A SATURDAY IN EARLY JULY, 1960
uke shakes my pillow at the first expectant pulse of false dawn and insistently repeats in my ear, “Get up—Wade. I want to go to Three Ponds early today.”
I am sluggish after a long fitful night, and Luke has to pester me awake. Mac wants to go, too, and lends his tongue and breath to the effort. I drag myself out of bed and mope my way to the bathroom.
My lackluster mood is due in part to the increasing absence of my mother. The house is so empty without her. Wondering if she is home now, I think about peeking into her room. While brushing my teeth, I consider brushing Mac’s teeth as well. Not a chance. He won’t cooperate. I slog into the kitchen and spot a note left near the sink.
See you guys tonight.
That’s it. No, I love you, Mom.
With Earl now completely out of our lives and residing in Barstow with someone named Trudy, and Lucinda working more hours than ever, Luke and I are left to entertain ourselves. What we lack in material things we try to make up for with imagination. Still, our devices are limited. Only three weeks into summer vacation and we are trudging through periods of tedium and restlessness, the onset of the devil boredom. The devil’s plucky partners—phone pranks, simple trespass, petty theft, and other minor transgressions—whisper in our ears with the zealousness of overstocked drug dealers.
Luke, the master of pluckiness, keeps pestering, and soon, against my rumpled humor, we are on our way to Three Ponds.
From where we live on Ruby Place, a block north and a block west of the intersection of Figueroa Street and Meridian Street, it is quite a trek east to Three Ponds. Neither Luke nor I own a bicycle, so walking is our stock in trade. Hoofing it affords one great freedom to notice and appreciate detail, which in our case fosters a predictable amount of mischief. If we take the most direct route and do not dawdle along the way, we have at least a forty-five minute walk ahead of us.
I notice Luke concealing something in his right hand, and I snap to the task of running herd on him. He can get me into a pickle in the blink of an eye. “What’s in your hand?”
“If that darn Molly barks, I’m gonna throw this rock at her.”
Molly, a rather pretty but dumb Irish setter, belongs to Mrs. Roberson, who is not dumb. To the contrary, Mrs. Roberson is more than adept at investigating to her complete satisfaction the misdeeds of neighborhood kids and their pets. She is an outspoken critic of Mac, who manages to impregnate her Molly on a semi-regular basis. A female in heat within five miles turns Mac’s hind legs into powerful pogo sticks, and our six-foot high fence is useless to keep him in. Give him another decade and Mac will no doubt have descendants leaping fences and scratching fleas on all seven continents.
Molly, who is perpetually smitten with Mac, stirs when she sees him. She pulls against her tether and calls out to him with two passionate barks followed by a longing whine. I notice Mrs. Roberson spying out her kitchen window just in time to restrain Luke. Molly, not being in heat at the moment, warrants only the dregs of a halfhearted glance from Mac.
Only after we round the corner at the end of the block and Luke’s mind moves on to other things does he finally drop the rock. “Do you think Jake’s will be open?”
Luke has yet to develop a useful sense of time. Patience. “No—it’s way too early.”
Jake’s Barbershop sits across the street from Luther Burbank Junior High School. Jake the barber, no relation to Jakey Blume, is a fun guy, if not a great barber. Jake is a big man with a barrel chest and huge Dizzy Gillespie jowls that shake when he laughs or growls as he loves to do whenever we show up. Plainly speaking, Jake loves people, especially kids. He is an excellent storyteller and always has a funny yarn to share.
It is impossible to walk past his shop without stopping to say hello. “Hey you!” he’ll yell like thunder if you dare try to pass by without at least giving him a wave. Jake is the only barber who’s ever cut our hair. He used to be a friend of Earl’s. Recently, though, I suspect he’s angling on Lucinda. He sure asks a lot of questions about her since word of Earl’s absence has gotten around.
Luke and I have a passion of our own. We call it “sneaking,” which is code for sneaking in through Jake’s back door. We secrete ourselves in Jake’s supply room, peek through a curtained doorway, and wait for an opportune moment. Seeing our chance, we dash through the center of the barber shop and out the front door, whooping and hollering like a couple of cowboys letting loose on a Saturday night. I think sometimes we overdo it and frazzle him a little.
Still, if we manage to scoot past Jake without him grabbing us, he rewards us with a wad of Bazooka bubble gum. It is a gamely challenge. Jake is a big man, but he is sure of foot and lightning quick. Half the time he catches us, and when he does, he slings us up into the barber chair. In forty-five seconds or less, what little fuzz we’ve grown since the last time he caught us is on the floor ready for the sweeper. We may be poor, but we are never in need of haircuts. Thanks to Jake’s frequent army-style buzz jobs, Luke and I usually look like a couple of cue balls in search of a snooker table. Lucinda never pays for any haircuts, as far as I know.
We stop and look in the barber shop window. No Jake. Mac pads around the corner of the building, lifts his leg, and documents his visit.
“Darn dog,” Luke mutters.
Down the block from Jake’s is a pedestrian tunnel that burrows under Figueroa Street. It comes up on the other side of the street in front of our school, Garvanza Elementary. The tunnel has always intrigued me. I like the cool air, and the echo is fun.
Nothing exciting ever happens down there, but I always feel good in the tunnel. Something about being underground surrounded by the concrete walls makes me feel safe. I plan for Luke and I to hide out in the tunnel if the nuclear war Carl often rants about ever comes. I don’t know, maybe I am part mole or groundhog.
Today, however, we determine to take our chances aboveground. Our personal crossing guard, Mac, aggressively challenges the traffic to stop, and the happy wanderers skip across the street.
The school playground slows us down. Luke is still determined to throw something, and dirt clods fly over the fence at no apparent target. Mac and I stop and watch him. I figure it’s best to let him get it out of his system.
He throws one last dirt clod, ponders the sky for a moment, and then turns and looks at me. “Is Matthew in heaven?”
I never know what he is going to say or do next. Luke definitely has a way of keeping me on my toes. “I think so.”
“I wonder if Lucinda knows that.”
“Well, maybe. But she still wants Matthew to be here with us.”
He stares at me, and I can almost hear his brain whirring. “She seems sad or angry all of the time. And she hardly ever talks to me anymore. Is she mad at us?”
“Sometimes—I guess. Mostly I think she’s mad at God.”
“I wish Matthew never died.”
My heart hurts for him and I step closer. “I miss him a lot, too.”
“I don’t like it that Lucinda is sad all of the time. Yesterday I heard her crying in the bathroom. Wade?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think God knows about us?”
“If He doesn’t yet, I think He will.”
“How?”
“I think Matthew will tell Him about us.”
His countenance takes on an almost angelic softness. “Matthew is pretty cool.”
“Yeah, he is.”
“You’re sort of cool, too, Wade.”
“I know. Are you done throwing dirt clods?”
“You know what’s weird?”
“What, Luke?”
“Remember when we used to go to Sunday school?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, one time, the teacher told us Jesus said, ’suffer the little children.’ What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
We move on toward Kory’s Market at the corner of York and Figueroa. At the intersection, I give a long look up York Boulevard to the north. The Highland Park police station is only a couple of blocks away. Is the Sergeant keeping tabs on us today? Kory’s has a big parking lot and four checkout stands. Lucinda calls Kory’s a “supermarket,” which always makes us chuckle because the “supermarket” is the best place to steal a free look at the latest Superman comic books.
Kory’s is a busy place, and sometimes we’re able to take advantage of the hubbub and slip unnoticed behind the magazine racks to catch up on our favorite two-dimensional hero. On good days, we get away with freeloading for ten or fifteen minutes before the store manager spots us and gives us the boot. The free peeks are getting harder to come by.
At Luke’s insistence, today we skip Kory’s and beat an expeditious path the rest of the way to Three Ponds—left off York Boulevard before the bridge, down the hill on San Pasqual Avenue, and straight ahead all the way to the overpass at San Pasqual Creek. Most days offer something more to ignite a digression or lead us on another tangent. But little do we know, this day is shaping up to be like no other.
A secret known only to a few privileged local kids, Three Ponds is a hidden wilderness overlooked by time and progress. A meandering stream towered over by giant eucalyptus trees provides a peaceful, restful setting. The stream sets the pace, never in a hurry to join the larger flow of the Arroyo Seco, which feeds the larger yet Los Angeles River.
Birds and small animals thrive here protected from encroaching civilization. Early morning and late afternoon, when the animals come to drink and play, are my favorite times. If you hide downwind and crouch very still, the experience is more fun than visiting the jailed species on display at the Griffith Park Zoo. Animal tracks disperse from the ponds like wheel spokes from a hub. Always fascinated, I study the print trails and picture the little creatures sleepily snuggling in their dens.
The birds are usually in a flurry overhead. I enjoy the constant aerobatics and chatter of the jays, robins, sparrows, and finches, all of them frequently visiting the water’s edge to sip, bathe, and preen.
Luke and I tend to visit during daylight hours, preferring the nonjungle terrain of Billy Goat Hill for our nighttime adventures, motorcycle gangs notwithstanding. Three Ponds is fertile ground for our hungry minds, and Luke and I are drawn here often.
The occasional appearance of an aggressive mockingbird usually disturbs the harmonious interaction of the other birds, and forever reminds me of my bad dream and Sergeant Cavendish’s story of Jakey Blume’s fatal fall from Eagle Rock.
A few days after the Eagle Rock incident, I decided to tell Luke about my dream of him being attacked like Jakey Blume was. He now monitors the sky like an obsessed astronomer. He’s become so shadow-shy and jumpy, reacting badly to every little motion overhead, I wish I had never told him about the mockingbird dream. Truth be told, I don’t like the mockingbirds any more than he does.
Today I am prepared to fulfill an oath I swore to myself to avenge the death of Jakey Blume. Armed with my slingshot, my pockets stocked with ball bearings, I am ready and able to shoot—if and when the enemy attacks. A ridiculous thought for a boy who avoids stepping on ants.
We while away the morning sitting with our pant legs rolled up, bare feet dangling in the stilling coolness of the middle pond. We examine the animal prints in the mud and trade speculations about what kinds of animals have preceded us this day. I tire of throwing sticks into the pond for Mac to retrieve, but keep it up because it’s the only way to keep him from barking, which he will continue to do until he is good and ready to quit.
“Darn dog. He thinks he’s some kind of bird dog.”
I smile inside, sensing an opportunity to rile Luke. “You’ll be wishing he’s a bird dog if those mockingbirds come to visit your head again.”
Luke looks at Mac. “Uh, well, you’re a good dog.” He reaches up and tugs on the visor of his Dodgers cap just to make sure it is there, and I am reminded of that rookie cop who nervously checked his gun the night of the hazing on Billy Goat Hill.
It was Luke who insisted I start packing my slingshot. Of late, heading deep into mockingbird territory requires special preparations. Two pocket loads of ball bearings are cached and ready, but it’s a special chore to haul them, requiring considerable work to keep my pants up. What I won’t do for Luke in the name of brotherly love. I fondle the bulging supply stuffing my pockets, and like that rookie cop, I double-check to see that the slingshot crammed into my back pocket is still there ready for action.
Mac finally tires of playing “Get the Stick” and ignores my last throw. This prank always rankles me. He can’t just go get the stick, return it politely, and say thanks for the game. Nope. He has to make me throw the stick one more time just so he can ignore it and thereby have the last word. If only I had the power to make myself invisible. Then he would run back to where I had been and stand there with the stick in his mouth not knowing what to do—and looking stupid.
Mac sits in the mud, his rump in two inches of turbid water, his tail like a thick black water snake swishing from side to side. He arrogantly stares at me, and I hold his gaze for a moment, then look away and spit into the water. “Chase that.”
He puts his head down, closes his eyes, and ignores me.
“Who do you think is better, Drysdale or Koufax?” Luke casually asks.
He is lying on his belly, creating an elaborate baseball diamond in the mud, using his finger like an artist. He’s been working on it for over an hour. It actually looks pretty impressive.
“Duke Snider is the best.” I know full well he is not talking about power-hitting center fielders. Already I catch a whiff of smoldering cordite.
“I’m talking pitchers, fire throwers, masters of the mound, you big dumb donkey!”
It isn’t easy, but I ignore his insult, as Mac ignored mine. “Okay. Who do you think is better?”
He looks up from his muddy handiwork. “I asked you first!”
Now my fuse is burning and I fire back louder. “I asked you second!”
We are angry pint-sized versions of Abbott and Costello. Who’s on First? Except rarely do we find humor in this non-comedic sibling ritual. Being the older brother, I try to be patient and take the high road with Luke. Admittedly though, now and then I make a wrong turn and get stuck in a quagmire on the low road.
He relishes ensnaring me with perplexing trick questions, black or white, hot or cold, up or down kinds of questions, so that no matter how I respond, he can automatically jump on the contrary side of the fence. He does it on purpose, of course he does, and the best I can do is attempt to throw off his rhythm and detour around the quagmire by echoing his question back to him. The tactic irritates him to no end, which is great fun for the big dumb donkey.
At first I decide not to antagonize him further, but then I change my mind. “Okay, Luke, Drysdale is the better of the two. But I’m glad we have Ron Perranoski in the pen.”
I say this not because I necessarily think Drysdale is better, but because I know he thinks Koufax is better.
Smart-alecky as can be, Luke looks up from the mud and glares at me. “No way! Sandy Koufax is an ace!”
“Oh yeah—well Don Drysdale is the king of diamonds!” I point angrily at the mud. “Including that mucky mess of a diamond you’re making with your stupid, dinky little fingers!”
Luke jumps to his feet and screams in my face. “Drysdale’s the king all right! He’s the king of the bean ball!”
Reacting to the rising tension, Mac starts churning the water with his tail, but he doesn’t open his eyes. He’s heard this a thousand times before.
“It wouldn’t take a Drysdale to brush you back from the plate, you little twerp!”
Quagmire!
I step in the mud right where he’s constructed his pitcher’s mound, mashing my foot down as hard as possible.
Luke gasps. “Hey! You big dumb donkey!”
He clamps onto my leg like a monkey to a vine and knocks me off balance. “Whoa!” I splutter, arms flailing.
I make one futile, spastic lurch to try to right myself before I land front down in two inches of fetid water, burying my face up to my ears in the mud. Luke jumps on my back, landing hard enough to force a loud Umph! from my lungs. He starts shoveling gobs of slimy goop onto the back of my head.
He’s knocked the wind out of me, and I can’t catch my breath—putrid, muddy scum filling my mouth and nose. Mac is now barking furiously at the rough-and-tumble action. Through my moss-clogged ears, his barking sounds like someone beating on a muffled gong.
Frantic for air, I thrust my back upward in a powerful bucking arch, propelling Luke skyward like an overmatched tenderfoot bull rider. Dazed and gagging, I stand up and wipe gunk away from my stinging eyes. I feel a wiggle in my throat and reflexively cough up a big black tadpole.
Yuck!
I open my eyes but cannot focus. I bend over at the waist and blink away pond scum clinging to the inside of my lids. Straining through burning slits, I look toward the pond and spot a vague blue dot moving on the lazy current. In seconds it disappears down a smooth rock flume on the way to the shallower pool of the lower pond.
Where’s Luke?
“Luke!”
I choke on a hard lump in my throat, a different kind of panic, and then dive into the water like Johnny Weissmuller rescuing Maureen O’Sullivan from flesh-craving crocodiles.
The middle pond is about twelve feet deep at its center. I have touched the sandy bottom only once before, and that was with my foot. I kick my legs as hard as I can, grab arms full of verdant liquid, and descend faster than I think possible, until I realize it isn’t because of my powerful strokes.
I am sinking.
My ball bearing-laden pockets are pulling me down faster than a pair of concrete boots, and all I can think about is how I ignored Luke when he asked me to teach him how to swim.
Nearing the bottom, my ears begin to ache from the pressure. Then my feet touch down harder than I expect, startling me into action. Eyes open, I glance up through an emerald glow and strain to see the faint, rippling sheen of the water’s surface.
What a way to go, lying face up at the bottom of a huge vat of lime Jell-O!
Straight out in front of me, my arms wave uselessly, fading at the elbows into handless stubs swallowed up in a murky, greenish gloom. There is so much area to cover, too much, and not enough oxygen to feed the frenetic exertion of every muscle in my body.
I snatch something in my grip that feels like it might be an arm or a leg. My heart surges, and I tug the object to my face only to see a waterlogged piece of wood, part of a tree root, not part of Luke. Angry, I kick my legs and wildly swing my arms, searching the area around me, and I know I have started to cry.
Underwater tears.
Underwater sobbing.
Underwater doom.
On the verge of drowning myself, I turn and kick off the bottom and pump hard toward the light. The sinkers in my pockets hold me down like a baited hook and it takes forever, but at last I reach the surface. As my head comes out of the water, I hear myself screaming for help. I suck my lungs full of life and immediately sink back into the watery dungeon that holds Luke captive.
Again I search, scouring the bottom with my arms and legs until I must kick hard to make it up to the surface and furiously replenish my breath. Down I go again, but Luke is not to be found. I am powerless to do more, and I must have more air before resuming my hopeless search. Keeping my face above water, I desperately try to dig the ball bearings out of my pockets, but to no avail. The moment I stop paddling with my arms, I start to sink.
More air!
God, please help me!
Gasping, choking, fighting to catch my breath, I dog paddle furiously, the stronger kick of my right leg pushing me in a wide arcing circle. Entangled in a mile-long moment of indecision, all I can do is sob.
“Luke! Luke! I’m sorry, Luke!”
Arms and legs working full throttle but rapidly diminishing in thrust, I come around to face due west and look up straight into the glaring afternoon sun. I am spent, defeated. The sun beats down, punishing my face with brutal slaps of hot accusation. I want to die.
Why, God? Some fall off cliffs? Some drown in ponds? But I’m the one to blame. I threw him in the pond. Don’t take him. It’s not his fault. It’s my fault. Take me, God! Luke! I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Then, just below the lower fringe of the sun’s hot glare, I imagine I see something move. I blink hard. There it is again, shapes, two shapes…
“You swim worse than Drysdale pitches, you big dumb donkey!”
There on the muddy bank, with Mac proudly stationed at his side, stands a very angry Luke. I blink again, harder, and try to raise a hand to shield my eyes, but my leaden arms won’t respond. Moved by the current, I come around slowly, and my face drifts under a merciful shadow, only to leave me wide open to the blunt force of Luke’s petulant glare.
His freckles seem to radiate with energy absorbed from the sun, which towers over him like a giant, tangerine sparkler. And there amid my brokenness and desperation, I am, for a fleeting moment, utterly, profoundly, wonderfully relieved that my brother is safe.
Mac barks, a muffled gong; the pond pours inside me; and I go down in a swirling nebula of bubbles. Spiraling, spiraling, down I go, thankful that God has accepted the trade. I watch as the ghostly forms of Luke and Mac get smaller and smaller, corkscrewing up, up, away, and gone.
I love you, Luke.
I’m going to be with Matthew now.
Take good care of Mac.
It feels like a school of eels are wagging their tails in my face. My eyes flutter open and I swat out instinctively, missing whatever is there. I am astounded to find myself staring eyeball-to-eyeball with Mac, and the eels are actually one big sloshing tongue. I hold still for a moment and let him lick my face. It feels so good the way it affirms I am alive.
Thank You, God.
“What happened?” I feel sick to my stomach, and I groan as I feebly raise myself to a sitting position. My legs weigh ten tons. The ball bearings have turned into bowling balls.
“I think you drownded.” Luke cautiously keeps a step out of arm’s reach. He is not quite sure if I am mad or not. “But me and Mac saved you.” He grins triumphantly but still keeps his distance.
“You mean you jumped back in the water and pulled me out?”
His grin slackens. “Well, uh, not exactly.”
Given his uncanny knack for showing up at times like this, I look around half expecting to see Sergeant Cavendish. I don’t see him or anyone else for that matter. My head is pounding, my ears are full of water, and the way my stomach is twitching, I think I may have swallowed a few tadpoles.
Then I belch real loud, moss flavor, and Mac gives me one of those head-cocked-sideways, eyebrows-raised looks like he always does whenever Luke or I make a mysterious noise. “Chase that.” His tail instantly goes into motion, and my stomach suddenly feels much better. “What do you mean, not exactly? Either you saved me or you didn’t.” I shake my head from side to side, but my ears remain plugged. Mac looks at me strangely again.
“I don’t know how to swim. You know that.”
“Well? How did you get me out of the pond then?”
“I didn’t.” Luke chuckles softly. “Mac did.”
“Huh?”
“Mac pulled you out, you big dumb donkey!”
“Well I’ll be a bluenose gopher. How in the name of Pinky Lee did you get him to do that?”
“Easy, I just shouted, ‘GET THE STICK, MAC!’ and pointed at you.”
“Well, I’ll be dogged!”
“I think you were, Wade.”
Physically, mentally, and emotionally depleted, I sprawl on the bank of the middle pond and let a large shaft of afternoon sun bake me dry. With considerable effort, I move twice to remain in the warm, rejuvenating spotlight. When finally I regain enough energy, I pull the slingshot from my back pocket and unload the near deadly ballast from my front pockets.
Still weak and shaky, I mindlessly count the ball bearings and arrange them into letters on the muddy ground in front of me. I give it my best effort, trying to polish up my downbeat mood, but soon one hundred and sixty-six silver marbles spell out the word STUPID in six-inch capital letters.
It’s a wonder that I ever came up from that first dive. I’m not as smart as Tarzan. Jane never would have survived with Wade Parker running around bare-chested in nothing but a loincloth. With my luck, she probably would’ve gotten tangled up in one of my swinging vines and strangled to death.
Meanwhile, Luke seems to be enjoying a new level of kinship with Mac. For once Mac did what he asked him to do.
Thank the Lord for that!
And Mac knows he’s done something important. He shows off, retrieving everything Luke can find to throw with unusual enthusiasm.
I watch them play while I rest my aching muscles. My anger at Luke has been washed away in a proselyte’s conversion. I am blessed to have Luke as a brother and Mac as a friend. Turning it over and over in my mind, I keep coming back to how stupid I was to place Luke in yet another hazardous situation. I really thought he had drowned.
Will I ever learn? Maybe, but in the meantime I can’t let him down by appearing weak. He needs to look up to me. I may be in chaos, but it’s time to suck it up. I have to reestablish some order and remind Luke who is boss, for his sake.
“Hey, twerp, what happened to your hat?”
In all the excitement, Luke has not realized his hat is missing. In a panic, he reaches up to his head and then reflexively ducks. His eyes snap skyward like a cottontail reacting to the blip of a hawk’s shadow.
“It must have come off in the water,” he utters stonily, eyes to the vertical, his hand still feeling around on the top of his head.
Mac barks, impatient for Luke to throw the stick dangling from his other hand.
“Darn dog,” Luke mutters, instantly reverting to his old ways.
He tosses the stick away without looking down from the sky. Mac watches the stick sail to the far side of the pond. Put off by Luke’s lack of sincerity, he turns around twice and sits in the mud. Game over. I smile.
“Darn dog,” Luke hisses.
“Don’t worry about your hat. We’ll find it in the lower pond on our way home.”
“Okay,” he says tentatively, looking very naked and vulnerable.
I have a thought. Like Luke, old ways are hard to change. A small smile sparks inside me and begins to multiply outward. I adopt a gravely serious tone. “You know what I would do if I were you?”
“What?” He’s still looking for jet-trails or maybe a message in the clouds.
My eyelashes flutter dramatically. “I would smear mud all over my head just in case any mockingbirds are in the area.” Yes, I am feeling much better. So much better, I can’t resist an impulse to push beyond the line of fairness. “You know, the way your red hair lights up in this bright sunshine, you’d probably be safer walking into a bull ring with a red suit on.”
He doesn’t even look down. He just kneels, scoops, and smears. In a matter of seconds, he looks like a lost gopher popping up in the middle of a peat bog. Maybe I’m not so stupid after all.
The looming shadows turn the pond from an iridescent green to the color of overripe guacamole. Luke is content to sit next to me and repair his earthen headgear whenever I note a piece has dried and fallen off, while I play a restful game of word-spell with my one hundred and sixty-six ball bearings. Just as I discover I have enough ball bearings to spell Mississippi if I don’t dot the is, Luke squeals like somebody pinched him.
“What’s your problem?” Can I make smaller letters and have enough ball bearings for Massachusetts?
“Look,” he whispers, rapidly patting more mud on his head.
I look up, hearing fear in his voice. “What?”
He keeps smearing. “Over there.”
“Where?”
His lips scarcely move as he hoists a muddy finger and points across the pond. “Two mockingbirds just landed—” whimper—“in that bush over there. Get your slingshot.”
I choke back a giggle and look where he is pointing. “Where? I don’t see any birds.”
“Get your slingshot!”
“Okay, okay. Take it easy.”
I force myself not to laugh at the streak of goop working its way down his forehead. I pick up the slingshot and take a ball bearing from the second s in Mississippi. I prepare the ball snugly in the leather sling and pinch the load firmly between my thumb and forefinger.
I’ve never hit a thing I’ve ever aimed at with this stupid weapon, and now I’m supposed to hit a bird I can’t even see from a hundred feet away? Right.
“Where are they?”
I have about as much chance of hitting a bird as I do to meet Duke Snider. Those birds, if there are any birds, are safer than raw liver crumpets at a Shirley Temple tea party.
“They’re right across the middle of the pond. Look on the top branch of that smallest bush next to that L-shaped rock.”
He couldn’t be more precise. “Oh yeah, I see them.” I squint harder. “You’re absolutely right. There are two of them, and they’re checking out your head, I think.”
Luke’s neck disappears down inside his T-shirt. Now he looks like a turtle, a scared little mud turtle.
“Kill them,” he nervously urges, oblivious to the little chunks of mud now slipping off the end of his nose.
Mac dozed off earlier. He is whining in his sleep, dreaming of Molly, no doubt. It is just as well that he doesn’t see my shot miss. He can be very judgmental.
Luke is about to come out of his skin. “Hurry up! They’re getting ready to attack!”
I prop my left elbow on my knee and raise the slingshot to eye level. The birds look to be a mile away as I position their faint little shapes at the center of the yoke. Slowly, I pull back on the black rubber straps, back, back, as far back as I can. My shoulder trembles and the muscles in my forearm bulge from the strain. I hesitate, held back by an itch of guilty sympathy for the birds.
They are so small and I’m so big. It doesn’t seem fair. Am I Goliath aiming the slingshot at David? That’s not how the story goes.
Luke is nearly apoplectic. “Shoot, Wade! Shoot!”
Aw heck, I ain’t gonna hit them anyway. I close my eyes and let go.
Thwack! The ball bearing sizzles forth, singeing the air over the water, and instantly a puff of feathers floats around the bush. In stunned disbelief, I watch as the feathers settle on the leaves like fake snow in a Sears Christmas window display. The recoil of the rubber straps snaps the slingshot out of my hand and flings it into the pond, where it dips and bobs away in search of Luke’s Dodgers cap.
“You got ’um!” Luke roars. “You got ’um both!”
He’s right. No more birds. I’m a murderer!
Mac opens one eye, winks at me, and goes back to sleep.
Luke dances around in a circle, a fearsome warrior celebrating a fruitful hunt, and then takes off upstream toward a spot where he can cross over to the other side without having to swim.
“Wait up, for crying out loud!” Still fazed with a strange mixture of amazement and regret, I hurry to catch up with him.
On the other side of the stream, we hurry back downstream to the middle pond. Out of breath and full of excitement, we jostle through the undergrowth until finally we stand side by side at the feathery bush. There are lots of feathers, but no birds. Puzzled, we push farther into the thicket, scouring the branches and ground as we go.
Robbed of the prize, Luke turns sour. “Some bird dog Mac is.
Look at him lying over there snoozing in the mud. He could be helping us, you know. But he’s not even interested. Darn dog.”
“Why do you always have to pick on Mac? Just be quiet and keep looking. They’ve got to be around here somewhere. Birds can’t possibly fly with that many feathers missing.”
I feel guilty. I am sure they have to be dead, at least one of them anyway.
We push our way deeper into the brush, maybe thirty or forty feet, and come upon a small open space. No birds.
“Darn, Wade. I bet they’re hiding and getting ready to launch a counterattack. I need more mud.”
“What could have happened to them?”
“Hey, what’s that?”
Luke points to a piece of cardboard big enough to use for sliding at Billy Goat Hill. It’s standing on end leaning against a waist-high rock, looking quite out of place in these undisturbed surroundings. Noticing something even more peculiar, I step closer and observe a perfectly round hole in the cardboard, exactly the same diameter as my ball bearings.
“Look at that.”
We step closer. I lean down to peek through the hole. Luke reaches over and grabs the cardboard. The cardboard falls over.
We both scream!
My face wavers inches away from a man’s face. He’s sitting upright, legs outstretched, torso leaning back against the rock. His mouth is open as if frozen in mid-speech, his glazed eyes staring in disbelief. And there for the whole world to condemn is my killer ball bearing buried down a bloody vent in his forehead. I see the shimmering sphere lodged one knuckle deep in the finger size hole. Flies already flit around the wound, excited by the early smell of death.
The realization of what I have become rampages to my very core, driving a pile at the pit of my stomach and slamming up my spine to my brain, where a silent scream builds to a mental roar raging to split my skull wide open.
A moment later, Mac stands bracing against my weakening legs. He sniffs cautiously at the dead man’s shark skin pant leg and looks up at me, his big brown eyes flooding with worry, as if to say: This is not good, Wade. Not good at all.
Before I faint, there is an instant of revolting sickness, then a hallucination of me softly descending into the safe, protective arms of my father. But Earl does not catch me. Instead, my head crashes hard on the rock next to the dead man.