Untouchable (7 page)

Matthew was only one spot above The Kid in the eyes of the other kids at school, only one rung above the absolute bottom. Or maybe The Kid was actually one rung above the absolute bottom, which would be Michelle Mustache, who the other kids hated as much as they hated The Kid, but on top of that she was also a girl. Either way, The Kid knew that if he weren’t around, Matthew would be the one with all the incidents. The Kid knew that Matthew knew this as well. They’d been friends for as long as he could remember, but sometimes The Kid wondered if Matthew only stayed friends with him because of this. Because without The Kid it would be Matthew standing there in the locker room looking at his wet clothes.

Matthew held the comics out for The Kid. “I’m giving them to you to take home for safekeeping.”

The Kid reached for the comics, but Matthew held them back, fixed The Kid with a serious look.

“But only on one condition,” he said. “That I can come over to your house and look at them any time I want.”

That sounded reasonable. The Kid nodded in agreement.

“You’ve got to promise officially,” Matthew said.

The Kid opened his notebook to a blank page, wrote quickly across the top.

I promise
.

Matthew read the line, looked back at the covers of the comics. He finally nodded, handed the stack to The Kid. The Kid slid the comics under the waistband of his pants, tucked his shirt in over the tops.

“You should write down where I’d hidden the comics,” Matthew said. “So you’ll know where to hide them again if you need to.”

The Kid opened his notebook, wrote,
Under a garbage can
on the next blank line.

They pulled the garbage bin back into place and snuck back around to the front door, into the soft, carpeted calm of the house.

Matthew’s father sat in his armchair in the living room, reading the newspaper. Mr. Crump was a big bald man, an accountant for an insurance company downtown. The Kid had never seen him without a dark suit and tie, even on weekends. Matthew had a couple of dark suits, too, hanging upstairs in his bedroom closet. He wore a suit and tie to church, to bible meetings. He also wore these suits when he and his parents went out in the mornings and knocked on people’s doors, told them about their church, invited them to come along.

The living room was ringed with high wooden shelves packed with encyclopedias and bibles and other religious volumes. An electric organ sat in the corner, sheet music open on top, hymns to the Lord. There was no TV in the living room, in the entire house. Matthew’s father said that they didn’t need a TV. They had books, they had the electric organ.

The Kid could hear Matthew’s mother’s kitchen radio set low to a religious station, organ music and a pastor’s deep voice. Mrs. Crump moved through the kitchen like a bird, cautious and precise, setting out silverware, folding napkins, humming along with the radio.

There was still time before dinner, so they went upstairs and sat on the floor of Matthew’s bedroom with the big blank sheets of paper Mr. Crump brought home from work. The sheets were big enough that when a few pages were folded in half, it was the perfect size for a comic book. The Kid wanted to work on a new issue of the comic that he and Matthew had made for the last couple of years,
Extraordinary Adventures
. A new issue every month, maybe every two months if they were really busy with homework. They each wrote and drew their own stories, one or two per issue. Superhero stories, outer-space stories, cowboy stories, war stories—anything, really, the only rule was that the stories had to be extraordinary. No boring stories, no stories about people doing normal things.

The star of most of The Kid’s stories was Smooshie Smith, Talk Show Host of the Future. Smooshie was the most popular talk show host in the history of TV because he had a time machine that let him go back and forth through the years and interview all sorts of people. He interviewed cowboys in the Western stories, soldiers in the war stories, aliens in the outer-space stories. Sometime he got caught up in battles and fights, but mostly he stuck to broadcasting his highly-rated show from different points in the timeline of the universe.

For the first issue of
Extraordinary Adventures
back in fourth grade, The Kid’s mom made copies of the original comic at her school. Then The Kid and Matthew sold as many as they could to other kids for fifty cents each and used the money to make copies of the next issue at the print shop on Vermont Avenue. With the money from that issue, they paid for the copies of the next issue, and so on. That was how it worked. Ten or twelve pages, usually, per issue. Black and white drawings because color copies were too expensive.

Since that first issue, they’d sold fewer copies of the comic. More kids didn’t like The Kid, didn’t want to buy the comic. The Kid had always been picked on, had always been smaller than the other kids, not as tough as the other kids, but things got really bad in fourth grade. A girl in his class said that The Kid’s breath stank. She may have been right, The Kid didn’t know. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, plenty of kids’ breath stank, but it stuck to The Kid. Someone told someone and someone told someone else and before The Kid knew it almost every day some kid was telling him that his breath stank. And then his armpits. And then his hair. They said that he was contagious. They didn’t want to touch anything that The Kid had touched. It grew like a weed, this idea of The Kid as an awful thing. It tangled around everyone and everything.

Around that time, his class had done a history unit where they learned about people in India who were so despised that they couldn’t even be brushed up against, could barely be looked at. That was where the name came from, the untouchables, the name for The Kid and Matthew and Michelle Mustache. Things got so bad that for the last issue of the comic they’d made, right at the end of the last school year, they’d only sold one copy. The rest were under The Kid’s bed, or boxed up in the garage back at the house, hidden away, embarrassing, a failed thing.

He’d tried to keep it from his mom and dad. He was ashamed of this, the way other kids thought about him. He didn’t want the germ of the idea to be planted with his parents, that he was dirty, that he was contagious. He was afraid that they would start to think this, too.

Of course his mom got it out of him. She noticed all the unsold comics, his increasing fear about going to school. He finally told her what was happening. She talked to his teacher and the principal of his school, but that only made things worse, really, only made the other kids angry about being lectured to. He pleaded with her not to say anything else, just to leave it alone, let it go away on its own.

But it didn’t go away. It had only gotten worse since his mom had been gone.

Matthew didn’t want to work on a new issue of the comic before dinner. He didn’t see the point. No one would buy it anyway. He said that instead he had a superhero scene he’d been thinking about, that he’d come up with a good idea, but he’d have to tell it to The Kid and The Kid would have to draw it because he wasn’t allowed to draw superheroes anymore. The Kid adjusted the
Captain America
comics in his waistband, made sure they were still covered by his shirt. Got a blank sheet of the big paper, a couple of colored pencils, started drawing the scene as Matthew told it.

There was a giant robot that was trying to destroy Los Angeles. It was a robot the government had made to pick up trash, but it had gone haywire when all the computers went berserk on New Year’s Eve, and now it was trying to destroy the city. The robot had big metal jaws with broken-glass teeth that it was supposed to use to eat garbage but now used to eat people. Matthew had The Kid draw a panel where the robot was walking through the downtown buildings, scooping up businessmen in its iron fist and biting them in half as other businessmen ran around screaming and waving their arms.

In the second panel, a superhero team arrived. This was the team’s last fight. They would have to give up their powers once they defeated the robot, because they’d found out that their powers were a gift from the Devil and not a gift from God, as they’d originally thought. They were pretty sad about giving up their powers, but they’d all banded together one last time to try to save the city.

The Kid drew a panel where the robot had reached their middle school. Kids poured from the doors, screaming as the robot crushed the building with its giant metal boots. The Kid gave each classmate an exaggerated distinguishing feature that made Matthew laugh and nod with approval. Brian Bromwell was flexing bulging muscles, Razz was wearing baggy pants ten sizes too big, Michelle Mustache had a real mustache, a dark brick of hair on her upper lip.

Matthew had the idea that he and The Kid should be two of the superheroes, that they should each have their own costume and power. The Kid drew Matthew flying into the scene, drew his oval head, his big round eyes. Drew him wearing gloves and boots and a long blue cape.

“What superpower do you think I’m going to pick?” Matthew said.

The Kid shrugged.

“Guess.”

The Kid found a blank corner of the page.
Super strength
, he wrote.

“Heat vision,” Matthew said. “And cold vision. One in each eye. That way I can melt things or freeze them in a block of ice.”

The Kid colored one of Matthew’s superhero eyes red, colored the other one blue. He finished drawing Matthew’s costume, decorated half with flames, half with icicles.

“But before I attack the robot,” Matthew said. “I shoot my beams at some of the other kids. The kids we don’t hate so much are getting frozen with my cold vision, but the kids we really hate are getting melted with my heat vision.”

The Kid drew cold beams shooting out of Matthew’s blue eye, ending in an icy cube around some of the kids who didn’t give them such a hard time. He drew shiver lines wiggling out from their bodies, tiny puffs of frozen breath coming from their mouths.

“Now draw the others,” Matthew said. He was sitting on his heels, starting to rock with excitement. “Draw the others getting melted.”

The Kid drew a blast of heat vision shooting from Matthew’s red eye, then a ring of fire burning on the ground around Brian and Razz’s feet. He drew shaded tendrils of gray steam rising from the tops of their heads, big beads of sweat leaping from their brows. Then he went to work on their faces, distorting their eyes and noses, stretching their features, melting their skin in the heat. The more he drew, the more he wanted to draw, the more gruesome detail he wanted to add. He drew blood pouring from their eyes, bile oozing from their mouths. He set their clothes and hair on fire, opened their bellies to spill their guts.

The Kid stopped, finally, put the pencils down. He and Matthew looked at the drawing. A riot of colors, filling the entire page. They could hardly make out the individual figures in the gory mess. The only character who could be easily identified was the superhero Matthew, standing in the middle of the scene, causing the carnage, cold and heat beams shooting from his eyes.

“Now draw yourself in there,” Matthew said, breathing hard from the excitement of the scene. “Draw yourself using your power for the last time.”

The Kid leaned back into the page, drew a tiny gray figure way up in the corner, a red cape fluttering behind.

“What’s your power?” Matthew said, rocking back and forth. “What do you do?”

The Kid didn’t answer. He kept drawing, sketching skinny arms reaching out from his sides, skinny legs stretching out behind, the superhero Kid soaring, passing the puffy clouds, leaving the scene, flying away out of the picture.

Sea green light in the fish fry on Alvarado Street. Darby and Bob sat in their booth by the window, looking out into the dark parking lot. A knot of people stood at the curb waiting for the bus, women in nurse’s scrubs, men with toolboxes and lunch pails, slump-shouldered, the fatigue evident in their bodies.

Bob was laying waste to a large basket of fish sticks and tater tots. Darby picked at his filet, the greasy roll wrapped in a page of car ads from the morning’s paper. There was a TV on a high shelf behind the counter. Darby could see its reflection in the window, a news report on the survivalist group up north, the same footage from earlier in the day, a long-lens shot of the buildings behind the high fence.

“He wanted to haggle about the price,” Bob said. “That room was a heavyweight job and he wanted to haggle about the price.” He dunked a fish stick into one of the cups of tartar sauce, tossed it back into his mouth. “I told him that if he wanted to haggle, I had twenty-five biohazard bags full of he-knows-what that I was willing to dump back up in that room, just give me the word.”

They had dinner on the nights The Kid was over at the Crumps’, usually in the same booth at the same fish fry. Bob was always eager to have a meal away from home. After a couple of marriages and head-case girlfriends, Bob had lived for the past few years with his elderly Aunt Rhoda in her claustrophobic old house in Boyle Heights. He took care of her as best he could, though there was nothing really wrong with her but old age. She never left the living room, the couch in the living room, where she slept, where she watched game shows and the daily
Mass for Shut-ins
.

“I don’t mind the cleanups,” Bob said. “The fluids and matter and all of that shit. It’s listening and talking to those people that wears me down.”

A bus pulled up to the curb. The group at the corner climbed aboard, leaving the stop empty. Darby scratched at his hand, a small scab on the black-script W above the knuckle of his index finger.

Bob coughed into a napkin, wiped his mouth. “How’s my guy?” he said.

“I had to pick him up at school again today.”

“What happened?”

“Somebody pissed on his clothes.”

Bob shook his head. “Don’t let them fuck with him, David.”

“I know.”

“You think they’re little kids so, so what, what’s the worst they can do.”