The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (2 page)

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September 2009

It was a hot September day in Visalia,
California when I first heard of the Institution of Elements. I’d
just gotten home from school, which meant 6PM after I’d finished an
hour of detention for cussing in class, followed by some time with
the girlfriend if her mom was working, time with the friends if she
wasn’t. Friends . . . dickheads-I-hung-with more like, just to keep
boredom away. Another bit of nature is safety in numbers, even if
you can’t stand the people who make up your numbers.

Three digits still that year, an extra hot
year in an extra hot town and our little shitty house had to make
due with a swamp cooler that only worked half the time and probably
spewed more mildew than cold air when it did.

I’d stolen a portable fan from Wal-Mart that
I treated like it was gold-plated. I had it chained to my bed with
a bike lock to keep my sisters from taking it. Especially JoJo. Or
at least . . . that was the reason at the time, they were both
moved out by then, one the day she turned eighteen and the other
didn’t even wait for then.

But the fan . . . the fan never got
free.

Just me and my folks, miserable all three of
us. Mom was continually drunked out on the couch, but at least she
wasn’t a mean drunk, just dead to the world and one time when an
older friend came over—frisky. Dad
was
a mean drunk but he
only drank on the weekends. During the week he’d come home after
his long day plus four in overtime and smoke a joint in the
backyard to help numb out the physical pain, maybe the mental pain
too. He’d cook dinner also, which is probably the only reason I
ever came home during the week. I’d learned not to come home at all
during those weekends when the booze started flowing between Mom
and Dad.

I was a bit surprised to see an unknown car
in the gravel driveway. It wasn’t expensive but it was
new
,
which was out of the class of anything Dad or Mom could manage. As
far as ours went we had a truck and a SUV, both over ten-years-old
and one of them always worked, though which one had a habit of
changing every few months.

So . . . new car and I know something’s up.
None of my dad’s friends from the warehouse had new cars either.
You’re probably feeling bad for how poor we were, but don’t. Lots
more worse off, Dad always said, and he’s right about that. We had
insurance at least, and when I got my arm broken in a fight during
fourth grade taking on a sixth grader just a bit too big for me, I
got it fixed no problem. Plus checkups. Plus dental.

Take your pity somewhere else, assholes.
Turn off the tape and go read “
The Note Book
” or some other
weepy crap.

Mom and Dad were waiting for me in the
kitchen, which on accounts of Dad being the cook made it the
cleanest room in the house. Couldn’t do anything about the heat
though. Fucking Central Valley summers, never ended when they were
supposed to and always tried to sneak their way into Halloween.

Mom was having a ‘Good Day’. Doctor got his
doctor on and said she’s Bi-Polar, an extreme case of it, which
means good as in
up
or
hyper and happy
. ‘Good Days’
always freaked me out way more than bad ones.

There was a woman I didn’t know sitting at
the table with them—probably just past thirty I guessed, the kind
of just-past-thirty you only see in movies or in those celebrity
magazines my girlfriend loved to read so much that I stole them for
her.

Wasn’t I romantic?

This woman would have fit right in. Well,
her face and blond hair at least. She was too thick for Hollywood,
not enough bone showing, though normal people would call her thin.
Her blue eyes were sharp as she took me in, all of five-foot
nothing, ratty shirt with some MMA fighter on the back and jeans
that probably needed replacing. She had a sharp smile too, so sharp
it cut.

“King Henry Price, this lady wants to speak
with you,” Mom said—she only took the lead on ‘Good Days’. Mom
smiled too. Pissed me off at the time . . . what woman deserves to
smile when she named her kid
King Henry
? And no, I am not
joking about that crap. King Henry Price. Like the height didn’t
start enough fights already.

“I don’t know her,” I eloquently
back-talked, resisting the urge to call the lady ‘
bitch’
while pulling out a can of generic soda from the fridge.

A whole three seconds of heaven wrapped
itself up in that burst of cold air. Popping the can, I took a sip.
If the words I spoke and the cigs I smoked didn’t rot my teeth, I
wanted the high fructose corn syrup to do the job for me.

“Son,” Dad told me, “best be respectful this
time.” Dad hunched over a metal chair, his frame settled so heavy
on it that if gravity magically turned off it still wouldn’t have
floated away.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said to the lady.
Huge lie. I’d always done something.

Her smile cut at me again, amused by me.
Annoyed I could do in spades, but amused was new. And, funny
enough, I found it annoying. It actually threw me off enough to
forget about respect. “What you laughing at, bitch?”

Dad moved to cuff me across the table—and
who can blame the guy?—but the lady waved him off quick enough to
stop the blow.

“My name is Ceinwyn Dale,” she said, “and I
am a recruiter for a very special school.” Like I told you, some
real Charles Xavier shit. “Would you prefer to be called
King
or
Henry
?”

“Both.”

“
King Henry
. . . and what do you
rule, King Henry? England, Ireland, and France?” Ceinwyn Dale
asked, again with that smile. Snip, snip.

I wanted to haul a right hook into her and
scream, ‘
Your face!
’ but, for once in my young life,
prudence won over anger. “I rule the kingdom of
me
. It’s
small but big enough where it counts, ya know?”

“What if I told you that you rule nothing?
That you’re completely powerless before outside influences? That
fate will kill you one day and there is nothing you can do to stop
it?”

It’s like she was asking for it. I didn’t
know it at the time, but Ceinwyn Dale’s an aeromancer with more
besides and could have shot my little ass out of the window like I
was a cannonball.

“I’m trying to be nice, lady,” I told
her.

“You like to fight, don’t you?” Ceinwyn Dale
observed.

Mom tried to wave that off, seeing the
chance to get rid of me dying before it was born but the lady
stopped the waving with a look. There is something about Ceinwyn
Dale that makes you shut up and listen when she commands your
attention that has nothing to do with the Mancy.

“You like to fight, King Henry, like to
punch and take a punch especially I’d guess.”

“So? The shirt of the guy beating the crap
out of the other guy give it away?”

“It’s the only time you can feel above,”
Ceinwyn Dale kept up, talking around her smile. “The bones, that’s
what you like. Bone hitting bone in one perfect punch. Their bones
cracking and your bones holding up. Instant gratification.”

“You want gratification? Got other ways to
give it . . .” Dad
did
cuff me then. “Hey, man!”

“Watch it or I’ll
give
another!”

I turned angrily back to Ceinwyn Dale. She
watched me like she might eat me one day, like I was some lamb
going
bye bye
come harvest day. “Enough games, you crazy
smiling lady, what do you
want
? Who gives a crap if I like
fighting? What kind of fucked up school are you a part of? And why
should I bother to care?”

“You’re going to be so fun to break, King
Henry.” She reset her smile. Going from annoying me to freaking me
out. Current educated me always thought of the Cheshire Cat. Old
white trash me saw reruns of Jack Nicholson playing the Joker from
Saturday afternoons when there was nothing worth watching on the
TV.

“Fuck you,” I told her. Real snappy wordplay
at the time.

“You’re special. One in ten-thousand at
least. One in a quarter million perhaps,” she explained. “Does this
make you feel above? Does it make you tingle and give you
goose-bumps?”

Damned if it didn’t.

Damned if it didn’t piss me off that she
called me on the feeling, belittling it into nothing. Typical
Asylum maneuver—making me seem like some pathetic little emo
wimp.

I popped up from the kitchen table, pointing
a finger at my parents, ready to spread my favorite word around.
“Fuck you two for talking to her,” and pointed at Ceinwyn Dale,
“and double fuck you with something rusty!”

I ran into my little room, locking the door.
Know I did. Still remember the lock turning like amber frozen in
time. All the good memories from before Mom got sick have faded
away but that one stuck . . . me turning a lock. Something
small—something
huge
.

Lying out on my unmade mattress of a bed, I
clicked on my aforementioned gold-plated fan. The bike chain
rattled as the tiny motor kicked full speed, clanging the bars of
my headboard. A prisoner’s cup making noise to make noise and pass
the time. Fitting sound for a fitting room.

Running away from your problems and hiding
in your room when you don’t understand what’s going on is a
long-standing teenage tactic. In my house, with its thin doors and
even thinner walls, it didn’t work too well. You could still hear
everything. But at least I didn’t have to see Ceinwyn Dale’s smile
any longer.

I lit up a cigarette to calm down. Smoking
was forbidden in the house . . . actually it was forbidden at all .
. . but doubly forbidden in the house—I wasn’t giving much a crap
at the moment.

My fan rattling and wafting exhaled smoke, I
heard the aftermath. “Sorry about that, Mrs. Dale,” Dad said in his
gruff voice which only got kind when he talked to my mother.

“It’s Miss still . . . and don’t worry
yourself over him, I’ve seen worse. The Institution of Elements is
very capable at handling young men with his type of problems.”

“Then you’ll still take him?” Mom asked. Her
voice was happy, almost relieved.

“Of course we will . . . he’s a special boy,
deep down. I wanted a reaction and I got one, my job is to see how
applicants react to situations they don’t understand. As I said,
I’ve seen much worse. He has hidden potential.”

“Let’s not get hasty. He don’t want to go,
he ain’t going,” Dad reminded the women who were deciding my future
for me—getting enough strings together to make me a baby
bootie.

“He’ll want to,” Mom complained. “Once he
calms down and hears Miss Dale out.”

Like hell I will
, I told myself.

Pathetic little shit, I was. I popped on a
stolen iPod and picked up a stack of stolen comics—told you I had a
habit of getting lucky with accidents—and completely tuned them out
on the idea I was going nowhere. Special. One in a quarter
mil
.
Fuck her
. My life could suck but it’s
mine
. I wasn’t leaving what I knew for some reject school
that probably stole more money from the government on some crackpot
scheme to
improve
troubled kids than I ever had.

Guess who my favorite comic book character
was? Wolverine. Got to love a fighter. He’s short too. Got hurt but
could take all the pain, that’s better than being invincible. Got
all the women he wanted without having to deal with relationships
like that poor sap Cyclops with his girlfriend that died fifty
times. A teenage boy’s wet dream. Comic, cigs, girlfriend,
fighting: my life.

My
life, assholes, take your strings
and shove them.

A couple comics finished and lots of heavy
metal songs later, I realized I wasn’t alone anymore. Over the rim
of my comic book I saw the smile.

How you doing, Alice?

My next look went to the door, which was
still locked. And it wasn’t one of those shitty locks you could pop
with a hairpin, but a nice deadbolt I’d stolen from Home Depot.
Yeah, I stole a lock, bite me and go find your own irony.

The music still beat from my earbuds as they
dropped away. I screeched a little from the shock. “
Who the fuck
are you, lady?!?
”

“Ceinwyn Dale, a recruiter for a special
school for special people.” I checked my window, still shut. She
noticed, but commentated on something else, “You like comics?”

“Yeah.” The ‘
bitches
’ and
‘
fucks
’ were largely killed dead in the face of the
impossible.

“And music? Metal? That’s fitting . . .”

I sat up on the bed and put out what was
left of my cig.

“You can check the door if you’d like,” she
told me, matter-of-fact about my astonishment. I checked again. The
nasty-ass
clothes
I’d kicked in front of the door hadn’t
even moved.

“I ain’t going to your school, lady.”

“Why not?” She was genuinely curious.
Ceinwyn Dale, always the interested observer.

“I’m not a freak. I get by. I got a life. So
I fight, who gives a rat’s ass?”

She picked up my iPod and browsed through
the playlist. She had beautiful hands. Not a body part most guys
notice, and Ceinwyn Dale had some others that were pretty
noticeable, but her delicate fingers and sapphire fingernails drew
the eye when she used them in front of you. Nimble manipulation,
just like the rest of her, turning those fleshy stubs into the
finest tool, skinny and elegant. “Is this the entirety of your
reasons?”

“I got a girl.”

“And you
love
her?” The smile quirked
extra.

“Sure. I guess.” Love wasn’t a big emotion
in the Price household. We had trouble managing
giving a
shit
.

“Or do you just like what you get to do with
her?”

“That too.”

One part about Ceinwyn Dale I started
figuring out during that first conversation is she mocks
everyone
but she treats her kids the same as she does
adults. Which I wasn’t seeing much of back then. It was inclusive
and part of the reason she’s such a good Recruiter.