Still Summer Nights

Chapter One - Paul

CHAPTER ONE

Paul

I WAS TIRED of listening to Eisenhower on the radio, his enunciated vowels, clipped consonants, and the way he says the year nineteen-hundred-and-fifty-eight as if he might be counting change from his pockets.

If I were truthful in all things, I’d say the reason I came outside with my book was to wait. But I am not truthful in all things.

So I’ll just blame Eisenhower.

While I wait, a breeze comes through and makes the pages of my book curl.

It’s an already battered book, with dog-eared pages and a torn back cover that I pasted together seven months ago.

I used to carry it with me everywhere, thinking I’d need some comfort, some escape.

I smooth out the pages as best I can and keep one eye on the sun making its arc through the western sky.

It’s the time of day when Aunt Amy’s dresses and underthings have dried on the line and the fresh scent carries over in the breeze.

The day is old and hot and there are suppertime smells in the air.

It’s perfect. As perfect as anything can be in my life, which is nothing really, and I turn in the lawn chair just enough so I can see without being seen.

My secrets begin and end with the arc of the sun.

“Paul,” Aunt Amy calls. In my periphery I see her coming out onto the patio with a basket, her bare feet swishing in the grass. “Are you really reading that book again ?”

I glance over at the apartment building just behind the fence.

It’s a square brick building with exactly four apartments.

The two on the bottom have sliding doors and a patio , and the top two have sliding doors and balconies of concrete and metal railings.

A gravel alleyway separates Aunt Amy’s fence from the apartment building’s pathetic yard.

My fingers tighten around the book cover. “Mom liked this book.” I glance over at Aunt Amy and her expression goes solemn. I feel a pinch of guilt.

“I see,” she replies, forcing her voice to sound light.

She begins removing clothes from the line.

At the end, in a little collection, are my own clothes, dried and swaying.

I sit up in horror at the thought of my underpants swaying about like a flag.

I look up at the apartment building, relieved there’s no one outside to see.

Especially not him .

From where I sit, behind the brown wooden fence, I can see that the bottom right apartment looks empty.

I’ve peeked through a slit in the wood and there’s nothing on the patio.

No chairs or ashtray. But there’s a frayed-looking rug just by the doors and sometimes there’s a light on inside.

I’m guessing it’s an old man who doesn’t want to be bothered.

Widowed and alone, suburbia lives and thrives while his golden years pass him by. And he’d just prefer it that way.

Aunt Amy puts the clothespins in her apron. “Maybe we’ll have dinner out on the patio this evening. If the weather holds up.” She glances toward the south where there are some threatening clouds rolling in.

The bottom left apartment has a maybe-married couple and some kids.

I don’t know how many, but a dolly has been sitting next to the ashtray for a couple of months now.

The hair is frizzed, the face browned, and every so often a lady with curlers in her hair and wearing a mint-green robe sits out on the patio with a pack of Chesterfields.

Sometimes a guy yells from the inside or a kid shrieks like a banshee.

“What do you want for dinner?” Aunt Amy starts pulling down my clothes from the line. My shoulders relax.

“I dunno,” I reply absently.

The top right apartment has two girls. They look about my age, but I’m not so sure.

They don’t come out much. For a while, one of them would come out to smoke and lean over the balcony rail, her hair up in a scarf.

It always seemed like she was looking for someone down below. Romeo come to serenade her at last.

“I could get us a pizza pie,” Aunt Amy offers.

I shrug my shoulders and my gaze zeros in on the top left apartment, and by design, the furthest apartment from me.

I always hear his Triumph first, the sound of the motor breaking through the birds’ songs and dogs’ barks in the neighborhood.

He must park it in the front somewhere, because I’ve never actually seen it.

From the time the motor cuts off to when he appears on the balcony with a can of Pabst and a Lucky Strike is anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes.

I imagine my ears perking up like Bugs Bunny in anticipation.

“Well, I’ll fix us steak then,” Aunt Amy says, folding the last pair of pants from the line into the basket. “Steak and those little new potatoes. I’ll roast them, and I made a cake for dessert. You’d like that, right?”

I nod. It’s no different from what we have for dinner every night: meat and potatoes.

Sometimes there’s ice cream instead of cake.

Sometimes Aunt Amy burns the meat. Sometimes she over-salts the potatoes.

I can’t really hold it against her. Out of all my father’s sisters, she remains the only one unmarried.

She isn’t used to cooking for anyone but herself.

As she picks up the basket and turns to me, I hear it. A distant roar, a vroom vroom that bucks and canters as it gets closer, and I close my eyes, trying to picture him riding it. Five hundred pounds of steel between his legs, denim and leather, and the wind blowing past his slicked back hair.

“Paul?”

I open my eyes and Les Misérables slips out of my hands and onto the grass. “Yeah?”

I glance over at her, and she’s got one eyebrow raised in disapproval.

“Sorry. I’m sorry. I meant yes?”

“That’s better.” She tilts her head at me, and her eyes look down at the book. “Maybe you should consider going for a walk or something. It’s a nice afternoon.”

I shrug and fiddle with the thick, worn paperback. The engine draws closer until I know it’s right in front of the apartment house, right out of my sight. It cuts off.

“Maybe later,” I say.

Aunt Amy gives me another eyebrow raise.

I didn’t use to read outside, or just go outside in general, but she insisted.

Saying what a lovely spring it had been and the summer was just as nice and I should get outdoors.

It would be good for me, she said. She was gentle about it at first and allowed me to wallow alone in the guest room with my comics and Les Misérables , keeping the perfect company.

But she pressed the issue one morning at breakfast, her hair curlers falling out, her lips without color, and then she cleaned up the lawn chair and a little table and set it up.

I didn’t have a choice but to go outside then.

I’m worried she’s going to keep talking, and I’ll lose track of the time.

I won’t see him come out. I won’t be able to get to my spot between the shrubs and the fence, where I can watch him undetected.

But Aunt Amy says nothing more. She goes inside with the laundry basket.

I wait a beat or two, and slink over to my hiding place.

I guess I shouldn’t want her to go away so quickly, because it’s Aunt Amy I have to thank for this.

Or curse.

Whichever.

Because I first noticed him two days after she made me read outside.

I sat in the lawn chair, waving away a fly from the rim of my glasses, and I glanced up.

He sat on a stained wooden chair on the balcony, hunched over, the smoke from his cigarette curling upward.

His T-shirt was bleached white, sleeves rolled up against biceps that clenched and rippled as he sat back.

His sandy hair, heavy with pomade, framed a face that all at once appeared nonchalant, disinterested, and haunted.

His eyes glanced over to me, and I’d quickly crouched down by the fence out of his sight.

In my head I decided to call him Blue, because I was sure—and I’m still sure—that’s the color of his eyes.

I’m never close enough to see, but that’s what they look like to me. A crystal blue; azure prisms of light.

And when I read Les Misérables , I have to wonder if Blue is more like Javert the Inspector, orderly and obedient to the law, or Jean Valjean, the convict who changed his identity, soft-hearted and giving.

I wondered if Blue had taken a new identity to hide his past or if he was harsh and exacting in all things.

But then I felt like he could be Cosette, orphaned as a child, loved by Marius; just a mystery for me to unfold, enamored and pining, only I’d never be brave enough to search for him if he were ever lost to me.

At exactly five-fifteen, the doors to his balcony slide open and Blue steps out.

Today he wears another bleached-white T-shirt, a pack of Lucky’s rolled up in the right sleeve.

No, left sleeve. His left. His denim pants are dark, the cuffs folded up over black work boots, reminiscent of a factory worker, or a mechanic.

Sometimes he wears this short-sleeved plaid over the T-shirt, the buttons undone, and I’d die if there were no T-shirt underneath.

He lights a cigarette and drinks from a can of beer.

Sometimes he brings out one can. Sometimes two.

I’ve tried to figure out if there’s a pattern or a reason, but there doesn’t seem to be a reason at all.

Just what he feels like. Blue often stares out as he smokes and drinks.

It’s all leisurely, and I suppose it’s how he relaxes.

He never seems to notice if dogs bark or if the kid downstairs wails.

His eyes gaze across the rooftops, up to the sky, into a distance only known to him.