Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (6 page)

He had all those qualities and yet I've forgotten what he looks like. His real name is Tom Hander. All he did was run after us a lot. The more I think about it, the more he just seems like some
guy
.

But this is me, going to bed tonight, in my Bills Zubaz pants, moving my forehead muscles around in a caring way and caring about all this. Because, maybe Toby has a point: What about that night me and Necro paintballed Luckytown's truck, and then only a week afterward Luckytown just happened to pull Necro over for expired license plates. What about how after Necro spraypainted the phrase
HULKAMANIA RIDES ALONE
onto Luckytown's truck, Luckytown chased us down the street, wearing these cow-patterned slippers, and caught Lip Cheese, and pinched Lip Cheese on the tricep so hard that he had this yellow and purple sore on his arm and, from there, the flu for two weeks. And, then, as the rest of us ran away, Luckytown literally yelled into the street as we ass-bolted into the woods: “I will eat you alive!”

Because, when I wake up the next morning, after Mom has gone to work, the news shows that, while I was asleep, three fires occurred downtown—total Roasted Face of Satan as your downtown map. Authorities find a charred-up mattress
in a boarded-up apartment building, burn patterns cursived all over the bedroom. Near the Liberty Pole, the second floor of an apartment collapses after another fire, and an old man on the second floor breaks his leg. I think at first: Maybe those two fires are simply regular fires that sort of happen and I'm just paying more attention now. But then, an explosion blows out the mirrors in the Y's weight room—and investigators find shrivelings of what might have been a soda bottle that maybe contained explosive liquid. Police detain or arrest or apprehend Rambocream, whose real name is apparently Brandon Ross, but they let him go without charges. Some radio host calls the whole thing a “race-war amalgamation.”

And, while there are no suspects for the Race-War Amalgamation, people at an all-black church on Joseph Ave. hold an antiviolence vigil a few days later just in case.

Then, the next night, nothing. The phrase “race-war amalgamation” is never mentioned again, and I find my mouth hanging open in disgust when sports goes back to taking up half the news's half-hour.

Because, my mom grew up blocks away from the Liberty Pole. When I was way younger, during what I'd maybe call my Snowpants Indoors Phase if I'd known Necro then, she took me to the Pole's Christmas lightings, where they bring out the mayor and for an hour the city seems safe. Up close, the Pole looks like a junkyard harp; the tall buildings around it are quiet and the square around it empty except for maybe a lone wheelchaired person moving slowly through. Blocks away though, from East Ave? Those lights, strung along the metal wires that extend downward diagonally from the pole,
look like a lit-up extension of the street, like a ramp of light, lifting suddenly into the sky.

So maybe I think the lights are nice, the way much of downtown is perfectly nice, or the way how even though I never go to House of Guitars, I still hope it stays there forever. So maybe my point here is that it sucks, is all, that nobody cares when a building in Rochester burns down.

Except, when I wake up—the next afternoon now—to get my Thurman Thomas jersey, right when I've finally worked up the most focused Pope-like Boner of Hate for Luckytown Hastings that I can, here's Mom. She appears over my shoulder with a colon full of Level 10 Bitchentery:

“Goddammit Nate! You were here this entire time? I told them you were out!”

“Told who?”

“An investigator—for an insurance adjuster!—came by this morning and wanted to ask you about that
explosion!
I told him you were out, because I just assumed, for whatever reason, that there'd be no possible way you could have been sleeping this entire time and only be getting up at 4:45 p.m.”

She passes me briskly in the kitchen and heads toward her bedroom.

“Don't say it like I blew up the building!” I say.

But like all moms, if the Japanese bomb your house, she'll tell you it's your fault for living there. She turns around.

“Three hundred dollars. Rent,” she says. “You will start paying at the end of April. I will
not
have a freeloading
knife collector
in this house.”

“Mom!”

“Go work construction somewhere,” Her Witchy Tundracuntedness says. “It's good for your hands.” She laughs her one Ha. She hands me the investigator's card, but I'm so pissed I tear the card up and let the pieces float to the floor and walk out of there right in her face.

Because when Toby drives us to find Luckytown, you can already hear the harmonica in the wind, the Bow Tie Being Unpinned from the Dead. The gravel hisses when we pull into the lot of Goateez Sports Bar, out in the shoebox storefronts of Victor, the town where Luckytown hangs out, because we just know this, though I forget how.

On the Goateez marquee, it says: 8
PM WET T-SHIRT CONTEST / 10PM CHRONIC PARADIGM.
Cars are parked even on the grass across the street. Inside, it smells like peanut shells and roasted clothing. The decorations are standard Box of Atmosphere: Coors banners; dark wood lacquer that's a little greenish like old, infected chocolate; dimming softball trophies and shamrocks.

Me, Necro, Toby, and Lip Cheese shoulder-wedge through the crowd—no Genny or Labatt's or Shea's here. We stand behind Toby. I can barely see above or around his shoulders.

But when we see Luckytown Hastings—with his friends at a booth, collared shirt under a black sweater, anchorman grin perfect enough to put you to sleep after a workday—I no longer want any part of this, am suddenly so embarrassed that I'm unable to see anything in front of me, blood cells in the Pope-like Boner of Hate returning to base. The blood cells in Toby's Pope-like Boner of Hate, too, appear to be returning to
base. Because when Luckytown notices us, Toby spins away to avoid eye contact.

“Actually let's just hang out,” he says. “This is Colonel Hellstache. I didn't mean Luckytown when I said that.”

“Wait—what are you talking about?” Lip Cheese says.

“I said I don't know why I said Luckytown Pinned Bow Ties on the Dead! I was upset! That tape over Wicked College John's face messed me up!”

“Pinned what, Toby?” Luckytown says, suddenly from behind, gnashing his whole body at us.

Toby looks down and, as if remembering to, folds his arms and says, “Nothing.”

Luckytown turns to his friends, who are both wearing Dickshirts—one with the Goldschlager logo; another that says
HOW DO I LIVE?
on the front and
FCKN' LOUD
on the back. He lowers his voice, like he's maybe impersonating someone. “Does
he
have a raincoat for that?” Which his stupid friends laugh at for some reason. Like it's a joke.

“A raincoat for your
eye
, maybe!” Lip Cheese yells, pointing at Luckytown from over Toby's shoulder.

Luckytown, whose meanness alone, if you liquefied it and drank it, could kill a man, stands up from the table. He grinds his teeth down to powder. Toby's face muscles deaden with what might actually be fear. So he yells:

“Everyone! Everyone!” And when the crowd quiets, Toby appears even more scared, like he hadn't anticipated talking to a quiet room. “Um, so basically, this guy, Tom Hander, he may—or maybe not—have made a bomb out of a Timex watch to blow up the Rochester Public Broadcast building. So,
you know, we were just dropping by to, you know, accuse him of that, and to make you all aware of, you know …” Then, Toby yells, in total Auxiliary-Level Embarrassment-Recovery Mode: “Pinning Bow Ties on the Dead! Our friend is in a coma because of this man right here!”

Except, then? Luckytown, and everyone in this Mung-Hut Dynasty of a bar, starts cracking up! The crowd noise picks up again, like they're celebrating something. Somebody pats Toby on the back, and not in a mean way.

“Pathetic, pathetic, kill yourself already, you
children
,” Luckytown screams over the crowd. “The fact that someone unconditionally loves you at all you
piece of maternally deposited
…”

He stops and inhales, face recomposing itself like a VCR rewinding him into calmness. “I don't feel all that sorry for anybody who associates himself with some
boy
”—and he points his finger hard at Necro—“who, when he's bored, exchanges weapons and chemicals and explosives with people who have tried to form a currency called the David!”

Something unclicks inside me. “You don't know Necro!” I say from behind Toby. “Necro's not that type of guy! Necro hasn't Unabombed anybody!”

But Necro, right now? He droops his lower lip, raises his triangle Dracula-brows, and twists a button on his Necro Hall Of Fame Parka. As the bouncer muscles Toby toward the door, Luckytown says, voice thinning into the crowd: “I don't think you know your friend here as much as you think you do.” He flops his arm toward Necro. “He'll light a bomb and he'll take you by the hand; he'll lead you straight into hell, he'll lead you
into …” and then I can't hear him anymore, because we've been nudged outside.

Riding home on 490, Toby's car's wipers whimper across the windshield.

“I was so close, so close to throwing a punch,” he says. “When I think about it, I feel sorry for every person in there. Laughing like that. Who laughs at a life?”

Next to me, Necro leans against the window and smirks into the collar of his Necro Hall of Fame Parka. He mumbles something.

“What'd you say, Necro!” Toby goes, near-pulling the car over. “You laughing along with them?”

Necro leans against the window, closes his eyes, and laughs, once, into his fist.

“Kangaroo for a Kid? Kangaroo for a Kid?” Toby says. “Is that what you said? I have eleven German Shepherds, and one of them died, and the reason everyone calls me Kangaroo for a Kid is because—”

“Drop me off right here!” Necro says, pounding Toby's headrest. His eyes are bloodshot and dark, like caves where fawn fall asleep and die. “You all look at me like I'm stupid! You take and invent a conspiracy. That is animalism!” Necro says. “It's a good thing they don't have a word for you—you and your Cockdramas! Your moral masturbation! Your pleonastic intestinalism! Your hippocampal food rape!”

Toby pulls over on the side of the highway, passenger side-view mirror inches from the highway's concrete sound-blocker wall. Necro slams the door, pushing air in on us. He
shrinks in the rearview mirror when Toby drives off, walking with big strides on the road shoulder.

“Well I don't know what any of that meant!” Toby says.

Minutes shift by like earth plates. The sky is light purple, and there appears to be a crane, stretched all the way up into the cold into the top floor of a skyscraper. The water spraying out of it looks like a feather.

At the exact same time, in the seat well where Necro was sitting, I find a manila folder with Necro's bootprint on it. The folder has a bunch of what appear to be printed illustrations, in color on shiny paper. One shows a knight with a single flame making a wide curl around his body and ending at his sword blade. Behind him, a silhouette of a palace, gutted bright orange with flames. The body of a young man, in a pageboy vest, lies at his feet.

“What's that?” Toby says from the front.

“Oh, just some job applications I left in here,” I say. I stick the folder in my jacket.

Because, in the way old friends do, Necro always forgets to take his things with him when he leaves a place. He's left five pairs of boxers at my house, five chapsticks, one pair of swim trunks, two retainers, one bicycle, one Rygar, two Rush T-shirts, thirty-four colored pencils, one sleeping bag, two pillows, one toothbrush, and a pencil drawing of Electrus Nucleotide, a chrome bald man staring straight at you, arms muscley but straight-lined and robotic, like rock candy, each hand crunching a much smaller robot, electricity falling from their necks like confetti. The day he drew that was one of the
Big Days, years ago, a day of Crazy Stories. Beforehand, we rode our bikes, standing up on our pedals, really Maverick Jetpantsing it, one county over into the pine trees. Somehow, the gate to the Holleder Armory was open. We made up our own organization back then, the CTA, even though the letters didn't stand for anything. But we'd printed CTA bumper stickers—he's left nineteen of those at my house—and we snuck into the armory, stuck them on some army jeeps, and rode away.

I don't want to talk about this anymore. Pinning Bow Ties on the Dead? You take that phrase.

The Wegmans human resources office is mocha colored, the size of a bathroom that gave up on getting a toilet. I've borrowed one of Fake Dad No. 3's purple shirts, and am wearing khakis and navy Polo socks. The tiny plastic fastener-thing that holds the socks together in the store knots up in my calf hair. I'm sitting in a plastic chair with no armrests, talking to this interviewer woman who is all shoulder pad:

“And why is it that you want to work in Meats, or in Cheese Shop?” she asks.

“I just thought it would be interesting,” I say. “That cheese, you know, would be interesting.”