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

I followed Jimmy outside to the firing line, not having a great deal of faith in that too-short prayer. A blast of warm air hit us as we stepped onto the porch. Jimmy stopped directly in front of Inky, who wasn't much taller than my best friend even though he was three years older than Jimmy, and held out the bottle to him.
"You an yer goofy lookin’ brother want a sip?" he asked Inky in a serious tone of voice.
He could have said anything, anything

but that. I watched with terror as Butch quickly pushed himself away from the column with the foot he’d planted against it. I instinctively clenched my fists. Inky stayed locked against his column and didn't offer any response, or even twitch a muscle. Finally he lifted one hand and extended it toward Jimmy.
"Yeah, I'll take a swig. Butch don't like Coke much, though, do you Butch?"
Butch stopped dead. He must've been trying to think about his brother's question—maybe that he did

like Coke? I watched his eyes crashing against the corners of their sockets, and his mouth open and close slightly, rapidly. Yes, he was trying to formulate the correct wrong answer. And then he replied to his older brother's question obediently, "Nah. I hate the stuff. I think I'd like to kick this sissy's ass, though."
That sissy would be me, and that would be the correct answer. Inky grinned.
This was not good. Jimmy was making friends with Inky while I was preparing to get knifed. Where the hell was my miracle, I wondered? I kept glancing at Butch, waiting for him to pull the switchblade, and then over at Inky, hoping he'd say "Heel" to his brother. Inky grabbed hold of the Coke Jimmy offered to him, brought it to his lips without shifting his dark eyes off Jimmy, and then slowly emptied it. That kind of made me nervous. After that display of defiance he burped very loud…and very long. When he'd finished with the entire insult he handed the bottle back to Jimmy, who graciously took it without a complaint. Butch let out a roar of approval. Surely he would never have been able to think of something as clever as that himself. I waited with growing apprehension.
Jimmy lifted the empty bottle and looked it over, and then tossed it past Butch's nose into the small, weed-infested garden beyond the porch. Butch stood straight up at that, pulled his shoulders back, and raised his clenched fists. I moved a step closer to Jimmy waiting for the shit to hit the fan. Strangely, Inky didn't flinch, nor did Jimmy. As Butch began to strut around like a boxer waiting for the bell sounding the beginning of Round One to clang, Jimmy calmly walked off the porch. I wasted no time following him.
"You owe me one, Inky," he said without looking back.
Inky responded, deadpan, "Yeah, I'll bring it by as soon as you kiss my ass." He burped again, and Butch began to howl.
Jimmy and I walked across the gravel toward the sidewalk at the corner. We were forced to stop when the number 75 bus rumbled up, and the doors opened with a loud hiss. Half of the people in the neighborhood must have been on that bus and decided to jump off at the very same stop. Providence? An answer to my prayer, at least, because Butch had decided to follow me off Mrs. Rashure's porch. The appearance of the people getting off stopped him cold.
Clifford Childs, the dumpy little ten year-old who lived three doors down from me, tumbled out of the bus first with his mother and another woman, both with feathered hats on their heads and shopping bags dangling from their arms. They were followed by an old woman and someone I took to be her husband of more than just a few years. She stepped down, firmly planting both feet on each step before going to the next, and then when she'd reached the sidewalk, she turned and fussed over her husband as though he were helpless in the face of the two steps he had to negotiate. He managed pretty well—that is to say he didn't fall. A bunch of other passengers patiently waited their turn to vacate the bus. When they were all safely out and standing on the sidewalk, the driver closed the doors and prepared to pull away. Suddenly, as if on some unspoken cue, the entire group in front of us seemed to sense a coming battle. They stopped dead and stared at Jimmy, the Patterson brothers, and me. I heard the soles of Butch's boots scuffle to a stop behind me in the gravel. The bus pulled away with a roar.
How could I not help but see the next vision? In the frozen second when everyone waited for the boots to fall, I beheld her radiant face in the rear window of the bus. The girl. The dancer I’d seen twirling and pirouetting on her front porch the day we burned up Marilou Jenkins’ hair. Beside her sat that drip of the neighborhood, Allen, his mouth all twisted up in some word he wanted to say, the sun twinkling for an instant off the thick lenses of his Buddy Holly glasses. She seemed almost angry, like whatever he was blabbing about irritated her, and she looked straight out at me. I bit my lip, hoping she wouldn't see what was going to happen in the coming seconds; hoping the driver of the bus could whisk her and Allen far enough away so that my beating wouldn’t’ be observed. Then I turned my head quickly to find out where Butch was. He had retreated a few steps, hands shoved into his rear pockets again, waiting, I think, for the crowd to disperse. Or maybe reaching for his knife.
Jimmy had already sidestepped the crowd and had hustled into the street. He turned about halfway across and did what I should have expected, and what made me cringe with terror. What sent the ladies in the nervous crowd straight into reactions of horror and outrage—and what forever made the two of us state enemies of Inky. Jimmy bent over in the middle of the empty street, dropped his jeans, and told Inky and his idiot brother exactly what he thought of them with his bare ass.
"Kiss this!" he said pointing at his lily-white cheeks with both hands.
When I saw that, I excused myself immediately and made a beeline for the safety of my house. Jimmy was right behind me, laughing like he'd just K.O.'d every one of the world heavyweight champs from John L. Sullivan on.
Really, I don't know if the Patterson brothers bothered to follow us—I didn't hear their footsteps over the exclamations of disgust from the rest of the crowd—but I suspected our days of semi-peaceful co-existence with them were now numbered. Numbered zero, to be exact. Jimmy continued rejoicing at his cleverness all the way home with bursts of laughter. He might think it was funny, but I knew differently. They'd be down to pay us a real glad-to-have-met-you visit, and thank Jimmy for his parting thoughts very soon.
At the far end of the block the bus had stopped again. The dancer hopped off, followed by Allen, right on her heels. He waved his arms and spoke as though she really might be interested in whatever it was he'd been jabbering to her about. I suspected she wasn’t. She walked away from him, but before she got too far, she turned and glanced back at Jimmy and me just as we hit the front fence of my yard. We went over like Olympic hurdlers, and I wondered as I crossed the top bar what her name might be. Sandra Dee, maybe? I found the image of her exhilarating, even knowing I would surely die within seconds if Inky and Butch caught up to us.
***

Text: Patrick Sean Lee, (c) 2012
Publication Date: 09-13-2012

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
"I gotta' go back a little ways here-back to before we got in trouble at church, before we nearly killed the little kid next door. Right after that little snot Dennis blackmailed Jimmy into giving him the matchgun. It was a couple of days later-a Sunday-and THAT'S when all the trouble started." Skip