Angels in Heaven

sent me some highly realistic fake caca in a small
jewelry box, gift wrapped; or how come Billy would never let me fire even one
shot from his Red Ryder BB rifle. We sat beside each other in grade school and
in high school and even lined up beside each other on the left side of the line
(he was end) for the mighty Packer High Panthers. We once got disciplined
together by the principal for vulgar behavior: when our cheerleaders begged the
spectators to give them a “P” during a game, we stood up and pretended to have
one.
    I liked football. It let me bully
smaller kids legally. Billy hated it, but remember I’m taking about days so
long ago that everyone who wasn’t a girl or in a wheelchair had to turn out for
the team, even sissies, even fat kids with funny shoes and glasses.
    Oh, dear. Billy Baker. Billy was
smart. He could do fractions. He knew where Czechoslovakia was. He could even
spell it. He read books that weren’t on the official reading list, and I’m not
talking about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Gang-bang or God’s Little
Acre —we all read those. Strangely enough, I became something of a reader
myself, later. Orphans may daydream a lot, but so do people in the clink,
whatever type of clink it may be, and is not reading a type of daydreaming too,
Evonne, my precious?
    Well. Billy’s pop owned and ran a
small trucking business and was also a useful all-round handyman, and when Mr.
Baker and my pop found us kids wanted to put up some sort of a clubhouse using
the wood from the blown-over fence, they decided to draw up the plans for us
and took to sitting out back in one or the other’s garden drinking lemonade
that we knew was spiked but we weren’t supposed to, filling page after page
with highly detailed plans until me and Billy finally built the thing ourselves
without plans, and for all I know it’s still there. It was, of course, in that
shack that Running Deer and Gray Wolf swore brotherhood until the last smoke
signal rose and the last tale had been told.
    Sabu and I used to work for his pop
weekends and summertimes, me as slave labor doing chores like toting two
thousand bathroom scales from the warehouse along a plank into one of the
trucks, him on the road with his older brother, Ed, learning the true trucker
creed—which stops had the greasiest foods, the biggest tits, and the worst
music.
    Different as we were, we shared one
common dream (two, if you count getting Marge Freeman’s trainer bra off):
getting out of town and staying out. Don’t get me wrong. I love Davenport and I always will. I go back every chance I get, like every centennial of the
town’s founding.
    Somehow it came to pass that we both
in our own ways did manage to get out of town, although in my case I didn’t
have a lot of choice. I was sent down south to a farm for bad boys outside Springfield, while Billy miraculously made it to state college. Hell, in those days it was
a big deal even to finish high school without getting thrown out or knocked up.
And Billy got through college too, graduating in something like bus. admin.,
and then he went to a couple of places I forget and then to New York, while I
went to a couple of places I’d like to forget and then, finally, out to the
West Coast.
    We kept in touch for a while and
actually contrived to meet once, in Chicago, but the rest was silence, like the
Sphinx, I think it was, said. Mom wrote Mrs. Baker once in a while and still
exchanged Christmas cards with her, so I guess that’s how Billy knew that Tony
joined the cops after he came out of the army. Why Billy hadn’t written to his
mom and asked her to forward the letter to me was another question. Perhaps he
didn’t want her to know he was in Mexico, let alone serving as rat food in a
high-security slammer there.
    All of which led, of course, to a
further question: could Running Deer, once the strongest and bravest of all the
Apache, ignore the cunning, master tracker Gray Wolfs cry for help? Not while
the wind still whistled through the sycamores, he couldn’t. It would
unfortunately mean I would have to postpone calling up Mel, dazzling the prez,
losing my soul, signing my life away, and buying a decent suit, but had Running
Deer spoke with forked tongue that afternoon in the shack after school? Forget
it, redskin brother.
    I got out the memo pad again.
    On the top I wrote, in capitals, “MEXICO.”
    Under that I wrote, “1. Diarrhea
medicine (large size).” Under that I wrote, “2. Make