Then the door to my room swung open and there she was, that rash that wouldn’t go away, a look of demented sisterly pleasure on her face.
“You know what I’m here for,” she said.
And I said: “Yeah, but I’m all out of Ugly-Be-Gone.”
When she charged across the room, I scooped up the book to try and defend myself, and the Queen of Noogies sent me to sleep with bruises and one bastard of a headache.
And the tired realization that some things would never change.
3.
I met Fat Bobby first. His real name was Bobby Templeton, but fat he was and knew it, seemed to despondently accept it, and so Fat Bobby he became.
Now I don’t know about God or anything like that. I guess I’ve asked myself the Big Questions like just about anyone else has in their life at some point or another, but I guess my brain is too small for the Big Answers. There isn’t much in this life that makes sense to me, but one thing I’m pretty sure of is that there isn’t any such thing as coincidence. It seems that how one thing leads to another and that to another, so that there’s a whole series of events that gain momentum and become inevitable, is a natural consequence of cause and effect, and there isn’t anything coincidental or accidental about it.
I think Fat Bobby was the first in just such a chain of events. I think on how it all ended, the pain and the loss and the misery, and wonder how it all would have been different if I had just passed on by that fat kid in the woods.
But then there wouldn’t have come the other things: the friendship, the trust, the laughter.
All things good in this haphazard mess we call life.
* * *
On Dad’s first day at the store, I woke up early, thinking I’d cut through the woods and walk into town, maybe check out the local comic book shop, perhaps pay Dad a visit. Lazily excited, I rolled out of bed and stumbled my way to the bathroom across the hall, Bandit following. Starting the water in the shower stall, I waited for it to warm, stripped, and climbed in. Bandit watched with a perplexed expression from the throw rug in the center of the bathroom’s tiled floor, as if he wondered why he was excluded from this splashy fun.
After throwing on jeans and a T-shirt, hair still wet from the shower, I raced downstairs. Mom was preparing breakfast, something sizzling tantalizingly in a pan atop the stove. She asked if I wanted some bacon and eggs, and though I was sorely tempted by the smells, I told her my plans and said I’d have Dad get me something from the bookstore cafe. A mild scowl told me what she thought of the nutritional value of a cafe breakfast, but Mom didn’t object.
“Just make sure if you’re going down to the woods,” she said, “don’t go alone. Take Bandit with you.”
I hardly needed her advice on this, and neither did Bandit, prancing so close behind me that if I stopped abruptly he’d end up nose first in my backside. Out on the porch, Bandit at my heels, Mom called after me and asked when I’d be back. Down the porch and into the yard, I yelled back an “I don’t know!” and continued down the road.
Our dirt road led to the highway, which in turn led into Payne proper, but as I walked my eyes drifted to the nearby woods. I remembered Dad telling me that a stream ran through the forest and eventually into town. I figured I’d head that way, find the stream, and maybe idle away some time there with Bandit, leisurely making my way to civilization.
The highway led north, while the woods and stream were somewhat westerly. I walked with the sun at my back, the heat coming down like fiery arrows. My hair dried pretty quick, but by the time I reached the edge of the forest I was wet again, this time with a sheen of sweat. Bandit’s tongue lolled out like a strip of unrolled carpet, yet he wasn’t panting, still moving silently at my side like that Indian ghost dog.
The path to the woods led up a steady incline. When there was still about a quarter mile left to go, I paused with Bandit to rest. From my new vantage point, I looked over the woodlands like a god upon his domain.
To the north I could see the town of Payne, rustic earthy adobe and brick buildings splayed out like an Old West settlement. I could see the roads crisscrossing the municipality from one end to the other, the entirety of the place laid out there below me like a toy model. I half expected to see buggies and wagons and men on horses kicking up dirt clouds, and maybe a blacksmith pounding red-hot metal with a huge hammer. Perhaps a gallows where outlaws and criminals were hanged, looped rope and maybe a corpse swaying in the summer breeze.
I turned back to the woods and, off in the trees a distance, I saw something catch the golden sun like a mirror, twinkling and casting back the light. A hand cupped over my eyes like a visor, I squinted, had to turn away as the sunlight flashed off the object again. I tried to pinpoint its location by some sort of landmark, maybe a tree larger than all the others, or a rock formation that broke the thick landscape around it. There were a couple craggy hills poking about through the surrounding tree coverage, but nothing remarkable.
Nothing I could check on the map in my mind as noteworthy, like a marker on a treasure map.
All the trees looked the same, and though I saw some outcroppings interspersed out among the green landscape, none were very close to that sparkling object. So, I set imaginary crosshairs in the direction of the reflecting light and walked straight as an arrow, hoping for a minimum of obstacles on my route that would make me stray.
“Come on, Bandit,” I said, and he trotted at my heels, big dog smile splitting his face as if this was all that he needed: his boy, a sunny day, and a long walk with no particular destination.
At best I judged the source of the bright light to be a couple hundred yards into the woods, and I came to the stream long before I’d trundled that far among the trees and bushes and fallen limbs. The stream was about two car lengths in width, clear water sparkling the sun in a million daggers of light, and at its center I could only just see the bottom. Vague and distorted water-rippled rocks peppered the riverbed. Fish like silvery lasers darted beneath the surface. The sound of the stream moving and rushing along its course was soft music, and a fine spray—wet and cool—carried the current’s song in the air.
Bandit had seen the fish as well, or smelled them, and he slipped into the water as silently as he walked, a phantasm entering the flow of the Styx. I settled down on a rock that seemed to be formed just for that purpose. I took off my shoes and socks, thinking I’d dip into the water also, its sharp clarity and cleanness inviting me.
Wiping sweat from my forehead, I wished I’d brought a bottle of water. I thought about leaning over to drink from the stream, but seemed to remember hearing something about fish shit in stream and river water, and it making people sick and giving them the shits. Spending the first week of summer squirting diarrhea until my ass was raw didn’t seem such a hot idea. So I didn’t drink the water, tried swallowing some spit in my parched throat instead.
Reckoning I’d have to settle for just dipping my feet in, maybe splashing about with Bandit a little to cool off, I started to do so. A shout and a loud splash from further downstream brought me to a stop with one foot in the water, the other still on the bank. Leaning in the direction of the sound, head cocked to hear better, I watched the flow of the water to where it ran around a bend in the streambed and out of sight.
Bandit’s ears pricked up at the sound also, and he started that way, forgetting the darting fish for the moment. Keeping my voice low, I called for him to wait. We moved along in the water together, boy and dog, one trying to be as stealthy as a ninja, the other naturally so.
A second cry traveled through the air around the bend and, in it this time, I distinctly heard the words “Please! Stop!” and more splashing. Despite the high-pitched whine of the voice, and a decidedly embarrassing nasally sound on the verge of being full-blown crying, I could tell it was a boy’s voice. A kid probably around