The Summer of Winters (2 page)

I won’t waste too much time on that. It’s nothing new; the same stuff that has been happening in schools for ages and will continue happening for ages to come. Name-calling, bullying, spitballs thrown at the back of my head, no one wanting to sit with me in the cafeteria at lunch, always picked last when choosing teams for P.E. You’ve heard it all before—maybe experienced it yourself—and that isn’t really what this story is about. Suffice it to say, all I wanted that summer was to spend as much time alone in the backyard as possible, making up games to entertain myself, or riding the bike my mother had just bought me used out of the classifieds.

That was also the first summer after my father had walked out on us. The previous winter, just before Christmas, he’d taken up with a younger woman who worked as a cashier at the Fast Fare convenience store down the street from our house and moved to Florida with her. We hadn’t heard from him since. Not even a letter. Not that it bothered me all that much. My father was a drinker with a mean streak, and he always looked at me as if I were a disappointment. My home life was a lot more tolerable without him around.

However, it did leave my mother to support me and my seven-year-old brother Ray all by herself. This wasn’t easy for a woman with no education and little work experience beyond being a housewife and mother. She’d gotten a janitorial job at a local textile plant, which looking back must have barely covered the bills, but at the time I don’t think I appreciated how much she had to juggle to make ends meet. We may not have had the very best, but there was always food on the table and clothes on our backs and even the occasional toys to play with.

My mother worked a lot of twelve hour shifts that summer. I didn’t know why at the time, but I now know it was to save up money so my brother and I would have a decent Christmas. The one the year before had been lousy. All I knew then was she wasn’t around much. She still considered me too young to watch after Ray on my own so she had her friend Julie sit with us while she worked. Of course, Julie’s idea of “babysitting” consisting of watching TV and reading magazines all day while scarfing down potato chips and shushing us if we got too loud. I didn’t mind. That left me the freedom to pretty much do what I wanted.

After I got rid of my kid brother, that was.

Ever since Dad left, Ray attached himself to me, follow me around wherever I went, and I found it more annoying than anything else. All he ever wanted to play was cowboys and Indians, which I thought was excruciatingly boring, and when I tried to get him to play some of the games I’d made up, he always refused to follow the rules. Luckily I had recently found the prefect way to get him out of my hair. One night just before the end of the school year, as we were getting ready for bed, he’d stubbed his toe on the corner of the dresser and said “Shit!” I’d been blackmailing him ever since, threatening to tell Mom—who I’d heard use much fouler language—if he didn’t leave me alone. I figured that threat would lose its power eventually, but I certainly made the most of it while I still could.

So Ray spent most of his time that summer in the house playing with his toy cars and action figures while I played make-believe in the backyard. In fact, that was what I was doing the day I first met Paige Moore.

***

The green house next to us had been empty for nearly a year. The Haverson family had last occupied it, a real white-trash clan with a mother and father who weren’t married and five dirty kids who looked and smelled like they’d never heard of soap. They only lived there for four months, and it was four of the worst months of my life. The Haverson kids were mean and not afraid to beat up on a weaker kid, even the girls, so I actually avoided going out of the house if at all possible during their brief stay at 405 Jefferies Street. Apparently, and lucky for me, they weren’t able to pay their rent, and the landlord, Mr. Mahaffey (who also owned our house), gave them the boot. I was as happy to see them go as I was my father.

Off and on over the next year, I’d seen Mr. Mahaffey showing the house, but apparently he couldn’t get anyone interested in renting. It was bigger than our house but seemed in even worse shape, and Mr. Mahaffey wasn’t really one for repairs. I’d sort of come to believe that the house would remain empty indefinitely.

And then around ten that Wednesday morning, early in June about two weeks after school had let out for the summer, I saw a big yellow moving truck back into the front yard next door. It was drizzling that morning, so I was stuck inside, sitting by the one window of the bedroom I shared with Ray. He was up on top of the bunk-beds, rolling his cars along the coverlet and sending them careening over the edge to crash on the floor. I was trying to tune him out, staring out the window and doing my best to will the rain to stop so I could go out back and play. Being cooped up in the house on a summer day was like a nightmare.

The moving truck briefly distracted me from my rainy day blues. I hadn’t seen Mr. Mahaffey showing the house in the past couple of weeks, and I hadn’t heard Julie say anything about it. She usually knew all the town gossip. I leaned forward until my face pressed against the glass and tried to get a glimpse of our new neighbors, but our room was at the back of the house which didn’t give me a good angle to see the front yard of the house next door. I could see the very front of the truck but that was it; no sign of who was moving in. I just hoped they didn’t have any mean kids like the Haversons. I got picked on enough at school; I didn’t need it at home, too.

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.