The Boy King

Wade Hoppel, ten and seven-twelfths years old, a B minus, C plus student, though soon to be recognized as a genius by the Interplanetary Commission on Boy Geniuses, during a gala ceremony, rules the town of Lanfield, Arkansas, that magical, lush hamlet, about to be renamed Wade Town, or Wadeville, or just plain Wade.

His bike, an old Huffy, blue like the sky, if the sky were scratched up, dented and rickety, with its genuine banana seat––room for Queen Heather to sit, should she soon see the light––and with rusty rims and a back tire not too fond of holding air for long, but never mind these last details, is his chariot, his mobile throne. He’s added dual mirrors and horns, should either eye want to glance at the gone world trailing away, or either hand want to squeeze out goosy noises. He saved up his sporadic allowances to add these deluxe accessories, and he also helped Mrs. Rodriguez with some yard work––ten dollars for three hours work, kingly wages––though he didn’t tell his mother about this last business and she didn’t ask where he got the money for the horns and mirrors, anyway.

He rides his little Harley, his majestic horse, his Junior Police Squad vehicle, over paved, gravel and tar, and dirt roads, thud-thudding over sewer grates, and, on the sweltering days, popping the tar bubbles on gravel avenues with his tires, pretending he’s gliding over steamy tar pits that once sunk the Tyrannosauruses of Lanfield and greater Craighead County. He zooms down sidewalks and over lawns where sidewalks ought to be. He races down alleyways, sometimes stopping to check dumpsters for jewels, briefcases full of money, broken toys, or dirty magazines like Bikini World. He hits the trails behind the school, sloshing through the mud then riding up and down–– wee-hee!––the drainage ditch separating the woods from the housing development, until someone yells, “Hey kid, get the hell off of our property.” Oh they don’t know to whom they are talking to, they just don’t know. And therefore they are almost forgiven.

King Wade’s wheeled adventures began in preschool with a beat-up, generic version of a Big Wheel (its front wheel having to be duct-taped many times in order to maintain itself), and soon, perhaps in record time, he was promoted to tricycle riding, the red and shiny trike arriving in a factory-sealed carton, the cardboard bearing the words “Majestic Bicycle Company,” the tricycle inside blanketed by newspapers from some far away land, the unreadable headlines surely proclaiming wonderful news. In those early years he could pedal as far as the end of the driveway, the edge of the mysterious world. Even when not supervised, some invisible chain, some understood tether, told him when to brake, when to turn back.

By late first grade he had his first two-wheeler, a silver, no-brand bike bought at a garage sale, with training wheels attached, though he’d still tip over, his elbows and knees ever-pink. Wade was allowed to ride as far as five houses west or five houses east, but only when his mother was watching, usually sitting on a lawn chair in the front yard in a sun hat and fanning herself with a magazine, like she did back then.

In second grade he could cruise up to two streets over. Fatefully, Heather, his future queen and by far the most beautiful girl at Lanfield Elementary, perhaps in the galaxy, lived two roads away on Forest Street. He couldn’t play with her, wasn’t permitted to even step foot on her property––her dad hated his dad and his dad hated her dad––but she’d always smile and wave. She wore blue dresses then, always blue dresses.

By third grade his travel limits were extended to the reach of his mother’s voice, which wasn’t much of a bonus, since her voice could only fly about two streets, maybe three streets on a windy day, when the wind would take hold of her voice, each chime, each note, find Wade, and deliver the message: Wade, it’s dinner time; Wade it’s getting dark, come home Wade; Wade, your dad’s on the phone. Hurry. He only has a minute. Hurry. If it was this last message, he’d jet home and breathlessly grasp the phone in time to hear his father say, “Just wanted to say hi, partner. Got to run. Be good.” If Wade had had more air in him, he might have said, “Wait Dad, can we talk some?” That was back when his father still phoned, those sweet Days of Then.

In fourth grade he took ownership of the Huffy, retrieved from the Kazenkratz’s junk pile, those fools, and Wade could legally ride as far as the elementary school and the wooded trails behind it, as long as he was with a boy that his mother approved of: Robbie, Foster, or Milton. Should he risk fate and ride alone in the woods he might fall off his bike and hit his head on a trailside rock and die alone, recounting his few days on earth until life left him, Wade having been called home to some really big dinner. So never ride alone, Wade. And his mother warned him that there were bad men in the woods who might do terrible things to him. What exactly they might do she didn’t say, couldn’t say, just too frightful to talk about. Wade figured that freakish monster-men clubbed boys on their heads, ate their brains, then put the boy’s clothes up for sale at the consignment shop run by the Garden Club ladies. Never ride alone, Wade. That way, someone can run for help.

By fifth, there were no riding rules anymore and only three house rules: do your homework, go to school, and keep quiet. Presley had moved in. His mother’s whole world became Presley. Presley is so great. Presley is so handsome. Presley is so nice. Presley did have cool sideburns, but as far as Wade was concerned that was the only good thing about him. With no coming home time and no limits on where he might go, the whole world was now Wade’s. If only there was enough light in a day, and he had more leg power, he might ride very far, extending his fiefdom throughout the county and the state, then cross over into Tennessee and claim lands and peoples there.

One Saturday Wade spent nearly the whole day riding. He headed out after a lunch––a cold cheese sandwich and potato chips. Wade now hates cheese, especially since Presley loves cheese, always nibbling with his ugly, oversized teeth on cheese doodles or cheese crackers, like a smelly, ignorant rat, a Presley rat, might. Wade announced, “I’m gonna be gone for awhile,” and Presley said, “Send us a postcard,” and his mother said, “Stop that” and hit Presley, but in a joking way. Wade vowed to never send them a postcard.

He pedaled and pedaled, and finally came upon Lake City, the border of his hamlet. He boldly traveled twenty, maybe thirty feet past that city’s “welcome to” sign, where he saw a boy, near his age, riding a bike, not a one-speed but an eighteen or twenty-one speed, new and shiny red. The king of Lake City, doing his patrolling. Wade was not ready to do battle, not yet. But he’ll be back, he promised himself, and his mighty forces will topple that blond boy’s empire, and Wadeville and Lake City will be united. People will cheer and call his name: “Wade, our king!” They will throw roses at his feet, and he will be awarded more bikini magazines than he could read in one lifetime, a professional chemistry set, and whatever animals and accessories he wanted from the pet store. And Heather will start calling him handsome, and stop calling him dorky.

So our future hero returned to Wade Town, riding up and down many of the streets, reclaiming them all in the name of Justice and Light, and then hitting the trails where he stopped to pee, making sure he splattered his liquid gold off of a tree to reduce the chance of drowning nearby ants. The kind ruler even cares about the ants of his kingdom, one of the many reporters who will soon be interviewing Wade will tell the world, a world hungry for news about this noble, brilliant, and (all the girls say) hot, boy emperor.

He made it home after dinner. They didn’t save him any. Presley and his mother were making out on the couch in a slurping kind of way. The TV was on, a cable channel program about monster trucks, so Wade sat down on the dusty gray carpet and watched. The trucks were painted with dragons and flames and skulls and monster fangs, and crushed anything that got in their way. He wanted one.

“I rode to Lake City,” Wade said, watching a truck smash the roof of an old blue car that looked enough like Presley’s Mustang for the boy to get a charge out of it. “Next time I might take the freeway across the Mississippi, and, if a big semi hasn’t flattened me dead yet, I’ll head into Memphis. That’s what I’ll do, I’ll ride all of the way to Memphis on the freeway.”

“Pick up some smokes for me when you get there,” said Presley. “Smokes are cheaper in Tennessee.”

“There’s some hamburger in the fridge,” his mother said. She went back to slurping with Presley. The dungeon awaits them both, though Wade will only allow the possum-sized dungeon rats to gnaw on Presley’s legs. He’ll build special rat-proof leg shields for his mother. She was once good.

It’s a Wednesday in early August, a few weeks before the start of sixth grade, and, despite King Wade’s ever-goodness, his kingdom is in tatters. His best friend Milton, a member of the Royal Court, has just gotten home from the hospital wearing two fat leg casts, having been hit by a speeding car. Presley has not yet been forced into exile. Heather is still ignoring Wade, denying her queenly calling. And his right-side bike mirror is cracked due to a recent wipe out on fresh gravel––the slippery stones thrown onto a paved street by insurgents––making the past world trailing away look all fractured and jumbled, like parts of it were closer than you wanted it to be and other parts were farther away than you wished.

It’s in the high nineties, and the world is sweating and complaining about the heat. Wade has a taste for some lemonade, but there is no lemonade mix in the house, or sugar, or lemons. Riding the Huffy down his driveway and ready to begin his daily patrol, he sees Mrs. Rodriguez, across the way, pulling grass blades out of the cracks in the driveway while saying “sorry ladies,” like she is hoping the grass blades aren’t mad at her.

“You need any help?” Wade hollers, then he stops his bike and stands up so they can enjoy smiling at each other.

“Not today.”

“Saturday maybe? I’m saving up for a monster truck.”

“Perhaps on Saturday. I don’t need to remind you I’m a retiree, can’t always pay much.”

“I know,” says Wade. He looks at the old lady and is glad that he is no longer upset with her for running over his cat, Candycorn, orange and white, a few months back. It’s the Days of Presley after all, so the cat is probably in a better place, Cat Heaven, a world with lots of mice to chase and windowsills to sun on. Trees fruiting Friskie treats. A world where there aren’t any Presleys dropping you from the roof of the screened-in porch to see if you’ll land on your feet.

“I have to get back to patrolling,” he says.

“Stop over on Saturday,” Mrs. Rodriguez says. “If there’s no work we’ll sit and eat cookies and chat like two old biddies.”

“Sounds fine,” he says. Mrs. Rodriguez looks at Wade and tells him he is handsome and well mannered, not like most other boys, and that he has a “far out” bike. Wade thanks her. She is one of the few residents of Wadeville who appreciates his gemmed (glitter taped) vehicle. Soon, they’ll all want to own Huffys just like his.

Riding off, Wade remembers that he hasn’t worked on Mrs. Rodriguez’s cancer cure for a few weeks. She’s in remission, but should the cancer come back Wade wants to be ready to go with aggressive treatments. On the Friday nights when his mother and Presley go to the drive-in, adults only, so they tell him, he prepares the formulas in his lab, the garage. The latest concoction, Formula XZ-13, was composed of soda water, black pepper, powdered onion, pollen from a tube-shaped weed growing in the backyard, ketchup, a dissolved Tum’s tablet, and lime juice. He put a tablespoonful in Milton’s dog’s water bowl, and the elderly mutt, Caesar, seemed to be wagging his tail at a faster rate. He’ll next try human testing by secretly putting some XZ-13 in Presley’s beer. Wade will have to scrap the formula, should Presley regrettably burst into flames.

He zooms by Heather’s house, 172 Forest, a holy address, standing tall and regal on his pedals, and spinning out in the gravel driveway opposite her property. He isn’t exactly sure she’s home, until, on the eleventh pass, she opens her bedroom window, scrunches her face––but man oh man alive she still looks so very beautiful––and says, “What do you think you’re doing, Wade the Snade?”

These are the trials where boys become men, and men become knights, and knights become kings, and snades become unsnaded. “Bike riding,” he says to Heather. “And there’s no such thing as a snade.”

“I wish,” she says. “Now don’t go riding so close to my house.”

“It’s a free country.”

“No it’s not.” She closes the window so quickly that she has to open it back up to free a strand of her black hair, hair that bounces gracefully when she walks, and glistens like black fabric studded with purple glitter beads when she’s at rest.

Wade usually leaves love offerings on Heather’s lawn––gum, candy, comic books, or something special for her birthday or on Christmas, like a junior make-up kit––but he has nothing like that with him, so he rides by twice more then blows her a kiss. Heather taps on the window glass and flips him the finger. She no longer wears blue dresses.

He pedals the many streets, keeping an eye on things, honking his horns at squirrels crossing the street, and watching for approaching horrors in the mirrors. Wade then checks the calibration on the twin invisible laser guns mounted on the handlebars: by a simple adjustment he could either send out a beam wide enough to blow up a house, or a pinpoint beam that could cut out a person’s internal organs. He might use the narrow beam on Andy Ray, or one of the other neighborhood troublemakers, yank out a thorax or pancreas, and the wide beam on the houses of… the list is very long. Just one or two exploded houses and people will start behaving.

At Milton’s house he parks his bike in back and tells a sleeping Caesar, chained to a tree, to keep an eye on it. Milton’s dad, always happy to see fine young Wade, follows the boy upstairs, saying, “How are you, handsome? You got a girlfriend yet? How’s it at home? That Presley got a job yet? He treating you right? I know the family, bad news all around, don’t you agree? You sure things are okay?” Wade answers fine, no, fine, no, yes, yes sir, and yes.

Safely in Milt’s room, somehow evading the dad’s shoulder squeeze, a test of Wade’s manliness, brutes and football players all being thick-shouldered, Wade closes the door and the two boys give each other their secret greeting: they form an O over their mouth with their right hand then flap the fingers upwards three times, like a bird’s fluttering wings, and make the sound of a blaring trumpet.

Milton serves as the kingdom’s magician-sorcerer. He’s a junior astronomer, soon to be the first lad on Mars, and even has a telescope nicer than the school’s: through it he and Wade can vaguely see the houses the astronauts left on the moon, plus a few shops and maybe a disco. Wade will bring the people in line, Milton the cosmos.

While Wade signs both leg casts “to Magic Milt from Wade of Wade,” Milton reveals to his chum a I-just-might-burst-if-I-don’t-tell-someone secret. On the last night of his hospital stay he saw a girl’s butt. Yes, the genuine article. He was sitting in a wheelchair in the hallway when a girl walked by with her smock undone in back, her butt in its full glory. Both cheeks and the crack. She must have been seventeen, a high school girl, Wade, a high school girl!

After some debate, it’s agreed the butt-viewing event, while huge, is not quite as big as their both seeing Mary Needle’s flat chest in fourth grade. On the playground after school they told her it was shirts and skins basketball, and she was skins. No other girl had fallen for that trick in the history of the boy and girl world. Those twenty minutes of heaven were life altering. Mary’s chest was no different than theirs, except that it belonged to a girl. A girl.

Their conversation, not unexpectedly, progresses to pubic hair: they imagine it, on girls, to be like tiger fur, soft, golden, and exotic, and bearing jungle markings like stripes or spots. Soon they are laughing loudly, so Milt’s dad walks up the stairs, knocks on the door, and inquires as to how schoolgirls got into the room. But that leads to a shared sadness, both boys realizing that it might be years or decades before actual girls are in their bedrooms. They are already cast-outs, misfits. That wasn’t supposed to happen until at least middle school.

“So how’s it going with Heather?” Milt asks.

“Much better,” Wade says. “She even talked to me today.”

Wade leaves his pal and returns to patrolling. While keeping an eye out for burglars, drug dealers, and other losers, his brain starts working on the schematics of an X-ray scope. With such a device he will be able to discover all of the secrets behind the walls of 172 Forest. Maybe he’ll get to see Heather sleeping in a soft blue negligee ordered from the Spiegel catalogue, or her eating Waffle-o’s for breakfast. (He recently found a Spiegel catalogue and an empty Waffle-o’s box in their garbage).

He heads downtown. Wade will make sure none of the stores or banks are being robbed, and then buy some candy for Heather. She likes chewy things, like Laffy Taffy, he’s certain, even though she denies it and claims to feed his candy gifts to the disposal.

A few blocks from the sweets store, Andy Ray, soon to be a ninth grader, jumps from between buildings and grabs the handlebars of Wade’s bike, stopping it so abruptly that Wade almost flies over the bars and into the bully.

“Didn’t you see the sign, little girl?” asks Andy Ray.

“What sign?”

“No riding bikes on sidewalks in our beautiful city.”

“There’s no sign like that.”

“You calling me a liar?”

“No, I’m just saying…” Andy Ray shakes the bike and Wade begins to shiver, his body forgetting the day’s heat due to an immediate threat to the empire and to all that is good.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to confus-ki-sate the bike,” Andy Ray says.

“No, please.”

“Get off the bike!”

Wade dismounts his royal steed and Andy Ray gets on it. It doesn’t try to buck him off. Wade watches Andy Ray ride away on the Huffy, honking the horns, twisting the mirrors around, weaving between parked cars, and slamming on the pedal brake and doing skids. Wade turns and starts walking home. He is crying now. He doesn’t want to be crying but there is still a little weakness in him. He’s been trying to extricate it, this girly element, yet it keeps reseeding itself like a weed that just won’t go away. A Presley type weed.

Andy Ray is suddenly upon Wade, slapping him on the back of the head as he rides past the ruined boy king. The bully turns around in the middle of the street, gets off of the bike, holds it into the air, and drops it to the pavement, saying he doesn’t want to be seen on such a piece of junk. The bike bounces twice and falls over. It whimpers, and calls for Wade. The boy runs to the bike, his stagecoach in this Wild West town, his FBI motorbike, his rocket ship that can speed him away from awful things, and rights it. A shard of mirror glass is now missing from the already messed-up mirror, making the memory view even more suspect. He hops back on the Huffy, promising to never again hand it over to Andy Ray, that Norman invader, without a duel to the death.

The back tire is nearly out of air, so Wade flops and bumps all the way home, telling his chariot, his wounded horse, that he still loves it, even when it limps, even when it embarrasses him like it is doing now. Naturally there are a hundred kids outside, all noticing his wounded Huffy, and one of them even saying, “Hey Wade, you need some air in that tire,” as if Wade, who knows more than all of that kid’s knowledge doubled, and doubled again, is ignorant of his plight.

He parks his bike in the driveway and is about to walk inside the house when he hears his mother and Presley fighting in the kitchen. They don’t fight often, but when they do it’s a terrible affair––fists flying, chases around the house with knives, and mean words never forgotten, at least by Wade. His mother says, “I’m swallowing my pride by supporting a bum,” and Presley says, “I’ll give you something to swallow.” Some object is thrown against a wall, something metal. His mother says, “I hate you.” Presley says, “Shut up and fix dinner.” His mother says, “Fix it yourself, you lazy fuck.” Something else is thrown, something ceramic.

In the garage, Wade searches through boxes of old toys and finds his hunter’s slingshot. It’s the only thing Presley ever gave him, but Wade wouldn’t use it to kill any of the little beasts of fertile, fair Wade Town. Presley called him hopeless that day, but Wade knew then, and still knows today, that Presley is wrong because he is just busting with hopes, sometimes so many hopes that he loses track of them.

In the driveway he fills his pockets with flat, rounded stones that look like they were once the blunt teeth of some harmless giant. Wade imagines taking down Presley–– a stone to his groin, his center of operations, should do the trick––but there are several complicating factors, such as the fact that Wade’s mom, most of the time, still bubbles over with Presley happiness. They probably are already kissing again. Wade hopes she will soon awaken from the spell, from the Presley hocus-pocus.

He pumps breath into his bike’s back tire then gets back on the Huffy, twisting at the worn handle grips and making vroom vroom noises that quickly transform into the fiery roars of an angry dragon—rahhhhh, rahhhhh!—ready to bust out of its lair.

Wade rides in a snaky way down the middle of Walnut, then turns onto Greendale. The slingshot tucked under his shirt tickles his belly with each turn of the pedals, tickle, tickle, but he forces down each rising up giggle because he is All Business. “The Days Of Presley will soon be no more,” he says. And Andy Ray and that college kid who ran down Milt will also be justly punished––a kingdom needs its rules. But first, Wade has an urgent matter to take care of in Lake City: he must defeat their boy king and take his horse, his red bike of many speeds. It’s his mission to unite opposing forces, to build and rule a peaceful, expanding empire, to set the world straight, and to have a flame-red chariot fit for a king. And Heather will faint with love for Wade the Victor, Wade the Brave (not Snade).

“It’s war,” Wade declares while doing a wheelie, the Huffy rising and whinnying its battle cry as he bikes north down the gravel and tar road, the unhinged stones making all kinds of racket by catching in the tires and pinging off the Huffy’s fenders, sounding to the boy like enemy machine gun fire hitting the steel walls of his fortress, or maybe like sudden hail smacking the roof of his father’s car, a boxy red Olds with plush seats the color of vanilla ice cream, which his dad used to drive him around town in, just to see the sights.