Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (21 page)

“I need a new flying partner,” Mal says, looking scornfully at Gordon. “This one chickened out on me.”

“What’s wrong, Gordo? That crash in Chicago got you spooked?”

“I just don’t feel like flying today…” Gordon says. He’s not about to explain himself to that suck-ass, Mike, of all people.

“So how ‘bout it?” Mal says, faking a jovial attitude. “You up for a trip into the wild blue yonder?”

“You bet I am!” Mike says, slapping the side of his dusty overalls. “Hot dang! I’m right there with you, big guy! Let’s go!”

Mal puts Gordon to work, as promised, ordering him to sweep the floor of the nail shed and sort all the nails he finds there into their respective bins. It’s busywork and they both know it. There are hundreds–if not thousands–of loose nails on the floor, in scores of shapes and sizes. After his father turns his back on him with an angry “Hop to it!” and walks off with Mike, Gordon leans on a push broom, then goes slack with despondency as he sizes up the task. He’s convinced it will take days.

After twenty minutes of morose sweeping, Gordon finds himself with a mound of nails big enough to fill a wheelbarrow. He starts the mundane task of sorting them into their proper bins one by one. It doesn’t go quickly enough. He sits down cross-legged and sorts the big pile into smaller piles of matching nails on the floor in front of him. Still not quick enough…. His mind starts to drift. He reaches into the spiky metal pile too fast and gets a wicked jab on the middle fingertip of his right hand. He yanks it back and puts the wounded finger in his mouth, tasting blood. When he takes it out, he sees an inflamed pink gouge running underneath his fingernail. It stings and throbs. He squeezes the tip of his finger and it bleeds copiously, dribbling fat red spatters onto the dirty concrete.

For a moment, Gordon thinks of his body as a kind of bedraggled pet. He feels great sympathy for it. It’s a pity he hasn’t been able to take better care of it. He wonders if he should get his body a tetanus shot.

“No job is done till you shed a little blood,” Johnny Hoss says, walking up behind him. “My daddy used to say that.”

“I guess I’m done then,” Gordon says, wiping his bloody finger on the cuff of his pants.

“’Course, my daddy whipped us till we bled if we didn’t do our chores–so there was blood whether the work got done or not.”

“My dad just calls me names,” says Gordon. “I guess that’s better.”

As Gordon uncrosses his stiff legs, Johnny offers a big callused hand to help him up. “Depends on the names, if you ask me,” Johnny says.

“Jackass. Asinine. And ‘Ass-cheeked Ding-a-ling.’ That one’s my new favorite.”

Johnny laughs gruffly. “That’s a lot of asses you got goin’ there! Boy, you musta done somethin’ to really piss him off.”

Gordon gets on his feet and almost starts laughing, too. “All I did was say I’d been raised by wolves.”

“That it?! That ain’t so bad.”

“Yeah, well… I said it in a national magazine.”

Johnny laughs again, uproariously this time. “Yep, I can see how that mighta got your ol’ man fired up…. Wolves! Your mama musta
loved
that one!”

“She
is
kind of like a wolf, when you think about it.”

“I know! Hell, you don’t need to tell me that. I been around her long enough. That ring-tailed bitch’d eat her own young if she had half a chance.”

Gordon is weirdly grateful whenever he hears another person confirm that his mother is hostile and crazed. It reminds him that it’s not all in his head. For years now, his friends have been telling him he has the worst mother in town. Prior to that, Gordon had assumed all mothers were like Cynthia–mean-spirited, evil-tongued, and prone to violence. As a child without much first-hand knowledge of the larger world, he believed the environment he grew up in was perfectly normal. It was a relief to be told otherwise. At least there was hope for others, if not for him.

“It’s not so bad that my mom hates me,” Gordon tells Johnny. “She’s acted that way my whole life, so it’s no big deal…. But now my dad’s kind of acting that way, too. And that kind of bugs me.”

“Yeah, I seen he’s got you on his shit list today. Wants you to sort all them nails one-by-one, huh?” Johnny raises his bushy brown eyebrows, then gives Gordon a wink. “I got an idea for ya. Y’know how customers always come in here wantin’ to buy a whole bunch of different nails all at once?”

“I never noticed that before,” Gordon says honestly.

“Well, they do…” Johnny assures him. “Now… what if we had us a bin fulla all these mixed-up nails here and we sold ‘em all for one low price, by the pound.” He pulls out a black felt tip marker from his shirt pocket and writes the word
Assorted
on the front of an empty nail bin. “That’d make a lot of people happy, don’tcha think?”

Gordon is already putting nails into the empty bin by the handful. Smiling, he says, “I think you’re a genius. But what if my dad finds out?”

“Well –” pointing to the bin’s new designation–“you just tell him an
Ass Sorted
‘em. Tell him I put you up to it. I guarantee he won’t say shit about it after that.”

“Thanks, Johnny,” Gordon says. He feels an overwhelming urge to hug him, but he refrains, knowing that would be unmanly. To his surprise, Johnny grabs Gordon in a rough bear hug and says, “Once you’re done there, why don’t you and me go have us a beer?”

“Okay!” Gordon nearly yelps. He’s never had a beer before, but with Johnny as his guide, he’s willing to try anything.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

Beer tastes like carbonated water that’s been sitting around in a rusty tin can long enough to absorb its essence. It’s not until Gordon is midway through his second bottle of Coors–beading with condensation from the ice in Johnny’s private Igloo cooler–that he begins to realize why people might drink it willingly.

“My head feels like a warm sno-cone,” he tells Johnny. A kind of slow motion tingle is running up and down his limbs. He feels good. Loose. Self-confident.

Johnny laughs and pats Gordon’s leg, saying, “You’re gettin’ a buzz on!”

They’ve been sitting upstairs on the long, flat table in the framing room for about an hour, surrounded by boxes of single- and double-pane sheets of glass and rolls of thin wire mesh used for window screens. A single 60-watt bulb hanging from a wire in the center of the room provides the only illumination. Gordon has always considered the framing room to be a particularly spooky place, tucked away as it is under the blackened hundred-year-old rafters on the fourth floor of the lumberyard’s main building. The stairs leading up to it are so dark they’re hard to see. The framing room is bordered on its right by an unlit loft where insulation products are stored: rolls of cotton candy pink fiberglass gone cobwebby with years of accumulated dust. When Gordon was smaller, he used to see monsters in there–once a hairy, hulking Sasquatch, on another occasion, a slithering, shadowy presence with tentacles. To the left of the framing room is an even scarier place. An open doorway leads to a sloped attic room where old ledgers and documents are stored in wooden fruit crates dating back to the 1870’s. In the fifth grade, while he was in the framing room cutting a sheet of glass, Gordon thought he heard the devil whispering to him from somewhere in there. Even worse, daring to poke his head through the perpetually darkened doorway a year later, Gordon swore he saw the ghost of an old football player hunched against the far wall, floating two feet above the floor. The apparition looked just like an elongated James Dean in a varsity letterman’s jacket from the fifties, only Gordon could see right through him and he glowed. Gordon was convinced then that the ghost meant him harm. But with Johnny Hoss at his side, he feels perfectly safe.

“Here’s the deal with your daddy…” Johnny says. “He’s not a bad guy. He just settled down too young. Hitched himself to one piece of tail for the rest of his life way before he was ready for it.”

“You mean my mom?” Gordon asks, a little slower on the uptake than usual.

“Damn straight, your mom. You seen their wedding pictures? She might or might not’ve had a bun in the oven, but man, she was hot!”

“She hardly even looks like the same person,” Gordon observes. In his parent’s wedding pictures, his mother is slim-figured, blonde, and glamorous–a potential rival for any young movie starlet. It’s difficult for Gordon to believe she was once so beautiful, knowing how she looks now.

“Yeah, she lost her looks when you was born,” Johnny says, taking a meditative sip of beer. “And I’ll bet ol’ Mal kind of blames you for that, even though it wasn’t your fault none. He just can’t help it, y’know?”

“He could tell my mom to do some sit-ups.”

“My bet is he can’t tell her to do nothin’. Your mama has a mind all her own.”

No kidding
, thinks Gordon. He’s never seen his father ask his mother to do anything, whereas she bosses him around all the time.

“So try lookin’ at things from your daddy’s side,” Johnny says. “Here he’s got this mean-ass wife. Her body’s all shot to hell and she prob’ly ain’t puttin’ out much. Then he’s got this wheezy, way smart kid–that’d be you–who he don’t even half-understand. And now there’s a new baby on the way…. Meanwhile, he sees his little brother Gerald out there bangin’ all the secretaries and havin’ the time of his life. No wonder your ol’ man’s pissed. He’s feelin’ like he got the short end of the stick!”

“Y’know, I never thought about it that way before…” says Gordon. The beer is putting him in a mellow, contemplative mood. He should have taken more notice of the competitive relationship between his father and his uncle. They’ve always seemed to hate each other, and now Gordon is beginning to understand why. What Johnny says is true about Gerald and the secretaries. The latest one, Darla, is a trash-talking, Dr. Pepper guzzling County Fair beauty queen who looks like Farrah Fawcett, only with bigger boobs and pink frosted lips. She’s been making regular appearances in Gordon’s most recent shower fantasies.

“What your daddy don’t realize is that your Uncle Gerald’s life ain’t all that great, neither,” Johnny says as he pries open another bottle of Coors and sends the cap whizzing across the room with a snap of his fingers. “Both Gerald and your daddy have to answer to your grandma.
She’s
the one who really runs the show around here. She’s the queen bee and this lumberyard’s the hive they’re both slavin’ away in. She’s got ‘em workin’ twelve and fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and then when they go home, they still can’t stop thinkin’ about it. Me, I just put in my 9-to-5, and then I’m
outta
here.”

“Yeah, but they probably make a lot more money than you,” Gordon points out.

“Money ain’t everything,” Johnny says, tilting back his beer. “You ever notice how rich folks are almost always sorry-assed bastards. And they’re goddam
brutal
to their own kids. That’s why rich kids are mostly screw-ups. Exceptin’ you, of course.”

“I’m a pretty big screw-up, too, if you ask my dad right now.”

“You still worryin’ about that wolf business? Look, forget it…. The reason your daddy got so mad is because he knows there’s some truth to it. Him and his wife can’t get along, him and his brother hate each other, and he’s wishin’ your grandma would just up and die soon. Everybody goes around actin’ all pissed off all the time–it really
is
like growin’ up around a pack of hungry wolves. And your daddy knows it. But he can’t get mad at himself, because that’d mean he might’ve made some bad decisions and then he might have to change things. So instead, he gets mad at you

“Kill the messenger,” says Gordon.

“Right, kill the messenger! Call that fucker an ass-cheeked asinine ding-a-ling!” Johnny roars. Then, more seriously: “Which, by the way, if you ask me, those cheeks of yours are almost back to normal. You’re lookin’ more like your ol’ self again, only taller. Must be a big relief. I didn’t wanna say nothin’ while you were goin’ through it, but for a while there you was lookin’ like the damn Pillsbury Doughboy.”

“I know,” Gordon says. “They had me on pills for my asthma. They’re almost done now.” Saying that makes Gordon aware of a mild tightness in his chest, probably from all the dust in the insulation storage room next door. He takes a hit off his asthma inhaler as a preemptive measure.

“Y’know, I always wondered what that asthma juice is like,” Johnny says, indicating the inhaler. “Mind if I try a puff?”

“Sure. Go ahead.” Gordon tosses the inhaler in Johnny’s lap.

Johnny picks up the inhaler and shakes it, then squirts it into his open mouth as he takes a huge gulp of air. His eyes bug out. He makes a face like he’s just bitten into a sour plum. “Man, that shit’s nasty!” he says, scraping his tongue across the roof of his mouth. “I can’t say I’m breathin’ any better.”

“I don’t think it does much for you if you don’t have asthma.”

“I guess I thought it might give me a big ol’ boner that’d bust through walls like Superman or somethin’.”

“Nope. You just have to turn thirteen for that.” Gordon’s birthday was yesterday. His parents forgot about it–as usual.

“Yeah, thirteen’s a bitch, ain’t it?” Johnny says, looking at Gordon with genuine compassion. “Old enough to be horny all the time, but too young to get much pussy. You must be whackin’ off like a damn fiend.”

Quickly–almost involuntarily–Gordon nods his head.

“It’s nothin’ to be ashamed of. Hell, every guy does it at your age. And it don’t stop there….”

“Yeah, but I worry about it. I mean, I know I won’t go blind or grow hair on my palms or anything, but I’ve been reading the Kabbalah–”

“Wait a second. The
what?”

“The Kabbalah. It’s sort of the Jewish Bible–only weirder. Anyway, in the Kabbalah they say that if you spill your seed in the wrong way, like by jacking off, it creates monsters. There’s this whole evil supernatural world that reproduces itself by feeding off human sperm. It’s ruled by two demons named Lilith and Samael who come and fuck you in your sleep.”

“Well, Gordon, if that’s true–and I ain’t sayin’ it is–then I must’ve created one hell of a lot of monsters in my day.”

“Me, too. And I’m just getting started.”