Meeting The Skulls by Patrick Sean Lee (icecream ebook reader .TXT) 📕

I drifted across the yard and the fence to Jimmy’s house. It was Sunday, half past eight, and I spotted him rummaging through his trashcan out in the alley, making a terrible racket and cussing. It was warm that morning, the kind of beautiful early spring day when Chinook winds came floating into the city and sent the thermometer skyrocketing. A perfect day to tramp the gravel alleys looking for interesting things people had thrown out, poke sticks through the fences at snarling dogs. Whatever we took a notion to do.
“Whatcha’ doing?” I asked him.
His head was stuck deep into the fifty-five gallon drum so that when he answered me it had a rumbling quality to it.
“Lookin’ for empty bottles.” He pulled his head out of the trashcan and looked over at me standing inside his yard. “Pop bottles. I told her not to throw ‘em away with all her goddam’ empty whiskey bottles, but she don’t hear shit I say anymore.”
“Why don’t you empty the trash, then? Beat her to the punch?”
He shrugged. “I dunno’. Just don’t.”
Beside him on the ground lay a pile of Coke bottles in good shape, and one with the neck broken in a nasty, jagged line. I don’t know why he’d bothered hauling that one out of the barrel; it wasn’t good for anything, except maybe to use in a fight.
“We going up to Rashure’s for candy?”
“Maybe. I wanna’ get a Coke though. Eight bottles’ll do.” He glanced down at the pile beside him, counting them quickly. “Six. We need a couple more. Go check out Baumgartner’s trash,” he said pointing to the cans across the alley.
I left through the gate attached to his garage, crossed the alley to the trash cans over there, and dove into their drums filled with all kinds of smelly shit. After holding my nose and pushing garbage-stained bags and other crud around, I found the two that we needed; two more as well.
“Here you go.
“How’s your mom?” I asked.
Jimmy crossed the alley to take the bottles from me. “Dunno’. Still sleeping it off, I guess.”
“Oh. Did you eat yet?”
“Yeah, I found a can of sardines in the cupboard. Let’s get these bottles into the yard, then we can work on somethin’ for a while until Mrs. Rashure opens her store.”
And so we carried the ten empty bottles into his yard and laid them next to the red brick barbecue that his grandfather had made when he built the house for his only daughter—next to the patio, midway between the rear of the red brick house and the back fence. The barbecue had been extremely well constructed by mason grandpa; would withstand horribly cold winters and a great deal of other normal abuse. But it would never be the same, much to Mrs. Riley’s horror (in one of her sober breaks), after Jimmy loaded it up with M-80’s to test the strength of its several hundred, tightly mortared bricks. A portion of the pyramidal stack was missing since last year--since the summer afternoon when Jimmy satisfied himself that the firebox was as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, having loaded it up with the explosives. The stack itself hadn’t been so lucky when he decided to test its strength, though.
“Let’s get movin’” he said. “ I’m real thirsty after them sardines.”
“Yeah, ok.”

Mrs. Rashure was most likely some kind of Protestant—one of those who saw no wrong in opening her business doors on Sunday if she wanted. I suppose we shouldn’t have patronized her on that first, holy day of the week, but I blew off that unwritten commandment, and off we went, bottles in hand, down the long driveway onto the sidewalk leading south to the corner where the old lady’s store rested in nineteenth century shabbiness.
We made the short trek without a care in the world, still talking about the hilarious shank of weedy-looking hair on the chicken monster from outer space, wondering if by our experiments we could invent a super-weapon more powerful than plain old gunpowder that would blast through its force field. When we crossed the street, I saw them standing outside the store on the porch, leaning against the white painted columns supporting the small gabled roof.
The Patterson brothers—Inky and Butch.
Butch was the shorter of the two, stocky, and ugly as a basket of rotten apples, but Inky—he was tall, athletically built, and good-looking. He must have spent hours each morning in front of the bathroom mirror with a jar of Brylcreem and a comb getting every strand of hair in that jet-black pompadour just perfect. I admired him for that, but trembled at the thought of stumbling into his path without Jimmy, Mickey, and every other kid I knew beside me. The hairdo alone would've made me sink to my knees and pray for mercy.
Inky stood on one side, at the top of the wooden steps; Butch across from him with his thumbs inside the waistband of his jeans. Both of them had a lit cigarette dangling out of their mouths, and a pack rolled up in their white tee-shirts at the shoulder. Every decent hood in the world did that. Butch looked stupidly at us, mostly because, I think, he was stupid…but Inky sneered with his head-devil smarts as we stepped between them, single file. We didn't want any trouble, just a cold bottle of pop. I even tried not to think back on the teepees we'd built in the vacant lot across the street from our houses last summer, and which I knew without asking any questions, they'd smashed to the ground on one of their midnight raids down onto our block. Now, here they were, ready to smash us to the ground.
"Where you buttholes goin?" Butch greeted us when we passed by, mangling the words out of the side of his mouth opposite the cigarette.
Inky didn't say a word. Neither did Jimmy or me. We continued on into the store, with its glass-faced display cases standing on either side of the main aisle, without a peep. The Coke box stood at the far end near the doorway entrance to Mrs. Rashure's living area at the rear. We were in, but we were trapped. I knew we weren't gonna' get back out of that place without a fight unless we ran like scared chickens. Thinking about the alternative to having our faces used as punching bags, I was all for the chicken idea. Worse, I’d heard about Butch’s devotion to switchblades. I sure didn't want a knife stuck into my belly.
Mrs. Rashure shuffled out of her apartment when she heard the little bell above the screen door ding, and I saw the look on her face when she saw the load of bottles we'd lugged in. She was a widow, stooped over, wearing an ankle length, dark blue polka dot dress, and she was for sure a hundred fifty years old if she was a day. Her thin face looked like a potato left out in the sun for a month. Her scraggily arms and hands could easily have been the shoots that had withered and died, cryin' for water.
"I don't want no more bottles, boys. I got too many already. They're all over the place back there," she said in her faltering voice, pointing back at her living quarters.
"But you get money for 'em," Jimmy complained. "We just want a cold Coke. We even got an extra couple we'll let you have. That's four cents profit."
That seemed to move her. Four cents wasn't much, but it was better than nothing, I guess she thought. She turned up her nose, but she opened the cash register drawer and slipped a dime and a nickel out for us.
"Actually, that's five cents profit," Jimmy told her as he took the two coins. "It's all yours, and we thank you, don't we Skip?"
"Yep. Thanks."
I looked behind me as Jimmy went to the machine and lifted the top. Inky hadn't moved a muscle, but Butch had moved across the porch and was standing just outside the dusty screen leering in at us. Mrs. Rashure noticed him, too, and she immediately went for him.
"You hoodlums take those cigarettes and get on outta’ here before I call the police. G'won," she said wagging a finger at them, "you ain't hangin’ around my store like two banty roosters. Get on up the street!"
Butch turned up his boxer’s flat nose and sneered out of the free side of his mouth. He turned slowly, and with his typical arrogance, retook his position at the column a few feet back, staring in at me, exhaling a bluish-white puff of smoke. Inky didn't budge.
I turned my head to Mrs. Rashure, and without daring to ask her, used my eyes to inquire whether Butch’s retreat might not've been far enough—which I was sure it wasn't. She must have thought otherwise, because she turned and shuffled back toward her living quarters.
"Don't bring no more of them bottles in here, boys. I got too many of 'em already. They're all over the place back here." She disappeared without another word through the doorway, leaving Jimmy and me to face certain annihilation in another minute—and without the benefit of a cop, or even an old lady, to referee the slaughter.
I looked at Jimmy, who didn't seem to be all that frightened, and mouthed the question, "Now what?" He gave me a little smile, snapped the cap off the Coke at the opener attached to the side of the bright red case, then led the way back out. We had our ratty old Keds sneakers on—Inky and Butch were sporting their engineer boots with rock-hard toes. I could feel the excruciating pain in my shin bones already.