by Bethny Ebert
Deathskull Bombshell
Bethany Ebert
Copyright
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, locations, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 Bethany Ebert
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author.
This novel was previously published under the title Twisted Meniscus. It was later edited for clarity and formatting. A number of details have been changed, such as the name of the band, the title of the book, and several poorly-worded sentences.
The cover photograph was taken by Iamlawrenc at http://www.freeimages.com and edited by the author using Paint and Gimp software. It abides by the terms of the Freeimages.com Content License Agreement. Use of cover photograph does not imply photographer’s endorsement of viewpoints contained in this novel.
As this book is a fictional story set in contemporary times, the names of some musicians, celebrities, automobile companies, and other pop culture entities have been included. Use of these names does not imply any endorsement of the novel or viewpoints expressed therein.
ISBN 978-1-311-42384-9
Fourth edition
Chapter one
September 2015
One of the hardest things about sibling road trips was the radio problem. Nobody could agree on music. Parker liked punk. Kylie liked pop. Margot liked books-on-tape.
The Beloit family had a rule. Whoever drove controlled the radio. They had a second rule, though: if “Head Like a Hole” by Nine Inch Nails was on, you had to turn the volume up. A long time ago, someone said it was the anthem for anyone who’d been to boarding school. After that, Parker’s dad made the rule. It seemed funny, making up a rule to fight other rules. Then again, industrial rock wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to anyone.
At least it wasn’t Justin Bieber.
As the years wore on, sibling road trips became less frequent. Margot’s teaching internship kept her busy with mountains of homework and curriculum planning sheets. Kylie had field hockey every week. Parker started up classes at the tech school to try and get educated. But it was the fall pow-wow. You couldn’t miss that one. They loaded up the Honda Civic and drove halfway across the state.
Ma and Dad and Grandma decided to carpool with a few neighborhood elders. They brought Hunter along, which was fine with Parker. At six years old, Hunter took great joy in driving everybody insane. He acted out, always throwing food on the ground, yelling random shit, laughing at jokes that nobody else understood. Sometimes he’d pick up the phone when it rang and sing the theme song to Spongebob Squarepants. Punk.
Parker didn’t think of his parents as elders. They were just his parents. They did parent things. But to the community, they were important. Pillars, someone said one time. Parker pictured a big building with his mom and dad struggling to hold up the roof.
Parker’s grandma, Anetta-Lin Skunk, made a name for herself out in the world as a great Cherokee poet. She was proud of her heritage, even though there were hardly any Cherokee in their part of Wisconsin and most of them ran off and married white people anyway. Anetta-Lin had two daughters, but she never married. Being alone helped her work.
Ma taught literature at Spartan High School, where Parker and Margot used to go to school. Kylie went there now. Besides being a teacher, Ma liked to cook. Growing up poor, she learned to work with whatever was in the kitchen, even if it wasn’t real gourmet quality. Sometimes you had to just deal with it.
Dad didn’t work, but he was still important. He wasn’t a goddamn bum like all those goddamn bums by the liquor store, he liked to say. He volunteered at the soup kitchens. He did his time in the war, he never asked for nothing. Everything he had, he worked for it. Everyone would nod and say “that’s right”. He was the sort of man who was right, Parker’s dad, even if he swore all the time. Old John Beloit was a great Ojibwe man, a warrior. He fought at Desert Storm. He would have fought more wars too but his leg got all tore up. The world needed more warrior men like Old John Beloit.
This, Parker heard again and again at the pow-wow. Parker was his name, but they always called him Junior or John Junior because he looked so much like his father. John Junior, they’d call him, boozhoo John Junior, namadabin, come sit down, so he’d go sit down and hear stories. Old John’s bravery at Desert Storm. The kitten in the tree back in ‘87. How he met Mrs. Beloit. On and on. He got pretty sick of hearing about his father from everybody. He’d known the man for twenty-eight years, for Pete’s sake. There were only so many new things you could learn about a person. But it made them happy to talk, so he’d listen anyway.
And then sometimes, but only sometimes, they’d stop to ask, how are you doing? Aaniish naa ezhiyaayin? What’s been going on? And sometimes they’d remember his name was actually Parker and not John Junior. But only sometimes.
As for what was going on, he never knew the right answer.
“Got a girlfriend yet?” asked one of the grandfathers. He wasn’t really Parker’s grandfather. Out of respect, they called old people “grandfather” and “grandmother”.
Parker looked away and bit his tongue, tried to hide his hand with the ring on it. He didn’t want to talk about it.
“Oh, he’s in love, I can tell,” another grandfather said. He was drunk. “Hah-hah. Go get ‘em, old John Junior. Parker. Old John Parker. Parker Junior.” Coughing and laughing, he slapped Parker’s back with a thick, meaty hand and started muttering to himself.
Parker walked around for a while. The Ojibwe singers were chanting and beating drums. In the weeks before the pow-wow, they practiced at the community center almost every day. Walking past the building, the pounding drum and the singing struck his eardrums and for a while, it was all he heard. Sometimes he wished he would have taken up with them. They had a good sound. But he was a bassist, not a drummer. Sometimes you had to let other people do their thing and appreciate it without adding to it.
Nobody could do everything.
Eventually he found his old friend Stevie, smoking tobacco with a couple other guys.
“Hey, what’s up,” Stevie said, smoothing his long hair back. He took a drag on his cigarette. Sparrow tobacco, hand-rolled, his usual.
“Not much,” said Parker.
Stevie passed him the cigarette. It wasn’t a question so much as a greeting with him. You knew he cared, but at the same time he didn’t care. Stevie’s personal life ran on gentle apathy. “Still working at that Phat’s place?”
“Nah,” Parker said, taking a hit of the cigarette. The paper was wet where Stevie’s lips had been earlier. He felt his heart beat a bit faster, thinking on that. Shut up, he told his heart. He had a crush on Stevie a long time ago, way back. It always seemed to resurface at times like this. “Got a job volunteering at the library.”
“How the hell you gonna make any money volunteering? Damn, niijii, get a real job,” Stevie said, but you could tell he was joking. He hit Parker on the back a couple times, and Parker coughed out the rest of the tobacco smoke.
“They pay me,” he protested.
“So it’s not really volunteering, then, huh.”
Parker smoked the cigarette again, taking an extra-long drag this time to compensate for the smoke he’d lost. “Well, they didn’t draft me.”
Stevie cracked up. “You’re alright, Parker.”
“You still play bass?” one of the other guys asked. He looked familiar, but Parker forgot his name. Ben? He looked like a Ben, with his wispy fac
ial hair and sideways baseball cap. Ben had a girl with him, long-legged with choppy pink-red hair, drunk and clinging to his arm. She looked like she’d fall over.
“Not really,” Parker said. No, he meant, but he said not really. He still fucked with the bass on his own, and he’d had a few gigs as a substitute bassist with musician friends of Elizabeth and Trevor, but the good old days were gone.
The guy’s girlfriend smiled up at him through thick eyelashes. “I play bass,” she said, grinning.
“No, you don’t,” her boyfriend said.
She hit him on the shoulder. “Whatever, I do too.”
The pow-wow made for a long day, and Parker felt grateful for the ride home.
Kylie drove the Civic, trying out her new license. She loved pow-wows, so many men to gawk at, and she loved especially the dancing, the women with their jewelry, all the food anyone could need and then more food just in case you needed extra. She blasted Carly Rae Jepson and One Direction on the way back.
Parker looked out at the road, watching the sky turn from blue to darker blue to inky black. The stars flew past, glittering, beads and sequins in the night sky. It was cold out.
A lot of the guys ended up homeless lately. Him and Jimmy and Dan passed a forty around at the pow-wow and they told him all about it. Sleeping on crappy mattresses at the shelter or in the bushes at the park, avoiding cops.
Shitty.
All three of them grew up together. Parker didn’t know how he ended up in college while they were stuck on the streets. Wasn’t fair. He expected Jimmy’s money-making schemes and Dan’s natural ease with women would put them ahead of the game soon, though.
They’d be okay.
Margot sat in the backseat, chewing on a bobby pin and looking over term papers with a flashlight. Lately her internship ate up most of her time. She wanted to be a math teacher. Margot was a serious sort of person, a bit older and more cynical than most twenty-two-year-olds. During the traditional dances, she always complained of a sore leg. The only boy she wanted to dance with was far away in Afghanistan. She swore never to dance until his return.
Margot was okay, though. She was the one who figured it out first, about Parker and Nick O’Doole. To her credit, she never said a bad word about it, just “oh, well, that’s nice”, and went back to her copy of The Hobbit.
Kylie, by comparison, treated it with her usual stupidity when he told her, cracking lame jokes to get on his nerves. “Does he have a wide stance? Are you gonna start listening to RuPaul now?” But she thought Nick was cute with his glasses and funny red hair, so she didn’t mind. It was just another thing to make fun of.
Still, he couldn’t bring Nick to the pow-wow. Natives only. A few white people showed up every so often, usually news journalists or girlfriends of tribal members, but Nick’s parents were known in the community for being anthropology professors. Pow-wows weren’t for white people’s academic benefit. Even though Nick wasn’t in college, he was still his father’s son. It would have been too hard to keep Nick away from everybody, anyway. All the talking. They got mean sometimes.
Ma knew, of course, she always did, and Grandma Skunk figured it out eventually. She wasn’t stupid, Grandma Skunk liked to say, just old. Even his father knew. He didn’t approve, but he took it more seriously after the wedding. It was a rule in the Beloit house, though. Nobody could mention Nick O’Doole to anyone, especially not the elders. And if they did, they could only call him Parker’s roommate, or his friend.
He wore the ring, but he didn’t answer any questions about it. It wasn’t really their business.
Kylie turned the radio up. It was her favorite pop musician Blake Lucas’s hit single, “Baby I Really Love You”. She sang along, attempting to match Blake Lucas’s syrupy baritone to her second soprano. “Baby, I really love you,” she sang. “I really, really do-ooh. Baby, I don’t think you understand the lo-o-ove I have for you.”
Parker hated Blake Lucas. Bleak Mucus was more like it. Dude was a toothpaste advertisement wrapped in a shoe advertisement. He decided to counter with his favorite band Death Death Metal. “Dead babies,” he growled in a low voice. “Dead babies. I eat babies. Everything is dead.”
“Oh, shut up,” Kylie said.
“What, I can’t sing? Why do you get to sing and I don’t?”
“Because my music isn’t stupid,” she said, turning the volume up.
Parker would never allow himself to be defeated by such a man as Blake Lucas. He sang louder, trying to sound like the guy from Underoath. “Dead babies,” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Whoa whoa. I bit the head off a bird. Everything is pain. Pain.”
“Stop,” Kylie said.
“Pain. Whoa-whoa.” Parker smiled at her, his weird all-teeth twitchy-eyed smile he reserved for annoying his sisters. It was funny. When he timed the twitches just right, it looked like an epileptic seizure.
He drooled out his mouth a little, just to piss her off.
“Mar-got,” Kylie whined.
“You kids calm down up there,” Margot said, not looking up from her homework, “or I’ll hijack the steering wheel and drive this dumb car straight to Oklahoma, where we’ll all die of heat stroke. You shouldn’t be goofing off while you’re driving anyway, Kylie. And Parker, seriously. Grow up.”
Parker crossed his eyes at her.
“I wasn’t goofing off,” Kylie said. “It’s Parker’s fault.”
“All my fault,” said Parker.
Margot sighed. “I gotta work on these term papers. You guys shut up.”
Kylie glared out at the road, but she didn’t say anything, just kept the music on. It made ignoring Parker easier. Kylie hated Oklahoma. She’d be damned if Margot got her way. Maybe she was joking, though. It was hard to tell with her sometimes. She always wore a serious face, so even an empty threat looked real. Anyway, the last time they were in Oklahoma, visiting someone on the Cherokee side, a prairie dog crawled into the glove compartment and died. From then on she always associated Oklahoma with the hot smell of rotting fur and flesh.
Chapter two
April 2003
Nick O’Doole hunched over the full sink, lamenting his existence. Dishes everywhere. No respite. Each time he finished a load of dishes, Frasquita and Polly just gave him more. He’d be here all night at this rate.
He wiped the sweat from his brow. Stupid glasses kept fogging up. Same shit, different day. The end of his Saturday night shift at Lardé’s Bistro drew close, but there were a million things to do before quitting time.
A group of drunk theatre types came in and ordered pretty much every item on the menu. They looked so happy. Nick wished he could order that much food in one setting.
But he was only a dishwasher.
His paycheck? A meager seven dollars an hour, plus tips. The boss, Newt Larson, said promotions were decided every year around Christmas. But it was only April. He had a while before his first promotion. Surely he’d earn one, though. He was a hard worker. Some nights when they were understaffed, like tonight, he had to be both dishwasher and waiter.
Frasquita, a former Hooter’s girl, second-oldest employee at forty-one, discovered if you had a good pair of scissors and a sewing kit, you could modify your work uniform. More cleavage meant more tips. It quickly became a fashion trend with the waitresses at Lardé’s. Brought in more customers, so the boss never reprimanded anybody for it. Somehow Nick’s own pasty chest didn’t elicit the same response.
Talk about sexism in the workplace.
Everyone at the theatre table wore ridiculously gaudy Elizabethan costume. It looked like something out of an old Shakespeare movie.
The theatre people chattered and gossiped, oblivious to his presence. A drunk old man in pointy buckled shoes spoke with his mouth full, waving around a chicken leg in the exuberance of his storytelling.
Nick cleared his throat, feeling cheap and anachronistic in his dirty apron and black jeans. He was supposed to wear slacks, but he never did. He hated shopping. “Ex
cuse me,” he said, “do any of you need me to take your plates?”
“Only to refill them!” chuckled the man with the drumstick. Everybody laughed.
Nick stretched a smile over his face.
“Oh, don’t mind him,” one of the women said in a Cockney accent, rolling her eyes. She wore blue mascara. This idiosyncrasy made him like her a bit more than the others. Blue mascara was a thing of the past, but a past he recognized to some extent. “Sir Fenwick always gets carried away.” She handed him her plate. A few other ladies followed suit. “Thank you for your trouble.”
Nick nodded, keeping the plates flat against his palm. De rien, he thought. Thinking in French helped him study. Wisconsin sucked. If it weren’t for Brooke and Parker, he’d move to Quebec or something, speak nothing but French and eat poutine forever.
“It’s nothing,” he said, in English. “What’s with the costumes?”
The woman laughed. “Costumes? My dear boy, this is the Cacahuet Renaissance Faire troupe. These are our working clothes.”
Nick raised an eyebrow.
She smiled, putting her elbows up on the table and leaning her chin into her hands. All of a sudden, she grabbed the strings of his work apron, pulling him close to her. For a moment he thought she meant to slap him, and he closed one eye, bracing himself. Instead, she slipped a ten dollar bill into his apron pocket, then pushed him back on his feet. “For your service.”
He nodded again. In the face of such charity, he could only choke on his words.
Her perfume, nauseating and sweet, like a poison pink flower-cloud. Oh god, it hurt.
“Thank you,” he croaked.
“Never you mind, dear,” she said. “Go buy some lucky woman dinner.”
“Oh! A man in love!” the old man said through a mouthful of bird and mashed potatoes. He chuckled. “Good for you, friend.” Before Nick could protest, he reached into his velvet British-looking trench coat and procured a twenty-dollar bill. “Compliments of the Cacahuet Renaissance Faire. Have fun.”
