WES' BIKE MAUSOLEUM

On the day that Wes set the fire at the Invincible Court, he was not high or drunk. His speech was not slurred, or his tongue mashed against the side of his mouth. He was a little tired because he could not sleep; the Marshalls were going to be knocking and knocking and eventually breaking down his door later on in the morning, so...The little sleep that he did get placed him in a dream that was both disconcerting and hugely entertaining; in fact, the real reason that Wes could not get to sleep was because he kept on playing the momentary dream in his movie theater head.

Because I could not peek at Wes' dream I can't really tell you what he dreamed. But by the look on Wes' face as he slept, I can guesstimate what it is he dreamed about. You see by nature, Wes is inclined with a mechanical ability, no an acumen. Wes' hands, those skinny legumes of adroit pressure and precision, are any machine's Kryptonite; there is not a machine built that can not be intuited by Wes. This skill came to him after a short stint in the Army, before the Vietnam War, when he was stationed at a base around Boulder City. At the base, he was a mechanic first class, but there wasn't an officer, screw, or grunt that hadn't come to him with a shiftless alarm clock or lazy-eyed watch, cannibalistic electric shaver.

But he got up as he planned, at 7 in the morning, and took the gas canister from the closet in his 1/1 hovel. He placed it at his feet and lit a Newport; besides tasting like cactus toothpaste, the cigarette was his first of the day and felt like that mythological first cigarette all smokers chase. Wes threw the sheets on the futon spine and clamored over several bike skeletons in his hallway. He was the bike man in Harlem and people from as far as Rucker came to him so that he could fix their bike. He had garnered quite a reputation and people often payed him with dime bags and coke battleships, the occasional rock or two. And some people were just too far gone to be able to offer Wes something that he could use. So more often than not, he just kept the bikes from people who couldn't pay. Eventually, he would strip those bikes to repair the bikes of people who could pay. It is in this way that his house resembled a bike mausoleum.

And one of the reasons why he thought that the only solution to the Marshalls that were fast approaching through time and space was to torch the Invincible Court.