The rain is beginning to subside, It feels more like the clouds are gradually beginning to drool overhead. Last week at Tim’s once-a-month role-playing outing Tim continued to rapidly augment his characters strength and endurance by having each of them take turns in utterly slaying each of VonBehren’s and Patrick’s creations and then, after the color in Tim’s countenance reversed back from the psychotic blood hounding hue that overtakes his enthusiasm as he begins to drop his characters dice, commenting to himself and rolling his fist each time, saying a plosive tongue bitten, ‘yes’ every time he rolls the dice for his own creations and an almost perfunctory, ‘Shit boy, you shouldn’t have done that. You’re virtually fucked.’ every time Tim splatters the dice behind his visual obstructing GM fence for his gaming patrons, shaking his heads, red splotches filling his forehead as he rubs his hands together as if in greed, quickly calculating how many more H.P, points each of his characters will receive for pummeling Wolverine and Iron man and co., once again, into a bludgeoned pulp.

 

            After Tim hounded the players last week and took his time grinning to himself, dropping dice, and verbalizing his accomplishments, slapping himself on the back, talking about how his Death Force is the most potent cataclysmic unit in the chartered universe, Tim likes to strut over to his purple spray painted stereo and play a kazoo and accordion duet version of Pomp and Circumstance, he recorded from a BBC special on Weird Al.

 

            Both Dave and Patrick have grown extremely attuned to Tim boasting about his promotions. Although Tim is the Gm, or GOD, so to speak, of his jaded superhero universe, Tim has also manifested himself in a number of creations.  

 

 

For reasons no one has yet to properly figure out Flanagan’s basement is the tealish color of a used ice pack. Both Pat and Von Beheren look at the character sheets in front of them like dinner menus before Patrick clears his throat in a manner reminiscent of a dish disposal commenting aloud that he wonders just when Hale will show up, a remark which leaves Tim to address him simply as oh that fat fuck.

 

It is after school and Patrick is running. Autumn foliage is blurred like near-sightedness on all sides of him. His elbows thrust and tug him into a steady sprint, behind him voices drown-a posse of neatly trimmed basketball lads all in pre-game warm-up uniform stampeding the dead grass with overly expensive tennis shoes endorsed by pro-basketball transients. Patrick is all alone. Shit. His fucking maternal progenitor should have been here by now. Where the fuck is Helen?

 

“Get-um!”

 

“Dork!”

 

“Fucking nerd.”

 

And Patrick is running, hauling his Irish Ass, the playground serving as a fortress—a safe haven the silver tongue of the slide slinking down into a pit of arid sand. Eric Bushmen seems to be in the lead-the boys behind him forming a sort of Euclidean triangle. Their blue-n-white dappled and streaked patriotic attire give them the overhead semblance of a giant three-corner hat, dashing after a menacing, flailed arms Benedict Arnold. Three minutes earlier Patrick was innocuously kicking it with Allan and Sarah, in the reservation area Coach M. designated as the McReynolds stye—where Allan and Sarah and himself are required to wait for a scurried Mrs. McReynolds who always seems to be running twenty-five minutes late. VonBehren left fifteen minutes ago, unbuckling his safety patrol and popping his back, asking Patrick if he is sure he wouldn’t need a lift up the hill, Hale was the first to vamoose, walking out to his grandparents minivan with a giant Rocket for his science project. For some reason Mr. Looney excused the basketball players to an interim recess so he could utilize the gymnasium for personal free time with the new physical educational intern from Appleton, Wisconsin.

 

“He’s headed toward the playground!”

 

“Get him.”

 

“I’ll beat the ever living fuck out of you McReynolds,” Aron sneers and shouts. Patrick does not look around. Instead Patrick triple jumps from the pillar slab of concrete and lands on the soles of his split-lip sneakers on the tongue tip bottom of the slide. He grapples both sides of the slide to heave himself north, only to realize that Bushman is behind him while Mario and Aron have taken an alternative route to the top. Aron yelps out the words Get him once again. Patrick realizes that he is trapped. A fist is pounding into his back. He wishes the mother ship would show up. He wishes VonB or Hale would be close by. He wishes he should have tucked his BB pistol and shot for eyelids. Wish he should have blinded them. Eric Bushman’s near skeletal hand creepers along Patrick’s fair torso. He can see Mario in a Jesters cap and cigarillo holder asking Patrick if he enjoys playing with matches. And then there is God damn Bum fuck Bowman who is uncoiling a gas pump from god knows where-like a serpent, dousing Patrick with gasoline. The stench and slight burn as the gas first sluices across Patrick Caucasian skin. Hale? Where the fuck is Hale? If Hale wasn’t so goddamn Big Friendly Giant all the fucking time, the two of them could have a fighting chance. If Von Behren wasn’t so hung up on his repressed sexuality. If Allan or Tim Flanagan were all here-maybe-just maybe he would have a fighting chance.

 

Aron squirts gasoline out of the gas nozzle and onto Patrick like a fireman and a hose. All the boys are laughing the hyena neck loll laugh and Tod, who is wearing a clerical collar has taken the cigarillo out from between his stashed lips is talking about the fires of Hell and of damnation, pausing a tenth-of-a-second before offering his benediction in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit, tossing the butt of the cigarillo on the glossy tongue of the slide before the basketball posse utter a stale, uninspiring Amen. There is a pause and a flash and then internal writhing as the match snaps on top of a gasoline saturated Patrick. From the distance of the school the slide resembles a chrome tongue that has just swallowed a pitcher of jalapeño peppers and is definitely in need of some hard core Aqua. Patrick is burning. Everything inside of him is burning and through the inferno-nimbus he sees Heaven—the Kingdom Come being a giant gymnasium flanked in golden golf pillars, rooting for the Christ Lutheran Comets. Von Behren is warming the bench and Hale is a water boy. All of the basketball players are once again conversing about how bad they are and Patrick can see his Parents shuffle into the arena and check the stubs of their tickets-Warren, hinting something into Helen’s shoulder about how he thought the Kingdom come would be less of a Trophy case and more of a bucolic Irish meadow with Leprechauns who know your first name and cows whose udders usher forth the rich froth of Bailey’s Irish. Mr. Looney’s stilted gait is recognizable even in the after life and Patrick can see him thanking everyone for coming, here for tonight’s game and for eternity as Patrick burns, his skin flayed and peeling yet still in tact because he is now in Hell—the place Rev. Morningwood refers to by gritting his teeth and pointing into the earth and talking about plural Hockey sticks. Patrick has found himself in hell and he has found himself all alone. He sees Hyacinth Lyons roving her tongue back and forth between Bowman’s salivating drool as the arena cheers. Angie and Karen and Corrine all seem to be cheering on Bowman in the basketball arena. Mr. Mooney is saying something about man and wife as Von Behren chin-chin’s a champagne chalice and Hale talks about purchasing another round for everyone. Just then, through the flicker and gash of the inferno, Patrick witnesses a close-up of a bemused Warren ruffling his cowlick with his dirty fingernails, inquiring to his wife that he thought their eldest son was suppose to be here as well. A fire. A burn.  Patrick’s whole body feels like a Pentecostal flame breaking dancing its fiery tongue across the balding forehead of an aged usher. His gallbladder feels like it is being toasted over an open campfire with three-foot long marshmallow pincers. As he is looking up he can hear a door open-it is almost as if his own mother is going downstairs to the furnace, informing him that he had better get his shit together right now young man if he there is any opportunity for advancement down here, pronto. Patrick can feel loud jeering close-up face of his mother yelling at him. Screaming at him. Asking him where he thinks he is going and telling him now to get in here right now young man. Get in the car right this very minute-asking Patrick if he thinks she is doing this for her own health?   

The rescue

 

Although Von Behren is seated on the handle bars of the thruster, Patrick has his arms buckled around his torso like a life vest as if trying to hold on to something as the Thruster involuntarily continues to screech across the blue pasture of the almost windex colored late-spring afternoon sky, the two boys continue to carol out a chorus of yelps and wails as the vessel gyrates and spins forming what feels like consecutive 360 ‘s headed in a downward spiral towards the stain glass afro of Ghetto Jesus. Patrick hears Von Behren almost illegibly drawl something out about this perhaps being the end before Patrick feels the palms of Von Behren’s hands slice back over his own vision just as the astral vehicle darts into the heavy black left pupil of Ghetto Jesus spewing glass like crystallized confetti in every which way direction but, and the next thing both of the lads realize is that the Thruster appears to be headed a la direct course in the direction of the Guillotine located in the center of the gymnasium. The blackness of Von Behren’s palm slowly pans out into peach riddled geometric lines of latitude and longitude before Patrick’s vision enters the den of his previously wrought destruction. The entire scene almost calculated before his eyes in a tear-drop of a second. His youngest brother Allan, the hostage, still comfortably clad in his Native American Boston Tea Party incognito feathers and war paint bounded and trussed, head lodged into Coach M’s Guillotine most commonly reserved for in the art of severing the heads of rival mascots. For some reason Coach M has the A-team theme song is blaring through the schools magnified sub-woofers, cosigning Patrick and Von Behren’s rescue with an almost patriotic sense of pre-ordained urgency. Patrick can feel flecks of glass sprinkling behind his ears and his head and the moment he sees that Warren’s Thruster, the timely brakeless vehicle served as a rescue chariot in the operation of war, is on course to batter his brother straight in his locked forehead, Patrick grapples the handle of the Thruster as hard as he fucking can and using some sort of almost Herculean strength on loan from some higher authority, his teeth grinding steadily behind his lips as he marshals the handlebars hard, to the left just as the tires to the skid into the lucre shine of the finance for eternity floor, leaving serious skid marks that look like dirty rainbows three feet above the three-point arch, marks that coach M will later say were placed intently to give Marcellus Buck an idea where the NBA three point parabolic curve is located. Patrick then swerves the bike, revs the gas aiming into the direction of his nemesis Coach, still ready to decapitate Allan in the center of the gymnasium. 

 

            “Fuck,” Patrick screams out as he wields his tomahawk out in his free hand, his left hand harnessing the vehicle as if in rodeo posture jousting towards the wooded podium where Coach M still stands, his lips petrified in a frame of shock. As Patrick accelerates the vehicle towards the podium he swings the tomahawk around in what appears to be an overhead figure-eight and, with his lips tucked into his skull, thwacks the bladed instrument into the direction of Coach M, which, judging by the Coaches response, it appears that Patrick may have seriously nicked some part of his right hand.

 

            Before Patrick can tell Von Behren that he plans on circling around the contours of the Finance for Eternity Gymnasium a couple of times to gain the accelerated momentum the Thruster needs to launch, Von Behren has already jump kicked off the handlebars and is sprinting towards a bent over Coach M. Several of the Varsity Elite seem to be chasing after Patrick with their arms outstretched as if they are caricatures in an animated strip as Patrick cuts and seamlessly carves an additional NBA three-point parabolic curve before telling Aron and Mario to eat his dust as he screeches, swerves, cuts off the foaming crowd, back pedals, forming what he will someday learn is the mathematical emblem for infinity across the sheen gloss of the gym floor headed skewered and rackety, trying to gain momentum, watching as Von Behren kicks an already crouched waist Coach M in the chin by falling back in slow motion and then punting up his own ersatz Nike Dedalus Puma pro-wing into the coaches chin in a fashion in which it looks like Von Behren is punting the football after third and long. As Patrick breezes past the side of the gymnasium where the folded lunch tables hibernate into the wall Patrick can’t help humming out the blaring A-team theme song to himself as an anthem of pending victory as he realigns his weight, digging his shoulder deeply into resplendent soil of the refurbished court, looping back like a corporeal boomerang near the bleachers where he can see Marceullus Buck picking up something that resembles one of his emaciated bitches and hurling it javelin like in the direction of Patrick, to no avail.  On the top of the podium Von Behren has successfully unraveled the leather cuffs behind Allan’s wrist after carefully yanking his head from the swallowing wooden orifice of the guillotine. Patrick is in the middle of accelerating speed on his second loop and a steady crowd of basketball elite has begun chasing him again, Donald Lionowski, leading up the pack, slowly jogging his limbs in the circular-eight formation already breaking a sweat. Von Behren looks at Patrick as if to say, next loop and we’re off brother. Without hesitating Allan  immediately creepers Coach M and then pushes him off the lip of the podium just as his older brother zips past him for his final lap—the Coach, oscillating his arms in a wild akimbo of fury as he trampled into the sprinting Dedalus soles of the Varsity Elite still charging after Patrick. As Patrick veers into right he can feel the bodies of both his brother and his best friend mount the Thruter, in a wobble, Coach M standing splayed limb in front of the Thrusteras if playing chincese tag, Von Behren lowering his right hand and scooping up what appears to be a stuffed animal of orinthological merit in his right hand, Patrick mandating that they tuck their heads into their shirts as if in prayer, as if supplicating for something greater in the scope of this world as he can feel the Thruster lift plowing through the antipodal eye of ghetto Jesus in the atmosphere, glass sprinkling like wished for rain in a time of need.               

Hale, taking his sweet little old time, trying to keep his grubbing hands off the c-cup of your treasures...

The wind continues to momentarily thrash and scatter heaps of leaves and twigs at the side of the house. Tim has finished off kish-ka-bobing all of Hale’s characters in his DC campaign. Patrick, sparing his own ass, literally speaking, pinches his lips together and says ‘owww’ every time’s Death Star or Nightmare begins to disembowel one of Hale’s creation.

 

            The third Friday of every moth Patrick hosts the all-night role-playing rampage. Hale hosts the first Friday night at his digs on Buena Vista which consist of numerous pizza, plenty of belching farting and, since the campaign is solely VonBehren’s and his rowdy cadre of Side Arms, Digital Justice, Strider, Jasmine, Maxima and Company, the results are almost always consistent. Everyone walks away happy with mental hardons, usually from the trouble ladled out on Elysian Monarch, the hero’s space vessel and home, so to speak, which for reason having to do with the Empire Strikes Back, Patrick refers to it as simply Air City.

 

            Last week Dakota returned from a long, classified operation endeavoring to discern more about the Galactic threat known simply as the Shredder. For being a mere mortal and a mature C cup, Dakota knows how to kick some serious ass with some artillery Patrick’s character Iron Horse likes to pick up and go BLAM with.

 

            VonBehren introduced Dakota North in mid-September, shortly after his own romantic strike out with Meredith-Elise Willow, who, after their demise, shipped Patrick VonBehren’s Marvel box with a calligraphic heart stitched on the cover, and a picture of a needle piercing it right in the center.

 

            Meredith had routinely gamed with the lads from time to time but kept dwelling on what she called the ‘insubstantial panoramic ennui that ensues from rabid amounts of intergalactic imaginative stints.’ VonBehren was always telling Meredith-Elise’s character, Persephone Glass Siren; i.e., thickly horned-rimmed sexually frustrated librarian by day, hard core sex addict, leather strap femme-fatal vixen by night, who, of course, was the love of Col. Side Arms, only to go awry, for reason’s VonBehren hasn’t mustered up the courage to tell his fellow gamers and best friends.

 

            The second Friday of every month belongs to DC and I’m the G.M. Brandagan and Tim, pretending to drop the dice so that they land on just the right digit. Brandagan’s room is antifreeze blue and, although Tim is the size of a sixth grader in a sophomore’s body, every single mechanical toy and trinket he has ever own is on permanent display with little, KEEP YOUR GRUBBY PAWS OFF MY TREASURE signs posted periodical. Tim keeps reminding Patrick that, like sex with his mama, he is free to look but touching may violate certain laws established to keep cretins like yourself in constant check.  Hale is by no means ever allowed to even set foot on the Flanagan’s front porch. After Tim exiled Hale from his basement last summer, Tim filed a restraining order against him, saying that the next time he even so casually struts his fat ass down my sidewalk, I’ll sue.

 

            Hale has gone out of his way to try to make Tim as comfortable as possible. Tim chooses not to attend Hale’s role playing beer and barbecue fiesta’s because, as he numerically states, a.) He can’t stand Hale. b.) VonBehren can’t run a valid, realistic campaign worth shit. c) He can’t stand Hale.

 

            Hale first went out of his way to introduce himself to Tim at Von Behren’s stellar, unforgettable, thirteenth birthday bash, which introduced Patrick to gaming and everyone else to booze (Patrick figuring out how to decimate the Master lock on VonBehren’s parent’s liquor cabinets. All of the kids, with the exception of Tim, sipped copious amount of Mogen David casually). From the outset Tim snarled at Hale and openly suggested a weight loss program that had helped his uncle Floyd out considerably back in the day called slimfast suicide. The boys first role playing outing lasted an exhausting seventeen hours, Patrick suggesting that now that he has finally found the one thing in his life that seems real to him, we might as well just go on right ahead and game till’ VonBehren’s twelfth birthday bash.

 

            The party was momentarily adjourned to Tim’s basement down the street when Mrs. VonBehren walked into the dining room table, an empty bottle of Mogen David in one hand, a charred master lock in the other, a tear sliding down her lip, saying that something happened to the bottle of wine she had been saving from her wedding for her son to take his first communion with VonBehren went to console his mother and quickly devised a fabrication how it was probably Rev. Morningwood when he dined with them last Sunday and finished that bottle of port before the salad course that he more than likely dickied his way into the liquor cabinet in an endeavor to ward off the demons that still haunt him ever since performing that exorcise on Barney Lowery, the congregational lush, during happy hour, over a decade ago.

 

            Patrick took this as his cue to leave and Tim suggested that they continue in his basement exactly one block down the street, where he had Nightmare cast an illegal Illusory-curtain over Hale’s newly made character Tim named Centurion after his sister’s Tracey’s muffler dragging sad-excuse for an automobile she paid three hundred dollars for last summer. Patrick’s standard Wolverine (which, even though Wolvie is a solid trademark of Marvel comics, Tim allows Patrick to portray Wolverine in an accumulated cross over endeavor from Von Behren’s Marvel campaign to Tim’s stringent D.C. campaign, Tim got such a kick out of Patrick pretending that metal sprouts of adamantium really could sprout from his knuckles with an imaginative CHA-CHING that he amended the rule to make it realistic) thought that he was actually slicing and dicing up the bad guys, only to be informed, by a pedantic Tim afterwards that what he thought was reality was nothing more than a thinly-filmed veil and that Centurion know looks like a platter of stale fettuccini generously soaked in blood.

 

            Hale looked back at Tim the way he looks at Mario and Aron and the remainder of the Varsity elite during lunchtime, when they wedgie Jebediah, or even after lunchtime, as he helps Patrick unearth Jebediah’s head from the shitter. He simply looks at them as if he is sad. The jolly, hummel-cheeked sexual epicurean leaks out of him, and he momentarily commiserates with his pain.

 

            The only reason Tim can tell Hale is that he needs to keep it realistic. Everything in Tim’s game needs to be strategically monitored in accordance with the character generation law and the overall rules of the game.

 

            “It’s like the law of physics,” Tim once told Hale, pedantically, informing Hale that he more than likely wouldn’t happen to know too much about physics since he was so young and fat and clumsy and shit. Patrick looks at Tim as if, okay, he gets the point.

 

            “In case you haven’t heard pot pie, we have something on this planet called gravity. Our whole entire solar system is supported by this gravitational proof, suspending in perfect equilibrium by the sun. Say the sun even moves just one minute fraction of an inch, dickless, and it’s goodbye life and hello to the end of the world as we know it. Get my drift?”

 

Like Aron Browman, Tim has one caterpillar length eyebrow that connects point A to point B on his forehead.

 

            Hale decided to go out of his way to make Tim as comfortable as possible on their next role-playing extravaganza. Hale, who was just starting sixth grade at the time, decided to cordially invite Holly Trurner, evasive love of Bradnagan’s life, high school senior, who Hale has met disguised only as Brandagan’s heavily perfumed and scantily clad feminine characters. Over the pending summer the Coaches Widow had just given breech birth to her youngest and she was in dire need of an around the clock caffeinated refill, using the same horribly jaundice Styrofoam cup she has used since Watergate, making Hale, on call, twenty-four seven, cup of Hillsboro’s finest in tow.

 

            After spoon feeding Mrs. Mooney her twenty-sixth refill of the day, Hale cozily snuck out of the cross-shaped hallways of CLS, casually strutted down to the corner of Westmoreland and Starr where he had it pre-arranged to have his Grandfather pick him up one hour early and drop him off at Bradley University, walking in strides to Miss Trurner’s house, and ringing the doorbell, hoping to God she’d be home so that he could cordially invite her to Tim’s second role-playing outing.

 

 

 

 

            Holly answered the doorbell still dressed in her nightgown, her blonde-straw thick bangs curved into her forehead from massive amounts of hairspray that would make VonBehren proud.

 

            “Miss Trurner, I was just wondering if I could step inside for a moment and discuss a mutual friend of ours.” Was all Hale said, before his ears registered the solid clack of the dead bolt lock while his left hand was swiftly guided into her house, a suburban domestic abode which, come ten minutes time will seem from the casually observer sauntering down the cement strips passing for sidewalks on the opposite side of the street, that the top of the house will be nodding up and down in coital cadence, the drapes and awnings fluttering in such a way as if it is about ready to vainly take the Lords name three times in a row before releasing itself in a way it has yet to properly understand. 

 

    Patrick keeps his mind fixed firmly on the skull. The jaundice sockets and friable nosepiece. After telling Lynnford to go back ten yards, Hale cranks his arm behind his shoulders before tossing the skull a la pigskin fashion. Patrick keeps thinking that all the skull really is is some sort of solidified fertilizer. Basically soil that has yet to become ground. Crazy Hoof still stamps his feet and motions his limbs, chanting out what sounds to Patrick almost like constipated groans. The Honda zips past and beeps twice, heading down further into the parabolic court of downs circle. In the background, someone is trying to play taps on a bugle.

 

            “Dude,” VonBehren says to Patrick. “Can you believe this shit? Can you believe we fucking did it?”

 

            Patrick’s face is still stunned. Lynnford is saying hut-hut and, before ordering the final hike, inquires if Hale plans on bending over even more, big boy. A shot is fired down the street. The skull is now a football and Patrick thinks of telling the boys to quit it, but then thinks to himself, what’s the use, it’s dead anyway. That was Weird Duane’s excuse. Weirdo Duane lived in between Harvey Liddle in the abandoned house on the corner. Duane would teach Chinese students how to drive stick shift by taking them to Saint Mary’s cemetery, telling them explicitly not to worry if they just so happened to run off the narrow gravel slither and onto the grass of the actual cemetery itself; claiming that the inhabitants of St. Mary’s cemetery were dead anyway, prodding the petrified Chinese in the ribs, quoting that they wouldn’t feel a thing nonetheless.

 

            Hale tells Lynnford to go back, way back as he fires the skull in the air. Lynnford runs, trips, his heel getting caught in a pothole, and Patrick can’t bare to look as the skull hits the hard surface of Down Circle and splits into what seems like a million cosmic pieces.

 

            “Shit!” Hale yells out. “Damnit Lynnford!”

Shots echo from near Patrick’s house. Harvey Liddle is more than likely giving his salute. The Garcia clan has been unusually quiet recently, and Patrick wonders if it is because of an anonymous caller from next door called the police about a mango-colored hippopotamus that was grazing in their yard. More shots echo out. Between Harvey and Patrick’s brother-in-law in the air force, Patrick’s done pretty well keeping his bullet shell collection in the upper hundreds. Another shot. He can hear his mother yelling for Patrick to come home and grub. Hale still seems to be chewing out Lynford for not reeling in the skull into his chest when he failed to catch it. Crazy Hoof’s eyes appear to be somewhere else, like he has momentarily crossed over the metaphysical bridge and his own hoofs are now galloping roughly over breaded plains with thousands of Buffalo that have come and gone before him. The smashed skull resembles the overturned dregs in the ashtray Helen turns over and empties out of the car before Warren occasionally drives it.  He can hear the occasional police car hum down Sterling, headed toward the South side. Helen’s voice slithers through the air once again, ordering Patrick to hurry, on the double; addressing him once again the way the Coaches Widow addresses him. Calling him young man.

 

            “Pat, bro,” Von Behren’s voice perches up. “I guess you better get going now. Your mom seems pretty intent on having you and your brother over there for dinner. Perhaps maybe she’ll be generous with us and spare a few pork chops.”

 

            Patrick pauses Von Behren in mid gesticulation, brushing his hand down south, swatting him on the wrist, looking at him as if he has just done something that would constitute the shock jock caliber.

 

            “Allan,” Patrick says. “Holy fuck!!! We forgot Allan!!”

 

            “Shit,” VonBehren says. “Wait a minute, I though he was going to enter the gymnasium with you?”

 

            Patrick slaps his hand on his forehead in a forgetful manner.

 

            “Allan. Shit!! They probably have him. We have to go back down there and rescue Allan. Holy Shit. They’re going to slice off his pecker with the guillotine commonly reserved for the Varsity mascots. They probably have him trussed and gagged right now.”

 

            Hale immediately comes over, addressing Patrick and VonB as mass people, inquiring to them what in god’s name is all the fuss about. Lynnford follows Hale, holding his elbow pumped back, inquiring out loud if anybody thinks that the wart on his elbow could be an early indication of genital herpes. Patrick drops the tomahawk, jumping up and down after the blade lands on the top of his tattered pro-wings.

 

            “Hale, shit. It’s Allan. He’s still down there. We have to go find Allan!!!”

           

            As if perfect echo, Helen’s voice once again soars out of nowhere, informing her two, innocent darlings get to their sweet and innocent asses seated before Warren operates that Garcia Clan tracking device he’s been waiting so earnestly to use.

 

            “We need to get back down there right away,” Patrick briefly lodges the side of his nail inside his mouth, bites down on it, looks up with a look of poised vigor slitting from his eyes.

 

            “Okay,” He says. “Who hear knows how to operate a vehicle?”

 

The boys’ just sort of look around at each other. Crazy Hoof continues to stamp his knees as if stranded in mid-pout. Lynnford raises his hand and says that if the car has a clutch, he should be able to figure something out, due to his history with jumping starting objects phallic in both shape in nature.

 

            “Patrick,” VonBehren assents. “We need to get down there fast. Just tell your mom that you left something very vital and important down at CLS and that you need to return ASAP to retrieve it.”

 

            “What?” Patrick’s eyes blink. “I go into the school by myself and come back out with brother in tow. Ahhh-yah. That will be the day.”

 

            From the house Patrick’s mother yells out again. Lynnford cuts in between the boys, gulping his throat in such a way that his Adam’s apple looks like a pear.

 

            “Okay,” Offers Lynnford, making a time-out emblem with two finely manicured and lotioned palms. “Here’s the plan, sweetie. Hale and I will go into the McReynold’s establishment and keep your parents’ company while you and VonBehren hustle down to CLS and retrieve your brother.”

 

            “Nice one Miss Collins but the only ordeal is that, we have no vehicle, and it will be at least an hour round trip, twenty minutes jog both ways.” Patrick’s fingers contort into his signature shotgun, his lips firing blanks at his temple.

 

            “Wait,” says VonBehren. “We won’t have to run,”

 

            “Says you Mr. All-state Track star guru.” Patrick comments, lifting up his shirt. “What do you think this is, a tan line?” He says, pointing near his waist.

 

            “No,” says VonBehren. “What I’m talking about is our little Thruster-er in the garage.”

 

            “Whew-hoo,” Hale says, rattling his torso left and right like he is riding the helm of a toga-clad conga line. Lynnford asks what about the Thrust-him, big boy?

 

            “Dave, that’s reserved for our Florida expedition in three weeks. We still haven’t conducted all of the final rounds of tests.”

 

            “Pat, we have no time. Allan’s head could be lodged in that guillotine.” Patrick can still feel the deep rug burns welted into his neck. Hale turns around immediately, running into Casa McReynolds driveway. 

 

Hale comes skidding out his claw arm up in the air, the thruster bike kicking heavy clouds of smoke behind him. He skids past the boys once, pops a wheelie, makes a u-turn, fires back in the boys general direction.

 

“Shit,” VonBehren says. “Patrick, bro you actually pulled it off.”

 

“Told you I could.” Patrick says in a semi-condescending manner, smiling. Hale revs up the bike again. More smoke vomits from just beneath the back seat cushion. Patrick takes over on the seat and orders VonBehren into the passenger’s side.

 

“Where the fuck is the passenger’s side?” VonBehren asks. Patrick points to the handlebars.

 

“Pat, bro. No mean to quash your science fair hopes already but if we’re going sixty miles an hour, wouldn’t the inverse velocity propel me off the handlebars at an even greater proportional speed?” Patrick looks at VonBehren, informing him that his ass is to be seated immediately.

 

“Remember!” Hale shouts, with his hands cupped around his mouth. “If you find little pecker parrot pick him up. I still want to see if he is capable of saying that other thing the man at the Costume Trunk informed me that he was capable of saying.”

 

VonBehren squats on the front of the handlebars. Patrick steps down hard, backwards on the breaks, kicking his vehicle into start. Thick exhaust the color of charcoal erupts from Patrick’s EAT SHIT COCK JOCK bicycle License plate and he can hear Lynnford say something about needing a cock jock as the two of them zip out from Downs Circle, taking a hard left on the cement flab of Sterling Avenue.

 

“Shit, Patrick, how fast is this thing going?” VonBehren turns around.  Patrick still has his eyelids squinting, wishing he would have remembered to bring goggles.

 

“I CAN’T HEAR YOU. WHAT?” Patrick screams, blaring through the stop sign where Rohmann meets Sterling, heading south. The average speed limit for automobiles is thirty miles per hour, radar enforced and verified. When riding the EAT SHIT COCK JOCK in stationary mode, he has seen the bicycle read near hovering speeds of 115 miles per hour. A thick spume of smoke tornadoes behind the bicycle and before either of the boys realize what is transpiring they are sliding between the blurred green of Madison gulf course, headed toward Martin Luther King and Sterling, where the path cuts down near Manual High, to Griswold and down to CLS.

 

“Shit,” Patrick yells. Hold on. I’m going to fucking attempt to do something that has never before been done.”

 

Before VonBehren has a chance to yell back at Patrick, asking him just what in the fuck he is actually talking about, Patrick has grappled both the handle bars serving as VonBehren’s throne and is kneeling back, trying to pop a wheelie. Near the break handle he squeezes the clutch and before Patrick or VonBehren are aware of anything happening the second back up thruster explodes, engendering a thick carcass of deep black fumes, hurtling the bike over the stream of traffic pissing across two opposing lanes Martin Luther King Drive, over the aluminum capped bluff, through thick foliage.

 

 

                               

 

 

“SHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTT!!!”

 

VonBehren yells out a-whew, much in the similar fashion Hale would shout out the first syllable of his signature catch phrase. Patrick places both of his own hands out like wings.

 

“Patrick,” VonBehren snaps back. “Shit brother, you did it. You fucking did it!!!! This thing is flying.”

 

“Wheeeeeeewww!!!!” Patrick shouts out, seventy-feet above the ground. “Dave, look. We’re flying. We’re fucking flying! Take that Coach M and all your Varsity elite shit!!!”

 

The tips of Patrick’s wings turn into middle fingers. From above they can see the sparsely shingled houses of the south end. They can see smoke swirling from the direction of CLS. Manual high school has already been passed.

 

“I feel like we’re the fucking Wright Brothers,” VonBehren shouts, coated in black charcoal from the eruption of the second thruster.

 

“How ‘bout you say we fucking kick some of that CLS ass, Orville?” Patrick yells back, still shouting out at the top of his lungs. With the thick exhaust smothered on top of the pancake mix Patrick coated himself with to  look like an authentic Native American, Patrick face slightly resembles tar baby in countenance. His hair is black as well and looks like a cactus salvaged from greenhouse inferno.

 

“Dude, Patrick. This is fucking amazing man. We get this out on the market, and we’ll both be millionaires. The United Stets government will insist that every war troop will have one. This could revolutionize modern warfare and infantry combat forever, bro!!!”

 

“Dude, says Patrick, slightly relaxing, leaning back on his handlebars as the thick, ribbons of air brush over the both of them. “Can you imagine Dave? We can take this thing anywhere and not get in trouble for it.”

 

“Where do you suggest we go after we rescue Allan?” VonBehren yells looking down, one-hundred and fifty feet above the shingles and the trashcans and the graffiti.

 

“I don’t know?” Patrick says, rather overly sure of himself and confidently. “I’ve always heard Paris is extremely nice this time of year.”

 

“Patrick dude,” VonBehren shakes his head left and right. “You don’t want to fucking get involved with any of the French bitches’ brother. Trust me, when they find out you could build something like this at the formative age of eleven, they’ll want you to be devising shit for them all the time.”

 

Patrick alters his handlebars and VonBehren’s crunched derriere slightly to the left. The can see the smoke curling up like an Old Testament sacrifice from the corner of the gym. They can make out the serpentine hose lines plugged into he fire extinguisher. From above Christ Lutheran looks small. It seems that everything Patrick and Von B avidly deplore in this world is small and scattered below them right now.

 

“Alright, bro.” VonBehren assents. “Let’s land this here bitch.”

 

“Hunh?” Patrick looks at Vonbehren, semi-puzzled. His face contorting into the slouched-crumpled countenance excerpted from the yearbook last autumn.

 

“Patrick, bro, the school is right over there. Slap on those air-brakes so we can swoop in, pick Allan up and then thrust the fuck back home.”

 

“Uh-yeah, hmmm.” Patrick warbles his consonance. “Air breaks, yeah.” Patrick’s knuckles grope around the edges of the handlebars. Slight squeezes emit from the breaks. Nothing seems to happen. All of a sudden the bike freeze at a seventy-five-degree curve above CLS.

 

“Patrick,”

 

“Dave, look, I know what you are about to tell me, and all I can say is that I know, I should have verified that the brakes work. I should have learned how to land this thing.”

 

VonBehren turns his head around on the handlebars. The vessel pauses completely in mid-air.

 

“Patrick!!!” VonBehren yells.

 

“Prepare for an emergency landing, sir”

 

“What!!!” VonBehren yells back. The encompassing force of gravity slowly begins to tug at the boys and their vessels.

 

“I suggest you hold the fuck on sir!!!”

 

“What!!!” VonBehren screams before the bicycle drops, boomeranging out of nowhere, screeching towards the prison of Christ Lutheran School. The scream the boys emit is something that their future friend Tim down the street might classify as Bloody Murder.