WHEN I SAW RELLY the next day, it was like we'd both done something really wrong and didn't want to bring it up. I'd heard girls talking about going to a party and getting drunk and sneaking off with some boy. And the next day they kept to themselves, not sure who saw them the night before or what they'd seen.
I guess it was like that with me and Relly. We hadn't done anything wrong. Nothing at all. In fact, lots of kids were friendlier now, as the word got around about our show and how Scorpio Bone blew the other bands off the stage. Still, we didn't say much to each other.
He even made up some bogus excuse why he couldn't eat lunch with me that day.
Then we were in bio again together and we got to see the Full Knacke.
He had this thing about smoking. He hated it, I mean, truly hated it with all the hate inside him. And so he built this smoking machine he called the Marlboro Man with glass tubes for lungs. It had been a full-size lifesaving dummy, but now it breathed all by itself, the air sucked in by a bellows run on a little electric motor. That day, Knacke set him up and put a cigarette in his mouth.
He lit a match, snarling through his teeth, "Welcome to Marlboro Country." He got the pump going and we had to sit for twenty minutes watching the black goo collect in the glass tubes. Knacke was getting all excited, saying, "See? See the filth you're taking into your bodies? Do you understand? If you smoke, then you pollute yourselves." And he made us come up, row by row, and look real close.
The dummy had a cowboy hat and Knacke would show us ads from magazines. "You see him? Do you understand what happened to this imbecile? He smoked himself to death." Knacke passed the ads around. Tough-looking cowboys. Macho range-riders. "Dead of cancer!" Knacke would scream at us. "Dead from smoking!"
I think he'd won some kind of award from the American Cancer Society. And the school loved it, of course. Somebody in Admin put up a display on the bulletin board right by the front door. "Festus B. Knacke, fighting for the lives of our young people."
We had bio last period. He'd done the smoking bit for all his classes. So by the end of the day, the lungs were pretty disgusting.