“What?” Dotson leaped backward too.
“Heidi will kill me! Look at the bike!” The front tire was shaped like a paramecium, the spokes splayed out like cilia.
“Look at you!” he responded.
I looked down and leaped backward again. “Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!”
“Now what?” Dotson asked as he echoed my leap.
“Mom will kill me! Look at my shoe! I just got these yesterday!” My left shoe looked like it did when I left the store. My right shoe looked like Old Glory after a particularly rough night of shelling. It was in a state unlikely to inspire the most ardent patriot when viewed by the dawn’s early light. Viewed by the afternoon’s light, it was appalling.
A lady, looking like she was constructed entirely of feather pillows cinched up in an apron, scudded from the house behind us. “Oh my goodness! I saw the whole thing. Are you OK?” she screeched in a flurry of agitation, practically running a figure eight around Dotson and me, her hands pressed to her cheeks, fingers splayed like overstuffed sausages in a pan of dough.
If only her voice had been as soft as she appeared to be. Instead, it had much in common with the screeching of metal on metal I had heard while the truck was transforming Heidi’s bike into modern art. She could have had the same effect with a lot less effort if she had just pounded nails into my ears. I covered my ears with my hands.
Dotson thrust his hand in my direction. “He’s crazy. He keeps raving about his bike and his shoes.”
Mrs. Puffy-Screechy looked at me holding my head. “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness! He hit his head! I must call the ambulance.” She veered toward the house and screeched, “Heathcliff! Call an ambulance. He hit his head.” Then she spiraled in my general direction, grabbed me, and steered me through the gate to the porch. “Here, you must sit down and don’t alarm yourself. No time for hot tea, but I can bring you some lemonade.” She disappeared into the house, squeaking, “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness.”
I looked around, wondering how I ended up on the porch swing. Dotson produced a little cigar with a white plastic mouthpiece and paced beside the truck, trailing smoke like the Little Engine That Rather Wouldn’t. He stopped occasionally to gesticulate toward the bike and ask “Now what?” to nobody in particular.
Mrs. Puffy-Screechy reappeared, thrust a jelly glass into my hand, and disappeared back inside the door like a Frau in a cuckoo clock. I stared at the lemonade. She popped back out again with a wet dishrag and slapped it against my forehead. “Here, hold this on.” I was sitting on the swing, lemonade in one hand and a dishrag in the other, when M came running up the sidewalk to the porch, leading Mom, Heidi, and Hannah. I was attempting to explain what had happened, pointing at my shoe with the dishrag—which Mrs. Puffy-Screechy kept pushing back up to my forehead—when an ambulance appeared. The technicians jumped out, popped open the back door, and pulled out a gurney.
“I’m OK. I can walk,” I hollered and jumped up from the swing, spilling the lemonade.
“Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, he’s going to faint,” the harpy cried and grabbed me. I jerked away and stumbled down the stairs. M caught me. “Whoa, man,” he said. “Take it easy. I’ll just hang right here with you.”
The assembled masses decided I should be x-rayed to make sure I wasn’t harboring a fatal wound like a secret grudge with which to accuse them later. As they ushered me toward the ambulance, I heard a familiar voice cry “Hey!” and I looked up. Dad was headed toward us, looking from the ambulance to the mail truck to the bike and to me. He was covered head-to-foot with soot from the furnace, a slightly overdone Pillsbury doughboy.
Dotson paused inside his cloud of cigar smoke and spread his arms, looking up. “Now what?”
“Hey,” Dad repeated, gesturing with his glasses toward me in the middle of the crowd. “That’s my boy you got there.” He looked like Malcom X’s brother Y, the short one with the gland problem.
The ambulance driver looked at dark, short, and dumpy Dad and then at M standing next to me, also dark, short, and dumpy. “No, sir, your boy is just fine. It’s this one we’re taking to x-ray.” He took me by the shoulders and lifted me into the front seat of the ambulance. I still held the dishrag in my hand.
“No, no, that’s my boy,” Dad said, following the ambulance along as it pulled away, looking like an escapee from a minstrel show. I could hear Mrs. Puffy-Screechy wailing, “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness” from her yard.
“It’s OK, mister. We’re just going to give him an x-ray,” the driver said, and rolled up his window. He looked over at me. “Was that your dad?”
I looked back and nodded.
He shrugged, looked out the window, and looked back at me. “Do you want to hear the siren?”
I nodded. And we went to the hospital.
Later that evening I sat in my room under house arrest, charged with unauthorized removal of Heidi’s bike from the premises. Heidi was given exclusive custody of my bike until I could earn enough money to repair or replace hers. I was reading Tom Sawyer. A dark, round head appeared around the door.
“You conscious, man?”
“Yes, but grounded.”
“That’s what I figured.” M walked in and pulled a flashlight out of his back pocket. We padded lightly up the attic stairs to the secret alcove and sat next to the window, M pointing the flashlight to the ceiling between us. It cast a soft light with heavy shadows around us. “So, what happened at the hospital? Did you have brain surgery?”
“No, just an x-ray.”
“Did they find a brain?”
“Ha. Very funny. They said I have a concussion.” I had no idea what a concussion was, but it sounded impressive, so I was glad to have one since I had no bandages to show I’d been to the hospital.
“Wow! A concussion! Does it hurt?”
“Not yet. I’ll let you know if I feel anything coming on.”
“Just think, man, if I hadn’t been there, you’d probably be dead right now.”
“What?” I hadn’t considered this theme and wasn’t particularly pleased with its introduction.
“Think about it. What was the difference between you hittin’ the side of the truck or being in front of the truck? Maybe a second? A second and a half?”
I replayed the events in my mind. “Yeah, about that.”
“Runnin’ over me probably slowed you down just enough to make the difference between concussion and coffin.”
I didn’t say anything. Dust sifted through the beam of the flashlight in front of M’s face.
“Do you believe in God?” M asked.
“Of course,” I answered automatically.
“All the time?”
“Of course.” I looked at M a little closer. “Don’t you?”
“Yeah.” M looked away and shone the flashlight to the floor, away from his face. The shadows turned upside down. “But not all the time.”
“Why not?”
M turned off the flashlight. The alcove plunged into darkness. We sat in silence. Eventually my eyes adjusted to the thin illumination that penetrated the grimy dormer window from the streetlight. M’s face was a black moon in a blacker night, eyes lost in shadow.
“Sometimes, there is no God.”
I squinted in the dark, trying to see his eyes. He turned his head away from me and his eyes came out of shadow, shining. He looked out of the window into the night. I said nothing.
“Sometimes you pray for somethin’, somethin’ good, but it never happens. Sometimes you pray for somethin’ bad to quit, but it don’t.”
I said nothing. I rarely bothered God with my problems. Of course I prayed before meals, at least when Mom and Dad were around. And at church. Just the regulation stuff. I had heard of desperate people pleading with God, but I had never done so, probably because I had never been desperate. What did I have to be desperate about? I was only ten years old, for crying out loud!
M kept his gaze riveted to the window. “But today I saved your life. That s
hould count for somethin’.” He looked back at me, his eyes veiled in shadow again. “You owe me one. Or maybe God owes me one. Maybe there is some special thing for you to do, and I kept you alive so you can do it.”
This whole thing sounded too hypothetical for me. “Or maybe you just happened to be there. Does it have to be some big reason? Maybe it’s just for no reason. Maybe it just is.”
M sat still for a long time. “You said you believed in God. All the time.” With fierce deliberation he breathed, “There is a reason.” He switched the light back on and shined it directly in my face. I squinted at him and shielded my eyes with my hand. M turned and walked down the stairs, leaving me in the darkness.
A long time later, I followed.
CHAPTER FIVE That Christmas something happened that changed my life. I got an AM radio. It was a battery-operated portable, not very big for a milestone, only about the size of a deck of cards. Still, it was an opaque window into another world that didn’t have much in common with mine.
Each night, when I was forced to quit reading, I would tune in to WLS AM 890 out of Chicago and put the radio under my pillow. I fell asleep to the world-according-to-pop music in all its eclectic glory—from quirky, weird songs like “Auntie Grezelda” to production masterpieces like “Good Vibrations.” I drove my parents crazy by making them turn up the radio whenever Tommy James and the Shondells came on singing “Hanky Panky.” Heidi, Hannah, and I sang along without a clue as to what the song was about.
Sometimes strange, disturbing images of another world trickled through in lyrics to songs like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” or “White Rabbit” —images I didn’t understand, but were all the more fascinating to me because of their elusiveness.
One weekend we drove down to Kentucky to visit some friends. I was staring out the window as we passed through Cincinnati, looking at all the tall, narrow houses lined up like pastel dominoes waiting for a perverse giant to push the first one. In the downtown traffic we inched past a park. A group of teenagers were hanging around a fountain. They all had long hair, even the guys, and were dressed like they were headed to some kind of psychotic costume party: tie-dyed shirts, hip-hugger bell-bottom jeans, fringed leather vests, headbands, necklaces of various kinds.
“Oh, look,” Mom said, pointing out the window.
“Hippies,” Dad said, using the same tone of voice he would have used to identify a hippopotamus or giraffe in the zoo.
Hannah giggled. “Hippies!” she repeated.
I was intrigued. “What’s a hippie?”
“Young people who live in communes and grow their hair long and wear necklaces they call ‘love beads’ and take drugs and protest the war,” Mom explained. She didn’t mention the “free love” thing, which I didn’t realize until later, of course.
“That’s stupid,” Heidi said.
I looked back out the window. “Why are they called hippies?” I expected them to have very large hips.
“I don’t know,” Mom said.
Dad volunteered some etymology. “It comes from the word hip, which came from the word hep, which means fashionable or knowledgeable about the latest trends.”
“Hippies,” I whispered to the window as the park faded from view, certain that these hippies were pieces in the puzzle forming from my AM-radio-sponsored lessons in pop culture.
The reference to drugs fascinated me even more. I had heard of acid, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, of people hearing colors and seeing smells and smelling music. I was very curious about how the senses could trade places, and I wondered what red sounded like. Was it loud? Soothing? Alarming? Obnoxious? Hypnotic? Stories of bad trips and acid flashbacks added a darker, menacing tone to the magical stories. Why did these hippies risk such dangers for the experience? What was I missing that made the reward worth the risks?
From that day forward I listened hungrily to the evening news whenever I saw a protest march or a love-in, grasping for details that would enlighten me about this new world. My tastes in music shifted from pop hits to music with more edge to it. From the Supremes doing “Keep Me Hanging On” to the Vanilla Fudge version, from the Monkeeys to the Stones.
I also started wondering about the Creature again. I periodically peered through the fence, sometimes catching a glimpse of her brogans jutting out of the box. When it got colder, she disappeared like the robins. One January afternoon I ventured through the gap. The box had collapsed into a soggy ruin. I propped it up. The tattered blanket was still inside, now hardly more than a rag. Nothing else of the Creature remained.
The next Saturday M and I walked to the library, bundled in hats, mufflers, mittens, and overcoats. A low gray blanket shut out the sun. Melted snow left behind a mantle of gray slush that mirrored the sky. The world seemed a muted dreariness. We kicked at the slush with our boots as we trudged along. I told M that I thought the Creature had left.
“Don’t even mention her, man,” he said with feeling. “It’s bad luck to talk about witches.”
“She wasn’t a witch, just a lady hobo.”
“Oh, she wasn’t? Didn’t you hear her put a curse on me? She tried to turn me into a pig!”
I stopped and looked at M. “What?”
M stopped and turned back. “Yeah, man. She said, ‘You will be cursed and become a ham,’ or somethin’ like that!” He shivered, but not from the cold. “And,” he added resentfully, his eyes narrowing into slits, “she said somethin’ about me being a slave. I missed some of it when I cleared that fence.”
I laughed, puffs of breath floating around my head. M was not amused. He walked on.
I ran to catch up, almost slipping in the slush. “M, she wasn’t putting a curse on you; she was quoting the Bible.” (Sometimes it comes in handy to be a PK. Not very often though.) “Ham was Noah’s third son. After the flood and the ark and two of every animal and the seven of some kinds of animal that nobody ever mentions and the rainbow and all that, Noah got drunk and was lying naked in his tent, and Ham made fun of him, but the other two sons walked into the tent backwards and dropped a robe on him or something, so Noah said that stuff about Ham. Cursed him.”
“What?” M stopped, again. “Where did you hear that, man?”
I walked back to him. “It’s in the Bible.”
“Really? There’s stuff like that in the Bible?”
“Oh, yeah. All kinds of stuff like that. Even weirder.”
“Really?”
“Really. That’s not the half of it.”
He considered for awhile, shrugged his shoulders, and we resumed our walk to the library.
“I still think she’s a witch,” he said.
I pushed him and he slipped on the ice, dragging me down with him. We wrestled in the slush and arrived at the library a little soggier for the trip. I got three Hardy Boys mysteries and Kidnapped. M picked up More Homer Price and Sounder.
On the way back, M introduced a topic that had never come up between us.
“I bet I know who you like.” M kicked a can exposed by the melting snow.
I immediately kicked the can back and said, “Who?”
“Pam.” He kicked the can back to me.
I faltered and missed the can completely. Every boy had some girl he liked, but it was usually a secret he guarded more jealously than his middle name, assuming, of course, he had an embarrassing middle name, like Maurice. (Apologies to any guys out there named Maurice, but at least your middle name isn’t Shirley, like one guy I knew! No apologies to any guys named Shirley.)
I liked M, but he was treading a little too close for my comfort. I hesitated to divulge the truth, but to deny it seemed to betray the girl of my secret affection, and my sense of honor shrank from that dastardly deed. I self-consciously admitted to M that I was entranced by the plain but intelligent Pam.
“And Bingo was his name-o!” M cried just before slipping to the ground in a wail of laughter while attempting a pirouette in the slush.
Of course I wasn’t giving this in
formation away for free. After he got back up and picked up all his books, I kicked the can back at him and demanded a corresponding disclosure.
“Guess,” he said, with a kick.
I mentally ran through the Negro girls in the class and picked a likely name.
“Nope.” Kick.
I picked another.
“Nope.” Kick.
I named them all.
“Nope.” Kick.
I gave up in exasperation. I figured it must be someone in another grade, and I didn’t know many kids in other classes. “So, who is it?” I demanded.
“Terri,” he said with a grin.
I was stunned. “Terri?”
“Yeah, Terri.”
“Oh.” There was no denying Terri was cute, but she was also white. The fact was so glaringly obvious I wondered why M hadn’t noticed. I walked in silence for awhile, kicking the can when it came into my lane. Because he was my friend, I felt I should say something. But also, because he was my friend, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I didn’t know how to do both.
“Well . . . I don’t . . . I mean, it’s not . . . well, I’m not sure that would work out,” I said lamely.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Well, because . . . you know.” I kept my eyes safely on the can.
There was silence for a moment. “Oh, you mean because—”
“Yeah,” I said in a rush, feeling vaguely ashamed without knowing why. We walked on in silence for a long time, the can abandoned behind us in the slush.
We finally arrived on our block. Our library visits had developed into a tradition. The ritual was usually concluded with us repairing to an attic, his or mine as the whim took us, to read for awhile, often with refreshment smuggled up the stairs. This time we stopped on the corner, awkwardly not turning toward either house.
The impasse was broken by M. “You know, Moses’ wife was black.”
“What?”
“Looks like there’s some parts of the Bible you don’t know that much about, man.”
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