Summer In Ridley

Summer In Ridley
By Simon John Cox

Cover design by Simon John Cox
eBook design by Simon John Cox
All rights reserved.

Warning: contains swears. 

 

It was Chick Burnham who came up with the idea. He was always coming up with ideas. Sure, most of them were a heap of shit – like the time he convinced us to catch a conger eel to sell to the Cranson District Aquariarama, which of course was how my buddy Gumball ended up losing four hundred bucks and one of his fingers – but he figured for every twenty bad ideas he had there'd be one solid-gold one stuck there in the crap with them, so he kept on tossing them out.

At first this latest idea seemed to stink like a heap of shit too, so we whipped the back of his fat little legs with a length of electrical cable same as we always did when he pissed us off, but then a rerun of the A-Team came on TV so we took some caffeine pills and settled down to watch it, and an hour later Hannibal had a cigar in his mouth and Gumball and me'd come around to thinking that maybe Chick's idea wasn't so bad after all.

We didn't apologise to him for the leg-whipping, though, because Ridley, Texas is a jungle of bad shit with a rigid hierarchy and if you show any sign of weakness you're dead, no doubt about it.

Hannibal wouldn't apologise to Face Man for jack – that's how come he was top dog.

So yeah, we came round to his way of thinking. We each had a beer and a shot of schnapps, which is traditional for the Lone Star Defense Force before setting out on a mission, and then we headed out in Chick's mom's Hyundai. Chick drove us downtown, and we wore Burger King crowns and wound the windows down and played Whitesnake at full volume because we were pumped and we were crazy and we wanted everyone to know it.

We weren't thinking straight – I hadn't slept for two days, and I think Gumball hadn't slept for three – but even so we could tell that although his idea was good it wasn't dynamite, and in order to tip the odds in our favour we'd need more manpower and some specialist skills. Gumball and I raised our fists in salute because we knew it meant we'd have to call on one of the other badass members of the Lone Star Defense Force.

We wanted Moose, but we couldn't use him since Sheriff Bukowsky'd busted him good for pulling a handgun on a girl scout, which was a real shame on account of his love of street brawling and his skills with a bow. It was kind of moronic, but even we could see that this time the fat-ass sheriff had a point: the Lone Star Defense Force is and always has been a neighborhood defense organisation, so waving a .45 Magnum in some eleven-year-old's face – even if it is just a part of his circus quick-draw routine – is no part of our remit.

We still went round to Sheriff Bukowsky's house at three a.m. one Sunday morning and wrote "faggot" on his lawn with gasoline, though.

So anyway, after Moose the next coolest member of the Lone Star Defense Force is Buck Mayo. His brother used to work the door at a nightclub in Reno and one time he had to punch Tom Selleck in the throat because the idiot refused to buy a new drink for some chick after he spilt her Piña Colada. Predictably, Tom Selleck's management made damn sure he didn't keep his job at the nightclub for very long, but their loss was our gain, because having the brother of a bona fide celebrity chop-buster in the Force is great for PR.

We told Chick to head for the flats, and I spilt some soda on my jeans, but it was OK because I was getting pretty excited and it reminded me that we needed to keep calm.

We found Buck Mayo in his trailer wearing nothing but his Jesus Is My Homeboy boxer shorts, whittling a lump of wood with one eye on the TV. He may be a stone cold fucking killer but he's got the hands of an artist, and what he can do with a knife and a block of wood could bring a tear to a grown man's eye. Anyway, we told him about Chick's idea and of course he was down with it, so whilst he went out back and threw on his jeans, Michael Jackson Thriller-era leather jacket and beret, I swept the greasy taco wrappers off the back seat of Chick's mom's car. Five minutes later Buck Mayo walked out of his trailer with a smile like death himself and jumped in back with Gumball.

With Buck Mayo on board there were four of us and we were ready for the mission, so we headed over to the playground to see our man Benveniste. Benveniste is a big old wild-eyed nigger who used to hang around our school, deal a little weed and try it on with young girls. He said he was a Ghanaian witch-doctor of mixed parentage, but he just looked like a regular East Texas nigger to me. He also said he used to be Tom Cruise's pool guy but he quit because the chlorine made his hands turn white, which would have been bad enough for us white guys (even Gumball, who's half Puerto Rican), but for a nigger it would have been even more embarrassing, so we could kind of understand why he had to leave. Anyway, Benveniste can get hold of anything you need – which was why we still used him to hook us up with shit even though he'd tried it on with pretty much everyone's sister – which was cool because we needed to be tooled up for this mission.

We told him what we needed and he told us to meet him in two hours, so we went to the mall to kill some time. Chick and Gumball played frisbee outside Starbucks, which is good for your reflexes, while Buck Mayo and me did some nunchuk practise.

Everyone in the Lone Star Defense Force does three hours of nunchuk practise a day, so this was a good way of getting part of that day's quota out of the way.

Other people kept away from us while we were doing our shit; they always keep away from us when we're out in public on manoeuvres. It's good in a way because it helps keep our identities secret, but it can be a bit depressing because these good people are the exact same ones we're trying to protect (it don't matter how tough you are, it hurts your pride when the manager of Starbucks brings mall security down on your ass).

Anyway, when Chick was done talking the security guard out of calling the police it was about time for us to bounce the fuck out of there, because we had to roll if we wanted to meet Benveniste and get tooled up. I didn't mind too much as my arm hurt a little anyways, on account of going too hard with my nunchuks.

Benveniste was totally loaded on rum and cough syrup when we got there and he wasn't making a whole deal of sense, so we had to slap him around a little until he sobered up. When we finally got him lucid he took us over to his pick-up, and we gave him the green and he gave us the merchandise. I grabbed one of the big ones. It felt pretty cool to hold a weapon again.

"What's its name?" Gumball asked me as I flexed my biceps. They looked ripped.

"Don't know," I said, "Didn't know it had to have one."

"Don't you know shit? You gotta give it a name."

So I named it Lucille, which is the name of the girl who I always kinda liked, even though she thought I was a creep ever since I had to urinate on her school bag as part of my Lone Star Defense Force initiation. I don't know if she would've liked to have a weapon named after her, on account of her being president of the Junior United Nations at school, but I couldn't think of anyone else to name it after.

I rested it on my lap as we boomed back towards town. Chick had slammed a Huey Lewis And The News tape into the stereo and he was driving on the wrong side of the road; we were all pretty wired. I was sweating and shaking with excitement.

We blasted into town like a hurricane of whiskey and piss, rocking down Main Street in a bubble of our own invincibility, destiny up ahead and the devil himself riding shotgun. As we passed Taco Bell, though, a car rolled out of a sidestreet about a hundred yards in front of us to block the road. It was a black Toyota with green flames painted on the doors, and the sight of it made my blood boil. Chick let the Hyundai dribble to a halt as four guys piled out of the Toyota and ran down the street towards us. We all knew exactly what this would be about.

"This is a challenge," shouted one of the men, whose name was Rudy, though he liked to be called Laverne, "Do you accept?"

"We accept," I called back. Turf wars were an unavoidable part of being a vigilante group. Buck Mayo pounded his fist on the roof of the car.

"The usual rules," Rudy said, "No submissions. And no weapons."

Militant pig-fucking pussy. They may have had powerful allies over in Cobb County but the Cobra Justice Squadron had never been as keen as us on the use of lethal force; they were nothing but a vapid slew of steroid-enhanced poseurs hoping to flex their way to the top of the neighborhood defense tree. Still, rules are rules, and they'd called them.

"Whatever," I said, and we spilled out of the car and onto the burning tarmac.

We squared up across the street, Mexican style. The afternoon sun poured into our eyes, turning our adversaries into shapeless monsters. Buck Mayo turned up the collar on his leather jacket. I popped some chewing tobacco into my mouth, to help me concentrate and clear my mind so's I'd be in the zone when it came to busting heads. I felt like Chuck fucking Norris.

Then it started.

The fight was a classic; it seemed like it lasted for hours. Bone on bone, shoe on face, fingers in throat – a righteous hailstorm of elbows and knees and teeth that wouldn't have looked out of place in No Retreat, No Surrender II. My knuckles were raw and you couldn't see the stonewash on my jeans for caked blood, and the twin smells of gasoline and vomit loitered in the street. I'm sure I remember hearing bone splinter a couple of times. It could have been mine; I was so pumped I couldn't feel much, to tell you the truth.

Then a cop car screamed down Main towards us, red-and-blues all flashing. The Cobra Justice Squadron bailed like the cowards they are, and with that the contest was over. We scraped ourselves up off the street as the black-and-white pulled up and Officer Barnes and Officer Carlson waddled out.

"When will you kids learn?" said Officer Barnes as he cuffed us and shoved us into the back of the car. Asshole.

A night in the cells was a small price to pay. We'd beaten the Cobra Justice Squadron in the noblest of contests – a martial arts streetfight – and escaped with only minor injuries. Gumball and me laughed; the cuts and bruises hurt like hell, but the Lone Star Defense Force had stepped up another rung on the Ridley, Texas ladder.

And Chick's idea? Hell, there was still six weeks of summer vacation left. There'd be plenty of time for that tomorrow.
  

(c) Simon John Cox
This short story is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives licence.