Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (9 page)

Before anyone can move, Gordon arranges his knife and fork in the shape of a crucifix and shouts at Jimmy: “I cast thee out, you damn devil!”

Jimmy spits a stream of pea soup in Gordon’s ear and yells back: “Eat my barf, preacher guy!”

Gordon splashes a glass of water in Jimmy’s face, saying, “Have some holy water, Satan!”

Gasping, snarling, cursing like a seven-year-old demon, Jimmy clutches at his throat and pretends to melt. In the background, two freckle-faced waiters doff their boaters as they hoist an ice cream laden Pig Trough to their shoulders and rush around with it like Keystone Cops.

Cynthia and Janice take long drags off their cigarettes, stub them out in the ashtray, and then lunge at their sons. The boys run screaming from the table to join the chaos that is Farrell’s on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Fresno, California–a place where every soul must make a choice between good and evil: a fresh green salad or The Pig Trough.

The Pig Trough usually wins out.

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Looking back, Gordon wasn’t quite sure when he first got the notion that Jimmy was in league with the devil–but it was early on. Maybe it was when he found out that Jimmy had green blood. Or maybe it was in the restaurant after they saw
The Exorcist
, when Jimmy played the role of the Satan-possessed youngster just a little too well. Regardless of where the initial hint came from, by the time Gordon spends the night at Jimmy’s house a few weeks later, he’s convinced that Jimmy has somehow sold his seven-year-old soul.

Jimmy’s parents aren’t rich, but he has all the things Gordon has ever wanted. He has his own basement bedroom with blue shag carpeting and knotty pine paneling and a workbench across the far wall. He has a microscope, comic books, remote-controlled airplanes, dinosaur teeth, geodes, and a ham radio
(so powerful it can talk to men on the Moon!)
all arranged on neat shelves. There’s a saltwater fish tank built into the closet under the stairs. A mummified six-foot-long crocodile dangles from the rafters like a malevolent piñata. It’s a little boy’s version of paradise and Gordon doesn’t think Jimmy deserves it at all.

Jimmy is obsessed with electronics. His parents buy him Heath Kits so he can build whatever his greedy heart desires. On the night of the sleepover, Jimmy enlists Gordon to help him build a Heath Kit Quadraphonic Stereo Receiver. All night long Gordon has been hearing, “That’s where the resistor goes, not a capacitor, Dumbo…” and other quips full of scorn and derision. Jimmy can read schematics and Gordon can’t. That fact alone seems to indicate a Satanic influence, at least to Gordon’s way of thinking. He wonders if Jimmy planned wisely for the future when he made his pact with the devil, or if he’ll just wind up spending the rest of his life reading comic books and working as a preternaturally knowledgeable television repairman.

“Hey, did you see my new tooth?” Jimmy points his soldering iron at a huge, blackened shark tooth set up for display on the shelf next to them. “It’s from a dinosaur. My dad said it’s at least 200 million years old.”

“It looks like a megalodon tooth,” says Gordon, glad to be back in one of his areas of expertise.

“What’s a megalodon?”

“Sort of a prehistoric shark–only bigger than even the biggest Great White.
Carcharodon megalodon
is its full name. I saw a picture of its fossilized jaws once, with five scientists sitting inside it. Its teeth looked just like this.”

“So in a fight between a megalodon and a
Tyrannosaurus rex
, who would win?”

“In water or on land?”

“Both.”

“A megalodon could bite a
T-rex’s
head off. No problem.”

“Cool!”

Gordon stands up to get a closer look at the tooth. It’s as black as obsidian and bigger than his fist. Its edges still look sharp enough to shave the hair off his arms, even after nine million years. “Where’d you get it?” he asks.

Jimmy points to a square wooden door on the left side of his workbench. “In there, under the house. I’ve dug up all kinds of cool junk. It must’ve been something like an Indian burial ground. Or a troll’s secret hiding place.”

There’s something about the wooden door that Gordon finds ominous. He knows Jimmy’s just joking about the troll, but he could easily imagine finding that same door on a tree stump in a forest, leading to the lair of some evil, bone-gnawing dwarf.

Jimmy swings the door open on its rust-caked hinges and reveals a vast, musty darkness. A labyrinth of cobwebs, concrete posts, and water pipes can just barely be seen beyond the doorway. There’s a smell of raw earth and something stronger, like stale cat piss or an old wino’s vomit. Gordon thinks he hears rats scurrying back where the light doesn’t penetrate. “Aren’t you scared to go in there?” he asks.

“I always take a flashlight with me,” Jimmy tells him, “and a rope that’s tied to my bed so I won’t get lost.”

Gordon tries to remember if the San Joaquin Valley was underwater back when megalodons swam the world’s oceans. Could Jimmy really have found a fossil under there? He’s not sure. He just wants Jimmy to close that door…
before something comes through it.
Gordon asks himself why he’s having thoughts like that, but there’s no rational explanation. He just is, that’s all.

Janice calls down to them from the top of the stairs: “Jimmy, Gordon, time to hit the hay!”

“Okay, Mom!” Jimmy shouts back. He shuts the crawlspace door and unplugs the soldering irons. Gordon relaxes, although he’d feel a lot safer if the door could be locked. Maybe having a basement bedroom wouldn’t be so great after all.

Later, after they’ve changed into their pajamas, Gordon asks Jimmy if they can listen for astronauts talking on the ham radio. Jimmy claims he’s also heard pirates and ghosts broadcasting messages late at night, so Gordon is curious. But instead, Jimmy wants to listen to a record player (soon to be replaced by his quadraphonic stereo system) that he keeps next to his bed. He sets the needle down and slowly turns up the volume.

“What’s this?” Gordon asks when he hears the first eerie strains of orchestral music. It sounds like it was recorded in cavernous room inside a dark, faraway castle.

“Shhh!”
Jimmy puts a finger to his lips, whispering, “Just listen. This is the scariest record I know.” He turns on a little lamp by the record player and shows Gordon the album jacket. A blazing red Phoenix is rising from the ashes of a stylized bonfire, like some nightmare vision after falling asleep during Walt Disney’s
Fantasia.
It’s Igor Stravinsky’s
Firebird Suite.

“Where’d you get that?” Gordon asks. He’s seen that bird somewhere before.

“Shhh!”
Jimmy hushes him again. He turns out the light.

They both pull the covers up to their chins and stare at the crawlspace door across the room, which can just barely be made out after their eyes adjust to the darkness. The music is making Gordon’s scalp tingle in a not completely unpleasant way. There’s something delightful about spookiness when you’re seven years old and your best friend is beside you to talk about it.

“Hey, Jimmy,” Gordon whispers, “do you ever worry about a monster coming through that hole?”

“Sometimes, yeah,” Jimmy whispers back.

“How do you sleep?”

“I figure if a monster was gonna kill me, I’d already be dead by now. So if there’s a monster, it must be my friend.”

“What if it’s just waiting until you get fatter?”

“Then I don’t know. I’ll get ate, I guess.”

Jimmy rolls over on his side with a yawn and pulls the blanket up over his head. Gordon keeps staring at the crawlspace door, even though it scares him. But it scares him even more to look away from it. Stravinsky is filling his mind with images of headless knights on skeletal horses, a sinister queen cloaked in ravens’ wings, a dagger with a handle of rubies. Jimmy’s breathing has become loud and rhythmic. Gordon lies there wondering if there really
is
a monster behind the crawlspace door. If there is, he doesn’t want to make friends with it. But Jimmy does. Gordon stares into the dark, thinking,
If they’ve made the kind of deal I think they have, they’ll be together for a really, really long time.

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At first he thinks he’s having an asthma attack. Not yet awake and he’s already feeling the familiar internal desperation, like breathing through cotton. There’s an invisible weight pressing down on his chest, constricting his lungs. The Japanese have a word for the feeling–
kanashibara
–“to tie with an iron rope.” Gordon’s throat aches and his tongue itches. His shoulders are hunched up around his ears. Each breath is a struggle. When he opens his eyes, no more air will come.

He immediately sees why: he’s still in bed in Jimmy’s basement and Jimmy is perched on his chest like an incubus, sucking the breath right from his nose. In a creaky, old-witch-in-the-woods whisper, Jimmy leans close to Gordon’s ear and says, “Jimmy-Toad!” then croaks like a maleficent frog.

With the last of what little strength remains to him, Gordon thrashes under the covers and pushes Jimmy off. Jimmy laughs and scampers up the stairs in his underpants, leaving Gordon behind to rummage around for his Primatene inhaler, which he finally finds on the floor in the left front pocket of his wadded up shorts.

“Gordon! Time for breakfast!” Mrs. Marrsden yells.

It takes three hits of Primatene before Gordon can even sit up.

Breakfast consists of glazed doughnuts and Shasta Root Beer, yet another way in which Jimmy’s life seems superior to Gordon’s own. It doesn’t cross Gordon’s mind that he could easily fortify his morning bowl of Super Sugar Smacks with Coca-Cola for a similar wake-up jolt.

The boys head out into the backyard with their doughnuts to check on the progress of Jimmy’s latest manifestation of good fortune. Jimmy’s dad has been out there every weekend all summer, building a tree house for him on top of an old telephone pole planted in the middle of the lawn.

They arrive just in time to see a crane lowering a thatched roof onto the top tier’s gazebo-like posts. “Pretty neat, huh?” Jimmy says, as his father–four-stories up–unhooks the cable and signals for the crane to move off.

Gordon drops his doughnut in absent-minded amazement. It’s as if The Swiss Family Robinson has packed up their island and moved it to Jimmy’s backyard. The tree house has three interconnected levels of roped-bamboo walls, Plexiglas windows, and driftwood-fenced terraces–all on sturdy redwood platforms. It’s all so elaborate that Gordon wouldn’t be surprised if it had electricity and indoor plumbing. A rope ladder leads to a trapdoor at the bottom of the first platform–the only way in or out. He can’t wait to go up.

“Man, your dad’s so cool!” Gordon says, bouncing around with excitement.

“I know,” says Jimmy. “You should have your dad make you one, too.”

Gordon’s face darkens. He knows the prospects for a tree house of his own aren’t good. He can already imagine the conversation:

“Dad? Do you think you could help me build a tree house?”

His father, on the floor watching television. “A tree house? Where?”

“In the backyard. In a tree.”

“Sounds like a waste of a lot of good lumber, if you want my opinion.”

“But you own a lumberyard.”

“That’s right. And lumber is money. It doesn’t just grow on trees.”

“Well, technically, it does, Dad.”

“Don’t be an ass, son. Smart-alecks never get anything nice done for them.”

End of discussion, with the usual sting.

Maybe Gordon can dig a very deep hole somewhere and go live in it, but a tree house is probably out of the question.

Mr. Marrsden waves down at them. “What do you think, guys? Like it?” The boys shout their appreciation, jumping around like feral puppies. Gordon has let enthusiasm overcome him again without even realizing it. He asks–practically begs–Jimmy, “Can we go up inside?”

“Not unless you’re member of the Order,” says Jimmy, suddenly pretending to be much older than Gordon.

Sensing that Jimmy has stopped acting like his friend, but not understanding why, Gordon asks, “What Order?”

“The Tree House Order of Jacques de Molay.”

“Who’s Jacques de Molay?”

“Some medieval knight who got burned at the stake and turned into a ghost.”

“Cool! So how do I become a member?”

“There’s some stuff you have to do.”

“Like what?”

“You know. Stuff.”

It turns out Jimmy has a membership contract drawn up in red crayon on a piece of graph paper folded up in his back pocket. He takes it out and shows it to Gordon.

Prospective members are allowed to join the Tree House Order of Jacques de Molay in one of two unnatural ways. The first option–which Gordon immediately rejects–is to climb up on the roof of the Kingsburg United Methodist Church and hum “The Star Spangled Banner” with Jimmy’s wiener in his mouth. Jimmy finds this proposition hilarious and swears that Timothy Lundquist has already joined the Order via this unorthodox method. The second option–which Gordon deigns to consider–is to offer up three talismanic items: a Troll Doll, a hatchet, and a hangman’s noose from a dead man’s garage.

“Where am I supposed to find a dead man’s garage?” Gordon asks, quite sensibly.

“I know where there’s one,” says Jimmy, “but you should probably do that last.”

So Gordon sets out on his mission. The Troll Doll is easy. They sell for $5.99 over at
Gunnarsson’s Toy Shoppe
. He just has to raise some quick cash. To that end, he goes up and down the alleys of his neighborhood, searching through trashcans for pop bottles. He gets five cents for the small ones and ten cents for the big ones when he turns them in to the grocery clerks at
Ivan’s Swedish Market
. It’s dirty, sticky work, but Gordon doesn’t mind. He likes the idea of making money from what other people throw away.

It’s getting dark by the time Gordon heads for home lugging the big Hefty bag full of pop bottles on his back. He thinks he has around fifty bottles, enough to buy a troll doll when combined with the few dollars he already has in the little bronze stagecoach bank that the teller at Wells Fargo gave him when he opened a savings account. Sweat has turned the dirt on his arms and face to muddy smears. He reeks of rotten garbage and old lawn clippings. He keeps to the alleys to avoid being seen. As he passes behind his grandmother’s house, he sets the bag down next to her stockade cedar fence to rest.