Sea Monkeys

by Kris Saknussemm

  Smushed snails on the sidewalk. Held breath, pounding hearts. The adrenalin and innocent danger was immensely therapeutic for me. We literally worked our bodies into the palings and the vines of the neighborhood. There were sprained ankles, broken fingers, bruised knuckles and scabbed elbows. We were lucky it wasn’t a lot worse. Some kids we didn’t even know except by nickname—like Drumstick or Gooey—joined in. No one ever telephoned or made an appointment. No one was texting on a cell phone then. We’d all come in on a different kind of beam and find each other without knowing how.

  My father and my new stepmother were generally silent regarding our activities (my mother said they let us run wild). I think my father reasoned that too close a questioning would only bring to mind the famous Christmas Eve, when in full Santa Claus regalia (complete with sleigh bells), he got stuck out on the very steep roof of our house in Berkeley (following a few too many eggnogs) and had to be rescued by the fire department. It had happened many years before, when my father was convinced I needed to believe in Santa a while longer. I think my sister was in on it. I appreciated the effort—and the risk of breaking his neck. Having come to understand quite a bit about roofs, I grasped just how much gumption (or eggnog) it would’ve taken. Still, the slightest hint of that night in the past could set me laughing again, the sight of the old man clinging to the chimney for dear life, cold stars overhead. Best to let us go our hidden, hunting ways, he figured. Besides, he was smart enough to know that anything he was even vaguely aware of that we were up to was but the tip of an iceberg. (How true that was.)

  Lights Out would’ve gone on a lot longer had it not been for his birthday.

  It happened over an unusually warm Easter. A big barbecue on the new redwood deck out back. Lots of Dad’s old cronies and clients showed up, including Ron Walsh and his newish wife Phyllis, who looked very uncomfortable, perhaps because Ron insisted on bringing a bottle of Seagram’s, with a look in his eyes like he’d been into another one before they arrived.

  My stepbrother and I were allowed a can of Coors each, which at age twelve seemed like a big deal in public. We savored the brew slowly. But all the adult talk of Freud and fondue bored us, so after the burgers were devoured, we felt the forces reaching out. The tribe was gathering. Time to play our stalking game. So we headed off. But Ron Walsh wanted to come too. We didn’t know what to say.

  “Why don’t you take it easy?” Dad asked, with uncharacteristic restraint. “Here,” he said, handing over some corn on the cob wrapped in tin foil.

  “Negative, Lieutenant,” Ron said. “The Captain must lead his people.”

  “I think they’ll be all right on their own,” Dad remarked, as pointedly as I ever heard him say anything. Several people made comments, but Ron wasn’t to be dissuaded.

  “C’mon honey,” Phyllis chided. “You’ll make a fool of yourself.”

  “That’s never worried you before.”

  It was very awkward. He was swaying, trying to get a cigarette lit. I opened my mouth to say something, but he waved me down.

  “What’s the matter Star Steam Stroopers, don’t you think the Captain can hack it? A little hide ’n’ seek? Christ, I’ve been doing that my whole life. You just watch old Uncle Ron. He will disappear before your eyes. He is a professional entertainer, don’t forget. A thesss-pian.”

  We didn’t want to be cold, and we could see the way the other adults were turning on him. So, my stepbrother quietly explained the way Lights Out worked—the ambush rules, the tactics. This was no pissy olly-olly-oxen-free party game that would be over in a few minutes. It was serious business. It could take hours and cover several blocks—and my stepbrother was going to be It.

  Ron nodded to all these instructions and warnings. He seemed to sober up. At least some of the grown-up weariness and cynicism seemed to leave him. Then we were off, fifteen or so of us scattered into the streets where cats hissed at us and oil pans dripped. I hoped Ron would be found quickly and go home.

  We strayed over fences and through cypress borders, each of us breaking off on our plan. The late afternoon light began to fade. Carlos snaked out his hands from under an old mattress and grabbed a kid called Weird Willy by the ankles. Willy got so spooked he bit off the end of his tongue. Petey and Drumstick formed an alliance with Krazy Katie, a light-skinned black girl, who carried a Filipino flick knife with a tiny flashlight built in, and together they chased the twins all the way to the chain-link fence of the abandoned car wash and pelted them with tanbark before pulling their pants down.

  My stepbro was in fine form, staring through walls and around corners. He nailed five people in the first hour, which meant he had a formidable team to hunt with. But they didn’t find me. At one point, three of them were prowling around a front yard on Florio, where an old woody station wagon was parked, with a canoe on the roof. I was inched up under the canoe, thinking I could get all three of them, which would make them mine—but I wasn’t sure I could scare them sufficiently from such an awkward position—and then the people who lived in the house peeked out the window and everyone ran off. I was the one who got a big scare then, because this red-haired guy came out and headed for the woody. I only just escaped. He yelled something as I bolted.

  Sprinting openly down the street was the most dangerous thing you could do. That’s when you were totally vulnerable. I made for a little garden shed that I’d used before. It was kept locked, but there were two boards in the back that were loose, so you could crawl through. There was a rat’s nest in there, and it smelled of snail pellets and fish emulsion, but I didn’t care.

  When I got alongside I heard something that made me stop. At first, I had this funny idea that Ron Walsh was in there. I listened closely. Definitely breathing—but then a sticky, squishy noise. I crept down on all fours and stuck my eye up to a slit. There was just enough light to make out Donny Chandler. He was sitting down, leaned up against the door, with his dick out of his pants. It was hard. Every once in a while he’d spit on his hand and stroke the shaft.

  A thrill came over me. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was seeing—only that I wasn’t supposed to. Danny was older, our family didn’t talk about sex, and because of the rape, I was shy about all that stuff. But I knew not only could I scare him to death, I’d have him in a real corner. He’d be so embarrassed he’d do anything for me not to tell. It made me almost laugh out loud. I was so eager to bust in on him I could barely contain myself. He was dead meat.

  But I liked watching him. Not because I wanted to see his dick, although there was something nasty and real about it that was intriguing. I liked the power I had over him then. For those few moments, listening to him—spying on him in that old garden shed that smelled of rat piss and fish guts—I held his neighborhood reputation in my hands. Carlos and Krazy Katie would’ve eaten him alive if they’d known. But I couldn’t bring myself to. It didn’t seem right. I ran away and went to hide in a Salvation Army bin, trying to gather my thoughts. I actually fell asleep in there, and woke up stiff and cramped.

  I took the longest way home I knew, and by the time I got there, it had been dark for some time. My stepbrother was in the front yard waiting to hit me with a lemon. He never missed. He said no one had found Ron. In all the commotion about the canoe and Donny whacking off, I’d forgotten about Captain Galaxy. Maybe he was better at hiding than we thought. Or maybe he’d just gotten bored—or thirsty. We went inside and snacked on leftovers.

  At nine o’clock, Ron’s wife rang and said that he wasn’t home. Dad was a little worse for wear from the party, but he got us to join him on a walk through the neighborhood. We felt sort of silly calling out, “Ron! Ron!” But the neighbors were used to odd stuff from us. No answer. No sign. When we got back, I could see Dad was worried. I figured Ron had just slunk off to a bar somewhere. Or maybe he was passed out. He’d come around when the temperature dropped.

  Next morning, however, when Ron still hadn’t shown up, any trace of anger or humor gave way to anxiety. Phyll
is had even spoken to the police. Dad did another search of the neighborhood, which turned up nothing. I got to thinking about what Ron had said before we started playing—about how he was going to disappear before our eyes. It made me think of Dr. Madden, an orthodontist and gambler Dad had been counseling, who supposedly died down in Mexico. Only when the body came back in one of those silver airplane coffins—temporary coffins, they call them—it wasn’t the right guy. Dr. Madden was never heard from again, and more than a few people thought he’d planned it that way.

  The next day the cops were taking the matter seriously. Phyllis was beside herself. Three days later a man named Bledsoe, who lived a block over, noticed a smell. Mr. Bledsoe’s house was one of the older ones around. Down the narrow space between his house and his neighbor’s was an old boxed shed built into the wall. The box was clapboard to harmonize with the house, with a heavy shingled lid on rusted hinges. The lid was hard enough to raise when outside, standing on firm ground. From inside, it would’ve been far more difficult. A young boy couldn’t have done it.

  But what Ron couldn’t have known, until it was too late, was that the box was connected to an old coal chute that had once run down to the furnace in the basement. As the coal furnace had long ago been replaced by an oil burning one, the coal chute had been blocked off. Unfortunately, the chute had been sealed up from the basement side. In climbing into what he probably thought was an old storage box for wood, Ron fell down far enough into the chute to get himself wedged. Drunk, confused, he might’ve struggled. Bledsoe hadn’t been home at the time, and none of the other neighbors heard. The medical opinion, which my father conveyed to us as sensitively as he could, was that the cause of death was a heart attack.

  Phyllis Walsh never blamed us openly for what happened, and she was as polite and controlled as could be at the memorial service, for which Dad put on his ministerial robes for the first time in several years. But she never spoke or waved to us again in the street. A few months later she moved to San Francisco. The details of the death were respectfully kept out of the media. My father gave the eulogy and some of Ron’s colleagues from the TV station spoke about his contribution to broadcasting and the community, which were confirmed by many tributes.

  I’d never stop thinking of Captain Galaxy after the moment we found him, curled like a fetus, his face discolored—a mix of terror and resigned peace. How kind he was to me that first day on the golf course. How black it must’ve been inside that box at the end. In dreams sometimes, I go back to that box and open the lid—but I don’t find a dead man or a boy inside. I see a bright green fairway full of daisies. At the far end, way off in the distance, I see myself, poised on my mother’s roof as the sun goes down. I remember what it was like to be scared—so scared I couldn’t even say what it was that I was afraid of anymore. I remember what it was like to leap into the dark. How good it felt when I finally fell home.

  THE FLAMINGO CONSPIRACY

  If you’d been going to classes with the same kids, boys and girls together the whole time—what would you think if one morning Mrs. Kremser ushered all the girls out of the multipurpose room and Mr. Wallace ordered all the boys into the gym?

  Would it worry you if your routine of building California missions out of sugar cubes and inflating flabby wet chunks of cow lungs with Sweetheart straws was suddenly interrupted by a forty-five-minute film on waterbirds?

  We weren’t stupid; we knew something was up. But we were trapped, forced to learn about cormorants, penguins, petrels, puffins, ibises and heron—all of us dead curious, of course, about what was going on with the girls. We even missed them a little.

  Grant Dorset, who was two years older than the rest of us, thought he knew what was happening, so naturally Carl Spock claimed he knew too, but I didn’t trust either of them because they once put out a cigarette in my ear.

  It was hard to pay attention to the birds, being so curious and all, but the colors were very bright and the sound was turned way up, so I actually started to get interested, especially in the flamingos—then suddenly the reel ended and everybody was knocking over chairs to get out to the blacktop, where all the girls were milling around, smiling strangely.

  “You don’t think they saw a film on landbirds?” asked Dieter, the butterball with the bristly hair we gave knuckle burns to.

  “Jesus, Dieter! Act your age, not your IQ,” said Noel, as he ran over to quiz the girls. Like us, he figured as soon as we got a hold of the Blabbermouth, Nancy Strange, we’d get to the bottom of the mystery, but even she was very coy.

  It felt like something mysterious had happened. The girls were acting like they’d been let in on a big secret, as if they’d somehow gotten older than us in only an hour.

  Then Noel came running back with his report. “They saw a movie too,” he said. “It was about a red dress.”

  “A red dress?” we all said.

  “Yeah, this little girl grows up into a real girl and her mother buys her a red dress. The rest was all about washing up. You know, about keeping clean and stuff.”

  “Jesus! Who’d want a red dress?” said Paul Marhenky.

  “What’s the matter, Stinky, do you wanna blue one?” said Noel as he ran off to climb the backstop, thinking the puzzle solved.

  I wasn’t satisfied, though, so after social studies I cornered Lonnie Child, who kind of liked me, and she told me the movie was about bleeding and how babies are made. She told me that girls have eggs inside them, but not like the kind of eggs you buy at Safeway. Then she told me that boys have this kind of milk inside them—full of little swimming things with tails like tadpoles. It was enough to make you sick.

  She said girls get eggs and bleed. Boys get directions, then the boy sticks his wiener in the girl’s angina and squirts tadpoles that mix with her eggs and one of the eggs becomes a baby unless the boy wears a balloon.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I tried to tell her that we learned about eggs too. I told her about the flamingos, but she didn’t care. She said we got the wrong film. We were supposed to see one about wieners and tadpoles, but someone got confused and we got flamingos instead. I figured she was confused, or the teachers had told her to say all that—that it was part of the big trick being played on the boys.

  Things just weren’t the same anymore. I watched Amy Swanson stomp out of a perfectly good dodgeball game because she claimed it was “immature.” The way she strutted past a group of boys who were fighting by the drinking fountain reminded me of one of the birds in the movie. Then I looked at Lonnie and her cheeks flushed bright pink. She was playing with her hair, shifting from one leg to the other. I wanted to talk to some older kids—to find out if anything weird had happened to them. What else weren’t we told? First my father claimed I came from God, then Mr. Gaskell, our science teacher, tells us we’re really made of pieces of dead stars. Now Lonnie was telling me I was full of tadpoles and that I’d once been an egg, and had only been born because my father didn’t wear a balloon when he got directions. It was pretty clear to me. Somebody was lying.

  Noel thought so too, so after school we took his Daisy gun down to the dump and shot up Dr Pepper cans and tried to work it all out. We gave the matter some serious thought and what Noel came up with made me feel better. He said, “I don’t know about the flamingos and stars, but Dieter’s a tadpole if I ever saw one, and if I were you, I’d still ask Lonnie to the carnival. It’s not her fault she’s got eggs.”

  So I asked her, and she said yes, and I bought her black licorice ropes and a strawberry snow cone and she got sick on the Scrambler, and two weeks later the tadpole film came just like she said it would, and while we laughed at the pictures of penises, the girls had to watch a movie about the building of the Hoover Dam, and Noel tricked Dieter into sitting in rubber cement . . . and I was right about things never being the same again.

  REINDEER GAMES

  Don’t ask me why it was important—it just was. Christmas had become all about blowing up fake fat snowmen and
stealing reindeer from the roof of the Rexall drugstore.

  It was Layne who led us. We used to laugh at him and call him names, until he beat us senseless or did things we never dared to do.

  On top of the drugstore, we looked for the Star of Bethlehem but found only the guard lights of the lumberyard and the faint glow of the front room, where my German shepherd had scratched the chrome table before the vet put her to sleep.

  Then Layne wrenched Rudolph out by the roots and slit the anchor rope with a Tijuana switchblade and we began the difficult descent.

  “Don’t worry so much, you sissies,” he said. If you get stuck, just jump. It’s like climbing, only backwards.

  Who knows how the cop car came to be waiting by the Dumpster below—it was one of those bad-luck breaks. But we knew we were done for, all of us reconciled to capture—except for Layne. He was the one carrying Rudolph and we all bet he’d be the one quickest to bolt when we hit the ground.

  But he had invited us on a mission that night, and he refused to abandon his prize or us. So he battered a bewildered cop with a plastic reindeer while his buddies scattered down the tracks, where the cop car couldn’t go. Then, even then, rather than fling the stupid thing away, Layne ran with Rudolph crumpling and cracking underneath his arm, because it was just a silhouette. Damn him if he didn’t beat us to the trestle, where we laughed, knowing we were safe.

  Four years after the robbery of the reindeer, Layne followed Jorge Pacheco off the school bus for a fight behind the Chevron station. One minute they were standing in the sunlight, relaxing for combat . . . the next minute . . . Jorge was lying beside an oil drum bleeding badly from the head and twitching—and Layne was running down the tracks again. Those same tracks I’d run down.