by Weston Ochse
With spades, it was the terminology that Danny loved the best. To win you had to make tricks. Tricks were a good thing in Spades. In fact, the more tricks you made the better the chances of beating the other team. Then there was Boston. Danny had no idea why it was named after the famous Massachusetts city, but going Boston meant you would win every trick, thus leaving the other team trickless, luckless and winless. Playing a Boston meant that in one perfect, magnificent hand, the game was over.
Unless it was tournament play. Tournament rules were different, and more often than not, the boys played that way, regardless of the temptation to play the city. Tournament rules allowed so many more ways to score points, so many in fact that it took tremendous skill and even greater luck to stay on top of a game. You could score even without winning any tricks.
There were Blinds and Nils and Double Blinds and Double Nils and every once in a while, a last gasp attempt to win could result in a team betting Double Blind Nil. Uncle Stan had called them the Fate Cards. To bid, a team had to decide, without even looking at their cards, that one person wouldn’t win any tricks and the other would win seven. They were each allowed to pass two cards and if they made the bid, received a whopping three-hundred and twenty points. With a bid of Double Blind Nil, even the other team was silently rooting for you to win. So hard. So impossible. Yet, so fun.
Two years ago, much to the chagrin of Danny’s father, Uncle Stan, on one of his visits taught Danny and Elaina spades. The card game was so much better than Go Fish, Rummy or Double Solitaire. More importantly, spades was a grown up game.
When Uncle Stan returned home to Iowa, Danny and Elaina wrangled their parents into replacing their Saturday night game of the kiddie board game of Life with the adult card game of spades. It was a hard sell and both parents had tried to dodge the game, but Elaina had reminded them of college and how, according to Uncle Stan, the two had spent every hour of every weekend for two years locked in marathon games, much to the detriment of their grades. Danny remembered seeing his parent’s eyes momentarily brighten at the memory and it had only taken a few of his patented Pleases to bring them around.
Those had been the days, sitting on the deck with a pitcher of iced tea snug beside a pitcher of Gin and Tonic for Mom and Dad, the setting sun casting bloody red rays upon the green waters of Lake Chicamauga. With the dusk, came the cool breeze pushing aside the oppressive heat and thick humid air. They’d laughed their way into the night, each member of the family surprised at the other’s spade’s acumen. Blinds and Nils and a few Double Blinds set the stage for a close-fought game.
And like with his family, the four boys filled the glade with their laughter. Jibes and curses passed as often as stunned looks. Bergen and Danny were winning. As Clyde began to deal the dreaded French Cut, Doug stumbled into the clearing.
“What the—” said Bergen, jumping up.
“—fuck” finished Eddie.
Doug groaned and fell.
“Doug!” shouted Danny, throwing his cards aside and rushing to his friend’s aid.
“Greg,” he said through a mouthful of blood. “Found out about the itching powder.” His lips were thick, cut in several places.
“Holy shit!”
“How the hell did he find out?” asked Tony.
Doug coughed again. The effort bent him over and a drool of blood escaped in an unbreaking string. Finally, he sat up. “Because I’m stupid. Me and Greg, we was talking. I mean really talking. He wasn’t treating me like garbage at all. More like we were real brothers or something’ stupid like that.” He paused, waiting for the laughter.
But everyone was silent. Danny knew exactly what he was talking about. What he would give to be able to talk to his sister again. He prayed that, wherever she was, she was happy.
“I mean, we were going back and talking about all the best and meanest tricks we’d done. Everything from silly-ass short sheeting beds to Midnight Crap Bombs. It was a laugh a minute and he never even punched me once. I mean, my brother with all his problems can do some pretty cool things. Remember what he did last Halloween? Funny as hell, wasn’t it?”
Of course Danny remembered. It was funny as hell, but it had almost caused several accidents, too—his mother’s car included. In fact, he’d been grounded from playing with Doug for two weeks before his mother had finally relented and all because of Greg’s ghost. He turned to Bergen again and watched as his friend tossed an acorn at a crow sitting on a low branch. His aim was true, but the bird side-stepped and twisted its head slightly, as if to ask why.
“Everyone knows he stole the idea from a Brady Bunch rerun,” continued Doug, “but those geeks did it down the stairs and it was Greg who was smart enough to do it across a road. I mean, when that sheet slid down the wire, it looked like a real ghost attacking the traffic.”
“Yeah, people still talk about it sometimes, calling it the Haunting of Lake Haven,” said Clyde. “Stupid suckers.”
“See. It WAS a good one. Well, I wasn’t about to let Greg win the best trick contest, and after all, we were getting’ along so well. So, I figured I’d just tell him about the itching owder. I mean, how mad could he be after all this time?” asked Doug. One eye was already closed and it looked like the other might soon follow. The left side of his face was one large matte of purple hues. Blood had begun to crust on his nose and his lips were already the size of Vienna Sausages.
“Bad move,” said Tony.
“Deadly,” said Danny.
“Suicidal,” said Clyde.
“No shit,” said Doug.
The Itching Powder Episode had truly been the best trick any of the gang had ever, or would ever, pull off. Back in November, Greg had been dating a short blonde named Bunny Manoshovitz. Girls with names like Bunny are immediately stereotyped as dim, flighty and ready to spread their legs like a turkey at Thanksgiving. Or so Elaina had said, and Danny supposed everyone thought the same thing. According to Doug, Greg had been thrilled as hell that this particular Bunny seemed determined to live up to the reputation every Friday and Saturday night when the two would park in his 1965 white Mustang convertible down by Chicamauga Dam.
Bergen was the one who’d come up with the idea. On vacation to the Outer Banks, he’d scrounged through a specialty shop that not only sold books, shells and antiques, but an entire shelf of gags ranging from whoopie cushions to a small glass bottle that promised to make someone itch until their skin peeled. Although Bergen couldn’t wait to use it, he didn’t want to waste it. So he hoarded the stuff, waiting for the perfect opportunity to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting enemy.
The opportunity came one Friday afternoon after Greg had bullied him at school. So, while Greg was pimping in the bathroom for his date with Bunny, Doug dusted the backseat of the Mustang with the vile powder. Then the boys met at Danny’s and with the gusto of a platoon of infantrymen, charged to their ambush point on their bicycles. The road wound for two miles along the lake edge, up and down steep hills and through the kudzu covered forest. When the boys finally arrived at the Dam, their shirts were plastered to their bodies, their breath coming fast and fierce. They hid the bicycles in a copse of azalea, then ran down the hill to the hedge surrounding the picnic area. They could barely contain themselves as the minutes ticked by.
At nine thirty, the white Mustang finally pulled up. No sooner had Greg parked than the two were ripping each other’s clothes off, Greg fumbling with the complicated mechanism of a double D bra’s hasp. Lips still interlocked, they slid into the back, pushing the front seats forward to provide more room for their gymnastics. The boys had seen naked girls before, but for Danny and Bergen, if you excluded a sister and an old aunt, Bunny was their first, living, breathing three-dimensionally naked girl.
The boys exchanged barely shushed giggles and elbows to ribs. Danny was in a state of awe.
Suddenly, Bunny jerked up, dumping Greg gracelessly onto the floor. She ignored her date’s protestations and began to scratch furiously at the backs of her
legs. Greg, instead of being angry, levered himself onto the seat next to her, trying to scratch his back. He finally settled on rubbing it against the edge of the seat like a dog to a tree. The moments of super-heated gymnastics had twisted into a frenetic session of cooperative scratching. The more they scratched, the more they itched. Like the label said, the itching powder had built up under their fingernails, each scratch adding to their misery. Finally, with screams of frustration, they scrambled out of the car and across the park, and dove into the cool water of Lake Chicamauga.
For days the boys reminisced about the bounce and jiggle of Bunny’s immense boobs as she’d run naked into the water. Doug had told them the rest. Greg had come home late, way past his curfew. Doug had hid on the stairs for two hours listening to his parents argue over suitable punishments and decrying the state of teenagers in the nineties. When they’d heard Greg’s key in the lock, they’d both stood ready to confront their out-of-control son, but the look of utter misery on his thin face, quenched their parental rage. He cried as he explained the strange and mysterious chigger infestation that had attacked Bunny and him as they sat in the car at the drive-in movie and how Bunny had vowed never to see him again.
His father had smiled and his mother had cocked her head, dubious yet concerned about the tears. Outraged at his parent’s disbelief, Greg ripped off his shirt revealing a back that resembled a chicken pox infected ten-year-old. A hundred pinpricks of red dotted his skin sending his father to the telephone and his mother running to the vanity.
While Doug’s dad consulted with their pediatrician and shouted commands at his mother from the other room, Greg sat slumped in a kitchen chair, stripped of everything including his underwear. It was quickly determined that he lacked any of the symptoms of the pox, so with an apology to their doctor for waking him up, Doug’s dad hung up and went into the bathroom for the traditional cure for chiggers. When he returned, Doug’s mom grabbed the plastic bottle of pink fingernail polish and dolloped it over each dot of redness. If the little beasts couldn’t breath they couldn’t live and the nail polish would smother the non-existent chiggers. The old Southern cure was the only way, short of invasive surgery, to remove the thousand biting bodies. Within half an hour, the red dots coating Greg’s body had turned to a pleasant shade of pink, and in between his sobs, he begged them not to tell anybody.
Yeah, it had been an evil thing to do, but the episode had been a justified retaliation. It shouldn’t have resulted in this bad of a beating, however.
Greg had gone too far.
“We gotta get him back,” said Danny. “Right Berg?”
Bergen was only half-paying attention, his eyes knitted in concentration as he tried to bring down the crow. After six acorns and the acrobatics of an unusually dexterous crow, they were at a stalemate and Bergen was getting pissed.
“Yeah.” Clyde put the cards away. This was serious business. He’d also been losing.
“Let’s kill him,” said Tony. “Lemme call one of my uncles up in Jersey and I’ll arrange a hit.”
Four sets of eyes, seven wide open and one pounded shut, stared at the Yankee transplant turned Mafia Hitman once removed.
“Kidding. Just kidding, guys. Jeeesh. Like every Italian family from New Jersey is part of the Mafia. You guys watch too much television.”
Bergen, tossing a handful of acorns away in disgust, spoke up for the first time since Doug had arrived. “I got an idea.”
People paid attention to Bergen when he had ideas. He may appear to be the spokesperson for the International Order of Dorkdom, but there was no one smarter in the entire school, and that included a good percentage of the teachers, so the boys listened closely.
Bergen took a deep breath and stared hard at each of his friends.
“It’s simple. We do exactly as Tony said.”
“What?” shouted four voices.
“You heard me,” said Bergen, a sly gleam in his eyes. “We shoot him.”
The boys jumped as the crow fell from its perch, squawking and cawing. Somehow it managed to catch itself three feet from the ground and swooped, barely missing Bergen’s head. The boy never flinched. As the crow flew off and into the afternoon, Bergen leaned back, placed his hands behind his head and smiled.
“We can’t shoot him. Shit, Bergen. Are you off your rocker? What the hell are you thinking?” Clyde jerked his head around to make sure there weren’t any police hiding behind the trees, listening in.
“Thur we can,” said Doug. The bleeding had stopped, but his lips had swollen to the point words had trouble getting by.
“Sure we can,” repeated Bergen, his smile like something from a Manson groupie. “And we can get away with it too, if we use paintball guns. Ones with red paint balls.”
The boys stared, Slowly their suspicion disappeared into smiles as each imagined the look on Greg’s face when his chest suddenly sprouted a dozen red holes.
* * *
Paradise Valley, Arizona
He smiled and stared into her eyes. She found it hard to meet them, their blueness as deep as an ocean. He was boy-next-door handsome, his face both trusting and engaging. She allowed herself to trace the laugh lines from his flush lips, along the hard line of his jaw and noticed, not for the first time, how humor had been forever caught just beside his eyes, as if the orbs were spiders and had embalmed a giggle.
And within those lines, those sad happy lines that promised anything and everything, she was trapped like a moth struggling.
“Not a moth, but a butterfly,” he said. “You’ve transcended youth and metamorphosed. No longer the caterpillar—lanky, unsure, unmanicured, you have changed. Your spirit has become wings, perfect beauty untouched.”
She sighed, struggled, and felt the lines grasp tighter.
“You flit from flower to flower, searching and tasting, carrying your past along until your feet are too burdened.”
She could see herself catching the air. Descending. Ascending. Gliding. In search of…
“—me. And like your bee cousin, you find me. Unerringly you return to the hive where you are the same, different, yet a much needed part of the whole. My lovely butterfly, you are needed. Desperately, you are needed.”
He smiled wider. Cheshire.
“Open yourself.”
His lips moved. Embracing, coalescing, they mingled in transference. His breath was flower scent, his lips slick pollen. She was hungry, his ripeness her evolutionary destiny. As her heart beat and swelled she barely felt anything as her clothes, one at a time, were removed and cast to the winds.
“Butterfly. My butterfly,” he whispered, the heat from his words warming her. “So perfect. So impermanent. I want you.”
“Take me,” she sighed.
“Yet I touch you. I touch you and the perfect pigment of your wings evaporates. Fingerprints that ruin. The more I touch, the more I feel, the more I love,” his breath was fast now. “The more I hurt. If I love, you can never fly again.”
“Never fly,” she whispered.
“Never.”
The knife came from nowhere and descended, its edgeless blade stiletto sharp, falling to a circular tube at the base to collect the blood. He slipped it to her and felt her body undulate as she imagined it in his hand.
She didn’t discover the blood until later. A butterfly, deflowered, her blood taken to promote growth. Never did she wonder why. Never did she care. She was a butterfly and still flew upon the winds.
CHAPTER 6
Wednesday—June 13th
Chattanooga, Tennessee
As always, Maxom was in search of the boys. He’d flown past each of their homes, but other than a spilled bag of French fries and the tantalizing smells of open trashcans, there was nothing there for him. He’d paused to perch atop the high, rusted lifeguard chair of the dock admiring the Monet dapples of pastels upon the surface of the lake as the fresh water seaweed applied its leafy bristles from beneath.
He would have remained entranced had not a
family arrived for a day of sunshine and water sports. His head cocked as he watched the avalanche of wind-milling arms and white flesh flow down the hill and onto the long wooden dock. The vibrations not only making the tall chair quiver, but running deep into the pilings, rippling mud in minute holocaust storms. Invisible to the humans, it wasn’t only Maxom who detected these metronomic pulses of radiating waves along the edge of the dock. A thick muscled bass shot away with a flick of its broad tail. Crappie rose, their hyperactive curiosity sending them to the surface in kamikaze darts and dodges.
Maxom allowed the bird’s Darwinistic reflexes take hold, sending him soaring, barely escaping the clutches of ten, short stubby fingers. The words Mommylookyatthebirdy fell away into the silence of the afternoon as he allowed his borrowed wings to catch the thermals, lifting him into the sky. He headed towards the center of the lake, allowing the bird to control, sitting back like an observer, enjoying the flight.
Three-hundred yards out, he passed the navigation buoy used by the TNT Plant to guide the barges in. The red and white cone marked his turn around. Maxom wheeled right and glided slowly across the white swipe of sandy shore, then up and up until the woodline was first beneath, then behind him.
An hour of intense garbage spotting and sparrow dodging finally ended as he came to rest on his favorite branch, high in the oaks that surrounded the boys’ fort. Yet again, they were nowhere to be found. He began to patrol outward in gradually widening circles. Ten minutes later, he spotted six figures moving panther-like through the forest.
* * *
The drip drip of the new rain fell softly from the leafy canopy to the sentinel ferns guarding the forest floor, fronds like spears slicing the air to discourage passage. Sparrows shot into the sky in bursts of communal fear, the beat of two dozen wings stilling the forest’s constant insect moan. The denizens of the loamy earth shrunk away from the bitter scent of impending violence, disappearing one by one into the below ground. The forest stilled and waited, hoping that once again it would be spared the collateralism of the damage inherent in war.