Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (2 page)

Nevermind that there aren’t any forests in Kingsburg. It’s all farmland–
The Raisin Capital of the World
, actually. But there haven’t been any hellacious, earth-scorching vineyard fires, either… thanks to Gordon.

The curious snuffling of his basset hound, Sam (short for Samantha) rises to Gordon’s ears from the low corner of the sliding glass door nearest the fireplace. Sam is narcoleptic. Any loud noise or too much excitement will cause her to fall into a sudden sleep, an instant paralysis of dreaming. Basset hounds being low to the ground, she never hurts herself. If she’s running, playing fetch, and she hears a garbage can clang or a truck backfire, she simply falls on her side, skidding to a halt on one of her long, floppy brown ears. After a few minutes of REM sleep she’s back up again, feeling fine, wagging her tail as if nothing happened. Gordon adores the dog. There are times when he thinks Sam is the only living creature in the whole world that truly loves and understands him. This is one of those times. He gets down on his hands and knees and peeks through the curtain, finding himself staring into Sam’s round brown eyes. Sam returns his gaze with a look of abject loyalty and incomprehension. She wags her tail, hoping it’s Alpo time. She paws at the nose-marked glass, asking to be let in. Gordon mistakes these gestures for sympathy and affection.

“Sam,” he whispers, almost bringing tears to his eyes with his own pathos, “when I grow up, I’m gonna marry you… if I don’t die first.” Once again, Gordon has landed squarely on the idiot side of the idiot savant equation. At least on this occasion no one capable of criticism is around to witness it. Sam merely licks her chops in response. She knows she only gets fed once a day, at the same hour every evening, but a dog can dream, can’t she?

Gordon dives deep into reveries of married life with a basset hound. Would Sam still let him use a leash? How would she look in a bridal gown? Would she be allowed to wear white, or would getting humped by the Rowley’s Doberman last April count against her? Etcetera. Then a twinkling in the camellia bush beyond Sam’s wagging tail distracts him. Colored lights are flitting around in there, like Tinkerbell’s spark-farting fluttering at the beginning of each new television episode of
The Wonderful World of Disney.
Can camellias erupt in spontaneous combustion?

Airborne splashes of neon pink, tungsten blue, and electric yellow suddenly leap from the bush and dance about in the cool night air, coalescing into the shape of a cartoon rabbit. The eerie, faceless rabbit noiselessly bounces across the cement patio on long hind paws, hopping from one side to the other. As it hops closer, it whirls apart into separate splashes of light; then its individual components–ears, legs, palpitating nose, fluffy tail–suddenly reassemble into a rabbit again. Gordon’s heart is full of wonder, but his mind is full of dread. He’s always been prone to daydreaming, but this is more like a paranoid-schizophrenic break with reality. It scares him. Nevertheless, he decides to invite the Easter Bunny in.

Wheezing, tongue curling out the corner of his mouth in determination, Gordon fumbles with the grey plastic lock on the sliding glass door. Sam, meanwhile, manages a growl as the apparition nears, then falls on her side in a fit of narcolepsy. Finally, the lock clicks free and Gordon rolls aside the door on its sandy aluminum track. It sticks after traveling a length of about eighteen inches, but that’s wide enough to greet the mystery. Gordon opens his arms for an embrace. There’s a moment of beatitude–or something very much like it. God, after all, has answered his prayers. Then the Easter Bunny lunges through the curtains and hurls him to the floor, pummeling poor Gordon in a frantic show of malevolent colored lights.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

No one ever believed Gordon’s version of what happened that day. Everyone said he must have been hallucinating. It was strange, thought Gordon, how adamant they all were. How they wouldn’t even give him the benefit of the doubt. It was as if they were all afraid of something–the truth, perhaps. What it all boiled down to was this:

No one wanted to hear that the Easter Bunny had beat the crap out of him.

Toward the conclusion of that Easter Sunday–late evening in the Kingsburg Memorial Hospital, under an oxygen tent–Gordon contemplates his sorry state. He feels like he’s drowning, trying to breathe from under a bag of wet feathers. Through the condensation beading on the inside of the clear plastic tent, he can just barely make out his loyal old grandmother, half-asleep in a chair. An IV drip runs into Gordon’s skinny, blue-veined arm. He feels a dull ache where the needle pokes into the crook of his elbow, the pinching stickiness of adhesive tape holding his wrist to a splint.

There’s more tape holding a tube to his chest. A doctor had come by earlier to tell Gordon that a pneumothorax had collapsed his right lung. Gordon had sworn that was where the damn rabbit bit him. But would anyone listen to him? No. “Bunnies are nice,” the doctor said. “The hell they are,” said Gordon. His Grandma Helen was so disturbed by what he told her that she gave Gordon a book of Bible stories to read, fearing his soul might be in jeopardy.

The book is a cheap, illustrated Sunday school edition with oversized type. Its laminated front cover depicts a round-bellied Mary on a donkey being led by a morose Joseph, who is probably wondering how his wife came to be with child without allowing him to do the begetting. The Star of Bethlehem shines down on them both from above the title:
A Young Lad’s Book of Bible Stories.
Gordon prefers his fairy tales to come from the Brothers Grimm. He thumbs through the book out of sheer boredom. But then his attention is drawn to a kitschy illustration of a small, bandaged boy, very much like himself (except for a too-perfect haircut), lying unconscious in a hospital bed with his right arm upraised and a radiant Jesus attending him.

The text that accompanies the illustration tells the sad tale of Little Toby, a boy like any other, who is run over by a large Buick while riding his bike across a bridge in a sleet storm. Little Toby is knocked forty feet in the air and lands in the river, where a kindly policeman fishes him out (
at least he wasn’t eaten by piranhas,
thinks Gordon, who has a morbid and ungovernable imagination). The policeman calls an ambulance to come and cart Little Toby off to the hospital, where it is discovered that he has thirty-three broken bones and a case of double pneumonia. Things look bad for Little Toby. So bad, in fact, that when he regains consciousness in the middle of the night, with no one around to comfort him, he gets a tad hysterical. He holds up his broken right arm and prays to Jesus, asking to be taken to heaven. Holding up the right arm is somehow crucial, according to the book. Anyway, it gets the Son of God’s attention. Jesus swoops right down in a blaze of holiness and rockets Little Toby off to Paradise. End of story.

Self-pitying tears well in Gordon’s eyes as he sets the book aside. Then he does something he’s never done with any sort of sincerity before: he asks Jesus into his heart. And of course he props up his right arm before he goes off to sleep. Gordon desperately wants to leave his earthly existence behind. Who wouldn’t, after getting his ass kicked by the Easter Bunny?

That night Gordon has a dream he’s had many times before. It starts out like an old silent movie: a black title card flickers with implosions of dust and white scratches as it spells out
Marauder in the Bog,
or perhaps
Murder in the Jungle
–Gordon can never quite remember for sure. He hears an ominous gypsy song as the dream-film opens on a bayou shack under coal-black skies, surrounded by tall reeds swaying in the moonlight. Gordon lives in the shack with his parents, who just happen to be cartoon characters–the mother and father from the comic strip, "Dennis the Menace." Gordon, not a cartoon, knows he must run away. He leaves the security of the shack and ventures out into the cold reeds. They tower above his little blonde head. He looks back over his shoulder and sees, through the shack’s window, his cartoon mother serving his cartoon father a cartoon turkey dinner. They don’t seem to miss him. Barefoot, unarmed, Gordon wends his way along a muddy path, but soon loses his bearings. Then he hears a rustling and deep, heavy breathing. Terrified, he starts to run, but the path ends in a cul-de-sac. The wall of reeds to his right shudders and parts and the face of a black, furious crocodile-ape roars out at him with a terrible gnashing of teeth.

Gordon wakes up with a scream.

Jesus, that loafer, doesn’t show up for Gordon that night. But early the following morning, before Gordon is fully awake, he feels someone clasping the fingers on his upraised right hand. “Hold this,” a voice says–not the voice of Jesus, unfortunately, but the voice of his best friend and future nemesis, Jimmy Marrsden. Gordon finds himself holding up a G.I. Joe doll in dirty miniature fatigues. There’s an amber-brown, nacreous bald patch on G.I. Joe’s head where Jimmy burned him with a magnifying glass. Jimmy backs up and points an imaginary machine gun.
“Brrraattt-a-tat-tat!!!”
he sputters. Imaginary bullets ricochet down the corridors of the otherwise quiet hospital. G.I. Joe’s loose peg of a neck wobbles in Gordon’s unsteady grasp and then his shiny head falls to the floor.

Gordon scoots up into a sitting position and wipes away a swath of condensation from inside the oxygen tent. Through the round window he’s created, he sees his mother and Mrs. Marrsden on the far side of the room ensconced in aquamarine acrylic chairs. They’re wearing spangled pantsuits and oversized Gucci sunglasses that remind Gordon of a close-up photograph of a butterfly’s retinas that he saw in a recent issue of
National Geographic.
They murmur to each other in low, sinister tones while puffing on menthol cigarettes. Gordon’s grandmother pointedly ignores them, focusing her wrinkled, crimson lipsticked scowl on her knitting instead. Just as Gordon registers this maternal tableau, Jimmy jumps up on the bed and peers in at him like a sea monster at a ship’s portal. He’s a welter of freckles, red ears, belligerent eyes, and unruly brown hair. Gordon shelters his testicles from Jimmy’s bouncing Keds basketball shoes. Keen on creating the impression that he could die at any moment, he greets Jimmy with a quivering half-smile and a tubercular croak.

“Hiya, Gordon!” Jimmy shouts with enthusiasm.

“Hi, Jimmy,” Gordon says, then fades back into his pillow, as if even that effort might have cost him a lung.

“How ya doin’?”A question asked while bouncing, with no real concern.

“Not so good….” Gordon assumes an expression of fake piety and picks up the Bible story book he fell asleep with, beckoning to his knitting grandmother: “Grandma Helen?”

Instantly solicitous, Grandma Helen gets to her feet. “What? What is it, sweetie?”

“Why do innocent children suffer and die?”

With tears brimming from her pink-lidded, heavily mascaraed eyes, Grandma Helen leans over and gives Gordon a hug, almost bringing down the oxygen tent around him. “Oh, honey…” she says in that trilling, swoony voice of hers (she reigned as Queen of the 1936 Kingsburg Raisin Parade, and her illustrated likeness graced the packages of Sunny Maid Raisins for the next thirty-three years–hence her flair for histrionics, which Gordon has inherited). Grandma Helen bravely stifles a sob, then says: “I don’t know why innocents like you should have to suffer. That’s one of life’s great mysteries!”

Gordon’s mother and Mrs. Marrsden roll their eyes behind their Gucci sunglasses and blow mentholated smoke heavenward.

“You’re not that innocent, Gordon,” Jimmy pipes up. “You peed on your dog.”

“He did
what?!”
Grandma Helen drops Gordon as if he’s contaminated.

“You did it, too!”

“Yeah, but at least it wasn’t
my
dog.”

“Jimmy! God
damn
you!” Mrs. Marrsden says.

“Don’t worry, mom. Gordon’s mom already spanked us for it.”

“I really let ’em have it,” Gordon’s mother concurs.

“Well, good!” Mrs. Marrsden says. “That’s good! Now you better get your little butt off that bed, or I’ll spank it again.”

Gordon and Jimmy’s mothers were ardent believers in capital punishment. They thought of little boys as sociopaths in short pants. There were times when Gordon had to admit there might be some validity to that theory. It was no use pretending he was a saint. He could be spiteful, cowardly, and vain. He’d been known to commit an occasional act that defied morality and reason, just like most other little boys his age. For instance, he really did pee on Sam, and he would never understand why he did it. He loved that dog! But Jimmy had a way of making him do things that he would never do on his own.

They’d been up in the old walnut tree in Gordon’s backyard looking for aphids and a particularly ugly strain of greenish-yellow caterpillar with blood-red humps (
Schizura concinna
). Sam had seen the boys up there and wanted them to come down and throw sticks for her. To get her point across, she was up on her hind legs with her front paws scrabbling against the tree’s trunk, barking at them. It was Jimmy who suggested they pee on her. He made it sound like a delightful new game:
Whiz on the Basset Hound!
And before Gordon had time to think through all the implications of what he was doing, he was right there beside Jimmy on a sturdy branch, doing his best impression of that statue beloved by the Belgian nation,
Mannekin Pis.
As the twin spumes of micturition splashed down on Sam’s long basset face, she turned and shambled away. Throwing sticks was now out of the question, apparently. As Gordon watched her go with her white-tipped tail dragging the ground, he felt something deep inside his chest turn to ash and crumple. He wanted to cry long before his mother saw Sam in all her pee-stained wretchedness and marched outside to whip the coils of an egg whisk across the backs of their skinny, sun-browned legs.

That was only the latest of Gordon and Jimmy’s excretory adventures; they owed their friendship to a much earlier one. It was actually Gordon’s earliest memory. It began on a summer day in Kingsburg, when the asphalt roads were so hot they had turned soft like licorice taffy and walking barefoot on them was not an option. Gordon was almost two and had just graduated to wearing Big Boy underpants–an accomplishment he was quite proud of. His latest slogan, repeated interminably, was: “Only babies wear diapers.”