you could always call out and be heard by at least one of your fellows.
When each round of the game exhausted itself—through fear or antagonism or boredom—we would find ourselves convened in some remote copse or break in the miles of granite stone walls that not only bounded current property lines but also ran through all the woods where the ghosts ofold farms and the foundations of former houses mingled with the forests and clearings and streams we explored, and we would report to one another about the night—there was Jupiter; there was a dancing light we all saw but none seemed to have made; there was the corpse of Freaky, Mr. Jones’s mutt who after years of chasing cars and losing his tail, then an ear, then an eye, then a leg, now lay split open in the uncut grass of the ditch between the silent road and Mr. Jones’s orchard, his coat matted with gravel.
“Jesus, it’s Freaky.”
“What?”
“It’s Freaky, man. Dead as
shit
.”
“I’m going to bury him.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I’m going to. Out of respect. He was the guardian spirit of Cherry Street.”
“Bullshit.”
“Yeah. And look at him. He’s all fucked up.”
“And he smells
nasty
.”
“Go home then. I’m getting a sheet and a shovel and I’m going to bury him.”
“Hey, Wader, I’ll give you ten bucks if you eat a mouthful of his guts.”
“Lord’s right. We’ve got to bury Freaky. Out of respect.”
“Out of respect.”
“Out of respect.”
How different we were at night, out from under the tyrannies of due dates and gym classes and school bells, luminescent faces in a circle, telling one another what we’d seen and heard, what we’d found (Algonquin arrowheads and flintswould still turn up now and then, when one of us scratched at a patch of sand), making small adjustments to the rules for the next dispersal, fetching Peter’s dad’s old GI-issue spade and spending the rest of the night taking turns digging a grave for a dog.
W HEN WE CAMPED ON Peter Lord’s front yard we always stopped whatever game we had been playing in the meadow just before the first fletchings of dawn and stood in the high grass for a moment or two, scratching bug bites, wiping our noses with the backs of our hands, raking our dirty fingers through our sweaty hair, murmuring a quiet, conclusive word or two.
“Something big moving in the pond tonight.”
“Huge.”
“Full moon’s why.”
“Bullshit.”
“Look it up.”
“Look
what
up?”
“He’s right.”
“Owl took half Watt’s hair.”
“Screamed so hard his balls fell off.”
T HE LAST CARS OF night had driven past hours ago on Cherry Street, beyond the fields, past the stone fences. The first cars of morning had yet to come. We thrived in that nocturnal kingdom, which emerged from the fields like a pop-up world in a cardboard book and collapsed back into the grass as wekicked one another to jittery sleep. You could almost hear it folding itself back up just ahead of the sunrise, outside the nylon walls of the tent. We were careful never to be outside when it disappeared, in case one of us tripped on an overturning corner and was gobbled down into the throat of that old earth, into the cross sections of years and centuries and generations, folded up into the curled layers of prehistoric winters and antique summers where we had no business being after dawn, and getting coughed back up into the right night onto the right front lawn might be a one in a million or even slighter chance, and the rest of us finding a rope in Peter Lord’s garage and lowering it into the eons and lassoing our friend and hauling him back up through the constellated gears and pinions of eras and epochs was something we couldn’t get a grasp on, couldn’t plumb, didn’t have whatever tool, whatever rare sextant or theodolite was required for sighting the lines along which we could pull him back to the here and now without him being hoisted from the ground a dead Puritan or quadruped
When each round of the game exhausted itself—through fear or antagonism or boredom—we would find ourselves convened in some remote copse or break in the miles of granite stone walls that not only bounded current property lines but also ran through all the woods where the ghosts ofold farms and the foundations of former houses mingled with the forests and clearings and streams we explored, and we would report to one another about the night—there was Jupiter; there was a dancing light we all saw but none seemed to have made; there was the corpse of Freaky, Mr. Jones’s mutt who after years of chasing cars and losing his tail, then an ear, then an eye, then a leg, now lay split open in the uncut grass of the ditch between the silent road and Mr. Jones’s orchard, his coat matted with gravel.
“Jesus, it’s Freaky.”
“What?”
“It’s Freaky, man. Dead as
shit
.”
“I’m going to bury him.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I’m going to. Out of respect. He was the guardian spirit of Cherry Street.”
“Bullshit.”
“Yeah. And look at him. He’s all fucked up.”
“And he smells
nasty
.”
“Go home then. I’m getting a sheet and a shovel and I’m going to bury him.”
“Hey, Wader, I’ll give you ten bucks if you eat a mouthful of his guts.”
“Lord’s right. We’ve got to bury Freaky. Out of respect.”
“Out of respect.”
“Out of respect.”
How different we were at night, out from under the tyrannies of due dates and gym classes and school bells, luminescent faces in a circle, telling one another what we’d seen and heard, what we’d found (Algonquin arrowheads and flintswould still turn up now and then, when one of us scratched at a patch of sand), making small adjustments to the rules for the next dispersal, fetching Peter’s dad’s old GI-issue spade and spending the rest of the night taking turns digging a grave for a dog.
W HEN WE CAMPED ON Peter Lord’s front yard we always stopped whatever game we had been playing in the meadow just before the first fletchings of dawn and stood in the high grass for a moment or two, scratching bug bites, wiping our noses with the backs of our hands, raking our dirty fingers through our sweaty hair, murmuring a quiet, conclusive word or two.
“Something big moving in the pond tonight.”
“Huge.”
“Full moon’s why.”
“Bullshit.”
“Look it up.”
“Look
what
up?”
“He’s right.”
“Owl took half Watt’s hair.”
“Screamed so hard his balls fell off.”
T HE LAST CARS OF night had driven past hours ago on Cherry Street, beyond the fields, past the stone fences. The first cars of morning had yet to come. We thrived in that nocturnal kingdom, which emerged from the fields like a pop-up world in a cardboard book and collapsed back into the grass as wekicked one another to jittery sleep. You could almost hear it folding itself back up just ahead of the sunrise, outside the nylon walls of the tent. We were careful never to be outside when it disappeared, in case one of us tripped on an overturning corner and was gobbled down into the throat of that old earth, into the cross sections of years and centuries and generations, folded up into the curled layers of prehistoric winters and antique summers where we had no business being after dawn, and getting coughed back up into the right night onto the right front lawn might be a one in a million or even slighter chance, and the rest of us finding a rope in Peter Lord’s garage and lowering it into the eons and lassoing our friend and hauling him back up through the constellated gears and pinions of eras and epochs was something we couldn’t get a grasp on, couldn’t plumb, didn’t have whatever tool, whatever rare sextant or theodolite was required for sighting the lines along which we could pull him back to the here and now without him being hoisted from the ground a dead Puritan or quadruped
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