Crab Town (2 page)

Johnny Balloon is on his way to the bank, but he’s thinking of seeing a movie today. Johnny loves going to the movies. It’s one of the few things a balloon can enjoy. Unfortunately, balloon people are usually not very welcome in movie theaters. The other movie-goers think their squeaky balloon sounds are annoying and ruin the movie-going experience. For this reason, Johnny tries to see movies during the day, when the theater is mostly empty.

Holding a newspaper over his cinder block as he walks, he checks to see what is playing at the town theater. He opens his knapsack and pulls out a watch. It’s still early. He has plenty of time, if things go smoothly. He puts the watch back into the bag, careful not to cut himself on anything sharp within.

Since balloon people have their clothes permanently painted onto their bodies, they don’t have any pockets. They have to store everything in bags they carry. It is possible for balloons to wear watches, but Johnny would rather not. He thinks it feels weird on his wrist.

Johnny stops in his tracks. He looks at the ground. While reading the newspaper, he wasn’t watching where he was going. He almost steps on broken glass. Just like a regular balloon, Johnny Balloon can easily be popped. One little prick will cause his balloon body to explode.

Scanning the ground, there are several broken beer bottles all around him. Slivers of glass cover the sidewalk and the street on both sides. Johnny folds up the newspaper and puts it in his bag, then carefully backs away. He’d rather play it safe and take the long way to the bank than try to tiptoe through the shards of glass.

But as he walks backward, he hears a
clink
as he kicks some glass with the back of his heel. When he turns around, he realizes there are more broken bottles behind him as well. He wonders how he got through all of that without popping. He must have accidentally stepped in all the right places without paying any attention.

“It must be my lucky day,” he says.

But then he realizes he’s trapped within the circle of glass. He squeak-rubs his forehead, contemplating his best course of action. One of the problems with getting rid of the gravity devices that were attached to his feet is that they used to act as protective footwear. Before, he could have walked over this glass with no worry. Now, it’s not so easy to walk safely through the streets.

Examining carefully, he realizes he’s going to have to jump over it. Safety is only five feet away. He believes he can make it, even if he won’t get much of a running start.

He bends his knees, flexing his rubber legs with a
squeak-squeak
.

“Come on, Johnny Balloon,” he tells himself. “You can do it.”

Then he jumps, but with the weight of the cinder block in his arms he doesn’t go very far.

“You
can’t
do it,” he cries, in midair.

As he watches his feet drop toward a sharp blade of glass, Johnny drops the cinder block. With the loss of weight, his body flies away from the ground, spinning toward the sky. Once he’s three stories up, his balloon string goes taut and ceases his ascent. He rolls over in the air and looks down at the people walking by on the street below. None of them seem to notice that he’s floating above them. None of them offer to help him out.

“No problem,” he says. “I’ve prepared for this…”

He swims through the air and grabs the string below him. This is something he’s practiced in his apartment several times before.

“All I have to do is climb down…”

One hand after another, he pulls himself down the string.

“Easy peasy…”

But once he’s seven feet from the ground, he isn’t quite sure what to do from there. The ground is still covered in glass. He tries calling out to the people walking by, but they just ignore him, going around, annoyed that he’s taking up their sidewalk.

“Fine, I don’t need help. I’m sure I can figure this out on my own…”

He tries tugging on his balloon string to pull it across the sidewalk, out of the glass. It moves an inch.

“There you go, Johnny Balloon,” he says. “It’s going to work just fine…”

He pulls it again, harder, moving it a whole foot across the ground this time.

“You’re the smartest balloon in town,” he says with a giggle.

He tugs on it again. The string breaks.

“Wuh…” Johnny says, as he sees the end of the string separate from the cinder block.

He floats further into the air, screaming for help, trying to swim-fly, trying to grab onto the light post that is only another arm’s reach away. Nobody even looks at him. His gaseous brain spins inside his hollow shell of a head as he drifts higher and higher toward the blue abyss above.

When he was a kid in grade school, Johnny learned about the Great Depression in history class.

He asked his teacher, “What’s the difference between the Great Depression and our times?”

The teacher looked out the window at the war torn city and said, “Our times are a heck of a lot worse.”

Johnny didn’t really understand the definition of the word
depression
, even after his school had closed down due to lack of funding. He regularly heard people call the current era the
Greater
Depression, but his father said a more apt term for it would be the
Infinite
Depression…

“Because there’s no hope of ever getting out of this one…”

When Johnny became an adult, the depression only got worse. He lost his job at the canning factory and had to move to the Crab Town area of Freedom City, where all the other jobless people live. The Great Depression Era had Hoovervilles. These days, there are Crab Towns.

“Why’s it called a Crab Town, anyway?” Johnny asked one of his neighbors.

The neighbor was an elderly woman suffering from radiation sickness. She coughed a pool of blood into her palm and wiped it on a crusty brown t-shirt before answering, “Because everyone in this section of city lives in CRABs.”

CRAB stands for Citizen Renovated Abandoned Building. After the end of the war, once neither side could afford to pay for any more bombs to drop, the government proposed the idea of Crab Towns.

“If you can renovate it, you can own it.” That was what they said at the time.

Since many people were out of work and living in the streets, and most of the bombed sections of the city had been abandoned, it seemed like a good way to rebuild the cities while at the same time give the less fortunate citizens somewhere to live. Unfortunately, those who were in need of homes did not have the resources to repair buildings that had been partially leveled by atomic blasts.

But Johnny was happy in his apartment in Crab Town. He used a tarp instead of a south wall, there wasn’t any running water, and he could see into the apartments below and above him via multiple holes, but it was home. And Johnny kind of liked it. That is, until he was so desperate for money that he decided to have the operation to become a balloon man. His apartment wasn’t a very happy place after that. Even those living in Crabs didn’t like having balloon people around.

Johnny grabs hold of a windowsill six stories up. His legs dangling up in the air above his head as he looks inside. There’s a young naked woman near the window, washing soap from her face and semi-pregnant belly with a hose attached to her kitchen sink.

When he sees her, Johnny yells, “
Help!
” as he tries to climb inside.

The woman sees him and shrieks. She grabs a mildew-encrusted towel and covers her breasts. The cloth is too small to hide the rest of her body, which is coated in razor scars.

“Please,” Johnny cries, his fingers slipping. “Please…”

The woman sneers at him. “Get out of here you perverted creep!”

“No, that’s not it…” Johnny says.

Then she lifts her large sawdust-covered foot and kicks him in the face. His balloon head bounces off of her heel, launching him out of the window.

“I’m floating away!” Johnny yells.

“Serves you right!” The woman pulls a knife out of the kitchen sink and tosses it through the window at him.

The blade barely misses Johnny’s shoulder.

“Don’t do that!” he says.

She throws another knife at him, then a few forks. Johnny’s lucky she’s a bad aim. He drifts up past her window before she can pop him.

A breeze comes in and blows him down the street, toward a crowd of people crossing a busy intersection.

“Help me!” Johnny cries, but nobody bothers looking up.

He blows past them and goes over another group of people down the block.

“Help!”

A fat guy with bloody teeth looks up from his hot dog to watch Johnny’s plight for entertainment. The man smiles and then takes another bite of hot dog.

The balloon string gets tangled up in a tree and catches Johnny from moving any further. His body just whips around in the breeze. After ten minutes of begging for help from passersby, he gives up. He realizes he can’t rely on anyone but himself in this city. He grabs his string and pulls himself in toward the nearest tree branch.

When he gets to the bottom of the trunk, he fills his knapsack with pieces of rubble from the street. Lucky for him, the streets are always filled with debris. Even the buildings in the middle class side of town are falling apart. Once his bag is the right weight to keep him on the ground, he unties his string from the branch.

“Thank God that wasn’t a pine tree…”

He waits for a large black sewer crab to cross the sidewalk before continuing on. The sewer crab looks a little too snippy. After all that he’s already been through, Johnny decides he’s going to have to play it safe for the rest of the day.