I hated it there. She kept everything all perfect, and noticed if you ever touched anything. And I mean anything. Once just to mess with her I turned a couple of  decorative cups around so the handles pointed at an odd angle. I swear, she wasn’t in the room three minutes before she spotted it and fixed the goddamn cups. She shot me this real bitchy look when she did it, too. The look said I know what you’re up to, Buster. That’s what she called me when she got mad. Buster.

You asked why I ran away, didn’t you?

After mom left for her AA we hightailed to the beach. Zach was super pissed mom found our stash. I was too, because it was my fault.

“I should have hidden it better. I mean, what the fuck was she doing going through my shit?”

He shook his head. “Some vacation. Two weeks without being able to get high? Fucking sucks, dude.”

I held up the Proto Pipe. “At least there’s some stash in here. Let’s head down to the beach and get wasted.”

“We got to conserve,” he said.

But sitting on the sand we smoked it all anyway.

 

 

I remember how Benny and me would get under the blanket draped over the chairs and watch a DVD. “Fort Blanket,” he called it. Wayne, let’s go to Fort Blanket. I’d pop a bag of corn if there was any. We didn’t have much to choose from in the movie department. Barney, which we both hated. The Reanimator, which I loved but Benny was too scared to watch all the way through. His favorite was A Bug’s Life, especially how that little ant made a tiny telescope from a dew drop and a rolled-up leaf.

I miss him so much.

 

 

It was God punished him.

Just like I prayed for.

The top of that ol’ silo got took by the storm, the barn burned and the woman got sick, just like I prayed.

Oh, he had it coming all right, all of it—the fever cows and the horses shitting their guts onto the field in long strings.

I may have helped with some of them retributions, like mixing the poisons into the feed and maybe helping that barn get burning.

The old lady was sickly besides.

But I had nothing to do with the silo.

That part was God.

 

Skanks has plan.

You know down in the yard, in the ball cage?

How they got that old fashioned water tank in the corner?

Well, Skanks said the faucet is solid bronze.

He said the back of it is the perfect diameter for a marble.

He’s been saving matches and coffee creamer packets to make gunpowder, so alls we need is to get that faucet somehow.

Fucker’s like sixty caliber!

I mean, it won’t go far or nothin’, but pushed upside a guard’s head it would do some damage.

We use him as a hostage, Skanks says.

So, you in?

Rank and foul, the old man was in his wine. He would not shut up. The same stories of the Republic, delivered in his slurry Catalonian lisp. For the hundredth time he told how his nephew, ten years old, smuggled a bomb into Franco’s headquarters, a bomb disguised as a picnic basket.
The filthy old bastard grinned. He held up a slice of baguette.
“We were told to send a girl. But we knew the guard was a pederast.” He drove his grimy finger into the bread, twisting it back and forth. “Too bad the bomb did not go off.”

It’ll be fun. You can see the planets.

Bullshit. I didn’t come to Hawaii to look at fucking planets. How about learning to surf? How about getting laid?

And then I see the snow. I can’t believe my eyes. Snow? In Hawaii?

In the front seat they sit  chattering away about how pretty it is.

“You may not give a shit, but I am wearing flip flops.”

Mom turns in her seat. “Randy, I told you. It’s on a mountain.”

“Observatories are usually on mountains, Randy,” smirks Dad.

I swear, I am going to push him over the fucking railing.

 

 

I set the bottle going and hid back out in the woods. I always liked to watch how the flames licked up the side of the door frame. It was real pretty. Like Christmas.

He didn’t come out for a long time. The fire was pretty much all over the porch by that point. He looked real handsome in his robe. I imagined him coming over, me undoing his robe and touching the hairs on his chest.

It looked like he was thinking about going back in for his wife, but he never did. That confirmed it in my mind.

 

 

He smelt bad when he leaned on me, grabbed up on my breasts and jammed his old hairy hands at my parts, sour breath in my face. He said he dint know I was a girl under them boy clothes, said it dint matter because it was rules of the road and I should know better. I relaxed back and let him get atop me while I reached around to where I kept the ice pick tied on the string down my back. I shoved it hard into his crusty ear so fast he dint have time to howl.