by S. A. Hunt
“Yes, yes, of course.”
The tiramisu flavor? It reminds me so much of Giuseppe and his sister back home in Sicily. Oh, how I loved their house, with its rose trellis and the statue of the fisherman pissing into the ocean—
“Yes, the tiramisu. Now leave me be, Mother. I’ve work to do.” The cat got to its feet and jumped down off the counter, trotting away.
Pointing at the stove, Marilyn gestured the teakettle into the air. Floating over to her teacup, it poured her another helping and then followed her knobby finger back to the cooling electric eye.
Her head sank forward, she cupped her eyes in her hands, and Marilyn continued scrying.
12
“You asshole!” howled Pete, startling Wayne out of his daydream. He looked up from the sidewalk and almost ran into Amanda, who had stopped to pet a cat. The animal jumped in surprise and skittered down an alleyway.
“Look out where you’re going, space cadet!” said Amanda, watching the cat disappear through a cluster of patchy junipers.
The four of them had come to the intersection of Wilmer and Broad and were approaching the traffic light. To the left and right was a long stretch of two-story buildings: boutiques, offices, shops, storefronts. A pet shop across the street boasted about its hamsters, kittens, turtles. Next door, a frozen-yogurt shop in pastel colors claimed more flavors than Baskin-Robbins, and a knickknack shop carried bamboo wind chimes and frilly marionettes on tin bicycles.
Broad reminded him of the older parts of Chicago, the streets that led back to the wild-west days, but Blackfield’s historical district was cleaner, almost precious in its maintenance. On the other side of the intersection, Wilmer turned into a brick road bisected by a median full of little trees, and lining it was a funnel of fancy bistros and taverns.
Pete held up his sarsaparilla. “You ruined my drink!”
“How did I do that?” asked Johnny Juan.
Pete showed him the can. Johnny leaned in to examine it. “You threw a holly berry in my Firewater!”
Wayne and Amanda clustered around Johnny to see. The girl tugged it in her direction with her long, pencil-slender fingers and he noticed her nails were green.
“I’ll be dang,” said Johnny, leaning back to laugh. Wayne looked down into the mouth of the can—which was no bigger than a nickel—and sure enough, a little red berry bobbed at the bottom.
Amanda smirked. “You should try out for basketball!”
“Basketball my ass!” fussed Pete. “I can’t drink this now.”
“Why not?” asked Amanda. “It’s just a berry.”
“Aren’t holly berries poisonous?”
She paused and squinted up at the sky, palming her mouth in thought. “I have no idea.”
Johnny shrugged. “You could try it and see. Hey, there were food tasters back in King Arthur’s court and stuff. They tasted things to see if they were poisoned before they were served to the king.”
“Then you taste it, Sir Lancelot,” said Pete, thrusting the can in his direction, “and let me know if you die.”
Johnny stepped back as if the can were a spider.
“You are the biggest wuss,” Pete growled, balling up a fist. “Two for flinching.”
“Aww.” Johnny hugged himself protectively and Pete punched him twice in the shoulder, hard enough to almost knock him over. He balanced on one foot, rubbing his arm. “Jesus! Do you have to hit so hard? That’s like the third time this week.”
Wayne took out the ring on the ballchain around his neck. Lifting his mother’s wedding band, he peered through it at the world, and at Pete’s broad back.
Can you see my new friends?
Something about doing this lightened him, made him feel like he was sharing his eyes with his mom, as if the ring were a camera, transmitting some ethereal signal she could see from wherever she was now, if “wherever” was Heaven.
As Pete continued on, Wayne caught up to him. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“I wanted to ask you something.”
“Yeah?”
“Why do you get so upset about food?” asked Wayne.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you told me and my dad that you don’t eat much. So why do you get so upset about wasted food like the Pop-Tart and that can of Firewater?”
Pete’s mouth twisted to one side in thought, or at least that’s what Wayne thought, but the next words out of the boy’s mouth were low and laced with emotion. “We ain’t got a whole lot of money, you know? My mom does what she can, but we don’t always have money … for things like soda and Pop-Tarts. I mean, like, there’s not always food in the house, so I don’t sit down and eat much, but when I do, I—” He frowned, glancing up at the sky and then at Wayne. “I don’t know, Mom always told me I had to clean my plate. Kids in Africa starving and all that. So I hate to waste food, even if it’s something I don’t like. Like okra. Eugh.”
“You guys don’t have food stamp cards down here?”
“EBT? Yeah, but she won’t do it. I don’t know why.”
“We did for a little while,” said a voice behind them. Johnny. “My dad didn’t want to, I think he felt like—”
“Like a failure?” asked Wayne.
“Maybe? He told my mom that he didn’t come all the way to America just so he could take a handout. Maybe your mom feels the same way.”
“Pride,” said Wayne.
“Yeah, well,” Pete muttered, pistoning forward.
* * *
Superheroes beamed from the panes of a storefront window: Spider-Man on the left, Batman on the right, both of them in action poses, swinging through the air. Over Spidey’s head was FISHER’S HOBBY SHOP, and over Batman’s was COMICS, BOOKS, TOYS & GAMES.
Warm sunlight streamed in through the Spidey and Batman paintings, leaking dim and dusty gold beams into the depths of the shop. The door chime tolled like a cathedral bell in the silence; it seemed they were the only customers in at the moment other than a white cat curled into a ball on the windowsill.
“Hello?” called Amanda.
The place had a generally musty smell of disuse, the action figures nearest the front door sealed in packages bleached green by countless days facing the sun. Most days probably passed without seeing many customers, outside of regulars and the people who came for Movie Night. Shelves of games occupied the racks alongside the larger graphic novels and action figures: chess, Monopoly, Candyland, Scattergories, Apples to Apples, esoteric card games he’d never heard of. A council of Halloween masks stared down at them with empty black eyes, perched at the tops of all the shelves—Jason’s hockey mask, Michael Myers’s white face, a warty pig-man, a grinning devil, Pennywise the clown, Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies.
An athletic black man came out of a doorway stirring a milkshake. He wore a thin blue sweater hugging every muscle as tightly as a wet suit. He was a few shades darker than Wayne himself, without the warm honey cast Wayne had inherited from his mother.
“Hey, kids. How’s it going?” he asked, walking over to the counter and taking up position behind a laptop.
Directly behind him was a showcase with a glass front, containing a vast array of dazzling knickknacks and mementos: signed book jackets, DVD cases, and comic covers, a Freddy Krueger claw, and a veritable army of action figures still in their blister packs. The centerpiece was an Uruk-hai cuirass, a vest of armor worn by the orcs in the Lord of the Rings movies, and if Wayne viewed it at the right angle he could see the silvery writing where someone had signed it with a Sharpie. Peter Jackson, it said, in haphazard cursive. The chain mail underneath seemed older than Blackfield itself.
Pete bellied up to the counter as if he were a cowboy in a saloon, putting his chubby elbows on the glass. Underneath was a carpeted display with rare cards: baseball, Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, Garbage Pail Kids. “Hey, Fish. It’s goin’ all right, how are you?”
“About as good as good gets. Been a while, Petey boy. What brings you?” Fis
h chugged half the thick, sludgy milkshake in one go and put it down, waking up the computer.
“We’re showing the new guy around.”
“His name is Wayne. But we call him Bruce Wayne,” said Johnny Juan, clapping his diminutive friend on the shoulder. “Him and his dad just moved here from…?”
“Chicago.”
“Welcome to the middle of nowhere, Batman,” said the man. “My name is Fisher. Fisher Ellis.” He offered a hand to shake. “Everybody calls me Fish.”
Wayne shook it. “Wayne Parkin.”
“Sweet name. Well, welcome to my Place of Stuff,” said Fish, gesturing around the shop with a sweeping hand. He leaned over the laptop and started typing furiously. “I’ve got to do a little work. If you need anything, gimme a holler.”
Wandering away, Pete and Johnny took to a table of boxed comic books, cultural geologists flipping through sedimentary layers of superhero history. Amanda simply stood next to the counter, her arms folded, looking blandly at the stuff behind the counter. At first Wayne thought about browsing the action figures, but he wanted to know more about Fish and the shop. The fact it was so empty of people was nagging him.
“So what are you doin’?” Wayne asked, pointing at the computer. “For work. On the computer. Do you—” The question felt rude, but he couldn’t think of any other way to put it. “Do you sell anything? I mean, it doesn’t really look like many people come in here.”
Fish smiled. “I’m actually a director of IT for a postal company.”
Turning the laptop around, he flashed the kids a screen full of cryptic text. Wayne thought it looked like the green code from The Matrix turned sideways. “I work from home, doing programming and things like that. ‘Home,’ in this instance, being my hobby shop. It lets me be here at the shop and still do work for these guys.” Wagging a finger around the room, he explained, “This stuff is really for sale, but, yeah, I don’t do much business. It’s more like … like my personal stuff-room, you know?… You ever heard of George Carlin?”
Wayne couldn’t say he was familiar.
“Well, old Carlin was a comedian, did a lot of stand-up. Not exactly family-friendly material, right? But smart. Anyway, he had a bit about making money and buying stuff. ‘A house is just a place to put stuff,’ he’d say. ‘Bigger houses are more room, to put more stuff.’ So here it is. This is my House of Stuff.” He picked up the milkshake and toasted the air with the cup, gesturing around with it. “If I’m going to have all this Stuff, people might as well see it. What good is Stuff if nobody knows you got it?” He downed the rest of the shake. “Besides, I like the company. The shop keeps me social and out of my apartment.”
“Oh!” gasped Amanda, darting over to one of the displays and picking up an action figure package. “I didn’t know you had Adventure Time.”
The white cat jumped up on the counter and went to stick its nose in Fish’s cup, but he took it away and stroked the cat’s back. “No ma’am, not for you. You already get enough protein, you don’t need any more.”
“I want to have a shop like this one day,” said Wayne.
“You look like the kind of man who would take care of it. Treat it right.”
A sheepish pride blossomed in Wayne’s chest at being called a man, and a grin crept across his face. “It’s really awesome. Maybe when you get tired of running this place and retire, I can inherit it.”
Fish studied him for a long moment, then tipped the cup at him. “Tell you what. How do you feel about working up here after school a couple days a week? You could stand right here at the counter for an hour or two while I catch up on my code work, and on Thursdays you can help me get set up for Movie Night. Maybe I can start doing ’em on the weekends, too.”
“Are you for real?” asked Wayne, incredulous. “That would be so cool!”
“All you gotta do is guess what superhero I’m thinking of.” Fish touched a fingertip to his temple. “It’s my favorite superhero. You get three guesses. Marvel character.”
Wayne eyed the front window. “Spider-Man?”
“No, but you’re on the right side of the industry. Ain’t neither of them guys up there on the windows, though.”
“Can I get a hint?”
“Umm. Grass.” Fish tapped on the glass counter in thought. “Grass, frogs, and avocados. What do those three things have in common?”
Wayne considered them in turn, picturing them in his mind, chewing on his lip in concentration. “They’re all green?”
Fish nodded deferentially.
“Green Lantern?”
“Nope. That’s DC, dude.”
“The Hulk?”
Pounding his fist on the edge of the counter in feigned defeat, Fish pointed at him and said, “You got it. Man, I knew I made that too easy. What was I thinking?”
Wayne threw his fists in the air and Pete golf-clapped. “To be fair,” he said, “there’s only like two green superheroes, and one of ’em is DC.”
“Swamp Thing. Martian Manhunter. Beast Boy. She-Hulk. Gamora. You wanna go for a deep cut, you got Savage Dragon. You gotta do your research, man.”
“Shoot, you know a lot about comic books.”
Fish smirked. “Okay. Bonus points if you can tell me what makes the Incredible Hulk so incredible. Why the Hulk is my favorite.”
The man behind the counter was chiseled but slim, with a triangular neck and an overhanging shelf of muscle across his chest. He looked sort of like a superhero himself. Easy one, thought Wayne, confident in his answer. “Because he’s so strong.”
“He is strong. But that’s not why he’s incredible.”
“Because he’s so big?”
“Nope,” said Fish, leaning on the counter, his dark eyes pinning Wayne to the spot. “It’s because the Hulk adapts.” Flexing his bulging arms, he explained. “The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets. It’s the stress, y’know, it’s what makes him mad. The rage is just a by-product.”
Fish spoke with the magnetic, didactic focus of a self-help guru, his words clear and precise. Between every sentence, he paused for a beat to let his words sink in. His energetic hands did as much speaking as his mouth did, cupping and flinging every third word. “Everybody has to deal with stress. Hulk deals with it by becoming stronger than the stress. He soaks up the emotional energy around him and channels it into his strength, uses it to go one step above the problem at hand.
“You hit him with a hundred tons of force?” He punched at the air, slapping his bicep to give the strike a theatrical oomph. “Hulk hits you with two hundred tons of force. He’s not my favorite because he’s strong. He’s my favorite because he never lets a challenge beat him, he’s always ready to go one step farther than the other guy.”
“Yeah. Yeah!” Wayne nodded. “I get you. I get you.”
His father was pretty much the only adult Wayne ever had conversations with that felt as intellectually equal as this one, with this cultivated, channeled man and his superhero fixation, and now he felt a bit antsy—almost patronized, except he knew Fish was being earnest. It was a bit awkward, like being drafted into a stage performance in front of all his friends, but he liked it. Made him feel ten years older.
“Absolutely, you dig it?” Fish peered at his computer screen and rattled off a burst of typing. “And that’s my motto, man. Adapt and overcome. When life gives you a problem, you gotta adapt and be stronger, you know? Be the Hulk. Be better. Be bigger. Be badder.”
* * *
Adapt and overcome. After they left the comic shop, Wayne couldn’t get it out of his head. Be the Hulk. Be better than the problem. He thought this brilliant new proverb, and the eloquent, intelligent, cat-petting, code-breaking, comic-shop-owning man who called himself Fish, was the best thing since the invention of the wheel.
He even felt stronger, his feet lighter, as he bounced along behind Pete and Johnny Juan, occasionally flexing his chest and biceps. After the warmth of the shop, the crisp wind hurt his nose, but something about the gamma
-ray pep rally made it smell sweeter.
“What are you doing?” Amanda asked him as he was crossing his arms in a bodybuilder flex. She had fallen behind, and now tagged along in the rear. “Is your shirt too small?”
“No?” He made an indignant face and put his hands in his pockets.
Pete turned left and trundled down the sidewalk to a short, quaint hump of a bridge with rusted girders and simple steel banisters. Standing beside it, they could see down into the canal. A musky fish-smell coiled up from where water trickled along the bottom some eight, nine, ten feet down.
The channel itself was a square aqueduct with a flat bottom some fifteen feet wide, made of pebbly dark concrete dyed green by algae and moss. Sandbars of dirt and rocks collected along the walls.
Pete scanned the street, reassured himself no one was watching, and hopped down to a concrete platform with a grunt. The others reluctantly followed suit.
PVC pipes ran along the underside of the bridge, painted with jibber-jabber graffiti. Pete ducked under them and walked beside the thin ribbon of water at their feet. There was barely a current; Wayne could only see it if he bent over to examine the stream, the sky reflecting off of the wobbling quicksilver.
Under the bridge, Amanda’s voice reverberated, hollow, intimate. “Are you sure this is safe?”
Corn-fed Pete regarded her with obvious amusement, wheezing through his nose. “Of course it’s not safe. Fun things hardly ever are.” Their excursion definitely qualified as “fun,” though Wayne was getting tired and his feet hurt. This was probably the most exercise he’d gotten in a long time. But then, adventure was supposed to hurt, wasn’t it? Adapt and overcome.
Soon the novelty was gone and they were marching along the bottom of the channel as placidly as they had the sidewalk. Wayne squinted up at the stark blue sky. The canal cut down the middle of several city blocks, between the buildings to the north and south. This deep in the cut he felt as if he were walking a trail along the lowermost narrows of the Grand Canyon, framed by darkness. The real Grand Canyon, however, wouldn’t be this marred by graffiti: RANDY FREEMAN WAS HERE 07/22/2007. YEE-THO-RAH. A cartoonish rendering of a veiny penis and testicles, crude pubic hair corkscrewing from the speedbag scrotum underneath. DIAMOND AND TRAVUS, ♡4-EVA.
