In the fall of 1967 Bucky Dean quarterbacked the Midland Lee Rebels to eight straight victories and a shot at the state high school championship. In the spring he received his draft notice and was headed to Vietnam. The town mourned while celebrating his patriotism and courage. I turned ten that summer, the day after Sirhan pulled the trigger on Bobby Kennedy. In still moments, when I thought about it, I felt something of the volatility of American politics and the fear that Vietnam had become a “quagmire” (a new word for me that year), threatening one day to swallow my pals and me.
The Rebs didn’t go far in the playoffs, but Bucky remained my hero. Through a friend of a friend, my dad arranged for him to come to our house one night to sign autographs for me and my buddy Pat. Up close, Bucky was gangly and tall with a rash of pimples on each of his cheeks. Pat and I didn’t speak. We sat at his feet, holding out paper and pens. My sister and her friend Michelle, both twelve, laughed at us on their way out the door. “Dorks,” Janey said.
Bucky seemed embarrassed, hunching his shoulders, shifting his weight; apparently, he hadn’t got used to adulation, though my dad said every car dealer in town was waiting to use his face in its newspaper ads. They hankered for him to turn pro, maybe with the Cowboys or the Oilers, so they could recruit him for endorsements—surely, when the neon lit him up he wouldn’t forget his hometown. The war was just an inconvenient break in the Bucky Dean saga.
“When you shipping out?” Dad asked.
Bucky etched his name on a sheet of notepaper. “Headed to Fort Bliss in early June, sir, right after graduation. ABAR maintenance training.”
“I was in the Navy myself.”
“That so?” He knelt and handed me the autograph. “You gonna be a star passer?”
“Sure,” I said, though I was asthmatic and, except for Pat, the least athletic boy in our school.
In the presence of celebrity, Pat had puddled with sweat. His grip had dampened his paper, and the pen wouldn’t work on it. My mother fetched a blank sheet from the back of her financial ledger. Bucky knew Pat would never be a quarterback. The crutches told him that.
“You take care of yourself over there,” Dad said.
“Thank you, sir.”
From the front window Pat and I watched Bucky cut through Mogford Park, which sat between our families’ houses under a series of powerlines. “We’ll have to keep following his exploits in the paper, eh?” Dad said. Bucky had written to me, Always give one hundred and ten par sent. Yr. pal Buck.
For our final school project that spring Pat and I made a model of the lunar surface with a cardboard mock-up of the LEM that, a year from now, NASA promised, would land on the moon. We slathered plaster of Paris, dyed green with food coloring, onto a piece of plywood and punched out craters with our thumbs. As accurately as we could, we followed a National Geographic map of the Sea of Tranquillity, one of the possible landing sites. To reinforce the adjoining mountains we used newspaper padding. We agonized over whether to shred the Bronco Chevrolet ads featuring American flags and GOOD LUCK BUCKY! wishes. Dad said Bucky would be preserved forever in our handiwork. As Pat painted our spacecraft, he steadied his arm with one of his crutches.
The teacher was so proud of our moon she asked us to show it to all of the classes. Pat couldn’t carry it, so I lugged it from room to room and held it while he explained the Apollo program to our schoolmates. By the end of the day my arms were tired. I dropped the model on some concrete steps. It wasn’t badly damaged—a small crack on a crater’s rim. But a month later, as school was letting out for the summer, the crack had opened like a faultline. We had donated the model to the school library, and it had been sitting by a globe at the front of the room. Now the librarian said she’d have to throw it out. The crack would only get worse; our moon was doomed. Pat slumped over a magazine rack as the woman carried it out back. I stared at the globe. Pink and yellow continents. The oceans were colored black.
Pat didn’t call for a couple of days. I nursed my shame in the backyard, sitting with my sea turtle, Bacon, brooding on the face of the moon, which rose early that week, pale as popcorn in the heatshimmery sky.
How a sea turtle wound up in a West Texas alley I never knew. Perhaps he was an escaped pet, imported from somewhere. In any case, he appeared one morning beneath the humming powerlines, his green and coral flippers knocking back pebbles in a desperate search for food. He weighed no more than a small box of Cheerios. I brought him into the backyard, and he spent his days under my mother’s rose bushes, soaking up spray whenever she watered with the hose. Each evening at five, he’d turn up on the patio by our dining room door. I’d feed him two strips of cut-up raw bacon. He’d smack his lips and sit calmly while I moistened his shell with a wet paper towel.
Now, he scrabbled in the grass while I decided that the moon was too fragile to bear human weight. “Look at it,” I exhorted Bacon. “It’s so thin. Like those Jesus wafers in church. Right?” Bacon blinked and munched a hunk of gristle.
Three weeks later my mother woke me around seven one morning. “Happy birthday, honey. Robert Kennedy was shot last night.” She was shaken. She apologized for rousting me out so early but she’d got me, as a gift, a new desk for my room. The delivery men had just arrived. Profiles of Popeye, Snoopy, and Speed Racer scarred my old desktop. I’d scratched them into the wood with dry Bic pens, along with the number 16, over and over: Bucky’s number. I hated to let go of my old desk, especially since Mom warned me not to ruin the lovely mahogany of the new piece, but its right front leg had come unglued. It popped out at the merest jostle. We put the crippled desk on the back patio. Dad said he’d fix it up enough to give it to Goodwill.
By now, Pat and I were playing together again. He rang the doorbell on the afternoon of my birthday, holding a stack of Spidermans. When he saw the abandoned desk he said, “Cool. Let’s get some boxes and sheets and make a fort. The desk will be our rampart.” He poked it with a crutch. The leg fell off.
All day we worked, borrowing old towels from Mom, dragging empty book boxes out of the garage, arranging, rearranging the patio space, stretching sheets, tentlike, above our heads, using brooms and mops for support. Pat did the brainstorming, waving his arms like Arthur Fiedler leading the Boston Pops on TV. The heavy lifting fell to me.
By early evening the fort was complete. The moon appeared above the power lines, a sliver small and bent like a staple in the middle of a magazine. (In his Spiderman stack, Pat had smuggled a couple new Playboys, swiped from his older brother. Staples, notched in intriguing spots on the bodies of women, had acquired a vague erotic charge for us. The fort, we hoped, would protect our pilfered centerfolds.)
Bacon was agitated. Our sprawling structure blocked his path to the door. I gave him his food, and he disappeared under a hedge.
“What should we call it?” Pat said.
“Fort Bliss?”
He curled his mouth and thought. “Fort Trat. Your name, Troy, and my name, Pat.”
“Great!”
After supper and birthday cake, we ensconced ourselves in our stronghold. Pat had a little trouble squatting and squeezing through the opening between the desk and a United Van Lines box, but over the years he’d learned to compensate for his hip. He slithered through, pulling his crutches behind him, and closed our entrance flap: two yellow pillowcases clothespinned together. Safety-pinned to it, a sheet of notepaper proclaimed KEEP OUT! in purple Marks-A-Lot.
By flashlight, we arrayed my presents at our feet: the Star Trek paperback from my father, the new Peanuts collection from Mom (“Of course, the desk is your main gift,” she’d reminded me all through dinner), and the transistor radio Janey had bought me (“I even put the batteries in, dork, ‘cause I knew you couldn’t figure that out.”). I switched the radio on. Tommy James wah-wahing “Crimson and Clover.” On the walls of Fort Trat we had taped our Bucky Dean autographs, Life magazine photos of Wally Schirra and Eugene McCarthy (because he had, Pat said, a kind face), and a picture of John Berryman. I didn’t know who John Berryman was. I just liked his looks. Life called him a poet. He was standing by a stone wall—somewhere in Ireland, according to the caption. The wind blew his long black beard nearly sideways. He appeared ludicrous and bold, a combination I found enormously appealing.
We also displayed on our fort’s walls the Geographic’s moon map, last season’s Lee Rebels football schedule, a Country Joe and the Fish album cover (Pat and I thought their music was day-old garbage, but we loved the psychedelic artwork, so we taped it to the back of the desk). The Playboys we kept hidden beneath a towel. Since it was a special day, our folks let us play in the fort until nearly midnight—grateful, I think, to get us out of the house. Birthday cheer had been clouded for them this year. My dad hated the Kennedys—he considered himself “forever and always” a Goldwater man—but the shooting in L.A. troubled the adults more than they would say. Pat and I fell asleep outside, safe behind our barricade.
What did I fear, that the fort protected me from?
1) Janey’s friend Michelle, who lived next door. She had begun to look at me as though I were one of the colts she coveted in Horse Fancy magazine. Even more frightening, I had started to imagine her in conjunction with the centerfolds—not while I was gazing at them, but afterward, thinking about the pictures and about girls as a category. I didn’t see much connection between the Bunnies and Michelle—something bubbled her blouses, and I’d heard her whisper with my sister about training bras, but her body was angular, skinny. Still, I understood that she was on her way to becoming one of those grown-up creatures. The caterpillar and the butterfly. Her batty-eyed stares at me behind Janey’s back made me part of her process. What was I to do with that? What did I want to do with that? Something, maybe. But I didn’t know for sure. A retired cop, Mr. Wallace, lived on the other side of our house. I’d see him in his red bathrobe early in the mornings, plucking the newspaper off his lawn. He was blocky and muscled, like Broderick Crawford in Highway Patrol. Even his ears looked powerful. The strict orderliness of his garden countered some of the chaos I felt emanating, day and night, from Michelle’s house.
2) My mother’s financial ledger. As black as the school globe’s seas. Each Thursday after supper, Mom spread the family’s bills on the kitchen table and opened the ledger. Her face squinched as though the pages had appeared, all smelly, out of the garbage disposal. For the next hour, nothing we said could reach her. On the tabletop, the ledger’s leather cover scritched across old toast crumbs or fried chicken flakes, a grating worse than fingernails on metal. My dad was an independent oil man; he had a tough time competing with Exxon, Texaco, Mobil. “Your desk may be the last big purchase we’ll make for a while,” Mom told me. One night I overheard my folks talking, low, about “new directions,” “relocating.”
3) Hip disease. Though Pat had told me his malady wasn’t catching, his crutches made me queasy. The kiss of their rubber tips on concrete … the bandage-like padding … these struck me as unnatural, and I feared proximity to them. Neither Pat nor I understood the word arthritis. We didn’t talk about his disability. Our bond had formed on the playground. While our classmates smacked softballs, Pat and I sat on the sidelines. He’d punch holes in the dirt with his “sticks,” and wheezing, I’d try to catch my breath. We shared an excitement for reading and jokes. “Where’s the Anal Canal?” Pat asked, hanging around the jungle gym one day. Kids scratched their heads. “I don’t know. Egypt? India?” We laughed and laughed. I think his physical agility made our friendship possible. He could twirl on one crutch. In water balloon fights with neighborhood boys he could move as fast as the rest of us, flying like a pole vaulter. He could prop a crutch against a fence, climb it with his good leg, and wriggle over the top.
4) Powerlines. Josh, a neighbor boy, said the wires that crossed the alley, our house, and Mogford Park caused cancer. Neither of us knew what cancer was; Josh figured it was like bedwetting, only worse. “That’s just stupid,” I said. “Of course it’s worse, you dork.” Josh said, “Your house was already built, so it was too late. But Mogford Park? It’s there ’cause the city found out how terrible powerlines are, and they won’t allow another house on that spot.” Mogford Park wasn’t really a park; it was an empty lot. One year, the neighborhood raised money, planted holly bushes along the sidewalk, and put in some grass so it wouldn’t be an eyesore. Summers, I earned six dollars a week mowing it, wearing a face mask because of my asthma. I didn’t like Josh. His family had recently joined a Pentecostal church. Healings, speaking in tongues … spooky crap. He’d told me I was going to hell for listening to rock and roll. He’d told me my turtle was going to have a heart attack because of the fat in bacon. “Your foods are unclean,” he said. But the powerline business … that had a certain credence. The empty park, and all. On still, hot days, standing in my yard, I heard a buzzing above me like hundreds of bees.
5) The Rebs’ future. With the latest graduations, they were weak at quarterback, center, safety.
6) Sirhan Sirhan.
7) Vietnam.
Fort Trat did not become a bulwark against any of these threats. Some of the disturbances—the Playboys, Pat’s crutches—entered the fort. But the darkness and heat provided a reassuring cover, a space where distraction could thrive. We’d sit there in the afternoons, with a pitcher of Mom’s lemonade, cutting pictures and comic strips out of the paper to tape to the walls. Sometimes we shredded pages before Dad got to the baseball scores or his crossword puzzle. On his lunch break, he’d step onto the patio and rattle the edge of the desk. The sheets shook above us; the boxes would shift. The desk leg fell. But he didn’t destroy the fort, and surviving his assaults gave us a sense of invulnerability.
It was hard to get news of Bucky. The day he left Fort Bliss for Southeast Asia the Reporter-Telegram ran a full-color front-page photo of him in his military cap and uniform. He looked grim but resolute, as if a receiver had just dropped an end zone pass but the next play—fourth and goal—would do it. Pimples had spread to his chin. Next to him on the front page was an even larger photo of a three-year-old named Sheila. She had vanished from her home. She was laughing in the picture, wearing a pink hair bow and a lemony dress. Her family lived just four blocks from us. The paper urged anyone with information about her to contact police.
In the following days, she owned the front page. In television interviews, townspeople worried about her. “She’s a precious part of our lives,” one newsman said. Bronco Chevrolet ran a two-page ad in the Family section, saying, WE PRAY FOR YOU, SHEILA. Bucky rated no more stories for a while.
One afternoon, while Pat was visiting the “bone man”—his hip doctor—I scoured the alley for horned toads. Our plan was to keep them in shoeboxes inside the fort. If anyone, especially my sister and her friends, came snooping around, we could thrust the toads at them through gaps in the sheets and scare the intruders away.
The wires sang in the heat. I squatted to see an anthill. Busy figures building barricades. A shadow fell across the dirt: Michelle, gazing down at me, shielding her face with a Seventeen magazine. She wore yellow shorts. She puffed her lip. “It’s sad, isn’t it?”
“What? What’s sad?” Instinctively, I glanced at my crotch to make sure nothing stupid or embarrassing was happening there.
“Sheila.”
“Oh.”
With the toe of her sandal she rolled a pebble back and forth in the dirt. I stood. “I’m scared,” she said.
“Why?”
“What if someone took her?”
“Why would they take her?”
“It just makes me scared, that’s all. What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
She came close. The edge of her magazine touched my thigh. Sweat gathered in the ridge along her collarbone, just above her T-shirt. She smelled like cinnamon toast. “I don’t like being scared,” she said. Before I knew what she was doing, she rubbed her mouth on mine.
I jumped away, my right foot smashing the anthill. A red swarm erupted around us. Michelle didn’t seem to care. My ribs tingled and so did the backs of my hands, as if a current had leaped from the powerlines into my cells.
“Do you want to do that again?” Michelle said.
“Sure,” I said. “No. I mean, not now. Maybe later.”
“When?”
“Maybe later.”
She smiled and turned aside. Quickly, I bent and brushed an ant off her calf. Her smile widened. Her skin was warm. As she walked away along the cinderblock fence she didn’t look scared at all. She hummed “Mrs. Robinson” and swiped at tumbleweeds with her magazine. Wheezing, I retreated to the fort. I stared at the moon map, the coordinates that told you where you were if you were lost in an airless world. All afternoon I rocked back and forth, touching my lips, touching my lips.
One day, while Dad was home for lunch, my parents, Pat, and I stood at the front window watching two young cops talk to Mr. Wallace on his lawn. “Look like rookies,” Dad said. “Come to Mr. Wallace for advice.” The police had conducted house-by-house searches in the missing girl’s immediate neighborhood and stapled HELP us FIND SHEILA posters on phone poles all over town.
Mr. Wallace wore a checkered shirt, long-sleeved though the day was hot. He gestured toward the park. I was glad he was getting involved. The young patrolmen seemed unsure of themselves, fidgeting with their gun belts. In their tight blue caps they reminded me of Bucky in his military garb.
“It’s so sad,” my mother said. She sounded just like Michelle. “I wonder what’s happened to that little girl?” My father slipped his arm around her waist.
“Maybe she rocketed into space,” I said, “and she’s orbiting the moon!”
Mom smiled. “I’d better do the dishes.” When Dad dropped his arm from her hip I felt a lonely stab and wished I hadn’t opened my mouth. Pat suggested we head for the fort.
“That thing is starting to smell,” Mom said. “Your dirty feet and sweat … we’d better take it down soon.”
“Mom!”
“You didn’t think you were going to leave it up forever?”
Pat looked stricken.
In the fort we made plans to sneak a cassette recorder beneath my parents’ bed. On overnights, Pat had been amazed at my mother’s prodigious snoring. We often kidded her: “The rhino was on the rampage last night!” She said we hurt her feelings and threatened to stop making us lemonade, but she always relented. Now, Pat reasoned, if we recorded her snores and told her we’d expose the rhino to the world, she’d back off on the fort.
Soon we got bored. We’d read all the comic books we had. We pulled out an old Playboy, Miss December, a “butt shot,” Pat called it. “I like butt shots.” But we’d studied Miss December’s butt at least thirty times. I confessed to Pat what had happened in the alley.
“She kissed you?”
“I guess.”
“What do you mean, you guess?”
“I guess it was a kiss.”
“That’s how come no toads.”
“She wants to do it again sometime.”
“You’re not going to let her?”
I didn’t answer.
“You didn’t like it?”
I glanced at Miss December. Michelle’s butt didn’t look anything like this, I was sure. And yet …
“Creeps me out,” Pat said. Still, a moment ago he’d been mesmerized by the centerfold, despite its familiarity. It wouldn’t do to remind him of this. What was my point? The only thing clear to me was that it would shatter our trust if I started liking Michelle. Worse than ruining the moon.
“There’s only one thing to do,” Pat said.
“What’s that?”
“Attack.”
That summer, Mom often laughed at what she called “the kids’ new words,” but neither Pat nor I cottoned to expressions like groovy or far out. It was my father who had a language of his own. Now I began to interpret it. “The Shallow Oil Zone at South 162, thirty-six R … damn,” he’d say, skimming figures on the Reporter-Telegram’s back pages, next to the stock prices. “Less than six dollars a barrel …”
What this meant, I figured, was that we wouldn’t be buying a new TV, even though the tint on our old one was busted, greening everything. Jimmy, down at Slim’s Home Parts, had told us it was beyond repair. Walter Cronkite looked sick every night, talking about Newark, Berkeley, Watts. When he showed footage of American soldiers in the jungle, all I could see was a jittery green smudge. Better were the burning huts. The flames brightened the scenes, and I could distinguish uniformed men kicking down walls or pulling off a roof.
We wouldn’t be getting a new hot water heater despite the lukewarm shower. We wouldn’t replace the toaster or the waffle maker. Mom’s ledger had spoken, in Dad’s code.
One thing we did get, to Janey’s dismay, was a Carrier window unit for her bedroom. We had no central air, and portable fans weren’t cutting it as temperatures reached the nineties. Janey’s room got the most sun. The window unit would be too noisy, she complained, but Dad said that was the price of comfort. Mom worked out a reasonable monthly payment schedule, overriding Janey’s objections.
I knew her real reason for resisting the air conditioner. She revered our aunt Fern, who lived in Lubbock. Janey loved Fern’s stories of her teenage years. Fern used to crawl out her window at night and sneak off to meet her boyfriend. They’d hitch a ride to the Johnson-Connelly Pontiac dealership, which sponsored concerts in its showroom featuring Buddy Holly, Joe Ely when he was just a kid, and, once, even Elvis. Janey didn’t want to miss out on the great tradition of teenage girls sneaking away to meet their boyfriends. Fern had married her boyfriend—our dorky uncle Ralph—and lived with him now in a house swamped by the smell of his El Productos.
Now Janey and Michelle sat in her room playing “Hey Jude” and scowling at the Carrier. When I glimpsed them from the hall I got that buzzy feeling in my hands. What if I were the boy who spurred Michelle into slipping quietly out of a window? We could link fingers in the parking lot at Bronco Chevrolet, staring at the new Thunderbirds through the display window. My throat tightened. She looked so sweet sitting on Janey’s bed.
I suppose Pat and I had read the phrase Tet Offensive or heard it on the news. In any case, our Trat Offensive consisted of blackmail, subterfuge, and assault. The plan was, first, on Thursday afternoon, we’d slip a tape of my mother’s snores into her ledger. She’d get the message and leave our fort alone. Next, as Josh’s family gathered in their backyard, as they did each Thursday night, to sing and praise the Lord Jesus, we’d click on my radio, concealed in a holly bush just beyond Josh’s fence. The devil’s music would assault him and his always cheery folks. And last, once the radio was secured, we’d cross the street and wait behind my dad’s peach tree. When Janey walked Michelle home, we’d ambush them with water balloons. Operation Kiss-Kill. “To hide your face, you should wear your asthma mask,” Pat said. “Do you have an extra for me?”
That day, as I stood in the hall, while the Beatles nah-nah-nahed and Michelle glanced at me, my commitment to Pat started to crack. But what if Michelle told Janey about the alley? What if she ambushed me again with her short shorts? No. Solidarity. Nah-nah. Courage.
On Thursday morning, I lingered out of sight near the dining room, hoping for an opportunity to tiptoe to Mom’s writing desk and slide the tape into the ledger. Mom and Dad were sitting at the table, eating bacon, drinking coffee.
“But oil prices aren’t flat?” Mom said. “I thought you’d been more hopeful lately?”
“Till Atlantic-Richfield gobbled up Sinclair … the big boys keep getting bigger. We can’t keep it running, honey.”
“Well. There’s Oregon.” She had a cousin who’d just moved to Portland. He’d written and said the place was lovely, the “last patch of unspoiled America.”
“What’s in Oregon for us?”
“I don’t know. You know what they say. The Pastures of Plenty.”
“Houston’s more feasible. Shell is hiring there.”
“Yes, but it’s Houston!”
“Even if we were to refinance the mortgage—”
“What’s a mortgage?” I said, stepping into the room. I’d tucked the tape between my waist and the elastic band of my pajama bottoms. Mom stood and kissed the top of my head. “I’ll get you some eggs,” she said.
Dad explained mortgage to me. It sounded like a quagmire. “Are we going to move?” I said.
“I don’t know, son. We may have some hard choices to make pretty soon.”
I nodded.
“We’ll want to know how you and your sister feel about things.”
I felt like running to the fort. Mom set a poached egg in front of me. The ledger lay open on the table.
“I see the Rebs have hired a new quarterback coach,” Dad said, tapping the paper, lightening his tone. “Fellow from Ardmore. He says they’ve got a hot new prospect out of Big Spring, coming along slowly …”
I shrugged. My chance was slipping away.
“This ol’ Okie says someday he’ll be just as good as Bucky.”
“No one’s as good as Bucky.”
“Well, we’ll see.”
Mom started thumbing her ledger.
Stage One, aborted. I could have left the tape somewhere else—Mom’s pillow or in the bathroom—but I didn’t want to risk any action without checking with Pat. As I rose from the table the tape slid through my pajama leg and clattered to the floor. Mom looked up. “The Mamas and the Papas,” I said. “A new tape Pat gave me …”
I’d be court-martialed for this. I’d harbored doubts about Kiss-Kill, and now I’d let the rhino escape. But these worries were starting to dim in light of my parents’ conversation. Oregon? Houston? My folks may as well have been speaking Vietnamese.
Stages Two and Three of the Trat Offensive ran into stiff counterresistance as well. Midafternoon, three patrol cars lined our street. Officers went door to door asking permission to search garages, garbage cans, yards. Mr. Wallace stood in the park talking to two men in gray suits. They pointed at the bushes.
The young cops we’d seen before came to our door. Flustered, Mom tried to phone Dad at work, but he wasn’t available. “Well, sure,” she told the men. “You can look around. I mean, I guess it’s fine. I just wanted to check with my husband, is all. You won’t make a mess, will you?”
“We’ll try to be careful, ma’am.” The cop tipped his hat; pimples ringed his forehead. He and his partner combed through boxes in the garage. There weren’t many left. They searched the alley. The anthill was back in business, I noticed. Janey, Pat, and I stood behind Mom at the gate. She chewed her fingernails while the officers lifted her garden hose and started leafing through her bushes. “Be careful!” she called. “That yellow rose has been puny, and I only just got it to—” Petals scattered like pollen. “Oh!”
“Bacon!” I cried. They’d lifted him out of a moist bed of dirt. He’d tucked his head inside his shell but his flippers whiffled wildly. I grabbed him from the officer and set him down in a shaded spot.
“What’s this?” The men turned to Mom.
“It’s the kids’ fort.”
“We’ll need to take a look.”
She nodded.
The pimpled cop hesitated, then, when his partner scowled, tore the top sheet away. The other man leaned on the desk to peer inside. I knew it wouldn’t hold his weight. Pat’s hands trembled on the handles of his crutches. The desk leg popped loose, and the cop stumbled into the fort. Boxes flew. Paper tore. The desk cracked in half. He scrambled to get up, yanking the pins from our pillowcases. The men ripped through our stuff, pulling up towels. Playboys tumbled onto the patio. Mom’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything. Janey poked me in the ribs. “You sick little dork,” she said. “Wait’ll I tell Michelle.”
One of the cops plucked a walkie-talkie off his belt, spoke our house address into it, and barked, “Secure.” The receiver snapped with static, a louder version of the crackling I’d heard in the wires. The other fellow told Mom, “We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for your patience.” They left. Janey sprinted through the alley for Michelle’s house. It was next to be searched. Mom didn’t move. Neither did Pat. I knelt beside the upturned boxes. John Berryman’s beard had torn away and was stuck to Country Joe. I couldn’t find all of Bucky. A strip—par sent—the size of a Chinese cookie fortune dangled from our torn sheet.
Sheila’s green face. A green phone number at the top of the screen. Then the local announcer returned us to the national network. Coverage of Chicago. Through green haze, cops in green helmets beat T-shirted boys with sticks. Green rivers ran from their ears.
Dad passed in front of the television hauling a metal sign. “Help me, Troy, all right?” We hammered the sign onto the lawn: FOR SALE BY OWNER.
He’d done a phone interview with Shell Oil in Houston and gotten a temporary position in its geology office. He’d report by the first of September. To ease our transition, Mom would stay in Midland with Janey and me. We’d join Dad and switch to new schools after the first of the year. “If the house sells quickly,” Dad told Mom, “just move into a motel. I think we can afford a cheap one till Christmas.”
Pat didn’t say much. “What’s Houston like?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Big. Dirty. Black water.”
“Yeah.”
We had until December. We used his crutches to poke beneath the rose bushes. Bacon was gone. I hadn’t seen him since the day the cops had come. That night he hadn’t shown up for his food; he couldn’t have gotten near the patio, anyway, through the debris of our fort.
“Well, our battles may be over,” Pat said. “But we still have one important mission to complete.”
I’d hoped he’d forgotten. The rhino was pointless now. Josh, we’d decided, wasn’t worth the fuss. That left Kiss-Kill.
December loomed larger for Janey than for me. She clung to her friend; I never saw Michelle alone—a vexation and a relief. I could tell Pat I had no chance for attack. I didn’t have to worry about a second kiss. On the other hand, a second kiss … I squelched the thought. “Houston!” Janey whined. “Do you know what a hell it is?”
The rest of the summer I spent reading football forecasts—and analyses of the presidential race, which I paid more attention to after Chicago (and because Eugene McCarthy’s face had remained kind throughout the troubled convention). The memory of Bucky had been swallowed by new events—by General Westmoreland and Buddy Reece, the Rebs’ new quarterback coach. Bronco Chevrolet ran ads praising the “New-Look Rebels.” The front pages contained war news, campaign updates, conjectures about Sheila.
One day, with Pat’s taunts in my head—“I think you like her, and that’s why you won’t carry out your mission”—I filled a pink balloon from my mother’s garden hose. As I squatted by the roses I felt lonesome for Bacon. The balloon was soft and cool in my palm, as firm as I imagined the Bunnies’ breasts to be. Tears burned my eyes. A clanking above me. I looked up to see two workmen straddling the alley’s power poles. They wore helmets and belts with big metal tools. I wiped my eyes. “Hey! What are you doing?” I called. “Tightening up these connections,” one man said. His shirt hung limp with sweat. “Supposed to be a stormy autumn. We don’t want these wires falling on your house, now do we?” The rest of the afternoon I sat in my room, picturing that disaster. The room felt big, exposed. There was no place to hide. On my wall I’d tacked half of the moon map—all I could salvage from the fort. By the time men bounced through the Sea of Tranquillity, I’d be in Houston, hundreds of miles from Pat. From Michelle. Tears came again. The water balloon sat on my desk, eking drops onto the glossy smooth mahogany. I tied the knot tighter.
I must have napped. Slamming car doors startled me. I walked to the window and saw the cops who’d wrecked Fort Trat escorting Mr. Wallace to a black-and-white cruiser. He was handcuffed. Sun bounced off his head as though it were a mirror. I ran to the front yard, where Mom and Dad stood on the lawn. Josh and his folks watched from their porch. Pat came bounding through the park, planting his crutches like stilts, step by steady step.
The following day we learned from the Reporter-Telegram that Sheila’s body had been found in a crawl space in Mr. Wallace’s attic. The neighbors on his south side had noticed a funny smell. An investigation had revealed Mr. Wallace’s dark history, all the more shocking because of his years of exemplary service on the Midland police force and his church activities. It wasn’t clear how—or even if—he knew the girl beforehand. An early lead, kept from the press, had been the girl’s socks, buried beneath a holly bush in Mogford Park.
“I’m going to miss Michelle, but I’m glad we’re moving now,” Janey said at breakfast, over the paper. I’d never seen her so pale. “It creeps me out, living here after this.”
“Mom, what’s a ‘sexual predator’?” I asked, peering over Janey’s shoulder.
“You ought to know,” Janey snapped. “Your grody old pinups …”
I slapped her arm. “That’s enough,” Mom said. She’d not said a word to me about the magazines.
We weren’t allowed to play outside. “No fair!” I shouted. “They got the guy!”
“I don’t care,” Mom said. “When I think that, all this time, he was right next door … I don’t want you out of my sight.”
First Pat, now Janey. Her remark had sealed it. If whatever I felt for Michelle—mixed up with Miss December—tied me even remotely to Mr. Wallace, I had to end it. Now.
I lay on my bed, chewing my lip. When the girls passed through the hall I picked the balloon off my desk and hurled it as hard as I could. Janey screamed. Water splattered the carpet, the light fixture, the framed print next to the closet where Mom hid the presents Santa brought when we were little.
Michelle trembled, her hands at her sides. Her training bra showed through her thin wet blouse. She looked at me, gasping. A current zizzled my skin. It came to a head behind my eyes, a swift, painful flash, as though I’d eaten a scoop of ice cream too fast.
Janey’s screams brought Mom running. “Troy! What on earth’s gotten into you? Answer me!”
I sat by the desk, avoiding Michelle’s eyes.
“Get some towels and clean this mess right now. You’re confined to your room the rest of the day. Now apologize to Michelle and your sister. You hear me? Troy?”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled.
If Michelle had yelled or sneered it would have been okay. But she only stared at me, wide-eyed, hurt, shivering in her little slip of a bra. I knew, right then, I’d dream of her in Houston, and that made Houston a lousier prospect than ever.
The towels were the same ones we’d lined the fort with. I ran them over the walls. From now on, I’d link their stiff, rough texture to our patio. Their dusty-detergent smell was the smell of Bucky, Pat, summer slipping into fall.
In my room I moved my finger over my desktop, tracing invisible Snoopys. I looked out the window toward Mr. Wallace’s house. I imagined that Bacon had made his way to the attic and was hiding there, safe, though I knew this was impossible. I thought of Sheila as a doll, tucked away in our closet, a keepsake to give as a gift someday.
The radio said fifteen American soldiers had died near Cu Chi. The Rebs’ coach claimed his boys were ready to give 110 percent this year. I turned to the torn moon, the lines of latitude and longitude. In the next room, above the clattering of the air conditioner, Janey’s voice sounded in laughter with Michelle’s—soaring, brief, and though rendered at my expense, more reassuring than anything I would encounter for many seasons to come.