The Boys of Summer

by Richard Cox

  Todd’s hands went to his temples, as if he were trying to rub away a headache. He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath.

  “Things went wrong when that tornado hit,” Todd said. “It’s like it started something in motion, and I swear I can hear it somewhere, the inner workings of a machine that will eventually end the world.”

  “They were just dreams,” David said. “You’re a kid. We’re all kids. We don’t have to worry about stuff like that.”

  “But we do!” Todd shot back. “You think you’ve got all this time, but you don’t. Maybe it seems great now, because Wichita Falls has been rebuilt, but it’s not going to last. The recovery is an illusion. On the surface everything seems great, but underneath it’s all getting worse. Things are gonna just keep on getting worse.”

  “I don’t agree,” David said. “We have our whole lives ahead of us.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I mean, out of all of us you seem the most like someone who would actually, you know, be successful. You said the other day how people will do anything if you just ask them. You’re a natural salesman at school. You could probably turn your dad’s business into a chain of barbecue restaurants, but it’ll never happen because all he cares about is forcing people to ‘work hard.’ And by work hard he means suffer. It’s like he willingly bets against his own interests.”

  “My dad’s a good man. He built his business from the ground up.”

  “But it’s almost like he doesn’t want it to be more successful. Like he believes he doesn’t deserve it for some reason. And he makes his own son do the worst jobs in the whole restaurant.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” David said. “But he’s still a good man. He’s my dad.”

  “What about you, Jonathan?” Todd asked. “Are you ever going to call Alicia? Are you going to let your whole life go by while you wonder if she really likes you?”

  “Actually I did call, and her mom answered. She said she would pass along my message. But Alicia never called me back.”

  “How do you know she got the message?”

  “I don’t think her mother would forget about it.”

  “But she could have,” Todd said. “You’re honestly going to give up that easily?”

  “I think maybe she just doesn’t like me that way.”

  Todd put aside his keyboard and leaned forward. “Come on, man. You honestly think she wouldn’t at least return your phone call? Does she strike you as that kind of person?”

  Jonathan shook his head, but Adam didn’t think he would call her again. Some guys were afraid of girls, and nothing Todd said could change that.

  “You guys are smart dudes,” Todd said. “Each one of us is. But if we sit here and do all the same shit every other kid does, we’ll grow up to be like everyone else. Is that what you really want? To be nobody, like any old sheep in the herd?

  “Or do you want to be different? Do something special? If you want that, the time to start is now. We won’t have this summer forever. And if we waste it, we’ll grow up and get jobs and we’ll look back on this time and wonder what we did with it. Did we do something when we had the chance? Or did we sit around playing video games all day?”

  For a moment they all sat there, absorbing what Todd had said.

  Then Bobby spoke up. “I like that song of yours. I think you should be in our club. Does anyone disagree?”

  Adam knew it was a foregone conclusion. Everyone but him was fascinated with Todd and the things he had just said. It made him think of Matthew 7:15: Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Todd was pretending to tell them how wonderful they were, how they could change the world, but really he was planting the seeds of their downfall. Once he was welcomed into the club, it would only be a matter of time before everything ended poorly.

  “I appreciate that,” Todd said. “Thanks for having me. I think the five of us can do something really special.”

  “I agree,” David said.

  “And you know what else?” Jonathan asked them all.

  “What?” Bobby said.

  “I think we should rename the club. I think we ought to name ourselves after that song.”

  And here it was, already starting. Todd was going to change everything.

  “Let’s call ourselves The Boys of Summer.”

  A beat of silence passed and Adam hoped someone might disagree.

  “I love it,” Bobby said. “What does everyone think?”

  “I like it, too,” said David.

  “Works for me,” Adam lied, and when he glanced around the room again, he saw Todd was looking right at him. They made eye contact and held it for a second, and then another, and Adam began to feel vulnerable, like Todd could see right through his fake smile and into his dark heart.

  20

  Later that afternoon, as a strong south wind moved the trees to dance and their leaves to sing, Joe Henreid entered this story doomed from the first word because of a desire to hang out with Bobby Steele and his friends.

  He’d seen the boys many times in the woods behind his house, sometimes down by the river, sometimes at the fort that stood just outside the barbed-wire fence. More than once he’d seen them playacting a live version of Dungeons and Dragons with wooden swords and shields and battle axes, which was surely the coolest thing in the world. But at eleven years old, two grades behind in school, he was invisible to them

  Even if Joe could’ve found the nerve to approach the boys, at the moment it didn’t matter because he wasn’t allowed to leave his room. He was grounded for having made a “C” in Social Studies two times in a row, and he wouldn’t breathe fresh air for another four more weeks. His parents were morons.

  Joe’s room faced the backyard, and if you looked a little further, the woods. From here he could just make out the rectangular shape of the fort. Bobby and his friends kept the main door locked, but Joe had watched them enough to know that a few of the fence planks on this side of the fort were loose and used as a secret door. You could push your fingers under these boards, pull them up and out, and the nails at the top became hinges. Sort of like opening the door of a DeLorean.

  Joe wasn’t sure why he was so obsessed with the contents of the fort. It’s not like the boys used it all that much, especially during the brutally hot summer. But you didn’t lock a room unless you kept something in there you didn’t want people to see, which made people (like Joe) only want to see it more. And the strangest thing of all was that Bobby and his friends visited the fort way more often individually than they did as a group.

  It sucked being on the outside of things. And since none of the boys would ever dream of allowing him into their stupid club, the only way he would ever learn their secrets was to sneak over there, grounded or not, and have a look for himself. For weeks he had waited patiently for his chance, and today, finally, his dad was playing golf and his mom had left him home alone while she went shopping with one of her friends.

  So he put on a pair of Nike tennis shoes and opened his door. He padded down his hallway, crossed through the living room, and slipped out the sliding glass door. Across the green Bermuda of his backyard, over the chain link fence, and into the woods. Once he reached the trees the fort was only thirty or forty yards further.

  But standing in front of it, he paused. It was one thing to sit on his bed and imagine sneaking into the fort, but actually doing so was something else altogether. So rather than just barge in, he leaned forward and pressed his ear against the wood exterior. Heard nothing. But still, what if he snuck inside and the guys showed up later? He’d be trapped inside and caught like a thief.

  In the end Joe’s curiosity was stronger than his fear. He dug his fingers into the dirt below the loose fence planks, pulled, and the hidden door worked as expected. He ducked under the open boards and scrambled inside.

  What he found was profoundly disappointing: a dark and nearly empty space lit only by ribbons of sunlight that peeked
through the gaps between fence planks. There were a couple of wooden swords and a shield propped against the far wall, a tattered magazine called Rolling Stone rolled up in one corner, and a square of discarded plywood lying at a casual angle in the middle of the dirt floor. Had he really risked more trouble with his mom, risked discovery by Bobby and his friends, for this? Why did they bother to come here if there was nothing to do?

  Hold on. When he looked at the plywood again, he thought maybe its place on the floor looked a little too accidental. Carefully, Joe reached down and picked up the wooden square, where he found a hole in the ground underneath. A plastic trash bag was stuffed into the hole. He pulled the bag open and reached inside, and what he pulled out was his answer to the mystery of the fort.

  It wasn’t the pack of Winston Ultra Lights 100s. It wasn’t the can of Silver Creek snuff, or the three cans of Miller Lite. No, the real attraction, Joe felt sure, was the nudie magazines. There were at least ten of them. Hustler and Oui and Cheri and Penthouse. A couple of Playboys. Where had they all come from?

  A few months ago Joe had seen a magazine like this at a friend’s house. The friend, Nigel, had found it in his father’s nightstand. Nigel was only ten, and together they flipped through the glossy pages with a sort of disgusted awe . . . at least at first. After a little while, to Joe’s surprise, he began to see the women differently. His own private parts seemed more interesting than normal, the way they felt in math class when he got a good look at Shannon Streemer’s butt. Before the fifth grade he had never looked twice at a girl’s butt, but lately he couldn’t stop looking at them.

  Joe dropped the trash bag back into the hole and sat down. There were naked women on almost every page of the magazine, and plenty of naked men with them. A lot of the pictures looked like people pretending to do it. Joe wondered briefly if his own mom and dad made those faces and wore strange underwear when they did it, but the idea of his parents doing anything of the sort was flat-out sickening.

  He found the cover girl toward the middle of the magazine. In one picture she was standing with her back to the camera, head turned over her shoulder, and Joe couldn’t stop staring at her butt. What was so special about two cheeks of skin connected to her legs? He couldn’t say. But they made him want to do it with her, if only he knew how to actually do it. The version he learned in health class made no more sense to him than his dad’s strange explanation one evening after baseball practice.

  At some point Joe became aware that his private parts felt super and excellent and he decided he should take one of these magazines home. He imagined all the time he could pass, grounded to his room, looking at a magazine like this. The rest he began to stuff back into the trash bag, and he was about halfway done when he thought he heard something outside the fort. He froze where he was and listened carefully.

  Someone was coming. All at once he could hear voices and footsteps, and to Joe it seemed like all the blood in his body was collecting in his legs and feet. What the heck was he going to do now? How had he let this happen? There was nowhere to go!

  “Look,” someone said. “That tape is not in the fort. And if it is, it’ll be melted, and it will never play right again.”

  “It might.”

  “What will it hurt to look?”

  “I’m just saying—”

  Joe heard fingers scraping on dirt as one of them reached under the loose fence planks. He was distraught. There was still nowhere to go. He looked down and saw the copy of Oui in his hand. He dropped it on top of the bag and tried to push the whole works back into the hole, but a rectangle of light opened and fell directly upon him. Blinding him.

  “What the—”

  “Check this out,” someone said. “We got a spy in here.”

  “Who is that?”

  “It’s that kid who lives around the corner. Think his name is Joe. Is that right? Your name Joe?”

  His eyes were beginning to adjust to the light. He could see the silhouettes of three boys outside. One of them crawled into the fort with him. It was Bobby. David followed.

  “He asked if your name is Joe,” Bobby said.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Well, Joe, what are you doing in our fort?”

  Joe opened his mouth and nothing came out. The truth was impossible.

  Now Jonathan, Adam, and some other kid scrambled into the fort. Joe vaguely recognized the new kid but couldn’t place him. David walked over to the hole in the ground and pointed at the plastic bag. The copy of Oui was only partially tucked into it, and the plywood wasn’t covering anything.

  “He was looking at our porn,” David said. “See?”

  “How did you know we had porn in here?” Bobby asked him. “Did someone tell you? Have you been spying on us?”

  “No, I didn’t know. I just—”

  “You just what?”

  They were going to beat him up. Bobby would throw the first punch, and they would all join in, and he would be bruised and bloody when he left here. His mom would know he had left the house against orders. His dad would ground him for the rest of his life. This was all going to end very badly.

  “I didn’t know. I just wanted to see what it looked like in here. I just—”

  “You just what?” the new kid said.

  “I just want to be part of your club,” Joe answered. He was dangerously close to tears. “That’s all. I see you guys playing all the time and I just want to be part of it.”

  For a few seconds no one said anything, like the calm before a storm.

  Then Bobby told him, “We don’t need any new members. And we don’t need little kids invading our private space, either. I ought to smack you in the face for sneaking in here.”

  “How did you get in, anyway?” Jonathan asked.

  “The loose fence planks. I can see the fort from my bedroom window.”

  “You’ve been spying on us?” Adam asked.

  “No, not spying. I’ve been grounded to my room for eight weeks in a row and all I do is look out the window.”

  “Eight weeks,” David said. “Why?”

  “Bad grades.”

  Bobby was looking at him with narrow eyes and balled-up fists, and Joe kept wondering when he was going to smack him in the face. But then the new kid stepped forward and smiled.

  “I don’t see what’s wrong with having a new member. I mean, five people, is that really a club?”

  No one answered.

  “But we can’t just take you on, Joe. If you want to be part of our club you’ll have to earn it.”

  Bobby looked at the new kid, then exchanged glances with David, as if they were sharing a secret. But Joe didn’t mind. As long as he left the fort with his face intact, he could care less about his dignity.

  “Okay,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Well, we could initiate you, but that’s boring. Every club does that. How about this: Instead of us doing something to you, why don’t you do something for us? Think of something out of the ordinary, something that shows us how much you want to be a member of the club. And if we think it’s worthy, maybe we’ll let you in.”

  Joe had no idea what the kid was talking about. Do something for them? Like what? Did it matter as long as they let him go?

  “Should I come to you when I figure out what I want to do?”

  “No,” the new kid said. “Don’t ask us. Just do it. Then we’ll decide.”

  “Okay,” Joe said. “I guess I better get back home before my mom comes back from shopping. Since I’m still grounded and all.”

  “I guess you better,” Bobby said. “Better run home to mommy.”

  Joe waited another moment and then started toward the hidden door. Bobby loomed large as he walked past him, and the new kid grinned in a way that made Joe uncomfortable. Again he had the feeling he’d seen the guy somewhere before. But they let him pass, and Jonathan even held the door open for him as he crawled out. Someone laughed as the fence planks dropped shut behind him, and though
he wanted to run back to his house, back to his room, Joe forced himself to walk. He knew they were making fun of him. Still, the new kid had made him an offer, and Joe planned to take him up on it. Maybe they weren’t serious, but that didn’t mean Joe couldn’t do something anyway, something big, something that would convince them all he deserved to be part of their club.

  21

  It was evening, three minutes until eight o’clock. The kitchen phone beckoned, silently urging him to call Alicia again.

  Jonathan had been stalling since dinner. Whenever Bobby and his dad stayed at their own house, his mom usually declined to cook an actual meal, and tonight was no exception. Instead she had warmed up two Swanson pot pies, which they shared at the kitchen table in near perfect silence. His mom stared out the window until she was finished eating and badgered him only once.

  “What have you been doing in your room all afternoon?”

  “Reading,” Jonathan said.

  “You spend half your life reading. You might try living in the real world sometime, because you aren’t going to find a job living in someone else’s fantasy like that.”

  Fantasy. Funny she would call it that, because lately that’s what Jonathan’s own world had felt like. Sure, everything had been weird since the tornado, with his own dad gone and the introduction of Bobby and Kenny into their lives. But Todd’s arrival had only intensified the strangeness.

  Some things were weird for obvious reasons, like how your new friend had been on television three times because of his strange medical condition, yet he hung out with you every day like he’d never received any special attention at all. Or how he seemed more intelligent and wise about the world than everyone else his age, even though he had lost almost a third of his life to the strange medical condition.