The Acolytes of Crane

2 THEODORE: OUR ONLY HOPE





Here goes. I am going to be in this cell for a while, so I should make it good. Maybe I can annoy the guards by being overblown and loud.

“You know! I will not be able to remember what everyone said, so I will do my best to entertain!” I shout, and then to myself I whisper, “Is this thing on? Okay.”

I take a deep breath through my nose, inhaling dust particles.

“My name is Theodore Crane, originally of Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

I cough, then start again.

“As a kid, I experienced pain from three separate origins in life: the destructive catastrophe of my parent’s marriage, the cold steel of a burger spatula, and the rigid edges of a metal studded belt. This is ridiculous!”

After pondering the start of my account, I decide the introduction is satisfactory and continue loudly, with intent to annoy. “Before I was recruited by Zane, there were two things I knew to be constant, pain and loss!”

The guard bangs on the vault, the intercom clicks, and with a grumble, he says, “I am going to tell you this once, prisoner, keep it down!”

I say, “Yes sir,” because that is the only response warranted toward an imperial prison guard. I return to the recording, and pick up quietly where I left off:

“Alright, here we go again. It wasn’t until the end of the one-hundred-sixty-two game season that I realized there was more to life than just baseball. My favorite team won the series that year.”


The excitement surrounding their triumph stuck with me. I remember seeing it all on television. The team was strolling down the strip with their floats and limos, as multi-color confetti rained down. The players were covered waist up in fur. They waved to all the people that stood by them throughout the year.

It was all a spectacle. The team had a record that year of eighty-five wins and seventy-seven losses. It was the worst single season recorded for a world championship team in baseball history. Their success in the midst of defeat meant a lot to me.

Enough about baseball. Now, the beatings. I would never have ended up where I am now if it wasn’t for my freakish home environment. Now that I look back, it was very much like a parallel universe, where I could visualize my alter ego waving at me stiffly from across the vast realm of space, nodding, “Uh huh, no thanks, dude, I’m not gonna cross over.” I was a prankster, and foolish as a lonely kid can sometimes be.

That one day I recall vividly. It was humid and sticky outside. The kind of weather one dreams about in December, yet moans when it happens. I was wearing a tank top over my sun blazed back.

As the bus stopped, I peeled my exposed shoulders off the vinyl seats. The action reminded me of my stupidity; there was still a lingering sting around my shoulder blades and arms from a few days earlier, because of a prank that Jason and his friends put me up to.

I was dared by Jason to tag the dumpster situated behind our apartment building. This green steel monstrosity was overflowing with trash, with mattresses and mufflers stacked up ignominiously against it. I only had to sprint toward the heap of trash, and touch the side of this butt-ugly dumpster.

Sounds easy, right? But the catch was that we both knew it was a hot day in September, and hovering above every dumpster spewing out garbage in the area, was at least one swarm of a hundred bees. In accepting the dare, I stupidly thought I was immune to danger. The pulsating bee stings on my shoulders was the equivalent to those of several sharp blows from a cold metal spatula striking my ass. I could never back down from a challenge, because in my mind, there was nothing that I could not do—except find a solid friend.

I shook off my thoughts. It was my stop.

When the accordion door to the bus opened, I hollered out to my fellow riders, ‘See ya wouldn’t wanna be ya!’

‘See ya, Theodore,’ the bus driver said.

I was a skinny little twelve-year-old platinum-haired jerk. I felt like no one noticed me up to that point, except for my scraggly haired female bus driver Willy. She was the only one to bid me a good day. Willy swore at us all the time, and wore hilariously huge sunglasses.

Most of the passengers witnessed me as I slipped on the top stair of the bus and tumbled helplessly to the curb. As I lay on the hot asphalt, crippled, I glanced back, seeking pity from my chums on the bus. All I received were laughs. Even Willy, the bus driver, had no shame.

When I rolled over to get up, I splashed into a puddle that I had not noticed when I fell. After the rippled water settled, I saw my reflection. Right in front of me was my face sizzled by the sun, hardened by trial, and marked by misfortune. The color of my eyes matched the cloud-shrouded blue sky; my hair was bleached by the sun-dazed summer days. I might have drowned in that warm, stagnant puddle if I were any tinier for my age.

As I turned away from my reflection, I once again became conscious of Jason and his friends’ deep guffaws from within the bus; their laughs punctuating the sticky air. I knew they were heckling at me. There was no way I was going to stick around and listen to them pummel me with trash talk. With a dash, I was off, far away from the scene of humiliation.

Jason and I played together all the time—whenever he was not busy with other friends, that is. He was quite a popular guy. If he wanted me to do something absurd, he was my best friend, and if he didn’t like what I did, he was my worst enemy. He was tough on me like an older brother, even if we were the same age.

My eyes flashed a mischievous glance as I formulated a devious plan to get back at Jason for his cruel mocking of me. Running in the direction where the bus had headed, I hid behind some pine trees that were next to the “Red Bricks.”

The Red Bricks was the informal name we gave the broken-down apartment complex we lived in. The residents who lived there usually fit one of three categories; lower class families struggling to survive with the assistance of Section Eight and welfare; older kids on their own, in limbo between high school and college; or destitute old geezers who had long ago decided to wither away. The first description defined my family. People on the outside expected us Cranes to be an average family. The reality was the exact opposite.

Behind that pine tree, I sat waiting, plotting. I didn’t enjoy being laughed at—I never have. That mentality thrust me into trouble all the time.

At my feet, on the poorly maintained lawn of the apartments, there were three small well-composed rocks placed close by, taunting me like little devils. As if each had two tiny horns growing out. I picked up all three rocks and, pulling the edge of my T-shirt out, made a convenient “sling” for these objects of revenge. I straightened up behind my hiding location, giddy with anticipation. As Jason emerged within sight, surrounded by his entourage, I chucked the first stone like a four-year-old girl. With a bounce, the stone settled at Jason’s feet.

The hopping stone had distracted Jason and his friends. Startled, they looked about, still unaware of my location. That was all the fuel I needed. Any young kid could describe that giddy feeling. I was mischief, in the flesh.

They could not see me concealed behind the tree. Too bad for them. My attention snapped to the remaining two rocks, wrapped within the fold of my shirt. I didn’t even think about that second toss; it came so naturally. What I do remember is that it felt good leaving my fingertips—a perfect toss that arced like a jump shot from the three-point line.

That second rock soared ominously through the air. My target wasn’t Jason’s girlfriend Roxanne Schneider, but that was how it ended. I struck her dead on the left ear. I felt remorseful, and began a retreat into survival mode.

I should have deployed the third and remaining rock, because I had never seen Jason run that fast. I wish he had caught me. The beat-down I could have received from him was a fraction of what my dad would dish out. I think Jason just wanted to tell on me. Vigorously running up the stairs, I escaped into my unit in the complex, but I could not escape the punishment that would follow. Jason’s girlfriend Roxanne knocked on the door, waking up my dad Bill. She told my dad everything.

Next thing I knew, Jason and Roxanne were shooting me smug glances as they linked arms in solidarity on their way out of my apartment. ‘Dude, if you want to hang out, just ask me next time,’ Jason growled.

‘Yeah, Theodore, that hurt,’ Roxanne said, tilting her head back in disgust.

‘Theodore!! You know what to say, boy!’ my dad shouted, as he held my shirt by the collar.

‘I am really sorry, guys! I wasn’t trying to hit you, Roxanne!’ I yelled after my friends just before the door shut.

Pain and regret are profoundly experienced by any kid in all walks of life. In my case, my misfortune was to be the son of a father who still beats the crap out of his kid. First, the beating. Then, the grounding. Trouble was my middle name.

My dad enjoyed taking out the frustrations upon me. It was his release from his wounded pride, which resulted from his lowly position as security guard during graveyard shifts.


The punishment may have been fitting for my crime, if it was only a couple of thwacks.

I received twenty-three.

Initially, Bill had sent me to my room immediately. For now, I had escaped the prospect of a beating, although I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. As I lay there flexing my fists, full of fury, I remember thinking I would do anything to escape this place.

I had dozed off, and later I felt a chill on my feet that woke me up. The air conditioner was in my room at full blast, and I had to cover up my feet, if I was ever going back to sleep.

As I twisted, I pulled up what I thought was my blanket wrapped around my ankles. Suddenly, a snap and a bang occurred, followed by a series of booms. What I had thought was the blanket, were actually the bottoms of my spaceship curtains. As my bed lay firmly adjacent to the wall under these curtains, I had unknowingly dragged them into tangling with the creases of my blanket. The snap was the curtain rod detaching from its brackets. The bang was the rod smashing into the first of many junior encyclopedias off the nearby shelf. The booms of the heavy books pounding the floor, one at a time, were an insult to injury, because by that time my dad was standing near the foot of my bed.

There was a fearsome dangling belt beside him that could make a professional wrestler let out a triumphant, ‘Oh yeah!’

The Enforcer was two and half inches wide with metal studs. I think I saw that belt holding up the leather pants of a gas thief in a post-apocalyptic movie. It wasn’t a light plastic replication of metal, either. The studs were metal, and the belt weighed at least a pound and a half.

I knew pain because I was a familiar customer. After three strikes of the dreaded belt caused mind-searing pain, my mind went numb. Shocked to my core, I could no longer absorb any further anguish from the remaining twenty blows.

As my mind reverted to fog, my dad stood tall in front of me, withdrawing the lethal belt and rolling it up with his hands. He proudly announced the terms of the grounding: a full two weeks. I stood dumbfounded, contemplating my punishment: a couple of weeks stuck in my room, and an ass I could not sit on for days.

I remember that day so well. I will never forget the look on my mother’s face as he paraded me in front of her in the living room, where she had just barely restrained herself out of dread as she heard my blood-curdling screams. My dad presented my bruises to my mother—her name was Ann.

Bill said, ‘Look at what your son got himself into today.’

He was wearing the usual black slacks from work. Above was an over-bleached, worn-out T-shirt that hugged his terrifying biceps.

The look I saw that day upon my mother’s face, I had seen before, and would observe again and again in the future. It was the wide-eyed glare of cowardice. She knew something was wrong, but was too afraid to do anything about it.

‘Go to your room, Ted!’ Ann had yelled out of anger, while my dad escorted me. I knew she was trying to pry my father away from me, but because of her fear of him, could only defer to him as the Master, in command of my release.

Dad always talked about me as if I belonged to my mother, and that he wanted nothing to do with me. Unless it was a matter of meting out physical punishment, he acted as if I did not exist. He delighted in showing my bruises to Ann, triumphantly expecting her to cower before his might. After all, I had hit a girl on her ear with a pebble. Even though I felt bad, there was no denying it was a marvelous Hail Mary pass for his inhibited frustration.

The way he marched me to my room, one would have thought I wasn’t capable of walking ten feet on my own. Alone, as I rested on my belly, I bawled my eyes out. After about ten minutes of crying, I thought about what I did.

After several more minutes, I once again became restless. Muted voices—those of boys—lassoed my attention. They sounded familiar.

I heard Jason talking outside, and I rose up to look through my window. That was the day I first saw Travis Jackson.

Travis stood taller than Jason did by at least a head’s length. He had chestnut hair and a prominent nose like a gladiator’s. I was watching from my bedroom when I saw Jason shaking Travis’s hand. I could only see the tops of their heads.

Travis was new to the Red Bricks. He moved in that day. If I was there to meet him in person, I might have known his pain from the sight of him. I would come to find out later Travis was abused by his father, like me. Travis and Jason were the same age as me, and I wanted to be a part of their instantly formed clique. Badly.

‘Welcome to the corniest place on Earth, dude,’ Jason said.

‘Is there really a lot of corn here?’ Travis snickered.

‘No, this place just sucks, but there are some cute girls who live in Century Place,’ Jason said, answering Travis’s odd query. ‘Did you see anything cool on your trip up here?’

‘Well, if you consider twenty dead armadillos on the side of the road cool. We saw a motorcycle accident. There was a dead dude and I think he was gone because they wrapped him in a bag,’ Travis answered.

‘Wow,’ Jason said. Travis excited him, and I think that is when they became pals. Travis picked up on Jason’s excitement. ‘Do you want to see my new place?’ Jason nodded his head, and they both walked toward the front door of the building.

I liked Jason, because he was intriguing. I ached to become closer friends with him. He had set fire to the plains surrounding our area before they were paved over for suburbia. Jason was bad, and that was interesting.

Jason always cuffed his pants about two inches up from his shoes and wore shirts that were stretched in the neck from being so rough with other kids. He had brown hair, and his eyes were always welcoming—even if you knew he was about to pull off a prank the next second. He had the charisma I was missing. He lived in the complex just across the drab courtyard, which was nothing but a square of parched crabgrass, really.

“I once again became aware of very distant, muted voices that sounded exactly like those a few minutes ago. These voices were emanating from through my bedroom floor, which like all the other floors and walls, was paper-thin in this crummy building. In a kneeling position, I placed my ear down on the cold surface. I could hear Travis and Jason in the apartment below! This must be where Travis’s new apartment is! Stoked about my discovery, I heard Jason carry on to Travis about his old prank in setting fire to the woods in front of our apartments.”

Water.

My mind jolts back to reality, to the present day. Without saliva, my tongue feels parched against the roof of my mouth. Sitting in this cell is bad enough; I am wasting energy telling stories to a computer. Of course, now the battery is dying. The beeping indicator notifies me repeatedly that the device will soon shut down.

“Guard. I need some water and a charger for this damn computer. Guard!”

The intercom cues up with a buzz and click. The guard says, “Step back! I said, step back!”

Beyond the view box opening, he throws a splash of water at me, and I catch it with my shirt. I am no stranger to thirst, and I don’t think twice. I wring out the water that he tossed, over my lips, and into my mouth. He tells me the device will charge when it isn’t in use. It makes sense to me.

“Get back to it, prisoner!”

Without a thought, conditioned by several months of brutality in solitary confinement, I meekly say, “Yes, sir.” I will not sass him. Prison guards are notorious for lashing out, and it is usually a group effort. My side still throbs and continues to swell from the prod. Back to it, I guess. I should get back to how this all started, but it feels good to talk about my family—yes. Tears run down my cheeks. Even with the upsetting memories swirling around in my head, I know a universal truth—a child cannot “unlove” his parents.


“It was the second to the last day of my grounding. I was still bored in bed, having re-read my adventure books for the third time. There was a beam of light entering through the window, and I was fascinated by the highlighted dust I could scatter around with my hand.”

There was a brisk smell of possibly an early frost in the air. I had my window open, and I could hear some couple outside yelling at each other at eight in the morning. They were fighting about the garbage, of all things. Apparently, she threw out his sports listing and a bottle of high fat milk that was ninety-five percent depleted anyway.

My calico cat Meghan entered the room. She hopped into my lap and kneaded my belly. There was sudden excitement on her face, because a fly had just snuck through a dime-sized hole through the mesh screen of my window. My cat went into a berserk attack mode. It was thrilling. I was cheering her on. Meghan snagged the fly with her claw, and brought it to her mouth.

‘Please no, don’t eat it whatever you do!’ I exclaimed, forgetting my dad was asleep.

She ate it. Immediately, the contents of my stomach became the contents of my throat, then mouth. I was like a bulimic squirrel. I ran toward the bathroom as fast as I could, puking with sporadic bursts on the tan apartment carpeting in the hallway, despite my hands over my mouth. Just before I reached the bathroom, I encountered an immovable force—my dad.

‘What in the hell is going on here Theodore? You are puking all over my God damn house?’ my dad asked furiously. His face was red on the left side, probably from sleeping awkwardly, and his mustache was crinkled at the left corner of his upper lip as it twitched.

I firmly pressed my left hand against my mouth, still in a delicate state. I pointed with my right index finger to my face, with pleading eyes, and he reluctantly understood.

‘Go clean yourself up!’ he roared at me as he shoved me in the bathroom, closing the door onto me.

Gasping, I finished off my vomit in the porcelain sink. As my stomach dry heaved, I knew there was no more to come. Deadly afraid that my dad would open the door any moment, I quickly splashed water on my face and grabbed a towel to dry myself off.

My premonition proved correct. The door flung wide open as my father, out of control, grasped me by my pajamas collar. He shoved me, still maintaining a steel grip on my collar, toward the scene of the crime. Splotches of vomit still decked the hallway, plus some backsplash on the walls near the floor.

Spinning me around ferociously, he clasped his rough hands around my neck, and just like that, lifted me off the floor, my feet dangling. In that fateful moment, two lessons were branded on me like a searing cattle prod. Abuse of power was the first lesson—a familiar one he had pummeled into me several times in the past. Second—and the most fresh and damning—my dad could drain the life from my body any time he wanted. My dad wasn’t trying to strangle me. Rather, he was showing me that he held the power and that one wrong move could mean the end.

My feet were not touching the floor, and it was a good indication that the trial wasn’t over. I swallowed the rest of my puke. It tasted extremely acidic with crunchy peanut butter a la mode. Then, the balls of my feet hit the carpet, stiff in the spot where someone spilled mustard weeks before, and I realized that it was over. My dad faded into the darkness of the hallway and disappeared behind the slam of a bedroom door.

After spending the next hour trying to clean up the vomit, I set up a war game in my room. I wore myself out marshaling my anger into a fierce engagement. Mainly, the battle was between a plastic muscular commando and his army of transforming robots, versus the relentless onslaught of monochromatic green army men with baseplates. They were essential to any army or battle scene forged by the imagination of a kid.

The day crept on. When it was dark out, a sweeping series of elongated shadows intermingled on my floor, as the bright lamp on my dresser relentlessly shone through the darting miniature figures embroiled into battle.

It was now way past bedtime, and no one had yet checked on me. Exhausted yet still haywire from my war games, I retreated quickly to my blankets after I turned off the lights. I had darted across the floor as if it was sprinkled with hot coals. Once under my blanket, I hummed a popular cartoon theme song.

My eyes shuttered and slowly began to close. Just as my eyes were about to close entirely, something bizarre, shimmering with iridescence, slipped in through my window.

I sat up quickly, and the blood rushing through my head made me wobble. Hovering just above my feet at the end of the bed, the strange object glowed and flickered against the walls in my room. It was a warm and gentle light. I gasped. Was it a tiny spaceship?

The object bearing the multicolored radiance steadily hummed as it deliberately glided toward me. Its trajectory was in line with my window sill. Now, it was as if anti-freeze was being poured into the crevices in my brain. Panicking, I inched to my side away from the hovering object, feeling the full effect of the “flight” instinct. In doing so, I fell off my bed and thudded clumsily against the floor. Panting, I sat up on the floor, placed my hands at the edge of the bed, and peeked over my comforter that was bundled upward.

‘What! Is this for real?’ I exclaimed.

The object was foreign and weird. It had a jewel the size of a quarter linked to a necklace. Finally, as if surrendering, it stopped glowing, quickly descended right before my eyes, and landed on the apex of a blanket wrinkle. I leaned in and held out my hand to scoop it up. Suddenly, like the projector at a drive-in, it emitted a luminescent array of cryptic characters through the darkness, against my bedroom wall. The message read—

Theodore, you may be our only hope. Keep this around your neck, because someday it will be the only thing preventing your death and the ruin of the multiverse - K. T.

—or something like that. The glowing message simply vanished before I could commit it to memory. I brought my hands closer to grasp the amulet, supposedly the premonition of my fate. Once in hand, it felt warm, like the side of my TV. When I thought it to be safe, I gingerly lay the strings around my neck. Reluctantly releasing my grip on the amulet for a few seconds, I clicked together the links at the ends of the necklace. As my eyes grew wide with wonder, the necklace itself miraculously retracted to snugly fit my pencil-shaped neck. Cool. Once the necklace was secured, I clasped the amulet itself as if I could never let it go. Didn’t want to risk it, you see. What kid wants to die, or ruin the multiverse?

“As I crawled onto the bed, I wondered what the multiverse might want with a dork like me—and who was K. T.? I figured it to be a dream. I gripped the prismatic jewel firmly, and continued to hum until another day of grounding diminished. I fell asleep.”

I stop recording. I look at the gloomy walls of my prison cell, feeling at one with my just-concluded parable of me falling asleep. I yawn. Enough talking. I will sleep for now in this place in hell, having had the satisfaction of venting my past.

I turn off the tablet and allow it to charge. Lying down on the mats causes my side to sting. I roll over to position myself in a way that is comfortable, with my back against the floor.

Staring down multiple barrels of a chain gun is a situation not too far from the normal reality outside of this fortress. Closing my eyes, I fantasize about my escape from prison for the hundred and fourteenth time.