“Now inhale,” Hale demands of Tim. Hale’s palm still occluding breath from both of Tim’s northern air bartering orifices. Patrick still has his arm down like a road obstruction at a tollbooth, telling Von Behren that this fight is solely between Tim and Hale and that cooperation on either side of the fence will yield bitter results from both parties, even if they are just trying to break it up.

 

            Hale demands that Tim inhale again. His face is the color of a pinched blueberry. Veins are beginning to sprout like birches across the tapestry of his forehead. Hale warns him once again to inhale, adding that if he doesn’t breathe in now there is a strong possibility that he might never have a valid opportunity breathe again at all, as in ever. Von Behren looks at Patrick as if we need to get him off of Tim. Patrick looks back at VonBehren and tells him that Tim was the one who started all of this shit; let him dig his own way out.

 

            “What?” Hale inquires. “Can’t use your superpowers now, can you? Can’t use your superpowers now to help yourself? Can’t help yourself when you’ve perpetually punished us for no apparent reason other than to make your own picayune pecker appear larger than it actually is by destroying all of our personal endeavors. Don’t feel so potent right now at this particular moment now, do you?”

 

Tim’s eyes scream out of his skull. Patrick can see little red veins shooting out of the whites from Tim’s eyes. It looks as if his whole entire skull is about to blow up. Patrick imagines little particles of cauliflower brain squirting out from his ears like dual vertical atom bombs sprouting from Tim’s side in brainy puffs.  Hale seems to be pressing down harder into Tim’s lips, still demanding that Tim inhale.

 

            Before Hale can inquire Tim’s body rattles in an almost orgasmic fashion, the blue in his face blushing into a resplendent Lenten purple, correlating with the color of the rest of the furniture in his room. Hale lets go and Tim remains purple flushed and palsied limbed, toppling into the floor like a damp tablecloth. Hale pushes himself up off of Tim and the broken desk and pads his plump sausage link fingers searching for his stogie.

 

            “Dude, Dave, you don’t think.” Patrick says, his lips looking at Tim’s body like something that has just passed on.

 

            “Shit,” Adds Von Behren, running up to Tim. Hale is relighting his cigar with one of Tim’s purple chrome lighters. After igniting the dark wrapped tobacco, Hale bends over and picks up several of Tim’s prized possessions. He picks up Death Shadow. He picks up Nightmare and Cerebrus. He picks up all of these and, with fingers finessed of a florist’s grace, delicately spins them into a long carefully spooled wand, holding it up to the light like a bravura operatic stem before feeding the top of the sheets into the lit end of the cigar.

 

            “There,” Hale says. “Everything that Tim has stood for and believed in is now officially dead.”

           

The smoke of the wand moves from the top end to the bottom quickly. It reminds VonBehren of a fourth of July sparkler void of the industrial blitzes. Patrick is beginning to look at the basement window, wondering if it is possible for the boys to sort of sneak out of here before Tim’s body is discovered. He wonders if Hale will get life for this, or if Hale will somehow, thanks to being on such good terms with Mrs. Looney and the incessant coffee refills bit, happened to get Cocker Johnson for his attorney, which he will plead that Hale acted in one hundred percent self defense, which, of course, VonBehren and Pat will agree, it was Tim who initially stomped on the phone, foamed at the mouth and lunged at Hale, a residential look of evil stashed between the whites of his eyes.

 

            “Hale, dude, shit.” Patrick adds. Still looking at Tim’s face, which is gradually loosing the purple color and reverting into its pallid saltine whiteness.

 

             “I was acting out of self-defense,” Hale says, as the rolled flagpole of Tim’s beloved characters slowly disintegrates into char. “You know I never intended to hurt anyone.” Both Patrick and VonBehren have to nod. It’s true. Hale would never purposefully hurt a mosquito, even if it were propped on his cock during a nocturnal camping trip. He sees every living creature as an equal.

 

            From upstairs Tim’s mother is calling down to him, asking if everything is all right down there. Patrick looks at VonBehren, his eyelids suggestive of a possible solution and, without consulting his permission first; VonBehren pops his knuckles and pummels Patrick hard in the nads, his voice, screeching into a verifiable high-pitched Branagan falsetto, forcing Patrick to inform Mrs. Branagan that yes, everything is fine indeed, I was just beating the ever living shit out of my friends characters.

 

            “Dave,” Pat looks at both of his friends named Dave. “We have got to jet. There’s no telling how much shit we could get into for all this.”

 

            VonBehren holds his hand against Tim’s neck, feeling for the slightest insight of a pulse. Patrick thinks that perhaps the boys could call in an exorcist. They could lie and say Tim was trying to show Hale his latest wrestling maneuver and Hale accidentally slipped, running into the desk, rendering himself unconscious.

 

VonBehren continues to slide his hand up and down Tim’s neck, cursing, ordering Branagan to open his eyes. Hale takes generous puffs, picks up Holly’s panties and sniffs, holds them out like a white flag to Patrick, asking him if perhaps he would like a sniff at them as well.

 

            “I think I hear a pulse,” VonBehren says. Sweat breaking from both Patrick’s and V.B.’s forehead.

 

            “Do you think he’s just unconscious?” Inquires Patrick.

 

            “No,” adds Hale, sniffing and puffing casually. “I think he’s just an asshole.  I sometimes can’t understand your loyalty to him since he treats you guys like shit as well.”

 

            Patrick looks at Hale as if to say, you have a point. Von Behren pumps Tim’s chest several times up and down, staring at Tim like he is trying in vain to jumpstart a lawn mower.

 

            “Coma?” Patrick comments, casually.

 

            “I don’t know.” Adds VonBehren. “His heart rate seems fine.” VonBehren kneels down and presses his ear into Tim’s chest. Two months ago, he thought he was helping Meredith-Elise’s grandmother Hazel when she slipped and played dead and ended up seducing him while her grand-daughter came home early from Junior Shakespeare. VonBehren hasn’t told any of his comrades the real reason why Meredith-Elise is walking around the hallways, sucking on a black pacifier, wearing a choker with a black broken claddagh in the center of it, holding a voodoo-doll that looks like VonBehren with multiple spikes protruding out of his pelvis section. VonBehren feels the way right now the same he felt when he was trying to resuscitate Meredith’s grandmother, like Tim is faking it for his own means to an end.

 

            There are footsteps upstairs. He can hear Tim’s brother, Matt scream like a four year old at his sister Tracy for turning the channel and not allowing him to watch Thunder Cats. Patrick realizes that the boys should no longer stay here. Looking east, he sees that if they dismantle the window the boys will be able to make their escape avoid Bear and Mrs. Branagan’s inquiry.

 

            “Hale, come here, help me with this window.” Patrick points. Hale shrugs, stashes his souvenir panties in his side pocket and lumbers over to the window, extending his limbs up to the grilled rectangle, trying to remove it.

 

            “Hurry up,” Adds Patrick, his nuts still owing retribution to VonBehren. “The sooner our assess scram, the safer.”

 

            “I’m trying,” Hale adds, before telling Patrick not to have a cow, his body is still sore from Holly Turner. VonBehren drags Flanagan away from the crumpled desk, laying him near the wall next to Hale’s legs.

 

            “Hale, hurry,” Patrick adds, as Tim’s mother yells at him that it’s time for supper upstairs. Hale looks back at Patrick yells at him to, for the love of god, show a little bit of patience, people. Geez! Next to his boot none of the boys see that Tim Branagan’s eyes are open and that he is lifting up the bottom hem of Hale’s pants, licking his lips around his mouth like a vampire about ready to succulently feast on his prey.

Lost in the Cryptobyrinth.....(the bowels of the school).. Beginning of Allan's Walk (a).

 

Patrick is still nowhere to be found and Allan continually pinches his left lower hemispherical cheek, making sure all of this is nothing more or less than a dream, wondering, at the same time, just where the fuck he is and why he has never seen or even remotely heard in passing that the skeleton of the school was really some sort of religious terminal.

 

            With his hardhat still loping off one side of his head, the videotape in the camcorder still rolling, Allan continues to march onward, unable to figure out why he can’t find his way home yet. He is pretty sure that he hasn’t been in Kansas for quite some time and all he can do is walk the direction he can remember Patrick telling him is North, thinking that it will somehow reel him back into the shiny trophy glare of the hallways. Allan wouldn’t even mind going to Mrs. Brackenhardt’s classroom today and reciting the Lord’s Prayer one hundred plus times in Latin for missing the morning hours. Something tells him inside his chest that no one inside the school is ever going to believe this story, even if he would show the video.

 

            For being still in the third grade Allan is still considered a leper because of his last name and his brother and father’s reputation proceeding him. Last spring Allan brought  his brothers doctored bicycle to show and tell, explaining to the class that all you had to do was to press a certain orange button on top of the handlebars to make the bike slightly hover in mid-air.  Mrs. Brackenhardt, who, for some reason, has taught Allan’s class ever since he arrived at CLS when he was in first grade two years ago, told Allan that puritan’s much more intelligent than you have been burned at the stake for announcing such heresy. She made Allan get down on one knee and to confess in front of the class the sin of pride while, later in the day,  Mrs. Brackenhardt’s was seen wearing all Halloween black and a black dunce cap screeching through the hallways, motoring the bike in multiple figure eights until Coach M. ordered her to dismount, saying that it was his turn. VonBehren, Hale and Patrick had a hell of a time trying to retrieve the bicycle, Patrick, addressing the mission as operation P.O.W., telling Allan that his vision and his ideologies were too young to be involved in this sort of conspiracy.

 

            The hallways are lavender in hue and feel extremely ruffled in texture on Allan’s trampled feet. Allan heavily steps over what feels like either a thick film of crust or sand, filling in the sides of his mock Nike Dedalus Pro-wings Helen purchased in bulk, along with corduroy trousers, from Sam’s club— instruments of attire that have proven to be a consistent object of torture for the boys as well as Sair.  Allan can still here the intermittent snorts offered by Stertorous Taurus Sentarious as he continues to walk. The light on the top of his helmet offers a coned illumination in front of him, and, as he itches the top of his head to make sure the Caterpillar helmet has sufficiently surrendered his cowlick, Allan is completely unaware that the camera is rolling. Completely naïve of what is being filmed on the top of his brain, loafing like a technological tiara.

 

            Allan can feel thick webs of gossamers, spooled by spiders in the shape of life size mandalas. Still he walks, he clops, shouting out his brother’s name, shrouded in such blackness Allan feels like he should be hollering out the name of Marco, waiting for a droning echoing response that will perhaps never come. The snorts have all but ceased. The heavy grunts that made him fled initially even though Patrick made him pinky-swear that if he ever took him into the nervous system of the school he would remain within reasonable long hawking distance. There is a cool breeze and the shuttering hum indicative of a Lennox in need of repair. Patrick has often told Allan about the Skell, but always making it sound more like a seldom used mass underground public transportation system with the sporadic visit from Stertorous Taurus.

 

            If Patrick were still walking in tandem next to Allan he would tell Patrick that he not only thinks that they are not in Kansas anymore, he doesn’t believe that they are on the intergalactic life boat anymore called earth. More sand fills in the sides of Allan’s shoes like an egg-timer quickly expiring, forcing Allan to doff them and swing them over the top of his shoulders like a sling. Allan continues to yell out his brothers name, and, nine yards in front of his, he can see what looks like a trickling snap of light slowly creeping in the direction of his battered gait, a golden streak that would surely create a shadow if the darkness wasn’t so damn overwhelming. Allan thinks that this flicker of light is what he always imagined the HOLE in the Nuclear Woods to look like if the boys would ever make it all the way to the back of the HOLE.

 

            With caution, placing one foot in front of the other in strategic heel-to-toe deliberation, Allan walks into the Pentecostal blink-sized light, the coarseness of the sand charring his bare feet like coals on the Flying Garcia clan’s annual Ostrich barbecue kiln next door. The shuttering humming sound Allan heard before that reminded him of the Lennox his father is always doctoring mechanical appendages with, has soared into a pleasant hum and Allan can see that he is looking into what looks like an oriental setting with emaciated men who look like they could use a couple rounds at the old buffet, shuffling around in sandals, humming, wearing long orange robes. Allan draws near. Apparently he is peeping-tommying out of the wall, overlooking a courtyard of sorts with grandiose embellishments of Chinese dragons and Demons. Allan thinks of VonBehren Ninja princess Pagoda, thinking that she would feel quite relaxed in this tranquil atmosphere.

 

            Still squinting through the aperture it dons on Allan that he has never before seen or even heard about this section of CLS before, and that, from his periphery, between the tiled flanks, it looks like it could be another vector of Peoria outside, only he was never voluntarily aware that Peoria offered anything remotely close to a China Town, with the exception of Wong’s Great Wall Sweet-n-sour sushi all up can eat on Main which Warren took them to one year to celebrate the fourth of July while his oldest son inquired to the hostess if she was in fact one of those Geisha girls he had read so much about on specialty late night cable before overtly inquiring if he ordered a certain tossed eggroll salad what might transpire.

  

 

 

            Allan sees a giant concrete statue of a smiling bald, slightly chubby Chinese man who he once remembers from one of Reverend Morningwood’s chapels as being the Anti-Christ of the orient.  Many of the orange toga’d men squat around this statue with their eyes pleasantly sealed, humming a tune that sounds to Allan like something he would have heard when he was still behind bars in the crib. Something his mom or the surrogate sing-a-sleep rattle Warren rigged to chirp out melodies in an attempt to lull him back into the gentle realm of childhood slumber.

 

            Allan continues to squint. Unlike his brothers comrade’s who are always nagging Patrick to peek through the crawl pace in order to garner a better look at his sister in her slip, Allan’s only remotely fledgling experience with the, as his older brother Patrick

 

, the ancient and tantric art of voyeurism, came when Patrick sat him down at three in the morning and unearthed an extremely previously viewed copy of PORKY’s from the WHERE THERE’S A WILL THERE WILL BE AN A educational Beta sleeve. Allan remembers the scene where the protagonist got his wang choked gratis by the overt lesbian physical education instructor as the most vivid scene in the movie, Patrick, promising his younger sibling that, if he thought that was cool, wait until they actually get to high school, where he’s sure that they’re all sorts of secret passages and shit, providing ‘business opportunities’ to the young and inexperienced. For some reason Allan felt that if he were to stuff his fragile wang between the slight crevice it would not only go unnoticed and more than likely get stuck, it would also be extremely frowned on.

 

            The humming continues. What looks like little lavender bushes float around in a stream near the statue. Around a few of the shaved heads, Allan sees what looks like an ‘Aurora,’ which his father showed him how to see after Allan watched Wayne’s World and inquired to the crackpot Guest’s first appeasing genius where the proper location was indeed actually located. Warren said that when Allan spots an ‘Aurora,’ it is like the person’s face is emanating forth with all the nuclear capacity asof the sun, so that for as long as that person is glowing with this sort of capacity, he grants life and gravitational stasis to all of those orbiting around and close to him.

 

            The hum continues. Allan wishes he could see more of what is on the other side. The statue of the balding, good natured Chinese dude sort of reminds Allan of what Hale would look like id he would shave his scalp and momentarily abandon the stogie.  

           

There is a giant clang, from either a gigantic symbol or a gong. It reverberates several times and knocks Allan over, his Caterpillar hardhat with the camcorder duck taped to the top, tumbling off of his head and into the sand. The noise is shattering and Allan steps back. He can hear someone say in English, ‘The boot ties be in you,’ and he wonders what this means before the gong reverberates once more and he steps back, patting the thick hot sand to locate his hardhat, flicking on the switch to grant a dome of light in front of him as he steps. The humming has momentarily dimmed and pieces of the labyrinths ceiling begin to crumble overhead. Without peering back into the crevice he steps back, into the semi-solid darkness of the labyrinth, solidly stepping, hoping that he will find his way back to trophy coated hallways of CLS sometimes soon, perhaps just in the nick of time for Z lunch.

 

“It’s just that,” Patrick pauses, frisks his left pocket for a wished for smoke until realizing the he is currently smoking one right now. “I mean, this whole solar system and galaxy and neon mini-golf course and fucking cross-shaped hallways that is so refulgent it turns you into Ray Charles the moment you slink inside—what if all this stuff is for is just to blind you to the real truths about life, as to why we’re here—as to what our purpose is.”

 

            Patrick feels like saying another you know, asking Hyacinth if she has ever felt that was only he can tell by the look in her eyes that she is extremely bored by the scenario. It is autumn and Patrick can still smells the nutmeg aura of Cabbages McGranahans Dickens Cider wafting down the terminal like corridors of central plank. After Levi watts ill-timely photographed a rather excited Hale winning his annual autumnal streak by a head, Hale was flown out to the Playboy mansion and  presented with the Dirk Diggler award for

 

            Hyacinth shoots Patrick an insinuating look. Patrick envisions her turning into him, saying something like you mean there’s more to this only we just can’t see it—we have to somehow experience it and feel it, to which Patrick would inevitably move in for the kill and feel the contours of her lips around his. He still wishes that was her instead of her mom in her parents bedroom two weeks prior, which, come to think of it, wasn’t that bad. Patrick doesn’t like to think about how his first sexual encounter was with someone who would have been a sophomore in high school around the time his father was a junior in college. 

 

 

He doesn’t like to think shit like that at all….

Just in-Hale.....

 

David Hale courtly apologizes to Tim as he hands over the dappled blue flowered cotton panties like a white flag, stating that it was never his intent to serve as anyone’s personal entertainment system, he just sort of falls into these positions if you know what I mean, my dear friend, as he slightly elbows Tim in the ribcage.

 

         Before Hale can reach into his shirt pocket and offer Tim a cigar and complimentary slap on the back, informing Tim that it not only looks like the better man has won, it also looks like the better man had several orgasms during the post-game victory celebration, hinting that Holly Turner truly loves the natural protein rich flavor of cum since she kept on insisting that Hale perform his trick and blow his wad on her hair even more frequently to bring out the natural auburn beauty in her bangs. Before Hale has a chance to tell Flanagan all of this, realizing, mid-way through the whole cum conditioner bit that Hale’s own fly is unzipped and that his Holly Turnerized doused wang is in jeopardy of hanging out of his trousers like a clamp in a bell, Hale props up his pointer finger, offering his nearest and dearest a “hold-on-a-second” reeling the teethy strands of his zipper into one connected band.

 

 Tim Branagan explodes.

 

         He calls Hale Satan’s obese Sibling. He says that he has never met anyone bearing an IQ the size of his own testicle before, which, in Hale’s case, is zippo.

 

         As Hale politely recants the testicle analogy, claiming that Holly had a hard enough time getting just one of them between her lips while she was giving him another handjob, insisting that this time he aim where her split-ends cluster near the mole in her neck, Tim rashly overturns his DC briefcase while abruptly beginning to rip Hale’s non-piece-o-shit Orgon cross-over into paper triangles before lighting the pieces with his purple chrome lighter, tossing them inside his velour Deceptecon trashcan left over from his dog years at Washington gifted.

 

         Hale seems rather unparsed by Tim’s response, turns to each of his school friends politely inquiring what sort of animal it was that crawled up Tim’s ass and died.

 

         “FUCK!!!!” Tim screams. Hale is a tub of lard. Hale is so fat the circus could use his shit-stained drawers for their tent. Tim brandishes his forefinger, ordering Hale to exit his house once again. Before one final scream Tracy enters the room holding the cordless in her paw, handing it to Tim, saying that she’s been shouting at him from upstairs for the past five minutes—telephone.

 

         “Hello,” Tim’s voice drops while he answers, irked veins branching across his rhubarb-colored brow. Hale craftily blows smoke over the lit end of his stogie, careful to get the blazed tip just right.

 

         “What!!!!”  Tim’s Adam’s apple morphs into an exclamatory mark. He drops the phone, configures the tips of his fingers in spiny lighting slashes. Paralyzed, Tim begins to titter, looks into the placid lids of a cigar puffing Hale who is licking his lips, telling Von B just how much better these things tastes after a ill’ hoochie-woochie if you know what I mean. The phone from the stationed on the other side of Tim’s bedroom begins to ring.

 

Patrick rushes over to the phone and immediately picks it up.

 

         “Hello?” Patrick inquires. Hoping that maybe it’s Tim’s hot cousin whose name he’s not allowed to overtly pronounce aloud in this household.

 

“Yes,” Patrick says, his eyes still pointed in the upper-right hand corner of both sockets. Patrick nods exactly once before his face loses all color.

 

         “It’s for you,” Patrick says, facing Hale. “It’s Holly Turner.”

 

Before Hale can grab the phone out of Patrick’s extending grip, Tim swats the cordless out of Pat’s hand and continues to jounce up and down on the phone, as if the cordless were on fire.

 

         “NO!!!!” Tim continues, flailing up and down, “She can’t like you. You’re the fucking fattest excuse for a human being I have ever seen!!!”

        

Von Behren strongly lasso’s both of his limbs around Tim who is now trying to maul Hale who is seated near Patrick, casually puffing. Hale has placed both of his steel-toe work boots on the on the top of Tim’s role-playing desk. He has also picked up Tim’s purple neon-laced sunglasses, placing them around his eyes. As Von Behren struggles to keep a fire jolting Tim in check, Hale relights the tip of his cigar with Tim’s own purple lighter, humming out a happy hour variation of HAPPY BIRTHDAY MR. PRESIDENT to himself.    

        

“Dude,” Patrick turns to Tim. “When I picked up the phone, she asked if her own personal entertainment system was around and by that I don’t think she meant tiny Tim and his Sega Genesis.”

 

         Hale still hums, his legs unadjusted as he turns to a thrashing Branagan, asking him why, underneath all the skin deep subterfuge, why do you think it is that people really refer to you as Tiny Tim, holding out his pinkie finger and then making it slightly curve into the calloused surface of his own thick palm.

 

         “Tim, Tim.” Patrick says, as if rubbing his fingers together in shame before realizing just how serious the situation is at hand

 

 “Remember the eternal McReynolds’ hospitality mandate—Guest’ First, Fuckers.” Patrick offers a little marketable smile after quoting Warren’s newly enforced slogan.     

              

 

Von Behren hands are now manacled around Tim’s ankles. Tim kicks, stomps several time’s on Von Behren’s hands before freeing himself completely of his grasp, rushing over to Hale, screaming, as he would say, in an entirely different context, Bloody Murder while Hale tells Tim to bring it on, not altering his executive corporate slouch in the slightest.

 

With a feral leap Tim launches on top of Hale, pummeling him several times before the desk breaks, scattering paper slips and dice in every which way direction but. Patrick holds Von Behren back, warning him not to get involved, claiming that any interference and Tim is sure to take it out on both Patrick’s and Von B’s character creations later on.

 

         Tim is shrilling, striking Hale. Patrick swears he sees foam stirring in the corner of Tim’s lip as he endeavors to place the Saturday Night Special on Hale, the move Tim apparently popped a boner on while mauling Eliot Floyd in the rubber gym during pee-wee wrestling practice. Tim is about ready to ask Hale how-he-likes-them-apples-now and who his daddy is, bitch when Hale twists him around, puncturing the butt-end of his cigar in the center of Tim’s rather saltine forehead. Hale then continues to hoist the G.M. over his head, slicing his meatloaf thick hand over Tim’s lanky frame, before pinning both of Hale’s wrist in fingery bow behind Tim’s own back. There is something about Hale’s adept wrestling skills that imminently remind both VonB and Patrick about the adroitness of his RPG doppleganger. Using his left hand Hale continues to pinch the delicate conniving wrists of the GM into a corsage several inches above Tim’s butt crack, while, simultaneously Hale’s right hand undulates and snaps before Tim’s Adam’s apple and eventually his entire face surrenders to the thick aching fingertips of Hale’s entire palms hoisting the Game Master’s lank frame three feet above the basement ground like some sort of victory torch.

 

“Now listen,” Hale barks into Tim’s muffled face. “The four of us seated in this room are supposed to be friends.” Tim continues to squirm. Hale spits out the remainder of his cigar, tightens his grasp around Tim.

 

“What I mean by that is that friends are supposed to treat each other like friends.” Hale says, slamming Tim’s head against the wall where a bikini-clad mural of Rogue sun bathing in the painted center. Both Von Behren and McReynolds’ realize something that has been hinted to Hale his entire life. That Hale the Big friendly warm and fuzzy like-a-man-with-a lil-meat-on-his-bones giant simply does not know the size of his own strength.

 

Tim squirms again. Hale tells him to listen up, whipping his fingers across Tim’s nostrils as well, obstructing all passages of air.

 

         “By friendship I expect you to treat all of us as your equal.”  Hale slams Tim’s head into the wall. Patrick notices that Tim’s face is turning colors—transitioning from the burgundy rash of red into the bluish tint of windshield wiper fluid. Hale slams Tim’s head into the wall again.

 

         “By equal I would appreciate it that every time you game with my two very dear friends seated to your imminent left—I would appreciate it if you would treat them with the utmost respective and deference and that you refrain from incessantly slaughtering their characters so that you can make your own characters stronger.”

 

         Hale butts Tim’s head into the wall once again. Tim’s face is now the color of Marcellus Buck’s deep blue Versace etched warm up jersey.

 

“Fourthly,” Hale adds, miscounting, “ If I ever so much as hear that you have purposefully sliced up my friends’ characters for your own personal gain, If I ever so much as hear a whisper of that your characters game out victoriously while you discreetly drop dice in behind their back—in your own fucking gay-ass closet; if I ever hear that you so much as treat a firkin’ flea unfairly—we won’t have this sort of last-digit confession next time. I’ll just fuckin’ kill you.”

 

If Tim’s face were any more bluer he could pass for cosmic atmosphere. Von Behren tries to convince Patrick that Tim does too sorta look like Vanity smurf. The bickering continues. Hale tightens his grip.

 

         “Now inhale.”

 

 

                   

After the fracas Coach M pick up a stuffed object that apparently has fallen from the Losers aerial vessel upon departure. Upon entering the gymnasium  coach M holds the green parrot up over his head, claiming it to be more or less a token of tyranny. The amoebic crowd foams and sways more frenetically with every gesture coach M makes. Marcellus Buck’s, the sixth grade stand out parents are flagellating their limbs at their own shadow, telling Coach M to go on ahead and preach that shit on brother. Knockout student teacher Lillian Wiltz clatters up to the center stage and plants a wet one on the side of Coach M’s face. Cheers erupt from every direction as Coach M personally vows to find out whoever it is that is responsible for this fiasco and personal guarantee a clenched fist ticket bus pass to their eternal damnation not only here on earth but also in the numerous next worlds. The crowd is now chanting Terrence Mooney’s name in a fashion that sounds like Coach M running for some sort of elected political office. Coach M raises his hand in a seventy-degree slant, slicing his arm up rather quickly the way Patrick used to do in Spelling or Geography until he realized that the teachers would more than likely never call on him anyway because he wasn’t at all interested in shooting the ball from behind the arc after school with the rest of the privileged kids who literally has a silver spoon wedged so far up their ass it’s beginning to rust in their mouth. The foam of the crowd continues to grow and rant and pretty soon it sounds like everyone is saying coach M’s last name like a victory chant as he hoists Hale’s parrot in between the sharp sly gut tooth grin of the guillotine as he has done with so many other grade school mascots, asking the creature is he has any last words to say before he meets it’s maker.

 

            “Be happy! Be Happy!” The parrot chirps, in front of a suddenly silenced crowd. When Coach M clears his throat in the authoritative manner and asks the parrot to please repeat what he thought he said, the parrot once again breaks into his pecker! Pecker! Mantra before humming his Chestnut routine.

 

            “As did Abraham to Isaac, I do, therefore declare, a sacrifice.” The parrots fist sized head being planted between the gaping tooth of the guillotine. Coach M, reminding the raucous crowd that this is the most humane form of execution known to man.

 

 

                                       

“Listen, Satan, Lucifer. I know you’ve been getting a bad rap and all. I’m here to tell you that I’ve been a avid Ozzy Osborne Black Sabbath groupie for years and that I’m sure we can somehow manage to get along just find if you point me out to the latest firing range in Hell so that I can practice my cross-bow for eternity. Shit.”

                                                                       *

 

Hale joins them five minutes later with a sweat ring tonsured near his forehead, claiming that this was the eighth time in the last four hours.

 

Allan peers through the ventilation shaft-his camera still filming. Though he has long ago forgotten about it. Patrick is, on the other hand, trying very hard to explain things to Hyacinth Lyonkowski. 

 

Secretary former WW11 Centerfold Gayle Heurmann announces over the PA that all varsity Basketball players are excused from both class and school until further notice. Patrick thinks big fucking whoop. ‘Cello Buck and Eric the Red have been, once again, shooting threes all morning. Aron and Mario have initiated the ritual of drilling Jeremiah’s head deep into the shitter every time Mrs. Brakenhardt orders him to the restroom to wash his hands. At lunch yesterday, Bev Pine asked if the two of them could snap a Polaroid of Jeremiah’s daily predicament so she could post it on a T-shirt that would read CRACK KILLS beneath, so secular administrators would quit speculated that Coach M’s newly refurbished gym is nothing more than a luxurious opium den. Bev Pine apparently claimed that, if both Aron and Mario would do this, she would generously let them borrow a home video of Karen when she was five “getting kinky with the wet Banana”. “As soon as I get the video back from coach M.” she told them, “It’s yours, at least until her graduation.”

 

Normally either Patrick or VonB assist in freeing Jebediah everyday. After his head is free Jebediah cries for his dead mother and either VonB or Patrick have the dubious honor of changing Jeremiah’s underoos and cleaning them without being noticed before Jeremiah goes home to Aunt Kiley, his 400 pound legal guardian who last week during Springer inadvertently sat on the poor lad, crushing his retainer into plastic shards.

 

The next day Bev Pinesol sported her skin tight Custom designed Crack Kills tee shirt in front of Aron and Mario and asks if any of these boys would be interested to see what thirteen-thousand dollars in terms of saved Lunch money can purchase via cellophane.

 

Allan peers out the vent as he watches Aron and Mario tell Jebediah to take it like a man, today, faggot.  He watches as they wedgie him from behind and shove balled up TP in his mouth.  Allan watches as both Mario and Aron take a serious dump before hoisting Jebediah up and shoveling him headgear first into the shitter. Since Jebediah’s headgear is built like a miniature erector set version of the tower of Babel, Jebediah is able to breathe and avoid being totally Ostriched to the point of suffocation. Although he still reeks of shit.  Some days at lunch, Mario and Aron ingest only Cheese balls and chili beans, casually strutting behind Jebediah and Farting, as if to portent what comes next.

 

As they shove Jerbediah in, for the second time today, they talk about Misses Noel who lost one breast to cancer and then died in a three-lane car wreck on the way home form Mayo.

 

“I guess that’s why your mama was such a dead lay.” Aron laughs. Small particles of mucus spraying out of his throat.

 

“Do you get it Mario? Dead Lay?” Aron nudges his cohort’s ribcage. “Do you get it?”

       Mario admits that he doesn’t get it but still snorts anyway, telling Jebediah to take cover, there about ready to flush and turn the top of his head into a shit sandwich.

 

After Ostriching Jebediah and flushing Aron and Mario both turn and flex their fingers looking for Patrick. The bell to fifth hour has long past shrilled and Patrick knows it will more or less be his old Jonathan Edwards Irish ass anyway whether he shows up on time or not. Jeremiah is yelping for assistance. Patrick turns and looks for help. Mario had both of his wrists manacled around Jebediah’s suspended ankle. Even though there is a healthy linoleum echo resonating out of the bathroom Patrick knows that the only person who will come for help is perhaps Coach M, and even then, he will somehow encourage Aron and Mario to perform their Lutheran duty and continue on with the roast.

 

            “Stop it, you stale salsa breath piece of shit.”

 

            Aron is kicking Patrick in his ribcage. Trying to yank one of his hands into the bathroom stale. The bell four fifth hour sounds and Patrick realizes that this time there may in fact be only one way out.

 

 

He runs, the hallways is dark, the light fluttering down on the far end like it is trying to ward off mosquitoes. He can hear Aron’s gruff voice swearing after him, talking about removing Patrick’s testicles with his knuckles and then forcing Patrick to swallow them down afterwards and submit a three-to-five page expository paper, detailing the event, to Mrs. Mooney.  Mario, squealing scales that only highly trained Mezzo-soprano’s can hit.  He can see Deeba  and Shithead polishing the trophy case from last semester at the far end of the hall. This is his only hope.

 

“Shithead,” Patrick acknowledges. Shithead bows.

 

“Shithead, look, they're gonna kill me!” Shithead looks at Patrick like Allah will protect him. Aron Browman has just turned the corner picked up a half-limped JaVon Worthington  who was kicking it near the water fountain that coach M. told him was his semester assignment, to monitor the lower plank water fountain and make sure no one fucks with. Doctor Kennedy Marshal even pointed her hand toward the trophy case and told Bowman that he thinks Shithead may be trying to hide Patrick, and, once you locate him and beat the ever-living shit out of him, please remind him that he was late for his last session.

 

Aron and Mario arrive at the heap of Trophies from Last season. Patrick picks up one and hurtles it at Javon, like he is christening his dread locks. Javon just looks at him like he has indigestion before charging Patrick. The two of them fall into the trophy case, breaking the glass. Patrick feels blood treacling down his face. Aron Browman seems to have plunged in as well and now Patrick feels trapped. VonBehren and Hale are both, more than likely in class, with Hale more than likely ferrying a cup of coffee for Mrs. Mooney and then making a little whew-whoo with Cabbages in the Teachers Lounge. Another crash and Patrick is beginning to feel his ribs bruise. He can only speculate that Mario has just crashed into him and now Patrick feels pinned down under enormous weight and duress. Every time he opens up the lids of his eyes he sees a different color fist plummet into his vision. Mario is telling him that he is going to peel Patrick’s testicles off like a loosing Lotto scratch off right now, so make himself at home. The light in the lower corridor seems to take it’s time while flickering and before Patrick opens his eyes to the branding of another fist, he sees that he above light goes out for good and the next thing he knows he is falling. Falling for what feels like forever. Maybe this is what death is-life suddenly sucked out of you in a vortex of rolled-fists and clutched knuckles. He falls in darkness and then all of a sudden he just stops falling. Looking up he hears loud snorts-as if his father was sleepwalking once again back to the MacIntosh after his mother had once again set another twenty-hour time limit to conserve energy.

 

“Easy,” Patrick looks at the creature. A shadow seems to lurk and sniff. Satan. Patrick thinks. Goddamnit God, just send me back into Hell why don’t you. The creature continues to snarl. Patrick can see the creature’s breath exhale in dual tendrils out of its nostrils.

 

“Listen, Satan, Lucifer. I know you’ve been getting a bad rap and all. I’m here to tell you that I’ve been a avid Ozzy Osborne Black Sabbath groupie for years and that I’m sure we can somehow manage to get along just find if you point me out to the latest firing range in Hell so that I can practice my cross-bow for eternity. Shit.”

 

Patrick realizes that eternity is a fucking long time and that being dead feels an awful lot like being alive only there is a creature staring at you, grunting, as if trying to communicate.

 

“Wait a second,“ Patrick says, pinching his nipple, trying to make it hard. “How the hell can I be dead if I can still do that?” Patrick looks up at the creature, realizes that he must have fallen through a trap door or something and that he is now in the school plumbing. Which means that he is not only having a tête-à-tête with Lucifer, he has having lunch with Stertorous Taurus Sentarious.

 

“Shit!!!” Patrick turns around and runs. Although he can only see an inch or two ahead of him, Patrick takes off. To his left side he sees what appears to be empty library shelves, stacked high. Behind him he can still hear Taurus’s grunt, sounding rather upset.

 

 

 

 

“Shit. Fuck. Shit. Fuck Shit!!!”

The Welkin

Long before he would dip into the labyrinthine underground of CLS christened by one Patrick McReynolds himself as the cryptobyrinth, scuttling swiftly through the interior digestive track lining of the school, discerning somewhere in the early months somehow that not only all of CLS but also the world as we know it is more or less connected like one serpentine run on sentence, Patrick began hanging out after school in the ceiling rafters the newly refurbished gymnasium, perched a good fifty to seventy feet above the Skyboxx where Coach M entertains lord knows how many Comet Varsity elite cheerleaders over shots of knobs creek and imported Cuban cigars. For reasons no one has yet to inquire about the ceiling is referred to as the WELKIN, due to the cloudy lavender purple-sunset harbinger of a new day of peace and promise coating labeled to the flat top ceiling of the FINANCE FOR ETERNITY gymnasium—this is how the ceiling or “welkin” is perceived from the court, bleachers and skybox vectors below—as an ascension into heaven. The cloudy mist and purple polyutherane draped mist perfectly occludes the searing over head lights. It is simply unbearable to remain up lodged in the welkin during one of the 150 seemingly year round comet home games, due to the full wattage capacity of the overhead lights. But during mid-afternoon, before dusk, Patrick has found this vector of the school quite peaceful, even stain glass ghetto Jesus, the variegated mural of an afro-Christ dunking on the left hand plank of the crucifix—the mural Patrick himself was hurtled through at a velocity of God knows how many fucking non-gangsta G’s two autumns ago when Patrick decided to take matters into his own hands after smoking a peace pipe with Old crazy Hoof down the street and taking matters into his own hands, cajoling fellow Losers Von Behren and Hale and Dejuan and even Lynnford Collins into assisting him in his failed campaign.