Cheeseburger Subversive Read online

  Cobb immediately comes running.

  “Turn that line back on! There are ten minutes left in the shift!”

  Just ten minutes? Boy, time flies when you’re miserable and frantic.

  A few of the other men begin to walk past us, toward the time clock, thinking the shift is over. Cobb chases after them.

  “Hey! Hey! There’s still ten minutes left! Get back here!”

  The men keep walking.

  “Goddammit, get back here!”

  Cobb loses his temper. He kicks one of the machines, and his cursing momentarily stops. He falls to the concrete holding his foot, rolling back and forth, howling like he’s just been shot with a .44 Magnum.

  “My toe! My toe! Christ, I broke my fuckin’ toe!”

  The shift change horn blows, and all of the workers from the surrounding lines come over to see what’s going on. The men who had departed early from L-17 also wander back. This is a show that nobody wants to miss.

  And now I commit a serious error of judgment. I wander over to where Cobb is rolling around and say:

  “Gee, Mr. Cobb, guess you should have been wearing those steel-toed boots, eh?”

  Cobb’s face turns from red to purple as the other workers laugh at him. He shimmies across the floor on his butt, still cradling his injured foot in one hand, and reaches up onto the halted conveyor belt. With his free hand, Cobb grabs a jar of pickles. Jowls shaking, his face glowing crimson, he screams:

  “God! Damn! Fucking! Smartass! Kid!”

  He hurls the jar at me with all his strength. I raise my stiff arms to shield my face. The jar shatters against my wrists.

  I slowly lower my arms from my face, and the shard of glass buried deep in my left wrist comes into focus. I watch with fishbowl-eyes as my blood begins to spurt from the gash, spattering on the concrete, speckling my shirt, my jeans, and my dad’s workboots. Pain sizzles where the vinegar from the pickle brine has penetrated the wound.

  My memory of the rest of the day is sketchy. There are a few images of a nurse cleaning my wound, a doctor stitching the gash back together, the feeling of plaster hardening around my forearm and wrist. Through the blur of strong painkillers, I vaguely remember Mom and Dad helping me into the car just outside the emergency room exit.

  I’m still not sure if I dreamed this next part, but I’m pretty sure it was real. After Dad wheeled the car into our driveway, he squinted into the rear-view mirror, and with his lips tight and his jaw muscles bulging, he jumped from the car without even closing the door. With the engine running, he strode across the street to where Mr. Cobb was sitting on his porch with his injured foot propped up on a pillow.

  I couldn’t hear their conversation, but it was short. Dad’s voice was a lot louder than Mr. Cobb’s, and Dad definitely had the last word. His face was white when he reached into the car to turn off the ignition. He did not slam the car door when he closed it, and his voice had its usual even timbre as he and Mom helped me into the house.

  “Mr. Cobb has been made to understand that he will be in danger of suffering more than a sore foot if he bothers you again. If he forgets about this agreement, you will be sure to tell me about it, okay?”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  A few hours later, my brain is pleasantly humming from the effects of the painkillers. Dad shuffles in to my room to check on me.

  “How’s it going, there, Bud?” he says from the doorway of my room.

  “My wrist hurts.”

  Dad comes a little closer to my bed.

  “Well, Dak, I’m proud of you,” he says. “You really took it like a man.”

  Then Dad straightens up and clears his throat, the way he always does when the sentimentality-resistance circuit in his brain kicks in.

  He pretends he doesn’t hear me when I say, “So did you, Dad.”

  KRISPY GREEN PICKLE, Inc.

  is pleased to announce the

  of

  CHESTER L. COBB,

  Factory Foreman

  An informal gathering for Mr. Cobb will be held in

  The Jeremiah Faire Room of the Faireville Mental

  Health Centre this Saturday to thank him for his

  many years of service.

  No gifts please!

  Benjamin’s Aliens

  (Grade nine, with grade three flashbacks)

  When we were eight, Benjamin Cranston was obsessed with finding a way to escape planet earth. Now, six years later, it seems that he has finally achieved his goal.

  Even though we lived on opposite sides of the city, I suppose that I was destined for a while to become Benjamin’s best friend. I really didn’t have much choice; a force greater than either Benjamin or myself was involved in bringing us together: The Faireville District Board of Education.

  When my parents read me the letter that the school board sent them, I assumed that a “pilot project” had something to do with learning to fly an airplane. Naturally, I agreed to participate as any right-thinking, career-minded eight-year-old would have done. Instead of getting the flight training I expected, I was removed one afternoon from my grade three classroom and subjected to what my tormentors referred to as a battery of cognitive abilities tests. If you have ever been subjected to such testing, you will probably agree that the use of the word battery (as in assault and battery) is fairly accurate.

  Before the end of the following week, I was attending a special school, which was so new that it hadn’t even been given its own building yet, or even its own official name. Everyone involved simply referred to it as the Gifted School. It was located, for the time being, in a large, echoey room in the basement of an ancient, half-deserted technical high school on the other side of the city.

  It was in this cavernous room that I first met Benjamin. I could only guess that he had made the same mistake as I: the accidental demonstration of abnormal ways of understanding certain things. Benjamin’s crimes against being average were far more outstanding than my own; while I was certainly guilty of an early predisposition towards literacy, Benjamin was able to understand physics, chemistry, and engineering principles in the same way that other children understand Hot Wheels cars and Barbie dolls.

  Benjamin and I were the only real children in the entire program, so we didn’t have much choice but to spend a lot of time together. A dozen teenagers were also sequestered in that big, drafty room but just like the harried instructor in charge of our education, these older kids usually ignored us. As a result, Benjamin and I were given free rein to do a lot of “hands-on, student-directed learning,” which was edubabble for “fooling around mostly unsupervised.”

  During our stay, we produced an inspiring assortment of toys, machines, models, and best of all, real chemical reactions (which were often stinky, smoky, explosive, or, in the best case studies, a combination of the three). I learned many things during my stay at the Gifted School: to this day I am still capable of producing a multitude of dangerous chemical reactions with ordinary household substances.

  The program, by the way, was cancelled three months later. Perhaps it was because few of us brought home anything for our parents to display on the doors of their refrigerators, but more likely the cancellation was a result of the fire that burned the old Tech School to the ground. The program’s end didn’t really matter much, because by then, Benjamin and I had become best friends. Boys who make explosions together are friends forever. Blood may be thicker than water but explosives are more powerful than blood.

  “I’m glad the fire happened,” Benjamin confided to me. “I hated going to that school. But I’m sure glad I met you, Dak.”

  After we returned to our usual, everyday, readin’-writin’-and-’rithmatic classrooms, we saw each other less frequently — perhaps for one weekend every two months. Getting permission from my parents for even this limited contact required a great deal of whining and brooding since Benjamin’s house was some distance from our own, and also since his parents didn’t seem to make much of an impression on my own mom
and dad.

  We usually opted for Benjamin’s house, because his parents were more permissive about our experiments and expeditions than mine. In fact, Benjamin’s mom and dad were often pleasantly absent for entire afternoons, unlike my own parents, who hovered over us like surveillance helicopters every time Benjamin came to visit. There was, of course, a rather damning correlation between Benjamin’s presence and the number of physically altered household implements which surfaced afterwards. I never worried much about the little accidents that occasionally accompanied our projects, though; compared with the greater rewards of scientific exploration, they were small sacrifices indeed.

  The first time Benjamin invited me to sleep over at his house, he was busy planning an underground space station. I often made such plans myself, which would usually hang on the refrigerator for a few weeks before migrating into a trash bag to make room for plans of even greater proportion. Benjamin’s plans, however, were not just amusements, nor were they simply boyhood fantasies. When Benjamin made a plan, it was meant to be carried out. Benjamin’s imagination was much less gaseous than my own.

  Benjamin didn’t have much choice in the matter; he was convinced that aliens, who lived on the other side of the universe, were communicating with him. The aliens are coming to Earth, and they sent specific telepathic instructions so that things will be in order when they arrive.

  “How come they don’t communicate with me, Benjamin?” I asked him.

  “You’re just a normal human, Dak,” was his reply. “You may have been chosen for that gifted class, but you haven’t got a brain like mine. I’m different. The aliens have told me so. They need me. Their world can’t survive without me, and I have to get ready for them to come and take me away from here soon. You can help me build the underground receiving station for when they come, but I’m the only one that can go with them.”

  At this point, he had already started to march purposefully towards his father’s tool shed.

  “What are you talking about, Benjamin?” I asked him. This was a question I had become quite accustomed to asking.

  He sighed and rolled his eyes the way he always did when he felt he was dealing with a lesser human, one incapable of fully understanding his purposeful schemes.

  “They’re underground dwellers, see,” he would explain. “So we’ll have to build a reception station for them beneath the ground. We’ll feed them orange juice and nectarines because they subsist mostly on vitamin C. Their matter-transporting device will materialize inside our station and they’ll take me away with them so I can save their world. I am the Chosen One. They have told me this. They need me.”

  I have never been one to interfere with the imaginings of others, so I played along.

  “Oh, I see. Can I help?”

  “Of course, you can help! Do you think building an underground base is easy work for just one guy?”

  With shovels as tall as ourselves and with all the strength we could summon from our skinny little bodies, we proceeded to dig a hole in Benjamin’s parents’ backyard, a hole which would eventually become his subterranean alien friendship centre, his extraterrestrial welcome wagon. By nightfall, the hole was just big enough for Benjamin and I to lie down in — for some reason, this was important.

  “Perfect,” said Benjamin. “This is exactly the size they want. Tomorrow we can lay the boards across and put the grass back on top. No stupid adults will ever know the difference. The aliens will come and go. I’ll be gone before my parents even notice.”

  All of that digging made us quite hungry, so we searched through the Cranstons’ rather dark bungalow, looking for Benjamin’s mother. We found her sitting on the floor behind the basement bar. Tributaries of eyeliner were drying on her cheeks, and I knew that there was something very wrong. I knew that I should have called my parents right then and got them to come and take me home, but I feared that if I did, I would probably never see Benjamin again. Half the books I had read up to this point in my life stressed the importance of loyalty to friends. I kept my mouth shut.

  ”Hey, Mom, this is Dak, my buddy from the old Gifted School. Will you make us some supper?”

  His Mom looked up at us. She seemed to have dark circles under her eyes, like a raccoon, but it was difficult to see clearly in the dim basement light.

  “Get something from the fridge, will you honey?” she said. The tone of her voice made me shiver, but again I resisted the urge to run to the phone and call home. I would stick by my friend.

  “Okay, Mom,” said Benjamin, and we scuttled off towards the stairs.

  “What’s the matter with your mother?” I asked, rather meekly.

  “Oh, nothing, she just likes to sit back there behind the bar, that’s all. It’s her special place, where she gets away. It’s nothing.”

  His mother called out to us as we scampered through to the kitchen.

  “Boys! Try to be quiet, okay? Benjamin’s Daddy isn’t, um, feeling very well.”

  There wasn’t much worth eating in the fridge, so we raided the pantry instead. We tiptoed up the stairs to the attic where Benjamin liked to sleep — his bedroom was usually too cluttered to be slept in anyway. We spread our supper of potato chips, cola, Twinkies, chocolate pudding, and peanut butter out on the floor in front of us. I was going to bring along some nectarines, but Benjamin reminded me that those were for the aliens.

  As Benjamin changed into his pyjamas, I noticed a large, purple-brown bruise in the center of his chest.

  “Hey, Benjamin, what happened to you?”

  “What? What do you mean? Oh, the bruise. Um, well, one of my inventions malfunctioned, that’s all. I was building a spring-loaded rock-cannon, and it accidentally went off.”

  “Wow! You built a rock-cannon? Can I see it?”

  Benjamin suddenly became angry, the way he sometimes did when one of the other kids in his neighbourhood showed up to see if he wanted to come out and play. Benjamin had no use for little minds, or for people who couldn’t understand the immensity of his life’s purpose. Couldn’t they see that he had more important things to do, and that he was preparing for a great journey into the unknown?

  “No!” he barked at me. “No, you can’t see the damn rock-cannon, okay! I told, you, it’s malfunctioning! It doesn’t work! Are you deaf or something?”

  “Geeze, take it easy!” I replied, a little frightened at his outburst, but also a bit perturbed.

  “I’m gonna go home if you’re gonna start acting like a jerk!”

  His behaviour quickly changed.

  “No, no — don’t go home. Don’t leave. I’m sorry. I need you to help me finish the station. It has to be completed or the aliens will have no place to transport to. I’m sorry I yelled at you . . . ”

  He now sounded as if he might start crying.

  “Forget about it,” I mumbled. Sometimes Benjamin could be a difficult character to understand.

  I didn’t sleep very well that night. I kept having strange nightmares, nightmares with no pictures, only sound. I imagined that I was hearing muffled sounds of anguish crying, hollering, things breaking. I dreamt that these things were going on beneath me, maybe two or three floors down. A couple of times, the dreams were so real that I thought I could hear the sounds continuing after I was awake. I was so frightened, I may have even cried a little. I kept telling myself, you’re only dreaming, none of this is really happening — hell is not breaking loose downstairs.

  “How was your sleep-over, Honey?” Mom asked when I returned home.

  “Fun!” I gushed. “We played a lot. Benjamin’s got cool toys. And his mom is a really great cook!”

  I felt a little guilty lying to my mom like that, but I knew that she would never allow me to visit Benjamin again if I let on that his household was so much different than our own.

  I didn’t see Benjamin for three months, although I talked to him on the phone quite often. He was making good progress in equipping the interior of his underground station. He had even gone so far
as to smuggle a portable electric heater from the house to the station. He had also taken to sleeping outside beneath the ground, since the aliens had informed him that they might decide to come get him during the night. Logically, the aliens thought that it would be less dangerous if their rendezvous with Benjamin occurred during the night.

  The next time I visited him, we went to bed early. Although I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea, Benjamin insisted that we sleep outside in his underground fort, beneath the boards and sod and grass. He had brought out extra blankets and rations to make my stay as comfortable as possible, but I must admit that lying in the dirt under the ground in somebody else’s backyard is not the most restful situation. I was afraid that the whole thing might collapse on us.

  Benjamin slept soundly, curled up in a tight ball with his fingers in his mouth. When his alarm clock sounded at 3:00 o’clock, I was still fully awake.

  “Come on!” he whispered excitedly. “We’ve got an important mission to accomplish tonight!”

  Even with the flashlight, the tiny space in the ground was still dark. We struggled into our clothes and emerged into the cool, moonlit night. Our surroundings actually seemed bright in comparison with the black void in which we had spent most of the night. With my eyes fully adapted to the darkness, there was no mistaking that Benjamin removed a very large can of gasoline from bushes at the far side of the backyard lawn.

  “What are we doing, Benjamin?” I was afraid to hear his answer, but also partly exited.

  “The aliens have been having a hard time finding me, Dak,” he whispered. “Their scanners have been scrambled by certain particles in our upper atmosphere, and they haven’t been able to locate my underground base, yet.”