Malus Domestica (22 page)

For the umpteenth time, she mused on how much sweet-and-sour chicken looked like battered and fried mice. Another leap put her behind the wheel of a female tabby, in the middle of a frantic mating session behind the Dollar General on 9
^th
and Thompson.

The tom’s barbed penis jabbed at her long-barren womb and she almost fell off the bar stool, snapping back to the Lazenbury kitchen. “Aaraaagh!”

Problems?
asked Mother.

The gray cat licked its chops and flopped over on its back, studying her face upside-down.

“No…no. Don’t worry about me.” Shaking, Marilyn caught her breath and took a deep gulp of the bitter toad tea. “While I search for Annie’s daughter, I want you to get a good look at that thing down there in Annie’s house and figure out which one it is and how we get rid of it.”

Who the hell are
you
ordering around?
Reaching up, the cat snagged Marilyn’s sleeve with a toenail and unraveled a loop of yarn out of her sweater.
I was one of Rasputin’s lovers and pupils, you know! I mixed pigments for Michelangelo! I taught—

“I’m not in the mood for your sass, Mother. Or your history lessons.”

Sass? You ain’t
seen
sass, cookie.

“I have no doubt. Just, please, while I take care of this, do me a favor and take a look at that hairy freako down there in the Victorian. I’ll bring you up a bowl of ice cream after dinner.”

Do you promise?

“Yes, yes, of course.”

The tiramisu flavor? It reminds me so much of Giuseppe and his sister back home in Sicily. Oh, how I loved their house, with its rose trellis and the statue of the fisherman pissing into the ocean—

“Yes,
the tiramisu. Now leave me be, Mother. I’ve work to do.” The cat got to its feet and jumped down off the counter, trotting away.

Pointing at the stove, Marilyn gestured the tea-kettle into the air. Floating over to her teacup, it poured her another helping and followed her knobbly finger back to the cooling electric eye.

Her head sank forward, she cupped her eyes in her hands, and Marilyn continued scrying.

11

A
DAPT
AND
OVERCOME
.
A
FTER
they left the comic shop, Wayne couldn’t get it out of his head.
Be the Hulk. Be better than the problem.
He thought this brilliant new proverb, and the eloquent, intelligent, cat-petting, code-breaking, comic-shop-owning man that called himself Fish was the best thing since the invention of the wheel.

He even
felt
stronger, his feet lighter, as he bounced along behind Pete and Johnny Juan, occasionally flexing his chest and biceps. After the warmth of the shop, the crisp wind hurt his nose, but something about the gamma-ray pep rally made it smell sweeter.

“What are you doing?” Amanda asked him as he was crossing his arms in a bodybuilder flex. She had fallen behind, and now tagged along in the rear. “Is your shirt too small?”

“No?” He made an indignant face and put his hands in his pockets.

Pete turned left and trundled down the sidewalk to a short, quaint hump of a bridge with rusted girders and simple steel banisters. Standing beside it, they could see down into the canal. A musky fish-smell coiled up from where water trickled along the bottom some eight, nine, ten feet down.

The channel itself was a square aqueduct with a flat bottom some fifteen feet wide, made of pebbly dark concrete dyed green by algae and moss. Sandbars of dirt and rocks collected along the walls.

Pete scanned the street, reassured himself that no one was watching, and hopped down to a concrete platform with a grunt. The others reluctantly followed suit.

PVC pipes ran along the underside of the bridge, painted with jibber-jabber graffiti. Pete ducked under them and walked beside the thin ribbon of water at their feet. There was barely a current; Wayne could only see it if he bent over to examine the stream, the sky reflecting off of the wobbling quicksilver.

Under the bridge, Amanda’s voice reverberated, hollow, intimate. “Are you sure this is safe?”

Corn-fed Pete regarded her with obvious amusement, wheezing through his nose. “Of
course
it’s not safe. Fun things hardly ever are.” Their excursion definitely qualified as ‘fun’, though Wayne was getting tired and his feet hurt. This was probably the most exercise he’d gotten in a long time. But then, adventure was
supposed
to hurt, wasn’t it? Adapt and overcome.

Soon the novelty was gone and they were marching along the bottom of the channel as placidly as they had the sidewalk. Wayne squinted up at the stark blue sky. The canal cut down the middle of several city blocks, between the buildings to the north and south. This deep in the cut he felt as if he were walking a trail along the lowermost narrows of the Grand Canyon, framed by darkness. The real Grand Canyon, however, wouldn’t be this marred by graffiti: R
ANDY
F
REEMAN
W
AS
H
ERE
07/22/2007. Y
EE
-T
HO
-R
AH.
A cartoonish rendering of a veiny penis and testicles, crude pubic hair corkscrewing from the speedbag scrotum underneath. D
IAMOND
AND
T
RAVUS
,
♡
4-EVA.

As Pete led them farther and farther, the water picked up eddies seeping out of the concrete until the floor was rippling glass that clapped under their shoes. Splat, splat, splat.

The canal angled to the left and became deeper, with a dip in the middle, and a gaping black storm drain low in the wall continuously gurgled water into the trough, creating a fast-moving brook. They walked along the side of the ditch then, their ankles turned so they could traverse the incline like billy-goats, and sometimes Amanda would steady herself with a hand on the concrete. Some part of Wayne expected one of them to slip and fall into the water, sliding away and out of sight, screaming and flailing, but it never happened.

The buildings became shorter and shorter until the steel banisters along the top of the channel became a chainlink fence, and the crackerjack
WHZZ, WHZZ
of a power-wrench howled down to them from some mechanic’s garage overhead.
PSST, PSSSSST,
the pit-viper hiss of a paint-sprayer.

Stands of hickory and ivy and something with broad green leaves sprouted up from the base of the wall, where drifts of sand and trash accumulated. When the children shouldered past them, tiny birds shifted in the foliage, chirping and rustling.

Rumbling water became louder and louder until the children came to the end of the aqueduct and found the river, a wide band of darkness sparkling under the cold afternoon sun. The concrete sloped and the walls flared out like a spout, river-water licking and lapping up onto the stony floor and leaving smears of slimy brown algae.

Pete turned right and clambered up a short grassy hill, pushing past the end of the chainlink fence.

At the top of the rise, Wayne could finally see over the walls of the canal. They had walked east out of the main historical district and they could no longer see it, only the backs of various buildings and groves of hickory and oak.

On the other side of the river, far to the west, an apartment building was half-obscured behind the treeline.

“Where to now, Dora the Explorer?” asked Amanda.

“Down the river to the pipe, and then you cross it to the other side.” Their leader set off across the riverbank, stumbling across the uneven grass. Wayne glanced at Amanda, who gave him a noncommittal
whatever
face, coughed into her hands, and fell into step behind Pete.

The pipe turned out to be close enough that they could see it as soon as they went over the hill. In the background to the east, after-work traffic shushed back and forth across a long concrete bridge.

A pile of smashed bricks lay under a froth of dry brown brush. Johnny Juan picked up a piece, flinging it sideways into the river.
K’ploonk.
“I’m kinda getting tired, guys. My feet really hurt.”

“You
wanted
to come,” said Wayne. “You don’t even live out here.”

Johnny scratched his face and shrugged. “I know.”

Taking off his glasses, Wayne stopped to buff them on his shirt and the world around him turned into a smear of colors. When he put them back on, Pete was already heading for the river.

To Wayne’s relief, the pipe was two or three feet across, just big enough that he wouldn’t have been able to get his arms around it. Pete and Amanda had no trouble with it at all—the big guy put out his arms and heel-toed across it like a tightrope walker, only stopping once halfway across to bend over at the waist, pinwheeling his arms to keep his balance.

“Watch out!” shrilled Amanda.

Pete sneered at her and straightened, throwing out his belly. “Man I got this. See how a pro does it.”

He flipped them all the finger, turned, and wobbled the rest of the way across. When he got to the other side he threw himself on the grass and sat down to watch them make fools of themselves, using the bank as a windbreak.

Amanda stormed down the hill, stepped onto the pipe, and gracefully strolled the entire length of it as easily as if she were on a sidewalk, her long legs scissoring right across.

“Wow,” said Wayne.

“It’s ballet,” explained Johnny Juan. “Her mom takes her every Saturday to the ballet studio over on my side of town, the one in the building that used to be a garage or a hangar or something.”

“How did you know
that?”

Johnny waggled his eyebrows. “It’s right next door to my family’s restaurant Puesta Del Sol.” Turning back to the river, he gave a deep, steeling sigh, and flexed his shoulders. “I guess I’ll go across next. See you on the flip side, amigo.”

The boy stepped onto the big sky-blue pipe and started off across the narrow water. About one-third of the way across, he lost his balance and bent over at the waist, his ass in the air and one arm thrown out to the side. The other hand was pressed against the top of the pipe.

Johnny quivered there, twitching back and forth trying to find his center of gravity, and then straightened up again and shuffled forward, hunkered down with his hands out like a man trying to catch a mouse. As soon as he reached the opposite side he threw himself onto the grass and clambered away from the water on all fours.

“Your turn, Batman,” Amanda shouted through her hands as Wayne climbed down to the bottom of the river-bank.

Up close, the pipe seemed a lot slimmer than it had from the berm, maybe only a foot-and-a-half across,
easily
small enough to wrap his arms around and touch his fingers. Wayne put a foot on the plastic curve and something inside him quailed from the hollow thump.

The others all sat on the far bank, watching him expectantly.
Adapt and overcome.
His reputation hung on this moment, he knew down deep. It wasn’t the first time Wayne had been forced to be brave in order to fit in.

Be the Hulk,
he thought, standing on the utilities pipe over the Cataloosa River as Blackfield slipped into evening.

Pete, Amanda, and Johnny Juan sat on the grass watching him.
Adapt and overcome.
A band of rushing quicksilver streamed by underneath him, thirty or forty feet across, clear enough that he could see shelves of greasy brown stone under the surface.

“Hell are you doing?” said Pete. The water looked deep. Over his head, at least. “Snap out of it, fool!”

Be bigger. Be badder.
Wayne was halfway across, his arms straight out to either side, his hips swaying and twitching to maintain his balance. “I’m comin, I gotta—” he started to say, and then he slipped.

One leg slid into thin air and he sat down hard, the pipe flexing underneath and bouncing him a few inches. Suddenly he was lying on his belly in terror, straddling it, holding on with both hands. The fall had happened so fast that he couldn’t remember anything between standing-there and lying-there.

“You okay?” someone called.

Water cackled past the toes of his shoes. Now the burn came, the hot iron belly-ache of blunt force to the testicles.

Wayne sat up, hugging the pipe with his knees. “Yeah,” he shouted over the coursing water, wincing up at the sky. He’d hit his chin on the pipe too, banging his teeth together, and now a headache was germinating at the base of his skull.

He slid forward, inching across on his butt. “Uuuggh! I smacked my nuts is all.”

Pete gave a Nelson-laugh.
“Ha
-ha!”

Once everybody was safely on the other side, Pete wallowed back to his feet and steamered off across a huge gravel clearing. Now that he’d had a moment to sit and rest for a minute, he seemed to have gotten a second wind, and he was really hustling.

Dry grass, like brush you’d see at the edge of the desert, made a crunchy lacework in the chalky white gravel. Clouds had moved in while they were traversing the Broad Avenue canal, and the bright sun was now a smear behind shreds of white, sapping the childrens’ shadows of substance.

They passed a big wooden sign that said T
RADE
D
AY
. “What is that?” asked Wayne.

Amanda crunched along behind them. “Early every Saturday morning, a bunch of people set up here and sell stuff. A big flea market, I guess.”

“Like a garage sale, or a yard sale?”

“Yeah, but lots of them in one place.”

“My Paw-Paw used to take me when I was little,” said Pete. “There wasn’t really ever anything good. They had toys, but they was always old and dirty and sometimes broke.”

“My brother got a sword there once.” Amanda smirked at the ground, her hair draping down around her face. She’d taken down her ponytail. “But the firefighters stepped on it and broke it when our old house burned down.”

“Is that why you’re living in Chevalier Village?” asked Wayne.

“Yeah. My dad couldn’t afford to rebuild the house.”

“Where’s your brother at now?” He made a face. “I thought you only had the two little brothers. Kasey and Evan.”