Eddie's Shorts - Volume 2 Read online

world."

  Luke looks dubiously at the big box kite looming over them. The kite is a homemade job, straws and foul-smelling glue.

  "You say that like it's a good thing."

  It is another twenty minutes of the wonders of the Gulf of Chihli before Cole at the window announces, "I think it stopped."

  Kaiser quits talking, and for a moment everyone listens in silence to the absence of raindrops on the roof of the van.

  After the accident, the silence went on for months. It's very hard for a marriage to survive the loss of a child: This is what the counselors say while Luke's parents wall themselves off from each other. A year goes by and it's over, and he spends the next years to eighteen bouncing between them, building up speed and force, until he finally ricochets away from it all. He settles in the middle of the country like the continent were a ditch, and rolls north up I-35 year by year. Kansas City, Des Moines, Minneapolis. Stadium work, grill work, bowling alley work. It sometimes makes him laugh to think that he'll be at the North Pole by 30. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes he thinks about staying somewhere, maybe even wants to, but to date it just has not worked. Always, he runs into something, and so he goes. Not much by way of stability, but ever so maneuverable. He would make a good fighting kite.

  They pile from the van and spread out on the asphalt, stretching. The ceiling of the sky is still low and gray, but the rain has stopped and shafts of drier light are poking through to the impending suburbia around the hill. There is a decent wind from the west, and Luke looks around a bit more admiringly at the elevation. It is a good place for a kite.

  "I'm at a loss as to what may have happened to Shleg," Kaiser says, looking off to the north towards Cliff Road.

  "He probably got lost," Jewely says. Keith Shlegoff is Kaiser's personal underling from the bowling alley where Luke worked last winter. Even though he's still just in high school, it is generally agreed that spraying out rental shoes is about as far as Shleg's intellect is going to take him.

  Kaiser shakes his head sadly. "But the Hardee's was right there, you could see it from the intersection."

  "So what do you guys think?" A Bill calls. He and his namesake are scanning the western skies, while Cole has put on sunglasses in the grayness and is smoking against the side of the van. The sky west looks clearer, and while there is still a lingering rumble of thunder, it is beyond them to the east.

  "The last of this looks like it'll blow over in another twenty," Luke says. "Long as the wind stays like this we can probably get some up, maybe even your big box-monster."

  "Hey, that's a work of art!" the other Bill says back, looking theatrically offended.

  "I've only got about a half hour," Cole says, and the Bills look at their respective watches and make surprised noises of dismay.

  "A half hour?" Kaiser says and goes to join them in a huddle. Jewely turns to Luke and raises an eyebrow.

  "What are you smiling at?" she asks.

  "We're not going to have any time, we came down here for nothing."

  Jewely blinks. "And this is good?"

  "Oh yeah," Luke nods, and smiles at her widely. "I could still be kicked-back on my roof, lounging in the golden sunlight. You're gonna owe me." He waggles his eyebrows and Jewely pinches him in the stomach, he fends her lightly off with a half-full beer, and they both laugh.

  "Say, Lucas," Kaiser says, walking over. "Hey. Shut it down or get a room, you two."

  "What's the deal, Kaiser my Kaiser?" Luke says, putting an arm around Jewely's shoulder. "You need a ride or you going to wait and see if Shleg reappears?"

  "Just hang on, we've still got a half hour yet." Kaiser says.

  "So? As soon as we get something up we'll have to take it right back down."

  "So we won't put anything up for long," Kaiser shrugs. "That still gives you time to fight."

  John's red Moped is the first into the intersection, the one that flashes it's brake lights. The pickup zooms in from the right. Bald tires on a wet road, the little pop-gun of a motorized bike whines and fishtails.

  Behind on the black Moped he starts to shout, then his goes down, too. He watches the road slide by in front of his nose, and he hears the smashing impact but doesn't see it. When he turns his head the actual crash is over and done, all that's left is glass and parts falling back to the pavement with the rain, and the pickup slewing off the road with the twisted red bike embedded in it's grill.

 

  Luke is hands-down the best kite-fighter of Kaiser's "Association." That goes without saying. Kaiser or Shleg have never beat him, and while Chris from the U did once, he won't even fight Luke anymore. Not since Luke took the head off a Dutch dueling kite Chris had put two months into building. That was up at Riverside Park, and the kite had been lost in the river.

  Cole is apparently the St. School boys' designated duelist. He gets his weapon from under the back bench of the van while Luke gets his from his trunk. Kaiser and the Bills start haggling over a bet.

  The two kites are, perhaps not surprisingly, similar. Both Nagasakis - ancient designs never bettered for a fighting kite. They are fairly small at under three feet across, more square then diamond shaped, and with a billowing frontispiece in addition to the main kite on the frame. Both are wood and cloth: Luke's a uniform red, while Cole's is yellow with a design of what looks like a Chinese character painted in black.

  Luke and Cole stand with their respective kites before them, behind the van out of the wind, eyeing each other's workmanship.

  "What's that mean?" Jewely nods towards the design on Cole's kite. "Moo Shu Pork?"

  "Something like that," Cole says around the cigarette still in his mouth. "So we gonna do this or not?"

  "You need a string?" Luke asks, but Cole shakes his head and flicks his cigarette away at a puddle. He heads for the van's rear doors.

  Luke returns to his trunk as well. There are several rolls of line, nylon and fishing wire. A couple that he's been meaning to untangle, one of these days. His fighting line though is under the others. It is in a tidy role around a spool, with the last two feet pressed between heavy sheets of construction paper. Jewely holds his Nagasaki while Luke carefully lifts out the string and gets ready to tie it.

  "Well, that's that," Kaiser says, walking over and knocking his hands together like he has closed a business deal.

  "So what's the bet?" Luke asks without turning. He is kneeling before Jewely and his kite, threading line through the eye at the center of the spars. It is a very careful business, running through just enough string before the treated section. The treated length is a foot-and-a-half of line that has been soaked in powdered glass and glue.

  "Nothing important," Kaiser shrugs. "Another case of beer, and the loser's immortal soul."

  "You get change back from that?" Jewely asks. Luke smirks up at her, then straightens.

  "Ready?" Kaiser asks happily. Luke nods and takes his kite from Jewely. She leans around it and gives him a quick kiss on the cheek.

  "Stomp that little bald punk," she says, and Luke clicks the heels of his sneakers together smartly.

  He doesn't even see his brother for a moment, but then he does, and that is all there is - his brother floating in the air, not like he's soaring through it, but like he is floating absolutely still and the world is rushing by just beneath him. For some reason, lying half under the moped on the wet street, he can not in that second understand that his brother is in danger. He is hovering above everything, safe, and for that instant it seems he will stay there forever.

  But the earth is not only moving beneath him, it's moving towards him. A lamp post that started out sixty-seven feet away from the point of the crash lunges forward and knocks him from the sky.

  The wind in the tail of the storm front is in fact perfect, and both kites are quickly aloft. Luke and Cole start at the north and south sides of the cul-de-sac on the hilltop, both using the wind from the west, with their respective cheering sections all leaning on their hands against the wet van.
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br />   Luke unwinds his kite up into the heavy sky via a spool, Cole has his running through a fishing reel mounted on a short dowel. Luke smirks at Cole's apparatus. A little fancier maybe, but lazy for a kite fighter. Still, it keeps one of Cole's hands free for a cigarette.

  The kites stretch up into the sky and bob in the updrafts. Neither has a tail (ridiculous on a fighting kite) and they revolve as they bounce along in the wind.

  Maneuverability, not stability, is the issue.

  When both kites reach a height of maybe seventy feet and Luke and Cole are acquainted with the wind, Cole calls, "Y'ready?" and Luke nods. He doesn't talk much doing this, never has. His mind is elsewhere.

  Without moving on the ground, the two fighters manipulate the drag on their kites, and the bright flyers start to approach each other, almost hesitantly in the bumping wind. Warily. The spectators start clapping and shouting encouragement, but Luke hardly hears them. Glancing across at Cole, Luke finds he has tossed his cigarette away and is looking just as intent as he is himself. Cole sees Luke looking at him though, and he winks over the top of his sunglasses. Then he starts quickly reeling in a few feet of line, and high above his kite drops in the sky and darts forward.

  Cole's line is not treated with powdered glass as is Luke's. That is the Japanese style, Cole employs the Korean. A few inches beneath his kite's body, a wine cork is attached with the line running through it. Razor blades are embedded, blades out, all around the cork. His intent is to snag Luke's line, while Luke's is to ride along close enough to the other kite so that the lines meet and rub against each other. Cole wants to bring his opponent's kite down quickly, violently. Luke wants to keep his own kite in the air.

  These goals dictate the way the fight unfolds. Cole's kite, which he controls surprisingly well with the bulky reel, darts and dives, swooping across the wind for Luke's. Luke's is handled more sedately, moving out of the way and then turning to follow close behind. The competitors are totally silent, but every action above brings cheers from the van-side. It becomes clear that both Luke and Cole know what they are doing, and after the aerial ballet stretches out to about fifteen minutes, the cheers from the van have subsided from encouraging to just, "Kick his ass!"

  Luke still hardly hears the noise, but it starts to tell on Cole, and his face twists slowly into a snarl as time goes by and each of his charges is neatly avoided. He has drawn in a bit of line for each of his last attacks, and Luke hasn't given him room to lengthen it back out. Cole's kite is swooping closer and closer to the ground after each attempted charge, and Luke's is bearing in closer still. Finally, out of desperation, Cole makes a last rush with the wind, coming in strong. Luke's kite drops just as quickly out of the way, then rises behind. The two kites spin out of any control as their lines bind, then both move up and apart.

  "Did he get him?" Kaiser and one of the Bills asks at the same time, but Jewely starts to hoot and clap. The kites hang in the air, then Cole's blows off with the wind to the west and his line starts to float down to the ground. He swears and throws his reel to the asphalt, snapping the dowel and kicking up water from a puddle.

  Jewely is still clapping and skipping around puddles towards Luke. He holds one arm out towards her and grins, raising the other with the end of the line running up like a long extension of himself to the red Nagasaki above, hovering almost motionless in the wind, like it could float forever.

  The clap of thunder follows so close to the lightning strike that the two seem to be the same thing.

  He doesn't remember walking over to his brother. He was lying on the street watching him floating in the air, and then he's at the side of the road looking down at the impossible angle of his brother's back,