Corey Was A Danger Cat
Corey was a Danger Cat. He was six guns wide and fit to kill. He had two pistols and a bleeding rosebud etched in felt marker on the flesh of his forearm. It was the mark of a hero wounded in love, he said. But he’d never tell about it.
“What’s done is done,” he’d say, and he’d shield his eyes from an imaginary sun as though he was looking for something. He’d seen that move on TV. It had made his heart feel hollow with understanding.
In the confines of his helmet, Corey’s ears throbbed with the racket of the gravel grinding and popping under his plastic wheels. He no longer fit his Big Wheel properly, but it didn’t matter. He’s a Renaissance man. With shields up and rockets flaring, he pedaled flat-out, knees battering the chin-guard of his helmet, his elbows sticking out and back like shark fins. Like switchblades. No—like samurai swords.
His hollow wheels amplified the noise of the concrete slabs of the sidewalk—th-THUD, th-THUD, th-THUD—like jungle drums, or like the music that signals the approach of the hero when the bad guy least expects him. The noise had an effect on Corey that was simultaneously hypnotic and stimulating. His eyes grew wide and unblinking: he became Corey the Danger Cat. He was ready, and it was time.
He sped north on Glenmore Avenue towards the first branch of his tripartide Saturday morning Axis of Evil. At 565 Glenmore, the Danger Cat slammed on his brakes and skidded sideways in a wide, well-practised arc across the driveway of Chantelle Peters, who sat on her front porch with Erin and Marnie Valentine. Marnie, who wasn’t pretty, but was the most popular of the three because, or so Corey heard, she would show her boobs behind the dumpster out back of Mac’s Milk in exchange for packs of KOOLs. They were sitting on Chantelle’s porch sucking Pepsi Blue through straws they’d made from cherry Twizzlers with the ends chewed off. They did their best to pretend that he wasn’t there, but their giggles betrayed them.
The Danger Cat threw back his head and screamed, “Let freedom reign! Let freedom REIGN!”
“Jerk,” Chantelle said, sounding bored.
The Danger Cat registerd this as a victory, and shot down the sidewalk without looking back to witness the admiration he was certain he’d see in the other girls’ eyes. He pumped his legs as fast as he could and tore a strip up Parklawn Boulevard, towards the second branch in his Axis of Evil.
At the corner of Parklawn and Franklin, the Danger Cat executed a one-eighty at the precise point at which Ru-Ru, the Bromowitzes’ schnauzer, who’d come barrelling down the driveway at the sound of his approach, was abruptly choked back mid-air by the chain that kept her anchored to the porch. Poised like a panther surrounded by spear-wielding jungle midgets, the Danger Cat waited. His tongue darted up to indulge in the slippery salt that ran from his nose holes. His eyes shot from the Bromowitzes’ screen door to their rose bushes, in which Mrs. Bromowitz was known to lurk, and back to Ru-Ru, who was going ballistic a mere three inches from the Danger Cat’s tender but indifferent calf. Ru-Ru was mental, but Danger Cat was a coiled King Cobra, cool and slick. In the treetops, the Vikings wet their pants in fear, like fat babies who didn’t know anything about being men. Corey was a man. Corey was a Danger Cat.
“Any minute now,” thought the Danger Cat. “Any…freakin’…minute…”
“Corey Jackson!” Mrs. Bromowitz and her wooden spoon suddenly lurched towards the screen door from the darkened bowels of her lair. “I’m gonna call your mother! I mean it, I’m gonna call—”
The Danger Cat unleashed the voice of a thousand hounds of hell and shrieked, “Let freedom reign, Mrs. Bromowitz!”
“Ru-Ru, come!” Mrs. Bromowitz tugged at Ru-Ru’s chain, but Ru-Ru was busy drowning the Danger Cat’s message in frantic braying.
“Let freedom reign!”
“Corey, you’re a brute!”
He was off like a bat from a cannonball bed, down Parklawn, down Glenmore, obliterating anthill after anthill after anthill. Past the porch where the girls were no longer sitting, but he hardly even noticed, because Danger Cat would one day see the boobs of every girl. Until then, he would fill up every anthill with water till crunchy ant corpses littered the earth like sprinkles on a doughnut.
The Danger Cat built up brain-bending speed travelling south on Glenmore, until the sidewalk cracks thumped against his tires in unison with the pounding of his knees against his helmet. Dead ahead, in Glenmore Square, he spied the third and most volatile branch in the Axis of Evil.
Cornchips sat, unaware of his fate, with his feet soaking in Glenmore’s memorial fountain, mumbling to himself and picking gnats out of his long beard. The heat in the Danger Cat’s helmet was like a supernova. A lesser man might have chosen to wait until the sun was lower in the sky, or he might have even called off the whole mission, but not the Danger Cat. He narrowed his eyes and forged ahead, nerves jangling and guns blazing.
When the Danger Cat was only a couple of feet away from the fountain, Cornchips looked up, smiled his hideously toothless smile, and cooed, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!” He doubled over with laughter. “Kitty Cat,” he gasped. “C’mere, kitty, kitty!”
Disarmed, but determined, Corey drove his Big Wheel in tight circles around the fountain until the juice in his head began to swirl. He drove into a flock of pigeons and braked to watch them scatter into a whirling circle above his head.
“That dog get you yet, puss-puss?” Cornchips asked.
“It’s Danger Cat,” Corey said over his shoulder.
It was cool in the shade by the fountain. Cornchips seemed unusually docile, so Corey reckoned he had some time before the action started. He allowed himself to be temporarily distracted by a fresh puddle of pigeon shit. He nudged his Big Wheel forward until his front wheel made contact with it. Then he slowly reversed until he could see the splotch on his tire. Corey turned his front wheel slightly to the left and inched forward again, testing his poop stamp on a clean bit of pavement. It worked. Corey eyed the rest of the concrete around the fountain and wondered how much he could accomplish before the poop dried.
“I’m not a fan of spinach, myself,” Cornchips said. Corey was used to this out-of-nowhere talk, and ignored it, biding his time, absorbing himself in making poop stamps. Corey flinched as Cornchips stood up, but Cornchips merely bent over to pick a yellowed cigarette butt out of a crevice in the concrete at the edge of the fountain. He ran it under his nose like a fine cigar, and then jammed it between his cracked lips, patting down his pockets for a light.
“I mean, I’ll eat it if it’s on something,” he continued. “Like a pizza or what have you, but I’m not exactly over the moon for it.”
Cornchips struck a sputtering match, held it to the mashed end of the cigarette, and puffed madly. When the embers at the end of the cigarette failed to catch, he swore under his breath and spat the butt into the fountain. That’s when Cornchips turned to face Corey, who was admiring the arc of white splotches he’d made with his wheel.
“Boy!”
Corey tensed at the edge in Cornchips’ voice. He placed his feet on his pedals and squeezed his tasseled handgrips.
Their eyes locked. They stared at each other in silence. They both knew what was coming.
Corey took a slow, deep breath.
“Don’t you try it, boy,” Cornchips warned. He rolled up his right sleeve without taking his eyes off Corey, revealing a pale green smudge that had been, in his youth, a bold tattoo on his once-muscular forearm. “I’m warning you…”
Corey licked his lips.
“So help me god…” said Cornchips. His right hand slowly disappeared into his right pocket.
It was now or never—the old man’s reflexes were slow, and Corey knew it.
“Letfreedomreign!” he blurted and then peeled away from the fountain in a spray of pebbles and pigeon poop, his eyes wild, his legs pumping like pistons.
The water splashed up over the sides of the fountain’s basin as Cornchips lurched in Corey’s direction.
“What business is that of yours!” Cornchips screamed, and hurled a peach pit at Corey’s helmet. THOCK! A direct hit. Corey’s front wheel wobbled slightly, and then corrected itself.
Cornchips crowed with pleasure. “Take that, you little shit!”
“Let freedom reign!” Corey yelled once more over his shoulder. He glimpsed Cornchips struggling to climb out of the fountain and knew he’d go root around in the grass for his peach pit.
After about a block of flat-out pedaling, the wind whistling past his helmet vents and the squirrels running for cover, Corey let out the breath he’d been holding. Elated, he threw back his head and howled. He could do anything and go anywhere, and he would do it all with his head held high. He would look people in the eye. He’d gone up against the whole stinking Axis of Evil and not a single one of them had flung the usual insult at him. The word that the school kids yelled at him through the chain-link fence where he and the other kids like him had their separate recesses, the word that made his mother cry till his Nana snapped, “Cry alls you want, Belinda, but it ain’t gonna make him right.”
Today there’d be no lonely skulking on his driveway, watching the other kids play. Today was a day for sidewalks and shopping malls and schoolyards and all the other places in which he ordinarily hung his head. Today he’d shown them all. He was six guns wide and fit to kill. Corey was a Danger Cat.
