The Acolytes of Crane Updated Edition

by Tew, J. D.

  “I have been watching you for about an hour now, and that tablet has not been activated. I am going to shut the door, if you so much as fart while it is closing—I will flame you up so quick!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I worry about wasting my time, and that I might be losing my mind. My pants are dry, but they still stink. My tablet is sitting flat on the mat, off and charging. I pick it up quickly, irrational in my concern that it will not work anymore.

  I slide my finger across the screen to activate it, and I jump up and down.

  “Yes, I knew you were not broken!” That’s how dubious my mental state was. The tablet was my only friend in the prison, and here I was, experiencing separation anxiety with this cold, rigid device. I definitely need warm human conversation and contact.

  “Is there a problem in there, prisoner?”

  “No sir,” I say, and I start up right away to satisfy my longing for it. Under my breath, I continue, “I wish some people would mind their own business.”

  “What is that, prisoner, did you say something?”

  I lower my voice to a squeak and say, “No, nothing.”

  I caress my new toy; the tablet is on and working great, so I start by saying, “Okay it is only you and I now, so let’s begin. Each visit to the cliffs I did the same ritual. I hiked up the cliff, yelled out Jason’s name—loud enough to disturb the dead, and carved an inspirational message in the lone tree at the top. Almost every time that I returned to the scene, I found that my words were ignominiously overlayed by fresh carvings left behind by other people.”

  The ground was at times littered with the remains of a party. Another annoyance was the shards of glass from broken bottles or the occasional revolting needle or tourniquet. I thought the drunken punks that wandered the cliffs on the weekends were defacing my etchings.

  The next trip to Taylors Falls was the last time I could practice the tradition.

  It was 2016, two years after Jason’s accident. I was fifteen years old and still could not command enough charisma to increase my popularity. I spurted quite a bit, but I wasn’t attracting the girls—just yet.

  My hair sprouted sandy in color. I was a dirty blond, my grandmother proclaimed. I was still a twig of a boy and was tanned from cruising around town on my bicycle.

  My eyes were still bluish-green in color. My granny Laverne always compared them to an old print of a ship at sea, mounted above her bed. She said that when she looked deep into my eyes, she could see that eager ship battling the raging waves. My grandmother was as tall as I was, with a curly permed hairdo and a face that was cute like a kitten.

  Life at my grandparents’ house wasn’t at all peaches and cream. They followed a highly structured daily regimen, thanks to my grandpa Marv’s army training.

  The fridge was over-flowing with food, and I ate so much during mealtime that my grandmother called me, ‘Ted, the human garbage disposal.’

  I ate almost every meal that my grandmother served, but I hated liver. Liver to me was awful. It was like placing a dog’s feces in a pan, flattening it out with a burger spatula, and covering it in onions to give evidence to the fact that some people try to make unappetizing food taste good.

  I poured almost an entire bottle of ketchup on the feces every time I had to eat it. Something good came out of eating liver. Every time we did so, my grandpa Marv always told me a story or one like it.

  With the three servings of liver whimpering in agony on the table, the stage for the tale was set. He said, ‘Theodore, when I was about twenty-five and I was finally home from the Korean War, I went into this fine restaurant downtown. The restaurant was one of the best in the Twin Cities. I cannot remember what the name of it was.’ He hollered, ‘Laverne! Do you remember the name of that restaurant?’

  My grandmother was in the bathroom, and she didn’t answer.

  ‘Anyway, I ordered a T-bone steak, and it was absolutely dreadful. There was too much fat on it, not enough meat, and you know I like my fat crispy. So what did I do?’ he asked, pausing for a moment to see if I would respond. ‘I poured a half a bottle of ketchup on it. I figured it would take too long to send it back to get spit on, so I may as well get my money’s worth right?’ he asked, and I nodded my head rather than say anything because I was choking down some dry liver.

  Chuckling, Marv continued his story and told me the chef stormed out and yelled at him for pouring ketchup on his steaks. That tale sometimes tailed off into a rant about how pineapple slices should never be cooked on pizzas, because that is such an abomination.

  Then the real wisdom kicked in.

  ‘The point is, son…’ he said. He called me son a lot. I wasn’t sure if that was by error or intention. ‘…if you don’t like something, you don’t have to eat it. If you keep eating that liver, your lips are going to fall off, and liver will grow in their place.’ Marv chuckled.

  ‘People will call you liver lips,’ my grandma would add.

  My grandpa Marv dragged his liver tale out even further, and my grandma said his name in a long Minnesota-nice voice, to encourage him to stop, ‘Marv!’

  ‘Well, I guess what I am saying, Ted, is that if you keep eating the liver, we will keep feeding it to you,’ he said.

  What an amazing concept it was. If I led people to believe I enjoyed liver, they would keep serving it to me.

  My grandpa was a non-filtered cigarette smoker. He picked up the habit from when they issued packs in food rations during his tour overseas. Laverne so hated the filthy habit; she ordered him to go down into the basement, windows wide open, if he wanted to smoke during wintertime. Stubbornly refusing to break his connection with me, he always asked me to come down with him whenever he wanted to light up. I loved him so much, I always agreed, although it always reeked in the basement and made me feel like gagging. The stacks of cigarette butts, piled precariously on top of old-fashioned glass ashtrays, made me dizzy even to just look at them.

  Despite his faults, I always laughed when I thought about my grandpa. My grandpa was a racist. Not that being a racist is funny. The era of racism was so ridiculous at the time, that it made me laugh. I am entirely disgusted by it now. It was his one apparent flaw.

  When we watched pro basketball on TV, Marv pointed to a towering black man, all decked out in team colors, graceful as he expertly dribbled around the court. He asked me, ‘Ted, do you know why those basketball players’ eyes are really big?’ Most of the time I didn’t have a clue what my grandpa was talking about. He continued and said, ‘Because, when they came over to the United States, we had to pull off their tails, and their eyes popped out of their heads!’

  Afterwards, he tallied a couple of chuckles and released a scattered hiss that was almost never ending. If I didn’t get the joke, it didn’t matter, because his versatile tone of voice and quirky mannerisms alone drove me into a guffawing frenzy.

  My laugh sounded like that of a hyena lying on its back, being tickled in its most sensitive spots. The idea of anyone having a tail pulled off is hilarious regardless of the color being referenced.

  My grandpa always told the same stories and jokes throughout the years—including those periods before I joined his home. I don’t think he ever recalled previously sharing them with me. If I kept laughing at his jokes, he kept telling them.

  My grandparent’s house was covered floor to ceiling in interesting trinkets, which were grouped into different categories from one room to another. For example, Laverne made sure to exhibit her prized porcelain doll collection in the living room.

  As for their furniture, it was suitable back in its time, but I thought it was ugly. They had gaudy wood paneling both on the main floor and in the basement.

  A grandfather clock chimed at the top of each hour. I sat by that clock and played solitaire for hours. Whenever the bells chimed, I ding-donged along with them. The kitchen had a shelf spanned the entire perimeter of the room, strategically placed ten inches down from the ceiling. It was home to fifty-three miniature
rocking horses. I counted and named each of them. I had trouble remembering all the names, so upon the third attempt, I wrote them all down on a list, meticulously folded the paper, and hid it in a slot in the grandfather clock.

  Of particular delight to me was the walkout three-season deck in the backyard, perfect for me to practice my skateboarding tricks. Concrete stone slabs, firmly laid long ago although now they had become somewhat uneven over time, surrounded the deck. I would set my back wheels into the space between the planks. It was a good way to keep the board still while I practiced ollying. I figured that since the old, badly maintained deck jutted out to a huge backyard surrounded by forest, they wouldn’t mind if my skateboard ground down their steps. To my surprise, Laverne had shrugged and said, ‘As long as you don’t kill yourself, it’ll be nice for the deck to finally be of some use.’

  Three days before our trip to Taylors Falls, my grandpa and I decided to work in the flower garden together. My favorite flowers were the bleeding hearts. They had dark pink heart-shaped outer petals with drooping white inner petals protruding from the heart. They always had a slew of aphids crawling on them. In the garden, there was also a gigantic over-grown rose bush. He grew types of roses known as floribundas and grandiflora. The flowers were pretty, thanks to his incessant shapely pruning.

  While he pruned, I took up shelter in my tree fort, which grandpa helped me build last year. Equipped with two tiny haphazard home-constructed chairs made only of sawed-off planks, the fort afforded me a space in which I could hide and write in my journal. The trauma I experienced at the cliffs two years earlier had placed me in a social rut, and I regressed to preferring to “chill out” alone.

  I was enjoying the quiet, when I heard a pop. I dropped my journal. My amulet displayed its typical response by glowing.

  The sharp sound was like that of a cap gun or one of those little white bags of poppers we used every July 4 holiday. I heard my grandpa let out a man-scream, which was more or less an indirect yell.

  I hopped down from the tree and searched the neighboring patches of woods for the origin of the sound. Two kids were hiding at the wood-line by the fence. The neighbor boy had a friend over, and they were both sharing a pellet gun. Dimly, they had thought they could have their fun by taking one crack at an old man, and get away with it, too. They sat in disbelief for a moment and then booked beyond the pines. They hadn’t reckoned on one of their own kind resting away nearby in a fort.

  I yelled, ‘Ey, you get back here you punks! No one does that to my grandpa!’ I tried to make out their faces, but the forest cover was too thick.

  ‘What are you going on about, boy? I was stung by a damn bee,’ my grandpa said to me, not aware there were other boys about.

  ‘I saw two boys at the fence firing a gun at you,’ I said, sure of myself, but worried that my grandpa would not believe me.

  Marv turned to look and he saw the boys sprinting up the cherry stained deck of the neighboring house. Boy, I had never seen my grandpa run so fast, confuting his advanced age. He darted into his kitchen. He called the police, and no sooner than my grandma could fry a quail egg, two cops were knocking at our door.

  They introduced themselves. Officer Johnson, who looked like a kid right out of cadet school, had the lead role. I guessed the police force were anxious to train the newbies while a more experienced colleague looked on. The other man, Officer Carruthers, had sergeant rank. I could tell he was a sergeant, because of my gramps’ military ID that he saved from his term in the army. They both had high-n-tight hairstyles—the most severe buzz cut possible, popular with military guys.

  We walked over to the troublesome kid’s house. I marched next to the cops like a sidekick with an itchy trigger finger.

  Officer Johnson knocked on the window beside the storm door with his knuckles—fingers curled, while his more seasoned partner looked on. The tapping was light, as if he was trying to see if a bathroom was occupied.

  He had to knock a few times before someone answered. The person who opened the door was a wretch. He stood there, proud yet shabby, with belly hanging outward underneath his white cotton tank-top, the sleeveless kind of undershirt with the scoop neck and large armholes, exposing his hairy shoulders and armpits. His clothes were stained; some of his teeth were covered with black tartar stain. His face was poorly shaved with patches of stubble remaining. I didn’t like what I saw, so I took cover behind my grandpa.

  ‘What the hell do you want, pig?’ the disgruntled man asked. He went by Dick, a name befitting him.

  ‘Do you have kids here?’ Officer Johnson asked.

  ‘Yeah, but you should know I don’t like cops, especially cops that think they are better than me, with that tone. You are lucky I don’t take you out with my rifle for knocking so damn much. Now state your business,” Dick said with a slur and the glossiest of eyes.

  ‘We’re here because we believe that your kids were involved in an incident that occurred about twenty minutes ago,’ Officer Johnson said, ‘Now you can bring the kids out so that we can see for ourselves, or we can do this the hard way, and I can bring you all down to the station.’

  ‘Looks like you are going to have to do it the hard way,’ Dick chuckled and slammed the door into the cop’s face.

  It wasn’t at all a surprise he was so belligerent. He was continually inebriated, among other things. Dick and his family had lived there for such a short time that we really had not figured them out or even known them by face. Regardless, it all seemed that trouble was looming—very soon.

  The two cops had a quick huddle twenty feet away to discuss strategy, and then returned. I watched as the cops walked up as if it was a raid on a druglord’s house. Batons out, the duo looked like they were dying to use some excessive force.

  See, my grandpa had a theory about cops. He called them monster-builders. He believed that cops could turn the most docile-warmhearted person into a raging and fire-breathing monster. He said it all starts with a belittling comment, because few people allow someone to make them feel inferior.

  There were two cops about to engage a worthless junky, who probably felt inferior to begin with. There were so many unknown factors behind that dilapidated white door; it was the perfect cocktail for trouble. The door opened, and Dick’s eyes widened in anxiety. Seeing the batons withdrawn and hovering near his face, he knew the cops meant business this time.

  ‘Okay, okay, don’t hurt me!’ Dick exclaimed in a high voice as he darted clumsily out of the front door, holding his arms up in a sign of surrender. He stood limply, expecting to be tackled any moment.

  ‘Everyone in the house, out now!’ Officer Johnson bellowed in his best cop voice.

  Five second later, two boys sullenly emerged, their eyes darting about. One was Tim, Dick’s son, and the other was…

  ‘Travis!’ I exclaimed.

  The other boy, Tim, a reedy teenager with a shock of thick black hair covering his right eye, glanced nervously at Travis, then pointed at him with two hands. ‘He did it!’

  Travis scowled, but did not rebut the accusation.

  Officer Johnson, eager to prove his badge, held out the baton and slowly pressed its tip against Travis’ chest. Travis was no match for the six-foot-three-inch police officer, who towered over him.

  ‘Well, well,’ Officer Johnson drawled, ‘Travis Jackson, we know you down at the police station. Boy, we do know you.’

  ‘Shaddup,’ Travis retorted listlessly, then froze in fear.

  The butt of the baton dug deeper into Travis’s chest. ‘That’s not what you say to a police officer. Speak up, boy, what do you say? Huh?’

  Travis slowly raised his face to lock his gaze with that of Officer Johnson, his eyes still expressing contempt. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  This time, a sudden push onto the baton. Travis winced in pain. ‘Again,’ Officer Johnson threatened.

  Travis’ expression wholly changed. He looked like a scared 12-year-old, not his usual sullen 15-year-old self. ‘I’m really
sorry, sir.’

  ‘That’s better,’ the young cop said, finally withdrawing his baton. He nodded to Officer Carruthers. ‘Search the house for weapons.’ Officer Carruthers strolled into the house and disappeared out of sight, while Office Johnson started questioning the man Dick and his son, Tim.

  Travis stood alone, seething. His eyes conveyed pure hatred. He lipped to me, ‘I know your secret.’

  He had that same sinister look upon his face that he did that day on the stairs at the Red Bricks. He knew about the amulet. I figured he saw it at the cliffs before Jason died.

  The mere presence of Travis brought to mind the tragedy that transpired at the edge of that cliff two years prior.

  Every time I closed my eyes to envision or imagine Travis, I could only see Jason’s hand disappearing over the edge of the cliff. Selfishly, I savored seeing Travis being cut down to size by that police officer. But I couldn’t openly display my mirth in front of Travis. I was worried he would steal my amulet just to get even.

  ‘You’re free to go,’ Officer Johnson gruffly informed Marv and me.

  ‘What will happen to them?” Marv asked.

  ‘We’ll give Mr. Jackson a warning.’

  ‘Anything further?’

  ‘No.’

  I burst in. ‘Travis is not going to jail anytime soon, is he?’

  The young cop’s dismissive glare told me all I needed to know. ‘Come on, Ted,’ Marv said as he pulled me away.

  Once back home, I thought about the ramifications that may have followed. I sat there all shook up on my grandma’s comfy couch, with my mind racing. My grandpa put his hand on my shoulder and unintentionally startled me.

  ‘Ted, we did the right thing. Those clowns created trouble for themselves. People like that don’t belong here. So don’t dwell on it. What is done is done.’

  I showed gratitude to my grandfather with a hug, something that was indeed awkward. My grandpa was a man who didn’t like to show affection, but he was intent on sharing wisdom.