Eddie's Shorts - Volume 2

by M. Edward McNally

her muscles beneath smooth skin before she slides her shirt back on. Then he sighs and rolls over to find his own clothes.

  "I don't know," Jewely says. "Kaiser called me at like seven, and I was still pretty-much asleep. He gave me directions down to Eagan and told me to get over here and 'infuse you with team spirit,' or something."

  "Since when did you start following Denny Kaisershot’s orders?" Luke asks, standing up and pulling his shorts back on.

  "I don't know that I'm doing that," Jewely says, standing up into her own khakis. She turns around to Luke. "I'm just curious myself. It's a great day out there, and you're not working." She pauses and looks at him closely. "So how come you don't want to go out and fly a kite?"

  Luke looks back at her, then looks to his T-shirt on the floor and starts pushing it around with a toe. He shrugs. "Just don't feel like it today." He flips the shirt up into the air and catches it. It has a sweat mark from the roof, and Luke pitches it towards a hamper on his way to the closet.

  "What's the deal with today anyway?" Jewely asks.

  Luke gets an Iowa Cubs jersey from the closet and pulls it on. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, I'm off work too, and usually when we're both free we get together. You don't seem to have a lot going on today, but you don't want to go fight, and you didn't call me either." Jewely shrugs. "I mean I don't want to pry, but I kind of get the feeling something's up."

  Luke looks at her. He stays quiet for a time - thinking - like he did over the long days last winter. Sitting by the window, watching the state of Minnesota freeze over. Thinking about either disassembling his kites and storing them for the season, or maybe taking one of the cheaper ones out one last time and trying to run it up into the gray sky between the spiraling flakes and the gusts that could just as easily turn and tear it apart.

  "Nothing's up," Luke says. "Nothing."

  Jewely does not look convinced, but she doesn't press. She just shrugs, then sits on the bed and starts pulling her shoes back on.

  "So what are you doing today?" Luke asks. He's feeling a bit of a heel, but he really doesn't want to get into it, and he's not going to. Being forthcoming has not been his strong suit for the last nine years. And besides, there are some things people don't realize that they absolutely do not want to hear. Like your mother saying she feels so guilty because she always loved you more, Luke.

  "I dunno, not a lot to do," Jewely says. "Maybe I'll run down to Eagan myself." She stands up with her shoes on, puts her hands on her hips and gives her head a little toss. "It's too nice a day for both of us to waste, Luke."

  Luke sighs almost imperceptibly from his nose. "Your heap of a Dodge won't make it that far on a freeway."

  "So I'll hitch."

  Luke rolls his eyes and mumbles under his breath.

  "Pardon?" Jewely asks brightly. Luke steps to the low bureau against one wall and takes his car keys from the top.

  "I said Kaiser knew what he was doing, sending you over here."

  Jewely steps up behind him and gives him a hug. "Putty in my hands," she agrees, then smiles as Luke turns around. "C'mon, you know you'll enjoy it once we're down there. It really is a great day for it."

 

  John was the smart one, the one already thinking about college in ninth grade, while Luke just sat in class staring at the clock. John was more reserved, Luke a bit freer. Maybe a little wild. But John's red Moped was the first one into the intersection. The brake lights flashed red through the rain. Then it started to fishtail.

  As soon as they clear most of the concrete tangle around the Twin Cities and get onto 35W heading south, they can see the storm clouds down the road.

  "You think that's over Eagan?" Jewely asks from the passenger seat of Luke's LeBaron, a royal name for a distinctly peasant ride.

  "If it is, we're not going to get a kite up," Luke says. He's drumming his fingers on the wheel, eyeing the clouds ahead and wondering why he is not surprised to see them. He is more or less accustomed to Minnesota's schizophrenic weather, but it was so damned nice ten miles back. Still, today is today.

  Fat drops of water spatter the windshield, and when they start to run Luke hits the wipers.

  Jewely is peering at her own seven-in-the-morning scrawl on the back of a torn envelope. Kaiser's directions.

  "We want to exit and go left on either 'Cliff' or 'Clit' street."

  Luke glances at her sideways. "I'm thinking it's probably Cliff."

  Jewely nods. "You're probably right. Eagan's not that partying a township, as I understand it."

  It is Cliff, but Road, not Street. By the time they reach it the rain is falling harder and the wipers are on high. The Kaiser's directions lead them back into a subdivision nestled in the crotch of two highways: Two-story, two-garage houses, all shades of beige or brown. The streets are all either "Lanes" or "Trails", and look identical in the rain.

  "I don't think anybody's going to be down here," Luke says. "Even if we can find the place, you'd be nuts to try and get a kite up into this. Some of these are thunder clouds."

  "Of course we are talking about the Kaiser," Jewely reminds him.

  "True. Tell you what. If he starts putting something up, stand the hell away from him."

  The last street named in Kaiser's commands is found toward the back end of the division. It is a road of dark new asphalt, half blocked at the end by a bright orange sign with blinkers, reading "NOT A THRU STREET." Luke stops the car in front of it.

  "Gee, why does this look like a bad damned idea?"

  "Says, 'up the hill, cul-de-sac at top'." Jewely shrugs at the envelope and looks with Luke at the hillside. It is a muddy mess of half-finished new houses and gaping foundations. New streets with no signs yet run between the construction sites and piles of unearthed trees, their roots grasping at the slate sky.

  "Charming," Jewely announces.

  Luke turns to her. "You want to go up, or just screw it?"

  Jewely blinks at him. "We just drove thirty-miles down here! We might as well look for them. Kaiser could just be waiting out the rain."

  "Kaiser's always waiting out something," Luke says, but he lets up on the brake and pulls the car around the warding sign. He follows one of the unnamed streets to its end at a cul-de-sac on top of the hill, in which sits a blue van with fishbowl windows in the back. Luke doesn't recognize the vehicle, but it flashes its headlights as the LeBaron nears, and the side door slides open. Luke pulls up next to it and Jewely rolls down her window.

  "Greetings and salutations," Denny Kaisershot waves from within the van. Kaiser is on a bench seat in there with three other guys, none of whom look familiar. They must be the other kite club with which Kaiser has scheduled the day's festivities: Students from Saint Somebody-or-another's. There are several kites, mostly small store-bought ones, in the van along the walls. A big box-kite with green and white cloth panels sits above the rear bench.

  Kaiser gets up in the van and starts stepping gingerly around empty beer cans for the door. Everybody but Kaiser has a blue can of Strohs in their hand, an open case of thirty sits on the floor. Family Size. Kaiser manages his way around it, and then grips the sides of the van doorway like he's going to parachute out. Denny Kaisershot is somewhere in his mid-thirties but at a glance looks no more than half that, with a slight build and the smooth face of a teenager. His hair is a washed-out blonde and fine enough that a moustache doesn't start to show until a week after he stops shaving. His eyes though, a torpid shade of hazel, have the sunken look of having been around. When he trains them on someone and starts speaking in his glacial monotone, regardless of what he is saying, people tend to yawn against their will. He wears, as always, a sweatshirt with the sleeves down. Luke knows they cover old tracks.

  Kaiser finally hops from the van, splashing water up from a puddle he managed to bull’s-eye. He hunches over and shoves his face in the window next to Jewely, keeping his head dry though he's wearing a 'Larry's Lanes' cap that shields his eyes anyway.

  "I was
hoping you would change your mind," Kaiser says, giving a slow smile that is about as close as he ever gets to a beam.

  "Nice day you picked for it," Luke begins, but Kaiser turns to Jewely.

  "Excellent work, Miss Letourneau. Or, Mademoiselle. Rather. I suppose." Kaiser folds his elbows on the door. "You know, I had begun to be concerned. I hadn't heard from you, and about forty minutes ago Shleg took the car to go for burgers, as well as to give Lucas here a call, and he's not back either. This is all becoming some bad B horror movie, only instead of people going into the basement one at a time and disappearing, anyone sent after Luke goes missing."

  "We're here now, Kaiser," Jewely points out.

  Kaiser looks momentarily confused. "Oh, well, true enough...now. That of course kicks my little metaphor there right square in the keister." Kaiser looks thoughtful, which for him is very similar to looking confused.

  "Tell you what, why don't we all just forget I said anything?"

  All he remembers for sure is everything about the pavement. Wet and black, little pebbles of lighter material embedded in it, with the rain drops hitting like they were in slow motion, tiny crowns of water bursting upwards. It was right in front of his nose after his Moped slid out from under him, and it was so fascinating that he did not want to roll over and look at the noise.

  "Radio says its going to keep on like this all day," one of the Bills in the van says.

  "That's exactly why I believe it will, in fact, clear up," Kaiser answers what wasn't a question. "These weatherologists have no idea. Last night they were saying 82 degrees and a thirty-percent chance of partial clouds." His hazel eyes flick towards the window, the dancing puddles outside. "Looks like we've got, what do you think? A good inch of partial cloud already?"

  The van is an old wide-bodied thing, plush carpeted in wooly blue, but still crowded with all six of them, and the kites, inside. Kaiser has been regaling the guys from St. Whatsit - two Bills and one Cole - with the story of his foundation of the Minneapolis Kite Fighters Association, and making it all sound distinctly grand. Never mind that the Association consists of three guys who worked at a bowling alley together and a couple Aero Engineering students from the U, who are gone now for the summer anyway. And never mind that at a typical Association meeting a lot more beers go down than kites go up.

  "Well, we're not really that formal a club," one of the Bills says, obviously having bought Kaiser's line. The two of them, the indistinguishable Minnesota-blonde Bills, are seated in the two bucket seats behind the driver, facing back at Jewely and Luke on the rear bench. Kaiser has commandeered the Strohs case as a perch, which necessitates an awkward reach to get at the beer. The other new guy, Cole, sits cross-legged and backwards in the front passenger seat, back against the dash. He's shorter and darker than the Bills and has his window cracked to let out the smoke from his cigarette. His black hair is cut so short, almost shaved, that it looks gray.

  "We just sort of started flying some after Cole was doing a paper for..." Bill turns around to Cole. "What the hell was it?"

  "Asian Legend and Mythology," Cole says, still looking out the window. "Anthro 478."

  "Yeah," Bill nods. "Anyhow, there was some story about a Chinese general or somebody..."

  "I have spent some time in China," Kaiser volunteers, and this leads into another monologue, Denny Kaisershot in the Orient, which Luke and Jewely have both heard before.

  Luke turns to her. On the back bench they're far enough out of the circle to quietly disconnect from the rest of the conversation. Jewely glances at him and rolls her eyes while Kaiser describes Beijing for the rapt Bills.

  "Am I having fun yet?" Luke asks quietly, and Jewely thumps him on the knee with a Strohs.

  "Be good," she says. "At least you're out in the