Yes sir, yes, sir, we’ve all had days like that, yes sir; that goddamn perfect dilly of a dally of a day where you wake up in the morning and it’s summer, my God, that sunlight is so white and bright, and it makes trees and grass (especially if it’s all May young and not yet July old) all bright green—my goodness, and you wonder how it is that all the plants right here and now can be all so bright as if the very juice of them is somehow on fire with the burning green of growth. And now it was on that kind of day, a perfect dilly of a dally of a day that Edward, all of perhaps age ten, decided that he and his best friend Roy would go out and explore that perfect day.
So. Now. Just how do you go about exploring a perfect day? Why, of course, you go to a movie. And so Edward and Roy, they sat down right after breakfast (after sleeping out in Roy’s back yard and having for breakfast sausages and waffles and eggs over easy and hot cocoa, too, and they sat at the table while Roy’s thin mom with the black hair streaked with grey hummed to herself and cleared away the dishes with a delightful homey clatter placing them in the sink, and ran the sink full of suds and water) and Roy said, “Hey! Looky here!”
And Edward, still munching on a sausage and delighting in its squirting, salty droolingness grinned, and looked and said, “Huh?”
“Looky,” said Roy, pointing to an ad for the local theater, the View, (Oh, don’tcha wonder where names come from? View? The only view it had, at least from the front, was the new 1956-built Texaco station across the street with the Coke machine out front that, when it worked, delivered those awesome thick bottles of Coke that you had to pry the lid off of. View? Musta meant the view inside the theater maybe, or maybe the view of the apartment near the Texaco station, the second floor of which frequently had the drapes open with a wide man in tee shirt and red and white striped underwear looking out at the lines that formed in front of the View about noon on Saturdays, rain or shine, to watch the show and maybe never really realizing that he, himself, was a show but no matter—the View was the View and that’s all that matters here) and Roy said again, “Hey, a double feature! Creature from the Black Lagoon and Zorro.”
And Edward took another bite of sausage and said, “Wow!” and in the background the clatter of dishes. Outside Edward saw a willow wave and weave as if somehow a vast and vertical sphere and pool of green water rippling in the wind, and he said, “Hey, let’s do that. What time?”
“Noon,” said Roy.
“Let’s do it,” said Edward.
“More cocoa?” asked Roy’s mom.
“Yeah,” said Roy.
“Please,” said Edward.
“Marshmallows again?”
“Yeah,” they both said and in a minute they were drinking hot cocoa, delighting in the chocolate-slicked marshmallows and ah, yes, it seemed as if it was to be a perfect dilly of a dally of a day, yes, yes indeed and so, from breakfast table and the sighing at the wonder of hot chocolate, they went outside and felt the coolness of the air and admired the shadows of the trees, the blue sky and the sunlight coming through leaves and Roy said, “What’ll we do?”
“Let’s go for a walk,” said Edward.
So, they went for a walk to a so-called vacant lot that was supposed to be developed—that is, cut and leveled and paved over with a building dumped right there, right in the middle of a flat of black asphalt.
So. They walked through this vacant lot and saw: from a fallen and rotting tree with exposed deep and rusted red bark (the color soil and close to being soil) white, oh, so pale and white delicate mushrooms. “Ah,” said Edward pointing, “aren’t those neat?”
“Yeah,” said Roy and he stopped. “Hey, look.”
Edward did. A fly struggled in a web and a spider danced down to the insect and grappled with it and spun it about, then knelt and bit the fly and the fly became so still and the spider became busy wrapping, wrapping, wrapping the fly in a sticky silky package and then hauled it to the center of the silken web.
Roy said, “Geeze.”
Edward gulped.
And they continued on, on a pathway that was somehow, it seemed, just used by kids and Edward could never, but never figure out why older people never used it and they kept on through that vacant lot and something rustled in the leaves on the ground.
“Sh,” whispered Edward.
Roy stopped.
Edward looked around, oh, carefully this way, that, then pointing. Roy looked where a very large toad sat, warty as could be, brown skin the color of old leaves and delicate yellow lines down its back with eyes as dark as soil.
Edward leaned over and picking it up, the toad was suddenly wet and made soft and frightened pleading sounds.
“Hey,” said Roy, “it peed on you.”
“Yeah, it did,” and Edward laughed.
“You’ll get warts.”
“Nah, I won’t.” And for a minute, fumbling toad and Edward’s hands stopped their mutual dancing grapple and the toad appeared to be looking at Edward and Edward smiled again and put the toad down and it crawled away to blend and hide in leaves and earth and Edward wiped his hands on his pants.
“I hear they make good pets,” said Roy.
“Never had one,” said Edward, “but I’ve had turtles.” He shrugged. “Not very exciting pets.”
“My brother had a turtle, but he let the water evaporate from the bowl.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He found it all shriveled up like a prune a week later and tossed it in the bathroom sink and apologized to it for an hour.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Then what?”
Roy shrugged. “Frankie felt better but the turtle didn’t seem to benefit too much.”
They continued on, they continued on through the rich and damp smell of sour soil and leaf mold, through the dampness and cool of the so-called vacant lot and by the side of the path—
“Oh-oh,” said Edward.
“Yeah, doesn’t that look like Mrs. Ellsworth’s cat? She’s been looking for him for a week.”
The cat was a tiger cat, but now it lay close to the earth, eyes closed, and fur matted and very dirty as it lay, lay close, close to the earth.
“Been there for a while.”
“Yeah,” said Roy, “probably some jerk ran over it and threw it in the woods—”
And who knows why, but Edward took a stick and moved the cat.
“Oh, God,” he said, and the maggots squirmed and twisted and danced in their interrupted feeding and Edward had an urge to vomit; he looked away and took a breath.
“God,” he said, “God.”
Roy shook his head. What could be said at the spectacle of life returning to the earth? Not much. No, sir, not much at all and on that dilly of a dally of a day, the flow of life moving up from the soil into trees and into the leaves to dance as chlorophyll and photosynthesis and water vapor and sunlight and air and life, moved down from things once living now dying, now maggoty and returning to the soil and Edward and Roy just stared again at Mrs. Ellsworth’s cat that now was more and more belonging to the earth and finally Edward said, “God, that’s really weird. Let’s go.”
And they did. And they moved on through that vacant lot; they moved on beside a marsh and heard the plop of a frog and on the shore of that marsh that was most likely going to be moist mud in several weeks and after that, dry caked earth—but for right now, that was water, and that water was marsh and in that marsh: “Pollywogs!” said Roy. “Hey, why don’t we come back later with some jars—?”
“Yeah,” said Edward, “that’d be fun.”
And the pollywogs, like large black sperm, wiggled and waggled to the deeper water, waiting to be caught and watched or, escaping, waiting to transform. And they had just a short time to do it before the water would be gone, but Edward and Roy knew that they would do it in just the right time. Edward secretly wondered how it was that those pollywogs would do it in just the right time, just before the final water turned to air, but he knew and the pollywogs too, that it would be done, everything done as if a road map were somehow laid out and everything was arriving to every important destination right on time, the journey going along so well that no one, nothing, no pollywog nor maple tree nor maggot nor spider ever had to consult a travel clock or set a second hand or even glance at the position of the sun in the sky. Everything knew what time it was and where they ought to be.
And Edward finally said, as they came to a point where the path led out of the woods up an embankment of new dirt, “Hey, I bet we have time to stop at Jackson’s Drugstore,” and as soon as he said it, they were up over the embankment and there was the drugstore sitting right there.
“Yeah,” said Roy, “let’s do that!”
And they walked in.
They walked into Jackson’s drugstore and sniffed the alcohol and chocolate scented air. They went to the magazine section and glanced through the comics on that dilly of a dally of a day and they had only been there a few minutes when old Mr. Jackson walked in; old Mr. Jackson, owner of the drugstore, came walking in, tired looking with his brown hair now turned white and his face lined and jowled and his suit brown and a little baggy, and he went to the cashier, young Karen Thompson, maybe nineteen, with her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and braces on her teeth and she tried to smile and keep her upper lip down so that, she probably thought, no one would notice her braces although everyone knew she was trying not to show them because she thought it might be detracting from her looks and everyone loved her anyway, and Mr. Jackson told her, “I’m expecting a call from the Bax Brothers Construction Company—they’re supposed to fill in the rest of the vacant lot today.”
“Oh,” said Karen, “they already called—they’ll be here at one to fill in the lot.”
Edward looked at Roy and Roy looked at Edward, the mutual look of, “Oh crap!”
Then Mr. Jackson looked over to Edward and Roy and frowned and said, “You kids know you aren’t supposed to read the comics—buy or be on your way.”
And Edward and Roy looked at each other, put down Superman and Little Lulu and went back and followed the path past the marsh past Mrs. Ellsworth’s cat, past the place where to toad pleaded and peed, past the spider’s web and they sat on a log near the place where the pale white mushrooms fed off the old log returning to earth and there, amidst cool and dark shadows, they sat on a log; they sat and watched sunlight shift in the trees and looked up to the blue sky high above, and on this perfect dilly of a dally of a day, Edward and Roy sat. They sat on that log in the so-called vacant lot, knowing that they would not be going to see Creature from the Black Lagoon or Zorro. No, on that dilly of a dally of a day, they knew that even the finest of days brought with it monsters, and as they sat in the theater of earth and life, they sighed, felt sad and wanted to cry as they waited for the sad, sad show to begin.