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    X-Ray Rider 3: Mileposts on the road to Childhood's end: The X-Ray Rider Trilogy, #3
    X-Ray Rider 3: Mileposts on the road to Childhood's end: The X-Ray Rider Trilogy, #3
    X-Ray Rider 3: Mileposts on the road to Childhood's end: The X-Ray Rider Trilogy, #3
    Ebook74 pages1 hour

    X-Ray Rider 3: Mileposts on the road to Childhood's end: The X-Ray Rider Trilogy, #3

    By Wayne Kyle Spitzer

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    About this ebook

    Jonesing for a drive-in theater and a hotrod El Camino?

    It’s the dawn of the 1970s and everything is changing. The war in Vietnam is winding down. So is the Apollo Space Program. The tiny northwestern city of Spokane is about to host a World’s Fair. But the Watergate Hearings and the re-entry of Skylab and the eruption of Mount Saint Helens are coming…as are killer bees and Ronald Reagan.

    Enter ‘The Kid,’ a panic-prone, hyper-imaginative boy whose life changes drastically when his father brings home an astronaut-white El Camino. As the car’s deep-seated rumbling becomes a catalyst for the Kid’s curiosity, his ailing, over-protective mother finds herself fending off questions she doesn’t want to answer. But her attempt to redirect him on his birthday only arms him with the tool he needs to penetrate deeper—a pair of novelty X-Ray Specs—and as the Camino muscles them through a decade of economic and cultural turmoil, the Kid comes to believe he can see through metal, clothing, skin—to the center of the universe itself, where he imagines something monstrous growing, spreading, reaching across time and space to threaten his very world.

    Using the iconography of 20th century trash Americana—drive-in monster movies, cancelled TV shows, vintage comic books—Spitzer has written an unconventional memoir which recalls J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Youth. More than a literal character, ‘The Kid’ is both the child and the adult. By eschewing the technique of traditional autobiography, Spitzer creates a spherical narrative in which the past lives on in an eternal present while retrospection penetrates the edges. X-Ray Rider is not so much a memoir as it is a retro prequel to a postmodern life—a cinematized “reboot” of what Stephen King calls the “fogged out landscape” of youth.

    Want to go for a ride?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHobb's End Books
    Release dateNov 25, 2017
    ISBN9781386267140
    X-Ray Rider 3: Mileposts on the road to Childhood's end: The X-Ray Rider Trilogy, #3
    Author

    Wayne Kyle Spitzer

    Wayne Kyle Spitzer (born July 15, 1966) is an American author and low-budget horror filmmaker from Spokane, Washington. He is the writer/director of the short horror film, Shadows in the Garden, as well as the author of Flashback, an SF/horror novel published in 1993. Spitzer's non-genre writing has appeared in subTerrain Magazine: Strong Words for a Polite Nation and Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History. His recent fiction includes The Ferryman Pentalogy, consisting of Comes a Ferryman, The Tempter and the Taker, The Pierced Veil, Black Hole, White Fountain, and To the End of Ursathrax, as well as The X-Ray Rider Trilogy and a screen adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows.

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      Book preview

      X-Ray Rider 3 - Wayne Kyle Spitzer

      I | Fireworks

      THE LUMPECTOMY HAS GONE WELL. Her doctors believe with near certainty that they have gotten it all. That nothing has spread to the lymph nodes and she will make a full recovery. But she has a long, nauseous August ahead in which she will be bombarded with powerful X-rays, five days per week for five weeks, which could keep her incapacitated into September, and will probably cause her to become gravely ill and to lose her hair. His mother believes a celebration is in order before the follow-up treatments begin—a road trip, naturally. Sheldon chooses not to go, opting instead to join his friend John Morrison’s family on a fishing trip.

      She insists they go to Kelowna, British Columbia, to visit Bedrock City—a theme-park based upon The Flintstones, for the Kid; but the Kid doesn’t enjoy it, having lost his taste for dinosaurs, or at least ones that look like Dino—colored purple or Day-Glo orange or sherbet-green—with frilly humps along their backs. Because they take the El Camino (124,000 miles and still unstoppable, his father says more than once) they are forced to stop frequently to buy tranny fluid, especially on their way home, so that they find themselves pulling into a town called Oliver at twilight just as a professional firework display is starting—apparently in celebration of British Columbia Day.

      He is amazed by the rockets; how they shoot so high, momentum upon momentum, heat upon heat—then burst, crackling, into a thousand little stars. He and his mother watch them out the passenger-side window, their faces parallel to each other, as his father maneuvers the Camino through an area of grassy knolls, then stops and backs up a slope—ratcheting the parking break so that they remain there, the rear of the car with its minor dent pointed at the sky, where the fireworks boom and blossom like an interstellar conflict only within the earth’s atmosphere. He helps his father set up the lawn-chairs so that the two fixed-back ones flank the long recliner, which his father insists his mother lay upon, Like Cleopatra, says the Kid, which causes her to laugh heartily as she settles in.

      His father goes to the cab of the car, returns with his mother’s camera and a pair of binoculars.

      Try these, he says, handing him the binoculars.

      His mother takes the camera. Cleopatra accepts this homage, Marc Antony. She gestures grandiosely. So many Marc Antony’s, so little time....

      There was only one Mark Antony, says the Kid.

      Tell that to Liz Taylor, she says, and laughs.

      Since the lumpectomy she has become buoyant— poking fun at people she would never have poked fun at before and generally behaving as though she were seeing everyone in a new and ridiculous light. Not in a mean- spirited way, but just to have fun. So it comes as no surprise when—realizing they are not alone among the knolls—she leans toward his father and whispers, Looks like we have some hipsters next door.

      The Kid gazes across the elm-dark dunes, sees a psychedelic-painted van parked half-hidden amongst the trees. It has an awning made of what appears to be pink, fake fur attached to it, which reminds him of the shag carpeting in his half-brother Mick’s perpetually smoky apartment. Those are hippies, he says, leaning forward in his chair, rubbing the growing pains in his thighs and his calves.

      Those were hippies. But now the war’s over and they’ve adapted. She winks at him and at his father. Now they’re just having fun. Still running wild but with a whole new set of pretenses.

      He looks at the van through the binoculars, adjusts the focusing wheel. There are four or five hipsters beside it, reclining in their own lawn-chairs, passing some kind of vase. He watches a woman place the vase to her lips and strike a lighter, sucking while keeping the flame going so that the flame curves into a little bowl at the bottom and makes it glow. She sucks and sucks, cheeks indented, hair hanging. Finally she looks up and tilts her head back, appearing to hold her breath, and seems to notice him watching her. She has long, straight hair the color of goldenrod and is wearing blue eye makeup in which she has sprinkled glitter. A firework explodes above turning everything green and gold. Everything about the woman screams ‘adult;’ not adult in the sense that his parents are adult, but adult in the sense of ‘forbidden,’ although she couldn’t be much older than his half-brother, Mick, who is 26.

      He works the focusing wheel furiously.

      Her cheeks dimple as she seems to smile at him; then she exhales, as though blowing a kiss, making an ‘O’ with her lips—which are shiny with lip gloss—puffing softly, her eyes narrowed and glazed. The smoke turns to rings in the air, expanding and dissipating. For some reason he thinks of his X-ray glasses, which are neatly folded in the pocket of his shirt—his brother’s shirt, actually—the one with the stiff collar and the lapels like garden trowels, which he has borrowed. He takes them out and unfolds them, feeling their frames, now thin as felt, and slides them on.

      Look, says his mother, squeezing his arm. He looks, the binoculars hanging loosely in his hands—sees embers twirling slowly back to earth, dying. They’re always at their most beautiful when falling, she says, smiling at the sky. Her eyes shine as yet another burst goes off, painting her face white and blue and red.

      Fantastic, says his father, cupping his eyes out of habit. "Faaantastic. You watching this, buddy?"

      The Kid nods, gazing at the fireworks, hearing both the people nearby and people far off celebrating, gasping as each new missile

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