For the Love of No.27

By: Carisa J. Burrows


Several of them huddled in a small circle just around the side of Mundy’s Corner Market.
“It’s on the third rack on the right side.”
“I don’t think this is gonna work. I’m leavin’.”
Just as Scooter turned to run, Isabel grabbed him by the back of his worn overalls and pulled him to the ground.
“Sit on him!”
The other boys, scared that she was ready to start throwing punches, followed orders like two Privates listening to their Sergeant. They tackled Scooter like a quarterback wielding a pigskin. One sat on his chest, pressing the metal buttons from the bib of his overalls into the bare skin of his chest. The second kid held down Scooter’s legs as he began to squirm. Gravel ripped deep cuts through his pant-legs into his calves. Just then, a Ford Flathead Dump Truck carrying a load of coal squealed into the parking lot. A black cloud and several pieces of black gold flew from the trucks budging tailgate covering the kids in a veil of ash and dirt.
Isabel angered by the intrusion, kneeled down near Scooter’s head, held it straight to hers and started yelling.
“Stop moving, you’re making it worse! Now, you’re goin’ do this. We planned this for a whole week!”
Suddenly, Scooter wiggled his left arm out from under his human pile and landed an uppercut on Isabel’s jaw. The boy holding Scooter’s legs busted out laughing and almost peed his pants. Isabel stunned, fell backwards holding her chin and tears poured from her bright blue eyes leaving a clear trail down her blacken cheek. She did not let out a sound. She stood up and ran back through the field up the hillside toward home.
“I can’t believe you did that!” One of the boys tried to high five Scooter. The other backed away fearing repercussions from his own actions and scurried unknowingly in the opposite direction of his house.
A loud whistle came from across the wheat field and over the hillside where Isabel’s house stood. Scooter recognized the double handed shrill of his father’s heavily callused hands.
“You can’t go now Scooter. Let’s do this thing, too heck with Izzy.”
“You know you peed yourself,” Scooter smirked and pointed at the boy’s shorts before darting toward his dad’s whistle.
That night with the humidity covering the second floor of their farmhouse, Scooter lay awake in his bed next to his two older brothers, younger sister and their dog, ‘Kitty’. Unexpectedly, his sister shifted in her sleep and hit his left hand causing him to wince in pain. Scooter examined his hand in the pale moonlight that was streaming through the small crooked window. His knuckle had swollen and turned a funny color of plum and blueberry. Then he thought of Isabel. She wasn’t always a bully, they were friends once. Several years ago, Isabel’s mom passed away of pneumonia and her father, left with six kids under age eleven, spent most of his time working the fields for his daily jug of homemade whiskey and his nights beating his children for looking at him wrong. Scooter began to feel sorry for hitting her. He knew he shouldn’t have done it. After all, he wanted what they were after just as much as they did.
The steam escaping from their mom’s rusty tea kettle awaked the kids from their sweaty slumber. Scooter grabbed his overalls from the day before, grabbed his father’s straw hat from the peg in the mudroom and ran out the back door. The faint words of his mother yelling, “Paul Allen McCarthy, where are you going?” faded as he crossed the wheat field.
Scooter stopped running as he neared the Mundy’s Corner Store. He waited until two men on their morning dairy delivery entered the store and snuck in behind the second man so the bell hanging from the screen wouldn’t attract attention on him. As the men busied the clerk behind the counter Scooter spotted it. It was on the third rack on the right side just below the calendar that still read April 1939. Detective Comics written in huge white lettering, No.27 and May 1939 the first issue starring ‘The Batman’. Scooter stepped up onto a Sears’ catalog that was holding the stand off the floor, grabbed the book out of its bracket and shoved it into the bib of his overalls. He ran straight for the door, ringing the bell as he left. When he reached the hillside Isabel was sitting in the grass looking over the wheat field crying. He walked up to her slowly.
“Leave me alone, Scooter.” She was trying to hide a gift from her father, a newly blackened eye. Scooter sat the book in the grass next to her.
“I’m sorry about yesterday Izzy. I got this for you.”
Several minutes past, Isabel wiped away her tears and smiled.
“Scooter, if you want, we can read it together.”
Paul’s hand, weathered with age, held the hand of the woman next to him. She was strapped into a wheel chair. She starred blankly out of the picture window onto the freshly manicured lawn.
“And that’s how we met my dear over seventy three years ago.”
Isabel turned to Paul and smiled in a sudden moment of clarity.
“Scooter, you came to see me. Did you bring the book?”
Then she starred blankly again.
“Yes, my dear.” Paul pulled out the old and tatter No.27 comic book and began to read to Izzy again.