Badd

Captain Crazy must die.

This might sound like tough talk coming from a girl, but I’m a tough girl. One hundred percent. And my friends, Gillis, Tillman, and Brianna, agree with me about the captain. We trade off ways to do the deed. We’ll pickle him in brine, we’ll feed him to the blender, the lawn mower, the garbage disposal, the Chihuahua. We’ll slice off his fingers and toes like fresh carrots, dice him and mince him and chop off his head. Pack his leftovers in ice, French fry them in a deep-fat fryer. We’ll draw and quarter him, go after him with chainsaws and garden shears. We’ll stuff him and sell him at the flea market.

No, we won’t. Not really. We’re not some kind of evil devil cult. But you still don’t want to mess with us.

Actually, I’m the only one with a reason to be mad. The
others just want something to happen around here. Anything. But with me it’s personal because of my brother Bobby. He’s in the army, see, in Iraq. Well, he was in Iraq, but now he’s in Germany. We’re expecting him home in a month, and we sure don’t need Captain Crazy putting a hex on him before he gets back. I mean, this time I know he’s coming home. He really is. It’s just hard to believe it for sure until he wraps me up in one of his big bear hugs and says, “It’s me, Ceejay. Don’t worry, little sister, don’t worry. It’s me and I’m home for good.”

The Captain Crazy business starts when me and Brianna are cruising in her car and Gillis calls me up and goes, “Listen, Ceejay, you gotta get over here to the courthouse. Captain Crazy’s throwing a Vietnam War protest. It’s hilarious!”

Vietnam! Leave it to the captain to go all radical over a war that’s been over for thirty-something years.

Two minutes later Brianna and I pull up to the courthouse in her car. That’s the one and only good thing about living in a town the size of Knowles. Your friends can call and tell you to come somewhere, and you’re there practically before they hang up the phone. So when I get to the foot of the courthouse steps, the captain’s just starting to really roll, pacing like a preacher on crystal meth, his face red, his eyes bulging. He’s not even Captain Crazy anymore. Now he’s
Reverend
Crazy shouting down the devil. And don’t you know, if there’s anyone who’s really seen the devil, it’s him.

He’s got the usual paisley guitar and the conga drum close at hand but hasn’t started in playing them yet. Behind him, three posters on six-foot-tall sticks stand propped against the granite wall, each with flowers painted on them—purple, red, yellow, chartreuse—just like it’s really the dead-and-gone sixties hippie days. On the first sign, he’s scrawled
GET OUT OF VIETNAM NOW!
On the second, it’s
THE PRESIDENT IS INSANE
,
and the third one says,
KISS THE FISH MOUTH!
Only Captain Crazy knows the secret meaning of that one.

A couple of women, three old men, and about seven kids from school are watching the show. Nothing much else to do on a late-May afternoon in Knowles now that school’s out. A couple of older girls from my high school—the cupcake twins, I call them, because they’re all sugar frosting and no substance—look at ugly Gillis, huge Goth-girl Brianna, and scrappy little sixteen-year-old pit-bull me with these expressions like, “Oh God, there
they
are.”

Next to the fish-mouth sign, Mr. White stands with his arms crossed like he’s the captain’s bodyguard, and I have to admit I’m as bad as the cupcake twins because I can’t help thinking, Oh God, there
he
is.

Mr. White. He’s even weirder than we are—the long-haired, stick-figure guy from my English class who never says a thing. The new kid in town. Well, actually he’s been here a whole year, but in a town where everyone’s known you since you were a zygote, you’re still the new kid until you’ve lived here for at least five years.

His real name’s Padgett Locke, but we call him Mr. White because he always dresses completely in white. Probably never been in a fight in his life. Today he has on a plain white T-shirt, white shorts, white socks, and white tennis shoes. His skin is almost as white as his clothes. It’s like he finally broke out of his room, where he’s been cooped up reading books and listening to alternative bands that no one ever heard of, and now he thinks he’s at Wimbledon. The only thing not white about him is his long, stringy brown hair and his black-framed glasses. Anyway, I’m not surprised he hooked up with the captain. Maybe he thinks he’ll be like an apprentice and take over the job of town eccentric when the captain retires.

Gillis is standing in the front row of the small crowd, grinning like an evil leprechaun. I don’t call him a leprechaun because he’s short. I mean, he’s around my height, five-six, but he’s real solid, about as wide as he is tall. No, the leprechaun thing comes from his Irish pug nose and that sparse red wreath of a high-school-boy beard. Not a pretty sight, but he’s my buddy, so who cares?

He waves me and Brianna over and goes, “Check this out, Ceejay. The captain’s finally lost it all the way down to his socks,” and I’m like, “What socks?”

That’s the captain for you—ankle-high corduroy pants, ancient ruins for shoes, and no socks. He’s a mess. A scraggly sixty-something-year-old reject from a mental ward with a beat-up baseball cap and a beard that doesn’t look so much like he grew it as like it exploded out of his face.

To tell the truth, I always liked the captain all right until today. My dad says he’s bipolar. My big sister says he’s schizo. I say he’s probably both, but I don’t care if he’s a leper. He’s a lot more interesting than the rest of the humanoids we have around this town.

I don’t know how many times I’ve stopped off at Corker Park and watched him play his guitar and drum and sing his bizarre songs about Martians, chicken teeth, and blue cockatoos. What else am I going to do, go see the six-month-old Disney movie at the Apollo? Maybe go to the senior center and watch the clog dancers?

For the last couple of years, Captain Crazy has been about the best entertainment we have in Knowles. The story around town is that he moved here from California, probably from some crazy street-person shelter, after his mom, the cat lady, died two years ago and left her farmhouse to him. The place is
a dump, hasn’t really been a farm for years, but supposedly the captain’s brother, Richard, is jealous because he didn’t get it.

None of that is the reason why people are fascinated with the captain, though. Supposedly, he used to be semi-famous, had a handful of underground cult records out in the psychedelic sixties and seventies. “Sliced Penguins,” I think, was the name of his big song. It’s from his album
Captain Crazy’s Crash Landing on Pluto
. Hey, we didn’t make the name up. That’s what he calls himself. Sometimes he wears a T-shirt with his own picture on the front and the words
CAPTAIN CRAZY
spelled out in snakes.

Some people think he’s not fit to walk our streets, like our streets are paved with platinum Communion wafers or something. Captain Crazy’s a menace, they say. Not me. I like people who are different most of the time. That’s why I’m so pissed today. I was a supporter, a cheerleader for the cause of crazy. But then he goes and double-crosses me and my family and, most of all, Bobby.

At first, the protest is entertaining—the captain does have a sense of humor about how crazy he is—but things go bad when he picks up the guitar and starts singing about the war. I mean, you can’t even call it a song so much as it’s just howling to two chords with an occasional whack on the drum for an exclamation point. He’s all about tanks and bombs and children running down the street naked, on fire. Gruesome stuff. And then it’s white coffins rolling off of airplanes like widgets down a conveyor belt, and soldiers getting their faces blown off or trying to run for cover on bloody stumps. Screaming for medics, and the medics are already dead. And after all that, he howls what I guess is supposed to be the chorus:

This is too much. I see what he’s doing now, and it’s not funny. He’s not really protesting Vietnam. That’s just a cover-up. He’s talking about the war in Iraq. If you knew me, you’d know I’m not about to put up with this crap about soldiers getting their faces blown off. I mean, what if Bobby was coming home today instead of next month? What kind of welcome home would that be?

No one could get the better of Bobby here in Knowles, and no one in some small-time foreign country will ever get the better of him either, but crazy or not, the captain’s not going to get away with yelling garbage like that at me. That is totally unacceptable. I don’t need images like that in my head, with Bobby still out there trying to make it home. It’s not like I believe in hexes or anything, but there’s no reason to take chances.

And that’s not even the worst of it. Next, he starts spewing this trash about how war is the coward’s way. The president’s a coward, the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of war. And okay, I don’t really care about that, but then he goes and starts yelping about how anybody who is afraid to turn off their TVs, get off their big, fat couches, and stand up to the warmongers is a coward.