Mr. Leo Peeper's Denver 500, Patrick Sean Lee [best young adult book series .TXT] 📗

I listened to the radio more than ever during those dark days after shooting Jesus in the eye. Singers like Fats Domino, The Coasters, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly, filled me with brand new passions. The strangest desire to be with the opposite sex—Carol Hudson who lived a block away, maybe. So much closer than Miss Marilou Jenkins. I’d learn how to do dances like the bop, and the chicken, and feel the…her body. Maybe. I began to dwell on what it all might be like. Down there in my bedroom. Down there. All alone.
Something

deep inside me was stirring. Outside my little window I imagined her waiting on hands and knees, smiling. She was tapping. Tapping. Tapping ever so softly on the glass…
“Hey, Skip. Skip!”
What an ugly voice, I thought. Well, yeah. She turned out to be Jimmy.
Behind him, with his hands on Jimmy’s shoulders and a grin as big as could be, was good old faithful Mickey, lately sprung from his house arrest and no doubt come to rescue me from mine. I left my wistful daydream of floating down the mighty Mississippi, head in the lap of my Nubian princess, Carol. No. Miss Marilou Jen…no. Carol. Definitely Carol.
A visit by Mickey—or Jimmy, especially—was strictly forbidden. Lock-up meant lock-up. Period. Had the Pope himself come to visit me, he would most likely have been told to go away. That was the depths to which my mom’s despair over me had sunk. Should she have caught my two best friends trying to woo me out of the dungeon, God only knows what fury would have been unleashed. They’d have been railroaded out of the yard with a rake or a broom, and as for me. Well.
“You aren’t mad at me anymore?” I whispered.
Jimmy answered as though the question was stupid. “Nah. Everything turned out okay. I ain’t mad. Get up! Open the window.”
“No. I can’t. You’d better just go,” I said, motioning for them to be quiet. Mom was somewhere in the house upstairs, maybe heading for the broom closet as we spoke.
The small awning window set high up in the wall of cinderblock immediately below the floor joists was locked shut, and so I hopped from my bed and darted over to it. Jimmy motioned for me to open it, but I shook my head.
“Get outta’ here, you idiots! You want me to get another thirty days?”
“Just open the window.”
“No! I already told you I can’t.”
“We have to tell you something,” Mickey tried to whisper.
“No. I wanna’ get out of here someday, and if Mom catches you…” The vision of a beautiful raft filled with me and my buddies and half a dozen naked girls popped into my head suddenly, and I wavered. Could it be they’d been thinking about it, too? “Well…what’s so important?”
They both looked at one another, grinning, knowing they’d won the first part of the battle. Jimmy motioned once again that the window needed to be opened. I knew very well that I shouldn’t, that giving in to my curiosity would be my downfall, but I did it anyway. The open space between the dusty window glass and its casement was just big enough for a pint-sized burglar to enter, and so Jimmy slid through, followed quickly by Mickey.
The radio on my nightstand sang out a current hit by a very hip new group. Danny and the Juniors. I tuned the volume up a little, and then returned my attention back to my friends, confident that the noise of At The Hop would mask the chatter of the upcoming conversation.
“What is it?” I asked.
“We gotta’ get you outta’ here,” Jimmy told me. “Mickey and me was just over at Mrs. Rashure’s store an' we saw this paper taped on the front window. There’s gonna’ be a soap box derby race Saturday after next! We just gotta’ build one an' get in on the action, but there ain’t much time left.”
“Yeah,” added Mickey, “and you’re going to be the driver! We pulled straws. You won!”
“We did?” I asked.
“Well, since you’re stuck down here all by yourself, we put one in for you. You drew the longest,” Mickey said.
“What are we going to build this racer out of…and when?” I asked.
Jimmy plopped down onto the bed excitedly, and then answered. “Clifford has a pretty cool wagon with a perfect set of wheels for what we need. Real new. Slick as shit! You could give that wagon a shove, and it’d keep rollin’ forever! No sense askin’ him to donate it after the creek deal, so we’ll just borrow it for a coupla’ weeks when he ain’t lookin’. We don’t need the wagon part of it, just the wheels and axles. ‘Course we’ll give it back after we’re done with it. Not sure where we’ll get the stuff to make the chassis, but we figured you’d have an idea there—bein’ good with wood an' all.”
The “borrowing” thing again. We were skating on thin ice already, but I let Jimmy continue.
“We need your mechanical help, ya know. You gotta’ sneak outta’ here, somehow. You just gotta! Come with us tonight, ok? We’ll get Clifford’s wagon, take it over to my garage, then go find some stuff to build the rest of the chug with.”
“Nope. Not on your life. I’m not stealin’ any more stuff, and I’m not sneakin’ out. No way.”
Sure, there was a way. For the next fifteen minutes while the radio blared and every spirit in Heaven kept tapping me on the shoulder telling me to continue shaking my head no, I listened to the plan. The vision of a glorious first-place winning chug grew stronger with each of Jimmy’s colorful words, and, eventually, my better judgment went down the toilet.
“Well, maybe…”
“We’ll come by at seven,” Mickey said beaming. “Be ready!”
Jimmy shook his head, emphasizing his agreement, and then the two of them crawled back out the way they’d come in. I stood looking up at the window as Come Go With Me wafted from the speaker of the radio. The background vocal, deep and rich, played against the lead singer’s tenor voice and the piano, “…never, never, never, never…” The drumbeat on my shoulder grew stronger.

***
“Skip, you’ve been a regular little angel,” my mother announced out of the blue when she’d set the platter of hamburgers down and taken her seat at the dinner table. “I think you’ve learned your lesson, right LaVerne?” She had a bad habit of addressing my dad while looking at me, or vice-versa, and I often couldn’t be sure just who the comments were supposed to be directed at. This particular time, though, I was certain Pop wasn’t the one who’d learned a lesson. I sat silently while she waited for him to fill up his plate and answer her.
“I hope so,” he said.
“Yes, I think you have. And Jimmy and that Mickey haven’t come ‘round, neither. I don’t want you playing with either of ‘em for a while. They’re steering clear of this house…” She rambled on for a few more minutes in short, disjointed sentences concerning bad influences, trouble, and more bad influences.
“So I think we’ve decided…haven’t we, La Verne…to let you off the hook tomorrow. You can leave your room. You’ve had enough punishment. But if you ever pull off another stunt like you did last month, goddamit, well…what did we say we’d do to him, LaVerne?”
Pop shook his head. He had no idea, I’m sure. This was one of Mom’s extemporaneous sermons, loaded with assumptions that anyone else might be involved, or that any prior discussion had even taken place.
“Well, you won’t like it, will he LaVerne?”
“No, he won’t.”
I ate quietly after Mom had abruptly dropped the remainder of the charges against me and then moved on to other topics, none of which had a blessed thing to do with me or my friends, thank God. I was a free man as of tomorrow at sunrise. Unless something bad happened in the meantime—and it looked like something might.
Politely excusing myself from the dinner table, which made both of my parents blink with surprise, I left the kitchen dinette and headed out the back door onto the enclosed back porch. Before me stood the steep basement stairs leading down to the basement. What, I asked myself, was I to do? It was 6:45. In fifteen minutes Jimmy and Mickey would arrive, expecting me to join them in the merry hunt for unsuspecting Clifford’s wagon. Of course I couldn’t go. Not now. But that isn’t to say that I wouldn’t. Jimmy was a master of persuasion when he needed to be; when there was something stuck in his mind like a heated metal splinter screaming to be yanked out. If I said no, he’d list a hundred reasons why I should back up and say yes. And all of them were bound to make perfect sense in that moment.
The idea occurred to me to retrace my steps. Go back upstairs and leave my bedroom as dark as an abandoned mine shaft. I could do the unreasonable; begin to fill the sink basin with soap and water and start the dishes without a fight. Jimmy and Mickey wouldn’t dare try to approach me up there. Something deep inside told me, begged me not to take the coward’s way out, though. Face them—face Jimmy. Simply tell him my time of confinement wasn’t quite finished. Tell him that borrowing Clifford’s wagon was really just