Amp'd (21 page)

“They'd just fire us and hire new guys,” Will sighs. “Wouldn't change a thing.”

Is he kidding me? It could change
everything.
Freed of our commitment to Ick Ick, Will and I could go into business together, open a cupcake bakery, or a make-your-own-sausage restaurant. We could be pet sitters specializing in fish or open a day-care center, sell handcrafts on Etsy, operate a food truck. Kickstart a thing, build an app, microfund small businesses at usurious rates. We could be wedding photographers, amputee bloggers, start a driving school, rescue baby pandas, invent a gun that shoots bacon. E-commerce Internet meme fluff-and-fold web thing energy drink surf shop pumpkin something—

“Freaking
dam,
” Will disrupts my mental wet dream and heads back to his desk.

Over the rest of the week we collate and compile and eventually bundle it all under an assessment of lies with words like “improving” and “reversal” and imply a future where the Wabash is once again teeming with sturgeon, a scenario as much science fiction as
Zardoz.
When it's finished Will drops it on my desk and mouths a silent
ka-boom,
effectively gesturing a small, slow-motion explosion with his good hand.

 

THINGS YOU CAN GESTURE WITH ONE HAND

OK

Beckon

Stop!

Benediction

Blah-blah-blah

Check, please

Black power salute

Cross your fingers

Finger gun

Fist bump

Fist pump

High five

Hitchhiking

Metal horns

Thumbs-up

Scout's honor

Nazi salute

Hat tip

Wave

Peace sign

Mahalo

Live Long and Prosper

Finger wag

Talk to the hand

Loser

Fuck you

 

GUNPLAY

Saturday morning when I ask Consuela where Dad is, she nods at the closet. Before I can reach the door my phone rings.

“I'm bored out of my skull,” Dad complains on his cell phone.

“You've been through a lot. You need rest.”

“I'm unconscious all goddamn day.”

“What's it like?” I ask into the phone and through the closet door. “Are you aware of what's going on around you?”

“It's like watching TV three rooms away. You can't quite make anything out. And someone keeps switching channels. And it smells like toast.”

“But you're getting better every day. This … being able to talk to you. I never thought I'd hear your voice again.”

“I think I'd like to try some of that medical marijuana.”

“I'm not sure that's a good idea. The doctor was concerned—”

“What the hell difference could it possibly make?”

Dad and I share vaporized hits of Rastafazool in the closet. I wonder if it will affect Dad's scarred brain the same as mine.

“Not exactly the same as Fleischmann's, is it?” is all he says.

He giggles a little in the dark but is otherwise quiet, so I take him out into the light where I watch for any indication of its effect but see none. There's no way to tell if Dad is entirely unaffected or if his brain is snowed under by psychedelia. Consuela wheels Dad out to the backyard, where she gently coaxes a squirrel to take a nut from his fingers. I imagine Dad enjoys the touch of her hand against his, her hair grazing his face, her voice in his ear, despite not being able to understand. (Or maybe his amazing scrambled-and-rewired brain can decipher every word.) As I'm feeling guilty about having left him to return to fish counting (making a mental note to investigate whether there might be a marijuana strain that mollifies remorse), the doorbell rings, reminding me why I really returned to work after all: it's Will!

“Nice ride,” Will gestures to the heavy-metal van and enters, and instead of fist-bumping, we reach to embrace in a modified bro-hug backslap and handshake, sans handshake, backslaps made awkward by arms on the same side. “I thought I'd drop by; hope it's okay.”

It's awesome.

“How's your father doing?”

“A little better every day.”

“Really!” Will sounds pleased but incredulous. Spotting Dad through the backyard sliding doors, hunched and staring, I can't blame him.

Will roams the hallway, looking at the pictures on the wall of Dad, rifle in hand, ready to shatter the snow-blanketed quiet at the foot of the Wetterstein mountains.

“Must be tough for a guy who used to be so active,” Will remarks.

“Dad's spent most of the past thirty years sitting on a couch in front of
SportsCenter
. I'm surprised the blood didn't stop moving to his brain years ago.”

“Still, this guy”—Will points to the photo of my snow-skiing, gun-toting father—“must be in there someplace.”

Whether fueled by Will's presence or an especially perky strain of marijuana, I experience a eureka moment and set a plan into motion.

“Consuela!” I shout outside. “Can you pack a picnic lunch for five?” I gesture the universal symbols for five, lunch, and picnic basket that she's somehow able to interpret.

We load the picnic lunch, a twelve-pack of beer, and Dad into the van where I pull a bag over his head, earning a look of stunned disbelief on Will's face, the first I've ever seen. Lest it dissipate too quickly I don't bother explaining, and we're off to pick up the only other person my pot-stoked brain can imagine needs an adventure as much as Dad.

*   *   *

About a block away from school I spy a weary-looking Cancer Boy, further diminished, stooped under the weight of his backpack like prey caught in the moment of pouncing. Walking home with a small group of kids, he turns when I honk my horn, both happy and astonished to see me.

“Cool van!”

“I know, right?”

“You're on YouTube!” he shrieks, and then to his friends: “This is that guy!”

“I don't believe you,” a skeptic challenges.

“Show them!” he begs me.

I do, and this time no one screams or throws up, although they collectively coo and wow and coo some more, and Cancer Boy beams like the kid who just introduced his schoolmates to his rock-star friend. As even Will looks at me with admiration, they may be right.

“Hop in,” I tell the boy, knowing this could be considered child abduction but refusing to be deterred by technicalities.

*   *   *

Arriving in Crawlywood, Consuela takes a staple gun and a stack of color targets pulled from the inkjet printer and disappears into the trees. I remove Dad's hood and he awakens instantly. He and Cancer Boy stare as if each is seeing the other for the first time. Then Cancer Boy smiles and Dad attempts a grin, which merely stretches his face into a scary grimace and Cancer Boy instantly stops smiling, and so does Dad. Left alone with each other I'm certain they'd repeat this in an endless loop, so I move us along.

Will and I help Dad from the lift over the wobbly terrain into the woods. If he's aware of his surroundings, it isn't clear. I produce Dad's bolt-action .22 caliber rifle from the van and I can tell Cancer Boy thinks this is even cooler than the alligator that no longer resides in our bathtub. I place it in Dad's hands and point it out in front of him—which happens to be directly at Consuela as she emerges from the trees. We all quickly gather in the only completely safe place around a rifle-wielding stroke victim—directly behind him. Using our good arms, Will and I each grip a handle on Dad's wheelchair and race down the trail while Dad yelps.

It takes about a minute to get deep into the woods where we stop, about fifty yards away from the first target stapled to a tree. (I'm pleasantly surprised to see Consuela has mistakenly downloaded and printed not just any target but the Who's “mod” logo, a perfect red dot at the center of concentric white and blue circles.) I lean forward and whisper in Dad's ear, “You know what to do.”

Dad takes aim and blows a small hole in the tree, missing the target. The thunderclap makes Cancer Boy jump and laugh simultaneously. Three quick shots follow in the vicinity of the target, including one that straddles the outer blue ring and the white that surrounds it. Will and I pull beer cans from the cup holders on each of Dad's armrests and clink them. Dad rests the butt of the rifle on his thigh, pointed straight up, and closes his eyes, and we take off deeper into the woods, Dad yelping, Cancer Boy cheering, and Consuela grunting to keep up.

Eyes shut, Dad is able to feel the exhilaration of wind on his face and the bumpy rush of the ground beneath him. He blasts another target, his marksmanship better this time, scoring in the white between the red bull's-eye and the blue outside ring. Pressing on, Dad blows the hell out of three more targets and Cancer Boy pulls the last one from the tree, rushing it back to show Dad, who again bares his teeth at him.

We move on to the next target, which holds twin surprises: Consuela has inadvertently stumbled across the pit of Shop Smart coupon flyers I used to dump here (the summer job I failed with great intention), rotted and pulped together by decades of exposure to the elements; the second surprise is Ali, spread out over the mulchy, nearly unrecognizable mash, basking in the sun.

“
Is that a fucking gator?
” Will takes only a single step back but drops several notches on the cool scale.

“Yay!” Cancer Boy shouts. “You brought Ali!”

Suddenly a shot scatters confetti as the coupon flyers are blasted apart by Consuela, having seized Dad's rifle in panic. I shout, “No!” and leap between her and Ali, my brain telling both hands to dart out and up in the universal sign for “Don't shoot!” and falling short by a hand. Grateful that she's missed her first shot, I gently take the rifle from her as a hostage negotiator might after talking a disturbed gunman into tearful surrender. She crosses herself and makes a dash for the van as I lean the rifle against Dad's wheelchair.

Ali stares back at us, and if there's recognition in his eyes, I can't see it—unless it's the fact of knowing a small boy for food. For the second time I place myself in harm's way, only this time the alligator is not the one that needs protecting. I quickly toss Ali a tuna sandwich from the cooler.

“I take it you know this animal?”

“It's a reptile,” Cancer Boy remembers. “Can I feed him?”

“Maybe later!” I invoke the parental magic phrase to ward off a child's bad idea. “Will, how many sandwiches do we have left?”

“Four,” he counts.

“That should be enough to lead him back to the van.”

“Fuck that; I'm eating mine.” Will takes a huge bite out of one in an attempt to recapture his cool. It mostly works.

“Let me do it!” Cancer Boy plucks a sandwich and waves it hypnotically.

I stay close and we back-walk Ali with the three remaining sandwiches through the woods and to the van. Pulling open the rear doors, I toss the last sandwich inside and Ali scrambles after it as Consuela crosses herself once more and leaps from her seat. I slam the rear door and pop a can of beer for Cancer Boy, and we clink cans in unison with the sound of a rifle shot.

The four of us race back and every jarring step of the way, I can't help thinking how stupid it was to leave Dad alone with his rifle. What if he tried to get up and fell? Or am I really afraid that he might have deliberately turned the gun on himself?

Ahead of the others, I burst through the clearing and there's Dad sitting, pleased, his face stretched in an approximation of a happy grin. And why shouldn't he be happy? In our absence, he's scored a clean bull's-eye on the last target. We're all impressed, even the sheriff who appears suddenly to arrest us, at gunpoint, for discharging a firearm in public and destroying park property.

 

DEFENSE

Cancer Boy sits swinging his feet, clearly impressed by his step up in class from the principal's office to the sheriff's, one more way in which his friendship with me has paid an exciting dividend (although I doubt his mother will see it that way). Will and Consuela have been separated from us in the method, I imagine, that dangerous gangs are divided and interrogated and tricked into betraying one another by being told they've already been betrayed by the others. Clearly, I've been determined the leader; what this has to say about the roles assigned to my brain-challenged father and the little boy riddled with cancer is unclear, although I like to think “henchmen with nothing to lose.”

It's only when the sheriff declares, “You do recognize me without my gas mask, right?” that I realize this is the man who tear-gassed me, and who I'm suing so as to never have to toil in the arena of fish conservation or any other meaningful work again.

“No hard feelings?”

“Oh, nothing but,” he assures me, before neatly summing up the facts of the case: “So, in a nutshell, you took a stroke victim out to fire a rifle in a heavily wooded public area, and brought along a small boy to whom you have no relation as part of some recreational exercise.”

“Things haven't been so great. I thought they both deserved a treat.”

“It was fucking awesome!” Cancer Boy shouts his endorsement, and any trepidation I had scatters like nervous townsfolk as I face down the sheriff.

“And your other accomplices…?”

“A friend from work and Dad's nurse. Not their fault, really. I take full responsibility.”

“You boys
with the arms,
” he says, really meaning
without
them, “belong to some kind of club?”