by Hunt, S. A.
God? scoffed Leon. God needs to get right with me.
Don’t you start, Leonhard Luther Parkin. Marcelina’s broad shoulders hulked over him when she handled her pear-shaped hips like that, like she was using them as leverage to make herself even bigger, and she was already built like a linebacker. Her painted lips pursed under flaring nostrils. I’mma tell you what we gonna do.
What ‘we’ gonna do?
I’m gonna give you a little money, and you can get out of town. Get outta your head, get outta that apartment, get away from here and go somewhere you can get clear. Somewhere quiet you can dry up.
Leon jerked with a hiccup, standing a little straighter in his surprise. Get outta town? What is this, Tombstone? You runnin me outta town now?
If that’s what it takes to fix you.
Marcy, Leon had said, I can’t take your money.
Yes, you can, she told him, and you will. Look, you can pay me back whenever. She pointed at Wayne sitting in the car. The nail on the end of her finger was a bright red claw. I want you to think of that little boy sittin in there. Do you love him?
Leon recoiled. Of course I do.
Then get outta here, get away from these memories, away from this city, and get right with God. Baby brother, don’t make me hafta raise my own nephew. I got three boys of my own. Marcelina hitched up her giant leather purse where it’d slipped down her shoulder and took out a wadded-up tissue. You know she would want you happy, dammit.
Leon peered through the back window at Wayne, biting his lip in apprehension. His eyes were pink, and his face was twisted like something hurt deep inside. The boy could see the pain sticking out of him like a knife-handle.
I been talkin to Principal Hayes, said Marcelina. There’s a job down south he wanna recommend you for. It’s close to Atlanta. Trisha lives in Atlanta. Your cousin, Aunt Nell’s daughter, you ‘member her? She’s all right, you know? You two used to play together before her mama moved them down there to go to school. She craned her head forward to look up into Leon’s face. Will you think about it?
“You asshole!” howled Pete, startling Wayne out of his daydream. He looked up from the sidewalk and almost ran into Amanda.
The four of them had come to the intersection of Wilmer and Broad and were approaching the traffic light. To the left and right was a long stretch of two-story buildings: boutiques, offices, shops, storefronts.
A pet shop across the street boasted about its hamsters, kittens, turtles. Next door, a frozen-yogurt shop in pastel colors claimed more flavors than Baskin-Robbins, and after that was a knick-knack shop with bamboo wind chimes and frilly marionettes on tin bicycles.
Broad reminded him of the older parts of Chicago, the streets that led back to the wild-west days, but Blackfield’s historical district was cleaner, almost precious in its maintenance. On the other side of the intersection, Wilmer turned into a brick road bisected by a median full of little trees, and lining it was a funnel of fancy bistros and taverns.
Pete held up his sarsaparilla. “You ruined my drink!”
“How did I do that?” asked Johnny Juan.
Pete showed him the can. Johnny leaned in to examine it. “You threw a holly berry in my Firewater!”
Wayne and Amanda clustered around Johnny to see. The girl tugged it in her direction with her long, pencil-slender fingers and he noticed that her nails were green.
“I’ll be dang,” said Johnny, leaning back to laugh. Wayne looked down into the mouth of the can—which was no bigger than a nickel—and sure enough, a little red berry bobbed at the bottom.
Amanda smirked. “You should try out for basketball!”
“Maybe!”
“Basketball my ass!” fussed Pete. “I can’t drink this now.”
“Why not?” asked Amanda. “It’s just a berry.”
“Aren’t holly berries poisonous?”
She paused and squinted up at the sky, palming her mouth in thought. “I have no idea.”
Johnny shrugged. “You could try it and see. Hey, there were food tasters back in King Arthur’s court and stuff. They tasted things to see if they were poisoned before they were served to the king.”
“Then you taste it, Sir Lancelot,” said Pete, thrusting the can in his direction, “and let me know if you die.”
Johnny stepped back as if the can were a spider.
“You are the biggest wuss,” Pete growled, balling up a fist. “That’s two for flinching.”
“Aww.” Johnny hugged himself protectively and Pete punched him twice in the shoulder, hard enough to almost knock him over. He balanced on one foot, rubbing his arm. “Jesus! Do you have to hit so hard? That’s like the third time this week.”
Pete poked the crosswalk button. “Do you want me to carry you across the street, or do you think you can do it?”
Johnny sulked, his hands jammed into his pockets.
The light changed and Pete trudged across the street, the others in tow. Wayne followed them, looking around at all the shops. He’d have to talk Leon into bringing him back here—especially to the pet shop. He needed a new pet, he thought, walking backward, checking it out. Maybe a dog. Yeah, that’s the ticket. A new dog for a new house. That creaky old house needs a happy dog living in it. Tappity-tap-tap on his cellphone.
theres a pet store in town
Oh yea?
Yep. can we go when u get home?
Maybe this weekend. what u wanna go to pet store 4?
can we get a dog?
we’ll talk about it.
There was some ineffable quality to his father’s texts that Wayne couldn’t quite place, something low and dim, or maybe it was an absence of warmth, an uncharacteristic dismissiveness.
In the time since his mother had passed, he had become finely attuned to his father’s moods, and he seemed to have developed the ability to glean his father’s demeanor from nothing more than a few words on a cellphone screen.
When you’ve had to wake up your drunk father and make him go to bed a few times, you learn to anticipate his lows. Sort of like an earthquake scientist watching a seismograph for the tell-tale jags and spikes that preceded disaster.
You doin ok today dad?
The cellphone didn’t buzz again for a long minute, long enough for Wayne to look up and sight-see a little more.
They were even with a barber shop, and a man inside was getting his hair cut by a dainty Korean woman. She had already buzzed his head into a brush cut, and was now scraping shaving cream off his neck with a long, curved razor. The blade flashed in dusty sunlight.
yeah i’m doin alright I guess. as long as I stay busy its all good.
A moment later Leon added,
I could use a dirnk but if I’m hre @ school I cant get 1. So thats good 4 me.
Wayne answered,
Yeah thats good. U do what u got to. I’ll b fine @ home. I can take care of myself.
He put the cellphone in his jacket pocket and took out the ring on the ballchain around his neck. Lifting his mother’s wedding band, he peered through it at the world, and at Pete’s broad back. Can you see my new friends?
Something about doing this lightened him, made him feel like he was sharing his eyes with his mom, as if the ring were a camera, transmitting some ethereal signal that she could see from wherever she was now, if that ‘wherever’ was Heaven.
“Here we are,” said Johnny Juan.
Through the ring, Wayne saw a big storefront picture window with superheroes painted on it: Spider-Man on the left, Batman on the right, both of them in action poses, swinging through the air. Over Spidey’s head was FISHER’S HOBBY SHOP, and over Batman’s was COMICS, BOOKS, TOYS & GAMES.
Warm sunlight streamed in through the Spidey and Batman paintings, leaking dim and dusty gold beams into the depths of the shop. The door chime tolled like a cathedral bell in the silence; it seemed they were the only customers in at the moment other than a gray cat curled into a ball on the windowsill.
“Hello?” called
Amanda.
The place had a generally musty smell of disuse, the action figures nearest the front door sealed in packages bleached green by countless days facing the sun. Most days probably passed without seeing many customers, outside of regulars and the people that came for Movie Night.
Shelves of games occupied the racks alongside the larger graphic novels and action figures: chess, Monopoly, Scattergories, Apples to Apples, esoteric card games he’d never heard of. A council of Halloween masks stared down at them with empty black eyes, perched at the tops of all the shelves—Jason’s hockey mask, Michael Myers’ white face, a warty pig-man, a grinning devil, Pennywise the clown, Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies.
An athletic black guy came out of a doorway stirring what appeared to be a milkshake. “Hey, kids. How’s it going?” he asked, walking over to the counter and taking up position behind a laptop.
Directly behind him was a showcase with a glass front, containing a vast array of dazzling knick-knacks and mementos: signed book jackets, DVD cases, and comic covers, a Freddy Krueger claw, and a veritable army of action figures still in their blister packs. The centerpiece was an uruk-hai cuirass, a vest of armor worn by the orcs in the Lord of the Rings movies, and if Wayne viewed it at the right angle he could see the silvery writing where someone had signed it with a Sharpie. Peter Jackson, probably. The chainmail underneath seemed older than Blackfield itself.
Pete bellied up to the counter as if he were a cowboy in a saloon, putting his chubby elbows on the glass. Underneath was a carpeted display with rare cards: baseball, Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, Garbage Pail Kids. “Hey, Fish. It’s goin all right, how are you?”
“About as good as good gets. Been a while, Petey boy. What brings you?” Fish chugged half the thick, sludgy milkshake in one go and put it down, waking up the computer.
“We’re showing the new guy around.”
“His name is Wayne. But we call him Bruce Wayne,” said Johnny Juan, clapping his diminutive friend on the shoulder. “Him and his dad just moved here from…?”
“Chicago.”
“Welcome to the middle of nowhere, Batman,” said the man. He wore a thin blue sweater that hugged every muscle as tightly as a wetsuit. “My name is Fisher. Fisher Ellis.” He offered a hand to shake. “Everybody calls me Fish.”
Wayne shook it. “Wayne Parkin.”
“Sweet name. Well, welcome to my little slice of America,” said Fish, gesturing around the shop with a sweeping hand. He leaned over the laptop and started typing furiously. “I’ve got to do a little work. If you need anything, gimme a holler.”
Wandering away, Pete and Johnny took to a table of boxed comic books, cultural geologists flipping through sedimentary layers of superhero history. Amanda simply stood next to the counter, her arms folded, looking uncomfortable. At first Wayne thought about browsing the action figures, but he wanted to know more about Fish and the shop. The fact that it was so empty of people was nagging him.
“So what are you doin?” he asked, pointing at the computer. “For work. On the computer. Do you—” The question felt rude, but he couldn’t think of any other way to put it. “Do you sell anything? I mean, it doesn’t really look like many people come in here.”
Fish smiled. “I’m actually a director of IT for a postal company.”
Turning the laptop around, he flashed the kids a screen full of cryptic text. Wayne thought it looked like the green code from The Matrix turned sideways. “I work from home, doing programming and things like that. ‘Home’, in this instance, being my hobby shop. It lets me be here at the shop and still do work for these guys.” Wagging a finger around the room, he explained, “This stuff is really for sale, but, yeah, I don’t do much business. It’s more like…like my personal stuff-room, you know? …You ever heard of George Carlin?”
Wayne couldn’t say that he was familiar.
“Well, old Carlin was a comedian, did a lot of stand-up. He had a bit about making money and buying stuff. ‘A house is just a place to put stuff,’ he’d say. ‘Bigger houses are more room, to put more stuff.’ And I don’t have any room at my house for it, so here it is. This is my Room of Stuff.” He picked up the milkshake and toasted the air with the cup. “If I’m going to have all this Stuff, people might as well see it. What good is Stuff if nobody knows you got it?” He downed the rest of the shake. “Besides, I like the company. The shop keeps me social and out of my apartment.”
“Oh!” gasped Amanda, darting over to one of the displays and picking up an action figure package. “I didn’t know you had Adventure Time.”
The gray cat jumped up on the counter and went to stick its nose in Fish’s cup, but he took it away and stroked the cat’s back. “No ma’am, that’s not for you. You already get enough protein, you don’t need anymore.”
“I want to have a shop like this one day,” said Wayne.
“You look like the kind of man that would take care of a shop like this. Treat it right.”
A sheepish pride blossomed in Wayne’s chest at being called a man, and a grin crept across his face. “It’s really awesome. Maybe when you get tired of running this place and retire, I can inherit it.”
Fish studied him for a long moment, then tipped the cup at him. “I tell you what. How do you feel about working up here after school a couple days a week? You could stand right here at the counter for an hour or two while I catch up on my code work, and on Thursdays you can help me get set up for Movie Night. Maybe I can start doing em on the weekends, too.”
“Are you for real?” asked Wayne, incredulous. “That—that would be so cool!”
“All you gotta do is guess what superhero I’m thinking of.” Fish touched a fingertip to his temple. “It’s my favorite superhero. You get three guesses.”
Wayne eyed the front window. “Spider-Man?”
“No, but you’re on the right side. It ain’t neither of them guys up there on the windows, though.”
“Can I get a hint?”
“Umm. Grass.” Fish tapped on the glass counter in thought. “Grass, frogs, and avocados. What do those three things have in common?”
Wayne considered them in turn, picturing them in his mind, chewing on his lip in concentration. “They’re all green?”
Fish nodded deferentially.
“Green Lantern?”
“Nope.”
“The Hulk?”
Pounding his fist on the edge of the counter in feigned defeat, Fish pointed at him and said, “You got it. Man, I knew I made that too easy. What was I thinking?”
Wayne threw his fists in the air and Pete golf-clapped. “To be fair,” he said, “there’s only like two green superheroes, and one of em is DC.”
“Swamp Thing. Martian Manhunter. Beast Boy. Gamora. You gotta do your research, man.”
“Shoot, you know a lot about comic books.”
Fish smirked. “Okay. Bonus points if you can tell me what makes the Incredible Hulk so incredible. Why the Hulk is my favorite.”
The man behind the counter was chiseled but slim, with a triangular neck and an overhanging shelf of muscle across his chest. That’s an easy one, thought Wayne, confident in his answer. “Because he’s so strong.”
“He is strong. But that’s not why he’s incredible.”
“Because he’s so big?”
“Nope,” said Fish, leaning on the counter, his dark eyes pinning Wayne to the spot. “It’s because the Hulk adapts.”
Flexing his bulging arms, he explained. “The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets. It’s the stress, y’know, it’s what makes him mad. The rage is just a by-product.”
Fish spoke with the magnetic didact focus of a self-help guru, his words clear and precise. Between every sentence, he paused for a beat to let his words sink in. His energetic hands did as much speaking as his mouth did, cupping and flinging every third word. “Everybody has to deal with stress. Hulk deals with it by becoming stronger than the stress. He soaks up the energy around him and channel
s it into his strength, uses it to go one step above the problem at hand.
“You hit him with a hundred tons of force?” He punched at the air, slapping his bicep to give the strike a theatrical oomph. “Hulk hits you with two hundred tons of force. …He’s not my favorite because he’s strong. He’s my favorite because he never lets a challenge beat him, he’s always ready to go that one-step-farther than the other guy.”
“Yeah. Yeah!” Wayne nodded, fidgeting as the story soaked in. “I get you. I get you.”
His father was pretty much the only adult that Wayne ever had conversations with that felt as intellectually equal as this one, with this well-spoken man and his superhero fixation, and now he felt a bit antsy—almost patronized, except he knew Fish was being earnest. It was a bit awkward, like being drafted into a stage performance in front of all his friends, but he liked it. Made him feel ten years older.
“Absolutely, you dig it?” Fish peered at his computer screen and rattled off a burst of typing. “And that’s my motto, man. Adapt and overcome. When life gives you a problem, you gotta adapt and be stronger, you know? Be the Hulk. Be better. Be bigger. Be badder.”
10
MARILYN FOUND ROY OUT back in the garden beating up the board fence with the weed-eater, his eyes shielded by his cheesy wrap-around redneck sunglasses. WHEEEER, WHEEEER, the trimmer-line cut through crabgrass and wild onions, tinting the air with a bitter green scent.
The secluded garden was massive, cutting deep into the encroaching forest. Impeccable landscaping occupied the majority of the space, a field of five one-hundred-yard wire fences, each one tangled in grapevines. Flanking the vineyard were shallow hillocks of purple dahlia and lavender, watched over by trees drooping with Texas mountain laurel.
The girls didn’t make their own wine anymore, too much of a hassle; these days with the internet they could very easily purchase much better wine, older stock, and to be honest Roy was a bit of an idiot and couldn’t be trusted with the delicate processes of producing a fine red.
The aforementioned idiot was at the very back near the dryad, the bright late-afternoon sun shining on his copper-and-salt hair. He cut the weed-eater off as she approached, pulling plugs out of his ears. “You look like you’ve had a hard week, dear,” she told him, her long hands clasped together over her belly like a gentleman vicar. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? Get started on the weekend a little early.”