A Gorgon In Dade County

by Jon-Paul Smith

Ronald kept telling me there was a Medusa that lived in Dade County up on the mountain in a trailer.

“She got snakes in her hair,” he said, his eyes getting wide behind giant plastic frames, holding his hands around his head. “Keeps em up in curlers.”

“They’re not Medusas. They’re Gorgons,” I said, handing the joint back to him. “Medusa is the name of a person.”

He ignored me every time I told him that. I’m not sure he understood the difference.

He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Born and raised on Sand Mountain. Three years in the state pen. Didn’t learn to read until he was maybe twenty-five. Even then he kinda struggled with it. I got to know him back when he was slinging weed for my step daddy. After a while he got tired of smoking weed with the old man so he took to hanging out with me in my room.

I was twenty one years old, a junior in college, writing code in Pascal on an ANSI terminal. It always made his eyes bug out staring at that screen, his eyes looking huge behind the lenses he wore, the ones the doc made him wear on account of his glaucoma. But that ANSI screen, in his eyes, it more or less made me a wizard or something.

“I need something computer I know who to call.”

Ronald was always talking about how good pussy was.

He also thought he was a lot better guitar player than he actually was. He’d get high and beat on his old Gibson, trying to look cool, but it sounded like absolute horse shit every time.

I kinda felt sorry for him sometimes, when he wasn’t getting on my nerves.

But damn that weed was good. A friend of his was running it up the interstate from somewhere in Florida. I never got all the details on that, never gave a shit really. All I cared about was the weed.

I used to call his friend the Jolly Green Giant, on account of he always had a huge shit eating grin on his face and he was kind of a big fucker. Not to mention dumb as a rock, like the human version of a can of green beans.

You gotta wonder what they feed those country boys sometimes.

The first time I met the Jolly Green Giant he had ten pounds of dank ass weed spread out on my step daddy’s coffee table. He was playing with a set of scales, trying to figure out how to weigh it and break it up like he was trying to solve a complex calculus equation. To this day I don’t think he ever figured it out. He looked like the whole thing was giving him a headache, judging by the pained look of concentration on his face.

Like I said. Dumb.

He never said much.

I remember he had a stripper girlfriend who was the brains of the operation. She had a mix tape she liked dancing to. Stevie Nicks. I can’t remember the song. I used to call her the Whore Of Babylon.

You know, the Jolly Green Giant and the Whore Of Babylon. It had a nice ring to it.

He brought her over one night while I was studying upstairs. I heard a lotta hollerin downstairs so I came down for a peek and there she was, naked as day one, doing a slow dance, the kind where she spread her legs a little bit.

“Show him your pussy,” Ronald said.

So I sat down in my step daddy’s recliner and she showed me her pussy. My step daddy was sittin on the sofa, high as hell, just smilin ear to ear like he was thinking hell yeah, that’s my boy, watching the whole thing.

She had a pretty pussy. She had it shaved and she spread it real wide for me, standing there right in front of me, her pretty little pussy with the brown labia not more than five inches from my face. It looked small and tight, real pretty.

“That’s some damn good pussy,” the Jolly Green Giant said, shaking his head.

Ho ho ho.

One day I walked in on the two of them while they were fucking but that didn’t stop them even when they saw me standing there. I remember she looked me dead in the eye while her boyfriend with the big dick hammered away at her pretty little pussy like Ragnorok was coming or something. That look in her eyes let me know right away that I’d get a chance to hit it if I ever got the notion.

All I’d need for that was a little green.

Which I didn’t have besides I was too shy anyway.

But one day when I asked them about the Medusa on the mountain their eyes just went wide.

“Ain’t never been there,” the Jolly Green Giant said. “Don’t plan to neither. But we used to go skinny dippin in the crick by her trailer. Hell, everybody has.”

Anyway that’s the crowd Ronald was rolling with. Good old boy from the mountain types. I guess they just reminded him of home. You can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy, ya know what I’m saying?

Ronald was just a good old boy out of his element and that’s all he was ever gonna be.

But boy did he take a shine to me. Like I was the life he never had or something.

He had this idea we could take a picture of her with our phones. That way we wouldn’t get turned to stone.

“She lives in a trailer out past Sandy Cove. It’s about ten minutes past my ex old lady’s house up in a patch of trees. Out by the crick. I used to drive by it all the time. I could take us to it.”

I kept telling him he was full of shit but I finally got tired of hearing him go on about it so I said yes I’d go.

That’s how we took a trip up on the mountain.

The ride up there we didn’t talk much. I had an exam coming up. I really needed to be at the house, working the books. I just sat there in the passenger seat of his Ford Trans Am, a vintage 70’s model that he somehow kept running, the one with a big bald eagle on the hood etched with rust, listening to that V8 purr and minding my own business watching the trees go by. It was about a forty-five minute drive from my house on I-24 past that bend in the Tennessee river, the one that kinda looked like a lake with the sun hitting its surface and cutting rippling shards of light. It rained a little bit on the way there but then it let up.

We crossed the Georgia state line when I finally thought to ask about how everyone knew about her what with everyone who ever saw her gettin turned to stone and all.

It was a pretty damn good question really.

Ronald didn’t miss a lick though. He had the window rolled down on the driver’s side and the wind was blowing his hair back. He kept it long, trying to look like a rock star but he still managed to look like a nerd anyway just not a very smart one.

“Everybody up there knows about her. I got no idea how it all got started.”

I guessed that was as good an answer as I was going to get.

Finally we came to a patch of trees on the right and he pulled the Ford over a little bit and stopped. The road there was pock marked and rough, like the skin of some big gray Titan with a history of bad acne.

We got out of the car and Ronald pointed at the brush.

“She’s that way a bit.”

So we pushed our way through.

The trailer she lived in was a shit hole. Clayton Homes single wide, pretty run down. The roof on one side had a dip in it where the rain had been working at it. There was a small beat up wooden porch that worked its way up two steps to a single door that was kinda hanging open on one hinge. The windows were covered over with old white towels, the white long gone now.

We’d had to climb through the brush just to find it. I never even saw a power line. I guess that’s just how she rolled up there in the thickets. When we finally wormed our way through it all I had those little sticker seeds all over my pants. I’d have to check myself for ticks when we got home.

The grass in her yard was kinda long. There was a rusted old swing set off to the left with a broken chain, the rubber seat hanging sideways like a peeled bandaid, still slick with rain. I could barely see an old dishwasher under a thick patch of brush and grass just behind the trailer on the left.

“That’s where she lives. Been there ever since the Graysons left.”

He pointed at the trailer.

The main thing though was all the statues there in the tall grass. They lined the yard like random chess pieces. It gave the yard just a hint of ancient Greece but they kind of gave me the creeps.

I noticed one of them had a hard on, some dude with a mullet in Wrangler cut offs and a cell phone in his hand. You could see the bulge by the left pocket of his cut offs, kinda poking out just past the frayed edge like a little ground worm checking out the weather situation. Whoever lived here had some pretty weird taste in art, that’s what I was thinking.

“Look one of those statues has a boner.”

I pointed at it and waited, staring at it for a minute, but Ronald never said anything which was weird cause his sense of humor usually ran that way.

So I looked over but Ronald was gone. There was a stone statue in his place right where he’d been standing.

Still it was him all right. Right down to the plastic lenses and those weird bug eyes of his that always looked gigantic behind those ridiculous frames.

Turned to stone.

It’d been his idea and the dumb fucker forgot to bring his phone along.

But that’s when I realized all his bullshit was real.

And that’s when I started to just get scared as fuck and I kind of froze up.

I thought maybe now might be a good time to let the camera on my phone do the looking around.

You know, just in case she tried to sneak up on me. She had to be around there somewhere.

It’s not that hard to do, really. You just gotta keep your eyes on the screen, man. You just stare bug eyed at that screen like your life’s depending on it.

So I whipped my phone out and started moving it from side to side, just feeling my way around, kind of the way you paw around for a switch when the lights are out. I wasn’t exactly looking for her.

I was actually just trying to find the goddamn car keys in Ronald’s pocket. Wondering if they somehow got turned to stone along with the rest of him.

Cause it was gonna be a long walk home without em.

And that’s when I saw her. Just as I was swinging the phone around.

I felt the hairs on my neck go real tight.

She was looking right at me, not ten feet away, standing right there on her front porch, the one that was built into the side of her trailer with the paint peeling off.

Looking me dead in the eye, with those fucking curlers in her hair. She had a bathrobe on, standing there barefoot. All those snake heads in her hair, yeah, they were looking at me too, wrapped around those curlers just happy as you please with the midday sun in their eyes.

They had tiny solid black eyes and flicking tongues like little demons.

But the phone trick must’ve worked because I wasn’t turned to stone.

So I stopped moving, kept watching her on the camera, just waiting to see what she was gonna do. I was scared, so scared I could barely breathe, just trying to keep that phone from shaking. I had cotton mouth so bad right then but I hadn’t smoked any weed on the way up. That’s how scared I was.

She started working at the belt on her robe.

“You know it sure gets lonely up here on the mountain,” she said, her voice kinda husky in a slow Southern drawl, taking a couple steps down the stairs toward me, her bare feet disappearing in the long grass.

Then she started undoing her bathrobe as she kept walking.

“You sure you don’t wanna stay a while?”

Then she opened that bathrobe all the way and I got a good look at what she had going on.

She had snakes down there too. Little bitty ones.

And a pussy that was pretty enough to die for.

And I was pretty sure looking at that would turn you to stone just the same as looking at her face.

Like there wasn’t any difference, she was still all Gorgon and all woman too. From head to toe, if you know what I’m saying, which was probably how all those statues got there in the first place.

I thought about the one I’d seen just a minute ago.

The one with the erection.

You know I’d thought it was some weird Greek thing but now I knew better. Can’t take the country outta those good ole boys with their phones, ya know what I’m sayin?

I mean those country boys sure love to go on and on about how good pussy is. Sure they could avoid looking at her face if they wanted to. But that pussy did them in every time.

I thought about it for a second.

And that’s when I tucked tail and ran.

She didn’t even try to follow me though. I guess she was just a horny old homebody at heart, all alone there up on the mountain.

It was hell getting back to my house. Eventually I hitched a ride from some weird fucker with a pot belly in a white wife beater. He picked me up in his pickup truck. He had a bald spot on his head but he couldn’t have been more than twenty five if that and the rest of his hair was real long.

“I’d ask if you got a good look at her,” he said. “But I already know the answer to that question.”

I thumbed my phone, thinking about that, thinking about how I’d probably been the first one out there to get a picture of her and still live to talk about it. I thought about telling him but decided against it.

I just didn’t feel like getting into it.

“Nah,” I said. “But my buddy wasn’t that lucky.”

He whistled through his teeth, shaking his head.

“Happens all the time up here on the mountain, man.”

When I got home I checked myself for ticks and found a couple. They popped open when I pulled them out. Then I wiped my hands, sat down with my phone and started going through the camera roll. It was all there all right. I got some good pictures of her face. I got at least one good picture of her what not too.

I still got the pictures if you ever want to see them.

But I ain’t ever going back on the mountain again.