Dwelling (9 page)

CHAPTER 10

SUICIDE SQUAD

Maggie

The television was blaring, yet Maggie continued to turn up the volume, hoping to drown out Moxie, who had been barking nonstop in Ricky’s room (
tomb)
for the last hour. She contemplated getting a couple
Aleve
from the kitchen medicine drawer, but decided it was too far away. Instead, she continued turning the volume up with Anderson Cooper on CNN. Today, the near white-haired, short-cropped reporter with ocean blue eyes was talking about the high rate of suicides among veterans and how the Veterans Affairs hospital in the desert baked capitol of Arizona had tried to cover-up prolonged wait times.

Why am I watching this?
Maggie wondered. She looked at the remote and her hand.
Whatever…nothing else is on
. A sympathetic Cooper sat opposite a teary-eyed middle-aged woman, the supposed whistleblower of the entire fiasco. She watched indifferently as the woman talked on a number of different issues with how the VA is run. Maggie huffed with the same indifference that floated from the decomposing sympathy flowers on the kitchen table.

The vibrant blues and purples and yellows were now black and moldy. She would have to throw them out eventually, but for now she was content to have the ‘sorry your husband is dead’ gifts on the table, along with all the letters and greeting cards and eviction notices.
Eviction from base housing…what a crock!
Anderson droned on about the spike of suicide among younger veterans. His voice seemed muffled as Maggie fell into distant memory. She thought of the boys, her best friends, and their club,
Suicide Squad
.

“
At this rate, an average of twenty-two veterans under the age of thirty commits suicide per day. That’s one every sixty-five minutes
,” said Cooper from the box. “
And you’re claiming the Phoenix office hid the number of suicides with their veterans
?”

“
Yes…that’s right
,” said the nervous woman.

“
Why the cover up?
” asked Cooper.

“
They died on the waiting list…they wanted to keep it a secret. Bad press, I guess,
” said the woman.

Maggie heard none of this. In her mind she pictured the gang. She could see a younger, chubbier Bobby Weeks before the war, before he disappeared. She could see Johnathan, complete, whole, before the RPG took his leg. And there was Jake, a real
Poindexter
, but the most honest and kindest of them all. She saw herself clad in jeans and Nirvana t-shirts. And then she saw Ricky as well.

Ricky stood young and handsome on some imaginary dock licking the waves of recollection. He was a natural-born leader whom she first began to really love, not just as friends, but romantically, in high school. Maggie swallowed the hot anger of this memory. Hope seemed so far away.
But who cares, right? Who cares…?

“
New requests for treatment were stuffed into a desk drawer…to make
,” the woman stopped between sobs,
“…to make the books look better! These people are real and they never got treatment and now who can they trust? Who…?”
The woman cried. Anderson Cooper looked placid.

Maggie ignored the TV. She peeled back the fabric of her mind, looking deeper into her memory. Searching for the moment their club had taken on the name
Suicide Squad
. As Cooper and the sobbing woman continued to drone on, Maggie felt herself fall some nineteen years into the past. The memory she found was of the summer of 1995, a week before the trip to Giddings and the abandoned house in the little town called Jotham.

It was the start of the summer, school had just ended, and thankfully none of them had to do any remedial work in summer school. Before Jotham, the gang, as best Maggie could recall, had spent most the first few days of summer messing around the back roads and alleys of Piper’s Meadow in Houston. Once, near the drainage canal by their neighborhood, one of many canals carved into the earth from Houston, feeding into the Gulf, Ricky had found something dead. They weren’t sure what.

Could never properly identify it
, Maggie remembered. The
creature
, as Bobby had whispered, was as large as a dog, maybe a lab, but its face had been mushed with decay. The fur looked slick and black with mud or whatever else it had collected from floating down from the city. Its legs seemed too short and fat to be a lab.
‘Maybe it’s a rat?’
Jake had suggested. The group was in awe by the concept.
‘There are rats this big downtown?’
Johnathan had cried.
‘Bigger,’
Ricky said matter-of-factly.
‘No way…you guys are messing with me,’
Johnathan had protested.
‘Don’t have a cow, man,’
Bobby teased. In her living room, Maggie smiled. The memory felt warm and comfortable, safe.
It’s been so long.
Too long. Even for Ricky’s funeral, they all weren’t there. Johnny-Boy has been hiding behind Karen. Bobby…? Jake…? Maybe we need to get back together. Have a little reunion. Doesn’t that sound nice?

The more Maggie thought about her friends, the more rapidly the memories came. The summer of ’95 had been hot; the humidity in Houston set a new record. But there was only so much a group of kids could do back then inside. The fun, real memorable fun, was outside, riding bikes behind the local Bowling Alley, scoring a pack of Marlboro Reds, hacking lungs against the tar-bite smoke, prank calling 911 on the Clear Lake Plaza payphone, tossing eggs down on passing cars off Bunker Hill, or bribing one of their parents to drive them out to the Cinemark.
What did we see that summer? There were a few. Ricky had insisted on…? Yes! We saw
Batman Forever
, which we all hated, except for Ricky, but
Ricky always had a thing for Val Kilmer.
The nights were reserved for horror movie marathons or Sega Splatter House championships, though for these Maggie could never stay the entire night. Her parents would never allow it, despite her best attempts at whining.
‘You are not going to be spending the night with a bunch of—boys! It’s not decent,’
Maggie recalled her mother saying more than once.

She didn’t understand until High School why her mother had been so paranoid about boys. Yet, she’d hangout for a little while anyway, eventually finding her way back home, alone, and usually past curfew, much to her father’s and
mother’s
disappointment.
It was hard being the only girl in the group
, Maggie confessed now as the whistleblower on the TV sobbed into her palms.

Maggie searched farther into her memory for the birth of
Suicide Squad
.
Why did we pick that name?
Why that and not something else, something less…grim?
The woman on the tube had broken down and was frantically crying still. Copper looked smug, but did his best on camera to console the woman. Maggie found the little bubble she had been looking for. It was the day she and the boys were hanging out in Bobby’s clubhouse, the large square mock-house overgrown with kudzu, real kid stuff, but it was the groups only, as Ricky called it,
Inner-Sanctum
. It was private, at least. Non-club members were not allowed.

Johnathan had come running in one day, huffing and puffing, red in the face. Between his hands he held a long rectangular white box. Instantly the group knew the contents were comics. Maggie smiled, shifting on the couch, ignoring the drama going on the Anderson Cooper Show, and beckoned the memory to the surface a little more. It came, as if she were really there, a silent observer for days gone by.

***

“Look at what I got,” Johnathan wheezed.

“What? Your mama’s panties? Boo-ya!” Bobby teased. He was sitting in the corner of the clubhouse smiling, a half-eaten carton of Oreo’s lying beside his faded black Vans sneakers, nearly concealed by the bell bottom plume of his JNCO Jeans. His teeth were coated with black crumbs.

“Dude! That’s hella sick!” Ricky screamed in mock horror.

“Shut up!” Johnathan retorted.

“Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you, those are your panties, ain’t they?” Bobby mumbled between a mouth full of cookies.

“Don’t be a douche bag,” Maggie warned. Turning to Johnathan, “Whatcha got in the box, Johnny-Boy?” She sounded genuinely interested, her gaze falling on the box.

Johnathan turned pink. “Box?” he managed.

“Whhaaattss in the booox?” Ricky whined in his best Brad Pitt impression. He sat at the small table they had stuffed inside the mock-house. Jake sat on the other side of him.

Bobby snickered from the corner. “Love that movie!”

“Oh. Yeah. Here, check it out.” Johnathan moved to the table. The others gathered around as he lifted the box lid revealing the contents inside. In the long rectangular box, stacked row to row, were comics, mostly 1980s era stuff, including a few detective genres and Star Wars editions from the ’70s.

Ricky eyed the Hulk comics while Bobby drooled over the Uncanny X-Men Dark Phoenix series. Jake was interested in the Days of Future Past ones, picking up the Uncanny X-Men issue 142,
“Mind Out of Time,”
the one when Wolverine was obliterated by an Sentinel Alpha Class on the cover with the words
“THIS ISSUE: EVERYBODY DIES!”
written across the bottom corner in bold lettering.

“Phat…” the group of friends whispered in unison.

“Bobby, don’t get your crumbs all over the comics, okay?” chided Ricky.

“Your mom.”

“How original.”

“Shut up.”

Maggie flipped through the box, looking no doubt for a Ren & Stimpy comic. She was never that big on the boys club Marvel and D.C. were known for. Some of it was pretty grittier and dark, she didn’t like those kinds of storylines. Others may have, but not her. But even so, beholding such a collection was mystifying, an almost religious experience, even for her.

“Where did you get these?” Ricky asked.

“My brother gave them to me,” said Johnathan.

“Jesus! What did you have to do to get these, blow him?” Bobby said matter-of-factly. The ease of his vulgarity was unnerving sometimes. But they were used to it. Bobby had always been crude, even in grade school.

“No,” Johnathan smiled. “Caught him sneaking out of the house last night. Told him I’d rat on him. Teased him about going to see Holly Peterson in the middle of the night.” He started giggling.

“Rotten-Crotch-Peter-Eater?”
Bobby exclaimed.

“The one and only!” Johnathan laughed. The boys joined in.

“Don’t be gross,” Maggie warned.

Johnathan turned red again.

“Easy, boys, we’ve got a lady amongst us,” Ricky teased.

Maggie punched him in the arm. “Shut up, numb nuts. I’m more man than you’ll ever be!”

“Ouch!” Ricky mocked offence, holding his chest and falling to the floor.

“So, Vincent just up and gave you his comics?” Jake inquired.

“Offered as fair trade. For my silence, of course.” Johnathan had his hands on his hips, looking very proud. His chin up. Eyes nearly closed.

“Sweet deal,” Jake commented.

“He didn’t really care, actually. Hadn’t read ’em in years. I think he was just pissed he got caught is all,” Johnathan confessed.

Silent agreement. Heads nodded as the group continued to pour through the treasure. Hushed excitement stirred in quiet murmurs as long forgotten and unknown comics were rediscovered. Ricky was flipping through a
Superman and Swamp Thing
50th anniversary issue. Bobby stared perplexed at a
Werewolf by Night
, issue 39—also known as Werewolf VS. Brother Voodoo! Maggie was peering into a Savage She-Hulk, issue 9.
Why does fathead Vincent have a She-Hulk comic?
Johnathan was carefully turning pages on an Iron Man comic, issue 128, better known from the “Demon in a Bottle” series. He turned the pages with a queer look as he studied the disheveled image of Tony Stark looking at himself through a mirror.

“Oh…!” Jake broke the silence.

Everyone snapped, “What?” in unison. Eyes were on Jake.

Jake said nothing. He lifted his hands, eyes wide with wonderful childlike glee. Lips quivering. Light reflecting off a modest pool of drool collecting on the corner of his lips. He held a comic for everyone to see. The comic had a near complete black cover. Eight headshots profiled the center image, along with the words
“These 8 people will put their lives on the line for our country. One of them won’t be coming home!”
running down the center. Looming above, in bold red, was the title, Suicide Squad, issue number 1.