BOOMER TRAP

BOOMER TRAP
by Dale L. Sproule

Jacket weather finally settled in after our long, sputtering summer. My wife, Wendy, used to come on these walks with me until her wonky knees turned me into a lone wolf on my weekly prowl for winning lottery numbers. Ow-ooo!

I light up as soon as I turn the first corner so the smell of cigarette smoke wears off by the time I get home.

Tonight, the routine feels stifling. For the first time in ages, I’m looking for some sizzle. Fat chance on this route, with its wide, well-lit streets, and stadium-bright parking lot lights at all the factories. Cruisers keep creeping past ‘cause the police garage is right over there. None of ‘em on duty. But it keeps the riff-raff outta the residential area.

I roll my stiff shoulders and crack my fingers.

What can I do to shake things up – hold up the convenience store where I buy my cigs and lottery tickets? Philip wouldn’t take me seriously and I don’t have a gun.

The adolescent me would have gone in with a knife. No threats, just a flash of steel, a simple demand. In those days, you’d think I had wings feathered with blades. Reflexes honed with darkness. But I left all that behind.

Adrenaline wears off quickly and leaves a leaden residue.

I cleaned up in my twenties, made something of myself, even if no one reads anymore and the respect that journalists once got now elicits the looks from other people that I would have given my neighbour, who used to be a milkman.

Now when Annan, the daughter of the old knife sharpening man pedals her cart down the street, I don’t even have mower blades to bring her because we hire a lawn care service.

Turning the corner onto Domine Road, my gaze goes straight to the field; the only patch of true darkness on the entire route. Empty for decades, there’s not even ‘for sale’ signs. I’ve been known to stand peering through the chain link fence into that darkness. The air seems crisper there.

The observation comes like an answered prayer. I’ve never seen the gates open but tonight they’re swinging inward, danger signs facing one another, no chain or lock in sight.

Fine gravel has been freshly poured over the sunken sidewalk, across the verge and for a body length or so into the field, where it stops abruptly. A single set of tire tracks continue into the field. Maybe it was leaving, or maybe they took a different exit and forgot they’d left this gate unlocked.

I light a second smoke. Glance from side to side. Danger, danger say the signs. Ha! Danger, danger everywhere! A challenge. A promise? I grin and ponder the nature of what I might encounter here.

Tripping hazards? Razor wire? Land Mines? Guard dogs? Three-headed fucking guard dogs at a pre-historic burial ground? A multi-dimensional U.F.O. landing pad?

My manic grin subsides as I bring myself down to Earth. More likely toxic waste. This is an old industrial area, after all.

During my half a season as the Parkside Raven’s junior rookie baseball coach, one of the team parents told me that the baseball field we were playing on was built on top of an old garbage dump. He pointed out vent-pipes at the corners of the field. “Dunno if the gasses hiss out slow and steady. Or if they build up and belch out when conditions are right. My friend Tyrell works at the Morrison landfill. He swears that the ground there fucking breathes.”

“Breathes? You mean like in a rhythm?” I asked.

“That’s what breathing is.” Doofus was implied at the sentence even if he didn’t say it out loud. “And its breath sucks ass!”

If the old household trash under the baseball diamond gives off noxious gasses, imagine the halitosis from a factory that created lyes, dyes, oven cleaners or insecticides.

In the decades before Madame Curie discovered polonium, the most noxious substances weren’t necessarily being manufactured by big companies, but by neighbourhood chemists – people who couldn’t mix a decent drink – playing around with adult chemistry sets.

I give my head a shake. This is supposed to be fun – rubbing up against danger like a cat to catnip.

Defiantly I take twenty more steps onto the property, to the edge of the tall dry grass and thick underbrush. Each step sends a little thrill up through me.

I wonder why I’m wired like this.

I was weaned on the same mundane terror as everyone else of my generation. After Mr. Brown showed us that nuclear bomb documentary in grade nine, I would lie awake at night thinking every airplane that flew overhead was a nuclear missile. I guess the difference between me and my friends was that I kind of liked it. It supercharged my dreams.

I look down to see my shoes sinking into the muddy soil. Shit! These are new shoes. Almost new. Fucking expensive. But I did buy ‘em for work before I retired. Found ‘em in my closet a few months back and they became my evening walking shoes. Not-so-new then. Water-repellent, easy to clean. Perfect walking shoes.

Taking a last drag on the cigarette, I flick the butt into the tire tracks.

There is a funny sound. A woof. More of whoof, to be honest. There’s something on the ground I can’t quite make out. I think it’s a can or metallic wrapper at first, but it’s some sort of glow-in-the-dark liquid, pooling in the soil. I bend over, prod with a tentative finger, and pull it back out, swearing like a motherfucker.

My fucking finger’s on fire – like a matchhead crackling with purple fire. I stand staring like an idiot until the pain has me swiping at it, and it sticks to other hand and to my pants and for a moment I’m slapping at random bits of flame as if they’re mosquitos.

Those embers fall at my feet and light the other tire track.

Having now pinched out my flaming fingers in my armpits, I gaze in awe at the flame rippling along the tire track to the gate – which is now literally on fire; not just the fence, but the space between the gateposts.

Imagine a layer of gunk buried so long ago, beneath twelve feet of gravel, sand, clay and debris. The density of the ground doesn’t let it escape – except around the outside edge of the property.

My burned fingertips send harsh shocks of pain through me, waking my synapses from dormancy. I have a hard-on like the ones I sometimes wake up with in the night but which otherwise never happen spontaneously anymore.

My hands shake with extreme nervous twitches like a mad orchestra conductor as I break and run for the gate, my joints groaning against the sudden acceleration. Bone spurs crackling off them like dried stems.

I’m gonna burst through the burning membrane like a circus performer jumping through a burning hoop! My hips and back clench in anticipation.

In five more steps, I see the sidewalk collapsing, peameal gravel pouring down between the slabs. Mauve flames rise through them, blackening the concrete like charcoal briquettes.

I forge onwards, but four steps later, come up hard against a wall of heat.

Fall back one step, then two. Pirouetting, for the next step, before ducking as the heat crawls up my back and over my head like a sentient cloak, an awakening fever. Lucky I don’t have much hair to burn.

I scramble desperately as I let my jacket fall to the ground. Crumpled tissues and lottery tickets spill from the pockets and burn like leaves. My cigarettes fall to the ground and smoulder energetically until the lighter lands beside them and explodes.

I gasp for air as I run. Waves of energy pump through me, discovering forgotten glands; exploiting them; igniting unused pockets of adrenaline and lust. The longed-for release is upon me. The return of my youth is upon me. And I shout, not in terror but in fierce joy.

The grass around me is burning but has not yet surrendered its structure. I stop and look back toward the perimeter and it’s like peering at candlelight through a stack of photographic negatives; a vague memory of light, an impression of presence without proof.

I don’t smell anything burning.

Maybe these grounds really were occupied by a pharmaceutical company and all of this is hallucination.

I can no longer see the edges of the field. It is no longer a field I know.

I bend over expecting my feet to be lost in unfathomable darkness, and instead I find the darkness to be finely textured; astonishing detail visible within the black-on-black. From the laces of my walking shoes to the puddles I have been skirting without knowing it. I see it all and more. So much more. There’s another me looking down, keeping me on track like a third person narrator.   

He is me and I am him and we are here together.

I step, I step, I watch me step. Revisiting the moment when I run toward the fire, I stop two steps earlier. And everything changes. Futures blossom – every possibility more exciting, more inspiring, more transformative than the path that I was on when I left my house. I can’t help but wonder if that was the real trap.

The darkness is an empty blackboard, containing realities where I never reach the centre of the field, and where there is no centre of the field to reach. Perhaps they’re all tricks of the darkness. Or maybe, the darkness itself a trick and I must close my eyes to see where I’m going.

Here goes nothing.

Fiction © Copyright Dale L. Sproule
Original Image by Screamenteagle from Pixabay

Dale L. Sproule has over 50 published stories and hundreds of articles, interviews, and poems. His work has most recently appeared in The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir; That is SO Wrong; Emanations 9; Theme of Absence and The Colored Lens. He is the author of four books; short story collections Psychedelia Gothique and Psychedelia Noir and the novels The Human Template and Escape from the Carnivorous Forest (Oct 2022).

His website is dalelsproule.com and his blog is https://dlsproule.blogspot.com/