“What would you fight for?” Tom asked the ram. He was looking it in the face and I was hoping it would butt him, but not too bad. If it knocked him out, we’d have to carry him home, and that was a long ways to carry someone with shit on his shoes.
“Baaaaa,” the ram said. Or at least that’s what Tom pretended it to say, holding its lips open, using his hold on the ram’s horns to bob its head up and down. The other two rams looked over at this, interested, annoyed, but still just sheep in the end.
And that’s when the flashlight lit up on us.
Scared holy hell out of us.
Came from nowhere.
Came from only ten feet away.
Greg shrieked like a girl (I’m real sorry to use that expression, because it sounds demeaning not only to girls, but also to the man who would become Paladin, but the truth is what it is, and Greg Barrows shrieked like a girl) and he jumped down off the fence he’d been sitting on, down into the pen with Tom, and he immediately turned and tried to run, meaning he ran full into the fence he should have remembered was there, since he’d just jumped off the thing.
I froze into place.
Tom jumped on the ram’s back, straddled it like a horse, and started yelling, “Giddy-Yap! Giddy-Yap! Ride, you beautiful bitch! Away we ride!”
I was still frozen in place, trying to see where the light was coming from, but it kept shining in my face whenever I looked at it, blinding me. In my mind I was thinking that if the sheep farm had given birth to someone like Warp, to someone who wasn’t merely human anymore, a place where Nazi horrors were assuredly in place, where alien artifacts were twisting the minds of men, where Mayan gods were holding sway over the destiny of mankind (we really had smoked quite a bit of marijuana that night, quite a prodigious amount) then we’d should have known that the premises would have incredibly sophisticated security, such as what appeared to be a sentient beam of light, drawing out my soul.
Again, the marijuana.
“Ride, bitch! Ride!” Tom was yelling to the ram. Instead of galloping away, carrying Tom over the fences with great bounding leaps, the ram settled heavily to the ground and sent him sprawling.
“Tom Clarke,” the voice behind the oncoming flashlight said. “That you? Sounds like it’s you. What you doing with that sheep, boy?”
“Not sex,” Tom said. “Definitely not.”
“Thank god for that,” Officer Horwitz told him, clicking off his flashlight, climbing halfway into the pen, regarding the three of us.
Tom was simply dusting himself off, unperturbed at the turn of events, because he was unshakeable. A rock. I was a rock, too, but only because I was frozen into place, still, trying to understand how a beam of light had transformed into a man. I thought of Star Trek teleportation, mostly. Greg was holding his bleeding nose, which was broken, having snapped sideways when he ran into the fence.
Yes. He broke that nose when he ran into the fence. I know how many of you have wondered how Paladin, the healer, could have a broken nose. The truth is that it happened before he got his powers, so it was set in stone before he could do much about it. The truth is that Paladin’s broken nose had nothing to do with any supervillains (like he would sometimes claim) or any meteors (which was kind of an official story) and instead it was from how, when he was sixteen years old, he’d ran face first into the side of a sheep pen at the Selood Brothers Sheep Farm.
My mind, at the time, a bit late, was suddenly realizing that there were no aliens involved in the night, no superhumans, just Greenway’s only law enforcement, Officer Horwitz, who was grinning at the three of us and shaking his head, trying not to laugh, and laughing all at the same time.
“You boys is drunk, ain’tcha?” he said.
Tom said, “We boys is drunk.”
“That marijuana I smell?” Horwitz asked. He made the words sound resigned, like a father who understands a boy has got to grow up in his own way, and make his own mistakes.
“The sheep,” Tom said.
“Pardon?” Horwitz asked. Mike Horwitz was country beefy, which is different than city beefy. Being
country beefy
means you have some girth to you, born of nights of deep-bottomed stew pots and days of walking long miles and moving occasional trees or rocks or confused bovines.
City beefy
means nights of greasy-bottomed fast food bags, and days of riding elevators, and being a confused bovine.
“The sheep gave us marijuana,” Tom said. “They are our guides to the celestial.”
“More likely you got it from that Molar son of a bitch,” Horwitz said. “He’s the only one around here with access to marijuana good enough to reach the stars, which is exactly where it sounds like you boys are tripping. Come up out of that pen. Get out here.”
“I think my nose is broke,” Greg said, holding it. There was blood coming from between his fingers, and his words were muffled and twisted. “
I finkk muffh noff iff broff
.”
“Might be that it is,” Horwitz said. “It won’t heal any faster in there, though. Come on, boys.”
We came out of the pen, with Horwitz helping Greg the most, but still holding him mostly by the shoulder, trying to avoid the blood on his nose, the blood on his fingers, the shit on his shoes. The three rams were up against the fence nearest us, as if they too believed they were getting out of the pen. A couple times there was one of them that made the
baaa baaaa
noise and of course now it sounded more like laughter. I wondered if it might have been the one that Tom had tried to ride, but I really couldn’t tell them apart. Dad would have been able to. I hoped we weren’t getting him into any trouble.
When we were assembled, Horwitz made us wait next to his car while he radioed back to headquarters, which was in Bolton, not Greenway. On the radio, sitting half out of his car, staring at us, he said, “Nothing spectacular. Just three boys trying to rile up the sheep. Yes. They’re drunk. Greg Barrows, and then the two Clarke boys. They weren’t hurting anything. Yes. Very drunk. No. I don’t see as how we need to cause any big ruckus. Barrows hurt his nose. He’s crying about it.”
That wasn’t fair. Greg wasn’t crying about. He gave a hurtful look to Horwitz, then a look to my brother and I, wanting support. We nodded in outraged sympathy.
Horwitz, still on the radio, said, “Not sure. Let me check. And… we need to know this for official? Okay then, I’ll ask.” He put down the radio and beckoned to Tom, waving him closer with that two-finger wave that officers learn in their first day of training. Tom took a step closer.
Horwitz said, “Headquarters needs to know if you’re wearing condoms when you’re scoring on Judy.” Tom’s eyes went wide.
“You know she’s related to Bolton’s chief of police, right?”
“No. Sir,” Tom said. It was about the only time I’d heard him say
sir
.
“
No
, meaning you’re not wearing a condom? Or,
no
, you didn’t know that?”
“I didn’t know that,” Tom said. Greg and I were looking at each other, then back to Tom. Some lights had gone on in one of the nearby buildings. A voice, in the distance, was yelling for the dogs to keep quiet. One of the light poles in the sheep pens had gone on. There were maybe fifty of them, spread out, but only the one had gone on. Horwitz was giving Tom a serious look, and his hand had strayed to his gun, unclicking the strap that held it fast in his holster.
“Holy shit,” Tom said.
“Fuck,” I said.
Horwitz looked to me, eyes narrowed, and he gestured at me with the radio in his hand, shaking it at me, the cord of it brushing along against his sideburns, but he didn’t even blink.
“And, you, Stevie Clarke,” he said. “Headquarters needs to know… you getting anywhere with that Layton girl?”
Greg hissed in a breath. I mumbled something. Tom moved protectively in front of me, even though Officer Horwitz’s hand was on the butt of his gun. I loved him for that. I loved him anyway, but I loved him for that, too.
Horwitz burst out laughing suddenly, turning around and hooking his radio back into place. “This fucker’s been off for two minutes,” he said. “God damn and Mother Mary, you two fuckers is oughtta have seen your faces!”
Tom was the first of us to laugh. He said, “You ugly fucker!” but he was laughing so hard he had to lean on the police car in order to support himself. “You ugly
ugly
fucker! You brilliant fucker!”
Horwitz was laughing even louder. Greg started in as well. I still didn’t see the humor in it.
Horwitz told Greg, “I was gonna brace you, too, but I heard your girlfriend has got big titties, and even an officer of the law has to respect that.”
“The honor of the badge!” Tom laughed. Greg didn’t know what to make of other people laughing at his girlfriend’s big titties, but he smiled because we weren’t getting shot. His face finally made me laugh, just as Conroy Selood, one of the sheep farm’s owners, came walking out with a flashlight and a border collie. He asked us what the hell was going on and Horwitz told him about catching us in the sheep pens. Conroy just looked at us for a long time, and then mentioned… to Tom and I… that our father worked there.
He added, “Sheep are so damned dumb. You didn’t hurt any of them, did you?”
Tom said, “I tried to ride one. Didn’t work. You have any super-powered sheep?”
Conroy said, “Boys. You’re drunk. Officer… just take ’em home, if you would.”
Horwitz asked us, “You walk out here? Ride bikes? Steal a car? Ride any sheep?”
I said, “Walked.” We had thought it would be stealthier.
Horwitz told us, “In the car, boys. In the car.” We all three of us started for the car but Horwitz stopped us before we’d even really started.
“Not with those shoes, boys. Not a chance.”
So we all had to take off our shoes, and Tom even his pants, and we left them crumpled against the fence at the Selood Brothers Sheep Farm and rode about halfway back to Greenway (it was less than two miles) with Greg and I in the back seat of a patrol car (which smelled of disinfectant) and Tom up front, noting, but not quite complaining about, the cold leather seats, since he was only in his underwear.
Greg was the only one to really see the tanker truck.
I mean, before the accident.
***
Horwitz was steering with one hand, staring back to me, not believing that I’d dated for two months without getting any pussy (that’s
real
pussy, son, not just
kissing
a girl that
has
one) off of Adele Layton.
Tom was fiddling with Horwitz’s handgun, for which Horwitz had given him permission after stripping the gun of its magazine and even firing off one round into the night sky, making sure the weapon was empty.
I was making excuses that would have sounded like poetry to a girl, but like bullshit to a man, and right then I was a man among men (though that was, obviously, being questioned) and wondering if I should make a more ardent move on Adele. I was even considering if it was too late at night, that very night, for tapping on her window and seeing about making some progress. The negatives to this were that it was very late at night, and that her ground floor window was directly beneath her parents’ second floor window. Also, I smelled like sheep shit.
The positives were that I might get some pussy. And, anyway… didn’t women like the smell of shit? Wasn’t there something
primal
about it? Some sort of pheromone in place? I’d read that somewhere. I’d read a lot of things, online.
We were going through the intersection just out of town, the one near the derelict house we all called the
Scooby-Doo house,
abandoned by the Wright family a half century ago and said to be inhabited by ghosts. The place is just past the old airplane hangers from the Wennes airport, a recreational airport that shut down in the air traffic controller strike of 1981, and just never reopened. The airplane hangars were barely visible from the road. We didn’t much glance in their direction, though I can remember seeing a light near one hangar, which I thought was odd. Greg started to yell something. We were halfway through the intersection and that was as far as we were going to get.
A tanker truck appeared in front of us. For me, in that split second, it was just a flash of white, an apparition in the road. It was a septic service truck, or at least it was disguised as one. That type of truck is sometimes known as a
bowser
, and they typically carry about 3000 gallons of liquid. This one wasn’t quite full. It held a little over two thousand gallons.
We were doing almost a hundred miles per hour when we slammed into the side and cracked that bitch open. Horwitz had been trying (successfully) to impress us with the power of his squad car. He died instantly on impact.
Tom, Greg and I… we all did something else.
CHAPTER FIVE
I
sat in the corner of the old log cabin in the park at Greenway, Oregon. Or, more precisely, I sat in the corner of the rafters, there in the historical log cabin (comprised of one room only) situated at the northwest corner of Charles Park, which is in Greenway, Oregon.
Where once I’d had to wedge my shoes into the corner and lift myself up, scrambling up the logs in order to climb up to the rafters, this time I easily leapt the ten feet, landing nimbly on the third rafter, making barely any sound. Time does change things.
What it hadn’t changed was the list of girls that had given their all (and by all, I mean a bit of their virtue) in order to earn their place on a very special roster. Or at least time hadn’t erased that list. There had indeed been changes. There were a few more inductees, which pleased me. There was still April. Beth. Lossie. Roberta. Daisy. Ginny. Clio. Georgie. Britney. Paula. Terri. Nora. A few others that I remembered. Past that was Clementine (a name I can’t read without humming that old miner’s song) and Colleen and Annie and Petra (it must have been the Gorner twin, but the incident would have hardly been her first experience), Gladiola and Wendy and Adele and Libby and Fran and a whole host of others. With the Greenway population explosion, the roster had increased exponentially, so much so that I sniffed the air, trying to scent the hundred or so girls who had given that finger-length piece of their virtue here in the log cabin, because surely the smell of teenage sex must have permanently bonded with the oaken logs. Nothing, though. It just smelled like wood.