by Paul Tobin
“What happened in your last fight with Eleventh Hour?” he asked. For this question, he stopped in front of me on the road. We were coming up on the base. A line of scientists and a couple of their caped successes had emerged from out of one metal silos to watch our arrival. A larger group of soldiers was instructing them that now wasn’t the time.
“I lost,” I told Bryant.
***
Before we move too far past it, I want to talk about my first kiss with Adele Layton. Once she’d given me the go-ahead, I didn’t wait. Even before she gave me that go-ahead, I could see it in her eyes. I leaned in closer and her lips were harder than I’d thought. A woman’s lips are so often described as soft and yielding, but hers had a force. The first kiss wasn’t much more than the two of us pressing against each other, her leaned over, me twisted in my theater seat, my neck cricked to the right, and she let out a sharp huff of breath into my mouth as we met, and again as we parted, explosions of breath that meant something important was happening, and of course I’d known how it was true, but I’d thought all the importance was from my side, and to feel the warm proof of how she was feeling the same way, that we were both in the role of the aggressor, to think of her thinking of me, not just reacting to me, but gauging me, being alive, no longer some transient creature that existed only in my range of sight, but a person who had wanted this moment, had spent time working this instant into reality, maybe talking with her sister while mending that doll she had carried, the two of them laughing about me on the roof of the Lincoln, with me hugging the car roof, splayed in my white underwear, and Adele wondering what I would be like to kiss, deciding she had to know.
“Oh,” I said. She’d kissed me into a realization.
We’d fallen in love.
The second kiss was stronger than the first. Her tongue was there to meet mine and there was another of her explosions of breath, and I was thinking of how glad I was that we hadn’t gotten any popcorn, that we hadn’t gotten any soda, no chocolates of any kind, because this way her lips didn’t taste of salt or butter, not of corn syrup or anything else excepting Adele Layton.
I kissed her for some thirty seconds. Expecting her to tell me to stop. Realizing she wouldn’t. Wondering if I would. Only finally interrupted by Tom’s laughter, sinking into me somehow, him at the tail end of his far less passionate embrace, and also interrupted by one other thing.
Adele’s back was pressed against her theater seat, her lips on mine. Our tongues were shameless. Glorious. Adele had her eyes closed. But mine were open. I wanted to see her.
But in seeing her, I also looked past her, to the seat behind, where Travis Gerber was eating his chocolate drops and staring into my face. He was looking disappointed. Looking like he thought I was doing a very wrong thing.
He didn’t understand how Adele and I were in love.
A man like Travis Gerber couldn’t know of such things.
Kissing Adele couldn’t possibly be wrong.
But of course, he was proved right in the end.
***
Let’s talk about Paladin.
Saying those four words feels strange. I can’t count how many times I’ve said just the opposite. Microphones surrounding me, reporters with notebooks, e-mails from students who needs quotes for a thesis, women in bars, the nightly news, congressional hearings, people on the streets, Presidential requests, all of them asking (and quite often demanding) for me to talk about Paladin. About how it began, and how it ended.
And I’ve always told them no.
But…
… what the fuck…
… let’s shock the world…
… let’s talk about Paladin.
Paladin’s real name was Greg Barrows and he was probably my best friend, excepting only my brother Tom. Greg was a boy I’d grown up with and we’d bonded on tales of pirates and Greek gods. We’d made a game in the creek beds, him with his Greek gods (they were actually repurposed He-Man figures) and me with corked wine bottles we pretended were pirate ships, and my pirates and his gods would do battle (we made up new rules every time) and we would then have to, on the spur of the moment, create stories about what had happened, embellish the narrative, so that if a wine bottle ran into Hercules (portrayed, in this instance, by Vikor of Grayskull) it was actually the lead ship of Bloodsword (the king of my imaginary pirates) ramming into Herakles (we spelled it differently, at times) who was on the beachfront of Paris (we weren’t bound by history or geography) while they were both vying for the hand (and so much more) of this and that wayward princess. All of our princesses were wayward. On that we were consistent.
Greg and I were on the same baseball team together, not surprisingly, of course, since Greenway could only field one team at the time. He was a pitcher and I was a first baseman. Both were positions of responsibility. We both batted well. He pretended to be a god that was batting quarrelsome meteors. I pretended to be Count Vladbeard (my newest pirate captain, who was also a vampire) knocking back the enemy grenades that had been hurled at my ship by the Sailing Templars.
I could go on with a hundred similar examples of our actions and our childhood fantasies, but in them we didn’t vary greatly from any of our friends, from any other of the boys, and we largely abandoned these tales at about the same time as the rest of the boys, and for the exact same reason. The girls were growing up.
Kathy. Allison. Angela. Dylan. Jennifer. Mikla. Adele. Paula and Petra… the Gorner Twins. Clio. Georgie. Nora. We were suddenly consumed by our thoughts of all of them. These thoughts needed urgent discussion. Because of this, most of us ostracized the girls who had been our friends, suddenly unable to face them, though the thoughts of them dominated conversations whenever we were awake, and held sway in our dreams at night.
In my first sex dream, the Gorner Twins and I took off all our clothes and stood simply looking at each other, unsure of what to do.
In my second dream, the night after I’d spent half the day walking around with a porno CD (Mass-Ass-Blasters Chapter 6) that I finally watched the second my parents closed their bedroom door (allowing for ten extra “security” minutes) our antics (this time it was me and Georgie and one or the other of the Gorner Twins) were far more athletic and involved, though even in the dream I was screaming, “Am I doing this right? Am I doing this right?”
I could go on and on. Every teenage boy, of course, could go on and on. I could tell you about the discovery of every aspect of sex. I could tell you that every time I thought I’d discovered every aspect of sex, some website would reveal to me that I was mistaken, that there were more things under the sun, and under the covers, and often chained to a bench in certain German townships. I could tell you of stained socks, stained towels, stained shirts, embarrassingly whimsical boners, of Tom coming home and telling me to sniff his fingers for a “nasal glimpse into Judy’s Forbidden Valley,” of how the two of us would sit on our porch, after our parents were in bed, and I could talk of Tom giving me a beer stolen from Dad’s outside fridge, the two of us discussing girls, about how nothing on the internet ever translated into real life, how movies had it all wrong. I could relate how Tom was sometimes quiet, lost in thoughts, admitting that girls scared him (I’m not sure this was true… it may have been said entirely in order to make me feel better) and the two of us sending each other links to the very best pornographic websites, and also to yoga and strength-training regimens because it was clear, from the online portrayals of sexuality, that it was only those in the very best of condition and the most limber of limbs that could possibly achieve any satisfaction.
You can get these tales from any teenage boy.
And, I assume, from any teenage girl, substituting some elements, such as crusty socks, and replacing them with vegetables suspiciously disappearing from the refrigerator.
What’s important is that, by the time Greg Barrows and I were headed to the quarry that day, we were almost finished with the age of telling tales concerning mystical might, and we were succum
bing to the tales of the Curvy Ones. It no longer mattered that the princess was being rescued… it mattered somewhat more what she was wearing, and how favorably she’d look upon her savior. But mostly it mattered what each and every girl in school had been wearing that day, and if she had known (did they actually KNOW such things?!!) that we could see her panties (how could she NOT know?!!!) and would it happen again tomorrow?
Reality had interfered with our fantasies, because reality had boobs and, we came to realize, KNEW that it had boobs, and actually wanted to show them to us.
Greg and I were drinking lemonade from cans, riding our bikes, criss-crossing the streets, soaring across yards, up and over the Gerbers' bike ramp (it was only there during the summer months, when their nephew came to stay) and Tom was along with us, trying to ride his bike backwards for a whole block. Greg was riding beside him, asking about Judy, asking if he could borrow her, and Tom was trying to gauge if Greg was serious (he wasn’t) and I was trying to gauge if Tom was seriously considering it (he was) and Adele waved at us from her yard (I remember this) and we made it to the quarry without any incident remarkable to a teenage boy. Tom had fallen three times and was skinned along his shin, bleeding somewhat. I’d run into John Molar’s red Ford truck when he’d gone through a stop sign (he did it enough that I should have been expecting as such) but had little to show for it except a dent in my forehead that was probably going to get me a scolding from Mom (unfortunate) and some nursing from Adele (fortunate) and Greg had racked his nuts trying to stop his own bike from colliding with the red Ford, and so we were having a good time making fun of him.
We collected several fossils from the quarry that day. I may still have mine around. There was a full ammonite from the Cretaceous period. That was the best find. There were also several plant fossils, I assume from the same age. Greg found something that may have been a bone of some kind. He patiently chipped away at the fossil, brushing loose rock aside, while Tom and I were wrenching what we could from the rocks. We’d finished the last of our cans of lemonade from our backpacks, but we’d expected that, and we were well prepared. We had beers.
We got drunk.
For the first time ever, I heard the rumor (Tom told it) that Warp had grown up in Greenway. That he was a local boy. Tom had read the rumor on some website, along with a thousand other rumors.
I told Tom, “Everybody thinks Warp comes from their hometown. Everyone.”
“Petra Gorner says she saw him,” Tom countered. “She says she was getting undressed, and her curtains were open, and she heard a noise, and she looked, and it was Warp.”
Greg said, “She couldn’t have seen him. He’d have run away too quickly.”
I said, “She does undress with her curtains open, though.” I knew this to be true. Every boy in Greenway knew this to be true.
“But he would have run away. Far too fast to see him!” Greg wasn’t making any arguments that Warp wouldn’t have been peeking in a window; tales of Warp’s hobbies were already beginning to surface. He liked his nightlife. That’s one way to put it.
“Maybe he wasn’t done looking,” Tom said. That gave Greg pause. Petra had indeed reached a point where she needed some looking, and it wasn’t something that could be rushed.
“Doesn’t mean he lives here, or ever did,” I said. “Warp’s so fast, he might live in Paris, just run over here for the peep show.” Paris was the only foreign city I could think of, back in those days. I’ve traveled quite a bit, since then. Paris is still a very nice city, of course.
“Why here?” Tom said. He belched. It was a good one. It was a champion. It should have been fossilized and preserved for future generations.
Tom’s question gave us all pause (and plus we were silent in awe of that belch, though of course the echoing quarry walls had played not a small part) and we really couldn’t think of any reason why someone like Warp would have come to Greenway unless he lived here, or had lived here. Past that, Petra was beautiful enough that her claim of the Warp sighting couldn’t entirely be discounted. Being around a beautiful woman is always worth the price of stupidity, and if that woman happens to have a twin sister and also happens to undress with her curtains open, then you’ve just plain got to believe what she says.
“Online,” Tom said, “I found a quote from Warp.” He was standing tall, looking knowledgeable, waving a beer can between me and Greg.
“Yeah?” Greg said. There were only about ten million quotes from Warp online.
“He said that he’s come a long ways from his days of shearing sheep.”
“Shit,” I said. “He did not say that.”
“He did.”
“Dang,” Greg said. His mother didn’t like him swearing. That curse was a lot, coming from him.
I said, “It’s not like the Selood Brother’s Sheep Farm is the only place that’s ever had sheep, or people that shear them.”
“Australia,” Greg said.
“Australia,” I agreed.
“Australia doesn’t have the Gorner Twins and an open window,” Tom said. “These things add up.”
“Maybe Dad can tell us something?” I said. Dad didn’t talk much about work. He mostly liked to talk about politics. He was thinking of running for mayor of Greenway. We didn’t have a mayor, but he was thinking about running.
“Maybe we can find out something ourselves,” Tom said. He came over and he tapped me on the chest, and he tapped Greg on his chest. We both looked at our chests like we suspected he’d left a mark.
You have to understand that both Greg and I knew Tom. We knew he wasn’t talking about going to the Selood Brothers Sheep Farm during the day, talking to people, asking for a tour, or anything like that. He was talking about an expedition. He was talking about being secretive. Of breaking into the sheep farm at night, when all the secrets would be left out in the open, with no one to guard them. Tom was a man (we considered him a man, then, though I’d say a boy, now) who had began our games of hiding action figures on certain rooftops around Greenway, and then he’d send his friends notes about where the figures were hidden, and if you could retrieve the figure, Tom would steal a six-pack of beer for you. It’s anybody’s guess how many action figures are still hidden up on the rooftops of Greenway, possibly covered in moss, or perhaps adopted and tended to by crows.
“Field trip?” Tom said to us, raising his beer can.
“Field trip,” I said. I raised my own beer can.
“Field trip,” Greg Barrows agreed, clicking his beer can against mine and helping to set in motion a chain of events that would change the world, and in the eyes of some people, turn him into a god.
***
I’m moving too quickly, now. I want to talk more about Adele.
We turned, both of us, sexually shy after the day at the movie theater. It wasn’t, though, truly about the sex. I’ve never been all that shy about sex. I’ve heard it said that people who grow up in big cities are more blasé about sex, and in some ways that might be true, but on the other hand, you have to understand that we (meaning “people who grew up in small towns,” not the “we” that I usually mean, the one about “we… who put on the costumes and toss boulders and fly through the air”) didn’t have much else to do. There were only so many fossils to be collected or games of tennis we could pretend to play at the one city park. We did a lot of canoeing, outdoor things, but we had the same curiosity about each other’s bodies, the same need for each other’s bodies, and a world that was a whole lot more open in which to exercise those curiosities. I’m trying to say that sex wasn’t a mystery to me or to Adele, which isn’t the same as saying it was a known factor, either. We were both virgins, but it wasn’t sex that was making us shy (not an ounce of that, really) but instead the fact that we both realized we’d fallen in love.
City people. Country people. Small-town folks. We all fall in love the same exact way. With a happily churning sense of giddy fear.
So Adele and I went for walks together, and we were in lo
ve together, and one day we bought three boxes of dog biscuits from Tom when he was working at the Mighty Convenient convenience store (he asked us if we were planning on doing something really kinky, some sexual role-playing, and Adele told him that we certainly were, but declined with a smile when asked who was to portray the role of the dog) and then we went all over Greenway, walking each and every street, and if we saw a dog (and they weren’t rare) we would go up onto its yard (happy barks, angry barks) and give it a biscuit, pretending that we were gods descending from on high to bestow wisdom and dog biscuits.
We were, Adele and I, the permanent friends of every dog in Greenway after that… though of course I didn’t live there much longer.
But I’m not talking about dog biscuits. I’m talking about phone sex. It occurs to me, now, how much Tom would have loved the transition, but… at the same time, I guess I won’t dwell on that. It’s a bit strange to talk about your brother and phone sex at the same time. I’ll avoid that.
Eight nights after our first kiss in the theater, and subsequently the next fifty or sixty kisses in succession, Adele called me at nearly one in the morning and asked, “Am I your girlfriend?”
“Yes.” If anyone wants to know if I hesitated (the tabloids always want to know if I hesitated, no matter what the situation) then the answer is no… I did not.
“Then I’m naked,” Adele said.
“What?” I hesitated, here. Put that on record.
“I’m naked and I’m playing with myself.”
“What?” I was starting to understand. I’d been thinking about making a similar call, but couldn’t believe that Adele had done it. Girls don’t do that, do they?
“I’m playing with myself. Do you know how girls play with themselves, or do you need me to describe it to you?”
“You better describe it to me.” This wasn’t from a stance of ignorance on my part, not anymore. This was from a firm (immediately) stance of knowledge. Whatever Adele was doing, however she was doing it, I wanted it to be described in lingering detail.