Unstoppable Moses

by Tyler James Smith

  “Way ahead of you, man.”

  “No, no, we act like we just got here and found the car because someone stole—just get out and look panicked and out of breath.”

  He gave me a dull “That’s it?” look before dropping his shoulders and screaming as he whipped the door open, yelling about goddamned thieves.

  “Not hysterical! Do not act hysterical!” I said, grunting, as I climbed out of the car.

  We stood next to Freddie while “Sweet Child o’ Mine” started up again. The divine band was framed by two enormous, unlit bowling pins. From the parking lot, the music sounded crisper than it had from the roof as it expanded above us.

  The encroaching red and blue strobe lights from the cop car turned our shadows into giant black cutouts against the doors and windows of Pinz! Our negatives flashed, growing and framed by red, then blue, then red, as the cops came careening to a stop in front of us, and I swear that for just a second, in the epileptic chaos of the lights, it looked like the music and lights lined up. For one perfect moment the gods and the world and us played together, all lit by the same uneven glow, and when the music swelled and the lights went brighter, we were looking at a miracle.

  When the music started warping and the lights we’d strung up started popping, sending sparks raining down on the flag and the pallets, I realized we weren’t only being busted for stealing Rock ’n’ Roll Jesus—we were also looking at arson charges. The green flag had ignited and dropped, draping around the band. It brought Buddha and Vishnu together in a warm embrace before the flaming polyester melted through and through, igniting the deities and the pallets we’d bolted them to.

  The music around us became police sirens and wheels grinding deep into snow.

  Somewhere Charlie was yelling, and in that somewhere, my heart was pumping hot pulses of clean and utterly genuine panic in my throat and ears.

  And I remembered Charlie asking about the smell.

  And I remembered who was standing next to me.

  And I thought, No fucking way did you just get me to burn a building down.

  The flames licked up from the wooden base, growing with each violent gust of December wind. The heat circled Jesus and Lou Reed, intense enough to light the end of Jesus’s guitar and droop his pointing arm until it addressed me and me alone. Lou Reed toppled, sending tendrils of smoke rising past the yarmulke that was singeing and lighting.

  I felt my gloves reach up and grab two fistfuls of hat. I clicked over to autopilot as the officer spilled out of the squad car and demanded we turn around and get on our knees. Hands already on my head, a gun pointed at me for the second time in my life, and my body trembling from the Brain Evulsion, I turned. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Charlie was smiling.

  Even after all the shit Charlie had pulled over the years—even after the many, many times I’d seen that smile—my first thought was that he was smiling because he knew, somehow, that it was going to be okay. But as we dropped to our knees, I realized what that smile really meant.

  “You fucking didn’t,” I said.

  “I did,” he said, awestruck, like even he didn’t believe what he was seeing.

  He’d finally pulled off the special kind of stupid and reckless stunt he’d always talked about.

  In front of us, I could hear the cop barking into his radio that he needed emergency response vehicles. He cut himself off and yelled at us to get on our stomachs. I watched, twisted around with my hands still on my head, as Jesus sank into the flames. Jesus sank how you’d imagine a ship sinking: straight down, permanent, and hugely silent, vertically into the pool of nothingness beneath. In the paradoxically sped-up and slowed-down moment, he eventually melted into an amorphous, bubbling pool of smoldering plastic where all the gods we had thought to steal swirled together into one holy and indefinable mass.

  My blood was molten lead and every movement was a heavy gesture through air that had gone thick. The heat from the building was starting to find us; it caressed our faces and made our kneeling shadows shudder in fiery prayer.

  Sometimes, when you’ve just inadvertently lit a bowling alley, a handful of gods, and a boom box on fire just a couple days before Christmas, and a police officer is pointing a loaded weapon at you just like your cousin did nearly ten years prior, you can’t help laughing.

  You laugh because you’re a miracle and bullets don’t slow you down and because the more you try not to laugh the more you can’t stop. You laugh especially hard because you fell for your cousin’s shit the way you’ve always fallen for it. You laugh because you realize you’re laughing when you should be crying or screaming.

  I heard my voice stumbling over words, trying to articulate to the officer that it wasn’t what it looked like, and felt my legs slowly insisting themselves to a standing position since standing had to look less criminal than lying prone in a bowling alley parking lot. The officer pointed his service weapon at me and demanded I get down.

  If the fire had been part of Charlie’s stupid, reckless plan, then what the cop did next was something my cousin had failed to imagine: the officer took a step forward, tensed his shoulders, and readjusted his grip on his gun, moving like he was a half second away from pulling the trigger.

  And then Charlie’s voice, which, even through the roaring flames, wasn’t filled with the absurd laughter I’d expected. It was the tone of someone who’d expected to watch the fire on the news, not in person, and not with a gun trained on us. It wasn’t the tone of someone who expected a gun pointed at his best friend and cousin.

  The tone was rattled. The kind of tone I hadn’t heard from him since we were eight and I was all but dead.

  Charlie’s voice cut through the heat as he stood up too, taking a step toward the officer with his own hands up. I didn’t hear what he was saying because the officer was faster and louder than him: Guns ’n’ Roses warbled and drowned in the fire as peaceful, loving Buddha expanded and burst and the startled officer shot Charlie in the head.

  TWO: MIDWEST TRAJECTORY

  “WHY?” THE KID ASKED AGAIN. He wasn’t older than eleven or younger than eight, since the kids on the bus were exclusively between third and fifth grade.

  “Because I have to be,” I said back to him mechanically while I stared, stagnant and cramped, out the window.

  “Why?”

  “Because the judge said so.”

  “Why?” he said, musically and shittily.

  “Because she said I was lucky enough to be a minor and she determined I wasn’t dangerous and because if I don’t prove I’m a responsible member of society, then my scholarships will be shot down and I’ll end up at GCC and working in Guthrie for the rest of my life,” I monotoned to the window, past my thin reflection, using the exact words the judge had used. I decided not to mention the irony of punishing me for acting dangerously by putting me around a bunch of innocent children.

  The other little kids on the bus were mostly talking with each other, sleeping, or being aggressively ignored by the teenage Camp Buddies. Except for the kid sitting next to me. Behind us, there were two more busloads of kids and Buddies2—a busload for one of each of the counties making up the tri-county combo: Lake, Cook, and DuPage County.

  “Why?”

  “Because if there’s a school that can reject you based on a criminal record, it’s Duke. And Duke is a place you want to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re picky. Like really, really picky. And because now I’m not necessarily someone they would still want,” I said, not explaining that I didn’t care whether or not it was Duke anymore, which is where I’d always thought I’d go, as long as it was Anywhere but Here. That I would take The University of There in an instant, even if it meant pulling myself apart to get it. That it could be a crap college in some small town, in another state, hours from a city I’d never heard of, so long as it wasn’t in Guthrie.

  “Wh—”

  “Because my cousin and I made some bad decisions.”


  “Why—”

  “Because they didn’t seem like bad decisions at the time.”

  “Why?” the kid asked, steeling himself. He had gotten tired of the Why game thirty miles back, and had stopped until we’d pulled over at a travel center, where he’d bought a Red Bull from a vending machine. At some point it had stopped being a game to him and had transformed into a battle of wits.

  It was a battle I wasn’t going to lose.

  “Because we were over-caffeinated and spent too much time watching adventure movies and because we didn’t plan for things going balls-up.” In the window, I saw his face crinkle up a little, like he wasn’t used to people saying things like “balls-up” around his baby ears. “Just balls to the fucking sky,” I said, watching him to see if he’d go running to the front of the bus to tell the hulking driver about me.

  The driver looked like an aging bodybuilder who’d fallen on hard times and had to supplement his allowance for bronzing creams and Heavy Things to Pick Up by driving children to and from museums and camps. Exactly the kind of person who had enough misplaced frustration to pick me up and bend me in half over his head when Why Kid inevitably went screaming up the bus aisle to tell on me.

  And who knows, maybe getting theatrically murdered by an angry bus driver was a fitting end for someone who was supposed to be smart and supposed to be a superhero but who wasn’t smart enough or heroic enough to stop his cousin from getting shot.

  When Why Kid didn’t, I yawned and stretched the hand that was supporting my head against the window.

  “Why?” he said, recovering.

  “Because we were unstoppable,” I said. Outside, the Midwest ticked by like a scale model on treads: barn, barn, field, field, field, field, corn, cows, barn, billboard about God, field, field, field. We’d driven out of Illinois, skirted the top of Indiana’s industrial corridor, and hooked up into Michigan, due north. “We had plans.”

  “Why?”

  “What.”

  “What?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What?”

  “You meant ‘what.’”

  “Why?” Why Kid asked, visibly becoming frustrated and tangled up in his own stupid game.

  “Because why isn’t the question you really want to ask me. ‘Why did you have plans?’ is probably more nihilistic than you meant it to be,” I said against my palm.

  “What, then?” he asked, exasperated.

  I looked over at him. “What were our plans?”

  “Yeah, what plans?” he said, exactly like someone not old enough to add, “Jesus fucking Christ, just answer the question.”

  I almost said, “We wanted to give our miserable little town a jolt, something new for them to care about besides politics. To get them to look up from their fucking phones. We just happened to have different ideas about how to do it. I wanted a town full of people to see all of our gods playing Guns ’n’ Roses together. We’d bring people together through something absurd and beautiful. Charlie wanted everything to burn though, and I guess it all kind of backfired,” and when I’d pause to let him think I was done and when he took a breath to ask me “Why?” again, I’d say, “Because it turns out you can’t ever really know someone. Even your best fucking friend, who is also your cousin. We just wanted to do something big, and funny, and ridiculous; instead, a bunch of bad shit happened, and I’ve spent almost a year wondering how fucking dead I have to be, given the fact that I haven’t cried even one time.”

  I almost said, “You’re not talking to a bad person, kid, you’re talking to a goddamn robot.”

  Instead I said, “It involved a bowling alley and Guns ’n’ Roses.”

  Twenty minutes later he’d given up or forgotten about asking “Why?” and had moved onto the real, burning questions locked away in his fourth-grader brain. “But why aren’t there seat belts? My mom says I always have to wear my seat belt,” the kid said to me.

  Talking to him wasn’t half as bad as having to listen to the Buddy sitting a few rows behind us. He’d loudly introduced himself as Jeffrey to the kids sitting around him before narrating every Podunk landmark we passed. This kid was ten times better than hearing another word from the sentient travel magazine behind us. The worst part was that he didn’t need to be everything that he was so loudly being. There were plenty of students and Buddies alike sleeping or talking quietly. Jeffrey was just making it known that he was the type of person whose own mother always wanted to tell him, Goddamn, dude, just shut up for like five minutes.

  “Right, I get that. What I’m saying is that your mom is wrong.” His forehead scrunched up and he looked like a person who’d gazed into the abyss and found the single most terrifying secret that the universe had to offer. “No, I mean, she’s mistaken. About this. Yes, you should wear your seat belt. But it’s different on a bus.”

  “But why?” he asked, more legitimately than before.

  “Okay, do you actually want to know? I can give you a grown-up answer, but…” I raised my eyebrows at him, eyebrows that said, “It’s going to be full of big words that you aren’t going to understand and then you’re just going to ask ‘why’ again but I’m not going to explain it all over just because you were dumb and didn’t listen.” The kid’s face went deadly serious and he nodded, ready to receive whatever extremely confidential and adult information I was about to give him. “All right. Seat belts wouldn’t do much of anything on a bus, so they rely on compartmentalization. It—see? Huge words. Compartmentalization is the seats being so close together and with high backs that absorb impact. Specifically—”

  “Do you ever have to pee so bad it makes you mad? Like just absolutely livid?” one of the other Camp Buddies, four or five rows up and within earshot of the bus driver, said. He was not-quite-yelling to his friends who were sitting on the other side of the aisle. They were some of the few Buddies that didn’t have their Buddy shirts on. I looked down at the brightly colored Buddy Shirt that hugged me like claustrophobia and tried to imagine what kind of jokes Charlie would have made about it.

  The Buddy who had to pee was wearing a shirt that said, “WWJD” with a picture of John Denver giving a thumbs-up.

  The immense bus driver’s eyes flicked up in the rearview mirror, just long enough to betray that he was, unfortunately, listening. The abundantly hydrated Buddy went on with his pee spiel, much to the rolling laughter of the little kid sitting in the window seat next to him. The kid had a hatchet-job haircut—like it had been done in the dark, in the kitchen, by a mother with a grudge.

  “It’s actually beginning to boil inside of my body, that’s how mad it’s making me. It’s just going to come out as yellow steam. It’s infur—Furinate! I’m going to furinate as soon as this bus slows under fifty. Like Speed, but with pee. Peed.” I recognized the John Denver Buddy as the one who’d bought three Red Bulls immediately before I got to talking with the Why Kid. The empty cans were a pyramid of bad decisions at his feet. He combed his dark hair out of his face with his hand, then looked over at the kid sitting next to him, making sure he was still smiling.

  The bus driver was shaking his head, but not in a “Man, do I love my job and these wacky kids” kind of way. I was going to continue explaining compartmentalization to the kid next to me, but my physics lesson couldn’t compare to this.

  “Toilet’s in the back,” the driver said to the mirror.

  “That?” the Buddy said, pointing back without turning around. “I’m not falling for that. I’m not going into your execution tube. One press of a button and I get launched out of the bottom of the bus with my pants around my ankles.”

  The bus driver didn’t say anything, but his bleary, jaundiced eyes told the Buddy to go endlessly fuck himself.

  Pee Guy had black hair and dark skin, and was handsome in that unintentional “Yes, this is legitimately bedhead” kind of way.

  “Just go pee in the thing, Faisal!” said the Girl Buddy sitting across the aisle from Pee Guy, turning and motioning toward the b
athroom in the back of the bus. She was wearing an oversize Evanston Panthers Class of ’18 hoodie that didn’t quite manage to hide her frenzy of brown hair. When she turned and her eyes landed on mine, they lingered in a flash of recognition. She spun back around and leaned over on her knee to Faisal, who nodded for a second and slipped back into the forward and upright position. After a beat, he dramatically stretched and looked back at me. The girl slapped him in the ribs and his hands shot out in a “What?” gesture. The Buddy sleeping next to her against the window shuffled around a bit, somehow managing to tune out all of the bus noise—I could only see the back of his head from where I was sitting, but he’d slept through the last pit stop we’d made and I’d gotten a look at him. He slept like the kind of person who could fall asleep without a second thought on a bus full of wolf-children. His surprisingly crisp button-down shirt and side-parted haircut made him look Wall Street, even while sleeping.

  I knew they recognized me because it had been ten months since the bowling alley, and when it turned out that the community didn’t take kindly to their gods being publicly burned, we’d hit the news and the town had hit us back. The first leg of the ordeal had been heavily televised because the facts weren’t all in and everyone was outraged and demanding to know why we’d done it.

  I cleared my throat and tried to figure out how to best hide behind the hand I was leaning on. It was still technically possible that the camp admins would decide my best and most effective job over the next week would be doing the camp’s dirty work, somewhere tucked away where nobody could see. Something that didn’t involve me talking to people any more than I needed to.

  But I knew it was too late. They had already seen me, picked up my scent, and they’d be the same as everyone else I’d dealt with since Charlie.

  They, the good God-fearing people of Guthrie, had insisted that what we did was a hate crime, even when I’d told the police and reporters and the lawyers and the judge and my parents and anyone who would listen that we were trying to be funny, and maybe even do something good. Stupidly.