Kevin's Point of View
By Del Shannon

Chapter 2


Kevin sulked on his bed. What started out as a pretty good day had taken a big turn toward rotten. This morning he’d been grounded for three afternoons for running naked in his backyard, which meant he’d miss his favorite television show, Captain Disaster. He wouldn’t get to find out how Captain Disaster escaped from the Floogonians in time to foil their plans for attacking the earth with their new secret weapon, the Brain Mushifier. The Brain Mushifier turned the entire human race into drooling, vegetable slaves so they would do all the nasty jobs the Floogonians hated, like dirty-diaper-counter, toenail-cleaner, and squashed-skunk-in-the-road-remover.

Then at school Mrs. Schmidt, his teacher, had given him detention for daydreaming during English. He was sitting at his desk trying to figure out how she escaped from the Swamp of No Return when he smelled baking soda. He looked up and noticed her hulking body in front of him, her viper-like eyes red with anger. A weak smile by Kevin didn’t help. As he walked down the hall toward another note for his mother and a half-hour of after-school detention, he decided that next time he’d send her to the Mountains of Doom. Evil goats lived in the mountains and swarmed around unsuspecting travelers, nibbling away at their limbs when they weren’t looking.

Rap, rap, rap came the sound from Kevin’s window. Kevin’s best friend, Antonio Luciano DiVietti, or Tony for short, smacked his knuckles on the glass. Tony was much like Kevin – short, wiry, but with a straggling mess of hair as dark as a moonless night. Kevin threw his body off the bed and trudged to the window. Before he reached the window, Tony opened his mouth, pressed his lips against the glass and blew. He looked like a giant blowfish stuck to the window, except for the half-eaten cracker in his mouth, which he smeared around the glass with his tongue. Tony always knew how to cheer someone up.

“Your mom told me you were grounded,” Tony said as Kevin pushed up the window. “She said I could see you on Saturday, but I had to tell you what happened on Captain Disaster.”

"I think I figured it out,” Kevin said smiling slightly. “He still had one last piece of inviso-gum hidden in the heel of his shoe, remember? So he chews the gum and becomes invisible. Then he screams for Gwisher that he wants to tell them everything about the Earth’s defense systems. Gwisher comes running but when he gets to the cell, he thinks CD’s escaped. Gwisher panics, opens the door and, POW, CD flattens him in two punches.

“Then he grabs Gwisher’s keys and runs for the spaceport. But some of the other guards notice the keys floating down the hallway and start chasing him and the Floogs put up a force field blocking the hallway. The inviso-gum only lasts for five minutes, and he’s used up probably two or three minutes by now, so he’s got to think of something fast when he sees a ventilation shaft above him. He jumps up, rips open the grate and climbs in. He crawls through the shaft until he reaches the spaceport but he can’t jump down because it’s 50 feet off the ground. He doesn’t have time to crawl back and find a lower shaft so he kicks open the grate and jumps to a cable hanging from a crane. Then he swings over his ship, and does a perfect triple somersault before landing in his cockpit. All he had to do after that was hit the insta-accelerators and he was gone.” Kevin finished his version of the story and leaned back against the wall folding his arms across his chest.

“That’s pretty good, Kevin,” noted Tony, “and almost right except for the part about the ventilation shaft. He actually just ended up creaming everyone that got in his way . When he got to the spaceport, CD had to do three back handsprings and a double somersault to get into his ship because the Floogs had it surrounded.”

“One thing about the Floogs, they may be smart but they’re big, fat, and slow,” snickered Kevin. “Well, at least I was right about the inviso-gum.”

“My grandma could’ve figured that out, you cretin,” Tony shot back. “But CD’s not out of it yet. He still has to knock out the Brain Mushifier and the Floogs must have 30 ships waiting for him to come back and try it. I’ll try and tape it for you tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” Kevin said. “You know, I wish things were as exciting for us here in Boulder as they are for Captain Disaster. I don’t think I would run around my backyard naked if I had more to do.”

“Yeah,” nodded Tony. “That’s the act of a desperate guy. We definitely need some excitement around here. Maybe we’ll get to do some cool things next week at school camp?”

“I sure hope so,” answered Kevin.

“Well, better go before your mom catches me. See you tomorrow, Kev.” Tony waved good-bye and Kevin watched him scramble out the window and over the fence. Kevin turned and trudged back to his bed. It would be dinnertime in an hour and his mom expected most of his homework, which he hadn’t started, to be finished. He pulled his History folder off the floor and began reading but it was boring and his mind quickly drifted.

Kevin’s eyes traced around his room, over his walls, and stopped abruptly at his calendar – April. It didn’t seem like a year, but then not much that had happened in the last year seemed like anything Kevin had ever felt before. And as the spring, hinting at the warmth to come, seeped into his room from the window Tony had left open, he remembered the morning he last saw his father.

It was by chance really. Kevin had just gotten out of bed and was shuffling to his door when he saw his father peddling his mountain bike toward the mountains west of their home. His father relished these early morning rides, when the air was crisp and much of Boulder still slept.

An hour later a Boulder County Sheriff’s Deputy knocked at the front door and collapsed Kevin’s world. There was an accident. A car and a bike. They needed to get to the hospital. But Kevin already knew what they would find.

Like Kevin, his mother and sister were never the same after that morning. In their eyes he saw the pain, so readily rising to the surface but still attempting to hide it. But for Kevin, the death of his father opened a fault deep in his mind, a fault he sprinted to. At first it was just daydreams, distractions to his day. But within six months he had found a place deep in his mind where the death of his father didn’t exist. And Kevin relished this life. He learned to seek out his imagination, a world where all was as it should be.

His mother had tried counseling, therapists, psychologists, and anything else she could think of to help, but in the end all concluded that the behavior, while odd, wasn’t doing much harm. Time, patience, and love would eventually bring Kevin back to tangible world at hand.

Kevin had to smile at that. Maybe the experts were right, maybe time will heal his wounds. But time couldn’t bring his father back. The further Kevin moved away from that April morning, the further he was from his father.

***

The plainly wrapped package, mailed four days earlier in New York by Pudge, was delivered to the Tobin’s door by Erik, their postman, on Saturday morning. Erik liked going to the Tobin’s house, a remodeled two-story bungalow with a large covered front porch. A sweet breeze rustled the spring leaves of the maple, cottonwood, and oak trees that lined Mapleton Street as he walked up the path. He knocked politely on the heavy door and smiled as Ellen opened it gingerly a few seconds later.

“Sorry to bother you this morning, Mrs. Tobin. We’ve got a mystery here and I was hoping you’d be able to clear it up,” explained Erik. “The U.S. Postal Service hates mysteries. The address on this package got smudged a little,” he showed her the package. “We’re not quite sure where it should go. We would have sent it back but there was no return address. New York sent it to us because they thought Boulder was the most logical town in Colorado it could have been addressed to. See here,” Erik pointed to the label.

evin T n
35 Map St.
B , CO 8 2

Ellen leaned over to examine the address.

“It kind of looks like it’s addressed to Kevin,” Erik offered.

Ellen tilted her head and read the address again.

“Is Kevin expecting a package from New York?” Erik asked.

Ellen’s face suddenly lit up at Erik’s question. She took the package, pulled a pen from her pocket and filled in the blanks of the address. It now read

Kevin Tobin
2235 Mapleton St.
Boulder, CO 80302

It must be from Kevin’s godmother,” Ellen said. “She always forgets his birthday. It was three weeks ago. I’m sure she sent it. She never remembers to put a return address.”

Without a word Erik handed her the package, tipped his hat, and bounced down the sidewalk, happy to be rid of his small problem.

Ellen closed the door and placed the package on the dining room table. “Kevin! There’s a package for you!” she yelled. Silence. She breathed deeply. “Kevin, where are you?” A faint, crackled voice came from the family room, “Repeat Red Team leader, repeat. Return to base now? Target in sight. Ready to strike. Over.”

Ellen sighed. She had no strength to fight his imagination this morning and reluctantly decided to play along. “Affirmative, Red Tiger,” she yelled, holding her nose, trying to sound like a distant radio voice. “Important package to pick-up. Highest priority. Orders from the Pentagon. Cancel attack and return to Red Base immediately. Repeat, cancel attack. Over.”

“Wonderful,” First Lieutenant Tobin muttered as he banked the sleek F-16 fighter starboard. “Twenty seconds from knocking out a missile site and I get called back to be a $50 million taxi.” He streaked through the sky, grumbling about the unimportant role he’d been reduced to, when he suddenly got a very good idea. As long as he was going to be a taxi, he thought, why not be the world’s fastest taxi. He grinned and reached for the afterburner throttle.

The powerful twin rocket engines pressed Tobin back into his seat. The F-16 passed through Mach one within a few seconds and began to close the gap on Mach two. Up ahead, Red Team Base came into view and he scanned the runway with his eyes for his package. It was too small for his radar to locate but he quickly spotted it with his hawk-like vision. Instead of slowing for the pickup, Tobin screamed toward the runway at over 1,300 miles per hour and only 100 feet off the ground.

Ellen heard the sound of running footsteps and turned her head knowing it was a green and blue blur named Kevin. He was running with his head down and his arms flailing wildly as he entered the kitchen. He stepped on Sprinkles’ tail as he raced through, and bared down on the dining room. Ellen had been in this situation before, caught innocently in the path of an out-of-control Kevin and she immediately dove out of the dining room and into the living room, leaping to the safety of a large, overstuffed sofa.

Now only five feet above the ground, Tobin’s eyes fixed on the package. He lowered his pickup boom from underneath his exhaust vents and made one final adjustment before locking in his path.

Kevin never slowed down as he raced past the large dining room table and scooped the package with his left arm. Just before Ellen thought he would crash through the front window, Kevin turned sharply into the living room. He missed his mother by inches as she curled on the couch, careful to bring her arms and legs in close to her body. She turned and watched him race down the hallway, up the stairs, and nearly tear his bedroom door off its hinges as he threw it open and quickly slammed it shut.

Ellen sat on the couch in a heap, too bewildered to move. She watched the floor lamp next to the couch sway gently back and forth. It was only 10:30 am, 10 hours until Kevin’s bedtime.

First Lieutenant Tobin relaxed in the cockpit of his F-16 as it sat motionless on the tarmac of the ultra-secret base. So secret was the base that it didn’t even have a name, only coordinates. The package, it had turned out, was for him and he held it curiously in his gloved hands. He wondered what secret the Pentagon was entrusting to its bravest and best fighter pilot. He tore through the brown paper and pried open the cardboard box.

Kevin snapped back to reality as quickly as he had jumped through Mach one earlier. Sitting on his bed, surrounded with brown paper and a thousand Styrofoam peanuts, he held a small, sleek black box with the word INFLUXITRON painted on one side in white block letters.


End Chapter 2