..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

“Girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors and the boys try to look so hard. . .”
- "Born To Run" - Bruce Springsteen



FICTION:



Swordfighting (part 3)



“True story. He’s only got one.”

The two boys were trying to play the lying game.

Ashley was in the car, on the way to their shipwreck, their secret place, their clubhouse, and they were all trying real hard.

“No shit. How?”

“You really want to know? It’s not a long story. . .”

Before they picked her up, Steven had told James about how he'd found her, and the way they'd played that game in her car. Steven told James that, even though he’d lost that game, he had somehow talked her into seeing him again. He didn’t tell James that he suspected that she was only coming out to see James again, to see what he’d tie to his fingers this time.

So, before they honked the horn and she came running out, they decided to fight for her, sort of. They decided that they were going to lie. Not about themselves, which was the way it was usually done, they were going to lie about each other instead. And the loser would be the first one to deny what the other one was saying, or the first one to have Ashley call him a liar, or the first one fuck up and tell the truth when they thought they were lying. The instant that this happened, the loser walked the plank forever and lost his half of the shipwreck.

Steven was hoping that James would try too hard too fast, and even if he had to back him up by nodding along with a few crazy lies right out of the gate (probably admit to fucking something dead on the side or the road, or getting caught with god-knows-what up his ass, or crying when there was a Tornado Warning on the television) it would be okay, because she’d start shaking her head and James would be the first one she called a liar.

"So. Ashley." James said, turning around to face her. "I heard you were creeping around a car crash with my boy. Did you know that ninety nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent of unexplained car crashes are caused by spiders?"

“I thought it was bees, go back to what you were saying about his-” she said.

“No, it’s spiders. And I’ll get back to that.”

"Where did you hear that?" she asked.

"You didn't tell her?" James backhanded Steven across the shoulder and he didn’t have a lie ready fast enough. "Okay, I'll tell her.” James went on. “I heard about it on TV, or in a movie or somewhere, and I never believed it. Until it happened to my best friend. Years ago, a bug got into his car, scared him, bit him or stung him, no one is sure exactly. He crashed though, and lost one of his testicles in a tree. Right Stevey? Tell her I’m wrong. Like I said. True story. He’s only got one."

"No, even though it’s true that I did lose one,” Steven corrected, “That only means I’m down to two. . .”

Ashely frowned and James looked over sharply. She was ready to call him out on a lie and Steven laughed it off, to show he was just kidding about have three testicles. James smirked and Steven could tell he was going to let it slide.

He knows I still had my hand on the chess piece, so it’s okay if I move it back, Steven thought as he steadied his nervous knees. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to game rained out in the first inning. Hold on, I got a better analogy that involves balls. It’s like I fucked up and almost sank the 8-ball after his break, and he caught it with his hand before it dropped. He doesn’t want to waste the quarters.

“Hold on a second,” Ashely said laughing as she raised up and dug through her pockets.

“Who’s got a calculator? One plus one plus one minus one equals. . .”

“Just kidding.” Steven interrupted. “Yeah, I’m afraid he’s right. One ball.”

Steven turned to the window to count mile-markers. James had scored right off the bat. He was actually kind of relieved that James had at least left one testicle. He tried to recover. He turned back around to Ashley.

"It doesn't look weird or anything. They gave me a metal ball to even things out and, um, the remaining one is three times stronger now, like when someone loses an eye and suddenly they can smell things far away...or underwater...or whatever."

"What? What are you talking about? There's no connection between your balls, eyes, nose and brain." Ashley said. "You really got one, though? Weird." She thoughtfully kicked around at the bottles and cans at her feet. "So where are we going to drink?"

"I told you. On my new boat." Steven said as he sat up straight. "I have my own boat." Then he realized that the lie had to be about James so he quickly added, "James doesn't have a boat." Pause. "I just let him hang out on mine sometimes, right?"

“That’s right.” James agreed with a smirk.

"There's no water out here." Ashley said as she hung on the back of Steven’s headrest.

"It rained recently though. You can smell it.” Steven said.

“So,” she said as James shook his head in disgust.

“You only need a mud puddle and you can-hell, you only need a bottlecap full of water and you can drown in it." Steven declared. "You never heard that? So where did I park my boat James? Right around here, ain’t it?"

"Yep." James smiled. "Hey, you wanna know how he got this boat, Ashley?"

"Don't call me Ashley,” she said, sitting back. “Suddenly I hate it. Something about how you guys say it. Coming out of your mouths, it sounds like an adverb. Call me Ash from now on, okay." James just stared in the rearview mirror and waited for her to answer his original question.

"How?" She took a long blink, tired of him staring.

Dreading the answer, Steven closed his eyes, rolled down his window and leaned his head out into the roar of the wind.

"I'm not sure myself." James said. “I know it didn't cost him any money though. All I know is I get a call a couple weeks back to come down to the water where it's docked and I'm looking all around for Steven, and all I see is this dude standing waist-deep in the water, right down in the middle of the boat-launch lane. This guy doesn't see me coming and I get right to the edge of the water when splash! up comes Steven like a dolphin, coughing and spitting all over. I'm all like, "dude?" and Steven looks all embarrassed and stutters "uhhh, I dropped the keys, I was looking for them with my hands and he was looking with his feet,” and I'm ready to believe him, because the other possibility is to hard for me to swallow, when suddenly this other guy laughs and gives Steven a quarter, yeah, that’s right, a fucking quarter, and he says, "see, I told you that you couldn't breathe through it!" Now what does that mean? I still don't know what that means. Can’t be good though."

"That didn't happen." Ashley declared.

"Steven tell her..." He didn't know that he’d just lost the game.

"I dropped my keys. That's what happened." Steven said. He didn’t know that he just won the game. He looked up at her, suddenly angry about something. "Ash? That doesn’t sound right. How about if we just never say your name at all? Ever."

James was confused. He wasn't sure if Steven's answer about the keys was breaking the rules of their game. Steven looked over, then behind him, then bumped the rearview mirror so that they couldn’t see each others eyes and it reflected nothing except sky.

How do they make mirrors anyway? He thought. Why do they keep working, even after you break them? That’s how I met her. I’ll have to remember to look that up later. . .

James and Steven exchanged a glare. Steven knew that they were both thinking too much and neither could remember what the rules were anymore.

That’s when they finally ran out of road.

James stopped the car on an incline. The headlights had been on, even though it had only grown dark enough in the last five minutes. He left the car in gear so i wouldn’t slide and, as he reached for the keys, he stopped and leaned forward on the steering wheel to stare out into woods. Steven looked too. Even Ashley grabbed the headrests to see.

The headlights were angled upward. The road had stopped at the top of a hill that was just high enough to aim the lights into the top of the trees. It was something none of them had seen before, as if two huge spotlights had been switched on and suddenly the night had a roof over it that no one had seen before.

There was something else. A movement up in those trees, branches and leaves rustling and falling silent and still as they watched.

Then Steven reached over, turned off the light and took the keys before James could react.

The sun was going fast, the night a wave of black ants carrying it over the horizon on their heads. Three shadows, two boys and a girl, were crunching through high grass and weeds. Every so often the girl would stop and listen for a river.

“We should go back in the car. There’s no water out here.” She said. “Three is a bad number anyway. The only time three people can get along, is in a car. Because the third person is separated.”

“Don’t worry.” One of the boys said. “No one’s gonna start fighting.”

“And no one is gonna start crying,” the other boy said.

“You two make me laugh,” the girl said as she kicked down a cattail. “I remember back to a time when boys used to actually fight over girls.”

“Got a joke for y’all,” one of the boys called from up ahead. “Crazy man is walking in the woods with two little kids and the kids suddenly start crying. Crazy man gets mad and says, ‘hey, what the hell are you two crying about? I’m the one who has to walk out of here all by myself!’”

“I don’t get it,” the other boy lied.

“Me neither,” she was telling the truth.

One of the boys tripped over a shark’s fin as they reached a clearing. He quickly turned around with his arms out to stop the other two.

"Hold up a second,” Steven said, stepping out in front of them in the last of the light. “James? You owe me a bottle of Tequila. Go back and get one." Steven turned to Ashley to explain, still forgetting the game was over. "James lost to me arm-wrestling. He looks stronger I know. No one can figure it out. He loses every time and he bets on it anyway. You remember the bet right? Bottle of Cuervo. And you gotta run the whole way back."

"Aren't you going to say that you were arm-wrestling with your elbows in broken glass and scorpions or something?" Ashley grumbled as she pushed passed him and stumbled. "Where the hell are we?"

"Close.” Steven said. “Watch out for sharks. . ."

James ran to catch up with her, going out of his way to stomp some cattails too. He leaned over and whispered.

"It wasn’t arm-wrestling. It was thumb-wrestling."

* * *

When they finally saw the shadow of the shipwreck in the distance, Ashley crouched down and gasped when she saw the sharks.

Steven had dug long trails through the grass with his feet and fingers to give the vinyl shark-fins a wake behind them, a path of figure-eights where someone could imagine they were circling the boat. Ashley started to crawl after one, dragging a heel behind her to trace one of the trenches. Steven quickly ran over to get in James' ear.

"I'm serious. Go get the Tequila. Now. On foot. You know the rules. I got the keys, remember?" he said, patting a jangling wad in his pocket.

"That'll take three fucking hours.” James said, watching her with his arms crossed. “Fuck that shit. I could just lie and say the fucking place burned down."

"You mean you could lie and say I burned the fucking place down.” Steven corrected. “Remember, you can only lie about me, and me about you. So go ahead and do that. And I’ll just say that you helped build a new one. We could do that shit all night. Just go. I’ll be invisible again when you get back anyway."

James sighed, watching her run her hands through the dirt in the last of the light. Steven grabbed his head to turn it towards him. James shoved his hands away and his eyes flashed in anger. Ashley was walking towards the boat, squinting at the name scrawled on the side.

"What's that say?” She asked. “What’s a ‘road sword?’ What’s that mean?"

James was walking backwards back into the woods. He yelled at them, eyes still blazing,

"Steven didn’t name the ship. I did. I'm the only one who knows the story behind the name. I'll have to tell you when I get back."

He started back-peddling faster and faster and faster into the trees. Steven and Ashley both waited for him to fall and he never did.

"No, you won't." Steven called out. "That's our secret, brother. Remember? You swore."

James was gone. They could still heard him running in the distance, along with the first rumble and hiss of rain. Steven counted the crash of his footsteps and he told himself that James would have had to turn around to be running that fast and not hitting anything. He wasn’t sure though. It made him nervous for no good reason.

Steven thought about how he would stare at things when he was a boy. How he would get scared when his vision blurred and things faded away. Whenever it happened, he’d get scared that he was the one vanishing, instead of the world.

He felt a rain drop on his nose and suddenly he smelled everything so strong he felt drunk. The earthworms, the weeds, something dead until a fallen tree. An animal had shit somewhere to his right, another had pissed somewhere to his left. He couldn’t see any of these things and knew there was no way to prove they were even there. There was one though.

The girl behind him in the dark. Her hair, heavy and black. The dirt, sweat and grass-stains on her elbows, fingers and knees.

* * *

Her eyes followed a bright orange electrical cord and the rusty caged light bulbs that hung from it around the small cabin of the shipwreck. The cord started at a hole kicked into the floorboards, she put a hand near the spot and she could smell the gasoline and feel the pumping of a generator. From there the cord crawled up the wall next to the right side of the door and took a sharp left turn at the first caged light, hanging from a nail in a dog-eared fuzzy black-light poster. On this poster was a picture of a blue and black poisonous frog with the caption:

"Eat a frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen all day."

She looked closer and saw that the word “frog” was crossed out and the word "spider" was scrawled under it. The frog also had extra legs and eyes drawn over it. Under that, someone had written:

"Jerk-off first thing in the morning and nothing better. . ."

She followed the cord past the spider-frog to the end of the wall where the next caged light was tied around the handle of a tiny dorm-room refrigerator. The cord climbed up over her head where another caged light dangled at the top of another black-light poster. This one was something she’d seen on a T-shirt once. Tiny skeletons in "69 Positions." She wondered why there weren't any black light bulbs in those cages. Maybe they didn't know what kind of posters they had. Or maybe they weren’t even their posters.

Below the sixty-nine skeletons was a ratty green love-seat that seemed to be growing out of the wall. Hunched over so she wouldn’t hit her head, she leaned down and tugged on it. It slid forward and one side dropped down, the leg rolling past her shoe. She could see that they had cut the love-seat in half to make it fit. She stared at the springs and wooden ribs sticking out the back and was reminded of the split dogs from her biology class. Or maybe she’d seen them in a movie. She pushed it back into the wall and thought of theater props. Fake stereos and TVs and fruit that decorated the stage and looked real enough until you touched it. She backed up to the doorway to look for Steven and tripped as her foot came down into a milk crate full of cassette tapes. She shook it loose, noticing that they were too small to have music on them. She could see shards of broken records piled in with them. The cabin was so small that there really was no empty space to speak of. She could almost touch two walls, the roof and the floor without moving.

Everything was touching everything. There was nowhere to walk, one full step in any direction was denied. She thought about a game she'd played when she was little. It was called "hot lava" and she played it with her three cousins whenever they spent the night. The idea was that the red carpet in the living room of her parents house would kill you if you touched it. So you jumped from tables to cushions to chairs to bookshelves and you tried to knock someone down into the "lava." It was a dangerous game and none of their parents ever knew they played it when they were gone. The girl always ended up breaking something while they arched their backs and twisted their bodies to keep any part from touching the floor. They took the danger so serious that they never even tried to push each other down.

She found the orange cord where she’d left off to finish its journey around the room. It stopped dead-center on a wall. There was a peak in the cord where a light and a nail were sticking out of a broken record. Someone had nailed it up for a fin, then drawn the rest of the shark on the wall around it with crayons. Crayons? She looked close at the drawing and saw that someone must have peeled the crayons to roll them and make the shark's lines thicker. Something a child would do on a wall. The caged light was the shark’s eye. She saw that this bulb was black. Of course the posters and the shark wouldn't glow unless the all the other lights were black or busted. She wondered if they knew that one black light was a waste of time.

There was a blue extension cord coming from the shark that she followed down to a stereo behind the open cabin door. It was a large stereo that looked even larger with the steering wheel someone had somehow attached to the volume knob. She reached down and turned it on. Nothing but static. She smiled and cranked the wheel like she was a getaway driver taking a corner. Steven quickly pushed his way in behind her to turn it back down.

“None of this is yours, is it?” she said, falling back onto the arm of the love-seat.

"What are you talking about?” he said, not answering the question. “Do you want to listen to music? There’s no reception out here."

"No.” she said, feet restlessly kicking at the air. “So what does the name mean?"

"What? The name of the ship? It means nothing." Steven admitted, giving up the secret in record time. "It just came out after we got drunk. It means something to James for some weird reason. It’s just two words that sound good together. Road and sword. Sword and road. . ."

“Not that. The “S. S.” thing. I always wanted to know what that shit means.”

“No idea.” Steven muttered, angry that he’d broke his promise with James for nothing.

“Then why did you put it on there?”

“Ask him. It’s a little boy thing. The make up words for no reason. No one stops to listen or they’d hear a whole string of nonsense every time one of them climbed a tree.

“Why just little boys?” Ashley’s feet started peddling the air as if on a bicycle. “Little girls are even more misunderstood.” Her feet slowed down, then started peddling in the other direction.

“I doubt that.” Steven laughed. “So what do you want to-”

"Tell me a story about you." Her feet suddenly stopped and she was crawling across the sofa, careful not to touch the ground.

“What are you-”

“Tell me a story.”

Ashley was licking her fingers, trying to unscrew one of the white bulbs without getting burned. She hissed every time she touched it until finally she turned it enough for it to flutter and wink out.

“Can’t think of one right now.”

“Which one is harder to think of? A true story or a lie.”

“A true story.”

“Then quit it. Keep playing the game.” Ashley stopped unscrewing a bulb and looked around the cabin. “You know what? You three should have a mirror in here,” she said. “To make it look bigger inside. You gonna tell me a story or not?”

“There’s only two of us.” Steven climbed up next to her and moved in close.

“You sure?” She asked as her hand came up between their faces. He breathed in deep, smelling the burn of bulb mixed with the grass and soil on her fingertips.

"Back up.” Ashley said quietly. “We aren't going to do anything."

"Why not?" Steven asked, reaching out to follow her lead and unscrew another bulb.

"Why not what?” She sighed. Then she saw what he was doing. “No, not that one!"

His hand slipped when she yelled and the black light shattered over their heads, a puff of glass and dust rained down as they pinched their eyes and mouths shut.

"That's the only one I wanted on." She said after a moment, then gently picked a piece of black glass out of her hair.

"Don’t worry about that bulb. I got something else that makes the posters and the shark glow better than any black light. So why can't we do anything?" He repeated.

"I'm bleeding."

Confused, Steven quickly grabbed her hands and held them under the shark’s eyes.

"Did I cut you?"

“No. That’s not what I meant.”



-© 2003 david james keaton

::: david - 9:02 PM [+] :::
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