Free Helmet Head by Mike Baron

seen the glory. The seed was planted. If the Rabbi had any idea his son wanted to be a cop, let alone a motorcycle cop, he might have moved them all to Israel.
    ***

CHAPTER 16
Hot Dog
    Fagan’s only friend and partner-in-crime was Josh Peterson. They met in the 7th grade, phys ed pariahs. Josh was the Fat Boy. Fagan was the concave-chested wraith. Josh was the original gun nut. His father was an avid hunter and Josh knew all there was to know about guns. He had access to his father’s rifles and pistols. With the bullying Josh endured, it was a miracle he didn’t pull a Columbine. He never expressed a wish to blow his tormentors away.
    They would borrow Josh’s father’s rifles, go into the fields and blast away at anything that caught their interest. One day Josh loaded dum-dums into his father’s scoped 30-06. Rifles over their shoulders they hiked through the fresh April fields to a tree line. Josh sited down on a crow in a tree.
    “Watch this.”
    He squeezed the trigger. The crow exploded like a feather bomb and the sudden report launched a dozen others into the air cawing. Josh handed the rifle to Fagan.
    “Here. You try it.”
    They walked down one side of the windbreak until they spotted a squirrel sitting in a tree. Using the crotch of another tree to steady the rifle, Fagan sighted in. The fat squirrel loomed large in the cross-hairs. Fagan squeezed the trigger and the squirrel exploded into fur and flying meat. Birds took to the skies.
    “Gimme the rifle!” Josh enthused. “I see a barn cat!”
    Josh’s most prized possession was the Waffen SS dagger he got from his grandfather who fought in the Battle of the Bulge. The boys would huddle in Josh’s basement bedroom poring over pictures of the Third Reich, goose-stepping around and yelling in bad German accents. Fagan knew well the horror of the swastika. Maybe it was his id crying out, I am not a Jew!
    Fagan worked at a local country club as a caddy one year. Myron McDonald was the Head Caddy. He liked to punch Fagan in the arm as hard as he could.
    “Levi!” he roared. The other caddies roared with him. It was the height of wit.
    Fagan and Josh watched horror movies. Fagan’s taste ran toward Godzilla , Gojira , Anaconda , Tremors . Josh favored torture-porn: Saw s I through V, Hostel s I through IV, Last House on the Left . They sneered at Star Wars and referred to their adherents as “stookies.”
    It was Josh who turned Fagan on to comics. Fagan had always regarded them as silly. The only ones he’d seen were Archie and Richie Rich . Josh showed him what was happening at Marvel and DC, characters like the Punisher or Hellblazer. Ghost Rider in particular intrigued him. The idea of a flaming motorcyclist. If Fagan had to be a superhero, he would be Ghost Rider. From there it was but a hop skip and a jump to the EC crime comics of the fifties, which Josh owned in hardbound. He bought them himself from money he earned from his paper route.
    Fagan could not believe the lurid tales of suffering and vengeance and they fired his imagination in all the wrong ways. Josh showed Fagan his father’s secret stash of Playboy and Oui . The only reason Fagan didn’t start his own collection was fear of the Rabbi. The Rabbi was the personification of kindness, but his disapproval was like a lead blanket.
    Josh had a younger sister named Adrian who was a brainiac and ran interference for him at home. She was plain, wore glasses and had an instinctive sense of how to cruise under the radar.
    Josh’s parents gave him a Volkswagen Beetle on his fifteenth birthday. Farm kids could get a permit at fifteen. Josh and Fagan would drive around looking for small game to blast.
    Once when Josh stopped the car to take a shot at a barn cat in a barnyard, the farmer saw him and rushed out of his barn clutching his own shotgun. Fagan hadn’t thought a VW could burn rubber like that.
    After that he declined Josh’s hunting trips. They still spent plenty of time together.