Hey, Hermie!
Come on, Hermie! Jesus!
Hermie! Hey, Hermieeeeeeeeeee
And then they were there, right in front of him, milling about like three nutty jumping beans. Oscy, Hermie, and Benjie, slamming at one another viciously. Running, dodging, shouting. In the fog, then in the clear, passing so close by that he could reach out and touch them. But he didn’t try, because he knew they weren’t there.
He watched Hermie evade a bone-crushing block and then stop to look up at the house on the dune, to fill his mind with it, to memorize it for that day when he might care to recall it once more. And then Hermie was gone, Oscy and Benjie with him, somewhere in the fog, inhabiting days long over, laughing invisibly, but never ever gone.
The man walked on. He had things to do and this whole moment had been a self-indulgent sidetrack. But even as he walked, old visions kicked up a fuss in his mind, and odd recollections came spinning out. In the summer of ’42 they raided the Coast Guard station four times. They saw five movies and had nine days of rain. Benjie broke his watch, Oscy gave up the harmonica, and in a very special way, Hermie was lost forever.
When he got back to his Mercedes, a single sea gull was flapping and squawking in the sky, and a big blast of shit was already beginning to harden on the car’s windshield. Someone had remembered him after all, and he cried all the way home.
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Table of Contents
Summer of ’42
Copyright
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More from Herman Raucher
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Summer of '42 Page 22