Hokey Pokey (2 page)

Every other step is a leap over a sleeper. All is quiet save thunder beyond the trees and the thump of the sun bumping the underside of the horizon.

He hoprocks across the creek, past the island of Forbidden Hut, and pulls up huffing at the far loop end of the tracks. He looks up, looks down.

Nothing.

He slumps exhausted to the steel rail. He stares at his sneaker tops. He gasps, reflects. She said she would do it. “I’m going to take—” No, to be accurate, she didn’t say
take
, she said
ride:
“I’m going to ride your bike.” And who knows? Maybe if she had said it nicely … maybe if she wasn’t a girl. But she
is
a girl and she said it with that snaily smirk, but there was no way she was ever coming within ten long spits of his bike.

But she did.

And he hates her. He hates her for taking the thing he loves most in this world. But maybe even more, he hates her for being right.

He pushes himself up from the rail. Once more he casts forlorn eyes up and down the tracks that no train travels. He cries out: “Scramjet!” This is too painful to bear alone. From the black tarpit of despair he rips his Tarzan yell and hurls it into the jungle and over the creek and across the dreamlands of Hokey Pokey.

F
LIES OVER THE
M
OUNTAINS
, spreads its tiny wings high above Hokey Pokey and rides the riptide of Jack’s despair.

Over Flowers and The Wall and the mutter of badwords in Jailhouse sails the call of Tarzan. Over Snuggle Stop and Tattooer and Tantrums and Stuff. Veering wide around Socks, over Thousand Puddles and Doll Farm and Trucks. Over Great Plains and the wild herd flies Jack’s lament, over sleepers sleeping and monsters monstering and all the badlands and goodlands of Hokey Pokey to the ever-listening ears of Jack’s best pals: LaJo and Dusty. Amigos.

Dusty has slept in his favorite spot, under the outstretched, monumental arm of The Kid. LaJo—who, like most Hokey Pokers, sleeps where he drops—has bunked in Flowers. Both hear at the same moment. Both hear more than the usual morning call. Both hear:
Pain!
Both hear:
Help!
Up from the ground, into the saddles, homing in on the sound waves:
Tracks … farside bend
. Pounding pedals, gravel flying, together returning the yodeling call:
Coming!

I
F YOU WANT TO GO LONG
, you can call him Most Amazing Terrible Ever Destroyer of Worlds. If you want to go short, call him Destroyer. But don’t call
him
short. And don’t call him Harold Peter Bitterman Jr.

It is the return Tarzan call that awakens Destroyer. He has spent the night, as always, high in the remote-controlled SuperScoop of his cherry-red eight-wheeled Mark X BullDogger dump truck, Hokey Pokey’s biggest toy. He lazes on his back. The high, thin clouds look like truck exhaust tinged with pink. A brown bird flies overhead. He wishes he had a stone. He catches a whiff
of apricots—and jerks fully awake, sits up. This is the day! He hopes he’s not too late. He peers over the edge of his high hoist. His kingdom sprawls below him. He spots a dustball rolling across Great Plains. Here and there a monster dissolves in a pale yellow puff, but most are still there, hovering over their dopey little sleepers.

He’s got to move fast. He grabs the remote, punches
DOWN
. With a click and jerk, the great red cradle stirs, swings, lowers him slowly to the ground. He punches the remote—SuperScoop returns to its up spot. He dashes around to the cab, jumps in, plants his feet on the pedals—Wait! Clothespin! … Does he have it? He feels into his pocket.… Yes, OK, move! He pushes—right foot, left foot, churns, churns.… BullDogger lumbers off.

T
WO SIDES OF AN ARROWHEAD
, two bikes, come to a point at Jack, slumpsitting on the rusty rail. LaJo, Dusty glance about.

“Where’s—” says Dusty.

“—Scramjet?” says LaJo.

“She stole it,” says Jack. He doesn’t have to say who
she
is.

“Glove too?” says LaJo.

Jack hasn’t even thought of his baseball glove, looped over the handlebar of the bike. Where he goes, the glove goes. He nods heavily.

They cannot speak. They do not know Jack without his bike. Things have shifted.

They dismount.

Jack pulls up his shirt and pretends to wipe sweat from his face, but really, even though he wants them here, he doesn’t want to be seen.

LaJo stares in shock, is about to say something, clears his throat, says something else: “You crying?”

Jack springs, shoves LaJo backward. LaJo’s bike clatters to the ground. “Do I
look
like I’m crying? Did you
ever
catch me crying?”

Jack kicks LaJo’s bike tire, glares, dares him to do something about it. He turns to Dusty. “Did
you
?”

Dusty flashes a V-finger peace sign. “Hey, not that I ever saw.”

Jack is in his face. “Not that
you
ever saw? What’s that mean?
You
never saw me but somebody else
did
?” Poking him in the chest. “Huh?”

“No, man.” Dusty puts up his hands as if sheriff-caught. “I ain’t sayin that. You never … you just ain’t a crier, Jackarooni—everybody knows that.”

Jack gives Dusty’s bike a kick and scuffs down the tracks, stops, sags, shows them his back.

Dusty calls: “Scramjet. He was a great one, Amigo. Right, LJ?”

“Yeah,” says LaJo.

Jack is silent, still. Then says something they cannot hear.

Both call, “What?”

Jack wheels. “What do you mean
was
?”

LaJo straddles his fallen bike. “Hey, man—”

Dusty rushes forward, laughing too loud. “
Sí, sí
, Amigo! What’s this
was
stuff? We just got to get it back, is all.” He punches Jack’s arm. He gives a sneery laugh. “Ain’t no
was
.” He spits in the dirt, gives Jack another punch.

Jack returns the punch. A grin peeks over the edge of his scowl. “I know where she’ll head,” he says.

Dusty yips like a puppy. “Yeah! Where?”

Jack pulls LaJo’s bike to its feet. He mounts the rear fender. He looks from one to the other. “Gorilla Hill,” he says. And in their eyes and growing grins he sees the truth of it.

T
WO BIKES
, three Amigos crunch the cinders back along the looping rails to the off-track side of the bluff: Gorilla Hill. They stow the bikes in the brush at the foot. “Hurry,” says Jack. They lean into the hard, yellow, mica-flecked trail. It’s downhill heaven but uphill hell. The sweat and the sun on LaJo’s brown skin give his forehead the sparkle of a root beer hokey pokey. Jack’s hatred grows with every step, every thigh-crunching reminder of his shame—this epic, this magnificent hill is for riding down, not walking up.

Suddenly up ahead, beyond the bow-bend, up, out of the glittering sky itself, a voice: “Yee-hah!”

Dusty cries, “She’s coming!”

“Off the trail!” barks LaJo.

They cannot see yet but they can hear: the chittering chain and axles, the stone-pocked crunch of rubber, the thief’s crazed scream unfurling. They can feel the speed, feel it accelerate with every wheelturn, feel the hill snuffle and grin and stiffen its spine, feel the air split like a snapped stick as into the bow-bend they lean.

“Yeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eeeee—”

“Now!” cries Dusty.

“Holy crap!” cries LaJo.

And out of the bow-bend they come as the sun at last thrusts its bristling fist into the sky and blinds the boys to all but the high sonic scream of chainsong and a hissing shadowblur of steed and she-demon blasting out of the sunfire.

“HAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

“Scraaaaaamjet!” Jack cries, but his voice is already a hole in the afterwind.

In time the Amigos stagger onto the trail, blinking, shading their eyes. Already bike and rider are a flying
speck halfway to Great Plains. They appear to be one. Stunned, silent, the boys begin their grim descent. They avoid each other’s eyes. Beneath their sneaker soles the trail is warm. The air smells of girl and burnt rubber.

J
UBILATES
!

Churns—no hands!—across Great Plains, whooping, laughing, scattering the wild herd of bikes in a fright of dust and spitting stones. The thrill, the exhilaration of the downhill dive—the freefall of it, the uncontrol, the
flight
!—she has never known before.

The handlebar dips, veers to the left: feeling the pull of the old herd. Oh yes, she thinks, how wonderful to be wild again, racing dust devils across the Plains. Should she let the beast go, rejoin the herd? Should she? … No! Maybe someday but not now, not yet. Now there is only the thrill! The power! The speed!

And no more
Scramjet
. No more
he
. “No!” she shouts full voice over the flatlands. She jacks her elbows, leans forward till the tire spins inches below her face, the prairie a weedy blur. “Hazel,” she whispers. “You are”—she straightens, shouts—“Haaazzzzzz-el!”

She giggles at her own brilliance. She knows the name Hazel is dumb, but her opinion doesn’t matter. What matters is
his
opinion, the boy’s. The germ’s. When he hears what she’s renamed his pride and joy—oh she wishes she could be there to see it!

She shouts: “Hazel! Hazel! Hazel!” She wishes there was somebody to celebrate with, to high-five, but there is only herself and Hazel and the wild wheeled mustangs. So she gives Hazel her head and high-fives—high-tens!—the morning sky.

G
REAT
!

The kid is still sleeping, his monster bobbing above him. Ugliest monster Destroyer has ever seen. Which figures: the wimpier the kid, the grosser the monster. Days of scouting have led to this moment. The victim has been carefully chosen. He has three things going for him:

1. He’s tiny. Of course, he’s a Newbie.

2. He’s weak and wimpy. Of course, he’s a Newbie.

3. He sleeps on the ground. He’s a Cartoons freak. Every night he flops in the same spot practically inches
from the enormous screen. The scoop-up will be a piece of cake.

Destroyer steers around the many bodies that litter the massive lawn. Cartoons never stop on the big screen.
The Flintstones
is showing now. This is where he first saw Daffy Duck. This is the first time he’s been back here since The Worst Thing That Ever Happened happened. The memory makes him want to cry. But he doesn’t.

He pulls up to the victim, stops. He punches the remote. Down comes SuperScoop, flush to the ground. Gently, toes on pedals, he inches the scoop forward till he feels resistance—the kid’s body. He stops. The kid’s monster, a watermelon-headed joker with green fangs the size of bananas, floats in the dawn like a balloon, looks brainlessly down on Destroyer. This is the tricky part. Destroyer readies his feet, takes a deep breath—
now!
The scoop slides forward, under the kid. Destroyer punches
UP
, then
REVERSE
. SuperScoop thrusts skyward. BullDogger rumbles. The kid wakens and wails. The monster vanishes in an apricotty mist. Destroyer churns.

Past Trucks, on toward a gray hill that rises from a desert barren of even weed and insect. Destroyer stops at the edge of the desert. The red cradle is rocking on
high, the Newbie is shrieking, going nutso. “Hold yer pants on!” Destroyer calls, and laughs. He digs the clothespin from his pocket, clips it onto his nose, honks “Hold yer smeller!” and churns onward. Closer, the hill resolves itself into shades and scraps of gray … into … Socks. It is a heap, a mountain of dirty socks so disgusting that life in all its forms steers clear. In the red cradle the Newbie victim gets his first whiff, and now the red cradle rocks and lurches to the peals of terror from the doomed Newbie.

Breathing through his mouth, Destroyer churns on. The air itself becomes gray, mossy. Destroyer doesn’t bring BullDogger to a halt until the front tires are noogling into the flank of the monstrous heap. He wishes he’d brought cotton for his ears; the screams are deafening. He lowers SuperScoop till it sways a mere body length above the gray slope, which close up seems to be roiling from the power of the stench. He reaches for the remote. He punches
FLIP
. The red cradle abruptly turns upside down. Into the unholy heap falls the Newbie.

Destroyer backchurns, turns and pedals off as fast as his legs will go. He discovers it’s almost impossible to pedal hard and laugh hard at the same time.

T
HREE
A
MIGOS LEAVE TWO BIKES
in the brush at the foot of the hill. If one can’t ride, nobody rides. Sunlight is sour on the tongue.

Squinting in the yellow dust, Jack says, “Let’s split up. Cover more territory that way.”

“Rippin,” says Dusty.

“What do we do if just one of us finds her?” says LaJo.

“How many you need to stop a girl?” says Jack.

“Yeah, LJ,” says Dusty, grinning. “Want me to come with you? ’Case you need help, Amigo?”

Jack pokes them both. “Just do it. I don’t care how. Just get the bike back.”

They start off in three directions. LaJo mutters something.

Jack stops. “What?”

“He said
on foot
,” says Dusty, swallowing a giggle.

Jack stares. “OK, fine. LaJo, just stay here. Go lie down there in the weeds and kiss your bike.”

LaJo sniffs. “No.”

“No? What no?”

“No, you ain’t my boss. None of us is boss. We’re equal.”

Jack and LaJo commence a stare-down, neither knowing what to say next. After a while LaJo’s eyes drift to the side, causing Jack to turn. Dusty is standing square at the foot of the hill, looking up.

“What’re
you
looking at?” says Jack.

Dusty doesn’t appear to have heard the question. His eyes are slits in the sun but he doesn’t shade them. His voice is dreamy. “She came down that hill—” They wait for more but that’s all, until he says it again, this time with a touch of wonder on the word
down:
“She came
down
that hill—”