Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (21 page)

“Skills,” Lip Cheese says. He points the laser pointer
upward. The red laser line goes on and on into the sky, stopping seemingly at the atmosphere's ceiling. “Man!” he jumps again. “'Don't shoot; don't shoot!' You got Time-Bomb Jungled.”

“That's Garth Heffernan's phrase,” I manage to say.

He slaps me on the shoulder. “What—? I thought that's what we were doing that one week. I got Jungled when you and Toby ripped on me when I looked up all those files; Necro got Jungled when we showed them to Luckytown, and—”

Necro's body revolves, slowly, toward us. His jaw muscles are clenched, spine arched. Lip Cheese's chin retreats into his neckfat.

“It was Nate's idea!” Lip Cheese says, and he immediately runs away, Igor-like, back hunched, darting around blankets, jumping over coolers, and then I never see him again. I heard he's a payroll specialist, still at Paychex, downtown.

Necro folds his arms. Everything in my body is moving fast and thinning out. “I never had any ideas,” I say into my shoulder.

Because, I can't look at him. Look at him! He's just staring at me, some feeling or another damming up behind his cheeks.

“Two months ago,” he says, “the police took and walked right into my house. Like they were dinner guests, completely eschewing whatever stipulations various legal echelons have against doing such initiatives. It took me forever to get my computer back from them. The police department said they wanted to see a receipt.” He slams his fist downward, hitting an imaginary table. “Who has a receipt for a computer just filed away for their documentation purposes?”

“Clearly they didn't arrest you,” I say. “Sometimes police just investigate stuff. We barely even—”

Then I stop myself. Necro sniffles, angrily, once, either for no reason or for every reason ever. And so of course, now I've learned officially, Pope's Decree, that having the police Riot on Necro's house was an awful thing to do, was never funny and probably illegal, and didn't even need to be done, because I haven't been in nearly as horrible a mood about myself recently, I don't think, and it's never good to try to stop people from moving on. But since I know this, now I have to sit through this entire conversation while Necro Goes Off the Top Ropes on me.

“At least you bother to take and self-own it,” Necro says. “Owned something, you Friend to All Animals.”

Which for obvious reasons is completely uncalled for. Necro knows I threw out that pair of underwear, and all my stuffed animals—even the yellow bear we named Shut Up and the leather E.T. doll we named Grandpa—so that nobody would bring up Friend to All Animals ever again. And so if Necro's going to start Cooking with Gas on me, I widen my eyes and turn my head, slowly, right back at him. Because, I find myself in that position where, because Necro is being so Colonel Hellstache, I end up arguing for everything Toby has been saying, which I totally don't agree with, just so I can defend myself.

“Let's look at how every time a picture appeared on NecronicA, a building burned down,” I say.

Necro juts his chin toward somewhere behind me, maybe a third of the park away.

“What about those homeless shelters?” I say. “What about how, just before Wicked College John got hit, you were shoving us toward that building?” And, I swallow some TV static in my chest here: “And why'd you burn down my room in that one painting?”

And rather than answer an easy question, Necro apparently has to say:

“That's a new thing we're doing, Nate. Me and the Unabomber decided that along with our assorted manifestos, we're only going to communicate in explosions. One firebomb means Yes; two means No. For even our casual socializations, we just aim explosions at each other. Boy, that was one coy explosion!”

“But we've seen your drawings,” I go. And then Bambert Tolby? Comparing you to Timothy McVeigh?”

“He has no money. He sold his weapons and furniture to pay house bills. He tried to burn down his own store.”

“Timothy McVeigh?”

“
Bambert!
” He spears his face forward at me. “There's no nonprofit! No altruistic machinations! He took and gave back all his various accrued funds. He told the clerk at some church, ‘You're too kind for me to do this to you,' pleading, like terrified.”

“Was he a con man?”

“That, or pipe dreams and incompetence. He doesn't answer his door now. He's sitting in there waiting to be arrested.”

But before I can ask further, Necro, though, turns into a Complete Bowl of Skittles! He begins walking, stiff-legged, in
a circle. “What is up, college dude, do you like 311?” he says, in his happy-robot voice.

Campus-Tron 4000, Necro. I get it. But he goes on like this for practically six more years: “Interact with me!” he pivots on his right heel and walks away from me.

“Interact with your Kangaroo for a Kid,” I stand on my toes and say at the back of his neck. “Your Kangaroo for a
Kid!
” I say again, in case he didn't hear me.

But he keeps walking that way, opening and closing his mouth Pac-Man style, holding his arms forward, leaving his wrists limp.

So, I reach into my pocket. I show him the receipts Toby gave me. Necro's brow muscles and the flab under his chin loosen like a noose dropping.

“Where did you get those,” he says.

There's some polite applause from the people sitting on the park grass, and the PA begins playing some trilly marching-band music, which I have to yell over. “We're just wondering where you've been, man! You never call us! I miss you!”

He flails around, away from me, arms trailing like tetherballs. “I can't even believe you would go through my—”

A firework goes off, like a popped balloon held to a megaphone. People go “ooh” like they've seen expensive jewelry.

“Necro!” I yell. “Simple question! What's this bill for copper benzoate for James Mason? Because if you've gone off to spill blood in the streets, if you were trying to tell me something, in that painting, when my room was on fire, if this is all your way of saying that you've Maverick Jetpantsed beyond me, and our friendship is over, well, I would just be unhappy, is all.”

Some chandeliers and tinsel pop in the sky and leave tracers when I blink. Necro rips the receipts from my hand.

“Do you even know what dextrin and lactose are?” Necro yells. “Do you know what they take and use copper benzoate even for?”

“I can barely hear you!” I yell over some smiley faces spreading across the sky.

“Blue!” Necro yells. He points to the sky. “Blue color! You can't get Paris Green anymore so you have to use the copper. Look up!”

“What?”

“Look
up
!”

Right then, blue-colored fireworks explode—blue fingers and willow trees.

We can see the shadows of trees and of ourselves, flickering, while the fireworks pop, sometimes four shadows at once, like an “x.” It's too loud for me to hear myself saying, “You have got to be kidding me.”

Necro lunges forward and yells down into the space between my eyes: “The town took and helped my dad and me run fireworks this year!” he yells. “Hunan province had a huge factory explosion, so we had to change up where we order from. James Mason's company imports the fireworks!”

Explosion imprints, like banana peels made of smoke, drift to the left.

“You bag of asshole,” Necro says. “There's a muzzle on your brain, and Toby has the leash. And that muzzle has been taped on. Like a dildo.”

No! Even if Necro didn't Pin Bow Ties on the Dead, you ask him a simple question, and he Taped-On Dildos you!

“I explained Taped-On Dildo to you years ago,” I say. “You
know
the Toys 'R Us is miles away from Lyell Video and News!”

Necro sets his hand, coach-like, on my shoulder. His fingernails are full, unbitten unlike mine, like he might actually clip them now. Then he says, in this practical way, like he's announcing layoffs: “Your dad was a gelding and your mother was a whale, and they gave birth to a suitcase with a flesh mask inside.”

Which, I have no idea what that means, but I have to squeeze my bladder shut when he says it.

“Toby is not going to like what I tell him about you,” I say.

The next day, I meet Toby at the Airplane Booth. It's 4 p.m. Nobody's there. A waitress at a corner booth rolls silverware into napkins and the hose water from the dish room drum-rolls off a pan.

“Necro Pinned Bow Ties on the Dead,” I tell Toby. “He said it to my face. Even this most recent one at that Democratic building.”

Toby freezes for a second, like he's surprised to be told he's right. He picks up a French fry and holds it midway between the basket and his face. “What should we do?”

I bite down on my plastic straw and drag it through my front teeth.

“Should we call 911?” Toby says.

Which I don't have an answer for. So we both, instead,
manage to look angry enough, sorting through our fries after we've finished speaking and people start to come in for dinner and someone slightly dims the lighting.

Because, like I don't have any comebacks against you, Necro. Kangaroo for a Kid? No end, Necro, no end. Necro: trying to stare me down during fireworks, calling me Taped-On Dildo. Taped-On Dildo! He's lucky I didn't kick his ass right then.

When I say Mindy Fale makes friends with the worst people, what I mean is she makes me drive to Greece so I can meet her at Conor Ricketts's parents' house, where he's having people over. Which Conor Ricketts deserves completely—living with his parents I mean—because without Conor Ricketts, there would be no Sausage Academy. And with no Sausage Academy, I would not be this person who one day, if people don't get better about asking Are You Alright, might just walk, fully clothed, down into a swimming pool and float there, facedown, until I finally stop thinking.

And I hope for the drive to be long, but I get to Conor Ricketts's house way too fast. He wastes no time at all, still with his Colonel Hellstache Phish T-shirt and his Colonel Hellstache hair that parts in the middle and flops just above his ears. He immediately shoehorns me into a headlock when I walk in.

“Look at that forehead! Look at this headwound!” he says, voice still squinty as his face. “That scar is
ripe
. Where were you the last three years, Sausage Gray?”

He's a medium like me, but he squeezes my head into his ribcage, and I feel some head-cartilage pop, and some blood-juice sling around my head, and I wonder if I'm going to faint, soil myself in front of everyone, and therefore have to change my name and move to another country.

“Just gonna grab some of this chorizo,” he says, mellowly, like a doctor doing a physical, before twisting a handful of my stomach fat. “Just gonna mix that with some peppercorns and beef. Then we can spawn an infant Sausage Academy.”

I squirm away and try to laugh it off. But my face is already scalding red. Even worse, my response: “Or spawn an infant Bags Gigolo.”

Right then? Back to Sad Archives. Back to age sixteen, when Bags Gigolo was everyone's nickname for Conor Ricketts and not, somehow, Rickets.

His house is like a worn-out college rental—walls thin enough to vibrate the whole place if you punched them, stairs to the second floor right there when you get in. There are nicer, parentish things: gold picture frames, a wall unit, carpets and furniture colored like different degrees of creamed coffee. I sidestep my way past the red party cups on the glass end table. Around Kim Stanton, Kim Piscarelli, Kim Opec, all still here; around Mike Falconi; around the other Mike Falconi who did track and jazz band. I set the cube of Labatt's I brought on the sticky kitchen floor, and, in a Clinic of Hellstachery, Mindy Fale has not arrived yet, and there is nobody to talk to.

Nobody, except for Conor Ricketts, who, I decide: Why not go stand around while he talks to Eric Ashner and some kid who is maybe Jeremy Near.

And if you've ever just had a standaround with someone who has ripped on you your whole life, the conversation always feels four jokes ahead of you. But since Conor Ricketts is one of these people I always think I'll never see again (until I always see him again), I get this post-headlock, really-terrific chipper hate in me:

“So, Conor! Are you in school?” I go, slapping him on the arm.

And the only good part of the night is right here, when his face unsquints, for a second, like I'm maybe finally seeing the face that got nervous on the bus to school, or the face that told his mom he felt like he had no friends. But he collapses halfway and goes: “Can't do it, man. Can't do it!” He looks to Ashner and the other kid who, actually, might be Kevin Keaveny if Kevin Keaveny burned his neck really bad. “He's just Sausage Academy. Slim Jims as pencils, books with pages made of sliced turkey.”

And because she is already a Life Mistake, Mindy Fale chooses to arrive right now, with her work shirt and stretch pants and perfume of raspberry-scented paint thinner. She kisses Conor Ricketts on the cheek. Which why tell me I should come here if she's going to be that way.