“End of the line,” he says. “We’re a short walk to the town of Lynnbrook, Ohio. Kang and I are heading there to pick up some supplies, but I believe I owe you a pizza. Afterward, we’ll put you on a bus to wherever you’d like to go.”
We’re making it! I give Arthur’s arm a squeeze. He grins at me. We’ve got a badass head start, people. Ohio and California aren’t that far apart. I can’t wait to see Burton Trotsky. What did I tell you, punk? I’ll say. Who did you think you were talking to?
Before I can climb down the ladder, Seabrook stops me.
“I assume you’re a man of your word,” he says. He hoists his eyebrows.
“What?”
“You’ll be telling your father about the success of this venture?”
“Of course,” I say. “Why wouldn’t I?”
I mean it too. The Tamzene is a freakshow, no doubt, but it really works. And once His Eminence scoops this little beauty up and shows his constituents what it can do without using a drop of gas, the next election is in the bag. And that means fewer campaign stops where yourstruly would have to put on a dorky suit.
“That’s great,” Seabrook says, smiling. “It’s been a pleasure.”
We climb down onto the pebbles and rusting cans at the edge of the river. Kang, leading the way, walks into the woods. I’m straining to catch a glimpse of the town through these big dancing monster trees. I see nothing, but I hear a hissing noise—an electric buzzing, maybe a few cars.
We’re not more than a few yards in when a man jumps out and scares the living shit out of me.
He’s bare chested and speckled all over with bits of straw, paper, and brown shit, and a long, matted, grayish-brown beard brushes his stomach. A wild look parts the place in the beard where his mouth should be and continues up into his eyes, which are crazy and rolling around.
A full minute seems to pass. A few birds squawk. The river gurgles.
“Wraaaaaiths,” the man says. It’s a horror show voice, a hiss from lungs coated in something thick and drippy.
As if that’s not enough to wig us all out, he hefts a piece of wood with a sharp stone point and a few pigeon feathers tied to the end and threatens us with it.
Well, Kang is like double this guy’s size, so I feel like he’ll push him over and we’ll get on with our day, no problem. But then another guy leaps up out of the brush, also with a spear.
The Tamzene is a short jog back behind us, and I’m all for turning around and finding another way to town. I’m not alone, I realize, because Seabrook has also turned, but then a few more of these half-naked guys crawl out of the woods.
“Just take what you want,” Seabrook says. He plunges a hand into his pocket, but one of the men jabs him in the throat with his spear.
And now it’s too late to run for it because there are ten of them, waving spears and circling around us, mumbling about wraiths in this low, guttural drone. Fucks me up. It’s like that Ambling Corpses show come to life.
A guy with a crooked anarchy symbol prison-tattooed on his arm steps out of the pack. The other guys go quiet. He has mangy blond hair that’s turning into natural dreds from no washing. He’s ripped, but not Abercrombie model ripped—muscles cling sharply to his bones. He circles around us, pushing his buddy’s spear away from Seabrook’s throat.
“The fuck you doing here?” he says.
“We’re just trying to get to town,” Seabrook says.
He leans in real close and sniffs Seabrook. Then he makes a face like he doesn’t like the smell.
“This is private property,” he says, never taking his eyes off the doctor.
“My apologies,” Seabrook says. “We’ll turn around and get out of your hair.”
The blond guy shakes his head. “No, no, no, no, no,” he says. “Too late for that.”
He wanders around to each of us in turn and leans in wicked close to me. The smell! A hundred locker rooms and a hundred port-a-potties stirred into pudding send a shockwave through my fear-shriveled stomach.
“Look,” Seabrook says, “we’ll give you whatever you want.”
“You ain’t got nothing I want, wraith,” the blond guy says. He smiles. I wish he wouldn’t. He’s gumming two broken pieces of cement I realize are his teeth.
“Fellas,” he says, “let’s take these boys to Bob.”
we learn about the shells of the sweetworm
Burton Trotsky has this mad funny video called Bumfights where homeless guys whale on each other. The other Paste Eaters and I love that DVD. It’s a howler—toothless winos and crackheads duking it out for cheap liquor. This one time, we thought about maybe making our own Bumfights on Trotsky’s Canon XL, but chickened out when these two assholes from LA got busted for smacking homeless people around with baseball bats and said they were inspired by the same flick. People are so sensitive. Those videos are mad funny.
I’ve never seen a real-life homeless person up close. Every now and then, I see a couple from the window of the Bentley on the way to Primrose, but they’re just part of the background, brown and green dudes I’m just happy to be separated from by a pane of glass.
These Ohio guys look like the guys from Bumfights: hair sprouting out all over, jagged shards for teeth, grime, and the white parts of their eyes all yellow. There are some differences, though. First of all, as far as I know, the Bumfights bums and Philly’s homeless don’t travel in packs. Second, the men on the river are dressed weird. Even for bums. They wear pants, but they knot the legs around their waists and let the waists of the pants cover their junk, so their asses are exposed. Dozens of pale, hairy balloons lead us through the woods. Third, there’s the jewelry. Around each of their necks, looped through a piece of twine, are at least twenty crushed soda cans apiece—Pepsi, Sunkist, and Coke. I’ve seen bums picking up soda cans before, but never wearing them. And fourth, I’ve seen bums pushing shopping carts or cradling paper bags, but I’ve never seen them toting spears.
I’ve also never heard of a boat mugging before. It’d look freaky on CNN: “Senator Mortimer Brubaker’s son killed in a boat mugging in Ohio.”
There’s a hoard of them. One points a spear at Kang, whose eyes have gone crazy, and his muscles ropier than ever. The blond one has a spear on Seabrook, and another is threatening Arthur—who has gone all Rain Man—and me.
I’m thinking: Select button. Arsenal. Gatling gun. A and B buttons tapped three times with the trigger on. I leap, hold down the trigger, and spin, and the Gatling gun mows all of them down in a cloud of vaporized blood.
They’re all dressed the same: soda can necklaces and jeans, or flannel shirts worn as belts to cover their privates. They march us at spearpoint into the woods.
Arthur glances at the spears and trips over roots, skinning his knees. Kang looks wicked pissed, shifting his eyes from side to side and walking with muscles tensed. Seabrook stops and tries talking to them, but then they jab him with a spear and he keeps walking.
As for yourstruly, I can’t seem to find my pain and fear reservoir, and all the songs on the mental iPhone are coming up File Not Found. Sometimes when you get really scared you don’t think about the situation you’re in—like, what is this ever-growing group of smelly homeless guys going to do with us in these woods?—and you focus on something else. Well, people, for me the twenty-twenties can’t stop lasering these crushed soda can necklaces. There are black dudes, Chicanos, Asians, and white guys among them, and the only thing they all have in common is their nasty uncleanliness and that crazy-ass bling.
“Doctor Seabrook?” I whisper as we march along.
“What?”
“Why are they wearing soda cans around their necks?”
He looks at me like I have orcs crawling out of my nostrils. “That’s what you want to know?” he whispers. “Why are they wearing aluminum cans?”
The blond freako must have heard. He gives me a nasty look. “What do you want to know?” he asks. He pushes through the others and stands in front of me.
&
nbsp; “Chill, man,” I say.
Kang turns and lowers his shoulders like he’s going to rush the blonde, but one of the others points a spear at his throat.
The blonde holds the stone point of his spear a fraction of an inch from my nose.
“Not cool,” I say, burying my face into Seabrook’s stomach. “Not cool, man.”
“You know what’s good for you,” he says, “you’ll shut your yap about cans.” With his free hand, he cradles the clunking, rust-colored caterpillar he has tied around his neck. “These are the shells of the sweetworm.”
Some of shirtless guys snicker. Blond guy grins up at them, showing his little gray spade teeth. I don’t get it. At any rate, I guess the blond dude feels he’s adequately terrorized me, because he pulls away and lowers his spear.
We continue into the woods until we can’t hear the river anymore. They keep us on a path of sorts. Ferns and briars scrape us as we walk, but we don’t have to scramble over any stumps or fallen limbs, and the forest’s thicker growth rises up on either side. Birds and bugs and other monsters scream.
There’s also that other sound, the noise I heard whispering when we first got off the boat. It comes from a long way off—barely a hiss. I hardly notice it at first, but soon it’s clear as an electric guitar chord and sounds just as familiar.
After a while the trees peter out, and we reach a big clearing that stretches about the length of a football field. In the center of the clearing, towering nearly as high as the trees, is a collection of charred logs, roped together in what once was a big bonfire. Next to it is a man in a cage. The cage is a dome of chicken wire with pointy ends that have been shoved into the ground. The man, a sickly looking guy with red hair, loops his fingers into the wire and stares at us as we enter the camp. He’s a little better dressed than the bums who took us hostage. That is to say he wears his clothes normally, legs in pant legs and shirt buttoned over his chest.
Surrounding the bonfire are row upon row of cardboard boxes and packaging containers. On some of the flaps are brand names like Whirlpool and Kenmore. The boxes have been set on their sides and appointed like homes—rotting cushions, rags, and other junk spill from their mouths.
On the opposite side of the clearing, a large pile of these packing crates stands nearly as tall as the bonfire.
Between the rows of cardboard boxes, there must be a hundred of these homeless people. They’re dressed the same as the guys who took us, although the women cover their boobs by knotting shirts around their chests. They dart in and out of boxes or stand talking to one another while others sit around sharpening their spears.
When we march into the clearing, the pack of derelicts and winos stops and stares at us.
we meet shwo-rez
The dudes with the spears march us into a central corridor between the boxes. The other bums step out of the way, staring at us like we’re a freak show. The center of town is hot and close, and I might hurl from the smell of sweat pressing in from all sides.
Nobody says a word. A freckled woman with red hair that falls down to her waist clutches a naked baby to her boobs. A bony old man with hair sprouting from nearly every inch of skin chews on God knows what as he watches us, never once blinking. Filthy kids—some probably about my age—wrapped only in T-shirts or pants, who had moments before been playing some sort of game with what looked like the remnants of a baseball, stop and stare at me like I’m something sick.
No plasma screens. No iPhones. No iPads.
It’s unreal.
It occurs to me, people, that maybe it isn’t real. Maybe it’s TV’s version of real. Follow me here. Maybe it’s reality TV—maybe like another Bumfights. And they can’t talk to outsiders because that’s part of the contract. Or maybe they’re the contestants, and it’s one of those shows where to win you have to dress in garbage, refuse to bathe, and eat grubs and worms.
“George!” hollers the man in the cage. “This is crazy, George!”
One of the hunter dudes hisses at the man. “Shut up, Clarence,” he says. “This don’t concern you.”
“Come on, show some pride, now!” the man hollers again. “Ain’t no need to do what he says. This is crazy, and you know it!”
“I said shut up and mind your own,” the hunter says. The blond leader looks at him like he’s pissed, and he quiets down.
As we pass through the cardboard box town, people drop what they’re doing and follow us. Men drop their tools, women clutch their kids, and, never taking their eyes off us, fall behind us in a trance.
I still can’t spot the cameras.
Our silent parade makes its way up the path toward the tall pile of boxes on the opposite end of the field. There’s no noise but the yelping and tittering of the things in the woods, along with that hissing noise I still can’t place.
By the time we arrive at the big pile, the entire town is following us. Someone has stacked the crates one on top of another and then fastened them together at the sides with sharpened twigs bent like staples. Together they make a big house with no windows. The sides are scratched or punctured. Rainwater has turned them white with mildew.
The blonde raps on the side of one of the crates.
From inside the box house, a man’s voice says, “Who knocks?”
“Yellow-Hunter,” the blonde says. “We come to see him.”
A flap opens and a short man with a few wisps of gray hair sprouting from his temples steps out. A well-fed old bum—a round, hairy belly bulges over a flannel shirt, which he’s tied over his waist to cover himself. The wrinkles on his forehead are pursed like he’s pissed at first, but when he sees us, he gapes. He and the blond guy mumble to each other, and then he goes back into the box and closes the flap.
We wait. I look over at Arthur, who is rocking back and forth at the waist with his eyes fixed on the tips of those spears—unless there’s a noise from the forest, and then he looks off in that direction. Kang grips his shoulder as if holding Arthur upright. Seabrook’s head hasn’t stopped moving since we arrived in the village; he cranes his neck to look at the town, then up at the mounds of packing crates. He doesn’t look frightened—he didn’t even look frightened when that storm almost sank his boat. He just looks mega pissed. As for yourstruly, I’ve stopped trying to stuff things down in the pain and fear reservoir. I still hear the same hissing noise—that soft buzzing way off in the distance. I know I’ve heard it before. It drowns out the crazy freaks around us, the sweat smells, the reality TV show set we are stuck on, and the pointy spears.
Then the flap opens and the gray-haired man appears.
He says: “You may enter the palace of Shwo-Rez.”
WTF, right? But we have no time to think about it, because they make us duck inside this stinking mound of cardboard. There’s enough room for Seabrook to stand up straight without hitting his head, but Kang has to stoop. The air is hotter and the BO thicker, and I can feel the food barreling upward as I stumble down the corridor. The gray-haired man shuts the flap, and all is dark except for shafts of light knifing in through the cardboard holes.
At the far end we walk back out, and we’re standing in a courtyard. The containers loom over everyone’s heads on all sides. There’s enough room for about forty people in here.
In front of us is a heap of old pillows. They look like somebody’s trash, which is fitting with the whole decor—some are mildewed and patched. Even the newer ones are torn and leaking silver wisps of stuffing.
Tall, pointed sticks are shoved around the edges of the pillows. Spitted upon these are beige spheres with long mops of yellow and brown hair hanging from them. I nearly go schitzo, but as we walk closer I breathe a little easier. They’re the heads of department store mannequins.
Sitting on the pillows is a chubby guy with long white hair. His jowls dangle and around his neck are many necklaces—more than I can count—made of twine and crushed beer and soda cans.
He looks familiar.
The man is smoking a cigarette, but as w
e approach his jaw goes slack, and the cigarette falls from his lips onto the pants he tied around his waist. He jumps up to stamp it out.
In his lap, he caresses the sides of an old cigar box. El Rey del Mundos. I recognize the brand. His Eminence gets those things by the gross. It’s supposed to be hush-hush because they’re illegal here.
“Horrors!” he says when we walk in. “Horrors!”
Towering right there behind him, like a mirage, is the skyline of a small city on a mountain. It must be several miles off. Skyscrapers climb, radio towers blink, church steeples point—the hissing noise I’m hearing is civilization. I haven’t heard it in days, since cruising past silent Pittsburgh didn’t count.
“A city!” I say. “What city is that?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Brubaker,” Seabrook murmurs. “It’s got to be Lynnbrook, Ohio.”
We are pushed closer. I fall into place beside Arthur, who hasn’t stopped being catatonic. Seabrook keeps craning his neck, his eyes bugging out. Kang’s muscles look like skin-covered piles of rocks. I would think twice about messing with him if I were one of the bums with the spears.
Yellow-Hunter steps up and bows from the waist and says some gibberish like, “Great and mighty Shwo-Rez, we have brought you four captive wraiths.” This might read just like Lord of the Rings, except Yellow-Hunter sounds like a longshoreman.
Now I’m really thinking this is a reality show. Has to be. Nobody talks like that.
Then the gray-haired guy steps in and tells Shwo-Rez that it’s impossible because he and the “Shrub People” have proven that “wraiths” do not exist. He isn’t much more convincing than Yellow-Hunter, which is why reality TV jumped the shark, people—regular folks off the street are lousy actors.
The Shwo-Rez guy says that wraiths must exist because here we stand, and he waves at us.
The gray one, whom Shwo-Rez calls Gray-Aide, keeps saying we aren’t, because wraiths don’t exist. And Shwo-Rez doesn’t know what to think. They keep going on and on in circles until Shwo-Rez waves his arm and says they should chant until they figure out what’s what.
We Are All Crew Page 8