True Heroes

by Gann, Myles

  “How did you know about her?”

  “I met him the other night, and we talked. Well, I talked. He threatened. He has a stern face with no care in his eyes, cute hair, and stands as though a bear may tackle him at any moment.”

  Caleb looked ahead and down. “It’s not worried about a bear.”

  “You don’t talk to him much do you?”

  “Not on friendly terms.”

  “You should.”

  “What did you two talk about?”

  “He really must not like you….”

  “Is that what it talked about?”

  “Well, kinda.”

  “Kinda?”

  “He talked about Carol.” Alice turned and looked up to him. “About what really happened.”

  “The fine print…then you know it’s my fault.”

  “No, no, no, Caleb. That’s not your fault. You lived, she lived, and you guys just couldn’t live together.”

  “It was me. I always tried to make her perfect.”

  “Nobody can be.”

  “I thought I could be.”

  “You can’t push yourself that hard.”

  “See? You don’t know a thing about me. I can do anything.”

  “You were depressed because you couldn’t earlier.”

  “I remembered that there was still a chance for me to learn.”

  “Learn what?”

  “How to be perfect.”

  “I don’t think you can be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because….”

  “Nobody has been?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “I’m not nobody.”

  “What’s wrong with nobody?”

  “I can do more than a nobody could.”

  “Like what?”

  Caleb stood and gently lifted the gate. Alice rubbed at her eyes as he reached down for her hand. “I’ll show you a little of it. This place is a cramp.”

  “Where isn’t cramped?”

  She took his hand hesitantly, but grasped hard. He pulled her up gently, and entwined their fingers once she was sturdy. “Tons of places. Where would you be right now if you could be, say, around the city?”

  “This is nice right here.”

  He looked down at her again, feeling her thumb brush across the back of his hand, and smiled. “Do you feel like flying with me?”

  “We aren’t now?”

  “Heh, only on one level.”

  “I can see your face now. I like this more.”

  “Me too. Pick a place.”

  “Even with the light like this I can see your whole face. Your hair keeps getting longer. I like it like this, though. We were listening to a baseball game earlier and do you know the average length of a baseball player’s hair? Like two inches. You could be a baseball player.”

  “Baseball stadium it is.” Caleb knelt down. “Piggy-back ride?”

  “To where? The stadium? There’s a game there now, but it’ll be over by time we get there.”

  “Do you want one or not?”

  “You’re going to carry me to the stadium?”

  “Do you want to get to the stadium before it closes?”

  “I told you I’m fine here.” Her other hand closed around theirs. Caleb looked up slightly and smiled warmly.

  “Trust me. We can have this anywhere. I want to show you something.”

  “Trust you?”

  “If you can, yeah.”

  She pounced on his back. They both fell forward laughing a little. “Don’t drop me.”

  “I think I can carry a Chihuahua like you.” She laughed into his ear. “I might go a little over the speed limit, so make sure you cling to your seatbelt nice and tight.” She hugged around his neck tightly as he stood. His eyes brazen blue torches seconds before his legs churned, and Alice’s gasp was lost. He held her arms around him as they ran. His feet pounced and landed upon roofs, the night sky flew endlessly before the skyline until Caleb’s mammoth steps landed them across the street from the stadium. “Look at that. We made it after all.”

  She clutched his neck still and dug her face into his skull. “Still can’t get us in.”

  “Oh, you Negative-Nancy. Are you okay?”

  “Terrified. Scared. Heart beating a lot.”

  “Yeah, I can feel it. Do you still trust me?”

  “Are you asking if scaring me to death is a good enough reason to not trust you?”

  “That would be the gist of it yeah.”

  “You didn’t drop me. I hung on and you hung on and we were going so fast.”

  “Don’t let your mind get overloaded yet. Like you said, we still have to get in.” A radio broadcast of the game blared from down the street, equivocating the collective groan of the crowd with a foul ball that would’ve been a homerun. “Hold on.”

  They jogged across the street and to the front side of a large building with a step-design at the top. “People are staring.”

  “They do that for me, not for you. Don’t be afraid.”

  “I trust you. Not them.”

  “Don’t let them carry you.”

  “I won’t.” Caleb looked around his side of the walkway. A bus passed on the road, and they shot up to the lowest of the imitation stairs. “It’s cold up here.”

  “It’ll be colder in a minute.”

  He turned back toward the stadium and gently walked across the glass until cement was under foot. The edge offered enough footing for his energy to gather, and the uncoil sent them both soaring at a controlled angle back across the street, into the stadium, allowing one foot, then the other, to land safely on the left field foul pole. The roar of the crowd engulfed them immediately as the land coincided with a homerun to the opposite field. They both looked around, Alice still clung and Caleb smiled widely. He felt her quickened breath on his ear. “I can’t see the scoreboard. How do I know whose winning?”

  Caleb let a low laugh out and shouted back to her. “Listen to the crowd. They’ll almost always tell you who’s winning. Wait, you don’t think this is crazy?”

  “It’s happening, so it’s obviously not crazy. Nobody would believe this.”

  “Yeah, that guy must be really something. He’s all you talk about.”

  She laughed again and brushed her hand against his cheek while leaning her head forward onto the nave of his neck. “Now you’re definitely not so arrogant.”

  From beneath them, a group of eyes wandered upward with pointed fingers and flashing cameras. Caleb saw them and quickly flexed into a missile, shooting down to the riverfront and back across into the neighboring state. They landed again and again, then a half block from Alice’s apartment, before she finally relinquished her grip and set her feet back to solid ground. She stepped away with a furious mumble resounding and her hands behind her back. He stepped forward, but nearly ran into her as she quickly stepped forward with her cheek to his. “I was blushing, a lot.”

  ‘She’s so…she’s here, but that wasn’t the best I could do. I could take her anywhere. She has to know that. She has to be thinking that right now. How I didn’t take her exactly where she wanted.’ He listened to her mumbles next to his ear. “So many faces, I didn’t look at any of them. I imagined his. I passed them all up for his face. Over, and over, and over. It’s his smile, then his serious face, then any face. No other face.” ‘She had a blast. But how? I wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t the best…I wasn’t who I was before. I’m still not. What is, then? Something else was perfect. Had to be.’

  “Did you have fun?”

  She pulled her face from his ear and shook her head wildly, her hair flying across her nose and lips. Caleb carefully reached up and brushed it back, suddenly feeling a petrifying core forming in his stomach. “I told you, I’m fine just being here.”

  “I don’t want you to be fine. I want you to be perfectly fine.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  Caleb suddenly didn’t quite know what to say. He could’ve been romantic, or arr
ogant, or contemplative, but his words suddenly couldn’t choose the right avenue to travel. Some avenues wandered to his fingers, making them twitch and itch, while others travelled to his feet, making his legs jittery and ill-complacent. In the end, his mind could only allow one sentence to fly into the open air: “You deserve to be perfectly fine all the time.”

  She recoiled until her head was straight enough to balance on the end of a top. “Someone will have to teach me.”

  Her voice was barely loud enough to pass the night wind’s test of endurance into Caleb’s cochlea. She had a lightness in her tone that made her seem breathless, and yet a glow from her dark eyes projected a field of zeal that engulfed further than the artificial light above them. “I’ll keep an eye out for a good teacher.”

  “Why wouldn’t you be the one to teach me?”

  “I wouldn’t make a good teacher.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know my own lesson plan.”

  “Oh, you seem pretty good at learning.”

  “Not lately I haven’t been.”

  “Well, you could take some time.”

  “I was going to, but I can’t miss this chance.”

  “What chance?”

  Caleb smiled and leaned in closer. “We’ve gotta whisper when we talk about this.”

  She smiled and leaned her head a bit. “Why?”

  “It’s a very fragile thing, what I’m talking about.”

  “Tell me, then.” Her whisper was excitable and alive.

  “There’s a chance that you’re not like everybody else.”

  “That’s it?” She mocked.

  “That’s a big deal, believe it or not. Tell someone they’re not like everybody else, and they can start acting like everyone else.”

  “I couldn’t if I wanted to.” She leaned back to focus into his eyes again. “Would you sleep over? And maybe we could go do something tomorrow?”

  “Sleep over? Are we in high school?”

  She giggled. “No, but I like talking to the blue version of you too. Not as much as you, but still. It’s kinda cool, you having two sides.”

  “Not as much as you think.” He stepped back and looked up the building that grew darker by the second. “But yeah, sure. A couch beats the floor any day.”

  - - -

  “What do you mean?”

  Power sat Caleb’s body into a relaxed position. “I mean he has an annoying damper on his mind that I don’t. He said that you weren’t like anyone else, but what he meant to say was ‘You may be the girl that saves the world,’ or, more to the point, ‘There is a chance, a tiny, insignificant chance that you’re the girl that I’ll always love,’ and, apparently, that’s the difference between you and him talking and me gaining control. Percentage points.”

  Chapter 13

  Benny sat in his chair amongst the usual configuration from David to Alice and back again. His highly-strung boots tapped rapidly on the ground as the green pant legs tucked atop the socks wrinkled and waved with each furled motion. The olive outfit continued up, into, and beneath the cargo vest, dog tags dangling gently with every alternating kick while the smooth helmet on his head shone dull green against the fluorescent halogens. He held a stick of thin white between his lips that gave off no ember or smoke as he removed it and blew out for effect. “The trenches were hell. Murderous, frightening, frozen hell. Rats gnawed out toes while Geris pasted our heads with walls of bullets, mortars, knives, anything they could find. My gun was jammed like clockwork, and the sirens told us when it was time to eat, shit, breathe, or charge to die. It was a full-on mutiny against God; the man upstairs was getting a lot of refunds that day, week, or month, or year, however long we were there. Anybody that kept time was dead before they could mark it, and anybody that cared an inkling about ticks on a damn wall after that, well, maybe God didn’t accept all the refunds after all.”

  Caleb looked around the circle with an amused look on his face. Benny caught him smirking and threw down the fake cigarette, stomping down and sending the candy chunks flying. “War’s hilarious to you boy? You think the world was born free?”

  Alice gave Caleb a smile while the rest of the circle glared at him. “Not funny, no sir.”

  “You ever served, boy?”

  ‘He’s getting uppity.’ “Not enlisted, sir.”

  ‘He’s just in character.’ “Do you find the blood of brave men funny?”

  ‘He’s a condescending narcissist.’ “I never said that.”

  “Well obviously you do.”

  Caleb lost his smile. “Bella, horrida bella: know what it means? Wars, horrid wars. That’s what I live by. War is a horrid thing that shouldn’t be made a play thing to those that haven’t experienced it through lofty scenes and pretty words.” Alice pulled Benny down to his chair while he was visibly tensing for a strike. “You don’t have the experience, Private, don’t sing the song.”

  David cleared his throat. “Thank you for the story, Benny, and Caleb for your input. Let’s move on to one-on-one time.” He walked over immediately to Caleb. “It was just a story. Threaten anybody else and you’re gone.”

  He walked away as swiftly as he’d come, the couple suddenly standing in front, their hands still clasped while the others held up folded chairs. Caleb was calm again in their presence. ‘I’m still not in the mood to talk.’

  ‘I know. The amount of times you whine and mentally coax Alice to look at you would put a hummingbird to shame.’

  ‘Screw you. I’m sorry I crave a familiar face among a city of strangers.’

  ‘Don’t even try to hide feelings from me. There’s no more grey area between us. I know what you know.’

  ‘I like her. It doesn’t take a condo in my cerebellum to know that.’

  ‘Apparently, I know what you don’t know too.’

  ‘What don’t I know?’

  “Everybody, we’re going to pass around a sign-up sheet to go trick-or-treating with Alice tonight. It’ll only be for half an hour, but it’ll be nice to get some fresh air outside of the gym and dress-up a bit. Have fun with it.”

  A clipboard appeared on Christopher’s shoulder, his open hand carefully threading the board across his body and onto his leg. Caleb stared at their clasped hands as Christopher signed his name, passed it, and Angela signed her name. She tried to hand Caleb the board, but his focus was off the simple paper. “You two are never apart. You don’t even let go of one another’s hands. Why?”

  Christopher upturned his chin without adjusting his eyes. “What’s wrong with it?”

  Caleb took a deep breath. “Nothing, honestly, I think it’s sweet but strange. I was just curious as to why you two can never be apart.”

  Angela kept her head down as Christopher’s eyes flicked up. “I’ve never stopped to ask that. It’s just always felt good.”

  “It feels right.” Angela suddenly had her cheeks up and her hair flipped out of her eyes as they stared directly at Caleb. “I like how it feels.”

  “Well, do you like it because it’s right?”

  Her sea-green eyes pierced through his leftover angst as he took the clipboard from her tiring hand. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean do you like his hand because it’s warm, or because you simply can’t be without it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re asking, really.”

  Caleb glanced up to see Alice’s eyes and smile quietly illuminating the conversation. “Hold her hand with your free one.”

  Alice smiled at Angela and took her hand. They clasped the same way Angela and Christopher—‘He’s interested now,’—had their hands clamped. Caleb smiled and witnessed Angela’s reaction. “Is it the same feeling?”

  She studied the two connections intently; her right hand adjusting against Alice’s slowly and deliberately, feeling for the proper fit as her left sat ideally synced. Her eyes met with Caleb’s again. “No, it’s different. She’s warm.” She looked over to Christopher. “He’s warmer. I like his warmth it’
s different.”

  Alice faked a frown and quickly smiled again. “Glad to see you’re getting along with them.”

  Caleb smirked. “Would you like to join us? I feel outnumbered here.”

  Christopher and Angela cracked a smile—‘Opposite corners of their mouths raised,’—as Alice cocked her hips in her hands. “Who says I’d be on your team?”

  ‘She’s given that look to everyone in this group a hundred times don’t fill your pocket with too much excitement.’

  Caleb smiled widely for a second. ‘She’s given me this look once, and her eyes are emanating. I thought you of all entities could see that.’ “You wouldn’t leave me by myself against three people would you?”

  “I’m sure you could handle it, and they’re basically one person anyways, so we’d outnumber them.”

  “Well, hold my hand. One-on-one.”

  Caleb felt a chair behind him and, while creating the optical illusion of grabbing the leg to Christopher and Angela, gently pulled it forward with his power. He held his hand out in the air between the two seats, looking back up at her with a sideways smile. Alice unlocked her hips and mumbled lowly, never losing her smile. ‘There’s the green again. You were right.’

  She moved slowly while giving him an innocent, inquisitive smear across her smiling lips as she rounded his shoulder and heavily sat into the chair. The screech of the chair turned heads across the room to her as she sighed playfully, looked him in the eye, and gently slid her hand between Caleb’s fingers. They smiled to one another again, even while Christopher and Angela did the same. “All right, now we’re even.”

  David’s eyes passed over the scene once, and began speaking halfway through his current thought. “All right, let’s reconvene people. It’s Tuesday so bring out your number problems.” Everyone rearranged their bodies, reaching into pockets for small slips of paper and giving them to David.

  “Number problems?”

  Alice dropped his hand, one finger dragging across his palm as the warmth escaped, and answered, “Andrew is a number guy. Just watch and listen.”