Authors: Bruce Bethke
woods, the trail wound on. And on. And on. Around .27 miles, I noticed
that my suitcase was getting
real
heavy. That, and Payne and the rest of
the kids were moving a lot faster than I was. I’d already lost sight of the
group; even the Style Statement wimp who was bringing up the rear.
(How he ever managed to move that fast in
those
shoes, I don’t know).
At .56 miles, I started to flash on them all being in on the scam.
Yeah, that was it. Dad had paid them all off. They’d flown me up here
just to ditch me in the woods, and now they were back at the plane,
laughing hysterical.
At 1.12 miles, I came out of the woods and into The Academy.
The basic layout was a bunch of long, low, prefab buildings lining
the sides of a big rectangular field. The forest came right up to my end
of the field; at the other end they’d stacked a mess of the prefabs to
make a vaguely high-schoolish looking building. There was also a sort
of reviewing stand or something out in front of the big building, with
two flagpoles, a Canadian flag, and a U.S. flag even bigger than the one
at Perkins. Something bothered me about that, and I kept looking at
those two flags until I traced it down.
The flags were the only splash of bright color in the whole scene.
The sky was a kind of a washed out pale blue, with the occasional fluffy
white cloud scattered around. The woods were a lush, deep, mottled
green, tall pine trees stretching on forever. The underbrush came right
up to the edge of the Academy, like a thick, dark green wall. The grass
on the field was cropped short and sunburned a greenish-tan; the
buildings were green, the reviewing stand was green, every damn rock
and garbage can was painted green. There must have been two hundred
guys around the buildings or out on the field, and every single fritzin’
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one of them was dressed head-to-toe in green!
Except for two electric blue mohawks at the tail end of a line going
into a large, low building. I walked over and rejoined my group.
Step by step, we filed slow into the building. The McPunk who’d
done all the laughing was still in Sputter ‘n’ Snicker mode so he wasn’t
much use, but after awhile I got the other one talking. Turned out his
name was Scott Nordstrom, and he was from Iowa or Illinois or
someplace with an I like that.
“How’d you wind up here?” I asked him. He ejected the CD from
his boombox and handed it to me.
Angina Pectoris:
The bimbette who’d
made the tatterblouse famous. I’d never thought much of her music, but
Lisa really grooved on the image. “So?”
Scott shrugged. “My folks are like, Springsteen dweebs, y’know? I
mean, Big Time. Souvenir decanters, paintings on black velvet, the
whole bit. Like we even went to Asbury Park for our vacation last year.
Christ, it was a pilgrimage.”
“So?”
“So we mixed it up the other night, y’know? I’m listening to
Diamonds from the Veldt
, and they start getting on my jammy about how
Angie is so yoko, total trash, and all the rest of that metal, y’know? Then
they go into the usual spew about how I should be listening to some
Genuine Boss and getting in sync with the working classes.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said. I’d lucked out. My olders had never had it
that bad. They’d just collected every version of
Born to Run
ever
recorded.
Scott pointed to the CD label. “So I program my boombox to be
playing track #3 ninety-nine times in a row. Then I crank it to def
volume, lock it in their bedroom closet with all the sweetleaf plants, and
leave the house.” He smiled. “I take the closet key with me.”
I looked at the disk. Track #3 was,
Brucie B Dead (And I Glad He
Gone)
. I handed the CD back to Scott. “No sense of humor, huh?”
Scott shrugged. “I expected them to get messed, y’know, but they
smoked their voice coils! I was hanging out in front of Mickey D’s with
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my homeboys when eight sides of bacon rolled up in their stymobiles,
and we all wound up spending the night in the drooler’s lockup. The
boys got out the next morning, but my dad refused to take the call. Max
dweeb!”
Scott calmed down. “It took the bacon a week to get my folks to
admit they
were
my folks, and by that time Dad’d jammed through the
academy admit. I went straight from Vagrant Heaven to the airport, to
some private slammer in Seattle. My luggage caught up with me there.
My folks sent along some clothes, my skateboard, my boombox.” Scott
took the Angie Pectoris disk back from me. “And
one
CD.”
I started to mumble something sympathetic, but he threw me an
interrupt.
“You want to know what’s
really
yoko?” Scott blurted. “Listen!” He
cranked up the boombox’s volume control and started spinning through
the FM dial. “Zippo, man. Flat nothing!” He shut the boombox off. “I
don’t know what state Canada is in, but we are a zillion miles from
anywhere
I
want to be.” By this time we’d shuffled up to the door of the
shed. Scott turned to step inside.
“The Von Schlager Military Academy,” he grumbled. “Hah! They
should call it Absolute Fuggin’ Nowhere.”
A little flag went up in my head. “Break! A nano back you said—
Scott, you
know
something about this place?”
He turned back to me, surprised. “Don’t—? Uh, sure. Like you
never heard of the Von Schlager Military Academy?” I shook my head.
“Oh, bummer. Look, dude, this place is def bad. I don’t mean ‘baaad,’ I
mean
bad
. I mean, the Fundies don’t send their kids here, ‘cause they
don’t like the way they think when they get out. Even the
Posse
don’t
send their kids here.” A look of big concern took hold of Scott’s face.
He pointed to himself. “It’s like, I’m not worried about myself, ‘cause I
am so together, y’know? But if you’re going into this cold blind ... ,” he
shook his head and frowned.
I grabbed his sleeve. “Scott, you gotta tell me—”
“Will you two wimps kindly get your candy asses in here?”
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Somebody grabbed hold of Scott’s other arm and dragged him inside. I
got pulled along in the cavitation.
The room was small, windowless, and dusty hot airless. Four big
kids, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, were standing just inside the
door. One grabbed Scott’s suitcase as he came in and ran with it out the
door on the other side of the room. Another grabbed Scott’s boombox
and threw it on a folding table, while a third started going over Scott’s
body with an airport detex. The fourth one—a big, red-haired guy with a
face like a pepperoni pizza—just stood back and looked mean.
“Hey dudes,” Scott said, as boombox batteries went rolling all over
the floor, “this is not cool.”
Nobody answered. The guy who’d taken the boombox pulled out a
screwdriver and started cracking open the case.
“Hey, man! You’re wrecking my tunes machine!” Scott started to
move, but Pizza Face stepped forward.
“‘Hey, man!’,” Pizza Face said, on maximum mock. “We won’t
break your ‘tunes machine’.” He smiled, nasty, and added, “We let your
bunkies do that.”
“Relax,” the guy with the screwdriver said, a little friendlier. “I’m
just checking for contraband.”
“Riiight!” Scott said, all smiles. “ContraBand. I heard of them; salsa
group out of Miami, right?” Nobody smiled.
“Well, he’s clean for metal,” the guy with the detex said, “but the
sniffer’s picking up something.” He waved the loop around Scott a few
more times, then announced, “
D
-Lysergic. Right front pants pocket.”
Scott never had time to react. Neat and businesslike, the two
inspectors dropped their tools and pinned his arms, while Pizza Face
reached into Scott’s pocket and pulled out his handkerchief. “Hey dude,”
Scott said, “if you needed to blow your nose, you just hadda ask.”
Pizza Face whipped out this enormous thing that looked like a cross
between a Bowie Knife and a ripsaw and split the kerchief along one
seam. The kerchief turned out to be made of two sheets of thin fabric,
with a thick layer of soft white paper in between. “Oh, crud,” Scott said,
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quiet. Pizza Face sheathed the knife, pulled a plastic lighter out of his
shirt pocket, and fired it up. When Scott realized what was happening,
he made one more desperate lunge to break free. They had him solid.
Fighting was getting nowhere, so Scott tried talking. “Hey look,
dude. That’s five hundred dollars worth of really def blotter there. Let
me go and I’ll have my homeboys put some maximum ‘roids in the next
load. You look like a dude who’d appreciate some really fine ‘roids.”
Slowly, Pizza Face brought the lighter to the paper. He was enjoying
this.
“No, really, I’ll get you top drawer shit,” Scott said. “Make you feel
like Rambo.”
Pizza Face touched the flame to the edge of the blotter.
Scott started to cry. “C’mon, dude! I traded my
Casio
for that!”
Pizza Face smiled at him. “Toughski shitski. From now on, you go
straightedge.
Everybody
here goes straightedge.” The flames enveloped
the blotter. Scott just stood there, watching and whimpering, until it was
all gone.
They let go of him, and the guy with the detex made one more pass.
“Clean,” he announced. The other guy collected all the pieces of the
boombox and handed them over, and they pushed Scott through the door
at the other end of the room.
Pizza Face turned around, smiling. “And now for
you
.”
Don’t misunderstand; I was still in orientation mode, looking sharp
for an escape hatch, and not at all interested in being cooperative. Only,
this didn’t seem like a good place to
prove
it, y’know? When Pizza Face
moved forward I stood total still, raised my hands slow. The baggage
guy came back into the room and ran off with Mom’s suitcase. Pizza
Face took a step back and let the other two guys start working me over
with the detex. Honest, I was trying my best to ride out the flow!
Until the detex beeped as it went over the inside pocket holding my
Starfire, and the scanners dropped their tools and pinned my arms to my
sides.
Maybe it was ‘cause I was fierce hungry. Maybe it was ‘cause I was
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burned-out tired. Maybe it was ‘cause I had this horrible flash forward
of ham-hands with the screwdriver trying to take apart my Starfire, or
maybe it was ‘cause I’d spent most of the last 24 hours getting my arms
pinned by various kinds of gestapo and I was just real tired of being
grabbed like that. Anyway, Pizza Face came swaggering over, saying,
“Let’s see what he’s got, shall we?,” and reaching for my jumpsuit