The Summer of Winters

by Mark Allan Gunnells

  I considered going into the living room to see what I could from one of the windows there, but just as quickly as my curiosity had been piqued, my interested in the new neighbors waned. I wandered away from the window and over to the small two-shelf bookcase my father had made for me for my birthday two years ago when it became apparent to him I was “nothing but a goddamn bookworm pansy.” Most of the books I owned had been picked up for a dime apiece at thrift stores or yard sales. Paperbacks with torn covers and yellowed pages, but I didn’t mind. I’d read most of them at least twice, but I had a stack of recently checked-out library books sitting on top of the bookcase. I had just gotten my library card the previous month, and while our small town library may have had limited selection, it still felt like the world had opened up to me. It was certainly a better selection than the kiddie books in the little school library.

  I selected a horror novel called The Nightrunners by some writer I’d never heard of and crawled into the bottom bunk, trying to lose myself in the story until the rain moved on. It was hard to concentrate with Ray above me still sending Hot Wheels to their deaths, but after a while I fell through the portal of the pages.

  ***

  The clouds dissipated like so much smoke sometime shortly after lunch. I’d made bologna and mustard sandwiches for me and Ray because Julie was engrossed in her soaps and couldn’t be bothered. Apparently some chick named Laura who had been dead wasn’t really dead, or something crazy like that. After gobbling up my sandwich in three bites and downing a glass of grape soda, I was ready to head out the door.

  As usual, Ray tried to tag along, but I told him, “If you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to tell Mama what you said, Gay-beau.”

  Gay-beau was about the nastiest insult I could come up with back then. I couldn’t quite bring myself to use the term “faggot” that I’d heard some of the older boys at school throwing around; “gay-beau” was my lightweight equivalent.

  Ray looked like he was about to cry, then he looked angry enough to punch me, and finally he just called me a meanie-butt and stalked off back to the bedroom. I yelled to Julie that I’d be outside then exited through the kitchen onto the back porch. Because our house was built on a steep incline, the back porch was actually elevated about twenty feet above the ground, overhanging the outside entrance to the basement. The steps leading down to the yard were wooden and creaked and bowed beneath my feet. I knew my mother didn’t trust the stairs and had often told me and my brother to go out the front to avoid them, but I thought she was just being overly protective. I bounded down those steps so fast my feet barely touched the boards.

  Our backyard was sort of boxed in on three sides. To the left and right were tall, tangled hedges; along the back was the bamboo forest. Yet I didn’t feel closed in here; instead I felt a sense of seclusion and privacy that was actually quite liberating. For a while I just ran around with my arms held straight out at my sides, as if I were a plane trying to find a place to make a landing. My sneaker-clad feet splashed through the soggy grass, still wet from the morning rain. The sun, so recently freed from its prison behind the clouds, was warm on my face. When I tired myself out, I fell onto the ground and stared up at the powder-blue sky, panting, not really aware of the goofy grin I wore.

  I decided to play a new game I’d recently made up. I pretended to be a modern day Robin Hood who robbed banks and gave the money to homeless people whose houses had been illegally foreclosed on by the unscrupulous banks. My name in this game was Robin Banks. It was nothing but a silly lark at the time; I never would have guessed that as an adult I’d pen a series of paperback novels about such a character.

  The bamboo forest was where Robin Banks hid out with his posse of homeless cohorts, and I got to my feet and entered the woods, going to the very center where I’d made a clear spot on the ground. I huddled around a fire that blazed only in my imagination, but was no less warm and bright because of it, hatching schemes with my equally imaginary friends and co-conspirators. Once we’d come up with the perfect plan, we burst forth from our hideout to commit our next heist.

  The shaded area under the back porch was the bank, and I held out my right fist with index finger pointed out and thumb straight up. In my mind, I was wielding a bad-ass Colt .45 (even though I wasn’t entirely sure what one looked like, I’d heard my Dad talking about the gun in the past and he’d described it as “bad-ass”).

  “Okay, nobody move or I’ll blow everybody’s heads to smithereens,” I said in my best imitation of a tough-guy drawl. Like Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. “Now I want you to put all the cash in a bag and don’t try any funny business. I can shoot a moving fly from fifteen yards, just remember that and do what I tell you.”

  “Now that’s intimidating.”

  I let out a high-pitched squeak—okay, I’ll be honest, it was more of a shriek—and spun around, actually holding out my finger-gun as if it could do some real damage to this unexpected intruder.

  Standing at the edge of the yard just in front of the bushes that separated the property from the green house next door stood a petite girl, surely no older than me. She had blonde hair that fell in spiral curls over her shoulders, and she wore a pale yellow dress that hung on her like a sack. There was mischief in her eyes, but it didn’t seem to be aimed specifically at me. Perhaps the world in general just amused her.

  “Where’d you come from?” I said, holstering my Colt.

  “Next door. We just moved in this morning. I was playing and discovered there are all these neat tunnels through the bushes. I followed one of them…and here I am.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I had learned in school that the best way to avoid ridicule and humiliation was to keep your mouth shut.

  The girl continued to stare at me, one side of her mouth lifted in a half-smile. “My name’s Paige.”

  “Mike,” I said, pointing to myself as if she might be confused and think I was telling her the name of some other kid that wasn’t around.

  “Hey Mike. You lived around here long?”

  “My whole life.”

  “Got a bicycle?”

  “Um, yeah,” I said with a frown, uncertain where this conversation was going.

  “My folks said that after we got settled in, I could take my bike out and explore the neighborhood. Wanna be my guide?”

  I didn’t know what to say to this, so I ended up saying nothing, just standing there dumbly and staring back at her. No one had ever asked to hang out with me before and I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  My continued silence seemed to unnerve Paige, and she tugged at the hem of her dress and started backing toward the bushes. “Well, you don’t gotta. I’ll find my own way around.”

  “No, I will,” I blurted loudly, as if my voice had just escaped a steel prison. “I mean, I do…wanna. I’ll be your guide.”

  Her smile was bright and infectious, teasing a smile from my own lips. “Good. I’ll meet you in your front yard about ten tomorrow morning. Sound good?”

  I opened my mouth to say yes, but all that came out was some guttural grunt that made it sound like I was drowning on muddy water. I nodded so she would know I was answering in the affirmative.

  “See you then,” she said, then turned and disappeared back through the foliage.

  I stood there for several moments as if rooted to the spot, my mind a chaotic jumble. I felt slightly dizzy and like I might float right up to the sky until my head banged against the floor of heaven. I wondered idly if this was what it was like to be drunk.

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was possible I had just made my first real friend.

  Chapter Two

  The basement was accessible from inside through a door in the bedroom Ray and I shared. A narrow set of wooden steps led down to a large open room with a cement floor, the washer and dryer, and boxes of old junk stacked in the corners, some of which had been left by previous renters. I had dug through some of the boxes before and found paperbacks
by Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell, the closest I was ever going to come to buried treasure.

  I also kept the Purple People Eater in the basement. That was what I called my bike, on account of its color. It was a Panasonic Motor cross with high handle bars that had blue-and-white tassels dangling from them. Not necessarily the bike I would have picked for myself, but I didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter. My mother couldn’t afford to get me a new bicycle, but she’d found the Purple People Eater in the paper for only fifty bucks. Even then she had to save up for it for nearly three months. I’d overhead her telling Julie that it had belonged to some kid who’d died of leukemia and the parents were selling off some his stuff cheap. Felt weird knowing I had a dead boy’s bike, but it wasn’t as if he’d died on it.

  Still, I would have preferred a sleek ten speed with the breaks on the handlebars, but at eleven I’d already gotten used to not getting what I wanted. It was like last fall when my mother had done some back-to-school shopping without me, and she’d come home with this pair of no-brand high-top sneakers that were a bright neon orange color. I knew my mother thought she’d bought me something that was “all the style,” as she liked to say, but what she’d actually done was saddle me with yet another thing that the kids at school could ridicule me for. Eventually I took an old nail and ripped up the left shoe, then told my mother I’d snagged my foot on a root when playing in the backyard. The pair of shoes she bought to replace them were even cheaper but were at least plain white and didn’t draw any unwanted attention in the school hallways.

  However, unlike those orange high-tops, I wasn’t embarrassed by the Purple People Eater. Sure, it might not be my dream bike, but it was still a bike, and that meant freedom. As much as I enjoyed the backyard, sometimes I wanted to play the part of Explorer. Not that there was much to explore in Gaffney, South Carolina, but in my limited experience the town seemed vast. Of course, I typically ended up in one of two locations. The Oakland Cemetery or the Public Library, both places of quiet reflection.

  As I took my bike through the basement’s outside door into the backyard, I felt unaccountably nervous. It wasn’t that I was afraid Paige wouldn’t show up; I was afraid she would. I wasn’t used to someone wanting to actually spend time with me. Granted, I was still pretty much a stranger to her, and there was always the possibility that once she got to know me she would catch the stink of loser on me and run screaming. That was the root of my fear.

  I could have just gone back inside, told Julie I had an upset tummy, and went to bed, and the truth was, I considered doing just that. Why set myself up for more rejection and ridicule? Then again, how would I ever make any friends if I didn’t put myself out there, take the risk that went along with extending a hand toward someone else? After all, Paige had asked to hang out with me, not the other way around. Of course, it was possible she was just setting me up for some mean prank, like when Ryan Dumas and Marquis Jefferies had asked me to sit with them at lunch in third grade and had ended up knocking my lunch tray into my lap, everyone in the cafeteria pointing and laughing at me as Mrs. Childers led me to the boy’s room to get cleaned up. But Paige was new in town, had just met me; why would she want to pull a prank on me already?

  These were the conflicting thoughts ricocheting around my brain as I wheeled the Purple People Eater up the steep hill to the front yard. I continued to entertain the idea that Paige might not show, but that was dashed when I discovered her already waiting for me on the sidewalk in front of my house. She stood next to her bike, which was resting on its kickstand. A typical girl’s bicycle, pink with a banana seat and a white wicker basket mounted on front. Paige herself was wearing a pair of denim shorts that were baggy on her and a red T-shirt that was too tight. I had a feeling Ray and I weren’t the only kids in the neighborhood who got their clothes secondhand.

  “Hi,” Paige said brightly. “Nice bike.”

  I tensed, searching her expression for some hint of mockery, but there didn’t seem to be any. Not that I could detect, anyway. “Thanks.”

  “So…you ready?”

  “Um, sure. Where do you wanna go?”

  Paige giggled. “I don’t know, silly. That’s your job, to show me where there is to go in this town.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Well, Central Elementary is just a few blocks from here. That’ll be where you go when school starts back.”

  “Sounds good. Lead the way.”

  We both mounted our bikes and started off toward the school, Paige keeping pace right next to me. We rode in silence at first, and I kept trying to think of something to say. Finally I turned to her and said, “So where are you from?” because it seemed like the kind of question you would ask someone who’d just moved to town.

  “Columbia.”

  “That’s a pretty big city, isn’t it?” Not that I knew for sure. I’d never been outside of Gaffney in my entire life. All I knew about Columbia was that it was the state capital, so it had to be big.

  “I guess so. Compared to Gaffney anyway.”

  “So why’d you guys move here?”

  “Dad lost his job, couldn’t find work. My Uncle Johnny lives here in Gaffney, said he could get Dad on with the construction company he works for. So here we are.”

  “You miss Columbia?”

  Paige shrugged. “I don’t know. I miss my old room, I guess. And my friends. But I heard my dad tell my mom one night when they thought I was sleeping that it was either move here or starve, so I guess moving here was the right thing to do whether I like it or not.”

  “Oh,” was all I could think to say.

  “Anyway, my mom just got a part-time job waiting tables at the Pizza Inn. What do your folks do?”

  “My mom…well, she…er, she works at the Limestone mill,” I stammered, not wanting to admit she cleaned the Limestone mill. “And my dad…well, he’s not around anymore.”

  “I hear ya. A lot of the kids at my old school had divorced parents, too.”

  I neglected to mention that my parents weren’t technically divorced; my dad was just gone.

  “Is that the school up ahead?” Paige asked.

  “Yeah, that’s Central.”

  Central Elementary School sat on the corner of Montgomery and Johnson Streets, a long building of red brick built in an L shape with some mobile units out back. It had a small playground that consisted of two jungle-gyms, a slide, one basketball hoop, a swing set with only four swings, and an open field where we played kickball. It was a place I dreaded seeing during the school year, but on summer break—emptied of students—it didn’t look so bad.

  We rode our bikes onto the playground and stopped by the metal jungle-gym that looked like a complicated knot of pipes. It reached up about twelve feet, embedded into the hard ground, no sand or wood chips.

  “Race you to the top,” Paige said, jumping off her bike and popping down her kickstand with a foot before scaling the bars with the agility of a monkey. She was already at the top by the time I got off my bike, letting it just fall over on its side.

  I normally didn’t like to climb to the top of the jungle-gym, as heights tended to make me feel queasy, but I didn’t want her to think I was some kind of chicken. So I swallowed down my fear and made it to the very top, perching myself on a bar next to her, refusing to look down.

  We sat in silence for a few moments, a warm breeze catching Paige’s curls and making them dance around her head, reminding me of that snake-headed woman I’d read about in some book of mythology. I sat rigidly, as if the slightest movement might send me crashing to the ground below, but Paige seemed to have an ease about her, as if she were sitting in her favorite rocking chair at home.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said after a while, “but this is kind of a pitiful excuse for a playground.”

  I surveyed the area and had to admit to myself that she was right, not that I’d ever given it much thought before. I usually spent recess sitting on the two-foot high brick wall that surrounded the flagpole
, reading a book.

  “I’m not bragging or nothing, but at my school in Columbia we had a much better playground. Had see-saws and a merry-go-round and everything.”

  “They got some of that stuff over at Thompson Park,” I said.

  “Thompson Park? Where’s that at?”

  “Down by the Public Library.”

  Paige rolled her eyes. “Well, I don’t know where the Public Library is, now do I? Is it far?”

  “Not really, just a few more blocks.”

  “Well, what are we doing here? Let’s go to Thompson Park.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t like to go there; I like it here better.”

  “How come?”

  “There’s usually a bunch of kids at the park.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  I started fidgeting on the bar, felt like I was slipping and held on tight, even clinching my butt as if maybe I could get a better grip with my cheeks. “I just don’t like crowds.”

  “Mike, what’s wrong? You can tell me.”

  I considered it but then shook my head. “No, you’ll make fun of me.”

  “Will not, I swear,” Paige said, taking her forefinger and making an X over her heart.

  “It’s just, well, I don’t have…” I was going to say any friends, but at the last moment I changed my mind and finished, “many friends.”

  “You got one more today than you did yesterday,” Paige said with a smile, reaching out and squeezing my hand before she started the quick climb down. “Now let’s go.”

  I hesitated a few seconds, staring down at my hand where she’d touched me, then I followed.

  ***

  Thompson Park was indeed as crowded as I had expected. As we coasted our bikes down Union Street, I thought all the kids running about looked like a swarm of ants. The swings, the slide, the merry-go-round, the sandbox; all seemed occupied. There were even some teenagers using the tennis court. A bunch of parents were congregating by the picnic tables, which were housed under a shelter that consisted of a flat slate roof held up by poles at each corner. The place looked even more packed than usual, as if yesterday’s rain had driven them out from underground. Just like ants.