“It’s a hundred years old.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell. The wood’s all gray, and they don’t build buildings like this no more. Let’s go in.”
“We’ll get in trouble,” I said.
He looked at me as though I’d drooled on my chest.
“No, we won’t. The guy who owned this is dead, or he would have painted it.”
This seemed air-tight logic to me, and I told him I was in.
The building sat on a corner lot, surrounded on both sides by what we always called “prairies”—unused vacant lots given over to weeds and prairie flowers sometimes four or five feet high, and thick as the bristles on a brush. Rabbits and mice lived in these places, and small snakes, you could lose or hide things in them, and Matt contended that a dead man had been found in one near his house but no one believed him.
Grandma Dorsey had begun giving me my father’s old Hardy Boy mysteries, and I realized that I was poised at the onset of exactly the type of adventure that Frank and Joe Hardy seemed to have every week. Thus the locked doors of the old barn gave me no pause: the Hardy Boys were forever breaking-and-entering in the name of adventure. Besides, to this day I have no idea where we were but it was a strange neighborhood, and a crowd of small boys far from their homes quickly lose what little moral restraint they have acquired. We bought Matt’s line of reasoning without hesitation. Rooting around in the high grass like a scavenger tribe, we found a rotten log and, using this as a battering ram, Matt and I and a boy named Terry Logan pounded at the ancient planking near the back of the building until it caved in with a dry crack. We pulled the shattered plank away and without hesitation crawled in.
A billion specks of dust hung suspended in the bar of gold light from the hole we’d just made, and the rest was darkness. We were vaguely aware of a large dark shape in the center a few feet away but it wasn’t ’til our eyes had adjusted to the darkness that we realized it was a car. It was unlike any car I was familiar with, tall and boxy and odd, and I realize now that it was probably one of the old ungainly cars from the 1920s. More important to us than its strange silhouette were the thick cobwebs that hung from it and dangled from what few corners of the old barn we could see. Matt drew a finger through the dust along the door of the car, then looked up and squinted into the dark.
“There’s something up there,” he said, and my heart sank but I followed him to the back, where we found a brittle wooden staircase that moved from side to side as the three of us climbed up. “Up” led to a loft that seemed to run along all four sides of the building. It was narrow and crowded with boxes and long or bulky objects that we could not see but which made each step an adventure. At one point Terry Logan almost fell out of the loft, and afterwards I could hear his fevered, terrified breathing.
“Ain’t this a ball?” Matt asked at one point, and I almost laughed aloud at Terry’s unconvincing, “Sure is.”
“Prob’ly spiders up here,” Matt said with undisguised joy.
At the front we found a sort of window, matted with fifty years of dust and filth, which Matt kicked in after only a second’s moral debate, our earlier assault on the wall having made him a hardened second-story man. Sunlight, blinding sunlight, shot through the hole. Now that we could see around us, the barn lost none of its mystique: we could see old farm tools, ploughs and scythes and a pile of old wood-handled drills, and Matt thought he’d died and gone to heaven.
“This place is great, this is unbelievable. These are from Civil War times I bet.”
“Maybe older,” I suggested, and we had a brief three-way debate on whether there had been a Chicago before the Civil War, with the others insisting that there hadn’t been, and me holding to a position that Chicago was even older than New York.
Our discussion was interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up very close by. We scampered down the staircase, and I was struck by a wave of terror that did not abate even when I tumbled the last three steps and landed on my back with Terry Logan on top of me. Matt was already out the hole. When we emerged into what seemed to be a sun that had moved closer in our absence, we saw a man staring at us. I have since seen shock on many faces, but never, before or since, have I seen shock so perfect, so total, as this man watched three small boys issue from his property through a hole of their own making. His mouth was open and his eyes unnaturally wide, and when he finally spoke, his voice was just a whisper.
“You little bastards!” he said, and then I heard Matt giggle and knew our adventure was entering a new phase. Matt headed through the prairie, instinctively seeking an equalizer for the man’s long legs and finding one in the thick weeds. Terry and I followed with our hearts battering through our chests. I was by turns horrified that my life was about to end in a foreign place where no one knew me, and delighted that we were having an adventure which involved a potentially violent adult who rained profanity on us with a vigor I’d never before experienced. This man had none of the imagination I’d noted among my uncles and some others, but the vehemence with which he cursed us was admirable and made one overlook his lack of a vocabulary.
As I ran through weeds head-high, I could hear the man behind us, panting and still cursing, and I realized I was laughing, and so was Matt. Then I fell. I caught my foot in the tangled stems of the weeds and went down, certain that my life had come to a sorry end. For a while I lay there, holding my breath and peering up at the blue sky with one eye, expecting the tall weeds to part at any moment and reveal the drooling, maniacal face of the cursing man, who would then kill me. He tramped heavily through the grass, gasping now, and then I heard a heavy thud and a groan.
For just a frozen moment in time I lay there wondering if this was the first manifestation in my young life of that most widely debated of creatures, the Guardian Angel. Had my personal angel grabbed the Cursing Man by an ankle, or given him a hard push to send him face-first into the weeds, or just created a sudden and short-lived hole for the Cursing Man to step into? For a second I worried that My Angel had struck the man dead, but even in my nascent and often bizarre theology there was little place for the concept of Guardian-Angel-as-Personal-Assassin. Whatever had happened, I was grateful and eventually remembered that the continuation of my life depended on my escape. I bounded to my feet and took off.
Matt and Terry were waiting for me at the mouth of an alley a block away; Terry was saucer-eyed with fright and Matt had gone pale under his constant sunburn, not because he’d been afraid of being caught himself but because he’d envisioned going home to tell my grandmother he’d gotten me killed or sent to prison.
“Hi, you guys,” I said in my breeziest manner.
“Did he get you?” Terry asked.
“Nah. I got by him without him seeing me. I fell though,” I added, feeling that I had to account for my tardy arrival. Matt gave me a look that mixed relief and disapproval, and we all made for home at a brisk trot.
Later that day I tried in a circuitous way to find out whether Matt believed in angels. It was a mistake. He stared at me for a moment with a look halfway between skepticism and irritation.
Then he said simply, “There’s no angels. I don’t believe in none of that. That’s make-believe.” Something in his face and tone told me that his angel had had more than one opportunity to show up, and hadn’t.
Looking back at the summer of 1954, my first summer with my grandparents, I can see all the stages but I am unable to make out the seams, as one time blends into another, but I’m certain that within a month of trial-and-error they’d managed to resurrect as much of my old routine as could be expected.
In the afternoons I played with a boy up Clybourn named Ricky or my schoolmate Jamie Orsini. My days were full, each one reflecting the determination of the adults around me to make up for what they saw as a great yawning hole in my life,