Stain grabs his eyes. “I think I have hepatitis.”
I give Stain an out of the corner of my eye sort of glance. “Hepatitis? In your eye?”
“Yeah, the fellow that had been liberated from possessions was spitting while he spoke.”
I laugh, out loud, and then I suddenly put on a serious deadpan face, even though I’m anything but serious. “What if he had herpes?”
“What? Oh, no. I can totally get ocular herpes. I’ve heard of that.”
“Oh yeah. You’ll have a big ring of incurable disease blisters shooting out of your eye.”
“What can I do?”
“This is terrible. People are going to think you were the creamy filled center in all boys production of circle time.”
“They totally will. They’ll look at my oozing eyesores and think that I love facials and not the good kind either.”
“There’s a good kind?”
“Yeah, it’s like a whole skin treatment at a beauty salon.”
“Oh, wow! Now, I feel like you deserve eye herpes.”
Stain starts fiddling with his eye a bit more and shows me his index finger. He looks and sounds very relieved. “It was just an eyelash, not an ocular disease.”
“That’s a relief. Now you only need to worry about the downstairs infections.”
A cop car is driving by. Stain waves a friendly hello, and the car pulls over.
A man wearing a funny costume with a piece of metal pinned on put his window down. “What are you boys up to tonight?”
I ignore the cop. Stain walks right up to the car, with his hand reaching up into his shirt. It almost looks like he’s holding a gun. “We’re walking, downtown.”
“What’s downtown?”
Stain moves his eyes back and forth, as if he were revealing the world’s best kept secret. “We’re going to get t-shirts made. We’re superheroes.”
“Ah, OK. Look, I’ve had some reports of weird stuff happening not too far from here. One report involves a large, tall, white guy. The other report is a medium framed, slender Chinese man.”
Stain looks, only mildly offended when he says in a racist Jerry Lewis type of accent. “So sorry. Me love you long time.”
The cop looks annoyed. “Are you trying to be smart with me?”
I look over. “He’s not Chinese.”
“Well, if you say so, but he sure looks Chinese, or Japanese, or something that ends with an ease sound.”
My tone is clearly annoyed at this point. “That’s right. He’s cheese. That’s his heritage. He comes from a long line of cow booby milk with a ton of bacterial culture.”
The cop gives the hand them over hand signal. “All right, names and IDs.”
Stain is happy to say who we are. “I’m Stain and this is Sappho. We fight for good.”
I’m much less thrilled with the whole encounter. “Listen sideshow. We’re not giving you our IDs. We don’t respect your authority, and your goofy little costume doesn’t do anything to help you out. Are we clear?”
“I can take you both down to the station right now. Would you like that?”
I screw up my eyes at this comment. “You. You’re just a peacock. You couldn’t even take one of us down to the station, never mind both of us. Give us your best.”
Stain actually looks a bit concerned now, as the cop begins calling for backup.
“I have matching descriptions for one Chinese man . . .”
Stain looks at me very intently but still finds the time to put on the Jerry Lewis accent again. “We run now? You want a flyed lice?”
“Yes, now we run.”