Mayhem (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 1)

by J. Davis Henry

  Man, this is incredible. Another clue to whatever the hell is going on.

  After a few raps with my knuckles and a reprimand from Jenny about not believing her mom, we walked back downstairs.

  Jenny’s mother greeted us with a smile that faded briefly as her eyes flicked a hesitant glance down the hall. Returning her attention to me, she twiddled her fingers in a friendly farewell and disappeared with her daughter into their apartment.

  I walked to the area that had distracted her. On the floor lay a puddle of fresh water. It hadn’t been there minutes before. I touched my finger to the liquid, verifying that it wasn’t more of the artist’s perfect ability to interpret reality. The air held the smell and taste of salty ocean. Looking up, the scene on the nearby door portrayed a pod of orcas cruising the surface of an inlet, sprays of water jetting forcefully from their blowholes.

  Chapter 17

  While smoking a jay with Ham, I told him about the amazing art at the Monster Alley building.

  “C’mon, man, check it out. It’s not too far.”

  “All right, let’s groove on over.”

  I couldn’t turn the doorknob, so I bounced my head around in front of the colored windows and poked the glass with my fingers, thinking they held the key of how to get in.

  “What the hell are you doing, Deets?”

  “There’s like a secret code of movement or something to unlock the door.”

  “What? You’re fucking weird, man. The door’s locked, that’s all.” He bounced his knuckles against the wood. “Man, never seen anything like this black stuff. Reminds me of a meteorite. And the glass, very cool.”

  “It looks like the aurora borealis. The iridescent sheen is odd, almost metallic.”

  “Yeah, like pigeon feathers or oily water.” Ham intensified his knocking. “There’s no buzzer or intercom.”

  I kept dancing my head and hands around at different angles and speeds, first in front of one panel, then the other.

  Ham gave the wood one last whack. “You sure this is worth looking at?”

  “The guy who bought your painting lives here.”

  “No shit, but so what? I don’t have to break in here to see my own work.”

  “You want to see something bizarre? Take a look at this.” I steered him towards the alley.

  “Goddamn. It’s the same alley as in my painting.”

  We sat across the street, waiting to see if anyone left or entered the building. Our conversation centered around dreams, psychic mysteries, and the creative energies that drove us to do our art. After relaying some of the oddities of my life since I saw the smoker in the alley, I mentioned the acid trip with Greg and the cleansing feather.

  “You telling me you’re Jesus Christ or some holy roller miracle worker?”

  “No, man. Listen. I’m saying that Santa led me to a park where this purple pigeon hung out. Later, the pigeon follows me and Greg seven flipping blocks. Walking, man. You ever see a pigeon walk seven blocks before? Then this same bird practically hands me a feather that looks exactly like the one I saw over Greg’s heart.”

  “Santa? What are you talking about? Oh, man. Santa? You were on LSD.”

  I waved away his response. “The feather’s made of some indescribable material and it’s beautiful. It felt amazing to hold, too, like purity itself.” I thought about the sequence of events and how much to reveal to Ham, lit a cigarette, and blew out a long stream of smoke. “After I saw your painting, I went to the alley and found the same bird. Dead. It looked like it had been killed, burned up in a sacrifice or something. Not much more than a few feathers left.”

  “What? How do you know it was the same bird?”

  “It was. I just know, man. Later, I find out Santa’s real name is Pigeon. He’s the guy that bought your painting. His door has a matching feather, made of the identical material, right there in that building.”

  “Maybe you’re just fucking crazy, Deets.”

  Chapter 18

  I couldn’t make any sense of the intertwined mysteries that had injected themselves into my life lately. My mind would go wild with confused possibilities. I escaped into the liberating stream of thought I underwent while drawing with ink or pencil, relieved I could temporarily unclog the seemingly impossible connections that were threading their way into my consciousness. I disappeared—from the streets, the bars, my friends—depending solely on my art to soothe the chaos in my head.

  Some early dawn, weeks later, I finished a seven-foot long colored drawing of a mountain range that appeared to be a sleeping giant. His craggy face looked as ancient and rugged as the rocks and crevices of earth’s oldest volcanic dreams. Atop the snowy peaks, dozens of women with monkey tails and cow horns danced erotically. A lone man lay in the foothills, his body draped in exact imitation of the giant’s pose.

  When I took it to the HooDoo Gallery, Daisy was thrilled.

  “Oh, I love it. The women, they’re so Rubenesque, so sensual. Who’s the model? She’s wonderful.” Playfully, she put her hand to cover her mouth and giggled. “Maybe I shouldn’t be asking.”

  My answer surprised me. “Oh, it’s a lady I met once.” I scratched my head in bewilderment as Jenny’s mom flashed into my mind.

  “I think it will look good over on that wall.” Daisy swept her hands in a grand gesture outlining the area she planned to hang it. “Deets, this one’s on me. I’ll take care of the framing.”

  “Cool. Thanks.”

  Daisy inquired about my progress on the anti-war series. I mumbled awkwardly that the drawings had been put on hold while Dreamer’s Mountain took over my life, but they would be done soon.

  On the way home, I stopped at the soda fountain in the local five and ten to have a vanilla shake. I jerked my head up from the final slurping when I caught a whiff of smoke. Looking around, no one else seemed to be reacting to a possible fire, so I asked the counter man if he smelled anything burning.

  “Nah, I think you’re imagining it. I’ve got a pretty good sniffer, and besides, there’s an alarm that would go off.”

  Unconvinced, I quickly moved through the aisles, honing in on where I believed something was ablaze. At the end of an aisle stuffed with cheap novelties and toys, I spotted a box of small American flags on sticks. The scent was so strong I expected to find some smoldering as I rummaged through them, but they showed no evidence of fire.

  Nearby, a man and a young boy were browsing. I asked them if they smelled smoke.

  The man wiggled his nose, testing the air. “No, I don’t.”

  “Wow, Dad, look at all the flags. Can I have some? They’re neat.”

  The kid grabbed a flag. I sniffed at the box and asked him if he thought it stunk. In answer, he held the Stars and Stripes out in front of him and made machine gun spitting sounds, shaking the stick like he was shooting at me with it.

  At that moment, the rest of my anti-war illustration series came into focus. I bought some of the flags and went back to my apartment. In my darkened bedroom, I struck a match and held one flag above an ashtray as I watched the flames turn the red, white, and blue material into nothing. The act was a solemn, private ceremony that realized a long simmering rebellion. I remembered standing in classrooms as a young child with my hand on my heart, resenting that I had to repeat the same words day after day, wondering what a pledge was, worrying if there would be a test about liberty and justice. When the flag became just a wisp of smoke and a scattering of ashes, the hole drilled into me by mindlessly wording an allegiance during my childhood years was replaced by the sense there were greater things to live and die for than a piece of cloth.

  And Greg? Where was his allegiance when he raped and killed.

  Sadness was my overriding emotion as I worked in pencil, detailing twists of fire consuming the stars and singeing the stripes. I felt fooled, felt the nation was hiding and
dying for lies.

  The next morning, laying in bed, I turned on the radio to hear that a young man had set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon to protest the war.

  “Aw, man, no, no, don’t. Not for this war.”

  Only respect for life will defeat it. They’ll never hear your voice now.

  I couldn’t ignore the coincidence involved in my drawing and burning of the flag, and the man’s fiery suicide the same day. Was I connected to him, acting in tandem in my own way with the spirit that moved him?

  Despite a foggy depression, I was determined to continue the anti-war series with a flag theme. I grabbed a bus up to 42nd and 1st to sketch out the details of a drawing of the flags in front of the United Nations building. I drew them flying full force with fire and smoke streaming, turning them all into identical symbols of destruction. I couldn’t stop thinking about the protestor’s suicide, cursing him for leaving the living, unable to reconcile his self-annihilation as worthwhile.

  After two more pieces, I finished up the series with an illustration of a shattered Vietnamese village with red wreckage, still white bodies of women and children, and blue flames rising above it all.

  When I handed the drawings to Daisy, she laid them out in front of her and nodded, a bare “hmm, hmm” reverberating in her throat.

  She placed her hand softly on the rendering of the U.N. flags burning, almost caressed it. “Deets, when did you draw this?”

  “About a week ago.”

  She pushed a newspaper across her desk. “This is today’s paper.”

  Staring down at a picture of a man on fire in front of the United Nations building, my mind slipped torturously as I compared images—flags waving in the background of the photograph, aflame in my drawing.

  I grasped for a chair, sitting clumsily. Awed by an invisible power, horrified by yet another life being taken that seemed to coincide in some obscure way with my actions, I couldn’t see anything in the room except the photo of the man’s self-immolation. He had doused himself with gasoline and lit the match in the exact spot where I had stood sketching and painfully obsessing about the destruction of life.

  “I can’t do this, Daisy. I can’t. I can’t be causing this, can I?”

  She looked at me without saying a word. I interpreted her silent appraisal of me as accusatory. Leaping from the chair and rushing outside, I lost myself to a crying need to understand the invisible connections between people. Had I created the murderous actions with my art? Or witnessed them? If so, why? With every step I sought the ghosts of the two dead men. I needed their spirits to reassure me that I had nothing to do with their deaths.

  I meandered the streets, then sat in Washington Square. Confused about my role in the terrible deaths, my mind was spinning, one conflicting thought striking out at another.

  Slowly, I became aware of a soft murmuring, sliding snakelike through the battle in my head. An incomprehensible secret language, materializing from nowhere as a whisper of color, sounds, and shapes, it disappeared nearly as soon as I realized it. Remarkably, as it faded, so did any blame I had placed upon myself for the suicides. I had witnessed the same destructive energies as the victims somehow, but not instigated them. Upon recognizing my guilt had just vanished, my eyes immediately flicked to the silhouette of someone standing under the square’s large arch. A prickle of fear ran up my spine when I identified the shape as the same deep shadow that had revealed the glob of horror inside Greg’s heart and wiped it away.

  Suddenly, a young girl, braided pigtail flying, arms waving, feet dancing, skip-roped rapidly across the square. Pigeons scattered and leaped into the air as she pranced gleefully among them. Jenny. She didn’t notice me and kept moving until I lost sight of her.

  When I looked back to beneath the arch, the fathomless, living darkness was gone.

  The Shadow Creature.

  Any uncertainties that inexplicable events were happening in my life trailed away in Jenny’s slipstream of white pigeon feathers swirling in the air all around me.

  Okay, all of you, whoever you are, you’ve got my attention.

  My mind felt surprisingly clear as I walked home, roaming from useless, but fanciful, suppositions about the Shadow Creature to thinking about the two individuals who had killed themselves protesting the evil in other men. To me, their suicides were a shameful waste, acts as brutal and misguided as the war. The government didn’t care about their deaths, wouldn’t change policies on their account. The president and his cabinet were willing to send them to the jungle to be killed anyway.

  I wondered when dedication to a cause became willing to die for it. Warriors had to ask themselves that—the smart ones, at least. I could understand putting your life on the line to save another, and maybe that’s what the two protesters and most soldiers believed they were doing. But destructive methods for carrying out that belief seemed senseless to me. There had to be healthier, more constructive ways.

  Besides, I was getting the feeling we weren’t in charge of the results anyway, no matter our actions.

  The week before Thanksgiving, US Army forces had their first major combat with the North Vietnamese. I watched on Chang’s TV as reporters, pinned down alongside young American boys, rattled off details of the struggle. Soldiers my age bled and died on camera. Bullets tore through them as they fought for some burned-out hill. Chang passed me a joint, and I held the smoke deep inside my lungs, watching a bandaged American’s eyes glaze and his last breath shudder from him.

  “Man, I ain’t getting caught up in that shit. Poor dude.”

  “I can’t believe we get the channel from Hell.”

  “Yeah. It’s not from the way I adjusted the rabbit ears either. This is too fucked-up.”

  A reporter in a helicopter had a wounded man’s head in his lap as he yelled into a microphone, trying to be heard above explosions and the roar of the aircraft. Clouds of black smoke blew though the open cabin. The reporter’s image went intermittently in and out of focus as the cameraman shook with every bounce of the chopper.

  Planes came screaming into view. A section of jungle burst into a ball of flame. Shirtless soldiers rammed shell after shell into artillery pieces. A medic pounded on a man’s chest. Next to him, a skinny kid with big ears jerked with the recoil of his weapon, continuously spraying bullets into an area of dense bamboo and ferns.

  “This is misery. Has America gone insane?”

  Chang turned off the sound and picked up his guitar. He strummed slowly, the strings echoing a foreboding knell, as we watched kids shooting, running, ducking. And dying.

  Chapter 19

  The Oldsmobile pulled over to the shoulder of the road. Nodding to the woman in the passenger seat and focusing on the man behind the steering wheel, I said, “Trenton.”

  He answered, “Hop in. We can drop you off in Princeton.”

  I climbed into the back seat where two children fidgeted. One of them farted. The other whined, “Who’s this man, Daddy?”

  “My name’s Deets. I’m headed home for Thanksgiving.”

  “Do you live in Trenton, Deets?” The woman leaned an arm on the backrest of her seat and looked back at me and her boys.

  “You smell, mister.” The kid wrinkled his nose, pretending I was to blame for the foul odor in the car.

  “Me?”

  “Bucky, don’t be rude.” The mother fidgeted with a blue, butterfly-shaped barrette in her hair, gave me a suspicious look, and turned away with an uncertain half-smile. The father glanced in the rearview mirror at the boys and told them to behave themselves.

  “I live in New York, but my parents live near Yardley, over in Pennsylvania.”

  We made small talk for a few minutes, then fell silent. It had taken three rides to get out of the New York and Newark area. Highway construction projects had compounded my difficulties, and I ended up hitchhiking on a backroad running
parallel to the turnpike. This ride would cover a lot of mileage, and there would still be plenty of daylight left to catch another.

  Bucky peppered the atmosphere with gas periodically. I was glad to feel the crisp chill of fresh air when I got out of the car in Princeton.

  Walking through the town, a story that no one in my family had ever believed to be true came to mind. When I was six years old, my parents dragged me along on a day trip to the university. Dad went off to attend a conference while Mom and I visited an old friend of hers who taught at Princeton. Mom, seeing me bored and restless with adult talk, sent me outside to play in the backyard sandbox.

  Involved with my creative muse, I looked up at, but generally ignored, an old wild-haired man in baggy pants who stepped into the fenced-in yard. He watched as I built a steeple of sand about six inches high. Being slightly damp, the grains packed together well. Using the edge of my palm, I then carefully scraped away the sides until there was nothing left but the original space of flat sand.

  The man took out a tobacco pipe and asked me if I could build another tower. When I did, he said, “Now before you shave it down with your hand, build one over here.” He pointed with his pipe.

  “And another,” he gestured again, “over there.”

  As I built the piles, he watched—smoking, curious.

  “What do you call these, young man?”

  “Well, right now they’re still just sand stuck together, but when I finish, they’re Zobes.”

  “Zobes?”

  “Yep.”

  “Interesting. And what do you think about them?”

  “Well, first there’s just sand. Then, when you start piling it up like this, you can see what they look like half-finished.”

  I moved my hand skillfully, cutting away one side of the creation as I continued my explanation. “But they’re only something when I scrape them down, and they become nothing.”