Comic Book Hero Chapter 1

Tom Blackwood slid the last box of Category 5 cable off the bed of his pickup and hoisted it to his shoulder with a soft grunt. He steadied the cable with one hand as he closed the tailgate with a practice flip of the other, then turned around and made his way through the back door of the west wing of Lydecker Laboratories. With the ease of long practice he threaded his way through the hallways crowded with building contractors and their equipment, stepping around, over, or through the many piles of tools and materials. Dust from the drywallers filled the air, and the discordant sound of multiple power tools and pounding hammers echoed in the brightly lit hallway, a tune so familiar that despite the volume it had long since become mere background noise to Tom and the other people who worked there.

As he continued through the bustling hallways the number of hardhats and plaid shirts began to thin, replaced by the California business-casual uniform of short sleeved shirts and slacks, and the occasional bow to tradition of a gray suit and tie. Concrete floors and unfinished walls gave way to new oatmeal carpeting and eggshell white plaster, the world of raw form and construction bowing to the corporate polish that was the finished part of the building. On the west coast research was big business, and business would not wait for such niceties as walls and flooring, so the scientists and the yuppies had started moving into their new abode before the paint had even dried.

Ned Politaino was waiting for Tom inside Lab #7, where he sat on a folding chair cutting Cat 5 cable with the razor sharp Buck knife he always carried. He never glanced up as Tom dropped the heavy box of cable on the ground beside him, concentrating instead on the task of separating the eight colored wires that made up the cable, arranging them in the proper order, and them crimping them into a cable plug with the tool made just for that purpose. Tom pulled up another chair and with a nod started prepping the cable from his own box.

The two men had worked together for over five years, and their routine was well established. Both were hard workers, and neither had time for idle chitchat. If your mouth was going to be busy, your hands had better be working too. It was five minutes before Tom, as usual, started the conversation.

“I got an E-mail from Benny last Friday“ he said, as he carefully fitted the clipped wires into the clear plastic plug.

“Oh, yeah? So how’s he like livin’ in Osaka?“ Ned replied, as he fitted his end of wire to the segmented fiberglass pole they used for running cable through the false ceilings. The pole came from an old dome tent and Ned had used it for years, claiming it superior to any of the poles manufactured for just that purpose. Tom was pretty sure he would keep claiming that no matter how good a new pole was. Underneath the bearded hippie look Ned favored, everyone knew he was a conservative.

“Says it’s okay. He’s still having trouble with the language, but most kids over their speak at least a little English. The problem isn’t Japan.“

“Don’t tell me,“ Ned snorted. “The problem’s name is ’Miko’.“

The younger man grinned. Ned was holding back, he usually had a lot more to say about Tom’s ex-wife, none of it good. But the grin left as he answered Ned’s question. “Yeah, it’s Miko. Seems she went to a lawyer last week. She was trying to get Ben’s last name changed.“

“WHAT?“ Ned snapped, an outraged glare sparking in his brown eyes. “Are you telling me that bitch doesn’t even want him to have your name? His own father’s name?“

“Yeah,“ Tom muttered, looking away, the shame of it hitting him once more. The back of his neck started to burn. Christ, talking about this was even harder than he had thought it would be. A lump formed in his throat, which he took time to swallow. Five thousand miles away, and Miko could still push his buttons.

Ned shook his head in disgust. “Man, that sucks. What’re you gonna do?“

“I’ve already done it,“ he answered, grimly. “I spent the weekend with my lawyer, and he spent a lot of time on the phone with Miko’s lawyer. The two of them finally talked some sense into her. She thought a Japanese court would be in her favor, but they convinced her they wouldn’t, not if it means denying a boy his legitimate father’s family name. It cost about a grand in overseas phone calls, but it was worth it.“

Ned snorted, muttering something under his breath. Tom changed the subject.

“Hey, are we going to do lab 6 today? Or do we have to wait for it to be fumigated?“ It was an old joke. The ’Mad Scientist of Laboratory 6’ was not popular, even among his own co-workers. And the harsh French cigarettes he fired up in defiance of the posted rules were the source of a lot of ill feelings.

“If you’re talking about that chain smoking little baboon’s lab, then yeah, that’s the one we got scheduled this morning. C’mon, we might as well get as much done as we can before he gets here. ’Benjamin John Takahashi’. Christ, that woman!“

With that last shot Ned grabbed his roll of cable and the sectioned pole and left, leaving Tom to shoulder the heavy box of cable and bring up the rear.

*****

In 1968, the European auto manufacturers Citroen and Maserati joined forces to create a dream, and then to make it a reality. The dream was to be the marriage of the high performance Maserati engine with the sleek styling and sophisticated suspension of the Citroen, to produce the first true Gran Turismo car. The result of that hopeful union became known as the Citroen Serie Maserati, or Citroen SM, which premiered at their Geneva salon in 1970. Considered to be one of the finest examples of European engineering of its day, less than 13,000 of the cars were ever produced, only a fraction of which were ever imported into the United States. It was now over thirty years later, and avid collectors still fought tooth and nail at auctions the world over to own one of these timeless pieces of European automotive history, completely ignoring the fact that the SM was a temperamental gas hog that spent more time in the shop than it ever spent on the road.

Dr. Dominic Scarpelli pulled into his private parking space at Lydecker Labs, the silver vehicle jerking to a halt as the brakes grabbed, the engine continuing to diesel for long seconds after he turned the key to the off position. It was one of the increasingly rare days when the SM wasn’t in the shop, and Scarpelli did not have to arrive in the back of a taxi cab. It was a true love/hate relationship that he had with the car, but mostly it was hate. For although in public he always praised the machine and called it mio fianciullo, my child, in his own heart he regularly consigned the damned thing to the furthest levels of Dante’s hell. But Dominic Scarpelli loved all things European, and to admit that anything from there could possibly be inferior to something American was blasphemy.

At five foot seven Scarpelli was a short man, with shoulder long brown hair speckled in gray, parted in the middle and swept back from his forehead. His features were sharp, with thin lips and a Roman nose, and an almost perpetual sneer. His suits were silk, Italian and expensive. He chain smoked Galloise cigarettes, cupping them in his hand instead of holding them between his fingers in the American fashion. Besides English he spoke four languages fluently, and if you asked (and even if you didn’t) he would tell you that he got his degrees at the Sorbonne and at l’Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.

But in the real world, Dominic Scarpelli was born at St. Jude’s hospital in Chicago, Illinois. His degrees were from Columbia and MIT. His French, Spanish, and Portuguese were textbook perfect, but his Italian still carried the harsh consonants of his Little Italy childhood, so he was always careful never to speak the language in front of a native of that country. Scarpelli had been to Europe five times in his life, where he was spotted as an American by almost everyone he ever met.

Today Dr. Scarpelli strode through the glass doors of Lydecker Labs with the confidence of the truly arrogant. Neither the two receptionists at the front desk nor the people he passed in the hallway greeted him, as he always answered such encroachments either rudely or with silence. However, if they had attempted that today they might have been surprised at his reply, for on this morning Dominic Scarpelli was a very happy man.

The diminutive scientist made his way to the back of the building where his new laboratory was located. Briefly his good mood was spoiled by annoyance, for the wood and glass doors were propped open by a stepladder, and his way impeded by one of the two buffoons who were installing the building’s computer system. Normally he would have taken the time to upbraid the fool, but the thought of what today’s endeavors might bring made him too anxious to take the time. With a disdainful snort he edged around the foot of the ladder, purposefully jostling it as he went past.

On top of the ladder Ned frantically grabbed at the open edge of the drop ceiling, from where he had just removed an acoustic tile. The stepladder swayed under him as he fought for balance, and swore under his breath. The little prick meant to do that. Christ, what an asshole!

From his perch Ned glared red death back at Scarpelli, but the smaller man completely ignored it. With a disgusted sigh the bearded man abandoned his visual assault and instead climbed down to the floor where he angrily folded the ladder and carried it out into the hallway. In the process he slammed it against the doorway as loud as he could, but Scarpelli ignored that too.

Ned toted the step ladder down to the end of the long hallway, where Tom stood unreeling the Cat 5 cable from its box. An acoustic tile had been removed from the ceiling above, and another one every twelve feet or so on down the hallway and back to lab #6. The sectioned fiberglass tent pole was already attached to the end of the Cat 5, ready to be used to feed the cable through the ceiling. Tom looked up as Ned approached, one eyebrow rising in surprise at the stormy look on his friend’s normally placid face.

Ned set the stepladder down underneath the hole in the ceiling, opening it up with an energetic clash of aluminum. He shot one last glare down the hallway before turning to Tom and said, “That little prick with the tobacco jones almost knocked me off this ladder. And the sunovabitch did it on purpose, too!“

“Ouch,“ Tom replied. “Are you hurt?“

“No, I’m fine. Guys who think they’re better than everybody else just rub me the wrong way. I’ll get over it.“

Tom looked at his friend, a little troubled at this rare outburst of real anger. He decided it was best if he could defuse the situation somewhat, and maybe prevent Ned from doing something that would get them both in trouble.

“Uh huh. Tell you what, why don’t you feed me the cable this time, and I’ll pull it. That way you won’t have to face the little psycho again.“ Ned nodded his agreement, and together they started feeding the cable through the first hole in the false ceiling.

In the average new office building in California, the distance between floor and ceiling is thirteen feet, but that gets reduced to ten feet with the addition of a drop ceiling. A drop ceiling is a framework that hangs down about thirty-six inches from the original ceiling by a series of struts. The framework holds in place large acoustic tiles laid horizontally, creating an airspace of almost three feet between true ceiling and false that provides for both temperature and sound insulation. The airspace can also hold the lighting and sprinkler system, as well as providing a convenient pathway for telephone lines and, in this case, computer networking cable.

Ned stood on the stepladder and used the tent pole to feed the cable through the drop ceiling and down to the first removed tile. When it got there he laid the pole down and climbed off the ladder, which Tom then took down to the opened tile and the opposite end of the pole. Once there Tom would climb the ladder and continue feeding the pole down to the next opened space, while Ned passed more cable through the first hole. In this way they progressed down the hallway, and after about an hour Tom was at the door to lab #6.

Inside Dominic Scarpelli was hard at his work, the previous days’ experiment already taken from the vault and set out on the slate black lab bench. Chemicals boiled over Bunsen burners, their harsh odors already tainting the air in the laboratory. A large precipitator and condenser dripped a viscous dark liquid into a glass beaker, and the electrical hum of high voltage equipment completed the illusion of a Frankenstein’s workshop, with the evil doctor himself seated in the midst of it all. Scarpelli had already changed into a white lab coat and a pair of gold rimmed reading glasses, and while the process he had cooking bubbled away he wrote furiously on a lined yellow notepad. Crumpled sheets lay haphazardly across the lab bench where he had discarded them, and three cigarette butts already filled the large glass ashtray at his elbow.

The compound had no name, but instead held the designation of SL-137, or Scarpelli-Lydecker test #137. It meant, of course, that this was the 137th compound that Scarpelli had made and tested in the three years that he had worked for Lydecker, but to the man himself it meant much, much more. To him it represented one hundred and thirty six failures, and one amazing triumph. It represented six years of hard work, vindication of his most cherished theories, and the recognition and power that he had chased after all of his life. The thrill of these accomplishments was proving to be a heady wine, one which Scarpelli was consuming in gluttonous quantities.

“Uh, Professor?“

Scarpelli’s eyes glanced up, annoyed, seeking the source of the intruding voice. It was the other buffoon, the fat one, partner to the one that had blocked the entrance to his laboratory this morning. Scarpelli ignored him, turning his full attention back to his writing.

“Professor Scarpelli?“

This time he frowned. Couldn’t this idiot take a hint?

“Professor, I’m here to wire your lab. I’m putting in your intranet hookup. You need it to set up your computer. Hello, Professor?“

With a long suffering sigh Scarpelli lay down his pen and looked at the lummox standing at his doorway and carrying a familiar looking stepladder. It would be so easy to vent on this fool, to throw him out and then to make a call that would be sure to have him fired, or at the very least banned from this building. But the oaf was right about one thing, he really did need his in lab computer terminal, and as soon as possible. Since leaving the old Lydecker building in Berkeley and moving to this godforsaken hole, he had been forced to store all of his records on his laptop. It was cumbersome, and potentially disastrous if anything were to happen to the machine. The sooner he could tap into the building’s mainframe, the better.

Scarpelli fixed the intruder with a steely glare, and in a deceptively even voice asked, “Young man, do you think this is a university?“

Tom blinked, surprised. He was thirty-one, so no one had called him ’young man’ in almost a decade. “Uh, beg pardon?“ he replied.

“You seem to think that this is a university, although obviously you’ve never been in one, unless it was to empty the trash,“ Scarpelli said, his voice dripping with contempt. “So let me enlighten you: a ’Professor’ is a teacher. He is a man with a degree who does not have enough talent and or intelligence to go out into the real world and actually contribute to his profession. He therefore stays in the tiny little world of academe, trying to hammer knowledge into the thick skulls of dullards who are even less intelligent than himself. I am a scientist. I hold two PhD’s, and I do not teach. I answer to ’Doctor Scarpelli’, ’Mister Scarpelli’, or ’Sir’. Do you understand, or do I have to write it out for you in crayon?“

Tom felt his face turn red, and a tightness in the skin around his temples. Christ, no wonder Ned wants to thump this guy! With an effort he managed to get his temper under control, forcing down all thoughts of mayhem. After all the crap with Miko and the lawyers, the last thing he needed now was to lose this job.

“Yeah, okay, Doctor“, he said, turning around so the little twerp couldn’t see his face, his hands already busy setting up the stepladder in the doorway. “I can see you’re a busy man, Doctor, so I’ll just install this cable and get out of your way in a minute. And then I’m sure there’s some trash somewhere that needs to be taken out, too.“

Tom’s sarcasm was wasted, as Scarpelli had already immersed himself back in his note taking. Tom directed one last evil thought his way, and then turned to the job at hand. Climbing the ladder he crouched on the top step and grasped the fiberglass tent pole and loosened the Cat 5 cable, pulling the segmented fiberglass and collapsing it as it came out. Next he began to pull the cable through, letting it coil at the foot of the ladder. The cable still had to go through the ceiling to the rear of the room where the plug was to be set, but Tom knew better than to try dragging it around a corner. He and Ned would start over again with the pole at this point. He worked steadily, in a hurry to get the job done, but also careful to do the job right.

Strictly speaking Scarpelli was not really working on the SL-137. The two mixtures he had heating over the gas Bunsen burners would still have to boil away for at least another hour, to reduce them to a crystallized precipitate. And the condenser would take at least that long, before it left its tar-black residue, the final ingredient for the 137. A large flask of the completed compound already sat across the table from him, left over from the previous days’ experiments, its contents black and granular like volcanic sand. So Scarpelli had taken this time to indulge in one of his favorite hobbies; writing his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize.

The little man stopped writing long enough to snub out his Galloise and light another one, using a wooden match taken from a small silver box. As befit any public building in California, Lydecker Laboratories had liberally seeded most of the hallways and all of the work areas with ’No Smoking’ signs, including the walls of lab #6. On his first day there Scarpelli had disdainfully torn the sign down, and had ignored it as he had all the others in the building.

As the end of the French cigarette began to glow, for the first time he actually made out the tune that Tom was humming across the lab. A familiar song, he’d heard it before, on the radio perhaps. Now what was it…?

With a start that almost made him choke on the harsh smoke, Scarpelli remembered the song, and at the same time realized it’s significance. It was an old tune, popular back in the eighties, he thought.

It was Randy Newman’s ’Short People’.

Now it was Scarpelli’s turn to feel his face swell and turn red. This fat, floundering toady was mocking him! Him, Dominic Scarpelli! This white trash, blue collar, low browed Neanderthal…! With a snarl that would have frightened anyone who knew how vicious a man he truly was, Scarpelli tossed the still burning match into the ashtray and rose, teeth clenched and eyes flashing, to stride around the lab table and towards the unaware Tom Blackwood.

The wooden match slid over the edge of the cut glass ashtray and skittered across the table. It came to rest, still burning, against one of the crumple sheets of yellow notepaper. The paper rested against the rubber hose that led from the gas tap to one of the Bunsen burners.

Scarpelli strode stiff legged to the foot of the ladder and stopped, his eyes smoldering as he stood there nursing his anger. Deliberately, he took a deep drag on his cigarette, and then blew the smoke at the head of his object of ire. Tom stopped whistling when he smelled the harsh smoke, finally becoming aware of the smaller man below him. As he turned to look down, Scarpelli gave the ladder a resounding kick, causing Tom to desperately grab at the hole in the ceiling as the ladder almost bucked out from under him. An acoustic tile buckled under his hands, splitting almost in half.

“You miserable piece of unwashed FILTH!’ Scarpelli roared, his voice shaking with rage, spittle flying from his mouth. “You dare to mock and belittle me in my own place of work. You louse ridden piece of garbage, I’ll have you living in the street and begging for pennies before this day is through!“ His hands clenched into fists, and for the moment the maddened man was the image of a rabid dog attacking a bear.

But the bear had had enough. With a snarl of his own Tom started down the ladder, with the clear intention of mayhem evident in every movement of his body, and to hell with the consequences. But before he took that first step down the ladder to unemployment he stopped, his eye caught by a yellow flicker of light. An atavistic fear born of half a million years of evolution instantly drowned his anger as he realized the imminent danger.

“Oh, shit,“ he muttered, then shouted, “FIRE!!!“ at the top of his lungs.

Scarpelli spun around at Tom’s shout, and saw the flames leaping on his work place. Fear like a deluge of ice water drowned his own rage, as he saw his life’s work endangered. With an inhuman shriek Scarpelli spun, rushing back to his workbench, hands out in an instinctive attempt to snatch his dreams of power and glory from the licking flames.

Tom was halfway down the ladder when the fire melted it’s way though the thick rubber tubing. A spurt of flame raced its way back down the stream of natural gas, following it like the fuse that it had become. In a split second it passed down the tap and through the fittings, into the holding tank in the floor below, where it ignited a small piece of hell on earth.

Tom never made it to the ground before the explosion hit him, a giant formless hand that plucked him and the stepladder up like leaves in a storm, peppering him with the shrapnel that had once been the glass and plastic of Scarpelli’s lab equipment. His mind was strangely detached, as in slow motion it seemed he was pushed through the doorway and out into the hallway. He had time to wonder what had happened to ’Doctor’ Scarpelli just before he hit the opposite wall, and everything turned to a red tinged black…

*****

Darkness, like being in a box full of black cotton. No dreams, no sensation, no awareness at all. Time had no meaning, and thought was only a possibility. Minutes, hours, or maybe years later, and the darkness was slowly pierced by sound. A mechanical beeping, steady, like a heartbeat. Murmured voices and footsteps, echoing hollowly down a hallway. And now came scent, the chemical and pine of cleansers, the fresh cotton smell of sheets, overlaying an ever present hint of sour bodies and human wastes. A hospital, comes the thought, you’re in a hospital. With the thought comes memory, your identity, your name, who you are. OK, then. Two facts now for your mind to latch on, to build on. What else? Lydecker. Scarpelli. The fire. And then what? Oh yeah, it all went Boom.

Tom slowly opened his eyes, allowing the light to finally drive away the last of the darkness. He blinked, focused on the sight of dingy white tiles, polished and waxed to a high shine. He could see light reflected in a swirling pattern, the marks left by an electric buffer.

He was lying facedown, arms near his head, his face pressing into a padded ring that let him both breathe and see the floor. The beeping sound he recognized from a thousand TV shows as a heart monitor, which he took to be evidence that he was still alive. He could feel the numbness and lassitude of drugs, supposedly they would wear off soon and probably leave him in a lot of pain, even more proof that he was alive. Tom decided he wasn’t in that much of a hurry to know.

After another interminable period he finally found the will to raise his head, slowly, and look around. White sheets, pillows, day bright sun coming through a window with opened drapes. Metal rails on the side of the bed, a nightstand with a plastic pitcher and a cup wrapped in paper, sitting next to a metal bedpan. Oh yes, definitely a hospital.

Slowly Tom became aware of the rest of his body, stiff and achy, with a strange swollen numbness all over his back. Bandages and Novocain, maybe. A sick thought slid its way into Tom’s consciousness, leaving dread in its wake. Hurriedly he flexed his fingers and toes, felt a liquid rush of relief when he could move them. All right. I’m alive, and I’m not crippled. And now for the bad news.

Tom raised his head again and looked around, discovered the call button hanging from a wire near his head. Grasping it stretched the muscles and skin along his back, finally bringing a vague sensation there, but still no pain. Tom pushed the button and then laid his head back down, waiting for the pretty lady in the starched white uniform to come take care of him.

Tom’s first disappointment of the morning was that no pretty nurse came to comfort him in his time of need. Instead a stocky guy with thinning blonde hair and a stethoscope came in and introduced himself in a cheery voice. Dr. Somerville, and this was the burn unit at Mercy General Hospital. The doctor started to examine him, listening to his heart and lungs, checking his reflexes, poking and prodding and asking if it hurt. And as he worked the doctor talked, asking and answering questions.

Tom was there following an accident at his work site, at the Lydecker Laboratories. Did he remember any of this?

Yeah sure, all of it. So what happened, how bad was he?

Does that hurt? Good, it’s supposed to. Apparently he was standing on a ladder in a room that exploded. They said it was a gas leak. The explosion picked him up and hurled him through the door and into the opposite wall. From the impact he sustained a concussion, a broken nose, and a chipped front tooth.

Uh huh. Tom had noticed the tooth, but for some reason he hadn’t noticed the bandage across his nose. OK, so what about his back. Why couldn’t he feel that?

Right now he couldn’t feel anything because of the medication. How much he could feel afterward, they’d have to wait and see. He had sustained first and second degree burns over most of the back and shoulder areas, but almost nothing to the back of his head, probably because it had been ducked as he scrambled down the ladder. Those would heal and skin grafts wouldn’t be necessary, but there would be scarring, although nothing that couldn’t be covered by a shirt.

Well, since Miko left him no one had been around to see him without a shirt anyway. He could live with that. So what else?

They’d had to clean the wounds out several times, searching for foreign matter, like shrapnel, from the explosion. It was mostly glass with a few pieces of metal, which they had been removed easily enough. However, there was a great deal of some type of dark plastic, most of it the size of grains of sand, which had peppered his skin. They had removed the larger pieces, and many of the smaller ones had been working their way out, but much of it had been imbedded under the dermis and into the muscle tissue, even into the bone of the vertebrae. They couldn’t remove it all, but as it didn’t seem to be causing any harm they felt comfortable enough leaving it in. However, some of the debris granules were visible through the skin and scar tissue, much like a tattoo. Again, a shirt could cover all that.

Wonderful. Scarred and tattooed. (yawn) Oooh, getting kind of sleepy now. Any more good news, Doc? Like how long he was going to be in here.

Most likely he’d be in the hospital for another seven days, four of them here in the burn unit. After that he’d be able to go home, and with luck he’d be back at work within another month. Was there anything else the doctor could do for him?

Nope, not a thing. But thanksh for th’ shot. Maybe now he’d jushh….

*****

The next week went by in a haze of drugs, discomfort, and boredom. The usual flood of visitors came in the first few days, swiftly tapering off to a trickle as the word spread that Tom would be all right. His brother Mike visited everyday, as did his parents, who had driven down from Seattle in the forty-foot motor home that they’d lived in since his father’s retirement four years ago.

The days crept by hazily, broken up by singular events. The first time he used the bathroom, the first time he walked by himself, the first time he rolled over on his back. Tom may not have been athletic, but he was usually active, and the weakness and inactivity were beginning to tell. As his irritation levels rose, he had to force himself not to take it out on his over solicitous friends and family.

At the end of the week Tom’s brother Mike came to pick him up. As per hospital regulations, Tom was given a ride to the front door in a wheelchair, pushed by the same Dr. Somerville who had treated him. At the curb he and Mike helped Tom into the front seat of Mike’s mini van, and when Tom turned to shake his hand Dr. Somerville gave him a large plastic pill bottle heavy with something other than pills.

“What’s this?“ Tom asked, peering at the contents through the yellow plastic.

“A souvenir,“ said the doctor, grinning. “We pulled so much junk out of your back, we thought you might want it to make a paper weight out of it. Like I said, it’s mostly glass and plastic, but there’s a few good pieces of twisted metal.“

Tom frowned, not too sure that he wanted to keep such a graphic reminder of the incident, but in the end he decided not to risk offending the doctor. They shook hands, and as Mike put the mini van into gear Tom settled gingerly back into the seat, the pill bottle of twisted shrapnel forgotten in the bottom of his carryall bag.

They stopped by Tom’s place briefly to pick up some of his clothes and personal things, and then turned their heads to Mike’s home. When they got there they parked in the driveway of the small three-bedroom ranch house in Rosemont, one of the better neighborhoods in southeast Sacramento. Even the short ride was enough to stiffen Tom like a board, and he gratefully accepted his brother’s helping hand out of the van.

As he stood next to Mike, Tom was briefly struck by the physical differences between the two. Whereas he was dark and stocky, with an extra forty pounds on a six foot frame, his older brother Mike had skin as white as milk, was three inches taller, and was so thin he was almost skeletal. Tom’s hair was dark and short, while Mike wore his dirty blond locks long, in a ponytail that fell several inches below the shoulder. He wore glasses with bottle thick lenses in dark plastic frames. In fact the only thing that marked the two young men as brothers was their eyes, both of them having the exact same color of steel gray.

The bowling ball and the bowling pin, thought Tom, not for the first time. Or as Dad use to put it, Ollie and Stan.

“You sure Cathy won’t mind me staying here, Mike?“ he asked, as his brother insisted on taking the carryall. “Two weeks is a long time to have an in-law underfoot“.

“No sweat, Tommy. You know how she feels about you. Besides, she’s at work all day, anyway. Most of the time it’ll just be you and me.“

At that moment the front door burst outward hard enough to slam against the wall, and a four-legged whirlwind boiled out into the front yard, screeching in two voices loud enough to etch glass.

“Daddy, Daddy! Tyler pooped her pants ’cause she was watching cartoons an’ she was too lazy to go to the potty an’ it stinks and she is so stupid ’cause she’s just a baby!“ said six year old Desiree, racing up to Mike and using him as a human shield to hide behind. And she obviously needed it too, as her four-year-old sister pursued her, armed with their mothers’ favorite saucepan and waving it over her head like a battle-axe.

“You liar you liar, Des’ree, you take tha’ back, you stinkface, you take tha’ back or I gonna bash you!“ cried the maligned four year old, the intent to commit murder stamped clearly on her face.

Forgotten in the background Tom watched, as Mike went into Daddy mode and swiftly began separating the two miniature combatants who now clutched at his knees. He let out a weary sigh and picked up his bag. It was gonna be a looong week.