Late in the Standoff Read online

  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.”