Boys Life

thing?”
    God has a sense of humor that gets my goat sometimes.
    September dwindled away, and one morning it was October. The hills were streaked with red and gold, as if some magician had painted the trees almost overnight. It was still hot in the afternoons, but the mornings began to whisper about sweaters. This was Indian summer, when you saw those purple-and-red-grained ears of corn in baskets in the grocery store and an occasional dead leaf chuckled along the sidewalk.
    We had Show-and-Tell Day at our grade in school, which meant that everybody got to bring something important and tell why it was. I brought an issue of Famous Monsters to class, the sight of which would probably set Leatherlungs off like a Roman candle but would make me a hero of the oppressed. Davy Ray brought his “I Get Around” record, and the picture of an electric guitar he hoped to learn to play when his parents could afford lessons. Ben brought a Confederate dollar. Johnny brought his collection of arrowheads, all kept in separate drawers in a metal fishing-tackle box and protected by individual cotton balls.
    They were a wonder to behold. Small and large, rough and smooth, light and dark: they beckoned the imagination on a journey into the time when the forest was unbroken, the only light was cast from tribal fires, and Zephyr existed only in a medicine man’s fever. Johnny had been gathering the arrowheads ever since I’d known him, in the second grade. While the rest of us were running and playing without a moment’s interest in that dusty crevice known as history, Johnny was searching the wooded trails and creekbeds for a sharp little sign of his heritage. He had collected over a hundred, lovingly cleaned them-but no shellac, that would be an insult to the hand that carved the flint-and tucked them away in the tackle box. I imagined he took them out at night, in his room, and over them he dreamed of what life was like in Adams Valley two hundred years ago. I wondered if he imagined there were four Indian buddies who had four dogs and four swift ponies, and that they lived in tepees in the same village and talked about life and school and stuff. I never asked him, but I think he probably did.
    Before school began that morning of show-and-tell-which I had been dreading for several days because of what the Demon would offer up for appraisal-the guys and I met where we usually did, near the monkey bars on the dusty playground, our bikes chained to the fence along with dozens of others. We sat in the sun because the morning was cool and the sky was clear. “Open it,” Ben said to Johnny. “Come on, let’s see.”
    It didn’t take much urging for Johnny to flip up the latch. He may have kept them protected like rare jewels, but he wasn’t stingy about sharing their magic. “Found this one last Saturday,” he said as he opened a wad of cotton and brought a pale gray arrowhead to the light. “You can tell whoever did this was in a hurry. See how the cuts are so rough and uneven? He wasn’t takin’ his time about it. He just wanted to make an arrowhead so he could go shoot somethin’ to eat.”
    “Yeah, and from the size of it I’ll bet all he got was a gopher,” Davy Ray commented.
    “Maybe he was a sorry shot,” Ben said. “Maybe he knew he’d probably lose it.”
    “Could be,” Johnny agreed. “Maybe he was a boy, and this was his first one.”
    “If I’d had to depend on makin’ arrowheads to eat,” I said, “I would’ve dried up and blown away mighty fast.”
    “You sure have got a lot of them.” Ben’s fingers might have been itching to explore in the tackle box, but he was respectful of Johnny’s property. “Have you got a favorite one?”
    “Yeah, I do. This is it.” Johnny picked up a wad of cotton, opened it, and showed us which one.
    It was black, smooth, and almost perfectly formed.
    I recognized it.
    It was the arrowhead Davy Ray had found in the deep woods on our camping trip.
    “That’s a beauty,” Ben agreed. “Looks like it’s been oiled, doesn’t it?”
    “I just cleaned it, that’s all. It does shine, though.” He rubbed the arrowhead between his brown fingers, and he placed it in Ben’s pudgy hand. “Feel it,” Johnny said. “You can hardly feel any cuts on it.”
    Ben passed it to Davy Ray, who passed it to me. The arrowhead had one small chip in it, but it seemed to melt into your hand. Rubbing it in your palm, it was hard to tell where arrowhead stopped and flesh