son got nutted by a dyke by the porta-potties, or when they found that sick bastard selling made-for-television murder items or the time the world was nearly overrun by ancient singing glass. But that would be jumping ahead, which is ironic, as much of this story somehow takes place thousands of years ago.

Bottom line: In the heavily trafficked intersections of this twisted world, the worst parts of the wreckage that crumple and break free get sold at the Dusty Bucket Flea Market, off I-13; or, as Bud liked to call it, the swap meet of sin.

Two. The Reptilian Escapades of the Lizard Pimp

My initial idea for selling at the flea market (for a single weekend, I thought) stemmed from suddenly being responsible for knick-knacks that my mother had accumulated over decades. When she passed, I found a garden shed filled with Hummels, Gnomes and other collectible tchotchkes.

It was not a surprise when she died. We had not been close for a long time. I kept putting off the inevitable while rationalizing that she would get better. I kept delaying the conversations about what she wanted to do with her collectibles; did she want me to stay in the house, or should I feel guilty if I want to sell it and move on? Or when it was that I stopped being the daughter she had always imagined she could be proud of?

I will not say, In her defense, because it is just a fact: I was not destined to be the daughter most mothers imagined. It is difficult to say when I went from accepting the clothes and toys of a girly girl to noticing boys. Not sexually, at first, but feeling the vibe of the boys and how they dressed and carried themselves. That just felt more authentically me. She was not very understanding, but then she was a widow and not very educated. Again, not in her defense.

After separating from my most recent significant other and recovering from a layoff at the paper, I needed a cash infusion. I decided to try my luck at unloading the figurines. As fortune would have it, one of the inside stalls had recently become available.

Y ou smoke?

The market office was a strange column-like two-story structure along the middle aisle of the market. There was a window for transactions at least five feet off the ground, wherin the rotund young woman who ran the office (where you paid for your space and had it assigned) sat pretty far above that, addressing you from a desk that meant literally talking down to everyone.

The window itself was reminiscent of a confessional, with a thick layer of screen across the opening through which she made her decrees. Regulars pay their rent and confirm their space before the end of the previous Sunday. However, this was mid-morning on a Wednesday, when new dealers could pick up vacancies on a first-come/first-served basis. I remembered that from when I worked at the same market one summer back in high school, selling hot dogs and soda at the concession stand, crushing on just about everyone working next to me. I did not remember a smoking policy. It was always an open air, shanty-like market. The question surprised me.

Cigarettes? Yeah... I admitted. I saw no reason to divulge a chronic weed habit. I had no intention of sparking up during business hours out in the open. And I never took to vaping.

OK, good. Non-smokers aren’t usually happy with this space, but it’s the last one I have under the roof. You're going to be in Row H, east of center. Cell phones never work out there, so don't come at me about it. If you got something important, you can use the Ferris wheel. Just ask one of the regulars.

I should have been more curious why being a smoker made me more eligible to take the spot, but I just wanted to secure the covered space. Besides, it quickly became apparent after I drove to my designated 10’ x 10’ stall.

Early that Saturday morning, I smelled the burnt tobacco and ash while several spaces away, and my windows were not even down. I drove through a cloud of nicotine to get to my booth, and the dealer I passed displayed carton after carton of what appeared to be generic cigarettes.

The cloud was so constant and thick that I never saw the neighbor clearly while I unloaded my trunk and set up my table.

As I vaguely remembered to be the normal flow of things, early mornings at the flea market were when it was the busiest. People waited in a line of cars for the public parking to open so they could be the first to get legitimate deals, often to sell the items themselves at other swap meets or on consignment somewhere (or, more recently, online).

There was a mid-morning lull after that rush. I sold a single figurine of two children on a seesaw for $15 (likely worth closer to $50), recovering a little under half my rent for the weekend, but was otherwise not impacted by the supposed prime time. That initial lull was the first time my neighbor deemed me worthy of a conversation.

That’s a good stall, he started saying, assuming I would know he was even talking to me after ignoring my booth from within his cloud for more than an hour. We had exchanged nods to each other, but that was it. He was about 6’5" (making him a foot taller than me), bald, clean-shaven, and never without a lit cigarette in his mouth. In retrospect, his smoking made me smoke less (*that* day, anyway).

Our choice of clothing was weirdly similar. Dungarees you might find on a hobo, tucked in white Oxford shirts too worn to be welcome as a donation somewhere, and both with our sleeves rolled up and ready for business. Besides the ink on my arms and my Chuck Taylors versus his scuffed boots, we were funhouse reflections of each other.

"You’re lucky to grab that. There was a reptile guy there who sold lot lizards - like iguanas and salamanders he’d catch in the parking lot - and bbq - with small and numerous racks of ribs - and girls...not bbq girls, although could you imagine?

You heard me talking about the bordello before? He slithered in after the bust and set up with a strict no married vendors policy and a filthy Winnebego. He had a circle of girls specializing in handjobs, although I guess it could be considered Lot jobs. They'd make the deal right where you're sittin' and then led the johns back to the storage lot.

He then indicated another dealer in the next row, almost directly across from us. "His girls would fight over the guy who sells candied nuts over there because they loved the smell after. His junk made their hands smell like pecan pie, they said.

Mr. Slithers got jealous and intimidated the shit out of the candied-nut guy. I brokered the truce between them for a while, he interjected with obvious pride.

"Like all reptiles, he reverted to his nature. He had some style, don't get me wrong, with his alligator shoes and snakeskin everything. But he only weighed like 85 lbs, and he’d cut you as soon as look at you. ‘I don’t cut deals, I cut chumps,’ he’d say.

"He also ate pickled eggs. Whole. Just swallowed them down. ‘Now that’s $5 for the lizard jerky, $20 for a handy from my girl, or get the fuck out of my face!’ Holding a pimp cane with a rattle on the handle, he punctuated his bullshit by eating an egg, bottom jaw unhinging; you could see it slide down his throat whole.

"A little while ago, he tried to lean on some high-school jock who groped one of his girls without paying, but the jock got a quick, lucky swing off and jacked his shit. Suddenly Mr. Slithers was left crying on the concrete, cane broken and in pieces all around him, whore trying to console him until he belted her.

Then, last Monday, he charged the high school football field during practice and stabbed the kid right out in the open. Didn’t kill him. Pickled eggs don’t give you the strength to force a knife through a defensive lineman’s shoulder pads. Still, that was likely the last we’re going to see of the lizard pimp. Lucky for you, though. That’s a nice spot.

Three. The Uncanny Carlboros

It’s difficult to recall precisely which tall tales the cigarette guy told me – or in which order – after that first exchange. This partial amnesia includes when he initially told me to call him Bud.

He repeated himself frequently, but he also added to or changed the details of his stories, which made it difficult to keep track, likely on purpose. Bud started selling at the Dusty Bucket back in twenty-ought-three, after his Sally died.

Died of lung cancer, she did. Never smoked a day in her life. Explain that!

She never complained about Bud’s smoking, if he was to be believed, and loved the flea market.

He would tell me these snippets, rarely inquiring about my life in return, often turning away as I would start to engage him in whatever conversation so he could bark at the crowd:

"Looking for Marlboros? I have Carlboros! Carl Campbell rolls them up out behind the VFW. Good stuff!

"Come one, come all! Law enforcement, medical professionals, military personnel, traveling salesmen: When you see the impermanence of life every day, we’ve got the break you’ve been looking for!

"From machinists to construction workers, masseuses to surgeons, nothing steadies your hand like a Carlboro!

"I’ve got nicotine gum, nicotine patches, chew for your chaw, and more! What’s more!? For college athletes, airline pilots, grade school teachers, firemen, and tracheotomy patients: when you’re on the down low, I’ve got Holy Smokes, the new nicotine suppositories on sale exclusively here! When pills, patches, and gum aren’t enough, try the new butt snuff!

"Call yourself a Camel man? I have Campbells! Carl Campbell rolls *them* up behind the VFW. Good stuff.

Feeling constipated, anxious, or have family members facing death by firing squad? Seven out of ten doctors practicing in 1953 recommended premium nicotine for postpartum depression, colicky babies, and the violently senile. From cradle to grave, cigarettes make your life more tolerable. Get your smoke on for less here!

He would occasionally look around to see if anyone was listening or (more often) if there were no customers in the row and he wanted to wake up his neighbors.

"In the market for ‘Light’ cigarettes? We’ve got Campbells Wipes, discounted because they’re rolled when Carl has to take a dump. But don’t worry. He’s got a hose for emergencies.

I’ve got Fairfax Fatties. You’ve waddled a long way, doll, if you’re smoking Fairfax Fatties, he’d continue as if he was doing a tight five at the Chuckle Hut. The flavor is in the plump!

Sometimes, during a particularly quiet moment, or when no one was paying attention to him whatsoever, he’d turn back to me to say something like, "There’s a Vietnamese tobacco called thuoc lao. I got hooked on it when I spent time in Viet Nam. I wasn’t drafted, or anything. A man’s gotta do *something* with his time.

"They have a tobacco in Kuwait called dokha, which means ‘dizzy.’ I tried it when I first met Carl in Iraq in 1991. We were drawn to the chaos. Also, there was an international tobacco enthusiasts convention."

Kuwait plays heavily in his exchanges with the customers. While he only accepts cash, he will take a variety of currencies, most especially the Kuwaiti Dinar, the strongest currency on the planet (according to him).

Then Bud would turn back toward the other vendors who were bored and hot. For the more refined consumer, I have Brothellos, rolled in the flappy petals of a retired prostitute! She also does Cameltoes, unfiltered! The laughter would reverberate up and down the stalls.

No, but seriously, menthol fans will want to try CarlPorts. If you like jazz and cocoa butter and are also subject to systematic police brutality, you can’t go wrong with CarlPorts!

This deviation would invariably prompt an exasperated request for him to stop from the older black woman on the opposite side of him.

I cannot accurately determine how much he told me or the passers-by that first Saturday. All I knew for certain was that I grossed $42 (which was depressing), going to the bathroom when you’re selling convenient-to-steal product is nerve-wracking, and I hardly told Bud any details about myself, which felt okay.

We were neighbors, and maybe we would be acquaintances, but I had no impression whatsoever that we would be anything akin to friends.

Bud had already put up tarps around his space, making his inventory slightly more challenging to reach and thus securing his place for the night. I had to wrap, box, and load all my inventory back into my Camry, taking a tremendous chance of chipping all of it.

If this is something I’m going to do every week, I thought, I need to improve my system.

Then I spent my net profits on some chicken nuggets on the way back to be alone in the 1950s prefab home my mother left me when she died.

Four. Creepy Curses of the Knife Nazi

Igot there way too early on that first Sunday. When you’re alone and not remotely religious, there are usually few reasons to get out of bed on that particular day of the week. I’m guessing the novelty of selling my life outside (or at least my mom’s former life) gave me a charge. The morning was bright and full of promise.

Bud’s VW bus was already there as I pulled up to my stall. I didn’t see him anywhere, though his tarps were all stored. It didn’t impact me one way or the other. I just started unloading the Camry of the heavily insulated boxes and setting my figurines up for display. I was putting out the last gnome, tilting him ever so slightly so his cherubic expression *might* catch the eye of someone passing by, maybe, when Bud’s voice startled me from his space.

If you plan on coming out every weekend, you’re going to have to diversify.

I did my best to resist reacting. I had no interest in conveying that I had been surprised. I did not turn nor try to meet Bud's eye when I said in as non-committal a fashion as I could muster, Is that right?

You know that’s right, he confirmed. "Mr. Slithers only started selling BBQ when folks stopped buying his lizards for pets...or his rough tugs. The lady selling homemade puppets from the shit she finds along the side of the road? She used to sell self-help cassette tapes. The lady who sells shampoos, conditioners, and other hotel shit? She’s a shill for a home security company.

"They set her up out here with a clipboard and a box for collecting folks’ personal information for a free cruise, and then they rob their places while they’re gone and *then* they sell them home security, which is a great scam! But she wasn’t making a ton from it, so now she sells the bathroom crap she gets from God knows where. Shit, even Nick the Knife Nazi used to sell belt buckles, like almost exclusively...before Obama."

I finished futzing with the figurines on my table while he spoke. We were both at the front of our booths, looking at the enormous double-spaced slot across the aisle. There the greasy, slight figure of a middle-aged man had just arrived and had started uncovering his inventory of Swastika-adorned Crocodile Dundee-style giant serrated knives, switchblades, and even throwing stars (which was a little strange, I thought. White supremacist imagery affixed to Asian defense weapons? But there they were), plus assorted bandanas, flags, and other miscellaneous fare. I kept my voice low. I still don't know if Bud wasn't able to do the same, or just didn’t care.

Wait a second, I asked. The guy who sells knives’ name is ‘Nick?

Nope. Name’s Dwayne. But he’s shown up one too many times with one too many bandaids. He keeps insisting it ain’t ‘cause of his own inventory, but we took to calling him Nick behind his back. He paused to look at me directly. You might be sharp.

I have moments, mostly. ‘Nazi’ seems extreme, no?

I wouldn’t normally condone anyone being labeled Nazi without good reason, but Nick gives good reason. He used to have a high-profile spot near concessions, back when he was selling belt buckles with stuff like the state of Texas or Graceland on them, but the moment Obama took office, he shifted to items more appealing to the weekend warrior skinhead crowd, and his booth was permanently relocated to our aisle with the lizard bbq and discount cigarettes. It hasn’t helped his disposition. It’s not like he’s the only one doing it, though. Every flea market in this country has a knife Nazi. Nick just happens to be ours.

Bud motioned for me to go to the back of the booths, to stand in the channel, well out of eavesdropping range because *this* was going to be the interesting part. Before he started, I had to ask him, Do you hear that?

What?

Not even hear, exactly, more like feel. It’s music, but it’s not in the air. It’s coming from the ground.

Bud looked discouraged. You sound higher than a Himalayan hooker in heels.

I’m on caffeine and nicotine. Maybe a little residual weed from last night, but that’s it, I swear. You don’t feel that sound in your feet? It’s the strangest thing. It’s kind of lovely.

Bud gestured dismissal of all that as though he didn’t have any idea what I meant and that was not what we were back there for. Then he started telling me the story of the feminist cult leader who sold crystals and one of her many booth babe girlfriends some years back. 

N ick had joint custody of his older teenage son, who came out to the market every few weekends and listened to nothing but Chicago on a constant loop and loud enough for everyone to hear. Bill, the son, was 17. He became somewhat obsessed with one of the younger lesbians working at the enormous multi-booth set up near the middle aisle that specialized in new-age literature and Wiccan paraphernalia.

Bill was convinced he’d been sent by God to convert the salesgirl to proper, God-fearing heterosexuality. This was surprising because everyone who knew him in the Lots was pretty confident he’d never actually been laid himself.

One weekend, he confronted her near the food court, basically demanding she go out with him and tugging at her arm as she tried to politely say no. Finally, on the walk past the lucky coin fountain, she reached her limit with his interest, turned quickly to tell him to leave her alone, and accidentally kneed him in the balls while Baby What a Big Surprise played in his headphones. Loud enough for everyone to hear.

Later, around closing time that Sunday, he tried to revenge rape her. On her last trip to the outhouses, with no one else around, he lunged at her to force her into one of the plastic shit booths, laughing like it was all a big joke. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t keep track of her boss girlfriend, who thinks almost as much of knives as his old man. She swept in out of nowhere and castrated him with one well-placed thrust in the crotch of his jeans and a determined pull up and out when extracting the blade. They left him to bleed in the mud next to the port-o-lets while Feeling Stronger Every Day faded into the background. Still, it was loud enough for everyone to hear.

At least that was the way Bud told it. There was no way he could know what the kid was listening to, or even what went down. He wasn’t there. But he spoke with such authority on whatever he was blathering about that it was easy to keep the questions surface level. I mean, whether he was telling the truth or not became incidental. I was riveted. It didn’t hurt that I was also completely enthralled with this rhythm my brain heard but my feet felt. I was entranced and had not noticed the crowds finally coming through.

When he finished the story, Bud immediately started barking.

After sex, before church, or the other way around if you’re groovy, get your Carlboros here! Good stuff!

I shook my head to bring myself back to reality and turned to look at my table of goods. I thought I do need to diversify.

Five. The Intolerable Teapot Lady

Things took their usual downturn around lunch that day. I only remember because I was having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I first heard the ruckus in the stall to my right.

I’m sick of it, Frank! I’m tired of you and your customers being so inconsiderate!

I was still chewing when I quietly got up to investigate. I peered around a stack of cigarette cartons towards the back of Bud's booth and saw a petite, older black woman in an impeccable pantsuit, standing on her toes in the cigarette vendor’s personal space so she could lecture him face to sternum.

"It’s SOOT, Frank! SOOT on my inventory that *I* have to clean! YOU don’t have to clean them! YOU aren’t courteous enough to even *offer* to clean them!"

Bud’s expression was primarily bemusement, even with her finger coming perilously close to his face.

C’mon, Doris. That could come from anywhere. Why, that could be dust from the channel–

"Stop! Stop insulting my intelligence, cancer man! It’s you smoking, it’s them smoking, it’s all *this*, she gestured to his entire inventory, and it shouldn’t be legal!"

I didn’t have an issue with Bud or his business, but I knew she was right. The tin roof above his stall was several shades more gray than everywhere else, and this part of the market smelled like an ashtray.

Well, if I’m ever arrested, at least I know who to call, he said with a grin.

Not even if you were on death row!

That response appeasing her need to make a point, she withdrew her accusatory finger, dropped down off her