The Revenant Road Read Free

earlier, a fact that she’d never grown tired of reminding her “little sister.”
     I was sitting in the back seat with Doctor Necropolis  and Black Murray, the garter snake I’d liberated from my second-grade classroom. Black Murray lived in the glass geranium I kept on the windowsill in my bedroom. I’d taken him along on the trip to Oak Bluffs thinking (inexplicably) that he might enjoy the beach.
     My parents had waged a silent war since leaving New York: silent because my mother remained adamant that Aunt Selena never hear her and my father arguing, thereby adding fuel to a fire that was ignited the day my mother was born. As a result, I’d spent the summer of ‘79 ignoring hissed accusations and dodging thinly-veiled glares. I was only 9, but I wasn’t stupid.
     Doctor Necropolis giggled: Toil and trouble m’boy, he whispered. Toil and trouble .
     Doctor Necropolis was the mortal nemesis of The Time Rangers, a ragtag bunch of time-traveling marionette soldiers who haunted the UHF arm of Chicago ’s TV galaxy for nearly a decade. He was the second-hottest seller in the FADCO line of action figures and games from 1967 until 1974, surpassed in popularity only by Captain Radion, the lantern-jawed Commander of the ‘Fighting 509 th .’
    He’d made the trip from Chicago , where we’d lived until 1973, to New York , largely because my parents had only allowed me to take one toy with me during a hastily organized move conducted in the dead of night.
    The black-clad Doctor Necropolis wielded a ‘Flying Death-ray Lazer Pocket Watch,’ ‘ Perfect Karate-chop Action’ and a ‘Time-Grenade’ that could blast his enemies into the distant future or the forgotten past.
    My Doctor Necropolis knew when people were going to die.   
    He’d begun speaking to me sometime after my sixth birthday, an item he’d instructed me never to share with either of my parents.
    Newsflash from Futureville , O-dog ,” Necropolis chuckled.     
    My father was fiddling with the radio as we drove along the Merritt Parkway toward New York while Lenore sat staring out of the passenger window, her jaw muscles clenching as she gnawed the bone of her discontent. Finally, the bone broke. Always consistent, Lenore went for the marrow.
    “When we left Chicago you promised me that it was over, Marcus.”
    Marcus took a deep breath and kept his eyes fixed upon the road.
    “They’re breathing down my neck, Lenore,” he said.
    Briefly, our eyes met in the rear-view mirror.
    “Let’s talk about this later,” he said.
    My father took pains never to argue with Lenore in front of me. Sometimes this made him appear weak before the juggernaut that was (and is) my mother: Lenore suffered from no such compunction.
    “ I don’t care ,” she hissed. “I don’t care if he knows. You spend more time with Kowalski than you do with him anyway, so don’t pretend that you care.”
    “Lenore, when Kowalski calls...”    
    “You jump,” she said savagely. “You jump up and run to him like his little black lapdog every time.”    
    When angered, Marcus could bellow like a general commanding troops under heavy fire. Marcus worked nights. A lot of nights.  Often, I’d heard them arguing when they thought I was at school. I’d sit on the front porch until the screaming stopped, too angry to open the door and scream at them to shut up shut up just shut...up .
    But the finality I heard in my father’s voice that afternoon scared me more than the loudest shout.
    Party’s over, O-dog, Doctor Necropolis whispered.
    “You have no idea what’s happening out there, Lenore,” Marcus said, “and I’m tired of explaining it to you.”
    My mother actually gasped. She was (and is) a woman unaccustomed to being thwarted.
    “You arrogant son-of-a bitch,” she snarled. “Don’t you dare talk down to me.”
    “Dad?” I interrupted.
    Marcus looked up at me in the rear-view mirror again.
    “Quiet, son,” he said.
    I returned his