Buckethead

 

                “Do you read me? Over.”

                “Loud and clear. Over.”

                She put her finger back on the message 

button, pressed it down and said, “What are you 

doing? Over.” She lay back on the bed, staring at 

the white ceiling, listening to the static against her 

ear, until the plastic talked again.

                “Not much. Over.” From inside the 

red house next door, her friend’s voice was 

traveling through the magic of walkie-talkies.

                Beulah held the machine back to her 

mouth. “We should do something. I’m going to 

pretend my bed is a boat. Over.” She sat up and 

stared out the window facing the ocean. The gray 

waves rolled out for thousands of miles towards 

Japan, a long way for the mattress to row.

                “I can see you out my window,” the 

voice in the toy said. “Over.”

                There was her neighbor, framed in 

Beulah’s other window, waving to her from another 

place.

                Beulah chopped up and down on the 

bed, springing back and forth, letting the invisible 

waves get really bad before she picked up the 

walkie-talkie again. “The storm’s hitting,” she 

warned. “Over.”

                A loud pirate voice crunched out of 

the little speaker, “What are you doing?” It hollered, 

“Get off this channel!”

                “Why should I?”  Beulah snapped and 

crouched, waiting for the reply.

                It didn’t take long. “Listen, Buckethead. 

Shut up!”

                “You shut up!” Beulah’s friend 

challenged, “Buckethead!”

                Beulah bounced and joined in, “You 

stupid Buckethead!”

                His answer was garbled with curses. 

From somewhere far out at sea he swore through 

their children yells. They were both laughing, 

cursing back at him, unleashing their vocabularies 

and inventing new words to get him.

                Beulah stared at the sea.

                Then the music began to play, spinning 

out of her walkie-talkie.

                Her feet started tingling, Beulah felt 

the sound filling her up inside like poured in water. 

The window facing the Pacific flew open and the 

drapes blew out like leaves disappearing fast 

across the ocean. She clawed at her walkie-talkie 

but couldn’t turn it off. The music got louder and 

louder, even with it jammed under the pillow. 

Screaming didn’t stop it either. The sound 

danced inside of her, freezing, rattling her bones, 

crawling tremors.

                Just like balloons, her feet rose off 

the covers, lifting her legs up. The blankets were 

dragging loose. She pinched the edge of the 

mattress, doing a headstand, struggling to hold 

onto the headboard. Her body tied itself in knots 

around the metal spokes, fighting the musical 

gravity.

                Looking over her shoulder, Beulah 

could see the frothing ocean, waves like hands 

pulling a line to her. And through all the loud, 

she could hear something else.

                With terrible kicking and shouting, 

Beulah’s friend levitated out of the red house, 

over the lawn, the picket fence and steep 

blackberried cliff and sailed out of sight.

                A mouth closing, the window shut 

slowly and all the hungry pull gave way to 

quietness as the music stopped, returning 

the room to stillness.

                Beulah fell back onto the softness, 

shot a hand under the pillow and smashed the 

walkie-talkie into pieces all over the wooden 

floor.

 

 

Annotated Buckethead:

This story was written in 1993

and appeared in my magazine

PIE IN THE SKY, #21.

It was inspired by a real life

episode in Maine when 

my cousin and I tuned into 

a lobster boat with our walkie-talkies.

For the past year I've been compiling 

a book of short stories, already 250 pages,

hopefully a publisher will soon appear.

 

(My friend Aaron Gunderson 

drew the scary title page tough, 

sad to say I made the cowboy cover,

1993 was a rough year.)