The Spiderman Incident

"And don't forget the flour. Last time you forgot the flour! Sometimes I think you'd forget your head if it wasn't attached."

The young boy listened only partially to his mother's voice which, when she was in a mood like this, took on the qualities of a fork scraped across a dinner plate. He hated that sound. It wasn’t that he disliked his mother—he, in fact, adored her. It was just that being the only child left at home out of a family of six kids, and the only boy at that, he had few options when it came to avoidance. Truthfully, even when his older sisters had been home he had always been the one singled out to run "errands" for his mother. She called them errands but in reality an “errand” was anything she didn't feel like doing. Anything.

"I didn't hear you, James Edward. What did you say?" she hollered from the screened-in porch.

Ten year-old James, or Jimmy to his friends, hadn't said anything. What she wanted was for him to say something like, "All right, mom." Or, "Yes, mother." Something like that just so she'd know he was listening. 

"All right, mom. I won't forget."

He stood in the street outside their simple house under a summer sun that felt as if it were burning his skin through the long-sleeved shirt she always made him wear whenever he went outside. 

"Now you hurry back. I don't want you dawdling." 

He didn't really know what “dawdling” meant but he supposed it had something to do with him stopping at the pharmacy to look at comic books and eat candy. Jimmy loved candy and he especially loved Cherry-a-Let candy bars...but not as much as he loved comic books. He figured he could probably spend an entire day just looking at comics if Ralph, the pharmacy owner, would let him. And he probably would.

A southwest wind sent a flurry of dust devils racing past the wheels of his cart—okay, wagon, but he preferred to think of it as a cart—that he always pulled behind him when going to the market for his mother. It had become an every day thing lately. Sometimes two times a day and one day last week she had made him go three times. Of course that had been the day he had forgotten to get the flour so that third trip technically didn't count. 

At the end of their little street he glanced behind him to see if she was still watching. She usually watched until he got out of sight. Today, however, the porch was empty. Jimmy thought that a bit strange that she wouldn't watch until he turned the corner like she always did. It actually made him feel kind of funny. In fact he almost turned around right there and went back to check up on her, but in the end he decided to just keep going. 

His route took him past the old Wells Fargo Bank; the city water plant; the hardware store where you could buy hay for horses and corn meal for chickens (along with just about every other thing you could ever imagine needing for rural life); past the diner where they served the best root-beer floats he'd ever tasted; past the pharmacy and then the small grocery store where everybody knew his name, where he lived and everything else there was to know about him. 

Some of them even claimed to know where his dad was, which was a sore subject with him because he hated his dad and hoped to never see him ever again. When he asked his mother what had happened to him three years earlier she just said that he'd, "Run off." Sometimes he wondered what a person did when they ran off. Whatever it was, though, he was pretty sure it wasn't good given the looks on the faces of the adults when they talked about it. And they talked about it. He figured small towns didn't get much news and when something like that happened it could keep people going for a while.

With his cart loaded down with everything on his mother's list—and you can bet he'd checked it twice, just like Santa Claus—he started the long trip home dreading the mile and a half walk through the hot sun. 

Passing the pharmacy Jimmy slowed way down and looked through the window at the magazine rack. Right away he could tell that there were a lot of brand new comic books. Comics he hadn't seen. Looking up the street toward the clock tower that was easily the tallest structure in town he realized that if he spent fifteen minutes looking at comic books he could still get home before his mom started fretting. 

He parked the cart where he could see it through the window and went inside, straight up the aisle to where the candy was tantalizingly arrayed and picked out a candy bar after squeezing and hefting a half-dozen or so. You had to be careful with candy; just because it said it was a certain size on the wrapper didn't necessarily mean it was really that size. He had actually proven this to be true with his old friend Bradley. But Bradley's family had moved away last year and there was no one left to corroborate his story. That was okay because he knew it was true.

Ralph, the pharmacy owner peered down at him from behind the counter smiling as if he were genuinely glad to see him. And he was. In fact he and the boy were good friends and Ralph tried to help Jimmy out wherever he could since he didn’t have a dad looking out for him. Like allowing him to read the comics for free. No one else got to do that. No one!

"So, you gonna squeeze in a few minutes at the rack, Jimmy-boy?" he said, winking conspiratorially.

"I thought I would, if that's okay with you," Jimmy said as he handed over the fifteen cents for the candy, which was highway robbery in his book because he could remember when it had only cost a nickel!

"Got a new Spiderman in just this morning," Ralph said in a loud whisper as if it were a secret that only the two of them were supposed to know.

Jimmy's eyes lit up as he hurried toward the rack and immediately searched for the comic finding it in just a few seconds time. Spiderman. Good ol' Spidey. He wondered what sort of evil he'd save the world from this month. But when he opened the book, the first page was torn almost completely away which meant that a good portion of page one AND page two were missing. How in the world was he supposed to know what the story was about with the critical first two pages gone? He grabbed another one—same thing. And another, and another. They were all the same.

He looked around as if to spot a potential culprit, but besides Ralph, he was the only one in the store. 

Jimmy was just about to go and tell Ralph the bad news when he heard a soft knocking coming from the direction of the big plate-glass window. Turning slowly he saw something that made his heart stand still. It was Leroy Marshall, the meanest kid in his school. He stood with his face pressed against the glass grinning from ear to ear, his long, jet-black hair looking as if it had been dipped in motor oil before being slicked back. And in his hand...the torn pages from all ten Spiderman comic books.

Jimmy got really mad. Madder than he'd ever been. All he wanted to do was to take one of the torn pages and stick it in his pocket for safe keeping while he stuffed the rest down Leroy Marshall's throat, which was probably a bit unlikely since Leroy was two years older, at least a foot taller and quite a bit meaner. 

Later on he would wonder why he did what he did, but in that moment there was no room for logical thought, only action. 

He got up and pushed through the front door which dinged pleasantly to let Ralph know that a customer had entered and shouted, "Give me those pages, you creep!"

"Why don't you come and get them," Leroy shouted as he took off running, laughing loudly as if it were just the funniest thing.

Jimmy hesitated, but only for a second and then was in full pursuit, the cart full of groceries and his promise to his mother temporarily forgotten. He surprised himself, and Leroy, by running him down in the space of two blocks, leaping on his back and immediately beginning to yank on his long hair as if pulling on the reins of a wild stallion.

“Ow! Ow, my hair. Le’go my hair, you little punk!” Leroy screamed in a voice drifting perilously and incrementally into a soprano range.

“Give me those pages!” Jimmy hollered in reply. “You should’n’a took those pages, Leroy!”

Jimmy rode him all the way to the ground where Leroy finally relinquished his grip on the precious pages in order to concentrate on beating the stuffing out of Jimmy, which he accomplished in short order.

“And that’s for pulling my hair, lambchop!” he said while delivering a final stinging slap to the back of Jimmy’s head before stalking off, the pages left lying scattered and forgotten on the ground.

Jimmy thought about asking Leroy what he found particularly insulting about the term, “lambchop” that would cause him to employ its usage so regularly, but decided that’d be pushing his luck. As it was he’d gotten off with only a knot on the back of his head, a slightly puffy lip and scraped knees—injuries that were well worth the effort if it meant having the Spiderman pages back.

Crawling in a rough semi-circle he gathered up the ones that hadn’t blown completely away, smoothing out the wrinkles before beginning the walk back toward the pharmacy. It was right about then that he discovered to his utter shock and dismay, that page one and two were not, in fact, related to the current story, but contained advertisements for two new comic books “coming soon.”

He started to get really mad, but decided in the end that the whole thing had been worth it just to hear Leroy Marshall scream like a girl.