Pirates of the Retail Wasteland (9 page)

“We’ll need time to set up anyway,” said Anna. “Five-fifteen’ll be fine.”

“Just one thing to keep you guys out of trouble,” said Andy. “If Harold comes in, you have to tell him you’re setting up to sell Girl Scout cookies or something.”

“He’ll still kick them out,” said Troy. “You probably can’t do that, either.”

“Yeah,” said Andy, “but you don’t go to jail for selling Girl Scout cookies. I’ll take the rap for letting you set up. Good a way as any if I want to get fired.”

“Should we be in uniform for that?” asked Brian. “We were going to go for business gear.”

I tried to think of Brian in a Girl Scout uniform. If the cops saw him dressed like that, they’d surely think they’d found a pedophile in Cornersville Trace at last.

“Nah, that won’t be necessary,” said Andy. “People sell Girl Scout cookies in civilian garb out in the parking lot all the time; I’ll tell him we let you inside because it’s so cold. Just be here early enough and I’ll cover the rest.”

“No problem,” I said. “Five o’clock it is. We can handle being kicked out eventually, as long as he doesn’t arrest us or anything.”

“You guys still wanna plunder some booty?” asked Troy. “Here. I’ll mark this out as damaged.” He picked up a brownish yellow bag of coffee beans and tossed it at Anna, who caught it.

“Wackfords House Blend?” she said, looking down at it.

“Good sir, you insult me.”

“I didn’t say you had to drink it,” said Troy. “Maybe you can throw it through somebody’s window or something.”

Brian snatched it out of Anna’s hand. “Avast!” he shouted. “We be plundering this here booty for the crew of the HMS Pirate Ship!”

Behind the counter, Andy snickered. “Yo ho ho and a bottle of organic kiwi juice,” he said.

“Tell you what,” said Troy. “Come to Sip Friday night at nine, we’ll go over all the last-minute details.”

“Deal,” I said.

“And you have to promise to blur out our faces in the video,” said Andy. “It’s another rule of the McHobos—never get anyone else in trouble. I don’t want Troy to get fired, too.”

“I can get fired!” said Troy. “I can go get another name tag job someplace else, too.”

“Patience,” said Andy. “You’re not ready yet.”

Troy nodded reverently again.

So we all shook hands and the four of us wandered back outside into the cold wind.

“Holy shit,” I said. “We did it. We just organized a mutiny at Wackfords.”

“That was way easier than I thought,” said Anna. And she grabbed my arm and pulled me in close. I pulled her in closer. It’s hard to cuddle through about four layers of clothes, including thick winter coats, but suddenly she was hugging me so tight it felt practically like we were going to second base. She whispered into my ear, “I’d kiss you, but I’m afraid my tongue would get stuck.”

“Fair enough,” I whispered back.

Clearly, my plan to show I was on her level, not some dork following along behind her, was working.

Brian opened up the bag of coffee beans Troy had given him as plunder and threw it high in the air over a mostly empty strip mall parking lot. The beans came flying out as it fell to the ground, raining down onto the icy blacktop, which made a really cool noise.

“Yo ho ho!” Brian shouted. And you could hear it echo all the way down the street.

Of all the times not to have a camera running.

By the time I made it home, I was in a great deal of pain. I felt like I could’ve pulled my face right off of my skull—I imagine it would be a lot like peeling a Fruit Roll-Up off the cellophane—if I could’ve moved my fingers.

“Leon!” my mother shouted. “You’re late! Where’ve you been?”

“Stayed late at school,” I said. “I had to work on a project for my job market skills class.”

“You could have called,” she said.

“Not really,” I said. “They won’t let me use my phone at school, and with all my gloves on and stuff, I couldn’t have dialed once I got outside.”

Sometimes rules backfire on parents; they’d pushed for all the rules against having phones in class back in the days when the only kids who had them were drug dealers. Now everyone had them, and needed to use them to call home, since there weren’t any pay phones left, but the parents were stuck with the rules they’d made.

She walked to the door, where I was busy trying to get all my winter gear off and hung up.

“Well,” she said, “I guess as long as it was for school, it’s okay. I can’t blame you for not wanting to take your gloves off in this weather.”

I finished getting unbundled and wandered into the kitchen. “You don’t happen to have any coffee brewed or anything, do you?” I asked. “Something hot?”

“I’ll brew some,” she said. “Your dad is in the lab, working on his dye. He’ll probably want something hot when he comes in, too.”

“Maybe he could focus on inventing a lower-cost heating system,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “it’s not like I haven’t tried to get him to invent something that practical over the years. But it’s no use—he invents what he feels like inventing.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And trying to come up with heating systems would probably put him in way more danger than working on dyes, anyway.”

It was exactly one second later that we heard a blood-curdling scream coming from the garage. Dad came running into the kitchen, where he quickly stuck his head into the sink.

“Aaaahhhh!”
he screamed, turning on the water. “Just shoot me! Shoot me! Shoot me!”

“Nick!” said my mother, running over to him. “What happened?”

He growled and groaned while the cold water ran onto his head. “The dye!” he said. “It burns!”

A minute or so later, he’d stopped screaming and turned off the water. He just stood there with his head in the sink, breathing heavily.

“Well,” he said, between pants, “I don’t think it stuck to my scalp, at least. Rolled right off, just like it was supposed to.”

A few seconds later he pulled his head out of the sink and toweled off with a dishrag.

Most of the Mohawk was gone. All that remained was a little patch near the front of his head.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I don’t think it agreed with your hair.”

He paused for a second, then brought his hand ever so slowly up to his head, feeling around where the rest of his Mohawk used to be.

“Oh my God!” he said. “I’m bald!” He then found the remaining patch and heaved a sigh of relief that there was some left.

“I guess it must have burned it off,” he said, like a regular crusader for the obvious. He walked into the nearby bathroom to get a look in the mirror. When he saw himself, he made a face like he’d just seen the ghost of somebody really unpleasant. “I made it so it would react to hair but not skin, and I guess it worked. At least my scalp isn’t all bloody and blistered, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Well then, I guess it sort of worked,” he said. “It just rolled off my skin without leaving a stain. But it sure as hell felt like it was burning!”

Right about then, he stepped out of the bathroom, and my mother started to chuckle. “Well,” she said, “I hope you didn’t mess up your scalp so much that your hair won’t grow back,” she said. “You look pretty silly.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you looked pretty silly to start with. Now you have a punk Charlie Brown thing going on.”

My dad came and sat down at the kitchen table, wrapping the towel around his head. “I thought the Mohawk was cool,” he said.

“It would have been,” I said, “on somebody else.”

“That’ll do, Leon,” he said. “That’ll do.”

And he sat staring across the kitchen, through the living room to the empty fireplace, looking devastated. I had never seen him so upset. He usually looked crushed when his inventions didn’t work, which was often enough, but this was different. He had the look of someone who’d been told that an old friend had just died. Like he had tuned the rest of the world out and was just sadly contemplating the meaning of life.

Finally, I sat down next to him. “I don’t mean to say that you looked dumb,” I said. “Just…that you aren’t really the kind of guy who can pull off a Mohawk. You’re not a punk.”

“Hey,” he said. “I may not be young anymore, but I get frustrated with society, too. Why shouldn’t adults get to lash out? It’s not like the world sucks that much less after you grow up.”

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said. “But you still have that one patch of hair left. You’ll find another way to rebel.”

“You mean another way to deal with a midlife crisis,” he grumbled. “Maybe I should just buy a sports car like everybody else.”

“Come on,” said my mother. “You know that won’t make you any younger or cooler. And you’re not old enough to have a midlife crisis.”

“Fine,” he said. “Pre-midlife crisis, then. Same difference. I need to take a trip or something. Anywhere. Maybe I can go live in a gutter for a while.”

And he sat there, staring off into space and scowling. The poor guy didn’t even have the energy to be a Grilling American that night.

Thursday was a big improvement, school-wise. Activity period was just on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, so when Skills for the Job Market ended that morning, I was able to face history class with a smile, because I had the longest possible amount of time before
more
activity period in front of me.

The day was made all the better by another appearance from Coach Hunter before Coach Wilkins’s class.

“Another one!” he moaned. “Will you look at this? This one’s downright filthy!”

“Let me see,” said Wilkins, taking the sheet. He looked it over and read a couple of lines out loud, then read the rest to himself. “Wow. This is pretty rough,” he said. “It’s not as bad as the poem it’s based on, though.”

“Can I see it?” I asked.

Coach Wilkins passed it over to me.

“I’ll bet you know what it says already, don’t you?” asked Coach Hunter.

“I told you, Coach,” I said. “I don’t.”

I looked down at the poem on the page.

WAIL!

by the Same Guy

I saw the best minds of my generation

destroyed by gym class,

starving, hysterical, sweating, dragging

themselves around

one more lap in fifth period, waiting for the

angry bell.

Who climbed to the top of the rope and cried

“Holy” and studied volleyball, basketball,

dodgeball, while the floor instinctively vibrated

at their feet at the foul line,

who allowed themselves to be made the

subject of paramilitary rage

and wailed with joy when the vein in the

coach’s neck twitched

and his eyeball also twitched,

who were awash in a sea of squats squats

squats and rubber balls

and cried out “Rage! Rage!” against the starting

of the class.

Students of the world, I’m with you in gym

class.

I’m with you in gym class,

where we circled in an eternal square dance.

I’m with you in gym class,

where we longed for the days of playing with

parachutes.

I’m with you in gym class,

trying to see up your shorts when you stretch,

checking out your

butt when you present the coach with push-ups.

I’m with you in gym class,

hearing the action-movie music in my head as

the rubber

ball flies toward your head like a missile in the

musky air.

I’m with you in gym class,

where the sad coach wailed the lonely wail that

begged to

become a cry from the grave.

“Not bad,” I said. “What’s it based on?”

“‘Howl,’ by Allen Ginsberg,” said Coach Wilkins.

“You’re lucky, Gene. The original is a lot longer. More obscene, too.”

“One more of them, Harris,” Coach Hunter said to me.

“One more, and it’s locker search time. And if I find one obscenity in any of them, it’s military school for whoever’s writing this stuff!”

I was past worrying about getting my locker raided, of course. I’d already cleared it out enough that all he’d find were some smelly gym socks, which he was welcome to.

But it was a good thing he didn’t go on the search right away. After class, I opened my locker and a piece of yellow paper fell out. I picked it up and saw that it was a note from Jenny.

Dear Leon,

Thanks again for your kind invitation to become a pirate. Sorry I couldn’t do it, but please don’t think it means I’m not crazy enough or anything. I swear I can keep up with you guys. I really can. See you at gifted pool tomorrow.

Break on through,
Jenny

P.S. Out of curiosity, have you ever seen a girl naked?

I stared at that note—the last line of it, anyway—for a really long time before shoving it in my pocket, where Anna wouldn’t see it, and spent the next class trying to get Jenny out of my head, but you don’t get a letter with a last line like that and forget about it. Jenny hadn’t exactly offered me the chance to see
her
naked or anything. In fact, when I thought about it, I felt as though she could have been a bit more specific. Was she asking if I knew what a naked girl looked like, like from pictures and stuff, or if I had actually seen one myself, in person? ’Cause they’re two different things, but she didn’t seem to differentiate.

I was awfully glad that I’d gotten it out of my locker, though. If Coach Hunter had found it, he would have passed it on to Dr. Brown. Then he’d know we were plotting some sort of piracy, and I shuddered to think of what sort of videos he’d make Jenny watch to warn her not to write things like that to a guy.

And anyway, if that happened, word of the note would get back to Anna, and I really didn’t want to know how she’d react. Maybe she’d get mad at Jenny. Maybe she’d get mad at
me
. If she saw that I’d gotten a letter like that, she’d surely know what I spent the next class period thinking about, after all. Things were already a bit awkward between Jenny and me, not to mention between Anna and me. Something like this couldn’t possibly help.

In any case, I was very glad that Jenny had a different lunch period than me. I didn’t know if I’d be able to see her without getting either really embarrassed or really turned on, and I didn’t want to be either. As usual, though, just having Anna show up took every thought of Jenny out of my head. It worked every time.

At lunch, Anna, Brian, Edie, and I hardly even mentioned the upcoming piracy. Anna was talking about Louis Wain, one of the artists they’d been discussing in the art history activity. He was a guy who painted cats and stuff, and then he went crazy and started painting the cats as crazy, too.

“God, I wish I were in that class,” I said. “Know what we talked about in my activity? Resume-writing skills.”

“Too bad you couldn’t take political science,” said Edie. “We argued about free trade all morning—it was awesome! Everyone thought I was crazy!”

“Speaking of crazy,” I said, “Coach Hunter is on the warpath.”

“Which one did he find?” asked Dustin. “I hid about five of them in his office.”

“‘Wail,’” I said. “He’s threatening a locker raid on everyone in the pool.”

“He can’t do that!” said Edie.

“Maybe he can, maybe he can’t,” I said, “but there’s nothing saying he won’t. Get anything incriminating out of your locker as soon as you can.”

“I wish I had some dog crap I could leave in there,” said Brian. “Maybe I could make, like, a spring contraption that would throw crap at whoever opens the door without punching in a secret code that only I know or something.”

I had no doubt that he could make this work.

“Yeah,” said Anna. “But if he never does the search, you’re stuck with dog crap sitting in your locker.”

“Small price to pay if it might lead to Coach Hunter getting crap in his eye.”

Lunch period was a welcome twenty-minute break from thinking about anything of any consequence. Between the upcoming piracy and the whole business with Jenny, the Coach Hunter stuff seemed like an amusing sideshow.

Once lunch was over, though, I was back to thinking about the note in my back pocket. All through the day, I tried my absolute hardest to keep from picturing Jenny naked, but it wasn’t easy. And I knew, from having had her sit on me on the couch and stuff, that she was reasonably developed and everything—she probably looked great naked.

So did Anna, though, I kept reminding myself. I tried to picture
her
naked instead, which, in all honesty, was not difficult. But then I’d start picturing both her
and
Jenny naked, and, to make a long story short, it was probably the longest afternoon I’d ever spent in class. I needed to get home. Badly.

But I still waited for Anna outside, just like always, and I walked a lot closer to her than I normally did as we headed to the edge of the parking lot.

“Well,” I said, “tomorrow night will be the last planning meeting. We’re going to have to get all our stuff in order tonight.”

“I’ll send everyone an e-mail,” Anna said. “See ya tomorrow, sailor.”

She started walking away, but I said, “Wait,” grabbed her by the arm, pulled her back to me, and kissed her. Hard. And long. With tongue, which was unusual for us. A couple of people shouted out the windows of their parents’ cars as they passed by. For a second I was afraid she’d pull away and ask what I thought I was doing, but she didn’t.

In fact, she was kissing me back just as hard. She even grabbed the small of my back and started pulling me a little bit closer, but I took a step back so I wouldn’t be pressing too much against her. I’d been picturing her naked the whole day. She might have been able to tell.

“Well,” she said as she finally pulled away from me. “Something got into you today, huh?”

“You could say that,” I said, feeling like I was standing at about a forty-five-degree angle so as not to be up against her.

She smiled and headed away. I ran home as fast as I could.

An hour after I got home, Dad called me downstairs. He sounded pretty happy. Downright chipper, in fact. Clearly, the loss of his Mohawk had not knocked him out for good.

He was wearing all black—black pants, a black turtleneck sweater, and black sunglasses. His scalp was terribly pale, and what was left of his hair was sculpted into one pointy spike, like he had a green horn on the front of his head.

“Um, Dad?” I asked. “Do you know you look like a half-man, half-rhinoceros time traveler from the future?”

“It’s the latest style for the hair-free gentleman,” he said.

“You seem awfully chipper,” I said. “Good day with the dye?”

“Gonna have to let that slide for a couple of weeks,” he said. He tapped himself on the head. “I don’t have much hair left to test new models on, and after yesterday, I certainly can’t imagine you’d want to volunteer as a guinea pig.”

“Thanks for guessing that far ahead,” I said.

“So,” he said, “I figured I’d need something else to pass the time. I took a sick day to figure out how to make this spike and then did some shopping. Come see what I got!”

I followed him out to the garage. The card tables he used for experimenting were folded up along the wall, and all the lab equipment was gone—presumably in the boxes in front of the card tables. In their place, in the center of the garage, where sensible people keep their cars, were a bright red electric guitar and a small amplifier.

“You got a guitar!” I blurted.

“Isn’t it a beaut?” he asked.

“What kind is it?” I asked, walking up to it.

“The red kind,” he said. He picked it up and turned on the amp. It hummed softly, until he started very sloppily playing the riff from “Smoke on the Water,” which is known throughout the land as the easiest song in the world to play badly.

“Does Mom know about this?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he said.

“She might kill you,” I said.

He stopped playing for a second. “Yeah,” he said. “I thought about that. But she didn’t kill me over the Mohawk. Lots of guys find themselves sort of at loose ends when they get to my age, you know. Call it a midlife crisis, a pre-midlife crisis, or whatever, it’s all the same thing. But it happens to everyone. Some guys get sports cars. Some have affairs with younger women. All things considered, she’ll know that starting a rock band probably isn’t the worst thing I could do.”

“Band?” I said. “You’re starting a band?”

“Sure,” he said. “No point in getting a guitar if you don’t have a band, right?”

“Well,” I said, “one could argue that you should learn to play first.”

“Hey, man,” he said, “it’s only rock and roll!”

For a split second, I barely recognized him. This bald man in black with the shades and the green spike frankly didn’t look a thing like my dad. And he didn’t look any cooler, really.

But he was smiling, at least. If I didn’t have the upcoming piracy to remind myself about, I would have been quite worried that my dad, of all people, had become cooler than me. If there was one thing that could’ve strengthened my resolve as a buccaneer, it was that. I may have been a bit of a dork, but on the worst day of my life, I hoped I would never be a bigger dork than my dad.

Two hours later, there was an e-mail from Anna.

Yo ho ho, mateys!

Tomorrow at Sip during the game will be the last strategy meeting before the takeover. I’ll have the map. Troy will be joining us. Don’t tell anyone about anything. But have the following items ready:

Nice clothes. We need to look like people who work as accountants (and not the kind who have Mohawks. No offense, Leon).

A stapler. We won’t have pistols or daggers, like most pirates, so we should all be packing staplers.

An office accessory. Andy offered to bring a couple of small desks in his car, but we should each bring something else. Apiece of boring artwork or a fern or something. Be creative.

All the video gear you have. Remember, this is all for a movie. The only people who are probably going to know about this at all are people who happen to come into Wackfords while we’re there, so we won’t be making much of a point just by taking over the store. We need the movie to make our point. Wackfords is more of an office than a coffee shop. Let’s show the world, and send them to Sip.