Seize the Night

stupid,” I protested.
    “Geek, geek, geek chase,” he insisted, leaning into the steering wheel.
    The Jeep jumped the curb, flashed under the low-hanging branches of two flanking laurels, and crashed through the boxwood hard enough to rattle the bottles of beer in the slush-filled cooler, spitting broken hedge branches behind it. As we crossed the lawn, a raw, sweet, green odor rose from the crushed grass under the tires, which was lush from the winter rains.
    The creature had disappeared around the side of the bungalow even as we were blasting through the hedge.
    Bobby went after it.
    “This has nothing to do with Orson or Jimmy,” I shouted over the engine roar.
    “How do you know?”
    He was right. I didn't know. Maybe there was a connection.
    Anyway, we didn't have any better leads to follow.
    As he swung the Jeep between two bungalows, he said, “ Carpe noctem , remember?”
    I had recently told him my new motto. Already, I regretted having revealed it. I had the feeling that it was going to be quoted to me, at opportune moments, until it had less appeal than a mutton milkshake.
    About fifteen feet separated the bungalows, and there were no shrubs in this narrow sward. The headlights would have revealed the critter if it was here, but it was gone.
    This vanishment didn't give Bobby second thoughts. Instead, he pressed harder on the accelerator.
    We rocketed into the backyard in time to see our own private Sasquatch as it sprang across a picket fence and disappeared into the next property, once more revealing no more of itself than a fleeting glimpse of its hirsute buttocks.
    Bobby wasn't any more intimidated by the line of spindly wooden pickets than he had been by the hedgerow. Speeding toward it, he laughed and said, “Skeggin',” meaning having big-time fun , which most likely comes from skeg, the name for the rudder like fin on the underside of a surfboard, which allows you to steer and do cool maneuvers.
    Although Bobby is laid back and tranquility-loving, ranking as high in the annals of slackerhood as Saddam Hussein ranks in the Insane Dictator Hall of Fame, he's another dude altogether, a huge macking tsunami, once he's committed himself to a line of action. He will sit on a beach for hours, studying wave conditions, looking for sets that will push him to and maybe past his personal threshold, oblivious even to the passing contents of bun-floss bikinis, so focused and patient that he makes one of those Easter Island stone heads seem positively jittery, but when he sees what he needs and paddles his board out to the lineup, he doesn't wallow there like a buoy, he becomes a true raging slash master, ripping the waves, domesticating even the hugest thunder crushers, going for it so totally that if any shark mistook him for chum, he'd flip it upside down and ride it like a longboard.
    “Skeggin', my ass,” I said as we hit the fence.
    Weathered white pickets exploded over the hood of the Jeep, rattled across the windshield, clattered against the roll bar, and I was sure that one of them would ricochet at precisely the right angle to skewer one of my eyes and make brain shish kebab, but that didn't happen.
    Then we were crossing the rear lawn of the house that faced out on the next street in the grid.
    The yard we had left behind was smooth, but this one was full of troughs and mounds and chuckholes, over which we rollicked with such exuberance that I had to clamp one hand on my cap to keep it from flying off.
    In spite of the serious risk of biting all the way through my tongue if we suddenly bottomed out too hard, I said, in a stutter worthy of Porky Pig, “You see it?”
    “On it!” he assured me, though the headlights were arcing up and down so radically with the wildly bucking Jeep that I didn't believe he could see anything smaller than the house around which he was steering us.
    I'd switched off the spotlight, because I wasn't illuminating anything except my knees and various galactic nebulae, and if I threw up in my lap, I didn't care to scrutinize the mess under a high beam.
    The terrain between bungalows was as rugged as the backyard, and the ground in front of the house proved to be no better. If someone hadn't been burying dead cows on this property, then the gophers must be as big as Holsteins.
    We rocked to a halt before reaching the street. There were no hedgerows to hide behind, and the trunks of the Indian laurels weren't thick enough to entirely conceal a bulimic super model,