Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality

by Bill Peters

  But the problem is the entire story is impossible to explain and I start to feel embarrassed, total pre-Melting Backsickle, and I forget what I was talking about.

  “Have you heard of NecronicA?” Toby says.

  Luckytown rips off a length of foil from the roller. “Our department tracks any number of activities.”

  “Because if you go to his website, NecronicA,” Toby says, “you can see that he has been drawing an awful lot of fire.”

  Luckytown motions for us to sit in his living room, the carpeted region just to the right of his kitchen. Vine plants with red flowers hang above a small, gray TV/VCR combo. Basil-green recliners are arranged in this prim way where it feels like nobody ever sits in them. Lip Cheese sits in one, though, and sets his papers on his lap.

  “So far, this year, the Rochester Fire Department has reported twenty-one arson task force investigations under way,” Lip Cheese reads from some document, with Toby nodding grimly.

  Lip Cheese turns to a printout he has made of all the drawings posted on NecronicA. His index finger hops over each miniaturized picture on the page. “There are twenty-one fire-related artworks on NecronicA,” Lip Cheese says.

  Maybe this is all still technically hilarious, but I really start to wonder: They are getting really specific with this joke.

  “Hm,” is all Luckytown says, folding the length of foil over the casserole before sliding the dish back into the oven.

  “Do you know Bambert L. Tolby?” Toby asks.

  “We know he opened a military surplus store in Webster,” Luckytown says, losing his upright-barricade cop voice for a second. “On Ridge Road. Bambert’s Weapons. But that’s public. Something else happened with him, years back. I don’t remember.”

  I swallow a yarnball of lightning. “Have you seen Necro there?” I say.

  “Oh I don’t know,” Luckytown says, shredding some Parmesan on a bell-shaped shredder. “But, hey, little man, that’s why we have police departments.”

  I won’t even begin to tell you how I reacted that night to Luckytown finding out, before me, where Necro might be semi-Maverick Jetpantsing to. Taking a shower, I’m fine. But lying in bed that night, I throw an elbow into my mattress. At first, since Mom is asleep, I pick up a stereo speaker and set it down on its side, as if I’ve knocked it over. I roll a pen off my homework desk. After that, all I will say is that the rumors are not true and my room is normally that trashed.

  The next day, there’s enough leftover Off-the-Top-Ropes rage in me to drive over and pick up Toby (because Lip Cheese is working, and Toby drove yesterday, and so I’m driving today, because those are the Laws of Gas). We go to Ridge Road in Webster, if only so that you know, Necro, that no matter where you are, you will see my face.

  Webster is flat, with cracked, tarred-up roads, big backyards, and houses with storefronts. The sign on the new weapons shop, above one huge window, says Bambert’s Weapons in italicized maroon lettering. When we enter, a tinkly “Here’s a Customer” bell rings from the handle of the glass door, like the sound of Hitler making his own candy. Immediately, I’m scanning for anything that might be not just Murman-level Uncomebackable, but Pharaoh Uncomebackable, something so Pharaoh Uncomebackable that Necro will never leave his house again.

  But the store is only a counter and a stack of cardboard boxes behind it. Rambocream, with a sweaty buzz cut, leans over the glass display counter, ice-cream sandwich arms spread out and palms flat on the glass top. He closes some book by H.P. Lovecraft. In the glass display are sword- and knife-shaped velvet insets but no weapons. Rambocream looks like he’s not sure if he should let us know he remembers us.

  “Excuse me, we’re not technically open yet?” he says.

  “We’re looking for Andrea Fanto,” I say. “And Bambert L. Tolby.”

  His eyebrows leap and he suddenly smiles, voice suddenly connoisseurish: “Bambert, unfortunately, is booked solid today. I assume you’re from the church?”

  “Church?” Toby says.

  “Are you Community Investors?” Rambocream says, apparently capitalizing those words.

  Toby slants his brow, the way he does when he appears to be yelling, inside his head: I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY I’M CONFUSED.

  “All we were wondering is if you could tell us if you’ve seen Necro today,” Toby says.

  “Necro?” Rambocream says.

  “Andrea,” I say. “Andrea Fanto.”

  Rambocream folds his arms. “You mean Loostro. Are you the media?” he says.

  “Necro’s in here that much,” Toby says.

  Rambocream points to a Toyota Camry parked across the street outside, with a manila-folder-colored sparkle.

  “That’s Mel Reid, from the newspaper,” he says. “Whenever I lock up at night and walk out, he carries this tape recorder that’s the size of a Fisher-Price tape recorder. Sometimes, he’ll even park outside Bambert’s house, for an hour, eat a sandwich, and drive off without requesting an interview. Two weeks ago, they printed a headline titled: ‘No word yet on white-supremacist explosion.’ Maybe you are Loostro’s friends? But I’ll have to consult and see what we’re comfortable with.”

  Rambocream closes his eyes, raises his eyebrows, and angles his head slightly away.

  “Let’s go, Nate,” Toby says. “This guy’s Colonel Hellstache. Do you even know what that means? Colonel Hellstache? Holy Grail Points? He doesn’t know. He isn’t Necro’s friend.”

  We turn around to leave, because really I should be applying for jobs right now, but then Rambocream goes: “The Nintendo Power Bucolic Farm. What about that?”

  I swing myself around. I don’t know if my reaction is visible.

  “Because that’s where he is,” Rambocream says. “He goes out there to clear his head. If you know him, why don’t you take and take a journey, with Journey, and go find him there.”

  When I worked so hard to stay Necro’s friend, and Necro gives away even the Nintendo Power Bucolic Farm. Where the abandoned Canal Creamee had this payphone that worked without change. You and me, Necro, Off the Top Ropes, playing America’s ribcage as a guitar, pranking Nintendo customer service with that phone (“Uh, are you planning on coming out with a new Nintendo game where you can, uh, make tires?”). Because, going to the Nintendo Power Bucolic Farm got me through back-to-school season. You want to give something away, Necro? Give away Shinobi Hamslicer. Give away Peanut Butter Shoulder. Give away Dorito Henderson; we never needed Dorito Henderson, Necro; you and I together were always better than Dorito Henderson. But to tell even Rambocream about the Nintendo Power Bucolic Farm? This one hurts, Necro.

  “Don’t be this guy’s Wendy,” Toby says. “This isn’t worth the Cockdrama anymore.”

  But I lower my voice and say to Rambocream: “Oh, I know where the Nintendo Power Bucolic Farm is. We will drive to Fishers and we will find Necro and we will bring him back here in one hour and we will talk.”

  Rambocream has this smile where his upper lip curls over his teeth, old-man style. He flips his palm upward. “All right.”

  “But there’s motocross on! X Games Finals!” Toby says, following me outside to the car, the door handle bell dinkling again. “I didn’t set the VCR!”

  “Yeah, well.”

  On 490, after easily a whole episode of motocross passes, Toby yanks back the backrest of his seat and stares up at the ceiling. The sunset tangles into the trees. I near exit 45—the Mob Execution Exit.

  “Wendy Wendy,” Toby says. “Wendy Wendy Wendy, Wendy Wendy Wendy put on a Wendy Nametag.”

  So rather than admitting that, oh shit, I haven’t been to the Nintendo Power Bucolic Farm since 1996, I totally make a tasting menu out of Toby’s pissed-offedness. I slam my foot on the clutch to coast.

  “Do I turn here? Exit 45? Where is Fishers again, Toby?”

  “How about toward my goddamn house!”

  “No, it’s further this way. Past like Bloomfield and all that.”

  Another episode of motocross probably pass
es. The worst thing about getting lost in the plains is that there are no signs or landmarks. When I turn onto the country routes, there are some white, boutique-y looking buildings that I feel like I remember, and Toby rolls onto his side.

  I turn onto Route 20A—a guess turn. Then another guess turn. More episodes of motocross. The street lamps run out. I see a sign for what, I guess, is a town called Atlanta. Wheat fields drizzle by.

  “If you’re not their Wendy, Nate,” Toby says, “then what are you? Their Mommy?”

  In response—to make up for the Total Comeback Shutdown of yesterday afternoon—I turn left onto some road, and the sky opens up into a black whipped cream of cloud cover. “No, wait, I think I remember where we are now, Toby!” I say, smirking as hard as I can. “There’s a church up here! Fishers is totally this way!”

  “Fuck! This!” Toby kicks my glove compartment drawer.

  I take the next left. “Oh wait! No! The Nintendo Power Bucolic Farm is totally up this way! I swear to God!”

  A wall of cornstalks appears on our right. On Toby’s second kick, the glove compartment door cracks. The light from inside it makes the crack look like a lightning bolt.

  It’s dark enough so that my headlights seem only to light the small bowl-shaped area of road right ahead of me. So I start to wonder, okay, seriously: Where am I.

  “Let me see the map in there, Toby?”

  With his pointer finger and thumb, Toby tweezes the map through the crack in the glove compartment and unfolds it.

  “It’s a map of Buffalo,” he says, and karate chops the map to the floor.

  I flip on the ceiling light and pull over. I turn off the car. I’m warm enough to unzip my Bills winter jacket. We open our doors and step out into the quiet. If there were cars coming, you’d see the headlights from a county over. Everything, my shoes on the gravel, sounds intricate, like someone whispering into your ear. Across the street from the cornfields, a hill slants upward into a patch of woods. No street lamps anywhere, no power lines.

  I sit on the hood and scratch the sweat off my forehead. Toby kicks some gravel and puffs his cheeks.

  “Well maybe if you’d shut up, Toby, I could’ve concentrated when I was on the highway and actually found the Nintendo Power Bucolic Farm,” I say.

  “Well maybe if you didn’t Mommy yourself so much over Necro—”

  “Fine! Fine! Fine!” I yell. The word echoes, blinking smaller into the woods.

  Then, a bright, sharp, pinhole-sized red dot, from a laser pointer or a rifle, appears on the car’s rear driver’s side door.

  A spike drives up through the middle of my brain. My muscles feel like floating ash. The dot loops around Toby’s ear.

  “Who’s there?” Toby says, a little quiet, the way you’d speak into the dark when woken by a burglar’s footsteps.

  When the dot squiggles toward my crotch, I do a flailing jumping jack and land on my knees in the snow crust. Next thing, we’re both in the dirt, covering our heads as the dot makes angry cursive over us, doing evasive roll moves, scrunching our heads into our shoulders.

  The dot spirals wide and slow across the cornfields and, eventually, settles on my forehead.

  “Get down Nate, oh God—NO! Don’t shoot!” Toby says. The lettering on his Drew Bledsoe jersey is visible when he crawls back into the car and ducks into the seat well.

  I crawl behind the car, gravel stabbing my knees. I look up from behind the trunk. For no reason, I say: “Necro?”

  The dot pauses.

  Then, the dot jerks toward my chest, then to my crotch, then back toward my chest and down again, like it’s either nodding up-and-down Yes, or bludgeoning me. The dot then scribbles up and down my arms and my chest and legs, like it’s trying to color me in.

  I think: Coloring me in, Necro? Like coloring me in because I’m dead inside?

  “Either shoot us or show yourself!” Toby yells from inside the car.

  Then, slowly, the dot moves up the leg of my nylon running pants, my sweatshirt, up to my collarbone, crawling toward my eye like an insect I can’t feel, and I decide, surprisingly quickly, surprisingly practically, that it’s probably better to die this way rather than go on embarrassing myself the way I have. The laser point pierces my eye, and I feel some microheat on my eyebrows, and it moves to my forehead, and with the efficiency of a bank withdrawal I accept death, and I cramp my eyelids shut to brace for the bullet and, then, the point disappears.

  A leftover dot-shaped, orange-sherbet-colored stain drifts in my eye. I can’t see the corn or the patch of pine trees across the street. The snow crunches when I move any part of me—ice grains rolling over ice grains. No branches crack from the woods, no footsteps.

  When I get back into the car, I think I hear Toby sniffle.

  “You all right?” I say.

  “You will never be able to win an argument with me again,” he says. “If you still think you’re friends with Necro. All I’m saying, if you still think you’re friends.”

  I start the engine. I turn on the headlights. We don’t hear a single thing at all.

  HIGH SCHOOL FRITO PACE-OFF

  Back home, the dark from the cornfield and the tracers of the laser pointer have settled into my spine. I keep from looking at anything for too long—the spoon rest on the oven, the paint-spattered radio on top of the fridge—just in case another dot appears. Sleep never works, so I settle on an all-night High School Frito Pace-Off.

  The uncrumpling of the Fritos bag is loud, like announcing it to a racetrack. I set the bag on one end of the kitchen table and a glass of milk on the other. Then I walk a lap around the table, handful some chips into my mouth, and reach the glass of milk just as I’m done chewing.

  “Nate?” someone says.

  Fake Dad No. 3 velvets his way into the kitchen from the living room, bare legs under his purple bathrobe, Thor-mane in a ponytail.

  “I was sleeping on the couch,” he says, leaning against the oven and thumb-knuckling the corner of his eye to uncrust it. “There was a great documentary on Lake Canandaigua. Canandaigua—do you know what that word means?”

  Through the kitchen window, the sky milks up with pre-sunrise. He answers his own question. “It means ‘the chosen place.’ Isn’t that interesting? That we have a body of water that was regarded as ‘the chosen place?’”

  I’m too busy Frito-chewing to even notice what he literally, actually says next: “You remind me of a story. One time, my friend Theebs, we called him that, he and I were camping in Nevada. He met a lady there, at the campgrounds, who had a prosthetic hand. Just two pincers to grip the phone when she talked girl-talk with her girlfriends. But Theebs, always seeking a connection, thought this lady was so ravishing, in the face, that he offered to smoke with her our hash, and she said she’d meet him later that night—with the caveat that love’s arbitrary yet fluid currents might bring them closer.”

  I hear a coughing in the walls. The shower’s turning on: Mom.

  “We’d already been drinking Carlo Rossi; already were in the bag,” he says. “So Theebs went out, met her, and returned to our tent nearly doubled over in pain.”

  I wipe the salt on my pajama pants and, before I even think about why he’s telling me this, I admittedly admit that I’m sort of cracking up here. “Wait wait wait wait,” I go. “A Terminator Reacharound?”

  Which, obviously, reminds me of something that happened both to Necro and Lip Cheese, and they know exactly what I’m talking about.

  “That’s very funny,” Fake Dad No. 3 says. “A lot of richness.”

  “That actually happened to your friend?”

  “And me, too.” He reaches for his robe sash. “Would you care to see the scars?”

  I whip my entire body away from him. “No! Don’t!”

  “Kidding! You’re a pushover.” He crosses his ankles and his robe slides back past his right knee. “I know you think I’m the Homosexual Time Lord, or what not. But might I make you a proposition, Nate, which you are fr
ee to ignore.”

  I pour myself a new glass of milk and down it like a shot. Since he’s already insulted much of himself for me, I say: “Okay, sure.”

  “I’ve heard you talk on the phone to your friends, and I think you might find the loam of my offer to be particularly fertile. I have my chosen place, as well. Every summer, I go to a retreat, outside Philadelphia, near King of Prussia. Have you been—to King? of Prussia?”

  “It’s named a king?”

  “It’s a series of three-day retreats—although they offer longer engagements that intersplice multiple disciplines—in a confined, but wooded, natural creative space with yeomanic clearings, stone farmhouses amid the tall grass. It’s run through the Continual Center Foundation, which is world renowned, completely legitimate. The meditation technique is based on Vipassana—a twenty-five-hundred-year-old form of idea-incubation that means, loosely, truthful observation. It’s a way of eliminating war, eliminating suffering.” His right hand pans from his left arm outward across his body. “It would be challenging, excruciating. You wouldn’t be able to talk at all—except for obvious emergencies—but eventually, after multiple sessions and efforting toward an essence-forward life, you’d come out of it not needing to prove yourself to anyone. I donate very regularly there. And if you were interested in such a means of self-excavation, well, I could make that happen. We draw a ragtag band: everyone from ex-offenders to corporate executives. Yours for the low price of tender loving care!”

  When I think of Pennsylvania, it reminds me of Greta Hollund, who I kind of liked even though I only saw her from across the cafeteria, and who wore plaid pants and had buttons on her book bag straps. She went to college in Philadelphia. When the kids go back to school every September, I’ll put “Hysteria” on repeat, in her honor or something, and I’ll do a Sad Archives Transfer, and re-rig my stomach to feel what I imagine she felt when she was younger. And I’ll imagine myself shrinking, like the thin white rectangle after you turn off an old TV, until I think to go do something else.