by Larry Doyle
“Rich!”
Ca-chunk.
A rivet popped on the section of the gutter he was leaning on.
The gutter ca-chunked again, and then ca-CHANKed.
Denis plummeted. Just below were bushes planted to commemorate Denis’s First Holy Communion, since the jujube was the source of the thorns in Jesus’s crown. (Denis’s parents treated their Catholicism not so much as a religion as an anthropological teaching opportunity.)
Denis fought his way through the thorns of Christ, his clothes pierced and skin scratched where it wasn’t already contused (there too, but harder to make out). He ran over to Rich, who was lying on his back clutching the drainpipe between his legs.
“I’m paralyzed,” Rich said with remarkable calm. “I’m a paralyzed virgin.”
“Sorry,” Denis said.
Above them, the gutter rattled.
Denis watched in shock and awe as three studly silhouettes leapt from the roof in unison and landed on the grass, tumbled together, and seamlessly rose to perfect commando formation.
Denis looked down at Rich. He was gone.
“Yo!”
Rich was standing in the next yard.
“Run, you dumb monkey!”
A very large dog appeared out of the shadows and swallowed Rich.
THE BEAST WAS ALL OVER HIM when Denis arrived. Rich was thrashing his arms and legs wildly, tossing his head from side to side and squeaking and squawking, suggesting the dog was up to no good.
“Kimberly,down!” Denis commanded,yanking the dog’s collar. Kimberly backed off Rich and sat, panting happily.
“And now I’m partially eaten.” Rich sighed. “The chicas don’t go for half-eaten guys.”
Kimberly was a big dog, a rottweiler-Lab-and-possibly-black-bear mix, but she was no man-eater. She was merely playing with Rich, and maybe tasting him a little.
“Kimberly?” Denis scoffed. “She’s just a puppy d-ahgoo!” Denis sneezed, and remembered why he didn’t play more often with this big fluffy sack of dander and mites.
He sneezed again, and felt his open eye start to swell closed.
He sneezed again, and there was Kevin.
“Listen, Kevin,” Denis began diplomatically, and then, where the abject apology should have gone, he sneezed in Kevin’s face.
Kevin wiped off the snot particulates and, looking for a place to dry his hand, settled on Denis’s face. He reached out and very nearly got his fingers bitten off.
Puppy Kimberly’s large and sharp teeth glinted in the moonlight as she snapped and snarled, lunging at Kevin’s body parts. He backed into his backup, feeling, what was it—fear? Roadside bombs and sniper fire barely got Kevin’s attention anymore, but there was just something about fangs.
“Good dog!” Denis said. He reached down to help Rich up and discovered his friend had once again run off without him. “Good doggie,” Denis reinforced, and fled.
DENIS RAN LIKE A DUMB MONKEY through the backyards of Hackberry Drive:
through the Deters’, whose son Lawrence went to Notre Dame on a football scholarship but decided to become a priest instead, breaking his father’s heart;
through the Lemleys’, whose daughter Lucia had once sold Denis fudge and lemonade made from recipes contained in the rhyme milk, milk, lemonade, around the corner fudge is made;
through the Cobes’, who always gave out full-size candy bars on Halloween;
through the Schmidts’, whose twenty-two-year-old daughter Shauna got undressed every night at nine, and took her time about it;
through the Snelsons’, who always went out of town on Halloween, leaving a bag of cheap peanut butter kisses hanging off their doorknob, until that one Halloween;
and into the Confers’ yard, under which nine cats were buried, and where Denis finally caught up with Rich, who was doubled over and breathing hard.
“Coach Raupp was right,” Rich winced. “We are total pussies.”
Denis tapped Rich on the back. They both saw:
Kevin and his troops marching at them double time, in a cadenced trot. They hurdled a four-foot chain-link fence without breaking stride.
Rich mulled this. “We may be dealing with cyborgs.”
Denis took off toward the front yard.
“Hey!” Rich yelled, betrayed.
ACROSS THE STREET there once was a playground equipped with the monkey bars that Justin Cherry was briefly the king of, before tumbling off and becoming stupid. The Park District had taken the unpopular legal position that Justin was already stupid; as part of the ensuing massive settlement, the playground had been torn down and replaced by “Justin’s Jungle,” a rain-forest-themed Safeplay™ space, built on a Tiny-Turf™ seamless safety surface and constructed from EnviromenPal™ recycled plastic play components. Children seemed to enjoy it, despite its safety.
Denis ran up a monkey tongue and into its manic head.
“Have you learned nothing?” Rich complained, climbing the structure after him.
The boys clattered across the SynTeak™ Suspension Bridge and through the Eco-Go™ KnowFun™ Pagoda.
“Is there a point to this?” Rich asked. “Is there a plan here?”
Denis dove into a crawl tunnel that was mercifully free of theme, except for being banana yellow.
“Oh,” Rich said. “Hiding.”
Denis curled up near the midpoint of the tunnel, positioning himself between two of the Comfortholes™ that dotted the structure, allowing children to smile and wave at their parents and allowing parents to never ever lose sight of their precious, precious children. Rich didn’t fit quite as nicely as Denis; his head and neck pressed against the top of the tube and knees jammed into the opposite wall.
Moonlight filtered in the ends and holes of the tunnel. A warm wind whistled through almost imperceptibly. The boys’ panting slowed to heavy breathing. If Rich and Denis were ever going to make out, this was the time.
Rich grinned.
“Beth Cooper was straddling you,” he said, vastly expanding the meaning of to straddle. “Excellente.” Rich chortled lasciviously and may have winked; it was too dark to tell.
Denis was raising a finger to shush Rich when a massive limb shot through the hole next to his head. He first mistook it for a leg; the toes grabbed his nose and he realized it was a heavy-duty arm.
About the same time another arm sprang from an opposing hole, took hold of Rich’s collar and began whipping him back and forth, slamming his head into the tunnel wall.
Denis freed his nose from its attacker and scooted away, and into a third arm, which wrapped around his neck and began choking him with a definite purpose.
Rich made all the expected sounds as his head spanged off the hard yellow plastic. Denis made no sound at all because there was no air getting in or out of his lungs. Instead he steadily turned the color surrounding his injured eye, which had passed indigo and was entering aubergine.
Based on the rate of his progression to unconsciousness, Denis concluded that he was being both suffocated and strangled, in effect overkilled, and that his death would arrive shortly. He wondered where the requisite premortem flashing-before-his-eyes of his life was.
Ah, here it came:
The back of Beth Cooper’s head, and then the right side of her perfect face, as she turns to talk to Kate Persky…
Neon parrot fish swarming around him, wanting his wet bread, as he scuba-dived in the Great Blue Hole off Belize with his parents…
Beth cheerleading on the gym floor, from high in the bleachers, glimpsed around somebody’s fatty tattooed head…
In his room, reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, lying on his bed next to Rich, watching The Valachi Papers on a portable DVD player…
The back of Beth’s head again, turning slightly as she reaches over her shoulder to return a pencil she had borrowed from him.
That about summed it up.
Denis heard celestial trumpets. The tunnel filled with a brilliant light.
Wh
ite light, Denis thought, that’s a bad sign.
I’m dead.
In a plastic yellow tube.
Just as quickly, Denis wasn’t dead anymore. The arm released him. Air streamed into his lungs and blood flowed to his brain. The sound of celestial trumpets resolved into a high-pitched car horn, and the beckoning light bobbed and veered away from the mouth of the tunnel.
Denis was confused, and then flabbergasted, when a happy face appeared in one of the Comfortholes™.
“Hi!” Treece said.
OUTSIDE THE TUNNEL, a white 1996 Cabriolet convertible had Kevin pinned against a giant laughing giraffe. Beth was leaning on the horn. Under the circumstances, Kevin was conciliatory. “Lisbee?” he said, like a boyfriend who had done something awfully wrong and was so sorry even though he wasn’t certain what it was he had done.
And then: “Lisbee!” he screamed, slamming both fists on the car hood, like a guy who was too coked up to wait three seconds to see if the first strategy worked.
Beth responded by easing the brake and tapping the gas, causing the vehicle to gently lurch into her boyfriend.
INSIDE THE TUNNEL, Denis crawled over to Rich. After being yanked to and fro and having his head slammed into a durable plastic enclosure a few dozen times, Rich was a bit discombobulated.
“I’m a shaken baby,” he said.
A hairy hand continued to grip Rich’s shirt, but was only halfheartedly whipping him back and forth in a distracted manner. Denis got the hand’s attention by biting it, hard.
Sean yanked his arm out of the tunnel, yowling.
Denis nudged and shoved and finally shoveled his semi-conscious friend out the tunnel. With Treece’s help, he folded Rich into the backseat of the Cabriolet. Beth threw the car in reverse, and Denis hurled his torso over the front door as it backed away.
The Cabriolet was doing minus 40 mph when Beth spun it 180 degrees and Denis’s lower body did an impressive demonstration of centrifugal force as he clung to the interior door handle. The car tore forward down a grassy incline with Denis struggling to remain attached, and then hit the curb, throwing the boy aboard.
BETH SWUNG on to Arlington Heights Road without stopping or signaling in accordance with the Illinois Rules of the Road, or without yielding the right of way to the Volvo XC-90 that was already on Arlington Heights Road. This resulted in some sudden brakeage on the Volvo’s part.
Rich bounced around in the backseat, more than dazed.
“You okay?” Treece asked. “Is your brain dead?”
“Is blood coming out of my ears?”
“Not a lot.”
Denis was up front, in a position that might unfortunately be described as fetal, on top of Cammy, who did not appreciate it. She shoved the boy mass off her lap and down into the passenger legroom space that the Cabriolet wasn’t known for.
Denis rocked from side to side on the floorboards as Beth swerved around any object doing less than twice the speed limit.
“We got away,” Denis pointed out from his cubby. “You can stop escaping.”
Cammy shrugged at him. “She always drives like this.”
In the back, Rich stared into infinity.
“I was in driver’s ed with her.”
DRIVER’S ED WAS TAUGHT by Coach Raupp, who resented having to do it and was incensed that physical education class time was wasted on such an ass-spreading activity. This was reflected in his teaching style, which was screaming. He screamed on the test course, If that cone was a BABY GIRL, you would have KILLED it! He screamed on the road, Pull over NOW so I can SLAP you! The only time he wasn’t screaming was when he was showing Wheels of Tragedy (1963), and its sequel Highways of Agony (1969), two films that had been dropped from most driver’s ed curricula because their incorporation of real accident footage of dead, mangled and dismembered teens led to more crying than learning. But every time that imprudent hippie was scooped off the roadway and his stoned brain casually slid out onto the pavement, Coach Raupp could be heard cackling in the back.
He only screamed at Beth Cooper once.
Rich was in the backseat then, too, with Victoria Smeltzer, when she still weighed over a hundred pounds. Coach Raupp was in his typical instruction pose, one fist balled in his lap and the other rhythmically pounding on the dashboard. Beth was driving with blissful confidence, as she always did, unaware she was about to kill them all.
“Yo, Munsch,” Coach Raupp snapped, “what is the speed limit on Illinois highways?”
“Sixty-five,” Rich answered, for once almost certain he was right.
“Then can you tell me why the hell Mizz Cooper is doing over seventy?”
Rich’s hopes of ever answering two consecutive questions correctly were dashed.
“I’m not doing seventy,” Beth responded. “I’m only doing—” She stared down at the speedometer: 71. “The flow of traffic.” The vehicle meanwhile drifted off the highway and onto the loose gravel shoulder; Beth tugged the wheel and popped the car back into its lane, more or less.
“Pull over!” Coach Raupp screamed. “Now!”
Beth pulled over, now. She neglected to signal or to decelerate. Coach Raupp overcompensated for this by slamming on the instructor brake, sending the car into an uncontrolled skid. Beth tried to steer back onto the highway. The car slid sideways and began to roll, tumbling side over side several times before erupting into an enormous fireball.
“It did not,” Denis said at lunch that day, as Rich related the story. “You’d be covered in third-degree burns. Your nerve endings would be exposed. You’d look like this.” Denis held up his slice of school pizza. “Only more sauce.”
Rich took the slice, folded it lengthwise and funneled the grease unto his tongue. “I was thrown clear. Everybody else got crispy creamed.”
“Victoria is right over there.” Denis nodded furtively, so as to not attract her attention. Victoria was sitting with Patty Keck, his secret shame, eating her Diet Coke while Patty finished both of their lunches.
“Half of Beth’s face is…just gone,” Rich said. “Like Mel Gibson as the eponymous Man Without a Face.”
He held the pizza over one eye.
“Is it this? Is this what you see? I assure you it is human. But if that’s all you see, then you don’t see me.”
Would Denis still love Beth if she were The Girl Without a Face?
“Which half?” he asked.
“The good half.”
Denis decided he did not have to decide. “And this has been another Richard Munsch dramatic presentation.”
Rich swallowed the last of Denis’s pizza. “Car did almost tip over.”
RICH WAS IMAGINING he was in the scariest, goriest, least educational driver’s ed film ever made:
In it, Rich played himself. Treece was played by Shanley Harmer, the actress who starred in Bitches on the CW, and then went on to movie fame in Holy Mallory and that Internet mp4 with Licks’ front man Brent Koz. He was mentally casting Denis—that kid from Geek Camp?—when he suddenly flew forward, bounced his face against the front seat and slammed back next to Treece. She buckled him into his seat.
Beth had overshot the red light by a couple of car lengths. Black SUVs coming in opposite directions very nearly crashed into the front passenger and rear driver’s sides, tearing the little Cabriolet in half like two wolves fighting over a plump bunny. Beth gave a cursory my bad wave and rapidly backed out of the intersection, coming within five-eighths of an inch of hitting a third black SUV behind her.
Denis crawled out of his hole. The last few seconds had brought back Rich’s Driver’s Ed Tales (there were several) and so he was currently struggling with the conflicting emotions of:
1) intense joy that Beth had just saved his life, choosing him over a former boyfriend;
2) fear.
“That was…with the car back there, but—”
“That wasn’t for you,” Beth cut him off. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Kevin can’t have another incident. On
e more, and it’s court-martial for sure.”
Joy left and fear reigned.
“One more what?”
THE LIGHT TURNED GREEN and Beth floored it. Denis, perched between the two front seats, was thrown into the back.
“So,” Treece said when he landed next to her. “That was fun.”
“Some fun,” added Rich, partially recombobulated. His head lolled in Denis’s direction. “Your dad would be so proud.”
Denis thought of the champagne bottle lodged in the wall, the Technicolor gooshes, the dead microwave and mutilated lawn. He leaned back through the front seats.
“Can I borrow your cell phone? I—”
“Good catch,” Beth said. She pulled her cell phone from her purse and tossed it out of the car. “GPS that, asshole.”
The phone flew through the window of a passing Honda Civic and hit Harold Angell, a thirty-four-year-old nurse practitioner who had no ironic connection to anyone in the car.
Denis sank back into his seat. He bounced off Treece and then Rich as Beth swerved along her merry way.
“Her driving’s gotten a lot better,” Rich commented.
Denis felt around behind him for the middle seat belt, finally pulling out something that appeared to have been chewed on by several packs of dogs. The buckle fell off.
“You can use my phone,” Treece said, reaching into a pouch that cost more than Denis’s entire wardrobe. “Not this one.” She dropped a silver flip-phone back in. “My mom has it tapped”—meaning only that her mother scoured the bill for calls to men her mother dated. “Here.”
Treece handed Denis a hot pink phone encrusted with jewels and dangled charms that looked as if it had been decorated by a three-year-old but which had been custom junked up in Japan at considerable cost.
“Tell your parents I said hi,” Cammy remarked from the front seat.
“What makes you think I’m calling my parents?”
“Because you’re you,” Treece said, much nicer.
DENIS’S FATHER WAS DRY-HUMPING Denis’s mother in the back of the Prius when his phone began buzzing.
“You’re vibrating,” Mrs. C said.
“That’s because I’m about to explode,” Mr. C moaned, grinding into her.