Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (19 page)

Virgil sighed and propped his sad, puffy face between his hands.

“They
do
look a lot like those jars,” he said grudgingly. “Remember when you went into the Assessment Chamber?”

The boys shuddered.

“That was
awful,”
Gene recalled with quiet horror. “It was like being hungry …
everywhere
. Ugh.”

“But do you remember the
jars
?
”
Milton asked.

“Sort of … I guess.”

Milton swept his eyes across the four boys. A cobra tattoo gradually appeared, then disappeared along the side of Gene’s neck. Hugo’s button nose unbuttoned into a full-blown schnoz. Virgil’s hair receded and swelled like a tide of hair lapping a scalp shoreline. Thaddeus’s pouty boy boobs became a touch
perkier
.

“And, in case you guys haven’t noticed,” Milton observed, “you all have a strange habit of …
shifting …
like there’s a roulette wheel of people spinning inside of you.”

The boys glanced at one another guiltily through the corners of their eyes, as if they were silently acknowledging a secret they all shared yet hadn’t dared utter.

“What about this: we aren’t losing any weight,” Milton continued. “Do you all want to be here for eternity if we don’t graduate?”

“Who cares?” Thaddeus declared abruptly as he cinched up his corduroy pants. “We’ll just burn it off in the DREADmills.”

Milton stood still, his massive arms akimbo, glaring at the boys with disgust.

“You’re eating human souls and you couldn’t care less!” he spat.

Hugo screwed his plaid beret upon his head.

“Well, it’s no worse than what that friend of Virgil’s did. What was his name? Melvin?”

“Milton,”
Virgil mumbled, eyeing his disguised friend uneasily.

“Whatever,” Hugo continued. “Using those lost souls to free himself and leave you behind.”

“Yeah,” Thaddeus joined in. “I heard two demons transferred from Limbo talking about it, that those souls tried to reunite with their totally dead bodies. Some had even been
cremated
. How terrible is that?”

“Horrible,” Gene muttered.

“Yeah, what a creep,” Hugo said, walking toward the sulfur water fountain with huge sweeps of corduroyed thighs.

Milton sat down as the wind was metaphorically taken out of his sails.

“But it’s morally wrong,” he sputtered weakly. “It’s like …
spiritual cannibalism.”

Gene and Thaddeus rose to join Hugo by the door.

“But, it’s not really …
that,”
Gene replied nervously, “if you don’t know it is, that is.”

Hugo pressed the door open with his meaty palm.

“First, you’re wrong,” he said. “Second, if you aren’t, there isn’t anything better to eat. Nothing even comes close. And … and …”

“Third,” Thaddeus offered.

“And third, I just don’t care. One guy’s morally wrong is another guy’s unquestionably delicious. So keep your crackpot theories to your big ugly self.”

The boys left the locker room, leaving Milton and Virgil to share an uncomfortable silence.

“I felt so supported in all that,” Milton grumbled.

Virgil sighed and faced his friend. “I tried …”

“Do or do not. There is no try,” Milton mumbled to himself.

“Look, we really don’t know for certain,” Virgil continued. “And it’s clear that none of the boys care about the ingredients. They’re just thinking with their stomachs….”

Milton glared at Virgil. “And what do
you
think?”

Virgil picked at his beret’s orange pom-pom.

“What I think is … is that you’re probably right. But … you come here like … like a cowboy, ready to take something on when you don’t even know for sure, you know, what’s really happening.”

Milton sighed wearily.

Maybe Virgil is right
, he thought.
Who do I think I am, anyway? I abandon my friend and my sister, making things worse for them, then come charging back in trying to make things right, not for them, but for myself
.

“Maybe if we registered a complaint, or a concern, anyway,” Virgil suggested as he walked over to the swab dispenser on the wall. “There’s a box right outside, goes straight to the vice principals….”

“Fat lot of good that would do,” Milton groused.

Virgil took a cotton swab from the dispenser by the warped Seems-Only-Fitting mirror.

“Ugh,” he said as he worked out a sizable iridescent glob from his belly button. “For the past few days, the boys have all been making belly button wax like nobody’s business. Ever since Hambone Hank—”

Virgil tossed the swab into an overflowing swab receptacle. “Anyway, I just mean that registering a complaint couldn’t hurt, though I suppose that most everything could hurt here. I don’t know what else we could do, really, short of messing with Hambone
Hank’s recipe, switching the souls with something else….”

A small grin formed between Milton’s gelatinous Pang chin and misshapen nub of a nose. Though Milton was currently four-hundred-something pounds and counting, he suddenly felt as light as nonfat, lo-cal, no-carb air.

Milton rose, beaming, ambling toward Virgil with his clumsy borrowed body. Virgil gulped.

“What? You’re scaring me.”

Milton wrapped his massive arms around his friend, enveloping him. The Pang skin reflexively tightened around Virgil, thinking it was suddenly gripping warm, struggling prey.

“Oww,”
Virgil squealed. “Too … tight.”

“Sorry,” Milton offered. “Still trying to get a handle on these arms.”

Milton stepped away from Virgil, his bespectacled eyes glittering with perilous notions beneath his Pang sockets.

“I’m worried about you,” Virgil said.

“You gave me a great idea!” Milton exclaimed through numb, oversized lips.

Virgil swallowed.

“Now I’m worried about
both
of us,” he whimpered.

* * *

“Okay, we’ll try it your way,” Milton whispered as they walked down the hall. “We’ll register a
concern,”
he said, emphasizing the last word with sarcastic finger quotes.

They arrived at a speaker box in the middle of the hallway connecting the Lose-Your-Lunchroom to the boys’ bunks. It was a smiling clown whose grin was stretched so wide it became a mocking leer.

“Hello and welcome to Blimpo’s suggestion box,” said the recorded voice, cracking in adolescent squeaks. “Your feedback is important to us. Please state your name and the quality of service you received. And don’t worry: special orders don’t upset us! Thank you for being sentenced to Blimpo.”

The clown beeped.

Virgil looked nervously at Milton.

“Um, yes …,” Virgil mumbled.

“Please speak clearly into my jolly mouth,” the voice added.

Virgil cleared his throat.

“Yes, I … this is Virgil Farrow and …”

Milton shook his head fiercely from side to side, his Pang jowls slapping his freakishly small ears.

“… just me. I wanted to register a
concern
. About Hambone Hank’s Heart Attack Shack. The food is awesome! And the service is really first-rate, efficient without a lot of meaningless chitchat—”

Milton smacked Virgil on the shoulder, gesticulating for him to hurry up.

“The problem is, or might be, anyway … We—I mean
I
—can’t be sure.”

Virgil wiped the sweat pouring down his face like a windshield wiper on a rainy drive.

“But we—I—think he may be using …
souls
in his soul food. Lost souls. Stolen from—”

“Thank you for your comments,” the clown chirped from the cruel crescent of its mouth. “They help make Blimpo a bigger,
better
place to be punished. Have a
blimptastic
day!”

Virgil gazed expectantly at the pasty white clown face. Milton patted him on the back, restraining the Pang hand that wanted to clutch on to Virgil as if he were the ultimate entree.

“We did it your way,” he said cheerily. “Now we’ll do it mine.”

Virgil turned to Milton with alarm. “What do you mean? I thought—”

Milton folded his arms together until they looked like a huge, swollen pretzel.

“Complaining was a great idea,” he said earnestly. “That way, if the vice principals don’t do anything, then we know they’re in on it. Meanwhile, though, we have to take action. Just in case.”

Virgil sagged sadly, like an empty carton of chocolate milk.

“C’mon,” Milton said. “It’ll be like old times. You and me, messing with the system. At least, this time, I promise: no wading in sewers, hip-deep in poop.”

Milton’s smile faded, like an old picture of a smile.

“Though we may find ourselves wading in something
far
worse.”

19 • CALL
i
NG THE B
i
G SHOTS

“WHOA, PARLEZ-VOUS
déjà vu?
” Lester Lobe, a wild-eyed man with gray hair spilling out from beneath a tattered red fez, quipped as Algernon Cole and Damian stepped into his metaphysical museum, the Paranor Mall. A pensive cloud crossed the otherwise sunny, manic sky of Lester Lobe’s face.

“I
didn’t expect to see you again after Milton’s …
accident
.”

Lester Lobe gave Damian the once-over, then smirked at Algernon Cole, exposing a mouth full of nicotine-stained teeth.

“What are you, some kind of kinderlawyer now?” he said. “As if exploiting adults wasn’t bad enough. But,” he added, arms outstretched, spinning in a slow circle among his crowded cathedral of curiosities, “we all have our niches in life, don’t we?”

Algernon Cole extended his arm from his beige suit cuff. He glanced at his Mickey Mouse watch.

“I don’t have time to trip down memory lane with you right now, Mr. Lobe,” he replied. “My client has a very specific request that I, as his counsel, am bound to execute.”

Damian gazed, dumbfounded, at a life-size fiberglass alien statue. It grinned—glittering yet cold and aloof, like a faraway sun.

“This place is every shade of crazy,” he said, wiping his rough-hewn nose.

Lester Lobe smirked. His bloodshot eyes quivered from his morning liter of Pace Breaker soda with a triple shot of espresso.

“The Paranor Mall is just a mirror held up to society, to see if it’s still breathing,” he explained. “UFOs … ESP … MTV … all of life’s hard-to-explain phenomena have a place here, unlike in those snooty, big-city museums where they’re only interested in leading you to the gift shop, not a new conclusion.
They
curate boredom. I, on the other hand,
cure
boredom.”

Lester blew the tassel of his fez out of his eyes.

“Wow, you’re that
other
kid who came back from the dead,” he said with a spooky whisper that reeked of coffee and ashtrays. Lester looked over at Algernon Cole. “You really do run a specialized business: Central Kansas’s go-to lawyer for once-dead minors.
Heavy
. If
you get another client, I might have to dedicate a new wing.”

Damian spat out a sunflower seed husk onto the floor.

“Just show us the way to the mirror booth, freak show,” he sneered. “The one that Milquetoast used.”

Lester puffed up with indignation. “His name was
Milton,”
he said, stepping closer to Damian. “And I don’t have to show you nothing.”

Algernon Cole stepped between them.

“Double negatives notwithstanding,” he said to Lester, “this boy is about to come into some serious
moola …
so we’ll be willing to pay a rather hefty admission price. That money could buy you a whole
fleet
of flying saucers with all the extras thrown in: air-conditioning, leather interior, universal positioning satellite …
the works
. So please take us to your chrysanthemum.”

Lester Lobe rubbed the stubble on his chin as he eyed Damian.

“It’s
Psychomanthium,”
he clarified. “And why is he so gung ho about getting in it?”

Algernon Cole glanced sideways at Damian.

“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure myself.”

Damian widened the cruel, dark slits he used to glower at the world into something masquerading as sincerity.

“Well, speaking of … Milton—Milquetoast was my nickname for the poor little guy,” he said. “It was what he ate for lunch every day. It was all he could afford. Anyway, I thought that I might try to use the psycho-whatever to contact him.”

Lester folded his arms together. “Weren’t you the kid responsible for killing him the first time?” he posed dubiously.

Damian wiped a dry eye.

“Yeah, and I’m all torn up about it,” he replied. “I tell you, there’s nothing like death to make you see life. It’s like looking in the rearview mirror of a stolen car … you see everything race away behind you, except without all the sirens. And when I was toast—you know, dead—I saw Milquetoast,
Milton
, and it made me wish I could have a second chance to make things right.”

He snickered and shook his head.

“In fact, I guess that a
lot
of what I did in the past could be—if you looked at it in a certain way—viewed as less than honorable.”

Damian scratched himself indelicately just south of the belt border.