The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [5]
It seemed these days that Popsicle pushing was the hip thing to do, all of his relatives were doing it, and the area around the Los Angeles International Airport was infested with new trucks. They had begun their invasion as suddenly as though they had parachuted from the descending air traffic like fallen angels, forcing the truck further southeast and into a decaying portion of the city of Hawthorne. The truck slowed into virginal territory, splashing remnants of the late morning rain onto a litter-ridden curb. The ghetto children leaked onto the sidewalks like snails in a rainwashed exodus that livened to the truck’s serenade, its loudspeaker painted like a cherry atop a metal carriage of rust coated with chipped white and faded stickers.
As it crept along, rounding a corner, it met the fanfare of children’s cries with an abrupt halt so as to avoid serious injuries to the oncoming brigade. Two bicycles, then a training-wheeled third, burst from the depths of an alley behind the corner’s towering brick building.
“Sons of bitches!” its driver bellowed after them, and the children continued ignorantly with a destination in mind that had nothing to do with tasty treats, peddling their ways to the street’s opposite side and over the puddles of a driveway. An onslaught of other children, short of a two dozen count, various ages, hands waving and stretched upwards above their heads bills and coins to flag down the attentions of the ice cream man, surrounded the truck from every direction until the driver vacated his seat and opened a side window to greet them with a freshly lit cigarette hanging from his lips. The truck soon commenced its laggard crawl, all said and done, its cherry speaker fumigating the neighborhood with an Old MacDonald that drifted and hung in the air like a vaporous dirge.
The three bicycles raced faster, over dampened concrete and past the graffiti of a lengthy wooden fence. Missing boards revealed vacant lots beyond and between the overlooking doleful buildings; crabgrass shot out from broken sidewalk and crept beneath the rusty metal of an old abandoned Ford, and beneath a slumbering transient. The reflecting tones of an overhanging billboard sported a gleaming medieval knight which, despite its spray-painted Spanish profanities, boasted that the detergent suspended from its lance was stronger than dirt.
“Jesus, guys, hold it a second,” declared the oldest of the children, the jolting KER-THUMP of a pothole meeting his bike’s front tire in a drenching splash. Threadbare Hushpuppies slid from spinning pedals and ground to a muddy halt, the other children stopping in turn. He was a haughtily streetwise nine-year-old, a bubblegum renegade whose appetite for daring mischief proved an enticing retreat from an asylum of dull poverty.
“What? What is it, Matthew?” breathed Dabby, disheartened by her friend’s startled aversion. She was second youngest, a pudgy elf of a girl whose emerald Asian eyes peered out from beneath a tattered grey baseball cap.
Matthew had silently fixed his gaze attentively upon something ahead. The three children were midway down a small cul-de-sac now, which jetted into several alleyways surrounded by still more decaying buildings. Directly before them loomed the rusty remnants of Rothchild Cannery, shut down and dormant since a month ago, about the time when Fall had announced its annual migration of lunch-pail juvenilities for the initiation of another school year.
It took a moment or two before the girl caught sight of what had drawn her friend’s attention. Throwing off a succinct giggle and proceeding forward with her bike, she informed him, “If it’s the s’curity man you’re wining over, it’s only the same man as last week. Gave me that groovy spaceship, remember?