Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality by Bill Peters

a bar, starts cracking up! The crowd noise picks up again, like they’re celebrating something. Somebody pats Toby on the back, and not in a mean way.
    â€œPathetic, pathetic, kill yourself already, you children ,” Luckytown screams over the crowd. “The fact that someone unconditionally loves you at all you piece of maternally deposited …”
    He stops and inhales, face recomposing itself like a VCR rewinding him into calmness. “I don’t feel all that sorry for anybody who associates himself with some boy ”—and he points his finger hard at Necro—“who, when he’s bored, exchanges weapons and chemicals and explosives with people who have tried to form a currency called the David!”
    Something unclicks inside me. “You don’t know Necro!” I say from behind Toby. “Necro’s not that type of guy! Necro hasn’t Unabombed anybody!”
    But Necro, right now? He droops his lower lip, raises his triangle Dracula-brows, and twists a button on his Necro Hall Of Fame Parka. As the bouncer muscles Toby toward the door, Luckytown says, voice thinning into the crowd: “I don’t think you know your friend here as much as you think you do.” He flops his arm toward Necro. “He’ll light a bomb and he’ll take you by the hand; he’ll lead you straight into hell, he’ll lead youinto …” and then I can’t hear him anymore, because we’ve been nudged outside.
    Riding home on 490, Toby’s car’s wipers whimper across the windshield.
    â€œI was so close, so close to throwing a punch,” he says. “When I think about it, I feel sorry for every person in there. Laughing like that. Who laughs at a life?”
    Next to me, Necro leans against the window and smirks into the collar of his Necro Hall of Fame Parka. He mumbles something.
    â€œWhat’d you say, Necro!” Toby goes, near-pulling the car over. “You laughing along with them?”
    Necro leans against the window, closes his eyes, and laughs, once, into his fist.
    â€œKangaroo for a Kid? Kangaroo for a Kid?” Toby says. “Is that what you said? I have eleven German Shepherds, and one of them died, and the reason everyone calls me Kangaroo for a Kid is because—”
    â€œDrop me off right here!” Necro says, pounding Toby’s headrest. His eyes are bloodshot and dark, like caves where fawn fall asleep and die. “You all look at me like I’m stupid! You take and invent a conspiracy. That is animalism!” Necro says. “It’s a good thing they don’t have a word for you—you and your Cockdramas! Your moral masturbation! Your pleonastic intestinalism! Your hippocampal food rape!”
    Toby pulls over on the side of the highway, passenger side-view mirror inches from the highway’s concrete sound-blocker wall. Necro slams the door, pushing air in on us. Heshrinks in the rearview mirror when Toby drives off, walking with big strides on the road shoulder.
    â€œWell I don’t know what any of that meant!” Toby says.
    Minutes shift by like earth plates. The sky is light purple, and there appears to be a crane, stretched all the way up into the cold into the top floor of a skyscraper. The water spraying out of it looks like a feather.
    At the exact same time, in the seat well where Necro was sitting, I find a manila folder with Necro’s bootprint on it. The folder has a bunch of what appear to be printed illustrations, in color on shiny paper. One shows a knight with a single flame making a wide curl around his body and ending at his sword blade. Behind him, a silhouette of a palace, gutted bright orange with flames. The body of a young man, in a pageboy vest, lies at his feet.
    â€œWhat’s that?” Toby says from the front.
    â€œOh, just some job applications I left in here,” I say. I stick the folder in my jacket.
    Because, in the way old friends do, Necro