Kick (The Jenkins Cycle Book 1) (18 page)

“So, did you remove anyone else from the list like I asked you?”

Not just toast—more like toast-scented vapor.

Plodding forward, I said, “I keep meaning to, but …”

“Uh huh. Do you want me to do it? My family isn’t that big and you have so many friends. People will think it’s strange if I only bring four people. They won’t realize I’ve only been in the area a few months.”

“I’ll make sure to drop it in conversation,” I said. “It’ll seem natural. Trust me.”

Ignoring that, she said, “We’re getting married next weekend—you ran out of time for this weeks ago.”

“They’re my peeps—my bros. They got my back, fo’ shiggidy.” I flashed her a gang sign.

She ignored that too.

“I just wanted a small, quiet wedding with the two of us. Is that so bad? I know you have to marry me, but …”

Mentally crossing my fingers, I let a little irritation slip into my voice.

“Erika, we’ve been through this.”

“I’m also worried how my family will react to being suddenly surrounded by all those people. They’re very conservative, and with Tim there… Not to mention Rob and Mike. God, Rob gives me the creeps. He’s always
looking
at me.”

Before I could respond, our waitress-thing returned with the bill.

“Hurray!” she said. “Drinks, drinks, drinks! No rush on the check—you sure you’re not up to the Chocolate Challenge, hmmm? It’s yummy …”

“No, thank you,” Erika said.

Throwing out teensy little bu-bye waves, she said, “You two have a wonderful afternoon.”

When I looked at the bill, I saw it had teddy bears and hearts scrawled all over it, with her name—
Trisha!!!—
underlined three times.

On the way back to the house, I learned that Erika planned to move in after the wedding. I wondered if she were from Chicago, since she’d just flown in from there, but I couldn’t come out and ask her. Nate already knew these things. And then I thought,
He gets her pregnant, proposes, but won’t live with her? She wants a small wedding, but he doesn’t?

By the time we got back to the house, Erika and I were fine again. She gave me another one of those great kisses in the driveway and then drove off to Victoria’s Secret or wherever girls like that go when they’re not with their stud boyfriends.

I felt worn out, so I went to the bedroom and stripped down, intending to take a nap. Nothing like lunch and an afternoon nap, right? Sadly, my mind had its teeth sunk deep like a puppy with a tug toy and wouldn’t let go. I lay there, not sleeping, going over what I’d learned so far. It wasn’t much. None of it helped me figure out what Nate had done to piss off the Great Whomever. I mean, if Nate were such a monster, why would he marry her? He could easily afford child support. The type of people I’d encountered over the years didn’t go around getting married because they felt bad.

A chill didn’t actually go down my spine, but it did so metaphorically. If Nate were a molester, then raising a kid of his own could appeal to him in a darker, more sinister way. Why buy milk with a cow at home, right?

Even I cringe a little when I think of it that way. But given the number of years I’d been doing this, nothing surprised me anymore. The problem was it didn’t seem all that plausible. He was a gym teacher for crying out loud. He had his pick and then some. Heck, with all that money, he could quit being a teacher and fly off to Thailand or Rio and do as he pleased for as long as he wanted—with the unofficial sanction of the government, no less. Which leads me directly to Michael Jackson. Millionaire, uncontested purveyor of Jesus Juice and porno magazines to little boys. Father of three. He had it all: King of Pop, inventor of the Moonwalk and seriously
funky
.

I felt well fed and increasingly comfortable and relaxed. After driving Ferraris and kissing beautiful women all morning I seriously needed a nap, followed by some chocolate cake, dammit.

I napped.

***

It isn’t possible to sleep in the Great Wherever because the thing inside that lets you fall unconscious is missing. Or rather, there’s something missing around you: a tired body. Being unable to sleep means you also can’t dream, and this is a bigger disadvantage than it seems. So much so that I believe the ability to dream is all but wasted on the living.

When most people have dreams they wake up and forget them. Or when they wake up they remember only a little part and forget the rest. I once read an article that claimed most people can’t recall more than a dozen dreams they’ve had in their entire life. I number the dreams I remember in the tens of thousands, depending on how you demarcate them (they do sort of blur together).

I won’t pretend to know everything about dreams, but I know they aren’t just the unstructured flashing of neurons or a mere side effect of unconsciousness. I can say with certainty they tell you more about yourself than you’ll ever admit. When you weep in a dream over something and laugh it off in the morning, you’re telling a convenient lie—as if to assure yourself,
I’d never feel so intensely about that, so I’ve already decided it doesn’t affect me.
When you wake up screaming and your parents rush to your room, you begin to tell them what you saw and then a funny thing happens. You hold back. You don’t tell them you saw your mother stabbing your father over and over again while your sister held you down, immobilized, forcing you to watch. If pressed, you tell them you dreamed someone cut you and leave it at that. And if you’re normal, the dream will most likely vanish from your recollection.

By the way, the reasoning behind that little dream is obvious. Deep down, way down beneath a trapdoor I’d long since forgotten about, I knew on some level my mother hated my father. But I also know she loved him more. It was obvious if you knew her, though more complex than what we grow up thinking about “love.” In a movie, every kiss burns with passion and every glance caresses with love so sweet it’ll spoil your dinner. In real life, love’s a daily struggle against the tendency toward selfishness. In real life, love and hate are often only separable if we’re willing to recognize our demons and choose to become better people. That’s an important truth I’ve learned about being human: we either outshine our darkness or we are engulfed by it.

All this from a single, remembered dream.

Another dream I had, also forgotten, involved a highway overpass. I mention it now because I still find it incredibly perplexing. Well, that and one other reason.

***

He stands in a playground next to a double-lane highway in a city he doesn’t recognize. The road is empty of cars but filled with people, and all of them are looking and pointing up at the sky. With good reason: stretching across maybe a quarter of it is an enormous black bruise that blocks the sun and casts the world in a murderous red backlight. It is nothing like the eclipse he’d once gone outside to witness with the viewers they’d made in school from cereal boxes and aluminum foil. That had been a taking away and giving back of the sun. This blackness took not only the sun but spread like a juice stain, devouring the rest of the sky with it.

The people around him are frightened, yelling and pointing at it. Their yammer intensifies when the secret of the bruise is revealed: billions of things are flying out of it, streaming endlessly in all directions. Soon, the ones coming his way are visible—winged men and women with beautiful, intelligent faces, riding the sky in a circling, predatory manner that precisely reflects the mocking expressions on their faces. They corral the people below together, laughing wickedly all the while—jeering—and this shocks the boy because he knows now what they are. They aren’t aliens from another planet set upon invasion. Nor are they demons with hideous faces and horns and enormous bat wings. No, they are as far from that as good from evil, as beautiful as they are terrifying. They are angels.

The road passes beneath an overpass and away from the city. The men and women in the road who manage to evade their tormentors are running toward it, desperate to escape. The narrow confines of the dream’s reality beget an unspoken realization, more fundamental than natural law: beyond the overpass lies salvation.

The angels, seeing their quarry trying to escape, frenzy and dive from the sky in bold, swooping strikes, and as they rise they are clutching people by their arms or ankles or even hair. Then they soar toward the bruise in the sky, calling triumphantly.

The boy is frightened, but he does not run in circles as the others do, nor does he scream and point. Instead, he begins to pray: “Please protect me, please protect me, please protect me.” He doesn’t wonder whom he’s asking to protect him for the same reason he doesn’t wonder about the air he inhales. His focus is on getting to the overpass, knowing it’s hopeless, yet praying anyway. He knows they will come for him, grab him and taunt him as they carry him to the terrible black thing in the sky, but it doesn’t matter.

“Please protect me, please protect me,” he prays, on and on.

The angels spot the boy. They soar toward him, but unlike the others—grabbing mortals and carrying them away—these angels hover. No longer are they jeering and laughing, at least not at him. Their expressions have changed. For him alone, their faces shine beatific, warm and kindly. They circle him, flying about joyfully and following above him as he makes his steady way to the overpass. He is still praying the same mantra as he passes beyond, “Please protect me, please protect me …”

Then he is dreaming no more.

***

It is the strangest dream I’ve ever had. Even stranger than the one I had when I was six, where all the shoes in the house could talk and we were hiding from the evil shoes in the closet downstairs (this dream came courtesy of the opening credits to My Three Sons, some bullies at school and just a dash of dream dust). But the one with the overpass is the oddest because it derives its origin from almost nothing in my life to that point. I mean, I’d never seen a movie or heard a story where angels were mean to people. By that point in my short life my only religious education came about once a year on trips to Uncle Rick’s farm. Even then, everything in my modest exposure led me to believe the sky was Heaven. So the idea of wicked angels descending on humans and dragging them unwillingly to the sky made no sense at all. But in the dream, what made perfect sense was that the overpass was the gateway to Heaven, and the black bruise thing above went to the other place. Hell, or something like it. And why would angels fly out of Hell, anyway?

What made all this suddenly interesting to me was that during my nap I had the dream again, for the second time ever. Only this time, I was one of the angels, and the city street teemed not with strangers but with all the people I’d ever ridden. Killers, rapists, arsonists, pedophiles and brutes of every sort, each looking at me with recognition, and every one of them cowering from me in terror. All except one. Alone, standing there looking at me head-on and unafraid. Blond, beautiful and boiling with hatred.

Erika.

Startled from sleep, on realizing I lay safely in bed, I sluggishly did what people usually do in life after a nightmare—I released the troublesome thread back to the nether from whence it came.

Asleep again.

Chapter 22

I awoke in pain, lying on my side with my head poorly positioned, leaving me with a kink in my neck that no amount of kneading could remedy. The clock showed 3:40 p.m. I’d been out cold for more than three hours.

I wondered what Erika was up to and whether Nate had plans to call or meet her somewhere later. I worried that I wanted to see her. It’d been about four years since anyone had kissed me, and that had been a harmless, married person kiss. Nothing like Erika’s knocked-up fiancée kisses.

Hungry again, I wandered groggily downstairs and nuked a turkey pot pie. I poured a glass of Coke, hoping the caffeine and sugar would kick in quick. Midway through a second pie, Nate’s phone started to play a funky disco theme. I liked it so much I almost didn’t pick up. The display read, “Rob.”

I hit the button and said, “Yo.”

A lively voice said, “What’s shakin, bacon?”

“Not much. How about you?” I said.

“Tom was wondering what you want him to wear for the wedding. He knows you don’t care, but you gotta live with her.”

“Huh. Well, the best man should wear a tuxedo, shouldn’t he?”

Sure, I was fishing.

“I didn’t rent the thing not to wear it. But you know Tom. He’s got a suit, and I think he’d come in that, but only if you make an issue out of it.”

“Yeah, that’s Tom for you,” I said. “I don’t care either way. So long as you’re wearing pants I’m sure no one will mind.”

Rob gave a brief chuckle.

“I’ll tell Tom,” he said. “We’re still on for Friday, right? Everything still good?”

“Friday.”

“You ok? You didn’t tell her we were going to Hardlickers, did you?”

“No, of course not.”

Hardlickers? Ah…

“You’re still going, right? Not going to get all high and mighty? Everyone’s expecting it—it’s a tradition. Ya gotta respect traditions.”

As it turns out, I’m very traditional at times.

“It’s cool,” I said.

“Great. Let’s touch base later and work it all out, sound good?”

“Fine by me—see you then.”

“Ciao.”

Ok, here’s the deal. I don’t go to strip clubs or watch X-rated movies. Getting hot and bothered for no reason never made much sense to me, and having to take matters into my own hands, with my full and absolute knowledge that God or something like him exists and is aware of everything I do, well, that’s just seriously creepy. That said, I have been to these places, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to admiring the view. So yeah, I was looking forward to it in a general sort of way. But there were other benefits to going to a strip club with a few of Nate’s friends—with all the entertainment happening, any chance of a serious conversation with someone I supposedly knew would be easy to deflect. Conversely, it would be easy for me to sift information from Nate’s friends while they were distracted.