Perils  by Charlie Haddox                                                                            

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           Mrs. Fish, our seventh grade teacher, was extremely fond of telling us horror stories that always featured the same protagonist, her grown son, an unemployed thirty-five-or-six year old who was still living at home.  They were tales of his constant victimhood.  The whole world was a torture engine designed just for him.  A maniac slashed the ragtop of his De Soto (or was it his Opal Cadet?); black widow spiders made nests in his boots, “dope fiends” mugged him in broad daylight.  Other teachers shared stories of children (whom they claimed to have known personally) killed or maimed in a variety of bizarre and horrible ways: burned by playing with car batteries, disemboweled by their own pet dogs, shot in the eyes by friends with archery sets.  A personal favorite of Miss Hayden’s, our sixth grade teacher, was the tale of a girl who died while attempting to lose weight by eating nothing but pickles and pickle juice.  She (according to Miss Hayden) had pickled her own insides.  The early Sixties were a world of fear.

Poli and Mo Mazolli had just made asymmetrical grilled cheese sandwiches.  They served them to us on wax paper, along with watered-down red Kool-Aid in tiny Dixie cups.  The sandwiches tasted like they had been fried in hair cream.

           Poli and Mo were baseball fanatics who wore identical gray baseball jerseys and Yankees caps.  My brother Jim and I used to think they were twins, but Mo was actually a year older.  He had more freckles than Poli, although they were both Dalmatians.  Poli was also proof that in addition to the tales of the macabre with which we were constantly bombarded at school, there were real dangers surrounding us.  Poli had almost died of aspirin poisoning when he was nine, succumbing to the seduction of those orange-flavored baby tablets.  He seemed a little slow, and now that he was twelve his mother suspected that the aspirin had something to do with it.

Mo used to carry around a plastic Santa Claus; a Christmas tree ornament made in Mexico.  It glowed in the dark, thanks to the radium that was used in its manufacture.  Mo wasn’t much smarter than Poli.  He was always breaking out in rashes, and I have come to suspect that they might have been caused by radiation poisoning.  But what did it matter?  We were all going to get barbecued by the atomic bomb one day anyway.   

Their house was located near the edge of town, on the old U.S. Highway.  To say that they lived on the ugliest spot in the ugliest place on earth—the Permian Basin—is no exaggeration.  An abandoned motel stood across the street.  Teenagers occasionally used it for sexual rendezvous, and a couple of drug addicts were camped out nearby.  (Poli once tried to make a water balloon out of a condom that he found there.)  A filling station built on the far end of a vacant lot that ran up to the house was also deserted.  They were the only structures standing within a mile or two of the place.  Someone had discarded a load of wet bentonite that had hardened into a mound on the filling station parking lot.  We used to say that Poli had taken a really big dump there.

On that searing summer evening, my brother Jim and I had decided to sleep over with the Mazolli brothers, just as the sky turned purple and flashes of heat lightning sputtered randomly, like a continuous peril.  Two blood-red clouds stained the horizon.  The flat plains smelling of oil that surrounded the house looked bleak and desolate—hell, they looked spooky—and menacing silver-colored natural gas storage tanks loomed off in the distance.  The house had no porch light—no exterior lighting at all.  It was just a dark, weathered little bungalow set in the moonless, treeless emptiness.  It wouldn’t have looked any less cheerful had it been sitting on an icecap.

Poli dragged me off to his bedroom, where he proceeded to slaughter me at toy soldiers, his “Grays” overrunning my “Blues” in a revisionist version of the Civil War.  It was his bedroom.  He always won.  His room was full of model jets and other war toys.

Poli once ate an entire stick of butter.

Mo and my brother Jim were watching Lights Out Theater on the old black-and-white in the living room.  The Mazollis had the largest television I had ever seen.  I think that the four of us boys could have fit inside of it.

Poli and Mo didn’t have a father, and I never learned what happened to him.  Maybe he just couldn’t take having Poli and Mo as sons.  I wouldn’t have wanted to be their father.  Their mother worked late at the Red Rooster Bowling Lanes, but as soon as she got home, she sent us all to bed.  I slept in Mo’s room and my brother got stuck with Poli.

I heard their mom watching TV in the living room for a while, and then she must have gone to bed, because the house was silent except for noises coming from Mo’s bed, the origin of which I did not even want to think about.  It was late when I finally drifted off to sleep.  

I awoke with a start a short while later.  My brother was standing over me.  I could see the reflection of flashing red lights on the walls and windows, and heard male voices and Mrs. Mazolli’s high-pitched voice, which sounded even higher pitched than usual, talking animatedly in the living room.

“What happened?” I finally asked.

“Poli got up a while ago and tried to sneak the TV into his room.  He knocked it over on himself, and both his arms look broken.  His mom called an ambulance, and they’re taking him to the hospital.  She’s leaving dumbass Mo in charge.  Go back to sleep.”

The next morning I awoke to find the rest of the house still in bed.  I made my way to the cozy country living room.  Bright summer sunlight streamed through a high corner window that had no curtain, reflecting off the wallpaper that was decorated with horses and old-fashioned wooden barrels.  The television lay on the scratched linoleum floor.  It was unplugged.  The picture tube was smashed.  It must have hurt like hell to have it fall on him, I thought.  I remembered the girl who pickled herself.  The green glow of the plastic Santa Claus that contained enough radium to fry a whale.  The mushroom cloud.  Mrs. Fish’s son.

My brother Jim had crept into the room.  I didn’t notice him until he spoke.

“Mo says Poli broke both his arms last night.  What’a ya know about that.  Hey, now our ‘Blues’ can finally whip his ‘Grays,’ and there’s not a damn thing he’ll be able to do about it.”