Tradition by Nexxie     "Kelly, I hope I don't see a water bomb in your hand."     "Cap, I hope you don't either."  Chet Kelly whipped his right hand, which clutched a very large container of water, behind his back and headed for the locker room.     "Freeze!"     Habit and respect for his captain, or more specifically for the captain's creative ability to reward The Phantom's pranks with unpleasant details, brought Kelly to a screeching halt.     "Aw c'mon Cap, he's gonna expect it today of all days, you know that!"  Chet looked imploringly at the man who had the authority to put the skids under his latest effort at making sure John Gage felt appreciated.     "Kelly, why is it that you feel the need to spoil John's birthday?  You never do anything to any of the other guys on their birthdays, but year after year you go after Gage.  I wanna know why."     Chet set the water bomb on the kitchen counter as the two men made their way toward the coffee pot.  The squad was out on a run, the first of the day received just after roll call, and from the sound of it, wouldn't be out long.  Cap was wasting, in Chet's view, the precious time necessary for setting up a colossal prank.  He shrugged, "It's tradition, Cap.  I mean, if I didn't do anything to Gage today, he wouldn't be able to relax.  I figured I'd get it over with early on...kind of a 'mercy-bombing', so to speak."     The captain shook his head.  In his own screwball way, Chet was probably right.  The two men had a love-hate relationship that saner minds than his were hard-put to comprehend.  It was already established when Hank replaced Dick Hammer three years ago and despite Gage's grumbling and threats at almost always being on the receiving end, showed no sign of changing any time soon.  The two childish firemen and their constant sibling-like prank wars, made up as much of the atmosphere on Station 51's A-Shift as Mike's quiet reflective nature or Marco's flair at cooking.  If it suddenly ceased, life just wouldn't be the same.     Hank shrugged and made a gesture of dismissal.  As long as the pranks were not directed at him and were not dangerous, nor in any way interfered with doing the job, it was probably better to just ignore it.  He smiled indulgently and shook his head as Kelly, like a child on Christmas morning, set his coffee cup in the sink and made tracks for the locker room, water bomb in hand, his captain right behind him, determined to watch.     Kelly was a little nervous with his captain looking on as he prepared the water bomb and then removed a large bottle of glue from his own locker.  After setting the spring trap in Gage's locker, Chet removed the towel from the top of the stack in the linen cupboard and opened it, unfolding it on the bench.  He ran to the kitchen and returned with some plastic food wrap, spread a length on the towel and poured the white glue in the center, then folded the towel back into its original configuration and placed it back on the shelf.     His eyes sparkling with mischief, Chester B. Kelly, alias The Phantom, nipped into the dormitory and returned with a pillow, presumably Gage's.  He took a small pocketknife from it's place on his belt and carefully snipped the stitching across the end of the pillow until the seam was completely removed, then laid the pillow on the bench and returned to his own locker.     Aware he was observing a master at work, Hank watched Kelly move swiftly and surely to execute his plan.  The Irishman removed a reel of fishing line and a package of thumb tacks from the bottom of his locker and lay them on the bench as well.  Chet twirled the ends of his mustache in anticipation and hurried to the kitchen for a chair.  When he returned, Hank was able to piece together the actions and anticipate the trap.  "Kelly, that's diabolical!"     Chet acknowledged his superior's compliment, "Why, thank you, Cap.  The beauty of this baby is in its simplicity."  Kelly proceeded to cut a short length of fishing line and put a loop in each end.  He then tied a second, longer piece of line, to the center of the first.     Hank shifted and put his hands in his pockets.  "Just out of curiosity, Kelly, how did this prank war get started?  I mean, why do you constantly pick on John Gage?  Why him, of all people?"     Chet thought a minute before he stepped up on the chair and tacked the four ends of his handkerchief to the ceiling directly above the laundry hamper, forming a bowl shape.  He looped the short piece of fishing line over two of the tacks and let the long piece drape down into the hamper.  "Well, Cap, you weren't here when Gage first came to this station.  In fact, by the time you came on board, he'd mellowed quite a bit."  Chet grunted as he stepped down from the chair and reached for the pillow.     "Mellowed?"  Hank looked at Chet in amazement, "You're kidding!"  It was hard to imagine his junior paramedic, who possessed the metabolism of a chipmunk, being more high-strung.     "It's true, Cap, honest.  Before I took him in hand, Gage was a real smart-alec and stuck-up to boot.  He had some kind of idea that he was better than us 'ordinary firemen' just because he'd gone through some extra training."  Kelly returned to his work, removing a handful of feathers from the pillow and stepped up to place them in the handkerchief tacked to the ceiling.  "We were all getting pretty tired of it, even Stoker."     Kelly stared at his handiwork for a moment as if trying to remember a forgotten step, then snapped his fingers and ran out the door.  Hank smoothed his hair and waited for the fireman to return, anxious now to hear the rest of the story.  Kelly returned with the tape dispenser from Hank's desk.  He gave the captain a questioning glance and, at Hank's gesture of non-interference, taped the trailing end of the fishing line to the wall just above the hamper, allowing a portion to sag invisibly into it's depths.     Standing back to admire his handiwork, Chet nodded and indicated for Hank to preceed him out the door.  The two men made their way toward the kitchen where Chet replaced the chair at the table and took a seat on the couch.  Captain Stanley leaned against the wall, his hands in his pockets, and waited for Chet to continue.     "Man, he sure had no sense of humor back then.  You never saw anybody take himself so seriously.  Gage just stuck his nose in the air and pretended to be above it all.  You'd have thought his name was Brice sometimes."     "Well what happened?  Didn't he retaliate?"  Cap was intrigued.     "Not at first," Chet admitted.  "In fact, it wasn't until about the second month that he finally lost it.  It was classic, Cap, you should have seen it.  Even Roy got fed up with his partner always complaining about how their talent was being wasted directing traffic and handing things to the nurse.  There were times when he talked about quitting the paramedic program and we all felt like telling him to 'go ahead'.  Then a call came for the station to get a cat down from the ledge of a building; of course we didn't know it was for a cat.  This poor old lady was crying her eyes out about her 'Elvis' being in so much danger.  Gage thought at first it was her grandson and climbed out on the ledge only to discover it was a dumb cat.  He crawled on his hands and knees, a lifeline attached to his belt, and went after this flea-bitten old tomcat.  'Here, kitty, kitty,' he called."  Kelly shook his head, smiling broadly at the memory.     Knowing from a few earlier responses that his partner was uneasy with heights, Johnny volunteered to go out on the ledge.  Traffic below paused to gaze up at the spectacle of a fireman in pursuit of a feline in a stereotypical rescue.  The irony wasn't lost on the young paramedic.  "I've trained as a rescue man..."  He didn't finish the sentence.  Elvis managed to stay just out of Gage's reach.     They were pretty high up and pretty far from the woman's apartment window, when a pigeon landed on the ledge just in front of Johnny.  The cat lost interest in the fireman and went after the bird.  When Elvis pounced, the pigeon flew away and Gage made a grab for the cat.  The feline managed to wiggle away and Johnny felt himself slipping from the ledge.  Slowly he backed up and regained his balance.  The pigeon, determined to investigate the strange new inhabitants of his ledge, landed on Johnny's head.  Elvis, seeing renewed opportunity, leapt for the feathered prey.  The startled bird dropped a load on Gage's head before he flew away.     Cheated of his prize, the cat jumped on Johnny's back and then returned to the apartment without a care in the world.  Gage, afraid the cat would claw him, tried to jerk away.  When he did, he fell off the ledge and hung swinging back and forth on his lifeline, pigeon poop dripping from his hair.  His crewmates leaned out the window and made catcalls while they reeled him in.  Elvis, safe in "mommy's arms" seemed to sniff disdainfully at his would-be rescuer.  Angry and disgusted, Johnny was nonetheless polite, if not particularly charming, to the old lady as he crawled in the window and returned to the squad, Roy following a safe distance behind with an amused grin stretching ear to ear.     "We didn't let him forget that one," Chet said, a smile playing on his lips.  "The very next shift, at lunch time, we put birdseed on his plate."     "I remember that," Marco Lopez added as he entered the kitchen.  "Man, was Johnny mad.  'I ain't no pigeon,' he said, 'so cut it out.'  And then ..."     Gage pushed angrily away from the table and dumped the contents of his plate into the trash, then reached for a new one from the cupboard.  As he opened the cupboard door, he received another surprise.  Chet's spring mount catapult enjoyed a change from its usual water bomb fare as it was put into action launching a basket of feathers at the disgruntled paramedic.  His mouth open in surprise, Gage nearly swallowed some.  Johnny spat out his coworkers' gift and stormed from the room, pausing at the kitchen door to eye Chet angrily, "Kelly, I know this is your doing.  There's no 'phantom prankster' in this station, just an immature fireman jealous of the training he doesn't have."     "Oh, I'm not jealous, Gage," Kelly replied, "I'm glad they save the hard stuff like rescuing kitty-cats from ledges for guys with nothing better to do.  Leaves the really important work for us 'real' firemen."     Johnny's jaw worked as he fought to control the anger that had built up inside.  Acutely aware that he was unable as of yet to use the paramedic training he'd labored through, and unsure if it would ever be of use, he had no stinging comeback.  Sometimes Gage fervently wished to be back in his squad at Station 10 with Tony Freeman doing their best to make the hard rescues, ignorant of the Paramedic Program and unacquainted with Roy DeSoto who talked him into this joke of a job.  He turned on his heel and stomped out.     "Johnny sure was mad," Mike Stoker commented, joining his crewmates in the kitchen.  "Captain Hammer almost made Chet apologize."     "Oh, yeah?" Cap questioned, "why didn't Dick Hammer do something about it?"     "Because Gage decided to try and get even," Chet answered.     "Yeah, Johnny went out back and got a garden hose, turned it on, and stuck it into the window of Chet's old camper van.  After that, Captain Hammer decided that if Johnny was gonna be as immature as Chet...sorry amigo...he would just let the two of them figure it out."  Marco shook his head at the memory.     "It sounds like he got you back pretty good, Chet," Cap chuckled.     "Amateur stunt," Kelly replied, "purely amateur.  No imagination at all."     "I don't think he was concentrating on being clever, Chet," Mike commented.  "Oh, by the way, why is there a pillow in the locker room?"     Chet Kelly bounded from his seat on the couch and streaked toward the locker room to hide the evidence.  "Such a slip-up must have been because Cap was watching me," Chet decided.  "It's a mistake unworthy of The Phantom."     Chet returned to the kitchen just as the squad backed into the apparatus bay.  "Timing is everything," Chet decided with a smile.  "And now, we just wait for nature to take its course.  It's a nice touch, though, on his birthday to make it a 'feather' gag."     The squad doors slammed and they could hear bits of an ongoing conversation between the paramedics, one that Cap could just bet Johnny had been stuck on since the duo left on the call.     "I wish he would just get it over with," Johnny said gloomily.  "You know it's coming...I know it's coming.  Maybe it'll just be quick and painless."     "Come on, Junior, maybe nothing will happen this year."  Roy's tone didn't match his optimistic words.  He'd seen the gleam in Chet's eyes before roll call that morning and knew his partner was in for it.     "Aaaargh!  Kelly, I'm gonna kill you!"  The angry voice echoed throughout the station as, in the kitchen, The Phantom took a deep bow.     In the locker room, Johnny reached for a towel from the top of the stack to clean up the mess on the floor and was surprised to find it stuck in a folded position.  He tossed it into the hamper from across the room and watched in amusement as a quantity of feathers drifted down from the ceiling to cover the floor.  "Well," he told Roy, "the Phantom is certainly getting more creative."     "You gonna tell him the water bomb missed?" Roy asked his partner.     "Nah," Johnny's crooked grin put in an appearance.  "It'd ruin his whole day.  Wonder what the guys got me for my birthday this year?" THE END feedback for Nexxie return to main page .