Branden Boyer-White, Week One, Story Two

‘The Fickle Hook of Fate’

I wasn’t actually that frightened by the radio announcement about the escaped homicidal maniac, but Teddy was really in a mood to ‘do it’ and I wasn’t so I said I had the creeps real bad and wanted to go home. Teddy rolled his eyes and put his lips back on my neck with all the finesse of an octopus scaling a glass wall; I let him carry on for a couple more minutes but it got to be too much so I insisted we leave for safety’s sake. The announcement had said the maniac had broken from an asylum not four miles from where we were parked, after all. And he was a murderer; a crazy one. We definitely had to leave, I told Teddy while I buttoned up my sweater. I had had to unbutton it myself not half an hour earlier: he could be such a dunce with closures.
‘Do you just not want to do it or something?’ he sighed, resting his forehead to the steering wheel like he was chucking a pumpkin.
‘Of course not. I mean, of course not, that isn’t what this is about. You heard the news bulletin: everyone within a ten mile radius of Friendly Hills House is advised to stay home. I mean, he’s a killer- with a hook for a hand.’
‘We should be doing it more by now, you know. We’ve been going together for, like, eight months now. That’s like, forever.’ Sometimes, when the moonlight filtered through the windshield just right, on nights like this when we parked, Teddy’s eyes looked almost intelligent: like any moment, he would become a poet or a theorist or something. It was why I had hoped to fall for him eventually, why I had given myself to him in a moment of heated, unbridled curiosity. The way the moonlight hit him just them, he looked like Teddy, homecoming king 1962, so I dredged up some tears to show how terrified I was and he started the car and we were on the road home.
I find that when I remember back to that night, I think about predestination, or the collective unconscious: stuff like that; I think about how even though the car was acting up as it made its way down the dark road, I couldn’t be distracted from wondering what the maniac looked like, hook hand and all. I think about the way Teddy talked to the engine and asked it if the crack in the oil pan was the problem, almost as though he expected it to answer, and how I didn’t talk back to him in my car engine voice the way I usually did because it made him giggle so hard. I think of not having given him his last giggle.
I think of how I didn’t tell him to not go for help after the car had belched to a halt on the desolate highway, a whole twenty minutes from the nearest house. I suppose we could have stayed there all night and waited for help, if I had suggested it as an alternative, but I didn’t; and I rationalize that if there is some greater scheme to things, then it’s not my fault that Teddy has his head bashed in on his own bumper by a maniac not ten seconds after he had left the relative safety of the car. It was just as easily supposed to happen anyway as not.
I might have been more upset by the sight to Teddy’s body on the ground, his sometime-almost poet’s eyes forever closed, if I hadn’t seen the hook stuck in the door handle immediately after getting out of the car. It wasn’t as grand a hook as I had been imagining, but I guess it is my tendency to romanticize at times. I had wanted an elegant pirate’s glistening silver tusk: the thing lodged up tight under the bar of the door handle was a dark, industrial metal and probably most menacing-looking to the fish that had been gutted with it. You couldn’t fight a flying boy with this hook. All the same, I put in the considerable effort to work it out from its trap, and then turned my attention to the maniac with a stump instead of a hand standing at the front of the car.
There was a swath of blood draped entitled-like across the bumper, but he was staring instead at a plume of steam that was snaking in a white, searching tongue from under the hood.
‘I believe I broke your automobile,’ he said.
‘Oh, it’s not my car. It’s my boyfriend’s.’ I threw a glance at Teddy on the ground so the maniac would know who I was talking about. ‘And anyway, I’m not sure it was your fault. The oil pan’s been cracked for a while; dragging your extra weight probably only exacerbated the existing problem. Here’s your hook.’
‘Thank you,’ he accepted it and with a spider’s dexterity in his fingers, managed to reattach it to a leather strap around his wrist. Once a part of his person, the hook took on new shapes and meanings- it was like some cheeky Modernist sculpture, or the tree branch scepter of an earthy pagan idol. Suddenly, I couldn’t help but notice that for an escaped homicidal maniac, he was kind of dreamy. He nodded with the satisfaction of being reunited with his appendage and looked back at me. ‘So, how long have you two been lovers?’
‘Me and Teddy? Since the beginning of this school year; I am of the mindset that you shouldn’t spend your senior year alone. It’s the last chance you have for the rest of your life to have a high school romance, you know?’
The maniac finally smiled; he had a scar that lifted one edge of his lip higher than the other. Very impish. ‘Yes, I remember my first lover. She was an oboist. We never did get to Vienna. The way one wastes a summer, don’t you think?’
I nodded. ‘What’s your name?’
He waved the question off with his hook. ‘What’s in a name?’
‘Shakespeare. Keen.’ I smiled. He smiled.
And so it was; I am sorry to say nothing more happened between us, nothing more than the passing of two strangers, ships on the road of life nodding a hello to one another in the night. And I believe that is enough, most of the time. Predestination, a big group idea of what should happen, that is how it happens: the way it’s supposed to. So, I can only be thankful for what I was allotted.
I hope the maniac got to Tallahassee the check on the prize-winning rosebushes he had to leave behind; so few people appreciate beauty in this world. And me? Prom queen 1962, a lifetime of car trouble and octopus kisses stretched out in front of me, all a desolate highway. At least now, I know it’s okay to not be afraid of what the radio tells you to fear; I know that you should always endeavor to give someone their last giggle, because it might be the thing you’re meant to do. In the end, I have that night, and the way the moonlight illumined the maniac’s poet-eyes like so many star dust candles. I wasn’t sure that I believed in kindred spirits until I met the maniac: love? Probably not; but by God, it was conversation.