Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality

by Bill Peters

  I imagine I’m giving a toast in front of an audience, and Necro runs up to me and yells “You fraud!” I hear myself say that if Toby finds Necro, he’ll kill him. He’ll kill him and go to the police, and I need to show him this article, right now, need to watch him read it over to uproot the Runaway Cockdrama. I try to breathe deep—to get my brain to tread some water—but the best I can do is stand up. Then I think: You can never lie again. And I maybe, right here, get myself to fully form the thought of: if I can tell the truth about Sausage Academy, I can tell Toby the truth about Necro. But then I hear a girl yell in what is the opposite of a voice: You are going to die this way.

  “Hey. Wake up,” I say to Mindy Fale, at conversation volume.

  Some saliva at the back of her throat pops when she breathes.

  I tap her shoulder. “We have to get out of here,” I say. Her hands, folded, rise and fall on her stomach. “My friend’s in trouble. I have to apologize to him.”

  She smacks her lips and rolls over. Since I’m relieved to at least be annoyed by this, I rip open the curtains, and behind them the entire time was a sliding door, which opens to a balcony, which overlooks the Horseshoe Falls.

  The falls are so loud, curving like a broad, raging fingernail, that I’m amazed the balcony’s concrete floor is still there when I step out. The mist is thick enough to comb your face. I kick some cobwebs off the chair and tip it forward to dump the puddle from the cushions.

  After two or three pairs of headlights slide by—however long that is—Mindy Fale comes out to the balcony. The timing of which, for obvious reasons, is total Colonel Shortchange Moonteeth Hellstache.

  “These new pills must have reacted—” she yells, before the loudness of the falls makes her impossible to hear, “—of my stalkers there.”

  “Yeah!” I say, because I can’t get my head around asking her to repeat herself.

  And I would think to tell her we need to leave, but I’m in Weird Politeness Recoil now that she’s out here with me. She hugs herself against the balcony railing and mouths something I can’t hear. So I stand up next to her.

  “Sometimes, the falls freeze all the way across!” she yells. “Tourists used to go out and party on the ice! There were liquor stores!”

  “Yeah!” I yell. Mindy Fale’s been destined for temp jobs. But in class once, the teacher was talking about Einstein’s brain being preserved in a tank. Her hand darted up: “You mean like Napoleon’s penis?!”

  A strand of her hair is stuck to my shirt sleeve. I can’t tell if her arm is touching mine. And, how sad is it that, right now, I’m thinking about Frankenstein, eating a hamburger, and how me and Necro, long ago, could have totally joked about a horror-themed restaurant with intentionally-poorly-named menu items like the Horror Burger, or the Chicken Salad with Werewolf Fingers, or the Really-Scary, Awful-Tasting Spaghetti with Vampire Meatballs. How sad that I have to go to Niagara Falls to figure out that I’ve chosen Toby’s Cockdramas and women over Necro? Because what do you say, with some girl who is kind of a Level 3 Frumptruck, some woman you’ll only use to think of someone else, and in my head, Necro is yelling to me “That was my life!” and another voice yells “Take him to court, Necro!” before something in my body tells my brain That’s Enough. And only now am I able to punch a hand, mentally, through my brain’s cemetery dirt and tell myself: I Am Absolutely Blazing.

  “Well, there they are!” she yells over the falls.

  “There they are,” I say.

  THE AURORIST

  The Genesee Falls downtown, however, are green. When me and Toby cross the bridge, the air from the water feels me up through my shirt in that way where you can’t tell whether you smell the deodorant of every person living here, or every person being murdered here, or whether it’s just back-to-school season. But you saw me—even though I went to bed first, and when I woke up the next day the Brain-Chafing Fraud High was done and I only felt urgentless—you saw me show Toby that article today. You saw his eyes moving over the words. So I tell him one more time, just to make sure: “Turned out, after all this, it wasn’t Necro. It was a gas leak. It was some kid, a juvenile.” I force a laugh out. “We’re retards!”

  “Retards. Huh.”

  “I already called Necro to apologize,” I say. “I left a message from us.”

  Toby’s facial expression doesn’t change, still stuck on Will Put Body Parts in Suitcases.

  But, have you seen what Toby does all day? I’ve been with him since before noon just to keep him from generating Havoc Rays over Going Off the Top Ropes on Necro. I got in his car and we dumped some trash bags behind the post office. I stood in line with him while he talked to the girl at MotoPhoto (“Make extra duplicates; you know the ones I like,” he told her).

  “So, find a place? Watch preseason?” I say, because Necro would never end up at a Bills bar.

  But Toby’s brow suddenly crumples. His pupils harden, like there’s an apocalypse of fear only he can see on the horizon. I wonder if he’s heard a police siren, which is what we came into the city for, because Toby loves to listen for sirens.

  “He’s right up there,” he mumbles into his shirt collar.

  “Up there who?”

  “I was downtown yesterday and I knew it was him.”

  We get to the end of the bridge and pass some club with a chrome façade and black windows. A tall kid with a Euro soccer jacket zipped up to the collar says to a group of kids with side bags: “You gays like techno?” in this California-therapist voice. “House? Deep house? Chicago? Oakenfold? Berlin? I’m spinning at Freakazoids: Tuesdays and Fridays. The Aurorist. Come check it out—”

  Then, the kid, who’s handing out laminated, postcard-sized fliers—right when he sees us, he takes off!

  And Toby follows him! Chain wallet swinging with his fat, his sprint-form somehow really professional looking.

  Except, right then—I put back together what I just saw: That kid—despite the dyed-gray jeans and short white hair—had a swollen face and triangle Draculabrows. That kid was Necro! Necro, but dressed totally different and with a personality-changing haircut!

  Toby chases him over the fence behind Dinosaur BBQ, down a short hill into a grassed-over trench the width of two car lanes. At the entrance of Rochester’s abandoned subway system—an entrance the size of a garage door, black as an eye socket of a large skull—they disappear. I swallow hard, and go in after them.

  The Rochester subway. I’ve heard there’s still paperwork on the desk inside the dispatch office, dispatching Ghost Trains, or Trains of the Dead, or the C.H.U.D.way—jokes I tried out once on Necro years ago but were forgotten after ten minutes.

  Faint light reflects off the puddles, and what looks vaguely like chubby graffiti floats over the walls. I pass a raised platform, maybe where passengers waited, where a stairwell leads straight into a concrete ceiling. Just past that, I walk into an area with long rows of pillars to my left and right, black like underwater chess pieces on a board that won’t end.

  “Toby?” I say. “Necro?”

  Echoing burbles from somewhere.

  I press my thumb into the button that turns on my watch light—one of the bright blue kinds. I point my wrist forward. My shoe-echoes shriek when I jog through the large pillary area, and I arrive at a series of narrow metal walkways right-angling in labyrinth-type directions. Way off at one end, some archways overlooking the Genesee let in some half-moons of city light, the color of candle flame. Water pours out of a pipe somewhere.

  I hear some footsteps, then some clanging metal, and then a splash.

  “Toby?” I say.

  Palms and legs slap in the water. “Brhghghhggg!” the body in the water says.

  There’s enough light that I can see a long, straight path on one of the walkways. Far off, under one archway, where the light is at its whitest, I see a silhouette turn, delicately, ninja-like, and run. I run, too—on my toes, like I’ve got winged sneakers, wind slicking my hair back, metal of the walkway bendin
g a little under me, until I end up at the portion of the subway tracks that run underneath the Aqueduct.

  I’ve actually heard about the Aqueduct, which I think the Erie Canal passed through a million years ago. The curves of its brick archways recede like skipping rocks. The graffiti on the pillars overlaps, brightly colored as stuffed animals inside a drop-claw prize machine.

  The shadow stands at the opposite end of the Aqueduct, collar turned up, one shoulder turned toward me, like it should be holding a katana, like it’s waiting for me. I make another ass-bolt toward the shadow, the soles of my shoes soft, like there should be a ledge up ahead and, after it, deep space and the broad blue curve of the Earth below.

  The shadow stands there and, as I get closer, the shadow becomes a person. Necro. With a face. “What!” Necro screams.

  That Necro knows his way around an abandoned subway in the dark? A little hurtful.

  “The Aurorist, Necro?”

  “That’s what they call me now, as of current. That’s what I’m trying to do, something positive with my life. Trance, deep house. Got a new URL, got some photography on there and shit. Stuff of the future: ‘Curio Goldwing dirges: It’ll be an integument of clean destitude.’ Or at least that’s how, I imagine, sarcasm will sound like, two hundred years from now, in music reviews,” he says, somehow, still with anger.

  I pucker my lips, to suck on a pretend pacifier, and hold out my arm: “Touch my arm, Necro! Touch it! Please!”

  Instead, Necro reaches into his pants pocket and wings his keys at my face. Some of the teeth of one key nick my left eye. The feeling is more annoying than it is painful, the kind of annoyance you can only get rid of by one way.

  “You threw your keys at me,” I say.

  “Yeah, well.”

  “You threw your keys at me!”

  My tear ducts swell like boiling fruit juice. Because, I’ve never for-real fought Necro before. And even though fighting won’t at all be like when we were younger—when you could throw a log at Toby’s head one day and call him up the next—I lower my shoulders and charge.

  Necro is ready. I close my eyes. My arm hooks his stomach and the rest of me whiplashes forward. My right thumb jams into some muscle between his ribs. My left hand crumples his ear. I punch him in the thigh. My forehead rubs against his collarbone. He smells like wood and hair. I sniffle violently. My left eye waters. I open my mouth, and one of us yelps quietly. My midsection collapses—Necro has just cock-kneed me. His breath is like horseradish on the back of my neck. I punch him in his left buttock. He sniffles and inhales through his teeth. I try to head-ram him in the stomach, but he reverse-pelvic-thrusts away and I miss. Both sides of his Euro jacket hang down around my ears. He bites my shoulder. I think about reaching down his pants and grabbing his wang, not to inflict pain, but just to confuse him, but decide against it. I clamp my arms around him. We pull ourselves toward each other for a few seconds longer, and I realize that, probably, we look pretty much like two dudes who are trying to hug and rob each other at the same time.

  I fall and manage to backward-somersault away. I look up at him. My lungs taste like penny-flavored mucus.

  “I fucked up, Necro,” I say.

  I spit out a grain of something. And, then, I start laughing. I look up at Necro, who is leaning over, one hand on his knee, right arm dangling. The corner of his mouth—I think; in hindsight I have to—curves upward, like he’s about to laugh, too.

  He opens his mouth, and if he responds, we can at least begin the process of un-fucking-this-up. But from behind me, Toby, shoes quacking with water, juggernauts through and shoulders into Necro. Necro’s body flies in the air for about a second, his back bounces up off the dirt, and he rolls over on his side. His head sounds like a rock dropped in the mud when Toby punches him.

  “Wait wait wait wait wait!” I yell.

  I try to grab Toby by the shoulders, but he flings me to the side. Some dirt scrapes up my calf. I see Necro’s cheek break open when Toby hits him again—a large, parenthesis-shaped opening.

  “I told you Necro was buying fireworks, Toby!”

  Necro’s brow is snarled up. His digital calculator watch is broken. Blood is smeared on his sleeve. Toby wipes the gravel scruff off his jacket, picks up Necro’s hand, and shakes it.

  “You got Jungled, Necro!” Toby says into his face.

  On the bridge pavement above us, a semi truck hits a seam in the concrete, and bass vibrates through my scalp. The wind rolls an aluminum can from one side of the Aqueduct to the other.

  “What!” Toby shrieks. “Laugh already!”

  A TORTURABLE PLACE

  So, all of that happens. Weeks after, Mom sets the red pepper jar in front of my egg plate, where my morning Gatorade should be. She snaps a dry spaghetti noodle into small pieces, unscrews the salt jar, and sticks the pieces into the salt.

  “I ran into Cheryl Violi outside Kaufmann’s,” she said. “She said John’s doing well in speech therapy.”

  The thought that shoots through my head is: I must be some asshole. Because, this whole time, when was the last time I even visited Wicked College John?

  “Cheryl hasn’t told many people,” Mom says. “John doesn’t really want to see anyone.”

  But I go anyway. Have you seen the Heated Driveway District in Mendon, where Wicked College John lives? Hilly new developments with long, noodly roads. Houses with pillars on front doorsteps; dirt covered with this Christmas-colored green spray. Wicked College John’s house is mocha colored with an uphill driveway and a lipstick-red front door, two skylights on one long slant of roof. His mom’s Dodge Viper is parked outside the garage. Her keys jangle when she shuts the front screen door. She’s wearing pointy white high heels, tank top, and leather pants, and carrying this bright turquoise purse. Freckles are everywhere on her tan. She walks down to the end of the driveway and lights a menthol.

  “Oh Nate, sweetie, his speech isn’t all there,” she says before I can say hello.

  I ask if I can go in.

  She does a short inhale. “You can try. But he’s really being a little shit right now. He’s not eating. I try to breathe slowly around him. I try to touch his arm. I say my name all the time.” She nods her head toward the screen door. “But he’s in a torturable place. And I need a break.” She pauses. “I need, need, need a break.”

  “What happened?”

  “I tried to tell him, sweetie, you’re alive. You’re making amazing progress. I tried to tell him again what he’d been through, and”—she whispers this part—“he yells at me: ‘I don’t care what happened! Look at my face!’”

  Through the screen door, I can see MLB 2000 on PlayStation on the living room’s TV. Wicked College John himself: sitting on the leather living room sofa. His body looks milked and thin under his T-shirt, hemp necklace and cargo pants. His hair is un-gelled, combed down over his forehead. One crayon-line of scar makes a giant comma across his cheek.

  “Sit,” he says, slowly but sharply, like there are weights mounted to his lips.

  Crowd noise ensues from the video game. Around him are sheets of yellow loose leaf paper, each with tiny sketches of baseball diamonds, some with the bases filled in black. That’s when I feel like I’d better cram at least fifty missed visits into this one.

  “I used to be—” He pauses like it’s the end of a sentence. “Good at this game.” I see him write “Nate” in the top margin of a yellow sheet of paper. He drops the controller, either on accident or on purpose.

  “You’ll get better,” I say.

  “No I won’t,” he says, voice NyQuil paced. “That won’t happen.”

  “Do you want to go outside? It’s warmer out there.”

  “I can enjoy more than nature, Nate. I can still think.”

  An infielder on Wicked College John’s team positions himself under a pop up, but dives out of the way at the last second, and Wicked College John punches himself in the thigh.

  “I have this walker,” his voice jerks a litt
le.

  “So there goes your what—modeling career?” I take off my Bills hat and show him the dent I have in my forehead from Raw Dog. “Man, we’re just a bunch of ugly—”

  “Yeah, but that’s you,” he bites his thumb. “The doctor says some people don’t fully recover from these kinds of injuries. Which means,” he says, swallowing more now, “I might always be this stupid.”

  “But you know you’re stupid!” I say. “That’s the smarter part of your brain working. You build off of that!”

  “So you’re saying I’m stupid,” he says.

  “John! Look on the bright side!” When as friends, we’ve never had terms for “bright side.” “Have you seen what’s her face? That girlfriend?”

  His head bounces slightly when he collapses against the headrest of the couch. I remember his head hitting the pavement in front of the Weapons of Mankind building, and I half-stand up to see if he’s okay.

  “Word of advice, bro,” he says. “Do not talk to a girl if you cannot actually talk.”

  “What did you do to her?” I ask.

  “I was just happy my dick worked again,” he says. “She came to the hospital. I tried to tell her ‘Sorry.’ I thought I could handle the word ‘sorry’ in my brain, but when I tried to say it, I kept saying ‘Tongue.’ And the more I tried to say ‘Sorry’ the more I kept saying ‘Tongue.’ I had this really mad, red look on my face: tongue, tongue, tongue. So no, she hasn’t called. No Welcome-Back Chinese Tape Deck.”

  “Chinese Tape Deck! A little Tokyo Rocking Horse! Those are jokes, from your memory!”

  “Whatever,” he says. “Taco Island Pepper Grinder.”

  “Whatever whatever. You’re very lucky.” I’m on the edge of the recliner, almost setting my hand on his knee. “You could be, I don’t know, eating applesauce through an IV, you could be—”