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Systems Unlimited

Brent Joseph Johnson

    Benjamin Eugene Skeers was lowering himself from off the side of a moving freight train when the train bucked violently and knocked him loose from the rungs. Forty feet behind him, attached to another corn-syrup tanker, Brent watched as he caromed off the ballast and disappeared into the weeds. Then he freed his own left arm and leg from the ladder and leaned out against the brunt of the wind and kicked himself clear.
    Near the edge of the tracks Brent rose out of the snow and trudged back to where his friend now stood smoking a cigarette. “Holy shit,” Brent said, “I thought you fell beneath the train for a minute.”
    Benny glanced around at the fence and the high apartment lights beyond it and patted his bony chest and hips. He didn’t have a scratch on him. Even his clothes and shoes were still pretty clean.
    “I thought it cut you in half.”
    They made their way back along the frozen tracks and after about twenty yards they turned north through the chained-off terminus of the alley where Brent’s barnlot and the apron of his driveway fed into his backyard. In the middle of the chain, several inches into the snow, sagged a repurposed stop sign with rusted buckshot holes long fired through it.
    “You should stock up with the warm beers instead,” Benny offered during a moment of brilliance. “The warm beers won’t hurt our hands.”
    From his satchel Brent quickly reloaded the fridge with the cold PBRs and from Fodge’s warm case on the kitchen floor he quickly refilled it. “You know,” Brent slurred sticking the rest in his pockets, “you can survive on Mars for several minutes without having a spacesuit on?” Then in the same uneasy motion he rose and swung his satchel strap around his neck and shoulder and started for the back door. Benny clumpered after him.
    “What happens after that?”
    “I think your organs explode. But I might be wrong.”
    They picked their way back towards the alley and twice Brent fell on the ice but each time he was able to twist himself in such a way that when he landed he landed without breaking any of the cans. Behind his towering, castellated barn, at the couch and the stump of rusted bedsprings, he pulled out two adventure beers from his front pockets and passed one over to Benny. They struggled to open them with their knitted gloves so they uncovered their hands and cracked the tabs. Right away their fingers started to hurt.
    “Are you ready for excitement?” Brent watched his friend’s eyeballs obie in the barnlight.
    “Yeah, man.”
    “Are you ready for adventure?”
    “I’m ready.”
    “Are you ready for the future?”
    “I...believe that I am.”
    “Boner jams.”
    “Pew pew pew.”
    After a hundred yards or so, beyond Brent’s wretched yellow farmhouse that the tiny city and its sophomore ghetto had grown around, they overtook the engine to the now idling train and in the grimy window they caught sight of the engineer who was deepthroating a footlong chili cheese dog out the end of a paper container.
    “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you ask him for a bite.”
    “Ha ha. No way.”
    “How about thirty?”
    “I’ll give you thirty bucks if you ask him for a blow job.”
    “I’ll give you thirty bucks if you ask him tenderly for this dance.”
    The wooded tracks led them into the eastern hills and single file between the rails they aligned themselves in front of the train and continued on through the half-light of the deepening ravine. The sky was clear and wracked with stars and among the stars the moon was completely black and you could only really see it by the circular void that wandered in front of the constellations.
    Near the underskirt of the Summit Street bridge Brent tossed his empty into a patch of weeds. “This is us,” he said, pointing at the rise of a dirt path. Up through the steep and narrow woods.
    “Here bust out those beers first.”
    Brent dug two out of his bulging back pockets.
    “Hell yeah, brodie. This is how we do it. Old school.”
    “Ha ha yeah. Old school.”
    Benny finished the swill in his other beer and crushed it. Then he threw it at the tracks. Only it hit the inside rail and bounced back at him. “Fucking Spider-Man, bro.”
    At the top of the bluff, somehow without falling, they reached a small dirt ledge, maybe two feet wide, before a tall board fence stopped them dead in their tracks. From the north the wind bore down heavily onto the neighborhood, tangoing the rimed-over trees and wobbling the street signs. Benny meanwhile bent his dazed eyes up towards the canopy of black branches and searched for any falling debris. But the wind passed. And beyond the bridge the street signs unwobbled. And the trees untangoed.
    “You ever notice how local commercials get weirder and weirder the later it is?” Brent asked him. Pawing around at the fence he found a loose board and swung it over to the side.
    “Yeah, bro. Bros before hoes.” Benny squatted and worked his way through the opening.
    “Ha ha, right. Bros before hoes.”
    Along the edge of the trees Brent pulled out his tiny maglite from the fingerish pocket on his satchel and clicked it on. Then he started off cautiously towards the far side of the frozen backyard, Benny falling in close behind him. The snow was knee-deep and barked over with ice and to cross it Brent had to draw his feet high and punch through to the ground. Benny drinking his beer crowhopped from hole to hole. “Bros before hoes,” he echoed.
    Beyond the tree stumps and the picnic table and an outcropping of big wheels and strawberry shortcake trikes, beyond the duckboard path that branched away from the sundeck like a stripper stage, beyond the secret clothesline that garroted Brent cartoonishly in the teeth, they reached the other side of the yard where a plot of dead plants tufted out of the snow. Among them he brought the light upwards about twenty-five feet and centered it on what was possibly the largest sunflower the world had ever known.
    “Here look at it.”
    “Holy shit,” Benny said.
    “It’s ungodly.”
    They stood their gawking up at its rank wilted head, drinking their beers. Then they tossed their cans aside and the cans clattered off into the fence.
    “Here,” Brent said pulling out his boxcutter, “push it down for me.”
    Benny got himself behind the brown stalk and with his hands in his peacoat he tried to shoe it forward. Only the recoil knocked him back and his magical legs buckled. “Ope,” he said.
    Brent dug some more beers out of his satchel and when Benny got up again he passed him one. “Ahh,” Benny said and sinking half of it, he dropped to his knee and holstered it into his sitzmark.
    “All right. Now try it like this.”
    Then together they wrapped their arms around the monstrous plant and bent it soundlessly towards the earth.
    “Jesus christ.”
    “Now sit on it right here.” Brent motioned towards the hunch in the stalk. Then he followed his tracks back towards the sunflower head, about halfway to the bluff, where he flipped open his boxcutter and started to saw away at its neck. “Here get it like this.”
    “Okay.”
    “No like this.”
    “Okay okay ouch.”
    “No over to the side.”
    Again Benny fell. “Ope,” he said. But this time the plant stayed down.
    “Stop fucking around,” Brent laughed.
    “All right all right.” Then he nasal-twanged his way through the opening riff to Bad to the Bone. Air guitar. “Squeeble squeebly squwaaams.”
    Abovehead another powerful wind tore through the trees and a frozen branch dropped combatively to the ground. Strumm en drank, the Germans sang. Germamalies. Elven wonders. And somewhere in the slumbering neighborhood a car alarm went off and several coyotes answered back.
    Pushing himself onto his feet, unfazed, Benny said, “I’m all jacked up right now.”
    “What?”
    “I mean I can’t find my beer.” At the bottom of his doubled sitzmark the can lay crushed but when he patted around his jeans and his peacoat, his clothes were still pretty much dry. “Roll for damage.”
    “Nat twenty,” Brent called out. Then he picked up the monstrous sunflower head and cradled it in his shitty arms. “Jesus. Look at the size of this thing. It’s enormous.”
    “What do you want to do with it?”
    “It’s huge.”
    From inside the house the kitchen light came on and a humanoid darkness filled the window. Brent and Benny looked at it.
    “Well shit,” Benny said but when he looked over at Brent again, Brent had fled back into the trees.
    At the little bootleg wicket that he had property-damaged, Brent chucked the sunflower head over the fence and ushered Benny through it and following after him they skittered their way down the wooded bluff, the half-bluff, the hillside, what thirty feet down following the wheeling sunflower head, but about a third of the way there, Brent buckled on his drunk and crashed into Benny and together they bonered into the ditch.
    Benny was the first one up. “Fucking Spider-Man, bro,” he said. But for Brent one of the squirrel-beers in his satchel had exploded when he fell on top of it. Now he was doubled up in pain like someone had suckerpunched him in the gut. “Ahh,” he said, “ahh shit.” His jacket was sopping wet and so were the front of his jeans and it was so cold outside that the sopping was already turning into slush.
    “C’mon. Pass me up another one.”
    Brent pulled a fresh beer out of his satchel and passed it over to him. Then he curled back painfully into a ball. Benny otherwise peeled off his glove and cracked the tab and killed half of it. Soon from the top of the bluff, through the fence, someone started to yell at them. There were christian swears and swears about their sexualities and about the utility of their anuses and mouths. So killing the rest of his beer Benny tossed it onto a sofa and with one hand he picked up the giant sunflower head. Some of the dead leaves had come loose from its halo and most of the seeds had burst from their sockets. And with the other hand he grabbed Brent by the wrist and tobogganed him off towards the underside of the bridge.

    Neither one of them could remember when or where exactly they got off the tracks but once their brains started to more or less work properly again, almost simultaneously, they respawned inside a part of town that neither one of them had ever seen before. Here the streets and the yards looked all bald and cancery and as a wind tore across the deserted neighborhood, it stripped off some of the snow-cover and upcast it high into the air where the particles then hove about crystal-like in the orange glow of the lampposts.
    “I wish we had more weed,” Benny chattered.
    “I wish we had a car.”
    “I wish we had one of those giant boomboxes like in that Spike Lee movie.”
    “Last Exit to Brooklyn?”
    “Yeah Last Exit to Brooklyn.”
    Brent Joseph Johnson stopped beneath what he took to be a white ash tree, nearly ninety feet tall, with a sleeveless cosby sweater crocheted around the bottom part of its trunk. Then he set the sunflower head on top of a mottled snowbank and dug out his boxcutter again. The sunflower accordingly slid down into the street. “I’m gonna keep you warm.”
    “Thank you,” his teeth chattered.
    “I’m gonna provide for you, Benny.”
    “Thank you, bro.”
    “I’m gonna hunt and gather for you, bro.”
    With half a dozen strokes he hacked it off the trunk and handed it over to Benny who caped it around his shoulders and as they continued aimlessly throughout the lost neighborhood they came across more and more of these ratty-ass tree sweaters and each one Brent hacked loose until they’d added maybe half a dozen layers around them a piece. Bulging like spraypainted turtles. Finally they stopped again in an odd coil of streets where on one side they found several dozen hobbit houses masoned out of large round stones. Also they’d sobered up mostly because their beers had frozen solid. No that was a lie. They were still fucking hammered. “How much money you got?”
    “My wallet’s in your room,” he said.
    Brent felt around for his own wallet. But he couldn’t find it. “Well shit,” he said. Then he shifted the sunflower head from one arm to the other and two of his tree sweaters fell to the street. Finally he noticed that one of the little hobbit huts had steam rising from a vent on its roof and through the small picture window, through its sheer blue curtain, he could see a thin wavering light.
    “Hey go ask them to call us a cab,” Benny said. “Tell them it’s an emergency.”
    Because it was.
    “Okay.”
    “Tell him we’re normal.”
    “Okay.”
    They stood there for a while staring at the house. It’d dropped to negative one and it was so cold their cellphones didn’t work anymore.
    “Stash that sunflower,” Benny said. “We don’t want to look crazy.”
    Brent glanced around the neighborhood. On the other side of the street everything was pitchblack and there was nothing inside or beyond it. Not even the orange glow of the streetlight could penetrate the darkness. Then he set the sunflower head on the ground and kicked it over to the storm drain but the head was too thick to go down there. Behind him though, all at once, Benny with his hands in his pockets scuttled over to the curb. Then he slid several feet and rammed it into the hole with his shoe like a giant coin into a coin slot but as it disappeared below the pavement Benny wheeled about and his legs kicked into the air and he crashed onto the street. His head smacking hard against the compacted snow. “Ope,” went Benny. But this time he didn’t get back up.

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