Hope you enjoy it, Raymond
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/my-brothers-elastic-winkle/id458707331?mt=11
CHAPTER FIVE
When I got to the base of the water tower itself a couple more kids had arrived and were impatiently waiting for me to fall off. Even my brother had scrooched up his nerve and had come outside to where he could see me. Maybe he wanted to be able to tell Mum all the gory details or maybe he thought that once I got up on the ramp that encircled the tower and started stomping around up there I might knock the bottom out and he’d get every bath he’d never wanted.
It was hard to tell what was going on in my brother’s head. It was so fat that during the hottest part of the summer it bubbled.
Anyway, I did stomp around a bit, waving at the world and spitting on my admirers below in the age old tradition of winners and losers. They cheered and threw a few unsuccessful rocks up at me. They could do anything they wanted to as long as it didn’t work. They knew the rules. I kind of wished I had a few boulders on hand because being a nearly a hundred feet in the air gives you a sense of power and a quiet feeling of thoughtless cruelty.
From where I was standing I could see the whole town laid out like a toy electric train ad. A few other kids had either spotted me or had whiffed the excitement in the air and were hotfooting it like upright ants towards the water tower. The sky was blue. The upturned faces of my admirers were little brown blobs of interest. My home town looked like I could push it around with a forefinger and up this high there was a slight cooling breeze to blow the sweat off my busy little head that was crowned with a widow’s peak.
I felt great.
I was the first nine year old who’d ever climbed the tower and when I got my growth who knew what I might do? Everybody sensed this and the accomplishments of the two or three big kids who’d come up here were shoved off the edge by my audience who cheered or nervously dodged the mist of my spit as it softly fell on them.
To get better aim as well as to give them a little extra thrill, I leaned further over the rail and a couple of times my feet came off the rough unworn planks of the ramp. The kids below couldn’t actually see my feet waving behind me in the air, but they knew what must be going on to let me do that and they gave an extra cheer when my body stretched over the two by four rail further than it should.
My brother sat and waited with fearful expectation. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to have to do all our chores alone. Especially if I was as weak and as lazy as he was. But then there were the toys and another Christmas coming up and the increase in allowance and even Dad would have to treat him nice since he had nobody else but one fat stepson and an equally fat wife. Dad was no fool.
But, on the other hand, we had the biggest garden in town and it specialized in growing dandelions and chicken weed. Even from where I was, I could see he didn’t look happy. He picked at the scar on his knee. A sure sign he was mixed up about something. I waved with one hand at my gathering audience while I hung on with the other and smiled. I knew that if he kept picking at his knee like that he was going to get cancer.
Finally, I got my nerve up and drew back from the railing. The kids couldn’t see me very well and they milled about uncertainly. They wanted more of a show. Maybe have me sit on the railing and pretend to fall off. Despite the fact that it was late afternoon on a very hot day they were excited and game for anything including instant worship of the dead.
I gave them a last wave and tried spitting a gob on my brother. Even if I got lucky and hit him at that distance and he ran home to tell, nobody would believe him. It was too good a chance to pass up.
Besides, I thought dramatically, by that time I might actually be dead.
I hacked up a good goop and flobbed it out and away in his direction. Then, without waiting to see if I’d draped it on his fat frying head, I turned and started up the ladder that ran up the side of the water tower.
The kids stopped cheering.
Nobody’d ever tried that before.
The tower was a big fat wooden tub twenty feet high, topped by an angled cone roof and so far the only thing that had ever fallen off it was rain water. The few big kids that had struggled up as high as the ramp had been quite willing to leave it at that.
But, according to my Dad, I had a swelled head as big as the whole outdoors and so, with my arm, leg and backside muscles tightening as I got higher, I carefully clawed my way up the ladder leading to the tower’s steep roof. This time I didn’t look down. I figured that nearly a hundred feet was my personal courage limit. Especially since, even though the ladder was dry, the curved wall it was set against was leaking smooth, round drops of slippery green water.
I got to the top of the ladder leading up the side and breathed with relief. I’d made it higher than anybody. I waited for a feeling of triumph but nothing happened.
I was not only higher than my bravery, I’d also left most of my ambition somewhere beneath my feet.
From where I crouched, bent over the top of the tower, pushing my quaking stomach against the last rung, I could see that the ladder kept going and led off across the steep roof to the bottom of the flag pole. My heart froze even as my little rubber soled running shoes melted onto the dry wooden rung underneath them.
Why they’d ever put the flagpole up there was something I’d wondered about when I was on the ground and backed up enough blocks to see it but, now that I was looking it square in the base, I had a pretty good idea. It was there so they could lower it to half mast after I’d fallen off. I hung onto the edge, my muscular little bum sticking its blind face out at a very bare world, and fought the shakes.
The wind, now that I was sweating so much, felt cold.
There’d been a flag on the pole but now there was only an inch or so of ragged faded cloth flapping off the side of some rotting cotton rope. And now that the Second World War was over, nobody was patriotic enough to climb up and replace it. I didn’t blame them. The Japs could have it. And yet inside my insane peanut brain came a rush of desire, despair, hope, and a lack of plain good sense. A chance like this only came around once. It was now or never.
I took two deep breaths of thin air and scrambled over the edge of the tower onto a suddenly creaking ladder that, now that I was on it, I could see was bending into a very old, weak cedar roof.
With my terror-stricken ears, I could hear the slow laps of the dark water beneath my knees, the burble of my own liquid in my shivering belly, the splintering creaks of the ladder and the roof and the walls of the tower and the horrible groans of the already overstrained creosoted beams that crossed themselves again and again until they reached the safety of the ground.
Worst of all, as I scuttled across the ladder up towards the flagpole, I suddenly remembered that a reliable source over twelve had told me that the water tower was really an aquarium where they kept a fifty foot octopus so it wouldn’t drag down small boats out in the harbor.
I crashed into the flagpole, nearly knocking it over and wrapped myself around it.
I no longer cared about community approval or the admiration of my buddies who were somewhere out of sight below. I didn’t want a commemorative plaque or any sort of fund set up in my name for aspiring, insane and underage climbers.
I didn’t even want my Mum.
As I hung onto the flagpole, bending it this way and that, depending on what side I was now afraid of sliding over to a screeching, fingernail-ripping death, I looked about me at the town which I could clearly see–providing it was two blocks away from the bottom of the tower–and I only wanted one of two things.
Wings or off.
CHAPTER SIX
We left me waving the empty flagpole at a distant world which was far below the reach of my most important sense at that given moment. My sense of touch.
I had been there for about half an hour working my fingerprints into the bare wood while pretending in between long our moments of terror to be a breathless Vasco de Gamma. My unseen audience below had given up shouting for me to show myself or yell or fall off or something equally impressive and had probably fought themselves to a successful draw about who should climb up and rescue me.
They were most likely now sympathizing with my brother about the garden and his future as an only child until Mum and Dad could get some more. I wasn’t being bitter for I wasthen, and am now, a firm believer that life should go on. But preferably with me along.
At first I tried to enjoy the scenery from my once-in-andmaybe-last-in-a-lifetime vantage point but since that quickly became too sentimental I gave up and closed my eyes tightly and wondered if octupuses’ hearing was a strong as their eight arms.
I knew I should do something but I also knew I couldn’t get back down the way I was feeling and I had no plans to go up any further even if the flagpole was the only friend I had at that moment. So I decided to stay put and wait for a miracle one way or the other. I was hoping my soul was worth saving.
The Minister of the United Church that I’d been made to go to had told me that this was not the case. A terrible thing to say to a small boy until you realized that half his Sunday School staff were still taking special retraining in proper Christian behavior after they’d gone apeshit one hot day when I was at my devilish best and put their Sunday boots to me in the aisle until they were exhausted from their sins.
I waited another half an hour then I opened my mouth, licked my thin little lips, freshened up my tongue, squeezed my bulging eyes together and uttered a hateful word for the very first time in my short career of fact, fancy and general fooling around.
“Help!” I shrieked. “Help! Help!”
“Help!” I screamed. “Help! Help! Help!”
Then finally in one shameful our moment of absolute terror from which I would never recover, I strained my jaws apart like a vomiting rattlesnake and belched out the still-unforgiven word.
“Mum!“
CHAPTER SEVEN
The fireman was fat, sweaty and scared. I could smell him on the wind that blew over his greasy, thin hair and his thick round shoulders. He grabbed hold of a couple of rungs on the ladder and bent over the corner of the roof. He was close and made everything else look so far away that it scared me even more.
“C’mon down here, kid,” he ordered in a wheezy voice and then cleared his throat.
I got a better hold on the flagpole and drew my legs closer together. If he came up here and fell through the roof I wasn’t going to go with him. I had an insane hope the flagpole went all the way down to the ground and that it was going to be my salvation.
The fireman moved his weight around on the ladder below and seemed to slip on it because his face went white through his sweat like the belly of a dead flat fish and his knuckles spread over the wooden rungs. Some wood creaked.
“For Christsake, kid! Get down here!” he yelled in a high, squeaky voice. Sweat dripped into his eyes but he only shook it away. “And hurry it up!”
I looked around the flagpole at the sky and the far off hills and at the toy town below. A seagull floated by us, giving us the eye for handouts, then fell downwards towards the ground.
“I don’t wanna,” I said.
“Look, kid! I’m not going to stay up here forever! So hurry it up if you’re coming with me!”
That surprised me. I had it figured that we were both trapped now. And I was grateful for the doomed company.
“You’re not going to leave me, are you?” I whined.
“You bet I am! In exactly ten seconds I’m going back down! So you’d better hurry up!” The fireman was trying to sound like he knew what he was talking about but his voice was shaking so I knew I had him. I knew how to tell about adults’ voices. It was my secret weapon. I wrapped my legs around the pole for security.
“For God’s sake, kid, quit going backwards!” the fireman started roaring but ended off in a sobbing squeak. Just like my brother when I had my hands around his throat. The sweat in his eyes was starting to blind him but he was so chicken all he could so was blink and squeeze it out then shake his head carefully. The veins in his arms were growing larger by the minute.
“So, c’mon! Let’s get out of here!” he screeched.
“I can’t.”
“Then why did you come up here for in the first place? This is no place for a kid! You’re going to get us both killed, you little bastard!”
“That’s not nice to say,” I said. “Can you send for my Mum?”
“What’s she supposed to be? A mountain climber? What the hell you want her up here for?”
“To help us.”
“I don’t even know where she is, for Christ sake!”
“She’s probably at home. Maybe in the store, helping Dad. It wouldn’t take too long to get her.” I let go with one hand and pointed a few blocks away to where our garden and capital L for love shaped building spelled out a familiar message to my popping eyeballs.
The fireman turned and followed my directions then rolled up his eyeballs in brand new terror. He tightened his grip on the ladder rung. “No! Goddamned it! I’m not going to get her! I came up here for you, you little asshole! So, let’s get going!”
“You got a rope or something?”
“You’ve got legs! Use them!”
I did and wrapped my legs even more tightly around the flagpole. “I’ll come down in a little while. I promise.”
“No! Now!”
“What about you?”
“I’ll go down ahead of you.”
“Will you catch me if I fall?”
The fireman hadn’t thought about that and I could see him trying to guess my weight.
“You’re not going to fall,” he said,
“But if I do, will you catch me?”
The fireman carefully let go with one hand and wiped the sweat off his face. “Yeah. Sure, you little asshole, then we’ll fly down together. Now get over here.”
“What’s your name?”
“What the hell’s that got to do with anything?”
“My name’s Ray.”
“Okay. Mine’s Bill. Now let go of that pole, Ray, and start climbing down the ladder. I’m getting tired.”
That was a lie and we both knew it. He could hold on forever just like I could.
“I will in a minute,” I said. I wiped my nose with my elbow and treasured the smell of grass and salt water on it.
“Now!”
“Okay,” I said and got a grimmer hold on the flagpole.
The fireman ground his yellow uneven teeth and snarled through them. “Now, look, kid–“
“I don’t wanna.”
“That’s just a figure of speech. Are you coming down here or am I going to have to come up and get you?”
“Would you?”
“Don’t be such a chickenshit or I’ll come up and give you a licking,” the fireman threatened and carefully kept his eyes dead level. “Now, c’mon!Let’s get outa here!”
“I don’t wanna.”
“You like it here?”
“It’s better than the ladder.”
“Ground’s better than anything! So, c’mon!”
“Can you see it?”
“See what?”
“The ground.”
“Of course! Look, it’s down there! Straight beneath us!” To build up my nerve, he looked down. The ladder he was on went straight through the ramp below so he got more of a look at the ground than he really wanted.
“Yousee, it’s right beneath us and–holy shit!” He jerked himself over onto the roof and clung onto the flatter part of the ladder with everything he had. He stared across at me, feeling like a total chickenshit. “Are you coming down or aren’t you, you little prick?” he yelled.
“Maybe they could send a plane to pick us up,” I said, trying to help him. “I’ve seen it done in the movies.”
“If this was a movie, they’da shot you right off of here with a gun, you little bastard!” the fireman shouted. He hung on for a second while we looked at each other then he grunted miserably. “I’m coming up to get you, you little shitass,” he announced. He started up the ladder, his eyes getting bigger with every move. The closer he got to me, the faster his breathing got.
“Be careful!” I screamed.
He stopped. “What? What are you talking about?”
“You’d better watch it!”
“What? Watch what?”
I refolded myself around the pole. “I think the roof’s going to cave in,” I said.
The fireman stared at the dark and rotting shingles around him, listening for any creaks. “Who told you?” he asked.
“It nearly fell through when I came over and you’re a lot bigger than I am.”
The fireman’s face looked like one of Randolph Scott’s cowboy friends when he got shot in the back with an arrow. Like he was trying to say something. “Bullshit,” he finally said.
“I heard it!”
“Heard what?”
“The roof. It was creaking.”
“Where?”
“Right where you are.”
The fireman tried levitating like those Hindu Swannees Rivers that I’d read about. “Kid, don’t shit me!” he yelled. “This is no funny business! It’s life and death! Don’t shit me! We shouldn’t be up here! Now, don’t shit me!” He lay on the ladder very still and listened.
He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. “I heard it creak when I came over,” I said. “I figure you’ll go through for sure. I mean, look how big you are.”
“That’s what I told them! I told them I’m too big! But I used to be a logger before the War so I got picked!” He banged his fist carefully on a ladder rung. “This part time fireman crap is a buncha bullshit anyway! I only do it cause I don’t make enough at the bakery!”
“You still want me to come down?”
“Stay where you are, you little horse’s ass! This ladder ain’t strong enough for both of us! Don’t you dare move!”
“Where you going?” I called out fearfully.
“I’m not going nowhere!” the fireman yelled and remained halfway across the roof, fixed in one place like a lizard waiting for lunch.
“That’s a double negative,” I said.
“The only thing negative around here, kid, is your brain matter! So relax!”
“If I relax, I’ll fall off!”
“You sure it creaked?”
“Sure I’m sure! I can hear it now. Listen!”
The fireman pulled his face forward like a sucker on a rock and put his ear onto the shingles. His ears got red then white. There was a creak.
“See what I mean?” I said smugly.
“It’s probably the wind!” the fireman said uncertainly.
“The wind’s stopped,” I said. “It’s the roof.” I got a better grip on the flagpole. “If you have to swim for it down there, don’t knock into the flagpole, okay?”
“Don’t talk like that, you little shit!”
“Well, there’s no sense in both of us dying!”
“Shut up! I’m trying to listen!” He inched carefully back down the ladder. The whole roof creaked.
“Don’t leave me!” I shrieked. “I’ll tell my Dad!”
“Shut up!” The fireman was sweating like crazy. “I’m going to get a rope.”
“What good’s a rope going to do? It’s a hundred feet down!”
“Shuttup, you little bastard! I can’t think!”
The fireman took another blind step back down the ladder and, as his foot went over the edge and waved in the air, his knee knocked off a shingle and it clunked all the way down.
“Jesus Christ!” he screamed as another shingle went skittering past him. “I can’t swim! Jesus Christ!” He crashed up the roof ladder, knocking shingles aside.
“Stay away!” I howled as he scrambled up towards me. “It’s my flagpole! It’s only big enough for one guy! Stay away!”
The fireman almost took the flagpole with him as he thumped onto the top part of the roof, his boots knocking off more shingles. His fat chest and belly squeezed against me as he tried to curl around the thin wooden pole.
“Quit hogging it all!”he yelled in my ear and pushed me around to the other side. I hung on like grim life and managed to keep both my legs hooked onto the pole. It swayed towards me and creaked. The fireman was still leaning on it while he pulled his feet up after him. My back turned into a single goose pimple.
“Let go!” I yelled. “We’re going to fall!”
“Stop hanging on with your feet!” the fireman yelled back. “You’re the one that’s causing it!”
“I was here first!”
“No shit,” the fireman grunted and tried unhooking my legs.
“Help! Help!” I shrieked. “Murder! Dad!”
“Shut up!” the fireman shouted. He pushed my legs underneath me. “Now hang on with your arms and stop heaving at the pole like that or you’ll break the goddamned thing!”
I reclenched the pole and made myself as comfortable as I could by bracing my feet on a couple of loosening shingles. I made note that the fireman’s bronzed belt buckle with an eagle embossed on it was only two inches away from my right hand. If I fell, he and that goddamned eagle were going to come with me.
I looked up at his sweaty, frightened face. “You going to get us out of here?” I demanded.
The fireman looked at the very far distances, the very near rotten shingles, then he looked past the end of his nose, unsuccessfully trying to find one good idea. He shifted his fat body closer to the pole, almost breaking my arms and leaned his perspiring forehead against the dark gray wood.
It was then that I understood what adulthood was all about. “Mum! Mum! Mu—um!” I shrieked kindly for the both of us.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The fireman heaved a sigh of relief and lowered himself onto the ground. One of his buddies gave him a cigarette. “Listen, you little prickassholebastard-pissassshithead!” he said. “Don’t ever go up there again, you hear me?” He tried to hold the cigarette in his mouth but it shook out and he had to catch it with his hands and it burned him.
“Goddamned it! You hear me?” He managed to take a drag. He sounded ugly but I’d had to help him down over a couple of tough places so I wasn’t scared of him.
I looked up the entire height of the dripping water tower
and started the old brain noggin in motion. Rusty sniffed at my
sneakers to see if there had been any dogs up there lately
while I worked on my idea.
“You hear me?” the fireman yelled and started coughing. “Don’t go up there again! Ever!” One of the other firemen started burping him.
“I won’t,” I said and I meant it. Climbing was for kids.
Now that I’d seen what a bunch of crapouts firemen were, I had a
notion that in high altitude rescue operations, I could make a
fortune.
“You can do anything else you want and I personally don’t care if it kills you! But just don’t go up there again!”
I’d heard all this stuff before. All adults must’ve gone to the same school. “Okay,” I said.
“Cause I won’t get you!” A couple of other firemen with dust all over their shoes muttered agreement.
“Won’t need you,” I said and wondered how much they’d pay a kid to perform impossible rescues in a self made, helium filled dirigible.
The helium I could get from Maurice Hodgeson’s brother who worked at the airport. The balloons I could get out of Dad’s store. I’d need maybe a couple of hundred of them. I’d have to start filching them as soon as possible and stretch it over a period of a couple of weeks so he wouldn’t notice. The netting maybe I could get from the old Chinaman’s line when he was out crabbing. Trouble was it was old as he was and it wouldn’t stand up if we got into a storm.
“What was that you said?” the fireman yelled, interrupting my planning.
“You know where I could get some new fishing net cheap?” I demanded.
“No, but I know where you can get lots of cement blocks, you little asshole!” the fireman shouted. He dropped his still burning cigarette in the dry grass where it started to smoke and swaggered away with his buddies to their old dirty red truck.
I slapped the side of my head with my hand. Of course! How could I forget? I’d need weights to control it from going up too fast or I’d be taking a trip to Oz. I was impressed.
That fat fireman wasn’t as stupid as he looked.
spencesense 
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