December 3, 1989

 

  

I suppose this is a story dedicated to all those paperboy’s who wanted to deliver justice to the nagging paper-readers who refuse to pay on time. To a fifteen year old boy, I look in retrospect and see how much anger this one customer must have caused me. Once again, I have to thank the power of speech to resolve these problems without any physical action. The pen IS mightier than the sword.

 

I delivered the Calgary Mirror every Monday since I was 12, after school in snow up to 3 feet deep. I bought candy and the latest robotic gadgets, unfortunately for me we didn’t have LEGO Mindstorms.

 

I delivered the Calgary Herald for several years, starting at age 14 by saying I was 16 on the application. I did this route before school EVERY day. It sucked, and it led to me stealing many comic books and chocolate bars at the neighborhood Macs store. I was busted and had hell to pay. So I started breaking into peoples cars on my route. This worked well if there was a heavy snow falling, which would cover my tracks. Sayonara, I don’t miss that.

As 5:30 rolled around to the town of Barry's flats, several alarm clocks blared, announcing the beginning of another grueling Wednesday morning for a few of the 17 000 residents.

 

One of those was Jeremy Haggart.

 

He got out from under his plush blankets with a leap, sending his cat, Nebbie, flying off of the bed. Jeremy slammed a fist down on the top of his Citizen alarm clock, dimming the LED display and causing a strangled, crackling sound to be emitted instead of its regular irritating yowl. He staggered around like a very satisfied wino and finally managed to put on his clothes from the day before.

Jeremy had never really slept that night; at least, not really. He had too much on his mind and, like a dealer in a drug bust; he wanted to get it all over with in a hurry. He had gotten about three hours of sleep the night before and wasn't really feeling up to eating another shit load of a day because his muscles ached and his stomach did loop-the-loop's in his chest.

But he would feel better soon, he thought.

 

Jeremy donned his Nike's and opened the side door, letting himself silently out of the house. He had to get his 'special delivery' done quickly-like before the sun came up in less than an hour.

 

But first, the papers.

 

They were big cock-suckers that weighed half a ton each at five thirty in the morning. So as Jeremy routinely dropped the papers into his canvas bag, he thought about glory and gore.

 

And Mrs. Sarah Fitch; yes, Fitch the Bitch.

 

She had given him a lot of trouble during the past months, phoning up the Barry's Flats Tribune to complain if her paper was so much as one minute late and bitching at him every time he came to collect the month's pay about how he knocked on her door too loud and that he made too much noise in the morning. She always complained about how he woke her kids by slamming the mailbox lid open too hard. HA!! Now that was a joke. If Jeremy was her kid he would've shot the ugly momma long ago. But obviously her kids didn't have the same kind of love for her as Jeremy did. The kind where torture and beatings came before affection and understanding. And as Jeremy thought those things, stumbling back and forth from house to house like a person stutters from word to word, the sun was slowly rising under the east horizon.

 

He was very tired. During the past week he'd had a grand total of two hours of sleep a

 

night and his school grades were rapidly decreasing.

But Chris helped him out on his homework most nights so that Jeremy would get a few marks. Chris was one of his few friends in this world and unlike most, the bond between them was like the one that a young couple feels for each other. The bond, or pact if you will, to be truthful and interesting. They had been friends since grade five and that was six years ago.

Chris was never up this early, even best friends are never always there for you when you need them, and as Jeremy did the papers, walking closer and closer to the Finch house, he could feel the tension and anxiety pulsing through all of his arteries and muscles, pulling them taut, and there was nothing to take it away.

       "Except sleep ' a voice whispered deep within his soul.

Jeremy's feet made a drifting path in the lawns between all the houses but he didn't give two tin shits if his customers woke up to a trail of trampled, foot-worn grass. He didn't give a damn because he was tired. His eyes were fluttering open and closed and his mind kept on drifting away from reality and all he could do to stay awake was to slap his own cheeks and bite his tongue.

"I can't fall asleep now, oh God, I shouldn't even be tired. It's too risky to be tired now.' he muttered, not noticing the first rays of light filter through thick, dense morning clouds.

 

And in front of him was the house.

 

He walked up the driveway and shakily lifted the welcome mat that depicted a couple of frogs on a lily pad.

 

 

The cement was bare underneath it and so Jeremy reached inside his coat and pulled out a thin, grey plate. It was roughly the size and shape of fifty sheets of writing paper and had two wires sticking out of the side. On these he placed a pair of 9-volt Duracell’s and the ignition coil from an old car. He carefully set the mat down again, on top of the bomb, and shakily adjusted the paper on top of that so that one of its comers was drooping over the edge, a pull cord attached to it. Laughing internally and jittering with nervousness, Jeremy stepped off of the landing and continued on his slow, sleepy travels.

Time dragged on and Jeremy's bag became lighter and lighter but one thought, one flicker of fear, kept reeling over in his head sending horrific shivers up his spine.

Then another question passed through his head and struck him in the heart like an arrow shot by an unruly Indian.

 

But whose was it then?

This thought turned over and over in his head for about five minutes until suddenly he realized in stricken horror whose mat it was that he had lifted. Right then his lungs turned to shattered glass and his legs turned to wet rubber.

Then he ran. He just threw down his canvas paper bag and ran, cursing and crying in a deadly mixture of terror and hope. Hope that the door hadn't been opened. Hope that the mat hadn't been moved and finally, hope that the grey, ceramic bomb, handcrafted carefully by his very own hands during all those dark, lonely nights wouldn't work.

So Jeremy ran like hell, his legs carrying him across the rough, wind-worn asphalt. Eleven minutes had passed since he had set up the bomb and it was now around six o dock.

Allhe could do now was run, hope and pray.

His mind felt like ice cream left out in the sun for too long, slowly melting and oozing into a puddle and his aches were getting more profound. His chest stung like he had a gaping knife-wound in it his heart pumped ice water and his lungs breathed cyanide gas. All of those hours of work, carefully laboring over the perfection of that bomb were in vain if he couldn't reach the doormat before anybody else did.

He turned the corner and could see a row of blue spruce trees in a perfect semi-circle around a dark green house with black tar shingles. He could see a walkway leading up to the door and he could see a figure, silhouetted heavily by the glow of the morning sun, reaching to pick up the Tribune.

"NOOO! OH GOD, NOOO!!" his screams skyrocketed through the crisp, morning air, "OH CHRIST NO!! DON’T YOU ASSHOLE!"

The figure looked up for a second, as if recognizing why Jeremy was howling, then bent over and lifted up the paper and from fiftyfeet away, Jeremy could hear the click as the pull cord sprung into place. In the next split second the house transformed from dark green to a scorched, burning black. The person's expression changed from a drowsy morning scowl to a complexion of terror and anguish as he shattered, sending bone and flesh fragments splattering and skittering across the driveway. Then the front of the house blew in, sending millions of deadly splinters across the street.

Jeremy could just stare, his eyes wide and his chest hitching up and down in rapid respiration. A string of entrails landed in front of him, drenching his shoes and pants in blood and gore as if to say what it thought about this little episode before shitting it's life force onto the road.

Jeremy really felt like shit. Chris's shit. The Chris who would never shit again.

Never.

Because Chris had woken up early to get his dad the paper on his birthday.

Now Chris was dead.

So Jeremy ran, drooling blood in a long stream from all the splinters in his arms and face.