Boys Life

door that showed the steady progress of my growth. “I think Tom’s got a lot on his mind right now.”
    Their conversation rolled on into the realm of this and that, though at the center of it was the incident at Saxon’s Lake. I watched the baseball game with Dad, and I noticed that he kept closing and opening his right hand as if he were either trying to grasp something or free himself from a grip. Then it got time to get ready to go, and I gathered up my pajamas, my toothbrush, and another set of socks and underwear and shoved everything down in my army surplus knapsack. Dad told me to be careful and Mom told me to have fun, but to be back in the morning in time for Sunday school. I rubbed Rebel’s head and threw a stick for him to chase, and then I climbed on my bike and pedaled away.
    Ben didn’t live very far, only a half mile or so from my house at the dead end of Deerman Street. On Deerman Street I pedaled quietly, because guarding the corner of Deerman and Shantuck was the somber gray stone house where the notorious Branlin brothers lived. The Branlins, thirteen and fourteen years of age, had peroxided blond hair and delighted in destruction. Oftentimes they roamed the neighborhood on their matching black bicycles like vultures searching for fresh meat. I had heard from Davy Ray Callan that the Branlins sometimes tried to run cars off the street with their speeding black bikes, and that he’d actually witnessed Gotha Branlin, the oldest, tell his own mother to go to the bad place. Gotha and Gordo were like the Black Plague; you hoped they wouldn’t get you, but once they laid a hand on you, there was no escape.
    So far I had been insignificant to their careening meanness. I planned for it to stay that way.
    Ben’s house was much like my own. Ben had a brown dog named Tumper, who got up from his belly on the front porch to bark my arrival. Ben came out to meet me, and Mrs. Sears said hello and asked if I wanted a glass of root beer. She was dark-haired and had a pretty face, but she had hips as big as watermelons. Inside the house, Mr. Sears came up from his woodshop in the basement to speak to me. He was large and round, too, his heavy-jowled face ruddy under crew-cut brown hair. Mr. Sears was a happy man with a buck-toothed grin, woodshavings clinging to his striped shirt, and he told me a joke about a Baptist preacher and an outhouse that I didn’t really understand, but he laughed to cue me and Ben said, “Aw, Daddy!” as if he’d heard that dumb joke a dozen times.
    I unpacked my knapsack in Ben’s room, where he had nifty collections of baseball cards, bottle caps, and wasps’ nests. As I got squared away, Ben sat down on his Superman bedspread and said, “Did you tell your folks about the movie?”
    “No. Did you?”
    “Uh-uh.” He picked at a loose thread on Superman’s face. “How come you didn’t?”
    “I don’t know. How come you didn’t?”
    Ben shrugged, but thoughts were working in his head. “I guess,” he said, “it was too awful to tell.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I went out back,” Ben said. “No sand. Just rock.”
    We both agreed the Martians would have a tough time drilling through all the red rock in the hills around Zephyr, if they were to come calling. Then Ben opened a cardboard box and showed me his Civil War bubble gum cards that had gory paintings of guys getting shot, bayoneted, and clobbered by cannon balls, and we sat making up a story for each card until his mother rang a bell to say it was time for fried chicken.
    After dinner-and Mrs. Sears’s wonderful black bottom pie washed down with a glass of cold Green Meadows milk-we all played a game of Scrabble. Ben’s parents were partners, and Mr. Sears kept trying to pass made-up words that even I knew weren’t in the dictionary, like “kafloom” and “goganus.” Mrs. Sears said he was as crazy as a monkey in itching powder, but she grinned at his antics just like I did. “Cory?” he said. “Didja hear the one about the three preachers tryin’ to get into heaven?” and before I could say “No” he was off on a joke-telling jaunt. He seemed to favor the preacher jokes, and I had to wonder what Reverend Lovoy at the Methodist church would think of them.
    It was past eight o’clock and we’d started our second game when Tumper barked on the front porch and a few seconds later there was a knock on the door. “I’ll get it,” Mr. Sears said. He opened the door to a wiry, craggy-faced man