by Mike Ramon
Chapter One
The first day of summer always held a sense of wonderment, and the promise of long days and warm nights ahead. Fireflies, the buzz of grasshoppers, lightening flashing brilliantly from distant thunderheads on hot, muggy nights, as well as the sound of mother’s calling their children in from their shared adventures (or misadventures); these were the things that made up a summer. The summer held secrets that would be remembered by children long after they ceased to be children, when they would meet as old friends or barely remembered strangers, as mothers and fathers, husband, wives and divorcees, and they would say, “Remember the time when…?”.
The first day of summer had started out as a good day for Frankie Gardener and his little sister. At twelve years old most boys would resent having their eight year-old sister tagging along with them all day, but Jessica was pretty cool for a sister, and he didn’t really mind. Sometimes he gave her a hard time, told her to go away or that she wasn’t old enough to join in whatever fun he and his friends had found to kill the day, but when he did he was just going through the motions of how a brother was supposed to act toward his little sister in front of his friends, and she always knew that he didn’t really mean it.
So she took the occasional half-hearted jibes from her brother in stride and stuck around, knowing that in a few minutes the older boys would turn their attention away from the little sister and focus on more important things, like seeing who could climb the highest on mean Mr. Kerch’s apple tree before the old man himself came out to yell at them to stay the hell out of his yard, or figuring out whether it was the second or third down in a pick-up football game (one’s view in these arguments seemed to depend on whether or not one’s team had possession of the ball).
When Frankie headed out the door that morning, the first of summer, Jessica followed after him without discussion; it was expected. The siblings joined a loose-knit and shifting group of kids, which grew larger and smaller in turns as the day wore on. At some point Buddy Weaver and a few of his friends joined the flock, which made a few of the kids uneasy, given the boy’s size and unpredictable temper, but he seemed to be in a good mood, and they all breathed a little easier. A game of freeze tag had given way to a half-assed game of baseball that ended when their only ball was line-drived straight into some sticker bushes. No one volunteered to search for the ball, and so the group, using that odd groupthink that seemed to settle over gangs of kids just like a colony of ants, decided as one that the next destination would be Sag Creek.
They used a rope that had been tied around the trunk of a particularly sturdy tree by some earlier generation of kids to swing out to the center of the creek, where they let go and soared for brief moments that felt like forever before crashing gown into the muddy water. They splashed and swam, and spat water at each other in the bruised light of early evening.
Everything was fine until Buddy Weaver started dunking Jessica under the water. It just looked like typical horseplay at first, but when Jessica shouted that it wasn’t funny anymore and Buddy responded by dunking her under again it took on a note of the casual viciousness that the big boy was capable of at odd times.
“Quit it!” Jessica said when she came up again. “I mean it, Buddy!”
Buddy dunked her again, then brought her up. She gasped for air and started flailing her thin arms against his stocky frame. He laughed at her efforts, sounding eerily like a braying donkey. He pushed her back under the water again. A few of the kids laughed along with him, glad to be in on the joke instead of being the joke itself, while others looked on with the quietly disapproving looks of kids who knew better than to vocalize that disapproval to a kid who had an advantage of a few inches and twenty pounds over them. Frankie, seeing what was happening, waded out into the water, heading toward Buddy on the bigger boy’s blind side.
Buddy let Jessica up and she struck out wildly with one small fist, catching him on the bridge of his nose. He cried out, in surprise more than pain, and shoved her away from him. She lost her footing on the slippery creek bed and went down, going under the water or a moment until she was able to right herself and stand up. Water dripped from her dark blond hair, landing in little droplets into the body of water.
“What’s your problem?” Jessica asked.
“I was just playing around,” Buddy said. “You didn’t have to hit--”
He didn’t see it coming when Frankie, standing to the left and slightly behind Buddy, took a swing, his arm snaking around and his fist landing on Buddy’s jaw. Buddy crumpled to his knees, the water coming up just below his chin. The way he folded with the force of the blow was almost comical, though no one laughed.
Frankie stood upright in the creek, staring at his fist. It throbbed with a dull, aching pain, but he couldn’t deny feeling a certain kind of thrill. He had never punched anybody in his life, and he had always secretly believed that if he did it would have little or no effect. Seeing Buddy Weaver fall to his knees after one blow was proof that he was stronger than he had given himself credit for. The fact that it was Buddy he had struck, the boy who had pushed him down the slide behind the school in the first grade, who had thrown a stick in Stan Mercer’s path when Stan was riding his bike last fall (the result: a sprained wrist and a janked up wheel rim), and who had been messing with his sister, just made the moment that much sweeter.
Frankie imagined this moment as a scene in a movie, when the nice, unassuming kid had finally had enough of the bully’s wretched behavior and stood up to him, knocking him down in front of the whole school, standing over the defeated young tough as the crowd cheered and clapped in celebration at the takedown of the terror of the playground. But there, at the creek, in a moment that was not a scene from a movie, nobody cheered, nobody clapped, and there was no celebration. Buddy stood up, towering over Frankie. Frankie looked up into the other boy’s face with a look of confusion; this was not how the movie was supposed to end.
Buddy pummeled Frankie with his frozen ham fists. Frankie lost the use of his legs, and his knees buckled under him and sent him face first into the water. Buddy dragged him toward the bank of the creek. One of Buddy’s friends waded out to help pull Frankie out of the water and onto the dirt.
“Leave my brother alone, you asshole!” Jessica yelled out.
Frankie was lying on the ground with his eyes closed, but they popped open when Jessica said this. He had never heard a word like that come out of her mouth, and it shocked him. He looked up and saw that Jessica was trying to rush to his aid. Stan Mercer, he of the sprained wrist and damaged bike, was holding her back. Frankie knew that Stan meant Jessica no harm, and that he was simply trying to protect her, and he made a mental note to thank Stan when he got the chance.
Buddy turned his attention to Jessica for a few seconds, and then turned back to Frankie. He had a sneer on his face. Frankie could feel his right eye starting to swell up from the shots that Buddy had landed. Buddy looked him over, as if deciding just what to do with this pitiful specimen he found before him. Then the sneer was gone, and the shininess of the boy’s eyes dulled a bit. Frankie could see Buddy’s mood change like a storm cloud passing.
“Ah, I was only playing,” Buddy said. “No hard feelings, huh?”
This was Buddy’s way, had always been his way, even back in the first grade when he had shoved Frankie down that slide. Only minutes before they had been pals, and minutes after Buddy was trying to be his pal again and he seemed genuinely confused as to why Frankie was angry with him.
“Don’t be a baby,” Buddy said.
He stuck out a hand, offering to help Frankie to his feet. Frankie didn’t take it, preferring to stand on his own. Frankie ran his hands along his throbbing face and looked at them; he hoped there wouldn’t be any blood, and there was none. Buddy withdrew his proffered hand, sulking at what he saw as a slight on Frankie’s part. The two boys stood facing each other for a moment, both of them breathing heavily from the tussle, and then Buddy turned away, motioning to the kids who had come along wit
h him when he had joined the group earlier that day.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said.
He looked back at Frankie.
“We don’t want to hang around with a bunch of pussies, anyway.”
Frankie thought of responding to the putdown, but decided against it. The fight was over, and he saw no reason to start it up again. Buddy and his friends slunk away through the trees, leaving trails of set, soggy footprints behind them.
“Are you okay?” Stan asked as he let go of Jessica.
“Yeah; I’m fine,” Frankie said.
Jessica ran over to Frankie and gave him a hug.
“I thought you were dead meat for sure,” she said.
He gave her shoulder a slight squeeze and gently pushed her away, lest the other kids think he was a softie.
“It wasn’t so bad,” he said.
“Well, your eye is all swollen up like a balloon,” Jessica said, seemingly in awe of her brother’s most prominent battle wound.
Frankie could barely see out of his right eye. He reached up and touched it lightly with his fingertips, and a sudden flash of hot pain made him wince away from his own touch.
“Yeah, I guess it is,” he said.
“Sorry, man,” Stan said. “I would have helped, but he had his friends around him, and, you know….”
“It’s all right, Stan.”
Frankie understood. He knew that, in all honesty, he probably would never have challenged Buddy in the first place if it hadn’t been his own sister who Buddy had been roughhousing with. It would have been up to some other brother to take a drubbing. Frankie walked over and took a seat on the trunk of a small, fallen tree.
The kids still at the creek, the ones who hadn’t left with Buddy, went back to swimming and splashing now that the entertainment was over. Even Stan seemed to forget about the whole thing, taking hold of the rope and swing out over the water, using the momentum to launch himself through the air, soaring for a couple of seconds before gravity did its work and dragged him down from the air and into the water. Jessica took a seat next to her brother and sat watching the other kids at play.
“What are you gonna tell Mom about your eye?” she asked.
Frankie shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”
“If you tell her what really happened I bet Buddy’s dad will whip him good.”
“Yeah, but then everyone will say that I’m a snitch.”
The girl sighed.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
In the world of adolescence which they inhabited you didn’t tattle, you didn’t rat, you didn’t snitch. It was something akin to a mortal sin to do so, and there was no surer way to convince everybody that you were just an overgrown baby who couldn’t be trusted. The kids who betrayed the secrets of the playground and the park, or in this case the creek, were the kids who found themselves left out of all the fun. Nobody wanted to be one of those kids, the earnest few who were only trying to do the right thing, and found themselves punished for it for however long it took until the other kids forgot why they had been punishing them in the first place. Then, and only then, was it safe to join in once more. So Frankie wouldn’t snitch, and Jessica would go along with whatever story he made up to explain the swollen and darkening eye.
Eventually Jessica wandered away from her brother and joined in the play. Frankie didn’t feel much like swimming or swinging on the rope anymore, so he stayed where he was seated and watched the other kids. He wondered about Buddy, and whether this whole mess was done with, or if the capricious boy would seek to humiliate him further at some later date. He hoped it was over.
As the last light of day started to drain out of the clear summer sky the last of the revelers started their exodus. Goodbyes were said, backs were slapped good-naturedly, and tentative plans were made for the next day’s activities, many of which would never come to fruition, given the fickle moods of the children making them.
Frankie and Jessica headed home accompanied by Jenny Snider, a girl around Jessica’s age whose own home was along the way. Jessica and Jenny walked together a ways ahead of Frankie. Frankie’s eye was still throbbing; he could feel his pulse beating in the stretched skin of his eyelid. He was unsure of how the fight would play out in neighborhood lore. Would the story be of a boy who bit off more than he could chew and took a whooping, or would it be the story of a smaller boy who had stood up bravely against a bigger boy and had never cried or begged?
The girls did a few cartwheels and laughed.
“Did you see?” Jessica asked, turning back to look at her brother.
“Yeah, I saw.”
“Whadja think?”
“I don’t know. Pretty good, I guess.”
The girls rolled their eyes and walked on. When they came to Ketchum Street the girls said their goodbyes, and Jenny ran off down Ketchum. Frankie hadn’t stopped to wait for the girls to say their parting words, and Jessica had to catch up to him. She came up beside him, brushing the hair out of her eyes.
“It’s late,” she said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Too late. Mom’s gonna be mad,”
“I know.”
She hummed a bit to herself, some tune Frankie couldn’t make out.
“Have you thought of what you’re gonna tell her about your eye?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“Well, you’d better think of something.”
“Come on, let’s cut across here,” Frankie said, motioning for his sister to follow him.
There was a chain-link fence that ran along the sidewalk there. Beyond the fence there was a parking lot, and to the right of the parking lot sat the imposing building that everyone called the Home. Frankie didn’t know why it was called that, but it had always sounded vaguely sinister to him--the Home. He parted a section of the chain-link that had been cut through by who the hell knows, way back who the hell knows when. Cutting across the parking lot would only save them about a minute and a half at most, but to a kid a minute and a half was nothing to sneeze at when you were already late getting home. Ninety seconds could make the difference between a stern word of reprimand and an all-out grounding. So a minute and a half could be a really big deal.
“Come on,” Frankie prodded.
“I’m coming. Hold your horses.”
As Frankie held the tear in the chain-link open as wide as he could Jessica squeezed through to the other side without difficulty. For Frankie it was a bit of a tighter squeeze. His shirt caught on a jagged metal point, and Jessica had to help him free the cloth so as not to rip it. Coming home late was bad enough, and coming home late with a wrecked eyed was worse, but also coming home with a ripped shirt would earn him capital punishment for sure.
“Careful,” he warned.
“I am being careful.”
“You’re pulling on it too hard.”
“You can do it yourself if you want to.”
“Sorry. Just be careful.”
The shirt came free with the aid of the young girl’s nimble fingers, and Frankie made it inside the fence with his shirt intact. The chain-link rattled as he let the gap in the fence close in on itself.
“Thanks for giving me a hand with that,” Frankie said.
“No problem.”
They walked on, the Home on their right and an overgrown field on their left. Frankie kicked a bottle that was lying on the cooling asphalt, and it went rattling on the ground for fifteen feet before rolling to a stop, unbroken. At the other end of the lot they came to another fence. This one also had a section where the links had been snipped with some unknown tool, and he took hold of the fence on either side of the gash and pulled it wide.
“Come on,” he said.
He watched the street. A pickup truck sped by, the wind of its passing blowing against his face. Jessica had not slipped through the fence, and he turned to see what the holdup was. Jessica was still thirty feet behind him, staring up
at the Home.
“What are you waiting for?” Frankie called. “Hurry up.”
Jessica didn’t respond, didn’t acknowledge in any way that she heard him call to her. He let go of the fence and placed his hands on his hips, wondering what in the hell was so interesting about the dark hulk of a building.
“Jess, what are you doing?”
Jessica turned her head to look at him slowly, as if she were moving under water; a light breeze that lifted her hair around her head only served to heighten the effect. Her eyes were dark pools of shadows in the gloom of the evening.
“Can’t you hear them?” she asked.
“Hear who?”
“They’re calling us.”
She shifted her gaze back to the building, and stood still as a statue for a moment. Frankie sighed, starting to get angry. Jessica could be a little weird sometimes, but this was too much.
“Come on, dummy,” he said. “We’ve got to get home.”
He expected a sharp response from her, a demand that he not call her a dummy, a claim that he was in fact the dummy. There was nothing. A little ball of fear settled into his stomach as he looked from his sister to the dark, empty building that held her attention, then back to his sister. Jessica moved then, and for the briefest of instants Frankie was able to feel some relief. Then he realized she was moving toward the building and not toward where he stood at the fence.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
There was no response. Frankie followed after his sister, jogging to catch up with her, slowing down to a walk as he came up even with her.
“Come on, Jess; talk to me. What are you up to? Is this some kind of joke?”
“They want us to play with them,” Jessica said.
Her voice sounded slow and dreamy, the voice of a sleepwalker.
“You’re nuts, you know that? Now stop playing around, and let’s go.”
Frankie stopped walking, but Jessica kept going.
“I’m not going in there with you, Jessica.”
She walked up to a gaping hole that used to be a window before somebody busted the glass out, and peered inside the dark interior of the building.
“I’m gonna leave you,” Frankie said. “You’ll be out here all by yourself. Do you want that?”
Jessica grabbed hold of the empty window’s bottom edge and pulled herself up.
“Jessica, don’t go in there. I’m serious.”
Frankie walked toward her, meaning to pull her down and drag her back home, if that was what was necessary. Just as he reached to grab the back of her jacket she was jerked away from him and the through the window frame, disappearing into the darkness.
“Jessica!”
Frankie hoisted himself up and jumped down into the shadows. He squinted hard in an attempt to see the room he was in, but he couldn’t see more than a couple feet in front of him.
‘”Jess, where are you?” he spoke to the inky blackness. “Jess, say something. Jess!”
The only things he could hear were his own breathing and the sound of blood rushing in his ears, and the small ball of fear in his stomach wasn’t so small anymore. Then a shadow seemed to take form and break away from the surrounding darkness, moving closer to him. It drew up before him, and he was unaware of the fact that his bladder was releasing warm fluid that was dripping down his pant legs.
Fifteen minutes later Frankie walked into his house. His mom had been waiting for him and Jessica to walk in so she could scold them for staying out after dark; his dad, who wasn’t as strict about such things, was in the garage working on a new birdhouse. When Frankie stepped into the living room something in his face, something that had nothing to do with the swollen eye, told his mother that something was very wrong.
“Where’s your sister?” she asked.
He didn’t say anything; he just started crying.
“Frankie, where’s Jessica?” she asked again, her voice rising.
There was a hysterical note in her voice now. Her husband, having heard her and sensed that something was wrong, came in through the door leading from the kitchen to the garage. He stalked from the kitchen into the living room and stopped, watching his wife and his son face each other near the front door.
“Mary, what is it?” he asked.
She paid him no mind.
“Where is Jessica!” she yelled at Frankie.
And Frankie could only stand there crying, starting to hyperventilate, cold urine dripping from the cuffs of his pants to the clean beige carpet.
