Boys Life

Number Ten in them. I felt ready to tear that math book up.
    We left Bruton. The river flowed gently between its banks. The night’s breeze blew softly through the trees, and the lights glowed from windows as people finished their dinners. I had two things on my mind: the hauntingly beautiful face of a young woman with green eyes, and a new bike with a horn and headlight.
    My mother was thinking about a dead man whose corpse lay down at the bottom of the lake but whose spirit haunted my father’s dreams and now the Lady’s dreams as well.
    Summer was close upon us, its scent of honeysuckle and violets perfuming the land.
    Somewhere in Zephyr, a piano was being played.

PART TWO – Summer of Devils and
    Angels
    Last Day of School
    Barbershop Talk
    A Boy and a Ball
    I Get Around
    Welcome, Lucifer
    Nemo’s Mother a Week with the Jaybird
    My Camping Trip
    Chile Willow
    Summer Winds Up

VIII – Last Day of School
    TICK… TICK… TICK.
    In spite of what the calendar says, I have always counted the last day of school as the first day of summer. The sun had grown steadily hotter and hung longer in the sky, the earth had greened and the sky had cleared of all but the fleeciest of clouds, the heat panted for attention like a dog who knows his day is coming, the baseball field had been mowed and white-lined and the swimming pool newly painted and filled, and as our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Selma Neville, intoned about what a good year this had been and how much we’d learned, we students who had passed through the ordeal of final exams sat with one eye fixed to the clock.
    Tick… tick… tick.
    In my desk, alphabetically positioned between Ricky Lembeck and Dinah Macurdy, half of me listened to the teacher’s speech while the other half longed for an end to it. My head was full up with words. I needed to shake some of them out in the bright summer air. But we were Mrs. Neville’s property until the last bell rang, and we had to sit and suffer until time rescued us like Roy Rogers riding over the hill.
    Tick… tick… tick.
    Have mercy.
    The world was out there, waiting beyond the square metal-rimmed windows. What adventures my friends and I would find this summer of 1964, I had no way of knowing, but I did know that summer’s days were long and lazy, and when the sun finally gave up its hold on the sky the cicadas sang and the lightning bugs whirled their dance and there was no homework to be done and oh, it was a wonderful time. I had passed my math exam, and escaped-with a C-minus average, if truth must be known-the snarling trap of summer school. As my friends and I went about our pleasures, running amuck in the land of freedom, we would pause every so often to think of the inmates of summer school-a prison Ben Sears had been sentenced to last year-and wish them well, because time was moving on without them and they weren’t getting any younger.
    Tick… tick… tick.
    Time, the king of cruelty.
    From the hallway we heard a stirring and rustling, followed by laughter and shouts of pure, bubbling joy. Some other teacher had decided to let her class go early. My insides quaked at the injustice of it. Still, Mrs. Neville, who wore a hearing aid and had orange hair though she was at least sixty years old, talked on, as if there were no noise of escape beyond the door at all. It hit me, then; she didn’t want to let us go. She wanted to hold us as long as she possibly could, not out of sheer teacher spite but maybe because she didn’t have anybody to go home to, and summer alone is no summer at all.
    “I hope you boys and girls remember to use the library during recess.” Mrs. Neville was speaking in her kindly voice right now, but when she was upset she could spit sparks that made that falling meteor look like a dud. “You mustn’t stop reading just because school is out. Your minds are made to be used. So don’t forget how to think by the time September comes around a-”
    RINGGGGGGG!
    We all jumped up, like parts of the same squirming insect.
    “One moment,” Mrs. Neville said. “One moment. You’re not excused yet.”
    Oh, this was torture! Mrs. Neville, I thought at that instant, must have had a secret life in which she tore the wings off flies.
    “You will leave my room,” she announced, “like young ladies and gentlemen. In single file, by rows. Mr. Alcott, you may lead the way.”
    Well, at least we were moving. But then, as the classroom emptied and I could hear the wild hollering echoing along