The damn toll light is still red. Not all the nickels made it down the whiffle funnel into the collection machine.
Fuck it.
I almost get a thrill speeding away from the blaring sirens and flashing lights from the toll station. God, grant me adventure. I smile as the sound fades and the lights behind me shrink to small LEDs. I look at Sarah beside me in the passenger’s seat who wakes up, startled from all the noise. I tell her to get used to it, not to be so damn jumpy all the time.
“You better numb yourself to this shit,” I say, slapping my hand on her thigh and packing my mouth full of grape flavored Big-League Chew as I ramble on about the Plan. I am talking to Sarah and to Clevis, who I can see in the rearview mirror, his eyes still closed. His face is drooly and he is napping in the back seat.
* * *
Sarah has always wanted kids, but we never wanted to make our own. We didn’t have that feeling people get that makes them want to throw out the condoms, the sprays, the pills. So Sarah and I started looking for kids we could borrow. We saw plenty of unwanted kids running around, those whose parents didn’t believe in abortion or birth control. Just young, innocent, playful mistakes looking for acceptance from anyone. We talked to high school students first because I decided we’d both be better off skipping the baby stuff.
So the first place we went to on our search, this cafeteria in a high school, some prick of a jocky kid in a polo called me a bum and threw an open soda at me. Then a nerdy girl screamed “CREEP!” at me when I asked her questions about her life. I simply asked her if she felt like something was missing. I told her I knew what it was. I said “Let me give it to you.”
Immediately, a tall, awkward security guard peered around the corner. The goofy, curly-wigged hall monitor angered up her face and brandished her plastic walkie-talkie, the kind with the unecessarily long antenna. The kind you might buy from TYCO. She threatened me, pointing the device at me and chased me down the hallway. Her bow-legs swung every which way, so she nearly kicked every screw-faced kid on either side of her. Frightened students leaned up against the walls trying to be invincibly thin. Guys shoved girls out of harms way, fighting to be heroes. They took the swift kicks to the shin, like soldiers, to be martyrs. I ran ahead, panting, leaning forward, and forcing my arms to pump harder with every stride. I heard every sound as I sped with kids screaming around me. I had never been so focused. I listened to my breathing, to my heart struggling, to my denim jean legs rubbing up against each other. I listened to me smack my gum. When I looked behind me, closely, I saw the black rubber antenna of the walkie wobble in the woman’s grip and slap her indignant face every few strides. High School Security guard grimaced at the constant, whipping reminder of her failure and I had to smile.
* * *
Clevis wakes up and says he has to pee. Again. I grip the steering wheel tighter and close my mouth, taking in a deep breath through my nose. I count to five while adjusting the bill of my cap, then turn around to tell him I saw a sign for a gas station 25 miles down the road. I am being patient and I say that was just about two miles ago.
“But I can’t wait!” he whines, cupping his crotch like a toddler and half-closing both eyes, not at all patient like me.
I repeat that the gas station is not that far. Sarah doesn’t look happy. She says I should stop. I want to ask who the fuck she thinks she is, but I pull the car over onto the shoulder and tell Clevis to make it quick. I remind him we are already behind schedule. We are late getting to the Alamo. The kid pees any damn time his eyes are open. Sometimes when they’re not. Kids are only good to have when you know you can take them back, like video rentals.
* * *
None of the older kids were into running away. Shit, who doesn’t like adventures? After our second day out, I told Sarah that high schoolers were too old. They were already accepting themselves and settling with their lives. Kids that age are already weak, bending over to take it from the Big Distraction.
We switched to younger children because they listen better. Their spongy minds are more impressionable. We picked them up at daycares and public elementary schools then took them to the park, malls, video game stores, wherever the hell they wanted to go. These kids had dreams and we made them come true, just for a day. Most importantly, we gave the Potentials one shot to prove themselves. We gave them a chance to be our kid, raised right. Most of them didn’t even want to go back home.
When we returned the children, unharmed, we craddled them in our arms as we walked. We all smiled. The parents and family waited at the front door for our arrival, hours after our phonecall. They were so thankful. They greeted us with genuine hugs, real tears. Everyone was so excited, so relieved. They hardly asked any questions, nothing we couldn’t explain anyway.
“He came to us for help. Said he was lost.”
I wanted to tell them their kids had failed; that they didn’t have what it takes. Their kids bored me with their lack of passion and creativity.
Only Clevis passed the test. He had the right qualities on the chart, almost paper-perfect. We had read his files: INTELLIGENT. WETS THE BED. ANTI-SOCIAL. FANCIES RIPE TANGERINES. But we nearly cut Clevis the minute we saw him, when he waved to us across the donut shop. He was standing in line, munching a bearclaw, holding a parfait in his other hand. He looked too chubby for us to even let him try the field test we had planned—the mock hold-up at the gas station. We didn’t think others would take him seriously. Not dead seriously like we needed them to.
* * *
“Everyone faces this at some point in their lives,” I explained to Clevis in the parking lot of the gas station, fastening the bicycle helmet strap snuggly under his double chin. The clips pinched his extraneous skin the first few times I tried to snap them together.
“In different ways, yes,” I told him, “but everyone has to test their limits, otherwise they’ll just never understand what they’re capable of.” Clevis shrugged.
I stuck the broken CD player I had ripped out of my Honda onto his colorful helmet with a lot of duck tape. Splayed wires poked out everywhere. The stereo body was heavy, and leaned over on the right side of Clevis’ head, off balance. But it looked legit. Besides, his face was kinda crooked anyway. The contraption almost made up for the asymetry. I handed him his Notre Dame Starter jacket which he had either grown out of or bought a few sizes too small to begin with. The fighting Irishman stretched out across his back, almost in contempt, growing bigger. Angri-er. Catholic-er. His cotton t-shirt hung out the bottom, like a ruffled skirt.
I grabbed the old Nintendo remote from our box of gadgets and helped him feed the cable up his puffy sleeve. Under his jacket we used bright red electric tape to attach 4 30 oz. cylinder cans of Pillsbury biscuits, first wrapped in foil. We connected the Nintendo controller wire to the back of the dough cans with more electric tape. I zipped up his jacket that struggled just to keep his belly inside. The cans protruded out, an obvious bulge, but no worries. Sarah shouted at me out the window of my Honda. She thought the get-up was a bit too much, but I knew better than that. Too much?
“Remember what I said,” I told Clevis, placing my hand on his shoulder and looking him directly in his eyes, “If you can do this, you can do anything,” I shook him to be sure he was listening. “Anything.”
* * *
I wait in the car on the side of the highway with Sarah while Clevis clumsily maneuvers around big rocks and bushes to find cover behind three small oak trees just beside a barbed-wire fence. He’s wearing his coonskin cap, and from far away it looks like a tall freak of a critter is poking around in the brush. Sarah looks at Clevis, then at me, and smiles. She slides her fingers delicately to rest on the back of my hand, but I reach for more Big League Chew. I swallow the chunk that’s lost its flavor and stuff my mouth full with fresh grapiness. You can never have too much. Of anything.
Clevis comes back to the car and asks how much longer until we reach San Antonio. I tell him I don’t have a damn clue, and to be more careful not to dribble on his good jeans next time.
I drive back onto the highway and set the cruise control to 77 to give my ankle a break. Clevis is dozing off again and Sarah isn’t looking up from her Cosmo mag. I look at the cover of the magazine and hope she is reading the 289 Ways To Please Your Guy, Sexually article. I lean over and glance at the section she has open.
On the top half of the page, a woman stands in a billowy, white mesh gown that moves in the same way the woman’s hair does in the picture, saying OK to the breeze. She looks kind of like Sarah.
A quote in giant italics underneath the picture says, in pink, FINALLY, I AM A WOMAN. The newly empowered, worthy woman glows like a virgin in the pristine room of bluish-green pastels, staring—dreaming. She holds an infant, a generic baby, smiling like babies do—not even knowing why. The woman’s breasts bulge with milk, enough tit to nurse a rhino. Her nips bud in the coolness of the room and I wonder where else she shows signs of arousal.
I bounce my head off the steering wheel swallowing my gum and losing my cap when I veer off the road, over the white and yellow lines on the highway. My palms shake and lose grip when my Honda runs over the bumpy grooves that warn me where the asphalt ends and twenty-foot drop-off begins. Sarah screams just before I hear Clevis’ clumsy head slam into the window on the opposite side of where he was sitting. His drooly face makes a slopping sound of thawed chicken thrown hard against a microwave door. I can’t correct my path in short enough time to catch even the slight curve of the road so I close my eyes and scrape against the guard-rail shooting a ray of sparks that hurt to look at. My shoulders tense up as I swerve and jerk the steering wheel side to side and lightly tap the brake to keep from spinning. I finally slow down against the steel savior. It’s hard to focus with people yelling at me, but I manage to bring the car to a safe stop. Goddam Cosmo.
“My bad,” I admit, keeping my head down a bit and trying to slow my breathing. Regain my composure. My knuckles are a sick white just like my face in the rearview.
“Everyone OK? Good!” I ask, not pausing for an answer.
The indentions in the concrete growl out as I ease my way back onto the road. A loose hubcap rattles because I forgot to fix it like Sarah reminded me to.
Heading south, the land flattens out before me and makes me want pancakes. I roll down my window and let the dry air borrow the moisture on my face, evaporating nervous sweat from my hairline. I grab more gum and chew vigorously as I go through the plans for the placement of the explosives, through my ideas with Sarah about how we will mess with Texas.
* * *
We came up with the whole thing on a Monday. I was sick of work, plain fucking sick of the monotony. Sarah was just bored. She was always making jewelry or t-shirts or crap. When I met her she wanted a family, a steady income, a normal life. I felt the same way because that’s what I had been told to want. They said that was my dream.
Bullshit opened my eyes. I asked myself what I really wanted. Adventure. I wanted to explore. I needed a woman who would go with me, if she wanted me at all. I needed a legacy, like Clevis, to pass on the word. We needed to start at the Alamo because everyone else had forgotten.
* * *
I reminded Clevis why he had to go inside the gas station and scare the man at the cash register. Clevis looked nervous, but eager to please. I knew he was exactly what we needed. I reached in my pocket and grabbed him a handful of gum, the Big League stuff.
“You can never have too much,” I told Clevis as I passed him the stringy wad of synthetic chicle. I blew a giant purple bubble about the size of Clevis’ crooked head. I chomped down on the end that was in my mouth real quick and blew a smaller bubble right inside, then let the two bubbles hang a few seconds off my lips as I stared at Clevis. I judged. He chewed. We focused. As I stood in front of him, I watched sweat dribble down his silly face.
I smacked down on the bubble in one quick snap making the loudest “POP” I’ve ever heard. Clevis didn’t step back, or even blink. “BOOM,” I said to him, widening my wild eyes and nodding. He blew one bubble that wasn’t really so big and then tried to blow another one inside. He didn’t seal the first one right with his teeth, so the thing started to deflate immediately. The gutted bubbles spread across his face and covered his nose and mouth. “BOOM!” he repeated through the pinkish purple mask.
I got back into the car with Sarah, watching Clevis go inside. We watched our baby bird spread his genius wings. I held Sarah close as she undid my belt and unbuttoned my pants. She went down and I watched Clevis inside the gas station. I watched him threaten the man at the register. He tried to unzip his Starter Jacket to show the man his ‘bomb’, but the thing must have been jammed. I wanted to go in and help but this was Clevis’ deal and my girlfriend was putting on a real show.
* * *
The ride in the car is quiet but I can’t blame anyone after I nearly killed us. My stomach feels knotted and I’m getting dizzy.
“Hey, honey, I’m not feeling so great, you wanna drive?”
I tell her we only have 32 miles to San Antonio, the Alamo. We can’t put off the Plan just because my body’s having a hard time dealing with anxiety. She looks up from her Oprah magazine.
“Holy shit, babe, I gotta stop!” I have a sudden pain in my abdomen like my stomach’s trying escape with a flaming saw.
I’m looking for a good place to stop when my vision blurs and I feel Sarah shaking me. I hear Clevis for just a few seconds before my ears go out.
“I gotta pee!”
I wake up in a hospital room with two doctors in professional white coats, with name tags. I feel like I can’t trust them. The smell of that powdery shit in their rubber gloves doesn’t help at all. I’m nauseated as hell and they’re asking me all kinds of questions. Do I have insurance? Is that woman my wife? Why does my kid pee so much?
I tell Sarah to go on ahead without me. I remind her that we have come so close to what we all wanted, so she takes Clevis out the door.
Then doctors tell me the news. Something is twisted in my colon. They said they had run some test while I was out.
“You see, the discomfort you’re feeling is from a bezoar that’s built up in your system over the years. These things aren’t so rare. But this one, I mean, it’s really unique because actually, well, it’s a giant purple bubble,” the first, older doctor says.
“You’ve had way too much gum, sir,” the younger doc adds.
“I thought my stomach fixed that. Doesn’t gum dissolve in seven years?” I ask, losing hope.
The doctors look at one another and smile in amusement. The older one inhales a deep breath like he’s about to make a few important clarifications. The newbie stares.
Then they tell me that my information was a bunch of hot-cock, an old wives tale. They say 95% of the time you shit the gum out and it looks almost the way it did when you chewed it up. Mine just got stuck. They explain that with every chunk of Big League I’d been swallowing, the bubble got bigger from my gases and they don’t have time for surgery. They say they don’t want to lose me, and for some reason I believe them.
“We’re going to have to pop this son-of-a-bitch with our bare-hands,” the old doctor says, “anally.”
“We’re sticking our hands up your ass,” says the newbie surgeon, “We’ll be wearing gloves of course.”
“Of course,” confirms the first, wiser doctor.
They tell me to pull down my pants and bend over the table. They say this is procedure. This is what’s normal. I hesitate at first, but can’t think of another solution. As I lean over, I hear my phone ring and reach to grab it from my pants, rolled down at my ankles.
My eyes water and my face pulses as one doctor sticks his lubricated hand up my ass. I look at the phone screen, it’s SARAH. All I feel is pressure, and all I hear is Sarah’s voice.
“Hey, so apparently, we can’t blow up the Alamo.”
“What the fuck? Why not?” I say.
Old doc says he thinks he’s found the problem.
And then Sarahs voice again.
“Well someone already knocked it down. A sign says they’re building a five-star hotel and a strip mall in it’s place. I guess we were kind of too late.”
I hear a loud “BOOM!” as doc jerks his arm up another quick inch. My insides are freed.
* * *
I check out of the hospital a minute later. I don’t want to believe the Plan is ruined, but I know when Sarah’s not fucking around. All the energy spent just feels like a goddam waste now. I stomp around in the parking lot of the hospital, cursing, then walk off down the street, onto the side of the highway to wait for Sarah and Clevis. God, Clevis. This was his dream. To make Texans to remember the Alamo. Again.
I pack some Big League chew into my left cheek, picking the last stringy bits out of the corners of the foil and then wad the trash into my pocket. I look over my shoulder at the stretch of highway leading North, to home, then turn back and face the road headed South, to where I thought all my dreams were. I can see the same distance down the vast asphalt strip in both directions. And each view is the same damn scene—tamed road cut short by wild sky at the horizon line.
I blow the biggest purple bubble and stare through it, letting it warp the world I see before me. Change my view. Change the color of my life as it falls to surround me and create my own Earth inside.
I neglect to seal it with my teeth so the thing starts to deflate immediately. I reach for more gum to plug the hole because sometimes ‘too much’ isn’t even enough. As I pat my empty pocket and stare down the road through the warping lens, for the first time, I realize I haven’t gone anywhere.
