The Eyes of Kid Midas (2 page)

"Jest looga that dowgie go!" said Hal, putting on a fake Texas accent. "How fast you think we can rope this dowgie, Bertram?"

Kevin had a fleeting image of himself with his arms and legs looped together like a calf in a rodeo, and being left there for the rest of the day.

Hal took the edge off the nelson just enough for Kevin to see Bertram, standing ten feet away. A steady beat pounded from Bertram's tape player, which now rested on the ground, as Bertram dangled Kevin's glasses from his fingers. The game was no longer a rodeo, but a bullfight.

"C'mon, Midas. Come an' get your glasses!" said Bertram.
"Toro, toro!"

Hal cackled with laughter. Kevin, barely able to breathe, could only grunt and snort like a bull.

Josh lurched into the clearing and, as was often the case, immediately took up Kevin's cause. His parents were lawyers, and so Josh had a way of talking sense and logic into onions and potatoes.

"You realize, Bertram," said Josh, "that you're already in enough trouble for the gum in Kirkpatrick's hair. If I were you, I'd lay low for a while."

Kevin could almost hear the advice go in one car, echo a bit, then come out of the other.

"Hal threw it," said Bertram.

"It was
your
gum," said Josh.

Bertram shrugged it off and returned his attention to the bullfight. Then Bertram's music, which had been blaring all the years Kevin knew him, suddenly stopped dead.

Kevin could hear the rush of a distant waterfall and birds singing high up in the pine trees—sounds of nature that must have infuriated Bertram.

"Huh?" said Bertram, turning around. Josh ejected the tape and backed away with it. Kevin's eyes went wide. No one who valued his life turned off Bertram's music. Bertram gritted his thoroughbred teeth, and growled like a hungry pit bull.

"You had best give me back that tape!"

Josh continued to back away with the hostage cassette, heading toward the outhouse.

The small green outhouse was the size of a phone booth, and it had one of those odors you remember for the rest of your life. Josh swung open the door and an unholy strangling stench flowed out like invisible fingers of death.

Bertram started toward him, but Josh held the tape out over the open hole of the grungy toilet.

"Take one more step, and down it goes."

Kevin, still in the crushing grip of the Extremely Full Nelson, watched as Josh Wilson rendered Bertram Tarson speechless. It was a moment for the record books.

"C'mon, Josh, a joke's a joke," pleaded Bertram. "You wouldn't do that . . . would you?"

Josh smiled. "Make you a deal. I'll give you back your music if you let Kevin go and give him back his glasses."

Bertram didn't answer right away.

"The offer is good for five seconds," said Josh.

Bertram turned to Hal and nodded. Hal threw Kevin to the ground, and Kevin gasped a deep breath.

"Good," said Josh. "Now the glasses."

"The tape first."

"You have three seconds," said Josh.

Powerless to bargain, Bertram tossed the glasses to Kevin. Josh then tossed Bertram his tape, keeping his part of the deal—which, under the circumstances, was not the safest thing to do.

"Josh, look out!" yelled Kevin, but it was too late. Bertram grabbed Josh by the neck andsmashed his back against the wall of the outhouse with a thud, pinning him there.

"You touched my tunes," screamed Bertram, his face turning red. "Nobody touches my tunes!" Hal held open the outhouse door, and in one instant the plan became painfully clear. Bertram and Hal began to pull Josh headfirst toward the outhouse.

"Listen," reasoned Josh, "you really don't want to do this. . . . Think of your conscience!"

"I ain't got one," said Bertram.

That's when Kevin threw the pinecone. It whizzed through the air and bounced off the back of Bertram's head.

Bertram slowly turned to Kevin, who stood across the clearing with the determination of a gunslinger. Kevin had taken enough. He could sense something igniting inside himself—something that was about to explode.

"Oh my God!" said Josh—realizing that Kevin meant business.

Bertram offered up a sinister smile at Kevin's foolhardy attempt at bravery. "
You
threw a pine- cone at
me,
Midas?"

Kevin, unflinching, pushed the glasses farther up on his face, and two words growled themselves out from the back of his throat.

"Your mother."

Bertram's smile faded. The only thing more sacred than Bertram's music was his mother. He dropped Josh, forgetting him completely, and stared at Kevin, fists clenched. His face was popping blood vessels, and his whole body quivered in fury.

"My mother what?"

Kevin clenched his own fists and readied himself for the fight. He stared straight at Bertram from across the clearing and shot his words from the hip.

"Your
mother's
a pinecone."

A hundred yards away, at the campsight, Miss Argus, the math teacher, was lovingly snipping gum out of Mr. Kirkpatrick's hair. So involved were they in their minor surgical procedure that neither they nor the other teachers observing the operation noticed when Ian Axelrod, finally turning up, came bounding from the woods and announced, "Hey, everyone, Bertram's fighting Kevin Midas!"

In a matter of seconds all twenty kids had vanished from the campsight, racing through the woods to see the fight of the century.

Kevin and Bertram rolled in the dirt, both delivering punch after punch. In seconds they were surrounded by a cheering mass of kids who were thrilled that somebody—anybody—was going to get beaten up. Josh tried to break it up, but Hal put him in an Extremely Full Nelson.

Kevin had exploded, all right—he was a fireball of fury, finding more strength in himself than he'd ever known he had. At last he had discovered the courage to stand up to Bertram! At last, after all these years, Bertram would get what he deserved: humiliation at the hands of Kevin Midas.

But as it sometimes goes, Kevin's fury just wasn't enough. Bertram was simply bigger and stronger—and all the righteous rage in the world wasn't going to change that.

In the end, Bertram pinned Kevin down by the neck with one hand and brandished the pinecone in the other, holding it above Kevin's mouth.

"Open wide, Mid
ass
," said Bertram.

"Go to hell, Bertram!" yelled Kevin defiantly, and with that, Bertram rammed the entire pinecone into Kevin's mouth, until Kevin's cheeks bulged like a chipmunk's.

Bertram got off Kevin, and stepped back to admire his handiwork.

Then everyone but Josh began to laugh at Kevin—even Nicole Patterson, the girl whom Kevin had a not-so-secret crush on. The humiliation hurt worse than his black eye and swelling mouth.

"Hey," said some clown, "Kevin's eating a high- fiber diet!" More laughter.

Kevin reached into his mouth and carefully dislodged the pinecone.

The crowd started to thin, but Bertram still stood there like a proud hunter over his kill. Just besideBertram were Kevin's glasses, which had fallen during the fight. Without taking his eyes off Kevin, Bertram lifted his foot and very slowly brought his dirty Reebok down on the glasses, grinding them into the dusty ground with all of his weight until the glasses snapped.

"Oops," said Bertram. He lifted his foot from the broken glasses, grabbed his tape player, and left the clearing, his victory now complete.

Three weeks into the new school year, and his glasses were already destroyed.

"He's gonna pay for this," mumbled Kevin, fighting back tears. "He's gonna pay."

Josh just shook his head as he helped Kevin up. "Somebody's got to do something about him," said Josh. "The psycho's totally out of control."

As they left, Kevin turned to look up at the mountain, which was nothing but a big blur now.
"He's gonna pay,"
Kevin would always say when Bertram laid into him, but lately Kevin wasn't sure that Bertram would ever pay for anything. He wondered if the world was really a place where all the Bertrams and Hals were somehow brought to justice—or if it was like the mountain, which merely watched in silence as Kevin was beaten to a pulp.

CHAPTER 2

The Divine Watch

Kevin didn't think of climbing the mountain until much later that night. The idea first occurred to him sometime around twilight, but he pushed it away. There were more pressing things to think about. Like how was he going to face the world looking the way he did?

It was sunset now, and the white cliff of the mountain had taken on a bright red face, bathing the campsite in unearthly shades of scarlet and vermilion. Most of the other kids were clustered around the campfire, making s'mores, but Kevin wasn't about to leave his tent.

His small travel mirror showed him an eye as bruised as they come and lips puffy and swollen from the painful kiss of the pinecone. He barely recognized himself.

Bertram had, of course, received a reprimand from Kirkpatrick and was "put on warning"—the same warning he had lived under his entire life. Hehad no problems facing the world with a reprimand.

But for Kevin to go out now, with the evidence of Bertram's victory all over his face—-that he couldn't do. So instead he just stayed inside, peering out of the slit of his open tent like a hermit.

It was Josh who dragged him out.

"If you don't come out," said Josh, "it'll make Bertram look even better. It'll mean he beat you up so bad you were ashamed to show your face."

Kevin had to accept the logic, as much as he hated to.

The sun was already beneath the horizon when Kevin shuffled over to the campfire. Now the mountain reflected a rich purple blanket across the campsite that clashed with the flickering orange flames of the fire.

Kevin couldn't quite make out the faces, but he imagined that they all stared at him as he sat down.

He grabbed a marshmallow stick and poked it into the fire, sending sparks that flew into the air and faded quickly out of focus. Embarrassed to look up, Kevin just listened as Kirkpatrick rambled on in his earth-science sort of way about the mountain.

"The Divine Watch," he said, "is a mountain of mystery, a place with roots dating back thousands of years." Kirkpatrick turned to look at the dark peak, its shade of violet getting deeper and deeper. "It was sacred to the Native Americans. They called it 'The Eye of God.' "

Now Kevin began to pay attention. When he squinted, he could make out Kirkpatrick's face across the fire. He was leaning into the center of the circle, drawing everyone into the story.

"The Native Americans believed that the sun- god peered off the top of the mountain each morning to drive back the forces of darkness and clear a path for the coming day. They feared that if he slept through dawn and didn't fight back the darkness, the sun would never rise again, and the world would be thrown into chaos."

Kevin reached into his pocket and pulled out a badly scratched eyeglass lens. He peered through it at the mountain. Its face was completely black now—an absolute ebony against a sky filling with stars.

Kevin began to forget his swollen mouth and black eye as he listened to Mr. Kirkpatrick weave the ancient legend.

"There's a prophecy," said Mr. Kirkpatrick, "that goes something like this:"

The flames began to leap higher as he spoke.

In the balance of dark and day, The endless battle; the lasting peace, Our lives are born of the dying dream, In the balance of dark and day.

"What does it mean?" someone asked.

"It
means"
said Nicole Patterson, who alwaysknew what everything
meant,
"that if morning never came, we would sleep forever and never wake up."

"Something like that," said Mr. Kirkpatrick, raising his eyebrows.

Bertram tossed a plastic fork into the fire.

"Dumb Indians," said Bertram. "What do they know?" The plastic fork twisted to a slow, painful end in the flames.

"I think they knew quite a lot, Bertram," said Mr. Kirkpatrick, "because that's not where the story ends." The last glow of twilight was gone from the sky now, and the fire played on Mr. Kirkpatrick's face. That and his crazy gum-shorn hair made him look like a shaman—an Indian medicine man.

"There's another place," he said, "fifty miles to the west, called the Devil's Punch Bowl. It's a huge bowl a mile wide, carved into the stone like the crater of a meteor, and in the very center of the bowl is a tall spike of rock, hundreds of feet high. That spike is called the Devil's Chair."

"So?" said Hal.

"So," said Mr. Kirkpatrick, "about a hundred years ago, two astronomers discovered something incredible! They discovered that the shadow of the very tip of the Divine Watch rests on the Devil's Chair at dawn, twice a year!"

"When?" asked Josh.

"I know!" Kevin blurted out. " 'In the balance of dark and day.' That must be the spring and fall equinox—it's the only time when both the day and night are exactly twelve hours long!"

Mr. Kirkpatrick gave a broad shaman's smile.

Josh smiled back at him, calling his bluff. "How conveeeeenient," said Josh, "that tomorrow is September twenty-first—the fall equinox. C'mon, Mr. Kirkpatrick—the whole thing's a bunch of baloney, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Bertram agreed, greatly relieved. "I knew it. I knew it all along."

"Maybe," said Mr. Kirkpatrick. "And maybe not." With that, he got up from the circle and poured a bucket of water on the flames. "Pleasant dreams," he said as the steamy smoke rose to meet the heavens.

The moon peeked its full, round face from behind the Divine Watch, casting a pitch-black shadow of the mountain across the forest.

There were more stars in the sky than Kevin had ever seen before. Enough to make the sky seem impossibly deep, and the universe impossibly large. Kevin had done a comprehensive ten-page report on the universe last year. There were supernovas and giant quasars out there at the far reaches of existence. There were billions of stars in each galaxy, and there were more galaxies than people on the face of the earth. Just thinking about it could make a person realize how small and insignificant his own problems were.