Chapter Sixteen
The redheaded boy was running around like someone had given him the hotfoot.
The second graders were learning dodgeball, it seemed.
But the redhead was the only target, and they weren’t in a line; they were just running around, picking up balls and throwing them at him.
Maybe they didn’t know the rules. He was hit with balls but wasn’t out; he caught balls and threw them back, but the balls kept coming.
The poor kid had a raw deal, Skip thought.
His hair made him stand out too much, maybe. His size made him easy to pick on.
“Look at that little bastard,” Ron Burgess said, laughing.
He took a pawpaw out of his back pocket, sank a firecracker into it, lit the fuse, and threw it high into the air over the recess field.
It exploded and rained bits of fruit down on everyone, making half the kids hoot and whistle and the other half scream and scramble.
—
Then summer came, and because they hadn’t had any rain all spring it was extra hot.
Brutal, his father said. It didn’t bother Skip any.
Sweat was sweat, who cared? He mounted his bike in the mornings and set out for whomever he could find to play with.
He had squadrons all over this side of town.
He played with kids in the neighborhood that he went to school with but only played with in the summer, for some reason.
He played with a couple of kids who lived in Tiller’s Flat and who went to the Black school one town over, like Vincent Deeds, who was Skip’s age and who lately wouldn’t shut up about Reader’s Digest miniature cars.
Vincent’s little sister, Ellah, who didn’t really play with Vincent and Skip but hovered around sometimes, spying on them.
Sam Riley, whose dad had died late in the war when Sam was little, and who lived with his mom, a block away from Vincent.
Sam was eleven and didn’t want to clothespin playing cards to his bicycle spokes anymore.
Every time they ran into each other, he asked Skip if his mustache was visible.
Theo and Ron lived on the other side of Brookdale, in Camden where the people his dad said he shouldn’t call poor lived.
There were a couple of mean dads in there, and there was a girl on the back loop who Theo and Ron called Downtown Alice, who was older, maybe ten, wore her brother’s clothes, and made sex gestures with her hands that none of them understood. Sometimes she threw gravel at them.
Skip would ride with whoever wanted to go: out to the railyard to thump over the ties; into the woods across Cooper Road to track Nazis and Commies; to the new, giant laundromat to check the coin returns and lint traps for loose change.
The only snag was that he couldn’t just mix and match his friends, willy-nilly.
He couldn’t, for instance, have Ron and Vincent together, or Ron and Sam.
Ron said terrible things about Tiller’s Flat and used the word for Black people even Skip’s Grandad didn’t use.
And Sam and Vincent didn’t have anything good to say about the “dumb cracker hicks” who lived in Camden.
Having squadrons, Skip had learned, meant having factions.
Sometimes it was easier just to ride around by himself.
—
Now and then he saw the redheaded boy in town, on his bicycle.
Hard to miss him if he wasn’t wearing a hat.
Sometimes he was with another kid or two, sometimes he was alone.
One afternoon, not far into the summer, Skip was out by himself, zigzagging over the cobblestones of Crenshaw Street and machine-gunning his voice, when he saw a group of boys at the corner, by the car wash.
He rode closer. The tallest boy, with the flattop, was from his class.
Three others were from the grade behind his, and in the middle of them all was the redheaded boy.
His bike lay on the sidewalk a few feet away.
What Skip saw made no sense to his brain.
That boy was the youngest and littlest of these kids.
The flattop was facing him, flicking his finger against the boy’s forehead, while one of the other kids held his arms pinned back.
The redheaded boy was twisting like an eel, trying to get away but to no avail.
Skip dismounted, walked up to the flattop, and used both hands to shove him to the ground. The flattop spit out a string of curse words and made to come at Skip, but Skip just shoved him down again, as if it were an afterthought.
After the lot of them had scattered, the redheaded boy brushed his hands over his arms the same way he’d dusted snow off his coat sleeves.
He walked over to his bike and stood it, then gave Skip the same look he’d given him when Skip had hefted huge armfuls of snow for the walls of the igloo: a little wary, maybe impressed. “Thanks,” he said.
“When they’re bigger than you, like that?” Skip said. “Kick ’em in the nuts as hard as you can. Works every time.”
—
The next time they saw each other, they bicycled out to the railyard and around the cars on the service tracks.
The time after that, they rode to Skip’s house and collected buckeyes from under the tree in his front yard, shelling all the ones that could be shelled.
Pockets bulging, they rode out to the abandoned mill and left their bikes at the bottom of the smokestack and climbed the rusted spiral staircase to the circular platform at the top.
From up there, they used Skip’s slingshot and shot the buckeyes at birds they knew they couldn’t hit.
They shot at crop dusters, distant cars.
They fired straight up into the air and stood with their hands at their sides and their eyes shut, waiting to be killed should the buckeye come down and pierce one of their skulls.
When they’d emptied all their pockets and Skip thought they were out of nuts, Tom pointed to his socks, which were bulging with them.
Skip thought that was one of the funniest things he’d ever seen. He called Tom Buckeye from that day on.
—
They rode all through Tom’s neighborhood, which Skip thought was fancy because the houses sat farther back from the street, and all through Camden and Tiller’s Flat.
They found Vincent at the nearly dry culvert, trying to ride his bike through it with his head sideways, and after he’d shown them the new Reader’s Digest car he had in his pocket—a hearse, he said, though to Skip and Tom it just looked like a purple station wagon—the three of them rode up and down the alleys behind the new warehouses on Dover Street.
Then up Jones Street and down Main and out to the cemetery.
When they saw, from inside the cemetery, Everett on his tricycle heading into town, Skip and Vincent glanced at each other, then took off, motioning for Tom to follow.
As fast as they could, they rode up Compton Road to Everett’s house, where they set about exploring all the junk in his yard.
The chickens watched them from one of the rusted Model Ts.
The old black dog watched them from the lip of his doghouse.
Everything was dirty and hot to the touch.
In Everett’s barn, there was no room to walk, but the three of them climbed over things, slapping at spiderwebs as they went.
Skip found a spittoon. Vincent found a moldy Bible in a trombone case.
Under a canvas tarp so stiff that it held the shape of its sag when he lifted it, Tom found a skeleton that might have belonged to a cat.
He and Vincent scrambled back from it, but Skip just shrugged and said it was no surprise because the old man was an ogre, and it was scientifically known that ogres ate cats.
Another time—just Skip and Tom (Vincent, who had a beloved tabby named Milton, wasn’t interested in going back after finding the skeleton)—they thought they saw Everett in town at a distance, but when they got to his house, he was sitting in an armchair in his front yard, in the shade of the giant oak tree.
Dressed in overalls, an undershirt. The chair stuffed with some kind of hair that tufted out of holes in the fabric.
A rifle lay across the arms. A bottle stood in the grass beside the chair.
“Why do you shitbirds keep coming here?” Everett asked them.
They liked that, shitbirds. They looked at each other and grinned. “What’s in the bottle?” Skip asked.
“If you don’t tell your father about it, you can have a taste.” Everett glanced at Tom. “Him too.”
“He’s too little,” Skip said. He walked up to his grandfather, accepted the bottle, and sipped from it. The top half of his face puckered. He leaned over and spit.
“Puts wood in your pecker,” Everett said.
He walked them around back, showed them a pachinko machine filled with dead spiders the tiny ball de-legged as it fell.
He showed them the giant wheel-handle off a printing press.
He showed them an old factory door hinged to a wooden frame set into the ground, and beneath the door, the fallout shelter he’d dug after the last war: just big enough for a cot and a shelf with a kerosene lamp, tins of water, tins of Spam.
When the jackasses who ran the world decided to drop the big one, Everett said, this was where he’d be. They were welcome to join him.