Johnny Chesthair by Chris Lynch

Author:Chris Lynch [Lynch, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0461-8
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-02-19T16:06:00+00:00

9.

Captains America

FIELD TRIP. LARS COULDN’T bear the lame condition of my club.

“Buckle up, young Americans. My club is going to show you-all the way.”

I thought he meant it as a figure of speech, like “buck up.” You never can tell with Lars. But no, he meant it literally. He slammed his foot down on the accelerator and whooped as he took the hard corners of the city at forty miles per hour. He lit a cigarette, beeped his horn at nothing. He nearly clipped a pedestrian, but then didn’t bother beeping. He screamed. He laughed at himself. He created an odor. Laughed at himself again. When all the passengers were nearly asphyxiated, I tapped him on the shoulder and he finally opened the window. Did I mention that the driver’s window was the only one that worked? Somebody in a worse car than Lars’s made a left turn across his path. He beeped and beeped and gestured and screamed until long after the person was probably parked and eating dinner at home. Every bolt in the car shook as Lars demanded much more of the vehicle than was probably fair.

We screeched to a stop.

Jerome vomited out into the street.

Lars stepped past Jerome and his mess, stared at it. “What are those in there, Alpha-Bits? Well, no wonder you’re sick, that stuff’s no good for ya.”

“What are we doing?” I asked as my uncle pulled the wheelchair out of the trunk. We were parked in front of a dilapidated used-auto-parts yard with a twelve-foot fence surrounding a small lot and a cinderblock bunker of a building. Even by junkyard standards, the place was a pit.

“We’re going into my club,” he said. “Don’t let appearances fool ya. These are the kind of people who like to keep a low-down profile, but the true fact is that these guys in here are the greatest collection of Americans in…in America, anyway. There’s, like, the modern Paul Revere inside here…the contemporary Patrick Henry…John Wayne…the whole shebang of American patriotic history.” Lars brought the wheelchair around to the door, where Wolf climbed in. “You,” he said, pointing then to Ling-Ling. “Now, my man, is when you are going to meet some superheroes. Every one of them is a Captain America.”

“I think I’m going to sit in the car,” Jerome said.

I went over and pulled him out by the wrist. “You’re the one who got me into the club business,” I said.

Wolfbang was struggling, his skinny wheels spinning over the rough terrain of the yard. But he seemed to enjoy the rough going, like one of those four-wheel-drive nuts in mud. Ling had him beat, though, brushing by him and practically running up Lars’s back to get into that building and the Captains America Club.

It took us a little longer, with me pulling Jerome like a sled over dry pavement, but finally we joined everyone inside. The members of my club stood thunderstruck, silent, watching the members of Lars’s club hug and growl and slap each other hard.

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