Fiends

It felt weird, being naked, feeling the warm air on my body, the sleeping bag under my rump. It might’ve been kind of exciting if there’d been nothing on my mind except going to Cyndi’s house. But George had ruined things.

    Once all my clothes were on except my shirt, I wrapped the rope around my waist. It had to go around several times. I did it carefully so the coils weren’t all bunched on top of each other, but arranged flat against my skin. I tucked the ends underneath.

    I’d just put on my shirt when Jim whispered, ‘Here he comes.’ Quickly, I fastened the buttons.

    We picked up our flashlights and crawled outside.

    Jim pressed a finger to his lips. George nodded, and raised the grocery sack he was carrying.

    I led the way. We stopped at the side of the garage.

    ‘You got the stuff?’ Jim asked.

    ‘Sure.’ George opened the sack. He lifted out a wine bottle. ‘I got the Twinkies, too.’

    ‘Great. Put it away.’

    ‘Don’t you want some now?’

    ‘Later.’

    ‘We know a good, secret place along the way,’ I whispered. ‘We’ll stop there and have a little party.’

    ‘Neat!’ George said.

    The hike to our ‘good, secret place’ took about twenty minutes.

    It was a railroad underpass beneath Jefferson Avenue.

    If George hadn’t been with us, Jim and I would’ve walked over it just as fast as possible and been mighty glad to leave it behind us.

    Even in daylight, the place gave us both the creeps.

    We’d never gone down there at night.

    I felt jittery the whole time as we walked toward it.

    Partly, I was worried that we might be spotted by cops or by someone we knew in the cars that went by. I turned my face away every time a car approached us from the front.

    Mostly, though, I was scared about going down into the underpass.

    We’d explored it quite a few times. From what we’d found, we knew that other people used the place. There was writing on the concrete walls, some of it pretty weird and sick. And there was always a lot of junk scattered around: empty booze bottles, smashed beer cans and cigarette packs, a ratty blanket or two, even an old, stained mattress. Clothes, too. Like a flat, dirty sneaker, a sock, somebody’s old underwear, a pair of pants.

    Once, we got pretty excited when we spotted a bra. Jim had picked it up. It was caked with dry mud, and one of the shoulder straps was torn loose.

    Our best discovery was a copy of Penthouse magazine. It must’ve gotten soaked a while before we found it, because its pages were all stiff and swollen, and a lot of them were stuck together. We peeled them apart and got to see quite a few pictures. We took that magazine with us, and Jim kept it hidden in his room.

    Our most revolting discovery was a used condom. We didn’t touch that.

    The creepiest thing we ever found down there, I guess, was the remains of a campfire - a circle of scorched rocks around a heap of ashes. In with the ashes were a couple of charred cans and a whole bunch of small bones. We figured they were probably turkey bones, or something. Until I found the skull. I picked it up and blew off the ashes. It had a short snout and pointed teeth. Jim said, ‘God, that’s a cat!’ I yelled and dropped it. The skull hit a rock and shattered.

    After that, we’d stayed clear of the underpass.

    I sure didn’t look forward to going back tonight.

    I would’ve chickened out except for one thing: it was the perfect place for making George wish he’d never messed with us.

    Too soon, we got there.

    Jim halted just short of where the bridge’s guard rail started. We stood there, silent, and waited for a car to pass. When it was out of sight, another set of headlights showed in the distance. Jim must’ve figured the driver couldn’t see us yet. He whispered, ‘This way, quick,’ and stepped off the sidewalk.

    ‘Where we going?’ George asked.

    ‘It’s a great place,’ I told him. ‘Nice and private.’

    Before the car got much closer, we followed Jim into the trees. We were hidden by the time it whooshed by. We crept past a few trees, then began climbing down a steep, bushy slope toward the tracks. To the right, the tracks stretched off across an empty field, shiny in the moonlight. To the left, they vanished in the black mouth of the underpass.

    A couple more cars sped by, but they didn’t worry me. We were low enough for the guard rail to prevent anyone from seeing us.

    The weeds were dewy. They made my jeans wet to the knees. I slipped once or twice. George landed on his butt once. But finally we made it down the slope and climbed a small embankment to the tracks.

    ‘That’s our place,’ I told George.

    ‘Under there?’ He didn’t sound thrilled.

    Jefferson Avenue was four lanes wide, so the dark area beneath it looked like a tunnel. We could see the gray of moonlight at the other end, but it was too dim to show us much of anything in the underpass.

    ‘Hope nobody’s there,’ I muttered.

    ‘Keep your eyes peeled,' Jim said. ‘And get ready to run like hell.’

    ‘Can’t we just stay here?’ George asked.

    Jim shook his head. ‘Somebody might see us from the road. Let’s go.’

    ‘I don’t know,’ George said.

    ‘You wanted to come along,’ I reminded him.

    ‘Yeah, but…’

    ‘Hey,’ Jim said. ‘If you want to run around with the big guys, you’ve gotta do what we do.’

    ‘Or you can go on home,’ I said. ‘It’s up to you, but we’re going in there.’

    He hung back while Jim and I stepped over a rail and started walking down the middle of the tracks toward the underpass. I really hoped George would chicken out. I didn’t want to go under there, didn’t want to nail him, wanted only to have him out of our lives so we could hurry on to Cyndi’s house.

    But he shrugged and came after us.

    There were two sets of tracks. They ran side by side, several yards apart. Ahead of us, broad concrete supports stood between them.

    We waited until we were just under the edge of the bridge, then switched on our flashlights. George dug into the paper sack and came up with a big, six-volt lantern.

    ‘All right,' Jim whispered.

    We shined our beams into the darkness. George’s was really huge and bright. We swept our lights all over the place before going any further.

    ‘Looks okay,' Jim murmured.

    It didn’t look okay. Not at all. But at least we didn’t spot anyone.

    Jim aimed his beam at the nearest support. The concrete was scrawled with names and dirty words and dates and drawings. The drawings were pretty crude. The biggest was an old one that I’d seen plenty of times before. It showed a cartoonish gal with huge tits and her legs spread apart. Jim and I used to call her ‘The Beave.’ Since the last time we’d been here, somebody’d added a mammoth erection just underneath her. It was aimed between her legs, and squirting like a geyser.

    Normally, we would’ve had a good time studying the artwork and making remarks. But George was with us. And we were in a hurry to get to Cyndi’s. And this was night.

    Neither of us got cute.

    ‘Check the other side, George,’ Jim said.

    ‘Me?’

    ‘You got the good light. Make sure nobody’s hiding behind those things.’

    ‘Aw, geez.’

    ‘Just do it,’ I told him. ‘We don’t want some damn wino jumping us.’