“You gonna tell Clarence about Cushing?”
“No, because if I tell Clarence he’ll start asking me a lot more questions.”
We sat quiet for quite awhile, just watching the town at supper-time, merchants closing down, rolling up their striped awnings and turning out the display lights in the windows. Every summer seemed to get shorter the older I got, and at warm day’s end there’s a melancholy about everything, long purple shadows and mothers calling their kids in for dinner, and I felt this kind of sadness I can’t explain, even though I was only fifteen I felt real old and I sensed that in just a few summers more all of us would be gone, I mean everybody I passed on the street young and old alike and all the people I loved including Mom and Dad and Gram and Debbie, all gone to ground and utterly forgotten with nobody to remember how beautiful the wine-colored dusk was on a snow-covered January night or how people laughed at Jack Benny on the radio or how neat it was to get a brand-new Ace Double Book or how the bonfire glowed on Homecoming night out at the football stadium or how lonely I felt the night Emmy Chambers told me that she liked Bobby Criker better than me or how much fun it was to chase fireflies with a jar on a July night with your aunt and uncle from Minneapolis sitting on the screened-in porch watching or how one spring night walking by the river I was so overwhelmed by the moonsilver water and the scent of apple blossoms and the friendly yips and yaps of neighborhood dogs that I knew absolutely positively that there was a God or how I sometimes had really corny dreams about saving some girl I loved from a burning house or how beautiful and neat and clean Main Street looked after a night rain — all those people and thoughts and memories would be dead. Mom and Dad would likely go first, and then all their friends and relatives, and then me and all my friends and relatives, and then Debbie and all her friends and relatives, generations born and generations dying until there was absolutely no trace of us left, almost as if we hadn’t existed, absolutely nobody who could remember us at all, the people of Somerton with all their wishes and dreams and desires and fears would be at best a rotted skeleton or two to be dug up three thousand years hence and looked at and shrugged over and then forgotten utterly once again.
“You all right?”
Barney brought me back. “I’m fine,” I said. But I wasn’t. I never am when I start thinking of eternity that way.
“What time we going out to see Roy?”
“How about seven?”
“Meet you by the tracks?”
“Fine. But let’s walk.”
“OK by me.”
“I’ll stop by Henry’s and pick up Roy’s stuff and meet you then.” I rode home. Douglas Edwards and the CBS News was on. Mom was serving the first sweet corn of the year along with broccoli and Jell-O. Usually Mom doesn’t let us eat in front of the TV — she’d read a piece in Parents magazine about how the American family was going to hell in a handbasket largely because of TV and rock and roll — but the heat evidently changed her mind for tonight at least, the living room being a lot cooler than the family room.
I sat beside Debbie on the couch. We both had metal TV trays which were kind of wobbly. She said, “It’s hard to eat this corn with that tooth gone, Mom.”
Which was when I figured out why she’d looked so strange when I’d come in. One of her front teeth was missing. In case I forgot to mention it, she’s eight.
“Just do your best, honey,” which is what Mom usually said to stuff like that.
“Let’s see,” I said.
Debbie put her little face with the big thick glasses she had to wear up for me to see. There was a hole in the top row.
“You still have the tooth?”
“Upstairs.”
“Be sure and put it under your pillow.”
“How much do you think he’ll leave this time?”
“Maybe fifty cents.”
“Boy!”
Last time she lost a tooth, Dad put a quarter under her pillow while she was asleep, then I went in my room and took a quarter from my Roy Rogers savings bank (I never got around to throwing things away, I guess) and then slipped it under her pillow, too.
We went back to eating. After Douglas Edwards, the local news came on which of course set Dad off griping about how every single person in the news business was a Democrat if not a Communist. Dad had never forgiven the press for what they did — or what he said they did, anyway — to his idol Robert Taft. You know, when Ike “stole” the Republican nomination from him.
The phone rang. Mom, who was on her way to the kitchen, got it and said, “For you, Tom.”
“Guess who’s been cruising past my house?” Barney said. “Who?”
“Who do you think? Cushing.”
“Cushing? You sure?”
“Positive.”
“When you leave, go out the back door. And then go down the alley. I’ll meet you at our old clubhouse.”
“Maybe he’ll start cruising past your house, too.”
“I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”
When I went back into the living room, a commercial was on so Dad was talking to everybody. “I took that money over to the chief and told him how you found it out by the crick and all. He wants you to stop in in the next couple days and talk to him.”
“Is he mad?”
“Not mad but kinda disappointed, I think. That you didn’t turn it in as soon as you found it. He said something I didn’t even think about.”
“Like what?”
“Like about that bank robber. The FBI thinks he’s up in the northern part of the state but now the chief thinks maybe he’s around here somewhere, the way you found that money and all. Anyway, if you’d brought the money in right away, the chief could’ve put some men on looking for the robber. Now the guy’s probably long gone.”
I made a quick pit stop upstairs and in five minutes was ready to go.
In the kitchen, I worked fast. I grabbed a paper sack from a drawer and dropped an apple in it, and then followed the apple with two slices of wheat bread, three slices of summer sausage, two bottles of Pepsi, a slice of Mom’s chocolate cake with white frosting that I wrapped in wax paper, and some carrot sticks that Mom always kept in this plastic bowl. I didn’t have to worry about them hearing me because the window air-conditioner sounded like a B-52 but I didn’t want Mom to wander out in the kitchen and see me loading up and then start asking all these questions.
I went out the back way, down the three back porch steps, under the clotheslines, past the dog house, along the row of garbage cans next to the small white garage whose shingles smelled as if they’d melted some in the heat, and out into the narrow gravel chalk-dust alley where I used to be Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Allan “Rocky” Lane and Lash LaRue, sometimes all on the same day.
It took me twenty minutes to get to the clubhouse, which was this long-abandoned garage on the downwind side of the city dump which, as you might think, did not smell exactly wonderful during a windless sundown of eighty-six degrees. I’d smoked my first cigarette in this garage, and then got so sick that I couldn’t get out of bed for a day, and got my first glimpse of a Playboy foldout which Barney’s sixteen-year-old cousin Stan had copped from his dad’s bureau drawer.
The clubhouse resembled this old sagging weatherworn outhouse in this small field of burned grass and empty tin cans and jagged broken pop bottles.
Barney was inside, squatted over in a shadowy corner with a bottle of Pepsi and a Lucky Strike. The last of the dusty sunlight peeped through the spaces between the boards. I’d brought along my old Boy Scout flashlight, which is the color a baby shits when he’s got the trots, and I shined it all over the dirt floor. About the only thing to see were a couple of squirming night crawlers who looked like my light had just woken them up.