"Mission Accomplished, chief..."

Having long since been hit, VonBehren’s face cracks open, offering his fellow passenger’s periphery a treacle of wan horror flashed with bloody spurts of crumpled fatigue. Knocked out, shrapnel severed and gashed, vaporous shards of a crystal ball collected and crazy-glued back together under ductile, unsuspecting, smudgy crayon blueprint fingertips—Patrick is wringing his bicycle handled wrists into a gnarled bouquet near VonB’s throat, checking for any sign of life whatsoever.  Holly is the first to comment out loud on the festering sty tumesced in VonB’s bruised left eyelid. Both of VonB’s flickering lids have been beginning to flutter out foreign hymns in a chipped slur, staccato, chiseled dimly out of key, as if his eyesight is perfectly unaware of the of Law of time signature and tempo—(The stutter in his eyesight orchestrating a honey mixed melody of its own accord)—a battered requiem toll taking slaps on his left cheek in a paramedic endeavor to awaken him back into the corporeal shallow-end pool of human consciousness. His lips shuffle slightly ajar, groaning chopped-up frequencies in a shocked dialect. His tightly crooked Adam’s apple bulbs north as saliva-warbled sentences spill out through his lips, spitting out arrow-feathered imprecations, ushering callow curses upon the arrival of his sole inward sojourn from which he is still, as of yet, returning.  He remembers his insides being split open. He remembers hearing a stilted laugh, a satanic-lip snicker from those believed to be the anti-Christ in parochial basketball school garb. He remembers being on top of a brick plateau—the din and oscillation of fire sirens chasing its own light bright dog tail in an incessant gyration. He remembers trying to remember the paparazzi flash to the chest—the jilted stitch and the impact. A slight drill and then his heart felt hammered into an anvil lithely contrived out of a fleshy wad of dermatitis. He could almost see the raisin pupils of his eyes performing circus trapeze somersaults before blacking out near Patrick, before falling up and hitting the gravel bottom of a q-tip cloud. He remembers Patrick with what looked like Skeletal metallic salad tongs eking out of from both paws, pulling them through the Redheaded Torso as Hale scaled the clouds and tumbled down into an unsavory chariot where Elisha was fondling a genie bottle behind the wheel nursing a hardon all the way up to the heavens.

 

Then all is blank and voices whorl in and out in kaleidoscopic tint leaving light to hang glide further into darkness-the daunt of unmapped topography scrolled out into the dusty maps of olde—the reemergence of globes and cities and elf inhabited forests- stories his friends dappled in Opera draped imagination, on a metal podium, also a city-soaring below with skyscrapers gelled in morning mascara and spiked hair. He tinkers even over constellations and beyond, rife with hunger, low on sleep, slapping his pocket for tobacco finding himself in a burlesque oak mahogany courtroom of sorts. A traveling gypsy casino caravan hosted by striped top-hatted Uncle Sam Guru wearing a patch over his patriot tattoo-blackjacks and dice and slot machine whirring eyes, constipated expressions where once hung-over cherry pupils resided. A judges wig and Portobello mushroom and gravy dinner w. cheap garish piled on the side-and a game of solitaire being played by one lone man who bitched about eternity not being all that everyone claims it is cracked up to be—do not now you see? A ruddy leprechaun aura emits as he digs for loose change with his finger tips, plugging the currency into a parking meter-repeating over and over again to himself that it is a sad, sad day when a fucking lad trades in his pixie dust for a pocketbook. A sad day. Sad. Before he wonders aloud if he has scraped and landed lollipop pudding side parking lot of Heaven-a marionette tug reels him back into a bucolic, celestial hamlet. There is family breakfast and the precocious child who doesn’t believe in fairy tales anymore. There is the wife who has cut her hair and who doesn’t wear any panties in the church pew because she knows that kinda naughty talk excites her aloof mate. A baptismal pool fraught with human drool bubbling up like a water fountain in Wisconsin and supplications-prayer, beads, mattress springs-and before he knows it or can even touch it-he is being pushed out of the cathedral, the family he will never have, the blonde-tresses of his wife falling down like a veil as her body comes on top of him-her eyelids-squeezed, squeezed, closing like a garage door opens and closes until finally he looses himself inside of her and is one with her-he has left his body inside of her body and he is once again wandering all alone, holding onto something invisible and moist-entering a Wheatfield and taking snapshots through his contact lenses-he heel-toes it alone yet not alone missing one whose nipples nourished- her body before him, around him, coming inside of him-pointing into the wind his destination-his return home. Tired and still w/o smokes, he traverses past an acidic brook fraught with moldy bread crusts and fish skeletons floating upside-down. Taking a right his eyes espy sprouted subway signs, multifarious Starbuck outlet with clovers for signs-he continues to jaunt-through the errant cat feces in gravel alleyways, past the jockstrap Egyptian phone booths with dildo earrings, the same prostitutes inside handing out horseshoes and glitter barrettes— he walks, takes a left at the avenue where the papers are dropped off in trussed bundles-wailing to be read like a papoose or oncoming Moses-he evades the suburban strip malls and SUV’s-stops at a cheap hotel to get his transient freak on with someone he did not know very well-and hastily leaves in the morning without coffee or a neatly folded ink scrawled missive bearing digits (thinking himself a stolid joke)- past the Botanical gardens where the Queen Bee sounds like she is having her period, ordering all of her bumbling suitors to leave the apiary, refusing to lay anymore damn bludgeoned eggs. He skirts avenues of avalanches, mini mountain range arenas, sanguinary Savannah’s floating Frisbees mistook to be UFO’s (wouldn’t you know?), a nimbus made out of a rusty hanger, duck taped with extension cords. He continues to rove past venerated fire hydrants adorned in leafy lei and extolled with pee stains from the poor. A monument christened to all things living, an insect that is having trouble singing. A golden tooth turned rodent feces. A firecracker heart attack and a field of sparklers. He pushes forward, dodging boomerangs and students lugging back packs, he hears her backstage voices rustling wash through the curtain rod of a light rain- as the housecoat fairies beneath his bare feet frolic and say, ‘look ma-no hands’ scurrying down into the lava lamp chimneys, abetting the fireflies to come out of the closet every once in a while and say hi. Everything is familiar-a child’s cradle serving as a transitional fortress and partial prison-arid dirt roads spoon fed with spoon airplane landing. A cow is croaking-the stars are burnt out street lamps little glow of one final electric sputter very far away-another time space-an abandoned couch viewing a televised touchdown and a wishing well which many who clacked past-worrying about a pending Wall Street attack, mistook to be a spittoon. Wishing well, as once he called it, mouth perching open as if to slip the elusive her the eternal tongue. A top hat prim chin and monocled Zephyr then greets him with a sales-associate grip smoking a pipe and eyes that remind him of space opera and Ursula minor. Surrounded by champagne bubbling from a baptismal fount—the soles of the aborted smelling of cocktail shrimp. Water wings are funny things as is the esophagus elevator he finds himself shafted in-dead flotation divinations of Zebra’s and falcons, fading past—he thought for a second he heard a mermaids splash-finding the beginning- a splintered shadow of a chest pulled from the closet door knob and the cloaked silver seaweed branch trimmings hand-puppets beneath the umbra’s of his own shadow (which stand above shoulder to shoulder hunched and towering over bristling him in autumnal cool as he jogs back and is cerebrally jolted back into his body) he has traveled, with elbows pin wheeling and knee-caps stirring a motion amidst blue squiggles, perhaps outlined entities- long gone soured promises he flees the periodical opening of a jarred light- a lidded canvass lips ripe fit for first communion-only to digest and pass-he flees, turns around,  the narrowly tunneled through the lids of his eyes which now are beginning to take slow, subtle breathes—fitted in a carnival Mask and jesters cap—he struts across a streaked gossamer threaded umbilical from Here to Now and Back Again, yarn knotted on either end clandestinely constituted by deceiving friends, flossed between two burning plateaus tarnished in unfinished ink, reminiscent of the color of his own fuel, fading into a crumbled blink and garage door blur, entering the pinkish contours of shackled vision with rammed static and disbelief, a half-smile of someone else’s eyes as he returns from his inward voyage, heaving himself out (through his dazed sockets-the wishing well) of a self-made manhole- arms straddled to hoist inner weight as he spits blood into the back seat of Tracy’s Centurion, and back into consciousness-only to find himself surrounded in an elbow intersection of flesh-the avenue of cracked joints on all steeples pointing into the hearts of those whom he loves most in this world. Antique clock face, inert, flogged limbed, branched arms thoroughly whittled from battle he weighs-anchored in the back seat of a mission he half-heartedly opposed from before the outset-a scattered breeze zipping on both sides of him, combing his forehead with a blanket of faded freedom-still, he does not move.   Scratchy itch lash which his hands find it cannot touch, reversal twirl free fall know all of a child learning how to kick during free swim at the community swimming pool.

Allan’s muffled echo suggests that the Col.’s face looks like it has been slashed and stapled with stained fangs which has just generously taken a bite out of and is currently nesting inside, off center, smacked deeply between sockets of a human face, Stung over his lips. He is reaching up, into the placid off-blue, screeching out on elongated tips, trying hard to verbally convey to his cohorts what inside feels full weighed billboard size blackboard bearing needle extended pawed fingernails and outside hints lightly of sipped oxygen yelping in calloused ached whispered in opn mouth-caved awe. Caverns pass under his chest- breath punting out phonetic foibles. Remote pause and static slow-mo frozen in stilted asphyxiated postponement and sterile pause.  Holly, whose mom went back to community college three semesters back wielding high hopes of obtaining a lifelong self-dream titled RN to pump into her children’s accruing college funds, looks on soberly, halted and hushed lip, gazing out into Patrick’s mangy viscera, reflecting doused sweat and paint reflection of her own inward writhing trepidations and flowering fear. Her vision then slowly peels back a scratch-off bedlam, kneels optically into Von B’s saccharine forehead, mopped with trench warfare-shooting her lids locked, sealing her own lips before her eyes spring open tersely twisting her vision once again, into Patrick the Loved, reaching out, cautiously tempting to caress Von B’s side, brushing next to an amber bail of forgotten leftovers- a bushel heap of barbed wire which she taps twice for fear of nerves shocking, fear skimming silently, she hushes out a caveat into Patrick’s left shoulder blade.

 

“Look at him.”

 

“………”

 

“Patrick, look at him.” Holly reiterates, cowed by Patrick’s all too trademark self-inclusive knuckle grope into chin pensiveness.

 

Patrick nods his head as if to indicate a yeah, I know. Yeah, I know.

 

“All the blood, sweat and saliva. And his face—”

 

VonB’s face features a dish dirty geyser of tumescent and welts. Effusing blood. Purple bruises sluicing juice--squirting out of veins into a pool of crimson near his chest pocket. Twice a block he jerks-goes gimp, clutched between third and fourth gear. Near his navel, blood also oozes out in generous 2^nd Marilyn helpings- something that looks like ravioli in a trash cylinder. Blood pools out of his left side, dappling Tracy’s back seat with a Jackson Pollock finesse. Holly again trembles, shields her eyelids, removes her hand and forces herself to look at him while Patrick, first date movie style, endeavors to slide an independent arm around her in comfort, stopping short when she iterates the comment about sweat and saliva, leaving Patrick to feign a quick finger mow across the back of his head, scuttling dirty finger nails over his unsuspecting, adamant cowlick.

 

There is Precious Moment Little Lamb Who Made Thee Innocence to Holly’s fright, and Patrick recompenses her fingers with a rudimentary squeeze; a squeeze of hope dished between studded realities cleansed in the dream and ambitions of youth.  Blood from Von B covers both Holly and Patrick. The troops look like they have just returned from a self-wrought Hell on earth. Von Behren tries in vain to mouth something important. A bubble of saliva hula-hoops through his lips before it pops, expires into a wad of drool and drops, as if a dead comet, dribbling south past his chin, mixing with blood and gritty perspiration.

 

“We need to get help fast.”  Holly says, accommodating her chin into the four directions of the car. Patrick still remains silent, his fist biting into his knuckles, as if he is seriously considering giving live-in Rodin models a run for their feeble francs.

 

“Like a physician’s needle help, fast! Patrick, Tell Tim or whomever it is driving this here hooptie that Von Behren is ready to give up the ghost like now in the back seat unless we like get some serious assistance back here to tackle his condition immediately. Seriously. This isn’t like TV. We need an ambulance.”

 

Patrick still nibbles into the side of his thumbnail and, much to Holly’s emotional chagrin, continues to feast from his platter of inward reticence. Holly calls out his name as if trying to wake his collective conscious from a sloping slumber. When his lids fail to respond Holly cozies up next to Patrick, the purported captain of this mission.

 

“If we don’t get help his name will cease to appear on the closing credits. The theme song will resemble more or less that of a side road swan whose neck is being slowly severed with cheap dental floss. Patrick! Listen! Do you hear me? Patrick!”

 

Inside lobes wreathed with cartilage, underwater earlobes clogged with scuffed wax and ear boogers, Patrick hears almost all of Holly’s sentimental rant. Overcast sentences stream through her fair lips, conflating with the crisp air, crashing into the horrific reality that their mission really is accomplished and that his best friend, neighbor and combative cohort really is, from the looks of it, on his death bed. A last right hand signature forehead cross and then a whoosh-see you on the B-side type of ‘later’ as Patrick mentally pictures VonB leap fogging off of the monkey bars and on top of the pile of mulch settled below, adjusting the brim of his starter cap with the affixed tag and brandishing a cool-dude surfer sign with his wrist, thumb and pinkie.  Patrick hears Holly once again shout aloud his name, inquiring to Patrick if he is deaf or just plain dumb. But Patrick is not deaf— deaf sounds too much like the word dead. The thinly curved slice of music escaping you before the first syncopated caress and beat make contact with the listener. He perfectly hears and mentally spells checks every word and idiom slinging through Holly’s alarmed lips yet he does not respond right away— at least not through the medium of language anyway. Pat’s mouth works on a hangnail presenting Holly with the familiar Pastor Morningwood's downward disapproval glare of a self-confused half-heathen not paying ‘Christ-like’ attention in confirmation class.  Directly in front of Patrick hogging steadfast shotgun is Hale who is holding up the neck of a severed rearview mirror so that Tim can see behind him and forward at the same exact time. A yellow square situated at a ninety-degree tilt appears on the left hand side of the road. Hale’s excitement immediately soars.

 

“Dip, Dip.” Hale yells, looking down into Allan’s grade school smirched grin. The stomach growling of gas being thudded and whirring, accelerated machines momentarily supersede Patrick’s silence, Holly’s harangue and VonB’s pending, ill time inevitable death. The car jolts as Tim grimaces at Hale who begins to hum the theme-motif from chitty-shitty-bang-bang.

 

“Are you out of your mind. You’re demented.” Tim mentally smacks the boy whose character and campaign he utterly obliterated because he has never thought very highly of his propensity for girth and tightly tauped armored bulk.

 

“He-he. Allan, press down even harder on thee gas. Here we go. Hold on. Whew-woo!”

 

“Shitty-shitty my….”

 

Before Tim completes analogizing his ass in front of his nearest and dearest, Allan presses down the tippy-toe of his pro-wing on top of the gas, hackling out a missing tooth pumpkin grin. Tracy’s spineless automotive leaps forwards, sleeks back, jerks up in midair, accumulates substantial hang-time before skidding onto the chipped gravel of the intersection into a matted tumble.  Hale and Allan both chirp out huzzahs before commencing to hum the theme song to NEXT GENERATION. Tim, in an effort to loosen up, comments about the car being a perfect one-zero.

 

“You say that like it’s your girl’s bra size.” Retorts Allan. Tim, thanks to an unused Christmas video last year of his Mother’s, Thigh Mastering with Suzanne Summers, twist ties his thighs tighter together, boxing Allan’s ears. The car slides back and forth before Hale tells them both to knock it off people, we had our fun now lets try to get serious here for just a goddamn second. Patrick taps on Hale’s shoulder and points behind the vehicle. Near the excavated dip lies the front bumper and part of a license plate freshly rattling on the side of the street. A hushed sobriety once again resettles between the seat cushions.

 

With pressed hands Patrick looks behind them in the front seat, and at Shot Gun.  If not for Patrick’s perseverance baked by a hushed, morose mouthed Hollis, the boy would momentarily forget that they are being accompanied by a wounded ally, belching for breath in the back seat.

 

“Dude,” Says Holly, looking to Pat for his approved nod at her newly picked up surfer colloquial. “He looks all bloody.” Last week Mr. Mooney showed his sixth graders the video of his youngest, ironically and aptly named David, entering a place he calls God’s good earth through the depot of his wife’s cream of wheat thighs. The video was taped, narrated and, as he jokes, ‘produced’ by her husband, Terry Mooney, whom the students are strongly advised to address as Mr. or Principle M or most respectively, Coach. Through the cacophony of labor pains and the occasional well timed bleeped out ‘Fah-beep-kuh you for doing this too me once again, Terrence.’- (Coach Mooney, in his suit and combed hair naively telling the class that what got bleeped out was his wife gratuitously thanking him for once again planting yet another Lutheran sesame seed bun in the oven). The classroom expression being one of openmouthed registered awe, as her youngin’ appropriately named David, smudged head first through that part of the Coaches Widow no grade school student ever expects to see outside of mock masturbation visuals. There were more screams and Doctors attired in what appeared to be poncho’s made out of blue Kleenex. Mr. Mooney zooming in as blood and a head sprouting through her lapis something or other. Eyes smashed in like the lumps in Bev Pine’s rice-n-tapioca Wednesday specialty. A plum colored embryo the size of three Gideon’s dabbed with strings of hair. He comes out still knotted to her insides—an astronomical tube granting him breath from the mother ship as he free falls into being. Even more appalling then seeing Mrs. Money’s vagina digitalized and broadcasted on the VCR in the Churches Community Room was that the creature she gave birth to looked more dead than alive. Fumbling to catch breath. Crying out in pain, it looked like something had just happened –a switch in its environmental teleos that it was not happy about. It looked, plain and simply, as Patrick candidly commented before getting sent out of the classroom for the second time that day, even though Mr. Money asked three times for his opinion, like road kill. And this is how Holly insinuates Von Behren looks right now, staggering and trying to belch himself back into existence with exchanged breath. Von B looks like he is either dying or giving birth to something through his mouth that looks almost dead.

 

A still life with a pin drop silence envelopes inside the car. Allan weasels his head between Tim’s kneecaps and purple knee high socks to momentarily periscope into the back seat. Hale is trying to light the victory Macanudo, shaking his Zippo as the Centurion rattles, pointing at Von Behren, thinking that at least VonB could have put fluid in his damn cigar lighter before he so graciously gives up the ghost. Before Flanagan’s face turns yellow and he can say the word lighter fluid while pointing to his ass, Hale probes his pointer finger North, as if testing for the direction of wind, expecting the imaginative glass contours of a bulb to flicker on.

 

“But of course, Dave probably does not realize that thee lighter takes lighter fluid in the first place.” Hale shakes the lighter in the manner of a pepper shaker before a flame resumes. Tim says the words duh, condescendingly, beneath his breath. Allan comments that it sure does feel warm down here between goody two shoes kneecaps.

 

“Hunh?”

 

Hale finishes lighting the stogie, puffs three planetary rings into the air before glancing into the back seat at his gashed limbed amigo; Holly and Patrick stationed around him like the crumpled flanks of Doric columns.

 

Slowly a giant tear the size of a baby pear descends the crevice of Hale’s left cheek. Sucking up his remorse, Hale tells his friend, if he can hear him, to hold the fuck on, bro. Everything is going to be all right. It has to in the end.

 

Von Behren’s lids slowly peel back, squint open and then quietly close before reeling into dust lighted particles once again. He sees three Patrick’s and two Holly’s and wonders out loud for all to hear why Allan is floating around like a genie out of Tim Flanagan’s torso.  URK. If this is what a Timmy Flanagan hardon resembles, the Cheshire cat performing a Pee-wee Herman Tequila ring knuckle dance, then he is glad Flanagan never kissed him like the way Flanagan purportedly kissed. Black out. Dawn again. The sun appears to be moving the light in Patrick’s basement, the one he flicked ON/OFF when descending the stairs to play War of the Worlds for the all-out role-playing half time intermission WAR, brandishing water and BB guns. Patrick got in serious trouble with his old man for swinging a water balloon on the Living room carpet. Tim still to this day claims that Hale was tossing a Jesus Christ glow in the dark condom filled with shaving cream in the basement. Back to reality and Allan is asking him something and the Holly’s, both of them, lift two pointer fingers as if to shhhh! Him. Madonna could it be. Like a virgin. Ha-her-ha-her. Touching for the very first. Bump. Dip rather. The vehicle soars and cracks. This is what happened when the baby carriage rolled off the front porch, VonB thinks. Shit. Pain. A geyser seems formed in stomach. Fuck. I never knew fucking b.b.’s could coerce such blood, unless, of course. Shit. How the fuck? ERRRRK. YEECK.  Coughing, a blood loogie launches out into splattered clots settling on what’s left of the windshield. He begins dimly to speak.

 

“Shit. Trinity of Patrick and Blessed Virgin...” Patrick looks at Von Behren as if to say that even on your deathbed, don’t ridicule and/or demean my harried Irish arse by insinuating that my girlfriend is a…. “Alright, I mean, blessed Holly. What the fuck just happened? Did we succeed?”

 

Or at least that is what VonBehren imagines himself to have said-what pumps out through his lips sounds something like this:

 

“Awooooawaghra…argegh, owe ean essed owie. Aught de fuck-wust aspen?  Awooer sex seed?”

 

Patrick nods his head as if to say fuckin’ aye, mate, yes. Fuckin’ aye

 

“Rock the fuck on.” Hale pumps his arm in the front seat of the car flocked with a mini cheers with the exception of Holly who is still weary and cautious of Von Behren’s frail condition.

           

Von Behren continues to dribble out salivated spittle and sliced-opened half sentences. In a painful, lachrymose drone, he tells his friends that he does not want to die.  He tells his friends that he is glad that the mission is completed and everything, but that over all he does not want to die.

 

Patrick gulps a full, heavy breath, telling David not to worry; he’s not the one who died.

 

“The only so-called dead creatures are those cucking funts who fucked with us all those years.” Yeah. All cheer. Tim continues to drive, his knuckles ossified around the wheel, steadily steering while Allan continues to apply pressure to the gas. Tracy’s Centurion zips down Griswold hardly noticed. Black heads bearing billed caps of sports monopolies and franchised animal caricatures jut out and onto the front porches of houses whose shingles could definitely use a steady Rogaine fix. Everyone’s head faces the smoke shroom planted near, almost next to, the steeple and cross. Patrick commanded everyone in the car not to look back at the debris. He ordered them to act as nonchalantly as possible-to act like they were going on a midday stroll— a field trip perhaps, before nodding accolades to their ears, commenting that they did a job well fuckin’ done and that they are all, dare he proclaim, real god damn soldiers. They are all men and women with integrity. The type of integrity that was never found at February tournaments.

 

Holly is crying, palming her cheeky sobs, tearfully apologizing saying that it is a female thing she doesn’t know if she can help it. Hale helps himself to the lasagna asking if Helen used Prego and if Tim thinks Tracy would just so happen to have any complimentary grazed cheese in the glove compartment by chance. Patrick takes his time in lighting and exhaling a cigarette. Von Behren’s head tilts. A light switch innocuously flicked on and off by five year old fingers. His glasses are cracked, crooked and one frame is gashed into spider web lens.  His chin tucks into his neck like a napkin as he appears to be, once again, out for the count, surrounded by Holly and Patrick.

 

“Is he...?”

 

“No-not Von Behren. He’ll tell you himself that he’s a bad motherfucker. He’ll pull through.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A stale mushroom of smoke sits atop South Side like a bookend as the boys drive the newly refurbished sardine convertible, turning off of Garden, on to Griswold, past Manual High, past the students in patriotic gym clothes who shield hands over foreheads spoon feeding their curiosity in self-salute. Past the houses that look like sad, aborted faces. Up Ligonier. Slide steeply onto Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. All of two minutes, a sharp left onto Sterling. Everything is going smoothly so far, no one seems to really have noticed anything out of the noonday norm with of course the obvious exception of fire sirens, gyrating lights accompanied with additional booms that are still heard echoing in a confused shuffled dirge throughout the South End of Peoria. Sterling streaks through Madison golf course and the Seventies Apartment complex where knockout student teacher Lillian Wiltz purportedly resides.  An ornery-eyed Patrick traipses across the grassy ice-wicks of a November weekend, claiming the he was watching a sort of Nocturnal bird as he mounted trees and stared into glowing squares using a pair of binoculars his father brought home from what he believes to be the orthodontist office when his older sibling Amy had her braces removed. The golf course slides though the blood-inked windshield, a tray of cookies slowly being pushed into a heated oven, a sound is heard. It is the shrill of a death. The scream of a mother finding her child’s suicide note in one hand, and a phial of empty pills in the other—a knotted noose lassoed around a thick vein-riddled neck stumped up and bushed like a cabbage, offering the world a sick-twisted clown smile.

 

“Shit Tim,” Hale shouts, his mouth still half full with a generous portion of Helen's special home made lasagna. “There’s a fucking cop behind us!”

 

Sure enough a lighted devil’s tower spins around. The siren blares, deafens, reminding the truants that school is not out of session as of just quite yet.

 

“Captain-what’ll we do? The cop has his cherries on.” Flanagan shouts out, jutting his chin just barely over the wheel, the last mandatory push-up in the presidential fitness test.

 

Patrick mulls over the situation, almost swallowing his Winston unfiltered as he cogitates, trying not to look at Von Behren. Holly screams.

 

“Patrick! What do we do?”

 

“Allan,” Patrick orders, “Slam on the gas as humanly hard as you fucking can. Tim, do your best to keep this vehicle steady.” Patrick then pauses, looks around the car. VonBehren’s chin seems to be assenting affirmative compliments every time Tracy’s Centurion hurtles over a bump. Holly looks like she has finally seen the light at the end of the tunnel and it has turned out to be nothing more than the ominous chug of the freight train at the other end. Hale still seems to be toying with the Zippo lighter and lasagna slice. As the wincing sear of the sirens continues to chisel agony into the party’s earlobes, Patrick continues to grant last-ditch assignments.

 

 “Everyone grab on. We’ll go straight through Sterling nonstop until we hit the Nuclear Woods. After that, we bail.”

 

Over a crackling loudspeaker the police are telling the newly refurbished convertible to move over now immediately or to risk dire consequences. Allan is squatted atop the gas petal. Tracy’s Centurion roars from thirty to sixty passing Sherman and Ayres, striding past St. Mary’s cemetery with such whirred velocity that the mausoleums and gravestones streak into a grisly marble and concrete blur. The destination is the Nuclear Woods for shelter and the police seem to relentlessly pursue. Everyone’s hair in the car is brushed back by a thick current of air thanks to Hale peeling off the top of the car, turning it into a convertible. The police continue to ass fuck. Patrick looks at Holly once again.

 

“Buenos Aires.”

 

“Patrick stop saying that, I’m scared.”

 

“Alrighty then, everyone, listen up, everyone. By the Time this car hits within ten feet of the woods we all jump. Ya’ hear? It’ll be every man, mutant and woman for himheritself. Hale, listen, when you abandon the car I need you to carry Von Behren. Take the back route into the woods, off the beaten, worn out path. Wait there for a few minutes. Unless the coast is anything but clear, push ahead. Remember we still have a few firecrackers and tainted ammo. Push ahead, fire at will-but try not to leave any sign of those who you think may be riding your ass.”

 

Patrick pauses, looks behind, and then continues to dish out mandates into Hale’s earlobe.

 

“Upon exiting the sagebrush there will be a gully with shuffling damp leaves with a slippery almost ski-slope- sway to it. Keep to your right and descend as quickly as possible. Holly, you’ll be in charge of the provisions so I need you to be careful-but if push comes to shove, dive like a bat out of hell and abandon all extra luggage.” Patrick points to Hale the way he has seen Coach M. whip out his finger into the point guard during the fourth. “Hale I need you to keep VonB strapped into your shoulder like he is Ivory cargo-even if he passes out and grows cold, do not let go of him for the life of you. Allan, you carry Hale’s bag of goodies and book ass as well. Be careful, the gully is steep and slippery, but know that once you’ve reached it, once you begin to stumble and to fall and slide out of control, know that the end is near and that a safe haven will soon solace into sight. You will empty into the area surrounding the abandoned Dairy Queen with a dilapidated whitewash shed in back.  Wait there. If I’m not there with help and medical provisions in forty-five minutes, retreat back into the woods and continue tumbling down into the creek-eventually your ass will slope through the skipper, where it will melt into the our hideout. I mean like fast. The car explosion will spawn a ruckus and hopefully the police won’t know what the fuck is going on so they’ll loose us. Once in the skipper, haul ass to the tunnel. We’ll hide out there.”

 

Patrick examines David then looks Tim and Allan ignoring the surrounding white of their eyes and searching straight for their pupils. “I mean like Haul. This is it, the mile sprint to the finish line, the thick brush of the checkered flag and it’s fucking emancipation baby.”

 

There is a bolt accompanied by a thunderous chord slashed into midair. The back left tire farts out a deflated epigraph before running out of air entirely and screeching. Tracy’s vehicle swerves off left and sags into the tarred pavement. What remnants of the bumper remain couched in the street. Hale says the word shit and Patrick asks what the fuck was that before turning around and screaming. A chorus of bullets sprouts from the passengers’ side of the police window. The police are firing. The one ominous cross section at Rohman and Sterling is Heading Avenue. An oblivious Oldsmobile with a Pro-life bumper sticker is taking a right onto Sterling, presenting a precarious situation for the boys. The car eclipses ninety. Patrick tells Allan to press down as much as is humanly possibly before signaling at every soul in the vehicle to duck.  The car accelerates past ninety-five. It passes Rohman and shoulders another vehicle. Another bullet exudes from the cop car and hits the left rear tire.

 

“Shit.”

 

“Allan don’t stop hitting the gas. Whatever you do.”

 

“Patrick there’s no fuckin’ way we can make that woods. It’s a good 400 meters.”

 

“Listen.” Patrick faces Holly and then faces Hale.  “Holly, again, don’t play Cadfael the curio this time, whatever you do, get your ass into that tunnel. I will be there. I shit you not, I will be there.”

 

The car passes Downs Circle.  Hale asks shouldn’t we stop by Mrs. McReynolds house and say hi to her or something and Patrick says not in this day dream we damn near don’t.

“Hungh.” Von Behren gestures for Patrick to near him. His eyes have melted into his face, and he appears to be addressing Patrick as Isaac, blessing surrogate fur. Slowly, Von Behren unbuttons the top of his shirt and hands his camouflaged comrade a nectarine outlined object. It is a grenade.

 

“What?” The insurgent citizens all appear to be stunned, with the exception of Patrick, who apparently knows exactly what he is to do with the object.

 

“Whatever you guys do, do not look back.” Patrick harks again. “Holly, what’s the magic bible verse?”

 

“Don’t look back. I won’t look back.”

 

The police car is now humping the bumper of Tracy’s newly refurbished toboggan. There is a flash and the right tire falls limp. Patrick yells out at Allan to hit the gas as hard as he fucking can for another fifteen seconds and then to jump. He then tells Holly not to look back as he unearths hammer out of his bag. Counting two and three.

 

            Von Behren’s face is tilted back—his face is wan and writhing. His speech is plosive breaths pushed out under the stately duress of unfathomable pain. It looks like someone should perform C.P.R on him. Hale is padding Hollis on the top of her palm, telling her not to worry, informing her that every single thing in Life happens for a purpose while Tim nods his gruff chin, quoting a bible verse from Revelation when he looks back behind and the smoke wrought detriment. Patrick precipitously begins to balance himself on the ledge with tight-ropers no-net apprehension assuaged by something inner and deeper. The stop sign where Heading clutches Sterling by the throat collar is approaching. Hale grapples Von Behren's over his shoulder, bending his arm around the seat and clutching him with ease and security. Patrick faces Holly, whose backpack is belted over her shoulder blade. Just past the stop sign, Allan pops up and clambers out through Tim’s knee caps for good and Tim already has the broken wing of the car door ajar and is ready to jump. 

 

“Just drive,” orders Patrick. “Just drive and haul ass and don’t stop for the goddamn muthafuckin’ life of you!!! Not for the life of you!!!”

 

His face slinks into Holly’s for one last time. There is no time for a kiss. No time for an embrace. No time for Patrick to brush his two fingers down the side of her face in a heartfelt performance of one of his romantic routines to show Holly what type of a guy he truly is. No time to perform any act of compassion other than what he is about now ready to do.

 

With a quick wink of sly confidence Patrick once saw Hannibal from the A-team do, Patrick leaps from the backseat of the car, wielding his hammer like Thor. The hammer shatters the glass face of the police vehicle. The officers appear to be nonplussed. Quickly Patrick deposits the grenade with as much ease as his Parents flush quarters in the slots where Sandy Hale works. The cops freak. Neither the cops nor Patrick move. Through the sweat drizzled in the sunglassed cop forehead he sees, ahead of him, an opposite film negative reflection of the bodies of his beloved as they flail like recently uncaged doves from the sides of Tracy’s vehicle. Hale dandles Von Behren over his shoulder, pushing hard and fast, hauling ass, near the west entrance of the Nuclear Woods. Allan and Tim bump into each other reverse, smashing their elbows together opposite directions, crisscross directions, charge at lateral angle bump into each other again until Tim says ‘Here,’ dropping his armpit clutched bible and grabbing Allan’s paw, dragging him down into the woods. Holly, he can see, does not look back. Either she entered the woods before Hale and VonB or sprouted wings and has flown back to her cloudy, heavenly abode. He pictures her in his head with wings, moments before he initially abandoned the vehicle— Holly, with her head tucked near her training bra cookies and her eyesight splintered into a volleyball court focus  (the way Mrs. Mooney periscopically surveys for bowed heads in chapel) busting out into a free for all life or death sprint. Ahead of them all, she scatters into the foliage of dead branches and remnant leaves from last autumn. Tracy’s Centurion plops into the side of bark and begins to fire. In a minute the trees will alight and the car will more than likely blow. There is movement and the moment that is after the initial movement and the shocked, egg-shaped visages of the cops who seem to know what time it is. Patrick, still, remains splayed out across the hood of the police vehicle deer in headlight dormant. It should take all of three seconds for the police vessel to rack the Gates of Kingdom come and then it’s, after all this time, after all the shit we’ve steadily endured throughout the years together, at last, it’s all good. At last we’ve finally accomplished something. Together. We’ve made something of ourselves. Fuckin’ aye. Damn right Captain. It is all fucking good from here on out. Say it with me now. Again. I double dare ya'.  All or nothing. It is all fuckin’ good. All good. And for now it’s good b…….

 

Mission Accomplished, chief.