The Acolytes of Crane Updated Edition

by Tew, J. D.

  To ensure success, we practiced in my backyard with a football the day before. I would throw the football straight at Lincoln’s face. With his excellent reflexes, he would catch it just before it hit him. We weren’t ready to engage The Intervention just yet, thus Lincoln always held his hands up near his face, to signal to any omnipresent force that nothing would happen. The aim was to wear down my reluctance to throw that object straight at his face.

  We spent a whole day practicing. My grandparents must have thought we were bonkers while watching me practically attempting to maim Lincoln with a football, and seeing Lincoln repeatedly dodge disaster with a wide grin on his face.

  There were to be two parts for the new trial, in which Lincoln would not defend himself at all. For the first part, I was to be provoked into throwing the ball straight against Lincoln. If The Intervention allowed my toss to hit Lincoln squarely in the face, it would have meant that my actions were warranted. In part two, I would chuck at Lincoln for no reason at all, and see if The Intervention would halt the ball. If nothing happened both times, Lincoln would be badly wounded, and we would be at square one. That would really stink. What a brave guy.

  We talked about The Intervention as if it was a beast. We found that the physical energy that we were toying with was not only intelligent, but was also much more powerful than any beast.

  We entered the sports apparel store. It was lightly occupied with customers, which allowed us to have witnesses around. My stomach churned in this public environment. I felt this might be a bad idea, because I did not want to harm my best friend. As I was about to turn to Lincoln to suggest canceling our trial, he let loose the trigger statement:

  ‘You are a loser, just like your dad!’

  Memories of my kid-beating dad flooded me, triggering vitriol throughout my veins. I grabbed a baseball and spun around with fury.

  I was like a wild behemoth on the mound of a baseball diamond, ready to beam the batter for angering me at the plate. I blasted off the ball straight at the forehead of the mocking Lincoln, who kept his hands at his waist this time. I then recoiled at what I had done, covering my mouth. Shock finally registering within Lincoln, he grew bug-eyed and attempted to duck, but was too late to avoid the ball’s blazing path.

  Then, the ball froze in mid-air.

  Our eyes bulged and our jaws dropped.

  The rapidly spinning ball was like a yo-yo that went to sleep and never came back. It sat rotating in front of Linc’s face for about a second-and-a-half, then fell to the checkered floor.

  We both gaped at each other in awe.

  Shaken and excited at the same time, I suddenly recalled I had to complete the second part of the trial. Quickly, I picked up another baseball, and fired it straight at Lincoln. This time, he merely stood, jaw wide open, transfixed by the spectacle of impending doom.

  The second ball did something I would never forget. Just as it was about to rearrange Lincoln’s nose, it hovered. There was a localized burst of light enveloping the ball, and then it vanished.

  An elderly lady, attired in a floral-themed blouse and beige pants, clucked at us, and shakily walked ahead, muttering to herself as she did so.

  “That ball just went gone!” a child’s voice rang out behind us. We turned.

  A little girl, about six years old, tugged at the pants of her father, a middle-aged spectacled man who appeared to be a bit of a jock, with a tight-fitting T-shirt. They both stared at us, with jaws open.

  The man blinked in shock. He rubbed his eyes. “No, no… it didn’t,” he told his daughter. He, too, was shaking his head in amazement.

  “But I saw it!”

  “Shush, shush,” the man said as he took the hand of his daughter, and gently turned her around. He darted one more quick glance at us just before he left, not certain what he thought he saw.

  I made the call: we were finished. I could not take the testing any further. We were bound to invite tragedy. Obviously, there was a strange and powerful energy that we knew little about. It was intriguing, but equally frightening.

  The conclusion was that I could not do wrong, and if I dared to try any further to do wrong beyond my first mistake, the results could be unpredictable and dangerous. Where that ball disappeared to, we had no clue.

  We excitedly chatted about our agreements concerning the just-concluded second trial: it didn’t matter whether a harmful act was justified or not. The Intervention controlled objects. The Intervention stopped your weapon if you intended to harm someone with it. I breathlessly said to Lincoln, ‘It’s as if it adapts. The first time, when you called me names, it made the ball stop. The second time, when you did nothing to deserve it, it just made the ball disappear!’

  Lincoln just nodded, too overwhelmed by the experience to be in a talking mood.

  We rode the city bus home from the Staplewood Mall. I will always remember that ride. The green vinyl-covered seat in front of us was ripped, and the yellow stuffing within was torn out. I read all the stickers and graffiti on the seats and on the inside wall of the bus, and while I pondered, Lincoln watched the passing traffic through the window. I spotted writing on the seat that read: Your mom was here.

  It was funny. I laughed from the simplicity of the joke. “Your mom…” jokes were popular, along with wearing your clothes backwards and deploying the ultimate cool joke: the whoopie cushion.

  ‘So you busy tomorrow?’ Lincoln said.

  ‘I don’t have anything going on, really. I have to clean my room. It’s crazy in there, and my grandma is on my case. Did you see these stickers on the seat? I have one for ya that I heard in school: your mom is so fat she pays taxes in three countries.’

  ‘Okay, that’s really lame.’

  I pointed toward the back of the seat in front of us despite his lack of interest. ‘There. It says: your mom was here.’

  Lincoln’s shoulders jumped; his eyes flashed anger. ‘Ted, I said it was lame, don’t be so immature.’

  ‘Dude, relax, I didn’t realize you were going to get all upset. I was only—’

  ‘Only trying to be funny. I know, but it wasn’t,’ Lincoln said. He turned away from me and lowered his chin onto his fist as he bent forward.

  ‘Cheese, it is only a joke. I don’t see why you are getting all mad.’

  ‘Listen, my mom died when I was five, okay? She died of breast cancer, and you keep saying, cheese. I believe what you are trying to say is geez,’ he said.

  For a moment, we sat in silence.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said, as I rested my hand on his shoulder, ‘I didn’t know. I guess there is a lot I don’t know about you. What did your mom look like?’

  ‘I looked a lot like her. She was beautiful. Her hair was black as night. When she smiled, there were these little dimples on the sides of her cheeks. Almost every day before school, she would make some pancakes that were so good. They were amazing, and they didn’t taste funny like at school. She would always arrange my bacon and butter scoops into the shape of a face on top of the pancake. I miss her so much.’

  Spellbound, I gazed at him. I felt like crying as I recalled the memories of my troubled parents.

  Lincoln saw my expression and recognized the hurt within me. He turned away and continued softly, still staring ahead in open space. ‘I would say the thing I miss the most about her, was her hugs. She squeezed me so hard that I would start to feel like I couldn’t breathe. I heard about your friend Jason. That must have been horrible. You must miss him too.’

  ‘Yeah, a lot. I really miss him. He always knew what to do. He could really help us out right now, because he always had great ideas, and he was good with the ladies.’

  I now felt horrible about what I had said to Lincoln about his mother.

  Lost in our thoughts, we said nothing during the rest of our bus ride.

  There were some weird characters on the bus that night. We had a man who was sitting next to us drinking from a brown bag. He was probably washing away the pains of the day with a bott
le of whiskey. He kept blurting out at people in the bus; ‘This is my world, my world.’ He repeated it at least twenty times during the ride. I tried my best not to make eye contact. When the bus stopped in our neighborhood, we exited quickly to avoid interaction with any of the bus regulars.

  We stepped down at our stop and said goodbye. When I arrived at home, I lay on my bed, shuffling through all my baseball cards. No, not any I had stolen recently, as I had not. It was the personal collection I had amassed over the years.

  Upon further reflection, I wished that I didn’t drag Lincoln into The Intervention business, and I wished that I knew why everything was happening to me.

  There was no way of telling what could happen. For my birthday that year, I received a ‘greatest hits’ CD. I plunked it into my player and began to rock to some clever vocals that were accompanied by a piano. Just as I was drifting away, my grandma entered the room and sat next to me in my bed.

  ‘Honey, we are not going to Taylors Falls tomorrow. I know that you have wanted to go up there, and we have delayed it a lot, but we cannot this year. We cannot afford the trip,’ my grandma said.

  ‘Well, that is too bad. I get sad after I go anyway. Things are good right now,’ I told her, but I suspected something was going on. She sighed, as if troubled. I decided not to ask.

  ‘Goodnight, granny,’ I said.

  She flipped the light switch and said, ‘Goodnight, Theodore.’

  That night, the sky reminded us of its power with a thunderstorm that ripped through our neighborhood. Gusty winds pounded the walls and rattled the windows. My grandparents, who had survived times of war and economic depression, slept through the fierce storm. In contrast, I watched through my window briefly as the storm rocked the trees at mid-trunk.

  The bolts of lightning streaked across on the tumultuous sky canvas, instantly dabbing the edges of the otherwise lead-granite colored clouds with brilliant flashes of cream, illuminating the ground below.

  My astonishment turned to fear, after a bolt of lightning split the picturesque window scene in front of me. The jagged sword of lightning splintered the elder tree in our front yard, leaving it a smoldering wreck.

  The proximity of the blast forced me back; the boom had taken my breath away. I retreated to my covers, because I was shaking from the bolt's impact on that tree.

  That tree spent nearly sixty years reaching for the sun, only to be destroyed in a millisecond.

  I tried to sleep for the remainder of the morning, but I was left tossing and turning. It seemed the days were becoming chronically weird.

  My grandma read the paper bright and early before my grandpa at around four in the morning. She preferred to read the paper before Marv, because he usually left it in a state of disorder after pulling out his favorite sections.

  Typically, I was the final person to read whatever was left of the paper, because during the summer, I was the last to wake up.

  That morning after that huge storm, my grandparents were out instructing the workers where to put all of the excess wood from the tree. The sounds of the worker's chainsaws and chatter pulled me out of bed.

  My grandmother left some food out for me on the stove. I grabbed a few bites and walked toward the living room. The taste of scrambled eggs still fresh in my mouth, I grabbed the paper. Typically, I could bypass all local news if it didn’t interest me, and I would cut straight to the comics.

  I sat in my granny’s chair and kicked up my feet on the tiny ottoman that sat next to it. Usually, when I sat on that chair, I felt like I became my grandma, as if I was looking through her perspective: a cold drop of tea in the bottom of a cup, a pen laying atop the day’s crosswords, and a pair of soft and stinky slippers. I slipped them on and gazed at the folded stack of papers.

  My heart stopped.

  There was a clean, rectangular hole on the first sheet of the newspaper section on top of the pile. Where the crossword puzzle usually was. But my shock was not from the fact that my grandpa must have cut out the crossword puzzle for himself.

  Peering through the cut-out hole, as if a ghost, the face of my sworn enemy leapt out at me.

  In bold print, underneath the photo, the caption read, Travis Jackson, 2001-2016.

  I blinked. This must be a mistake.

  I snatched the page where the photo was and threw aside the cut-out crossword page. It was the obituary section.

  But this was no mistake. The blurry black-and-white photo of Travis, sullen, looked out at me again. He looked a bit older than the last time I saw him. But that forlorn expression still dominated. He didn’t look happy.

  I read on, my heart pounding. It was Travis’ obituary.

  Apparently, Travis was camping at Taylors Falls with his dad, and he disappeared. His father reported him missing, and there was an ongoing investigation. Now, he was presumed dead.

  The paper’s columnist questioned Travis’ affiliation with Jason’s death, and presumed that Travis may have thrown himself from the cliff into the river.

  In shock, I breathed deeply, unsure what to think.

  Was this a clue left behind by The Intervention? I had to do some detective work to further my understanding of the unknown force, starting with the cliff that potentially stole the life of two kids. Did Taylors Falls hold the meaning to my amulet? After all, it had glowed there too.

  I didn’t mention anything about what I read from the paper to my guardians, and I had good reason. I had a plan.

  I sat on the three-season porch taking in the smell of the moist cherry wood. I sat in a white wicker chair that left imprints on my arms where they rested on the surface. I noticed these creases on my skin as I pulled away from the chair to grab some cookies.

  My grandma sat on a chair by the wooden kitchen table, sipping some Earl Grey. She would always ask me if I wanted tea, and I would say yes. After all, tea and cookies was quite the combo. ‘What is eating you, Theodore?’ she said while looking at me with an inquisitive squint, ‘I know there is something bothering you, Ted.’

  I started crying. I cried so hard and dreadfully long; I was hysterical. My body shook with sobs. My grandmother held me and ran her fingers through my hair. My sadness was always transformed into anger and motivation to do more—to enjoy life better. I wanted to make good of what I could do and the time that I had with her.

  ‘Theodore, you are special. I am not saying that because I have to, I am saying it because you have proven how strong you really are. You don’t have to be tough and hold in all of your sorrow. It helps to belt it out and shed some tears from time to time,’ Grandma Laverne said, ‘There is something else. Well, I think I will wait for your grandfather to come home to tell you.’

  She always had a way with words. After all, she is a grandma; comforting was her job. I found out soon enough what she was waiting to tell me, but not from her own lips.

  She was right on one thing. I was different.

  I furiously thought of an escape from my dour mood. I had it! For the last several years, my rich uncle always sent me fifty dollars for each of my birthdays. I had that money stashed away inside a T-ball trophy that I had on the top of my dresser. It was the perfect time to spend some of that money.

  I skateboarded up to the Big-Mart and used the pay phone to call a cab. The cab arrived, and the driver asked, ‘Where to, sir?’

  ‘Taylors Falls,’ I said.

  ‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Why so far?’

  I served him some lie about visiting my grandparents who retired there and wanted me to stay with them at their campsite near town.

  As I read the driver’s expression, my only worry was that The Intervention, that unknown power, could intervene. I dismissed the thought. Its jurisdiction was obviously limited to my surroundings, and not my mind.

  Hey. Maybe I was doing what it wanted me to do. That was precisely it, I figured. Perhaps, now, destiny was calling me. Travis’s obituary was the tipping point.

  Fortunately, the cab driver bought it. ‘We got a
long ride. Geez, you are going to have to pay half now. Twenty dollars up front, and pay the rest later. That is the deal,’ the driver requested, with his hand extended through the slot in the Plexiglas.

  “After the driver spoke, I knew Lincoln was right about the slang word geez. I paid the man his money, and we left for Taylors Falls.”

  7 theodore: K. T.

  “The funneled sound of an awesome classic folk-rock band lifted me from my slumber. My eyes still shut, the foggy sensation of color at backs of my lids reverted from deep brown to a glowing orange.”

  The roll of band’s fluid guitar solos and appealing vocals jarred uneasily with the off-tune pitch of the cab driver.

  There was something familiar about waking up to the smell of an armpit. My vision went from a blur to clear, and I had a flash of Jason’s arm extended with his pit firing stench into my direction. I wanted so badly to be with him. His image faded away after I rubbed the sleep out of the corners of my eyes.

  My neck was incredibly sore on both sides. I wiped the drool from the corner of my mouth.

  My hot breath stank; the smell was not unlike that of the stench of sweat pouring out from a Muay Thai boxer after several rounds of fighting, combined with that of camel poop. The smell of my hot breath could not contend with the nostril-flaring, olfactory-nerve-depleting stench of the second-hand smoke of cheap cigars, the sickly artificial scent of a half-dozen vanilla air fresheners, and the ongoing perspiration of the cab driver, itself a manly-man-sweat-factory of death. Put simply, the cab and its operator reeked. For a moment, I thought about my dad. The cabby reminded me of him with his rough demeanor.

  My dad had three important mottos. Of course, number one was; don’t ever eat the yellow snow. The rest were inherited by my great grandfather Willard: number two, you will not succeed in anything without a little hard work, and number three, trust is based on predicting from experience.