Day 58: Yellow

              So a little while back I read the book, "The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Nighttime" (I don't know if I should have put a comma there but I'm working on it), and the main character who has an unspecified mental illness hates the color yellow.  In high school, I used to eat mustard as a trick to make me throw up.  The first time I realized it did this was the first time I ate mustard, I went on a road trip with my then girlfriend Sam to visit my best friend Kefka whom I met online, and at a Denny's he convinced me to try it on a french fry.  Maybe it was just the Denny's french fry that made me throw up?  Anyway, now I can't eat eggs alone or it has the same effect.  So, I wonder if I've used the power of "autosuggestion" to extrapolate my color based food problem, or if I'm imitating the character in the book, or if I just have an unspecified mental illness of my own.  Yeesh.  Onto the more writing.
             I think it's where I live that's driving me crazy.  Or maybe it's the internet.
            Also, getting a cold just in time for Thanksgiving.  I want to get carried away and make this writing thing an obsession, but if I do that I think I'll raise the probability that I get "burnt out" on it sooner than later.  So 1667 words is good enough for me for now.

            Atleast he got to go to a good school out there on the east coast.  The religious academy they had him going to in Nebraska was a duplicitous academy.  All the fake goodness they could muster didn’t change it.  The kid wasn’t learning anything, although he could say his fifteen rosarys a day with ease.  But his wife had insisted that private school education was better than public school education, in any case.

            The phone rang off of its hook at the station.  Charles’ father had been calling for him, where he got the number no one could know for sure.  It was all the same because no one answered the phone.

            The Cedar Harvest Festival was that Thursday.  The town left its residental portions unattended, lit candles and watched fireworks.  They drank beer from the first light of the morning, all institutions including government were closed, the people from the asylum were brought down in a yellow bus.

            The quadriplegic swore he had seen a staircase pouring out of the great beyond before.  They moved him from a modified rotunder onto a wheelchair, despite his protests about how he preferred to be on the bed.  It was when they shifted him upright into the chair that he caught his first glimpse of the staircase off in the distance, and immediately insisted he be taken to see it.

            “Alright, there’s a little more work  to do down here and I’ll see you at the festival,”  The chief said as he hung the phone up on its mounted station on the wall.  The orderly knocked on the outside of the door and pulled it open, the wheelchair with their quadriplegic friend on it in the middle of the living room.

            The chief couldn’t remember what the quadriplegics name was, but he thought it was either Cyrus of Billy.  It didn’t help that he had “achy brakey heart” stuck in his head on an infinite loop, or that he remembered an episode of Walker Texas Ranger where Chuck Norris saved a bus of wheelchair bound pals who were hijacked by an evil terrorist and taken as hostages. 

            Luckily, Donny the assistant didn’t leave the Chief hanging.  The affable orderly with the sideburns leaned in to talk to the chief.  “Cyrus here says he wants to check out the stairs, says he’s seen something like it before.”

            “Say, you want to see the stairs?  What do you know about it?”  The chief whistled and leaned through the doorway.  The orderly backed into the hallway, sheepishly smiling with his hands locked in front of him.  He stared at his watch, twenty more minutes were left on his shift.

            “You get out there and have fun, I’ll take care of the rest of this.”  The chief said, a fixed confident look on his moustache.  He looked around the office aimlessly for a second to check if he had forgot anything and flipped off the light switch.

            Cyrus didn’t notice when his foot ran over gnarly branches, or when his knee slammed into rocks.  Each time, the chief sighed and promised not to do it again.  At a point, he had to put his sunglasses and visor on when the beams got too bright to continue, and the quadriplegic again did not complain. 

            The stairs looked bigger than ever from far away, but as they got closer the Chief saw they were the same old stairs.  A nest of possums had nestled a new home underneath, the young litter as cute as the older couple was ugly.

            “I ain’t gon to do you two any harm.”  The chief assured with his hands clenched in karate chops in front of him, like he was negotiating with a terrorist. 

            He touched Cyrus on the shoulder and he began to howl.  The chief released the chair and stomped around like he was trying to put out a fire. 

            “I’m sorry I’m sorry I just want to get out of here I’m sick of looking at these damned old stairs.”  The chief reasoned with him.  “You see them, ok?”

            With some difficulty twisting it against the dirt, the chief pushed the chair out of its position of rest and away from the trail.

            “I still wanted to look at it.”  Cyrus beseeched.  The chief rolled his eyes behind Cyrus’s head and swung the chair back around. 

            Cyrus sat wide eyed at like he was staring at a lost idol.  The chief resisted its charms at first but became mesmerized as the minutes scrolled by.  The possums watched them with the eagerness they watched the stairs with.  To them both, this luminous reflective flight was just a mystery.

            “Have you touched it, chief?”  Cyrus said with an abnormally high inflection.  The chief himself had not touched the stairs, and he explained that many others had but they just passed through it like touching a rainbow.

            “Psychology says rainbows aren’t real.”  Cyrus said.  “Rainbows are just light, they can’t even be proved to exist.”

            Chief thought about this for a second and walked out from behind the chair and laid a hand on the stairwell.  It didn’t give, but as he tried to climb on he slipped back off of it, his lower body dangling and upper body unwilling to pull him up. 

            “Well I’ll be damned.”  The chief said.  “It’s really a staircase, now.”

            At the office, the chief called the fair and insisted someone come watch after the paraplegic.  They sent someone after two, a barrel chested older man with no wife or children.  He was grateful for the responsibility.  The chief waved to him as he backed his truck out of the long gravel driveway, turning the car into drive.

            A little ways down the road the Chief found the sporting goods store run by a highschool friend.  He preferred when people didn’t know his name, and had started this new life as “chief”, so he cringed when he opened the door and heard Daryl Simmons call.

            The place was furnished with tall bare metal shelves, covered in varieties of nails, hoses, gauze, wrenches, divets, plastic bags with washers in them.  A greying man sitting in a stool opposite Daryl with his elbows on the glass display case spun around to look back at the Chief, and when he didn’t immediately recognize him turned back forward and started fidgeting with the buttons on his jacket.

 “Chauncey you old louse what are you doing in my goddamn store.”  Daryl called in an uproar.  He sprung to his feet and swung his body around the counter with calamity.  This was Chief’s tight end, the guy who had missed that block and let that giant linebacker crush his collar bone first with the palms of his hand and then onto the grass.  Even worse, he had knocked the ball loose.  Chief watched from his back as the scoreboard changed to “Home 17 Away 20”, in those big LED block letters.

The smelly sounds of REO Speedwagon contaminated the store.  Chief was sick to his stomach, all the bad memories spilling into his head at one time.  He straightened his elbow as much as possible as he reached out for a handshake, Daryl’s grip being much more solid and hands more rugged and refined.  Chief was pulled forward into an awkward embrace, one used by Daryl only to display his dominant physical prowess, and Daryl would only allow him to escape an arms length away.

“I need those spiked hiking boots.”  Chief pointed with an outstretched arm while standing stiffly upright.  “I need some rope too, and a helmet.”

Daryl guffawed and nodded complacently.  “Take’em.”  He said, with a shit eating grin.  “All those dropped balls I had, all the blocks I missed, let me do you this one favor.  You aren’t planning on climbing the empire states building in a bee costume are you?”

Chief gave a perfunctory laugh and saluted Daryl, collecting what he needed off of the walls.  “I can bring it all back when I’m done with it.”  He called as he crossed back out to the truck, but Daryl had went back to his conversation with the derelect at the case. 

“That son of a bitch,”  Chief snarled through his teeth as he threw the plastic bag full of equipment into the back of his truck.

Chief went through the A&W stand by Bear River to get a shake and mostly to oggle Debbie, the lolitan checkout girl.  On this day she ran the front by herself, in the back there was Ralphy, a tubby hippo of a man standing with his black polo sleeves rolled up and hairnet pulling his eyes back like a shiatsu. 

As Chief’s truck thumped loudly up the driveway and pulled into a spot closest to the front door, she hollered back at him,  “Son of a bitch ain’t even going to the fair.  How does he always know when I’m here?”

“Want I should kick his ass?”  Ralphy asked pulling his rubber gloves off.

“Nah, that’s ok Ralphy.  Sweet of you to offer.”  Her face snapped back into a smile as Chief pushed through the door with the giant cartoon bear on its inside-facing window.  He pretended he wasn’t coming in just to hit on Debbie, and it was true, he wanted a shake to take his anger out on. 

“Well how are you doing today?”  He asked with tardy tact.  “I’ll take a vanilla one today, dear.”

By the time he got back to the staircase, it was already getting dark out.  He hummed a sweet “More Than a Feeling” as he lugged his equipment behind him with two hands into the woods. 

The stairway glimmered a faint purple and he threw the spiked boots on, tying the rope around his waist and to a nearby tree.  He was perfectly oblivious to the fact the rope would do him no good if he were to fall.  He yanked on the dingy red helmet and had completed his transformation to Global Guts contestant.