Chaos to the Fly
1.
It was fucking hot. Milsap believed there wasn’t a half acre of hell hotter than the northside of Hammond in the middle of July. It was the sort of heat that made you forget you had ever experienced cold weather. Of course, Northwest Indiana, sitting on the ass end of Lake Michigan where such terms as “polar vortexes” and “chimney effect blizzards” originated, could get downright diabolical, freezing homeless winos to death by the dumpster full. Milsap couldn’t remember any of that, though, because it was so fucking hot.
“It’s so fucking hot,” Milsap said.
“Yeah, I heard you the first twenty times,” Brian said.
“Then you’re really going to love it the next twenty times I say it because it’s fucking hot.”
Brian couldn’t argue it. He could only curse their respective mothers for ordering them outside into this oppressive heat without acknowledging the very real possibility for spontaneous combustion.
It was all Brian could do to pedal his Mongoose down the street. Milsap struggled as well, riding the BMX he found at Hermit’s Park a couple weeks ago. Milsap hugged and sputtered, red-faced, as though he were bicycling up Burnham bridge rather than traversing the level expanse of Sheffield Avenue.
Brian’s brother, Wesley, younger by a year, stayed a couple bike lengths behind them, pedaling a Mongoose of his own, a bicycle nearly identical to his brother’s, the exception being the dominant color scheme. Wesley’s traffic cone orange as opposed to Brian’s Spiderman blue. Milsap’s BMX was a gunky matte black because that was the only color spray paint he could find in his grandpa’s basement.
Welsey munched Dairy Topper fries from a greasy paper sack cradled against the Ocean Pacific muscle shirt billowing off his scrawny torso. Brian and Milsap both worked their way around vanilla/chocolate twist cones. With the sun suspended less than a quarter mile above their heads, the ice cream melted like candlewax in a housefire, streaming across their knuckles quicker than they could lap it up.
Milsap gave up on his ice cream as he reached the top of the soggy cone. They were approaching a ’77 Ford F-150 parked beside the curb. The windows were rolled down which Milsap interpreted as a sign from God that he needed to throw the messy remains of his ice cream onto the truck’s vinyl bench seat. Which he did.
“What the fuck you do that for?” Brian said.
Brian made like he was going to pedal faster, put some distance between himself and the chocolate/vanilla twist melting across the black vinyl. He abandoned that idea after five seconds of effort.
“Relax,” Milsap crooned languidly. “I’m sure the guy had it coming.”
“Whose truck is it?”
“Well, how the hell should I know? I don’t know who lives there.”
Brian opened his mouth; the insults withered on his tongue before he could vocalize his derision. Fuck it. Milsap had to know he was a fucking idiot by now, no sense in wasting energy reconfirming common knowledge. Honestly, though, anybody who left their windows down in a neighborhood in which Milsap freely roamed deserved what they got.
“We oughta go swimming,” Milsap said.
“Douglas pool is right down the street,” Brian offered. “Pena’s older sister is a lifeguard up there. Might be worth checking out.”
“Eh,” Milsap flexed his sticky hand. “Pena’s sister got a mustache thicker than his. Also, I’m trying to save my money for some Chinese stars.”
“It’s only fifty cents, dude.”
“I look like I’m made of money to you?”
“I know for a fact you got at least two dollars in your pocket, right now.”
“And I don’t know how long that’s gotta last me. What if I need to buy another twist cone from the Dairy Topper to ruin someone else’s day?”
“Jesus. Where we gonna swim, then? Wihala Beach is way too far. You can’t stand Wolf Lake ever since those high schoolers like to drown you for running your mouth.”
“Yeah, I can’t stand those guys. Or that beach.”
“There ain’t no sense trying to go all that way, no way. There ain’t no sidewalks between the trailer park and Keil Chemical. That’s where Polanchek’s brother got run over on his bike.”
“That was just bad luck. It happened one time, and he was killed by a drunk driver.”
“This is the Region, jackass. Everybody’s a drunk driver.”
“You know, ever since the Lukasic brothers took over coaching the Pirates, you’ve been calling me a jackass entirely too much. I don’t like it.”
“I don’t hear you object when the coach calls you a jackass.”
“He’s got a certain style when he does it,” Milsap said. “It don’t feel so personal.”
“Hmph. Well, jackass, where do you want to go swimming?”
“I’m glad you asked, jackass. I don’t see why we don’t go behind Hermit’s Park and follow the train tracks to the back end of Powderhorn Lake and swim there.”
“Man, it’s nasty out there.”
“Everywhere’s nasty. Just leave your shoes on when you go out in the water.”
“I mean really nasty. Broken glass and dead fish and seaweed. It’s all polluted.”
“Ain’t no different than Wolf Lake,” Milsap said. “Wolf Lake’s probably worse. Keil Chemical is like right there on it. No telling what kinda shit they’re pumping into the water. Only thing polluting Powderhorn Lake is a dead hooker or two.”
Brian shook his head. “It’s just super nasty. Nothing can live in it except carp. And that dead hooker shit ain’t funny. My uncle’s ex-girlfriend got dragged out of that lake about ten years ago.”
“Dead?”
“She wasn’t out there doing back strokes.”
“Dick.”
“She was really dead. All cut up and shit.”
“Did your uncle go down for it?”
“You met my uncle Dennis.”
“I did, and he looks like someone who’d cut up women and dump them into lakes.”
“Well, he ain’t and he didn’t. He said, they said it looked like the work of Satanists. A whole cult of them. Uncle Dennis got drunk one time and told me all about it.”
“Satanists,” Milsap scoffed. “What a load of crap. Let me guess. Witnesses thought they heard some Ozzy Osbourne music playing the night of the murder?”
“I don’t know what they were listening to. I guess the murder was ritualistic like Satanists would do. I didn’t ask too many questions, Milsap.”
“I’m just saying Satanists get blamed for everything. It ain’t fair. All stabbings look ritualistic after the fact. Right?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care.”
“Guys,” Wesley piped up from the rear. “I really don’t want to go swimming with dead hookers.”
“Relax,” Milsap said, grinning. “They only fish two or three dead hookers out a year. Chances are we’ll enjoy a perfectly dead hooker free afternoon. Besides, man, we’re not gonna be swimming with them. We’re not going to be using dead hookers for floatation devices. If they’re out there, they’ll just be bobbing around, we should be able to see them a mile away.”
“Oh, God.”
They’d already angled toward Hermit’s Park. They circled back from Douglas Pool, five blocks down Cameron Street until it intersected with 141st. They took 141st past the PeeWee field on the back end of Hermit’s, to the dirt access road threading between the park and the neighboring industrial park of abandoned warehouses and defunct machine shops where not a single baseball game had ever been played. Surrounding trees formed a green canopy above as they negotiated the ruts baked into the impacted dirt.
After a quarter mile, the road opened up to a conglomeration of railroad tracks running north/south. If you followed the dirt road along the tracks and avoided the railroad detectives armed with rock salt rifles, you’d eventually get past the industrial parks, the dead buildings with blasted out windows. A thatch of woods grew up on the eastside across the tracks from the back end of Powderhorn, the preferred hangout of preteens and serial killers in the summer of 1988.
Milsap, Brian, and Wesley pedaled as far as the first stand of trees when Mickey Hayes emerged from the woods riding a bike that looked to have been cobbled together from welded tent pegs with two tires and a bike chain slapped onto it. A bushy stalk about four feet long draped across his handlebars. A machete hung from a yellow cord tied off at his wrist.
His sudden, sweaty appearance scared the hell out of the trio. Mickey Hayes was the last person anybody wanted to see on a good day. He was a year and a half older than Brian and Milsap, but was a year behind them in school, the same grade as Wesley though they attended different schools. He was what adults liked to refer to as a troubled child. At fourteen, there wasn’t much childlike about him. By his peers, he was generally regarded as a psychopath.
Mickey was the oldest of the Hayes boys. Mickey, Nickey, and Dickey who was mostly called Slickey. A year separated each boy, but they all looked identical. Fat, sweaty bastards with beady, piggy eyes and pug noses. Thin lips and no necks. They styled their pale, blonde hair the same as well. Short spikes up front, mullets grown out long and stringy in the back with greasy little rat tails extending beyond the length of their mullets. The Hayes boys had never known the sensation of wearing a shirt that didn’t have the sleeves cut out of them.
Whatever contraption he was riding, Mickey braked it by pushing back on the pedals, skidding to a halt not more than eight inches from where Brian sat on his Mongoose.
Damn, he’s one ugly son of a bitch, Milsap thought. He didn’t make it a habit, running around, judging dudes by their looks, but, shit, this kid was hard to look at, just like his brothers Nickey and Dickey who they called Slickey. His eyes managed to be beady and hooded simultaneously just like their momma who also looked exactly like the boys right down to the hairstyle.
Mickey’s cold, reptile eyes regarded them. “What the fuck y’all looking at?”
Milsap was relatively certain the Hayes boys lived in the Region their entire lives. Why Mickey toted a hillbilly accent, Milsap couldn’t rightly say, but he didn’t like it and would have mocked him for it had circumstances been different.
Milsap and Brian couldn’t trust themselves to speak at this moment.
Wesley said, “you just came busting out of the woods. Our eyes couldn’t help but look in your direction.”
Mickey considered this a moment, found it reasonable.
“What you doin’ back here?” Mickey asked.
I guess we’re being interrogated now, Milsap figured. He hated a lot of things. Being questioned about anything, topped the list.
“We’re going swimming in Powderhorn,” Wesley said.
Mickey’s little nose wrinkled up, thin lips twisting into a sneer. “That water’s nasty. You know that’s where they stick the dead hookers, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, we heard something about it.”
“Best thing y’all can do is fuck off the way you came. And y’all never saw me here, either.”
Milsap finally found his voice, and just in time, too. “We can dig it, hombre.”
Mickey nodded and continued pedaling his atrocity of a bicycle back toward Hermit’s Park and what passed for civilization in the Region.
Milsap, Brian, and Wesley watched Mickey recede along the tracks.
“Hombre?” Brian asked.
“I sure wasn’t gonna call him a jackass. I’ll call him a jackass, now, though. Jackass.”
“You think he’s back there carving up hookers?” Wesley asked.
“Not for another couple years, I don’t think.”
“You see what he had across the handlebars of that bike?” Brian asked.
“Hell, yeah,” Wesley said. “A big ass knife.”
“And a big ass marijuana plant,” Milsap said.
“That was pot?” Wesley asked, trying to rectify that bushy stalk with the couple pinner joints, most likely stuffed with oregano, he’d happened across during his short stint as a burgeoning delinquent.
“I promise you, it wasn’t sweet corn,” Milsap said. “Probably a whole field of dope hidden behind those trees.”
Brian and Milsap looked at each other a long moment.
“All of a sudden, I don’t feel much like swimming anymore,” Milsap said.
“We’d been better off coughing up the fifty cents and swimming the way God intended,” Brian said. “In heavily chlorinated water.”
Wesley, slapping away mosquitos the size of winged gopher rats admitted he didn’t care for any kind of swimming despite the heat. “Besides,” he added. “We got practice tomorrow morning.”
“Christ, I forgot about that clown show,” Milsap said. “All we’re gonna do is stand around, watch the jackass Lukasic brothers get hammered, and coach Wobbly-O spend half the morning trying to grab Economou’s ass.”
“I hear he’s in the hospital?” Brian said.
“Economou? He get hit by one ball too many?”
“Wobbly-O. It’s why he wasn’t at the Twins’ game.”
“He grab the wrong kid and get his face pushed in?”
“Just heard hospital. I don’t even know if it’s true.”
“Brian, you gotta start asking more questions. Anyway, it’s just as well. We don’t get out of this heat, we’re gonna be joining him. It’s so fucking hot.”
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
