Jimmy wheeled over to the laundry bags and the bungee cords and placed the rest of our bounty reverently down in the middle of one of the lumpy bags. “I gotta say, that seemed a little too easy,” he mused, “Don’t you think?”
“Easy is good,” I said, “Because I don’t think the next part is going to be. You guys ready?”
Bullseye sucked in a deep breath and nodded his head. Then he went over to the front of the potter’s shed and pulled down the wheelbarrow that was leaning up against the wall. “I got this,” he told us as he righted the wheelbarrow, gripped the two handles and rolled quickly away from us down the hill toward the parking lot.
As his small figure disappeared, I turned to Jimmy and said, “I think we might all be dead if it weren’t for him.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Jimmy. “That little man has a lot of guts. I don’t think I could have lived through what he lived through when I was his age.”
“I barely remember twelve,” I said. “Except for the fact that Trina could beat the crap out of me with one hand tied behind her back.”
Jimmy grinned. “And that’s different from . . . ?”
“Shut up, roller boy,” I said, and we both laughed, but our laughter was short-lived. As far as being a roller boy, that’s exactly what we needed right now, and for once, Jimmy had no problem with me grabbing onto the handles on the back of his wheelchair and pushing.
Halfway down the mountain we found our first likely candidate. The golden statue was of a woman with her palms together. She was standing on a tree stump surrounded by little piles of rocks.
“Okay,” I said nervously as I hooked my arms under her elbows. “Heavy or light?”
“Let’s say heavy and pray for light,” Jimmy said as I closed my eyes and lifted. The statue didn’t budge. It didn’t even move an inch.
“Are you kidding me?” I cried as I could feel my neck muscles bulging.
“Do you want . . . um . . . do you want me to try?” Jimmy asked.
“Fine,” I muttered, even though I felt like my ego had just taken a sucker punch to the gut. “Have at it.”
Jimmy took a deep breath, rolled up to the statue, brushed his unruly mop of ginger out of his eyes, and tried to bear-hug the golden woman. Just like me, the veins on the sides of his neck bulged out like he was being squeezed by a giant fist and was going to pop at any moment.
“Wow,” he said when he relaxed his death grip on the golden goddess. “What’s this thing made of anyway?” He rapped at the statue’s side and a funny, hollow sound filled the air. We both looked at each other with a puzzled look. Then Jimmy leaned forward and pointed at the goddess’s feet and started laughing.
“What?” I said.
“Look.” He chuckled. “She’s screwed to the stump.”
24
AFTER FIVE MINUTES of digging through the shed I found a screwdriver.
After another five minutes I released the golden woman from her pose on top of her stump, and positioned the plastic statue across Jimmy’s lap.
Even with his help I almost passed out from pushing Jimmy, the painted goddess and his wheelchair up to the top of the hill, across the meadow, around the Peace Pagoda and over to the bridge by the lily pond, but I survived.
Barely.
Bullseye, sweaty and determined, came up behind us with a wheelbarrow full of guns he liberated from the bus. They were army guns for sure. There were big-ass rifles that would probably blow a hole into the side of the Peace Pagoda to create a door. He’d even brought a bazooka.
I only knew what a bazooka was from some of my video games. Understandably it made me a little nervous. All I could imagine was a scenario in which Bullseye had to aim that thing at a helicopter with Diana or Dr. Marks inside.
One shot and they’d be wasted.
Nope. We were better than that, or I’d like to think we were.
My sister and Prianka were across the little bridge that spanned the lily-choked pond. Both of them were getting seriously dirty. Prianka momentarily looked up at me. We sighed in unison, probably because we were both thinking that our lives were so utterly different from the lives we were living just a few short weeks ago. I guess the good thing was that we were, in fact, still living.
I gave her two thumbs up just like Jimmy gave me not too long before, and flashed her that weird politician grin. She snorted and shook her head then went back to work.
So did Jimmy and I with Bullseye in tow.
It felt like the three of us spent the rest of the afternoon unscrewing plastic statues from wherever they were mired along the path, forever frozen in various poses as though they had been stupid enough to look at Medusa in the face and get turned to stone.
All told, we took about fifteen of them. I cracked a couple of golden feet along the way, mostly when a screw was a bit too stubborn and I had to resort to wrenching it free from where it was anchored to the ground. I hoped that elephant-headed Ganesha or any other deity was going to completely understand and give me a free pass instead of raining down godly wrath on all of us.
After all, we were doing good—or at least I hoped we were.
Finally, after we had all the statues from along the path, together with our booty from the potter’s shed and the bags of laundry we took from the monastery, a wave of exhaustion plowed into me and dragged me in its undertow into a completely and totally well-deserved cat nap.
I sprawled out in the middle of the dirty laundry bags, surrounded by golden gods, and let the world go black.
I probably only slept for fifteen minutes, but it was the best sleep I had in what seemed like forever. There were no weird dreams filled with poxers, or running from helicopters, or even doe-eyed lamas spouting peace and goodwill like a . . . well, like a doe-eyed llama.
There was just peaceful oblivion and it was awesome.
Too bad my siesta was short-lived.
“Now’s not the time to be lazy,” I heard Trina say. Even though my eyes were closed, I could tell that she was standing right over me. I tried to ignore her, but after sixteen years, I should have known better.
No one ignores Trina Light.
She kicked my foot.
“Is the apocalypse over?” I murmured. “If it’s not, then leave me alone.”
“Don’t make me make you get up.”
“I’m tired,” I whined. “I just pushed two dozen gods up a mountain.”
“Bully for you,” she said. “We did better. Come on. Get up. You have to see.”
I begrudgingly opened my eyes and stared at my sister. She was covered in dirt from head to toe. “Pretty,” I said.
“Yeah? You should look in a mirror.”
I didn’t need to look in a mirror to know what she was talking about. I felt like there was dirt caked on my skin and in my hair. Pushing Jimmy and plastic statues up and down that hill, over and over again, was no small feat. I’m sure every square inch of my body was going to hurt soon enough.
But you know what they say. ‘No pain, no gain.’
I held out my hand and Trina hauled me to my feet along with a cloud of moldy stench that followed behind me from the bags of laundry.
“Lovely,” she said.
I rolled my eyes.
Trina sauntered away from me and across the little bridge to where she and Prianka had been working. Bullseye was huffing and puffing, sawing at a piece of wood with both hands. His hair was plastered to his forehead, and his face was slick with sweat.
Jimmy was out of his chair and on the ground, strategically placing thick branches in just the right spot. Sanjay was sitting off to one side, near a couple towers of mindfully stacked rocks, with his legs crossed and his palms face up and resting on his knees. All he needed was to be floating three feet off the ground, in front of a cobra sl
owly rising out of a wicker basket, to make the picture complete.
“What do you think?” asked Prianka. Then she shook her head, walked over to me, licked her thumb like she was my grandmother and wiped some dirt off of my face.
“That bad, huh?”
“Yeah, sort of,” she smiled. “But I don’t care.”
I shook my head. How is it that I had to live through the end of the world to find the best girlfriend ever? It’s funny how things work out like that.
“So?” said Trina, as she spread her hands out. “Survey says?”
I looked at the ground. The girls had dug trenches, maybe a foot or two deep and then filled them full with dried twigs from the surrounding woods. After the twigs came bigger sticks then thicker branches, and finally big chunks of wood that would take much longer to burn.
Jimmy had just finished placing a couple of the bigger pieces in one of the trenches when he looked up at me. “I guess pushing me up and down a mountain with gods and goddesses on my lap is a little tougher than playing soccer, huh?”
He wasn’t kidding. Talk about a workout. My shirt was damp with sweat and it clung to my sides. “Hey, maybe you should lay off the tofu, dude. You weigh like a ton.”
Jimmy just laughed, flexed his enormous muscles like he was in a bodybuilding contest, and kissed one of his biceps. “No way, man,” he said. “These pythons could stand to grow a bit.”
“Yeah,” said Trina as she leaned over and kissed him. “Maybe Jimmy could give you a few pointers sometime.”
Prianka came up and put her arms around me, sticky shirt and all. “I think Tripp’s pretty just the way he is,” she said.
“Thank you,” I smiled and kissed her equally dirty nose. “See, someone around here has good taste.”
“Yeah. Us,” Jimmy and Trina said at the same time and we all laughed.
Meanwhile, Bullseye finished sawing another piece of wood. “You guys are all gross,” he said as he placed the sawed piece in one of the trenches. I disentangled myself from Prianka and looked around.
The girls had managed to spell out a big word on the ground, ready to be set alight as soon as darkness grew up around us. If the clouds parted just a bit, which I was hoping they would, and there were helicopters in the air, the helicopter people couldn’t help but see our message.
It was loud and clear and absolutely to the point.
The word spelled out ‘DIANA.’
Perfect.
25
WE STILL WEREN’T done.
Courtesy of a conversation I had with Bullseye back at Walmart, we had come up with as perfect a plan as we could muster, considering the circumstances.
What was it he said?
‘We don’t shoot people. That doesn’t mean that we can’t point a gun their way and scare the crap out of them.’
Even though the thought of threatening anyone with a gun made me a little queasy, that didn’t mean that a bunch of gods and goddesses couldn’t do the dirty work for us.
Surrounding the clearing where the fire pit and our message to Diana sat etched into the ground was a forest. That meant plenty of trees to hide behind and plenty of cover.
First things first. I grabbed the bounty we had taken from the moldy box in the potting shed. In my hand I held three rolls of thick twine and half a roll of black duct tape. It was exactly what we needed.
Over the next half hour, we all crossed over the lily pond, tore open the bags of dirty laundry and played dress-up with fifteen deities whose sole purpose was to promote peace and harmony at the Peace Pagoda. I could definitely rationalize that our goal was to promote just that, but we still had to do a few distasteful things to get what we wanted.
In my head I prayed for Ganesha to turn the other way and not look. What we were doing was definitely not pretty. Tacky, yes. Pretty— not so much.
We dressed the statues in dirty orange robes. We didn’t bother with tee-shirts and underwear. Frankly, there weren’t too many dirty undergarments to begin with. I guess that answered the age-old question about what monks wore under their robes.
When we had them dressed as best we could, we dragged each of the statues to the trees and strategically placed them behind the thicker trunks with just a shoulder or a head peeking out from behind the bark. Then we fixed them to the tree using the twine and bungee cords from the potting shed.
Last, but certainly not least, we gave each of the golden statues dressed in dirty robes a gun. We used the biggest ones we could find, securing them in place with black duct-tape.
I can’t say we didn’t have fun. It was sort of challenging to make sure that the statues were secured to the trees, the guns were secured to the statues, and the whole effect looked like if you were standing anywhere in the vicinity of the fire pit, you were totally surrounded.
The O.K. corral had nothing on us.
“They look pretty awesome, dude,” said Jimmy as he backed away from the woods and surveyed our handiwork. “If we were down at the University I’d say we just created one hell of an art installation juxtaposing the merits of peace against the horrors of guns.”
I almost choked. “Who uses words like ‘juxta . . . whatever?’” I laughed.
“College boys,” Trina said.
“And people who care about their college entrance exams,” added Prianka, not that any of us ever had to bother with taking one of those anytime soon.
“Juxtapose means to place different things side by side as to compare or contrast them to create an interesting effect,” Sanjay commented.
“And does Poopy Puppy say that?” I asked him with just a hint of sarcasm in my voice.
Not for the first time, Sanjay surprised me with his answer. “No,” he said with a weird look on his face and the stuffed dog hanging at his side. “Merriam Webster.”
We all cracked up.
Completely exhausted, I looked down at my wrist at Uncle Don’s watch. We had been working so hard that the time literally melted away. It was after five in the afternoon. That meant that we only had an hour or two left before we were engulfed in darkness. I looked up at the sky. Off in the distance, the sun was peeking through the clouds and a big swath of light illuminated some hills beyond the University. Littleham was that way. My old life in my old town with my old school was that way, too.
I didn’t know if I would ever see Littleham again. I missed my house and my friends. Hell, I even missed Chuck Peterson and his overpriced Hummer.
I missed Sprinkles.
“Where are the dogs?” I asked as the thought of my mother’s poodle pranced around inside my head with her pom-pom tail and painted toe nails.
“I got them,” Bullseye said and headed back across the bridge and off in the direction of the monastery. As I watched him go, I thought again about how much Bullseye had done for us since he first showed up at Aunt Ella’s house back in Cummington. If it weren’t for him, Trina and I would have been taken by Luke and Cal to Site 37 for sure, and Diana would have strapped us to a table and made sushi out of us.
My mom would probably have been dead by now, or she would be alive somewhere with pretty scientists trying to figure out what exactly they had done to her to make her sick and then well again.
Trudy Aiken, Randy Stephens, Nedra Stein and Freaky Big Bird wouldn’t have made it out of there either, not to mention Eddie with the fake hair or Tattoo Guy.
A momentary wave of sadness lapped against my insides. So many people had to die because of Necropoxy, yet someone as young and unassuming as Bullseye helped to change all that.
For a moment I stopped and looked at my friends. Here I was, at the Peace Pagoda, a place I had never even heard of before, with my sister, an autistic boy, an Indian girl who I couldn’t stop kissing, a guy in a wheelchair, a boy who should be in shock over watching his
family die in front of him, a service dog, a giant Newfoundland and a talking crow.
We were the new normal.
Damn Diana for thinking that we weren’t. Who was she to judge anyway?
As that thought lingered, I felt fingers curl around mine. “Hey,” said Prianka, “I think there might be a little surprise back at the bus. Want to take a quick walk?” For a moment, a frog caught in my throat. I didn’t know what she was talking about and I immediately felt pre-pubescent.
I think I may have even blushed a little.
“Um . . . uh . . .”
Prianka squeezed my hand a little too hard and gave me a blistering, searing look. “Not THAT kind of surprise,” she said, and tried to disentangle her hand from mine.
I quickly recovered. “Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?”
“Uh huh,” she said with just a little bit of frost coming out of her mouth. “And a guy could also get smothered in his sleep with a wadded up monk’s robe and just the right amount of pressure.”
“Ah,” I said and grinned. “There’s my girl. I thought you went soft for a moment.”
Prianka smiled and let our hands stay entwined. “Trust me,” she said with just a glint of a smile on her face. “When I go soft, you’ll definitely be the first to know.”
I smiled.
I guess that was good enough for me. I decided I would keep her around for a while, but in reality, she was probably the one keeping me.
26
THERE WAS MORE than just a surprise back at the bus. There was a cooler filled with food that I thought I would never taste again. Inside were a few packages of hotdogs, a box of something called garden burgers which sounded suspiciously like something you would feed a pet rabbit, and a couple bags of buns. Next to the cooler was a sack of briquettes and a little table grill that looked like a toy.
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