Jack dropped the buddle in a heap on the floor of the Old Jensen Place. Dust plumed up when the bag hit and made itself a little crater. They were all still nervous and silent. Jack looked around, eyes wide; the others shuffled their feet. As the dust settled Jack looked at the massive dark corners, at the rafters where who-knew-what lived, at the jumbles of old things gone to rust. Jack saw something else. He didn’t feel the strain of carrying the bag right then. And he wasn’t scared.
“Well, where’s the girls at,” Tony said and did this cackling laugh. “Darrel, I thought you said there was gonna be girls here,” that laugh again. That was Tony, always thinking about girls. His dad had a couple of magazines he claimed to have seen. Jack didn’t see what the big deal was. Girls weren’t stupid, like they were when he was younger, but they certainly weren’t as cool as Tony made them out to be.
“Shut up, dweeb!” Darrel said and socked Tony right in the shoulder.
“I’ve got some matches. If we find some wood we can make a fire,” oh, man. Jack didn’t mean to say that, he really didn’t. Especially when Darrel turned his face toward Jack’s, he still wore that sour expression.
He took a deep breath, he was already a big kid and when he did that he got even bigger. Jack was nervous again. “You know, the Dork’s right,” his eyes scanned the empty doorways and vacant holes in the roof. “It’s getting’ dark guys. Let’s get some firewood together so the Dork can use his matches,” Darrel kind of chuckled in his chest and got Jack on the shoulder. At least it wasn’t a punch, he used his open hand.
All of them set out in different directions. Each one went to a corner where the brush was the thickest. Jack went towards the north east corner, he thought he saw an old bench or counter or something. The darker the air around him got the bigger did his eyes.
Jack saw the counter. Saw it with freshly Windex’ed glass and those white tube lights – knee-on, something, - he saw the shelves inside, clean and full of comic books. The comics that came in plastic sleeves, the one’s you didn’t open. First additions and signed copies lined the shelves that only Jack saw. He stepped back a pace or two and looked at the walls. There they were, all comic companies represented at the top of each rack. They were ordered from oldest to newest somehow. His eyes fell on his favorite section. The smallest section in the only Collin’s County comic store was huge here. It filled a whole section, from support pole to support pole, from the ceiling all the way to the top. Except in the middle. Above the massive section, in the coolest letters and the emblem and all, a sign said: Dark Horse. Jack loved Dark Horse comics.
“You like it?” a voice surprised him. He recognized it, but couldn’t place it. He looked where the voice came from, behind the counter. He recognized the face, too. Short hair and slight stubble on the cheeks marked him for a middle aged ‘grown-up’. “You like what you see?”
Jack stammered. He was lost for words. The man’s gaze held him paralyzed. He thought maybe his mouth was doing that thing fish do when they’re out of the water.
“It’s great, I’ll tell you. This town always needed a good comic shop. Come on, Jack, you know that. Sure when you’re old as me…” the man chuckled. “Tastes change in this town, in every town, really. But you can do it Jack. You’re going to get it.”
“You’re going to get it,” Jack blinked and the darkness of the old Jensen Place came back into focus. “You’re going to get it!”
Darrel. Darrel was mad now and Jack really didn’t know what he wanted. He turned around just in time for a Darrel shoulder slug. He grunted and stumbled a little. “Go, Dork! Go get the rest of the wood. You think the rest of us are your slaves or somethin’? Go. Now!” He leaned back. Jack saw what was coming, a ‘super Darrel shoulder slug’. He busied himself with the broken wood from the ancient counter and the dead brush around it.
They built a woodpile and Jack fumbled with the matches in the glow of flashlights. The sun had long sat and the shadows grew until they met and two became one, and so on until all was darkness. Although he fumbled with the matches the wood was dry enough to catch pretty quick and soon they had a fire going.
In the dancing, chaotic light from the fire they set out their sleeping bags. The four of them made a square around the flaming pile. Tony and Darrel with their heads close together and the same with Scotty and Jack.
Jack couldn’t see across the flames but he thought he heard something over where Darrel and Tony were. He didn’t dare ask what they were doing, if Darrel wanted him to know he’d say something. And besides, he was probably just hearing things. Suddenly, a heavy, shiny, metal rectangle thumped onto his sleeping bag. “You did good Jacky,” that was Darrel. Jack hated it when he called him Jacky. “Have a drink. You called it about the firewood and the matches. It won’t hurt you.”
Jack raised the flask to his lips with shaky hands. He’d heard about this. Even seen his parents ‘drunk’ a few times. When the fumes hit his nose he almost tossed the flask in the fire. But he couldn’t back down, not now. Not with the whole gang here in front of him. Scotty was even looking at him with insults on the tip of his tongue, and Scotty was the nice one.
He closed his eyes and held his breath and upended the flask in his mouth. His whole head was instantly on fire and his throat was closing off. For one terrifying moment he thought he was dying, that Darrel and the rest had played a big mean joke on him and his death was the punch line. He coughed and coughed – the places on his chin that caught drips of the booze were on fire too – and as it died down in his throat to merely hitches in his chest, he heard them laughing. They were rolling.
“Way to go Jack!”
“Knew you could do it!”
“You’re only half a sissy now, Jack,” Darrel said last. “Okay, now, tell us a story Jack. We’re all going to take turns. What happened here Jack,” he paused. “Have another drink first.”
Jack took him up on the offer, the second drink went down much smoother than the first, not easy, but a little less harsh. His cheeks were hot, at first he thought it was from the fire but after he thought about it he realized the warmth in his cheeks started in his belly and radiated up his throat. Okay, what happened here?
“I heard that Old Man Jensen ran an old paper mill here and one night he went mad and brought his five kids up here and their mom too and put ‘em all under one of the smasher press things and he crushed them,” he looked around at his friends. They were all looking at him like he wasn’t finished. Maybe he wasn’t.
“Old Man Jensen fell to his knees in their blood and laughed and laughed and died laughing…” Jack took a deep breath and pointed out behind him, out to the edge of the firelight. Darrel and Tony were up on their elbows peering over the fire and Darrel was reaching for the flask as Scotty passed it to him.
“Right over there,” Jack said and looked them all in the eye one by one. Of course they were looking out into the darkness. What he meant to do then was yell something like BOO, or AARR, but the thought of them all jumping out of their skin was too much for him. Loud bellows of laughter and strangled breath came out of his mouth without warning. Jack doubled up on his sleeping bag and clutched his stomach. Soon, they were all rolling with giggles.
They all felt the effects of the whiskey after the second drink but the flask continued around. And so did the stories, getting sillier and sillier. Only Jack didn’t have anymore. His fuzzy mind couldn’t stop thinking about how great it would be to have a really, really, big comic store right here.
Eventually they all fell asleep – or passed out. The morning was terrible and Darrel was the worst. Terrible with a capital ‘T’. But they got the gear together and made their way back to their bikes and eventually back to Darrel’s house. There, they slept off the last of the hangover and Scotty, Tony and Jack all made it back home for supper. None of them talked about that night, ever. Nothing need be said but they all understood on some level that amidst the silly stories and the fuzzy feelings that came out of the flask they were all terrified. Scared beyond anything they would experience until much, much, later in their lives.
Jack never talked about it but that afternoon and the vision of the comic shop decided for him. That one night at the old scary Jensen place in Johnsfords Hollow showed Jack his destiny. He knew he would open a comic shop, he just knew it. But tastes change in towns, everywhere perhaps, over the course of years and by the time Jack was middle aged with close-cropped hair and a scrim of stubble on his cheeks it was a bar he was opening. A bar him and Tony played pool in sometimes, drank beer, and didn’t talk about the old days. The days when Darrel was still around.
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