25 Hour Watch

The green and white tennis shoe laced tight to his right foot had unraveled and come undone.  His left was lost a mile back, when he dashed across the Belkin’s muddy lawn.  Five toes had already been exposed and he was in danger of showing off all ten, but still, he ran.  Through wet grass, he dodged a tree, a mail box, and when he looked back for a micro-second to see if he’d really just missed a bird feeder that hung from a low branch on a cottonwood, he slammed into a company of trash cans.  A glorious explosion of body to bins produced a frantic display of garbage and limbs, into the street, into the night, and created a havoc of neighborhood barks, and curious lights.  He pulled himself out from the gnarl of wreckage and felt himself captured like a high-beamed deer.  Around the street-lit cul-de-sac, the neighbors had gathered at their windows, their open doors; they peered down at the mangled mess of week-old disposal, spread across their suburban street.  Like the buck he’d pictured before, Jack white-eyed back at his awe struck, aggravated audience, then he bound away.  With one shoe on, and one shoe nearly off, Jack continued to run.

He gasped and pulled more air into his enlarged lungs.  His heels struck the ground, he rolled each foot up to the toe, and he lifted his legs in alternating, ninety degree, rhythmic motions, metering through the damp spring night.  Since he’d lost a shoe in the garden, he ran a little off balance, but still in control, his body propelled across the evening.  Under a gibbous moon, he left damp silhouettes of a heel and five digits, and one geen and white tennis shoe.

The dark blue polo shirt he’d picked several hours earlier had grown soggy in the humid night.  Mixed with the stench of rot from untied trash bags, Jack shed his top and tucked it into the waist of his brown cargo shorts.  A navy streak, a tail, now trailed behind him; he felt his legs burn for relief, his lungs call for reprieve.  The sprint he’d maintained for nearly three miles had finally slown to a jog, which gradually slowed to a walk.  Valves had opened all over his body causing faucets of sweat to pour at full blast.  Now bent at the hips, hands on his knees, he yearned for recovery and felt his body tingle with runner’s high. Euphoric, and miserable, feeling the joy of success, his body thumped.  He felt the pipelines of life work as they pumped.  Blood from his heart, into his arms, down through his chest, into his legs, he felt the raw power pulse in his exposed toes.  From under that streetlight, where he bent to recover, he could see up the hill.  To the mansion that overlooked the city, three miles away.  The Belkin tower, the haunted house.  The woods and trees, now covered in 198 jumbo rolls of single ply festivity.

Somewhere out there, in the distance of the night, he knew they were searching for him.  All of them.  Friend and foe, searching for Jack.  The Mastermind. The culprit.  The trickster no one could find.  He’d orchestrated a beautiful symphony.  Conducted the melodic silence of fourteen eager participants in the prank everyone talked about, but no one had tried.  Come hell or whatever, Jack had decided, he would be the first.  He’d drawn up schematics, laid out the plan; and with text message, timed precision, the strike had been made.

52 jumbos remained somewhere up there on the hill near the garden, but when the light from the attic went on in the old mansion, 28 legs scattered like prairie dogs in the presence of the fox.  No one had been left behind.  Just a single, green and white tennis shoe, buried deep in the garden of mud.  An acceptable loss that Jack was certain was buried deep enough to never be seen again.

He picked himself off of his hands on his knees, and continued his trek back down the street.  Jack turned right at the next corner and followed a familiar path from the bus stop to home; though no buses were on route for the next five days.  It was going to be a glorious spring break.  The weather had changed, the birds had returned, and sneezes and sniffles had little to do with head colds and coughs.  He walked a little lopsided, the damp night kept him wrapped in his sweat, but nothing else could have felt as right.  He made the final turn down his street on Washington, and saw his house exactly as he’d left it.   Two cars in the driveway.  Apple tree bare.  His bike propped up against the tree.  A single light poured from the kitchen window, and provided just enough light in the darkness for him to find his way back home.

Jack lifted the latch on the gate to the back yard and curled around the bend.  Through the soggy grass squeezed between his naked toes, he raised himself to the slab of concrete his parents called a porch.  The one with no cover, which made summer days on the patio the perfect opportunity to boil an egg, or maybe some skin.  He sat down on the swing his sister made in wood shop, and his legs hung over the edge of the bench.  Tired.  Peaceful.  He started to rock.  Back and forth.  Jack looked out in the distance and admired the night.  The waves of his work.  Streams of double wide single ply, on the backdrop of night, fluttered like a million abstract flags in the distance.  He pulled out a phone from his pocket and sent out a text… “Job well done, please check in.”