Allan's walk (d.)

More electronic bleeps are heard. Allan can see wires and for a moment it looks like how his father sometimes configures his basement, with wires from all over the West Bluff snaking down to a bolted door in the sub ground level of Casa McReynolds with Warren chain smoking, guzzling infinite pots of java and devising things and solving mathematical quandaries that have stumped aging Aristotles for centuries past.

 

He treads past more bleeps, femur thick tangles of wire arranged in stalks akin to thin bouquets of bamboo. Perhaps this is the semi-nuclear facilitator room Allan overheard Patrick talking about filling with fireworks and then watching the whole of CLS rise over the horizon like a grainy Mario shroom levitating above the bluff.

 

There is what looks like a scoreboard in a giant arena hanging overhead with more extensions than medusa blinking pixilated cycloptic screens, about fifty or sixty or so on each side, each in black and white and each screen appears to be broadcasting a different image. What fascinates Allan about the screens is that every square seems to have a picture of his brother on it, or at least someone who looks like him. The screen’s fizz and bleep like early morning cable. On one screen Allan’s brother appears to be wearing a baseball cap with some sort of Mickey’s Ice Hornet attached to the front of it and he is in some remote villa in either Spain or perhaps France or somewhere like that and it is evening and Patrick is sweating plops of perspiration the size of rosary beads and he is breathing into some tanned, slightly Olive-skinnned girls’ lips, the girl, appears to be unconscious and it is apparently Patrick’s duty to awaken her into the onset of what reality really is. The girl’s limps flail up and down in a limp backstroke motion , wailing something up and down, screaming silence into her face. A giant MUTE bubble is flashing in the lower corner of each of the screens, occluding Alan from hearing anything. Another box shows the same character holding something in his hand, dandling it so to speak, smiling back at it.  There is another electronic box which shows what he is almost definitely sure is his brother sitting in Doctor Kennedy Marshal’s classroom, looking into a separate overhead screen. Another box shows Patrick seated at the table with people who look very much like Marcellus Buck and Aron Bowman and Allan cannot possibly discern why his brother would ever considering doing that in the first place.

 

Perhaps this is all reality really is, Allan thinks. Maybe this is all reality really is.

Voodoo doll-baby... (Meredith-Elise Willow and Iola clitty stoned narcotic interlude)...

Iola Klittie wears her ballet tutu to class and little Tiara and banner proclaiming her Miss Jr. Kewanee Hog Day Festival ’90.  The weird thing about Iola Klitty is that, even though her weight is comparable enough to be Bev Pines progeny-she has the most beautiful smile that has ever been spotted on campus. Reviled by jocks and losers alike, she waltzes on the tip of her toes, in between classes sashaying and pirouetting. Often Ollie Holiday will carry her books. Olivia “Ollie” Holiday’s locker is right next to Meredith-Elise’s locker. Meredith keeps postcards of Picasso’s Blue period epoxied inside her locker as well as works of Modigliani.  While the Losers scale the rungs of the Yellow Monkey bars Cabbages McGranahn and Meredith Elise exit the Café Hemlock and skulk down to the cemetery in the lower portion of logan field to smoke clove cigarettes, discuss ennui and juvenile sexual-incompetency, parochial tyranny and (oh yes) to occasionally get stones employing a hitter shaped like a Hello Kitty Pacifier.  

 

 

“I always have a hard time inhaling it,”

 

“Just think of it as vintage clove and inhale gracefully like this?”

 

“Like this?”

 

“Yes- “

 

“Meredith-?”

 

‘Yes vodoo dollbaby?”

 

“Before you start talking like a fucking English teacher and start saying things like, ‘The salubrious, medicinal benefits of THC  primarily is that it artistically assuages the ennui of life here in the cracker-barrel helmet of the midwest-I was just wondering if you think we’ll ever get in trouble for smoking grass during recess…”

 

“Doll babybuttercup-you have to first understand one thing,”

 

“Which is?”

 

Pause. Meredith-Elise takes another hit. The smoke seeps through her lips like exhaust from the dryer in late November, “When you, my oh-so knee-swaggering worry-wart, smoke grass, your eyes actually become more hazel.”

 

“Really,”

 

“As illuminant  grove-gulley hazel ensconced in a fair-cheek-ed socket lass, I assure you by the sweat of my fair forehead.”

 

“Thanks,”

 

“Doesn’t Hale ever make analogies like that about your physique?”

 

Cabbage’s McGranahan’ hazel eyes swing North, near the Yellow monkey bars and the mulch pile which Bev pine uses to empty her CRISCO lard barrel twice a week. She can see three shadows fall upon the heapy mulch. Hale is the largest and right now, his shadow seems to be gesticulating in such a way that it is making Pat McReynolds  shadow angry. She can see Hale’s shadow sway back and forth, as if he is dancing with his shoulders.

 

“Well,” Cabbages mutter, outdrawn. “Hale did say that my eyes were like two peas in a pods once-but I think he just said that to get some. You know Hale--poor boy can’t go three hours without a little, ‘Whew-hoo!’. Cabbages shifts her shoulders and performs a little jolly Hale jig.

 

 

Trundling near Edvard Stinkenhauser’s tombstone is Iola Klitty and Ollie Holiday. Ollie is performing her ballet leaps and Iola, with her apostolic Christian denim dress that picks up dirt every time she goes outside, has open her annotated N.I.V. concentrating in a highlighted verse.

 

“Careful Klitoraus, Cabbages is filling in her sexual cabinet.”

 

“Ohmigod, you girls are like having so many lustful and dirty thoughts-I like, love it.”

 

“Naughty-knotty,” Meredith-Elise makes a cross with her two forefingers and then brushes the top one over the bottom one as if she is endeavoring to generate heat friction to create an outback fire. Then she stops.

 

“Don’t you find it just a tad bit esoteric that our main hangout is like a cemetery?” Iola inquires, using her most mature voice, in front of Meredith-Elise.

 

“Actually, this was once Indian Mounds, so the urban legend goes?”

 

“It’s true,” Cabbages intervenes. “Hale claims that Patrick found a femur in the catacombs once when he was being punished.”

 

The girls look up. On the sidelines the cheerleaders patter plams and perform jumping jacks in front of Eric Bushman and Ganon Bowman. Marcellus Buck nearly always spends his recess period in one of the skybox-with Dwaynesha Terris-who already, at the tender age of fourteen, has given birth to three of Marcellus Buck’s twelve progeny. Apparently Buck claims that, once he goes pro, more than likely next fall, he will move Dwaynesha out of subsidized housing and hopefully, back to either Wllmignham or East Lansing. Connie Whitman jumps up and down. Karen pretty much performs a cheer in which she orgasmically titters every portion of her ample body and then sputters out the names of the starting five, one hand whisked between her legs in what she defines as being a borderline salute. Angie Passages sticks up her middle finger and calls Meredith-Elise a self righteous bookworm with very outdated spectacles.

 

“What pricks-if I may say so, in the name of Holy Moses,”

 

“Iola, you’re finally, in you’re A.C. snug naiveté-starting to come around,”

 

“When my mother first enrolled me in this academy-Coach M. said that he thought that an A.C. was something you turned on for five months out of the year.”

 

“Hale always says that Coach M. never knows whether to scratch his wrist or wind his watch-or is it the other way around?”

 

“Scratching your wrist is a sign of impotency,” Meredith-Elise notes.

 

“What’s that,” Iola Klitty, inquires.

 

“Iola, you go to the most licentious school in the country. Everything, everything that transpires inside these walls has something to do with scoring. How can you not see that?”

 

“Meredith-Elise face slowly rotates toward the pyramid of limbs and giggles and side pony tails held together by scrunches. In the center, leading the girls, is Junior Varsity Cheerleading Captain Hyacinth Hollis Lyoniski, a girl Meredith was once asked to partner up with over sliced frog spleen in anatomy lab, only she ended up getting stuck with Heidi Fairchild, because Doctor Marshal came into supervise the classroom and insisted that the popular girls namely, i.e., cheerleaders, partner together to cultivate an even tighter feminine bond.  Meredith-Elise has always wanted to hang out with Hollis. She has seen Hollis checking out both Dave VonB and Patrick McReynolds several times and once she was even livid because she saw VonB stare at her ass in the lunch line, the way he used to stare and salivate and ogle on her, Meredith-Elise’s shoulder pad. Before Cabbages fingers the hitter and taps it against one of the grave, Meredith thinks about how cool it would be if people would accept you-if strangers would talk to you. If you could watch 90210 reruns nightly and phone each other afterwards and hold slumber parties where people did girly things like paint and sprinkle appendages and gossip and talk about god in front of a my and the fourth American vowel. She wonders what an official CLS basketball game is all about. Von Behren used to work non-stop on his three pointer two season ago when Meredith first moved to this school from a little country shack outside of Havana, IL. VonBehren was a tenth reserve and, although he never missed a three, Coach M. put him in the game to commit fouls against the other team. The one time when the game was close and VonBehren went for a foul and ended up stealing the ball instead, he drove down the left hand side of the court and fired up the winning three to send the game into overtime. Coach M. was paralyzed with fury on the sidelines, claiming that VonB was a Judas and that he didn’t have enough self-esteem to be honored wearing a jersey of this caliber. VonBehren then left the game, but not without calling up his friends Hale and Patrick—Patrick, who somehow got a photograph of Lillian Looney, Coach M.’s thirteen year old  illegitimate granddaughter-who-for some reason, inexplicable-was enrolled in Concordia after her year at D.O.C. for stealing her father’s Volvo and driving to a PHISH and then selling the transmission to a stranded Hippie bungalow in exchange for three grams of shrooms-which she took, all at once-waking up three months later-asking her mom and dad where all the squirrels with the big ears disappeared to. Pat and Hale used to hang out (Coach M claims that they were the ones who corrupted their precious little angel by introducing her to a certain band called Metallica when she was in the third grade)-and on several occasion, Lillian would sneak into the Mcreynolds basement at three in the morning and the boys would pillage mama McReynolds medicine cabinet, which had non-child proof caps and non-mathematical proof  labeled on the sides and, at one party, Lillian, yanked down D. Hale’s tropical speedo and continued (much to the chagrin of Patrick-who, for some reason, never seems to get any in his own house these days) continued to give Hale some serious down south mouth head as the sun rose  and Hale tipped Allan a Kennedy half to take a Polaroid of the momentous occasion so that the photograph pictured Lillian I. Looney with her eyes locked and her face supplicating between two thighs the size of an arm chair and, by the end of the triple Comet overtime win (Coach M. informing the press that, even thought it may have looked like seldom used defense reserve D. VonBehren stole the ball and made the tying three-it was actually Eric Brushman who, momentarily had his contacts out and hair dyed brown) pounding on the locker and talking about, “How bad we is,” Coach M. entered the locker room, to compliment his kids when he found a copier machine, relocated from the teacher lounge, in the middle of the shower room Athletic-fungus fueled floor, locked on 1000x copies, ejaculating digitalized color copies of Lillian, Coach M.’s only daughter, going down on someone with rather large legs and acting like she enjoyed it more than the drugs or basketball. Apparently coach M just lost it, and, when no player came forth and admitted the culprit he ran to the visitor locker room with a handful of digitalized Xeroxes and beat the ever living shit out of the HomeValley Horseman that Opie Lippet had to be hospitalized and eventually fell into a coma before his lifeline was mysteriously unplugged afterhours-Mr. Mooney saying he was very sorry but was out of town on that date, offering a reward and free  in state tuition to the family who finds the murderer, telling the press that he needs to take it easier when he rushed into the VISTORS locker room to shake the lead forwards paw next time. Out of the one thousand pictures printed, nine hundred eighty-seven of them have been accounted for.

David Hale has three, framed and autographed, at home near his inventions table. It is rumored that Doctor Marshal Kennedy has one locked up in her safety deposit box underneath the cushions of her Rainbow patience couch. The other eight were purportedly sent out to global dignitaries-the president of the United States, the Queen Mother, Gorby as well as others, out of only two, Fidel Castro and Francois Mitterrand, sent back a thank you to coach M, Castro’s included a cigar which Coach M. used on intern, Miss Renae, or so it was wildly rumored. Coach M. Held a Shadrach, Meeshak, and Abindgo outing, where Hale, VonB, and Patrick were all coerced into wearing DEPEND diapers as mock loin cloths and then forced to stand very close to the Homecoming bondfire-the night ended with a wiener roast and sing-a-long and in  the morning-when the inferno waned, Patrick, VonB and Hale, still stood up, chilled, dew trickling down their spines wondering if they could go home now, to pray to their own mattress gods and goddesses.

 

 

 

 

 

Meredith looks up. Holly does a cheer, turns around, looks at Patrick who, from the fifty meter distant of the cemetery to the Yellow monkey bars and the cheerleader mosh pit, it looked like Patrick just blew Holly a kiss on the top of his forefinger and fired it her way, using his signature shotgun. Cabbages takes a long hit and passes it past Meredith-Elise and to Ollie Holiday, who takes a long drag and blows smoke out from between her lips.

           

“Go ahead, Iola, try it.”

 

“Is that like, illegal,”

 

“Everything that’s fun is illegal, Iola.” Utters cabbages, “Just look at Hale,” She points near the big man who has momentarily stepped off the Yellow Monkey Bars and is showing Jebediah Noel the proper methodology in the art of the Hoola Hoop. “He’s fun,”

           

“And he should be illegal, sex with him anyways”

 

The girls giggle. Iola crosses herself and looks up at a mashed cloud.  The sky has a London Earl gray flavor inked into it.

 

“Easy girls, whooooh, going just a leetle bit too fast for Iola here.”

 

Iola begins to mutter something which sounds like a prayer

 

“Ear,” Ollie turns into Iola, “It will help relax you,”

 

“Why is it that whenever people get high and pass a joint around between them after looking both ways first to secure that no one is watching them-why is it that they always say the word, ‘ear’. Like the body part?”

 

“Johosephats-I just couldn’t. Isn’t it written in the holy book that thou shalt not….”

 

“Thou shalt is written on every scale, in every fixed dragon’s fairy tale,” Meredith leashes back, quoting some philosopher she once heard her old man talk about all he time, before he retired for the evening to his word processor and drank fifth and fell asleep at the keyboard, trying to make sense of the keys he inadvertently slept on and the mothership messages produced...”

 

“So what do you think, Iola?”

 

“Dude-it’s like, smooth.”

 

“If you squint hard enough you’ll see Moses entering the new gymnasium.”

 

“Don’t fuck with her like that. That’s only Marcellus Buck getting ready to do his whole tedious LET MY PEOPLE GO routine,”

 

“Iola? Iola?”

 

“Give her a minute-she’s going form A.C. to T.H.C. It’s quite an arduous transition.”

 

“Iola?”

 

“For fuck’s sake she’s not gonna O.D. is she?”

 

“No.” Meredith-Elise looks straight into the limpid pool of Iola’s eyes, which are slowly starting to have little  red arteties branch across the whites like wings. “Iola, if you can hear me-EXHALE.”

 

Iola looks out, closes the lids on her eyes like maritime window shudders before her bodyshakes and wrings and smoke comes filtering out on all sides. She falls down where Ollie and Cabbages continue to help her out.

 

“Iola paperdollygirl. Are you alright?”

 

“Dude,” Iola says, slowly reopening her eyes and trying to adjust herself in the presence of her girlfriends. Ollie wreathes her arms around her friend. Cabbages is rubbing Iola’s palm in the manner of a clairvoyant expecting serious pay. Meredith-Elise simply stares back at her acquaintance and asks if she would like another hit of air before she divulges out any more of the green stuff. Iola speaks, sounding like she just arrived from somewhere over the rainbow and you were there and you were there and there was someone dressed up exactly like……………..

 

Allan's Walk (c).

 

    

Allan keeps walking, keeps adjusting his limbs and brushing the dust off of his corduroy trousers. He keeps walking. Having no clue just where the fuck he is, and having little less insight on the direction on which he is going, he continues to truck down the inside of the school, the Skell, becoming, something more than it originally was, he thinks. Even though he yells out in front of his shrouded limbs there still is no clue off his brother. He can’t figure out how the two of them got separated like this to begin with. He can’t quite piece together the fabric of where he is located. It is like VonB’s campaign, a whole ‘nother dimension exists right in the very midst of our own and for reasons not quite clear to us at the time we choose not to open our eyes and see it.

 

Allan still thinks of the golden man, seated under that tree, doing what Amy does to get ready before her dates with Tyler, that sort of Yogi exercises, only Amy wears leotard and likes to smoke, pushing the ash tray under the davenport when Mom comes into the room, usually shuffling bills together and cursing to herself, wondering when her Albert Einstein of a husband is going to get a job that actually puts a little pork back in the piggy bank, so to speak, before fingering in her pocket book and screaming out loud that she swears this house must be fraught with kleptomaniac Leprechauns who enjoy firing up a Benson & Hedges after a long day of trashing the house with her children’s toys.

 

    The darkness Allan wades in reminds him of the purported beginning of time, which according to reverend Morning Wood, happened six thousand years and fourteen-morning bourbons ago—make that fifteen. Dad wrote a very long letter to the reverend, stating that perhaps evolution should be taught in accordance with scripture. He even drew an outline of the cross, the vertical plank showing a time line of the greatest scientific achievements starting with ancient man and his ability to mix paint and spew graffiti on the caves in Australia and France. The Horizontal plank, Warren said, constituted religious movements, which he said started with something written in Hindi and then God’s covenant to Abram on the far left hand side. In the center, where the vertical and the horizontal stems coalesce and become one color, one moment, Warren has, on the scientific center, something about the first telegram going forward and, on the horizontal caliber, something about some guy named Bob or something declaring himself  in front of a giant gate or something. The whole scene greatly confused Allan and instilled Coach M with a furor never seen outside of an all too seldom basketball lost.

 

The whole entire point of Warren’s science intersects with religion cross configuration was that, as far as Allan can tell, the cross was simply just a symbol for something deeper and more metaphysical. Like a key hole, and, somewhere, after the genesis of the intersection of the cross, after the moment where science and religion slaps hands and gives each other a very Varsity elite What-up? After that moment, the two are very much in accord with each other indeed.

 

Allan also thinks that, after the meeting of the two, the east and west, both religion and science continue to go in separate directions, yet they are now part of the same overall shape. They grant structure to the cross and they both continue to grow in North and East directions until they somehow meet again. Allan found this whole postulation very exciting indeed. Coach M kept Patrick after school, again, for another three weeks, having him write the first chapter of Matthew on the board, in Pig Latin, stating that, if Patrick is asked in the hallway by the sniper who guards Buck twenty four seven, he damn well better know who Rehoboam’s great-great grandson was or else.

 

Allan continues to walk. Perhaps, before Coach M bought the school from those German Lutherans overseas, Christ Lutheran was some cool sort of Global religious academy where all were welcome to study, pray and learn and to sprout spiritually. Perhaps Coach M. greatly sequestered all of the other religions that once studied here into these vectors that are only now accessible from the Skell and, even though, are perhaps only visible to those who set out and are truly seeking answers, or at least trying to find what exact shape or color the question mark gives at the end of a very long run on sentence.

 

Allan adjusts the light on the top of his hardhat. He continues to jaunt in darkness, seeing what appear to be florescent purple pinwheels floating through him. Allan remembers the time Warren chided Patrick for smoking, pulling him aside and taking him down stairs, where Allan fortunately was hiding, trying to fire up a cigarette in the privacy of his own chamber, in the part of the dungeon Patrick always calls the AD&D lounge. Warren set Patrick aside and asked him to draw a question mark on the blackboard Warren used to do math on while mixing it with letters from the alphabet. Allan remembers his dad telling someone that, if letters could be used to represent numbers, couldn’t something else be used to represent letters. And what if the numbers themselves, were only letters void of testicles, signifying something else, something old and intangible and forgotten? Warren once got expelled from a University course for positing this sort of arcane theorem. The fact that all of our knowledge constitutes only a minimum of what we actual partake to be reality. The analogy Warren used was that of the Iris, looking up on a lucid, summer night and seeing the stars and realizing that, because of the shape of the atmosphere that conceals us, because of the distance the stars are from us; because of the disproportional distance of Time and Space, what we see happening right now happened long ago and, even if we are to look up and star gaze and close our eyes and feel in accord and dire oneness with the whole entire universe, we would only be shoveling less than a centimeter deep in perpetual optical quicksand so to speak.

 

After Patrick drew a question mark on the board, looking at his father as if to say, ‘and your point is?’ Warren drew the same question Mark, only opposite, facing the question mark Patrick originally drew.

 

“You see Pete,” He said. “Your problem is that you only see one side of the question. You have to see the answer as well before you can initially inquire.” Warren the doodled what looked like a little pot pan underneath the question mark.

 

“You see,’ He says. “It’s a light bulb. Don’t just look at the question as a desperate unit; look at it like only one tip of an iceberg. That’s all it really is, and don’t be afraid to pull down into the deep seas of your own personal inquiries and find out what lies before you on the other side.”   

 

Allan moves. He feels like he has been walking forever. It was heavily rumored that CLS was built on an ancient Indian burial ground or something before Coach M’s relatives appropriated the property in the earlier part of this century.   As Allan bumbles along, one hand pocketed in his corduroy trousers, still periodically whistling the French National anthem to himself as he walks, wondering if this is where Stetrorous Taurus Sentarious abides, within the shell of the school, traversing back and forth like Allan is doing right now, between all cultures, sidestepping all walks of life. Scarring the shit out of a person looks the same in any given language.

 

      Little bleeps and taps are now heard. The dust that Allan was kicking over his Payless  mock Dedalus has subsided and been replaced with a long metal sheets. It sounds to Allan like he is entering an arcade of sorts.

 

 

 

He continues to walk on.

                             

                                                             ***

 

            “Patrick, it’s just not gonna work out between us. I mean, what part of not-work-out do-you-not-understand?” Holly iterates the last portion of her sentence sounding as if she is talking to a four year old. “ I mean, I do like you, but I really like my life right now. I really like where things are headed and I’m sorry if CLS is a shitty experience for you, but for me…..”

 

                                                                    ***

Just In-HALE (b.)...

 

 

 

 

 

“AHH!! Shit!!! For the love of God people! Fuck!!!”

           

            Tim is munching into the side of Hale’s left leg. More foam seems to be accumulating form around the edges of his lips. Patrick and VonB both immediately run over to Tim and peel him off of Hale. Tim has part of Hale’s blood dripping off of his teeth.

 

            “Damnit Tim!!!” Hale yells. Drops the grille, pulls back his steel toe boot like he is about ready to kcik a field goal.”

 

            “Stop!!!” Orders VonBehren, using all of his mass to shove Hale in the corner, knocking down Tim’s Toys and the little signs he has pasted in front of them.

 

            “We’ve done enough for the day. We’ve done enough.” VonBehren quickly shoves Hale into Matt’s portion of the basement clad with crocheted stitches of Tigers on every wall. As VonBehren quickly looks back before slamming the door he can see Patrick spooning his whole entire body around a foam-cheeked red-eyed lunging Tim. Tim is screaming at an even higher pitch then Matt upstairs. His scream seems to perpetuate other dogs in the neighborhood to keen and howl as well. VonBehren thinks that Tim, with Patrick’s limbs buckled around his upper torso resembles an asylum patient trying to free himself from a straight jacket. VonBehren slams the door just as Tim looses himself of Patrick’s tenacious grip by biting his wrist, swatting the door in Flanagan’s face.

 

            “Hale,” This has gone off long enough. We got to get outta here. We just got to book.”   

 

            “That fucker bit me!” Hale says. Lifting up the cuff of his pant leg. More thuds are heard on the other side of the door. Tim is still screaming bloody murder, calling Hale a pussy; neurotically screaming at the top of his lungs. VonBehren still has his entire back stapled against the door.

 

            “Hale, come on. That fucker’s crazy.”  Another thud is heard. Mrs. Branagan’s voice is also screeching down the stairs asking what in Saint Johoesphat’s name is going on down there. Patrick is overheard trying to convince Tim merely just to chill. Just to chill out for the time being before more slashes and thrown raucous is heard on the antipodal side of the door. Tim is saying that he is going to single handedly pluck the little weed that Hale refers to as his pecker from out of his ass once he gets on the other side of the door for burning up his characters.

 

            “Hale,” VonBehren says. “You need to go. This is going to get ugly. Tim’s fucking nuts.”

 

            Hale swats down his stogie, casually rolls north the cuffs of his shirt, informing VonBehren to step away from the door, step away from the door, now. When VonBehren defies the orders Hale’s eyes reflect up in his head and he simply says the word please, for the love of god people, I’m a big boy, what you think this is under my belt—a finely tuned engine for a sex machine?”

 

            VonBehren complies. He slides one step toward Matt’s paint by number princess Tiger portrait, hearing the door splinter open, Tim, mad, foam still collecting in the corner of his lips, eyes what appear to be the size of fortune telling eight-ball protruding out of his head, a sword he purchased at a renaissance fair two years ago wielded high above his head. With his sleeves rolled up and his fists ready to pummel, Hale will tell you himself, addressing you as his dear friend, calling you honey, saying that honey, he may be dumb, but he sure as shit fire ain’t stupid. When he sees Tim storming towards him, the weapon brandished, a look of sick pride glued to his eyes, Hale decides that the most opportune tactic to employ now would be to in fact, haul some serious ass. Which he does, without looking back even once into the face of his adversary. Tim is yelling out high-ya in a high pinched nasal monotone that reminds Von Behren of Ms. Piggy.

 

            VonBehren swears that when Hale took off he saw little gusts of smoke emanating from his heels. More noise from the kitchen. Tim is screaming that he needs to perform an anal exorcise. From the sounds of things it sounds like Mrs. Branagan probably either feinted or decided to hurtle some of her pans at either Hale or her blood-grazed son. The front door swings open and close and then swings open and close again. Tim is still screaming, three octaves above his normal adolescent baritone.



 

 

 

 

 

 

VonBehren enters Tim’s room, looking around. Patrick is seen, smashed in the glassed case where Tim keeps his toys locked for showcase display only. Tim’s computer has been smashed. His poster that features a swim suit drawing of the female X-men in lewd positions under a titanium waterfall has also been ripped from the wall.  As he extends his hand and fastens his grip VonBehren can only surmise what Patrick saw his friend morph into—a demonic mammal outraged that the fat kid scored before he did.

 

            “Dude,” Says Patrick, brushing off GI Joes off of one of his shoulders.

 

The boys look around at the wrecked havoc. The cross that Tim made out of aluminum he wore around his neck after he self-baptized himself in the nuclear creek topples off of the shelf, the last remaining item to crumble, seeming both very ironic and very fitting at the same time.

 

“I’m sorry Patrick,” VonBehren says. “I should have stayed in here with you to try and get Tim to calm down. I’m really sorry.”

 

VonBehren can see several gashes and one long serpentine welt lashing down the inside of Patrick’s arm.

 

“Come on,” He says to Patrick, wrapping his arm around him like a bandaged war troop. “Let’s get you back to your house. There’s a bottle of Vodka in your crawl space we can nurse that wound with. Come on.”

 

Patrick remains silence. It is almost as if he has witness something that he should not have seen. Teddy Bear is still barking like mad upstairs and the kitchen is trashed. The table split upside down with little cut marks sliced into the edge.  Tim’s mother is bending over picking up pots and pans, yelling at the boys that she knew that DC game was just like Dungeons and Dragons; that it was a marketable product of Satan. She points her finger at Von Behren, saying that if it wasn’t for him bringing that creature Hale into her house in the first place she wouldn’t have lost her sweat, innocent Christ loving boy to the powers of Satan.

 

Patrick places a cigarette between his lips and fires it up before leaving the house. On the front porch, the same porch Tim exiled Hale off of a month before, Patrick and VonBehren see Tim, trotting heavy footed, his sword chipped in half, swearing. His face is green. It hurts VonBehren even just to look at Tim.

 

“All of your characters are dead. All of them. Every single one of them. You all lose!” Tim sneers, curses, walks away very heavily into the front door, slamming it closed and then locking it. Inside his chest, VonBehren heart feels like an anchor slowly descending into the plummeting depths of his morality. He feels that he should knock on the door right now and demand that Tim apologize for hurting Patrick. Pat brushes it off, tells VonBerhen to go ahead and get on his bike, he’ll follow him home.

 

In mid-to-late October the sun seems to sink. It doesn’t splatter the skyline with the amazing encores that it does in the summer. It hurts Patrick to pedal his carriage up and down and by the time Rohmann splits into Sterling and Sterling scatters into down Circle, Patrick and VonBehren see Hale, smoking another cigar, seated on the front steps of Casa McReynolds, not too far from the tree house Patrick built, which, one day, unsuspectingly, VonBehren decided to climb up to the very top of, just to see what he could possibly find inside. 

     

                                                            ***

 

“Is that why you are always obsessing over the tunnel in Bradley. Because it sprouts out of the womb of the earth and gives birth to shit on a stick?”

 

            Patrick bites down hard on the side of his thumb offering his companion a will get back to you before nodding into deep thoughts.

           

 

                                                                                ***

       “Skell my ass,” Allan thinks as he continues to walk, following the coned dome of light shining just in front of his footsteps. “This place is more like a fucking dungeon.”

 

            There are more spider weds, scores of them, and Allan feels like a hybrid between Indiana Jones, trying to find something important and lost that never existed in the first place in the caves of South America and Beatle Juice’s bride, shrouded in thick spider webs for a wedding veil. He could have almost sworn that he brushed back all of these spider webs before he saw what Patrick will later refer to as the ‘Dolly Lama’s,’ not believing Allan anyway, saying that it was, in all probability, probably something his brother, ate, drank or smoke that Baker gave him as a Guinea pig, to make sure it was safe for his own ingestion.

 

            The fervent hot sand has cooled considerably. Allan, replacing his shoes on his soles the moment his bare foot stepped on what felt like morning dew. For being inside the corridor has gotten considerably larger, almost as if it is giving birth to itself. The oriental clang has long subsided and what Allan first thinks is mice turns out to be the sounds of crickets chirping.  Allan looks up and sees prodding stars offering the atmosphere a shimmering wink. He adjusts the light in his hardhat once again to see thinking about   That guy sitting under the tree with his face glowing like the sun sure did scare the fuck out of Allan, especially when he thinks about how peaceful and serene the brother looked with his legs folded under his waist. It was like the whole universe was momentarily plugged into that serene man and that all of history and all the vicissitudes of time met and shook hands and traded recipes all throughout the discourse of the monks meditation, which Allan thinks still shines like the stars he witnessed all of two hours ago.

 

 

Allan continues to walk on, using his hardhat camcorder as a light, looking for his brother, sure that he is in part of the Cryptobyrinth no one has ever seen before, not sure exactly where it is he is headed in the slightest, knowing only that he has to proceed into the illuminated pocket of darkness alone.