The Almost-Apocalypse of Apple Valley

The Beginning of the End-2

Instinctively, he reached down and cupped his crotch. Through his jeans and thick gloves, he couldn’t feel much, but he hoped for the best.

Someone groaned in the distance.

Only it wasn’t as distant as he assumed.

It was him.

“Holy crapola!” someone yelled.

And Owen knew that wasn’t him.

That was a Jake saying.

And then there was that funny feeling again.

He flipped his pounding head to the side and looked up the hill at the substation. Though he was further away then he’d been at the top of the run, the tips of the cable-bearing steel towers seemed more menacing. As if there were tiny wizards living at the tops of each, controlling and doling out electricity like it was their special element of magic.

Over the bass-heavy pulse of blood pumping through his ears, Owen thought he heard rapid, heavy footsteps coming his way.

His vision was still shaky, but he noticed the driver’s side door of the Dodge pickup was now propped open. Leaning against its edge was the old man who had been reading the paper. He was tall and thick—through a plaid red and black button-up shirt, his shoulders seemed ready to burst through the seams and the top of the door barely met the middle of his crossed arms.

As far away as he was, Owen thought he could see the man frowning.

Then Owen’s eyelids shut out the world and told him to go to sleep.

Sunday, June 11, 1989 - 1:00 PM

Ryan and Jake were warmongers.

The two of them crouched behind a large creosote bush in the dirt and weed-filled lot next to Ryan’s tiny two-bedroom, vanilla-stucco house. Barely shielded from the oppressive sun, the two boys grinned like banshees as they switched between picking up golden ants on twigs and delivering them into enemy territory.

Ryan’s gray, short-haired mutt of a cat, Fluffy, stuck its tail in the air and decided to head back to the house since she was no longer the center of attention.

Within spitting distance from the iconic Bell Mountain, Ryan’s parents and three sisters lived in the north-western Apple Valley outskirts where their nearest neighbor was half a mile away. They had a well which seemed to need redrilling every few years and a septic tank which Ryan had the displeasure of seeing, and smelling, overflow more than once. As for the new cable television showing up? Even if they could afford it, the company didn’t have the wires run this far out. Ryan would have to be happy with whatever fuzzy signal the spangly antenna perched on the roof could pick up, which wasn’t much beyond the local TV station airing A-Team reruns and local news. His dad had pointed out one of the news anchors as a regular customer of the liquor store where he worked nights.

So, while other kids might have been able to sit inside an air-conditioned room and watch hours of cartoons and play video games, Ryan could only amuse himself with nature’s gifts in the wide-open desert lots beside his house, as he was doing so with Jake this afternoon.

The little yellow guys marched up, down, and around the stick in Ryan’s hand, causing him to constantly shift ends in order to avoid the things crawling up onto his fingers and digging in for a snack.

“These guys look so much cooler than the red ones,” Jake said. “And they’re stronger.”

“Says who?”

“My dad told me.”

Ryan’s lips twisted like the tied end of a balloon. “How does he know?”

Jake huffed, insulted as always when being challenged. “He just knows stuff. More than your old man, anyway.”

Ryan hated bringing his family into things when it came to his friends. His family wasn’t exactly living on easy street and his parents weren’t exactly models of worldly success.

His dad slept most of the day between night shifts and his mom worked every day but Thursday and Friday as a cashier at the local Sprouse-Reitz, a five-and-dime store in the old Apple Valley downtown.

Still, Ryan knew that his parents loved him and his sisters as much as a couple of perpetually tired parents could. At least he felt they did. Every Friday, he and the girls consistently came home to a cardboard tray of Little Caesar’s pepperoni pizza sitting on the tiny, chipped dinner table and proceeded to tear apart its paper wrapping like coyotes set loose on a warren of jackrabbits.

He’d find his parents sitting on the couch in the evenings, smiling, smoking funny-smelling cigarettes and giving the kids bear hugs in turn.

Yeah, they were a loving family.

Yet, whenever he was forced to compare his family with everyone else’s, except for Jake’s, Ryan felt shame on top of shame.

But out here, beneath the same sun that lit upon the face of every Apple Valley citizen, rich or poor, he felt a sense of equality.

Jake released a boisterous laugh, seeming to forget the whole tiff he’d inadvertently tried to start.

“Look at that guy,” he said, pointing a fat finger at one of the latest yellow transplants wrestling with a pair of red ants. “I told you they’re tougher. It’s taking two of them to take him on.”

The ants’ limbs were flicking and sticking to each other in random, staccato bursts. Their bodies occasionally tumbled one over the other in the dirt—the red ones would get one over on the yellow one and then the yellow one would push a red one off triumphantly, getting back into the fight.

“It doesn’t mean he’s tougher,” Ryan said. “It just means the red ones are more prepared. They’re smart enough to send more people. They run things like gangs.”

“Pfft.” Jake lifted his head and spit a fat loogie on the ground next to the anthill, pinning a yellow one beneath the slimy force field. “What do you know about gangs?”

“I’ve seen Colors,” Ryan protested.

The gang-ridden streets of Los Angeles were as far from quiet little Apple Valley as Pluto was from Earth, but maybe that’s why their dynamic fascinated Ryan so much.

It was different.

It felt dangerous.

Occasionally, his dad would give him and his sisters money to rent VHS videotapes down at Prime Time Video. When his sisters weren’t spending the weekly movie budget on cheesy horror movies, Ryan was renting Colors over and over again. He must have watched the film over twenty times now. He could spit out the Ice-T theme song lyrics at the drop of a dime. One day, he even took a red bandanna from the toolbox in his dad’s garage, wrapped it around his head, and strutted around the house with a gangster lean, acting like he was a Blood.

That was one of the rare times his dad lost his smile and swatted Ryan’s rear end until it was swollen like a baboon’s, telling him he’d better not see him doing “some shithead thing” like that again, or he’d wind up with more than a sore butt.

Still, his parents didn’t stop him from watching a movie that was wildly inappropriate for a kid his age. Come to think of it, they didn’t seem to care much at all what the kids picked up for their viewing pleasure, so long as they were occupied while Mom and Dad thrashed around the bedroom behind a locked door, doing whatever cleaning stuff in there that they said they had to do.

They were cool like that.

“I’ve seen Colors too,” Jake said, straightening up and preening like a peacock. And that’s all he could say. Ryan knew Jake wasn’t going to challenge him on his knowledge, because Ryan was sharp when it came to what he did know. It’s why he was in GATE.

Jake stood on his feet and wiped his dirty palms against his pant legs.

“I’m bored,” he said. He looked around at the endless surrounding desert. A pair of oversized crows cawed from their perch on the wooden telephone pole that connected the only piece of civilization to the Toscano household. “I think I’m gonna go home.”

Jake had ridden his bike here like he did most of the time. He lived about five miles away.

“Maybe I’ll stop at Steph’s on the way.”

Ryan’s ears perked up. Steph wasn’t exactly “on the way.” In fact, she lived in the complete opposite direction of Jake. Ryan had tried to call her earlier to see if she wanted to come and screw around with the ants or maybe watch a video. He actually called her before calling Jake, but no one had picked up the phone.

Ryan wasn’t going to tell Jake he was actually the backup choice.

Steph was a lot of fun, but if Ryan was going to be honest with himself, she wasn’t only fun in the way that Jake and Owen were fun. He couldn’t explain it well, even to himself, but whenever she was around, he felt like his feet were suspended by a bunch of helium-filled balloons. He’d get this nervous twitch in his stomach. Not the kind that made him nauseous and on the verge of throwing up, but it was more of a building excitement—like approaching the apex of a roller coaster (Ryan could only guess. He’d never been on an actual roller coaster).

She was one of the few people to get his random pop-culture jokes. Or at least she pretended that she did, which was good enough for Ryan.

Of course, he’d never tell her any of this. He didn’t even like to think it. But think it he did.

“What for?” he asked Jake, just in time to see him wheeling his bike back from the house.

Jake, climbing onto the seat, took hold of the handles and shrugged his shoulders. “She mentioned something about a get-well package for Owen.”

That helium-like feeling deflated a little and the nervous twitch seemed to magically convert itself into a rotating nausea.

“Oh,” was all Ryan could say.

Why was he feeling something acidic creep up in the back of his throat about that fact? They were friends, after all. They were all friends. And Owen had hurt himself pretty good yesterday. A little something from his fellow cronies to cheer him up would be a nice gesture.

But why had Steph asked Jake and not him? Ryan had comics and other stuff Owen could enjoy while he was laid up. Not that he needed any of it. Owen was probably playing Nintendo or something, anyway.

Then Ryan also wondered why he hadn’t even thought of doing something similar for Owen in the first place.

He assumed he’d see him in school eventually. Or even at his birthday party next weekend.

Maybe Steph was the true friend.

Ryan felt a twinge of embarrassment.

“See you at school tomorrow,” Jake said, pedaling off into the distance before Ryan’s thoughts were fully formed.

Ryan stared down at the anthill in front of his feet. The yellow ant they had mercilessly dropped off into a strange new world was now torn in half. The red ants streamed around the corpse as if it didn’t matter anymore—it was just another piece of the landscape now.

A potential warning.

An overwhelming sense of sadness struck Ryan. He hated what the red ants did to the yellow ant. And he hated more that it had been his fault for delivering him unto his enemies.

He quickly stomped out the feeling by taking the tip of his scuffed Keds tennis shoe and violently grinding it into the mound, causing it to collapse into itself, wiping it from existence.

He smiled now and it felt good.

Monday, June 12, 1989 - 9:00 AM

Time.

Time’s a deceptive, pernicious thing. You either have too much and you’re bored to death or you don’t have enough and you’re pulling your hair out with worry. You never have just the right amount of time you need.