Not the coolest of kids, I had to wait nearly two weeks to get over to his house. I half expected to show up and have him say he lost it, and then I'd know he'd been lying about having it the whole time. Hell, under the right circumstances, that's exactly what I would have done. But thank god Mike wasn't me, because when I finally got to see the thing -- it left me breathless.
Like a medieval monk measuring angels in some forgotten crypt, I sat there comparing it to the old EMPIRE Luke that I'd brought along with me. It simply blew it out of the water. The appendages moved more discretely, the plastic was strong and more dense, but most of all -- his new light-saber had been etched with an extra panel of detail. Mike reasoned that it was because Luke had had to build a new one after the fight with Vader in EMPIRE. I was struck speechless by the beauty of it, so my only response was to nod.
For an hour, we ran around the house staging battles with our action figures, two outdated Ti-Fighters and a brand new Addat (yep -- he had one of those two). On any other day, playing STAR WARS would have gotten boring after two hours, but on hour three were still going strong. My sadistic mind kept coming up with new and gory ways for incognito Luke to die and be resurrected on my side of the battlefield (drowning in a glass of acid milk, buried alive in the dirty clothes hamper, shredded in "razor blades" of a washboard.) Mike loved it, and remained as psyched about the whole thing as me. I coveted every minute I got with the new Luke. When it came time for me to leave for dinner, I begged and begged his mother to let me stay for just another fifteen minutes. I laid it on so thick that she agreed to let me stay until she got back with tamales from the old lady who sold them out of pickup truck down the street.
As soon as we were left to our own devices, the game somehow lost steam. Even though she hadn't been watching us play the whole time, something about her presence in the house kept us going. Within five minutes of her departure, Mike lost interest in our battles completely. He all but gave incognito Luke to me. Once I'd run through every fatality my twisted mind could come up with -- we both sat in silence for a few minutes until Mike asked:
Mike: Hey -- you wanna see something neat?
Me: Sure.
(He ran me down the hall into his parents room. No one had said not to go in there, but I could tell we weren't welcome. Mike began pacing anxiously at the foot of his parents bed.)
Mike: You can't tell anyone I showed you this.
Me: OK.
Mike: Swear.
Me: I swear.
Mike: Swear on my new Luke?
(He grabbed hold of half the action figure, and gestured me to grab the other half. It was obvious this was serious, but all I could think of was getting it over with so that we could get back to my last siege before having to head home.)
Me: (rolling my eyes): I said I swear.
(Mike got down on one knee and grabbed hold of the heating grate on the wall. He began tugging it. I didn't know anything about heating grates, but I was pretty sure he was going to break it. A pit started to form in my stomach -- this was trouble and I knew it. Worst of all, I was missing valuable Luke time.)
Me: Come on already. I have to go home soon.
Matt: Wait! It's almost ...
(The grate came flying off and nearly hit me in the head. When the dust settled, all I could see was a heating duct.)
Me: Cool. Can we go play now.
(Mike was ignoring by this point. He shoved his hand inside and drew out three things: a bundle of cash, a shiny metal and giant .357 Magnum with three speedloaders. Mike went straight for the metal, but I couldn't stop staring at the .357. I dropped incognito Luke like a bad habit and snatched up the revolver. It was much heavier than I though it's be.)
Mike: Don't touch that! It's from Daddy's office.
Me: Your daddy has guns at his office.
Mike: Yeah, whatever. (Proudly displaying the metal) Isn't this cool.
Me: I guess. My sister has bigger one from swim team.
Mike: (pissy) Well my Daddy won this one in the war.
That's when we heard Mike's mom come in the front door. We managed to just get everything back into the grate as she came calling for us down the hallway. Frightened we'd get busted, we snuck out the bedroom window and pretended to be playing in the backyard. Mike's mom scolded us for going outside -- having no idea that we'd done much worse than that.
A quick note on Mike's dad -- I only saw him four of five times in the three years I knew him. Average height, a bit pudgy, kinda grumpy, but otherwise unremarkable. Unremarkable, except for the shoulder length hair he wore. Back then, no one in West Texas had long hair except for the handful of Native Americans at the reservation and -- druggies.
A few months later, Mike's mom came over to our house very late one night and precipitously gave us all their chickens. I could lie and say it was an event that I vividly recall -- like her eyes were blood red from lack of sleep, she was dressed in all black and kept asking if we could hear something in the bushes -- but it isn't. In fact the only thing I really remember is that a few days later I went to feed the chickens and realized that some of the chickens were laying greenish-blue eggs (Mike's Mom's chickens were Araucanas -- a real kind of chicken that lays green eggs.) Sure Mike hadn't been at school, but again, I thought he was sick. The answer came a few days later when my parents nearly shit a brick reading the morning newspaper.
Turns out that Mike's dad was -- an undercover DEA agent. Like incognito Luke, he'd been a hero in disguise for as long as I'd known him. He'd busted one of those kingpin types with a tunnel full of drugs leading to Mexico, and forced to leave in the middle of the night to avoid having him and his family killed in retaliation.
So there you have -- real life DEA agents, green eggs and the ham that is me in the middle of it all. Tomorrow -- BB GUN WAR - WOUNDS
No comments:
Post a Comment