A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (2 page)

The others seem not to hear him. They sit on the wooden ties that divide the hillside from the parking lot and sink the rest of their sodas. Heaped behind them is a clinkery of discarded beer bottles. Thad has the idea to line them up for points and aim rocks at them from the top of the bluff. They set to work arranging the bottles in a row, posting them along the tarry wall. Kevin places a green one at the very edge, then
smacks the wastewater from a clear one and balances it on top of two browns—a three-pointer.

“Hey, Kevin,” Kenneth says. He points to an empty bolt hole in one of the ties. “Here’s a question. I’m not making fun of you, I’m just curious: Could you fit your penis in there?”

Kevin inspects Kenneth’s face for signs of ridicule, but all he sees is the question, floating there with its beak out like a hummingbird. He decides it is safe to answer. “Not when it’s hard, no, but otherwise—I don’t know.” He slips his finger into the hole. “Maybe it’s long enough, but I don’t think it’s quite wide enough.”

In his stomach he feels a wringing sensation, but it comes and it goes and there is no trap waiting for him, no ambush, just his best friends wearing the even-eyed expressions of teachers making checkmarks on a worksheet.

Soon Bateman sets the last bottle in place, and they step back to inspect the display: thirty-some jewels of green, brown, and yellow glass flinging kinks of sunlight out at the afternoon. Kevin decides to give the soul voice a try: “Ahh-ight, boy-ees. I think we got us a contest here.” It is a decent effort but not truly convincing. The others say, “I get the first throw,” and, “Go to hell,
you get the first throw
. It was my idea,” and, “All right, first one to the top then,” and begin scaling the bluff. He watches from below as they go Spider-Manning from rock to rock. Then he follows behind them, starting with the trench that reaches along the bottom of the wall and ending with the crumbly dirt ledge an arm’s length from the summit. This time he manages to finish the climb without any help, boosting himself onto level ground. Yes. The grass is so tall that the wind seems to scurry through it like a troop of small animals.
Kenneth, Thad, and Bateman have already set to work. Kevin rises to his feet and joins them. The soil holds its rocks so tightly that when they pry them loose it makes a sound like burlap tearing. All but the largest fit neatly in the palms of their hands. They offer a perfect quarter-pound of throwing weight, as if they were planted there for just that reason: to send beer bottles tumbling through the air like gymnasts. The bottles pop and they shatter, one after the other, leaving a few jagged cups of glass sitting on the wood. Bateman and Thad are barraging the wall with rocks, trying to demolish the lone survivor, when the manager of Mazzio’s comes crunching through the wreckage. “Hey, you little shits, knock it off!”

“Knock what off?”

“You’re filling my lot here with glass, that’s what.”

It is true, the asphalt shines like a mirror beneath him, but what can you do with a day so bright that nearly everything shines like a mirror—the green of the leaves, the brown of the dirt, the gray of the roofs and the pavement?

Thad lets a rock fall
thud
from his hand. “Sir, we are so, so sorry,” he says. “We must be total idiots. We didn’t realize.”

“Yeah, well, stupendous. Magnificent. Me and my people are gonna have to clean this mess up, though, you know? Or else someone’ll flatten a tire. Just use your heads from now on.”

“We will, sir. And again, we’re really sorry. Oh, and one more thing: fuck you, harpy-fucker.”

It is one of Thad’s favorite cutdowns, borrowed from Kevin’s
Monster Manual
—an insult so dirty and inventive that it ticks off nearly everyone who hears it. But the manager just sighs and scuffs back inside, a monkey look of disappointment
on his face. It is the expression of someone just like Kevin, with a tendency to believe the best of people until the very last second.

A long moment of insects and car horns passes. A blackbird lands in the crown of an oak tree, caws three times, and flaps away again. Only then do they decide the manager is not returning.

And maybe that counts as a win for them, but if so it is a frustrating one. The dude has taken the possibility of a great story, one they could have shared between them forever, and ruined it by failing to lose his temper. “It’s like a bad Fourth of July,” Kevin says, thinking of those bottle rockets that go sailing off with a
phrrt
of black powder and vanish into the silence of the sky.

The four of them decide to set off for Kevin’s house in case the manager surprises them by calling the police. It is the last weekend of summer, the last weekend before seventh grade, when CAC’s three elementary schools braid their twelve-year-olds together with the junior high and high schoolers at the big redbrick building on the hilltop overlooking the river brush. Thad is spending the night with Kevin, and Kenneth is spending the night with Bateman, and tomorrow they will return home to their families and wait for the day to empty out. Then, on Monday, they will all wake up and everything will be different.

On the far side of the field, where the valley rises up to meet the hilltop, is the apartment complex where Miss Moon, their sixth grade teacher, lives. She is tall and slight, with brown hair and blue eyes that seem drained of their color by her freckleless white piano-key skin. Something about the sound of her tongue stumbling over their names when
she scolds them fills the boys in Kevin’s class with shivers of sexual longing. He has never understood it. She is pretty the way a statue is pretty. Who would turn his eye toward a grown-up when there are girls their own age, impossibly gorgeous girls, who might actually let you touch them someday, and who would let you touch them now if you were touching material? Who would desire anyone else when there is Sarah Bell, Sarah Bell, Sarah Bell—say it loud and listen to it ring—whose fingers grazed Kevin’s leg last spring during chapel and made him feel as if his skin had suddenly grown too tight for him?

Kevin is good with stories and always has been. At school, whenever he has finished his work and doesn’t feel like borrowing a book from the library or mapping a dungeon out on a sheet of graph paper, he likes to write mystery stories with himself as the detective and his classmates as the kidnap victims—The Case of the Missing Tania Pickett; The Case of the Missing Ethan Carpenter—or superhero stories that mingle the Marvel Universe together with the DC Universe, or science fiction stories about a motorcyclist named Ace who leads two separate lives, waking into one the instant he falls asleep in the other, or ghost stories with paragraphs that conceal the names of all the shows on prime-time TV. In their group Bateman is the clown, Thad the heartbreaker, Kenneth the cool guy. What is Kevin but the inventor, the storyteller, the negro with the big imagination? It might be the single thing his friends like best about him. And so, as they walk through the apartment complex, he spins a pornographic little what-if for them, pulling this string and that, a fantasy in which one of them—take your pick—disconnects his penis and ships it to Miss Moon in the mail, and “What on
earth could this be?” she wonders, flicking its head, tapping it against her palm, holding it distractedly between her teeth, where she chews on it softly like a pencil, pleased and astonished when it begins to change its shape, so that she exclaims, “Oh my goodness, what a fun little toy!” and, “Let’s see what else it can do,” testing it with her lips and her tongue and her fingers as it transmits its psychic antenna signals across the city, until Kenneth seems to scarecrow-dance out of his limbs and says, “God, God, God, Kevin. Jesus. You have to stop right now.”

They pass a slender tree lashed to a triangle of stakes. A nest the size of a tea saucer has toppled out of its branches. Bateman tips it over with his shoe so they can look underneath. There on the grass, spilling out of a speckled blue egg, is the goo of a half-formed bird, a strange lump of Vaseline with a dark net of veins inside it, connecting a pair of eyes and a tweezerlike beak and the popped red balloons of several tiny organs, one of which must be its heart. Kevin can hardly stand to look at it. That this transparent stew of parts, slopping around in the darkness of its shell, is all the bird will ever be gives him an awful gutshot feeling he cannot name, and he knows that if he thinks about it for too long tears will rise to his eyes. He has always been the kid who cries too easily and laughs too easily, the kid who begins giggling in church for no reason at all, who blinks hotly in shame and frustration whenever he misses a question in class, living in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes.

Out of the blue Kenneth says to him, “Hey, Kevin, I’m not making fun of you, I’m just curious: Could you fit your dick in that egg?”

“Shut up.”

“Hey, Kevin, I’m not making fun of you, I’m just curious,” Thad says. “Do you have any hair on your dick yet?”

“What’s you all’s obsession with my dick, anyway?”

And then it is Bateman’s turn: “Hey, Kevin, what about your balls? Your Tes-ti-clees? Any hair down there?”

“All right. Cut it out, guys.”

“We’re not making fun of you, we’re just curious.”

Kevin’s house is one snaking downhill street and half an uphill street away. The wind has fallen still, so calm that the clouds appear to be painted onto the sky. The insects have stopped creaking, the trees stopped whisking the air with their fingertips. By the time they reach his carport, all four of them look like Bateman, their shirts glued to their shoulders with sweat. Kevin goes to the refrigerator for a Little Hug, an orange one. He peels the foil cap off the plastic barrel and stands there chugging the drink, his hand on the open door. This time it is December in front of him and August behind. The refrigerator wicks the moisture from his chest and stomach. “Ah,
mans
, this feels good,” he says, and before long Thad, Bateman, and Kenneth are clustered with him in the light of the refrigerator, like campers bunched around a fire, washing down Little Hugs. It is almost 3:30—snack time. But when Kevin makes the announcement, the others laugh and say, “
Snack
time?” and “Hey, it’s
time
for
snacks
, everyone,” and “Holmes, I don’t know a single other house that does that. Only yours,” until the drums in his head go click-click-click and snack time is safely stored away, added to the list of things it is impermissible to acknowledge or say.

His brother, Jeff, is spending the night somewhere else,
with Jack Barnard or Jason Burton probably, his unknowable separate friends from his unknowable separate life, which means that until Kevin’s mom gets home from work, the house is entirely theirs. They are the grown-ups and can eat whatever they want, in whichever room they choose. They sling their bodies across the couch and the loveseat, trading a box of Cheez-Its back and forth. Shortly before dinner, Kenneth climbs onto the bumper seat of Bateman’s moped, and the two of them go putting out of the driveway, and have you ever noticed how, from a distance, a moped can sound like a bird rattling out a message in the trees? Soon Kevin’s mom arrives home with Happy Meals from McDonald’s. Thad and Kevin eat their cheeseburgers and fries at the kitchen counter, sitting on the tall wooden stools with the vinyl cushions, leaning slowly over until they have steadied themselves on the two side legs, then pivoting onto the two back ones. They are trapeze artists. Acrobats. They spend the rest of the night booting the soccer ball around the backyard and walking to the gas station for candy and eventually, after Kevin’s mom has shut her door and they have given her almost an hour to fall asleep, trying to distinguish the breasts from the scramble waves in the blue-green go-anywhere of the Playboy Channel, all sound and no picture.

It is after midnight before they turn out the lights. Kevin lies down in bed, Thad on the floor in his sleeping bag. From out of the darkness Thad asks, “So are you ready for school? My mom and dad let me use my birthday money to buy this gold chain I’m gonna wear around my neck. Herringbone.”

“Here’s the thing,” Kevin announces. “Greg and his brother better stay the hell away from me, that’s all I have to say. I’ll tell the principal on them if I have to. I’ll do it. Watch me.”

“Uh-huh. You know, Greg’s brother isn’t really going to stuff you in a locker. He’s gone—Greg and his brother both are. They moved away in July. We just told you that ’cause we wanted to see if you would freak out. You freaked out, didn’t you?”

Kevin would like to kick the sheets off his bed, would like them to plummet to the carpet like a missile. “A little.”

“I knew it. We were all—I don’t know, not
annoyed
with you really. We just wanted to screw with your head. It started when you sent us those sneaker stickers this summer. That’s when we came up with the locker story. I can’t explain it. They were so weird and random. It was like,
Thanks but what the fuck? Sneakers?
Why did you mail us those?”

“I thought you guys would like them.”

He remembers buying the stickers from the greeting card aisle of the Jitney Jungle when his dad took him grocery shopping. His only other choices were rainbows, ladybugs, or dogs with American flag bandannas. For the second time that day, Kevin feels a clutching in his throat, the salt sting of tears in his eyes. No. He is trying hard not to be him anymore, that kid.

Sometimes, huddled in his sleeping bag, Thad can be unexpectedly nice, saying things like, “Well, it’s the thought that counts. You know, it’s all cool. But everyone is done collecting stickers—finished—so don’t go giving us any more. And nothing involving shoes, either. In fact, maybe you should just stop buying people presents all the time. None of that shit at all. So are you nervous? I can’t believe that two days from now we’ll be in junior high.”

“One-point-five.”

“Yeah, I’m going to wear my gold chain. Kenneth met some
of the Sylvan Hills and Geyer Springers at football practice. He says they’re not too bad. I saw this blond chick when I went to register, and she was totally hot. I mean, Jesus Christ the shape of her ass. Like two scoops of ice cream in a glass bowl. You wouldn’t believe it. So are you nervous?”