Deathskull Bombshell

Bethany Ebert

This novel is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, businesses, locations, events, and incidents are either
the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious
manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or
actual events, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 Bethany Ebert

All rights reserved. This book or any portion
thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the author.

This novel was previously published under the
title
Twisted Meniscus
. It was later edited for clarity and
formatting. A number of details have been changed, such as the name
of the band, the title of the book, and several poorly-worded
sentences.

The cover photograph was taken by Iamlawrenc
at http://www.freeimages.com and edited by the author using Paint
and Gimp software. It abides by the terms of the Freeimages.com
Content License Agreement. Use of cover photograph does not imply
photographer’s endorsement of viewpoints contained in this
novel.

As this book is a fictional story set in
contemporary times, the names of some musicians, celebrities,
automobile companies, and other pop culture entities have been
included. Use of these names does not imply any endorsement of the
novel or viewpoints expressed therein.

ISBN 978-1-311-42384-9

Fourth edition

September 2015

One of the hardest things about sibling road
trips was the radio problem. Nobody could agree on music. Parker
liked punk. Kylie liked pop. Margot liked books-on-tape.

The Beloit family had a rule. Whoever drove
controlled the radio. They had a second rule, though: if “Head Like
a Hole” by Nine Inch Nails was on, you had to turn the volume up. A
long time ago, someone said it was the anthem for anyone who’d been
to boarding school. After that, Parker’s dad made the rule. It
seemed funny, making up a rule to fight other rules. Then again,
industrial rock wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to
anyone.

At least it wasn’t Justin Bieber.

As the years wore on, sibling road trips
became less frequent. Margot’s teaching internship kept her busy
with mountains of homework and curriculum planning sheets. Kylie
had field hockey every week. Parker started up classes at the tech
school to try and get educated. But it was the fall pow-wow. You
couldn’t miss that one. They loaded up the Honda Civic and drove
halfway across the state.

Ma and Dad and Grandma decided to carpool
with a few neighborhood elders. They brought Hunter along, which
was fine with Parker. At six years old, Hunter took great joy in
driving everybody insane. He acted out, always throwing food on the
ground, yelling random shit, laughing at jokes that nobody else
understood. Sometimes he’d pick up the phone when it rang and sing
the theme song to
Spongebob Squarepants
. Punk.

Parker didn’t think of his parents as elders.
They were just his parents. They did parent things. But to the
community, they were important. Pillars, someone said one time.
Parker pictured a big building with his mom and dad struggling to
hold up the roof.

Parker’s grandma, Anetta-Lin Skunk, made a
name for herself out in the world as a great Cherokee poet. She was
proud of her heritage, even though there were hardly any Cherokee
in their part of Wisconsin and most of them ran off and married
white people anyway. Anetta-Lin had two daughters, but she never
married. Being alone helped her work.

Ma taught literature at Spartan High School,
where Parker and Margot used to go to school. Kylie went there now.
Besides being a teacher, Ma liked to cook. Growing up poor, she
learned to work with whatever was in the kitchen, even if it wasn’t
real gourmet quality. Sometimes you had to just deal with it.

Dad didn’t work, but he was still important.
He wasn’t a goddamn bum like all those goddamn bums by the liquor
store, he liked to say. He volunteered at the soup kitchens. He did
his time in the war, he never asked for nothing. Everything he had,
he worked for it. Everyone would nod and say “that’s right”. He was
the sort of man who was right, Parker’s dad, even if he swore all
the time. Old John Beloit was a great Ojibwe man, a warrior. He
fought at Desert Storm. He would have fought more wars too but his
leg got all tore up. The world needed more warrior men like Old
John Beloit.

This, Parker heard again and again at the
pow-wow. Parker was his name, but they always called him Junior or
John Junior because he looked so much like his father. John Junior,
they’d call him, boozhoo John Junior, namadabin, come sit down, so
he’d go sit down and hear stories. Old John’s bravery at Desert
Storm. The kitten in the tree back in ‘87. How he met Mrs. Beloit.
On and on. He got pretty sick of hearing about his father from
everybody. He’d known the man for twenty-eight years, for Pete’s
sake. There were only so many new things you could learn about a
person. But it made them happy to talk, so he’d listen anyway.

And then sometimes, but only sometimes,
they’d stop to ask, how are you doing? Aaniish naa ezhiyaayin?
What’s been going on? And sometimes they’d remember his name was
actually Parker and not John Junior. But only sometimes.

As for what was going on, he never knew the
right answer.

“Got a girlfriend yet?” asked one of the
grandfathers. He wasn’t really Parker’s grandfather. Out of
respect, they called old people “grandfather” and
“grandmother”.

Parker looked away and bit his tongue, tried
to hide his hand with the ring on it. He didn’t want to talk about
it.

“Oh, he’s in love, I can tell,” another
grandfather said. He was drunk. “Hah-hah. Go get ‘em, old John
Junior. Parker. Old John Parker. Parker Junior.” Coughing and
laughing, he slapped Parker’s back with a thick, meaty hand and
started muttering to himself.

Parker walked around for a while. The Ojibwe
singers were chanting and beating drums. In the weeks before the
pow-wow, they practiced at the community center almost every day.
Walking past the building, the pounding drum and the singing struck
his eardrums and for a while, it was all he heard. Sometimes he
wished he would have taken up with them. They had a good sound. But
he was a bassist, not a drummer. Sometimes you had to let other
people do their thing and appreciate it without adding to it.

Nobody could do everything.

Eventually he found his old friend Stevie,
smoking tobacco with a couple other guys.

“Hey, what’s up,” Stevie said, smoothing his
long hair back. He took a drag on his cigarette. Sparrow tobacco,
hand-rolled, his usual.

“Not much,” said Parker.

Stevie passed him the cigarette. It wasn’t a
question so much as a greeting with him. You knew he cared, but at
the same time he didn’t care. Stevie’s personal life ran on gentle
apathy. “Still working at that Phat’s place?”

“Nah,” Parker said, taking a hit of the
cigarette. The paper was wet where Stevie’s lips had been earlier.
He felt his heart beat a bit faster, thinking on that. Shut up, he
told his heart. He had a crush on Stevie a long time ago, way back.
It always seemed to resurface at times like this. “Got a job
volunteering at the library.”

“How the hell you gonna make any money
volunteering? Damn, niijii, get a real job,” Stevie said, but you
could tell he was joking. He hit Parker on the back a couple times,
and Parker coughed out the rest of the tobacco smoke.

“They pay me,” he protested.

“So it’s not really volunteering, then,
huh.”

Parker smoked the cigarette again, taking an
extra-long drag this time to compensate for the smoke he’d lost.
“Well, they didn’t draft me.”

Stevie cracked up. “You’re alright,
Parker.”

“You still play bass?” one of the other guys
asked. He looked familiar, but Parker forgot his name. Ben? He
looked like a Ben, with his wispy facial hair and sideways baseball
cap. Ben had a girl with him, long-legged with choppy pink-red
hair, drunk and clinging to his arm. She looked like she’d fall
over.

“Not really,” Parker said. No, he meant, but
he said not really. He still fucked with the bass on his own, and
he’d had a few gigs as a substitute bassist with musician friends
of Elizabeth and Trevor, but the good old days were gone.

The guy’s girlfriend smiled up at him through
thick eyelashes. “I play bass,” she said, grinning.

“No, you don’t,” her boyfriend said.

She hit him on the shoulder. “Whatever, I do
too.”

The pow-wow made for a long day, and Parker
felt grateful for the ride home.

Kylie drove the Civic, trying out her new
license. She loved pow-wows, so many men to gawk at, and she loved
especially the dancing, the women with their jewelry, all the food
anyone could need and then more food just in case you needed extra.
She blasted Carly Rae Jepson and One Direction on the way back.

Parker looked out at the road, watching the
sky turn from blue to darker blue to inky black. The stars flew
past, glittering, beads and sequins in the night sky. It was cold
out.

A lot of the guys ended up homeless lately.
Him and Jimmy and Dan passed a forty around at the pow-wow and they
told him all about it. Sleeping on crappy mattresses at the shelter
or in the bushes at the park, avoiding cops.

Shitty.

All three of them grew up together. Parker
didn’t know how he ended up in college while they were stuck on the
streets. Wasn’t fair. He expected Jimmy’s money-making schemes and
Dan’s natural ease with women would put them ahead of the game
soon, though.

They’d be okay.

Margot sat in the backseat, chewing on a
bobby pin and looking over term papers with a flashlight. Lately
her internship ate up most of her time. She wanted to be a math
teacher. Margot was a serious sort of person, a bit older and more
cynical than most twenty-two-year-olds. During the traditional
dances, she always complained of a sore leg. The only boy she
wanted to dance with was far away in Afghanistan. She swore never
to dance until his return.

Margot was okay, though. She was the one who
figured it out first, about Parker and Nick O’Doole. To her credit,
she never said a bad word about it, just “oh, well, that’s nice”,
and went back to her copy of
The Hobbit
.

Kylie, by comparison, treated it with her
usual stupidity when he told her, cracking lame jokes to get on his
nerves. “Does he have a wide stance? Are you gonna start listening
to RuPaul now?” But she thought Nick was cute with his glasses and
funny red hair, so she didn’t mind. It was just another thing to
make fun of.

Still, he couldn’t bring Nick to the pow-wow.
Natives only. A few white people showed up every so often, usually
news journalists or girlfriends of tribal members, but Nick’s
parents were known in the community for being anthropology
professors. Pow-wows weren’t for white people’s academic benefit.
Even though Nick wasn’t in college, he was still his father’s son.
It would have been too hard to keep Nick away from everybody,
anyway. All the talking. They got mean sometimes.

Ma knew, of course, she always did, and
Grandma Skunk figured it out eventually. She wasn’t stupid, Grandma
Skunk liked to say, just old. Even his father knew. He didn’t
approve, but he took it more seriously after the wedding. It was a
rule in the Beloit house, though. Nobody could mention Nick O’Doole
to anyone, especially not the elders. And if they did, they could
only call him Parker’s roommate, or his friend.

He wore the ring, but he didn’t answer any
questions about it. It wasn’t really their business.

Kylie turned the radio up. It was her
favorite pop musician Blake Lucas’s hit single, “Baby I Really Love
You”. She sang along, attempting to match Blake Lucas’s syrupy
baritone to her second soprano. “Baby, I really love you,” she
sang. “I really, really do-ooh. Baby, I don’t think you understand
the lo-o-ove I have for you.”

Parker hated Blake Lucas. Bleak Mucus was
more like it. Dude was a toothpaste advertisement wrapped in a shoe
advertisement. He decided to counter with his favorite band Death
Death Metal. “Dead babies,” he growled in a low voice. “Dead
babies. I eat babies. Everything is dead.”

“Oh, shut up,” Kylie said.

“What, I can’t sing? Why do you get to sing
and I don’t?”

“Because my music isn’t stupid,” she said,
turning the volume up.

Parker would never allow himself to be
defeated by such a man as Blake Lucas. He sang louder, trying to
sound like the guy from Underoath. “Dead babies,” he yelled at the
top of his lungs. “Whoa whoa. I bit the head off a bird. Everything
is pain. Pain.”