Sightings (3 page)

There it was again –
tink, tink, tink
– so I tore open the curtains to spot them, or at least a part of them – four little Indian asses crammed tight against the glass.

“Gah!”

They turned, grinning, and as they hoisted their shorts, Pony pressed his face to the glass and offered a final
tink, tink, tink
with his fingernail.

I watched his mouth as he enunciated each syllable:

Huck-le-ber-ry.

The next morning, upon returning to the baseball field, we found our bases flung to the trees, third base dangling from a low hanging maple, while home plate was recovered two pine trees over. The field, too, was covered with trash, the remnants of
TV
dinners and cake mixes and eggs shells scattered along the baselines.

Things had turned personal – they'd desecrated our home – and it was suddenly clear that Ronald had been right about retaliation.

“It's psychological,” Ronald said, explaining his plan a few nights later while filling a bag with dog shit just outside the Rosses' perimeter. “They call this guerilla warfare.”

Several of us had gathered near the oak tree in preparation for the assault. Jim thought it a good idea to dress up like Indians ourselves (“You know, like how they did for the Boston Tea Party!”), but in the end, he was the only one among us to don the war paint and feathers.

Ronald distributed our explosives – black cats and cherry bombs, mostly – before ordering us to fan out on all sides of the Rosses' residence and wait for the signal (a piss-poor owl hoot, courtesy of Ronald). Clutching our matches, we did just that, spidering across the street in perfect silence, our heads down and running heel to toe, which Jim (the closest thing to an Indian we had) had heard was how the real Indians used to do it during horse raids.

We all reached our drop zones, but after a few minutes of silence, we began wondering if maybe we'd missed the signal. The plan seemed simple enough: Ronald was to light the bag of shit, chuck it against the door, and then let sound the owl screech.

But there had been no screech – nothing even close to a screech – so Jim plucked one of his headdress feathers and pointed it toward the other side of the house, indicating that I should check on Ronald.

I began army crawling along the edge of the house, and in one instance, accidentally peeked inside the living room window to find the Ross family deeply engaged in a game show. Some of the younger brothers sat on the floor (Indian style, no less), while their parents and the older ones littered themselves on the couches. I glanced at the front steps (not a flaming bag of shit in sight) and so, continued crawling until spotting Ronald on the opposite side of the house.

He was in reconnaissance mode, his unblinking eyes pressed tight to the basement window.

“Psst,” I hissed, “hey, Ron. You gonna give the signal or what? These black cats are burning holes in my pockets.”

He didn't hear me.

“Psst.”

This time, his head swiveled just enough to reveal the sunburned bridge of his nose.

“What?” I asked.

He motioned me toward the basement window, and upon peering in, I witnessed something remarkable by the light of the hanging bulb – Pony pressed hard against the orange flowered couch and a topless Georgia Ambler grinding against him. On the floor beside them were the remains of her now bunched blue and white striped bikini, but all we could see was her body thundering against his like some great rebellion, sweat beading from the tops of her breasts and sliding through the canyon that separated.

I thought all sorts of things, but the last thing I thought was the strangest:

Some day she will be old.

Ronald tapped my shoulder, breaking the spell, whispered, “This was never part of our plan.”

Moments later, a cherry bomb cracked through the night (also not part of our plan, though Jim's itchy fingers had gotten the best of him), and as the sound echoed past the trash bins and telephone poles and two car garages, it eventually bounced back to Georgia. She pressed herself to Pony's shoulders as that Indian's ink eyes turned toward us.

We ran, tripping over Georgia's bicycle.

We were nothing but shadows by then.

The rest of the summer felt like we were down by seven in the bottom of the ninth – we all just wanted it over. Nevertheless, in an attempt to maintain Georgia Ambler's purity for the sake of our friends, Ronald and I kept what we'd seen to ourselves. We were demonstrating yet another secret power we hadn't known we possessed: our ability to carry an impossible weight. It was a burden we lugged alongside us throughout each swing in the on-deck circle, during every glimpsed interaction of our girl. Some days we'd lean against the baseball fence and watch Georgia ride past, and while the others started in on what they wanted to do with her and how, Ronald and I stayed silent. How could we break it to them that everything had already been done, that the world held no more mysteries?

Despite our burden, we continued in our routines: baseball in the morning, pool in the afternoon. It was pleasant enough, though while the others continued peacocking past Georgia's lawn chair every chance they got, Ronald and I stopped bothering. Everything we'd hoped to see we'd already seen secondhand.

June crept into July, July into August, and soon, much to our horror, school supplies began lining the window displays where once a sunscreen pyramid had towered six feet high. Eighth grade was nearly upon us, and yet we didn't feel any more powerful than before. In fact, most of us just felt a whole lot more tired. Whether we were willing to admit it or not, those Indians had taken a toll on us, and while the remainder of our interactions with them had proved mostly innocuous, this was only the result of our having redrawn the boundary lines – never stepping foot near the teepee, while they steered clear of the baseball field. Some afternoons we overlapped at the pool, but they stayed in the deep end and we in the shallows while Georgia Ambler, quite tactfully, ignored all of us equally while sprawled on her lawn chair.

For a few nights that summer, Ronald and I wandered back to that basement window, crawling up to the soft glow of the hanging bulb in the hopes that we might realize that none of it had been real. Just some dream we'd dreamed up. Some wild trick of the light. We never saw Pony and Georgia alone together again, and most nights, when we peered down, all we'd see was old Pony (Chief Tiny Dick) staring at the television while lying shirtless near a box fan. From our vantage point, his skin looked ghostly – a fresh pallor coating his body – while the rest of us just grew darker.

In the rare instance when Pony and Georgia passed each other at the pool, they never looked at one another directly, adding further credence to our dream/“trick of the light” theory. Still, every once in awhile I'd catch Pony glancing up at her from behind a crinkled
Sports Illustrated,
turning pages without reading a word.

While I'd never known love myself, in my fourteen-year-old estimation, Georgia seemed to have left a mark on him. In the days following what we assumed was the abrupt end to their relationship, Ronald pointed out that Pony resembled a young warrior who'd just lost his favorite horse.

“So broken-hearted,” Ronald whispered, peering down at Pony from our place outside the basement window. “Horseless with a hell of a long way to walk.”

If we, like Carrie,
did
possess secret powers, most remained undetected that summer. Sure, I could run like a coward and keep a terrible secret, but neither of these powers would give us our neighborhood back. Where was my invisibility? My super human strength? Some days it was all I could do to keep my eye on the ball and swing.

That final Thursday evening in August a platoon of weathermen bombarded our
TV
screens, pointing out areas on the map that looked suspiciously like where we lived. Those men used words like “doppler,” “humidity” and “perfect storm,” drawing even the most inattentive eyes toward the screen. The Emergency Broadcast System seconded the weathermen's warnings, its harsh beeps bleating from the radio, warning us of tornado watches until midnight, reminding us that this was not a test. Ronald was over (we'd been comparing class schedules), when my father peeked his head into my bedroom and told him he might as well stay over, that there was no sense braving a “goddamned whopper like this.”

Arrangements were made – sleeping bags unfurled on the living room carpet, grape soda put on ice – while Ronald and I watched the storm from the porch. We watched as a slow wind began tearing through the leaves, and how our front yard oak trees – once the target of an unprovoked mass toilet papering – now faced a far different foe.

One moment there was nothing and then, everything. The thunder came first, followed by the flash. And then the rain began flying in sideways, like Unser's rain, and as the howling picked up and the stars receded, we turned back toward the screen door.

We stopped.

From our place on the porch we spotted movement in the corners of our eyes. There was somebody out there, or several somebodies – it was hard to make out who. Ronald and I squinted until they came into focus, Pony and his tribe scurrying across their yard, collecting what remained of their lawn ornaments. Their mother shouted inaudible directions to them from the doorway, her finger pointing in a hundred different directions as her children scattered, tucking the rabbits and bunnies and deer into their chests like footballs.

They were drenched, Pony's long hair sticking to the left side of his face, and through all the shouting, somehow their dog slipped from between their mother's thick legs and burst across the street to our yard. This only caused Mrs. Ross's shouting to raise a pitch higher, and I was reminded once more of all the shouts and yips I'd endured throughout the summer, all the Indian asses pressed to my bedroom window.

I left the porch and called out to him – “Come here, pal,” – and sure enough, after releasing a nice, steaming dump on my mother's gardenias, he trotted over as if to claim his prize.

I grabbed him by the collar and then – faster than a speeding fastball – ran him home as the world fell apart all around us. Thick limbs cracked and collapsed on all sides of me, but I dodged everything, swooping over branch and under water to return that dog to safety. I leapt the trash bin lids that rolled down our street like tumbleweed, sidestepped the water-choked sewers. I was suddenly fearless, even as the sign for Kickapoo Drive rattled in the wind. I arrived at their home, handing the trembling dog over to his rightful owner, felt the leathered hand reaching back.

I heard a single word whispered over the sound of the crashing thunder:

Huckleberry.

I can't say if it was Pony or not – it was just some old, Indian hand – and by the time the hand laced its fingers beneath the dog's collar, I was already soaring back toward my porch. There was no thank you, just a change in grip, the charge safely passed and then silence.