by CeeCee James
I remembered Mom’s soda and grabbed one out of the ice-chest. Mom had spread a towel and rested, propped on her arms. My baby brother slept in a bundle next to her. Other moms had joined her with their own towels and babies.
Mom took the soda from my hand and asked, “Have you eaten yet? You be sure to eat something, Jimmy.”
I nodded. After grabbing a hotdog burned black from the grill I tried to weasel in through the group of men to get close to Dad so he’d notice me. His dark eyes snapped as he yelled out the punchline to a joke I didn’t understand. The men all laughed, bumping into me. I took a few steps back and shoved the end of the hotdog in my mouth.
The men’s conversation changed to the Summer Day parade and the float that Maverick’s Tavern was building for its champion baseball team. That meant Dad would be on it, and a bubble of excitement squirmed inside my chest. The whole town would see him, and know what a great baseball player he was. I thought about the neighbor kid, Logan, whose dad worked at the grocery store every day wearing a brown apron. Logan made fun of me because Dad had lost his job. Logan would see what a great man Dad was.
We were there until after dusk. The moon was coming up fat and bright over the mountain, and nearly everyone had already packed up and left the picnic. Just Dad and Jared were left by the fire drinking their last beer. Rocking the sleeping baby, Mom convinced Dad it was time to go.
We weren’t home but a few minutes when I heard the hiss of Dad opening another beer. Mom froze for a moment before hustling me to my room. She put baby David in the crib across from my bed and fiddled with his blanket. Then she went to the drawer and brought out my favorite pajamas, the ones that had the spaceships all over them. I pulled them on and climbed into bed. She leaned down and tucked my blanket up to my chin.
“Goodnight Jim.” She smiled at me before she kissed my forehead.
She shut the door, but it hardly muffled her words to him. Angry words. He snapped back; Mom’s high droning interrupted by his sharp barks. There was a loud crash, and Mom yelled “Maybe you want to pull the cabinets down like you did the last time you were drunk?”
Dad shouted, “Will you just shut up?”
The front door slammed and, outside my window, Dad’s truck roared to life. I heard Mom sigh, and the soft noises of her cleaning up the mess. I rolled over in bed to watch my baby brother in his crib. His arm stretched across his face and his lip wiggled like when he was hungry. He never woke, no matter how loud they fought. I wrapped my blanket around me. My eyes burned, but I was four. I was too big to cry.
*****
Finally the day of the parade arrived. Grandma, Mom, and I hauled out our lawn chairs from the back of the car and dragged them to the road. I jumped up and down, knocking into people surrounding me.
“Sit still, Jimmy!” Mom insisted.
I tried, but the tapping of my feet against the ground bothered her, too. “Fine, get up and jump then,” she said with an eye roll.
The streets were lined with people. About a quarter of the way down the block I saw Logan. He sat with his parents, his hair sharply parted and slicked to the side, with black rimmed glasses on his skinny nose just like his dad. They both turned and looked at me, wearing identical sweater vests. Logan doesn’t know what a cool Dad is. I snorted and looked away.
Just then I heard the fire trucks. Every year, they started the parade with their lights flashing and horns whooping. I whooped too as one of the firemen threw some wax lips my way, then sprinted to get them, nearly getting knocked over by a bigger kid. I crammed them in my mouth, feeling my teeth dig into the wax. The cherry vampire teeth hid my grin.
Confetti showered the air as the town’s unicycle squad went by. Cheerleaders, rah-rahing with their pom-poms, clowns twisted sommer-saults on both sides of the Big Tex Restaurant float, and 4-H horses were followed by a man with a shovel and wheel barrel.
A banner held by two teenagers announced the High School marching band. Teens in white boots marched with high steps and pounded on drums. Cymbals clanged. One red-spotted boy tried to hang on to his hat while blowing into a tuba. I watched, fascinated, as the hat slipped side-ways held on only by the chin strap, the boy’s eyes bulging from both embarrassment and effort.
We whistled and cheered. Then Mom called, “There they are.” I spun around to look. My heart deflated a little when I saw the worn flat-bed trailer that was hauled by a busted up truck. There were a few limp blue streamers taped to a construction paper sign. In scraggly hand-drawn letters it said, “Mavericks, Home of the Boot-filled Beer.”
Dad was front and center on a hay bale. With his best grin on his face he waved to the crowd, a cigarette dangling from his lip. I jumped up and down as the excitement roared in my chest, “Look, town! Look, Logan! That’s my Dad!”
By Dad’s foot was a dented bullhorn speaker. When his eyes caught mine he pulled the bullhorn to his mouth. I waved even harder. He notices me! He’s going to say something!
Dad pointed at me and yelled out, “Jimmy likes to dance with a hole in his pants.”
I stopped jumping. My face blushed red to the roots of my hair. I did not like to dance, and I never had holes in my pants. Mom made sure of that. Everyone turned to see who he was pointing at. There was laughter all around me. I grinned sheepishly and sat down.
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Chapter 2
Sunday afternoon was chore day. With a bucket full of soap bubbles, I staggered away from the spigot and out to the front yard. I was only half-way there and already my arms ached.
Dad waited in the driveway, wearing cut-off jeans trimmed so short the pockets hung out the bottom. He sprayed down his green Dodge Dart, catching a rainbow in the water droplets.
Dad loved that car. Wherever we went, he’d park it in the back end of parking lots away from people. Last week, a blue El Camino pulled in next to the Dart, just before Dad and I got out. He opened his car door wide and smacked it into Dad’s door. The stranger didn’t say anything, just headed for the store.
Dad leapt out of the car. He ran his hands down the paint and then called after the guy, “Excuse me! You just dinged my door!”
I sat up a little straighter in my seat, a cold pit in my stomach. You don’t mess with Dad.
The man spun back and shrugged his shoulders. “I wouldn’t worry about that little mark.”
Dad stared at the guy. He tapped a cigarette out of a pack from his front pocket, then lit a match with a snap and held it to the end. Took a long drag. Then grabbed the car door and slammed it again and again into the other guy’s car.
Bam!
Bam!
The crashing rang through the parking lot. When he finished Dad eyeballed the man and said, “Well, I wouldn’t worry about this mark either then.”
The man’s mouth dropped open. But he saw the look in Dad’s eye and didn’t move.
Dad climbed back into the Dart and the tires squealed as we squirreled out of the parking lot.
We turned on to the straight-away. Just before Dad hit the gas hard, he said, “Ready for this? Some heads are going to roll.” I laughed as we got sucked back into our seats.
*****
In the fall of 1979 we moved out of the little house and up into a place tucked far back in the woods of Wildfire Rim. I was six. My little brother was four, a little snot-nosed kid who liked to follow me everywhere. At least that’s what I told him. Truth is, he was my best friend.
Wildfire Rim was billed in the real estate brochures as a huge housing development, but the actual development was slow. In fact, all that had been built was a maze of dirt roads that swirled in and out of the green belt and led to nowhere. But, at the other end of the development was the queen mother of all fun places; a house nearly finished that begged to be explored.
David went to sneak a couple of sodas out of our fridge while I
held watch. We jammed them in the pockets of our carpenter pants. Mom always dressed us the same way, and it was a drag, but what could you do?
“Good job getting ‘em,” I told David, then to cool him down, “But you forgot the granola bars.”
He wrinkled his nose and scuffed his toe in the dirt.
“Aww that’s okay. I’m not hungry anyway.” I tousled his hair like I’d seen Dad do.
He gave me a smile and I hollered, “Let’s go! Let’s be like scouts!” That was our code word to be super stealthy. I ran down the side of the road with David hot on my heels, prepared to jump in the bushes and hide if anyone should drive up. We dove just in time as a big truck rumbled past with rafters bundled into giant triangles on its flat bed. We watched it go by with our noses in the dirt. Then we followed in spy mode. My belly scratched against the dead grass as I crawled to the edge of the half-built house.
The truck jerked to a stop and a construction guy in an orange vest directed the boom to lift the rafters off the bed. The rafters swayed in the air for a moment before the boom lowered them in the dirt yard of the house.
David elbowed me in the ribs and waggled his eyebrows in a crazy way at the rafters.
“I know!” I hissed. “Be quiet!”
After it was unloaded, the construction guys jumped back into the white truck, and, with the exhaust burping grey smoke, headed back down the dirt road.
David grinned at me, and we both dashed over the excavated yard to the rafters.
“Get on up there.” I pointed.
He looked at my foot pinning down one end and scrambled up the other side. Slowly, I rose up in the air. We took turns walking towards the middle of the rafter, like a giant teeter totter, until we had enough weight at the top end and it would come slamming down. Then we ran to the other side to do it again.
After the third time it crashed down, I called out, “I’m done!” and jumped off just before he made it to the end, causing him to fall off.
“Hey! I’m telling!”
“Yeah, go tell Mom. She’ll be real interested in knowing you’re over here.”
“Shut-up,” he muttered, suddenly absorbed with a pile of putty on the ground. He kicked at it with his shoe.
“Scoot over. Let me see that.” I scooped it up in my palm and rolled the blob into a ball. It started to stick with long strings to my hand.
David found another splotch of putty that sat in sawdust by some 2x4 board ends.
“Hey, be careful with it,” I cautioned him, when he started to play with it. “This stuff’ll stick to your clothes if you don’t pay attention. Mom’ll have a cow.”
“Or your hair!” David added.
I snorted. At six, I knew to be careful not to get it in my hair.
I dropped the gooey ball, and dragged my hands through the dust in the yard that I hoped would one day be filled with neighbor kids to play with. Still wiping my hands together, I glanced over at the half-built house.
“Think there’s a way in?” I examined the porch. No roof, but the front door looked bolted shut.
“Put that down and c’mon” I motioned to David. He dropped his blob and looked with big eyes at his gooey hands. I sighed.
“Wipe them there.” I pointed to a soft pile of sawdust shavings, then walked over to the side of the house. The sun was at the horizon and streaks of orange came through the trees surrounding the cleared lot.
“Hurry up.” I waved him along.
Down the side of the house were three windows, all with glass snug in their frames except for the last one, a gaping empty hole. I rushed over. “David! Check this out!”
He ran to me and stepped into my hands, my fingers looped like a stirrup. With a grunt, I hauled him up to the window edge, and he slithered through. I heaved myself up on my forearms on the window sill and squirmed through after him.
“Hello?” David yelled, then turned to flash me a gape-toothed grin at the echo. “Whoop! Whoop!” David scurried behind a lattice of boards of an unfinished wall.
“What do you think this room is?” I looked up at the wires hanging from the ceiling.
“Maybe a secret tunnel!”
“Don’t be dumb, they don’t build secret tunnels in new houses like this.” Still, I hastily surveyed the floor for any possible signs of a trapdoor. “Hey check this out! Maybe it’s some kind of safe.”
We examined the metal box screwed into a beam. I opened the door; just a bunch of switches, then slammed it shut and walked down the hall.
David wouldn’t walk in the hallway, and instead wove through each room through their skeleton walls. “Look! I’m a monkey escaping the zoo!” His hands gripped the boards as he squeezed his way between.
At the end of the hall stood the bare framework of a stairway. The workers had nailed a crooked handrail made of two by fours that traveled up its side. We looked at each other before racing up to the top.
“Don’t push!”
“I’m telling Mom!”
All the rooms upstairs had been finished with white-board walls. The rough edge of the wall was cool like chalk, and I dug out a half moon dent from the plaster with my fingernail. Behind me David hummed. With a piece of plaster he’d written on the floor, “Hi!” with a gargoyle smiley face. I sat next to him and added my own face, complete with sharp teeth. Bigger teeth than in his picture.
The light was getting darker. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. We hustled back down the stairs.
Outside, I found a bunch of black plastic ties that had held the rafters together. I dug through my pocket and pulled out a pack of matches that I’d snuck off our woodstove that morning when Mom wasn’t looking.
“Jim! No! I’m gonna tell Mom!” David jumped up and down next to me, tugging my arm.
“Hush! Want to see something cool? Watch this.” I lit the match with a quick snap like Dad always did and stared at the flame.
David’s eyes were big, but he bent to watch as I cupped my hand around the spark. When the flame was strong, I held it to the end of one of the plastic ties. We watched the hot plastic burn and drip black dots onto the ground. It made a cool sound: Zip! Zip! Zip! Zip! David reached to touch one of the drops.
“Stop!” I hissed. “You don’t want that on your skin.”
I made a pile out of leaves, shavings and a few small branches, and held another match to the base. The flame made me think of the look on Dad’s face when he yelled at the man. Tough. Strong.
“Yeah,” I nodded. “I make my own rules.” The dry kindling took right away, and I fed it a few more branches. Within minutes it was blazing into a nice bonfire. I looked around for something to cook, some old pinecone, or a left-over lunch from one of the workers.
Sitting by the steps of the house was a spray can.
“David,” I pointed to the can. “Go bring me that.”
“Why?”
“We’re gonna put it in the fire. Dad says they explode when they get hot enough.”
David looked unsure, but the promise of an explosion perked him up. He brought me the can, and I pushed it into the middle of the fire with a long stick. I covered it with more twigs and branches until it was a roaring pile. After a few minutes a pile of red embers cradled the can.
The can began to rock back and forth and started to tick.
“Uhh, David?”
“What?”
“Run!”
We both ran to the porch, and David scooted behind to use me as a shield.
The can exploded, blowing half the fire out in a shower of sparks. I poked my head up just in time to see what was left of the fire flaring along a greasy trail towards the house.
My heart beat into my throat.
“I told you Jim! I told you this would be bad!” David yelled.
“Dad’s going to kill us!” I shouted, and ran over to stomp on the fire with my tennis shoes. Luckily, most of the wood had been scattered by the blast, and I was able to beat down the flames.
David trampled over
the blackened ash for good measure when I was done.
“Wow!” David said, “The fire trucks might have come. And then you would have caught it!”
“Chill out, everything’s fine,” I answered. “You’re probably going to tattle anyway.”
“No,” He rolled his eyes. “I don’t tattle!”
I grinned at him. “That was pretty wicked.”
We heard the train come rumbling along the tracks on its way up to the lake. It made two prolonged horn blasts as it crossed the main road.
“Crud! We’re late!” I told David. It was dinner time and hopefully Dad would be home. If he wasn’t, then he’d be coming home late smelling like alcohol, and there’d be fighting tonight.
When we ran through the back door, Dad was home. But he had a bucket of plaster, and was filling in a new fist size hole in the wall. Mom’s lips were pressed into white lines while she stirred the macaroni noodles.
“You boys are late,” Dad said and smoothed the plaster with a spackling knife.
“Don’t you yell at my boys,” Mom said.
Dad looked over at her and his shoulders tuck down. I swallowed and looked away. My heart felt heavy, not wanting to upset Mom for not taking her side, or disappoint Dad by seeing him get lectured by Mom.
David made a small noise, and his eyes looked watery. In that instant, I knew what to do. “Sorry we’re late,” I said to Dad. And, to David, “Come on. Let’s go play Lincoln Logs in my room.”
I didn’t know what happened between my parents and the hole in the wall, and I didn’t want to know. They looked ready to start up again. I just hoped the bedroom door would block out any arguing so David wouldn’t hear.
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Copyright 2014 © [CeeCee James] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.