Gale Acuff – Dynamic Duo

Gale Acuff

Dynamic Duo

Between our houses on their own hills we run to each other to meet halfway at the Methodist church parking lot where we exchange comic books. I bought mine last night with extra money which I earned picking up stones from the garden. I dropped them in -to a gallon paint can and toted them to the side of our gravel driveway, where I dumped them into bottomless kudzu on the bank of the highway by our house. Hard work but worth it to turn my labor in -to fantasy. In a light rain I bring Bill what I bought and read the night before —Justice League of America, Blackhawk, Metal Men, Challengers of the Unknown, House of Secrets and House of Mystery. I swap them for the weekend for Hawkman, Atom, G.I. Combat, Green Lantern, and Doom Patrol. We’re standing near the cross as the rain thickens, pelts like meteors. Our coats are open; we wrap each other around, our heads touching. No one can see what we’re exchanging–it’s like a drug deal but we’re too young to know about that. Sex neither. We give ourselves to each other, it doesn’t take long, and we’re off, back home. I trust Bill: He won’t fold the covers back while he devours his; he respects me, too. Love is good–we don’t call it love. We need each other. I have what he held, beneath my coat, safe from the water. He brought his in the thin paper bag they came in when he’d purchased. I run up the hill to my place, recalling his charity –he offered me protection; I declined, saying, No, no, man. You can keep the thing. He slipped my comics into it; they filled the space of his own, now hugging my chest and stomach–I’m very small for my age and he’ll grow to be big like his Air Force father. We’re both juniors. William E. Nutt, Jr. Gale G. Acuff, Jr. We’re twins that way. We live in houses on hills. Twins again. We both have three siblings. Twins times three. He’s the oldest kid in his family –I’m the youngest. That’s not twins but it’s so opposite that it surely signifies. I take the magazines to my bedroom, in the attic. Which one do I read first? And what’s Bill doing now but wondering what I’m wondering about? What happened to us down there, when we traded for what we already have but never quite seem to possess? Now I’m sorry we parted but we had a mission this afternoon –I was the one who rang him; he picked up right away and said, Hey, man, I was just about to call you. We went to K-Mart and I got new comic books. Didja go shopping last night like ya’ll usually do? Yeah, I say, and I’ve read ’em all so let’s trade if you’re ready. Okay, he says. Meet me in front of St. Stephen’s but it’s started to rain so let’s do it real quick. On my way, I say. I go out the back door and down the steps and through the garden –it’s easy when it’s all downhill. He’s there just when I arrive. That’s when we huddle and shelter our heroes from rain and cold though we don’t know irony yet. I’m home again in five minutes and the world is what God meant it to be, which is why God died. And I won’t read them all at once—one now, one later, the rest after supper. Then all the letters to the editors and all the advertisements and once more through all five to find any good I’ve missed. And then I’ll read some old comics of mine that I haven’t read but once, long ago, and hope Bill feels how I felt the first time through, how you create something someone else created for you, until you don’t know who’s created what. Then I’ll fall asleep and when I wake I’ll wonder if I’m saved.

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