THE LAST WORD

by Stewart Shelley

Table of Contents

Chapter                                                        

1.   Drug Deal                          

2.   The Scene of the Crime

3.   Beginnings

1. Grilled Cheese
2. At the Lake
3. Gerald Calling
4. Mitch
5. Phone Booths, Houses, and Corrals
6. Bernadine
7. Following Maddie
8. The Bible and the Lucky Bag
9. Little Punks
10. Choices
11. Good Dog
12. Woofy
13. The Library
14. Unitas States
15. Lagoon Encounter
16. Study Hall
17. Tyson  
18. Meatless Friday
19. Lost
20. Vinnie the Vampire
21. Armed Robbery
22. Splendid Splinter
23. Army Bound
24. The Canal
25. Two Parties
26. Bonds…Jeff’s Bonds
27. A Sad Visit
28. Armando’s Friends
29. About Armando
30. Mrs. Calderon’s Strength  
31. Fame
32. A Very Bad Night
33. Dominic’s Story
34. Grady
35. Reversing Field
36. Ask Your Best Friend
37. Mirror, Mirror
38. That Tears It
39. After the Game

1:  Drug Deal  

        We drove to an abandoned construction site twenty miles past the last lights of town.  I guess somebody ran out of money after the foundation of their dream home got poured.  I didn’t understand why you would want to build your dream home in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, but nobody asked me.          

        Rebar jabbed through the concrete along the edges—the dots meant to be connected to form walls that never got built.   Weatherworn two-by-fours of varying lengths idled like guests waiting for the party that never got going.  

        It might have made a good make-out spot if it hadn’t been so exposed.  That seemed to rule it out as a place for drug deals, too, but there it was, and there we were.  Jeff had turned the headlights off half-a-mile back along the dusty road that led from the main highway.  Still, you could see every lizard and scorpion by the light of a silver-dollar moon suspended just out of reach.  At one corner of the slab stood a forlorn shack.  One wall served as a final resting place for faded candy wrappers and potato chip bags borne there by countless desert breezes over the years.

        The ragged front page of The Arizona Republic drifted over and clung to the windshield of Jeff’s ’57 Chevy Bel Aire.  The headline read, “Young Negroes March in Birmingham.”  I swiped at it and watched it scrape along until it came to rest against the hood of an old car sitting half-hidden behind the shed.

         Its headlights flicked on and off, and seconds later the door opened.  Jeff said, “You coming?”

        “No, I am not!  Go ahead and buy your dope, Mr. Cool.  I won’t be a part of this deal, and I won’t smoke any of that garbage, once you get it.”

        “Come on, Frank.  What’s the big deal?”        

         “What’s the big deal!  You think I’m going to smoke a reefer, just so you can feel like a big shot?  That stuff makes you crazy, Jeff, and I’m not doing it.”  

        “Don’t be dumb.  Nobody’s going to get hooked from smoking one joint.”  

        I remained slumped in my seat, sulking.  A shadow walked toward us, with a limp pronounced enough to make me rub my knee.  “Serve you right if you get shot,” I hissed.  If I had been less angry, or more experienced I would have gone with him.

        Jeff waited, looking at me like a disappointed father.  He shook his head, said, “Weenie,” and got out.  He walked halfway across the foundation to where the other guy stood.  Built like a linebacker, the guy stood just taller than Jeff’s six feet.  He wasn’t a giant, but you wouldn’t want him falling on you if he had a heart attack.

        It seemed funny for two tough guys to shake hands as they prepared to exchange money for illicit drugs.  They could have been lawyers in front of the courthouse.

        The guy held the handshake too long, like some foreigner.  Then he unleashed a bomb of a left hook that caught Jeff square on the jaw.  He never saw it coming.

        I don’t know what that skunk was thinking. Maybe he had planned something like this from the start.  Or maybe he thought Jeff was alone, which meant he might get away with the drugs, the money, and a cherry street rod.        

Maybe he was hopped-up on something stronger than pot, I don’t know.  All I know is, Jeff went straight down.  The brute turned him onto his stomach and grabbed his wallet.  He stuffed it into his greasy jacket—the jacket he wore in the desert in June.    

People who work in shops and stores watch out for guys wearing jackets when they shouldn’t be.  So maybe this clown supplemented his shoplifting income by moonlighting as a drug dealer.  Or, maybe he just didn’t have much fashion sense.          

Jeff hadn’t stirred since the guy dropped him, and I had no idea what the creep planned to do next.  He might look for the keys in his front pockets.  He might cut his throat.  

I couldn’t sit in the car like a crash dummy while my best friend got treated like yesterday’s laundry, so I shoved the door open and charged, screaming, “Hey, you faggot!”  I went after him like a defensive lineman chasing an unprotected quarterback, but I had enough time to notice a two-by-four about the size of a Louisville Slugger in my path.  I thought, that would really come in handy right now, but decided not to grab it because I didn’t want to give the guy time to get set.  By the time he half-turned, I nailed him.  

I never played defense, so I didn’t do much tackling, but I remember thinking I had made one of the most brilliant tackles in football history—or at least in the history of aborted drug deals.  I caught him right underneath his armpit with a shoulder.  I wondered if it would kill the guy to take an occasional shower.  I drove hard, chopping with my feet, just the way the coaches teach you.  I even wrapped my arms around him, like he was a ball carrier I didn’t want to escape.  

By the time we had skidded across the concrete, I lost my grip, and we ended up a few feet apart.  I got to my feet before he rolled onto his hands and knees.  I remember being proud that I had stunned him, even as I began to appreciate his size.  He must have outweighed me by fifty pounds.  My pride evaporated like a desert breeze.         

        It’s funny how many things can crowd into your mind.  As he struggled toward his feet, I noticed the look on his face.  It said I had insulted his mother.  I thought how good the two-by-four would feel in my hands and how much better things would be if he didn’t get up.  I even remembered to keep the Good Lord in my thoughts, but my prayer had more to do with saving my skin than with reverence for the Almighty.  I thought, Please, dear God, let Jeff wake up and save my scared little halfback rear end!  

I tried to kick his head to the Pinal County line, but only bruised my instep. While the thug rolled over and swore sincerely, I assessed my injuries.  I knew I wouldn’t be much trouble for this guy.  

Nobody ever saw anything as beautiful as what I saw next: not the Mona Lisa, not the Taj Mahal.  Not a “High, there!” smile on Tuesday Weld’s face.  I saw Jeff limping toward us.  The board he leaned on looked familiar.  He got steadier with every step, and when he closed to within three paces, it looked more like a club than a cane.  The goon saw it too, but I doubt he appreciated the esthetics.  

What started for him as a walk in the park, had turned into a swim in the sewer, so he decided to take the rest of the day off.  He hobbled toward the shed and his car.  It looked like an old Mercury with better days in its rear-view mirror.  

Halfway there, his leg fell off: slid right out the bottom of his tattered pant leg.  Otherwise, he might still be dragging it around.  Later, when I thought about it, it seemed funny: a monster of a man bobbing along like a sparrow toward his wreck, his free pant leg flapping like a flag, and Jeff advancing on him like Noah Webster’s definition of murder.  But at the time, it was not funny.          

The guy got behind the wheel and gunned it.  It lurched forward half a car-length and stalled.  It’s a safe bet he wanted to be somewhere else by then, because Jeff came across half an old cinder block, and picked it up.  The moon caught his face full, illuminating the hate in his eyes.  It reminded me of the way he looked when he talked about his father.          

The linebacker, as I now thought of him, got the Mercury started again, and took off.  Jeff let go with the block, leading him like he led me on a crossing routes. The night and the speed of the car made it impossible to see where it landed, but we knew it made contact because the car swerved, and we heard glass break and a muffled thud—and a not so muffled, “Shee-it!”

We hustled back to the Chevy, but with me hobbling, and Jeff still unsteady, the guy had a big lead by the time we started after him.  Otherwise, we might have caught him before he got to the highway.  Even then, it would have been tough, because the rutted dirt road kept us from doing over ten miles per hour.  

We were two hundred yards behind him, gobbling dust, when he pulled onto the blacktop.  We knew then he could never outrun us.  I estimated his speed at no more than seventy, and the Bel Aire could do that in first gear.  Following him couldn’t have been easier: he only had one taillight.        

        We stayed right behind him, not knowing what might happen next.  Would he be stupid enough to lead us to where he lived?  Or would he have a thousand buddies waiting to jump us when we got there?  Would he try to ditch us on surface streets when we got to town, or roll the Merc in the process?

        Once on the highway, we narrowed the gap right away.  I said, “Let’s force him off the road!”

        Jeff said, “Don’t be dumb.”

        He was right.  How would we force him off the road without risking a serious accident, or at least scraping up the paint on the Bel Aire?  “Okay, what, then?”  

        “Let’s just let him know this isn’t over,” he said, pulling alongside.  I tried to figure out something tough enough to yell at him as we ripped down Bee Line Highway side-by-side.  That’s when the sonofabitch pointed a gun at me!

“Back off!” I screamed, but Jeff had already taken everything in and tucked in behind the disgraceful wreck again. I wondered why the guy didn’t pull the gun on Jeff earlier, instead of slugging him?

        Jeff said, “What the hell?” which might have been the most intelligent thing either of us had said in two days.  

        I lapsed into a nightmare review.  An intrusive movie scene played in my head.  In it, I gaped past an enormous gun barrel at a grinning gorilla face.  I couldn’t make it stop.  It probably didn’t last as long as it seemed because Jeff hadn’t spoken again.  When words came back, I couldn’t tell if they were his or mine.  “Snap out of it, man!”  

        The car coasted for a second or two, then, ran normally.   Again, it happened; free-fall—normal operation.  Soon we decelerated steadily.  The sensation reminded me of a dream in which I drifted through space.  Except that in the dream, the ground approached my falling body, and now the taillight receded.    

        We swore, but we shouldn’t have been surprised because we habitually ran to the left of E.  In fact, the only time the needle ever moved off empty was right after we went to the Seven Eleven for a dollar’s worth of ethyl—two dollars, on payday.  

        Jeff pulled to the shoulder of the road.  I figured I would open the hood so people driving by would know we needed help.  I struggled against the pain to push the door open, but I shouldn’t have bothered.  Mr. All-star shot me a look, said, "Pussy," and took care of it himself.  

        "My hero," I said, my instep throbbing with every push of my heart, and my shoulder already so stiff I could barely move.  

2:  The Scene of the Crime  

        “I’ll hitch a ride into town,” he said before retrieving his well-used five-gallon gas can from the trunk.  “You stay with the car.”  

        A knot of vehicles formed on the highway.  Jeff extended his arm letting the yellow and red can dangle from his fist.  His thumb stood out horizontally, and the cars slid by without slowing, headlight beams flickering across his face.  

        “It might not be so easy for you to get a ride,” I said.                  

        “Why?”

        “Your head’s as big as a jack-o-lantern, that’s all.”

        "What are you talking about?  There’s nothing wrong with my head."

        "Jeez, Jeff!  Take a look in the mirror, man."  

        He bent to examine his blackened and swollen face in the side view mirror. After a second or two, he said, "Wow!  That guy really clocked me, huh?"  

        I said, "Maybe I should go."  

        "Hell," he said.  "You can barely walk.  I guess I’ll just have to make myself pretty."  He smiled, contorting his features into a swollen, purple, bloodshot-eyed specter.  

        "Uh, no.  Don’t do that."  Another thought occurred to me.  “What if a cop comes by?”

        “That wouldn’t be so great, huh?”

        “So?”        

        “So, what?”

        “So, what’s the plan, Mastermind?”

        He shrugged, “I don’t know, hope a cop doesn’t stop?  You got a better idea?”

        “Some plan.”  

        “Well, instead of bitching, maybe we should be thinking about what to do next.”

        A car slowed down and pulled onto the shoulder.  Jeff jogged toward it, but before he got there, the guy pulled back onto the road. We both yelled, "Shit!"

Jeff bounced the can off the ground.  “What the hell’s the matter with that guy?”

“I guess he got a good look at your jaw.  You look like a caricature.”  

“You mean character.”  Three or four more groups passed while Jeff stood with his thumb extended.  

        "I told you this was a bad idea," I said.  

        “You can be really tiresome, Frank.  You know that?”  

        “What the hell do you mean by that?   We could have been with Paige and Donna tonight, but you had to be a big man, and buy dope.”  

        “You didn’t have to come along.  But since you did, if you’d just walked out with me to meet the guy, none of this would have happened.”  

        “So, this is my fault?”

         A guy came along hauling cattle in one of those trailers you can see through.   It makes you feel bad about where the cows are going.

        I listened to crickets and fanned myself for the next half hour wondering why I let Jeff get me into situations like this.  Part of it had to do with his personality.  A damned force of nature is what he was.  A normal person with injuries like his wouldn’t be able to speak.  Heck, anybody else would still be curled up in a ball back in the desert.  But not Jeff.  Look, if you play football you deal with pain, but with Jeff, there was something almost mystical going on.

         Sophomore year, for example, he got sacked in the first quarter of the Camelback game and came up with two cracked ribs.  I’ve had the same injury and I can tell you I’d rather be smacked in the head with a ball pin hammer.  Just breathing is agony.  Any movement is unendurable.  And throwing a football is unthinkable—unless you are Jeff Barrett.  

        If you’re Jeff Barrett, you stay in the game and your teammates don’t even know you’re injured until you pass out after the final gun.  Not only that, you throw another eight or ten passes.  Several are “flag” routes, which means you throw the ball well over forty yards, and you put each one exactly where it needs to be.  I know, because I caught one for the winning touchdown.

        Okay, so you had to admire the guy.  You wanted to be around him, be like him.  I’m giving him that.  But that didn’t make him right all the time.  Anybody could see being stranded in the desert was his fault.  He was wrong, and I was right.  Period.

        I planned to tell him so too, as soon as he got back, but an awful thought hit me.  I didn’t have the courage to stand up to my best friend.  

        I had bumped up against the idea more than once before, and I always handled it by changing the subject, which meant I was afraid of being afraid.  It didn’t help that Jeff kept looking at me like I had disappointed him.  Again.  I might have sat there like that all night if he hadn’t come back sandwiched between two ASU coeds in a brand-new Corvette convertible.    

“One for you, and one for me!” he said.  They giggled like Bob Hope had delivered the line.  He looked over his shoulder on his way to the trunk for the gas can.  He said, “Ladies, I would like to introduce you to my best friend in the world, Richie Avalon.  Richie, this is Buffy, and this is Corky.”  They nodded in turn.  Buffy and Corky.  Sure.  

“Hi.”  I tried to smile, but I’m not sure how convincing I was.

To the girls, Jeff said, “I told you he was a cheerful bastard.”  They giggled again.  

Corky looked at me like she felt sorry for me and said, “We’re on our way up to Pinetop.  We’re watching my folks’ cabin for the summer.  Johnny said you guys can come up later in the week?”  She glanced in all four directions before taking a discrete chug of Hamm’s Beer.  

Jeff jumped in before I could say anything.  “Sure thing.  We’d follow you up right now if I didn’t have to get back for my organic chem final.”  He saw a look pass between them, and added, “Summer classes are a bitch, but you can’t finish a pre-med program in three years without making a few sacrifices.”  

Buffy, said, “Well, we better get going, or we’ll never get up there.  Nice to meet you, Richie.  You, too, Johnny.”  

“Yeah.  Thanks for the gas money.  We’ll get it back to you later in the week.”  

“Well, ‘bye,” said Buffy, wiggling to get comfortable behind the wheel.  She tossed her empty Hamm’s can toward a lonely sage as she steered the Vet onto the highway.

I had three goals while Jeff put gas in the tank—slide back to the passenger seat; do so with a minimum of pain; hide the effort from Jeff.   I knew I had failed when he slid behind the wheel.  “Pussy.”  

“Thanks for the assessment, Johnny,” I said.  

"Johnny Unitas… greatest quarterback in the history of the game."  

I thought about the two gorgeous girls in the Vet and wondered how Jeff had convinced them to give him a ride.  "How did you get those two to give you money for gas?"

He shrugged.  "I don’t know.  Girls like it when I’m happy."  

"Even when you look like Quasimodo’s brother?  I don’t get it."  

"You can ask them about it when we get up there later in the week."

“You mean when you get up there.  I’m not going.”  

“Yes, you are.”  He got the car started and pointed us back toward the abandoned dream in the desert.    

“Look, I know things like this don’t mean anything to you, but I gave my promise when I gave Paige my class ring.”

“Boring!”  

“Well, it may be boring, but I’m not going.”  

“Yes…You are.”  

Neither of us spoke while I counted to three and hated myself.  "Well, I won’t do anything when we get there."

“God, no.  I wouldn’t expect you to do anything but ruin everyone else’s good time.”  

He punched the radio on, and we heard a voice like sandpaper erasing a chalkboard.  “That was the Coasters, Baby, and this is the Wolfman…on the mighty ten-ninety…XERB!”  

I tried to stifle a big yawn.  “I’ll be glad when this is over.  I’m so damned tired!”  

It wasn’t always what Jeff said that made you feel like you had let him down, and you didn’t have to see the look.  You just felt it when you said certain things.  

"Tired, huh?  Sometimes, I can’t believe how damn dumb you are.”

        I pretended not to understand. “What?”

        “You know what?  You’re right.  We should go home and take a little siesta.  Get good and rested up before we wander back and see if there’s anything interesting back where we almost got killed!”

        “All right, all right” I said.  

        “I mean, why would we want to go back?  My wallet?”

        “He took your wallet, Jeff!  I saw him.”  

“And you’re absolutely certain he didn’t lose it in the fight?  Sure enough that it’s not worth going back to check?  It could be laying under a rock, right now.  But you’re right, let’s go home." The headlights picked up the turnoff.  I hoped that might distract him.  “And what about the guy’s wooden leg, for pity sake?  You think that might be worth looking over?  Anything else we might have overlooked, or forgotten?  Hell, he may have dropped his wallet somewhere.  With his I.D.  Who the hell knows what’s back there."  

"Okay, I get it, Jeff.  You’re right, and I’m wrong.  Like always.  Geez."  

"Dumb ass!"        

        I fell back on my favorite strategy—mocking him to myself.  But just to let him think I hadn’t missed a single syllable of his brilliance, I yelled, again, “All right!”

        This time under his breath he said, "Dumb ass."

        I thought about continuing, but he could keep this up until our arteries hardened.  Jeff was the quarterback, and the quarterback gets the last word.

        We listened to the Wolf Man until we got almost back to the concrete slab.  Jeff said, “What are we going to do if we don’t find the wallet, Frank?  My folks will kill me if that guy charges a bunch of stuff on my credit card.”

        His parents had given him a credit card for emergencies a week before he got into a ferocious argument with his dad and moved in with my family.  “How much was left on it?”

        “The whole thousand.  I haven’t touched it.”

        I was surprised he resisted the temptation, but I didn’t doubt him.  Jeff never lied to me without good reason.  “I guess we’re going to have to report it, man, before the guy goes through the whole wad.”

        “You think they’ll notify my folks?”

        “It’s in your name, right?”  He nodded, and I said, “I don’t know.  You’re still a minor.”

        Jeff turned off the radio, and we drove in silence. I tried to review the incident, but I couldn’t concentrate because each rut in the desert floor drove its own dose of jagged pain deep into my shoulder and foot.

        The play of the headlights against the saguaros and mesquites infused our spirits with a sense of depression, and we fell silent again.  

        Just before we got there, Jeff said, "What happened while I was unconscious, man?"  

        I said, "You mean when I disarmed him with my bare hands and made him not only surrender, but confess his sins and beg forgiveness for taking advantage of a poor, defenseless quarterback?"  

        "Yes, I’m sure you were heroic.  But seriously, I was out cold."  He touched his jaw and said, "I think you might have saved my life."

        He wasn’t smiling, so I did the only thing I could. I said, “Fag,” then, “I was pretty much out of tricks when you woke up, Jeff.  I know you saved my life.”

        “Yeah, I could tell you were a little scared.  I mean, the way you wet your pants and everything.  For the first time that evening we laughed.          

        When we got to the slab, we noticed the guy’s wooden leg right away.  “It looks pretty real, doesn’t it?” I said as we eased both car doors shut and crept toward it.  

The still night air made Jeff’s hushed warning sound like an explosion.   "Shhh!  You’ll wake it up."  

I said, “Maybe we should look in the shed.”

        “In a minute.  What’s the skinny with the weird shoe?”  It was a scuffed-up wing tip.  You couldn’t tell the color because it hadn’t been polished since the Civil War.  “And the crazy diamond-y sock?”

        “Argyle.”

        Jeff picked the leg up and took a practice swing.  I snorted.  We looked inside the shed. The door had come off, or been torn off years earlier.  The moon shined through the broken-out windows on two sides exposing the barren interior.

        Feeling ridiculous, I peered around the corner and took three painful steps toward the other side. "Nothing," I said.  My limp was so bad now, I added, "Mr. Dillon."  

He searched everywhere we had been, looking for anything we could turn to our advantage.  

We didn’t have a clear idea of what we were looking for beyond the wallet, but we knew we weren’t going to find it.  I remembered our creepy assailant hopping like a demented frog to get to his car before Jeff nailed him with the two-by-four.  The recollection caught me by surprise and made me snort again.  

        Jeff said, “What?”    

        “I was just thinking how funny that guy looked hopping around on one leg.”  I saw my two-by-four resting where Jeff dropped it.   An hour ago, I wanted nothing more than to feel it in my hands.  Now, it was nothing but an old hunk of wood.  “You know what’s strange?  You could tell the crazy bastard had a limp, but I never thought it was anything like this.”  I nodded at the wooden leg Jeff carried toward the car like a lunch bucket.

        Now he snorted.  We poked around for ten or fifteen minutes and found nothing useful.  We thought our luck had changed when we found a Pizza Burger punch-card—one free milkshake with the purchase of nine.  It only needed one more punch, but it had expired two days before—June 3, 1963.

        “Wasn’t that in your wallet? I asked.

        He tapped his breast pocket and shrugged.  We gave up after that.

        As we ambled toward the car a scruffy rat dashed across the concrete inches in front of us.  We jumped back, the image of a brutish face and a gun fresh in our minds.  The rat took the same route the guy used when Jeff was chasing him.  

A huge shadow blocked out the moon, gliding close over our heads.  It grabbed Mr. Rat in its talons and carried him into the sky.  The whole thing happened with no sound, like an old silent movie—except for the rat’s desperate squeal.  They crossed in front of the moon, and we saw the rat’s little feet clawing at the air on its last ride.  I still can’t think of it without getting gooseflesh.  

        If the owl had bothered to look over his shoulder, he would have seen the two best football players in the state crouching in the moonlight like two scared cheerleaders.          

3:  Beginnings

        To understand how Jeff affected us, you need to know how it was before he showed up.  I was the leader of our gang, and my cousin, Mitch Bradley was my lieutenant, so I guess you would say Freddie Warren; and the twins, Tim and Tom Sweeney; were the troops.  Eight or ten other boys hung around with us, but we were the hub.  I became the leader the way lots of kids do: I could beat up any kid in the sixth grade.  Also, I could make guys laugh, and I didn’t pick on people, so I didn’t have too many enemies.

        Next to me, Mitch was the fastest kid in sixth grade.  We could outrun all but two seventh graders, three if you counted Heather Mathews.  Most of the eighth graders, too.  We had been babies together.  We were more like brothers than cousins.  I was six months older, so I looked out for him, not that he couldn’t take care of himself.         

        The whole gang did well in sports.  At school, or riding our bikes all over the southern expanse of Scottsdale, which was growing as fast as we were, we played sports: basketball and baseball or softball when they were in season, but mostly football—always tackle—no pads—no helmets.  If we had a football, and a patch of level ground, and anything you could call daylight without being laughed at, we played football.  It’s not too surprising that we got better than everybody else.  We called ourselves The Big Five.  

        I was the star: strong, solid, hard to knock over.  If we had a pick-up game, the team that got me almost always won. If Mitch and I were on the same team, the other guys didn’t have a chance.  Mitch could throw the ball through a brick wall, so if we had to, I took off long, and he threw me the bomb.  The other guys wouldn’t let us be on the same team, though, unless they got at least two extra kids.  We still usually won.  

        We weren’t supposed to play tackle, but the teachers didn’t care too much.  We weren’t big enough to seriously hurt each other.  Somebody might get a bruised knee or a sprained thumb, but nothing worse.    

        When we got into high school and didn’t have the sense to stop playing tackle without pads, it seemed like guys got wracked-up every time we played.  A kid broke his collarbone, and another guy got a broken ankle. They weren’t on the team, but Coach Amblin should have made us stop, anyway.

        He sure as heck put an end to it when I broke my arm.  Fortunately, it happened in January, and I had seven months to mend before the season started.  Coach said anybody who got caught playing tackle without pads would get kicked off the team.  He meant it, too.  He kicked a second-string guard off the team for playing in a pick-up game out of state on summer vacation.  And the guy hadn’t even been injured.                  

***

        A new kid showed up at recess one afternoon standing off by himself, watching.  I guess he didn’t know anybody.  

        Buzz Wheeler, who wasn’t nearly as good as he thought, dropped a perfect pass and the ball sailed out of bounds.  A crazy little second grader wearing a Davy Crockett coonskin cap picked it up and ran for his classroom.  Three guys chased him, but by the time he dropped the ball and ran for his life, they were at the far end of the field.  The ball rolled dead at the new kid’s feet.  

        The guys motioned for him to toss them the ball but he threw it to me.  I watched from the opposite side of the field, down at the other end.  We had never seen anything like it.  The ball cut through the air in a perfect spiral over two county lines, heading right for me.  I didn’t have to take a step.  I don’t think Mr. Adams, the P.E. coach could have thrown it much farther, and I know he couldn’t have spotted it any better.  

        After I caught it, I stood trying to understand the significance of the thing, knowing only that my world had changed.  When I heard a murmur from the guys around me, I woke up.  I did the only thing I could.  I tucked the ball under my arm and yelled across the field, “Hey, kid!  You want to play?”  

        I watched him trot onto the field as we huddled-up for the next play.  Mitch said, “Frank go long, on two.” I peeked over his shoulder and noted the position the new guy had taken.  On the football field, the quarterback is king, and I never challenged Mitch’s authority.  But we all knew everything had changed.  I ducked my head back into the huddle and said, “Gimme the ball.”  

        Mitch said, “Frank, it’s a passing down.”  

        “Gimme the ball.”  

        He understood.  He looked at the other guys.  They understood.  The new kid understood.    

        Mitch said, “Frank, up the middle, on two.”  

        When he tucked the ball into my midsection, I changed direction enough to put me on a collision course with the new guy.  I don’t want to get preachy here, but something needs to be said.  If you understand, be patient for a second.  If you don’t, you need to hear it.  Sports is about dominance.  Anybody who tells you otherwise is either full of crap or trying to sell you something.  

        I lowered my head and hit him as hard as I knew how.  He was ready for me, knees bent, shoulders forward.  He popped me good.  

        We met shoulder to shoulder.  During my last growth-spurt I had beefed up, so even though I was still one of the shortest kids in school, I outweighed most of my classmates—including the new kid. The impact drove him back, but not as much as I expected.  Still, I had experienced similar encounters a thousand times, and I knew what had to happen next.  I would continue my inexorable drive, legs churning until he lost his grip, and I broke free.  Other boys would approach me in half-hearted attempts to stop the unstoppable… and I would charge toward, and ultimately over the goal line, the wild stallion, exuberant and unscathed.  

        But the bastard wouldn’t let go.  I realized my unfettered flight was a fantasy.  In the real world, he had locked both hands around my ankle, refusing to accept the inevitable.  I dragged him down the field, planting one foot, lugging his stubborn frame forward as the goal line lurched toward me in uneven hops.  Finally, one lunge short of the line, he must realize the hopelessness of his cause.  

Still, he hung on, and now he yelled to his teammates, “Get the bastard!”  And as I willed myself the final foot, I saw them looking at him—at me—for one extended heartbeat, and then they descended like Genghis Kahn’s hordes.  Mitch and my guys arrived half a second later, and the whole mob of us teetered along the goal line like some drunken behemoth until I fell—into the end zone!

        I heard the cheers erupt, knowing even as I did, that something was wrong.  I had scored, but they cheered.  They hopped up and down, clapping each other on the back clamoring to get to the new kid so they could whomp his back while they continued to celebrate in the wake of my touchdown.  

        We walked toward midfield for the kickoff, the two teams separating the way cells divide—one entity becoming two, and then drifting apart.  A third cell followed at a little distance: me and the other boy.  He bled from his chin, and the back of his left hand bled, too, from being scraped over the brown, October grass.  Extending his other hand, he said, “I’m Jeff Barrett.  Are you okay?”                

He put on a show the rest of that recess period.  It’s impossible to describe the way he threw the ball, even as a kid.  It’s impossible to describe how he handled the ball—how he handled his teammates.  When we walked off the field, I knew I wasn’t the leader anymore, but I didn’t mind.  Like everybody else, I just wanted to be on Jeff Barrett’s team.

He saw things nobody else saw.  If he told you a play would go a certain way, it did.  If he said a guy would react a certain way, he did.  If he told you a referee couldn’t see what happened to his left side, you could count on it.  

I remember the day he kicked an opposing player in the butt to prove it—just reared back and let him have it after the play.  All the spectators saw it.  Everybody on both teams laughed like Uncle Miltie was in town; everybody except the guy he kicked, and the ref.  The kid slugged Jeff and got kicked out of the game.  His coach went nuts and charged onto the field and cussed out the ref, and he got kicked out of the game.

        Jeff knew how kids would respond to him.  Some guys he bossed around, and others he encouraged.  That’s how he treated me, unless I blew an assignment, especially if I missed a block. Then he would get after me like a shin splint.  

        Once I missed a block, and in the huddle, he said, “Don’t worry about actually blocking old Schaeffer, Frank.  It’s really fun getting knocked on my can by that whale.”  Schaeffer had a rough time the rest of the game.  

        Usually, though, Jeff made me feel like a god.  He would say, “Frank, you can beat this guy.”  Then he would tell me how.  So, when I made a good catch, or run, or even a solid block, I felt like an All American.  I only cared what Jeff wanted me to do on the next play.  That’s one of the things coaches mean when they talk about intangibles.  Before I met Jeff, I thought intangibles were fancy oranges.  

Another thing: he made us all better players.  When I followed his directions, I found myself more open on pass plays, and I had more room on running plays.

And I wasn’t the only one.  By the end of afternoon recess the second day, any boy in the sixth grade would have jumped off the cafeteria roof for him.

***        June 16, 2018

Vickie Alderson was the prettiest girl in sixth grade.  All the guys were nutty about her, but everybody knew any boy who talked to her would die of a massive aneurism.  We didn’t know what an aneurism was, but we figured it was safer to throw spitballs.  Another approved approach was to make rude noises using the palm-and-armpit technique.  I tried both, and in each case, she gave me a look that made me pray my dad would get orders for Japan.  

        Jeff watched the boys acting like baboons for three days.  Then he walked up to her at morning recess, handed her a small box from Zale’s Jewelers, and said, “You’re cute.  Do you want to be my girl?”  

        She smiled, and said, “Okay.  Sure.”  

        Inside the box was a gold necklace.  It had block letters hanging from it—his initials, JB.  

        I watched the whole transaction from behind a trashcan outside Mrs. Telefsen’s room.  I took careful mental notes, and I can report with complete confidence that the words, "cooties" and "icky" were not used at any time.

        There were two other “couples” in the sixth grade.  A boy would give a girl his ring to put on a chain and wear around her neck.  After that, they hung around during lunch hour and recess exchanging sappy looks, and calling each other “honey.”  That’s pretty much what “going steady” was—except for dancing close at school dances, and maybe some kissing at parties.

So you knew how to act if you were going steady.  And so did Jeff.  But one day, instead of walking around with Vickie, and ignoring his buddies, he brought her up to the edge of the basketball court, handed her his jacket, and joined the game.  She stood watching, and pretty soon a couple of her girlfriends came up and started talking to her.  That’s the way it went until the bell rang.  The next day the other guys dropped their girls off too, and as far as I know, they still do it that way at Comanche Elementary School.  

4: Grilled Cheese  

We slept all day when we got back from the desert.  The last shadows of the afternoon snuck through the sliding glass doors as I wobbled toward the living room.  Any other Friday night we would have been preparing for a double date with Paige and Donna—or at least trying to sweet-talk Mom and the girls into letting us watch the Friday Night Fights.  

But now I worried about passing out from the pain. I ducked into the bathroom and found a half-filled aspirin bottle in the medicine cabinet. I washed three—okay, six down with water from cupped hands.  When I got back to the living room, I concentrated on showing no more discomfort than Jeff.  I’ve already mentioned how he didn’t notice pain like everybody else.  You had to break his arm to get his attention.  Even then, it wouldn’t bother him unless it was his throwing arm.

        That’s Jeff, not me.  Look, I’m as brave as the next guy, and I take what comes my way like a man.  But I would rather not have to deal with it.  For one thing, pain hurts.  For another, it makes me cranky.  So, when I sat down, I didn’t need any of Jeff’s stunts.

        He sat between Mom and my little sister Melinda like he had endured nothing worse than a refreshing massage at Doctor Wanda’s House of Health.  “I was just telling my favorite girls here…”  Melinda bounced until Mom put a hand on her knee.  “… about our little misunderstanding.”

        I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I would have given odds that it wasn’t true.  So, I did what I do sometimes when I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, or maybe trying to avoid it.  I talked.  “These are your favorites, huh?  What about poor old Maddie?”  

        Melinda scowled and stuck out her tongue toward the bedroom.  Jeff gave a W.C. Fields shudder and made the sign of the cross with his pointer fingers.  Mom didn’t laugh but everybody else did, including me.  Don’t get me wrong, laughter is great—unless you have been recently mauled by a lowland gorilla.  Then, it intensifies the pain in your foot and shoulder, and reminds you why you are angry at your best friend.  

        Still, I didn’t have too many options, so I said, “I know I’ll regret this, but what misunderstanding?”

        “You know, how that little pompon girl kept making eyes at you and laughing at your stupid jokes, and one thing led to another, and we got into this little scuffle, and you sucker-punched me, and—you know.”  He brought out the shrugs and boy-next-door smiles.  I would have thrown up if he had used aw shucks somewhere along the way.

        Melinda started bouncing again.  Her words were hushed, like when she asked Mom for her coloring book during one of Pastor Branson’s sermons.  "Is it true, Frank?  Did you and Jeff really get into a fight?"  She looked at Jeff’s black and swollen face.  "Did you do that, to Jeff?"                He smiled again, winced, and sang out, “Mammy!”

        About the only thing that came easier to him than throwing touchdown passes, was telling whoppers.  So, Melinda was caught somewhere between laughter and tears, and I sat next to her thinking about how much I hated lying.  I got that from my dad, I guess.  I thought about his letter, then, like I always did when I got into trouble, or found myself in an uncomfortable situation because of Jeff.  I knew I should read the letter again.  I always felt better, and more often than not, knew what to do when I took the trouble to read through it.  Yeah, I’ll read Dad’s letter when I get some time, I said to myself.

        Still, I could see why Jeff had said what he did.  The last thing we wanted was for Mom and the girls to know what happened that night in the desert.  We had to tell them something, with Jeff looking the way he did, and me hobbling around like I was forty.

        Mom turned to Melinda and said, "Dinner in half an hour.  Run outside and play.  I want to talk to your brother and Jeff."  

        Melinda stood up and flounced toward the arcadia door, saying over her shoulder as she did, "I’m not a child."  

        We stifled our laughter until she grabbed the hula hoop resting against the outer wall and stepped through the patio gate, closing it with the restrained dignity of an affronted six-year-old.  

        "Now," Mom said, "What’s going on?"  

        Jeff had taken his shot.  He tried to see through the gate to Melinda on the common lawn of the complex.  

        I scratched my left elbow.  I might as well have announced in the voice of an eighteenth-century town crier, "I’m going to tell you a monumental lie, now, Mom, so try not to be too disappointed.                 5/3/18

5:  At the Lake  

        I always looked forward to my dates with Paige, and why not?  She was the best-looking cheerleader at Corona High School, which is pretty much the same as being the best-looking girl on the planet.  You could make a case for Jeff’s girl, Donna, but let’s not quibble.  Any time you were in the same room with those two, you were face to face with four of the best points imaginable for being grateful for your storybook life.  And I’m not talking about their eyes, although, come to think of it, they were spectacular, too.

        The Saturday after the aborted drug deal in the desert I guided Mom’s ’53 Ford toward Paige’s house.  On the seat next to me sat an ice chest containing a half a dozen Cokes and a single long-stemmed red rose.  I carried the rose behind my back as I rang her doorbell and waited.  I swept it between us and bowed when she answered the door.

         "Oh, Frank!" she said, giving me a big hug and a quick kiss.  But when she noticed the pain accompanying my gesture, she canted her head and said, "What did you do?"  

        "Nothing."  I took the picnic basket she handed me and limped to the car.  I transferred the sandwiches, chips, and homemade potato salad to my ice chest and put both containers on the back seat.  "Can’t a guy bring his girl a pretty flower to show how much he cares about her?"  

        "I guess," she said, sliding next to me as I backed out of the driveway.  "So, how did you get wracked-up?  Are you going to be able to swim with me when we get to the lake?  I really wanted to show you my new swim suit."  

        "To see you in your new swimsuit, I would swim across the entire lake with two broken arms and legs."  

        "Sure, some wimpy, little inlet part of the lake.  But what about the widest part?  They say it’s a mile across."  

        "To see you in a swimsuit?  It’s a cinch."  

        She snuggled closer.  "Sometimes, you are such a nice boy."  

        By this point in an ordinary date, my arm would have been around her, but the whole right side of my torso was close to immobilized.  

        She searched my eyes for a moment and said, "You’re not going to tell me about how you got hurt, are you?"  

        "It’s no big deal, Babe.  Jeff and I were running pass routes, and I stepped in a hole."  

        She sat quiet for half a minute, then said, "Too bad Donna’s on vacation.  It would be nice to have her and Jeff along."  

        "Yeah."  

        "So, what’s he doing today?  Running stadiums, just to keep in shape?"  

        Now, I paused.  "Naw, he’s a little wracked-up too."  

        "Really?  Did he step in a hole, too?"  

        "It was a big hole."  

        "I’m not going to nag you.  I hate girls who do that.  But I will say it one time.  If you are in trouble, Frank, you should tell me.  We’re almost engaged, and you shouldn’t keep secrets from someone who loves you.  Besides, I might be able to help."  

        "Paige, I love you, too.  You know that.  But I really don’t want to talk about this, right now.  Let’s just enjoy a nice day at the lake.  If I can’t work through this in a little while, we’ll talk, okay?"

        "Okay, but I have to say one thing.  Then I won’t bother you about it again.  Okay?"  

        "Promise?"  

        "Promise.  Now I get to say my thing, right?"

        "Right."  

        "Whatever happened, it happened to you and Jeff, right?"

        "Yep."  

        "And it seems like every time something happens to you, it’s when you’re with Jeff."  

        I guess I squirmed or something, because she said, "Here’s the thing.  And like I said, I’ll be quiet after this.  Are you ready?"  

        I nodded, and she said, "Have you ever thought about saying ’no,’ to Jeff?"  

***  

        She was right, of course.  I, and everybody else in our gang, with the occasional exception of Mitch, went along with whatever crazy scheme came into Jeff’s head.  Usually, his ideas turned out to be funny, and harmless.  Take Kaley and the Great Cable Caper.  

        In seventh and eighth grade we liked to tromp around a swath of palo verdes and mesquites that ran along the banks of a little irrigation ditch in the middle of an unused cotton field.  We called the place the Mesquites.  One night seven of us found a long piece of cable tangled in the undergrowth next to the irrigation ditch.  We didn’t have any idea how it got there, or even if it might belong.  It never occurred to us.  We spent the next two hours digging it out with our bare hands, and when we finally got it free, we were too tired to do anything other than congratulate each other, and pant.  So we spent another ten or fifteen minutes covering it back up with loose bushes and boards and dirt—whatever we could find.  We didn’t want anybody else to discover it.  When you’re a sixth grade boy things like that make sense.  

        The next night we came back with a plan.  The six of us (Larry Norman had been grounded for chewing gum in school) dragged the cable across the Mesquites singing, “Yo-oh, heave ho” all the way.  When we got to the tract of new Hallcraft Homes we stopped singing.  After all, we didn’t want to make anybody suspicious—like half a dozen adolescent boys dragging a hundred foot cable down the street wouldn’t make anybody suspicious.  After another 45 minutes we wrestled most of it onto the front lawn of the house where the Seechrest girls lived.  They were three stuck-up blondes. One of them (the middle one, Kaley) had snubbed Jeff earlier in the week.  

        How we managed to get the thing onto the lawn without waking anyone up, or tearing out all the shrubbery, I think should qualify as some kind of minor miracle, because we were falling down constantly, giggling like we had tooted the Hallelujah Chorus in three-part harmony.  First, one of us would go down, then another couple, and by the time they got themselves stabilized, the rest of the mob would lose control.  When we had finally done the deed, and the cable laid there like some nightmare sculpture of loops and kinks, there was only one thing left to do…We snuck up to the front door, still sniggering by twos and threes.  Jeff rang the doorbell, and we ran like hell.  

6: Gerald Calling

        At nine o’clock Monday morning we called the bank to report Jeff’s missing credit card.  We decided not to make the call from the apartment because we didn’t want my mom and sisters to hear everything.  You could count on Maddie going right to her room and listening in on her princess phone.  She would say she wanted to listen to Chuck Berry records, but you knew she would listen in. 

        We drove to the Circle K down the street, but the page with Valley Bank’s number had been torn out of the book along with half-a-dozen others… ripped right out, no lie!  Jeff let the book drop, and we watched it dangle from the chain that held it to the aluminum shelf under the phone.  He puffed out his cheeks and said, "Not just the one page, either.  Everything from Ballet Lessons to Barbells.  What kind of an asshole does something like that?"

        I knew better, but I couldn’t resist a dig.  "The same kind of asshole that knocks people out and pulls a gun on them when they’re innocently buying reefers in the desert."

        “Yeah, Frank, it’s bad business.  You get mixed up in stuff like that, and pretty soon, somebody is getting the shit kicked out of them.”  The look in his eye told me it might be better if we talked about something else.  

        “There’s a phone booth at the Circle K over on Oak,” I said.

        When we got through to the lady at the bank, she wouldn’t cancel the card without his dad’s authorization.  It wasn’t what we wanted to hear but Jeff’s voice stayed as serene as a summer breeze.  “All right.  I’ll have him call you back.”

            We drove to his house and called from there after he went through some of the papers on his father’s desk and found his social security number.  

        “Lucky your folks are in Iowa,” I said.  

        “Yeah.”  

        He could make himself sound just like his dad.  When he called the bank again, the lady didn’t have any idea she was talking to a kid.  

***

        Sometimes we did dishes if we were home in the evening.  We didn’t do too much else unless Mom’s old Rambler needed repairs.  When that happened, Jeff got under the hood and fixed it right up.  Making engines purr was as easy for him as throwing touchdown passes.  I stood around handing him wrenches and listening to him talk about how someday we would be teammates on the Chicago Bears.        6/16/18

        Now, as he washed, and I dried, Melinda charged in from the family room.  "Can I get a drink?"  

        "Sure," Jeff said.  "Where’s your glass?"

        "Oh, I forgot."  She dashed into the other room and came back holding out the Welch’s grape jelly jar that served as a dinner glass in our house.  She gulped half the water down without breathing.  She looked at Jeff’s marred face and turned toward the family room.   Over her shoulder, she said, "Doesn’t it hurt?"  She stopped, waiting for a response.  

        "Naw.  I’m tough.  You know that."  

        Satisfied, she dashed back to the family room.  

        "Does she ever walk anywhere?"  

        Reaching for a dry dish towel, I said, "You realize she’s crazy about you, don’t you?"  

        "Of course, she is," he said.  "What’s not to be crazy about?"

        It was a different story with Maddie.  She was a freshman, and a real beauty, and she didn’t need anybody to tell her so.  But Jeff wouldn’t even look at her—which didn’t matter to her because Maddie hated everybody.

        With the sun resting on the horizon, we considered what to do with ourselves for the rest of the evening.  We didn’t want to sit around the house watching Bonanza re-runs, and besides, we had things to worry about.  The phone rang before we decided.

        Mom’s voice came from the family room.  “Jeff,” she said, “It’s your mom.  Long distance.”

        She couldn’t have shaken us up anymore if she had said, “It’s God.  He wants you to answer for your sins.”  Jeff picked up the receiver from the wall phone in the kitchen, and Mom hung up.

        I stood between the two rooms watching the Lawrence Welk Show.  "Thank you, thank you.  That’sa nice.  Next, let’sa hear something for the youngsters from the lovely little Lennon Sisters."  They broke into "Nowhere Man."  It seemed like Lawrence Welk did that a lot—had his boys and girls sing songs that didn’t fit them.  Trust me, those girls were not the Beatles.  They tilted their heads, smiled their sweet smiles and, snapped their fingers to the too slow beat, like that made them cool.  Most of the time, they didn’t bother me too much, but that night they irritated me.  Especially the little one, Janet.  I wanted to smack her, but it passed because I cared a lot more about Jeff’s conversation in the kitchen.

        “Yes,” he breathed into the receiver, standing soldier-straight the way he always did around his mom and mine.  With everybody else he was relaxed as a jazzman, like he owned the place.  He only had one other mode—his dad mode.  The two of them always looked like they were one careless remark away from a war.  

        While he listened, he made a writing gesture in the air.

        “Mom,” I called, “do we have a pen or something?”

        She said to Maddie, “Get your brother something to write with.”

        Quite a few things bugged Maddie, some, more than others.  For instance, she couldn’t stand the idea that I should be allowed to suck up valuable oxygen on her planet.  She also had a hard time coming to grips with having to get off her sweet behind—especially for me. “Why do I always have to do everything?” she said.  

        The only sound coming from the family room was the Champaign Music Makers butchering another Beatles tune.  It must have been a medley.  

        I guess Mom gave her the look because Maddie stomped in holding out a Spiral notebook with a pen stuck in it.  She looked at me like I had passed gas in church.  When I reached for it, she let go, and it made a splat when it hit the kitchen floor.  “Next time, do it yourself,” she said, and turned to leave.  

        "What a tool!" I said.

        She ran her hand through her hair, giving me the finger.  I had to admit, it was a sophisticated move.  

        I turned my attention back to Jeff and his conversation with his mom.  I couldn’t hear her end, but it was easy to fill in the gaps.  "Yes," he said.  After a pause while she talked he said, "I don’t know.  Did he say what he wanted?"  

        Pause.  

        "Yes.  He has something of mine, too."  

        I picked up the notebook and handed it to him during the next pause.  He pressed it to the wall above his head, holding the phone to his shoulder with his good ear.  He wrote a number and the name, Gerald, shaking the pen twice to keep the ink from flowing away from the point.  "No, it’s nothing important."  

        Pause.  

        "Yes.  I’ll be careful, Mom."  

        He double underlined the guy’s name while his mother talked.    

        "I know, Mom.  Me, too."

        Another pause, and he said, "’Bye.’"  

        We didn’t know anybody named Gerald, so we figured it must be the drug guy.  Jeff hung up, and we put away the last of the dishes fast and beat it into the night.

        Sometimes a quarterback and his favorite receiver don’t have to say a whole lot.  Jeff always knew where I would be on the field, and I knew where he needed me to be, especially if a play broke down.  It was like that now—like we were reading each other’s minds.

        We drove to the Quick Mart for gas.  Neither of us said a word.  I didn’t feel like singing but I turned on the radio out of habit, and the air conditioner too.  A blast of icy air hit my face, and I drew in a deep, contented draft.

        It hadn’t always been like that.  For almost a year we had driven around with the air off, and the windows rolled down, sweating like migrant farm workers.  When I got up the courage to confront him about it, Jeff said, “You are such a girl.”

        “Yeah,” I said.  “Well, neither one of us smells much like a girl whenever we get out of this sweatbox.”

        He gave me the disappointed daddy look.  It had a touch of “Don’t sass me, or I’ll kick your butt,” in it.  Snake-quick, he shot his fist toward my head, making me jerk away like you do when your reflexes take over.  It’s not like you recoil on purpose.  You see sudden danger, and you duck, that’s all.

        He laughed.  “You flinched.”  Then, again, like a snake, he struck. This one caught me in the upper arm, and he didn’t pull it.  With his other hand on the steering wheel, he couldn’t get much leverage behind it, and it didn’t hurt as much as usual.  If you’d been around Jeff like I have, you would understand that I’m not being a baby, here.  Jeff could knock a guy out.  I’ve seen him do it.          

        The only time my arms weren’t sore was when one of us took a vacation.  I got him plenty, too, and when I did, I gave him everything I had.  He never noticed, though, or if he did, he refused to show it.

        “Okay, Nancy, you pay for the gas, and we’ll run the A/C.”        

        I didn’t like the idea.  I already paid half, and now, because I didn’t want to die of heatstroke, or witness the asphyxiation of some innocent passenger, he wanted me to pay the rest?  “No way,” I said.

        He went into one of his routines.  He started with the mileage we already got, which was 15.6 miles per gallon.  Or it might have been 16.5, I wasn’t sure.  Next, he estimated the miles we drove in a regular week, figured in the twenty-eight cents per gallon for gas, and calculated a bunch of other minutiae.  I don’t remember, for sure.  By then I just wanted to stay awake.  The math he could do in his head made me dizzy! But not so dizzy I didn’t know what was going on.

        Jeff excelled at explaining why you should do things his way.  Sometimes he seemed to have the wisdom of Aristotle and the patience of Ghandi.  Sometimes he just called you a dumb ass.  I had learned to cope by giving his lectures names because once he got going, he only stopped to say, “Right?” or “Got it?” every three hours or so.  

        Since I knew I would end up losing, I didn’t bother paying too much attention.  Making up titles gave me something to do until he got finished.  I had decided to call this one the Gas Lecture, for three reasons: the hot air he was spewing, the subject, and how it affected my stomach.  

        I never argued because that would send him into a sub-lecture, which might take another hour.  In this case it would be something along the lines of Why Frank is an Idiot Because He Doesn’t Want to Pay for my Gas.  

        When he finished, I agreed to pay for 83.3 percent of the gas, which meant I would buy five times in a row, and Jeff would pay once.  We usually lost count around three or four, so I wound up buying most of the gas.  

        It irritated me before I remembered some of the things he said.  Like how I got free taxi service in the good old Jockmobile.  He even let me take it out alone sometimes if I had a special date with Paige.  And it wasn’t like I didn’t get to go along everywhere he went.  Sometimes, I wondered why we didn’t go places, or do things I wanted to do more often, but it was his car.  And, Jeff was the quarterback.  

***  

        When we pulled up to the Quick Mart, a guy came out of the phone booth and waved to us.  We had seen him there several times and got to know him.  In fact, the first time we saw him Jeff looked at him and said, "Hey.  How’s it hanging?’"  Never saw him before, and they’re old buddies.  I could never do anything like that.  Not that I’m shy.   I just tend to leave people alone.  That’s all.  

        This guy always acted friendly, and a little nervous.  If I had to bet, I’d say he went to Corona.  I kept expecting him to call us “sir.”  Lots of kids around school acted like that, especially since we won State the previous year.  If you attended Corona High School, you knew Jeff Barrett and Frank Cyrus. The guy said, “Hi, guys,” as he approached us.

        “How’s it going?” Jeff asked.

        He shook his head.  “Fight with Maureen."  Then, like he realized he didn’t know us that well, he said, "Maureen’s my girl."  

        It’s funny the way your mind works.  Even with the mess we were in, when the guy mentioned his girl, it reminded me of another girl named Maureen.  Maureen Trendler.  Not too long after Jeff took over at Tonto Elementary School, she decided Mitch should give her his ring.  He wouldn’t do it because he liked another girl.  Maureen saw her chance to get even one morning in English class.  

7:  Mitch  

        Everybody hated Mr. Lombard.  He hated kids.  It would have been unbearable in his class if he hadn’t been lazy and stupid.  He never bothered to grade the essays he assigned every morning before he sat down at his desk and hid his face behind the Arizona Republic.  He didn’t read them.  He didn’t even collect them—just had us hold them up so he could see we had done them. Then he checked us off in his grade book.  We all knew how it worked, so everyone with an ounce of sense showed him the same essay over and over.  We also knew what he did behind the newspaper.  The occasional snores made it obvious.

        That morning some of us caught up on work from other classes at our desks.  Some stared out the windows.  Most of the boys daydreamed about what was under Lucille Carter’s blouse.  After three or four minutes, Mitch shot a spit wad at the paper.  It hit Nikita Khrushchev in the eye.                5/4/18

        Scattered giggles turned into guffaws as the soggy dab slid down Nikki’s cheek like a lover’s teardrop.  Lombard jumped up, knocking over his chair and splashing the world’s headlines and his coffee across the desk.  He stared down the laughter and leveled a malevolent gaze at Mitch.  “Who did it?”

        He hadn’t finished the sentence before Maureen pointed at Mitch with one hand and held the other over her mouth.  An instant later her girlfriends imitated her treachery, and then the other girls, and within a second, every kid in class looked accusingly at Mitch—every kid except Jeff and me.        

        We never finked on him, even after we got swats from the principal.  From then on, we were the Three Musketeers.

        That’s not to say we never clashed.  For instance, that summer Mitch developed a growth on his elbow.  It wasn’t cancer, but when it grew to the size of a marble, it got hard for him to straighten his arm so Aunt Ruth took him to the hospital.  

        She brought Mom and me to visit him the afternoon before his surgery.  Mom and Aunt Ruth talked about family and other grown-up stuff while Mitch and I talked about football.  We tried to include Mitch’s roommate, but he’d never even heard of Big Daddy Lipscomb.  I don’t want to say anything mean about a guy I hardly knew, but he was kind of a dork.          After a while Aunt Ruth said, "We’re going to run down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee.  If you boys promise to be quiet, we’ll bring back some Cokes.  Maybe even some pie.  How does that sound?"  

        We nodded and said, "Great!"  

        Mom noticed the other kid and said, "Do you think your mom and dad would mind if we brought you a little treat?"  

        "Gosh, no!"  

        Aunt Ruth started for the door, with Mom right behind her.  Mom said, "Remember, keep it quiet.  And, no horseplay, you hear?  We won’t be gone long."  

        As soon as the door hissed shut the kid said, "Want to hear a secret?"  

        We wanted to talk privately, but who’s going to turn down a secret?  "Okay," I said.  

        He pointed his remote at the TV and turned it off.  He used another remote to raise his bed-back to a more upright position.  Nobody else was in the room, but he whispered anyway.  "After I get my tonsils out, my mom and dad are going to take me to India!"  

        "Gee," said Mitch.  "What for?"  

        "They want to cheer me up after the surgery.  You know."  

        "Not really.  Why don’t they just take you out for a pizza?"

        I said, "Your folks must be rich."  

        "We do all right."  

        "You think you might see a tiger?"

        "Sure.  They’re all over the place.  Why?"  

        "I just think tigers are neat, that’s all."  

        Mitch yawned.  "So, what’s the big secret?"

        The kid looked around the room like he figured somebody was hiding behind a chair, or maybe in the bathroom.  "My dad’s a spy.  He’s going on a secret mission to spy on the Russians."  

        "Liar," I said.  

        "Am not.  It’s very dangerous.  He could be killed.  We could all be killed.  Anyway, you guys won’t tell, right?  You promised."  

        "We said we won’t tell," said Mitch.  "So, we won’t tell."  

        I knew I would have no trouble keeping that secret for three reasons.  First, I kept my promises.  Second, we would never see the kid again, and third I didn’t even know his name.  

        But the promise and the secret came up the next summer.  I remember, because it happened after Jeff and Mitch’s championship Little League game.  They hit two homers apiece, and Mitch threw a no-hitter.  

        Afterwards, we rode our bikes to our school to get a football game going.  On the way we talked about how they dominated the previous year’s Little League champs.  Finally, Jeff summed up.  "Fifteen to nothing.  The Tigers never had a chance."  

        I remembered the kid from the hospital, and said, “Hey, Mitch, remember that kid who was going…”  

        “Shhh!” Mitch hissed.

        When I think back, I’m amazed that Mitch knew what I would say almost before I did.  But he did, and he wasn’t about to let me tell that secret, even by accident.

        He was right, so I shut up.

        Jeff said, “What?”

        “Nothing,” we said together.

        “Tell me.”

        “No,” said Mitch.

        “Come on, what’s the big secret?”

        “No,” he said again.

        “I’m your best friend, Mitch—me and Frank.”

        “I know.”

        “So?”

        We kept pedaling, and Mitch said nothing.  I didn’t, either.

        Jeff stared hard at us.  “I don’t believe this!  You have a secret, and you won’t tell your best friend?”

        We rode almost a block without speaking.  Before Jeff could say anything else, Mitch held up his hand.  It looked funny covered with his giant Hank Aaron model outfielder’s glove.  The other hand held a Louisville Slugger across his handlebars.  “Look,” he said, and then he stopped.  Jeff and I stopped too.  “You are my best friend—you and Frank.  But I’m not going to tell you about this.”

        Jeff smiled like he did sometimes.  You didn’t like to see that smile because it meant he was thinking about how much he might have to hurt you.  He said, “What if I just beat the crap out of you?”

        Mitch didn’t hesitate.  “You can beat me up, Jeff.”  He smiled his own little smile.  “But even if you do, I won’t tell you.  I wouldn’t tell Jesus Christ.”

        I watched them, watching each other.  Mitch waited, the crossbar of his bike resting against the inside of one thigh.  Jeff’s expression softened little by little.  After what seemed like a whole minute he smiled, and said, “If you and Frank and Jesus Christ are all ready, maybe we could go over to the school and get up a game, huh?”  He headed down the street.  

        “Hey, wait up!” I yelled, and the three of us followed him.  

***  

Nobody but the twins showed up for the game.  I don’t know why the other kids didn’t come, but with Freddie you could bet it had something to do with his parents.  They had some terrible fights and sometimes one of them hauled the kids off someplace trying to score points.  Lots of times his dad took him somewhere, and his mom took his sister somewhere else.  That afternoon Freddie’s dad took him camping.  On their way home the next day, he stopped at a sporting goods store and bought him a BB gun.  I never saw a kid with so much stuff be so unhappy.  Unless it was Jeff.  

You can play football with five guys, but it’s not usually that much fun.  Anyway, we only played about fifteen minutes, and Tom got sick.  Tim threw a flare pass to him, and when he caught it he yacked all over the ball.  We laughed at first, but he looked kind of funny, so the twins went home.  

Jeff looked at the shimmering football and said, "Man, that was a brand-new ball!"  

"Aren’t you going to wash it off?" I said.  

"You wash it off," he said, turning toward the basketball courts. We played horse for a while, and wound up at the drinking fountains by the bike racks.  

We talked about Mitch’s perfect game while we waited for the shadows to get long.  "You really could be a big-league pitcher," I said.  

He thought about it.  "Dad says I might have a shot, but he wants me to think about what to do if it doesn’t work out."  

"How can it not work out?  You’ve already got a better fast ball than half the pitchers on the high school team."  

"I don’t know.  He’s just thinking ahead, I guess.  My mom says I could be a doctor."  

"Like Aunt Lucy?"  I asked.  

Jeff tossed the basketball toward the bikes and we watched it roll dead against the spokes of his Schwinn.  "Your aunt’s a doctor?  A woman doctor?  God, you two come from a weird family."

"Us?" I said.  "Your family owns half the country!"  

He shrugged.  "Well, I’ll tell you two things, Mitch.  First, you may be a doctor someday, but you’ll never be my doctor!  I can just see you. ’Bend over and say ah.’"  We laughed.  "And second, me and Frank are never giving up football, right Frank?"

"Damn right!"  

A few minutes later we pulled our bikes from the racks: the first step in our ride home.  As I swung my leg over the seat, I turned my head toward Jeff’s football, but I didn’t say anything.  For all I know, it could still be sitting there in a shimmering in a pool of snot drawing flies.  

***  

I started having crazy dreams two nights later.  They always started the same.  I’m an old man—forty or fifty.  I sit in a large office filled with expensive office furniture.  I must be some rich business guy running a million-dollar corporation.  

I look down at the clouds through a huge picture window.  A helicopter flies toward me, but it never gets bigger than a toy truck—one you can hold in one hand without too much trouble, two hands, easy.  It flies through the window and lands on my desk, blowing papers all over.  I hold a black box the size of a pack of Luckys.  It has a lever, and the helicopter responds to the way I manipulate it.  I send the chopper dipping and darting around the office.  Then I make it glide out an open door past a pretty secretary typing at her desk, and finally out another door.

        Next, I’m in the helicopter, but now it’s regular size, and I’m flying off somewhere having fantastic adventures.  It’s a different adventure every time.  Once it flew me to a big hospital where a small boy was getting his heart replaced by one that had belonged to a soldier who died in a war.  A new heart!  I’m not kidding.  Of course, it was only a dream

        The doctor in his surgical mask and lab coat reaches into a red ice chest with a white top.  It’s filled with crushed ice and on top of the ice rests the heart.  But the heart is a greeting card, like the ones you send to somebody who’s sick, or has had an accident.  But, it doesn’t say, "Get well." Instead, it has giant red letters splashed across it—QB.

        The whole time the doctor works some machine keeps making a sound like boop, boop.  Every few seconds he says, “Clamps," or, "Suction," or, "Sutures." And every time he does, some other doctor, or a nurse repeats the words.  The kid sleeps through the whole operation until they get ready to close up.  He opens his eyes, then, and says, “Don’t be dumb.”  Then he goes back to sleep.    5/9/18

8:  Phone Booths, Houses, and Corrals

        The last thing you want to do on a June night in Scottsdale, Arizona is get yourself jammed into a phone booth with another person, but I wanted to hear what Gerald had to say as much as Jeff did.  Besides, I figured a good dose of 900-degree heat would help me forget my injuries, so I followed Jeff in and held the creaky bi-fold door open with a knee.  

        Our elbows touched, and I said, “Fag!”

        You don’t expect a good Catholic to walk into church, scratch his butt, burp, and flop down into the pew.  And two normal teen-aged boys don’t make physical contact, however incidental, in a confined space without following protocol.

        “Homo!” Jeff said.  He picked up the receiver while he dug around in his pocket for a dime.  Here it comes, I thought.

He came up empty and held out his hand, palm up.  I handed him a dime and said, “You’re not only a fag.  You’re a cheap fag.”

        He dropped the dime, dialed, and held the receiver so we could both listen.  We were already sweating like field hands, and I didn’t look forward to the way the phone booth would soon smell.  I prayed the conversation would be brief.

        After three rings, we heard a tinny, “Yeah?”

        I expected Jeff to say, “Hello, Gerald?”  But he would never be such a spaz.  “I want my wallet,” he said.  Pleasantries be damned—and he was right.

        “You have something of mine, too.”  Just from that, we knew two things about the guy.  First, Jeff’s cinder block, or my kick to the head, or both had hurt him.  You could almost feel the pain as each ragged breath scratched down the wire.  

        Second, he was a Mexican.  Don’t get me wrong.  There’s nothing wrong with Mexicans.  In fact, Paige is a Mexican, and she’s my girl.  I hang around with her family, and they’re good people.  

        Her dad and I talk football sometimes.   He played for Phoenix Union back in the forties.  So, I’m just saying you could tell the guy was a Mexican, that’s all.

        I wanted to hear Jeff and Gerald finish that phone conversation more than anything in the world—except for escaping the phone booth.   I barged out, coming down hard on my injured foot.  So, while Jeff talked inside, I hopped around outside, lapsing into a spate of color commentary as I did.  A customer came from the Quick Mart carrying a six-pack.  He didn’t take his eyes off me until he got into his car.  

        As I regained my composure Jeff emerged from the phone booth saying, "He wants to meet us at my place.  I guess he got the address off my driver’s license."                5/10/18

        The drive across town took more than half an hour with the Saturday night traffic.  Jeff stared where the headlights pointed, his back straight.  He drummed his fingers on the wheel hard and fast while the Beach Boys sang a ballad to a little surfer girl.  

I had never seen him this bugged.  As if to validate my concerns, he did something I thought I would never see.  Mr. Cool ran a red light.  A man with his wife and two kids almost T-boned us with their brand-new Ford station wagon.  Their faces looked like a still photo in Look magazine—their eyes big and round, their mouths open.  After my heart stopped racing, I said, “I wish we had seat belts.”

“Not in this kid’s car,” he said.  “Ever!”

Then he zeroed in again seeing nothing but the pictures in his head.  And that wasn’t like him.  Like all great quarterbacks, Jeff saw everything at once—every player, on both sides of the ball, every second of every play.

        Once, after a game, he said, “Did you see that goofy little kid in the stands with the crazy hat?”

        At first, I thought he had lost his mind.  I said, “What?”

        He said, "Visitor’s side, twenty-yard line, halfway up.  It had three upside-down horns, sort of checkered black and white."        

         I wondered how he noticed something like that in the middle of a game, but I knew what he meant.  “You mean a harlequin hat?”  

        "You talk funny.  You didn’t see it?"

        Of course, I didn’t see it!  I was in a football game, worrying about things like large young men trying to injure me for life.  But Jeff had seen it all right, and it didn’t affect his attention to the details of the game.  

        In that game, an all-state defensive tackle from Alhambra High was mauling me on dive plays. I got creamed on our first series of downs—stopped at the line of scrimmage when I should have gone for at least four or five yards. Even the coaches on the sidelines couldn’t figure it out.  How Jeff saw it so soon is still a mystery.  I dragged myself back to the huddle after getting hammered again and saw Jeff grinning at Don Gunnel, our left guard.  He said, “Here’s how you beat that guy.  Delay one count and then aim about a step to the right of where you think he should be.

        Gunnel asked Jeff, “You sure about that?”

        Jeff looked him in the eye and opened his palms.

        Gunnel nodded toward the guy and said to me, “He’s dead meat.”

        Jeff looked at me.  "When we line up, cheat a quarter-step to the left.  When I give you the ball, veer another half-step to the left, not straight ahead like usual."  He smiled again, "These guys are in for a surprise."

        Coach Amblin had called for a post route, with DeRoy Nelson, who was the fastest guy in the state, as our primary receiver.  We all did what Jeff said, and when I got the ball, there wasn’t a defender within five yards of me.  It was all sweet-smelling grass, and starry skies, and I went 67 yards for a touchdown.  Nobody touched me.        

        When we got back to the sidelines Coach chewed Jeff out royally for running the wrong play—and almost knocked him over with a pat on the back.  That play turned the game around, and we ended up beating the number one team in the state by three touchdowns.  I rushed for over 300 yards, and that tackle walked off the field after the game shaking his head.  When we shook hands, he said, “Man, you are one helluva ball carrier!”  

        I said, “Thanks, but I really didn’t…”

        “Good game, man,” said Jeff, coming up beside us.  “See you guys in the playoffs.”

        On the bus back to Corona, as our teammates yelled and sang the fight song, I asked him, “Why didn’t you let me set that guy straight?”  

        Jeff could say more with a glance than most people could with a book.  This one told me there are things a silly halfback will never understand.  In case I didn’t get it, he punctuated it with, “Don’t be dumb.”  

***

        Now, as we neared the ritzy part of Scottsdale, I thought about how he had lost the ability to see everything at once.  I figured he would settle down if I gave him a little time.  You didn’t get to be the best athlete in the state without being able to control yourself.  I say athlete because Jeff had earned all-state honors in basketball and baseball as well as football.  

Sure enough, as Gene Chandler and I went on about being the Duke of Earl he clicked off the radio.  “Here’s what we’re going to do.”  

        “What the heck!”  I said.  “I was listening to…”

“The guy will be waiting for us.”  He steered with one hand now and leaned back in his seat.  

“Damn, you’re rude, sometimes, Jeff!”

He continued talking to himself.  “This is important.”  I may as well have gone up in magic smoke.

“Oh, well, if it’s important.”

Don’t ask why that statement should do the trick, but I seemed to be back on Planet Jeff.  He sighed, a sure sign he intended to be patient.  “Look, Frank, we need to take care of this before it gets dangerous.”

“I know it’s dangerous, Jeff!  What about immoral?”  

“What!  What the hell are you talking about, immoral?”

        “I’m just saying, do we ever stop to think about what’s right when you get us into these situations?”  

“Okay, Frank, okay.  When we get through this with all our limbs, and maybe all our money, we can have ourselves a good cry, and promise to be boy scouts forever, so our fathers will be proud of us.”  

“That’s out of bounds, Jeff.”  I slumped into my bucket seat and turned away.      

“Look, all I’m saying is there’s a time to think about that stuff, and a time to worry about saving your skin.”  He glanced at me, I guess to see if he was getting through.  “I’m sorry for what I said about your old man, okay?”

I felt myself forgiving him, even knowing ninety-eight percent of his apologies were b. s.         "Really," he said.  "We’ll talk about it later, okay?  But right now, we need to fix this."  

        “What do you mean, fix it?

        “I mean, this guy is a bad hombre.  Dangerous.”

“Gee, why didn’t I think of that!”

        "That’s why he set it up this way."  His fingertips grazed his swollen jaw.  "That, and to scare me."

        “About your folks and the house?”  I asked.  “Do you think he knows they’re out of town?”                

        "Bet on it.  You think it’s a coincidence he wants us to meet him there?   He’s not crazy enough to hurt my folks, and probably not the house, but he wants me to think he will.  You know, like he might set the place on fire, or something."

“My God, Jeff!   We’ve got to call the cops!”

        “He wants this over as much as we do.”  I waited for him to recognize my existence.  

        A few moments earlier, he had been in a state foreign to him.  Confused, like the rest of us get sometimes.  But now the field general had taken charge again, mapping out the strategy for the campaign—devising the plan to obliterate the enemy.

A nut with a gun threatened his home, and he acted like we were reviewing game film.  I was the one on edge, worrying about little things like arson and murder.  

 It always unfolded the same: Jeff hatched some scheme to prove we were the coolest guys in town, and I wondered how much time it would take the clean-up crew to scoop up my remains after the grenade exploded.

        You need something to believe in. My dad had said those words before he left for a little country half a world and half a decade away. Now, he said it again.  

        Not now, Dad.  

         Now, I needed to concentrate on Jeff as he muttered, “He wants this over.”  

        “Yes, he wants it over!  He wants us dead!”

“Don’t be dumb.”          

        "Whaddaya mean, dumb!  The guy knocked you out, robbed you, and pointed a gun at my head!  Maybe he’s trying to tell us something! We need to call the cops."  

“If you’ll just listen for a minute everything will be all right.  You can have a cow after this is over.”                

        “We’re gonna get killed,” I said, but his calmness washed over me.  I tossed my hands up in frustration, which sent pain knifing through my shoulder.  I wound up sucking in a bucket of air.

        He said, “There, there.”  I wanted to slug him but figured it might be smarter to save my energy for the main event since he seemed determined to go ahead with his brilliant plan, whatever it might be.  “It’s simple.  All he wants is his leg.”

        I glanced at the back seat where the wing-tipped toe pointed at the headliner like it was still attached to someone leaning against the door.  I thought I heard my dad’s voice again, but I couldn’t make out his words because Jeff said, "All we want is my wallet.  So, we give him his leg, he gives us the wallet, and everybody’s happy.  And me and you go over to the Pizza Burger and get ourselves a couple of combos, and talk about how bitchin it’s going to be after we win State again next year."  

        "Your folks aren’t going to be so happy about the credit card."

        "One problem at a time, Frank.  First, we get Quasimodo off our backs, then we figure out what to do about my mom and dad."  

        Then, like we were walking to third-hour history, he said, “You know the letter I got from Army the other day?  They want me!  And Frank, they’ll take you, too.  Can you feature it?  Me and you starting in the backfield for the mighty Black Knights of the Hudson!  You might have to wait a year though.  They have two really good colored guys in the backfield right now.”  

        Before I could remind him I had serious misgivings about Army he said, “Wait!  Why don’t you go out for flanker!  You might not be the fastest guy in the world, but nobody runs a cleaner route than you, Frank—nobody.  And you never drop the ball, either.”  It was close to true, I had to admit.  “Why didn’t I see that before?” he said.          5/5/18

        “I haven’t agreed to Army.”  

He said, “You never know.  You might change your mind.”  

        We headed up Camelback Mountain.  The closer we got to Jeff’s house, the more I felt like I did on game days.  Jittery.  The only thing that calmed me down then, was putting on the pads and sitting with my teammates in the locker room silence before kickoff.  There, I looked at the x’s and o’s on the chalkboard that stood between me and the outside world like an impenetrable castle wall. I saw the hastily scribbled x that represented me, Frank Cyrus, number 24.  The arrow looping around the right side of the line gave me direction, and with direction came assurance and calm.  I knew my part in the plan.  And if I followed the plan everything would work out.  Even if we lost.  Even if I got outplayed by another guy.    

But now, we didn’t have a plan, or at least I didn’t know what it was, so I said, “Uh, Jeff?  What about the maniac waiting for us in the bushes when we get there?  And probably two thousand of his buddies?”

        “Don’t be dumb.  He’ll be alone, just like last night.”  

        “How the heck do you know what he’s going to do?”

        “Do you actually ever think about anything, Frank?  If he ran with a gang, they would have been there last night, and if he wanted us dead, we’d be dead—or at least I would.”

        It made sense, but I still worried.  When we pulled onto Jeff’s street I gave it one more try.  “Look, Jeff.  Let’s think about…”  

        “He’ll be alone, out by the front gate, probably over by the big juniper—sort of hidden, but so he can see us coming.  If he’s smart, he’ll be backed just off the street, ready to peel out fast.  Won’t he be surprised when we come strolling up behind him?”

        “What if he knows about the corral gate?”

        “We’ll know if he’s been there, and if he has, we just walk up from the front—wallet for leg.  No big deal.”  We crept down the dirt road using a row of oleanders running along the property line to obscure our approach.  Every trace of nervousness had fled from Jeff’s features.

        “Try to relax,” I said.  

        Keeping the house between us and our quarry, we watched the full moon glide low above the trees.  An old-fashioned sleeping porch ran next to the house—the kind people used before air conditioning.  The Barretts still used it on pleasant nights.  Not because they had to, but because they enjoyed it.

Everything about the place reminded me these people had money, and plenty of it.  It was zoned as horse property, which made me visualize a butler answering the door.  “Mr. and Mrs. Horse are indisposed,” he would say in his snooty, English accent, “and the three ponies are taking a nap, so kindly be good enough to go away and die.”

I remembered the first time I saw the place.  I asked Jeff, “Where’s the moat?”

Everything inside projected an air of quality.  The furniture looked like it belonged in a palace.  And from the way Mrs. Barrett yelled at Jeff to be careful, I figured it might be brittle, too.  Every time I stepped inside I looked for ways to get out before I bumped into something and contaminated it.         

 The grounds, or as I thought of them, Montana, rivaled Augusta National.  The sculptured trees complemented a white-rail fence surrounding the property.  It looked like it had just been painted—and not by anyone named Barrett.

        When we got closer, it was like Jeff said.  Gerald sat on the top rail looking up and down the street past his old Mercury.  His foot rested on the bottom rail, framed by the full moon.  Anybody else would have wondered what happened to the other leg.  

We got a good view of his car now, and it wasn’t old at all.  It just looked old—a ’62 or ’63 model that had most likely been a boss ride not too long ago.  

But now it looked like one of those jalopies you bust up to raise money for polio research.  Every year the guys in metal shop spent a semester hammering the dents out of a donated wreck and polishing it so it looked brand-new.  They parked it in the loneliest section of the parking lot, and all the guys lined up to take shots at it with a sledgehammer—one swing for a dime, three for a quarter.  What a blast!  But not for the car, I guess.

        Besides the wooden leg resting on his shoulder like a bat, Jeff carried the real bat he had used to win the state championship (home run, naturally).   It dangled from his right hand.  I carried a golf club—a driver.  Jeff said they were just to make us look tough—unless the guy pulled a gun again.  I waggled the driver just above the ground like I was ready to tee off, and I felt better.  Gerald didn’t have any company, which didn’t hurt my mood, either.    

        We stood behind a decorative Mulberry tree and watched him puff on a cigarette.  It smelled funny.  

        I couldn’t wait to see what he might do when my friend’s voice cut through the night.  I envisioned an airborne cigarette and a one-legged bandit tumbling backward off the fence.          

“Hiya, Gerald,” said Jeff.

        I’ll say this for the guy.  He may have been a low-life hood, but he wasn’t a pansy.  True, he twitched, and his arms flew up to help him keep his balance.  He tried to jerk his head toward us, too, but the pain made it impossible.  I heard the same sucking noise I had made through clinched teeth earlier, and I almost felt sorry for him.  I certainly understood the pain.  

        He hopped down, turned around, and folded his arms on the top rail like John Wayne.  I struggled to keep a tough-guy expression on my face even with last night’s brawl fresh in my mind.  I remembered how solid he felt when I tackled him, but now he bounced on his one foot to get himself settled into the right position, and it looked comical.

        Then, there were the bandages.  He, or someone, had wound them around his head and jaw.  Blood seeped through in several places.   The whole thing looked like a crazy helmet sitting on a small boy’s head.  

        Jeff took a long look and said, “Nice hat.  Who does your wardrobe?”

        Gerald said, “Up yours, rich boy.”

        Each stared at the swollen jaw of the other, unaware that he could have been studying a mirror.

        Soon, Gerald’s attention shifted to the artificial leg resting on Jeff’s shoulder, the toe pointing down in front, the straps hanging down in back.  He said, “You boys are in a little trouble, no?”  He took another puff from his misshapen cigarette.  Even in just the moonlight I could see the twisted end as he held it between his thumb and forefinger.  Now I understood why it smelled funny.  As he exhaled, he aimed the smoke straight at us.  It dissipated just before it got to Jeff’s face.  

        Jeff walked through the cloud right into his face—so close I thought they might shake hands again.  He said, “You look like you’ve been in a little trouble yourself, big guy.”

        “Naw,” said Gerald, trying a smile that hurt too much.  “Nothing I can’t handle—me and my friend here,” and he pulled his greasy jacket away from him, showing us the gun tucked into his pants.  I guess that’s why he didn’t need buddies.          

        You see it in the movies and TV—the gun stuck in the belt, right?  So, you think bad guys go around like that all the time.  But Mitch’s dad is a cop, and he says it’s not a smart thing in real life.  If you think about where the gun is pointed, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if the safety happened to be off, you would stand about a 38-caliber chance of blowing your nuts off.

        I appreciated the way Jeff reacted to the gun.  I confess, I took a half-step back, but he stood there and stuck out his chin.  “So, do you have my wallet, or what?”

        Gerald reached into his jacket pocket but kept his hand there.  “My leg, first,” he said.  

        I gripped the driver tighter and edged closer to Jeff.

        “You can see why I would want the wallet first, man.  I mean you didn’t exactly play fair last night.”

        Gerald eyed him, thinking it over—or admiring the job he had done on Jeff’s face.  He said, “Look, I was doing you a favor.  Teaching you the way the world works, you know.  People can get hurt doing business like we were, if they aren’t careful.  

        "You rich kids expect to have everything dropped in your laps, nice and easy, but it doesn’t always work that way.  You dig?  Think of it as a public service.  Besides, if I give you the wallet, how do I know I’ll get my leg?"  He gave it a long glance, and for the first time, his expression softened.  I had a wild notion he might whistle for it like a dog.  

        “Gerald, we don’t want your damned leg.  Just let me have the wallet and I’ll give you the leg, and everybody’s happy.”  He paused and said, “No?”          5/7/18

        You could tell neither wanted to move first.   Finally, Gerald said, “All right, my little gringo friend.  We’ll try it.”  He took the wallet from his jacket and held it out.  

        I realized I was holding my breath, so I let it escape as slowly as I could.

        Jeff set the leg down and took the wallet.  Never taking his eyes off Gerald, he handed the wallet to me and picked the leg up.  The credit card was there but not the money.  

        Gerald watched and waited, but who could tell how long that would last.  He didn’t strike me as someone with an overabundance of patience.  

        I coached Jeff with my thoughts.  It’s a deal!  Let’s walk away and never look back.  

        But I didn’t call the signals.  Jeff said, “How about our money?”  

        Gerald managed a painful shrug.  “It’s like insurance, man.”  He took a long look around the property, his eyes lingering on the house.  “You know what I mean?”  

        “Okay, here’s the deal.  You’re a chicken, man, or you wouldn’t have sucker-punched me.  You know what I can do, and my friend, too.”  

I was grateful that he didn’t use my name.  “So, take your frigging leg and hop away from here like the scared little rabbit you are.  And if anything happens to my house or my family, or my friends—or if I ever even smell you again, I will find you.  And I will kill you.”  

        He whipped the leg by Gerald’s ear into the big juniper.  

        Gerald ducked, winced, and hopped toward the tree, swearing like I’d never heard before, switching between Spanish and English.  When he dug it out of the branches, he looked it over, I guess to make sure it hadn’t been injured.  He turned and brandished it like a sword.  “You stupid gringo bastards!  You treat me this way?”  

        He hopped to his car and laid the leg on the back seat like a carton of eggs.  Before he got in, he stood at the open driver’s door shaking like he had been pulled from an icy pond.  He screamed at us, “You aren’t finished with Armando Calderon!”  

        The bandages had slipped along his face, so they half-covered one eye.  He looked like a mummy in a bad movie.

        He jumped in and stomped the accelerator.  Gravel and dust erupted into a huge cloud.  But he had the wrong gear, so the Merc shot straight back, snapping the bottom fence rail.  It made a sickly crackling sound.  He jammed the brakes and kicked up more gravel as he flew onto the street and disappeared, still cussing, I guess.  I couldn’t be sure because his words assaulted us now in rapid-fire Spanish.  

        We watched the lone taillight dwindle along Invergordon Road.  It had survived again.  We looked at the splintered rail and noticed he had also mangled a twenty-foot stretch of fancy shrubbery.  The debris littered the pavement.  Jeff walked over and began kicking it off the street with me limping behind.  We heard a faint clop, clopping heading away up the street.  Jeff turned to me.  “Did you close the corral gate?”  

***

        The neighbors contacted Mr. Barrett, and the next night he called long-distance from Iowa.  I stood between the kitchen and family room like the night before.  But this time I didn’t listen to Perry Mason tell Della Street the murderer’s identity, or how he almost eluded the police.  Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to hear Jeff’s end of the conversation.  The words weren’t much different, but he sure wasn’t talking to his mother.  “I told you, I don’t know anything about it.”

        Mr. Barrett’s voice came over the line.  I couldn’t make out the words, but the chill was unmistakable.  When he finished, Jeff said, "The movies."  Then, after another pause, "Follow that Dream.  It’s an Elvis movie—Elvis Presley."  More indistinguishable sounds from the other end, and then, "Here.  Ask Frank."

        Another handoff from the quarterback, and I held the receiver to my ear, ready to lie to Mr. Barrett.  All because Jeff wanted to be a big shot and smoke marijuana.  I thought about walking off and leaving him to face his dad without my help.  But I didn’t.  Mr. Barrett said, “Hello, Frank.  Do you know anything about what happened at our house Saturday night?”  

        “No, sir.”  Nothing had happened to the house, so it wasn’t a lie, technically.  

        “Did you have anything to do with it?”

        “No, sir.”  Following the same lawyerly logic, I hadn’t lied.  But if you judge truth by the information transmitted, it was a scale-tipping whopper.  At least I spoke in a respectful tone, so maybe God wouldn’t be too mad.  

        “Put Jeff back on the phone, please.”

        “Yes, sir.”

        I gave Jeff the phone and hobbled toward the arcadia door.  I heard Mr. Barrett’s next words.  Every one.  “That mare is in heat, and if she produces a jack-ass, somebody’s going to pay!”  

My foot and shoulder hurt like hell, but I would have borne that pain for the rest of my life to get rid of the ache in my chest—the ache accompanied by the knowledge that my father would have been ashamed.  I stormed outside, pulling the glass door shut so hard it shook the wall.  Melinda’s hula-hoop rolled away along the stucco wall.  As I moved into the hot, June dusk I damned Jeff for his arrogance and myself for my weakness.  He didn’t catch up with me until I had limped half a block down the sidewalk toward the Quick Mart.                  5/19/18

11:  Bernadine

        My sister, Maddie, is a pain in the ass.  Not Melinda.  She’s a sweetheart—cute as a speckled pup under a red wagon.  My mom uses that expression all the time. It always makes me smile.

        But about Maddie:  she’s so hateful, I can hardly stand to come home some afternoons.  Sometimes, I would relish slapping the hell out of her.  I never do it, though.  That’s one of the earliest lessons I remember coming from Mom and Dad: never hit a girl.  I was just a little guy when they told me that, but I never forgot the way they looked.  So even when Maddie lied last year, and told Mom I hit her in the stomach, I never touched her.  I got grounded until I collected my first Social Security check, but still, I never touched her.  I was mad enough to kick her down the stairs, but I never touched her.  

        That’s the thing that makes her hard to take.  She knows she can get away with things I would never take from a guy, so she taunts me like a mouse standing between a dog’s legs sticking its tongue out at a cat.  It makes me crazy, but she’s still my little sister, so not only do I have to put up with her crap, I have to protect her.  

        One afternoon when I got home from my shift at the Taco Bell, I saw her sitting on the couch bawling.  Mom sat next to her, holding her hand and talking in tones too low to make out.  

        I didn’t pay too much attention because nothing ordinary ever happens to Maddie—at least in her own mind.  Everything is always bigger, or more horrible, or more glorious, or more exciting or frightening than anything that happens to you or me.  So, I walked toward my room, hoping to get a little time to myself before Jeff got home from his part-time job at Scottsdale Pharmacy.  

        Before I got halfway there, Mom called, “Frank, will you come here for a minute?”  

        I walked over and said, “Yes?”  

        Looking at Maddie, she said, “Tell your brother what happened.”

The look on Maddie’s face told me this was more than some lovesick business with a freshman Lothario, or a catty remark from a rival.  

You should know, Maddie hated girls almost as much as she hated me, especially pretty girls.  The complete Most Hated list went like this:

        1.  Me

        2.  Pretty girls

        3.  All other girls

        4.  Jeff

        5.  Anita Bryant

        6.  Everybody else        

        She lifted her head from Mom’s shoulder long enough to give me one of her patented, I hate you more than Satan looks; which was a real accomplishment considering how hard she was crying.  I savored how awful she looked.  Curlers sprouted from her head, her eyes shone like Maraschino cherries, and make-up borne by copious tears cascaded down her face.  The certainty that snot accounted for a significant portion of the mix gave me special delight.

        Don’t look so beautiful, now, do you, Missy?  I’m about seventy-eight percent certain I’m going to hell for that, because any dope could appreciate her distress.

Just as the first sympathetic feelings stirred inside me she spat between sobs, “This is all your fault!”  

        I replaced the tenderness in my heart with fiery visions of how she might spend eternity.  “What!”

        Mom was a genius at keeping us from tearing each other apart.  I’m not sure how she did it with Maddie.  But she controlled me by radiating a love that made me want to please her even more than I wanted to choke my sibling.  

She drew Maddie’s head back into her shoulder and said, "Just tell him what happened, Sweetie."

        Maddie got the sobbing under control long enough to give me another special look.   “Your friend Gerald says, ‘Hi.’”  

        Until that second I had been trying to figure out a way to get to my room without looking bad in Mom’s eyes.  That way Maddie could go on being miserable, and I could go on not giving a damn.  

        But now I imagined the hulking figure of Armando Calderon menacing my sister, and the old protective feelings came back.  "What happened?"  

        "Oh, nothing much.  He grabbed me and asked me…"  

        "What?!"  

        "On my way home from school this afternoon.  He pulled up next to me and jumped out of his car."  She started sobbing again, which alarmed nobody.  Maddie couldn’t tell you the time of day without blubbering.  But there was more, now.  She began to shake, and she kept it up through the whole story.

        "You said he grabbed you?"  

        "Just as good as."  

        Mom said, "Sweetie, this is very important.  Did he touch you?"  

        "Well, he grabbed at me."  

        Maddie’s stories were almost always b.s., but it was clear she had met Gerald. "Did he say anything?" I asked.  

        "He was looking for you.  He said he wanted to sell you some insurance."  

        I already knew the answer to the next question.  "What did his car look like?"  

        "I don’t know.  Some kind of a wreck."

        Mom said, "Maybe we should call the police."

        "Don’t worry, Mom.  I’ll get it straightened out."  

        Maddie wasn’t done with me.  "Your friends are so creepy!"  

        "He’s not my friend."

        I got up to go to my room, but Mom stopped me before I took the first step.  "You and I are going to have a little talk after I get your sister settled down.  And I better get some satisfactory answers.  

        I saw Melinda standing in the doorway to the girls’ bedroom.  She hugged a Raggedy Ann doll to her chest and snuffled, her tears interrupted only by an occasional shudder.

        I went to her and put my arm around her shoulders and led her back into the bedroom.  God, I loved that little kid right then!  “Bernadine is a little upset, isn’t she?” I asked.  

        She nodded, her tears gone, at least for the moment.  

        I made a show of resting the backs of my fingers against the doll’s forehead, and offered, “Oh, no!  I think she has a fever.”  

        Melinda nodded again.

        This might sound crazy, but my dad guided me through moments like that.  When I spoke again, I felt more like the messenger than the author.

        “I think she needs to lie down, don’t you?”

        Another nod.  Her face remained serious.  You’ve seen the look a little kid gets when they understand they’re involved in something important, even if they don’t get the details.  If that look doesn’t touch your heart, you don’t have one.

        “I better take her tempature,” she said.  She always said, tem-pah-ture.  

        “You know what would really cheer her up?”

        She shook her head, no.  

        “Melinda, where is her favorite place in the world?”  

        Her eyes got as big as Oreo cookies, and she whispered a shout, “Your room!”  She shot over to her toy chest and grabbed her nurse kit.  She charged past me, banging Bernadine’s head against the doorjamb on her way.  

        I followed her across with an armful of storybooks. I grabbed the old chair that sat under my makeshift desk (an old door without the knob, laid across some stacked-up cinder blocks).  I pulled the chair next to my bed and dumped the books next to the doll.  “Maybe you could read her a story,” I said.  She already had the doll propped up on my pillow and was digging through her nurse kit.

        She climbed onto the chair and watched as I brought my letterman’s sweater from the closet.  I laid it across the doll, leaving its head exposed.  The doll regarded us with fevered button-eyes peering from above perfectly circular painted red cheeks the size of half-dollars.  

        Melinda called as I started toward the door. “I’m going to give her some medicine to help her sleep.  You can check back in a little bit.”          

13:  Following Maddie

         Maddie’s encounter with Armando had panicked her, and now Mom was upset too.  She deserved answers, but I couldn’t tell her why Jeff and I had been in the desert two nights ago.  I needed to talk to Jeff.  For now, it seemed like a good idea to get everybody’s mind off the whole situation. We gathered up our empty Coke bottles and cashed them in at the 7-Eleven.  Two cents a bottle brought us almost three dollars.

Mom said, “Sometimes I think we drink too much Coke.”  

We wound up back at the Taco Bell since I got my food half-price with my employee discount.  After we got enchiritos all around, everybody felt better.  

 Mr. Barker, the manager, came by and said he wanted to talk to me.  I thought he wanted me to come back later to cover somebody else’s shift, but when we went into his office he said, “Some guy was here just now looking for you.  Called himself Gerald.”  

        Panic again. “What did he look like?”  

        “Walked with a limp.  But here’s the thing, Frank.  He was a real scrub.  Bushy beard.  Dirty.  Greasy hair, greasy jacket.  In August!  He didn’t look like a friend of yours.  Too old, for one thing.”  He looked through the picture window toward Mom and the girls.  

        “What did he want?”  

        “Said he wanted to talk to you, that’s all.  Asked for your address.  I told him we don’t give out that kind of information.”  

        “Thank you, sir,” I said.  

        “I noticed him talking to Eddie and Janice at the counter, but I didn’t think anything about it right away.  Then…I don’t know.  Something didn’t smell right.”  He wrinkled his nose and put his hand on my shoulder.  I didn’t mind because I had always liked Mr. Barker.  In fact, I liked him so much I had told him all about my dad.  What he said next, reminded me of why.  “Frank, are you in some kind of trouble?”  

I said, “No, sir.  I can take care of this.”  

        “If there’s anything I can do, Frank, let me know.”  People say things like that, but when Mr. Barker said it you knew he meant it.  

        “Thank you, sir.  There is one thing.  If he comes in again, could you let me know?”  

“I’ll call you right after I call the cops.”  I’m not so sure Mr. Barker would call the police.  An ex-Army Ranger, he still looked like he could knock down a house.  So even though he was over forty, I figured he could handle Calderon if they ever got into it.  

        “Well, I better get back to Mom and the girls,” I said.

        “Go, Knights!”  He cocked a fist next to his ear.  

        I smiled as I turned toward the dining area, but before I got to the door he said, "There’s a pretty good chance you’ll go up against Salpointe in the semi-finals this year.  You gotta stomp those bastards!"  Mr. Barker never swore unless somebody mentioned Tucson or the University of Arizona.  Something about that place brings it out in people.        

***  

        When Jeff got off work, we drove through the Pizza Burger and later went to the bowling alley.  A few groups of kids bowled, but the pool and arcade area was empty.  We played the pinballs and shot some eight-ball.  After he wracked-up the balls, Jeff said, “So, what did the creepy bastard say to Maddie?”  

        “He told her he wanted to talk to me about insurance.”

        “Wow!  How does he know where you live?”

        “How the heck do I know?”

        “You said he talked to those two kids who work the counter at Taco Bell.  You think they told him?”

        “No.  They don’t know where I live.”  

        "Maybe he doesn’t know."  He ran the table three consecutive times.  Jeff always beat me when we played pool.  Like everything else.  The only place I did better was school, and if you wanted to get technical, only in English class.  "Maybe he knows the neighborhood, but not the address."

        “But how would he even know that much?”

        “I’ll bet he talked to that joker at Pioneer City—the guy who gave us his name.  He knows who we are, so Calderon probably put two and two together and started trolling around near the school.”          5/21/18

        “Yeah, maybe.  But how did he know Maddie was my sister?”

        “I don’t know.  A shot in the dark?  Maybe she was the first person he saw and when he started asking questions, she went ape.”

        “She sure as heck did,” I said.  “He scared her plenty.”  I remembered how I felt in the desert when I realized how big Armando was.  “What if he knows, Jeff?”

        “Well, did she tell him?”

        “No. She was too scared.”

        “How come he didn’t follow her home?”

        “I’m sure he would have.  Or forced it out of her.  But a cop came by and he drove off all casual, like a good citizen.”

        “Corner pocket.”  He sank it, and I racked them up for one more game before we went back to the pinball machines.  “Did the cop talk to him?”

        “I don’t know.  Maddie didn’t stick around to find out.  She took off and turned down the first street she came to.  She took a couple of alleys to get home.  It was him, though.  The car was all beat up and had a missing taillight.  Plus, she described how he looked.          

        "There’s something else, too.  My mom isn’t buying the cheerleader story anymore."  

        "Cheerleader story?"  

        "About how I supposedly messed up your face."  

        "Oh, yeah."  

        "I talked her out of calling the cops.  What am I going to tell her?"

        "You can’t tell her the truth, huh?"  

        "She’d kill me, Jeff."  

        "Yeah.  So, what did you tell her?"  5/22/18

        "Just that I’d take care of the situation with Calderon."  

        "And you got away with that?"  He sighted down the length of his cue while he thought.  "Okay, here’s how we handle it.  We avoid her for the next couple of days.  She’ll probably forget about it."  

        "And if she doesn’t?"  

        "Blame it on me."  

        "What do you mean?"  

        "Just tell her the truth…sort of.  I hauled you out to the desert.  You didn’t know anything about the deal until we got there.  Then the guy cold-jumped us, and everything else, tell her the truth."

        "She might kick you out of the house."  

        "I don’t think so.  She likes me a lot."  

        "I know, but…"  

        "I’ll be extra lovable.  Maybe do something for Melinda.  Maybe even Maddie."  

        "What if it doesn’t work?"  

        "Don’t worry.  I’ll think of something."  

        I thought for a moment.  "What are we going to do about this guy creeping around bothering my family?"  

        He broke.  A nice, clean break, like always, leaving him set up for another good run.  He said, “Solids,” and paused to survey the table.  “Good question.  He’s getting a little big for his britches.”  

        A guy wearing a letterman’s sweater walked by on his way to the restrooms.  If it hadn’t been for the treble clef on the C, you would have thought some nerd stole a football player’s sweater.  We never picked on band geeks, but after he passed we muttered, "Dork."  

        Jeff missed after he sank four straight.  He didn’t leave me much, but I banked the nine-ball into a corner pocket.  It made a low, rumbling sound as it rolled along the chute under the table, before it clacked into the balls already there.  “What if he knows, Jeff?  We have to do something before he really hurts somebody!”  

         “Sh!  Lower your voice, man.  Let’s stay cool and try to think this through.  From what you told me, it doesn’t sound like he knows where you live.  But he’s in the right neighborhood, that’s for sure.”

        “Right!”  I said.  “So?”

        “Okay, let’s say he knows where you live.  He knows where I live.  And he hasn’t messed with my house since the swap.  If he meant business, he would have pulled something there.  He’s just bored because he’s between drug deals, so he’s messing with a couple of gringos.”

        I ground chalk onto the end of my cue and watched as the powder piled up on the green felt edge of the table like a sky-blue snowdrift.  Everything he had said was true.  Not only did Calderon know where he lived, he had made threats.  How did Jeff manage to stay so cool?  

        “Tell you what,” he said.  “Just to be on the safe side, let’s see if we can’t even things up a little bit.”

        “What do you mean?”  

        “Since he knows where I live, and maybe you, too, let’s find out where he lives.”  He sank the eight ball, and we put our cues back in the rack and walked to the pinball machines.  We looked at the lanes, noting three high school kids putting on bowling shoes—two girls and a boy.  One of the girls glanced toward the restrooms where the band geek had gone a few minutes before.  

        Jeff approached his favorite machine; the one called Motor Madness and dug into his pocket.  “Hey, man, do you think…”

        “Jeez!”  I forked over a nickel.  “So how do we find out where he lives, Mastermind?   Look up Dope Dealers in the Yellow Pages?”

        “Don’t be dumb,” he said, finessing the machine with body English.  The silver ball danced as he manipulated the flippers.  Lights flashed, bells jangled, and the score swelled.  Jeff never tilted.  “He’s got a wooden leg, right?”        

        “Yeah?”

        “Where do you think those things come from, you dork?  The Wooden-Leg Fairy?”  

        “Heck, I don’t know.  I never really thought about it.”

        “They come from a store, of course.  All we have to do is go to some of those stores and check around a little.  There’s got to be records.”

        “You mean we just go down to the Wooden-Leg Emporium?”

        “Nothing gets by you, does it, genius?  They have places that sell all kinds of stuff like that: wooden legs, wooden hands, wheelchairs.  Vernon at the drugstore told me about them.  They’re usually next to hospitals.”  

The machine went crazy, the bells and lights making a hell of a ruckus—its unassuming way of announcing a new high score.  Jeff looked up and said, “Hm.”

        I wondered how my best friend could carry on a serious conversation and dominate a pinball machine at the same time.  I sure as heck couldn’t do it.  Maybe if I was the quarterback.  

I surveyed the bowling alley and saw half-a-dozen freshmen and sophomores joining their goofy friends at adjoining scoring tables.  Several girls snuck glances at us and whispered.  How would they feel if they knew what their heroes were contemplating?  “The Wooden-Leg Store, huh?  This will be about the creepiest thing we’ve ever done.”  

        “You want to find out where Calderon lives, or what?”  He looked at the kids on the lanes, and then at the Motor Madness game with its new high score of something like 29 million.  Flashing red letters scrolled across the bottom of the display: Winner!  You have won 8 free games.  The 8 appeared in a little window.  It reminded me of a number on a speedometer.  It had just flipped from 7.  Jeff still had three balls left to play.  He shrugged and yelled at the kid shuffling back to the alley from the restroom.  “Hey, buddy!  You want to take over for me?”

***

        It took me a long time to fall asleep that night.  Later, I had a crazy dream.  This time my helicopter flew me to a mansion in the middle of the desert.  Only, when I went inside, it was our apartment.  Mom and the girls weren’t there, and neither was Jeff.  

        I heard a noise in the kitchen, and when I turned on the light, I saw a wooden leg standing at the kitchen table eating Kentucky Fried Chicken.  It had sprouted little arms and hands, and wore a sombrero.  It turned to me with a series of little hops and said, "Ah, my little gringo friend!  Please, join me."  When I hesitated, he said, "Come on, this stuff is finger lickin’ good."  He held out the box with one hand, and with the other, motioned for me to sit at the chair next to him.  "Forgive me for not using a chair.  As you can see, I don’t have a butt."  He laughed at his cleverness, and seeing me shrink, started toward me, still offering the red and white-striped box.  

        He chased me around the apartment, and cornered me on the patio.  I cowered against the stucco wall unable to speak.  As he advanced, the chicken box transformed into a contract.  He extended it along with a pen and said, "I understand.  You have already eaten, no?  Do not be alarmed.  I am not offended.  After all, I am a business man.  My only intention is to sell you some insurance."  

        I sat up in bed, my breath coming in deep gulps the way it did after wind-sprints at the end of practice.  I heard the faint scraping of a chair on the kitchen floor, and thought, My God, I’m still asleep!   

        In that fuzzy country between sleep and wakefulness, I struggled toward the bedroom door.  I passed Jeff’s bed without a thought about why it was empty.  

        When I saw him drinking water from the tap, I whispered, "What are you doing, up?"

        "Couldn’t sleep."  

        "And you got dressed for a drink of water?  You realize you forgot your tie?"  

        "I told you, I couldn’t sleep, so I took a walk around the block.  Is that against the rules?"  

        "No, hell no.  Do whatever you want.  Only, if you don’t mind, try not to wake up the dead for the rest of the night, okay?"   I looked at the kitchen clock, but there wasn’t enough ambient light to make it out.  "If there’s any night left."  

        He glanced at his wrist watch, pushed the button that illuminated the night dial, and said, "Almost two o’clock."  

        "Jesus!" I said, and crept back to our room.  5/23/18

***  

        It seemed like I had just shut my eyes when I heard a soft tapping at the door.  Mom stood in the opening, a worried line creasing her brow.  She was dressed for work, so it must have been around seven o’clock.  "The car won’t start."  

        Jeff yawned and stretched as he struggled to a sitting position, his feet on the floor beside his bed.  "I’ll take a look.  What time is it?"

        "Almost six."  She shut the door and Jeff put on his jeans, yawning again.  He followed her out, not even bothering to use the bathroom.  

        Two minutes later I stood next to him under the cover of the common parking area.  I bent my head and watched him turn a wrench to loosen a nut on the manifold.  I think it was the manifold. I might as well have been looking at a roadmap of an imaginary city on Mars.  

        A rivulet of sweat formed under my sunward armpit and started its descent.  Jeff handed me Mom’s keys and said, "Try it."  

        I climbed in, my skin alternately sticking and sliding across the vinyl seatback.  When I turned the key the engine tried but failed to come to life.  I held the pressure steady until Jeff said, "Okay."  

        We slid into the routine we had repeated a thousand times—me handing Jeff tools, and him using them to work his magic.  The one significant difference was the lack of conversation about games, past and future; about what college would be lucky enough to have Barrett and Cyrus in the backfield; and which pro team would make us millionaires and celebrities.   Instead, Jeff directed his comments to the accomplishment of the task at hand.

        The third time he directed me to try the ignition, it worked.  As I stepped to the pavement, he nodded toward the apartment and said, "Good as new."  

        "Thanks Jeff," I said over my shoulder.  

        "I’ll send you the bill."  

        Inside, Mom sat at the kitchen table set with two cereal bowls next to a big box of Cheerios, and another of Cocoa Puffs.  Toast and butter were set out, and a hot pot of coffee waited on the stove.  

        She rose when I opened the door and said, "Well?" a hopeful look in her eyes.  

        "Ready to go," I said, handing her the keys.  

        Jeff opened the door, and she put her arms around his neck and said, "I love you, you big goofball!"  She dropped the keys into her purse and hurried toward the door. "Thanks, boys."  Then, as if she were already approaching the first intersection, she said, "I can still make it on time if I catch the lights!"  

***  

        We walked into the prosthesis store next to St. Joseph’s Hospital—just like Jeff said.  Half a dozen other buildings dotted the central parking area, some, part of the hospital itself.   Everywhere you looked you saw an optometrist’s office looking back: or a place that sold glasses and contact lenses.  Two pharmacies, a lab for drawing blood, and a whole mob of specialists’ offices took up the rest of the space.  

        Despite its cleanliness and bright, restful lighting, I kept expecting somebody to come out of the back room wearing a cape.  Jeff walked around like he had been there a hundred times.  

        Artificial body parts lounged on shelves everywhere: legs, arms, hands.  There were other things too, like canes, crutches, and wheelchairs.  I almost laughed when we walked down an aisle with diapers for old people.  We had been to three other places like this, and I fought the feeling every time.

        The clerk turned out to be an ASU co-ed with a knockout figure.  A guy could watch her move around that store pricing artificial boobs all day long.

I thought Jeff might be able to sweet-talk her and get the information we needed.  Sometimes, when he smiled, girls wanted to make him happy.  She got excited, all right, but not because of anything he said.  “Do you guys go to Corona?”  Before we could say more than, “Uh, yeah,” she was in the groove.

        “I know you guys!  You’re Barrett!  And you’re, um, Cypress!”

        “Cyrus,” I said.  She had the faces attached backward, but it still made us feel like pros.  

        “I took my little brother to the game last week.  He loves you guys!  He’s just a freshman.  I’m sure you’ve never heard of him, but he’s your biggest fan—I mean, actually I’m your biggest fan.  Great game!”  It looked like she might ask us for our autographs.  

        She didn’t, but she asked, “Are you guys coming to ASU, next year?  I would just die if I knew some guys on the team!”

        I started to tell her about Navy, but Jeff said, “We’re going to Army.”

        After that, he eased the conversation over to wooden legs, and people who might have bought them.  Twenty minutes went by fast.  Like I said, she was easy to look at.  When we walked out, we had Armando’s address and phone number.  

12:  The Bible and the Lucky Bag

        My dad was a hero.  He belonged to an elite force called an Underwater Demolition Team.  My freshman year they joined another special outfit and together they became the Navy SEALS.  

        I remember when we got the letter not long before my eighth birthday.  Mom came into my room holding little Maddie by the hand and carrying Melinda on her hip.  She made Maddie sit on the bed beside me and took the chair that always sat next to the little desk Dad and I had varnished the year before.  

        She said, "I need you children to be very brave, and to listen carefully to what I have to say."  She talked the same way she did in church.  "Your father is not going to come home this summer, like we planned."

        I could tell something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.  But I knew I could be brave.  “When’s he coming home, Mom?”  I asked.  

        She didn’t answer right away, and she did a funny thing.  She bit her bottom lip.  She clamped down and stayed that way.  It looked like a strange smile, with her upper teeth showing, except that her eyes weren’t smiling at all.  They got all squinty.  I remember, she didn’t cry.  

Aunt Ruth had come to visit the day before.  Later, when I got bigger, she told me Mom had cried through the night before, and all day while I was at school.  "Two Navy wives took the girls for the day, and I sat with your mom, and we cried all day.  She cried for her husband, and I cried for my brother.  We cried every tear right out of our heads."

        Now, Mom said, “Your father did something very brave.  He saved his whole platoon.  He’s going to receive the Medal of Honor posthumously.”  That’s when I got scared.  I didn’t know what that word meant, but I didn’t trust it.    

        I started again, “So, when is…” and I stopped, because I saw her shaking her head slowly, and then I knew what the word meant.  

        I cried, and that made Maddie cry, even though she didn’t know why.  The baby started crying, and Mom took us all in her arms.  But she still didn’t cry.  Aunt Ruth took the girls into the kitchen to help her make cookies—butterscotch chips with double nuts—my favorite.  

        Mom sat on the bed talking to me for a long time and rocking me while I cried.  She said, “Remember what Dad told you about being brave…about being the man?”  

        Gradually, I got through the tears.  Between sobs, I said, “Yes.”  

         “I thought he was wrong to scare you with that talk, but now I see he was right.  Can you see that, Frank?”                  5/30/18

         “Sure, Mom, only I don’t understand why did Dad had to…”  The tears took me again.  I fought them as hard as I could, and after a long time I managed, “Why did he have to die?  Didn’t he believe in Jesus?  Did he do something bad?”  

        “Of course not, Frank.  Your father was the best man I ever knew.  And, yes, he believed in Jesus.”  

        “Then why did he have to die?  I thought Jesus was supposed to watch over us.”  

        She held on to me so tight I thought she might squash me, but I didn’t struggle.  I knew I needed to be brave.  She said, “It’s very hard to explain, Sweetie.  Sometimes, things just happen.  And remember, Dad is with Him now.”  

        That’s when I got mad at God.  At first, it was sadness, but it turned to anger, and before I understood what was happening, I shouted, “I don’t care!  God is supposed to protect us but, he let Dad die.  I hate God!”  

        The anger went away after a year or so, but the sadness never did.  A kid never gets over it if his dad dies.  But if he is a great dad, and a wonderful person, I think you carry him with you after he’s gone.  The problem is, if you’re always thinking about somebody you loved very much, you stay sad all the time.  That’s the way it worked with my dad and me.

        The saddest memory was the talking.  He took me for long walks and we talked the whole time.  We talked while we played catch, too, and chess.  He played chess like a fiend.  He even won a trophy:  a brass horse-head on a column engraved with the words, Oregon Chess Association Open Tournament—Champion, Novice Division, 1940.  

***  

        On my seventh birthday, he showed me his Naval Academy yearbook, The Lucky Bag. It had hundreds of photographs of midshipmen surrounded by the historic landmarks at the Academy: Bancroft Hall, where the guys slept; Nimitz Library, where he wrote love-letters to Mom when he should have been studying; and the statues of Tecumseh, and Bill, the Navy goat he passed every day.  

        One picture showed him and the other guys on the football team in their blue and gold uniforms.  He said he didn’t play too much, but in my eyes, he was Jim Thorpe, John Paul Jones, and Superman.        

        Inside the front cover were a few lines of print.  At first, I thought it was a poem, but it wasn’t.  It was The United States Naval Academy Honor Concept.  It said:

        Midshipmen are men of integrity: They stand for that which is right.

        They tell the truth and ensure that the full truth is known. They do not lie.

        They embrace fairness in all actions. They ensure that work submitted as their own is         their own, and that assistance received from any source is authorized and properly         documented. They do not cheat.

They respect the property of others and ensure that others are able to benefit from the use of their own property.  They do not steal.

        He explained some of the words, and when he finished he said, "It’s kind of a fancy way to say you shouldn’t lie, cheat, or steal.  It’s a doctrine, or a credo."  

        “What’s a credo?”

        “Words to live by.  If you have something to believe in, everything will work out.”

        Then, he gave me my birthday present—a brand-new, genuine cowhide wallet.  I found two things inside—a five-dollar bill so stiff it made a scratching sound when you ran your finger across the edge—and folded up on a sheet of Naval Academy stationery, a copy of the Naval Academy Honor Concept.  On the back Dad had written, This is what I believe in…Love, Dad  

        I don’t have the five-dollar bill anymore, but I still have the wallet—it’s in my hip pocket.  I thought about keeping the sheet of stationery in the wallet so it would always be near me, but I changed my mind.  I folded it in half and tucked inside Dad’s old Naval Academy yearbook instead.    

14:  Little Punks

        We lived in quite a few places when I was six.  About the time I got over being the new kid, Dad would get new orders, and I’d be halfway across the country again.

        Most teachers assigned me a buddy to show me how things worked, and where everything was:  lunch room, bathrooms, nurse’s office, principal’s office (heaven forbid!).  My buddy always turned out to be the biggest dork in the class—which is why he was available to be my buddy.  So, this fat, or stupid, or stuttering kid would glom onto me because he figured I would be desperate for a friend, even somebody like him.  He knew I would most likely turn out to be normal, which meant pretty soon I would become part of the class, and he would be the one everyone laughed at again.

        One teacher assigned me a fat, stupid, stuttering, and mean buddy named Arthur Billingsley.  He wore glasses so thick you couldn’t see through them even if they didn’t have a month’s worth of grime on them.  When he showed me the boy’s bathroom he slugged me in the stomach.  It hurt, too, but it didn’t knock the air out of me, so I beat the hell out of him.  I went from new kid to class hero in one day at that school!          

        I always treated those kids well, even after I got popular, because I felt sorry for them. There was another reason, too; something my mom told me.  “It’s not so hard to be kind, Frank.  People with good hearts don’t mistreat other people.  And I think you have a good heart, Sweetie.  Am I right?”  She gave me a big hug, then.  I was still little, maybe four or five.  I must have done something bad, but I can’t remember what.

        After she hugged me she told me a story about a lion that didn’t eat a mouse when he had the chance.  Later, the lion got caught in a net.  The mouse came along and chewed through the net, and the lion escaped.  My mom hugged me again after she finished the story.

        I never forgot what Mom said.  That made it easier to be nice to those kids—except for Arthur Billingsley—he stayed away from me and it’s a good thing for him he did.  

***

        My first try at first grade had a great effect on me.  As I’ve already mentioned, we moved around a lot that year.  I attended five schools in three states.

        Also, I had the measles, the mumps, and chicken pox, as well as several bouts of flu and some upper-respiratory problems.  I spent a lot of time sick at home or trying to catch up at new schools.  

        That’s why I flunked first grade.  And though I never thought about it, it’s part of why I excelled in sports.  I was a year older than my classmates after that—a year faster and stronger.  But never bigger.  I got used to being the shortest kid in my class—kind of a twerp—a twerp who could run you down and kick your butt, not that I took advantage of it.

        We spent the next year in Yuma.  Dad was stationed at the Marine air base there.  I never understood why, because he wasn’t a marine, and he wasn’t a flier.  That was my second attempt at first grade and things worked out better for me.

        A month after I started second grade we moved to Phoenix, and that’s where I lived until I graduated from high school.

        A bunch of tough kids formed a gang in second grade and caused a good bit of trouble.  Despite their obvious shortcomings, I found myself attracted to them.  I didn’t know why.

         I asked Mom about it one afternoon after I got off the school bus. “How come sometimes I want to do things, even if you and Dad told me they’re wrong?”  

        “What do you mean, Sweetie?”  she asked, wiping the kitchen table with a damp dish towel, and setting a package of Pecan Sandies and a bottle of Coke in front of me.  

        That six-and-a-half-ounce bottle of Coke was a ritual Mom and I looked forward to every school day afternoon.  She loved Cokes almost as much as me.  She turned back to the fridge for her own bottle, then put her hand on my wrist as I reached out.  “Whoa, there, mister!  Capital of Montana.”  

        “Aw, Mom!  Helena.”  

         She released her gentle grip, and I took a long swig.  “How come Maddie doesn’t have to answer a bunch of dumb questions all the time?”  

        “Let’s see,” she answered, touching her finger to her bottom lip, and tilting her head like she was really thinking it over.  “Maybe it’s because she doesn’t get to have any Cokes like her big brother, because she isn’t even old enough to go to school.  Now, about this business of wanting to do things that are wrong?”  

         “Yeah, it’s about those guys with the motorcycle jackets.  I know they’re not nice kids, but, Mom, they are so keen!”  

        “Sometimes the Devil tempts us, Frank.”  

        “So, what should I do?”  

        “I think you know the answer to that question.”  

        “Trust in Jesus, and do what’s right?”  

        “You’re a very smart young sailor.”  

        “But wait, Mom.  What if I don’t want to do what’s right?  What then?”

        “Then, don’t listen to Jesus.  And do what’s wrong.”  

        “And you’re going to just let me do it?  I don’t get it.”

        She put her hand on my shoulder and said, “We talked about this before, remember?”  

         I nodded.  

         “Your father and I gave this a lot of thought, and we decided you will learn more if you go ahead and make your own mistake here.”  

        “So, now I get to do whatever I want?”  

         “Not always, and forever, but in this case, yes.  Just remember, Frank.  Sometimes finding out about things can be painful.”  

         I figured I had played it pretty cagey.  I didn’t see how anything bad would happen just because I started wearing an imitation black leather jacket.  Just because you dressed like someone, didn’t mean you had to act like them.  I went to my room and came back with my piggy bank.  

        Mom asked, “You’re sure?”  

        I nodded.  I could tell she was disappointed.  We counted the money out.  It was six-ninety-five—seven-oh-two, with tax.  

        The jackets made the kids in the gang look like the Hell’s Angels—or Hell’s Midgets.  They talked like miniature beatniks, which appealed to the rest of the second-graders including me.  At first, I couldn’t understand half of what they said, so I learned to nod my head and say, “Cool.”

        They called the leader Gaucho—not Groucho, like Groucho Marx, but Gaucho, with no r.  The whole gang almost jumped me once when I called him Groucho.  

They all had nicknames, and you couldn’t be in the group if you didn’t have one.  I don’t remember them all, but some of the neater ones were Stabbo, Hangman, and The Burple People Eater—Burp, for short.  He liked to burp the alphabet, but it never sounded quite right, because he always said l, m, n, and o together, like they were one letter: elumminno.

        Gaucho was a real smart aleck.  He wised-off all the time, and he got away with it, too.  Once, Miss Larkin taught us about the First Thanksgiving, and he said out loud, right in the middle, “Yakety Yak.”  

She said, “Let’s remember to be respectful while others are speaking.”  That’s all.  My mom would have knocked me out!  

        One afternoon Gaucho blew an earth-shattering fart during a social studies test—a real three-alarm job.   The whole class hooted, and after Miss Larkin got us settled down, she said, “Lawrence!”  That was his real name, Lawrence.  No wonder he called himself Gaucho.  The way she said it made us laugh harder than the fart.

        “That’s my name, Teach,” he said.  “Don’t wear it out.”

        The next thing we knew, Gaucho was heading out the door on his way to the Principal’s office.  Or so Miss Larkin thought.  What he actually did, was to roll up the grated steel doormat outside the door and stand it on end.  He used it for a stepstool, so he could reach the windows running along the top of the brick wall.  I had seen other kids use those doormats the same way.  All right, if you have to know the absolute truth, I had done it myself.  

        But even if I hadn’t, I would have seen his middle finger sticking up from the bottom of the window.  Everybody saw it.  Miss Larkin put her head down like a fullback going through the line and charged out the door after him. Even through the closed door, we heard her yelling at him. Kids aren’t supposed to hear some of the words she used.  

        One day Gaucho and the other kids in The Franchise beat up a colored kid named Archie.  The Franchise is what they called themselves.  I didn’t know what it meant, and I don’t think they did, either.  It sounded neat, though, and that was the main thing.

        Archie went around pretending he could hear music that nobody else heard.  You know, dancing around, and bobbing his head up and down.  Nobody liked him.  

        He cut in line all the time and called people names.  He deserved to get his butt kicked.  In fact, I thought I might have to do it myself, but he never crossed me.  So, if you told me Archie got beat up, I wouldn’t have lost much sleep.

        At afternoon recess one day Archie grabbed the classroom football and strutted around like he owned the world.  He was begging for it.  Heck, I wanted to pop him myself.  Gaucho snatched at the ball, but Archie pulled it away with a quick shoulder-turn and said, “I’m ball monitor today.”

        Gaucho looked around at the other Franchise kids.  They had already formed a circle.  He shook his head with sad eyes, and said, “No, you’re not, man.  It’s my turn.”

        “You were ball monitor yesterday.”

        “No shit, Sherlock.  So, what?”

        “So, today it’s my turn, that’s what.”

        A much larger circle of kids surrounded the ring of Franchise guys, with Gaucho and Archie in the epicenter.  I waited in this larger group, watching, like everyone else.  Archie’s eyes were round and white against his dark skin, as he looked for an ally.  They rested on mine, but not for long, because I looked past him.

        “Gimme the ball,” purred Gaucho.

        “No!”                

        “I said, gimme the ball, nigger!”  He gave him a chest-blast that staggered him.  Archie dropped the ball, and the gang struck.  Like the other kids in the outer ring, I gaped and did nothing else.                  5/24/18        

Choices  

        I didn’t even get into trouble at school because I wasn’t in the fight.  But I felt bad about standing around with my hands in my pockets when Gaucho and his buddies ganged up on Archie.  It bothered me so much I told my father when he got home.  

        My dad never got mad.  But that night I disappointed him, and it brought me close to tears.  Like everything else, he had seen it coming.  In those days, I half-believed my father could read the future.  

        That evening, he took me on a long walk so we could talk, man to man.  As we left the house after supper he told Mom we might be gone for a while.  She smiled a sad smile.  “I know.”

        At the end of our block, Dad stopped and said, “Which way?”

        “Across.”  It was the easiest choice in the world.  If we went left, there would be houses forever.  To the right, it would be houses forever, and a clunky Chevron station with a stupid Pepsi machine, not Coke.

        We crossed the street, and he said, “Your mother told you a story a long time ago about a lion and mouse.  Remember?”

        “Sure,” I said.  

        “Can you tell me about it?”

I told him about the lion, and the mouse, and the net, and when I got to the end, we came to another street.  

Dad said, “Which way?” again.

“Left,” I said. I couldn’t figure out what he was up to.  We both knew the way to the park.  

We walked by a house with a nasty watch dog out front.  Whenever I passed he charged to the edge of the fence growling like he wanted to bite my face off.  He couldn’t get over the fence, and the gate stayed closed, but he always made a big deal, anyway.  I remember thinking I would be nicer if I was a dog, but maybe not.  Probably, I would just act like a dog.  

On the return trip, I knew he would be waiting, so I ignored him just like my dad did.  But sometimes he surprised me on the way there.  This time, as I walked along concentrating on the lion story he scared me something fierce.  He snarled and bristled inches from me on the other side of the fence.

I scooted around behind my dad so he was between the dog and me.  Dad grabbed my arm as soon as I stepped off the sidewalk.  He squeezed hard, too, when he swung me up next to him but it made me feel good.  He moved to the inside of the sidewalk, right next to the brainiac dog.        

“Careful!” he said.  We walked a few steps without saying anything.  At the next house, he ran his fingers along the fence. I imagined him at the Naval Academy marching along Tecumseh Court, straight, tall and proud.  

We came to the end of the street and I said, “Left,” before he could ask.  

        He told me a story about a guy who played a magic flute and got rid of all the rats in a town in Germany.  When it came time to pay him, the mayor double-crossed him.  So, the guy took out his flute again and led all the kids to a magic mountain where they disappeared forever.

When we got to the park, he said, "Go play for a couple of minutes."  

He didn’t have to tell me twice.  I went down the slide three times, and swung across the monkey bars like a gorilla.  Just before he called me back, I hung from my knees.  I couldn’t see him because my shirt was hanging over my head, but I knew he was watching me.  Sure enough, when I dropped to the sand, he called to me from the bench he had picked out.  

"That was fun," I said.  

"Yeah, and it lets you exercise your large muscle groups."  

I looked at his big old arms bulging from his Naval Academy T-shirt.  "You think my muscles will ever be as big as yours, Dad?"  

"Sure, they will, Pal, if you train hard like I do."  

"You train a lot, don’t you?"  

"A hundred push-ups and a five-mile run every day.  Plus, some work with the weights three times a week."  

"How come you train so much?"  

"I need to be in shape in case I ever have to fight for my country."  

 He nodded toward the swings and said, "Race you!"  

I shot away, but he jumped right behind me.  I touched one of the chains holding the nearest swing and yelled, "I won!"  I only beat him by about a second.  

We talked a little sitting side-by-side in the swings.  He said, "Want a push?"  I looked around to make sure none of my friends was in the area.  He said, "You’re getting to be a pretty big guy, aren’t you?"  

I hesitated.  Nothing was more fun than having my dad push me, but you had to be careful about that kind of thing.        

He looked around the park, like he understood about my buddies.  "Well, I don’t want to embarrass you.  Here’s an idea. Why don’t you push me?"  I tried, but he weighed a ton.

We laughed like crazy while we walked to the duck pond.  Dad held out the Wonder Bread package filled with bread crumbs, and the ducks saw it right away.  They flocked to the edge of the water quacking like they couldn’t wait another second.  I threw crumbs one or two at a time, watching them scold each other and scramble to get the biggest pieces.

Dad said, "I bet you wondered why I kept asking you about how to get here."

I looked up at him, nodded, and reached into the bag for another handful.  

“It’s a lot like right now,” he said.  “Here we are feeding the ducks.  But we wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t made the right choices along the way.  You know, told me which way to go.”                Now, I had it!  I said, “So if we don’t make the right choices, we won’t get home.”

I never saw a bigger smile on his face.  "And the choices about getting here were easy, weren’t they?"

"Simple," I said.  

"Here’s the thing, though.  It’s not always easy to make choices.  And sometimes we choose the wrong thing."  Pointing at the trash can beside the winding sidewalk, he said, "Throw the bag away, and when you get back I’ll tell you another story"

        “I’ll bet it’s not about pirates, huh?"  

        “No, it’s a true story.”  

        “So, it doesn’t have any monsters, or anything?”  

        “No, but it’s an important story, and it’s about time you heard it.”

        “You mean because of what happened at school today?”

“Yes."  

When I came back, I still didn’t want to talk about it, but I knew it was time. I told him about how much I wanted to be in the Franchise.  I told him how neat Goucho and the other guys talked—how funny.  I said, “Everybody wants to be in the Franchise, but they only take the neatest kids.  And they want me in the club, Dad!  Mister Blister told me.”  

“Mister Blister?” said Dad.  

“Yeah.  He’s this kid in the Franchise.  They all have really keen nicknames.  He’s Mister Blister because he has some little shiny places on his arm.  He told me the guys…”  

        “What do these places look like—on your friend’s arm?”  He lit up a Camel.  The smoke curled up when he blew it out.  I thought about the places on M.B.’s arm.  That’s what we called Mister Blister for short—M.B.

        "I don’t know.  It’s hard to explain.  They’re like little dots.  Circles, only bigger."  

        He took another puff.  "About the size of a pencil eraser?"  

        "Yeah!  How did you know?"  

        He looked real sad, and said, "Let’s go over to the teeter-totters."  

        It’s funny with an eight-year-old kid on one end of a teeter-totter, hanging up in the air, and a big old underwater demolitions guy sitting on the ground on the other end.  After a while, he moved closer to the cross-bar.  He called it a fulcrum.  I never forgot that.  Dad knew a lot of words.  

        He said, “You know I’m very proud of you, Frank.  You’re a fine, brave boy, and you almost always do what’s right.”  

        Here it comes, I thought.

        “This thing that happened today—I’m not so sure you did the right thing.  Were you afraid, Frank?”  

        “Sort of, but not about getting hurt.”  

        “What do you mean?”  

        “Well, I wanted to be in the Franchise real bad, and I figured if I helped Archie, they would never let me in.”

        “And how do you feel about what happened?”  

        “Like a chicken,” I said, and I started crying.  It surprised me, but I don’t think it surprised him.

        He waited a long time for me to stop.  We went over to the drinking fountain, and I took a big drink.  It helped.  I said, “Dad, I feel so bad.  I just stood there like a dope and let them clobber him.”  I cried a little again.  

        “I know you feel bad, Frank.  And that’s why I need you to listen very closely to what I have to tell you.  Can you do that?”  

        I didn’t feel much like talking, so I said, “Sure.”  

        “Okay.  First, I’m glad you owned up to what you did.  Or didn’t do.  That’s important.  It shows you have integrity.”  I think he could tell I didn’t understand that word.  Sometimes I thought he could read minds.  “Integrity means you are a good person, and you admit it when you do something wrong, and you try to make it better.”  

        Then he took me by the shoulders, and held me out from him in his big giant hands, and looked at me with his soft serious eyes, “You should feel bad Frank.  You let something bad happen.”  

        I thought I might cry again, but he drew me in and hugged me for a long time.  He said, “I told you I know how you feel, and I do.”

We went back to the swings.  He said, “Maybe if I tell you that story now, you’ll understand.  When I first got out of the Academy, I was attached to a Marine Combat Engineer battalion at Camp Lejeune.”  

        I asked him, “Are the Marines brave, Dad?”  

        “Yeah,” he said.  “They’re not too smart, though.  Anyway, we were replacing shingles on the barracks roofs.  The captain had a German shepherd, big as a wolf.  A construction site is no place for an animal—too dangerous.  But the captain really loved that dog.  Anyway, he was talking to the gunny, and the dog wandered over to where I was standing—next to a barracks wall, under the roof overhang.  The dog was sniffing around a big bucket of tar.”

 “There was a great big two-by-four leaning against the barracks.  It must have been twenty feet long—sticking way up into the air.  For some reason, it came sliding along the edge of the roof toward us.”

 “Why did it slide like that, Dad?”  I asked.  I could see it sliding along the edge in my mind, but I couldn’t figure out why.  

“Who knows?  Maybe some jarhead on the roof bumped into it.  Like I said, Marines aren’t too smart.  Anyway, I saw it sliding toward the captain’s dog—coming faster, and faster.  I was right there, and I could have reached out my arms and caught the end of the plank, and saved the dog—but I didn’t.”  

“Wouldn’t it hurt?”  

“Probably,” he said, “But there are different kinds of pain, Frank.  And sometimes, the hurt inside your chest is a lot worse than any pain you can get on your body.  You know what I mean?”  

I sure did.  “Did the dog get hurt?”

He nodded.  

“Bad?”  I asked.  

He waited a long time before he said, “He died, son.”  

Tears came again.  I sure did cry a lot that day.  

When I settled down, Dad said, "I told you that story for two reasons, son. First, like I said, I wanted you to know I understand about what happened with you and those kids today.  Second, and I guess even more important—you need to understand that you can’t change things after they happen."

"No do overs," I said.  

Dad said, "Hm?"  

"Like when you’re playing marbles.  You get one do over if you mess up, or slip, or something."          

"That’s right!  Exactly!  The captain’s dog died because I didn’t act, and it didn’t come back to life just because I felt sorry.  I didn’t get a do over.  And I could never look the captain in the eye again.  I learned from it, though. I decided I wouldn’t let something like that happen again.”  

“And did you, Dad?  Let it happen again?”

“I have to admit, the answer is ‘yes,’ but not very often, and never about anything important.  I’ve done some brave things because I learned that lesson, son.  And now I want you to learn from your mistake.  

“You let a bad thing happen, today, and you can’t go back and change it.  But I promise you, Frank, you will get another chance.  Someday, you will face another bully.  When it happens, remember what we’re talking about right now.  Remember how bad the feeling is in your chest—how it’s worse than any bruises or cuts you might get in a fight.  Or how bad you might feel because somebody doesn’t want you in their club.  Stand up for what you know is right.  You might find you don’t lose the fight, or that you can live without being in the club.  The important thing is, you won’t have to feel this way again.”  

Dad searched my eyes.  When he looked at me like that, I felt like the most important kid in the world.  Even if I had done something bad.  

The sun settled on a house across the street.  I thought we might not get home until after dark, but that didn’t bother me.  Nothing could hurt you when you were with my dad.  

We followed our shadows toward home.  They started like long, stick figures way out in front of us, and got shorter and fatter until they disappeared under our feet at the next street light.  “Here’s the thing, Frank.  Sometimes the things that happen because of those choices…”

        “The consequences, right?”  I said.  Sometimes, I couldn’t help showing off in front of him.  

        He laughed and said, “Have you been talking to your mother, again?  Yes, consequences.  The thing is, sometimes they don’t happen right away.  It might even take years.  But they do happen.  So, be sure your choices make you happy, even a long time after you make them.”  

        He looked at me for a long time, but he didn’t need to worry.  I understood.

        “Think about the lion in the first story,” he said.  “Let’s say the lion is real old now, and he’s sitting in his lion rocking chair with all his little lion cub grandchildren playing around him.  He remembers how he treated the mouse, and he wonders what would have happened if he had made a different choice.  He thinks about his head stuffed above some hunter’s fireplace.  How do you think he feels?”

        Like I said, I got it.  “Good.”

        “Now, what about the mayor?  Here he is with only a few old people around crabbing at him about the lost children.  What is he saying to himself?”

“Boy, did I screw the pooch!”  I remembered him and some of the other officers using that expression. I figured it might make him laugh, but I didn’t know how hard, or how long.

        The funniest thing happened then; I started crying—right there on the sidewalk where anybody who drove by could see me shaking and sobbing.

        The next morning before school I told Mom to give my black jacket to Goodwill.  

        Right after we Pledged Allegiance Miss Larkin called me to her desk and handed me a note.  "I know I can trust you not to peek," she said, giving me her most serious teacher’s gaze.  I would never do something like that, but I couldn’t have seen anything anyway, because she had folded the note in half and stapled it along the edges.

        I gave the note to the nurse and she said, "Thank you, young man."  The treatment room door wasn’t completely closed, and while I stood at her desk waiting for a return note, I peeked 125in to see Mister Blister sitting on the examining table.  He had a cast on his arm, and his eyes looked funny.  He didn’t come to class that day.  In fact, I never saw him again.  

At morning recess I told Gaucho I didn’t want to be his friend anymore, and I didn’t want to be in his gang. I even tried to explain things to Archie.  He looked at me and said, “Shove it.”   His eyes looked funny, too.  

A lot later, Dad gave me a copy of a poem by Robert Frost.  It’s called “The Road Not Taken,” and it reminds me of how you can’t go back and do things over, like Dad said.  It’s almost like Dad gave me that poem when I was sixteen—seven years after he died.  Actually, my mom gave it to me, but it was from him.  He was saving it for when I got old enough to understand it.  Mom remembered it when I took American poetry my sophomore year.  She was good about that sort of thing.  I suppose it wasn’t too hard for her, because she and my dad were very close for a couple of married people.  

I like to read that poem sometimes when I’m confused.  It helps me figure things out.  I’d like to look it over right now, but I can’t remember where it is.  It’s with my Naval Academy Honor Concept.  I can’t find that, either.          

16:  Good Dog  

        After we talked about how Armando scared Maddie, I settled down.  It happened that way often with the two of us.  When I got agitated, talking to Jeff made things seem better. It’s not like my concerns about Armando Calderon disappeared, but I didn’t have any more talking-leg dreams either.  

The next night as we sat on the patio watching a summer storm build up I said, "Twenty hours ’til payday!"  

Jeff said, "Gas for the Jockmobile!"  

"Freedom!  It wouldn’t be so bad if we weren’t stuck here with Mom and the girls."  

        "God, I hate summer!"

        “It’s not so bad right now,” I said, enjoying the breeze playing on my bare arms and shoulders.  

        “You live in a lollipops and roses world, don’t you, Frank?”

        “No, but I’m not afraid to look on the bright side, either.  Even you have to admit it’s pretty nice right now.

        “Yeah, one nice night and three months of sweltering.  And how about the rest of the day?”                  

        “Jeez, Jeff.  I know it gets hot in Phoenix.”  

        "Hot!  What was it today, a hundred-twelve?  One-fifteen?  And what about the humidity?  Whatever happened to dry heat?"  He looked toward the south.  "We might as well be in Iowa."  

        We watched lightning dance and waited for the thunder so we could count the miles.  “The calm before the storm,” I said.  

        “Unless it’s another false alarm.”  

        “I know.  Remember last week, we just knew we’d get clobbered and the whole thing blew away?”  

        "Yeah, those bastards in Tucson got our storm.  The buttheads."  

         I rubbed a place above my elbow wondering if I had just felt a raindrop.  “You know what Mr. Barker says.  ‘Flush twice.’”  We finished the thought in unison.  “Tucson needs the water!”          

        Lightning struck again close enough to make us jump, and thunder rattled the windows.  The dog next door barked and three or four others joined him. It makes you wonder what they think they’re going to do—bite the lightning?  Once it starts, it can turn into a mindless riot.  If you spoke dog and asked one why he was barking, he would say, “Because I’m barking.”  

        People from nearby apartments stuck their heads out their arcadia doors and yelled at their dogs.  That got things settled down.

        But a few minutes later the next-door dog started again, and this time he meant business. The other dogs joined him. They made more noise than the thunder.  Then everything stopped—the wind, the thunder, the lightning, and the dogs.  The first heavy rain plops committed Hoot Gibson here and there around the patio floor. Two hit me on the back of my neck, and I shivered.    

        The spell held for a long count—hut, one; hut, two; hut, three.  The dogs started again.  I would have chalked their excitement up to the storm except for the undertone of unreasoning rage—especially from our buddy next door.  Bear was a good-natured animal: a big, shepherd mix who loved to let Melinda ride on his back.  Now, he wanted to rip somebody’s arm off.  

        People yelled at their dogs again, but they wouldn’t stop. Between thunderclaps, we heard a sound near the covered parking area.  We peered over the stucco wall like a couple of Kilroy’s.  

        The rain exploded, driving down on us like we had ticked somebody off, but good.  The world went fuzzy like we were looking through a steamed-up window, and the cold on our skin seemed bent on settling a score.  

        Through the rain, we saw a blurry garbage can hop across the pavement, and a blurry figure flee in the opposite direction.  He took two steps before he disappeared behind the walled-off trashcan enclosure.  It was enough to reveal a limp—or I guess he could have stepped in a hole.  

        Bear’s head and paws appeared above the wall again and again. I had never been afraid of him before, and I wasn’t afraid of him now.  But I was afraid.  

18:  Woofy

In seventh-grade, we all had paper routes.  Every morning Jeff, Mitch, the twins, and I got up before the sun and pedaled to a vacant lot between the State Farm Insurance building and a Texaco gas station.  There, on a thirty by thirty concrete slab, waited The Arizona Republic in bundles of fifty or a hundred, depending on the number of ads, and ten or twelve other boys, depending on who felt ambitious, and who felt lazy.  We had to deliver all the papers by six-thirty so people could read them while they ate breakfast.  

        One morning while we sat folding newspapers and stuffing them into the canvas bags draped over our handlebars, the five of us told the other guys about a horrific movie we had seen the night before.  

        We snuck through a hole under the chain-link fence surrounding the Round Up Drive-in and watched Psycho, the scariest movie I ever saw.  In one part a pretty lady takes a shower and gets sliced to pieces by a crazy guy wearing a wig and an old lady’s dress.  You couldn’t see anything, but you wouldn’t have noticed, anyway, because of the knife dagging up and down, and the crazy, shrieky music.                  

        We had a great time scaring the heck out of those guys, but we wound up even more scared ourselves, because as we talked, we remembered the poor girl.    

We delivered our papers in pairs that morning.  There was no moon, and some of the houses had dark porches or driveways.  And those places belonged to the grouchiest customers—the ones who insisted that you walk up and place their damned newspaper on their mat—don’t tell me there’s not a god.

        We scared each other every chance we got.  You know, we grabbed each other from behind—stunts like that.  At one house Jeff pretended to tie his shoe, so he didn’t go up on this spooky porch behind a row of bushes.  When I came out he jumped at me and made an awful sound like a cat yowling and spitting.  It was extremely funny…afterward.

        On a normal summer morning, we would have ridden back to my house and slept for an hour or two.  But we were too jacked up, so we grabbed my basketball, a baseball and bat, and two gloves.  Add those to the football Jeff kept in his saddlebags, and we were ready for anything.  

We headed to the school and played H-O-R-S-E, then walked over to the classrooms and got a drink from the drinking fountain on the outside the building.  The water was okay because the sun had only been up for two hours.  Later in the day, you had to let it run quite a while before it got cool enough to drink.  

        On our way back to the courts a big, friendly dog trotted up to us.  He had a sheeny black coat with some white on his chest.  I think he was a hunting dog, maybe a Labrador.

        We petted him and chased him around.  I found half an old broom handle from a janitor’s push broom.  I threw it and the dog shot after it and brought it back, but he didn’t want to give it to us.  It reminded me of a girl when she wants to be kissed.  

        We ran after him some more, and pretty soon he let Jeff catch him.  Jeff grabbed the handle and jerked it back and forth while the dog held on and growled.  You could tell he didn’t mean it, though, because he wagged his tail the whole time. I read his tags and said, “Hello, Darby.  How ya doin’, fella?”  

        “His name is Lucky,” said Jeff.  

        “I’m looking at his tags, and his name is Darby.”  

        “I’m just telling you,” he said.  “any dog that doesn’t belong to my old man is lucky.  Aren’t you, Lucky?”  

        Before long we went back and got another drink and rested. Jeff held the fountain on, and the dog stood on his hind legs and put his front paws in the basin and took a good, long drink.  

         Lucky sat with one paw crossed over the other and pretended he understood every word we said.  He might have carried it off, too, if it hadn’t been for the slobber globs sliding down his tongue and evaporating on the concrete.  

        “Your dad doesn’t like dogs?”

        “You ever wonder why we don’t have a dog?”

        I hadn’t thought about it before, but it did seem strange.  They sure had enough room on their property.  “You don’t like dogs?”

        He looked down at Lucky stretched out next to him and said, “Don’t be dumb.”

        “Well, you sure as heck don’t like cats!”

        “Cats are stupid; dogs are loyal.  A dog will die for you.  You think a cat would do that?”

        I shrugged.

        He took Lucky’s head in both hands and nuzzled him, getting a face full of dog tongue for his trouble.  “I love dogs, don’t I boy?”  More tongue, and more snot.

        Don’t get me wrong, I like dogs, too.  But I have my standards.  “Okay, so you like dogs.  Why don’t you have one?”

        “Because my dad would kill it, that’s why.”  Nobody said anything for a second or two, but old Lucky’s ears stood straight up, and he looked across the schoolyard, past the softball backstops in the corner of the field.  In another second, we heard somebody whistle.  Lucky sat up stiff, looked at us, and whined.  

        He barked and took off across the field.  By the time he got to the gate just past the backstop we could see an old man coming around the corner of a house.  Lucky put his paws on the guy’s shoulders. The guy patted him, and Lucky bounced around and wagged his tail like he was in heaven.  They disappeared around the corner.  

        Jeff said, “I had a dog once.”

        “And your dad killed it?”

        “Yeah.”

        “That’s the saddest thing I ever heard, Jeff.”  I felt like I was standing in somebody else’s house—seeing something I shouldn’t see.        

        Jeff said, “This dog I had—his name was Wolf.  I called him Woofy for short.  He was a big mutt, about the same size as Lucky.  Just as friendly, too, but Dad never liked him.”

        “That was before you guys moved out here, right?”

        “Yeah, back in Iowa.  Anyway, he chewed up my dad’s golf bag one time.  All the balls, the grips on the clubs, everything.  Man, was my dad mad!  He said, ‘We’re getting rid of that mutt,’ but Mom talked him into giving him another chance.        

        “I tried to keep him out of trouble, but he tore stuff up all the time—flowers in the yard, anything he could get ahold of.  Dad would get plenty mad, but he never said too much.  But the way he looked at him, you could tell.

        “See, the thing about my dad is, he’s this giant phony, and that’s why he never said too much about the dog.  Because he’s always been this big, phony animal rights guy—always blabbin’ about how animals have rights, too—Animals!  I kid you not!”

        I remembered the bumper stickers on their car and Mr. Barrett’s truck.  “Did he vote for Stevenson?”  I asked.  “Everybody else voted for Eisenhower.”

        “Hell, yes, he voted for Stevenson.  He’s a nut.  But it’s not just that.  He’s always acting like he loves everybody.  And talking about how everybody should love everybody else.  Always going on about what it’s like to be a working man and not having enough money to feed your kids—like he was born in a log cabin!  My grandparents gave him a brand-new Pontiac on his sixteenth birthday, for criminy sakes!  

        "That’s what makes me want to puke.  It’s just so much bullshit.  You ought to hear him talk about the wonderful working man when he thinks nobody outside the family is around—how they’re wrecking his business because it costs him so much to pay them.  And if you ever want to see anybody throw a class four conniption fit, try to get him to pay somebody overtime.  God!" 

        I said, "I don’t understand overtime."  

        "It’s time and a half, Dork."  

        "Huh?"  

        "Say you make a dollar an hour."  He paused to make sure I understood.  I didn’t.  

        "Does anybody make that much?"  I asked.          

        "Not on this planet, they don’t."  

        "That’s eight dollars a day!  What would you do with all that money?"  

        "I don’t know.  Buy about a million baseball cards?  Anyway, pretend, to make the math easier."  

        "Okay."          

        "So, you make a dollar an hour, and one day you work an extra hour.  For that hour, you get a dollar and a half.  Time and a half.  Got it?"  

        I still hadn’t figured out the dollar an hour part, but I went along.  "Sure, but I don’t understand what it has to do with the dog.”  

        None of the other guys had shown up, so we played catch.  Talking about his dad pissed him off and he started firing the ball at me with that cannon-arm of his.  It hurt like hell to catch it, but if I complained he would get all over me about being a pansy, and then show me how hard he could throw if he had a reason to.  So, I kept at it, and while the ball popped into my glove sounding like a thirty-aught-six, I listened to his story.

        "He was always telling anybody who would listen how much he cared."  

        "Cared about what?"  

        "You name it.  He cared about it.  He didn’t want anyone to get hurt, not even a bug.  So, he couldn’t let on about how much he hated the dog.        

        “Same with colored people.  ‘Oh, Civil Rights, Yay!  Martin Luther King is my hero!’  What a load of crap!”  

        “Who’s Martin Luther King?”

        “Some colored preacher who thinks colored people should sit in the front of the bus.”

        “What bus?”

        He gave me a funny look and said, “Don’t be dumb.”

        “Don’t you like colored people?”  I asked.

        “No, it’s not me!  He’s the one!  That’s what I mean.  Everything he says, it’s the opposite of how he acts.”

        The ball exploded into my glove.  It hurt like a mother bear.  

        “We had this colored lady that used to clean for us sometimes,” he said.  “Well, he thought she stole some money off his desk, so he never called the agency to have her come back.  Only she didn’t take the money, Frank.”  He kneeled to tie his shoe before he threw the ball again.  “I know she didn’t.”

        “Why?”  I asked without thinking too much.  

        “Because she didn’t!  That’s why.”

        His next throw slammed into my already throbbing hand, and I said, “Let’s get another drink.”

        You could tell it would be another hot day.  When we sat, resting our backs against the school building again, he said, “Anyway, my mom asked him about it, because that lady did a pretty good job, and she wasn’t too rich, either.  Wanna know what he said?”

        I nodded, and he continued, “‘You can’t trust those people.’  What a phony!”

“So, what about the dog?”  I asked.  

        “Yeah, the dog.”  He got up for another long drink.  “He could be a little weird sometimes.  I mean, like I said, he knew Dad hated him, so he got even sometimes—you know, tearing up his stuff, sleeping on the couch when he wasn’t around—stuff like that.  

        "One time he threw up in his golf shoes.  I mean, I’m not sure you can throw up on purpose, but he never did anything like that before.  When Dad found out, you could hear him screaming clear down the street!  But that wasn’t the worst thing.  The thing that did it was what he did to this big shot from the Democrat Party."

        “Did he bite him?”        

        “He peed on him.”        

        I thought I must have misunderstood.  “What do you mean, peed on him?”

        “I mean, he pissed all over him, but good.”

        I laughed as I pictured this huge dog letting some guy have it.  Jeff didn’t notice.

        “My dad was in the front yard talking to some precinct chairman or something.  He came over because Dad had been talking about running for the school board.  Or maybe he wanted a donation.  Dad gave a lot of money to the party—couldn’t afford to pay his workers, but he had plenty for the Democrat party.  Anyway, they were talking about what a great guy my dad was, and how much the Equal Rights for Winos and Bums guys needed him—or his money, I don’t know.  

        "Old Woofy comes trotting up, and right when the guy reaches down to pet him, he lifts his leg and nails him—and he was looking right at my old man the whole time.  It soaked the guy’s pant leg and dripped right through the cuff.

        “Man, I thought that was it for old Woofy for sure!  Dad turned red as a tomato, which is hard for him because he’s so tan from working in the sun all the time.  He couldn’t kill Woofy because he had to apologize to the guy.  He says, ‘Oh…my!  I’m so…Woofy!’  He takes a step after the dog, and then he remembers the guy and turns back.  The guy looked up like he expected Estes Kefauver to drop out of the sky.”        

        I laughed so hard I thought I might hurt myself, but Jeff didn’t notice.  He said, “So now, Dad takes his hanky out and starts toward the guy like he wants to wipe him down, but the guy steps back, and Dad says, ‘I’m…’  Then he sees Woofy slinking toward the backyard and thinks about going after him again.  

        But he picks up the garden hose instead, like hosing the guy down might be a good idea.  When the guy sees that, he gets in his car, and starts backing out the driveway.  He waves at Dad, and Dad waves at him, smiling this real sick smile, and looking around for Woofy, while he’s watering the lawn.  Nobody knew what to do, I swear to God!

        “After the big shot drove off, Dad glared at me.  He was shaking all over, no lie.  He said, ‘Bring that goddamned dog here!’  I didn’t mind getting away from him, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to turn Woofy in.  I beat it around to the backyard and found him hiding under the porch.  We snuck over to the school and hid out.  

        “Two weeks later, Woofy died—went around the side of the house and died under the rose bushes.  Mom and I cried like babies, but not Dad.  He looked at the body and nodded, then walked into the house and came back holding some big old garbage bags.  

        When he saw me hugging poor old Woofy and crying like a broken hydrant, and Mom with her arms around me, he said, ‘Get away from it!’  Funny, he didn’t say him, or the dog.  He said, it.  Then he stuffed Woofy in those bags and threw him in the garbage can—didn’t say a word.  He went back inside and came out with Woofy’s food dish, and his water dish, and tossed them on top of him like he was dumping leftovers.

        “That whole week I couldn’t get Woofy off my mind.  The more I thought about it, the more I knew something was wrong.  It’s not like he got sick or anything.  He ate all his supper like always and the next morning I found him. Then I remembered I didn’t feed him the night he died.  That made me wonder because I always fed him.  But that night, his food was already in his dish.  I asked my mom if she fed him that night, and she said, ‘No, your father fed him.’

        “I found a half-empty box of rat poison in the garage.  That evening when he got home, I waited for him to grab his newspaper and get comfortable in his easy chair. I showed him the box and asked him, ‘How come you fed Woofy the night he died?’  Man, was I scared. I mean, he was my dad!  And, well, you know how big he his.  But I did it.  I couldn’t let him get away with something like that.  You know what he said, Frank?”

        I felt awful but I couldn’t think of anything that would ease his pain, or bring Woofy back, so I shook my head again, and said, “No.”

        Jeff looked away, but not before I saw his eyes shining.  "My dad said, ’I don’t know what you’re talking about.’  ’Like fun, you don’t,’ I said.  ’There’s only one rat in this house, and he’s a big, phony rat-bastard liar!’   And I threw the box in his face and ran like hell.

        “About a month later I was raking up grass from mowing the lawn, and I saw him talking to that same Democrat guy.  They stood next to the guy’s car laughing like nothing had happened, or maybe they were remembering old Woofy peeing on the guy.  Then they got all serious, and talked about a bunch of stuff I didn’t understand, like UAW, and McCarthy.  What I did understand was when my big, phony, liar dad told this guy, everybody should give his fair share, and how much he hated war.  That’s about the only true thing I ever heard my dad say.  He sure as hell hated war.  Enough to make damn sure he stayed out of it, anyway.  That’s when I knew I would join the Army someday.”          6/2/18

19:  The Library

During basketball season, I got to walk Paige home every afternoon because I wasn’t on the team.  

        “Why do girls carry their books that way?”  I asked.  We turned into the long walk that led to the entrance of the public library.  We could have used the school library, but the Scottsdale Public Library had quite a few tables with no adults gawking at you all the time.  Also, you practically had to trip over the place to get to her house, so why not?  

        “Because, if I carried them hanging down at my side, I would look like a big, clunky boy.”  

        “Better than a girl, hugging her books to her boobs like she’s in love with them.”

        “Frank Cyrus, refined young ladies do not use coarse language!”  

        “You didn’t use it, I did.”  

        “Polite young ladies do not associate with boys who use language like that.”  

        “Okay, sorry.  Chests.  How’s that?”  

        “You are a rude person, and you are not going to trick me into talking about chests, either.  The subject this afternoon is algebra.  Let’s sit outside today.”  

        An empty concrete table next to the statue of Winfield Scott practically begged us to sit.  I said, “Did you know you can’t spell algebra without bra?”  

        She slugged me in the arm, and we sat down.  “How did you do on the exam, today?”

        “I aced it, of course.”  I put my books on the table and rubbed my arm.  “That hurts!”  

        She leaned to me and kissed my cheek.  “Act like a gentleman, and you won’t have to worry about getting hurt.”  

        “I don’t feel like studying today,” I said.  

        “Did you really get an A?”  

        I nodded, and she smiled.  You never saw anything like a Paige Martinez smile. “All right," she said, "what do you want to talk about?”  

        “How about our anniversary?”  

        “You remembered!”  

        “Yep.  We went on our first date one year ago this Friday.  Double date.  You and me.  Jeff and Donna.  Double feature at the Round-Up Drive-in.”  

        “I bet you don’t remember the movies,”  

        “How much you want to bet?”  

        “A million bucks.”  

        “You’re on.  Elvis.  Follow That Dream and Kid Galahad.”  

        “You are such a sweet boy.”  She kissed me again, this time on the lips.  Then her face grew serious, and she dug into her purse.  

        “What are you doing?” I asked.  

        “I always pay my debts,” she said.  

        I asked, “You got the whole million on you?”  

        “No, I thought I’d give you, say a quarter a week.”  

        “Fine.  Or, we could go double or nothing on the next bet.”  

        “Okay.  Otherwise, it might get confusing.  I mean, if I gave you a quarter right now I’d owe you nine hundred ninety-nine…”  I put my fingers to her lips.  Then I kissed them.  It took a while.  You could barely see the table from the street, but we heard some guy holler, “Get a room!”  

        She broke away and slugged me again.  “What was that for?” I demanded, rubbing my arm again.  

        She said, “You are a presumptuous young man.  Next bet.  What was I wearing?”  

        “That’s not fair.  I don’t know what you call those things.  They look sort of like a skirt, but they have pants, like shorts.  And a red blouse, and I thought I would pass out, you were so beautiful.”  

        “Hm, two million dollars.  Sometimes you’re like a girl.”  

        “Hey, wait a minute, Sister.  What the heck is that supposed to mean?”  

        “I’m sorry, Frank.  I didn’t mean it like that.  You just seem to understand a lot more than most guys.  Like our first date, as a matter of fact.”

        “What do you mean?”  

        “Halfway through the first flick.  What did you do?”  

        “Try to get fresh?”

        “No, after that.”

         “After that, you slugged me.”  I sighed, and said dreamily.  “Our first slug.”  

        She looked at me for a long time.  “Are you being deliberately obtuse?”  

        “I don’t like that word.”  

        “Okay, I’ll play your silly games.  Why don’t you like the word, obtuse?”  

        “Because you can spell it without bra.”  

        She balled up her fist, and I begged, “Please, don’t.  I’m going to need that arm to carry the ball in September.  So I can be a football hero.”  

        “I almost forgot for one glorious moment.  What you did was, you went to the snack bar and got me a Coke, remember?”  

        “Sure, I remember.”  

        “And why did you do that?”  

        “Because you asked me to.”  

        “I did not ask you, but you knew anyway, you adorable, perceptive boy.”

         “Sure you did, you said, ’My throat’s kinda dry,’ so I knew you wanted a Coke.”  

        “That’s the whole point, Dick Tracy.  You knew when a girl says, ‘I have a dry throat,’ it means, ‘Please get me a Coke.’  Most guys wouldn’t get the hint even if their girl started gagging.  They might get suspicious if she said something like, “Hey!  Bozo!  You think maybe you could get me a Coke?!”

         I laughed.  “And a box of Junior Mints.”

        “Yes.  See what I mean?”

        “Yeah.  I guess some guys wouldn’t get it.”  

        “Practically all boys.  Except you.”  

        “How about Jeff?  You think he doesn’t know?”  

        “That’s true,” she said, tilting her head.  “Only he’d be too damned ornery to get the Coke.”  

        “Ooh!  Remember our deal?”  I said, making a fist.

        “About me swearing?”  

        I nodded, drew back my fist, and kissed her.  

We were quiet for a minute, just looking at each other.  There are worse ways to spend an afternoon than looking into a beautiful girl’s eyes.  

        “So how come you’re so perceptive?” she said.  

        “It’s because I grew up around all females.  After my dad died, I mean.”  

         She touched my arm.  Not the one she had hit.  “He really was a hero, wasn’t he?  You must miss him a lot.”  

        I said, “You’re pretty smart for a girl.”  

        She slugged me again.  “Where are you taking me Friday?”  

        “You hit a lot for a girl.  How does dinner at Green Gables sound?”  She squeezed my arm.  “Ouch!”

        “Frank, can you afford it?”  

        “Of course I can afford it.  You owe me two million dollars.”

        “It sounds wonderful.”  

        “Yeah, well, it gets better.  You know Jeff and Donna are fighting again, so guess who gets to borrow the Bel Aire and take you out on a single date!”  

        I got another kiss and a big hug.  We talked too long, and we knew it.  She kissed me one final time and said, “I have to babysit my little brother.”  

I said, “Let the little brat babysit himself.”  She gave me one final slug, and I walked her the rest of the way home.          6/6/18

20:  Unitas States

        One November night the three of us walked through the orchard behind Jeff’s house feeling like the kings of the organized world.  Why not?  In six months, we would graduate from eighth grade, and we would be kings. “I’m hungry,” I said.  

        “You’re always hungry,” said Mitch.

        "I’m a growing boy.  Let’s go over to the Circle K."

        Jeff noticed a cat skulking under a nearby orange tree.  He picked up a fallen orange and hefted it, assessing its weight.  Never taking his eye off his quarry, he said, "Too far," then barked like an angry dog.  The cat double-timed it across two rows of trees and out of the orchard.  

         We walked in silence for several minutes, then came to a clearing.   In its midst stood the latest model home from Mr. Barrett’s construction company.  It loomed, dark, foreboding.  A few steps from the back door rested a head-high pile of expended construction materials, as well as a burning-barrel filled with lunch waste from the crew that had only recently finished the house.  

        Jeff spoke in low tones, almost whispering.  “This is what I wanted you guys to see.”

        We had poked around his dad’s model home sites before.  I said, “What’s the big deal?”

         Again, in hushed tones, he said, “This!”  

        Up high, where the brick wall met the roof overhang was a small window, cracked open a quarter of an inch.

        Mitch said, “It doesn’t look like there’s a screen behind it.”

        Jeff smiled.  “There’s not.”

I forgot about my hunger.  “Have you been inside?”  

        “No, dork. It’s too high to reach.  You’ll have to boost me up.”  

***  

Jeff came up with a great plan to get the whole gang over there on weekends without anybody’s parents knowing: we told our folks we were spending the night at Freddie’s house.  Here’s the brilliant part—or at least it seemed that way at the time.  If anybody’s mom called Freddie’s house to check up on them, which wasn’t likely, his big sister, Jana, covered for us.  

She was seventeen and could make herself sound very grown-up.  She pretended she was Freddie’s mom and said so-and-so was spending the night.  If they asked to speak to him, she said he was in the john or something.  It worked because Freddie’s mom worked nights, and slept all day, and his dad didn’t live there because they were getting divorced.  

Jana helped us because Jeff and Freddie walked in on her making out with some college guy.  The plan worked like Jeff said until her mom found out about the guy.  Then she didn’t have anything to lose, and we didn’t have anything to hold over her head.  

Before that happened, we got over to the empty house twice.  Boy, did we have a blast!  The first night we met at the school and checked our provisions.  Jeff put each person in charge of a different snack so nobody had to spend too much of his paper route money.  The pop had warmed up by the time we got there, but we were having too much fun to care: except for me.  I would never drink warm Coke, so I brought a canteen full of good old tap water.

        When we got inside we crept through the house and checked every room for monsters.  We did that as a group because once you see a movie like Psycho you never forget it.  Not even Jeff.  After we finished, Jeff said, “Good.  Let’s put everything in the back bedroom.”  

        Jeff and I had brought over four long planks from the site next door.  We used them to prop a blanket over the window.  It kept the light from getting out. Then we closed the door to keep light from showing toward the front of the house, and we were all set.  

        It didn’t take long for our eyes to adjust.  We only needed Freddie’s flashlight when Tim and Tom broke out the Playboy magazine they had kyped from a Circle K.  The water was hooked up, which meant we could use the bathrooms: but we forgot toilet paper, so Tom wasn’t allowed to eat any potato chips.  

        Freddie brought a transistor radio along.  We turned it on with the volume way down, but pretty much ignored it while we sat around munching and swigging, and whispering and laughing, and listening for intruders.  

Jeff said, “You guys stay alert, okay?”

Mitch whispered, “Yeah, listen!”  It got so quiet we could hear ourselves breathing.   That’s when he launched a thermo-nuclear fart.  

The rest of us got on our knees and waved our hands like we were slaves, and said, “Hail to the king!”  Then we coughed, gagged, and ran into the next bedroom.  

“Sissies!” he called after us, but we didn’t come back until we shooed the bad air out of the room.

        We talked about football and the future, like always.  Jeff idolized Johnny Unitas.  He even walked like him sometimes when he remembered, with his shoulders hunched up.  The rest of the time he stood up straight like his parents had taught him.  He had excellent posture when he wasn’t being Unitas.  

        We talked about other sports too that night.  And we talked about a party some kid was going to have.

        “Sheryl Donally’s going to be there,” Freddie said.

        She was new at our school because we were on double-sessions while everybody waited for a new school to get built. The kids who would go to the new school had the late session, so we saw them coming to school as we left at noon.  

        “She’s really got ’em!” said Tim.        

        “She really knows it, too,” Jeff said, and we all laughed.

        Tom nudged his twin and whispered, “Tell them.”

        Tim stayed silent, and Tom poked him harder.  “Tell them!”

        He held out for another long second, then blurted, “She’ll let you feel ‘em, for a quarter.

        Jeff said, “How do you know?”  We laughed as hard as you can when you’re trying to be sneaky.  Freddie ended up spouting a snootful of Barqs’ root beer onto the carpet.  

        Jeff erupted.  “Careful, will ya!  I’ve had it if anything happens to that carpet.”

        “Sorry, geez!”  Freddie looked at the rest of us for help.

        “It’s not like he did it on purpose,” I said, while Mitch wadded up the paper bags from our trip to the Circle K.  

        By the time he had soaked them in the bathroom sink and was using them to sop up the root beer, Jeff had eased up.  “It’s just that my old man will know.  You guys don’t know how he is.”  He puffed himself up, and cupped his hands under his belly, doing a decent imitation of his father.  “That floor covering hasn’t been touched by human hands.”  

Tim said, “I’m not sure about hands, but it might be a good idea to check underneath Mitch’s butt.”  

***

        It went on like that for a long time, and I don’t remember ever having more fun.  It’s funny though, it wasn’t quite as much fun the next week.  The second time never is.  

        It would have been perfect that first time, except that twice Jeff made us turn off the flashlights and the radio, so the two of us could sneak out the back door and check outside.  

“Jeff, it’s one o’clock in the morning,” I said.   “Why do we have to check the perimeter all the time?”

        “You talk funny,” he said.  

When we got, back I tapped on the window, using the pad of my fingertip instead of the fingernail.  We had to do it a certain way so the guys inside would know it was us.  It was: tap… tap, tap… tap, tap, tap, tap… tap.  Somebody from inside whispered, “What’s the password?”

        I answered, “Unitas States of America.”  Unitas, with an s.  If you didn’t say it just right—if you said United States, they would know it wasn’t us.  Jeff even made us practice before we went out each time, so everybody would get it right.

        As it got later the talking and goofing around subsided. That was what we were waiting for.  Jeff and Tim and I gave it another ten minutes, and then woke Freddie and Mitch, taking care not to jostle Tom.  As delicately as possible, we poured all the potato chip crumbs down his pants, front and back.  We tried heroically to hold back our laughter, but that’s pretty much impossible when you’re doing something that funny to a friend.  

        But it didn’t matter because Tom could sleep through anything—even one of Mitch’s historic farts!  Once we got started we couldn’t stop, and we wound up stuffing two packages of Twinkies, (one opened, one unopened), down there too, along with a box of Milk Duds, and a package of Pork Rinds.  Tom didn’t even twitch.  For the rest of the night, you could hear things crinkling and making little scratching sounds every time he moved.  

        Not only was he a world-class sleeper, but it took him forever to wake up, and he stayed grouchy through the process.  The next morning when we got ready to leave, he didn’t even notice until he got on his bike.  A series of strange sounds, (even by our standards), came from his pants and he sat for a few seconds blinking while the rest of us fell off our bikes and submitted to convulsions of hysterical yowling.  

        After he dismounted and undid his jeans to survey the carnage, he stabbed each of us with a contemptuous, bleary stare, and said, “You guys are assholes.”        

Something happened after we played our hilarious prank on Tom; after everybody else fell asleep.  Jeff couldn’t sleep so he and Mitch and I rode our bikes to a nearby Circle K.  We knew they carried Baker Boy Cinnamon Rolls, which were about the best snack in the universe.

        On the way, I thought about how rich Jeff’s family was.  I’ll be honest, I thought about it a lot.  “What are you going to do when you grow up, Jeff?”  I asked.  “If we aren’t in the pros, I mean?”

        A cat crossed under a streetlight in front of us.  It looked like the one Jeff had chased out of the orchard the week before.  I swear it gave him a look.  Jeff jumped off his bike like there was a bullhead on his seat and took his golf ball from his pocket.  He threw it as hard as he could and it clicked on the pavement inches from the cat’s head.  

        It yawned and moseyed into the shadows.  I guess it didn’t understand how close it had come to seeing that big scratching post in the sky.  It surprised me that Jeff missed—he was a dead shot with anything you could throw—not just a football.

        “Why did you do that?”  I said.

        He got back on his bike.  “Because it was too far away to run over.”  When we got to the streetlight, we parked our bikes and looked around for his golf ball.  

        Here’s something about Jeff.  He carried that damned golf ball with him all the time.  I don’t know where he got it, or what it meant to him, but when he threw it, we found it, no matter how long it took.  “I hate cats, he growled, running his hand through the tall grass.

        “You’re full of it, too,” said Mitch.  “You act all tough, but you could have creamed that cat easy if you wanted to—and we all know it.”  Sometimes Mitch could be pretty brave.

        Jeff snorted and said, “That cat’s lucky I’m in a good mood.”  He saw his ball under a bush and walked over to get it.  On the way, he looked back at Mitch.  “And so are you.”

        "So if we weren’t football players," I persisted, "what would you do?"  

        “We are going to be pro football players—starting backfield, Chicago Bears.”  Then he hunched up his shoulders, like Unitas.  “Or Baltimore Colts, maybe.”          

        “And I’m going to be the King of Siam,” said Mitch.

        “You’re going to get your ass kicked, too.”

        “So what would you do?”  We eased under the pools of light one by one, smelling orange blossoms and listening to the love songs of frogs coming from a water hazard on the Jokake Inn Golf Course.  “You know, if we got injured, or something?”

        “Both of us?”

        “Heck, I don’t know.  I’m just saying, what if, that’s all.  Would you build fancy houses like your old man and make a million dollars?  You know, take over the family business?”

        “I wouldn’t piss on my dad to put out a fire,” he said.  And then he farted—a real good one, too.

        Mitch snorted.  “Amateur.”

        I asked Jeff, “Why do you hate your dad so much?”

        “Because he’s a phony bastard.”

        “But I mean, really—what did he do that’s so bad?”

        “You really want to know?”

        We both nodded.  

        “Okay.”  He got off his bike again, and so did Mitch and I.  As we walked our bikes along, we could see the Circle K up ahead, an island of light in the night.  “My dad is about the meanest guy alive.”

“Meaner than you?” asked Mitch.  We all chuckled.  

        Jeff said, “You’re lucky, Frank.  Your dad was a really great person.”        

I thought about how much I missed my dad.

When we got to the parking lot Jeff said it again.  “You had a great dad—I only had this jerk-wad my whole life.”  Another pause.  "You know what I mean, man—right?"

        “I understand,” I said, but it made me feel a little funny.  

        “Also, he’s a big, fat liar.  Like he’s always breaking promises.”

        “Like what?”

        “Okay, like he used to forever be promising me he would come to my Little League games, but he never showed up.  Except for once.  And you know why he showed up then?  Because his company sponsored our team, and he was presenting a check to the Little League guys, and he wanted to make sure they spelled the company name right in the papers.  I mean, that’s what was important to him—not his kid, and his stupid Little League game.  He didn’t even stay to see me bat.  I hit a homer, too.  Remember, Mitch?”

        Mitch nodded.  “Yep.”          

        I had never thought about it before.  There was always somebody at my games—usually Mom and Dad with the girls, or sometimes just one of them.  But I never once came up to bat when I couldn’t look up in the stands and see somebody I loved waving at me.  And I didn’t hit that many homers, either.  

        Jeff continued, “He promised my mom about a million times he would stop smoking, too; and he promised he would take her to Europe.”  

        We left our bikes on the sidewalk in front of the store so they wouldn’t get run over by some drunk.  Sometimes if we thought about it, we left them where we could see them from inside.  Most of the time they wound up waiting for us at the end of the sidewalk by the phone booth.  

        Freddie knew a kid whose bike got stolen by some hoods.  Another kid is from New York, and he says you never leave your bike unlocked there, because it would get stolen for sure.   I’m not sure how much of that stuff is true.  Guys say stuff, you know?

        The store only had one package of cinnamon rolls, but we didn’t care.  We were still full from all the junk at the house, and we usually shared a package, anyway.  We also got a Coke each, and two packages of Planter’s salted, roasted peanuts to share.  

        A potbellied bum stood at the check stands in front of us.  The old guy behind the counter looked at us like he figured we were stealing stuff.  After he put the bum’s Marlboros in a paper bag he asked us, “Your moms know where you kids are?”  

        I looked at the clock over the magazine rack.  It said 12:40. Jeff said in his most polite young-man voice “No, sir.”  It pissed the guy off, good.    

        When we got outside, I said, "Damn!  We forgot to open our Cokes."  Jeff and Mitch dusted off a place to sit while I went back and popped the caps with one of the bottle openers on the counter.  They were tied to strings leading under the counters, one on each side.  That kept people from stealing them.  I could see why they would do that because it was a pain in the neck to get on the road and discover your Cokes weren’t opened.  

        Mitch and I would never steal anything, but I suppose some people would.  Come to think of it, my mom saw the twins kyping candy from a Quick Mart once and told their mom.  They got in big trouble!  That had been four months ago, but they still hadn’t forgiven me.  

        Outside, I sat down between Jeff and Mitch with my back against the wall.  “So, did he quit smoking?”

        “Hell no.”

        “Did he take your mom to Europe?”

        “No.”

        “Okay, so maybe he isn’t the best dad in the world, but that’s no reason to hate him.”

        “You don’t know him, Frank.  I told you, he’s a real bastard.  I mean, yeah, he takes care of us and everything.  He buys us stuff a lot—for birthdays and like that—if he remembers.  But that’s just because he feels guilty.  Heck, he’s always buying extra stuff to make up for the stuff he forgets.  He got Mom a new vacuum cleaner to make up for not remembering their anniversary.  Boy, does she hate that goddam thing!  Don’t ever buy a lady a vacuum cleaner!  

        “And I’ll tell you something else.  You know how he’s always out of town on business?  Well, he says he’ll be back in time to help you with your science project, but he never is.”

        He bit the corner off the package of peanuts and poured eight or ten of them into his hand.  He handed the package to me, and while I repeated the procedure, he poured them into the Coke bottle a few at a time.  I passed the peanuts to Mitch.  

When you drink Cokes that way, you have to get the bottle up to your mouth right away, or you’ll wind up with fizz all over yourself.  But the taste of the salty peanuts mixed with the Coke-taste, and the carbonation going rooty cazooty in your mouth is about the best thing in the world—with the possible exception of Baker Boy Cinnamon Rolls.  

        We sat for a long time but only two cars came.  One guy looked like the twins’ dad, and it scared us into bending our heads down like we were interested in those peanuts raising hell in our Cokes, but it turned out not to be him.  

        The old clerk from inside kept giving us the hairy eyeball, and pretty soon he came out and said, “You kids get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”  

        We took our bikes around the corner and sat against the side wall eating and talking.

        “At least your old man buys you get lots of junk,” Mitch said.

        “Yeah, I guess—if he doesn’t forget.”  He tore the cellophane wrapper off the Baker Boy Cinnamon Rolls.  I couldn’t wait!

        “That’s another thing, though.  Maybe he would remember his family if he didn’t play golf with his friends all the time.  He’s gone all week, then he comes home and spends the weekend playing golf with those douche-bags.  I mean, he’s got time for them—but not us.”

        “What’s a douche-bag?”  I asked.

        He shrugged.  “Beats me.”

        Mitch shrugged, too.

        Before we got on our bikes and started back toward the house I bent down to pick up our trash.  Jeff said, “Leave it.  That guy’s a douche-bag.”  

        I felt guilty about it because usually, we didn’t do things like that, but I figured Jeff was right.  Mitch picked everything up and put it in the trashcan, anyway.  We didn’t say too much on the ride back.  It’s funny.  I was the one without a father, but I felt bad for Jeff.          6/8/18

21:  Lagoon Encounter

         “Congratulations, ladies.  Last night you proved you are a match for the wheelchair all-stars…”  Everyone in room 117 chuckled.   Coach Amblin continued, “…if the officials have been paid off.”

        According to tradition the student-managers helped themselves to orange juice and doughnuts.  Next, they made a show of serving the Coaches.  Coach Amblin said, “Thanks, guys.”  

        The captain of the managers said, “You’re welcome, Coach.”  Turning to face us he said, “Hail to the mighty Corona High School Knights!”  The three remaining managers and the coaching staff called, “Hail!”  Only then did the team get served.  

        Our defensive captain stood and said, “Hail to the mighty Corona High School managers!”  The team stood as one.  “Hail!”

        “Hail to the coaching staff of the mighty Corona High School Knights!” said Jeff speaking as offensive captain.  The team responded, “Hail!” and broke into lusty cheers which morphed into chants of “Knights, Knights, Knights…”  

        Coach raised a hand. “Now, since nobody found a way to screw it up last night I have decided to hold an abbreviated film-review session this morning.”  The cheers from the team swept through the room like a tidal wave.  

        Coach honored his word. We pulled out of student parking section C at nine-oh-eight.  Jeff said, “The movie doesn’t start until seven-thirty.  What do you think?”  

        “I think the girls would be surprised and delighted by a trip to Encanto Park.”  

        “You realize we’re spoiling them, right?”  

I hope this doesn’t sound like bragging, but we liked to do things in Phoenix because we weren’t famous there.  We walked all over Encanto Park that morning and didn’t see any star-struck underclassmen gawking at us.  

At ten-fifteen we strolled up to the boat dock and rented two paddle boats.  The girls turned the head of every guy we passed.  Any of them with his own girl paid the price.  Most got the cold shoulder.  One got his foot stomped.

        You couldn’t go to Encanto Park and not take the girls around the lagoon in the paddleboats.  They called it a lagoon, but it wound all over the park like a sleepy canal.  Paige and I paddled at a pace slow enough to allow us to observe people enjoying the rides, having picnics, or playing softball.  It was a perfect October Saturday.  I left a light sweater in the car, knowing I would shed it by noon, and when Paige got too warm later on, I tied the arms of her sweater around my waist.         6/9/18

Here and there, willows hung their branches over the water’s edge. I steered toward each shady haven figuring such a setting might allow me to snuggle closer to her. She tried to steer away from the trees, but she didn’t struggle too hard.  I gained the shade twice, but gnats ruined my plans both times by flying up our noses.  

You never knew what Paige would do next.   But the way she looked, and the way she made me feel when she rested her head against my shoulder encouraged me to stick around and find out.  

Once I thought she had gone crazy because she paddled as hard as she could toward an inviting overhang of trees.  I worked with her until I realized we were about to plow into the bank. I backpedaled frantically.  The big wheel changed directions, and we pulled up inches from the bank, water and prayers churning around us.

Before I figured out what had possessed her, she said, “Kiss me now!”  and turned her sweet face toward me.  I saw no downside to compliance, so I made my approach.  Just before our lips met she blew a bubble—a Bazooka balloon right between us.  It popped and got all over both of us.  She laughed so hard I thought she might faint.  

The whole business didn’t bother me at all.  In fact, anything she did was all right with me.  If she had said, “I’m bored.  Stick your head in the water and pretend you’re a motorboat,” I would have submerged my fevered bean and engaged all engines full speed ahead.

After we got the gunk off our faces, she kissed me again.  When we pulled out of that one I was glad the ride wasn’t over.  I don’t think I could have stood to leave the boat right then.  

We paddled back to the middle of the waterway. I figured Jeff and Donna were around the next bend, but sometimes I lost track of time around Paige.  They could have been in Montana. 

I looked back at our clump of trees and saw a guy taking a leak.  I guess he thought nobody could see him.  And he was almost right.  Ordinarily, I would have been incensed by his rudeness.  But this time another emotion dominated my soul—dread.  The guy sported a greasy leather jacket and shaggy beard.           

***

After we took the girls home we drove to the high school.  We sat on the hood of the Jockmobile behind the stadium wondering what to do about Armando Calderon.  

        A new security guard patrolled the school that night. He didn’t know us, or much of anything else.  Not only that, he was a real dork—strictly Barney Fife.  He pulled up behind us, his brights boring into our eyes when we turned around.  Right away he started acting like Sergeant Joe Friday.  Before our feet even hit the pavement, he barked, “What are you two clowns doing here?”  

        Jeff said, “Uh…”

        “Show me your I.D.”  

        Again, Jeff said, “Uh,” and since the guy didn’t interrupt this time, he went on, “Sure.”  We reached for our wallets.

        He jumped back like we were reaching for guns and shouted, “Easy!”  He had reason to be nervous because he stood about five foot nothing.  I swear, he looked like a stick-man. He might have been a match for Paige or Donna.

        We waited to see what he would do next, hoping one of the regular guys would come along and straighten him out.  We tried to be respectful. We didn’t want him any more irritated than he already was.  

        He said, “Turn around and put your hands on the hood.”

        I thought to myself, Thank Goodness he doesn’t have a gun.  He did have a nightstick, though, and he took it out of his belt.

        I risked a look over my shoulder.  Hoping our names might register, I said, "This is Jeff Barrett, and I’m Frank Cyrus."  I forgot about keeping my hands on the car and reached for my wallet again.

        When I extended the wallet, he smacked me with the nightstick, just above the wrist.  I’ve never seen a grown-up act like that.  I swallowed a cackle and a gasp. I guess he wanted to show us how tough he was, but it didn’t work. Melinda could hit harder.

        Jeff spun around.  I’m still not sure whether we were going to fight or run, because another car pulled around the corner, and parked right across from us. Freddie’s dad, Mr. Warren, came barreling out of his old Corvair like Gangbusters.  He charged up to the guy, shoved his face right up to his nose and said, “What the hell’s going on, here?”

        The guard took a step back and said, “Good evening, sir.”  He said it the same way he must have said, I’m the one who put the apple on your desk, teacher.

        “Good evening?!” said Mr. Warren.  “Did you just say Good evening to me after I saw you assault this young man?”  Man, was he torqued!

        The guy went into a class four conniption.  “No, they assaulted me!  I caught them breaking and entering a public facility, and they attacked me.”

        “They did, huh?  Well, let me tell you something, Melvin.  I know these boys, and they would never break into this school.  Hell, they practically own this school!  Who I don’t know, is you.  Can you show me some I. D.?”  

        The guy dug for his wallet, and spoke in a most respectful manner to Mr. Warren, like it was all a big mistake.  The little creep even looked at us like he hoped we might put in a good word for him.  Fat chance!  

        Jeff and I watched with our mouths open until Mr. Warren looked our way and said, “Get out of here.”

        We did: and we didn’t ask any questions. We drove to El Dorado Park and sat on a picnic table after we ran some pass patterns.  I said, “What do you think would have happened if Mr. Warren hadn’t come along?”

Jeff shrugged.  “For one thing, they might have found that rent-a-cop stuffed in a trash can with a nightstick shoved up his ass.”

“Seriously, Jeff.  We could have got into a lot of trouble.”  

“Yeah, well…”  He shrugged again.  “I will say this.  That’s the gladdest I’ve ever been to see somebody’s dad.”

        Later Freddie told us his old man had gone out for a pack of Camels from the 7-Eleven on Scottsdale Road.  The next day, he reported the little jerk for unprofessional conduct.  I felt sorry for him until I realized somebody with that guy’s personality shouldn’t be allowed to have a stick and boss kids around.                6/11/18

22: Tyson  

        Jeff and I walked into our world history class and took our places.  Jeff had the catbird seat.  I sat one desk ahead of him, in what we referred to as the right hand of God.  Unless you’re the kind of dork who reminds the teacher to assign the day’s homework, you know the best seat in any class is the one farthest from the teacher. Stated another way:  dorkiness increases with proximity to the teacher.                  

        The bell rang when Jeff’s rear end touched his chair.  In the front of the room, Mrs. Lartner cleared her throat in preparation for her lecture.  Jeff prepared to run the class.  I’m only half-kidding.  Jeff had been king-of-the-hill long enough that he didn’t need to demonstrate his sovereignty.  There was no point in showing up a teacher—especially a nice lady like Mrs. Lartner.  

        Mrs. Lartner let a lot pass between Jeff and me as long as we didn’t make a big deal.  Jeff smiled and whispered, “Archie and Betty are at it again.”  They sat at the front of our row, and they thought they were cool.          

        “Ah, true love,” I sighed.  Focusing on the plight of the lovers gave me a break from worrying about Armando Calderon.  

        My mom says I have special insights.  Maddie says I have special problems.  Me?  I say I like to think about things.  At the moment, I thought about how Elizabeth Miller turned the slightest bit away from her boyfriend, Adam Riley—and what that said about their relationship.  That didn’t make me any smarter than any girl in the classroom.  But it made me smarter than pretty much every boy at Corona except for Jeff Barrett.  

        It reminded me of something that happened in biology the year before.  This kid named Tyson Goddard irritated just about everybody in school, teachers and kids alike.  He came from New York, which is almost as bad as Tucson.  On top of that he had this terrible New York accent.  Sometimes, when he said words like Gary and Larry, I wanted to jab a number four pencil through my ear drum.  

        Not only that: he just knew people from Arizona were rubes.  He really seemed surprised that we didn’t ride horses to school.  It got to where kids would say stuff like, "Well, I’d love to talk to you some more, but my horse is double-parked.  It took him almost a semester to get the joke.  

        One morning our biology teacher, Mr. Allerton, droned on about the life cycle of the Crested chickadee.  Another kid, Ronnie Blanchard allowed the monotone to lull him.  He had been staring out the window for two or three minutes when Mr. Allerton pounced. “Mr. Blanchard, what country has the largest population of Tasmanian Wombats?”        6/21/18

        Ronnie wasn’t a real bright person, and it was kind of a mean thing to do, but Mr. Allerton liked to keep us on our toes. You could see the panic in Ronnie’s face.  Was it a trick question?  What the heck was a wombat?  

        Tyson piled on with, “Moron,” under his breath.   A few kids laughed: not Jeff.  

        Ronnie Blanchard said, “Um.”  You could almost hear the poor kid sweat.

        Mr. Allerton said, “We’re waiting, Mr. Blanchard.  What country?”  

        Tyson couldn’t resist the opportunity to kick someone when they were down.  "It rhymes with Masmania."  

        Mr. Allerton had a quirk.  When he got nervous, he repeated the terms all right and okay. The more nervous he got, the more he did it.  He must have felt guilty that day.  He didn’t own up to it, but when he went back to his lecture, he said, “The crested chickadee is the only member of the chickadee family with webbed feet, okay?  Nobody knows why, because, as you know, this particular bird isn’t the least bit aquatic.  So, it’s a bit of a mystery, okay?  Anyway guys, it is by far the smallest of the Chickadee species, all right?  Okay?”  

        If you wanted to survive in Allerton’s class you had to know who was teaching—Allerton/Dr. Jekyll, or Allerton/Mr. Hyde.  Jeff could read him the way he read defenses.  One day he even imitated him.  

        He said, “Mr. Allerton, I don’t get it about salamanders, okay?  I mean, I just don’t understand, all right?  Okay, all right, okay?”

        The rest of us waited for Mr. Allerton to explode, but instead, he got a silly grin on his face and laughed.  

        To get back to Tyson and Ronnie, the more Tyson teased the poor kid, the more it bugged Jeff.  On our way to our lockers after class I said, “Goddard is a little bastard, isn’t he?”  

        Jeff said, “I was thinking the same thing.  He’s going to pay.”  

        “What are you going to do?”  

        “I don’t know,” he said.  “Something will come up.”        

        He got his chance the next day when two unconnected events came together.  First, Mr. Allerton felt guilty about his treatment of Blanchard.  He went at the all right, okay routine like there was a clearance sale.  Second, he lectured on the chickadee and titmouse families.  Keep in mind that while Mr. Allerton saw himself as a hip operator, he had the social awareness of a pomegranate.  

        I guess he read in some teacher’s manual that a good way to start class was with a question.  He opened his lecture by clearing his throat, and dramatically asking, “What is a titmouse?”

        Jeff’s hand shot up before the giggles faded away.

        Mr. Allerton knew Jeff could be a clown, but there were no other hands to choose from.  He said, “Mr. Barret, okay?  A titmouse?”  

        Already, the class was near pandemonium.  Jeff waited for the laughter to die down before delivering his line.  “It’s pronounced tit mouse, right?”  

        Through the laughter, Mr. Allerton said, “Yes, Mr. Barrett.  Titmouse, okay?  What is a titmouse?”

        Showcasing the timing he was renowned for on the field, Jeff waited for the next lull, then struck.   “A titmouse is the opposite of a bottle mouse.”  

        It took Mr. Allerton seventy-three seconds to re-establish order.  I timed it.  Tyson Goddard sat on the verge of collapse.  

        Mr. Allerton gave the most effective lecture of his career that morning, enjoying the complete attention of an entire class.  The class learned more than they had imagined possible about passerines while waiting for another innocent question from Jeff.  

        But he was busy working on Tyson Goddard, delivering a more or less constant barrage of whispered double entendre in the whiney style of W.C. Fields.  You can imagine what a creative mind can do with raw material like chickadee, finch, and titmouse. 

        Toward the end of the class period Mr. Allerton said, “Read pages three eighteen to three twenty-two, all right?  Answer the questions at the end of the chapter, okay?  Come to class tomorrow prepared for a short quiz.  You have the rest of the hour to begin reading, all right, okay?”  

        Jeff got up to sharpen his pencil.  As he passed Tyson Goddard, W. C. Fields said under his breath, “Pages three eighteen to three twenty-two, all right, okay?  Okay, all right, okay?”  Mr. Allerton didn’t hear him, and neither did anybody else except Goddard, and me.  

        The class had settled down and Tyson’s cackling alerted Mr. Allerton.  By then Jeff stood at the back wall grinding away on his pencil, the dictionary definition of innocence.  When Goddard had himself under control, Jeff sauntered back.  Again, under his breath he said, “Don’t screw up the assignment, all right, okay?  It’s important to know about the titmouse.”  Goddard started to shake. In his best W. C. Fields sing-song, Jeff said, “Titmouse…rhymes with shitmouse, okay?”  Tears poured from Goddard’s eyes, but he still held the laugh in somehow.  Jeff went in for the kill.  W. C. Fields murmured, “It’s the chapter on chickadees, okay?  Got it, my little chickadee?  That rhymes with prickadee.”

        Goddard let go with a burst of laughter that got everybody’s attention.  He was still shaking when Mr. Allerton said, “Mr. Goddard, maybe you need to step outside

until you get yourself under control."  

        Goddard struggled to his feet.  He might have made it to the door if W. C. Fields hadn’t whispered, "Okay?  All right?"

        He giggled again, almost like a girl.  He kept looking around the room, like he didn’t know what to do.

        Allerton said, "Get out of my classroom.  Now."  

        Before Tyson could resume his fateful journey, Jeff made a small movement of his head. When Goddard turned toward him, he mouthed, "My little chickadee," making sure the other boy’s body blocked the teacher’s view.  

        It was too much.  "Shut up!  Shut up!"  

        The entire class stared at him.  Then, at Mr. Allerton.  Nobody moved.  

        Allerton said, "Mr. Goddard, your behavior is disrespectful, and disruptive."

        He went to the intercom and called the office.  He said, “I need a student removed from my classroom, okay?”  

        Goddard erupted in new convulsions of laughter.  We could still hear him through the door when the assistant principal in charge of discipline took him away.

When he walked into the room after his one-day suspension Tyson glared at Jeff—but not too long, and not too hard.  He knew what Jeff could do with his fists.  Nothing unusual happened during class. But, as we walked toward the door after the bell, W. C. Fields had a few things to say.  He called just loud enough to be heard over the scrape of chairs and shuffle of feet, “Ah, yes… my little chickadee.”  And then, after the laughter died down, “Moron.”  6/23/18        

23:  Meatless Friday  

        It was Labor Day Weekend, and the six of us savored the last hot gasps of freedom before we became eighth graders.  We counted in days, now, instead of weeks—twelve, to be exact.          Jack-in-the-Box had a special on tacos—twelve for a dollar—so we biked over to take advantage. We pooled our paper route money and got two dollars’ worth, which worked out to four tacos for each guy.  I always gave one to Mitch or Jeff because if I ate four tacos I would get sick. Freddie gave one to Tim, and one to Tom, because he wasn’t supposed to eat meat on Friday.  

        “That means you’ll still be eating two,” Jeff said.

        “So?”

        “Won’t you go to hell?”

        “Don’t worry about it.  I’ll take care of it at confession.”        

        Tom said, “I don’t get how that works.  You say a novella, and everything is okay, right?”        

 “Novena.”

        By the time we got to the Jack-in-the-Box we were giddy from the night air, our independence, and the spell of the pack.  We had been doing nutty stuff all evening.  Jeff, for instance, got Freddie with one of the funniest pranks in history.

        Freddie’s little brother had taken his bike to another kid’s house, so Freddie hopped on Jeff’s handlebars and we rode along a deserted Hubble Avenue to get it back.  Everybody laughed and talked, the way guys do.  One of Freddie’s favorite songs came on Jeff’s transistor radio, and he sang along like he was on the Ed Sullivan Show.  Like a cat-burglar escaping from a balcony, Jeff jumped off the bike, leaving Freddie on the handlebars harmonizing with Jimmy Rodgers.  

        The thing that makes that joke so funny is the reaction of the guy on the handlebars.  If he doesn’t know you’ve jumped off, he will sit up there and keep the bike going a lot longer than you might think.  I kid you, not.  The tricky thing is to keep from laughing.          

        We managed for a short time, but then, one by one, guys fell off their bikes and rolled on the street cackling like escapees from the sanatorium on 24th and Van Buren.  Jeff’s bike had slowed so much it started to wobble dangerously.  Freddie had more and more trouble staying balanced, but he kept it going somehow. He crooned and teetered, and the rest of us held our sides and sniggered.    

        He sang on, guided by Jimmy Rodgers, who was going for the big finish.  The two of them wailed, "Uh oh, UH OH!"  That’s when he looked back and saw his good buddies, including Jeff, thirty yards behind him.  Freddie screamed and bounced off a stop sign. The rest of us lost all control.                  6/23/18

Freddie swore in a most un-Catholic manner as he examined his ripped jeans and skinned knee.  Even he laughed after a bit.  

        We were still laughing when we retrieved his bike, and during the short trip to the Jack-in-the-Box.  We parked our bikes at the tables outside where you can go up to the counter and order.  That’s the one thing I hate about Jack in the Box.  You can’t go inside—because there isn’t an inside.  I still love the food though.  We all do because it’s so good.  

        A station wagon in the drive-through lane gave Jeff an idea.  We all got together on our bikes and pretended we were a station wagon, Jeff and I in front, Mitch and Freddie in the middle, and the twins in the back.  We pulled up to the speaker in the clown’s mouth, acting as serious as we could.  

        The guy’s voice came from inside, but we couldn’t understand him because of the crummy speakers.  Between the static and the crackling, we made out, “Welcome to ack – the – ox.  – I take – or…”  

        “I can’t understand him,” said Tom.  

        “Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” Mitch said.  It didn’t matter though because we had the whole routine memorized.  

        From the driver’s seat, Jeff ordered.  “We’ll have twenty-four tacos, six large fries, five large Cokes, and a milk.”  He looked back at Tom and shook his head.  We all giggled but managed to stay in formation.  

         Tom looked hurt and asked, “What?”  

        We laughed again, which made it impossible to understand the clown.  Jeff had to reorder.  We still couldn’t understand, but we were pretty sure he had it right, so Jeff said, “Yes.”        

        The clown said, “Please pull forward,” or something like that.  He didn’t seem too impressed by the gag.  

        From the back-seat, Tim said, "They should have Carlos doing that job."  We all guffawed because a kid in our class named Carlos spoke with a heavy Mexican accent.  We only understood about half of what he said.  We couldn’t imagine how it would sound coming through a Jack-in-the-Box speaker.  

        “That’ll be the day,” Jeff said, and we pulled our station wagon up to the second window.  We decided we were a Plymouth Fury, light green, with no air conditioning, so we had the windows rolled down.            

        When the guy gave us the first bag, I turned around because the twins were bickering in the back.  “If you two don’t settle down, I’m going to come back there and whip your butts!”  

        Jeff gave the man the exact amount, and said, “Keep the change.”  We always did that because it was the funniest joke in the history of the world—except for the one where you jump off your bike and leave your friend on the handlebars.

24:  Lost

         We left the park early the afternoon we saw Armando at the lagoon.  Paige wanted me to take her to her cousin’s wedding, and the thought tempted me.  Weddings weren’t my idea of great entertainment, but being around her was.  Still, I needed time to think.  So, Jeff drove her home, and then me.  He took Donna for pizza, and then to the Fox Theater to see Cleopatra; she had been bugging him to take her for a month.  

        When he dropped me at the apartment, I went straight to my room.  I closed the door behind me, stretched out on my bed, and reached for the old tennis ball next to the radio on my night-stand.  I tossed it upward over and over, trying to get it to skim the ceiling.  Sometimes it lulled me into pleasant daydreams, like the time Paige and I played rock-paper-scissors, and every time I won, I got a kiss.  But now, I kept seeing Calderon peeing under the trees no more than a shovel pass from where we had been making out.  Every day he seemed to get closer and bolder, horning in on our lives.  But you couldn’t expect a crazy drug fiend not to act like a crazy drug fiend.  Maybe that was a good reason to avoid crazy drug fiends, instead of sneaking into the desert to buy reefers from them.  But Jeff needed to be Mr. Cool, and I needed to go along just because he said so.

        I looked at a history essay on my desk.  I had been working on it for two days, off and on, and needed to finish it so Jeff could turn it in the next day.  When I finished half an hour later, I slipped it into the three-ring binder he carried to every class, and tossed it onto his bed.  Clipped to it I left a note: You owe me.  

        As I started tossing the tennis ball again, I heard the phone ring from the kitchen and sighed with relief that it wouldn’t be Donna wondering where Jeff was.  My recent conversation with Jeff’s dad came to mind.  

        A few more tosses of the tennis ball, and I decided to read the Honor Concept my father had given me so long ago.  Maybe this time it would give me the courage to tell him I wouldn’t be lying for him anymore—for all the good it would do.  With Jeff, saying was one thing, following through was another.  

        I went to the bookshelf and took down Dad’s Naval Academy yearbook.  I remembered tucking the sheet of stationery next to his team picture. When I looked for it the following week, it wasn’t there.  I found it next to my record player, instead.  I didn’t remember putting it there.

        I kept finding it in weird places, like under the bed, or in the Praying Hands dish we used to hold our loose change.  Once, I even found it under Dad’s old chess trophy, but now I had misplaced that, too.  I guess all the trouble with Armando was making me forgetful.

        I looked through the whole book, trying to find the Honor Concept, then through all the other books in our room: everywhere I could think of.  I searched the whole house.  When I shuffled back into our room, I felt panicky, like the day I lost an essay I had written for Jeff.  I flopped back onto the bed and flicked the ball upward.  That’s when Jeff walked in.

        “Hey,” I said.

        “Hey.”  He dropped onto his bed and started throwing his golf ball toward the ceiling.  

        “Have you seen my honor code?”  I asked.  

        He said, “Nope.”

        "I haven’t seen it for a long time."

        He tossed the golf ball up right next to the ceiling again and again.  More often than not it brushed the surface with a soft pffft.  It always came down right next to his ear.  Then, right back up again.  

        It was different with me and my tennis ball.  Once in a while, I threw too hard, and it came off the ceiling at a dangerous angle, threatening to knock over the lamp on my nightstand.  But not Jeff—same place, up by the ceiling—same place, right by his ear.  One time we counted, just to see how long he could keep it going: 127 throws and catches, thank you very much.  It got so boring I stopped counting.        

        Sometimes it bothered me—living with somebody who never screwed up.  “I’ve looked all over the place, and I can’t find it anywhere.”

        He held the ball for a second and said, “I know, I know.”

        “Whaddaya mean, you know?”

        He sat up and said, “Sometimes I just get tired of hearing about your father, the saint, and your goddam honor code.”  He got up and stomped out slamming the door so hard it sounded like the final gun.  Sometimes I wondered what was up with Jeff.  I really did.  

25:  Vinnie the Vampire

        All through eighth grade we watched a crazy show on Friday nights.  We tried to get the whole group together and make it a party.  When we went to Mitch’s house, or Freddie’s, or mine, we got our moms to make popcorn.  If they weren’t paying too much attention, we’d go for some kind of soft drink consumption record.  We didn’t go to Jeff’s or the twins’ too much because their mothers always followed us around sticking coasters under our Cokes.  

        The show didn’t come on until ten p.m., but they called it Vinnie the Vampire’s Monster Matinee.  It featured Frankenstein, or Godzilla, or some other old monster movie.  It started in a spooky dungeon festooned with cobwebs.  

        The host, Vinnie, came out of a dusty coffin.  He inched it open from inside, and it creaked the whole way. Then he sat up and said in his Dracula voice, “Forgive me for being so late.  I’m just dead.”  Most of the movies were corny.  We laughed at them almost as much as we laughed at Vinnie’s antics.  

        Maybe once a week he showed a genuinely scary movie: I remember one called Donovan’s Brain, about a dead man’s brain taking over a living guy’s body.  It scared me so much I had nightmares for six months.  In fact, I got nervous every time somebody said the word brain.  

        We usually didn’t get too scared, though, because every time the monster got ready to eat somebody’s face, Vinnie came on for a commercial break.  He did some funny bits before the commercials and some more before we rejoined the movie.  It seemed like he was on as much as the film.  He told some awful jokes, like, “Please forgive me, I know I look a fright,” which was funny because he looked ridiculous in his vampire get-up.  

        One time his right hand choked him while his left hand tried to pull it away. He flailed all over the place and tore up half the set.  We couldn’t stop laughing.  Neither could the guys in the studio.  With the whole joint paralyzed and gasping for breath, he sprawled across his coffin and said, “I just washed that hand, and I can’t do a thing with it.”  I didn’t get that one, but Maddie did.  She had snuck into the hall behind us and she laughed like the pope had sat on a whoopee cushion.

        Sometimes Vinnie chased the camera guys around.  It was predictable and infantile, and we loved it.  When he got ready to show the next segment, he might say, “Watch this next part—it’s a scream!”  

***

        One Friday night Jeff convinced his folks to let me babysit for him while the rest of his family went out of town—but just me—nobody else.  Jeff could get just about anybody to do what he wanted.  

        The feature that night was The Blob, one of the worst movies ever made.  It was about a giant Jell-O mold that liked to eat cities: and every time he ate one he got bigger.  We made fun of it until Vinnie came on.  Then he made fun of it.    

        We had downed about a six-pack of Cokes apiece, so it didn’t surprise me when Jeff started singing in a twangy, Hank Williams voice.   Since there was nothing on but the crummy movie I didn’t mind. “There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.  There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.”  

        I knew the words to the first half dozen verses, so I laughed and sang along.  “Then mend it, dear Georgie, dear Georgie, dear Georgie.  Then mend it, dear Georgie, dear Georgie, then mend it.”          

        “With what shall I mend it, dear Liza, dear…”

         “Sh.”  Vinnie had come back on.

        When the show started again, the blob had finished its first helping—Cleveland.  

Jeff said, “What’s next, Columbus?”  

“I don’t know, but it’s a good thing he’s not out here.  Tucson would give him the screaming thin dirties, for sure.”  

Jeff laughed, but I knew it wouldn’t hold him for long.  He started in again.  “With straw, dear Georgie, dear Georgie, dear Georgie.  With straw, dear Georgie, dear Georgie, with straw.”

        We sang until I didn’t know the words anymore.  You could make up new verses as you went along, and you could keep going forever.  Jeff was having a blast.  I guess he didn’t notice it bugged me.  

        He howled his way through the next commercial break, only pausing to think up new lines.  I didn’t appreciate it too much.  That’s the reason we watched the show, for pity sakes—to see Vinnie’s nonsense during the commercials.  

        “Sh-h-h!” I said. “I’m trying to watch the show, okay?”  But he wouldn’t stop.        

        “With what will you pay him, dear Georgie, dear Georgie?  With what will…”

        “Sh-h-h-h, will ya?”

        He looked offended.  “How rude!  Besides, it’s the commercial, you dork.  Let’s go over to the Pizza Burger.  I’m hungry.”

        “How the heck can you be hungry?  We’ve eaten everything that didn’t fight back!”

        He shrugged and filled his lungs for another verse.

        Desperately, I added, “The Pizza Burger is closed.”

        “With money, dear Liza, dear Liza, dear Liza.  With money, dear Liza, dear Liza, with money.”

        “I want to see this part, Jeff.”

        “And how will you earn it, dear Georgie, dear Georgie—They’re open all night on the weekend—And how will you earn it, dear Georgie, and how?”

        “Shut up!  Will you, please!”

        “By doing some chores, dear Liza, dear Liza…”

        I put my head under one of those ritzy pillows rich people put on their couches.  

        He must have sung thirty verses in the next ten minutes.  Liza and Georgie were searching for spiritual guidance in the Himalayas.  He stopped while he worked on something in his head.  I found out what it was when he broke into the next line.

        “Let’s go to the Pizza Burger, dear Fra-ank, dear Fra-ank.  Let’s go to the Pizza Burger, dear Fra-ank, let’s go.”

        Now, everything he said was part of the song.  Like the blob devouring the countryside, Georgie and Liza were consuming our evening.  The show was ruined.  And I knew Jeff could go on like this for the whole weekend.  I pulled my head out and said, "Will you stop singing if I go?"

        He tilted his head, thinking it over.  “Of course, I will sto-op, dear Fra-ank, dear Fra-ank.  Of course, I will sto-op, dear Frank I will stop.”

        I wasn’t looking forward to walking a mile to the damned Pizza Burger, which was most likely closed, no matter what he said. I was still plenty ticked about the movie, too, and my eyes felt scratchy.   As I blinked, trying to make them stop, I wondered why Jeff got like this sometimes.  

        On the way out the door, I wondered if the junk at the Pizza Burger would make me sick after all the other stuff we had already ingested—and how it would be worth it if Georgie and Liza would stop.  

26:  Armed Robbery

 I turned up the volume and sang along—something about deep purple and sleepy garden walls.

        Jeff said, “Dork!”  

        “Did you know they’re brother and sister?  April Stevens and Nino Tempo?”

        “Who cares?”  

        “Jeez, Jeff, do you always have to put everything down?”  

        “Golly, no, Batman!  I just love it when you rave about stuff nobody but a bunch of marching band losers cares about!”  

        “Okay, Mr. Cool, what do you want to talk about?”  

        For an answer, he turned up the volume even more.  Ernie Maresca invaded the interior with his raucous rendition of "Shout! Shout! (Knock Yourself Out!)"  

        It wasn’t my favorite, but I liked it better than Jeff’s snide comments.  

        When it ended, I turned it down.  “What do you bet they play both those songs tonight?”

        I could tell he was looking forward to the dance, and getting close to Donna, even though he would never admit it.  He said, "I wouldn’t be surprised if they skip ’Deep Purple.’"

        “What’s wrong with ‘Deep Purple?’”

        “Too hard to dance to.”  

        "Yeah, you’re right."  

        Ordinarily we switched between KRIZ and KRUX, trying to keep the best song on, and avoid commercials—but not this afternoon.  Now, we kept it glued to KRUX waiting to see what Buzz Offenheimer would say about the dance.  When the next song ended he said, “The King, Elvis Presley, with a blast from the past, ‘Jailhouse Rock.’  Fourteen past two on K-R-U-X, number one in the Valley of the Sun.  

        "And speaking of the Valley of the Sun, guess where all the boss jocks will be tonight?  That’s right cats and kittens, it’s Halloween…" chains rattled, and hounds bayed. "…and that means the entire KRUX crew, including yours, truly will be broadcasting live and in person from Corona High School, home of the mighty Corona High Knights.  Yep, this year’s K-R-U-X Halloween Hop will be heard all over the Valley, live from the Corona High School gymnasium, seven to ten.  Why?  Because the Corona students won this year’s postcard contest.  I’ll tell you, those Knights are the boss for school spirit!  They sent in over eighteen thousand postcards with the phrase that pays—KRUX, number one in the Valley of the Sun.  Don’t forget, tune in tonight at seven o’clock for KRUX’s live, remote broadcast of this year’s Halloween Hop…" (more graveyard sound effects, including the cauldron-boiling introduction to Bobby Boris Pickett’s ’Monster Mash’"  

        “That guy is so cool,” I said.  

        “Yeah, he’s all right.”  Coming from Jeff that was a wildly enthusiastic endorsement.

        We listened to a few more songs and talked during the breaks.  I have to confess to being disappointed, because Buzz didn’t mention our names, even though he talked about the dance between every record.  I had hoped he might, since we were by far the biggest celebrities at Corona.  

        When I brought it up, Jeff said, “Maybe he’ll interview us tonight.”  

        “That would be pretty neat.”

We listened more intently as the time for Buzz’s sign-off neared.  He was the boss jock in town.  Not only did he play the biggest hits by the original artists, but the way he talked on the radio spoke to us in a way the other jocks could only envy. He was so funny, and famous, and neat, plenty of kids couldn’t even call in a request because he made them so nervous.

Like every other teen in Phoenix, Jeff and I had memorized his sign-off.  It was the neatest: and you could see it coming.  At 4:58 every afternoon he started his speech.  "It’s been great being with all you cool cats and curvaceous kittens…" and you hardly noticed the song playing in the background. "I’ll be back tomorrow at two with all the hits, all the time, on KRUX—number one in the Valley of the Sun!"  After that, he might go into a spiel about some upcoming event, like, our dance.  "Don’t forget to tune in tonight for the big K-R-U-X Halloween Hop, live from Corona High School."  

Finally, he would do the part everybody knew by heart, so you knew there were a million other kids all over town doing what you were doing at that moment.  It made you feel like you were part of something bigger than yourself—like you and all the other kids ruled the world.  He said, "This is Buzz Offenheimer, saying, ’It’s time for me to buzz off!’"  

Before you could blink, "Our day will come, and we’ll have everything," poured like syrup from the lips of Ruby Nash Garnett, the lead singer of Ruby and the Romantics.  

No matter what he said, or what the song, or how long the instruments played before the vocal, Buzz timed it so his last word came just before their first.  I don’t know how he did it.

After the station-ID, the next song came on and I sang along, picturing how nice it would be dancing close to Paige in her good witch costume.  

Most of the time Jeff let me control the radio, because I cared more about music, and I guess too, he figured it made me feel important.  He hardly ever interfered unless there was something on his mind.  But if I messed up, he would give me his What the heck’s the matter with you? look: or say, “Wake up dumb ass!”  

A dramatic fanfare sounded, and the news guy said, “Now, KRUX News Central with breaking news, Larry Lawrence reporting!”  As I reached to switch it off I heard him say, “Our top story this hour—Bearded man robs local liquor store.”

        I couldn’t move: it’s a good thing I wasn’t driving.  Jeff’s relaxed posture didn’t change at all as the story unfolded.  If you didn’t know him like I did, you would figure he was the cool quarterback reading a defense before he unleashed his next devastating play.  But I knew him better than anybody else, and the just-visible knot in his jaw told me the real story.        

        Larry Lawrence went on, “Just minutes ago a young, Hispanic male with unkempt hair and a shaggy beard held up the Sun Devil Liquor store in Scottsdale.  Store owner, Ronald Venson, who described the unidentified man as ‘very scruffy,’ said he held him at gunpoint while he emptied the cash register.  The bandit escaped with some five hundred dollars in cash.”          The thing about Armando Calderon was that he kept ruining good things.  You would go along for a while, and pretty soon you would start enjoying your storybook, football hero life, and then, like you had been hit by a manure truck, there you were—neck deep in horse shit.  

        And that was bad enough, believe me.  But there was more.  You could only endure so much before you grew tired of jumping at shadows and sudden sounds, and arguing with your

best friend.  Should we call the police?  Wait to see what happened next?  Maybe talk to someone a little older, like Mr. Barker; or even one of the guys; or Paige; or Pastor Branson? Thinking about things like that reminded me how much I missed Mitch.  But you didn’t want anybody to find out what you and Jeff had been up to on that first night.  And the more you thought, the more you understood there wasn’t any way out.

26:  Splendid Splinter

One day toward the end of eighth grade we leaned on our handlebars and looked straight ahead down Oak Street where another school day waited like some gigantic Sasquatch set to rip apart the dreams of American schoolboys.  Then we looked left down Palm Lane toward freedom and adventure.  

Jeff pounded his Mickey Mantle outfielder’s glove and said, “Red Sox and Dodgers, guys.  Is that bitchin, or what?”

“Bitchin!”  said the twins in unison.  Freddie murmured half-hearted approval, still not sure which way the wind would ultimately blow.  

That day Ted Williams called our names.  Sure, we could wait until Saturday.  That way, we wouldn’t have to ditch school.  But a guy had a better chance of discovering the secrets under Sister Mary Elizabeth’s habit than sneaking into Scottsdale Stadium on a weekend.  

But on weekdays there were plenty of empty seats.  Even better, the ushers stopped paying too much attention to the entrances after the seventh inning, so you could watch the last two innings for free.  It’s not like they advertised it, and it wasn’t a sure thing.  Some grouch might be watching the gate.  Or, if too many kids crowded up they might tell you to take a hike.  Still, it was a good bet.

        I said, “Why do you think they do that?  Just let us walk in, I mean.”

Jeff said, “Don’t be dumb.  They do it to make money.”

        “Huh?”  I said.  

        “You are such a dork.  What do we do when we watch a ball game?”  

        “I don’t know; eat peanuts and drink pop, I guess.”  

        “You guess, huh?  And do they just hand out that stuff for free?”

        I figured he knew the answer to that one, so I waited.  

        “No, they do not give it away.  They charge money—bread they would not make if they didn’t let us in.  Do you get it now?”

        But you didn’t have to pay for refreshments.  We always had plenty of candy stuffed in our pockets, or jammed up the fingers of our baseball gloves. We had to pay for Cokes, though, because you couldn’t sneak them in.  

        But we could make one super large Coke last a long time even with two or three guys working on it.  I always felt a little ungrateful, but like Jeff said, who could afford to shell out thirty-five cents for a hot dog?  

“You think Koufax will pitch today?”  said Freddie.  

“Or Drysdale?” said Tim.  

Mitch dispensed a root beer Pez, popped it into his mouth, and said, “It doesn’t matter to me.  I’m not going.”  

We listened to some tomcats yowling over on Hubble.  

Jeff said, “You too busy to watch guys like Jackie Jensen play baseball?  Frank Malzone?  Johnny Roseboro?  Who else, guys?  Help me out.”  

I pretended to be interested in the cats.  Lucky for me, good old Freddie jumped in.  “Don Zimmer, Marty Keough, Vic Wertz.”  

Tom said, “Frank Howard.”  

Jeff said, “You got nothing to say, Frank?”  

For the second time, I got bailed out.  This time by Mitch.  “See you guys.”

He pedaled toward school and the rest of us taunted him with chicken noises even though he wasn’t the one who deserved them.  I turned with the others and rode down Oak.  I remembered Archie and the Franchise, and I almost followed Mitch.    

        Almost as soon as we started Jeff yelled, “Damn, we’re dumb!”  He slammed on the brakes, standing up straight.  We all imitated him in half a heartbeat.  We must have looked like prairie dogs sniffing the wind.  “We can’t just ride by Freddie and Frank’s house.  Somebody’s mom will see us for sure.”  We rode back along Palm Lane to 74th Street.  “Hang a Louie,” Jeff ordered, and we headed toward McDowell Road.

         We stopped at a Quick Mart for supplies.  We weren’t in any hurry because the game didn’t start for three hours, and then we had to wait around for the eighth inning.  Inside the Quick Mart, we fanned out.  Freddie and I took several turns down different aisles and met at the magazine rack.  If you were lucky, you could get a decent look at the Playboys before somebody chased you off.          

        We spent some time at the candy counter.  Besides assorted candy bars, we picked up plenty of Beechnut gum.  Clove and Black Jack, too.

        When we walked up to the counter Jeff was waiting for the clerk to ring up his stuff.  The guy looked up from the last item, and Jeff said, "Oh, yeah.  And a pack of Winstons," like he bought cigarettes all the time.

        The guy gave him a look like somebody shit in his Cheerios, and said, "May I see your ID?"  Sometimes I wonder if Quick Stop makes sure you’re a grouch before they hire you.  Or, maybe something about the job turns you into a grouch.  I don’t know, but he muttered under his breath, "Goddamn kids."

        I looked back at the candy aisle, and saw Tim stick a Sugar Daddy down his pants, while Tom kept a lookout.  They did stuff like that all the time, and it ticked me off.  Once or twice I even thought about telling on them, but, like Jeff said, only a rat would fink on his buddies.  

        When we figured it was safe, we biked over to the twins’ house.  Their mom and dad both worked, and we knew the place would be empty after seven-thirty.  Since we had so much time to kill, we decided to have a rubber band fight.  We dragged the couch and armchairs next to the walls to serve as our forts.  Additional fortification came in the form of the bedspreads and blankets we had stripped from beds.   Draped strategically, they left handy crawl spaces along the walls.          

        Like the rest of us, the twins had paper routes, and they always had several boxes of one-thousand count rubber bands, which we would divide up between the two teams.  Then we dove for our forts and the rubber bands flew.

        We had done it a thousand times, so we knew the routine.  We fought World War III for close to two hours, then spent the next half-hour cleaning up.  That part was boring as a sermon, but worth it.  

        We had to be certain we picked up every rubber band, and replaced all the bedding, and dragged the furniture back where it belonged.  Mrs. Sweeney wasn’t the best housekeeper you ever saw, but it wouldn’t be so good if she noticed something out of place when she got home.

***  

         The ballgame couldn’t have been more exciting.  Williams hit two homers—one in the eighth, and one in the ninth to win the game.  Not only that, I caught one of the balls.  A mob of kids formed after this dork with glasses let it pop right out of his glove.  I wound up in a protective ball at the bottom.  Jeff stood at the top scooping guys off me so the ball stayed mine.

        On the ride home, he said, “Glad you came, now?”  I guess I had been pretty gloomy on the way there.

        "Of course, I’m glad!" I said.  

        How can you not be happy when you have a Ted Williams home run ball?  Even though it was just a spring training game, it was one of the neatest things that ever happened to me.  I knew I would keep that ball forever.  I did, too. It’s under my bed, I think.                 7/21/18

27:  Army Bound

        Most summer evenings Jeff and I practiced our timing on passing routes.  Nobody told us to do it.  In fact, if we had even informal practices during the summer, Coach would have been in big trouble.  But nobody could keep two guys from tossing a football around if they wanted to.  Next to making out with our girls, it was about the most fun you could have.  And if word got out that you spent too much time with your girl, you would get a reputation for being pussy whipped.

        I’ll spare you the trouble of asking the obvious question, and I’ll do it by telling you something about yourself.  You’re not from around here.  If you were, you would know you don’t do anything during the day in the summer in Phoenix, Arizona, except plunk your young ass into a pool, or park it under an air conditioner.  

        Jeff parked the Jockmobile across the street from the main practice field, and we hopped the fence.  "We should have gone to the park," I said.  

        We did some windmills and jumping-jacks to loosen up.  Jeff said, "Yeah, I know.  Cooler, with the breeze coming off the pond.  If you don’t mind being the main course for about a billion mosquitos."  

        I jogged twenty yards downfield, head-faked right, then button-hooked.  The ball hit me in the hands at the instant I planted my trail-foot.

        You couldn’t take more than ten minutes or so at a stretch, even after dark, so we dragged ourselves to the drinking fountains and soaked ourselves. We took good, long drinks, too, even though everybody knew you weren’t supposed to drink much in hot weather.  "God, it’s hot!"  I said.

        "Yeah, but it’s a dry heat."  We laughed.  I didn’t check the temperature, so I can’t tell you for sure how hot it was that night.  A safe bet would be… let’s see… June, nine o’clock… say one-oh-four… one-oh-five.

        "Come on, Jeff, ol’ buddy, ol’ pal.  Let’s skip it, just this one night.  What do you say?"  

        He spread his hands.  "I say, stop being a girl.  Do you think all those guys from Alhambra are skipping it?  The guys from Arcadia?"  

        "Hell, yes!"  I said.  

        We laughed again, and he said, "That’s right, Mastermind.  And that’s why they are not state champions.  And are not going to be state champions as long as Frank Cyrus and Jeff Barrett have anything to say about it."

        "You are so Goddamned inspiring!"  I said in my most awe-struck voice.  "Hit me with a long one."  I took off across the field.  Again, the ball hit me in stride.  It must have covered close to fifty yards.

        We had won our first state championship earlier that year, and everyone said we would repeat with no trouble.  But things don’t happen just because a bunch of people who don’t play the game say so.  Some of the teams we beat last year would be better this year.  And every game we played would be the biggest game of the year for our opponent.  Coach made sure we understood that.

        Those were the days when we started thinking about where to go to college.  We never doubted we would get that far; we were Barrett and Cyrus.  

        “You think we should go to ASU?” I asked, knowing the answer before I said the words.  

        “They’re in the WAC, for god sake!  If you want a chance at the pros, you have to go to a Big Ten school, or maybe someplace like USC, or Notre Dame.”

        I gave him my innocent face.  “Which explains why you want to go to Army?”  

        “Ever hear of Glenn Davis, and Doc Blanchard?”

        “Ever hear of ancient history?  What has Army done since the forties?”

        He fixed me with the look that said; Don’t bother saying anything else, because I’m going to educate you, now.  He launched into one of his spiels, outlining how Army was a lock for national prominence, most likely a national championship if they could convince us to sign.  For him, it was a short lecture, only twenty minutes or so, and when he finished, I appreciated his reasoning.  The only thing keeping me from signing up then and there was my strong feeling of loyalty to my father and Navy.                  

***  

        Most days we had lunch at a place called Tenny’s.  They featured a dinky hamburger with nothing but a lonely dill chip and a glop of mustard for fifteen cents; ten for a dollar.  Sometimes we met the interior linemen there and treated them.

        I’ll never forget the first time.  We got there before the buffaloes and Jeff stepped up to the order window.   Angelo, the owner smiled at us and said, "What’ll it be, guys?"  

        "Eighty Decaburgers and eight Cokes," said Jeff.  

        "What the hell…?" I began, but before I could go any farther he clapped a hand on my shoulder and said in a tone not much above a whisper.  "Think about it, Frank.  You ever wonder what would happen if those guys got tired of doing all the work up front while you and I get all the glory?"  

        "Yeah, but there’s the little matter of paying for this generosity."  

        "Don’t worry about it.  How much have you got on you?"  

        "I don’t know."  I dug into my jeans and pulled out seventy-eight cents.  

        He held out his hand, and I forked it over, "This means I’ll owe you five bucks or so."

        "Buy me lunch when we’re in the pros," he said.    

        When the linemen piled out of Manny Archuleta’s old pickup and crowded the order window, Jeff yelled.  "Hey, Lady’s.  Sit down, and enjoy your Decaburger combos, which will be out shortly."  He paused for effect.  "Courtesy of your very own all-state left halfback, Frank Cyrus."

        You think those guys didn’t open holes for me, and make sure nobody laid a hand on Jeff after that?  

        Other times we went to Tenny’s with Freddie and the twins.  Dutch treat.  Paige and Donna had first lunch, so they couldn’t come.  

        Late one morning in October, we cut fourth hour and went to a drive-in called Lucky Lou’s.  We only went there when we had something serious to talk about because none of our classmates ever went there.  It was close to the Arizona State campus and frequented by college students.  

        Jeff licked the first two fingers on his right hand (his throwing hand).  He had expunged the habit from his on-field behavior but it remained in his everyday life as a flashing neon sign pointing the way to his innermost feelings.  Everybody else thought of Jeff as always in control—in command—a real-life James Bond.  But I could finish his sentences.  

        He smiled.  "We’re going to Army."

         “You may be going to Army, but I haven’t made up my mind, yet.”  

        “You’re going to Army.”  He licked his fingers again.  “You’re going to be a star.  No need to thank me.”

        “Kiss my ass.”

        “I mailed my letter of intent yesterday.  All you have to do is sign yours and send it in.  We’re all set.”

         “May I take your order?”  I looked past Jeff, at the menu board atop the five-foot concrete post.  From the bottom of the menu, a cord drooped across to Jeff’s window.  Attached to it was the speaker from which the question had come.  It hummed while the young man inside the kitchen waited.  

        Without looking at me, Jeff said, “Two cheeseburger combos.”

        “What if I don’t want a damn cheeseburger combo, Jeff?  Did you ever think of that?”

        “Don’t be dumb,” he said.  “This is my treat.”

        “Thanks,” I mumbled.  “Jeff, I really don’t know if I want to go to Army.”

        He sighed deeply.  “We’ve been over this a hundred times.  It’s perfect—for both of us.  You might even start sophomore year.”

        “At flanker?”

        “They loved the footage Coach sent them, Frank.  You can probably move to left halfback junior year.”  He licked his fingers, and when he looked at me, he reminded me of a new dad looking through a big window at his newborn son.  

        It sounded great, and I knew he had gone to some trouble to get me included in the deal.  The problem was that no matter how many times we discussed it, I didn’t want to go to Army.  It seemed like a betrayal to my father’s memory.  

        “I don’t know,” I said.  It sounded whiny and weak, and I hated myself.

        “Whaddaya mean, you don’t know?  It’s all settled—It’s perfect!”  

        “I said, I don’t want to go to Army, Jeff.” 

        "Well, pardon me all to hell, tiger."

        A girl with a bored expression affixed the tray to the window and stood with one hip cocked, awaiting payment.  Jeff dug three singles out of his wallet and handed them over.  She felt around in the pouch running across the front of her apron, obviously holding out for a pathetic dime tip.  Finally, he said, “Keep it,” and she flounced away, shaking her head almost as much as her butt.

        When he looked at me something had changed. “I’m trying to help you, Frank.”

        “What the hell do you mean by that?”

        He looked hard into my face now, and said in a controlled, conversational tone, “Come on, Frank.  Don’t make me say this.”  

        I returned his gaze.  "If you’ve got something to say, say it."

        "Okay.  I didn’t want it to come to this, but the truth is, if you don’t go to Army, you’ve got nothing."

        His ease in delivering the blow surprised me, but it shouldn’t have.   The telltale licking of fingers had ceased the instant I demanded an answer.  I felt like I had been stomped by a frenzied mob of girls rushing the stage at a Frankie Avalon concert.  

        Jeff asked, “Come on, man.  How many scholarship offers have you had?”  

        I studied the bubbles in my Coke.  "I’ve had offers.  You’re not the only person who can play the game."  I had received a few offers, but none from major football schools, and this was the first sign of interest from any of the service academies.  

        “We both know the only reason you’re where you are, is because I keep feeding you the ball.  Otherwise, you’d be lucky to be all-city, let alone all-state.”  

        I let the assault roll over me, unable to understand how my best friend could say these things to me.  It wasn’t completely true.  I was an excellent football player, and we both knew it, even if I wasn’t in his league.  

        My failure to respond must have told him he had gone too far.  "Come on Frank, I was just bullshitting you.  You’re the best halfback in the country.  You know that, and I know it.  But for some reason, the big schools don’t.  Let’s go to Army and show them how great you are…we are.  Just like always."

        We drove back to the school in silence.

28:  The Canal

        In high school, we had to give up some of our nutty stunts.  Jeff and I had become local celebrities and it made a difference, trust me.  Let’s say two guys get caught throwing water balloons at the cheer squad as they come out for afternoon practice.  The guys get suspended, and everybody goes back to sleep.  

        If those guys are named Barrett and Cyrus, the next day’s headline reads, Football Stars Assault Female Students.  Bet money on one of the debs being quoted as follows, "I felt so violated." 

        So, okay, we gave up water balloons… mostly.  We gave up the crank phone calls, too, almost completely.  And we quit floating down irrigation canals on inflated inner tubes: not because we were famous, but because it was dangerous.  

        If I ever have kids, and I see them and their dorky friends heading out with inflated inner tubes, I’ll put a stop to it.  Right now, if I had a son, and I caught him doing something like that, I’d kick his butt.  I guess I’m a lot more mature now, that’s all.  You see things differently when you get a little older.  

        I still don’t know how we got away with it.  Think about it.  If you were a cop, and you saw a bunch of adolescents walking toward the canal in cut-off jeans with inner tubes around their stomachs, wouldn’t you be suspicious?  Or, if you were somebody’s parent, wouldn’t you want to know what they were doing all day, and where they were?  I guess they trusted us, but I’m not going to trust my kids—no sir!  

        I can still feel the mid-day sun assaulting my skin as we walked upstream along a canal access road one July midmorning.   How far we marched depended on Jeff.  Sometimes we continued until we reached a pre-determined spot.  Other times we persisted in an adolescent test of endurance and bravado.  Either way, no one entered until Jeff gave the signal.

        He tossed his tube into the water and dove head-first through the hole.  It was tricky because the tube moved with the current, and if he didn’t time it precisely, and aim himself just right, he risked painful, maybe even serious injury.  

        I tried it once and came away with a sprained neck and a lungful of canal water.  After that, I jumped in feet first, like everybody else, and came up through the hole from underneath:  a sensible strategy, but one that left you with another situation.  When you emerged, you saw Jeff, lounging on his tube.  He never failed to greet you with a cheerful, "Nice move, Nancy."  Or, his favorite: "Pussy."  It was better than breaking your neck, but not much.

        The water felt great on those hot, sunny days.  Once, though, a gigantic thunderstorm rose from the south.  Lightning danced among licorice colored clouds on the horizon.  Thunder mumbled somewhere over Tucson, which was fine.  Tucson could float away for all we cared.          Ten minutes later our blue sky turned dark, and a violent crash of thunder shook our world by the shoulders.  A gigantic lightning bolt tried to crawl into our laps like a kitten—a demented, billion-volt kitten.

        We scrambled from the canal, and ran a half-mile through the deluge, while zigzags of silver tried to spear us.  We ran until we reached a Union 76 service station, laughing the whole way.  Winded, soaked, and giddy, we passed the time insulting each other and listening to the sullen music of the raindrops. I dropped a nickel into the slot and popped the cap on a six-and-a-half-ounce bottle of Coke, and I knew that was the best nickel I would ever spend.

        Another afternoon, as I floated along half daydreaming, a massive turd lazed past me.  I could have reached over and touched it.  We had heard stories about the filth of canal water, but I never paid much attention until that moment.  I thought I might throw up, which would have been good for the turd since it would no longer be the most disgusting thing in the canal.  

        I didn’t throw up, but I did make up my mind that my canal-floating days were over.  I told the other guys what I saw and tried to persuade them to get out.  Everybody except Mitch either didn’t believe me or didn’t care, which made me think about throwing up again.  Mitch and I climbed up the gently sloped concrete side of the canal and started walking along the dirt road at the top.

        "Chicken!" shouted Tom.  

        Mitch picked up a dirt clod and lobbed it toward him.  “At least we’re not floating around like a bunch of turds in a toilet.”

        They answered with a chorus of, “Bawk, bawk, bawk!” followed by uproarious laughter.

        When the barrage subsided, I looked up and saw the waterway intersecting another canal half a mile ahead.

        I called down, “The locks are coming up, you guys.”

        They ignored us and Mitch said, “That really frosts me.  Jeff should know better.”

        “Let ’em drown,” I replied.

        We warned them twice more and got nothing for our trouble but remarks about our ancestry and our modest claims to manhood.

        But Freddie didn’t join in, and a minute later, he clambered up the bank which was so steep he had to grab Mitch’s outstretched hand for help.

        I tried one final appeal.  "Jeff, you guys better get out of there. If the gate’s up, the undertow’s going to be strong."

        "Pussy!" came the collective response.  Jeff flipped me the bird, and the three of them laughed.  

        When we got to the locks, they couldn’t get out.  The banks were only a few degrees off vertical now, and the undertow wanted somebody to die.

        The three of them bobbed like corks in the agitated water.  Mitch and I were the ones laughing now, along with Freddie—Laughing, and pointing, and holding our bellies because every time one of them got close to the side, the current dragged him back.  

        They begged us to get them out, but we were having too much fun gloating.  It’s what they got for being such jerks; let them bounce around for a while.  They looked so damned funny, I could have laughed all day, and I probably would have if Tim hadn’t got sucked through the hole in his tube.  

        Jeff grabbed his wrist before it disappeared below the surface.  He struggled to get Tim back to his tube where he coughed, and choked, and turned white.   That’s where Jeff fought the undertow for his friend’s life.  He slipped through the hole in his own tube, one arm looped over its curvature, and slid the other arm around Tim’s slender midsection.  He kept the loose tube pinned against the bank with a constant scissor-kicking of his legs and manhandled him back aboard.  Tim sat for a second or two with his chin on his chest.  Then he started crying.  

        Jeff leaned close to him before he climbed back to the relative safety of his own inner tube and whispered something in his ear.  Tim stopped crying.  He grasped the sides of his tube and held on.

        Jeff looked at me and called signals like he had done a hundred times before.  “Frank!  Get us out!”

        We made a lifeline with Freddie stretched face down on the bank, Mitch holding on to him, and me at the bottom pulling guys out.  Jeff helped Tim out first.  Next, Tom climbed up.  Finally, Jeff grasped my hand, palm to wrist.  

        Sometimes Jeff made me so mad I wanted to crush him.  But right then, when I saw the fear in his eyes—when I knew he knew it might be the end for him: that he might die—after he had made sure his buddies were safe—that’s when I realized why I followed him.

        I watched as he fell into a drenched, gritty heap with the other two on the dirt road at the top, able to do no more than look first at one, then the other, assuring himself of their safety.  Only then did he allow his head to fall back and rest on the sand.

        Exhausted myself, I tried to understand my best friend.  You could say with complete justification that his judgment was sometimes errant.  You could fault him for his arrogance and insensitivity.  But you could not question his courage, or his devotion to those he called friend, because as he had proved once again today, no matter what we did, or how bad things got, he would always be the first one in, and the last one out.

        It must have been 110 degrees that afternoon, but Tim shivered like an orphan in the snow.  After we got our strength back the three of us who had been on top threw our inner tubes into the canal with the others.  We stood on the edge, looking down at those six tubes being buffeted.  Then we headed for home.  Nobody said anything.  

        The quiet persisted until McDowell Road came into view, and then Jeff started in with an outlandish song he sometimes rasped out to drive the rest of us crazy.  Within fifty paces we had all joined in, singing raucously, irreverently.  We walked along the canal bank, not a concern among us more pressing than the words to the next line of "The Muleskinner Blues."  Hey, there, little water boy—bring the buck, buck, bucket here.  

***

        A couple of years later Jeff pulled Donna’s cat out of their swimming pool.  Boy, did the guys give him hell about that!  In all the splashing around the poor thing scratched his wrist up pretty good.  Still, he carried it to the side and put it on the deck where it hacked and sneezed for a while, then strolled under a lawn chair and washed itself the way cats do.  

        Donna sprayed Jeff’s arm with Bactine and cooed over him all afternoon.  All he said, was, "I hate cats."  

        It reminded me of the canal incident, and later I asked him what he had said to Tim.  He said, "I told him if he didn’t stop acting like a pussy I would throw him back in."  

29:  Two Parties  

        As kids, we dreamed about being big football stars in high school, especially our senior year.  Now, all the dreams had come true, but we were a long way from happy.

        Don’t get me wrong.  Things kept rolling our way, so how could we not be excited?  Just since September, we had won our second state championship and earned all-state honors again. Jeff was voted Mr. Arizona High School Football and selected to the High School All-America Team.  Only one other person in the state ever made the All America team.  We didn’t know it, but we were about to meet that guy.  

        It was a dream situation with the girls, too, except that Jeff and Donna fought all the time.  But if you expected that to change, you might as well put money on the Cubs to win the pennant.  

        Everybody seemed to know us, and want to be around us, even grown-ups.  A big sports writer for the Republic interviewed us and wrote a series of articles about us.  

        The college visits made us feel important, too.  USC, Nebraska, and Ohio State had invited Jeff for visits, and they didn’t seem to mind if I tagged along.  We were scheduled to talk with Coach Kush at Arizona State, but that wouldn’t count as an official visit since you could drive from my front door to the stadium parking lot in fifteen minutes.

        Except for Armando Calderon our lives were perfect.  And every time I thought about him, I wanted to knock somebody out.  He made everything feel wrong—like somebody playing your favorite song on a badly tuned guitar.  Like the flies on my eighth birthday.  

        My folks threw a great party for me that year.  The works—balloons, pony rides, great presents.  They even hired a guy to dress up like Hopalong Cassidy and do rope tricks and magic from the back of a big white stallion.  

        The only problem was the location: a park next to a dairy farm.  The wind blew the smell over us all afternoon.  No matter how much fun I had, I couldn’t get the stink out of my nose—or my mind.   Not only that, about a million horseflies buzzed around everywhere, trying to get their disgusting fly-selves on everything—your friends, your birthday cake, the ice cream, for God’s sake!  One landed on Maddie’s cake and started rubbing his hind legs together, really showing off.  She threw up all over him and her favorite party dress.  She bawled the rest of the afternoon.  

        It was like that with Armando.  He was in everything—on everything. You could never forget him.  And if you did manage to get him off your mind for a minute or two, something would happen to remind you.  

        Like the afternoon we took the girls to see The Sound of Music.  On the way home, a car next to us backfired and startled the girls: but not as much as it startled Jeff and me.  Donna said, “Big football heroes, huh?”          

        Once, we thought we saw him duck behind a big truck.  Another time we saw a bearded guy buying cigarettes at a Circle K.  It turned out to be some beatnik—or maybe not.

        I’ll be honest with you, we talked about Calderon quite a bit.  When we analyzed it, we always came to the same conclusion: everything had been settled.  Then we would see a beat-up car turn a corner and get spooked all over again.  

        Like everybody else, we went to David Arnson’s party two weeks before Christmas.  Everybody wanted to know if we were going to West Point next year.   One jerk even asked us to get game tickets for his folks back East.  We didn’t even know the guy’s name.  

        Paige and Donna rolled their eyes a lot while Jeff and I soaked in the attention.  To be honest, I’m not that crazy about parties.  You spend a lot of time answering the same questions, or if you’re with Jeff, letting him answer the same questions.  

        For instance, right after we ditched the free-loader, a girl who had been trying to steal Jeff for two years came up and snaked her hands around his biceps.  I guess she thought she might get away with it because Donna and Paige had gone to the lady’s room.   But she underestimated her opponent.

        I heard part of Donna’s whispered comment to Paige as they rejoined us.  "… scratch that little bitch’s eyes out."  

        Anyway, this girl, Angie, used the same conversational opener as everybody else.  "You guys going to break all the records at Army, then go fight the Germans?" I still wanted to go to Navy, but I figured why get into a big argument while everybody’s having a great time?  

        Jeff said, "You bet!  It’s in the bag!"

        Donna walked over, locked onto Jeff’s other arm, looked straight at Angie, and said, "Speaking of bags…"  

        A few minutes after ten o’clock Jeff nudged me and whispered, “We gotta go.”  I wanted to stay, but he had been acting distracted all evening.  Paige and Donna were okay with leaving.  I think they figured we were going up to Camelback Mountain to look at the lights of the city. 

        Jeff had different ideas, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because he and Donna got into it but good.  It happened on that lonely stretch of Camelback Road between Arcadia High School and Scottsdale Road, just before you turn onto the road that leads to The Overlook.    

        Donna and Paige had been going on about the Christmas Prom the whole time.  Donna said, "I can’t wait to show off my gown!"

        Before Paige could reply, Jeff said, "Ooh, yes!  And I can’t wait to show off my new sneakers!"  

        I think Donna was still pissed about Angie.   "Shut up, Jeff.  You are such an ass!"

        Jeff said, "Come on, Donna.  All I’m saying is there are more important things in the world than dances."  

        To a girl, nothing is more important than a dance.  She said, "Next to homecoming, this is the most important event of the year, and you know it!"

        "Yeah, yeah.  I stand corrected.  Please, Donna, tell us all about your silly-ass dress."  

Thirty:  Bonds…Jeff’s Bonds

        After we dropped the girls off that night, we drove to the high school.  Most times we checked all the doors on campus, just for kicks.  We never planned it—we just did it.  

        Once, sophomore year, we had found the door to the science and math wing unlocked.  So now, if we were walking around anyway, we always checked.  You could call it a courtesy since we felt privileged to have the run of the place.  Besides, we knew most of the security guys, and we didn’t want them to get into trouble.  Most of them weren’t much older than us.

        I tried to see my breath, but it wasn’t cold enough.  Jeff wasn’t ready to tell me why we had left the party, but I knew he would be soon. I knew he would get to it faster if I left him alone, but he was so absorbed I couldn’t resist.  

        I shot my fist at his face, pulling the punch an inch before it landed.  He jumped: we had both been easy targets since that first night with Armando.  “You flinched,” I said, and popped him in the shoulder as hard as I could.

        He shrugged.  “Pansy.”

            "You sure stepped in it tonight, Big Guy," I said. 

        "Yeah, so?"  

        "So, Donna’s really pissed."

        "Donna can kiss my ass," he said.  

        "Come on, Jeff, the two of you have been going steady for over a year."  

        "I don’t care."

        "I’m just saying you guys might have something.  Maybe you should think about it before you chuck it."

        He made a little puppet out of his hand—you know, the thumb-tip and finger-tips joined and looking at him, and then at me.  It whispered in his ear and looked in my direction while he said something to it.  I couldn’t hear them, but they made it clear they weren’t interested in anything I had to say.  

        After we had checked all the doors on both ends of all three buildings, we headed for the field.  “What’s the skinny?”  I asked.

        “We have to find Calderon.”

        I stopped with the toe of my Ked jammed into the chain links of the double gates.  “What do you mean?”

        “You remember those savings bonds I got for my birthday?”

        “Damn!”

        On his last birthday, his grandfather had given him five grand in savings bonds. They were for college and were stored in a safe-deposit box at his folks’ bank.  The idea was for him to cash them on his eighteenth birthday.  The old guy had given him the key to the box to keep until then.  I thought it was a neat thing to do.  I also thought again how rich Jeff’s family was.

        He put the key in a secret compartment of his wallet.  After a while, he forgot about the bonds and the key.  So, when Calderon returned the wallet, neither of us thought about checking for it.  We went through the wallet but didn’t think about the key.  But we thought about it now.

22: Study Hall  

        One of the things I loved about Paige was that she always knew what I needed.  Most afternoons in study hall she would let her knee rest against mine while we played tic-tac-toe, or half-studied for Latin, the only class we had together.  

        Sometimes she even let me doze if Jeff had kept me up late with some of his crazy plans, or if I was worn out from a hard practice the previous day.  It was easy to nap in study hall, because two hundred kids occupied the library, and Miss Beckworth couldn’t watch any one person too closely.  

        If you weren’t making noise or unleashing raucous farts, you could get away with a wide range of off-task behavior because she liked to walk around showing off her legs and boobs.  She was a very pretty lady with long, dark hair, and she always wore tight sweaters and skirts.  I knew better than to pay too much attention to her though, because once Paige caught me gawking, and pinched me so hard behind my elbow I thought it might bleed.  

         You could pretend you were reading a textbook, with your elbow resting on the table, and your hand shading your eyes.  One afternoon I drifted into a helicopter dream that way.  Before the chopper took me away, I noticed a scratch on the table next to my book.  

        I guess some delinquent had started to etch his initials and never got finished, so now a crooked gash marred the table top instead of a straight line. I felt the jagged groove with my finger and thought about how I hated guys who did things like that.  Not only did it ruin the table; it was bad for your knife because of how you had to scrape the point through the hard, laminated finish.  The knife could slip too, and fold up suddenly, and if it did, you might wind up

with a bad cut—not that I gave a rat’s patoot about people who did things like that.

        Thinking about the scar on the table made me remember a funny incident from freshman year.  One of the twins (I think it was Tom) got caught sharpening a pencil with his pocketknife and got it taken away.  

        Sometimes the twins could be really dumb.  They both had expensive jack knives that their folks had got them in seventh grade for their birthday, and now Tom’s was gone—at least until his dad came to the school and picked it up from the vice principal in charge of discipline.  

        I remembered how the rest of us gave him the business when we found out.  We all stood around outside the cafeteria during first lunch innocently cleaning under our fingernails with our pocketknives.

        Tom gave his brother a look, but what could he do?  Tom said, "Old Lady Hanford didn’t have to put me down in front of everybody.”

        Jeff finished up with his nails, put his own knife back in his pocket and said, “That’s what you get for being a dumb ass.”

        The next thing I knew, I was back in my helicopter.  You know how dreams are.  It landed outside City Hall.  Next, I sat in a courtroom, watching a trial—about the goofiest trial you ever saw.  The defendant was a little kid: a first or second grader, and he sat in a barber chair, on a booster seat, gaping at the judge.  The judge sat behind a mahogany desk big enough to land my helicopter.  

        The poor kid shook like crazy when he looked at the judge.  He kept muttering to himself, "I’m sorry.  I’m sorry."  Like all those dreams, there was something that just didn’t make sense.  The judge was a lady.  A colored lady, I kid you not!

        And man, was she royally ticked off!  “Notwithstanding the tender years of the accused,” she said—I remember that word, notwithstanding, from Perry Mason.  “this court will not tolerate depictions of violence such as the one under consideration today.  The defendant will rise.”

        The boy looked around trying to be brave like little kids do.  And he almost managed it, but he sniffled a little. His parents sat in the front row of the gallery just a couple of seats away from me.  His mom cried softly, and her husband put his arm around her.  She said to her kid, in a hushed, mom-voice, “It’s okay, Ernie.  Stand up.”

        But you could tell it wouldn’t be okay.  The judge asked, “Has the jury reached a verdict?”

        The jury foreman stood up (she was a lady too, only white), and said, “We have, Your Honor.”

        The judge nodded and the other lady said, “We find the defendant, Earnest McFarland Roberts, guilty of drawing a picture of a deadly weapon in the first degree.”

        Everybody gasped, all around the courtroom, and then started talking at the same time, and the judge slammed her gavel on her desk. “I will have order, or I will clear this courtroom!”  

        Things quieted down then, except for Ernie’s mom, who cried into her husband’s chest.  The judge looked at her and shook her head gravely.  She held up the picture the kid had drawn on a piece of school paper, with large spaces between the lines.  Some of the lines were blue, and others were red dashes.  

        I held my breath when I saw the picture because it looked exactly like one I had drawn when I was a kid—a police issue pistol with bullets flying out of the barrel, zapping a tiny stick figure criminal about the size of the trigger.  He held a bag of money in one hand, and a dagger in the other, and his eyes were exes. 

        The little boy tried not to cry, you could see that.  He sniffed twice, but held the tears inside—until he looked at his mom.  She made a motion to go to him, but her husband held her back.  That’s when the little guy started to cry.  “I won’t do it again,” he sobbed.  “Honest.  I’m real sorry."

        But the old judge wasn’t having any of it.  “You should have thought of that before you did it.  The penalty for first degree violent picture-drawing is death.”  Then she turned to the bailiff.  “String him up!”  

        Then I was somewhere else, on a street with giant shade trees in front of a row of beautiful houses.  I wouldn’t have been surprised to see June Cleaver stick her head out a window.  

        On the sidewalk two cops stood writing two pretty little girls a ticket for practicing commerce in a residential area without a valid license.  When they finished, they got in their patrol car and drove away.  

        The girls put some paper cups into a crisp brown paper bag.  One of them took the bag, and the other picked up a pitcher half-filled with lemonade, and they walked up the sidewalk to one of the houses crying.  After they went inside, a lady came running out, and folded up the card table the girls had been sitting behind.  She cried too, as she carried it into the house.

        A scrap of paper came off the table, blown by a little puff of breeze.  It turned over twice and landed face-up, next to the sidewalk.  Written in neat little-girl letters in purple Crayola, it said, Lemonade, five cents.

***

         Another thing happened in study hall the week after we realized Armando still had Jeff’s safe-deposit key.  Our world had shriveled to the size of a wrinkled raisin.  Everything but the two of us, and that crazy bastard Armando had shrunk to invisibility.  Armando stayed in our heads.  We hadn’t told anyone, but people could see something was wrong.  Especially Paige and Donna.  

        Paige always knew when I needed to study hard for Mr. Moreland’s Algebra II class.  That’s why she scooted her chair away from me that afternoon.  A few minutes later, when she caught me daydreaming, she elbowed me in the ribs.

        Algebra was the only class that gave me trouble, and right now it was giving me fits.  I fretted about the C- scrawled across my last unit test.  I got it because you can’t concentrate on polynomials when you’re worrying about some lunatic burning down your house and violating your sister.  Now, as I struggled to force my mind back to the book, my mood darkened by the second.

        Half an hour crawled by, and Paige slipped a folded sheet of notebook paper against my elbow. I guess she figured I needed a break.  But that’s not what I needed.  Among other things, I needed Jeff to quit trying to drag me to Army.

        And that made me remember how we almost blew our last game; I fumbled twice, and Jeff threw an interception, and we almost lost to Tempe—the Tempe Buffaloes, for God’s sake!  I stared at the clock on the library wall.  A little while later, Paige nudged me and nodded toward the note.  

        Something happened that had never happened before.  I realized Paige was annoying me with her damned, silly note.  Couldn’t she see I had other things on my mind?  

        And then something else happened for the first time: I ignored her.  I crawled between the covers of a book she couldn’t understand and left her outside.  Alone.    

        Any other moment I would have understood the terrible thing I had done.   I would have touched her arm, read her note, and made it right.  But now I saw nothing but Armando Calderon scratching an ugly red F on a report card labeled Frank’s Future, crumpling it into a crude football, and throwing it into a waste-paper basket.    

        And all I needed from sweet Paige was for her to see I was drowning, so could she please back off and let me fight my pathetic, hopeless fight?  Could she please just leave me alone?

        I think it’s interesting that a person can say all those things with nothing more than a glance.  I wish it weren’t true, because then I wouldn’t have said them, and she wouldn’t have covered her face and run to the girls’ bathroom.

        She stayed there through the rest of the study hall.  Half the cheer squad went in one at a time and came out glaring at me.  

        I didn’t see Paige again until after practice late that afternoon.  I walked her home as usual, but when I tried to take her hand, she jerked it away, and gave me a textbook Go to hell stare.  

        I decided to play dumb.  It wasn’t much of a stretch.  “What’s the matter?”  

        She looked straight ahead.  

        “Come on, Paige, I’m sorry.  You know I’ve got a lot on my mind right now.”  

        “Drop dead!”  

        I wished I could go back and have a second chance.  But even if I could, I wasn’t sure how much it would help.  I could be nicer about the note, but I couldn’t tell her what really bothered me.  Jeff and I couldn’t let those secrets out.  We had already told Mitch, and we couldn’t let it go any farther.  

“I’m really sorry,” I said again.  This time she let me take her hand, but it was different.  Her hand was not quite limp, but it didn’t have the familiar firmness that took the place of so many words.  

“I would never treat you like that Frank,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.  

“I know.  But you don’t know what’s happening right now.”  

“Because you won’t tell me!  You are inconsiderate and rude.  And you never talk to me anymore.”  

“Paige, there are too many things going on.  You know I would say more if I could—don’t you?”  

She stopped and faced me.  “I only know you won’t tell me what’s wrong, so I don’t know anything!”  

I said, “I just can’t…”  

“Can’t talk to me?  You are not a stupid person, Frank, so you have got to know how much that hurts me.  I am hurt, and you are the one who’s hurt me.  It’s mean, and you are a big, stupid boy!”

        Afterward, I walked home from her house alone, her note in my algebra book, folded in fourths like a greeting card.

        Jeff sat in the family room watching Twilight Zone with Mom and Melinda when I walked in.  Maddie was in her room, most likely hating somebody.  Jeff could tell I wasn’t in a mood to talk, so for once, he left me alone.  He stayed on the couch letting Melinda adore him with her little eyes.

        Inside our room, I lay down on my bed and opened Paige’s note.  On the outside was Frank, surrounded by hearts and arrows.  On the inside, it said:

        Dear Francis Harold Cyrus,

                You are the boy I want to marry.

                                I love you,

                                Paige Evangeline Martinez         

        I laid the note on my chest, and spent ten minutes feeling like a rat, and another ten feeling sorry for myself.  I drifted into an uneasy sleep and had another dream.  This time the helicopter took me to the airport because I had to fly to the White House.  The president had invited me to a big Christmas party.  Dreams can be crazy, and this one was a champeen!  

        I stood in a line with about a million other people.  I saw a Boeing 707 shining in the midmorning sun just outside the fantastic windows that formed a five-story wall.  Inside, the line of holiday travelers twisted back and forth, row on row, reminding me of a country road winding its way up a timber-clogged mountain.  6/19/18

        People didn’t want to say, “Merry Christmas.”  I stopped at one of the little magazine stands to get some Cracker Jacks and a copy of Mad Magazine for the trip, and when I said, “Merry Christmas,” to the guy behind the counter, he looked around like he was selling me dope.  

        He answered, "Merry Christmas," all right, but he almost whispered it—like he didn’t want anybody to hear him.  

        At the ticket counter, I thanked the lady and again, said, “Merry Christmas.”  

        At first, she pretended she didn’t hear me, then changed her mind and said, “Yes…Happy Holidays.”  

        I heard pieces of conversations as people said their hellos and good-byes, or made small talk. I heard, “Happy Holidays,” all over the place, but nobody would say, “Merry Christmas.”  There were Christmas trees up, and decorations everywhere, so you knew it was Christmas.  So, what was wrong?  

        If you think that’s strange, wait until I tell you the next part!  People were getting undressed—everybody!  They didn’t seem to mind, or even notice.  They took off their shoes and belts and put them into baskets that moved along a conveyor belt into a machine, where a couple of guys in uniforms stood looking at a TV set.  But the TV wasn’t showing Queen for a Day, or As the World Turns.  It was an endless parade of wallets, purses, and underwear.  

        Then from the loudspeaker somewhere overhead, you could hear the sound of all those people shuffling along, only instead of people’s voices, you heard cattle mooing.  I thought I heard Clint Eastwood say, “Head ‘em up.  Move ‘em out.”

Every once in a while, the machine that was swallowing everybody’s clothes started beeping, and the uniformed guys took somebody out of line and patted them down like cops do when they’re arresting some criminal.  Like I said, these guys wore uniforms, but they weren’t police officers, and they weren’t military.          6/20/18

        Two guys went through with wild-looking beards, and goofy robes.  They had towels wrapped around their heads that made them look like Sinbad.  The next person was a little old nun, with kind eyes and glasses sitting out on the end of her little nose—glasses like people wore in olden times, with tiny metal rims.  The two funny-looking guys were laughing like someone had just told a hilarious joke while they walked toward the plane.  About the time they were getting on, the old nun was getting frisked.  From the look on her face, you could tell she was worried about getting felt-up.  

        I asked the guy in front of me in line, “How come they’re picking on the nun?”

        He didn’t answer me, but a woman behind me said something under her breath.  I couldn’t pick up all of it, but I’m pretty sure I heard the words bigoted and redneck.  

        Just when I thought the dream couldn’t get any loonier, I got on the plane.  Was I ever wrong!  Take the stewardesses.  It was a huge airliner, so there were six or seven of them.  But they didn’t look like stewardesses.  They looked more like somebody’s mom than somebody you would want to take to see Kid Galahad.  I wouldn’t say they were exactly ugly, but they were middle aged, and trust me on this; they did not need to worry about some guy staring at their fannies if they stretched to get something from the overhead compartment!  On top of that, two of them were guys!  All I can say about them is it’s a good thing Jeff and couple of the other guys on the team weren’t on that dream flight, or those guys would have found themselves swooshing toward their final destination from 30,000 feet!

        Here’s another thing that was wild.  While we were waiting for the plane to taxi out to the runway, everyone had little devices held up to their ears.  They were about the size of a pack of Marlboros, but they were made of plastic, and –well, you’ll just have to believe me here; this was a dream—everybody was talking into these gizmos like they were on the phone.  

        I was on the verge of nudging the guy in the seat next to me, when I noticed he was reading.  But he wasn’t reading a book or a magazine—not in this crazy dream, he wasn’t.  He had a thing about the size of a steno pad.  It was made of plastic, too, and sure enough, it had words on it, but they wouldn’t stay still.  Every couple of seconds he would touch the words, and they would scroll up like it was a tiny movie screen.  The guy was sitting there reading this thing like it was no big deal—like everybody was doing it—and son-of-a-gun if they weren’t!  Or else looking at another very strange bit of business—a thing that had a little flat TV screen attached to a small typewriter that was sitting on their laps.  I swear to you, I’m not making any of this up!  

        And now—now the dream got strange.  I was in another line, this time waiting to greet the President.  It was in some fancy ballroom in the White House somewhere, I guess.  There were chandeliers splashing dancing light all over the place, and an orchestra playing Christmas songs.  All the men were dressed in tuxedos, and the ladies were wearing evening gowns, and were weighted down with so much jewelry they could hardly move.  I didn’t realize it until I had been in line for quite some time, but none of the songs were Christmas Carols.  No “Silent Night,” or “Joy to the World.”  They were all songs about Santa, and Frosty, and jingle bells.  They played “Blue Christmas,” which I love, but it was strictly square without Elvis.  

        Like the people in the airport, everybody seemed afraid to say Christmas, which was hard to figure out, since it was supposed to be Christmas party.  

         I mentioned how elegant everything was, and you would expect that at a party thrown by the President.  I felt as uncomfortable as I always did at Jeff’s place, but that wasn’t only because of the surroundings.  It was me—the way I was dressed.  I was wearing a Corona Knights football uniform, and there were some medals pinned on my chest, and once or twice I thought I heard whispers about the Medal of Honor.  

        The line inched toward the President, and when the dancers swirled around so that there was an opening for a second, I looked across the dance floor at a mirror on the opposite wall.  I got a good look at myself, and that’s when I noticed I was wearing number seventeen—Jeff’s number.  I stood up as straight as I could.  We were getting close to the end of the line, and I wanted to look good for the leader of the free world.  Also, I thought it might help me fill out the jersey a bit better, because it was too big for me.  

        Finally, it was time for us to shake hands.  A voice came through the air from

somewhere, like at the airport, and said, “Frank Cyrus, meet the President of the Unitas States of America, Ronald Wilson Reagan.”  

        I thought, A cowboy is President? and got so flustered I saluted him.  

        What he said made no sense at all, and that was enough to unnerve me.  He said, “Thank you for your service to our country.  Happy holidays.”  

        But the thing that shocked me most was that he wasn’t Ronald Reagan at all.  He was a skinny colored guy with a name tag that said Barry.  

        For a horrible, humiliating second, I thought I was going to laugh, but I managed to get out, “Merr…uh, Happy Hanukah, sir.”  

        Then it was time to let the next person have their moment.  It was just as well.  I hadn’t been so embarrassed since I fumbled at the goal line in the Brophy Prep game last year.  Besides, he seemed to be as uncomfortable as me.  He kept looking at my medals and clearing his throat.  

        I didn’t have any idea what the dream meant, so I told my mom about it the next morning at the kitchen table over Cheerios and milk.  She didn’t know what it meant, either, but she said, “Frank, sometimes I think you’re clairvoyant.”  

Maddie walked in about that time and said, “Frank, sometimes I think you’re full of shit.”    

Thirty-two:  A Sad Visit

        People don’t know how cold Phoenix can get.  I’m not saying it’s like Minnesota, but it gets below twenty degrees sometimes.  It might even snow once or twice a decade, but the snow never sticks.  It wasn’t going to snow the night we drove by Calderon’s house, but it was cold enough to show off our lettermen’s sweaters.  Not that we would be wearing anything we cared about: we both understood somebody might get racked up.

        We drove around for a while, avoiding turned-over garbage cans that dribbled Huggies and Pabst Blue Ribbon cans into the street.  "Nice neighborhood," said Jeff.  

         "That’s the address." I pointed out one of the nicer houses.  " 7728."  

        Jeff drove by in first gear.  "Let’s go around again, just to see what’s going on."  

        I smiled.  "Always the quarterback.  Checking out the defense."  

        "What do you want to do, Sherlock?  Rush up to the door wearing sandwich boards that say, Dumb-ass Gringos.  Please kick our butts?"

        "Okay, okay, Smart Guy. Just keep an eye on the gas-gauge, okay?"  

        Banged-up cars rested on blocks everywhere you looked, and half the streetlights were out—shot out most likely.  Most of the houses were run down, with yards that looked like they would eat a lawnmower’s lunch as soon as look at it.

        Christmas lights drooped by the thousands from weathered eaves.  That surprised me.  I figured if you couldn’t afford to paint your house every five hundred years or so, you wouldn’t be able to afford a bunch of Christmas lights.  

        On the second trip around I noticed a few of the houses were well-tended: small, like the rest, but with neatly trimmed lawns.  Sheets and blankets protected the decorative shrubs surrounding these homes. The Calderon house was one of these.

        I said, "I wonder if they ever get letters from the neighborhood association saying their house is too neat.".

        Right after Jeff turned off the ignition a car rolled by going the other way.  There couldn’t have been more than 700 guys inside, 800, tops.  They looked at us like we were something a dog left on the sidewalk.  

        "I wonder what shape the car will be in when we come out," said Jeff.  

        I said, "If it’s still here."  

        "If we come out."  

        We looked at each other and said, "Tomorrow."    

***

        The Arizona sun highlighted the differences among the houses.  Most had peeling paint and sagging shutters, and at least one window held together by decaying masking tape.  A few, like the Calderon place, had been at least cared-for, if not maintained in model-home condition.

         We walked up the fresh-swept sidewalk toward the neat, modest home.  We checked three times to make sure we had the address right.  There was no mistake.  "I can’t picture our guy in this place," I said.

        "Me, neither.  That greasy jacket, and greasy hair.  And his breath!"  

        I remembered my fight with Armando in the desert.  "You don’t have to tell me about his breath!"  

        At the door, I stuffed my hands into my jacket pockets.  Before we left the apartment, I had slipped a roll of pennies into each, and now they reassured me as I curled my fists around them.  Jeff knocked on the door, and I hung back, surveying the nearby houses and the street.  I felt like Joe Friday.

        When he raised his hand again, we heard a girl’s voice from inside.  “Coming.” You could tell she was our age.  

         She opened the door wide and stood wiping her hands on a dish towel.  Framed by the doorway she looked like a life-sized painting in a fine gallery.

        She knocked us out, but not because of her looks.  Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t hard to look at, but she wouldn’t stop traffic either.  It had more to do with the way she looked at us.  Like she could see past our eyes to somewhere way inside.  Here’s the funny thing: it made me feel like everything would be all right.

        It took Jeff a second to speak. “Is your brother home?”  

        For the tiniest second, a change came over her.  She seemed like the saddest, loneliest little girl in the world.  Then, just as quickly, she changed back.  She said, “Excuse me a second,” and shut the door.  

        While we waited, Jeff said, "Why do I feel like I’ve been talking to the queen?"  

        "Or the Pope?"  I said.  

        When she opened the door, she had changed again.  She seemed slightly plumper, with some gray weaving its way into the midnight black hair, and a few wrinkles around the obsidian eyes.  From her picture frame, she said, “Forgive my daughter.  Sometimes she forgets her manners—leaving you standing at the door this way.  You boys are here to see my son, no?”

        “Yes, ma’am,” Jeff said with the deference he reserved for mothers alone.  “Is he around?”  

        “We will call him,” she said.  Then, to the girl, who had returned to the kitchen, “Adela, please call your brother.  Tell him some nice boys are here to see him.”

        “Yes, Mama.”

        Now, the older woman led us through a modest vestibule and indicated the interior with a graceful gesture.  “Please.  Come in.”

        She affected us like her daughter.  There seemed no alternative to accepting her invitation.  But it was more: like magic lived here.  I think if she had said, “Hop up and down on one foot, and sing the Star Spangled Banner, we would have asked, “Which foot?”  Or, “What key?”

        She called to her daughter, “Is he coming?”

        The girl said, "No."

        "A shame.  But maybe I can help you."

        Jeff and I sat on the serape-covered couch.  She took the adjacent love seat and called to the kitchen, again, "Mi hija, please get these nice boys a Pepsi."

        You should know I hate Pepsi.  In our house, it is almost a religious thing.  We drink Coke, we serve Coke, and we distrust Pepsi people.  But if this lady had offered me a nice, tall glass or arsenic, I would have smiled and said, "May I have a slice of lemon with that?"                

        While Adela prepared the drinks, her mother said, “Again, our manners.  I am Mrs. Calderon, Dominic’s mother.”

        We told her our real names.  I don’t think either one of us even considered lying.  She would have made a great assistant principal!        

        Still, I needed to know about this Dominic character.  Maybe we ended up in the wrong house after all.  But that couldn’t be right.  She said her name was Calderon.  Maybe we got the creep’s name wrong.  

        And what about the eerie calmness that came over us almost from the minute we got here?  It was almost like we had been drugged, but the girl hadn’t even served us any Pepsi yet, so that couldn’t be it.  

        The most bewildering thing of all was the role of the females in this little house. They seemed to be the epitome of purity and goodness, and yet the blood of a maniac flowed in their veins.  If your IQ was above room temperature, you had to at least consider that they were complicit.

        There were other concerns too.  What if Dominic showed up with the other 799 guys from the old barrio-mobile?  They might have a special Christmas celebration planned for tonight—you know, gringo heads-on-a-stick paraded among the luminarias, with mariachis singing Noche de Paz.  I snuck a peek at my best buddy, but no alarm showed in his eyes, so I relaxed a bit.  

        I looked around the living room, half-expecting to see a pair of sneaky eyeballs peering out through a face in one of the pictures.  There were battalions of photographs and crucifixes, and when I saw them I knew we were in the right house because Armando was featured in several.          

        There were pictures of him with his mom, his sister, and some guy who looked like him, but older.  It must have been Dominic.  There were shots of family gatherings—Christmases, quinceaneras, confirmations.  There were photos in front of churches, on beaches, and next to piñatas.  There were football pictures, action, and team shots, mostly of the other guy. I wondered how these people ever got anything done, since they seemed determined to stop and capture the moment every time somebody pooted.          

33:  Armando’s Friends

        Mitch moved my junior year because his dad, my Uncle Len, became Payson’s police chief.  Jeff and I tried to drive up every two or three weeks, but it worked out to be more like four or five times a year. Late one Saturday morning on the way up, I switched between KRIZ and KRUX as usual.  And, as usual, it was hard.  Not only did I have to keep the best song on, I had to juggle the failing reception into the mix as we left Fountain Hills in the rearview.

        As I worked, I became aware of Jeff’s voice crowding out Ernie K-Doe’s complaints about his mother-in-law.  "… care what you say.  Babe Ruth would not make it in the major leagues today."  

        I looked at him in stunned disbelief.  Jeff liked to say crazy things just to get arguments started, but this was outrageous, even for him.  "Are you out of your mind?  Sixty home runs, single season.  714, lifetime?  What the hell are you talking about?"  

        "All I’m saying is, Maris broke his record.  The facts speak for themselves."  

        "Come on, Jeff.  Everybody knows that was a fluke.  Hell, I could have hit sixty-one homers batting in front of Mantle."  

        "Maris is the home run king, Frank.  Not Ruth."  

        "One word, man.  Asterisk."  I twisted the dial as KRIZ faded and crackled.  

        Jeff looked at the dial and said, "Why don’t you just give up."  

        In the old days, I would have told him to go to hell.  

        But now, all the music floated from my heart into the desert.  I turned it off.  "What the hell, Jeff?  What are we doing?"

        "What?"  

        I didn’t say anything.  I just let the saguaros and mesquites drift past for three or four years.  Then, I said, "They all know."

         "Know what?  What are you talking about?"  

        "You know exactly what I’m talking about.  Remember how everybody used to want to be around us?  Now, most of the kids act like a bunch of friendly dogs afraid to get kicked.  Even the guys on the team treat us different."  

         Now, he was the one who didn’t say anything.  

        "It’s like Mitch," I said.  "Why do you think he invited us up for this weekend?"  

        "He wants us to hear the Beatles on his new hi-fi."  

        "Come on, Jeff.  We both know that’s b.s."  

        "Okay, Einstein, you tell me why he invited us."  

        "Because he wants to talk to us."  

        "About?"  

        "About Calderon, of course."  

        He looked at me like I had eased one out in study hall.  "I haven’t said anything about Calderon, Frank."  

        "And neither have I."  

        "So?"  

         "So, he can tell.  Everybody can tell."  

        "So, what’s he going to do, save our souls?"  

        "I don’t know.  Help us get it off our chest?  Maybe look at some options?"

        "What options?  You think we should take out a contract on Calderon?"  

        "I don’t know, Jeff.  And neither do you.  All I’m saying is, sometimes when you talk to Mitch, he helps you to see things in a different way."  

        Sometimes Mitch made you feel better when you talked to him—like a priest.  In fact, we called him Padre, sometimes, and crossed ourselves.  Then we laughed like hell.  God, we could be funny!

        "What do you think we should say to him?"  I asked.  

        "We should say, ’How the hell’s it hanging, Mitch?’"

        "I mean about Calderon."

        "He doesn’t need to know a damned thing."  He looked over at Beeline Dragway, alone in the sand and cactus as we headed north toward the pines.

        Then he focused on the hood.  The front half of the car was primed because it had been keyed the week before.  We knew who did it, too, but we couldn’t prove it.

        “It’ll be good to get the old Jockmobile back in shape,” he mused, then added, “I hate that bastard.”

        “They told you it wouldn’t be a problem to match the color, right?”

        “Naw, it’s gonna be boss.”

        I thought about how the cream trim set off the metal-flake copper paint job, and how good it would look when the drag racing season started in a little over two weeks.  “When does it have to be back in the shop?”

        "Wednesday."

        Jeff thought it might be fun to see how his car would do against other street rods under official National Hot Rod Association sanctions.  We already knew it could shut down just about any car in the East Valley unofficially.        

         Jeff’s boss at the pharmacy had paid for his sponsorship in the NHRA.  I said, "Pretty nice of Mr. Tollof to sponsor you."  

        He stifled a yawn.  "It’s business.  He’ll get lots of good-will off the deal."  

        "Sometimes your gratitude is a wonderful thing to behold."  

        "Frank, sometimes you amaze me.  You just don’t know how things work."  

        "I know he didn’t fork over until you threw all those touchdown passes against Paradise Valley."  He had set a new state record with nine.  We pounded those poor schlubs 83 to 13!  "I don’t get you sometimes.  Ordinarily, you’d be jacked up because somebody else paid, even though your mom could have done it easy.  In fact, you would be all smug because your family can afford it.  So, why not now?"  

        "I don’t know.  Leave me alone."  

        "Okay.  But there’s something else, and I’m not trying to be a jerk, here.  I wish you had thought about it a little more before you accepted."  

        "What do you mean?"         

        "It just might look suspicious to some people."  I visualized the Bel Aire with Jeff’s number, 17, screaming from both doors.  

        He said, “There’s nothing wrong with somebody doing something nice for somebody.”

        I felt my dad stirring inside me. Be careful, here, Son.

        "Five hundred dollars for a sponsorship," I said, "That’s a lot of nice."

        "Tell your dad I said, hello."  Sometimes I thought he could read my mind.

        More miles slid by.  The sound of the wheels on the road tried to lull us to sleep, but with Armando Calderon stalking you, you’re lucky to find sleep in your own bed.  

        I thought about what Jeff said—about people being nice.  Once, a recruiter from a small college in Texas left some great spikes on my patio, with a note telling me to enjoy them.  It said I should call him if I wanted to know more about the excellent athletic tradition, that was the Texas Western Miners.  

        I thought about calling the number and telling him to come and get his shoes, but he already knew I wasn’t interested.  I wound up giving them to Jeff.  I told him the story, and he said, “You sure you don’t want them?”  

        I said, “Yeah,” even though they were terrific shoes.

        “You really want me to have them?”  

        "Yeah."

        He took them and said, “Thanks.”

        Now, with the desert easing down to where the Verde River ran under the Bee Line Highway, I went over the events of the last couple of weeks.  I tried to get Jeff to see that we needed some adult help—that Armando Calderon was too much for us to handle alone.  “We both know it’s getting worse.  Every time you turn around lately, there he is.”

        “I know,” he said.

        “I mean, he scares the hell out of my sister, robs the liquor store…”

        “We don’t even know that was him.”

        “Come on, man!  You have to admit, it’s a heck of a coincidence that it happened three blocks from the apartment.  Then, he follows us around at Encanto Park, which, by the way, scared our girlfriends half to death…”

        He looked into the rear-view mirror.  "Ex-girlfriend, in my case."  

        “Yeah.  And now Paige is barely speaking to me.”

        “Look, I know it’s gotten real serious.  I’m not saying we should ignore it.  I’m just saying, let’s not make things worse by running off half-cocked.”  He braked and swerved, avoiding a coyote that shot in front of us.        

        I shook my head, marveling again at his supernatural physical gifts.  One second, the road was clear.  The next second, I could have counted the coyote’s teeth.  If I had been driving, it would have been a shiny spot in the road.  

        He checked the rear-view mirror again, and said, “I don’t believe it!  There’s a hundred Armandos behind us.”

        I looked over my shoulder and saw what was most likely the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels coming up on us, but quick.

        We were crossing the bridge, looking down at the green water of the slow-moving river.  I said, “Wonderful!”

        Arizona barrels into the foothills after you cross the Verde.  Three or four miles up the isolated road, we would be winding our way among the craggy boulders toward Payson, pursued by a contingent of people you aren’t likely to see at your next church social.  

        Jeff held his speed while the shaggy low-lifes screamed up behind us.  Look, I’ll level with you, I don’t like guys like that. I didn’t like them before Armando Calderon jumped us, and I certainly didn’t like them any better now.  

        They gained on us fast.  They all looked like Armando, but we had no reason to think he was one of them.  As far as we knew, he didn’t ride a bike.  I waited in my bucket seat, putting my faith in the quarterback.  Even as I worried, I felt embarrassed, because they hadn’t waved guns at us, or made any threatening gestures.  They were just coming up behind us that’s all—coming up behind us like a pack of hungry wolves on two hapless jackrabbits.

        Jeff moved over to the right so they could pass: not like some senior citizen from Wisconsin.  You know, the kind you worry about winding up in the ditch.  But he wasn’t doing like some of those jerks who hug the center line either: the ones who speed up when you try to pass.  No, Jeff just drove along like a considerate driver.  

        In a blink, they were on top of us, following too close, but otherwise, making no overt threats.  We waited to see what they would do. The straight stretch ahead offered a perfect opportunity to go by in a hurry—or not.  

        I guess the thought occurred to both of us at the same time.  “Do we really want these guys in front of us?”  I asked.

        “It would be pretty easy to make us stop, huh?”  Before he could respond, they slowed down, the whole nasty host. We headed into the mountains that way, us and the Sewer-rat Escort Service.  

        We slithered along the winding road like a gigantic snake, with us as the head, and them as the body.  From time to time Jeff checked the rear-view mirror. I shifted to look over my shoulder, but he warned, “Don’t.”

        I had doubts about our options now, and said, “You think we should let them by?”

        “Don’t be dumb.”  

        “Why don’t they pass?”

        He shrugged.  A line of cars came toward us, so they couldn’t pass, anyway.  But they still didn’t make their move when it was clear.  Jeff said, “They might be waiting for us to get farther up into the hills.”  

        Every minute they stayed behind us made it more clear.  

        “Does any of them look like Armando?”

        “Hell, Frank.  They all look like Armando!”

        “What are we going to do?”

        In a matter of minutes the road would begin to twist its way into the hills.  Five of the oily creeps moved out to pass.  “Right on cue,” Jeff said, and gunned it.  My head snapped back. I turned and saw the whole group falling away fast, the lead cycles easing back into the right-hand lane with the others.  

        Jeff said, “I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do.  We’re not going to let any of those dickheads get in front of us.”

        Almost as soon as they fell back, the unholy mob closed on us.  A few heartbeats ago we had been doing sixty on a gentle upward loop.  Now, the speedometer jumped to the right of eighty-five, as we approached an endless series of twists and turns.  The next seventy-five miles would bring us to the outskirts of Payson—if we didn’t die first.  

        The first hard turn loomed ahead, the highway disappearing behind a rocky, saguaro-covered promontory.  We thundered toward it like a bowling ball hurled by a furious God.  Jeff mashed the brake pedal, downshifted, and took us around at sixty.  The caution sign reading twenty-five whipped past my head like an orange and black missile, and when I looked back, the gang had disappeared behind the hill.

        I didn’t know if a motorcycle could outrun us on flat ground, but I knew it would have to be doing a hundred-and-twenty.  Around these turns, on an uphill grade, it would take a rider named Knievel.  

        That made me feel better, but there was still plenty to worry about.  Would Jeff misjudge a turn and send us flying through a guardrail and hundreds of feet of blue sky to a dusty death below?  Even Mickey Mantle strikes out.  

        We tore along a short straightaway, and the hogs made up most of their lost ground.  That bothered me plenty, but not any more than why they were chasing us.  Only one answer made any sense.  

        I looked at Jeff.  “I guess Armando has some friends, after all.”         

***

        So, we blasted along, and on each straight stretch they took longer to come back into sight.  And each time, they looked smaller, until they appeared to be tiny dark dots on tiny wheels.  

        The first time we didn’t see them at all, we sighed with relief, but Jeff never let up for a second, and the Bel Aire’s four hundred horses screamed at the jagged hills, devouring them one by one.  

        When I saw the first scraggly junipers halfway up Rye Hill’s long pull, I looked behind again.  Nothing but blacktop—a welcome sight, but not enough to calm my fears.

        There was nowhere to pull over.  Even if we found a place, we wouldn’t have enough time to hide in the hills before a hundred maniacs hunted us down and murdered us.

        We had to get to Payson to have any chance.  Maybe we could avoid them on the residential streets, maybe not.

        We could go to the police station—not the way you would draw the play up, but better than being slaughtered on the side of a hill.

        Looking back, I failed to sight them. "Maybe they gave up."

        “Don’t be dumb.  That crazy bastard wants to kill us.”

        “Really?!  You think he wants to kill us, Jeff?  That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for the past five months!”  I ripped through a mental check-list of things I had avoided saying to him since that first night.  

        I would have told him then if I hadn’t glanced at the instrument panel.  “Aw, shit! Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, shit!  Why do we run out of gas every time we see Armando Calderon?”  The needle leaned far to the left of E.  We would never get to town, especially doing ninety—and we didn’t dare go any slower except around the turns.

        Jeff’s eyes followed mine.  “Shit!”

        I searched the road behind us once more.  Still empty.  “If we don’t find a place to hide before we run out of gas, we’re dead.”

        “Tell me something I don’t already know, Frank!”

        “Maybe we could get behind a boulder or something.”

        “Lemme think a minute.”

        I caught sight of them racing up the slope toward us like some impossible force of nature.          

         “Okay,” I said.  “But I’m not sure you’ve got a minute.”        

        We started into another chain of hills, the long stretch before the first buildings of the town.  I looked at the gas gauge.  The needle was horizontal.  We would never make it.  I said, “How long do you think we’ll have, once we run out of gas?”

        “Lemme think, will ya?”

        I pictured Jeff’s bat and my golf club in the trunk.  It would be nice to take a few of the bastards with us. When something like that happens—when you see the end, you want to picture yourself going down heroically, like the final scene of a movie, the credits rolling as the two heroes disappear under the filthy swarm of Nazi helmets and dirty leather jackets.  

        Reality is not nearly so satisfying because no matter how brave you are, you know you are going to die in a matter of minutes.  You think about it in those words.  I am going to die.  No final scene.  Just, I am going to die.  

        We noticed a yellow billboard with red letters six feet tall.  Kennedy’s Parts and Salvage—Two miles ahead.  Under those, smaller letters said, if you can’t find it here, you’re not looking.  

        “That looks like our only chance,” Jeff said.

        “Won’t they look there?”  

        He shrugged.  “You got a better idea?”

        We flew around two more turns, watching larger junipers, and the first ponderosa pines displace the saguaros of the lower elevations.  

        At the top of the next rise, we got a glimpse of the junkyard before the road bent and the trees reclaimed it.  Jeff said, “We’ll pull in there, and hope they don’t check.”  That’s when we felt the car coast for one sickening second.  

        The rest of the way sloped downward, except for a little mound at the end.  On the other side sat the junkyard.  Jeff eased off the accelerator.  We had fallen to sixty-five when we felt ourselves bend uphill again. The speedometer slid leftward, telling us its silent, sad story.

        The next minute marked the most hopeless little stretch of my life.  I couldn’t do anything but watch while the speedometer needle fell past each number, my hope falling with it.  Sixty, fifty-five, fifty.  The only thing more real than the needle was the distance between Armando’s thugs and us.  And the distance dwindled while the good-for-nothing gas needle reclined ever farther to the left.  

        The maniacs roared nearer.  I figured we had built up a pad of around two-and-a-half minutes.  But now as the speedometer failed—always dropping to the left, always whispering, SLOWER!—so did our precious lead.  Two minutes and twenty-five seconds, two twenty, two fifteen.

        Jeff gunned it, and we lurched up the little mound, gaining precious speed.  But only for a heartbeat before we coasted again—uphill, this time.  The needle; the damned, dumb needle; drifted left.  And the madman, Armando gobbled our precious seconds like a voracious serpent.  One fifty-five, one fifty…

        When we saw the top of the pimple that towered like Mount Graham, the speedometer dropped from five to three miles per hour.  We jumped out and pushed.  I labored the way you do at the end of a long, hot practice when you drive a blocking sled with everything you have left, and then some, to show the coach questioning your commitment that he is wrong about you; to show your teammates he is wrong: to show your quarterback that Frank Cyrus would give up his last breath before he would quit on his team.  If you play the game, you understand.  

        I urged the spent Bel Aire along the ridge until there was no more air in my lungs than gas in the tank.  Finally, slowly, we picked up speed.  The endless sea of dead cars and rusting trucks rose out of a clearing in the pines.  We scrambled back into the car.  A lifetime later we coasted under another, much smaller sign.  Attached to the padlocked chain link gate that barred us from salvation, it signaled its one-word judgment: CLOSED.  

        I lolled against the seat, panting like a netted bass.  I can’t tell you how I felt.  The best I can do is to tell you how I felt once before when I thought my life was over.  

        The scoreboard clock showed Tucson High School 28, Corona High School 20.  Jeff and I sat on the bench amid the wreckage of our undefeated season, our sophomore year, our whole lives.  Our defense glared as their offense sauntered up to the scrimmage line with nine seconds left.  Eight, seven, six.  No more timeouts.  We could do nothing but watch—five, four, three.  To a fifteen-year-old gridiron god, nothing could be more terrible—BANG!  Nothing more final.  It was the worst moment of my life—until now.  

         Because while the seconds ticked away this time, it was not my dreams of glory running out, but my one and only life.  One thirty, one twenty-five.  This time, there would be no next season.  One twenty, one fifteen.  No next anything.

        I should have been thinking about the trunk, the makeshift weapons, and how I would use them on my last play.  But I could do nothing more than count down and strain my ears for the first distant buzz of death borne on Harley Davidson’s wings.

        “Frank!”

        Forty-five, forty, thirty-five…        

        “Frank!  Push!”        

        Six junkers hulked like gargantuan offensive linemen just outside the gate, three on either side.

        “Push!”  Again, the command from the quarterback, and when the quarterback calls signals, you run the play.  

        Maybe he had come up with a plan.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  I pushed with the memory of past strength and nothing more—the loyal halfback giving his all for dear old These Are The Last Few Seconds of Your Life High.  

        He screamed, "No!  The other way!"  

        Again, my training kicked in.  Even while I thought my best friend, the quarterback had lost his mind, I dragged myself to the hood and pushed back—toward the highway and certain, awful death.  

        I heard him trying to get the engine to turn over. "Jeff, what the hell?"

Even if it caught, what was the plan?  Use the thimble-full of gas in the carburetor to charge into a hundred cutthroats?  Go out in a blaze of stupid?  

        Just then, it caught, and coughed, giving him enough room to turn around.  

        "This is fun!" I yelled, standing aside as he completed the maneuver.  

        He jammed it into reverse and backed toward the line of scrimmage, but the great engine sucked the last drop from the line, hiccupped twice, and died.  

        Now I understood the objective if not the motive.  He didn’t have to tell me to push.  With two yards left to get the Bel Aire even with the other vehicles, and motion all but stopped in the squishy cinders, he gave up steering, and drove against the doorpost, the two of us shoving, fighting to position the car at the end of the line.  We might have made it if the rear fender hadn’t run into a tiny, shoulder high juniper.  Big enough to stop progress.  

        With the sudden change in velocity I tripped.  If I hadn’t been so near exhaustion, I probably would have kept my footing.  As it was, I plunged toward the ground, clanging my head on the fender on the way.  

        I staggered up in time to see him glance toward the highway, shake his head, and say, "It’ll have to do.  Come on."  

        Still in loyal halfback mode, I tried to follow him to the rear of the vehicle, but I must have been closer to oblivion than I realized because my first step carried me to the ground again.  As I struggled to my hands and knees, I heard him mutter, "What a pussy."   He retraced his steps and dragged me to my feet. Looping my arm around his shoulder, he supplied the steam to get us behind the car where we collapsed.    

          We sat on a bed of pine needles with our backs against the bumper, attempting to suck all the air out of the Mogollon Rim.  I made a mental note that if God let us live, I would never complain about wind sprints again.  Seconds passed, and as my breathing began the long journey back toward normalcy, I glanced up at the friendly, familiar tailfins hovering over us like the wings of a mother hen.

        Small comfort.  Fifty-five, fifty.  I heard motorcycle engines whining ever nearer now and did what any bench-warmer would.  I cursed my fate.  Why couldn’t the junkyard have been open, for Pete’s sake?  Why didn’t a beefy Highway Patrolman stroll out toward his cruiser?  Why couldn’t we catch some kind of break?  Why was my life ending this way?  

        I felt my forehead with a trembling hand.  I was going to have one heckuva bruise.  If a bruise could form in forty-two seconds.

        It’s funny how your mind works.  Sitting, waiting for the Angel of Death, I felt the pique of curiosity.  Between still-sharp intakes of cool mountain air, I said, “Why the heck did we do that, Mastermind?”

        Some things will always be.  The sun will come up at dawn.  It will go down at dusk.  And whenever I ask a stupid question, Jeff Barrett will answer, “Don’t be dumb.”

        I gave silent thanks for that.  Because I knew when Armando and the rest of his scumbag friends got to me, they would find me laughing, instead of crying.  

        The air coming to my lungs more easily now, I said, “Just give me a straight answer in the very few seconds we have left, will you?  How is turning the car around and pushing it next to a bunch of junkers supposed to help us?”

        “Because they’re not going to see the car, you nitwit.”

        “Okay, I’ll play your silly games.  It’s not like I have anything else to do with the rest of my very short life.  Why aren’t they going to see it?”  

        “You tell me, Brainiac—what are they looking for?”

        “Oh, I don’t know.  Maybe a ’57 Chevy Bel Aire?”  I delivered the information in a whisper/hiss because the gang was about to top the hill—like I could have somehow screamed over the roar of their rides.

        “Wrong, once again, Captain Dumb Ass.  They are looking for the ’57 metal-flake, copper-with-cream-trim, boss Chevy they have been chasing for the last forty-five minutes!”

        “So?”

        He chuckled, as the roar of the cycles became a malevolent wave about to wash over us.  “So, if the rear-end of this ’57 Chevy was facing the road, that’s what they would see.  But the rear-end is not facing the highway, so tell me, Little Brain, what will they be looking at very soon?”

        This time I did scream.  “Holy shit!”  

        “The light descends, covering our lovable dimwit with true knowledge.  What are they going to see?”

        “At the end of a line of wrecks, they will be looking at the hood of a ’57 Turdmobile, primed to a dull grey.”

        “No shit, Dick Tracey,” he said.

        We laughed like hell for a couple of seconds, and then we stopped, because they were approaching our spot, and we were after all, still two shaken teenagers.  We held our breath as the scream deafened us, and then gradually became quieter, and finally eased to a distant drone as they rolled away toward Payson.          

34:  About Armando

        A traditional Christmas tree stood in front of the living room window surrounded by brightly wrapped tokens of goodwill.  The aroma of pine needles mingled with that of chocolate chip cookies emerging from the oven.  

        I said, "Yum!"  This can’t be the right place!  

        "You like cookies, no?  What red-blooded American boy doesn’t?"

        "It’s very nice of you to offer," said Jeff.  

        "Not at all.  Adela will have the cookies in no time, and Dominic will be here soon."  

        I stayed with the small-talk, but not without effort.   I’ll be honest: the situation had me almost spooked.  Not afraid, exactly, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we might not be calling the plays.  You would expect it to be worse for Jeff, but he seemed content to see what followed.  In fact, he had relaxed enough to find amusement in my discomfort as I sat contemplating the Pepsi sweating in my hand.  

         I waited for a lull in the conversation and said, “Mrs. Calderon, to get back to why we’re here…”  

        “Yes, dear,” she said.    She smiled, and I couldn’t imagine being around a more pleasant person—until I remembered Adela.

        Jeff almost always took the lead in situations like this.  But, as I mentioned, he was in some kind of I think I’ll watch Frank squirm for a while before I bail us out mood, so he looked at me like he couldn’t wait for my next dazzling move.  

        It pissed me off more than a little, but knowing how stubborn he could be, I decided to get to the bottom of things myself.  Otherwise, we stood a good chance of sitting there, sipping Pepsi, until it was time to ring in 1965.  "We’re actually here to see Armando," I said.  

        Mrs. Calderon drew in a sharp draught and looked at something beyond the room.  Adela showed up at the edge of the kitchen again, watching her mom.  She wore the same lost little girl expression we had seen at the front door.  

        The older woman started, “Oh… I, uh…” We waited.  I tried to understand what I had said to upset her.  Adela took a step toward her mother, who now looked tired.  She seemed older than just a moment ago.  “I… I see,” she said, at the same time holding her hand up to Adela.  

        She took a deep, deep breath, and whatever had taken her over went away, along with the breath she let out slowly.  She looked at Jeff and me like she was checking inside of us, the way Adela had done earlier.  Like she needed to know everything was still all right—in our hearts.  I was getting used to it.  She must have been satisfied, because she said, “Boys, my son Armando, passed away five months ago.”          

Thirty-five:  Mrs. Calderon’s Strength

        She said, “… a terrible head injury.”

        I heard, “You killed my baby!”  

        I wanted to get away, but you couldn’t run away from a nice lady who just told you about the loss of her precious son.  Not when you knew so much about his death—like, who killed him, for instance.  I looked at Jeff.  

        You’ve probably figured out by now that Jeff Barrett always had an answer.  In the huddle in the fourth quarter after he had been sacked because some halfback blew a blocking assignment; to a teacher, to a coach, to his old man, his girl, some bum on the street looking for a handout.  But not after Mrs. Calderon told us about Armando.  

        We had been running from a ghost for half a year and the news hit him the same way it hit me.  We sat on the couch like ventriloquist dummies.

        I caught a glimpse of Adela and felt like I could see into her heart for a change.  Maybe it was a Christmas Miracle.  Whatever it was, her thoughts filled my mind as if she had whispered them in my ear. You white boys sure look white right now.  

        Jeff came to his senses first.  “Uh…” he said.

        I didn’t know how to follow that, but I felt obligated.  “I… we…”

        Then Jeff jumped in again.  We could be a real one-two punch, sometimes—on the field, and off.  "Sorry… "

        “For your loss, we mean,” I said.  We were getting the hang of it, now.

        Mrs. Calderon gave us a smile then, and as always with her and her spooky, angelic daughter, it made things better.  But I felt guilty because it was not this woman’s job to make us feel better.  She had lost a child, not us!  And how would she feel if she knew what had happened between him and us?  

        I tried to sort out how I felt.  We didn’t have to run anymore.  You don’t need to run from a dead guy.  So, shouldn’t I be happy?  Well, sure.  Our lives weren’t in danger.  But they never had been.

        Then, there was the matter of the dead guy—a guy we had beaten up.  How do you lay that tidbit on someone without breaking her pure, pure heart, and making her hate you, too?  By the time I came up with a way to start, and the courage to do it, I was too late.  

        “We used to hang around with Armando at Pioneer City,” said Jeff.

        “Pioneer City?”  She directed the question at Adela.

        “Yeah,” Jeff said.  “It’s an amusement park in Tempe.  It’s the reason we’re here.”  Next, he said something that made me proud to be his best friend, because I knew he wanted the safe deposit key in his hand.  “But maybe this isn’t the time to talk about that.  We’ve reminded you of something…”.  

        “Painful,” I said.

        Mrs. Calderon, as usual, was two or three moves ahead of us.  “My Armando.  He has…had something of yours?  He took something?”  Adela gave her a handkerchief and she patted at her eyes, but she never sobbed or even snuffled.  

        “It’s not like that, ma’am.  I loaned him something, but it can wait, really.”  For the first time in my life, I was glad to hear him lie.  

        Mrs. Calderon said, "So many things.  I apologize for what he did."

        "No, please.  We should come back."

        We knew she couldn’t last much longer.  We searched for the words that would let us escape so this dear lady and her daughter could be alone with their sadness.  The key could wait.  She looked into our hearts again, the way a mechanic takes one last look under the hood before wiping his hands on a clean blue rag.  She said, "Please, boys, come back tomorrow.  Maybe my other son, Dominic can help you."          

Thirty-six:  Fame

        We know a guy from New Jersey, and he says things are different back there.  More than just the weather.  He says it’s not safe to go out at night.  Not just in the bad parts of town, but almost everywhere.  

        Something he loves about Arizona is the way kids can roam the streets day or night, without their folks worrying.  

        “Maybe they don’t have the sense to worry about us,” I told him.  But that was strictly a joke.  

        Almost from the time we learned to ride our bikes we could take off and explore.  We never ran into anything more sinister than an occasional group of older boys, and they were never interested in anything more sinister than girls.

        Sometimes we rode as far north as Scottsdale Stadium.  I already told you that’s where the Red Sox play their spring training games.  To the south, we might make it to Sun Devil Stadium, home of the mighty Arizona State University Sun Devils.  We all wanted to be Sun Devils in those days and worshiped guys like John Torok, and Rollin’ Nolan Jones, and a little later Charlie Taylor and Tony Lorick.  

        Until we got into high school, I still thought about going there if things didn’t work out at Navy.  But Jeff ruled that out when Army got interested in us.  Or, him, anyway.    

        We never thought about the freedom we grew up with until we felt it slipping away.  All through high school, we drove all over the place for old times’ sake.   Sometimes we parked the car and took off on foot.  

        We usually took the Bel Aire, but Lenny Mendoza had a boss ride too (a ’58 Fairlane convertible), so sometimes a half-dozen of us would pile in there and take off to see and be seen.  

        As often as not we ended up at Desert Lanes where we hung around until we got kicked out.  You can only not bowl and not shoot pool for so long before the manager gets mad.  That changed when Jeff and I got famous.  

        The Wednesday night after the Scottsdale High game we stopped in to play the pinball machines.  We almost kept going when we saw Mr. Bowen, the manager, behind the counter.  He had been giving us the hairy eyeball and chasing us away for two years.  But as we walked past this time, he looked up and called to us.  "Hey, aren’t you Barrett and Cyrus?  Nice game, guys!"

        We mumbled thanks, still not used to grown-ups paying attention to us.  He chased us down by the time we got to the game room.  "Uh, wait up, guys."  He eased past us and barged into the room where they kept the pool tables and pinballs.  He puffed out his chest like he had invented billiards.  

        Jeff and I looked at each other, wondering if we should make a break for it.  Before we could move, the old guy said, "Listen, really, great game.  I was there, and you two looked great!"  He indicated the nearest pool table and said, "Next game’s on the house."  He put a dime in the slot, and when the balls fell into the bin under the table, he racked them up while we watched with our mouths open.  

        "Uh, gee, thanks, sir," said Jeff, turning toward the cue sticks nesting in neat rows in racks along the walls.  I followed him, and picked out a stick, sighting down its length, making sure it wasn’t too warped.

        "Not at all.  I’m Roy Bowen.  I’m a big fan."  He held out his hand.  

        We shook, embarrassed by the attention.  "Well, thanks, again," I said.  Then, I turned to Jeff.  "Stripes or solids?"  

        We couldn’t get too comfortable, because the whole time we played, the guy hung around and watched.  He spotted us to a second game, and while Jeff wracked them up, he made his move.  "Listen, guys, here’s the thing.  As I said, I’m a big fan.  In fact, I played a little football myself…"  He paused then, like he wanted to tell us more about the old days, but I guess he changed his mind.  Instead, he said, "… a long time ago."  

        After a shorter pause, he went on.  "Anyway, what I’d like to do is extend the hospitality of Frontier Lanes, so from now on, you two bowl free…pool and pinballs, too."  

        "Wow!"  we said in unison.  

        He smiled like a kid at Christmas.  "Not at all, guys.  Not at all.  Come in anytime, just order your shoes at the counter.  The kids there will take care of you."  

        "Thanks, again," I said, as he turned to go.  

        He looked over his shoulder and said, "Beat Tucson!"          

        "Uh, Sir?  I don’t think we’re playing them this year," Jeff said.  

        He stopped, and said, "You will if you make the playoffs."  

        When he left, I said, "What a nice guy!"  

        Jeff shook his head.  "You are such a dipshit."  

        "What are you talking about?"  

        "Nothing," he said, "but I’ll promise you one thing.  That oily bastard didn’t do that out of the kindness of his heart."

        The next week everything was free.  It didn’t take long to figure out the game.  Twenty minutes after we arrived, the first underclassmen showed up.  By the time we left an hour later, the place was packed with kids bowling and laughing.  Girls huddled in small groups stealing glances in our direction and whispering.  Jeff nodded at the happy scene and said, "You think they’re bowling for free?"

***

        In grade school, we thought we were free to wander.  The truth is half a dozen places formed a sort of a circuit:  two Circle Ks and a Seven-Eleven; an all-night laundromat; Frontier Lanes, like I mentioned, along with its parking lot.  Not that we hit every one of them every time we were out and around, but we were sure familiar with all of them.  

        We also tromped around a swampy mesquite forest not far from Mitch’s house.  From the last half of sixth-grade all the way through the summer after eighth-grade graduation we got out there at least once a week.  

        Sometimes we ran into different bunches of guys knocking around.  If they seemed okay, we might hang around with them for a while.  

        Sometimes a natural animosity existed.  It got tense at times, but we never got into any fights.  When it looked like trouble Jeff and the other leader would talk while the rest of us crushed dirt clods underfoot and gave each other tough-guy looks.  After a while everybody got bored, and the groups drifted off in opposite directions shooting over-the-shoulder glares that increased with the distance.

        Sometimes we wound up running from older boys.  And when we got bigger ourselves, we scared the heck out of younger kids when they asked for it.  That’s when we realized nobody wanted to hurt anybody.  Things just worked a certain way, and nobody messed with it, that’s all.  

Thirty-seven: A Very Bad Night

        On the ride home from the Calderon house, we tried to reconcile the news of Armando’s death with the certainty that he had been chasing us for months. There were interminable stretches of chatter, followed by endless reverie.  The whole thing seemed to take hours, but when I looked at the watch my dad had left me, only five minutes had passed.  It went on like that for the whole trip.  

        By the time we got home, we realized Mom and the girls would never give us any peace.  That’s when we remembered the Mesquites.  

        We parked the Chevy and walked along the stream.  During every lull in the conversation, I heard Mrs. Calderon’s voice from inside my head.   “… passed away five months ago… terrible head injury.”  Over and over.  “… passed away… five months… terrible… head injury.”  Relentless.  “… passed away… head injury… head… injury… head…”        

        I couldn’t get the anxiousness out of my chest—the way you feel before a big game sometimes, or, a fistfight.  It’s like you need to take a deep breath, but your chest won’t expand.  

        I struggled with it until the next thought came, and I said, “Jeff, do you think we killed him?’

        “Don’t be dumb.”

        I guess it was the circumstances that made it different this time because Jeff had said the same thing a thousand times. “My God, Jeff.  You are so predictable:  

                ‘Good morning, Jeff.’

                ‘Don’t be dumb.’

                ‘Nice day, isn’t it, Jeff?’

                ‘Don’t be dumb.’

                ’We may have killed a guy, and now, we’re going to the gas chamber.’"

        He looked at me with a half-smile, "Don’t be…"  

        In spite of my anger, I started laughing before he finished.

        We walked along, dust puffing up like little nuclear explosions with every step.  I was glad to be wearing my low-cut tennies instead of my good black loafers.  “All this time, we’ve been running from a ghost.”  

        He kicked a rock toward the ditch.  “Man!”  

        It didn’t seem possible that all the times we saw him were nothing but tricks played by our minds.  I said, “I know we saw that guy… lots of times.”

        He shrugged.  “Me too, man.  You don’t think she was lying, do you?”

        “That lady?  Mrs. Calderon?  I don’t see why she would.”

        “Me neither.”

        “The only thing—she said he died five months ago.  That would make it around the end of July, or the first part of August.”

        “Yeah?” he asked lobbing a pebble toward a lizard doing push-ups on a flat rock.

        “So that means he was alive for a month or so after the fight.”

        “Yeah?”

        “So, we probably did see him a couple of times before he died—and he really was following us.”  

         “What about all the times after that?”

        “I don’t know, man.  Maybe it was just our imagination.”  

        We covered 200 yards in silence.  Then, Jeff said, “This is crazy.”  

        More silence, then I blurted, “What if we killed him?”  

        “Don’t be…”

        “Stop it!”  I flung the word at an uncaring universe as well as my best friend.  “I told you, I kicked him as hard as I could…caught him right under the chin.  And you!  You hit him in the head with a brick, for God’s sake!”

        “Cinderblock,” he corrected.

        “You saw his face, Jeff.  We wracked the guy up, good.”

        We saw the southern edge of the Mesquites.  They didn’t cross McDowell Road, and neither did we.  With a new housing development on the other side, we had run out of our refuge, and our daylight.  But there was no shortage of things to talk about; to hurt about; to regret and relive—and try to understand.  We turned back, erasing, and remaking the tracks we had left in the dust just minutes before.  

        Finally, Jeff spoke again.  “So, we wrecked him.  He deserved it.”

        “He didn’t deserve to die.”

        “No?  You said yourself he was going to kill me.”

        “No, I said I thought he might kill you.”  

        “What’s the difference, Frank?  You did what you had to.  Me, too.  It didn’t exactly look like he was getting ready to serve you tea when I woke up.”  

        “He’s dead, Jeff.  And we might have done it.”

        “Okay, Okay.  Just stop talking for a minute.”  

        So, I stopped.  But I didn’t stop thinking.  Thoughts like, We’re murderers, for starters.  

        Jeff picked up a stick and poked it at a dead crawdad.  “Look, don’t get all crazy before we even know for sure what happened.”

        “We have to turn ourselves in, man.”

        “Why?  I already told you—we don’t even know what happened.  He died almost two months later, remember?  And even if it was because—because…” I kept waiting for him to say, …of us.  

         He pulled the stick out of the crawdad goo and snapped it toward the underbrush like it had been dipped in a snot bucket.  The way it zipped through the air, end around end, reminded me of Armando’s wooden leg whipping by his head back at the Barrett place.  

        “He tried to kill us, man!  And his death probably didn’t have anything to do with us anyway.  I mean, it was months later.”  

        I kept thinking, head injury.  

        “We’ll know more tomorrow when we talk to his brother.”

        “What’s he going to tell us, Jeff—his brother died of a migraine?”  

        “It was a whole month, Frank!”

         “She said, a terrible head injury.  So, you think people get kicked in the head every day—or bashed with cinder blocks!  No, he got a tumor or a blood clot from the beating we gave him, and…”

        “You can’t give people tumors.”

        “You know what I mean.  Whatever we did took a while, but it ended up killing him.”  

        “Yeah, like his head just exploded one day, because of what we did a month earlier.”  

        “Everything’s a damn joke to you, Jeff.  I’m telling you, we killed that guy.”  

        “You don’t know that.”  

        “Then you tell me what happened.  You’re the one with all the answers.  So, what do you think, smart guy?  What makes sense?  ...a terrible head injury…you think that’s a coincidence?  God, what are we going to do?  We killed him, Jeff.  I know we did!”  

         “Okay, just listen a minute.  All I’m saying is whatever we did, and however it turned out, he had it coming.  Don’t you remember that night?  You told me I saved your life.  And I know you saved mine.  This was a bad guy, Frank.  Besides, you think he never pulled anything like this before?”  

        "No.  That doesn’t mean he should die.  Don’t you feel bad about that?  Even a little."  

        "I told you a hundred times.  We don’t know what happened.  And whatever happened to him, he deserved it."  He licked his index finger in the fading light.

         “Jeff, if we killed him, we’re murderers.”

         “No!  No!”  He yelled.  “It was self-defense!”

        “Right,” I snorted, surprised by his sudden vehemence.

        “Or maybe it’s manslaughter.  That’s when it’s like an accident.”  

        “Do you really care what it’s called, Jeff?”  Because I don’t!”          

        His face glowed crimson in the suddenly hellish sunset.

        “Frank, listen to me.  Stop worrying about poor old, Armando Calderon for a second, and start thinking about us.  Do you know what will happen to us if anybody finds out about this?”  

        “Do you think they’ll hang us?”  

        “Naw, we’re minors.”  

        “Put us in jail forever?”

        “No, but we might go to juvie.  We could kiss our scholarships goodbye—that’s for sure.  Plus, our reputations would be shot to hell.  And the girls…”

        “Our reputations?  We maybe killed a guy, and you’re worried about your reputation?” 

        “Take it easy, man.  Even if we… if he died because… you know.  We didn’t do anything wrong.”  

        “Died because of what, Jeff?  Why can’t you say it?  We killed him, okay?  And besides that, why would our reputations be ruined, if we didn’t do anything wrong?”  

        “I don’t know, man.  I’m just thinking, here.  People act strange about things like that.”  

        “Things like murdering people?  God!”

         Now, his voice went soft.  “Don’t say that again.”  

        He forced air through puffed-out cheeks.  As angry as I was, I figured it would be better to stay quiet.

        "Frank, listen, it’s done.  He’s dead, and we can’t bring him back—not that it would make the world a better place.  The question is, what do we do, now?"  

        Before I could answer, he said, “We need to make sure nobody ever finds out about this stuff.”  

        “How are we going to do that?”

        “Just don’t say anything.”  

         “What about his brother?   That Dominic guy?  What if he finds out?”

        "Finds out, what?"

        "That we killed his brother."

        “We didn’t kill his goddam brother!”  

        I couldn’t stop myself.  “I want to know, Jeff.  Are we going to kill him, too?”  

        “Shut up!”  He took a step toward me, fists raised.  

        I jumped back, my guard up, too.  Without thinking, I launched my counterattack.  It sliced through the air between us, more devastating than any doubled fist.  “What now, Jeff?  Are you going to kill me?”  

        It stopped him.  I don’t know if he intended to come after me, or just remind me who was boss.  It didn’t matter.  I had beaten him to the punch.  

        He dropped his hands, and watched my eyes, battling his own desperation even as he tried to deal with mine.  "It’s going to be all right, Frank.  We’ll get through this, you watch."  

        But I was too far gone.  Too crazy with the idea that my best friend and I were murderers—or killers—or manslaughterers.  Take your pick: none of them would look great on a college application form.  

        I kept seeing myself trying to explain the whole business to St. Peter while my dad looked on from inside the Pearly Gates wondering why I wasn’t allowed to enter.

        The full moon shone like it had that first night in the desert when it hung just beyond our reach.  The night everything started to go haywire.  I saw Jeff raise his palms in a plea for calm.  

        I guess the two nights were too much alike.  My mind kept bouncing between them.  I thought about where we were then, and where we were now—how much we’d been through, and how much was yet to come.  I said, “This is all your fault!”        

***

        We didn’t fight that night.  We walked all over the Mesquites, talking, and brooding.  We argued about who killed Armando; me, or Jeff?  Or both?  Or neither?  And how would you sort it out?  We argued about how guilty we should feel—or whether we should feel guilty at all, since we didn’t have a choice.  We hadn’t meant to kill him.  If we had killed him.  

        We talked about what to do next.  Go to the police?  A priest?  Keep quiet?  After a long, silent stretch, punctuated only by the occasional curse in the darkness, I said, “Well, at least we’re not dead, like some people.”  

        Jeff said, "He deserved it, the creepy bastard."  

        I said, "Come on, Man.  You have to feel a little bad for a guy who’s dead—even if he is a low-life like Armando Calderon."  

          "Yeah, well, right now, I’m more worried about his brother and what happens tomorrow."

***

        At 2:14 a.m. we dragged ourselves past the kitchen wall clock, through the living room, and into my bedroom. I lay in bed for a long time thinking about everything that had happened.  I felt like I had been drugged, my arms and legs too heavy to move.  Even so, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a long time, if at all.

        And my best friend?  I heard him flop into the bed across the room, and half-a-minute later I felt his profound snores bouncing off the wall.          

        It turned out I was right about not being able to get to sleep.  It probably took an hour, maybe longer.  It seemed like it, anyway.  And when I did finally drop off it didn’t last long, because I kept having a nutty dream.  We were back chasing Calderon down the freeway, and when we pulled up beside him, he pointed his gun at me, just like in real life.  But, in the dream, when I looked past the yawning hole in the barrel, the face I saw looking at me wasn’t Armando Calderon’s—it was mine.  

Thirty-eight:  Dominic’s Story

        The next afternoon we walked along the sidewalk toward the Calderons’ front door.  Jeff looked at his watch and said, "Three minutes early, Poindexter.  Feel better, now?"  

        "I just don’t understand what the big deal is about getting somewhere on time.  You say you’ll be somewhere at one o’clock, you show up at one o’clock."  

        "Or fifteen minutes early, just in case there’s somebody somewhere who doesn’t know you’re a dork."  

        "Or, in your case, two hours late just in case there’s somebody who doesn’t understand how rude you are."  

        As he rang the bell he said, "Dork."  

        Adela showed us into the living room and we sat on the serape-covered couch again.  

 When we had been there long enough for Jeff to guzzle most of the Pepsi Mrs. Calderon had served, we heard the front door open, and in walked Dominic.  

        Adela shouted his name and threw herself into his arms before the door even shut, but not before we got a good look at him.  He looked exactly like his brother, and completely different at the same time.  The first thing I thought was, He looks like Armando would, if he ever cleaned himself up a little.  The beard and hair were the same—but clean.  The build was the same.  It screamed linebacker!  But you had a picture of two linebackers on the sidelines.  The Dominic linebacker (I pictured him wearing number 55) stood straight, craning his neck toward the field, waiting for the defense to go back in.  

        Linebacker Armando (number 57), slouched on the bench, elbows on knees, hands clasped in front of him, staring at the grass, now and then looking around furtively as if he intended to tie a teammate’s shoelaces together if he got the chance.  

        You could tell by his mud-and-blood-caked-jersey that Dominic was a big part of the game.  

        Armando’s clean, but wrinkled jersey branded him a bench-warmer and an unsavory character.  It hung untucked around his hips like a tangible demerit.  I could imagine him grabbing it from the bottom of his locker where it had rested for a week on top of four joints and a switchblade.  

        But now the real Dominic gave his mother a warm hug and strode toward us with his hand extended in greeting.

        Mrs. Calderon performed a little maneuver, like a dance step that left Dominic where she had just been, and her heading for the kitchen.  “Dominic, you can stay awhile, no?”  She didn’t wait for an answer, saying, “I’m going to take Adela to the mall to do some Christmas shopping. This is Jeff.”  They shook hands.  “And Frank.”  

        My turn.  His grip was powerful and cordial.  

        We had stood to shake his hand the way my dad taught me.  I’m not sure it’s in an etiquette book somewhere, but I would never shake hands unless I stood first, although I noticed that lots of guys did, even some grown-ups.  It seemed to me that a man who wouldn’t stand showed himself to be both rude and weak.    

        Adela grabbed a sweater for herself and a light jacket for her mother and handed it to her as they walked to the door.  They took one last look into our souls, and Mrs. Calderon said to us, “You are very nice boys.  It was very nice to meet you.”  

        We called, "Good-bye," and, "Merry Christmas."  I even tried a tentative, "Feliz Navidad."  Adela giggled, and Mrs. Calderon gave her a stern look.  Before she closed the door behind her, she said to Dominic, “I think you have something in common with these two young men, Dominic.   Although you would have been on opposite sides of the ball.  This one,” she said, nodding at Jeff, “is the quarterback.”  She said it like there could be only one.  

        She looked at me, and something felt warm inside my chest.  “And this one—a fine halfback.”  Then, “Nice boys,” and she and her daughter were gone.  

        “How does she do that?” asked Jeff.  

        “Yeah!”  I said.  “And your little sister, too?”

        Dominic offered Jeff another Pepsi and looked at mine.

        “No, thank you,” I said.

        They both smiled, but I’m pretty sure for different reasons.  Dominic took our glasses into the kitchen and came back half a minute later.  He set a fresh Pepsi on the coaster in front of Jeff, and a glass of ice water in front of me.  Then he went back and got himself a Pepsi.  

        When he sat down Dominic said, “So, you have noticed their…” He paused and then said, “…gift.”  

        “They make you feel so peaceful,” I blurted.

        Before Dominic could say anything, Jeff asked him, “How did she know we play football—let alone our positions?”        

“I don’t know how she does it, exactly.  Sometimes she just gets feelings about people—Del, too.  Especially if they like you—or dislike you.”  He indulged in a comforting laugh, and said, “They like you two.”  

        Then, he got serious.  He looked at Jeff and said, “You are Jeff Barrett, no?”  I have something for you.  Excuse me.”  Man, everybody in this house was sure polite!  I struggled to see how Armando fit in.  Dominic left the living room.  From down the hall, we heard, “I will just be a second.”  And then more softly, “Here it is.”  

        Jeff and I looked at each other.  It had to be the key, but we barely dared to hope.  

        A few seconds later Dominic sat down again and handed Jeff the key.  

         Jeff looked at me, and we both let out big, slow, puffs of air.  “Thanks,” he said.  “This means a lot to me!”  

        Dominic said, “I thought it might be yours.” He had a powerful effect on us because he looked so much like Armando.  But he made us feel completely different—the way we felt around his mom and sister.

        “Your mother is very—calm,” said Jeff.

        Dominic nodded, but right away Jeff took another shot.  “And strong.”  

        “You don’t know how strong,” Dominic said.  “To understand that, you need to know how my brother died.”  

         From the minute Armando cold-jumped us that night in the desert, I had been crazy.  I had two minds—an ordinary mind, filled with thoughts of school, football, proms, girls, and scholarships.  It thought about playing for Navy or maybe Army.   Sometimes it worried about how Mom and the girls would get along after I left.  

        I mentioned girls. I’m not going to tell you what Paige and I did or didn’t do when her folks weren’t home.  It’s none of your damned business.  But I will tell you I had thought about her a lot lately—mostly about how hard it would be when I went to Navy and we wound up a thousand miles apart.  

        The other mind thought about Armando and nothing else.  Where was he?  Would he ever leave us alone?  Was that him peeking around the corner?  What would happen if we ran into him again?  Would the crazy bastard shoot us?  Could anybody be as evil as he seemed?

        And now, as we sat with his brother, this brain worked on some new ideas.  For example, how much alike were they?  They seemed nothing alike.  But they were brothers.  So, would Dominic want revenge if he found out we killed his brother?  Both minds got jolted awake when Dominic asked Jeff, “How did Armando end up with your key?”  

        As usual, Jeff reacted before me.  “We asked him to hold on to it as a favor.  It’s a long story.”  So much for telling the truth.

        Jeff’s expression changed when he looked at Dominic.  He wasn’t afraid, but the cockiness disappeared.  No longer the general inspecting the troops, he reminded me of my little sister when she looked up at my dad sometimes.  I almost laughed because the look didn’t belong on his face.  Like it had wandered into the ladies’ room by mistake.

        Warmth and well-being spread through my body again.  I wondered if the people in this house had magical powers.  

        When the big guy leaned toward him, Jeff listened like he was waiting for the next play to be called.  Dominic said, “Do you mind if I smoke?”  He lit up a Camel.  

        I realized I had been staring at him, and said, “Excuse me.  You just look so much like your brother.”  

        “I know,” he said.  “But I’m not Mondo.  We’re different people.”  

        He sat back and smiled a joyless smile.  “Were different people.  I’m still not used to him being gone.”  

        He puffed absently while he talked.  If we had been a little older, he would have offered us a smoke, I’m sure.  But he knew about athletes and smoking.   After a while, he said, “I know he took the key from you.  I know a lot about what he did before he died.  He was my brother.”  

        “What do you mean?”  Jeff asked, some of the confidence returning to his face.  Sometimes I thought he went too far with his innocent routine.  Anyone could see Dominic knew the score.

        “Mondo did some bad things after my father left.”  He waited, like he expected Jeff to say something more, but it didn’t happen.  I felt bad because sometimes Jeff needed a kick in the butt, or at least a nudge in the right direction.  But not from me.  He was the quarterback.

        Dominic continued, “I know he sold you drugs.  Or he was supposed to.  Something went wrong.  He probably tried to cheat you.  And he wound up with your wallet and money.  And the key.”          

        Jeff sat like a rock.  I shifted on the couch.  Not much, and despite my best attempts not to—but I did, a little.                  

        “Did he tell you that?” asked Jeff.

        "He didn’t have to.  After he died, I went through his stuff.  I didn’t want Mom to have to do it.  

        "But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.  You guys came for more than the key."  

        Sonofabitch!  Now he was looking into our souls!  The Calderons seemed to know as much about what happened inside our skin as we did.

         I said, “We were hoping you could tell us about how your brother died."  

        “Yes. I thought you might.”  

         "I still don’t understand how you knew the key belonged to me?"

        “Armando didn’t leave much when he died.  We gave all the money to the Church and flushed the grass.  So, when you two showed up looking for something Armando had taken, it pretty much had to be the key.”  

        “Where did you go to school?” I changed the subject like that sometimes, and it drove Jeff crazy.  Now, he and Dominic looked at me like I had just dropped from the mother ship.  I could see why.  It’s not like we weren’t discussing something important.  I just figured it wouldn’t kill us to be polite and give Dominic a chance to say something about himself.

        He said, “Sunnyslope—Go Vikings!  Class of ’57.  We went to the state quarterfinals that year.  Got eliminated by…”  He smiled and looked at Jeff, then me.  

         “Us!”  We shouted.  

        He nodded, still smiling.  “You guys got knocked out in the next round by Tucson High.”  

        I said, "I hate Tucson."  

        Jeff nodded.  

        "Really," said Dominic.  

        Everybody laughed.  We chatted a little more about football and learned that Dominic had been Mr. Arizona High School Football his senior year. He turned out to be the guy I mentioned earlier—the one who made first-team All-America.  He earned a full-ride to USC, but attended ASU instead, so he would be around to keep an eye on Armando.          

        Armando caused so much trouble Dominic left school after his freshman year.  Jeff and I couldn’t imagine making such a sacrifice.

        From what we already knew we weren’t surprised to hear Armando played for Sunnyslope several years after Dominic—or that he didn’t excel.  In fact, he failed to make the first team which disappointed Dominic a lot.  He said his little brother had better physical gifts than him but lacked the self-discipline required to be a top-notch player.  

        Dominic shook his head.  “I really thought it would help him if I stayed home.  He was always in trouble, and I was the only one who could get him straightened out.  But, it never lasted.  The funny thing is, he was a real neat little kid before my dad left us.  It sounds terrible to say but the rest of us were glad when Dad took off: but Mondo took it very hard.”  

        He refilled the drinks, lit another cigarette, and went on.  “My father treated Mom very badly—all of us, really.  But mostly her.  He drank a lot, and when he got drunk, he got mean.  He used to hit Mom.  It usually started when he gave us kids a hard time.  He would smack one of us for practically no reason, and that would set Mom off.  You know how mothers can be when they’re protecting their kids.”  We didn’t, but it didn’t seem right to say anything, so we just listened.  

        “Well, it could turn into something very ugly.  He really whaled on her sometimes.  I was the oldest, seven or eight I guess, so I tried to protect her.  I would get Mondo and Del out of the house, then go back.  He took it out on both of us until he was worn out and then stomped off to some bar.          

        “I don’t know why it affected Mondo more than the rest of us.  Maybe because he used to watch.  He would grab onto a window ledge and pull himself up.  

        “Mom and I got the worst of it.  Del was just a baby and didn’t understand.  But Mondo—He could watch, but he was too little to help.  

        “When he got a little bigger he changed.  He ran around the house like a wild thing.  All the time breaking stuff.  Yelling at Del and Mom.  He went after the dog with a broom once.  He got into fights almost every day at school… wet the bed until he was nine.  

        "Mom couldn’t control him.  One day I asked him, ’Mondo, why do you act this way?  You’re breaking your mother’s heart.’  

        "He said, ’It’s her fault!’  

        "He wouldn’t listen to anybody but me.  He hung around me all the time, but I didn’t mind.  We talked a lot, but not about the things Dad did—that just made him sad, and angry.  And not about why he blamed Mom.  

        "I could usually get him to settle down for a while.  Then he would go nuts again, and nobody knew what set him off."

        Dominic stopped talking and crushed out his last Camel.  What he said next hit us as hard as Armando had hit Jeff five months earlier.  He said, “You guys didn’t kill him.”  

        Before we could react, he said, “It kept getting worse.  He dropped out of school his senior year—let the team down, bad.  Coach tried to help him.  Keep him going.  He would call me up and beg me to talk to him, which, of course, I was doing anyway.  But it just didn’t do any good.          A month after he quit the team, he dropped out of school.  

        "He started hanging around with a gang and smoking marijuana.  He stayed stoned all the time.  Then he started dealing and got into heroin.  The funny thing was, he was so mean he couldn’t get along with the guys in the gang.  Most of them stayed mad at him.  That’s how he lost his leg.  A guy cut him in a fight.  Right up near his groin.  He lost so much blood we thought he might die."  Dominic went into the kitchen to empty the ashtray.  When he came back he didn’t say anything for a long time.  He smoked three cigarettes in five minutes.  I kept track.            Jeff said in his church voice, “Uh, you were telling us about how we didn’t kill him.  How you…”

        "How I knew you got into a fight with him?  I didn’t exactly know, but I figured.  I mean, he wound up fighting just about everybody he met.  That’s how he did business.  He liked to find guys without too much experience, no offense."  We were slightly embarrassed I guess, but that’s all.  He wasn’t breaking any news to us.          

        Besides, talking to Dominic was like talking to a priest.  “He would get guys to meet him in out-of-the-way places, and scare them to death, or beat them up.  That way he wound up with the money and the drugs.  I mean, what could they do?  Call the police?”  

        Jeff gave me a look.

        “The other thing is—you guys—the kind of guys you are.”  

        Jeff said, "What do you mean, ’The kind of guys we are?’"  He wasn’t being cute.

        “You guys are not just a couple of scared kids.  You play football—and you are good.  Which means you aren’t going to cut out just because somebody looks mean—or even if things get rough.          

        “Then he comes home all banged up, and now you guys show up.”  He shrugged.  It made sense the way he explained it, but nobody could convince me this whole family wasn’t full of psychics or saints.  Or demons.    

         A half-smoked cigarette later he said, “We all saw the end coming, but we couldn’t do anything to stop it.  He just got wilder and wilder: wouldn’t talk to anybody except me.  And then, only when he needed something.  Like, one time I gave him fifty bucks for a new set of tires—which he never bought.

        "He drove this beat-up old Mercury: the more he drove it, the worse it got.  It only had ten thousand miles on it, but it looked like—well, you know.  I got on him about taking care of it.  Told him the cops would stop him for sure.  As long as it ran, he didn’t care.  ’At least get the taillight fixed,’ I told him.  But he didn’t care."  

        He stopped, shook his head, and said "That’s what’s ironic about his death.  If he’d just got that damned taillight fixed, he might still be alive."  I hadn’t heard him swear before that.  You could see he didn’t believe the business about Armando being alive.  "Like I said, he just didn’t care how that thing looked.  So, naturally, one night he got pulled over."  

        He lit up again, took an extended drag, and stubbed it out.  “He let the officer get halfway up to him.  Then, he floored it—right into a telephone pole.  Went straight through the windshield.”  He wasted another innocent cigarette and said, “We had to have a closed casket for the service.”  

        I wanted to ask him if he thought Armando had done it on purpose, but I changed my mind.  After that, there wasn’t too much more to say.  We talked a little more football.  

        On our way out the door, I asked him a question even though I knew Jeff would give me a hard time about it.  "I know this is a little personal, but I feel like we’ve known you a hundred years.  How did you guys get through the whole thing?  Your mom and sister seem so peaceful.  Why aren’t they angry and sad?  And you, too?  I know you were very close to your brother."

        The way he looked at me gave me the strangest feeling—like he felt sorry for me.  He said, "You just need something to believe in."

        After he closed the door, Jeff said, "Dork."

        Back in the Chevy, I remembered all the Calderon family photographs and the crucifixes.  As I fiddled with the radio presets, I figured I might have trouble sleeping again.  

        Here’s something weird.  The first song that came on was an old rhythm and blues hit called "Tossin’ and Turnin.’"  Don’t tell me there isn’t a God.         

Thirty-nine:  Grady

        On even years, Mitch and his family came to Phoenix for Christmas.  It turned out to be a good thing that Jeff visited his grandparents in Iowa because we needed the room.  Aunt Ruth and Uncle Len had two girls and a grown-up son besides Mitch.  

        The brother, Grady, didn’t come down, and that was good, too.  We had eight people spread over three bedrooms.  One bathroom.  Four girls, two of them teenagers.  You could forget about getting into the bathroom in the mornings.  Still, I enjoyed seeing Mitch again.  

        I also loved to hear Aunt Ruth’s stories about growing up on the farm with my dad.  She said he was the bravest person she ever knew, even as a little boy.  Once he got off by himself somehow, and they found him in a field next to an electrified fence.  When they got close, he said, "Look!" and grabbed a strand of barbed wire, hung on, and twitched.  Then he let go and laughed.  He was reaching for it again when his father (my grandfather) snatched him away and hugged him to his chest.  According to Aunt Ruth, Dad was three or four years old.                          I grew up hearing stories like that, so I didn’t think too much about them, other than to laugh when I heard them, or thought about them.

        Then, one afternoon Jeff and Mitch and I overheard Jeff’s mom talking long-distance to one of his aunts.

        "Yeah," we heard her say.  "Jeff’s revenge."  

        She laughed and listened to the person on the other end.  

        Then she said, "Jessie was babysitting for him and Maureen.  He kept pestering them to play football."  

        Another pause as she held the receiver to her ear, then, "Hell, he was barely old enough to hold a football, but he wouldn’t stop.  You know how he is."  

        Another pause, and a giggle, and she said, "Well, she got tired of his nonsense, so she shut him in the closet.  He raised hell for a couple of minutes, then got real quiet."  

        Now, we could even hear the lady on the other end laughing over the line.  

        Jeff’s mom finished the story snorting and shaking, and wiping tears from her eyes.  "Jessie got worried, so she opened the closet door and almost passed out.  There stood little Jeff standing over a big turd.  A real steamer!  He pulled his pants up, looked up at her and said, ’That’s what you get.’"  

***

        Mitch drove the family’s old Pontiac down two days early, but his folks wouldn’t allow him to drive alone, so he had to bring his freshman sister, Janet with him.  

        We went to Christown Mall to do some Christmas shopping, but we had to take Janet and Maddie with us.  As soon as we walked through the main entrance, we split up.  

        Janet was about the only thing on the planet as good-looking as Maddie.  It must have been hard for them to tolerate each other, but they worked out a holiday cease-fire.  I could see the benefits from their perspective.  If they put up with each other, they could flirt their cute little bottoms off with a thousand strange guys, and maybe make life miserable for their brothers, too.  

        They enticed two dopes to follow them around like two huge puppies.  When we ran into them outside the Woolworth’s you could tell it made their day. The plan was for them to wiggle around and laugh inside their black little hearts while Mitch and I stared the guys down.  And that’s what would have happened if one of the guys hadn’t recognized me—the one who looked like The Abominable Snowman’s big brother.  He said, "Hey, you’re that halfback from Corona.  Midas."

        "Cyrus," I said.

        "Yeah, Cyrus. That’s it!  Jackson. Arnold Jackson.  I’m a defensive tackle for West High."

        "Sure," I said, remembering how we had humiliated them back in October.

        He looked at his buddy then nodded toward me.  "This guy is a hell of a halfback!"  He turned to the girls and said, "S’cuse me."  Then, back to me, "Man, you ran me ragged in that game."  

        For the first time, he seemed to notice Mitch, and said, "Man!  You must be Barrett! Pleased to meet you."  

        Mitch didn’t know what to do.  I said, "This is my cousin, Mitch Cyrus, the best pitcher in the state."  

        After they got tired of being snubbed by the girls, they left.  Janet looked up from her compact mirror long enough say, "Were those guys stupid, or what?"

        Snapping her own compact shut, Maddie said, "Strictly farmers."          

***

        Let me tell you about Christown Mall.  There are people who think it should be on the Seven Wonders list.  I’m not one of them, but I see their point.  If Paige got on the selection committee, The Pyramids wouldn’t have anything to worry about, but the Colossus of Rhodes might be in trouble.

        If you’re a girl, it’s the neatest place in the world, no disrespect to Disneyland.  Sure, if Disneyland was in Arizona, it would be the best, no question about it.  But it’s not.  So, you have to give the nod to Christown.  

        If you haven’t been there, it’s hard to imagine.  (Guys, be patient, here.  In case you haven’t already figured it out, I’ll tell you why it’s important for you in a few seconds.)  

        Visualize Sears, and Montgomery Ward’s, and J. C. Penney’s, and about any other big department store you can imagine.  Next, picture all kinds of other stores—hardware stores, furniture stores, TV repair shops, record stores, restaurants—you name it.  Now, put them all next to each other.  

        Now, try to dream up a whole bunch of places that don’t have anything to do with the ones I already told you about—barber shops, beauty shops, pet stores, bookstores, and sporting goods places.  In the middle of the whole thing, drop a bitchin arcade with pinball machines; bumper cars; and a fun house, complete, with mirrors, and a skirt-blowing nozzle: the whole nine yards.  Then, put about a million more stores on another floor above that, and a roof over the whole thing, and in the middle of that floor, put the food court.          

         You’ve never eaten at a place like the food court. It has all these little places where you walk up and order anything you want.  One serves burgers and fries, and the one right next to it might have Mexican or Chinese food.  There are even places that serve nothing but cookies, I kid you not!  All these places are like the beach surrounding a huge sea of tables and chairs.

        After you get your food, you can sit and talk as long as you want with no waitresses to pester you.  That’s what we did after we finished our Christmas shopping (all under one roof.)  Mitch got three pizza slices from The Leaning Tower, and I stopped at a Greek joint for something called moussaka.  I thought Paige would be proud of me for trying something new, then I remembered what Jeff said.  "You spend a lot of time worrying about what your girlfriend thinks."  

        Anyway, the best thing about the food court is that you can get exactly what you want.  For instance, since the Greek place only served Pepsi, I just walked to the sandwich place next door and ordered a Coke.  

        So, now you can see why girls love Christown.  I mean, with all the different stores and everything.  And with a million girls swarming all over the place, you can see why guys like it.                         

***

        The moussaka turned out to be a colossal mistake.  After I trashed it, I ordered some good old American fish and chips from The Jolly Goode Fish ’n Chips Shoppe.  I should have done that in the first place.  I felt like I was throwing money in the garbage, but a guy has to make a stand somewhere.  Foreign food is all right I guess, but if you’re looking for somebody to share a plate of goat’s eyes and eggplant, you should try some National Honor Society nerd.   Or, a U of A grad.  

        We talked about old times, and family, and sports.  I already told you what a great baseball player Mitch was, but I didn’t tell you he had given up football.   It looked like he might have a shot at the big leagues someday, and Uncle Len didn’t want him to risk getting injured.  I understood, but I also understood there were dues to be paid, and so did Mitch.  If you’re a guy, you know what I’m saying.  Maybe girls have a similar arrangement, I don’t know.  I said, “You’re a real petunia, Mitch.”  

        "Like a football Neanderthal would know a petunia if it bit him in the butt." His smile faded before it blossomed. "Great season, Frank.  You’ll get into Navy now, for sure.  Or, at least you will if the scouts don’t look at the State game films."  

        "I know," I said, keeping my eyes on my food.

        “What the hell happened?  You looked like shit.  And Jeff, too.”  

        “I know.”

        “Really, man.  You should have stomped those guys. You’re damned lucky you won.”  

        I hesitated.  Jeff and I had spoken before he left, and he had only reluctantly agreed that we should let Mitch—and only Mitch—in on our latest scrape with Armando.  Now, I said, “We’ve had a lot on our minds lately.”          

        "Well, you sure as hell didn’t have football on your mind that night.  You two stunk up the place."

        We took our lettermen’s sweaters off and hung them over the backs of our chairs.         Mitch said, "It’s that Calderon guy, isn’t it?"  

        “Yeah.  You remember when we were supposed to come up and listen to your new stereo?”

        “Yeah? You think I didn’t see through that bullshit about your mom being sick?"

         “Something happened.”  

        “Yeah?”

        I followed his gaze to six girls lining up at a place called Salad City.  I felt weird gawking at them as they talked, and giggled, and ordered.  They were easy to look at, but they weren’t Paige.  

        They were ordering salad—at a place where you can get any food known to man!  I will never understand girls.

        I can just see Jeff.  “I’d like a garden salad, double lettuce, please.”  While we’re indulging in this fantasy, why don’t we have him wash it down with a damned Tab!

        I forgot about it and said, "Look, this is serious, and I need to talk to you about it before Maddie and Janet come back."  

        He said, "Yeah, I figured."

        "What do you mean," I said.  "What do you know?"

        "Just what you told me.  About buying the dope and the fight in the desert.  And later, at Jeff’s house."  

        "Listen, Mitch.  What I’m going to tell you… It’s a secret.  Nobody can know, okay?  Not even Freddie, or the twins."          

        He nodded.  "Sure."  

         If Mitch said he wouldn’t tell anybody, he wouldn’t.  The problem was, he had already told somebody.  

        I told him about the Hell’s Angels chasing us through the hills, and how right after that we learned Armando was dead.  Through the whole story, he squirmed like he was trying to avoid a bullhead on his chair.  When I finished, he said, “Don’t you feel a little better?  Knowing he wasn’t after you all that time?”  

        “Not really, man.  Things are all messed up now.  Jeff’s broken up with Donna.  Me and Paige.  And half the guys on the team won’t talk to us.”  

        “Why?” he asked.

        “I don’t know.  I guess we started acting a little weird.  We wouldn’t talk to anybody because we didn’t want them to know we were trying to buy dope.  

        “It’s weird.  I keep thinking, if somebody else heard about it, they’d think we were crazy.  I mean, how could we have been so sure he was chasing us if he really wasn’t?  We couldn’t have imagined all those times we saw him—the Hell’s Angels, the time at the apartment with the trash cans—the lagoon?  If it wasn’t Armando, who was it?”  

        "He was dead, the whole time?"

        I nodded.  "Yep."

        He fiddled with his class ring.  “There’s something you need to know,”

        "What do you mean?"

        “You were right.  You did see somebody.  Only it wasn’t Calderon.”  

        “What are you talking about?  Stop messing around, all right?”

         “You saw somebody that looked like Armando.”

        “How the hell would you know, Mitch?  What’s going on?”

        “I only did it to help you guys out, Frank.”

        “Did what?”  

        “I was very worried about you guys—what you might do…”

        “What!”  

        “After you told me what happened at Jeff’s house.  With the fence and everything and the horse getting loose…”

        “For the love of god!  What!”  

        “I told Grady.”

        “Your brother?  The cop?”  

        “Detective.  It was him.”  

        Like I said, sometimes I can be pretty thick.  “What was him?”

        “The guy.”

        “What…”

        “The guy you saw at the lagoon… at the trash can.  Maybe you saw him peeking around a corner or something, too.”  The salad bar girls sat down at a table close to us.  We didn’t give them a glance.  

         “So, you got him to follow us?”          

        “It was more like poking around trying to find out about Armando.”  

        “Then why did we keep running into him?”                

        “Maybe because he was in the area, spying on Armando.”  

        Then, I remembered, "Grady doesn’t have a beard."

        "Didn’t," he said.  "He’s been working undercover for the Payson PD for over a year."  

        “Oh.  So, you told him about Jeff and me, and he followed us around?”  

        “Not you, Frank, Armando.  I already told you!  Just on his days off, sometimes.  I asked him to make sure you guys were okay, that’s all.”  

        I thought about it.  “Wow!  What a nice thing to do—both of you!”  

        He shrugged and settled into a comfortable position.  

        “So, he’s the one who scared Maddie by the school?”  

        "What do you mean?"

        "I told you, remember?  She was riding her bike, and he said he wanted to sell her some insurance…scared the hell out of her."

        “Oh, yeah.  That was Armando.”

        “Wait a second, Mitch.  How the heck do you know?”

        “Grady told me.  He found out about it from the cop Maddie saw.  That’s why he was there during the storm.  He thought Armando might be up to something.”  

        “But he didn’t want us to know, right?”

        He nodded.

        “So that’s why he was sneaking around.”  I took a long, slow pull on my Coke.  “And what about the Hell’s Angels?”  

        “I don’t know.”

        “You mean Grady wasn’t with those guys?”  

        “You know Grady doesn’t own a motorcycle, Frank.”  

        I knew the answer to the next question, but I asked anyway.  “What about the guy who robbed the liquor store?’

        “What liquor store?”  

        It made sense, now, like a lot of other things in my post-Armando world.  Of course, the liquor store guy wasn’t Armando.  Armando was dead!  It was just some low-life who robbed a liquor store.  But to Jeff and me he was Armando because he had a beard.  And because we were crazy—and so full of guilt and shame that everything we saw proved he was chasing us.  

        I looked at my cousin.  My heart said, Thanks Mitch, for what you did.  You’re a great cousin, and I love you.

        My words said, “You’re lucky I don’t kill you.”  I would have to thank Grady, too, when I saw him.  But that would be harder because he was older and bigger.  And he could kick my butt in his sleep.        

Forty:  Reversing Field

        After Mitch went back to Payson, I thought I might be going a little crazy.  I couldn’t stop thinking about Grady, and how Jeff and I mistook him for Armando.  Plus, Jeff kept bugging me about going to Army, which was the last thing I wanted to think about.  Besides that, I missed Paige so much I had to turn the radio off every time they played a Beatles song.

        Two days before New Year’s Jeff had to work a shift at the pharmacy.  On his way out the door, he asked, “You want to take me?”

        It was a nice offer.  I could have used the car to go over and try to get things straightened out with Paige, but I said, "No."  

        Instead, I walked to the park and sat on the teeter-totter where Dad and I had talked about the lion, the mouse, and the mayor.  Sometimes going there helped me think things over, but now I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that if my dad saw me, he wouldn’t be too proud of me.

        I felt exhausted, so I went back to the apartment.  Mom was still at work, and Maddie was out with a junior who acted like Eddie Haskell and drove a new Bonneville.  I didn’t think a freshman should date anybody—let alone a guy so much older.  But Mom was her parent, so it didn’t make much difference what I thought.

        Mom only let her leave with the guy because she promised to take Melinda along.  I knew she would mistreat Melinda, but she would do that anyway—That’s what Maddie did.  Also, having Melinda with them would keep Romeo off balance, so I wouldn’t have to beat him up for getting fresh with my sister.

        I went to my room, flopped onto the bed, and slept like death for ten minutes.

        My dad called my name from inside my head.  Did you ever have a dream where you hear somebody’s voice?  

        He said, “Frank.”  When you wake up from a dream like that, you can forget about sleep.  I heard him call my name.  Then I heard my heart thunking in my chest.

        The longer I lay there, the crazier and madder and sadder I got.  I cried like somebody’s kid sister for half an hour.  I got more and more ashamed of what we had done since meeting Armando Calderon—especially over the last couple of weeks.

        It was like God was talking to me—or my dad.  Everything that happened during that time made things clearer—The visits with Armando’s family when we found out his death had nothing to do with us; thinking those motorcycle scumbags wanted to kill us and then finding out they didn’t give a damn about us.  

        It made me think about all the crazy things we had done since that first night in the desert.  Everything we did stemmed from what had been inside our heads: not from Armando trying to kill us.  You can’t kill somebody when you’re dead.         

        Pretty soon I got up and washed my face and went for another walk.  If somebody had asked me where I was going I would have said, "I don’t know."  I didn’t even see my surroundings.  

        What I did see was Armando’s brother, Dominic.  He chanted some words I didn’t understand.  He repeated them.  And then, again.  He had used the same words the night he told us Armando was dead.   I heard them, but only as a senseless, urgent murmur.  

        I saw my father’s face and heard him say, "Frank," the way he had in my dream.  He tried to tell me too, and he used the same strange words.

         I didn’t realize it, but I guess tears were coming from my eyes again.  A little kid walking with his dad said, "Daddy, why is that guy…"  But his dad clapped a hand over his face and looked across the street as they passed.

        I stopped at a Circle K and bought a Coke and a bag of Planter’s Salted Peanuts.  I ate them as I walked along, and I felt a little better.  

        That made me wonder why I hadn’t been feeling better all along.  Because, except for the fight in the desert, and the next night at Jeff’s house, most of our encounters with Armando were fantasies—the scared imaginings of two kids who thought they were gods because they could play football a little.

        We ran around town doing our best to ruin all our friendships, and everything important to us: jumping at shadows and running from a ghost.

        I passed a school and noticed some fourth or fifth-graders playing football.  One shanked a kick, and the ball sailed over a chain link fence and rolled dead next to me.  They yelled for me to throw it back.  I picked it up and looked at them.  

        They were scattered all over the field.  One, taller than his friends stood on the far side of the playground.  Even from that distance, I felt him searching my eyes.  I fired it to him and he caught it right where he stood.  

        All the other little guys went "Ooh!" like I was Bart Starr.  You know how little kids are.  It couldn’t have been much more than twenty-five yards, but to them, it was a mile.  The kid raised his chin toward me, then called his team over to line up for the kickoff.  I decided to go back home.  

        For a long time, something had been churning deep in my head, trying to get to the surface.  Now, it elbowed all my other thoughts out, until it stood alone repeating itself, and now I understood what Dominic and my dad had been trying to tell me.  You just need something to believe in.  At first, it came from Dominic.  Then my dad joined him, and after a bit, it was just Dad.  

        I remembered the Naval Academy Honor Code written on Academy stationery.  I walked faster, and as I gained speed, I heard my dad say, You shouldn’t lie, cheat, or steal.  I reached for my hip pocket, but I knew what I wanted wasn’t in my wallet.  Now I walked as fast as you can without running—and now I ran.  But something had changed.  Before, I had been running away from something, and now, I ran toward something.  

        I ran right back to 1954, and my seventh birthday.  I sat on my bed next to my dad.  He watched as I tore the wrapping from a small box and took out a brand-new leather wallet with a five-dollar bill and the Honor Code inside.  I could smell the leather.  I held his words in my hands and read them.  This is what I believe in… Love, Dad.  

        I blinked and saw cars driving by.  I must have been a mile from the apartment.  I got up from the curb and started running again.

Forty-one:  Ask Your Best Friend

        As I charged down the hall, taking air in greedy, open-mouthed swallows I gasped a silent prayer of thanks for the empty house.  Inside my room, I shut the door and bent over with my hands on my knees.  When my breathing normalized, and I saw more than blackness punctuated with blood-red blotches, I slid down the door and sat against it with my knees drawn up to my chest.  

        I went to the bookshelf.  There, at eye level between Dad’s old Bible, and a huge dictionary, was the Lucky Bag.  I snatched it open to the page with the picture of my dad and the Navy football team.  

        The sheet of stationery should be there, folded in half, but I knew it wouldn’t be.  I had looked at least a dozen times over the past five months—in every corner of my room, and all over the house.  I had flipped through every book we owned, and all the books in my student locker at school.  I checked my scarlet and navy blue-bound playbook, resting on the little shelf in my team locker.

        I had even confronted Maddie.   "It’s a terrifically small thing to do, even for you."  

        She glared at me and said, "If you want to know where your precious honor code is, why don’t you ask your best friend?"  

         Now, I stared at the old yearbook, knowing what I had to do, but unable to move.  The truth bore down on me like ten thousand Armando Calderons on Harleys—the truth about what it would mean if my best friend knew where to find my honor code.

        A soft tap came from the other side of the door.  When I opened it I saw Melinda looking up at me.  She hugged Bernadine to her chest the way she did sometimes when she felt lonely.  She looked at me like I was the bravest big brother ever to protect a little girl.

***

        By the time Jeff came home I had devised a plan.  You would think things would be simple.  Either Jeff knew where the Honor Code was, or he didn’t.  I needed to find out.  But like I had done so many times I found another way—another plan.  It’s funny how you can lie to yourself when you’re afraid.  

        So, when he walked in I told him, “I need to be alone for a while.”  Don’t ask me how I had failed to learn that you don’t tell Jeff Barrett you want to be alone.

        “Alone?”  He said it the way my Uncle Don had said, “Job?” when Aunt Marie told him she wanted to go to work.  

        “Whaddaya mean, alone?  What are you talking about?”  

        “I need to think about some things.”

        “Things?  What things?”  

        “Everything, Jeff—Armando, you, me, dead people and broken fences.  Keys.  Paige.  I don’t know.”  

        “So let’s hop in the car and grab a pizzarooni.  My treat.”  Jeff thought you could solve all the world’s problems if you could manage to get to a place where they let you eat without silverware.  And he always treated if he thought you might go off somewhere by yourself.  

        “No, I really need to be alone right now.”  

        “Aw, stop acting like a two-year-old.  You’re just ticked off because I was right about the cops.”  

        “You think you were right about that?  God!  Listen, I don’t know if I’m ticked at you or not.  That’s the whole point.  I need to be alone for maybe two-and-a-half seconds, so I can decide what I’m ticked off about.”  

        He looked hurt.  “So, what am I supposed to do?  Sit here and twiddle my thumbs?”

        “I don’t give a hoot in hell what you do with your damn thumbs!  Just leave me alone for half a minute!”  

        I convinced myself I was being tough on him.  I wasn’t afraid.  Yeah, right!

        “So, you want me to move out, or something?”

        “No, Jeff.  I do not want you to move out.  I just want to be left alone!”  

        “Fine!  Tell your dad I said Hi.”  He stomped out, slamming the door behind him.  

        It ticked me off good when he said things about my dad.  Lucky for him he was probably halfway to Tucson.          

Forty-two:  Mirror, Mirror

        A lot happened over the next four years.  What was left of our senior year returned to normal, or what passed for normal.  Jeff finished basketball in the winter and played baseball in the spring.  The baseball team won the state championship, and he became the only person in Arizona history to win the outstanding player award in all three sports.

        I did okay in track, making it to the state finals for the third straight year.  I finished second in the four-hundred-yard run, fourth in the two-hundred-yard dash, and sixth in the hundred.  Five colored guys beat me in that race.  One of the two I beat had a bad hamstring.

        Paige forgave me after I explained why I had become so distant, but I had to tell her the whole story first.  We got engaged right after high school graduation and married when I was commissioned on graduation from the Academy.  

        I did well enough at the Academy, but it didn’t come easy.  The service schools stress math and engineering, and my mind runs more toward the humanities.  I got the first D of my academic career in a chemistry class my sophomore year.  Everything else was hard-earned C’s, with a handful of A’s in English and history.  

        Football was easier, but still, no cakewalk.  I made the jayvee squad my plebe year and rode the bench on the varsity my youngster year.  Our best ball carrier suffered a career-ending shoulder injury the third game into my junior year, and I moved into the starting lineup.  I didn’t break any records, but I didn’t embarrass myself either.  By the time of the Army game senior year, I felt Dad would have been proud.  

        I’ll have more to say about the game, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  If things hadn’t changed after Jeff stormed out of my room that night, we would have been playing for the same team.  

***  

        First off, my job at the Taco Bell changed.  One night, before closing, Mr. Barker said, "Sammy’s joining the Marines.  You want to be the new fry guy?"  

        "That sounds great, Mr. Barker.  How many hours is it?  I can’t work more than fifteen hours or so.  Twenty, max."  

        He said, "After you get good at it, you’ll be able to do it in five or six hours, twice a week.  Come in any time you want after we’re closed.  You can play the radio, even have Jeff in if you want—nobody else.  Clean up after yourself.  Don’t forget to fill out your timesheet."

        "Okay," I said.  

        "Can you come in next Tuesday night?  Sammy will teach you how to fry the shells.  It’s easy."          

        "How many shells do I fry?" I said.  

        "Sammy will give you the details.  Just make sure we don’t run out."  He handed me a key and said, "You’ll get a fifteen-cent raise.  Merry Christmas."            

***

        I don’t know what Jeff did after our argument, but he showed up just before midnight to drive me to the Taco Bell.  "What time do you want me to pick you up?" he asked.  

        I said, "Six."  Those were the only words we spoke.

         After I flipped on the lights inside I walked to the radio nestled among the boxes of straws and meal trays, but I didn’t turn it on.  Instead, I stood right there for an hour berating myself for my failure to stand up to Jeff.  I made up my mind to confront him.  I turned the radio on and loaded two racks with tortillas.  

        Five hours later, over the sizzle of the deep-fat fryer and the sobbing of Connie Francis, I heard Jeff pounding on the back door.          

        When I opened it, he said, "You ready to go?"  

        “I’m just cleaning up,” I said, walking to the food assembly line.  I drew him a large Pepsi from the fountain, hating myself for my weakness.  

         “Need any help?” he said, and we laughed.  We weren’t girls.  I cleaned the frying racks, and hung them on the wall over the sink to dry, while Jeff drew another drink.  

        "Help yourself," I said.  

        He drained the cup and refilled it.  "You still pissed off about last night?"          

        "It’s just that Mr. Barker doesn’t want me using up all the supplies."  

        "You said he doesn’t mind."          

         "He doesn’t, if I don’t abuse the privilege."

        "So, don’t abuse it," he said, filling his cup again.  When he had downed enough to ensure a fourth-quarter loss for the corporation, he liberated a monumental belch and headed for the door.

        I filled out my timesheet and followed him into the cold.  I double-checked the door, like always, and he said, “Let’s go, okay?”  

        I blew out a little cloud of life and watched it spread into a million atomic particles and float up into the stars above the city.

        As we walked toward the car, I wondered how one person could be such a good friend and such a jerk at the same time.  Jeff hadn’t hesitated to get up before dawn to pick me up, even after a big argument.  But tonight, he might keep me awake until two in the morning describing how we were destined to restore the glory days of Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard at West Point.  

        Then, he might detail our future exploits with the Chicago Bears.  And if I wanted to do something less important—like get a couple of hours of sleep before a critical math exam the next morning, I could hold my breath.

        Being around Jeff could wear you down, especially if he figured you were questioning his authority.  It sounds funny—questioning the authority of a seventeen-year-old.  But believe me, if Jeff held anything precious, it was being in charge.

        And here was I, about to do a lot more than challenge his authority.  I was about to secede from the Unitas States of Barrett… if I could keep from having a panic attack.

        Why did I find it so hard to challenge him?  It’s not like I was afraid of getting trounced.  I got beat up on the field every day.  But when I considered locking eyes with him, I found myself inventing reasons to delay.  This isn’t the time.  You don’t even know for sure he’s done anything. Except that I did know.  

        And I had known since Melinda looked up at me with admiring eyes a few hours earlier what had to be done. And now, recalling the look on her face I finally found the strength to do it.  Or, at least to take the first step.  

         So, I said the words as I reached for the door handle.  “Have you been in my stuff, Jeff?”  

        He stopped with his head half ducked into the car.  He stayed in that strange position for a full second, then backed out, stood up, and faced me.  He said, “What?”  His expression communicated more than the word.

        That look had stopped me a thousand times.  It held me frozen now, the way I had been with my back against the rear bumper of the Bel Aire as the Hell’s Angels roared toward us.  

        The memory of Melinda’s face began to fade as I looked for ways to justify another act of cowardice.  My resolve had brought me to the scrimmage line dividing boyhood from manhood, but left me unable to cross.  

        And that’s when a tiny, inconsequential memory jumped up and down, raising its little dim-memory hand as high as it could, and in a piping, earnest voice pleaded, “Ooh, ooh—pick me, pick me!”

        Small things make big differences in our lives—things you don’t recognize when they happen.  They pass, and you don’t even know they’re gone, let alone how much they’ve changed you.  But now, as I peered into the face of my best friend—my nemesis, I remembered one of those small, small things—a nothing thing, a non-event barely etched on the mighty fortress wall that shielded my conscience.

         Imbedded in the memory of Mitch staring back at Jeff on the afternoon of their Little League championship game was the truth I had denied for so long.  “You can beat me up, Jeff, but, I still won’t tell you.”  

        He turned and held a mirror across the years to me and said, “Here, take a look.”  

        I held it up and saw my own timid face.  Behind the face, I saw a path littered with acts of trepidation and self-betrayal.  

        Beyond the mirror I watched eleven-year-old Mitch facing then what I faced now—the imposing figure of Jeff Barrett.  I saw words scrolling across the bottom of the mirror like a weather bulletin across a TV screen… a midshipman stands for that which is right.

        Words and images flowed in rapid succession: you just need something to believe in.

         My dad, the Medal of Honor suspended from a pastel blue ribbon around his neck: "A guy shouldn’t lie, cheat, or steal."

        Mitch:  "I won’t tell you."  

        That’s when something happened inside my chest.  The ball was snapped, and I dove for the line.

         Another blink, and the memory and the mirror were gone.  The face in front of me belonged to Jeff Barrett.  I didn’t know how much time had passed.  A second for me to take in my life—a lifetime of failure to live up to a simple code.  Half a second?  A millisecond?  

        What I did know was that the face returning Jeff’s gaze had changed.  Not an insecure boy who would allow himself to participate in the purchase of illegal drugs, but a man; finished with half-truths; finished with looking the other way while his friends copied answers from his test papers; with standing inert while they engaged in acts of small-time thievery, or ganged up on a solitary victim.  A man no less frightened than a moment before, but now willing to face his fears.  I pictured an old lion sitting in a rocking chair surrounded by awe-struck cubs.  

        So, I shut my door, and folded my elbows on the roof of the Chevy, mirroring my best friend’s pose, if not his confidence.  And I asked again, “Have you been in my stuff?”          

Forty-three:  That Tears It

        As far as he knew, he just needed to remind me who called the signals. “What are you trying to say, Frank?”  

        “I’m not trying to say anything.  I’m just asking you a question.”  

        A hint of a smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  

        “I think you do.”  

        “Sure, I’ve been in your stuff.  I need a pencil, I borrow it, same as you.”  

        “I’m not talking about pencils.”  

        He scratched his chin.  “If I grab a nickel off your dresser for a Coke, you get it back.  Just like you pay for gas if you use the Jockmobile to take Paige out.”  

         I said, “Do you know what happened to my Honor Code?”  

        “Your what?”

        My options were clear.  Back down right now and save my skin.  Or, continue down the path leading to a country far beyond where we had been the night we squared off in the Mesquites.  The night I didn’t dare to bring up the Honor Code because it went much deeper than Armando.  

        To talk about the Honor Code was to talk about the two of us—where we stood with each other—where we had been, and where we were going.  It was about my doing something I had been unable to do since the day he lofted a perfect spiral a hundred miles across a green field to another boy—a boy who didn’t exist anymore.  It was about me taking that step and standing up to the assault that would surely follow.  “I want the Honor Code my father gave me on my seventh birthday.  You have it.  Give it to me.”  

        He leaned forward across the polished top of the car, his shadow obliterating the reflection of a parking lot light.  “Or what?”  

        My words seemed to come from somebody else.  “Or I’ll kick your ass.  So why don’t you just be man enough to admit you’ve got it.”  It pleased me to hear no hesitation and no quaver in the voice.  

        Jeff’s eyes narrowed, and he rubbed his nose.  

        “What’s so important about that friggin’ piece of paper?”        

        “My dad gave it to me.  You know that.”  I thought for a second he might change his mind, so I softened my tone.  “Can I have it please?”  

        That only seemed to make him angrier. “You think you’re the only one with a godddam father?”  

        I thought if I had been a little more mature, a little more experienced, I might have found the words to help him past his rage—past the place where he had to say hurtful things about my dad.  Then I noticed three empty Hamm’s beer cans on the back seat, and I knew there weren’t any right words.  

        Jeff started around the front of the car, slamming the door so hard the whole vehicle rocked.  “I’m sick of hearing about your old man, the war hero; and his special gift for his precious little boy!”  

        I stepped away from the Chevy but stood my ground.  “Don’t say another word about my dad.”  

        “Ooh…!” he said, shaking his hands in front of him.  “I’m scared!”  But he stopped, like he was making up his mind about something.  He seemed angry, scared almost—unsure of himself, doubting his mastery of the situation.  Not even when he almost hit the family in the station wagon, or when he thought the Hell’s Angels were going to kill us had I seen him so ill at ease.

        He looked at me for a two count.  Then he said, “Sure, I’ve got it, Frank.  I was just keeping it safe for you.”  

        I didn’t know what he intended, but I knew it wouldn’t keep me from getting what I wanted.  He licked his fingers, reached into his hip pocket, and pulled a piece of folded paper from his wallet.  He waved it in my face and hissed, “You want your goddam Honor Code?  From your goddam dead father?  Here!”  And he ripped it in half, crumpled the pieces, and threw them in my face.  

        I nailed him with a right cross loaded with a lifetime of shame and anger.  It caught him on the nose.  Blood erupted before I landed a left flush on his cheek that sent him staggering back.  It was the high point of the fight for me because I was no match for Jeff Barrett.  Not even an intoxicated Jeff Barrett.  

        He recovered and sent four left jabs whistling into my face, leaving us both bloodied a second and a half into the encounter.  

        I blocked another jab and ducked a right that might have put me in the hospital.  Now it was the gunslinger quarterback against the line-bucking halfback.  I tried to get inside the machine gun jabs and land enough body blows to bring his guard down. If that happened I might tag him with another big right—a cross, or maybe even an uppercut, if I got lucky.  

        There was also a desperate chance I might knock him off his feet if I kept barreling in.  And if that happened, he wouldn’t get up for a long time.  But it was just that—a doomed, desperate chance.  Jeff was too quick, too skilled.  So even though I did connect with some shots that hurt him I paid a heavy price.  The jabs landed more frequently, my head snapping back like a rag doll being shaken by a demented little girl.  Sooner or later he would correctly gauge one of the infrequent right hands.  

***  

        The surprising thing about getting knocked out is that you don’t feel it.  Well, you do feel it, but only later.  You wake up trying to figure out who and where you are, and a second or two later, you wiggle around and pat yourself to make sure all your body parts work.  Then you wonder what happened, and what you should do next.  

        I focused on the Naval Academy Honor Code laying in two ragged-edged wads next to my face.  One had unraveled enough to expose the sentence that said Midshipmen stand for that which is right. A tiny blood speck covered the period at the end of the sentence.

        I smoothed the pieces so I could carry them home and mend them like the wings of a wounded angel.  I staggered to my feet, not ignoring, but savoring a dozen painful cuts and bruises.  

        It’s funny the way your mind works.  Jeff had just stomped me, but I felt sorry for him.  You might say I’m crazy, but think about it.  When I finally stood up to Jeff, I wasn’t alone. My Dad was there and always would be now, in a way Jeff’s father never had been for him.  

        I forgave Jeff then and decided to tell him so as soon as I saw him.  I would ask his forgiveness, too.  It’s not reasonable to expect someone to take your father’s place.  

        I smiled and continued the journey home watching the sky go from murky gray, to light gray, to the pink that heralds the sun.  As I put my key into the sliding door lock, I noticed the Bel Aire wasn’t in its parking space.  When I got to my room, Jeff was gone, and so were all his things.  

Forty-four:  After the Game

        It doesn’t happen often, but if the conditions are right and the players are ready, a football game can take you on a magical journey to an enchanted land.  Army/Navy is always special, but the 1969 game was a magic carpet waiting to be boarded.  

        Both teams sported top ten rankings.  Only one loss kept it from being the first Army/Navy game between undefeated teams.  (Boston College had snuck up on us in October.)  Five All-Americans, led by Heisman favorite Jeff Barrett took the field.  And, boy, were we ready!

        Jeff passed for over 400 yards, threw five touchdowns, and ran for another.  Any fan, Army or Navy, will tell you it was the greatest individual performance in the history of The Game.

        But we had a great quarterback too, and a fantastic offensive line.  I had my best day as a collegian, rushing for just under 200 yards, and scoring two touchdowns, the last one to win the game with four seconds left.    

        When we met at midfield after the final gun, I wondered what he would say.  He extended his hand.  “Good game, Frank.  I thought we had you until that last play.  Nice run, man.  You kept your head up, just like I taught you.”  

        How could I not smile?  “Thanks.  Good game.”  

        Then he said, “You turned out all right, dumb ass.  I guess your dad was right.  You really do need something to believe in.”  

        My eyes went blurry, and my chest felt funny.  It came on me fast.  I pumped his hand and clapped him hard on the back.  There wasn’t much to add.  As always, the quarterback got the last word.  

        Before he turned to shake hands with one of my teammates, I got another glance at him.  I remember thinking it might be the last time I would look into his eyes.  I was wrong about that.

***  

        Two years later I occupied a bed at the Naval hospital at Bethesda, Maryland while I recovered from wounds sustained in Viet Nam.  The soldier in the next bed had served in Captain Jeffrey Barrett’s platoon.  He handed me a picture showing the two of them clowning around with nine others from their outfit.  Jeff had one of the guys in a headlock.          

        My new friend told me about Jeff’s bravery.  None of the details surprised me.  "Captain Barrett finally got Moore aboard.  Saved his life, sure as hell.  Him, and three others.  He kept going back for guys while the rest of us covered them from the chopper.  

        "You should have seen him.  The second trip, he slung Berman over his shoulder and dragged Albers by the hand like a little kid.  

        "The incoming from the Gooks was hell.  A real shit storm.  The chopper guys were yelling at the cap’n like crazy.  Called him every name in the book.  But I gotta hand it to them, they hung in there.  

        "Anyway, he got Moore aboard, like I said.  He was just climbing in himself when he caught four rounds in the back."  The kid stopped long enough to illustrate the pattern the fifty caliber rounds had made—from just above his left hip to a point midway between his right shoulder blade and his neck.  It is an awkward gesture at best, made more difficult because his injuries made any movement painful.  And because he paused for more than a minute while he fought back tears.  

        "We pulled him in and the chopper beat cheeks out of there.  It’s funny, I still have this picture in my mind of the sky standing on its side.  And the really funny part?  It was on fire.  

        "Doc got him stretched out on his back.  I wanted to cradle his head… you understand.  But Doc said, ’No.’  We could see he was hurt real bad.  

        "Rivera leaned over my shoulder and said to him, ’Don’t worry Cap’n.  They’ll get you fixed up in no time.  This is your ticket home.’

        "Doc shook his head.  Nobody seen it but me.  Then he filled him full of morphine and let me hold his head."  

        He paused again, and after a long time, said, "You really wanna know the details?"  I nodded, and he continued, "He was breathing funny.  I seen it before.  You know, like a dog, panting.  And he was breathing out blood.  

        "His voice was real weak, but here’s the thing—his eyes stayed clear as always.  He gave Rivera that look—the one he saves for when somebody says something stupid.  I know he would’ve shook his head if he wasn’t so weak.  He said, ’Home?’  

        I swallowed and stared hard at the photo during the next pause.  It reminded me of the one taken after we won our first state championship.  There were notable differences, like the uniforms:  Army fatigues in one, the scarlet and navy blue football gear of the mighty Corona High School Knights in the other.  And the victim of Jeff’s headlock:  an Army Ranger in one case, me in the other.  

        But the spirit emanating from each was the same.  Jeff’s eyes, then and now, held mine with good-natured confidence, and a good bit more than the full complement of defiance. The young Army Ranger continued.  It took some time, the throat clearings and involuntary sobs became stronger and more frequent.  They seemed to surprise him, as if he thought they were vanquished, but now discovered they were stronger than he had imagined.  

         But like soldiers have always done, he fought on until he completed his mission—until he told me the rest of his story—told me that Captain Jeff Barrett, my best friend, whom I had forgiven, pulled the young man close to his own, still youthful face.  Then Jeff closed his eyes and marshaled the strength that had allowed him to play the entire second half of a game with one of the most painful injuries a football player can sustain—and do it with such bravery and indifference that his teammates didn’t know.  Now, with the last breath sighing out of his large, imperfect heart he called his final signal.  “Whaddaya mean, home?  You think I’d leave this faggy bunch to screw up the whole war?  Don’t be dumb!”