William Robert Hibbard

Numbered Lakes

Small tales of a kid´s life in North Little Rock during the late `60s

Text and photographs copyright ©2016 by William Robert Hibbard

All rights reserved.

Numbered Lakes is a work of fiction. Except for geographic names and family members, all characters and events portrayed herein are the product of the author´s imagination. Any resemblance to people living or deceased or to actual events is purely a matter of coincidence.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandparents and my father.

For my family

Table of Contents

Preface

New Kid on the Block

Yard Sale

Worms for Red

First Fish

Lightning Robbie

Play Ball

Short Cut

Off the Cliff

Second Fish

Men in the Moon

First Flight

Learning to Read

Boring Day

On the Farm

Sunday at Spark´s

Free Tickets for Life

Sob

Word in the Club Book

Piano Lessons

Candy Corn

Kick the Can

Muscle Car Guy

Hurricane Camille

Comments

About the Author

Preface

When my youngest daughter, who was about 6 years of age at the time, tired of the same old bedtime stories, she asked me to tell her about my life when I was her age. What follows are some of those fictionalized memories as told by young Robbie who happens to be me. The characters in the stories are purely fictional with the exception of family members, who I hope will be forgiving. And while the story plots are fictionalized, I attempted to preserve the spirit of life during the late `60s in the North Little Rock neighborhood called Lakewood, a great place to raise a family.

``So what book do you want to read tonight, Isi?´´

``Can you just tell me a story?´´ Isabel said.

``About what?´´

``About you when you were a kid.´´

``Well, I can't remember that far back.´´

``Just tell what you remember.´´

``I'll try. Let´s see. How about when I moved to a new neighborhood, and I didn't know anyone?´´

``Tell that one.´´

``Ok, Robbie, that was me, and his family, my family, had just moved to Lakeview Road from Magnolia Street,´´ I said.

``No, tell it like you ARE Robbie,´´ Isabel said.

``You want me to tell it as Robbie, the little boy?´´

``Yes.´´

``How old do you want Robbie to be?´´

``Just a boy, not too old; 7 or so.´´

``Well, I'll try.´´

``Tell it, Papi.´´

``Ok, but we'll have to keep it short sleepy head because it's getting late, and I might not remember everything.´´

New Kid on the Block

We just moved to Lakeview Road. We live on the part of the road without a view. There are lots of kids in the neighborhood to play with, but I don't know anybody yet except Walter. On the first day we moved in, he saw me out in the yard playing with Cee Cee and my army men, and he came over and said, ``Hi, I'm Walter, but I go by Walt. You new around here?´´

``Yes,´´ I said.

``What's your name?´´

``Robbie,´´ I said.

``Nice to meet you, Bobbie.´´ And then he said the name of the street where he lived, but I didn't understand him - Loch or something. ``My house is right down yonder.´´ He said he was from Delight and stretched the D out for about five seconds before he said light. ``It's down south, you know it?´´

``No,´´ I said, but I had heard of De Queen and DeWitt, Arkansas, and I knew they were also down south. He was visiting his granddaddy for the summer.

``You like sports?´´

``Yes,´´ I said.

``What do you play?´´

``Football.´´ I don't know why I said football because it's baseball season.

He turned his head to the side like he had water in his ear, ``Ain´t you a little young for football?´´

``No,´´ I said. I really was too young to be on a team, but I had played touch football before back when we lived on Magnolia.

``Well, let's play us a game. I'll suit up and come over tomorrow at 10:00. You got you a helmet?´´

I almost said no and then said, ``Yes, but it's…´´

``Alright then, 10.´´

I have a uniform with pads and cleats and a helmet that's too big for my head. I like professional football but never got the autograph from my favorite player. I won´t tell you his name because maybe he didn't get my letter. I might have forgotten to put a stamp on it or sent it to the wrong address or the wrong state even. My sister Keri said the reason he didn't send me the autograph I requested was that I didn't write the letter in cursive. But I can't write cursive yet. Keri said she could write cursive when she was around 4 about the time she learned to read. And she learned to read all by herself. Mom said she saw her holding up a newspaper one day and laughing, and she asked what was so funny, and Keri showed her a comic strip from the newspaper. And my mom asked her to read it out loud, and Keri did. Mom couldn't believe it and shouted, ``Bill,´´ that's my dad, ``did you know Keri can read?´´

``Sure,´´ he said. He had been reading the comic pages from the morning paper to her since she was a baby.

Anyway, the helmet might be big on me, but with the bar going across it, I look pretty tough. My sister says the only thing tough is the helmet, and that I have a brain the size of an acorn, which is why the helmet is too big. I told her she has a wiener face, but she says that doesn't even make sense, but it does because her nose and face are long and skinny like a hot dog. So is mine, to tell the truth. Kids say I have a ski slope nose. I know it's long, but it's not that long. I come from a family of long noses from Switzerland where they do a lot of skiing. Mom says it's a sign of royalty in the family; a regal nose is how she put it. I guess kings and

queens had them, but I couldn't dress like a king with boots, the long robe, and a crown, especially in the summer. I'd rather be in shorts, wear a baseball cap, and go around barefooted.

I was ready to go outside when I got up this morning, but Mom said it was too early, and that I'd wake up the neighbors. But how could I wake up the neighbors? I didn't even know them. I wasn't going to knock on their doors, ring their doorbells, or yell for them to get up outside their bedroom windows. If I did, I'd probably get sent to military school. That's what happened to Bud who mowed down his neighbor's flower garden for giving out crappy candy at Halloween. You know that kind with the green and blue wrappers? It's the worst candy, in my opinion, and probably the cheapest too. But if you get some, it's no big deal; you just go to the next house. Bud always overreacted to small stuff, so his family finally sent him away. Anyway, with the jaybirds, redbirds, and mockingbirds carrying on the way they do, I bet the neighbors were already up. Mom told me to go back to bed, but I didn't want to miss the game at 10:00. The thing is, I can't tell time all that good; I mean I can tell time, it's just sometimes the hands on the clock confuse me, but I can count up to 100 in 20 seconds and to 15 in Spanish. I learned that a while back in kindergarten where I also learned to memorize stuff like the ``Incy Bitty Spider´´ and say it in front of the whole school and all the parents taking snapshots with flash cubes that blinded us kids. Another time, I think it was first grade, I got dressed up like an egg and told the ``Humpty Dumpty´´ story on stage at Lakewood Elementary. I knew I looked stupid. When I got up there, I froze. Some kid yelled, ``Break an egg.´´ I could see little kids whispering to each other and giggling, and I almost walked off without saying anything, but then it came back to me, and I got through the poem saying it all too fast and ran off the stage looking beet red, which was how Keri put it. I don´t care for beets too much and would have rather looked raspberry red. Raspberries sure beat beets. I was sure that everyone would tease me for the rest of my life about messing up on stage. In disgust, I tried to tear off the egg suit but couldn't. My dad had to extract me with a box cutter when we got back home.

I didn't want to go back to bed, so I reckoned I'd just have ``breakest´´ as my dad calls it. On Saturday, he'll go out at the crack of dawn before the street lights go off to pick up a dozen chocolate frosted donuts. But it wasn't Saturday this morning, so I had to make do with cereal which isn't easy to eat with a football helmet on. I didn't want to take the helmet off because Walter said I needed to get my head used to it before the game. I poured a bowl of cereal and picked out the fruit bits that I liked and dumped them into a glass of milk that turned pink and looked like a strawberry milkshake. I put the leftover cereal in the cat's bowl. Whiskers, our cat whose tail doesn't work, loves breakfast cereal, and nobody knows that but me and Cee Cee, my invisible pet mouse, well, visible to me but not to anyone else except Whiskers. I got in trouble the other day for talking to Cee Cee.

My mom asked why I was talking to myself, and I said that I wasn't, and she said, ``Well who are you talking to then?´´ and I told her to Cee Cee the mouse. ``We have a mouse in the house?´´

``Yes, I mean no, but he's a good mouse,´´ I said.

``You show me where you saw it, and I'll put down a trap.´´ I almost got my hand smashed in one of those traps trying to remove the hard orange cheese bit that not even a roach would have touched. I told her the mouse lived outside and not to bother and then ran off before she questioned me more.

Finally, 10:00 came. From our bay window, I saw Walter walking up to the front door. I don't know why it's called a bay window; there's no bay to see or lake to view, even though we live on Lakeview Road. I went out before Walter could ring the bell. He was wearing a purple

football uniform with pads and cleats and was carrying his helmet and a football. He looked like a real professional player and was almost as big as one. He asked if I was ready in a scruffy voice that sounded like he had gravel in his throat, and then he asked what my name was again.

``Robbie.´´

``Alright, Bobbie, here are the rules.´´

``Robbie,´´ I said.

``Ok, Bob, when you get the ball on offense, you say, down, set, hut, hut and then run. So when you're on defense, you try to tackle me. And when I'm on defense, I´ll tackle you.´´ I knew that already. ``Don't you worry none, I won't tackle you too hard.´´ I hoped not because he weighs about 165 pounds, and I only weigh 41 with all my clothes on. ``Now we'll play to 42. Every touchdown is 7 points. Since we ain´t got no goal posts, we won't kick no extra points. I'll kick off to you first.´´

My heart was beating like I had just run the 50-yard dash as fast as I could. I pretended I was a halfback for our local team, the Chargers.

Walt kicked the ball off the tee, and it went over my head. I ran back for it and scooped it up. The pigskin felt slippery like it was sweating fat. Maybe it was a live pig trying to squirm out of my hands. I finally got a tight grip and held it with two hands like a fullback would to protect the ball before he lowers his head like a bull and plows over the defense.

I saw Walt racing toward me, and I made a little juke move I saw a player make on TV, and Walter went right past me. I'm pretty fast; I don't think he knew that, and I knew he couldn't catch me. I did a high step like a bandleader and spiked the ball, only it went sideways instead of up in the air. Touchdown!

``Ok, now I´m a fullback for the Rattlers; that´s my team back home,´´ said Walt. I was having a difficult time picturing a snake playing football and thought of Walt as more of a bull who would try to run me over.

I kicked off, but the football didn't go up, it just rolled on the ground like an onside kick. Walt picked it up, ran at me kind of slow like he wasn't trying too hard, and I let him go by me a little, and then I tried to tackle him from behind, but my helmet flew off and onto the sidewalk where a tiny kid on a big bicycle with gears, who couldn't have been more than 3, swerved to miss it. Walt didn't go down but stopped. ``Good tackle, Bobbie. Go get your helmet.´´

``Who's that on the bike?´´ I said.

``Oh, that's Herbie. His sister gave him her bike when she got a ten speed for her birthday,´´ said Walt.

I was pretty sure I couldn´t ride a bike that tall and was envious of the kid half my age who could. I noticed that beads of sweat were dripping off Walter's face like a leaky faucet. Sweat. I don't know how to do that yet, but I just learned how to whistle blowing through an acorn shell held between my thumbs. Before that, I was just fake whistling in a high voice.

Walt scored a touchdown on the next play. He just tried to bulldoze me over, so I side stepped him like one of those bullfighter guys, only I didn't have a red towel. I pretended to trip, so I wouldn't look too scared.

The game went back and forth like that until it ended in a 42 to 42 tie. I think he probably won, but I couldn't add up all those touchdowns very fast, and he kept score by doing the times table - he said stuff like, ``You got 7x3, and that's 28,´´ or whatever, and he'd do the same when he scored -``7x5,´´ and so on. He knew his times table real well. Keri says she learned hers at 5 and thinks I should know mine by now. I know them a little bit but have trouble with the sevens.

I noticed my mom had come out to the porch and sat down two cans of cheap supermarket brand root beer with the metallic taste. We walked over and popped the cans open. Mine spewed a little bit into my face which gave me this idea. Walter guzzled his soda down, and when he wasn't looking, I poured some into my hand and then splashed it onto my face like my dad does with aftershave. I could feel the sticky soda running down one side of my face. Walter burped long and loud, then looked over and asked, ``What´s that on your face?´´

``Oh, it's just sweat,´´ I said.

``That's the brownest sweat I do believe I´ve ever seen,´´ Walt said. And then he crushed his can on his helmet and said, ``Good game, Bobbie,´´ and he walked off down the street to his house with bowed legs just like a cowboy.

Yard Sale

I'm new around here. I don't know many kids, just Walt and Herbie, the 3-year-old who rides a bike as big as a motorcycle. I don't know how he gets on it. And how he keeps his balance is another question. One of these days, I'll find out his secret. Walt says Herbie is with the circus, but I'm not sure I believe that.

On one of my first days here in Lakewood - that's what they call the neighborhood around here - I got up real early with the birds. There is this loud red bird, Red I call him, who can whistle better than any bird I know and has perfect pitch. My mom, who is a school teacher and studied music at the University, told me that like great singers, birds have absolute pitch. I wonder if birds could pitch a tent. Now my pet mouse Cee Cee knows Red from when we lived on K Street before Magnolia. He's got a call as sharp as a referee's whistle. I don't need an alarm clock with ol´ Red yapping at the crack of dawn. Gee, I wish I could whistle like him without using an acorn shell. I can do a pretty good fake one, but Keri says it sounds like a little girl screaming and not a whistle, but I think she's just jealous because her whistle sounds like a whisper and only gets the attention of our cat. Dad calls that sound a sibilant and said cats respond to it out of curiosity. Keri once said that we were sibilants, but I didn´t believe her and still don´t.

It was one of those summer mornings when it was already boiling hot. You could see steam rising off the sweaty grass. They say you're not supposed to mow wet grass because it won't cut right and will mess up the engine, but people still do it. The air smelled like a tossed salad of grass, onions, dandelions, and honeysuckle topped with hot tar and gasoline. Maybe the grass mowing was why Red was so loud. He knew he would find some worms on the freshly cut lawns and was calling out his friends to join him for the hunt. I tell you what, I know where to find big worms and spiders. But I don't think birds eat spiders, and if they do, I bet they wouldn't eat a granddaddy long legs. They like big, fat, slimy night crawlers. Speaking of crawly things, my parents´ friend wrote a book about the life of a good young worm named Mortal.

Dad got up before me and Red to play golf in the dark. I wanted to go, but he said that it'd be too early, and that I was too young to play golf. It's true that those golf sticks are longer than me. The only kind of golf I know how to play is mini golf and croquet. And I sure would like me a salmon croquette about now.

This morning, I noticed that the family station wagon from across the street had been moved from the carport and was now parked half on the street and half on the lawn. It was so long, it took up nearly the whole block. Now I know cars. I have about a hundred toy cars of all kinds, plastic and metal. My favorite is a blue and gold roadster that looks like a bullet, but the muscle cars are nice too. I can name every car on the road. I really can. And the neatest and also weirdest one I know is the Breckers´ micro car. It's from Japan and is the first one in Lakewood, or the first I´ve seen. It's tiny like a bumper car, which is what I thought it was when I first saw it. When I got a closer look, I thought it might be a golf cart or a riding lawnmower with a hard top. Mr. Brecker has it parked in his yard like a lawn ornament.

Two girls from across the street started bringing their toys outside - stuffed animals, a pair of expandable metal skates, some dolls, play jewelry, and a few board games. I don´t much like games with fake money because I know I can´t spend it. One girl looked about 14. At first, I thought she was a boy because she had on a baseball cap, but then I saw a ponytail coming out of the back of it. She was wearing a Lakewood sweatshirt, cutoff jeans, and sandals, the kind Jesus wore. The other one was a little older than Herbie and a little younger than me. She had short

brunette hair with a big white ribbon on top of her head that looked like a giant butterfly. She wore a white summer dress. She was walking around in white socks without any shoes. I think we both went to the same school a few years ago, but she might have been in nursery school and just stayed a half day when I was in the kindergarten. I was one of the few kids who had to stay the whole day because my mom is a teacher over at the elementary school. They gave us bird names like we were on a team or something. The morning kids were blue jays, and the afternoon kids, red birds. I was both - a red, blue jay or a blue, red bird. One thing about both birds is that they can sure make a racket squawking and screeching the way they do.

As I was about to get a closer look at the stuff the girls had put out, Walt came by.

``Hey Robbie, what are you doing?´´ He was wearing a brown mesh baseball cap with a lumber company patch that had an ivory-billed woodpecker pecking a pine pole for a logo.

``Oh, nothing, just sitting around. Say, do you know what's going on over there?´´

``Yeah, the Parkers are having them a yard sale. The kids want to make some money to go to summer camp or to buy a trampoline, one.´´

``What's that?´´ I said.

``You know, you jump on it, and it flings you up or out,´´ Walt said.

``Oh, I know about that. I got flung into the air by Gene Lee's long legs and broke my arm last year when we lived on Magnolia Street. Gene Lee is about 7 feet tall with legs as long and skinny as stilts. He´d lie on his back, curl up his legs so that his knees hit his chest, and us kids would take turns sitting on the soles of his tennis shoes as if we were weights, and he´d launch us like a catapult. I was so light, I went way up and out, landed wrong, and ended up with a cast and everything,´´ I said.

``Broken arm, cast, right on,´´ Walt replied.

``Yes, and it was also my right arm,´´ I said.

A whole bunch of people signed that cast. One kid who was about 2 years old was scribbling on it with three crayons in a clenched fist; Keri had to shoo him away telling him that my arm was not a coloring book. That same year, I tried to climb a fence but got my lip stuck on the barbed wire at the top.I was just dangling there helplessly like a wounded animal. The firemen had to cut me loose. And not a few weeks after that, Barry, who had a twin named Harry, smashed my head with a metal bucket, and I had to get stitches. I thought he might have done it by accident, but now I´m not so sure. When I was at the hospital getting stitched up, one of them stole my tricycle, which had a fake battery powered motorcycle engine on it that roared

like a chopper. My dad had to get it back, and after that, he had to chain my trike to a fence with a lock at night.

But I didn't really know what a trampoline was. The thing that came to mind was a diving board, but I don't think the thing was that.

``Hey Bob, I have an idea. You want to make some money?´´

``Sure,´´ I said.

``Well, you got some toys and stuff you don't want?´´

``No, but my sister does. I mean she has some stuff I don't want.´´

``Great, that'll do. Go on and get that stuff, and we'll sell it at the Parkers´,´´ Walt said.

``Do you think we can?´´

``Sure, let me take care of it. Just go get the stuff.´´

I knew just the things to get. Electric scissors - I knew they would sell. They're sort of mine and sort of Keri's, well, more Keri's, but I didn't think she would care. Anyway, they're a little dangerous. My friend Jerry said those scissors could cut your hand off. He said they'd shock you if you held them too long. Jerry knows about shocks. He stuck a fork in an electric socket on the wall and got shocked so bad his fingers turned blue, and he passed out. That's what I heard happened. No one has seen him around for a long time.

My sister's a good artist. She can draw anything. She won a first place ribbon for drawing a bunch of simple buildings, some tall, some short, lit up like tiny traffic lights against a dark night sky with a pink moon. My dad, who is an architect, said it had a minimalist feel to it. I´m not sure what he meant, but I do know that Keri can draw good with minimal effort. She doesn't need electric scissors for drawing. Me, I can't draw too good. I drew an owl once, but it looked like a skinny capital O - it was so bad, and the more I tried to make it look good, the worse it got. My mom said it was the best owl ever. I knew she was just saying that, and it made me even more frustrated, so I crumpled it up and threw it across the living room. Whiskers chased after it and batted it with her paw under the couch as if it were a toy. I stormed off, stomping like a soldier in a military parade. My mom retrieved it, and the next day I saw it hanging on the fridge. With all the wrinkles, it looked like an old owl.

The Jumpy was another thing I found to sell. The Jumpy is a jump rope made out of light chain metal that glows in the dark. I guess it´s what the knights trained with to get into shape for jousting, and all that other stuff they do. Keri won it in an art contest sponsored by the Galvanized Sporting Goods company that makes antique fitness equipment with modern touches. Her winning entry was a silver tabby cat made out of aluminum foil and paper towel rolls that looked just like Whiskers. The thing with the Jumpy was that you had to use it outside in the dark for it to glow right, and we had to go inside when it got dark, so it wasn´t very practical.

The other thing I thought would be good to sell was Keri´s Sunflower Doll. It´s a doll named Helen with a face that looks like a Sunflower with seeds for eyes and yellowish, orange hair like a lion. Keri doesn't play with it really or sleep with it, not like her other stuffed animals. And I think some little girl in the neighborhood would play with it more than she does. The doll just sits up all day in a chair staring at her bed; it never sleeps. As I walked over to Walt with all the stuff in a musty cardboard box that I found in the basement, I saw other kids from the neighborhood already over at the Parkers´ yard sale buying stuff.

``Let's see what you got,´´ Walt said.

Walter looked pretty happy with the haul and promised we were going to get rich. I already had the money spent on baseball cards and bubble gum. My mom says I should eat more fruit and less candy. But the fruits I like best, we never have - strawberries and cherries. What

we do have most of the time are bananas. I hate bananas. I tried to order a banana split once without the banana, so I just asked for a split. I only like the whipped cream, nuts, chocolate syrup, and the cherry. When I asked for a split at Scooper Dave's over in Little Rock, the guy behind the counter exploded with laughter which made me uneasy. Keri said, ``Stupid, they split the banana, that's why they call it a banana split.´´ So I ordered a scoop of Rocky Road instead.

Walt told the older Parker girl, Belinda, to put a price of $1.25 on each thing of mine. He said that she could keep 25 cents on every sale.

In no time flat, the stuff sold. Melinda, Belinda´s younger sister, bought Helen, the Sunflower doll, even though she was supposed to be making money, not spending it. The bodybuilder Ned, nicknamed Truck, bought the scissors and the Jumpy. He said he was going to cut the Jumpy up with the scissors to build a fence for something. We made three dollars in change.

Walt gave me all of it. For his trouble, he asked me to buy him a slushy at the convenience store. I put all the change in my pocket. It weighed a ton, and I sounded like a walking piggy bank. When I got inside, Mom asked what I had in my pocket, and I dug out the change, and some of it spilled onto the floor. I told her I had sold some stuff.

``You did what?´´

``Sold some stuff.´´

``What stuff?´´

``Just some stuff we don't need.´´

``WHAT STUFF?´´

``Well, Keri´s Jumpy, the dangerous electric scissors that could cut my hand off, and Helen.´´

``Helen?´´

``The Sunflower doll.´´

``Who bought all this stuff?´´

``They did over there.´´ I pointed to the Parker house.

``Who, the Parker girls?´´

``Yes and...´´

``OK, GO RIGHT BACK OVER THERE AND GET ALL THE STUFF BACK.´´

``But I can't. They didn't buy everything.´´

``Then who did?´´

``Well, Melinda did buy Helen.´´

``Does your sister know this?´´

``Uh…´´

``KERI, come here right this minute.´´

So Mom told Keri everything with her mad voice, but Keri just laughed.

``You sold my Jumpy? How much did you get?´´

``A dollar I think.´´ Keri continued laughing and I began to nervously.

``It's not funny Buster. You are in a heap of trouble. Keri, go with your brother and get back everything he sold.´´

``But Mom, it's not fair, I didn't sell anything.´´

``And I didn't either. The Parker girls did,´´ I said.

``Then I'll go and get everything.´´ She was furious.

``No, no, we'll go. Come on Robbie,´´ Keri said.

Keri talked to Melinda and got the doll back only after promising to play dolls with her all week.

``Where's the other stuff?´´ Keri asked.

``Truck.´´

``What Truck?´´

``The weightlifter down the street they call Truck, but his real name is Ned or maybe Ted.´´

``So let me get this straight. A weightlifter named Jed, a/k/a Truck, bought the Jumpy and electric scissors?´´

``I think it´s Ned, but right, he goes by Truck.´´

``Where does this Truck live?´´

I pointed to the house across the street and over a few. We could hear the clang of weights. I didn´t think it was such a good idea to try to get stuff back from Truck, him being a bodybuilder and all. He might shot put us back across the street and over our house.

Keri walked inside the carport and yelled, ``HEY.´´

Truck walked up and asked, ``What do you want?´´ He weighed about 200 pounds and was wearing a Lakewood sweatshirt with cut off sleeves. His arms bulged with muscles, and his legs had veins popping out that reminded me of cypress tree trunks. He was about to cut the Jumpy with a buzz saw.

``That's mine there, and those are my scissors.´´

``Not anymore, I bought them,´´ Truck said.

``And I just bought them back,´´ Keri said.

And she dropped a handful of change on the carport, and a few coins rolled down the driveway.

``It's all there, right?´´

As he counted, Keri grabbed the Jumpy and the scissors.

``HEY, you're 50 cents short.´´

And Keri pointed to the quarters that had rolled down the driveway and were now spinning on the street.

I was afraid that Keri was going to try to fight him, but Ned wasn't upset and was more amused than anything. ``What are your names?´´

``I'm Keri, and this is my little brother Robbie.´´

``I'm Ned.´´

``Robbie here tells me you go by Puck,´´ Keri said.

``No I didn´t. I said Truck.´´

And Ned gave a quick burst of laughter and said, ``That´s right Robbie, Truck not Puck,´´ and he put his hand out to Keri for a shake, but Keri wouldn't give hers. I put my hand out, and he squeezed like he was extracting juice from a lemon and held on too long. Just as my bones were about to be crushed, he released his grip and said, ``Y´all alright.´´ But my hand wasn´t. Keri grabbed my good hand, holding the Jumpy and electric scissors in her other, and pulled me home fast with the cord dragging behind her. I heard Ned shout, ``Robbie, don't go selling your sister's stuff again.´´

``Why didn´t you shake his hand? He nearly broke mine because I think you insulted him.´´

``You´ll live.´´

``I told you Truck, not Puck.´´

``Truck, Puck, what´s the difference? By the way, Buster, whose idea was it to sell my stuff?´´ Keri asked.

``Walt's,´´ I said.

``Well, you tell Walter the next time he wants to sell my stuff, he'd better talk to me first.´´

The whole episode was embarrassing, and the worst thing was that I wouldn't be getting any candy or baseball cards.

Worms for Red

Red was at it again. What he was at was making noise, whooping like an alarm clock. And it was still dark outside, but I couldn't go back to sleep because I had an idea. I knew Red was hungry and calling for worms, but it was too early to go out. I could still hear the crickets cricking. My dad wasn't even up, and he's usually up at the crick, I mean, the crack of dawn, before anybody else, even Red, who's not really a body but a bird. Cee Cee says birds don't just eat worms but eat bugs too, but I don't think Red'll eat lightning bugs. If he did, he might light up at night when he's supposed to be sleeping. Now I can get worms and lightning bugs pretty easy, and can even make bugs and was thinking to put some out for Red. All I needed was the Bug Maker machine in Keri's bedroom, but she was still mad at me for selling her stuff, well not so much for selling it, but for having to get it all back, so she probably wouldn't let me use it. I hadn't told her that I had almost sold it too, and I don't think I ever will. It's for kids 10 and up. I'm not 10 and up yet; well, I'm up, but anyway, I know how to work the thing. It's easy to use. You just plug it in, being careful not to also plug a fork into the electricity socket like Jerry did. They say he changed into a skeleton for a second, then turned blue, and his house nearly burned down; ambulance and fire trucks came and everything. Anyway, when the Bug Maker machine smells hot and starts smoking, you put this goop from a tube that smells like root beer and plastic into a mold for the insect or worm that you want. The machine sort of bakes the goop and hardens it some, and then when the alarm dings, you crank a handle and out spits a worm, a spider, or even a praying mantis if that´s the mold you selected. You're supposed to be able to eat them, but I don't like how they taste - no matter the flavor you put in, the bugs taste like flat root beer. Now I love me some root beer, root beer candy canes too, but it has to be bubbly, the root beer drink, not the candy, and creamy, and I like mine with a chilly cheese dog and chips, those chips that come in the huge metal can. I don't know why they call it beer, though. It looks a little like beer, but it doesn't smell or taste anything like beer. And I know about beer, even though I shouldn't. When I was younger, I snuck a sip of beer from a can that my dad had left out. It smelled awful, but I thought it might taste like root beer. As soon as I had a little in my mouth, I started gagging and then sprayed it back out into the kitchen sink. I nearly upchucked. I don't know how anyone could drink the stuff. I guess it's a grown-up thing like coffee, chewing tobacco, and cigarettes. And why root? The only roots I know are Fort Roots and my grandma's root cellar. But she doesn't keep roots there, just a bunch of homemade stew, the best in all of Arkansas, and pickled okra in the jars with the rings and lids that seal tight. Come to think of it, there are some old potatoes down there that look like they have roots growing out of them. I once had a fried pickle from this place in Atkins, but it was too salty for my taste. And there's a big white icebox in the corner that looks like a coffin full of frozen crappie fish, cleaned and filleted that Gagan, that's my grandfather on my mother's side, caught on Lake Tenkiller, or maybe it was Beaver Lake. When I´m over, he always fries up a batch with some hushpuppies. The old root cellar smells like a freshly dug hole of wet clay and mud that reminds me of the hole I´m planning to dig to China. When I´m down in the cellar, I can hear drops of water hit a small puddle, which makes me feel like I´m in a cave, like the one at Blanchard Springs, only a lot smaller, and it doesn´t have those stamagpies hanging, or whatever they´re called.

Gagan takes us fishing sometimes, but he's the only one who ever catches anything. Last time I went, all I caught was some brush that I thought was a lunker. When I reeled in the sticks covered with stinky green weeds and stuff, Keri said, ``Nice fish there little brother.´´ Keri doesn't

even try. Sometimes she gives up or loses interest and draws in the boat. She drew me reeling in a minnow, which is what we use for bait. She's always drawing.

I knew I'd have to sneak into Keri's bedroom to get the thing. Fortunately, her bedroom door was open. Her door creaks real bad when you open it, and if I had opened it, it would have woken her up. And who knows what she would have done - scream probably, and that would have scared me to death, and gotten everybody up and me in big trouble, so I crawled in there quietly and slid like a snake under her bed, and sure enough, it was there! I grabbed the box, slid out, bumped my head on the bed frame coming out, and heard Keri move, so I made a run for it back to my room. I opened the box and the machine was there but the goop wasn't. I thought about using toothpaste instead, but we didn't have enough in the tube. So I went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and grabbed a bowl of cherry gelatin. I found some flour, mixed a bunch of it with the gelatin to form a paste, opened the Bug Maker box, took the machine out, opened the lid, and just as I was about to pour, my dad walked in.

``Hey Sport. You're up early. Whatcha doin´?´´

``Oh, nothing,´´ I said.

``Well, you're doing something.´´

``No, just looking at the Bug Maker box.´´

``You weren't planning on using it, were you?´´

``Well.´´

``You know that machine is dangerous, and it's your sister's.´´

``I know.´´

``You better turn the machine off and put it back in the box the way you found it. I'll make you some breakfast before I leave. You want cinnamon toast?´´

``Yes, please.´´

But I really wanted cinnamon toast with cherry flavored bugs.

------------Later that Day-------------

``Here it is Cee Cee. Let's dig,´´ I said. But Cee Cee didn't want to dig because he didn't much like being around dirt and mud. He lives on some clean strips of the evening newspaper that he cuts up himself with his sharp claws. That paper comes late in the afternoon and sometimes just for him. The paper boy tries to sling it onto the front porch but misses half the time, and it goes into the holly bushes or under our old broken down aqua blue convertible that looks like a bathtub on wheels. That's when Cee Cee gets a hold of it.

I knew we were supposed to be digging for worms, but I was also thinking to dig all the way to China. I'm not sure why. I never heard anyone say what was in China except the Great Wall. I hope it's buried treasure. If I got there, I'm not sure anyone would understand what I was doing coming out of a hole. I don't speak Chinese either. All I know was that I was born in the year of the Rabbit. Dean Parker, Belinda and Melinda´s brother and a genius, who is about 16 with thick bottle glasses, had come over. He had on some sort of uniform with patches and a snake bite kit around his neck. He must have heard me talking in a high pitched voice.

``What are you doing?´´

``Oh, just digging a hole to China,´´ I said.

``You´re more likely to hit a gas line and blow up the neighborhood than get to China,´´ Dean said, and he made the quotation mark gesture as he said China. He told me that if I really wanted to know about going deep down, I should read some science fiction. I don't think we have any of that stuff at home, but my granddaddy might. He asked me who I was talking to, and I told him nobody that maybe he had heard Herbie or something. ``Oh,´´ he said and walked away.

``Wow, look at all them night crawlers! Look, Cee Cee, Red'll love these!´´

I put the worms in an old coffee can full of moist soil that kind of looked like wet coffee grounds. It was a big can, the biggest one I could find. I was planning on filling it up with enough worms for Red and even some of his friends. Then I saw Walt walking over.

``Hey Robbie, whatcha doin´?´´

``Well, digging me some worms for Red.´´

``Looks to me like you're a diggin' a hole to China.´´

``I am.´´

``That's a lot of mud you got there. You know they say if you eat a little mud, because of all the vitamins and minerals in it, it'll give you digging muscles to help you get to China.´´

``Really?´´

Cee Cee was squealing like a pig, something he'd do when he got scared or needed to tell me something important. I gave him an ``in a minute´´ look, but he kept on.

``Sure, and ain'tsa bad really. Just think like you're eatin' some chocolate ice cream.´´

``Well, I do want to get to China or at least to some faraway place.´´

``Then go on now. I'll eat me some too.´´

Walt took a handful.

I picked up a handful and took a leaf and a few pebbles out of it. The leaf probably wouldn't hurt me but the pebbles might. I mean, I could eat a leaf; it'd be like eating a potato skin, but I wouldn't eat a rock. The closest I came to eating one was licking some rock salt once when my granddaddy was making homemade ice cream with a hand crank machine that looked like one of those old-fashioned washing machines.

``Ok, on three. 1…2…´´

And just as I had the mud to my mouth, Keri came out. She was wearing an apron like she had been cooking, only she doesn't really cook too much. She helps Mom set the table usually and sometimes rolls the dough for pies and gets flour in her hair. One time, Keri was over at Grandmama's, my dad´s mom who lives down the street from us, taking a nap. When she woke up, she couldn't move her neck. It was stuck, and she started yelling, ``Help, my neck, I can't move my neck.´´ Grandmama rushed in but couldn't find anything wrong with her. Keri didn't feel any pain or have any fever and wasn't throwing up or anything. Grandmama thought it might be a crick or something, and that maybe Keri had just slept on it wrong but also thought it could be something serious, so she took her to the doctor right away in her 1964 tan sedan that looks like a hammerhead shark. The nurse examined her first and started laughing when she realized the problem. Keri had fallen asleep with a big wad of chewing gum in her mouth. It had fallen out and stuck to her hair and neck. The gum had somehow stretched out and had gotten all in her long blonde hair, and they ended up having to cut a lot of it off.

``Robbie, what on earth are you doing?´´

``Nothing.´´

``You were going to eat that weren't you?´´

``What, it has vitamins and minerals, tell her Walt.´´

Walt started laughing, ``We weren't really gunna eat it. I was just jokin´ around, right Robbie?´´ Walt said.

I didn't know he was joking around but didn't have time to say anything.

``Well, you better go joke around with someone your own size, making my little brother eat a mud pie - it could kill him,´´ Keri said.

``And what's in that coffee can?´´ Keri asked.

``It's just worms for Red,´´ I said.

``Don't tell me you were going to eat a can of worms too. Who's Red? Did you put him up to that Walter?´´ Keri asked.

At this point, Keri was boiling mad and almost as red as Red. She acts like my mother sometimes.

``He ain't eating them worms. And I swear, I don´t know no Red, or whoever he's talking about,´´ Walt said.

``It's a red bird.´´

He was laughing so hard that he couldn't even talk. The laugh, which was almost like a cough, was garbled and sounded like it was being chopped up in a garbage disposal.

``Robbie, get the hose and wash off before Mom sees you and come in for lunch - chipped beef and gravy, your favorite,´´ Keri said.

``NOOOOOO,´´ I said.

As Keri walked back to the house, Walt looked at me with surprise.

``Man, your sister's mean, Rod.´´

Then little Herbie walked over carrying a yellow toy front loader truck with the shovel bucket and started digging around the hole making truck noises, which was the first time I had ever heard him make a sound.

``Tell me about this Red you keep talking about,´´ Walt said.

``Like I said, he´s a bird.´´

``What bird?´´

``A red bird.´´

``You mean a cardinal?´´

``Yeah.´´

``Which one? They´s a lot of them around.´´

``That one.´´ And I pointed to a bird that was making a lot of racket, but it turned out to be a mockingbird. That's the state bird of Arkansas. It can even call the hogs - woo pig sooie.

``You have one big imagination there Roderick. First, you got some invisible mouse - DD or whatever his name is and now Red. You might need you a psychological evaluation.´´

``I don't need that, and it's Cee Cee, not DD.´´

``Go hose off and eat you some chipped beef.´´

``You hose off.´´

Herbie got up, walked over to the garden hose, turned the spigot on, pulled the hose over to the hole, sprayed in a little water, and then handed it to me.

``Thanks, Herbie.´´

I cleaned off some with the water from the hose. I took a sip, but only a sip, because the water was warm and tasted like plastic. I saw that Walt had gone off in the woods heading for the cliff. Before I went inside, I said, ``Herbie, turn the hose off when you´re done, would you?´´ He looked up, saluted, and then he went back to digging. He might make it to China before sundown.

First Fish

I caught my first fish the other day at the Old Mill pond on Lake #2, also called the fishing lake. The Old Mill pond isn't the place where people usually fish, and I don't think it is really part of the fishing lake - it's just a pond. Frogs are in there, with a few lily pads and some water bugs, maybe a snake or two. Rumor has it that anacondas are in there eating up all the ducks. It's true that I haven't seen many ducks swimming in the pond lately, but I don't think there are any anacondas in there. Besides, I asked my dad about it, and he said those snakes live down in South America, a long way from the Old Mill, and good thing too because big snakes give me the creeps.

The Old Mill is just across from Lake #3, the swimming lake, and not far from my house, so I walked down there one hot summer morning with my new fishing rig that I got for Christmas. What I like most about it is the push button on the reel. There's something about pushing a button that makes me happy. I like pushing doorbells too. The thing about doorbells is they don't all ring the same; some are loud, some soft, and some ring like a grandfather clock. Ours just buzzes. My dad's rolling bathtub has a push button radio and knobs on the dash that I like to push and pull, which may be one of the reasons the jalopy won´t start.

I balled up a piece of bread and put it on my hook and cast it out with a bobber and some split shot on the line. I honestly didn't think I'd catch anything at all at the pond. I really just went down there to practice fishing. And wouldn't you know not two seconds after I had cast my line, that bobber went under, and I set the hook like I had a whale on the line, and the thing nearly came clean out of the water, hooked good, without me needing to do much reeling. On the shore, he was flopping like fish do, gasping for air, and I didn't know what to do. I had never held a fish to take the hook out and didn't have a stringer, so I just left the little bream hanging from my pole and walked home. I wanted everyone to see that I had caught a fish. If I had just said I caught one, no one would have believed me. When I got home with the fish, I didn't ring the bell, I just walked in with it and my mom said, ``Good heavens, get that awful thing out of here.´´ Our cat Whiskers snuck up to the fish low to the ground at first and then got up to it and started smelling it on her tip toes pawing at it and growling like she was about to get into a fight, but that fish didn't have any fight left in him, and he was starting to really stink too, worse than when you first open a tuna can. I was going to put it in the refrigerator and ask my dad to clean it when he got home so we could fry it up for dinner. But then I wasn't sure it'd be a good idea because it was only a little fish, not enough to feed four and possibly not even enough for Whiskers, who only weighs 10 pounds. It'd be a light snack or something, like an anchovy to put on a cracker or a pizza, but I don't like snacking on fish. If I'm going to snack, it'd have to be a lemon meringue pie or a grape ice pop. I still had the fish dangling from the line and had to act fast because Mom was mad, but I was afraid to grab it even knowing it was dead because my hands aren't all that big, and Gagan, who taught me to fish, says to watch out for the spines because they could stick in you. I didn't want to be stabbed by my first fish, so I walked toward the bathroom and was going to drop him in the bathtub or the toilet when my mom blocked the entrance and pointed to our front door. Back outside, I thought it might be good to take the fish to the store to have someone stuff it like that big marlin Gagan has on the wall in his house. About that time, Walter came along and asked me what the fish was doing just hanging from my pole, and he grabbed it with his chubby hands and squeezed that bream so hard that it looked like the fish spit out the hook, and then he tossed it onto the grass. Walter had on overalls and a straw hat.

``What are you going to do with that goldfish?´´

``Get it stuffed,´´ I said.

``Stuffed. That little thing? You ought to put it in a fish tank.´´

``But it's dead. Maybe I'll just bury it out back in the hole I'm digging to China. Herbie can help with his truck.´´

``Good idea, let's go...wait a minute, we can bring that fish back to life!´´

``We can?´´

``Sure.´´

``Go get you a bucket.´´

So I went to the carport and got the bucket my dad uses to wash the blue family cruiser, our other car and the one that works.

I saw water flowing down the street next to the curb which meant somebody was washing their car or dog. And I saw a little house sparrow pecking at the water and splashing around cooling off.

A neighbor had his circular saw going, and I could see sparks flying up and could smell fresh pine - it made me think of Burns Park and our Christmas tree from last year. This year, I want a race car track and some new cars, but I probably haven't been good enough. I've been in a lot of trouble lately.

Walter turned the water on, pulled out the green garden hose, sprayed me a little bit by putting his thumb on the end of it, then filled the bucket with water. The bucket foamed up like detergent and had a piney smell. He dropped in the fish. I was thirsty, so I got some water from the hose knowing it would taste bad, but it was at least cool by then.

``See, it's alive!´´ Walt yelled.

The fish did look like it was moving a little, and I thought it might really be alive, but I couldn't trust Walt because he's a joker and almost never serious about anything. However, I did want my fish to come back to life.

Herbie came over on his bicycle and looked at the bucket and then rode off. He came back a few minutes later wearing a train conductor's hat and carrying a small plastic bottle. He rode up to the holly bushes, jumped off his bike, walked over and sprinkled salt or something into the bucket. It could have been pepper or who knows what.

Then Belinda walked up. She was wearing frayed cut off jeans, a yellow t-shirt, and a green mesh baseball cap hanging sideways.

``What was that Herbie, fish food?´´ asked Belinda.

Herbie saluted her.

Walt whispered something to her, and they started giggling. Then Belinda said, ``Hey Robbie, you got a fish tank?´´

``No, just this bucket.´´

``How 'bout an ice chest?´´

I was thinking we might have an ice chest, one of those light squeaky ones that I like to take a bite out of, but it's dry like stale popcorn, and when I try to spit it out, the bits stick to my tongue.

Then Keri came out.

``What's going on here?´´

``My fish came back to life!´´

She scrunched up her face with her head turned to the side looking at the fish, you know the way you do when something doesn't make any sense and you have to think it over real good.

``What are you doing with the thing? It looks like a minnow Gagan uses for bait,´´ Keri said.

``It's not a minnow or bait. I was going to keep it because he came back to life.´´

``How do you know that sardine is a HE? Anyway, it's, or he's DEAD, just floating belly up, can't you see?´´

``He's not a sardine, and he's not dead, tell her Walt.´´

Walt was rolling on the ground laughing again and said like he was short of breath, ``You should spread it on a cracker.´´

And for a second there, I was thinking of this song that they play a lot on the radio about someone who is always laughing. You know the one.

By this time, Melinda and Truck had come over to see what was going on. Melinda was wearing a yellow dress with pink polka dots and yellow socks but no shoes. Truck had on a batting helmet turned backwards and sported flip flops with what looked like giant slugs wrapped around his ankles. He was tossing up and catching a funny looking baseball with holes in it. I was expecting him to have a shot put instead.

``Hey Robbie, you're not trying to sell more of your sister's stuff, are you?´´ Truck said.

And then the fish started splashing around trying to come out of the bucket. I thought the fish was coming up for air as if it were a reptile. It would have been a good time for a lifeguard to jump into action. Melinda started screaming. It was the kind of scream that could pierce your eardrum if you were close enough to it and it made me jump back. The next thing I knew, Whiskers snatched that fish right out of the bucket and had run off toward the woods with it dangling in her mouth. The bucket overturned and the sudsy water rolled down the driveway and slowly made its way to the street where it would eventually flow down Snake Hill and drain into Lake #1, the skiing lake. I could hear Whiskers growling like a cougar in the distance. Some of us ran out to see what she was going to do with my fish. She had stopped right at the edge of the back yard. I had never seen or heard her looking so wild before and thought she might attack if anyone tried to take it away from her. For a moment, I wasn't even sure it was Whiskers. Maybe it was a new cat, an intruder. But it was Whiskers. I knew because her tail wasn't moving. A normal cat's tail would have been twitching like a live wire.

When it happened, Walter's mouth dropped open and his face turned white as a marshmallow. Melinda ran home screaming in short, sharp bursts. Herbie, who had a honeysuckle flower dangling from the side of his mouth, picked up the bottle of fish food, stuffed it into his pocket, got his bike from the holly bushes, and rolled it over to the ladder next to our house. Honeysuckle doesn't live up to its name. You have to suck on about 300 flowers to

get even a little drop of watery honey. I think the bees suck it all out and leave nothing for us kids. Herbie propped the bike up against the ladder so that it was pointed a little bit downhill. He climbed up the ladder a little ways, got on the bike, holding the handle bars and balancing himself on the bike frame, the kind with the girl bar that goes down. The bike started moving, and somehow Herbie got his feet on the pedals, kept his balance, and rode off with arms extended up in the air. He looked like a biker riding a chopper.

Well, we never found a trace of that fish again, not even the bones. I asked Whiskers what she did with it, and she just rubbed up against my legs. I didn't know what that meant, but it might have meant that she ate it. I asked her why she took MY first fish, and she just stared at me with those big green marbles, purring with a grin on her face. I think she wanted me to get her another fish. ``A catfish,´´ Cee Cee said. I was a little upset because she was well fed and always had dry and wet food in her bowl. I call the dry food, chips and Keri calls them treats. And she's been getting tuna lately for wet food of all things. She's a fisher kitty, and I thought cats only hunted. She's got claws like sharp hooks, but she doesn't much like to get her paws or fur wet. We tried to give her a bath once when she rolled in a pool of motor oil under the aqua jalopy. We held her down in the tub, got her wet, put some shampoo on her, and then she squirmed, hissed and jumped out, running all over the house, trying to shake the shampoo and water out. She did a pretty good job of it too, but we finally got her again in a towel, so she couldn't scratch us so much. We rinsed her off and got her as dry as we could. When we finally let her loose, she headed straight under Keri's bed and wouldn't come out for a long time. She looked like a Chihuahua. Anyway, can you imagine a cat with a fishing pole? It would probably eat all the bait or just play with it and never get a line in the water. I told Whiskers the next time she was hungry or wanted to play, to go get a bird or a bug but not Red. I warned her to stay away from Cee Cee too. I said this all in a high voice like I was talking to a baby, even though she's older than me.

Lightning Robbie

There are a lot of things I can't do. I can't write cursive, do the times tables, not all the numbers anyway; the 7s and 9s give me a headache. I can't yo-yo without messing up the string. I tried to send a yo-yo around the world, but it didn't get off the ground and just spun like a top. I can't sweat or crack my knuckles. Walter cracks his about 100 times a day. I can't even snap my fingers yet. But there are a few things I can do pretty well, and I'll tell you about them in a minute.

I live near Snake Hill. It's a steep hill with curves in it. There's a famous sign for it with a squiggly line to warn drivers not to go up or down it too fast. Older kids go down it on their bikes and try not to brake. And when it's icy, every kid who lives near it like I do, slides down it on sleds, garbage can lids, or card board boxes, even though our parents tell us not to. It is dangerous, real dangerous. There have been a lot of accidents on that hill. One kid slid all the way down into Lake #1, which is at the bottom of the hill, and nearly drowned. Lakewood has six lakes with numbers for names, but I´ve only been to three. Lake #1 is the skiing lake. Lake #2 is the fishing lake, where I caught the bream. Lake #3 is the swimming lake where I learned to swim. There's not much to the other ones. One of them is just a small pond full of lily pads. I don't think there's anything in there except frogs, water bugs, and snakes. It might have fish in it, but if you cast your line in there, you'd get snagged, unless you had a weed guard on your lure and that's for the pros. I just fish with a baited hook, line, and sinker, but I want to start using lures. Speaking of snakes, woods are everywhere around here possibly full of poisonous copperheads and diamondbacks. There probably aren´t any anacondas and spitting cobras, but it does have water moccasins. I like lakes and woods but not snakes. When I see one, I just let it slide or swim on by. Like a serpent, I can swim well too. I can float like a duck, go deep like a catfish and hold my breath for 45 seconds, and then swim back up, and glide on top of the water like a water moccasin. Keri says moccasin isn't the right name for it, that I should call it by its correct name, the cottonmouth. She says that a moccasin is a shoe.

My mom says I'm a water rat, but I've never seen a rat swim and Keri, who learned a lot about snakes at camp, said she's heard of a rat snake but is pretty sure it can´t swim. Cee Cee says rats can't swim, at least not the ones like him, and he should know better than anybody. But there are some animals related to the rat that do swim in the water like beavers. They even have their own lake in Northwest Arkansas. There's another rat called the nutria down in the Louisiana swamps that can swim well and is a pretty good dinner too, I've heard, but I've never eaten one. I guess a squirrel is kind of a rat, but they don't swim, or if they can, they sure don't like to. My mom said I always liked to swim, and as a baby, I would cry when she took me out of the water, so she'd have to put me back in. She could have put me in a basket like the baby Moses and floated me down the Arkansas River or the Buffalo River, and I´d have been splashing along having the time of my life.

I was born in February which makes me an Aquarius; Keri says it's why I can swim so well. My aunt has this groovy record with the word Aquarius in the song. And she lets us play records on her record player, the portable one in the suitcase that bounces up and down when you touch it. She even has some hippy sunglasses with purple shades. I tried them on once but they fell off my face and almost broke. Don't tell her. She takes me and Keri to Scooper Dave's across the river to the Heights for movies and ice cream in her green car that looks like a giant insect and sounds like a toy but sure has some get up and go. I like to lie down in the luggage space in the back and look out the window and watch the telephone poles, trees, and clouds go by.

My grandmother Gammy, my mother's mother, wanted to name me Abraham because I was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln, but I don't think my mom liked it too much, and I ended up William like my dad and granddaddy. So I am William Robert when my parents are really mad at me and just Robbie the rest of the time. I'm glad I'm not Abe because writing the letter A is a pain and takes too long and the cursive capital A isn't as easy as it looks, not that the cursive capital R is any easier. I'd quit school if my name started with Z. Try writing a cursive capital Z and you'll know what I'm talking about. I guess it's why parents don't name their kids something that starts with Z very often. The problem with the A is the circle; I just can't get the slant on it right. Sometimes I think I ought to switch to my left hand just to make certain letters.

I was also born in the year of the Rabbit which is maybe the reason I can run faster than most kids in the neighborhood and even faster than the fastest kid, thinks Walt anyway. The fastest kid is Jason, who is, I don't know, 12 or 13. No one knows exactly how old he is. Walt asked him once and he said that he had just turned 32. He did get kept back a year, so he's older than kids in his class but probably not 32. If he were, he'd be older than my dad. One day a whole bunch of us were out on Lakeview Road before it started to get dark. The cicadas were making a noise that sounded like a dozen amplified spinning lawn sprinklers and an airport full of helicopters all starting up at the same time. Sometimes a buzzing sound stays in my ear and keeps me from falling asleep at night. My mom thinks I need my ears cleaned out and maybe I do, but I don't want to go to the doctor to get a shot or anything. I hate shots. I've gotten my share of them too. Once at school, they had some weird shot machine that was like a giant electric stapler. They just lined us up, and bang, like an assembly line, one after the other - kids were screaming, some crying and the nurse would just say, ``next.´´ It was like we were being punished. I don't remember why we got them, maybe to protect us from smallpox, or the bubonic plague, who knows. Anyway, those bugs were so loud that we had to yell over them. Jason was bragging that he could beat anybody in a race and would even give any kid who would race him a big lead. He said he could run faster than a cheetah. It sounded like he said cheater, and I started snickering. Jason looked at me and said, ``HEY YOU.´´ He had long hippy hair and wore a bandana around his head with a psychedelic design that looked like the inside of a kaleidoscope. He wore Jesus sandals and spit through his teeth.

``Go ahead Bobbie, race him,´´ Walt insisted.

``Let's go,´´ said Jason, and he sprayed a fine mist of spit through the spaces in his lower teeth.

``Ok, I'll race you, but I'm not very fast,´´ I said.

``I'll give you a 20-yard lead, and we'll run to that stop sign down there.´´

It was about 50 yards away from where he would start.

``No thanks, I don't want a head start.´´

And I didn't really think I needed one. Plus, I had on my fast Razorback pumps, and he was just wearing sandals, which might be fine for sand but not too good for Lakeview Road.

He pointed at me and said, ``You think you can take me? Know this man...I've NEVER lost a race, EVER.´´

And he said it all mean like he'd beat me up if I won the race. And he probably could have because he was a lot bigger and older than me.

Walt says Jason really is fast and ran 6th-grade track at Lakewood Elementary. He won a bunch of first place ribbons and used to walk around with them pinned to his jeans jacket. He had the school record for the Shuttle Run and won the Presidential Patch in the 5th and 6th grade. I hope I earn that patch one day, but the problem is, I can't throw a softball all that far.

Why do we have to throw a softball and not a baseball? I don't understand it. Just for fun, Truck said he shot put the softball instead of throwing it and the ball went farther than most kids' throws. I'm pretty good at just about everything else, especially the running events. They call Jason, Jet, but Walt thought I had a chance to beat him. Before the race, a group of kids was standing around laughing, most of them I didn't know. Somebody said, ``Look at the little runt, he´s scared.´´ I recognized one kid who had been in my kindergarten class, but I couldn't remember his name. I only remember that he picked his nose a lot and cried at nap time. I hated nap time. I was probably the only kid who never fell asleep. But when the teachers came around, I faked it. One time I pretended to snore, but it sounded more like a pig snort and woke some kids up. I think some kid up the street was having a birthday party, and they had all just finished a game of Kick the Can. Herbie was riding up and down the street with a flashlight strapped to the front of his bike. The street lights hadn't come on yet, and I could see lightning bugs flickering on and off in the yards up and down Lakeview Road.

So Walt says, ``Ok - on your marks. Get set. GO!´´

I took off and never ran faster. I ran scared like a real cheetah was chasing me and never looked back. Right before I got to the stop sign, he passed me. I was thinking, wow, he really is fast. I turned around and started walking back slowly with my hands locked on top of my head, out of breath and noticed Jason was way back near where we started, hopping on one leg.

Walt came up to me and said, ``You smoked him, man.´´ And then Jason was saying something like he'd have won if he hadn't blown out his leg. I was a little confused, then turned around and saw a bike racing toward me and realized that it was Herbie, not Jason who had passed me. Everybody was patting me on the back and giving me compliments. Walt said, ``I´m going to start calling you Robbie Sonic.´´

``Dang, bro, you can flat out fly,´´ Truck said. He was wearing slugs on his ankles again. I asked him what they were. He said they were ankle weights to build up leg strength. ``Here,´´ and he took them off and strapped them on to my ankles. They were so heavy. ``If you wear those before any race, I guarantee no one will touch you. We're talking roadrunner city.´´ I took them off and felt light as a feather.

Dean walked over and said, ``Congratulations Lightning Robbie, the beacon of Lakeview Road.´´ That made me feel good but also made me think of those lightning bugs. How do they do it? And right as I was thinking about them, Herbie came up to me and held his arm out with a closed fist, palms side up. Then he opened up his fist slowly to reveal a dazed lightning bug. It blinked a yellow light at me twice and then started to hover like a helicopter and finally flew off.

And even though it felt good to hear the cheers and all that, I was wondering if Jason would have beaten me if he hadn't pulled up. I told him good race and could tell that he was mad. ``It´s my leg, man It wasn't even a race which means you didn't win. I saw you run. I can walk faster than that.´´ Maybe he really was hurt. And even if he was faking it, I don't know how he could have run very fast in hippy sandals. I mean who races in sandals? I guess you could, but it'd almost be better to run barefooted, or with socks, maybe not on Lakeview Road but at the track anyway. I did some running out on the padded track at North Little Rock stadium in my bare feet. I think I ran faster without the weight of my tennis shoes. I'd like to get me some light track shoes, but my feet keep growing. I wear shoes out really fast. Every time I get a new pair, my feet are just a little bit longer than before. I hope they stop growing because if they don't, I'll have clown feet and won't be able to run anymore or do any kind of sports, and I'd have no chance at the Presidential Patch. I'd just have to be the class clown. But to be honest, I don't like clowns too much. They're like sketchy cartoon characters come to life. Plus, clowns are too loud

and make small kids cry. I don't like anything too loud, which is a good reason not to get my ears cleaned out.

Play Ball

Yesterday was the first day of T ball practice. I'm on a team called Gas-N-Go. Our uniform is just a yellow baseball cap with the word GAS in red on the front and the word GO in green on the back. I wish the GO was on the front which is why I wear the cap backwards, but coach doesn't like that and says we have to respect our sponsors. But I sort of like Go-N-Gas better. That's what you do, right? You go and get gas, and then you go. It could be Go-N-Gas-N-Go. My cap is a small but a little too big on me. I need an extra small, but they only make them for babies. I do have a small head, but I didn't know it was smaller than small. I can't let Keri know because she'll crack some joke that I have a head the size of a peanut or something like that. The cap goes down over my ears and flies off when I swing the bat.

There's no pitching in T ball. We have to hit the ball off a tee. I guess we're too young to throw the ball to a batter; that's what they say. And that's probably true, but I can throw one pretty good and hit a baseball pitched to me. Some of us kids play on the dirt field at Lakewood Elementary on the weekends. It has a backstop and a home plate but no bases; it did, but someone stole the bases. Truck pitches to us but not too hard - the thing is, he's a little wild. Belinda, who usually plays catcher, sometimes has to take over, and then Truck becomes the catcher. He's probably a better catcher, and besides, he wears a batter's helmet backwards a lot of the time just like a catcher. I wouldn't want to slide into home base when he's blocking the plate. It´d be like sliding into a brick wall or a thick cypress tree. Belinda throws the ball a lot straighter and pitches underhanded to the smallest kids like to Herbie when he plays, but he gets bored too easily and can't stay in one place for very long. Belinda plays softball too with girls and can pitch a softball underhanded faster than most kids can throw a baseball overhand. The thing I don't understand about softball is why the ball is so big, which means you can't hit it as far, and if it hits you, it'll hurt more than a baseball - I mean it's bigger and really not that soft if you ask me. And why is it that only girls and grownups play softball, but not boys? Not that I would want to play softball, but why can't the girls play baseball with the boys if they want to? Some do, but not on real teams as far as I know.

I have a bad habit of flinging my bat after I hit a ball. One time, it almost took Herbie's head off, and he wasn't even playing. He was on his bike riding down the third base line in foul territory. I hit a line drive down the first base line and flung my bat toward third. It was going right at Herbie, but he ducked just in time. Truck said, ``Bro, you almost killed little Herbie - cool it with the bat.´´

``Yes sir,´´ I said.

Truck was usually pretty friendly with me, but he sounded mad like he was a monster truck. I knew he could snap me in two and shot put me over the fence, so the next two times I hit the ball, I carried the bat with me as I ran the bases.

The tee is a stand that has a rubber tube sticking out of it. The baseball is placed on top of the tube, and you try to hit the ball off of it. It´s harder to hit than it looks, almost like playing a carnival game. At practice, I took a few swings. On my first swing, I missed the ball completely. The second time, I hit the tee and the ball just dropped off it. Then the coach said, ``Ok Robbie, good try,´´ and then I had to go out to the field with my glove and watch my teammates give it a go. They didn't do so well either, but I'll tell you about that later.

I've been practicing with my dad and can catch a ball pretty good now. Walt came over the other day, and as he was walking toward me, he said, ``Here, catch´´ and threw a baseball at me. I ducked out of the way just as the ball curved over my head making this strange buzzing sound like the thing was from outer space.

``Hey, are you trying to kill me?´´

``Rod, go get the ball.´´ It had landed in the neighbor's holly bushes. Because I am small, I usually have to get the balls that roll into the bushes and under cars. Herbie had a tryout for ball retriever but took too long and kept getting distracted, so he never got a callback. I don't like holly bushes because the shiny green leaves have got these needle points that prick like a shot, and the one thing I hate more than anything is a shot. The holly bushes sometimes smelled like cat spray. Those tom cats were always spraying everything - trees, fire hydrants, bushes. Dean said they do that to let the other cats know to stay away. I think I know which one sprayed the holly bushes - Clyde! Clyde is my friend and he's one tough cat. He's orange with stripes, a little like a tiger and even dogs are scared of him. He'll come up to you and knock his head hard on your legs and bowl you over if you're not careful. So I found the ball, and it was like the one I saw Truck with the other day. It was plastic with holes all in it. Walt yelled, ``Throw it.´´ So I

threw it to him and the ball made this crazy sound again like it was whistling as it curved. You didn't need a glove to catch it, but it wasn't easy to catch because it moved so much. Walt threw it again. I tried to catch it, but it curved around me and went back under the holly bushes. So I had this idea, which turned out to be one of my worst and best ideas ever. The holly bushes have these red berries that you can't or at least shouldn't eat. Walt said they were just like those little spiced red candies. Those berries really did look like candy, so I took a handful, put them in my mouth, bit down, but spit them out because they were sour and made my tongue go dry and swell up. I had to run inside for water.

Keri looked at me and asked what happened. ``The holly berries,´´ I said.

``What, you ate holly berries - those are poisonous, why did you do that?´´

``I thought they were candy,´´ I said.

``Did Walt tell you that?´´

``No,´´ I said, even though he did.

Keri went outside and shouted at Walt, ``Those could have killed him you know.´´

After I rinsed my mouth out with water about a million times, I went back outside. Walt said he didn't think I'd actually eat them and had only said that they looked like candy, not that they were. So anyway, I went back under the holly bushes, pulled off a bunch of berries, and instead of trying to eat them again, I put them inside the ball. The holes were bigger than the berries so I got tons of berries in there. Then I walked out with it, got pretty close to Walt, and threw the ball at him. Some of the berries went flying out and hit Walt´s arms and legs.

``What was that?´´ Walt asked.

``Just some red candy,´´ I said.

He looked mad but started laughing. ``That was a good one...good one Bobbie.´´ And it was a good one. Walt played that trick on some of the other kids too. Once we crammed crabapples in there, but they never came out and made the ball too heavy.

I'm not good at T ball, but I can catch and throw a ball better than some of the other kids who I don't think know much about baseball at all. Lou can't throw the ball; it just falls out of his hand. The thing is, he doesn't use his fingers to hold the ball. He just puts it in his palm, and when he raises his arm to throw it, the ball just rolls off his fingers and onto the ground behind him, almost like he's throwing it backwards. He's the shortest kid and probably the youngest on the team. The tee is taller than he is. He also didn't have a team cap. He wore a plain red one. I don't know if they ran out of team caps or if his head is just too small. He might not even be on the team. I think he's the coach's son. When he swings the bat, he has to swing up. On his first swing, it flew out of his hands and almost hit the kid playing first base. ``Ok, Lou buddy, good try, we're going to have to work on that swing,´´ but they wouldn't let him try again. No kid laughed or anything because none of us were any good except Daniel. I think he has a tee at home. Daniel is a strong kid who looks older than everyone else. Someone said he just had a growing spurt and had already started shaving. His pants only went down to his shins and his tee-shirt was too short and fit tight, sort of like a pajama top that he'd outgrown. His cap was too small. It looked like it was sewn on to his head. When he takes it off, it leaves a red mark on his forehead where the cap had dug in. On his first swing, he missed the ball and hit the tee so hard it broke. They had to put it back together with duct tape. On his second try, he hit the ball into the clouds like a big leaguer, and it would have gone over the fence if the field down at Lake #3 where we were playing had one.

This kid Ted who was standing next to me watched it fly over his head and said to me, ``He can't be 7.´´

``More like 32,´´ I said.

Now when you hit the ball, you're supposed to run the bases. Ted, the one joking with me about Daniel, hit the ball but not too good; actually, I think the wind from his swing just knocked it off the tee. He started running the bases the wrong way. He ran to third and then second and finally the coach stopped him and pointed to first base, so he ran backwards over to first base and then jumped onto the bag. Someone yelled, ``Homerun!´´ Everybody was laughing when Ted ran the bases the wrong way, and he had this grin on his face like he had done it for the laughs.

Another kid hit the ball and ran to second base first. I picked up the ball and tagged him when he was on second base.

``You´re out,´´ I said.

``How am I out?´´ the kid said.

``Because you're on the wrong base,´´ I said.

Ted who was on first base, and who had run the wrong way and then backwards, ran backwards to home plate instead of going to second. As I looked around, I saw that my teammates on the field weren't paying attention. The shortstop and the center fielder were looking for four-leaf clovers, and one of them had actually found one.

I heard one shout, ``Four leaf clover, four leaf clover´´ and the two were fighting over it.

``I found it first.´´

``No, I found it.´´

The coach turned around and yelled at them, ``Boys, keep your head in the game.´´ Over on third base, two kids were playing Tic-tac-toe in the dirt. Little Lou was sitting down in right field sucking his thumb. A couple of kids, whose names I didn't know, were running around in circles like they were airplanes right after an airplane flew over the field. When that jet flew over, everybody stopped and looked up. A few kids were pointing up at it.

``Hey look, it's going straight up,´´ one said. It was an F-4, the same one the Blue Angels fly. And it sure did look like it was going straight up like a rocket, and it sounded like an earthquake in the sky - a skyquake. It left a trail of smoke that looked like a straight white line on the highway. And I was thinking to myself, how does it all work? How can a plane go straight up like that and make so much noise?

Coach was saying, ``Hey boys, focus - get your head out of the clouds and into the game.´´

To call it a game was a little bit of a stretch; it was more like recess at Lakewood Elementary. We sure had a lot of work to do before our first real game.

Short Cut

Our backyard is near the edge of the Lakeview woods and ends at the high cliffs above JFK Boulevard. At the bottom of the cliff is my favorite convenience store. I go there a lot with my mom and dad the long way in the car - Lakeview Road, then left on McCain Blvd., and down the hill past the burger place on the right, and a gas station on the left, and then left onto JFK at the stoplight, and another left to the store in the little plaza there. People on bikes take the sidewalk down McCain and cut through the gas station to get to the shopping plaza and the convenience store. Cars could cut through too, but the bell rings when you run over the black hose, and if you kept going, they'd know you were just cutting through. It wasn't that long ago that I didn't know my right from my left, which was before I knew how to write. My dad said the right hand is the hand you use the most, but that confused me because I can use either hand for writing on the chalk board, swinging a tennis racket, tossing a flying disc, and eating. Anyway, we go to the convenience store when we run clean out of stuff we need. It really is that you go in and then go out pretty quickly because it's a small store, and there's usually no one else in there except the cashier. And it's always just one person working because if it were two, there wouldn't be enough work for them both. When I go, I bring my pennies to buy bubblegum and baseball cards - five pennies for a pack of baseball cards and a penny for candy and bubblegum. If I just go with my dad, he'll let me get a cherry slushy, but I have to promise not to tell Mom. He'll get a lime slushy and a pack of menthol cigarettes. Once I got a pack of cigarettes for kids, but it was a little weird eating a cigarette. I like those bubblegum cigars that I can pretend to smoke. Anyway, Mom says the place is expensive and won´t shop there for all the groceries. We get groceries at a supermarket on JFK in Park Hill usually, but I don´t like to go with her, although sometimes it's fun to push the cart and ride in it when we don't have much to buy. One time, I got in one, and Keri put a bunch of stuff on top of me and almost buried me in packs of toilet paper and about a 100 bags of potato chips and I don't know what all else. She just kept putting stuff in, anything she could find, and then my mom grabbed her by the arm and said, ``That's enough young lady,´´ and I started laughing and she told me, ``Buster, you better get out of there right now,´´ but I took too long and crushed some bags of chips, and she picked me up and put me down hard. As I began walking away from the cart, I noticed that some shoppers in the store were looking at me shaking their heads.

I'm always getting in trouble at the grocery store, but I try to be good to get a toy car. They have them hanging near the cat food. The only time I ever got one when it wasn't Christmas or my birthday was when I was sick with the croup. The doctor told me I sounded like a frog and reached into his bag to pull out a shot, the glass kind with a bicycle tire needle. Three people had to hold me down. I tried to scream but couldn't because of my croup. The next day, my mom and dad brought me home a toy race car. It was a blue and gold Italian speedster with a supercharger that could probably go faster than our deepwater blue family sedan. I hope I get sick again real soon.

Like I was saying, the cliff is at the edge of the woods behind our house. Walter says it's nearly as high as Mount Magazine and is by far the highest point in all of North Little Rock, Arkansas, which I knew wasn't true. I asked him if it was higher than Snake Hill, and he said Snake Hill wasn't a mountain, just a hill.

The first high rise building I ever saw up close was the Lakewood House. It has about 15 floors. I went up with my friend Johnny whose grandmother lives on the 14th and got dizzy on the elevator. When we got to her apartment, I could see the tops of tall trees from the balcony. I

could see all of North Little Rock, which looked like a bunch of broccoli. On the elevator ride down, my ears popped, just like the time I was on an airplane. The Lakewood House looks like a giant mockingbird made of grey and white cinder blocks, so I call it the Mockingbird Tower. It really did tower over everything in Lakewood.

A new skyscraper is going up across the river. It´s called the Worthen Bank Building. It´s supposed to be taller than the Union National Bank Building, the shiny glass box completed last year. My dad showed it to me the other day - it's near where he works. It looks like a giant concrete waffle. Walt says the scrapper is the tallest building in the world, twice as tall as the Empire State Building, but my dad says it'll have 23 stories, which will make it one story taller than the Union National Bank Building, making it the tallest building in Arkansas. If it were twice the size of the Empire State Building, it´d have to be more than 200 stories high, which is a lot of stories and stairs. Or if Walt is correct, the Empire State building would have to be only 12 stories high or about the size of the skinny Union Life Building on West 2nd Street. From the top of the Worthen Building, I bet the workers have a great view of Little Rock and the Arkansas River. I was thinking it'd be a neat place for those cliff divers to practice.

Speaking of high things, Arkansas is a mountainous state with two major ranges: the Ouachitas and the Ozarks. In the Ouachitas, Mount Magazine is the tallest peak in the state. In the Ozarks, a section of the range is called the Boston Mountains. How they got the name Boston is a mystery. Boston is nowhere near them. Dean said the Ozarks aren't really mountains at all, just hills and that the people who live on them are the real hillbillies. I asked my dad about it who said Dean was right to call them hills from a geological point of view, whatever that means, but that he would rather think of them as mountains. Funny thing about Arkansas is all the names of towns that make you think you are somewhere else faraway such as Stuttgart, Hamburg, Dutch Mills, London, Paris, Melbourne, Egypt, Greenland, and El Dorado.

Today me and Walter took a shortcut down the cliff to the convenience store. Here's what happened:

I told Mom I was going out to play football. She said it was too hot for football, but I told her we´d be playing in the shade. I didn't tell her that in the shade meant the woods and going down the cliff. I knew the cliff was high and dangerous, so I took my football helmet. When I got outside, the heat hit me like a hammer. I had shorts on and about 20 pennies in my pocket. I met Walter in the backyard who was laughing - he was always laughing at me.

``What did you bring that helmet for?´´ Walt asked.

``For protection,´´ I said. He said that we were going down a cliff not down into a coal mine. He had a point so I put the helmet down and we started walking deep into the woods.

``Wait, stop, rattlesnake,´´ he said. I wished I had kept my helmet because I had heard that those snakes can spit venom. ``Ok, let's go slow over there to the trail,´´ said Walt. As we walked, he said, ``There, do you hear it?´´ And he looked over at me and said, ``Walk again,´´ and I did and he said, ``That´s you.´´ He asked me what was in my pockets, and I told him some pennies. Walt laughed, brushed off some sweat from his head, and said, ``Right on, man.´´ We followed the trail to the edge of the cliff. It was so steep that I got a little dizzy, like the time I went up to the top of the Hot Springs Tower with my family. It also made me think of those cliff divers again.

Walt said the key to going down the cliff was to go slow and careful, then he started running down it like a roadrunner, rocks and dust flying everywhere. I slid down carefully on my butt, digging into the soft rocks with my heels. The rocks were thin and loose and looked like the arrowheads Gagan had framed in a glass case on his wall next to the moose head. He has a little farm near the Arkansas/Oklahoma border where he found them. I picked up speed and started

sliding down the scree real smoothly like I was on the giant slide over there by the football stadium and pizza parlor where you can watch them toss up the dough and make the pies to live banjo music. By the way, I had an accident on that giant slide and nearly burned off all the skin on my arm going down. I won't go down it again. I´m no thrill seeker. I heard Walter say, ``Come on Robbie, you can do it.´´ As I got closer to the bottom, I got up and ran the rest of the way down all slouched over.

I realized that we were right at the convenience store on JFK Boulevard. I turned around and looked up at the sheer cliff and couldn't believe we had just gone down it.

``So Bobbie, are you going to buy me that slushy?´´

``No, I only got 20 cents,´´ I said, putting my hands in my pocket and mixing the pennies around so that he could hear them again.

``What happened to all your money?´´

``I had to give it all back.´´

``You what? Did you get the stuff back?´´

``Keri did.´´

``I bet Truck wasn't too happy.´´

``He was surprised but said that 'we were all right' and then broke all the bones in my hand when he shook it. Keri wouldn't shake his hand. She tried to get her Sunflower doll back, but Melinda started crying, so she made some kind of deal to play dolls with her.´´

``So, Walt, what can I get for 20 cents?´´

``You can get gum and candy or baseball or football cards, that's it.´´

``Can I get both?´´

``Sure, you can buy two packs of cards, and 10 pieces of gum or candy.´´

I actually knew that but pretended I didn´t to take Walt's mind off the slushy I couldn't buy him.

One lesson I´ve learned is to stay away from the gumball machine. It usually gives out old candy that's been baking in the sun. The faded gumballs come out stale and brittle. If you want gum, better to buy the packs or wrapped pieces.

I ended up getting a pack of baseball cards and a pack of football cards, five hard candies, green apple and grape, and five pieces of bubblegum, two grape and three regular. Walt didn't get anything. He had already spent his allowance on comic books. Comic books are supposed to be funny, but most of them aren't. Gliptoid, one of Walt´s favorites, sure isn't funny - just look at the monster - I mean he´s one of the good guys, but he looks like he´s been eating a steady diet of dead sycamore trees and poison ivy. I put the stuff up on the counter and dumped out all my pennies. One rolled off the counter and hit the floor where the clerk was standing. He picked up the penny but looked mad, like he wasn't going to let me buy anything. He wore an eye patch and had long oily hair. He had a big turquoise ring on his index finger. What does that even mean, index finger? His fingernails were dirty and short like he'd been chewing on them. But his pinky finger had a long, sharp, pointy nail. I think he recognized me from the last time I was there with my mom, but I don't think he was wearing an eye patch then. But he knew we had gone down the cliff because our clothes were all dusty, and I was afraid he might tell my mom the next time she goes in there. She wouldn't be very happy with me because I was supposed to be playing in the backyard. Well, I was sort of still in my backyard. His one red and teary eye stared at me.

``Is there a problem here?´´ Walt asked. And then the guy pushed off the change from the counter into his hand, put the pennies in the register without counting them, and bagged up my candy.

``Y´all be careful now.´´

He knew!

I asked Walt if he wanted some candy, and he took two for energy then started running up the cliff making a big cloud of dust. I could taste the dust and wished I had brought my football helmet to keep it out of my lungs and off my face. The air smelled like tar and tasted like clay. And man was I dirty as if I had just gotten out of a coal mine. When I got to the top of the cliff, Keri was standing there holding my football helmet and shaking her head. She knew too!

Off the Cliff

I'm not supposed to eat butter but do. I first ate it when I was 4 out at a restaurant on the old highway. I like the old highway because of those signs, balloons, and flags at all the car lots. My favorite is that one with the big red circles that moves like a train signal. The restaurant serves steaks and some other fancy stuff. Come to think of it, I´ve never had any of the fancy stuff there. We usually just order up some fried chicken, but no matter what you want, this place always serves a basket of hot rolls with pads of butter on little cardboard squares and little tubs of honey with the peel off covers. The rolls are so fluffy and delicious, especially with butter and honey, but if you eat too many, they'll fill you up. And add to it some salad with extra Thousand Island and crumbled up crackers from the cellophane packs, there's a meal right there. The problem is when the fried chicken comes, I´m nearly full. And when I don't eat my chicken, I get yelled at, well, not really yelled at but told to eat, ``Robbie get to work on that drumstick.´´ I like the drumstick best because I can eat it with one hand, but I don't know why they call it a drumstick because it doesn't look like a drum or a stick but more like a miniature caveman club.

A few nights ago, I had a dream that an old lady from the restaurant, who might have been the cook, came around with a white apron on to talk to all the customers. I hadn't as much as nibbled on my chicken when she came around and said, ``Sonny, you don't like my chicken?´´

I started shaking and picked up the drumstick which turned into a fish that said, ``He´s allergic to chicken.´´

She then took the fish and fried it and brought it back to me. ``Here's your fish, Sonny, go on and eat it now.´´

When I looked up at her, she had turned into a giant chicken. I tried to scream but couldn't. My mom and dad hadn't noticed what was going on because they were too busy talking to friends in the booth behind us. Keri had walked over to the fish tank that had some carp, crappie, and catfish in it. The tanks were three clothes dryers from a laundromat lined up in a row. The fish in there were spinning around like they were being dried. Keri was trying to figure out a way to feed the fish, and then I woke up a little dizzy. What do you feed carp in a dryer anyway? Maybe they'd eat left over fried chicken. I hear carp eat anything. I wonder if fish would eat chicken fried steak. They sure got the teeth for it and might need them too because if that chicken fried steak isn't pounded just right, it'll be as tough as beef jerky. I'm not a beef jerky eater, but I'd rather chew beef jerky than tobacco. Chew and spit. I wonder if anyone ever tried to blow a bubble with the stuff.

The last time we went to the restaurant, I decided not to eat a roll, to leave room for my chicken. Instead of the roll, I had me a cracker with butter, honey, and a dab of Thousand Island. I like blue cheese and Russian dressing too, but the Thousand Island here is the best, better than what we get at the grocery store. But be careful with the pour, and most of the time I'm not, because it'll shoot out real fast in the glass bottle that has the hole at the top with the metal flapper. Anyway, my cracker needed something else, so I added sugar from a packet. It tasted a little bit like taffy but not so hard. Walt says dentists take teeth out with lake water taffy instead of yanking them out with a wrench. Mine just fall out. I was going to try another cracker but decided to scrape the butter off that little card with my teeth when Mom saw me. ``Stop that. It's bad manners. Now sit up straight and behave.´´ My manners and posture in a booth are bad. I just can't sit still. I'll bounce a little, then slump and slide down under the table like a snail looking for loose change. But the snail wouldn't be able to pick up the change; he'd just slime right over it or maybe sit on it for a while.

At home, I have to make my own ice cream because we never have any. I mean we'll get a gallon sometimes from this specialty place down by the Arkansas River, but it goes so fast. Everyone in the house loves ice cream but not the same flavors. Keri likes strawberry. Mom likes butter pecan. Dad'll eat any ice cream but likes blackberry and peach most of all when he can find some. He likes all things peach including peach torte, peach cobbler, peaches and cream, and just the peach. Me, I'm a rocky roader, mostly for the marshmallows. I don't really like chocolate and the nuts are just okay and I could eat just regular marshmallows if I wanted, but you put it all together, the marshmallows, chocolate, nuts, and it works. Also, I like the name, Rocky Road. It´s a great name for an ice cream. Speaking of roads, I want to be a truck driver when I grow up. I'd drive a truck with 18 wheels, air breaks, and a horn that I'd blast every time a kid in a car wanted me to. When we have some ice cream in the ice box, I eat as much as I can and sometimes sneak a scoop with my hand. If anyone found out, I'd be in a heap, no, a scoop of trouble. Better to make my own and I do. What I do is peel the wrapper back from a long stick of butter and cut a piece with a spoon. By the way, I don't like knives because there was a man with a bloody one in a horror story that me and Keri read sometimes, and it scares the heck out of me. There's a picture of a guy with a bloody cleaver outside a house at night with a crazed smile who wants to attack someone inside. And you can see the family in the living room playing a board game having a grand time, not worried about a thing. And I've had this nightmare about a crazed butcher chasing me around. So I put the butter back in the refrigerator all neat like I found it. Then I squeeze out a little honey from the sticky beehive shaped bottle, or I'll use pancake syrup if I can't find the beehive bottle, and then mix it around in the butter and add a spoonful of sugar. My grandmama calls me Shuug and sometimes my other grandmama, Gammy, says, ``Give me some sugar, Sugarman,´´ when she sees me. The first time that I remember her saying it to me, I told her I didn't have any and she frowned and looked hurt, so I said that I'd try to find her some and went to the cookie jar where I knew there would be some sugar cookies. I sneak in there every chance I get, but always get caught right before I put my hand on the lid. ``Robbie, stay out of the cookie jar.´´ She has radar ears and I believe counts the cookies. You know what I like better than cookies? Going out on Highway 62 and stopping for a cheddar cheese burger at the Drive Inn. We'll go in the station wagon and I get to put in the eight-track tapes but don't like the music much - old-time country singers and stuff you hear at square dances. And next, I get me an ice cube from the tray and put it in the mix, then spoon it all into my mouth. Once, I wasn't thinking too good and put the cube in my mouth first and accidentally swallowed and choked on it. For a couple of seconds, I couldn't breathe and my head froze, and I think I turned blue and just as I was about to die, it went down, and I was ok. That's happened to me a few times. I know I shouldn't be sucking on ice cubes, but I can't help it, especially on a hot day in summer. And the best part is crunching it when the ice gets smaller. I'm an ice cruncher, and so is my dad, but Mom says it´s bad manners. We have this electric thing that crushes ice, but it's so loud that I think the neighbors probably complain, which is why we don't use it too much. Talk about bad manners.

One day I was so hungry my stomach was growling like a wildcat, so I just cut me a piece of butter and had the spoon to my mouth when my mom said, ``What on earth are you doing?´´

``Nothing.´´

``Put the spoon down right this instance,´´ Mom said.

``But Mom, I'm hungry.´´

``We´re fixing to have lunch. What are you doing eating butter? It´ll make you sick.´´

I knew we were fixing to have lunch, but I didn't want real food, which was going to be tomato soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, and milk. Besides, it was too hot for soup and I'd rather have butter and some ice. I don't like butter all that much and prefer margarine, which looks better than it is like it could be icing for a cake or vanilla ice cream. It didn't take much butter to fill me up either. I knew one bite was all I needed. But on this day, I was caught red-handed. I imagined that my mom would sentence me to my bedroom for the rest of the day or rest of the summer. That would have been the worst punishment, and I would have had to break out of my bedroom and run away. Maybe I'd take Clyde the tom cat with me and my pet mouse Cee Cee. Whiskers wouldn't come with me because she's Keri's cat and likes her better. But Mom wasn't all that mad, and I kind of knew it, but like Bud, who got sent away to military school for mowing down some flowers on purpose, I too overreacted to things. It's my imagination. It gets the best of me sometimes and into a lot of trouble. Keri says that I'm a little too dramatic like the cliff divers. I should have just dropped the spoon and apologized or said something like I was going to make a bread and butter sandwich for a snack, and I almost did. I guess that would have been too easy. She might have even let me do it, make the sandwich that is. I don't know what got into me, but instead of being calm, I ran out the kitchen door that goes to our backyard like a rabbit being chased by a dog with the spoon still in my hand. I ran wild into the woods waving my arms to keep the tree twigs out of my face, and Mom ran after me a little ways yelling, ``William Robert, now you get back here right now.´´

By this time, I knew I was in big trouble, and I knew I couldn't give in and go back, and suddenly I had this great idea, or what I thought might be. I ran for a little ways more into the thick of the woods, and when I knew she couldn't see me, I stopped and yelled, ``AAAAAAaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh,´´ starting out strong and then softer and softer like I was falling off the cliff at the edge of the woods. I was hiding behind a tree but could see her. She didn't respond like she didn't hear me, so I shouted again with a little more desperation, ``AAAAAAaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh.´´

This time she looked worried and hollered, ``Robbie, Robbie, Robbie,´´ scared like I had never heard her before. Then I thought she might not even know about the cliff and might be upset for another reason. Mom started crying softly, sniffling a little bit like she had a cold. Was she disappointed in me? And if she didn't know about the cliff, and heard me crying out in desperation, maybe she thought I'd been attacked by a bear - we'll it wouldn't have been a bear because I don't think we have bears in Lakewood, I mean we might, but I don't think so - they live out in the Sylvan Hills of Sherwood, I believe. There is a dog down the street that looks like a bear. It's the one that lives behind the fence that has a ``Beware of Hog´´ sign. When he stands on his hind legs, he looks about ten feet tall and you can see his teeth that are like walrus tusks, and he snarls like he´s about to attack. I think the only way to calm him down is to throw him a raw steak. Or maybe she thought a spitting snake got me which is the reason I've been asking for a pair of sunglasses all summer. Or maybe she thought I was getting squeezed by a python. I don't think we have those kinds of snakes in Lakewood either; Mom grew up in the country and knows about snakes. I then thought about the cougars. Lakewood has cougars, but I've never seen a real one. The closest one to a cougar I've seen is Clyde. Clyde may be a cougar for all I know - he sure looks wild and is twice the size of most other cats, but he's friendly and just eats dog food and birds. But if she thought I had been attacked by a cougar, I was surprised that she wasn't crying harder or calling the ambulance or the firefighters or something - I mean I might have just been lunch for a hungry cougar. I wasn't sure what to do next, so I took a chance and

came out of hiding and walked toward her. I figured I wouldn't be in so much trouble if she realized I was still alive.

``Mommy, I'm ok, it's me, Robbie. Don't cry. It's alright. I'm ok.´´

She put her arms out, and I ran to her. She hugged me tight and told me to never do that again, and I promised I wouldn't. A little later, I got to thinking about the promise, and wasn't sure what it was that she didn't want me to ever do again: eat butter, run away like that into the woods, or go off the cliff, if she thought I had, but I made a promise to myself to never tell her that I had been back in the woods with the snakes and cougars going off, well, down the cliff, all summer long.

Second Fish

Last time I went fishing, I caught my first fish ever and walked it home, still hanging from my pole. I told you about it, remember? And it came back to life, briefly, only to be snatched up by my cat Whiskers, who ran off to the woods with it flapping in her mouth. Well, I caught another fish the other day, my second ever, back at Lake #2, but not at the Old Mill pond because I was after a big fish and not a tiny bream sardine that my dad might have spread on a cracker and had with a cup of instant coffee for breakfast. The thing was not much bigger than a minnow. Say, what do you call a baby fish? Walt says a baby fish is a fry - you know like a small fry. He jokes around a lot, and I never know when to believe him. But I don't think he´s right on this one. Fry sounds too much like a small french fry like you could buy at one of the burger joints up on JFK in Park Hill. Now if Walt is right, and a small fish is a fry, I don't get it because when people have a fish fry, they don't fry up baby fish. Fish need a better name for their young ones. I mean, bears have cubs; cats, kittens; dogs have puppies; frogs, tadpoles. Keri and them were calling my first fish a sardine and a minnow, but they didn't say that I caught a fry. I might catch a fly and did once, but not a fry. Anyway, what I caught the second time was huge, and the funny thing was that it turned out to be the kind of fish Whiskers would like. No, it wasn't a tuna fish or salmon. What´s with the word salmon? If you try to sound it out, you´d say it wrong, kind of like the word colonel. And I was going to give it to Whiskers until something very strange happened. And I'll tell you about that in a second. Actually, Whiskers might not have eaten that fish and instead become best friends with it like me and Cee Cee. Even though Cee Cee is invisible, Whiskers can see and talk to him. They say cats can see in the dark and see things that aren't there. I can see in the dark too, trouble is, I can't see anything. I've heard that cats live in the fifth dimension most of the time, wherever that is, and I think that's where Whiskers goes when she falls asleep, at least that´s what Dad once said. I was looking for the fifth dimension the other night but never found it. Mom said I had been sleep walking. I do that sometimes, that and talk in my sleep. I have a story about that too, but for another time. They say cats don't like mice, but when I asked Whiskers if she liked Cee Cee, she said, ``Meow,´´ and then licked her lips. Keri said that's because Whiskers wants to eat Cee Cee, but I think Whisker's whiskers tickled or else she got some hair in her mouth. She's a long-haired tabby and looks like a raccoon. Her whiskers are long like fishing line and sometimes I find them on the carpet near the couch. I guess they grow back. The first time I found one, I thought it might be a nylon string from this toy guitar I have. Too bad a guitar string doesn't grow back when you break it. Maybe someone will invent a set of guitar strings that grow like whiskers. Maybe I'll see if Dean can do it. But it can't be that hard to do; maybe all you do is plant the broken string in moist dirt with some used coffee grounds and a handful of night crawlers. After a few days, I would expect to see a long guitar string or more worms. More worms for Red!

Me and Walt went back down to Lake #2. You can fish on the other lakes too if you want. I think you can get you some big ones on Lake #1, the skiing lake, if no one is out skiing. The swimming lake has some good fish in it on the part of the lake that's not for swimming, which is most of it. And you can do other things on Lake #2 besides fish, like, well, fishing is about all you can do on it really until it freezes up, which it almost never does. I guess you could go ice fishing on it, but nobody does, or at least I've never seen anyone fishing down a hole on the frozen lake. It'd be too cold anyway to stay out very long, or long enough to catch anything. Actually, Lake #2 has only frozen over once that I can remember, and that was last year. Instead of fishing on the ice, me and some friends went sliding across the lake. I sat down on the ice and curled up in a tight ball, and Gene Lee pushed me, the same Gene Lee who broke my arm on Magnolia Street, and who I wasn't supposed to ever play with again. I tell you, with that push, I glided nearly clear across the lake like a hockey puck. Some grownups on the bank yelled at us to get off the lake. They were waving hysterically like they could see the ice breaking around us. If we had ignored the grownups, which we did, they wouldn't have been able to do anything to help us. They weren't coming onto the lake, that's for sure. I just waved back like they were saying hello. I wasn't worried about falling through the ice because I only weighed about 35 pounds, but Gene should have been worried - he weighed more like 135 pounds. Anyway, that day was so cold that I blew smoke out of my mouth like automobile exhaust coming out of a car on a cold winter day, and I could feel icicles growing on my eyelashes. I have long eyelashes and they are always getting stuck in my eye, and sometimes a lash will get stuck inside my eyeball. When that happens, I have to soak it out with a hot rag. Then my eye stays red for a few days. Maybe that's what happened to the guy's eye who works at the convenience store. Well, after only about 20 minutes on the lake, I was ready to go inside for some hot chocolate with the tiny marshmallows that I like better than the chocolate. My feet were frozen solid. I just had on some green rubber boots over my tennis shoes. I was only wearing one wool mitten because I had lost the other one. The one I had on was for my left hand and it had holes in the finger tips, except for the thumb. I made a snowball and threw it with my bare right hand which turned out to be a mistake because my fingers started stinging. I tried blowing on them, but it only helped for a second, and I was running out of breath. Gene said I probably had frost bite, and I was thinking it was bad but not as bad as a snake or a spider bite. Thinking back on that day, slipping and sliding on the lake the way we did was more dangerous than we knew because somebody, as I found out later, had drowned in one of the lakes, I forget which, years ago on an icy cold day.

I got my push button rod and reel and brought along a big blob of some stinky cheese that my Dad bought at the cheese store in Little Rock off Cantrell near the Arkansas River. My dad said catfish love stinky cheese and this stuff was really stinky; maybe it came dead right out of the river - all pink, orange and red like a rainbow trout; it might have even dropped from Jupiter. My mom actually loves the stuff on a saltine cracker with pink wine. When we got down to the bank at the spot we thought would be good for fishing, I put a chunk of the cheese on the hook with a red and white bobber and some split shot on the line so that it cast right and sank good. I gave the line a good sideways cast. Walt was fishing for alligator gar he said, so he was using a top water bait that looked like a minnow with a bunch of hooks in it. I've never seen an alligator gar in the lake, but Dean shot a big Buffalo carp the other day with a bow and arrow. He showed us a picture of it. It was about as big as a buffalo and mean looking, but it didn't look like a buffalo. It looked more like a walrus without the tusks. He was going to fry up a mess of carp balls that he said looked like hush puppies but tasted fishy. Now I like me some hush puppies, but I don't know about carp balls; never had them and don´t plan on having any either. The only fish I like are fish sticks, fried catfish, and the red snapper from that fancy restaurant near Asher Avenue with the antique velvet chairs. I like the name red snapper. Red happens to be my favorite color. I´ve also been practicing snapping my fingers and have gotten pretty good, but can only do it with my thumb and index fingers. How is that possible you ask? Well, here´s the secret - I´m double jointed and can bend my thumb all the way back to my wrist. By the way, what are fish sticks? I know this: I've caught sticks before that I thought were fish.

I sat down and waited for a bite. Walt had stopped fishing and was skipping rocks, only they weren't skipping too good and just making big splashes because he was heaving in these giant rocks that were more like boulders. He said the splashing would wake up the catfish because they usually hang out at the bottom of the lake goofing around in the mud and brush down there. I thought all that splashing might attract an alligator if the lake had any. But I actually thought Walt was probably scaring away all the fish. And then I saw my bobber go under, and I gave the line a good yank and started reeling in as fast as I could. The pole was bent so much I thought it was going to snap. And sure enough, there was a nice fish on my line. I tried to reel it all the way in but couldn't because the fish was rolling and splashing so much. The thing was about to drag me into the lake. I thought that maybe I had snagged an alligator or a buffalo carp. So Walt waded in the shallow water and snatched it up with his catcher´s mitt. It turned out to be a catfish, and a pretty good sized one too, two or three pounds at least. It was squirming around in the glove and grunting and sort of growling too. And then I heard it say, ``Bad cheese.´´ I swear that's what the catfish said.

``Walt, did you hear that?´´

Walt was laughing. ``Sounded like barking. Hey Robbie, maybe it's a dogfish.´´ At least we had it on a leash, but it wanted to break free.

``Let´s put it back before it kills us both,´´ I said.

By the looks of the monster, it could have too. We didn't have a stringer or a net, and I didn't want to walk that fish all the way home with it on my bent pole talking to me. There was definitely something fishy going on. Walt could have walked it home in his catcher's mitt, but the thing might have chewed it up or left slime all over it and a fishy smell that would never go away. Actually, if Walt ever plays catcher in a game, it might make the batters sick, the smell that is. I was going to tell Walt that but I thought better of it. Walt took the hook out of its mouth. We could see the cheese was all gone. And boy did that fish smell; I mean bad like it hadn't taken a bath in two weeks. And the breath. It could have used a whole bottle of mouthwash. Walt

put the glove with the fish in the water to release it. It didn't move at first but after about 10 seconds, it swam off real slow, then picked up some speed and disappeared. He dunked the glove about 10 times to get all the slime off it and then splashed me with it. I smelled fishy after that and wanted to go swimming later at Lake #3 before it closed. It was just across the street, but you have to have on a bathing suit. I wonder why people don't wear bathing suits when they take a bath. And why isn't there a shower suit - there's a shower cap, but not a shower suit as far as I know. Come to think of it, there's no bathing cap either. Anyway, I bet I'll never see or catch that fish again. I wonder if anyone ever caught the same fish twice. I don't want to catch this rascal again, that's for sure, and if I do, he'll be bigger and meaner than ever and get me back somehow - maybe bite my hand off or knock me out and drag me into the lake. I think I'll start fishing with my football helmet and a baseball bat just in case I come across him again. And I think I'll go back to fishing with worms, crickets, and white bread.

I asked Walt if he thought fish could really talk and he said, ``Of course, they got mouths right and this one did say something, you heard him yourself.´´ And I definitely did. When I got back to the house, I told Keri that I had caught a giant catfish and that it had spoken to me.

``Yeah, right. Let me guess, you were with Walter and he told you fish talk.´´

``But they do,´´ I said, ``Why else would they have mouths?´´

``And what did it say?´´ Keri asked.

``Bad cheese,´´ I said.

And Keri started laughing so hard and loud that she lost her breath and could only say, ``ba ch.´´

``WHAT? I'm serious!´´ I said.

Then Cee Cee goes, ``Come on Robbie. Let's get out of here.´´

Men in the Moon

Some people say there's no man in the moon, but they're wrong; there are two in the moon. I saw them on TV. They looked funny bouncing around like robots wrapped up in aluminum foil with those helmets like the ladies wear at the beauty parlor.

I went out last night to see them. I lay down on the grass in my front yard next to the big oak tree and looked up at the moon peeking through the leaves and branches. A few acorns fell and landed beside me. It seemed early in the year for that. I tried to pry the acorn out of the shell, but it wouldn't budge. I wanted to whistle with the shell, something I´ve learned how to do that not too many other kids can do. My dad taught me, and it's our secret for now. I couldn't concentrate with the tree droppings, the buzzing sounds of the cicadas, and the percussive chorus of katydids. The grass blades tickled my arms, and I could feel some ants crawling on me, so I brushed them off and kicked and squirmed around like I was being attacked by a big family of them. I think I was sitting on their hill. Good thing they weren't fire ants. There were a lot of stars out and probably even the Big Dipper. Walt says it looks like an ice cream scoop, but I've never seen it.

Dean snuck up on me which made me sit up fast like being awakened from a bad dream. Once I sat up like that but was still asleep and started talking, but I don't remember what I said or even doing it.

``Robbie, what are you doing?´´

He must have seen me moving around on the grass and thought I was crazy.

``Looking for the man in the moon.´´

``It's not man in the moon, it's men on the moon. There are three up there in a spacecraft. Did you see the moonwalk today?´´ Dean said.

``Yeah, that was funny them bouncing around like that,´´ I said.

``You know why they were bouncing?´´

``Why?´´

``Zero gravity.´´

``What's that?´´

It made me think of my favorite candy bar that I get from the vending machine every time I go swimming at Lake #3. And thinking about it made me drool a little.

``There's no gravity to pull them down; it's like they don't weigh anything.´´

``I weigh 42 pounds.´´

``Well, you'd weigh nothing on the moon.´´

``What if I ate a 500 pound fried catfish and drank a gallon of iced tea?´´

``Doesn't matter, you'd still weigh nothing. You know you won't see them up there with the naked eye because they're too far away. You can't see anything that's too small without a microscope and anything too far away without a telescope.´´ And Dean couldn't see very far away without his glasses.

Just then, Walt came over. I guess he had been listening to us for a while.

``Bobbie, you can see the men in the moon tonight, but only tonight,´´ Walt said.

``Don't listen to him Robbie,´´ Dean said.

``No, you can Rod. If you run all the way down Lakeview Road to the top of Snake Hill, you'll see them,´´ Walt said.

And then, just for a second, I was thinking, 'so if there are men on the moon, I wonder if they saw the man in the moon.' When I lived on Magnolia Street, my friend Lee Roy said that if

you run to the other side of the moon, you would see the man. I tried once, but as I ran, clouds covered the moon, and it got darker and darker so that I couldn't see where I was going and had to stop. Lee Roy said that I'd have gotten to the other side if I´d kept running for just another five minutes. At that rate, I´d have been down in Levy and lost for sure.

Snake Hill is about a 15-minute walk from my house, but I can run there in five. I didn't really believe Walt, but I wanted to go there anyway before it got too dark. I thought I might get a better view of the moon. There are no sidewalks on Lakeview, so I had to run on the road. Every few houses I passed, dogs barked at me - one snarled like he wanted to rip me to pieces. I could see him trying to jump over his chained link fence, but he couldn't clear it. It´s the dog I told you about with the sign on the fence that said ``Beware of Dog,´´ but someone had painted an H over the D. He sounded mean as a hog, but I think he was a German Shepherd, only he´s not the kind of dog you could trust to look after sheep. Herbie passed me on his bike riding with no hands on the handlebars, at least that's what it looked like, but the light may have played tricks on me. The light was his flashlight headlamp which gave off a cloudy glow and helped me see a little better where I was going. The street lights hadn't lit up yet on Lakeview Road, and it was starting to get dark, so I followed his light. The air was thick with mosquitoes and fireflies and they were biting me pretty good, the mosquitoes, and I had a bump that was as smooth as clay on my arm where one of them got me, maybe two of them or the same one twice. I'm pretty sure when I go in, I'll have to slap on some of that salmon colored lotion. I don't get bit as much as some people because I have a weird blood type and take candy flavored chewable B vitamins every day. Walt gets bit more than most, and once he ran out of lotion and spread on some upset stomach medicine, but it didn't help; he said it just made him sticky and smell like wintergreen. The skeeters crawl on my legs too but almost never bite me there because my legs are always too dirty. Biting or not, they were up to no good. Here's a question, why don't mosquitoes bite ears or noses? It's not a joke either, and I don't know the answer. Have you ever met anyone who got bit on the lips? I haven't, although I don't usually ask people that question. Herbie was waiting for me at the top of Snake Hill and when I got there, he went down Fairway Avenue toward Lake #3. I still don't know how he stays up on his bike with no hands going downhill in the dark; he really could be a circus performer or the world's youngest daredevil. I asked Herbie once how he learned to ride a bike, but he just rode away, like he didn't hear me or wasn't interested in giving me an answer. I've never heard him talk and I don't know if he can, but Walt says that he just doesn't like to. I looked up at the moon, but it didn't look any different. I guess I needed that microscope or the telescope thing Dean was talking about. I sure wished the moon would get full like it did sometimes. When I got back, I told Walt the moon looked like a banana.

``Robbie, do you know what the moon is called tonight?´´ Dean asked.

``A banana?´´

``No, but it looks like one, doesn't it?´´

``Is it true the moon is made of cheese?´´

``It is - MOONSTER,´´ Walt said.

I laughed hard for a long time and got the hiccups. I know Muenster because it's the cheese my mom buys at the store. I have to say that I´m a little scared of the grocery store butchers. Once I had a nightmare that a butcher, who had gone mad, was chasing me around a store with a knife, and I kept falling down and having a hard time getting up. And on the shelves, all I could see were big animals with bloody heads. I saw a bear head with an open mouth full of daggers for teeth. I saw Gagan's moose head that he had on his wall, only it was talking in a strange, rough voice speaking some language I'd never heard, and I saw a marlin the size of a car

with a knife for a nose flopping around on ice. It's the only dream I've ever had twice. I'm afraid if I have the dream again, I won't survive it.

``It's not made of cheese; it's made of rocks. Tonight it's called a Waxing Crescent moon. A few months ago we had a Blue Moon - that's the second full moon in a month and it only happens every three years or so. That's where we get the saying, once in a blue moon,´´ Dean said. Mom and Dad sometimes spread blue cheese on walnuts and rye crackers and sip sweet white wine.

``Blue cheese moon. My dad really likes blue cheese, but it stinks. They should call it green cheese because it's green, not blue,´´ I said.

``Right Robbie, it stinks because it's made with fungus,´´ Dean said.

I pretended like I understood fungus and laughed, but no one else laughed.

The mosquitoes were really getting to me. I was swatting them left and right, doing a mosquito dance like a boxer getting ready to fight. At that moment, I needed Cee Cee because he eats mosquitoes for me, but I couldn't find him. Maybe he was up there eating the moon. Cee Cee loves Swiss cheese, but not Muenster. He really doesn't like Muenster; gives him gas, he says, and he has a really hard time pronouncing it. I don't think he likes blue cheese either.

Dean had on some sort of blue camping club uniform with lots of patches that looked like the coveralls mechanics wear. He had a snakebite kit around his neck like always. I sure wish they'd make a mosquito bite kit and also a burned tongue kit. Dean once won a prize at the school science fair for making a fire with the light of a firefly. That's what I heard anyway. I don't know if it's true.

``Deano, you just said the moon was made of rocks; now you say it's made of wax,´´ Walt said.

``Good grief, I don't know why I bother,´´ Dean said.

Herbie was down on his bike propped up against a crabapple tree. You know what we do with those crabapples when they fall? We roll them out into the street and wait for the cars to smash them, but if they miss, we just stomp on them ourselves. Herbie was chewing on a weed and was barefooted. From the light of his flashlight, I could see a frog sitting like it was asleep. Walt saw the frog and ran down to gig it with a sharp stick.

``Hey, don't kill it. Frogs eat mosquitoes. And don't pick him up or he'll pee on you,´´ Dean said.

I was thinking I needed the frog over by me to eat these mosquitoes before they eat me alive. For some reason, they were feasting on my rare blood tonight.

``But he's not even moving; he ain't eating no skeeters neither. Maybe he's already dead,´´ Walt said.

``He's not moving because the light blinds and freezes him,´´ Dean said.

``See, you just agreed with me - he's stone cold dead,´´ Walt said.

``He's not dead you idiot; he's frozen, I mean, immobilized,´´ Dean said.

A frozen frog on a hot muggy night - now that's pretty funny. Herbie took off and the frozen frog disappeared into the dark. I had lost track of time and heard what I thought was a whip-poor-will. I looked up at the oak trees all around to see if I could see one but couldn't. I never have seen one and don't know anyone who has. Dean has never seen a live one but saw a picture of one at the Laman Library in a famous book on birds. He says they're pretty small and blend in real well and come out mostly at night for insects. I wish he'd snack on some mosquitoes and cicadas every once in a while. I heard the sound again but realized it was my dad whistling for me. He'll whistle for me when it's time to go in. He doesn't like to do it because he

thinks I should know to be in by dark. When there's a full moon, it doesn't seem that dark out. And sometimes the street lights come on before it gets too dark, so I don't notice the darkness. I don't argue with my dad, though, because if I do, he'll say I have to be in by 7:00 p.m. or something, and I think dark is a lot later than 7:00 p.m.

I could see my dad standing on the porch with the evening paper folded under his arm. He had on his suit pants and a tucked in white cotton undershirt. He saw me and said, ``Come on in sport.´´ I was glad to get in because I was hot, full of mosquito bites, and hungry as could be. But I didn't want a glass of milk or a cookie, just a candy bar and a root beer.

First Flight

I've been sick with the croup. It got so bad my parents had to take me in the middle of the night to see this old doctor who walks with a bent back and wears a permanent frown. When he pulled out a shot with a long needle in a glass tube, the same kind Gagan´s cows get, I got scared and tried to run out of the room, but my parents caught me. I was kicking but couldn't scream on account of my croup. They would have put me in a straight jacket, but there wasn't one in the room. As soon as they had me still, the doctor stabbed my arm. The pain from the injection hurt like when I broke my arm a few years ago. I think he hit that same bone with the needle. I must have passed out but came to after my mom waved a grape lollipop under my nose, the round one with the rope handle. The doctor said I should stay in bed a few days, which means I might get to take some of that candy aspirin for kids that I like. But there´s a big problem: my mom has to go to work at the school and can´t stay home with me.

My dad is in Morrilton near Petit Jean Mountain at a building site. Last year, he took us out to see the work on it, and our car got stuck in the mud. It was getting dark and chilly. My dad was about to walk out to the highway a few miles away to flag down some help, but Mom didn't want him to go because she was afraid he'd get shot or run over. Just as he started down the muddy construction site road, a man in a `50s pickup truck pulled up. ``Y´all need help?´´ he said. My dad said that we did, and the man, who was wearing a worn feed company cap, bib overalls and cowboy boots covered in dried mud, got out and took a chain from his truck bed. He wrapped it around his trailer hitch and dragged the other end to our car looping it around the front bumper. He got back in his truck and drove forward very slowly so as not to yank the bumper off and pulled our car out. My dad thanked him and offered some money, but the man was quiet and unhooked the chain. As he got back in the truck, he looked at us and said, ``Have faith in Jesus,´´ and drove off. We went on our way to Northwest Arkansas to visit my grandparents, the ones on my mom's side, and got there real late. They were worried and thought we had crashed or something and almost called the State Police to look for us.

My grandparents on my dad's side, who live close to us in North Little Rock, had gone to visit a college in Louisiana that my aunt might attend. Keri is at Camp Ouachita and can't look after me either. I'm glad because if she could, she would tell everyone she had to BABY sit her BABY brother, and I hate it when she calls me a baby. I'd stay by myself, but I can't cook, and I'd maybe burn the house down and eat poison by accident. So I have to go to this tiny town in Northwest Arkansas where Gammy and Gagan live. It's got a population of 612, well, that's what the sign says, but they say that number includes some chickens and cows. Chicken coops and barns outnumber the houses there. It has a little town square with a post office that has gold letter boxes with combination locks and posters of criminals alongside news of the annual apple festival. It also has a diner, a barbershop, where the owner Buddy gave me my first haircut when I was 2, a bank, and a feed store. The place has two grocery stores where the townsfolk do their trading, one on Main Street, and another on Highway 62 near the Oklahoma state line. It's a friendly place where everybody knows everybody, and folks in pickup trucks honk to say hello. People talk a little differently too saying things like, ``Well, reckon I'll go down yonder directly,´´ and ``Ya dang tootin´.´´

It takes too long to drive up there and back to North Little Rock in one day, so we're flying to Fayetteville's Drake Field about 30 minutes away from my grandparent's house. My mom will fly back the next day, but I'll stay a week or two. Dad says we'll be on a plane with twin turboprops. He says the bird holds 50 people and goes about 340 miles per hour, 120 at

takeoff! Our family sedan only goes up to 120, but Dad just drives it 70 most of the time on the freeway.

I know airplanes. For my birthday, my granddaddy gave me a book on the history of flight with pictures of every airplane up to 1969. Me and my dad sometimes go out to the airport on Saturday mornings to watch the planes take off and land, and we've seen the twin props out there. Those birds sound like the vacuum cleaners at the car wash but 100 times louder. Dean says Southern Skies is a great airline that has never crashed any of its planes. Dean knows everything. My dad said, ``The kid is awfully bright.´´ He's like the set of encyclopedias Granddaddy has in his bookcase next to the fireplace. He's got a book for every letter of the alphabet. I like to close my eyes and pull one out and then flip through it reading about whatever entry, usually one with a picture that catches my attention.

My dad drove us out to Adams Field. Walt told me Adams Field was named after President Adams, but Dean said he was wrong. Walt is pretty much wrong about everything, according to Dean, who said both Adams Presidents died before the invention of the airplane, so it made no sense to name the airport after them.

``Hey Dad, was Adams Field named after the Presidents? Walt said it was.´´

``No son, it was named after a pilot, I believe.´´

``What did he do?´´

``Well, he served our country.´´

Walt and Dean argued a lot. Walt is 12, I think, but he looks a lot older. Dean is older, maybe 15 or 16 because he drives the family car around the block sometimes. He wears black magnifying glasses. He usually wears jeans with a tucked in t-shirt or a uniform with medals and patches on it. Yesterday, Dean was wearing a Hendrix College t-shirt. I asked him who Hendrix was (I'm always asking a lot of questions) and he said something about a guitar player. He asked me if I had heard about Woodstock, and I actually had but couldn't remember exactly what it was. He asked me what I knew about Woodstock, and I just said it had to do with the woods. Dean shook his head and said that when I'm older, I'll hear more about it. And then he added that Hendrix was a College named after a Methodist Bishop.

``A guitar playing Methodist Bishop?´´ I said.

``No, no, you don't get it. They're two different people.´´

We heard this scratchy announcement that our flight was boarding. It sounded like a warped record and came through this big loudspeaker with a fan inside it. We walked onto the tarmac up to the airplane. Actually, it's a jet - it says SUPERSONIC below the side cockpit window. As I looked up, I felt like an ant next to a giant bird. This bird had a green stripe going around it and a gray top with the letters Southern Skies in red over the passenger windows. The tail looked like a great white shark fin with a red stripe. The engines on the wings had huge propellers with four blades that would sure make good fans for Lakewood Elementary classrooms on hot days.

I don't know how this thing can fly; I mean it's crazy really and maybe not even a good idea to get on it. It must weigh as much as a building. My dad says it weighs about 30,000 pounds, so at 45 pounds myself, I really am an ant. ``Mom, do we have to go? I'm feeling a lot better.´´ But we did have to go. My heart was racing faster than an Indy racer drives as we climbed up the stairs they put up to the door of the airplane. The stewardess, who looked like a nurse with her blue uniform, waited at the top of the steps. The pilot standing next to her near the cockpit smiled at us. He had on dark aviator glasses. The two smelled like a mix of aftershave and bug spray. We've had so many monster mosquitoes in Lakewood this summer that the light

blue pickup trucks have to come out and spray at night. The stuff smells horrible. The city warns that it´s not good for pets, so we make our cat Whiskers come in at night. The nurse showed us to our seats. I might need a nurse if I get to feeling bad.

For as big as the plane looks on the outside, it was smaller on the inside than I thought it would be, almost like a bus. The plane smelled like cigarette smoke and one of those portable johnnies. It had two seats on each side and a long passageway with red carpet to the back of the plane. Walking down to our seats made me think of the Park Movie Theater on JFK Boulevard. I got a window seat.

The engines came on. I could feel the vibrations in my seat. Out the window, I saw the propellers moving, and then we started slowly rolling out to the runway. Then we stopped. ``Flight attendant, prepare for takeoff,´´ said the captain on the speaker, and we started picking up speed. The engines got louder. We must have been going 120 when the plane lifted off the ground, and then something kicked the belly of the plane. I wondered what it was and looked at my mother thinking `oh no, this is it, the end,´ and my mom handed me a paper bag that said ``occupied´´ on it.

``What's this?´´

``It's a barf bag.´´

I thought she said bark.

``Bark?´´

``No, barf bag for when you feel sick to your stomach.´´

I took it, laughed a little at the thought of a barking bag and was thinking it'd be nice to have some crayons for later. I hoped they had the seventy-two pack with the crayon sharpener.

As we flew higher and higher, I could see clouds close up, and we bumped through some too. Some were thick like Dad's shaving cream. One was as light and swirly as cotton candy. I saw a family of marshmallows - made me hungry. The captain came on the speaker and said that we were flying at an altitude of twenty thousand feet. I was thinking that's a lot of feet. What if he said we're at twenty thousand arms. But twenty thousand feet, that's got to be at least eight miles up.

We hit a bump and had a choppy ride there for a minute like we were being rammed by a bumper car. Some kid screamed, and I thought about giving her, or maybe him, my bark bag.

The nice nurse waitress came up to offer us something to drink.

``What would you like honey?´´

``Do you have root beer?´´

``They don't have root beer, Robbie. He'll have a juice,´´ Mom said.

``We have orange, apple, and grape.´´

``GRAPE!´´

I love grape because it gives me a mustache.

``And for you, Ma´am?´´

``I'll have a glass of white wine.´´

She brought out the drinks and gave me a pilot's wing pin and some peanuts. And she gave my mom a blue perfume bottle of wine on a tray with a real glass, not a plastic one, and some cheese and crackers.

After my grape juice and peanuts, I needed some chewing gum. My mom gave me a stick of gum to chew. As I chewed, the gum picked up some bits of peanuts and became more like food, so I spit it out into the bark bag and asked for another piece, but Mom said to wait until we start descending, that I'd need it for my ears.

``My ears? Why do my ears need gum?´´

``To help with the pressurization.´´ I was thinking about how weird it would be to put a perfectly good stick of gum into my ears and thought I´d actually need two pieces.

One guy across from us was smoking a cigarette without a filter. I was watching him. I didn't know you could smoke on an airplane. If grownups can smoke on the plane, I wonder if kids can blow bubbles on the plane or play hopscotch or marbles down the aisle. The guy's hands were shaking and some ash dropped on his knee. He blew a smoke ring, which was kind of neat. My mom asked if the smoke bothered me, and I said that it didn't and then croup coughed so she said to the man, ``Sir, would you kindly put that out? My son is sick.´´ He was pretty much done anyway. He didn't say anything but gave her a bad look and then smashed it out with a trembling hand into the little ashtray on the seat arm. I opened mine like he did to see what was in there, but all I found were some hard balled up pieces of different color gum stuck to the sides. The man started wheezing, and I thought he might not be able to breathe without his cigarette. When I looked up toward the cabin, I imagined I was in an iron lung. I saw a picture of one in the encyclopedia. The inside of the plane had the same shape, and we had windows all around. The guy could sure use one. Maybe I could too.

I got to thinking how strange it was to be up so high in the sky with all the clouds. What if the plane makes a wrong turn and goes to the moon? Or what if I get to my grandparents, and they look like my grandparents, but they're not.

My mom gave me another stick of gum as we started going down. She told me to chew with my mouth open. I got to horsing around pretending I was a cow chewing cud and the gum fell out of my mouth and onto my shoe. I decided not to put it back in my mouth or into one of my ears.

``Flight attendant, prepare for landing,´´ the captain said.

Learning to Read

I've done a lot of things for the first time this year. I learned to catch fish, to whistle, to tie my shoes, to tell my left from right, to play cards, to snap my fingers, to swim, to ride a bike, to roller skate, to shoot a basketball, and to clip my nails. But the biggest thing I learned to do was drive. Just kidding, it wasn't that. Actually, learning to read finally has been my proudest first so far. It has not been easy, though, and still is tricky. But I didn't learn magically like Keri, who was what my mom calls a ``self-taught´´ reader. I don't think Keri taught herself. I´m sure my dad had something to do with it because he was always reading to her. I didn't much like to be read to, except by Grandmama, who read to me before I took a nap on the days I was sick and couldn't go to school. Keri might have indirectly helped me learn to read by reading out words that she saw when we were together just to show off, or so it seemed to me. She'd read a big word and then call out the letters one at a time and then say the word again like she was in a spelling bee. She was an excellent speller. She´d smile at me knowing I couldn´t read the word and raise her head up ever so slightly, s-l-i-g-h-t-l-y, to show her pride.

Not knowing how to read is more frustrating than not knowing how to play piano, another something Keri can do that I can't. Do you know how frustrating it is to see words and not know what they mean, especially when practically everyone else around knows? I was young, of course, and still am, but I felt stupid like I should know. I could speak and understand English like anyone, no problem, but I just couldn't make sense of the letters and all that. Reading, if a first grader can do it, can't be all that hard to figure out, not like driving a car with a shifter. Now that's got to be hard, especially for a short kid like me who can't come close to reaching the pedals or seeing over the dash. And even though my mom is a second-grade teacher who teaches reading, she never had time to teach me, and I don't think I really wanted her to be my teacher; she's just Mom. There's a law against teachers teaching their own kids anyway, which is why I don't have her now for the second grade at the school I attend. No, I learned from a very good first-grade teacher, and before I knew it, I was reading and writing. It was sort of magical come to think of it. We sounded stuff out in our assigned groups reading Fun with Joe and Betty and learning about Mike, and Fido and all of them. Each of us kids got our turns reading out loud. If you could say the words well when you read out loud, you were put in Group 1, and if you had a little trouble saying the words or just needed more time to sound the letters out and all that, well, you were put in Group 2. Joe, Betty, Mike, and Fido lived in the most

boring family in the history of the world, all smiles and about as real as mannequins, but most of us were just glad to be able to read the words, which were designed to give us the keys to reading anything we wanted to read. Ok, we could read most anything, but not understand it all, which is why they made us buy books from the catalog at our grade level, although some kids were reading classic horror stories at home and making really scary drawings about them in class. One classmate, Conrad, who was one of the better artists in the class, drew a tree with a terrified face that looked on as a house was being swept away by a ghostly wind.

Reading gave me power. I can now read outside the classroom. When the sno-cone truck comes, I can see the letters s n o and know that someone forgot the w. I could read that it also sold ice cream and popsicles, although I knew it did from the pictures. I liked the rainbow rocket popsicle, the looks of it mostly, but prefer the taste of the snow cone. I knew the stop sign said STOP, which was what I figured it said, even though Keri had been telling me all along that it said HALT. I saw a stop sign once where somebody had painted out the T and P, and it just said SO. But English is tricky, which is what my second-grade teacher says, because of all the weird spellings. She told us not to bother with rules but just to memorize what the words look like and what they mean. She told us to sound out what we could and pay attention to the letters; that it's all about the letters and the context, which is how you can tell the difference between deer and dear; flea and flee. If you tried to sound out the words tough and eight, you'd get yourself into some trouble. The other weird thing about English is that some words have the same spelling but sound different, like tear and tear, so you have to match the sound to the context.

Back before I knew how to read, I had to guess what the words said. Street signs were my favorite. Sometimes they didn't say anything at all, so you had to read the drawing. The one with the curved lines meant, ``Beware of the rising river with snakes in it.´´ The one with the kid without shoes and feet was a warning for kids to wear shoes because we might step on broken glass and lose our feet when gangrene set in. That happened to my mom when she was a kid, but not the gangrene part; she still has her feet. She asked her mom, Gammy, if she could go up to the town square and Gammy said, ``Not without shoes because you'll step on glass and slice your feet up.´´ But she went barefooted anyway and actually did step on glass and nearly cut her feet to shreds. The sign with the bicycle was to remind parents to buy their kids a bike. It didn't work for me, and I still don't have the bike with the green banana seat I want, which is in a window at a bike shop out on the Sylvan Hills Highway. The sign with the car and the squiggly lines behind the tires didn't make much sense to me except maybe to show that a car can drive on springs if it needs to, and it might when it rains or snows, I thought. The traffic light with red, yellow, and green had to do with racing.

Before I knew how to read, I used to practice with Cee Cee. I figured he wouldn't know the difference anyhow. They say that to get good at anything, you have to practice for thousands of hours. I had this idea that it would all come to me if I just picked up a book and tried hard enough. I started out with the newspaper. There was a picture of the lunar landing and some words about it. I knew about the landing and had seen it on TV and everything. I had even looked up at the sky the night they landed but couldn't see them.

So I started my story when Cee Cee said, ``What are you doing?´´

``Well, I'm reading about the moon landing.´´

``How? You can't read.´´

``I'm practicing.´´

``How can you practice something you don't know how to do?´´

``What do you know, you're just a mouse. And how do you know I don't know how to read? What if I told you I did know how to read?´´ I said.

``Well, you'd be lying, because I'm always with you, and I would know if you had learned.´´

``Yeah, well maybe you were sleeping.´´

``I don't think so,´´ Cee Cee said. And I continued and just made up a story that the rocket got stuck on the moon and the men had to set up a tent and eat cheese for a month until they were rescued by a giant rocket-powered mockingbird from Arkansas. And Cee Cee said that he wanted me to talk a little more about the cheese. He asked what it smelled like and what else they ate. He was up on his hind legs, licking his lips and twitching his whiskers a little.

``You just said I couldn't read,´´ I said.

``Ok, you can read, so can you read about the part where I help rescue the astronauts?´´ Cee Cee said.

``Ok, so Cee Cee the mouse was the pilot on the mockingbird, and when they landed, Cee Cee had to dig out the muddy cheese where the rocket was stuck. After he finished digging out the rocket and got onto the back of the mockingbird, she couldn't take off for all the weight, so they had to leave Cee Cee on the moon,´´ I said.

``NO, it doesn't say that, STOP, that's enough practicing for the day,´´ Cee Cee said.

``That's right, it doesn't say that,´´ Dean said, who had overheard our reading session. ``Robbie, remember I told you that people are weightless on the moon? That wouldn't be the problem you described. By the way, who were you talking to?´´

I was going to say that Cee Cee doesn't weigh anything because he's invisible and that a mockingbird isn't a person, but I didn't want him to know about Cee Cee, and I didn't want him to know I couldn't read, so I just said, ``Uh, I was practicing a play I'm doing in my school, and I had to read the part of the other people in it.´´

``Reading, that's impressive, normally kids don't learn to read until the first grade. You are precocious,´´ Dean said.

``I am not,´´ I said.

``No, Robbie, I mean that as a compliment.´´

``You do?´´ And he did.

``But what story is that in your hand? I don't think that says anything about a mockingbird flying to the moon,´´ Dean said.

``What, this? It's just a prop. I had to memorize the story, but we have to pretend we are reading it for the play and all. Well, I got to be going inside, lunch is ready.´´ When I walked off, the slightly ripped morning newspaper page blew into my face and chest and stuck there, blinding me for a second.

Walter is not much of a reader, except for comic books. Once before I could read, he said that with the comics, you can pretty much read the pictures and forget about the words, which made me rethink the idea of what it means to read. If you skip over the words and read the pictures, isn't that reading too? If you know what that sign means with the squiggly lines and some words under but can´t actually read the words, isn't that reading? I asked Walt about it once, and you know what he said? He said, ``That's right Bobbie boy, it's reading alright, but just because you read something, don´t mean you understand it. That sign don't say, ``Snakes Crossing,´´ it says, ``Slippery When Wet.´´ You read it, but you read it wrong.´´

``Maybe I didn't read it wrong. Snakes are slippery and when wet even more slippery. And if a car runs over a slippery snake, well that could spell disaster.´´

``Good try there Ribbie, but it's not the snake that's the problem, it's the road. A snake that weighs 10 ounces won't be a problem for a 4,000-pound car, but a slippery road will be a problem. So you could read the pictures wrong or understand the words wrong, but that'll still be reading, not good reading, but reading.´´

And so what I don't understand is why they put us into reading groups based on how well we say the word. A good reader is the one who understands the meaning of the words, not the one who can say them like a radio announcer. But Walt was saying that a good reader is the one who reads what he wants to read and understands because he likes the topic. A bad reader is the one who tries to read something he doesn't know anything about. ``If you start reading and no picture comes to your mind, you'd best put that book down, because it ain´t for you,´´ Walt said. He's right about that. I can't read just anything, only what I like. Walter may not be smart like Dean, but he´s smart in a different way and sometimes says things that make me think about something differently. ``Bibbie, you know why you got that sign wrong?´´ Walt asked.

``Yes, I was thinking about snakes,´´ I answered.

``That's right, you were thinking about snakes, not about driving. When you start driving, why that's when you'll read those signs right.´´

I won't be driving for another decade, so I'll stick to reading football cards and all about airplanes, two of the things I like the most, and even if I get the tricky words wrong, the pictures tell the story.

Boring Day

It's not much fun being sick when there isn't much to do to pass the time. Oh, there's stuff to do, but some of it I can't do because I´m supposed to be resting. I never quite know what resting is. Does it mean sleep or just lying around like a log? Once I'm awake, I can't lie still for long. So I get up. Gagan leaves breakfast out for me before he sets off for the farm. Biscuits and white gravy with sausage bits today, and it'll be pancakes with maple syrup and bacon tomorrow. He'd have taken me with him to the farm, but Gammy won't let him. In a few days, I bet she'll give in if I show her how much I've been resting. She's still sleeping.

The house is pretty big, and there are all kinds of things to explore, but I get a little lonely with no one around except Cee Cee, who doesn't have much to say these days. After breakfast, I head upstairs to the attic. There's a lot of stuff stored there. Gammy keeps coffee cans of all sizes up there, hundreds of them. The cans still smell like coffee, and some still have coffee beans in them. I even found a few cans that had not been opened and looked older than the others; must have been rations left over from the Great War. I like to set up the empty cans and play drums on them by tapping the sides with a pen and the tops with my hands like a bongo player. They´re good for shaking too when I find some stuff like paper clips, pennies, and marbles to put in them. My performances can get a little loud, and I'm supposed to be resting, so if I wake Gammy up, she'll know I haven't been. So I put the cans up and go to Gagan's bedroom. He's got a bunch of ribbons that he won at the rodeo for barrel racing, I guess, or it might have been steer roping. He's good at that kind of thing. The only thing I can steer is a bike. I tried to ride Babe, the horse, once but didn´t stay on for very long. I looked like a peanut up there on top of her. I rode a little ways with Gagan holding the reins. Babe was gentle and knew I was scared. But I was more than scared of her, I was, and still am, allergic to her. As it turns out, I´m allergic to most short-haired animals, which would include some breeds of cats and dogs; I can be around them, I just can't or shouldn´t touch them. When I do, my eyes swell up like big gumballs and turn red as a radish. And then my throat starts itching, and I get sneezing fits. Hay does me the same way.

I don´t think I´m allergic to cows or pigs. They don't seem to bother me, but I bother them. They don't like me around. When they see me, they start squealing and mooing like I'm about to steal their slop or use a cattle prod. Gagan has to give the cows shots to get rid of pink eye, and they don´t much like that either. They don´t carry on as much as I do though and seem more annoyed than anything. Those syringes are not ordinary ones either. They come in big glass

tubes with long needles, like the one I got for the croup, or was it tetanus? Once, I fell off this old- fashioned bicycle I'd been trying to ride around the driveway and landed on a rusty pedal. It punctured my calf muscle. Blood was pouring from my wound. After Gagan cleaned me up, he took me to see a doctor for a tetanus shot. I think the doctor doubled as the town veterinarian because he used the same syringe as the ones they use for the cows on the farm, and like before, they had to get about five people to hold me down. I was screaming like I was being tortured, which was the truth as I saw it.

It's still early, and I have all day to do nothing at all. From Gagan's bedroom window, I can see the magnificent magnolia tree that towers over the other trees in the yard. The thing must be 500 years old and stands at least 100 feet tall. In full bloom, it has all these white flowers that look like little fan blades of wavy icing that you put on cake and smells like perfume from the square blue bottle. I like to stare at that tree and pretend that I'm in some faraway place, like Tahiti, or California. Actually, I am in a faraway place up here in Northwest Arkansas. If anyone were ever looking for me, they'd never find me here. The little town is on the map, but with a population of about 1,000, well the sign says 612, but that´s old, it's one of the places you pass to get somewhere else. Let's see, it has a giant grain tower, about 2,000 chicken coups, a town square, farms, apple orchards, feed stores, a drive-in burger joint, an auction house, another burger place in a mobile home out on highway 62, a bank, a barbershop, a post office, and a few small supermarkets. I guess it's got ``pert near everthang ya need,´´ as the townsfolk say, but it's not a place that attracts many tourists and folks around here like it that way.

From Gagan's room, I went looking for the toys stored in some cabinets at the base of the walls just outside the bedrooms. These are old toys, not what I like playing with so much, but an antique toy is better than no toy at all. And these toys were my uncle´s from the `40s and `50s: a black and white cop car, and one of those long cars that the gangsters used to drive; an army supply truck with a canvas cargo covering; a jeep with a missing tire; a cap gun with a holster but no caps; and some army men covered in cob webs. There was even a jack in the box missing the jack. It was a nothing in the box really. My favorite toy was a plastic B-17 Flying Fortress that looked like it had been shot out of the sky. The landing gear had snapped off, the props for the motors on the right wings were broken, and the ball turret cap was gone, as were the guns and the gunner. To imagine what it might have been like to be in a crash landing, I slid the plane on its belly down the steep carpeted stairs that lead to the front room. It spun around a few times as it tumbled from one step to the next coming to a stop upside down on the second to last stair. Thanks to the courageous grounds crew, some green army men that I had posted at the foot of the stairs along with the patrol car, the B-17 crew was rescued shortly before the plane burst into flames.

It was time for me to do some work down at the enormous oak desk, which was the nerve center of the house with a two-way radio and a typewriter. The drawer in the middle was full of pencils, pens, pads of paper, paper clips, pennies, thumb tacks, erasers, glue in a bottle, some fishing lures, and jigs. The drawers on the sides were business files that I knew I had better not touch. I got out a pad of paper and a few pencils and began to doodle. That's what I do best. Keri calls it abstract art, but it's just something to do to keep me busy, and since I can't really draw, I just start scribbling and zigzagging some here and there adding different shapes and filling in some with pen and crayon. From time to time, I'd study what I had created and saw something in it that looked real - a cloud, a dog, a bale of hay, a lake, and then as I continue to doodle, what was once a lake, was now a field, and later, a dark cave. When the drawing no longer looked like anything, at its abstract worst, as Keri would say, I gave up and left the command center.

To the bathroom next. This is a long carpeted room with his and her sinks and a long mirror with cabinets opposite that you can see in the reflection. On Gagan´s side, the side I use, he's got this machine that serves up hot shaving cream. I´m learning how to shave for when I need to, so I'll push the button and the cream comes out like soft serve ice cream, only it's hot. It sort of looks like marshmallow cream, and I wish it were. I put some on my face, and I look like the world's skinniest and youngest Santa Claus. I grab Gagan's razor and remove the blade. I really don't want to slit my throat. I give myself a smooth shave. I rinse off my face and slap on some aftershave. It stings a little but smells good. Gagan has a hat rack, and I chose the houndstooth fedora, but it swallows my face, and I put it back before I get it dirty with shaving cream or toothpaste. It's his favorite hat, and he'd notice if I got anything on it. He wouldn't be mad though; I've never seen him mad, ever.

I opened the medicine cabinet and saw lots of pill bottles with the child-proof caps that my grandparents had a hard time opening. I sometimes had to open them for them. One drug in a glass bottle scared the living daylights out of me - nitroglycerin. Walt told me that this kind of pill was an explosive and only safe when swallowed. If you shook the bottle, it might blow up. It was next to the pink lotion for bug itch and the little glass bottle of iodine. I don´t like iodine because it's what they put on my wound when I had my biking accident, and it hurt like you wouldn't believe. Walt had told me that iodine was radioactive, and it does have a kind of strange glow to it, but at least it wasn't explosive. And right after the stinging iodine treatment with that plastic dipstick thing they use to apply the stuff, I got the shot. I told you a little about it before. Man what a shot it was. I protested at the top of my lungs with screams as loud as the tornado warning system for the town. When that didn't work, I relaxed and promised I'd never have an accident again, that the iodine was all I needed, that it was powerful enough and even glowed in the dark. The doctor just told me that it wouldn´t hurt and that I should look the other way. As I did, he stabbed my arm with the needle. It hurt, and the medicine burned going in. When he took the needle out, I felt relief but could tell my arm muscle was going to be sore. Having tetanus or ``lock jaw´´ might have been less painful than the iodine and the bovine shot. That's what I thought until the doctor showed me some pictures of what tetanus can do to a body, and then I shut up real quick. You don't want tetanus, and I sure didn't. Next to the iodine was a tube of those tiny pills, a green bottle of back pills, and a tin of laxative. I knew about those little chocolates, and like the nitroglycerin pills, I knew to stay away.

But thinking about chocolate always makes me hungry, so I thought it a good time to raid the kitchen, which is what I tried to do. I managed to slink into the kitchen under the radar and put the foot stool up to the counter to make my ascent to the cookie jar. And just as I put my hands on the jar, Gammy yelled out, ``Outta the cookie jar,´´ which surprised me because I thought she was still sleeping. She didn´t see me, but somehow knew what I was doing. I opened the jar anyway to find dozens of fresh homemade sugar and chocolate chip cookies waiting to be eaten by me. But I would have to wait. I did have a sweet backup plan. There was a jar full of butterscotch and cinnamon hard candy in the living room that had been neglected for too long. I told Gammy, who by this time had gone into the kitchen to work on lunch, that I was going to the attic to look for treasure. I made a lot of noise going up the stairs and then softly walked back down to the candy jar, opened the lid, extracted two candies, placed the lid back on without making a sound, and walked back up the stairs as lightly as possible to escape detection. I popped both candies into my mouth. The mix was not quite as satisfying as a cookie, but it did the trick until after lunch when I was rewarded with two cookies for eating all my fried okra, black-eyed peas, tomatoes, and roast beef with gravy. And get this, after dessert, I asked if I

might have a hard candy from the candy jar, to which my Gammy said, ``You go right ahead, Sugarman.´´ And go right ahead I did.

On the Farm

I'm not a farmer; I'm just a little boy. But Gagan is a farmer. And that's not all he is. He is also a carpenter, a fisherman, and a hunter. I don't think there's anything he can't do or hasn't done. When I visit, he nearly always takes me fishing or out to the farm. He likes company. I haven't been able to go out with him lately because I've been recovering from the croup, but I'm much better now, thanks to the cinnamon and butterscotch croup drops I take. I've rested up about all I can and have been pretty bored inside these last few days, so now Gammy says I can go to the farm. Gagan goes about three times a day. He'll just say out of the blue, ``Well, I reckon we'll go to the farm,´´ and I better be ready too because he doesn't wait. Sometimes we take the station wagon there, but today we took the old tan 1956 pickup truck out. It's got the shifter on the steering column and is a little beat up like it had been in the war. It's got four eyes, but only three work. I asked Gagan why it needs four and he said because it gets so dark in these parts that two aren´t enough. It does get dark out at the farm, which doesn't have any electricity except for a few electric fences. To see anything at night, you have to carry a lantern; a flashlight won't do. And since there are no street lights out on the old dusty dirt road to the farm, having four eyes throwing out light helps, especially on a cloudy night. The last time I went to the farm, we took the station wagon. It doesn't have four eyes, but it has four doors and air conditioning, which you need for Arkansas summers. It was right before dusk so we only had a few minutes to feed the animals. We made the rounds, and by the time we finished, it was already dark. We went back to the barn to lock up. Gagan had a flashlight, but it was flickering like a firefly and then died on us. By the time he'd locked up and turned to walk toward the wagon, it was pitch black and we couldn't see anything. I now know what it must feel like to be blind. We bumped into the wagon and Gagan opened the door and told me to slide in, so I did. He got in and he said, ``Well, I declare, the steering wheel is gone.´´ He was searching for the gas pedal and couldn't find it either. He asked me if I could see anything, and I said I couldn't. He wanted to know if I could feel the steering wheel, thinking we might be on the wrong side, but I couldn´t. And then he started laughing. It wasn't funny to me. I imagined that we were in an episode of one of those science fiction shows and that we were in that fifth dimension. Then he said, ``Robbie, we have to get out because we´re in the back seat.´´

Now things aren´t so bad when a full moon is out with all the stars and Venus. You can see your way ok, even without putting the high beams on. And you can guide your car by the stars. Tina, a waitress at the diner in town, keeps a giant red and green star lit on the roof of her house, which is a ways down the road. It's always lit, all year long, and when we are driving at night, we can see it a mile off which helps us know where we are and how long we've got till we get to the end of the road. It's like a lighthouse guiding farmers back home safely.

Now the old four-eyed, down to just three, hauls a lot of stuff in it, hay, tires, saddles, oil cans, feed, fishing poles and tackle, horseshoes, lumber, even me sometimes when the weather's nice. And there's a knob on the back for pulling Gagan´s boat and a little homemade aluminum camper he made with what looks like a bunch of tin cans and a sheet of zinc for a top. It's got wooden furniture that he built inside it, and it has enough room to sleep two. Gagan calls the pickup his workhorse and says it's like having 200 horses under the hood. I was thinking it'd probably be better to feed that truck hay instead of gas. It'll go practically anywhere, except to the fishing pond which is at the bottom of a steep rocky hill that only the jeep can reach. If the pond were in Lakewood, it´d be Lake #4 which is tiny and has nothing but lily pads. Cows and horses cool off down at the pond and sometimes drink from it. I've never caught a fish from the

pond, but Gagan has. I bet there are some monster bass living in there. And there are some other things in there too like snakes, turtles, and water bugs. That jeep is even older than the pickup truck, and I think it came from World War II. It's faded green with bouncy, torn leather seats. The thing is so rugged that you could climb straight up a mountain with it, or drive it down the Grand Canyon. But mountains are a long way off except for the Boston Mountains that are just down the road a ways and to the right, or is it the left? I still have trouble with right and left. The thing with the Boston Mountains, which aren't in Boston and are part of the Ozarks sort of, is they aren't mountains, says both my dad and Dean whose dad is a geologist. Mountains, hills, it doesn't make any difference to me; I like them just the same. The mountain air is different. It's thinner and makes my lungs work harder. I went hiking on a trail last year near Cedarville way out in the sticks, and as I climbed up some rocks, my feet felt heavy, and I had a hard time catching my breath. I needed a tank of supplemental oxygen. The mountain air is thinner but sure smells good like a clean shirt washed with fabric softener. And there's always the smell of wood burning off in the distance, not a forest fire or anything, but like someone has a wood stove going cooking up some vittles with all the fixings. Gagan used to work in Dutch Mills and knew a lot of people who lived up in the hills, and he points out where they lived, but there were no landmarks, just woods, not even trails, as far as I could tell. Sometimes we´d see an old shack with boarded up windows, or an abandoned rusted out trailer home in a holler down the way. There'd be other signs of life or past lives on the side of the road - old washing machines, rusty septic tanks, and rows of chicken coops that had seen better days.

My grandparents live in hill country. I've got the Ozarks in my blood, and when I'm there, in the thin air, I know I'm not in Lakewood anymore. Lakewood doesn't have mountains, except for the cliff behind my house with the rocky trail down to JFK and the convenience store. Now Little Rock has the Heights, but it's not really a mountain, just a rock I guess, and not even a very big one if names mean anything. If you want mountains, you have to go North, North of North Little Rock, North of Lakewood, way north, up near Oklahoma and Missouri. And the mountains are the only place where you can hear the owl and whip-poor-will talking to each other at night and see big screeching birds of prey soar, circle, and dive in the daylight as if practicing for an air show.

Anyway, we didn't go fishing today or to the mountains and couldn't have because the jeep had a flat tire and some engine trouble. We were just going out and about in the pickup. We stopped off in the barn for some feed and looked at the tall bales of hay that I had climbed on once before. But I can't do that anymore. I can't wear a straw hat, or even touch hay and can barely be around it because I'm so allergic. Once after rolling in the straw, I sneezed 60 times in a row, which is my personal record. But I didn't feel like sneezing and wheezing with the croup and all and didn´t want to live in an iron lung for the rest of the year. Gagan knows I'm allergic, so he quickly filled up some grain buckets. I took one too and we put it in the truck bed and drove out to the pigs across the highway. It's not really a highway. Why do they call them highways anyway? Some of them look low to me. The pigs, they've got a nice setup really. It looks like a mini farm with a little tin barn they can go under for cover, and they've got a big yard for slopping around like they do. They aren't very polite, though. They look unhappy like they'd rip your head off if you stared at them for too long, and they grunt like, well, like pigs. But they weren't pigs really, more like hogs, wild as could be, big too. After all, this is Razorback country. Gagan dumped some feed into their troughs, and we went on our way.

Next stop was the cows. They were just standing around munching on grass and hay with big pieces of straw coming out the sides of their mouths. One was just chewing cud, it looked

like to me. Some stared at us and wouldn't move, even when we bumped them with the pickup truck. I don't know if this was just stupid behavior, or if they were trying to protect their young or keep us from eating their food, which I had no intention of doing. One mooed continuously and sounded like a tuba player hitting wrong notes. They say you can corral cattle with a trumpet or a fiddle. They are attracted to the sound and don't quite know what to make of it. I don't know if it's true, though. Once I played kazoo for a cow, but the cow seemed more annoyed than anything and responded by peeing.

We drove down to the chicken coops, but I didn´t get out of the truck because, to be honest, I´m a little afraid of the chickens. I don´t like chicken all that much either in any form be it chicken salad, chicken noodle soup or chicken livers, Whiskers favorite. I do like fried chicken and hard boiled eggs but that´s about it. Even though I´m mildly allergic to chicken, when I eat fried chicken or a hard boiled egg, I don't swell up or turn blue and choke or pass out or anything like that, I just get indigestion, but it's a weird kind of indigestion that I feel in my back. The chalky stuff doesn´t help, and the feeling just passes with time. I'm usually ok by the next day unless I have fried chicken for breakfast, which I never do. Some people have chicken and waffles, but I don't like waffles. I can only eat pancakes with lots of maple syrup or sorghum molasses, and I don't think chicken'd go with that; sausage and bacon, yes, chicken no. Even when I go to the Waffle Barn Cafe, which is next to never, I order pancakes, but I have to be careful with the eggs. I´ll order just the yoke of a hard boiled egg, but sometimes they get the order wrong and serve me a runny egg, or just an egg white or one sunny side up. On occasion, they just send out the egg with the shell, and I have to peel it. I´m horrible at peeling eggs and make a mess doing it. Once I extract the yoke, I´ll salt it heavily and wash it down with orange juice or an orange soda, if they have any. I don't actually like oranges because they too are hard to peel and stain the undersides of my fingernails. I do like mandarin oranges, though, and can eat a whole can of them with a fork and wash them down with the juice right from the can, but not all of it because it´s so sweet.

Last stop was to see the horse Babe, who you know about. She's my grandpa's prize-winning horse. He only has a few horses, and Babe is the only one anybody can ride. As small as I am, even I can ride Babe with a little help up on the saddle. Babe may not be bigger than the other horses, but to me, she's huge, reddish brown with brown eyes twice the size of a baseball, well, maybe not a baseball, with eyes the size of golf balls. I wonder if everything looks bigger to her because of the size of her eyes - like I wonder if a fly looks to her like the size of a bird. Even though I'm allergic to horses, I begged Gagan to let me ride her. He didn't mind, and I don't think he understood how anyone could be allergic to a horse. I didn't quite understand it myself, but I am, and I knew better than to push my luck, but I did. So he helped me get up on her and then with me holding onto the knob of the saddle, Gagan held the reins and led us around the corral. Babe, as gentle a beast as ever there were, snorted, and moved her head up and down a few times taking care not to bounce me too much. And good thing too, because it was a long way down and she weighed about as much as the pickup truck.

Sunday at Spark´s

The late church service took forever, and I was getting hungry. On this Sunday, Brother Boyd delivered a powerful sermon from the book of Leviticus that I didn't understand. I doodled on the program with one of those mini golf pencils they keep next to the pledge cards. I tried to make Keri laugh by drawing an airplane with eight propellers that looked more like a flying spider, but it was me who lost control and drew a pinch from Mom and a bulldog scowl from Mrs. Johnston in the pew across. I like airplanes but not spiders, except granddaddy long legs; now they are ok; giant, but gentle.

And it might sound like I don't like church either. It's true that I get fidgety and can't concentrate on what's going on for more than a few minutes. Sometimes, no, most of the time, my mind drifts, and I find myself in another world until it's time to stand and sing a hymn, which I don't mind doing, even though I don't usually sing. I follow along in the hymnal book and just mouth the words and imagine that what I hear is my voice, although some of what I hear is pretty far out of tune, especially from Mr. R. I don't want to say his name because he might get mad if he reads this. What gets my attention and keeps me coming back to church, even though I don't have a choice, is the pipe organ, for it is through the pipes and not the pipes of Mr. R. and not Brother Boyd's sermon either, that I understand the word of God. It's not exactly words that I hear, to tell the truth, which is something I should be doing when thinking about church, telling the truth so help me God. No, I don't hear words, but the notes and chords of the Almighty when the organist gets going good, and she does sometimes, sometimes so good that she forgets to stop, but that´s ok with me. I can almost see the notes coming out of each pipe, even the tiniest one, and each note appears as a different color from the giant crayon box, sharpened just right to fit the pipe, the deepest bass note booming in burnt sienna.

It's a Spark´s Inn Sunday. Honestly, I prefer the cafeteria at the North Park Mall where I can see and select what I want or the place out on the old highway for the rolls and chicken, but I don't make the decisions, and I don't pay for the meals. I couldn't even afford the tip. Spark´s Inn is a fancy place where diners wear their Sunday best. If you like red snapper, which is what Mom always orders for me, Spark´s is the place to go. I usually eat my fish fried, but the snapper comes out red straight out of the oven, and it´s not filleted, so you have to deal with the tiny little bones that are like the tiniest organ pipes from church. The place is so fancy, the waiters don´t take orders from kids. Once, I tried to order a ground chuck burger, but the waiter never even looked at me and my order was ultimately countermanded by Mom; I ended up with red snapper as usual, and instead of lemon lime soda, out came a tall glass of milk. Grownups love the place, and it has the best reputation but gives me the creeps a little bit. The restaurant is dark inside and reminds me of that new scary show on TV with the name I can´t remember. They use candles instead of lightbulbs and have fancy antique dining room chairs with green cushions and high backs that give me good posture, which is no fun. I slump in booths. What a funny name for a restaurant - Spark's. It sounds like a fire, or a match, and makes me think of sparklers on the 4th of July and the spark plugs my dad buys for the car.

I'm not big on fish, and to be honest, haven't caught a really big fish yet except for the talking catfish on Lake #2. It wasn't that big as catfish go, but it did have long whiskers, just like our cat Whiskers, which is why they call 'em catfish I guess, but they don't look much like cats in any other way and don't have hair or anything like that. And they don't meow. The one I caught barked, which I'm pretty sure a cat can´t do, except maybe Clyde. But like cats, they do have tails, I'll give 'em that.

And I'm not crazy about red snapper either, but I like that they are red, my favorite color, and salty like potato chips. I don't know why they named the thing a snapper. I don't think it snaps. It'd need fingers for that. It might snap with its mouth, but that's more like what a turtle would do. I tell you this, if it does snap, I sure wouldn't want to be in the water with it. Lobsters can snap and grab and pull and all that, crabs too. I do know that there aren't any snapper in any of the numbered lakes in Lakewood, or at least I don't know anyone who has ever caught one if there are, and maybe the snapper doesn't live in any lake. Gagan has never caught one at Beaver Lake or Lake Tenkiller. I haven't heard of them coming out of the Arkansas River either, but maybe they come out of the Red River. I believe red snapper is a deepwater ocean fish, not a freshwater fish, which is why they are so salty. Speaking of freshwater, a lake may be called freshwater, but the water smells bad a lot of the time, and most people would rather drink out of a garden hose than drink lake water. The thing with the snapper is all the bones, which I don't much like picking through. I guess you can eat them if you're really hungry, but you'd have to chew them up good, which is not a good idea, and both my mom and my grandmama are always saying, ``Be careful with the bones, Robbie.´´ I wasn't this time. I picked most of them out, but one got stuck between my middle lower teeth. My dentist says these two teeth are so close together that they are almost one. And somehow, I got a bone wedged up between them and it hurt like the bone was pushing my teeth apart.

``Mom, I got a bone stuck.´´

``What are you choking?´´

``Bill, he's choking.´´

``No, I'm not choking.´´ I did once on a chunk of steak the size of a half dollar and nearly died and had to have surgery and everything, but that's another story. ``It's my tooth.´´

``Your tooth is stuck?´´ Keri asked.

``No, the bone is between my teeth.´´

``A tooth is a bone,´´ Keri said.

``Robbie, try this,´´ Granddaddy said.

And he gave me a Smokey Burgers matchbook. What I would have given for a Smokey burger about now with barbecue sauce and shredded cheddar cheese. And burgers don't get stuck between your teeth because the meat is all ground up to start with, no bones. Ever heard of a T-bone burger?

``Use the edge like dental floss.´´

And the edge pushed that bone right on out.

``It worked!´´

``Why sure it did,´´ said Granddaddy. He let me keep the matchbook. From that day on, I started collecting them.

By this time, my salty snapper had gotten cold, and I wasn't too hungry for it, but I ate what I could knowing that I might lose my chance at dessert. I went into my food hiding routine. I smashed some fish into and underneath my baked potato and filled up the fancy table napkin with at least three good-sized bites. I looked up and of course, Keri was watching me, so I opened my eyes wide to tell her to keep her mouth shut.

And Keri said, ``Mom, Robbie…is doing a good job eating his fish.´´

``Why he sure is,´´ said Grandmama. ``You better leave room for some pecan pie.´´ Grandmama's home cooking is better than any restaurant food, let me tell you. And no one, I mean no one makes rolls better than her, not even the best restaurants in Arkansas. And her chocolate, pecan, and pumpkin pies are the best. She should open up her own restaurant. We

could call it Grandmama's by the Lakes. They do live near three of them and closest to Lake #3, the swimming lake.

Grandmama's green light for me to leave room was music to my ears, but I probably didn't deserve dessert, to be honest, and I'm trying to be especially good on Sundays. But I could have choked to death on a bone, so I guess, if the truth be told, I'd earned a piece of pecan pie. I don't actually like pecans. The worst thing about the pecan is the shell. When you crack it open, it's hard to get the pecan out of the shell, and sometimes bits of the shell hide with the pecan and those shells are not easy to chew, so I end up spitting out the entire pecan. And just like that bone, the shell bit will stick to a tooth, and I'll have a hard time getting it out. Taffy candy usually works best at getting it out. They work like magnets. Once I smashed a pistachio shell and ate the pistachio but got a piece of the pistachio and shell stuck to a tooth. When I tried to floss it free, a piece of my tooth came out with it. I didn't have any taffy on hand. I almost had to get a crown, but I didn't want to wear anything on my head. I put the bit of tooth under my pillow, but the tooth fairy never paid a visit. She could have at least left a nickel. But she is the tooth fairy, not the chipped tooth fairy. Now when I get a clean pecan, the nut is usually good with a little salt and honey if I can find any - honeysuckle works too, but sometimes the pecan is not quite ripe and it'll dry my tongue out which is almost as bad as a burned tongue. The rotten ones are even worse, and you know a worm has been all through it and stuff. But with pecan pie, I've never had a bad pecan, of course, all that syrup helps. And I've never had a bad butter pecan ice cream, but I don't order it much. Mom likes it, so sometimes they'll be a tub of it in the freezer, next to a bag of frozen peas. Too bad pecan pies don't drop from trees, and too bad you can't scoop ice cream from holes in them. You know something? I'd like to figure out a way to grow a pecan pie tree. I wonder what would happen if I planted a pecan from a pie.

Walnuts give me trouble too, but at least when I get the shell open, the nut comes out more easily. The bad thing about the walnut is that hard shell that looks like a tiny brain. You literally have to crack it open with a hammer or dynamite. What I want to know is why there isn't such a thing as a walnut pie? And why are there so many streets named Walnut and hardly any named Pecan? Do you know anyone who lives on Pecan Avenue or Pecan Circle? I don't. But we do have a street called Pine Tree Loop. I don't know how many pine trees they got growing there, but I would like to know if those trees have pine nuts. They may, but what they drop more than anything are those sharp cones and prickly, sticky needles. I wish those trees would drop ice cream cones that you could eat. It'd be a great snack for us kids when we take a break from playing. Be good to be able to eat the sap too - wintergreen sap. Wintergreen is Grandmama's favorite flavor of mint. My dad likes the clear peppermint ones to keep his breath fresh after smoking a menthol cigarette or drinking a cup of coffee. Instead, the pine tree drops a cone that looks like a pineapple or a porcupine, something you do not want to step on with your bare feet or try to eat. But what about the pine nut? Where does it come from? Are they hiding inside the pine cone? Someone has to know.

We all ordered dessert, and most everyone got pecan pie, except for Dad. I asked for whipped cream, but it looked like what I got was cream that was stirred but not whipped. Granddaddy got a scoop of vanilla ice cream on his which melted right away. Dad had a slice of rhubarb pie. I've never tried it, and don't think I will. It looks poisonous and sounds like it might kill you. I wouldn't want to be stabbed by a rhubarb, no sir.

Time for the check. Our waiter was ok, but he got a few things wrong, which wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't also forgotten the mints with the check. Granddaddy, who always pays the check, didn't seem to notice. I was going to ask where the mints were, but that would

have been bad manners. As we all cleared out, I saw that Granddaddy left a 56 cent tip. I don't know how much he normally gave for a tip, but it was usually the silver coins he had in his pocket, so that shiny penny sure looked funny there. Maybe he had noticed after all. The good news, which makes me think of church again, was that the mint basket was out - the white, pink and blue kind with the jelly center that I eat like popcorn, throwing them up in the air and catching them in my mouth - so I got a handful on the way out. And Granddaddy grabbed a pack of Spark's matches. You never know when you might need a phosphorus floss.

Free Tickets for Life

I've been dreaming lately, day and night, in black and white mostly. I've been trying to dream in color but just can't do it most of the time. Last time I saw some color was in that nightmare, the one with the butcher who had a bloody smock chasing me with a meat cleaver in the supermarket. But why is dreaming in the day called day dreaming and dreaming at night, just dreaming? I doze off a lot, especially in the car. I don't snore, at least no one has told me I do but my dad does. He sounds like a jackhammer. I do drool, though.

We used to have this tan German economy car that we got rid of when we moved to Lakeview Road. I miss that car; at least my aunt and my granddaddy both have one. One day when I was about 5, when we lived on Magnolia, we were going back home from Burns Park where we had been for a picnic and to ride the rides. I was in the back of the car where the luggage goes and also where the engine lives, so it was warm and comfortable for me there. Speaking of cold days, sometimes I'll sit on the dryer in the utility room when the clothes are drying to warm up and think. The soft whirring sound of the machine helps me concentrate and can hypnotize me briefly until a metal button or shoe eye hits the side of the dryer.

I was already sleeping by the time we got on the highway. I must have been asleep for a good 20 minutes, long enough to dream about a contest I entered at Funland. The place has rides and games where you can win stuff and has lots of concession stands where you can buy tasty treats to eat like corn dogs, snow cones, cotton candy, and fried dough, which is best with extra powdered sugar. But on this day, in my dream anyway, Funland was a little different because they had this booth setup called Kid Genius, where for 25 cents, they asked kids who were aged 5-9, 10 questions, and for each correct answer the kid got 10 cents. If the kid got them all right, she´d or he´d win free tickets to the bumper cars for life and either a whip-poor-will stuffed animal with a pull string or a glow-in-the-dark baseball. The kid would also get a t-shirt with GENIUS on it, and a television interview. Keri wanted to play but was too old, so she made me play for the whip-poor-will she wanted. And you know something, they don't expect a five-year- old kid to answer even one of the questions right, not a one, especially a 5-year-old boy like me who couldn't keep still and would rather be going down the rocket slide than answering brainy questions. Actually, I didn't mind playing because it was Keri's quarter, and I was playing for the baseball, not the whip-poor-will that Keri wanted, only I didn´t tell her that. She said if I won, she'd never call me a baby again, and she'd let me take as much of her Halloween candy as I wanted. It sounded like a good deal to me. What did I have to lose, except her 25 cents and Halloween candy, but I'd have my own, only I hoped I wouldn't get any crappy candy or a box of raisins. Once I got a stale popcorn ball. Instead of eating it, I bowled it down the hallway and Whiskers chased after it thinking it was alive.

And so here's what happened. I walked up to the booth where there was this guy who looked like a Pilgrim with a long white beard and a black top hat.

``Ok little fellow, do you want to play?´´

He had one of those clown smiles and a bunch of hair coming out of his ears, and I thought I might better run off to the bumper cars and almost did.

``I guess so. What can I get?´´

``Well, my boy, a stuffed whip-poor-will, or maybe you would like a glow-in-the-dark baseball?´´

``Can I get both?´´

``Well, we'll see, but you have to win first.´´

``What's your name?´´

``Robbie.´´

``How old are you, Bobbie?´´

I held up five fingers.

``Well alright then Bobbie boy, let's get started.´´

``Mister, it's Robbie. His name is Robbie. R-O-B-B-I-E,´´ Keri said.

``Well, that's nice.´´

``Ok, now here are the rules. I'll ask you a question, Robbie and you will have 10 seconds to answer. No help from your sister or parents or anyone else. If someone yells out the answer, I'll have to ask you a different question. With each correct answer, you'll win 10 cents. If you answer all 10 correctly, you'll win some prizes, an interview and best of all this t-shirt,´´ and he held it up and it had some letters on it for a word I didn't know - I hadn't learned to read big words yet. For all I knew, it could have said IDIOT or STUPID. I was excited mostly about the chance to get the baseball.

``First question. Robbie, are you ready?´´

``Yes.´´

``Oh, sorry, wrong answer.´´

``What?´´

``Just kidding.´´

``What city in Arkansas is the name of a tree?´´

I was thinking Lakewood, but it's not a city or a tree. Then I thought of Dogpatch, USA where we'd been before, but it's also not a city or a tree. Dogwood is a tree though and there were plenty in Lakewood. Time was running out.

``Magnolia,´´ I said.

``Why that's right Robbie. You just won 10 cents.´´

``Ok, question number 2. What is hardest mineral found in Arkansas that could make you rich, and it's also inside the Arkansas State flag?´´

I wasn't sure what a mineral was exactly and had the idea that it had something to do with a vitamin but didn´t think the flag had a vitamin on it. I did know what could make you rich and had been to that place digging for some but didn't find anything except a piece of aluminum foil.

``Diamond.´´

``Yes Robbie, that's it. You are one sharp kid. Another ``diamond´´ to you.´´

``Question number 3. Now they get a little harder. Please, everyone, quiet. No hints, no whispering. Name the state where Lake Tenkiller is located.´´

I didn't even have to think about this one because I had just gotten back from fishing there with Gagan. I didn't catch anything, except a minnow to put on a yellow crappie jig.

``Oklahoma.´´

``That's right, Robbie. How'd you know that?´´

Before I could explain, he put down his cards and started looking for some other ones.

``Number 4. Who is Spyder Fuller?´´

That was an easy one. Everybody knows Spyder Fuller or heard of him anyway.

``A football player.´´

``What position does he play?´´

And Keri said, ``Mister, that's number 5.´´

``No, it's part of the same question. What does he play?´´

``Football.´´

``Yes, but what position?´´

``Wide receiver.´´

``And for what team?´´

``That's number 6,´´ said Keri.

``No, it's a three-part question.´´

``Don´t answer it, Robbie, it´s a setup. As your lawyer, I advise you to remain silent.´´

``And then I won´t win the baseball.´´

``The whip-poor-will you mean.´´

``Ok kids, let´s not litigate this. Why don´t we move on to the next question?´´

``He played for the Chargers.´´

``That´s correct. Robbie, why don´t we settle now and you can run off and play. I´ll give you two quarters for your trouble.´´

``Hey Mister, as his legal counsel, I demand all the prizes be paid immediately.´´

``You are right, that three-part question should count as three questions, so we´ll continue at number 7.´´

``Deal Mister, but you have to throw in two baseballs with the whip-poor-will.´´

``Fair enough. Number 7. Name the bird that sings Theodore, Theodore.´´

I knew this one because Red sings that a lot. Red, he's a cardinal and really loud and when he's not doing the Theodore call, he'll start with that whistle that sounds like a tornado warning siren and he'll do these bursts like the sound of a lawn sprinkler that rotates and spits out water.

``A cardinal.´´

``Technically, it's a northern cardinal.´´

``Hey, he said cardinal, a cardinal is a cardinal,´´ said some man in the crowd.

``It's a southern cardinal,´´ yelled another.

And then some old guy said, ``It´s a red bird´´ and got the crowd to call the hogs: ``Woo Pig Sooie.´´

``Ok, ok, no need to get angry here.´´

I don't think the guy asking me all the questions was from Arkansas. The crowd was still calling the hogs and when they stopped, he continued.

``Number 8. What was the last year for the wheat penny?´´

I collect pennies and knew this one. It was a year before Keri was born.

``1958 and the first one they made was 1909,´´ I said.

``That's right, 1958, but I didn't ask you about the first one, so I'll have to ask you a follow-up question: Whose face is on the wheat penny?´´

That was easier than Spyder Fuller. I was getting bored and really just wanted to run along. I did want the baseball but could hear all the kids over on the rides screaming and having fun. One kid walked by with a red mustache from a strawberry snow cone.

``Abraham Lincoln and he was from Illinois, which they call the Land of Lincoln. He was born on February 12, 1809. That's my birthday, February 12. And Tenkiller Lake comes from the Illinois River.´´

``That's enough. No extra points for details. Number 9.´´

``Hey mister, that was another question, we´re on 10,´´ Keri said.

``9, 10, it won't matter because he won't answer this one correctly, no one ever has. If you do little Robbie, it would be a miracle, and you would be the first grand prize winner we've ever had.´´

I was thinking I might not win the baseball and the bumper car rides and my knees started shaking, and I tried to swallow but couldn't.

For the title of Genius, and a glow-in-the-dark baseball and free bumper car rides.

``For life,´´ said Keri.

``Bumper car rides for life and a t-shirt.´´

``With Genius on it,´´ said Keri.

``Yes, with Genius on it.´´

``What about the whip-poor-will?´´ I said.

``And the whip-poor-will. What kind of airplane was the Presidential plane built for President Truman?´´

I knew this one too but was almost too embarrassed to answer, so I nearly answered wrong, but I couldn't help myself and really, really wanted the glow-in-the-dark baseball.

``It was a Douglas DC 6 Liftmaster.´´

``Oh, my God. How did you know that? I mean - hey, who gave him the answer? Who could know that? I mean, how could he know, he's 5?´´

And the crowd started cheering and began to chant - ``Robbie, Robbie, Robbie.´´

``He's a genius, Mister,´´ Keri said.

``Can I have my baseballs now?´´

And just then, a television crew came up to interview me. I really didn't want to answer any more questions.

``How did you do it Robbie? Who gave you the answers? Did he give you the questions ahead of time? How did you know about the airplane?´´

``Hey, TV man, he has a book all about planes,´´ Keri said.

And that was true. Granddaddy gave it to me for my 5th birthday, and it has pictures of all the planes ever, and I look at those pictures in that book every day. And Granddaddy knows more about airplanes than anybody except for maybe my uncle, the pilot. He even gave me a red airmail postage stamp with that DC 6 on it.

``But the bird, how did you know the name of the bird, I mean are you with the Ornithologist Society? What is your secret?´´

``Red is my friend, and that´s what he calls. Theodore, Theodore. And my grandmama has this record with all the bird songs and stuff. It's one of those thin plastic records that came out of one of her magazines, and I listen to it every time I go over to her house. She knows all about birds and flowers too.´´

``But Tenkiller?´´

``Hey, leave him alone. That question was easy. We've been to Tenkiller. Everyone knows it's in Oklahoma,´´ Keri said.

``You know how I know Spyder Fuller? Football card,´´ I said. ``Do you know how he got that name?´´

``Hey, Robbie, is it true they gave you the questions and answers in advance?´´

``Who are they?´´ I said.

``Excuse me. I'm Robbie's Dad, is there a problem here?´´

``No, no problem sir, just wondered how he knew them all. He's only 5, right, what have you been feeding him?´´

``The only hard question for him was the one about the tree, and he said Magnolia by mistake, he meant the mimosa in our front yard. He gets those two confused.´´

``Daddy, we've been there too, remember?´´

``Maybe he didn't guess that one. It's true we stopped off at Magnolia for lunch on the way to visit our friends in El Dorado. Where did we eat son?´´

``Baxter´s,´´ I said.

``No, no it wasn't Baxter´s Diner, that's in Clarksville.´´

And I really just wanted to ride the bumper cars with my baseball and pocket full of dimes. And I also knew that FDR was on the dime without even looking. I had a coin collection and a stamp collection and a bunch of other collections too, but that's another story.

My dad went looking for the guy to get the free tickets for life, but he had left in a hurry. Another reporter stopped my dad and asked:

``Sir, you're the father, right - were you giving him the answers, some kind of signal?´´

``Get lost, Buster,´´ Keri said.

``Excuse me young lady, we don't talk like that. Now go find your brother,´´ Mom said.

``He's probably at the bumper cars already,´´ said Keri.

``Well, just keep an eye on him and, he shouldn't be in one of those bumper cars alone,´´ said Mom.

``If you want a story, go find that game host and ask him why he ran away with my son's baseball and free lifetime bumper car rides. I believe he's a scam artist,´´ Dad said.

``Is your son a genius?´´

``Now if you don't mind, I'd like to enjoy my day at the park,´´ said Dad.

I woke up as we were pulling up to our driveway. It was dark, and I was looking around for my baseball, which should have been glowing in the dark.

``Dad, where's my baseball?´´

``What baseball son?´´

``The one I won.´´

``You won a baseball?´´

``You were there dad, the questions - I'm a genius and won a baseball. It glows in the dark.´´

``Son, do you feel ok?´´

``Genius? Where'd you get that idea?´´ Keri said.

``But my baseball...you were there. You called the guy Mister.´´

``What guy? Go back to sleep,´´ said Keri.

``Sleepy head, you've been dreaming,´´ said Mom.

``No, I won it. Tell her Keri.´´

``Ok, knock it off. Nobody knows what you're talking about, and now you're just being weird.´´

When the car door opened, I heard a whip-poor-will mocking me. Or maybe it was a mockingbird mimicking a whip-poor-will. It was one of those dreams that was so real. I still think it might have happened and that the baseball is somewhere inside the car, maybe under the seats, still glowing and ready for throwing.

Sob

I was ready for first grade because I had already been to school for two years - nursery then kindergarten close to the dusty baseball diamond at Lakewood Elementary where my mother teaches second grade. I had more schooling than most because I stayed all day in kindergarten when most kids just went for only half a day.

During the first week of first grade, we practiced writing small and capital letters of the alphabet. To help us, there was a large alphabet on the wall above the blackboard. This particular board happened to be green, but nobody called it a greenboard. We also practiced copying our names from our name tags that the teacher had taped to our desks. I remember writing Rob over and over and not liking my capital R at all. It looked sloppy like I had gripped the pencil with my left hand and just scribbled like a 2-year-old. I don´t know why we had to use a cigar-sized pencil which could be purchased at a discount from the supply room down the hall. One kid named Lyle said he´d need his dad´s chain saw to sharpen it. I can write some letters with my left and right hand because Walt told me if I wanted to get good at sports, I´d have to learn to do everything with both hands - eat, bat, throw, kick, shoot a basketball, and write. He said I could be a great switch athlete.

I had been thinking about another kind of switch that had to do with language. I tested out my idea on Keri earlier, but she thought I was crazy and maybe I am. Now some of my ideas don´t turn out to be so good, like eating holly berries, but this one was brilliant, or so I thought. The idea was to change the first letter of a word to another letter to make a new word that would be fun to say and easier to write. Take my name. The capital R is a pain to write, so I wanted to replace the R with another letter. C was easy to write and would make me Cob, but then kids might call me corn on the cob Rob. I thought about D, but the D was too hard to write, though I liked the sound of Dob. I liked Hob, but I already had the H in my last name. Lob was a possibility. Wait. Sob. That´s it. I enjoyed making the S. It was more like drawing than writing. It didn´t matter that Sob was a weird name. At the time, I didn´t care what it meant; only what it looked like and how it sounded, and it looked and sounded a lot better than Rob. I had plans to suggest new names for some of my classmates too. I was thinking even to start a name and word changing business. Betty could be Jetty; Carol, Jarol, if she liked the J.; Lyle, Ryle, and so on. The school bell would be a dell. A dog could be a bog. A cat, a gat. I changed our gat´s name to Bhiskers, but she didn´t respond to it, so I had to change it back to Whiskers. Red would be the color zed. Kids would no longer go to school, but to bool.

Before school that morning, I had told Keri I couldn´t wait to go to bool, and she looked at me confused like she hadn´t made out what I said. ``Bool, you know school,´´ I said.

``School I know, but not bool. What are you talking about?´´

``You know, bool, like school, but it´s now bool.´´

``Look, you aren´t making any sense. Why don´t you just eat your cereal and shut up.´´

``Don´t you get it, I´m just changing a letter so instead of going to school, we go to bool.´´

``That´s more than one letter.´´

``No, it´s one letter, b for s.´´ I hadn´t exactly learned to read too well yet, but I could spell a few words. ``S-K-O-O-L.´´

``No dummy, if you just change one letter like that, it´d be Bkool. But school is with sch, not sk so if you change the first letter to b, you get bchool.´´

``Oh yeah, then I´ll replace the first three letters - bool.´´

``Yes, but Bkool is better,´´ Keri said with a smile. ``By the way, who gave you this idea anyway? Don´t tell me it was that Walter again.´´

``No, it was my own idea. So I´ve also changed my name to Sobbie.´´

``Good grief, you better put a lid on this before Mom finds out!´´

``Why? I can change my name if I want.´´

``Ok, but don´t say I didn´t warn you,´´ Keri said.

``And you are now Deri,´´ I said.

``God, you are so weird.´´

That same morning before school started, I was drinking milk in the cafeteria at Lakewood Elementary with all the other kids. I told the girl I was sitting next to, Simone was her name, that she might like to be Limone or change the S in her name to a C if she didn´t much like making a capital S. I think she was sleepy because she didn´t respond just like Whiskers had ignored me earlier.

``Simone?´´

``Did you say something?´´

``Yes, you could be Limone or Simone with a C.´´

``What?´´ she said. And she looked a little frightened. She clearly wasn´t in the mood for a name or letter change and got up and moved.

Then I went and sat down by Peter, and asked if he´d ever thought about being a Deter or Zeter, to which he replied that he had not.

``But you could be,´´ I said.

``What could I be?´´

``Deter or Zeter.´´

``But I´m not.´´

``But you could be if you changed it.´´

``Why would I do that?´´ Peter said.

``Well, if you don´t like writing P and want to work on Z or D, and maybe you like how it looks and sounds.´´

``I never heard no one named Deter or Zeter.´´

``That´s a good point. You would be the first.´´

``Well, I don´t like it.´´

``How about Zete? That´s a good one.´´

``You change your name,´´ Peter said.

``I already did.´´

``To what?´´ Peter asked.

``To Sobbie.´´

``Sobbie?´´

``Yeah, I like the S; it´s like the S of Snake Hill.´´

``Yeah, but Sobbie is not even a name.´´

``Well, it is if you call me that.´´

``But you can´t just change your name like that. Your parents have to do that, but they probably wouldn´t do it because they already gave you a name.´´

The bell rang, and I said, ``Well that´s our dell.´´ And he looked at me with a confused smile on his face and walked off whispering something to Simone, and they both started chuckling.

Later in the morning, as we were lining up for recess, I told some of my classmates that my new name was Sobert, but that they could call me Sob or Sobbie. I got some strange looks, but no one said anything; maybe they thought they had misheard me, or that I was telling a joke that wasn´t funny or that made no sense.

At recess, Carl who I knew from kindergarten but had never talked to much before, told me his nickname was Tex, and I asked him if it´d be ok for me to call him Tex in class, but he wasn´t sure because his mom told him he was officially Carl which is what he had to write on his class work. I asked him how he got the name Tex, and he said he was born in Texas but had never been there. And he paused a moment, and then we both laughed.

``Hey Tex, you ever thought about being Rex?´´

After recess, I was walking back to my classroom when I saw Mom who had been the recess monitor on duty. ``Robbie, I want to have a little talk with you after school.´´ Wow, some kid must have just told her about my new name at recess.

After school, I went to my mother´s classroom to wait for her to get ready to go home. I wish I could have walked home especially on that particular day, but it was a little far to Lakeview Road on foot.

``How was your day, Sobbie?´´ Mom asked.

``Not so good,´´ and I told her that I was sorry, and she asked what had gotten into me. I tried to explain about the letters, but she stopped me.

``Son, you don´t have to be perfect. Nobody is.´´

I told her that Rod Walker´s letters were perfect, and she said that how we write letters were like our fingerprints, and that everybody writes differently. She told me that if I needed help with my letters that she could help, or that Keri could help me. I didn´t think that Keri would be much help and that she would probably force me to write cursive. Mom asked me to go to the chalkboard and write a capital R and I did. She said that it looked fine to her. And it was pretty good, maybe not as good as Rod´s R, but not so bad. She then told me to write it on paper, which was harder to do. I did, and it didn´t look all that bad either.

``But why Sobbie?´´

I explained that I liked the S and that it was easier to make. And she asked me if I knew what sob meant. I said that I did. She asked if I wanted to be sad all my life, and I said no, but that it was no worse than to rob all my life, to which she replied that I was named after a dear friend of my father´s and that I should be very proud of the name. I actually like the name. I don´t know any other kid named Rob, and I asked her not to tell my father what I had done, and she agreed to keep it a secret, except that the cat was now out of the bag.

When we got home, Keri, who rides her bicycle to school every day, was already there.

``So Sobbie, how did Bhool go today?´´

``Don´t call me that, and it´s Bool, not Bhool.´´

``Sorry, BOOOL, and I thought Sobbie was your new name, and a good one too, as in sob like a baby.´´

``Stop it, I´m not a baby and I changed it back.´´

``What, did you get in trouble? Did you get kicked out of Bool?´´

``Stop it, I mean it,´´ I said.

``Really, what happened?´´

So I told her that I had changed my name, and that Mom had found out, but that she wasn´t as mad as I thought she would be.

``Did you tell her you had tried to change everybody´s name and create a bunch of nonsense words?´´ Keri asked.

``No, Heri, but I almost told her that your gat Bhiskers needs a new flea collar.´´

``Well, you better watch it or the next thing you know you´ll be marching straight to military school.´´

``You mean bool,´´ I said.

Word in the Club Book

I joined this local woodsmen club for boys without really knowing what I was getting myself into. There were some boys in my grade who had been in it for a while before I joined, but they didn´t live near me, so I didn´t know them that well. I knew they were members because they´d wear the uniform to school on some days, Wednesdays I think it was. I wanted to join mostly to wear the club outfit, - khaki pants, an orange vest and a camouflage hunting cap. I also wanted to get some achievement pins for the cap that I thought might make me a hero.

When I went to the first meeting wearing the outfit, I thought we might take crossbow practice or a hike. After all, we lived in Lakewood with plenty of trails and numbered lakes. I had the idea that we might even have a foot race or climb some trees, which I definitely thought would earn me some achievement pins. I secretly planned to be the most highly decorated woodsman in the history of Lakewood. Dean would be proud and maybe show me the secret to making a fire from the light of a firefly. I´d surely win the most valuable member award for catching a fish and getting it to talk, like I did with that catfish or for bringing a dead fish back to life. I´d be promoted to master woodsman after the first month, but I´d say no, that it would be ok for me to stay just a regular member with a hat full of pins. But my idea about the club was all wrong. The meeting was just that - a meeting. There could be nothing worse after a long school day than a long meeting after school. We just sat around a table and listened to the club manager talk about the honor of being a woodsman, and how important it was to respect nature, help the community, and bring 25 cents dues to every meeting, which I did not have, and didn´t know I was supposed to have. My family had already spent a lot of money on the uniform, and then to give 25 cents every week seemed like a bit much to ask. Couldn´t the city give the club some money? That´s my allowance money we´re talking about, which I´m sure I´d have to give up, and that would mean no more baseball cards and candy. I wasn´t sure I could sacrifice so much. In my opinion, dues should be optional like at church, unless you´ve already pledged, and then you pretty much had no choice but to fork it over. As far as I knew, I had not yet pledged woodsmen dues.

I know there´s honor in being a woodsman, but we should be outside looking for ways to keep the community out of danger, like destroying a hornet´s nest or capturing a venomous snake and relocating it. We could investigate the cougar and anaconda sightings. I wouldn´t even mind picking up trash in the woods behind Lake #2. Heck, I´d pull weeds and chew on the long stems of grass, which have just that little bit of sweetness, you know the one. Anyway, I heard that if you didn´t pay your dues, you´d be kicked out. I didn´t want to be kicked out but didn´t want to pay a quarter every week if all we were going to do was sit around and listen to speeches. I wanted to climb some mountains and test out a supplemental oxygen tank or build a boat for fishing out on Lake #2. We could go scuba diving searching for lake monsters and sunken treasure.

Well, I paid my dues for a while and got to go on the father-son camping trip. It was an overnight in the woods out at Camp Rollins, I think. I wasn´t a very knowledgeable camper. I couldn´t pitch a tent or build a campfire like most of the other boys could. I only knew how to start a fire in a coffee can full of matchsticks but not one rubbing two sticks together. You get points for doing certain tasks like building a fire and pitching a tent, but it was just easier for me to watch my dad, who is an architect, pitch it himself. Later, a bunch of dads and us woodsmen sat around a campfire that a teenager, who was supposed to be a mentor to us, started with a few squirts of Phelps 36 lighter fluid and a wooden match. He said he´d have gotten one going with a

flint and bedding from a bird´s nest he´d found, but it was too windy out. And this same teenager began playing campfire songs on a guitar. We were all kind of singing along but not too good, and most us just mumbled until we got to the chorus lines. At about the third verse of one of the songs, the teen broke a string, and that was the end of the music for the night. Most of us were glad because we´d rather be exploring or catching frogs than singing. I thought our teen mentor should try to make a string out of a clothes hanger or something, you know, forging it in the campfire until it was just right. I asked him if he thought he could do it, and he said it would be impossible, and that anyway it was a nylon string, not a metal one. ``Too bad we don´t have a cat around,´´ I said. And he looked at me strange, and I continued, ``you know, a whisker - you could use a whisker or fishing line.´´ I had seen a fishing pole that someone had brought.

And teen mentor chuckled at the suggestion and said something like he doubted anyone had brought along a high E line in their tackle box.

That night, I lay in my sleeping bag but had a hard time falling asleep because my dad was snoring and the whip-poor-will wouldn´t stop chanting. I was also a little worried that I´d be bitten by a brown recluse that decided not to be reclusive or a copperhead snake. When I was thinking about a copperhead, a copperhead penny came to mind, and getting bit by a penny sure would have been a strange and humorous event. The silly thought helped me relax, and I finally got to sleep.

The next week, I paid my dues, and all of us who had been on the camping trip got a pin for fire safety. I´m not sure why because none of us had anything to do with starting the campfire, but I guess it was because we didn´t start a forest fire.

My days as a woodsman were about to come to an end. I probably haven´t told you before, but I have bad allergies. I´m allergic to practically everything - weeds, dust, flowers, but not hydrangeas, a flower I just like to say, hydrangea. We have one in our backyard, but our dog Sniffles keeps eating it up, which is a strange behavior for a dog. I think she eats on it when she has an upset stomach - it´s like an antacid. Maybe she sees my dad take the stuff from the blue bottle and associates blue with medicine. I´m allergic to grass, dirt, milk, eggs (good thing because I don´t like eggs, except hard-boiled ones and just the yoke), oranges, cantaloupe, and chicken, which was the reason it kept giving me back indigestion when I´d eat it, at least that´s where I felt the indigestion - in my back. And when I´d get the indigestion, I´d have to chug down milk, which was supposed to calm it down, but made it worse. My doctor said that about the only thing I wasn´t allergic to was water and air, except when the air carried around pollen and mold spores, which it did pretty often. I am a mess, to tell the truth. Sometimes after I´ve been playing outside, I get a rash on my arms and legs and have to go to bed with a bunch of cream all over and then get rolled up in plastic wrap. It´s the craziest thing, it´s like I´m being marinated, but it does help. Being all wrapped up makes it hard for me to fall asleep, and when I do get to sleep finally, I go into a coma-like state and can hardly wake up. One night, I was talking in my sleep. I don´t remember any of it, but my mom and dad said I was sitting upright saying over and over, ``Word in the club book.´´

``What is it Robbie, what word?´´

But I kept repeating,´´Word in the club book´´ and then fell back and continued sleeping and dreaming, only I don´t remember the dream, and don´t usually remember any of them after a day or so. I do know that I dream in black and white, even though I´m not color blind, actually I guess I am when I´m asleep. Being color blind sure would be inconvenient for a driver at a stoplight. My brain is like a camera that captures stuff that happened in the past on black and white film. If I ever dream about the future, the dream just might be in color.

The worst thing about having allergies, worse than wearing plastic pajamas to bed, was having to get allergy shots every week. There´s nothing I hate more, I mean dislike more, because my mom hates it when I say hate; she says hate is a strong word, so I have to use dislike, and there´s nothing I dislike more than getting stabbed with a needle. Just thinking about it makes me shake. Actually, those allergy shots aren´t that bad really because the needles aren´t too long. The nurse who gives me the shots says that it´ll only pinch if I just relax my arm, which I do. She doesn´t stab me like some doctors do, and it´s not at all as bad as that weird vaccination machine they had up at the school to keep us kids from getting the plague, or whatever was going around at the time. The allergy shot is weird and is like a vaccination. It has all the things that I´m allergic to in it, although it just looks like water to me. I´d have thought it´d be a little orange on account of the cantaloupe. But I have had an allergic reaction to the allergy shot, which makes sense, but it sure was scary because my arm swelled up to the size of a baseball, no joke. And then I had to get another shot of adrenalin, or something like that, that made my heart rev like a motor. When it happened last, I was thinking the nurse might just hit it with a hammer like they do on cartoons. After the adrenalin kicked in, I felt better but was starving. We weren´t far from a burger joint on JFK, so we stopped by for a few hamburgers with fries and a vanilla shake. Yes, I was allergic to milk, but it was a shake, and they never did me wrong. We got the food to go, and I began eating the burger in the car. When I took a sip of the shake, it all started to come back up. I had to use the burger bag as a barf bag. When we got home, I took some pink medicine and a bubble bath, pretending to shave the bubble beard off my face with a comb. I was supposed to have gone to the woodsmen meeting that day, but missed it and my chance for a perfect attendance pin, so I just decided the thing was all too complicated, with the dues and the challenging tasks, the meetings and all the regulations and stuff and I quit. Walt had told me that if I missed a meeting, I´d have to pay double the dues, and that if I didn´t, they could send me to debtors´ prison in England where the main office is located. I asked him if it was England the country or England, Arkansas, and he said it was the England across the pond, and that I´d have to swim to get there. I´m a strong swimmer, but not that strong. My mom wasn´t too happy that I had decided to quit, but I told her that I´d rather start a savings account at Razorback Savings and Loan, and she thought that was a good idea.

Piano Lessons

If you had asked me when I was younger what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said a truck driver, a garbage man, or a church organist. But I don't want to be a church organist anymore, and I'll tell you why.

It all started with piano lessons. I'd always wanted to play the piano and sometimes did badly. I could work out some song melodies by ear on one hand, memorize them, and then play the songs to anyone who happened to be in the room. Anyone who didn't know how to play thought I was great, but the piano players like my sister knew better.

My mom is a musician. She plays a bunch of different instruments and is a music teacher too. It happened that I had figured out how to play this popular song one rainy day on our upright piano, and my mom heard me playing it. She said that I could be the next Vance Klinburg and that if I wanted to, I could take piano lessons like Keri did. I really wanted to learn to use both hands and wanted to play better than Keri, who had been taking lessons for a couple of years. She reads music and plays stuff with both hands. I had this dream to play the giant organ at church to hear and see the notes blast from all the pipes.

So now I'm taking lessons from my mom's friend, Mrs. Keys, who has perfect pitch. That's what my mom says. I wonder if she is good at baseball. I don't know of any baseball playing church organists, but I bet there are some out there too with a perfect pitch. Mrs. Keys knows everything there is to know about the piano and can tune one too. I´ve heard that it's harder to tune a piano than it is to play one. I don't know if this is true, but I think I'd rather learn to tune than to play. You get to use tools and stuff, and I guess it's like working on a car. She also plays the church organ and has an electric piano. I was hoping to get some lessons on it, but she said I had to learn to play the piano first. This reminds me of my friend Chet who takes guitar lessons. He wants an electric guitar, but his mom won't let him touch one until he learns the acoustic, and even then, she might not buy him one because she's afraid of ``that hippy music.´´ I was actually surprised Mrs. Keys would agree to teach me because she was a professional and always so busy. And I'm also surprised that she continues to teach me because I am a terrible student. I really am. Part of the reason, I guess, is that she's Mom's friend and the most patient person ever, which makes her a good teacher. And she may think I have some natural talent because of my mother and Keri, who is probably her best student. I try to practice but don't always learn the music and am too proud to ask anyone for help. As for Keri, she´s no help. When I get going pretty good, she sneaks up on me and bangs my hands down onto the keys. I do it to her too sometimes, or crawl under the piano and press down on the pedals, but she always yells, ``Mom.´´ Mom tells me the piano is not a toy and that if I ruin it, I'll have to buy a new one, which means no allowance for life. If I don't get an allowance, I wonder if that means I don't have to do any more chores like rake leaves and take out the garbage. The chore I hate the most is picking up my room. I tell you, my room is pretty heavy. I wonder if any kid has actually tried to pick up his room, you know like a weightlifter. I bet Truck could pick his up and hold it over his head. Then he'd bang it back down to the floor and win a medal.

Focus is a problem for me. I lack it. And I also lack patience. I don´t know very much about music, but I know the notes - E G B D F - Every Good Boy Does Fine, but I can't always remember the other one about the cows - A C E G, which is All Cows Eat Grass, but I get confused because some cows eat corn, dirt and wheat. Is there a W note? I don't want to play fairy tales from the piano book for beginners. All I want to play is music I like. Anyway, I learn better watching and listening than from studying a sheet of music. When I try to read the notes

on the page, I get confused and nervous with all the symbols. What I really want to do is learn to use the pedals to make that strange doorbell sound. The pedals look like brass feet and remind me of my parents driving our car pushing down with their feet all the time to shift gears and to get it to stop and go.

The thing is, I just can't follow the plan Mrs. Keys has for me to learn the piano. I'm also a little envious of my sister's playing. Mrs. Keys gives out white plastic busts of the great composers for doing a song perfectly. I got one once, but it wasn't the one I wanted - I wanted Bach but got Chopin instead. I wanted a Bach bust because he wrote all that loud organ music they play at church, plus Keri doesn't have one yet.

What I really want to learn to play is the electric piano and organ, like the one our friends have in their den with all those cool different colored flip switches. I have this fantasy that never turns out quite right that I learn to play the organ, and then save the day at our church when the organist can't make it one Sunday. The pastor would ask if anyone could play the organ, and I'd step forward, take a deep breath, stretch my fingers, crack my knuckles, do a few jumping jacks, pause, close my eyes, and begin to play brilliantly, the kind of playing that would have earned me a gold record, and that would have everyone looking at me with their mouths wide open. A genius they would all say - a young Vance Klinburg. After the hymn, the congregation would give a long standing ovation with a few ``BRAVOS´´ and ``AMENS´´ mixed in, some even pointing to the heavens as if I had performed a miracle, which of course I had. And then, just as I prepare to take a bow, Keri would stand up and shout, ``It wasn't him playing, it was me. He only knows one song and can only play with one hand, not both,´´ which was true. Then the shocked congregation would look at me with anger and shake their heads in disgust at my stunt. With drooping shoulders, I would walk out the side exit of the church in disgrace and go to the basketball court where I would find the rims had no nets. Maybe God was trying to tell me that keyboards weren't for me. Leave the keys to Mrs. Keys.

I'm the only boy in the neighborhood who takes piano lessons, or at least the only one I know of who takes them or admits to it. There really might be others, but it's not something we talk about at school. We're all too busy with the times tables, cursive writing, and running wild at recess. The only ones not running wild at recess are the upper graders who have to play kickball and dodgeball down in the parking lot behind the church. My lessons are at the church on an upright, just like the one we have at home, only ours doesn't sound as nice. Mom said that has to do with the acoustics of our house, which are not that good apparently. The church piano has a clean, crisp, and powerful sound. The piano room where the choir practices has this giant window looking out over Topf Road. I can see kids riding by on bikes and can hear the rhythmic bouncing of basketballs over on the court at Lakewood Elementary. If a kid were to look in, they would see me, which is why I duck and put my hand up to cover my face when someone passes. I pretend to sneeze so that Mrs. Keys won't think I'm too weird or ashamed. I'd rather be outside, to tell the truth. The embarrassing thing is that I usually can't get through the songs I was supposed to have learned since the last lesson. Mrs. Keys usually asks me if I had practiced and I say yes and do practice, but not enough, which is obvious. She just tells me to practice a little more the next time. I think she is surprised that I don't play better than I do because my mom and sister both play piano pretty well. She expects big things of me. The problem is that practice doesn't help me, and is the time when I mess up badly, hitting the wrong notes, and keeping the time wrong. I don't want to ask my mother to help because what is the point of taking lessons if I can learn from her? She's also very busy and would just tell me to practice more. Keri would say, ``That´s so easy´´ and this would infuriate me and make me want to quit. If only I could just snap

my fingers and play anything I wanted or that anyone wanted me to play. Mrs. Keys would sure be surprised and enter me into one of those professional contests where I would easily win the plastic Bach bust for most outstanding performance.

Jazz fantasy

My mom plays classical music on piano and sings too. My dad listens to her but is more of a jazz guy. He'll plop a jazz album onto our stereo that looks like a piece of antique furniture, and slump back into the couch tapping his feet to the beat and humming the base line. I'll come in and sit down across from him and watch him blow smoke rings which seem to dance to the beat of the music. I like the music too when I close my eyes and really listen. When I have my eyes open, I can only hear my dad humming. And when I hear the music well, it transports me to Robinson Auditorium, where I walk up on the stage to play with a world famous jazz trio. The other players are in their 30s with hippy hair and sideburns. They all have on Dingo boots and brown turtlenecks with matching corduroy jackets.

I get booed and heckled at first by this one guy sitting up front named Mack, who says, ``Where´s the toy piano?´´ and he starts laughing, and the laugh fades into a wheeze.

Someone else says, ``Better start playing because it's almost your bedtime.´´ It probably was too because I go to bed by 9:00 p.m. There were some other kids in the balcony eating popcorn like they were at a movie theater. There were a few more boos, but I wasn't sure if the boos were for me or Mack. I think Mack had been drinking a few too many beers, the tall ones like my dad has in our refrigerator. I already told you about the time I tried one. One sip is enough to make a man mean, and it sure was doing that to Mack.

I had to sit on top of a couple of Little Rock phone books to make it up to the piano keys of the new baby grand piano. I crack my knuckles and shake my hand because one knuckle really hurt and take a sip of orange soda on the rocks with a maraschino cherry and a little umbrella in it. I clear my throat, take a handkerchief out, and wipe my forehead that's spotted with sweat. I stick a candy cigarette in my mouth and say, ``This is a little one called ``Take It Cool,´´ a 1 and a 2.´´ The drummer starts up, and then the bass player and I get going, and the saxophone player starts playing the melody. I dive into the music, hum like the great pianists do, and mix in some improvised block chords. I don't have any sheet music, but the other players do, and they keep turning their pages, except for the drummer who twirls his sticks a few times. The crowd looks stunned and snaps their fingers to the beat nodding their heads as if they've all been hypnotized. I finish the song standing up.

The crowd goes wild giving me a standing ovation shouting, ``ENCORE´´ and ``MORE´´ with a few ``BRAVOS´´ sprinkled in from the balcony. I step away from the piano, walk to the front of the stage, bow, and point to the band who all bow together. The bass player has a pipe in his mouth and puffs out smoke that smells like vanilla ice cream. I motion for the audience to be seated, but they won't, and they keep clapping and yelling, ``MORE.´´ The kids were popping balloons and for a second, I thought someone had been shot, maybe Mack. I go back to the baby grand, and take a seat after adjusting the phone books. I signal for another orange soda on the rocks. I close my eyes, and when I open them again, I'm alone in the living room. The stereo tone arm is stuck on the end groove of the record, and all I can hear is a scratchy, bumpy sound with some hissing and popping that had moments before been my call for more.

Candy Corn

Dad calls me a picky eater. Mom says all I do is pick around on my plate. The problem is I don't like forks. They're too big. I'd probably eat more with toothpicks if they'd give me some. Spoons are better. I spoon up my food as much as I can. My parents always say, ``Robbie, use your fork.´´ If they don't want me to use a spoon, why is there always one by my plate every night? So I'll pick up the fork but go back to the spoon when no one is looking. I don't like knives either. The ones we got are too heavy - each one weighs more than me, and you have to be a weightlifter like Truck to pick one up; I think they're made of lead. Plus, I can't cut too good the stuff that needs cutting like chewy chicken fried steak. I'd rather cut with Keri's electric scissors, the ones I sold the other day but had to get back; they cut real good, but not food. We have an electric knife for turkey and pot roast. I don't like anyone to cut my meat for me. I don't like steak because it's too tough. Last week when I ate some dry roast beef, I bit down on a piece, and a tooth came out. My tooth was just sticking up in the meat. Keri said, ``Hey, it's roast beast.´´ I got sent to the bathroom to clean up. All I could eat after that was smashed potatoes with gravy, which felt weird going in the hole where my tooth used to be. That night, I got 50 cents from the tooth fairy who I know isn't real. I play along, though, because I know I'd get nothing if I said anything. And nothing won't buy any candy at the convenience store, conveniently located behind our house below the cliff that Dean calls Lakewood Bluffs.

Keri calls me a baby, ``Na, na, na, na, na, Robbie is a baby.´´ She says I don't need a plate at all, just a jar of baby food with my face on it. It's true I don't eat everything on my plate. On some days, I just don't like the food Mom makes. On Wednesdays, she makes that creamed beef from the little jar that looks like throw up and almost makes me sick to eat. Dad loves the stuff, and so does Keri, but only because she knows I can't stand it. I do everything I can to get out of eating it. I'll have a headache, a stomach ache, or say I'm not hungry, or that my tooth hurts. I try to stick some of it under my plate when no one is looking and spread it out so it'll look like I ate some. I'll take a mouthful and put my napkin up to my face, the good manners way, and then wipe it out of my mouth into the napkin. It works sometimes, but not the last time, because Keri said, ``Mom, look, he's doing it again,´´ and Mom tells me that I don't know how good I have it, that there are some poor families who don't have anything to eat for dinner. That sure makes me feel bad and really sad, but I still can't eat the stuff. Maybe there's something wrong with me.

As you know, when I eat chicken, my back starts to hurt. It's true, and everybody knows I´m allergic to it, but nobody believes it gives me a backache. You might be thinking, how can he eat something he´s allergic to? Well, it´s because the doctor says I´ll outgrow the allergy. Besides, I like fried chicken. I especially like it with lots of salt. I shake a pile of it onto my plate and roll the drumstick in it. It makes me thirsty, and I guzzle down milk, something I´m also allergic to, and then I wash the milk down with iced tea, something I´m not allergic to. I´d prefer mine sweetened, but we never have any sugar at the table. One time I put a cube of cherry taffy candy in my tea to give it some flavor, but it just floated like an ice cube, and instead of melting, it got harder. My dad salts everything - bananas, watermelon, tomato juice, even ice cream, and Grandaddy makes vanilla ice cream with big blocks of rock salt. When I complain my back hurts, Grandmama says, ``Shuug, maybe you have a little indigestion.´´ And that's what it is, only it's in my back, not my stomach. I say it´s back indigestion, but everybody laughs at me. Keri says there's no such thing, that I can't have back indigestion, that maybe I am backwards and feel my stomach as my back and my back as my stomach. She says that's common for people like me who are ambidextrous. I don't have the best penmanship, but I can write with both hands, not at

the same time, of course. I can throw a plastic baseball and that new round disk thing that glows in the dark with my right and left hand. I can even kick a ball with both legs, again, not at the same time. I tried that once. I can see with both eyes too. Walt told me he's left-eyed. I told him I thought I was right-eyed.

And there's something else that does me bad and that I don´t like - cantaloupe. It makes my lips swell up. When it happened last, Mom gave me some ice to put on my lips, but I wanted ice cream. The only reason I ever tried cantaloupe in the first place was that it's so soft, almost like ice cream, and orange like a tiger. And I really like tigers, but not the ones at the zoo. I mean I like them, but don't like to see them in a zoo because they look so tired and depressed, like they're in jail. I want them to be free like the ones on that Saturday afternoon wild animal show. My favorite stuffed animal is a tiger, but he's not looking so good himself lately. He's full of holes and losing his stuffing. What´s more, his nose fell off, and I can't find it anywhere, but it's probably under my bed. Orange is my favorite color for candy, fruit, and drink. You may remember that I eat whole cans of Mandarin oranges, which taste like orange candy. And I like that orange powdery drink in the packets too. Orange juice is ok, but I don't like the pulp in it. I call the pulp ``pinches´´ which make me gag. I think all the pulp comes from the Florida oranges Hurricane Inez blew off the trees and smashed up.

I also like children´s aspirin. It tastes good and a lot better than candy flavored vitamins and doesn't give me back indigestion, but I can only have two. Walt said that his brother told him that this boy ate a whole bottle of them and then started foaming at the mouth. The ambulance came and put a breathing mask on him. Real candy won't do that to you, but when I don't have any to eat, I sometimes pretend to be sick when I'm not. When I get a sore throat, I'll wake up and talk to my mom in a gruff, dry voice like I'm dying, and my mom'll come in with a thermometer stick, the thing with the silver jelly inside that's fun to play with when the glass tube breaks. Sometimes when I'm really sick, she'll give me cherry cough drops. They're pretty good too and taste like candy. My mom keeps them locked up because she knows I'll eat the whole roll all at once.

I eat a lot of things I shouldn't but all because I love candy. Me and candy are best friends. I need candy, and when I can't find any, I get a little nervous. The other day when I was sick and had to stay with my grandmama, I tried to eat a spoonful of margarine, the one in the can, but Grandmama caught me just as I had the spoon to my mouth and yelled at me. I dropped the spoon, but it had so much margarine on it that it didn't make a sound when it hit the floor.

``What are you doing, Robbie? Land sakes alive. You know better than to be in here eating margarine or anything else in these cabinets without my permission, do you hear me? You could become very sick, and I´d have to call for an ambulance.´´

I was thinking of the boy with the foaming mouth and got scared. I started crying because I had never seen my grandmama mad before. I told her I was sorry and would never do it again. She doesn´t know that I have eaten margarine before, and I don't think I could ever tell her. I don´t like it and don't know why I wanted to eat some again, except that it looks so much like vanilla icing. She also doesn't know that I drink the leftovers from the empty soda bottles in the cartons on the floor near the washing machine. I like the root beer best but don't care much for that new diet soda; leaves a horrible aftertaste.

My mom always tells me to eat my vegetables. And I do sometimes. Corn on the cob with butter rolled in salt is what I like the best, that and fried okra, black-eyed peas, and tomato relish. I like those little corn on the cob stabbers too. I like to use them as forks to stab lima beans and peas. Keri usually notices and looks at me with a silly face to make me crack up.

When I do, and I always do, I get in trouble and get sent to my room. ``But Keri made a face.´´ Nobody listens to me, and she gets away with EVERYTHING. But I don't mind going to my room because I have a little candy stash in there that no one knows about.

Candy corn is probably the best vegetable there is which is why I'm growing me some. It was Walt's idea. Cee Cee dug the holes. I put one in each hole and covered them back up. Walt watered them with a can of diet soda. He hates the stuff. It is pretty awful; the bitter taste stays in your mouth the whole day. His mother told him that he needs to lose some weight, so he can't have regular cola anymore. Walt says candy corn grows good with diet soda and that before we know it, we'll have a big crop full of sweet corn just like they have back on their farm in Delight. I can't wait. Keri said I'm going to be waiting for a long time because the Halloween harvest is many months away. I was just thinking how candy corn looks like those orange highway cones. I'd like to have me a big candy corn cone.

I was swinging with Cee Cee in the backyard on the swing set flying up as high as we could go. I was piloting a single prop airplane, and Cee Cee was the co-pilot, but he needed a booster seat. Dean came back to see what I was up to. He had a Swiss army knife, a rock, and some dental floss.

``Hey Robbie, you got any more candy corn on you?´´

Everybody knows that I always have some candy corns in my pockets. So I jumped out of the swing and landed on my feet but fell back. I almost squashed Cee Cee who squealed and ran off near our candy corn crop.

``Here's one,´´ I said.

``You know that this is just sugar and wax. I'm going to make a candle out of it,´´ Dean said.

``It looks like a little highway cone,´´ I said.

He cut a hole in the candy corn and put the piece of dental floss through it. He put the corn down on the pile of cinder blocks we have over by the woods behind the swing set. He poured some lighter fluid on it and then with a match, lit this stick he called a punk and then lit the dental floss with the punk. The floss caught fire, and then the candy corn burst into flames and started glowing like a jackal lantern which quickly melted away leaving only an orange speck on the cinder block.

Herbie rode over on his bike, slowed down and jumped off it. The bike rolled into the holly bushes but didn't fall over. He dumped a handful of dirty candy corn and plastic army men at Dean's feet.

Walt had come by and said, ``Robbie, there's your crop...hey, those are my army men! Where did you get those, you little thief?´´

Just then, Belinda and Melinda walked up, and Belinda said, ``Yard sale, Truck bought them at our yard sale.´´

It turns out that Walt had left his army men on the sidewalk near the Parker house and Belinda found them and sold them to Truck at the yard sale who then gave them to Herbie as a present. Cee Cee must have dug up my candy corn crop because he was sore at me for nearly crushing him to death. Keri had something to do with it too because she had come outside on the back porch with a smile on her face watching everything happen. Walt was smiling at her and tipped his baseball cap. This confused me because they hated each other. I thought they might be up to something.

Then Dean lined up the army men behind the candy corn and prepared each candy like he did the first. Walt's brother is at the war in Vietnam. A few days ago, Walt showed me a hand grenade that his brother sent back as a souvenir. He said it was a just a toy, but it looked real. He pulled the pin and threw the grenade. When it hit the ground over by the mimosa tree in our front yard, he said, ``BOOM,´´ real loud. I jumped back, but it didn't blow up. Whiskers ran up to it and pawed at it like it was a baby armadillo.

``What's on these? Smells like soda,´´ said Dean.

``It's diet,´´ said Walt.

``Diet cola?´´ said Dean.

``Yep,´´ said Walt.

``Groovy, man. That stuff´s flammable. We don't need lighter fluid on these,´´ said Dean.

``Fire 'em up, Deano,´´ said Walt.

``Right on, man!´´ said Dean.

Dean put the punk to the dental floss hanging from each one, and they sparked this time, maybe because of the diet soda, and burned bright and longer than before. It looked like the army men were in a battle. Fireflies darted in and out of the flames like combat helicopters. Walt saluted the army men. Little Melinda got scared and started crying. Herbie caught some fireflies and put them in a little glass jar that he had hidden in the holly bushes and hopped back on his bike to go home.

I heard my dad pull up into the driveway. He had the windows down, and I could hear some rock music playing on the eight-track. The car headlamps lit up the backyard, and I felt like I was at a night baseball game at Ray Winder Field. And then suddenly, the lights went out. I could hear the car door shut. My eyes adjusted to the darkness and after about a minute, my dad whistled for me to come in. I walked up the steps to the back porch and stood there looking out for a few seconds before going in, the embers of my crop still glowing brightly. The flickering fireflies looked like tiny airplanes in the night sky.

Kick the Can

The best thing about being out at night would be the fireflies. The worst thing about being out at night would have to be all the mosquitoes. If only the fireflies would eat the mosquitoes. When I see one or hear that buzzing sound, I start swatting, and when I feel one, I'll be slapping my arms and legs doing a little jig. When Keri sees me, she says I look like I´m dancing the samba. My mom sprays me with bug repellent right after dinner before I go out to play, but it doesn't work. Lately, mosquitoes have taken a liking to my blood. They don't seem to mind the bug spray. I mind it though; it makes me all sticky and stinky and then I have to take a bath when I get in. I don't like to take a bath, but when I get in the tub, it's not so bad, especially when we have some bubble bath. Once I put the whole bottle of bubble stuff in, and the bubbles bubbled out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor. I like to grow a Santa Claus beard and then shave it off with a comb that I use like a straight razor. My mom said she won't buy us any more bubbles because we waste them, and it's a waste of money. Keri tells me it's all my fault. And it mostly is. When I'm in the tub, I stay in there until the water turns cold or drains down. I like to go all the way under and hold my breath for as long as I can. What I need is a snorkel, but I don't think they make one for the bathtub. When the bubbles disappear, I'll start to play with my toys. I have a rubber duck, a rubber whale, and a ship that doesn't hold water very well. It'll get all foggy in the bathroom like on the high seas at night in a storm. The circle light on the ceiling is the lighthouse, and the captain, that´s me, can only see a glow like a crescent moon peeking out under the clouds. Then I'll have the whale and duck play.

``You are a small duck, so you better fly away.´´

``No, you fly away.´´

``How am I going to fly, I´m a whale?´´

``Use your blow hole and go up like a helicopter.´´

``That blow hole can't make me fly. Get out of my ocean before I swallow you whole.´´

``Then I will come out the blow hole.´´

``It's my ocean, and you can't have it.´´

``No, you are too big, and I will sink you like the ship.´´

``Here, take that,´´ and the whale splashed the duck and made a big wave.

``That's fun, do it again.´´

``I will swat my tail and throw you back to your little Lakewood Lake #5.´´

``No, not there, how about Beaver Lake?´´

``But the beavers will bat you with their tails back to my ocean.´´

``No, they will just pick up sticks and make a log cabin for their little babies.´´

``And then they will hit you like a baseball out of the lake and into my mouth.´´

``But Whaley, you are sleepy and snoring like a foghorn.´´

``Robbie, who are you talking to in there? Come out before you turn into a raisin,´´ said Mom. My hands really did look like raisins.

The water was getting shallow and cold. I hadn't even started to wash but figured the bubbles were like soap and would clean me enough.

``Did you wash behind your ears?´´

``Yes, and I shaved too.´´

All us kids like fireflies, especially little Herbie who has a collection of them. They're really slow and easy to catch. You can put them in a jar with holes in the lid, and they'll keep lighting up. They say you can't put lightning in a bottle, and who would want to, but you sure can

put lightning bugs in a bottle. What I don't understand is why they're called fireflies. Flies are fast and hard to catch; about all you can do is smash them with a fly swatter, and even that's not so easy. When a fly lights, Walt tries to hypnotize it moving his finger around in circles to get closer, and just when he´s within an inch or so, he tries to catch it, but he always misses when I'm around. I'm not sure what he'd do once he caught one. But if you can catch a fly and use it for something, like bait for fishing, why isn't there a job like they have for dogs? You know, there's a dog catcher, so there could be a fly catcher, but I don't think Walt would get the job. Herbie might go for that job. He has transportation. He has lots of jars. But they might not want to hire a 3-year-old. But they could. They probably wouldn't even have to pay much - maybe a penny a fly. He'd do it. Shoot, I'd do it. They could pay me in baseball cards. Most people make a racket when they try to kill a fly and the bigger and more colorful the fly, the greater the racket. Walt's mother broke an antique stained glass lamp trying to get one of those giant green horseflies. And the firefly can't make fire or put one out as far as I know. When they light up, it's not like a fire at all, and they aren't hot when you catch them. Everyone has heard that Dean can make fire with them, but I recently asked him about it, and he denied that he could. He said that if fireflies made fire or had some kind of sparking mechanism, there´d be a lot of fires to put out. I asked him why they call them fireflies then.

``That's a good question because they aren't flies at all.´´

``They aren't?´´

``No, they're beetles.´´

``The group?´´

``NO, not the group, the bug.´´

``Beetles can fly?´´

``Yes, the firefly is a beetle with wings. Actually, lightning bug is probably a better name for them.´´

I thought he might be pulling my leg about the beetle part, like Walt and Keri do a lot, but Dean is pretty serious, and I believe most everything he says.

``So what about the fire part? They don't make fires, and that light they got doesn't look like a fire or lightning.´´

``I don't know, maybe to some people their lights look like fire or a flash of light.´´

``What's the light for anyway?´´

``I don't know, maybe to see better at night. You know they only come out at night. They are nocturnal like owls.´´

I tried to draw one once, but it didn't turn out too good.

``I wonder if they hoot.´´

I thought he might laugh, but he didn't.

``They don't hoot because they're mute. They don't make any sound at all.´´

``They fly slow like a mosquito, but they don't bite,´´ I said.

``We should give them a different name. How about flying beacon bug?´´

``Frying bacon?´´

``No, no, flying beacon - you know, beacon - the light on a lighthouse.´´

``No, flying beagle.´´

``I think I like lightning bug better.´´

``Me too,´´ I said.

Later, I asked my dad about the firefly, and he said what Dean said, that they were winged beetles and he said the light was biolumen; that's not the word he used, but something

like that, and he said the light probably helped them find food. Speaking of flies, which makes me think of fries and I sure would like me some, I wonder if the different flies are friends, you know the firefly, horsefly, housefly, and the dragonfly. They´re bound to know one another. I wonder if they talk, and if they do, what they talk about.

``Nice weather we're having here.´´

``Don't touch that honeysuckle over there; it's mine.´´

``Oh, shut up and grow you a pair of real wings.´´

The housefly might warn of the mad lady with the fly swatter, and the firefly might tell them to stay away from kids with glass bottles.

They might have a potluck dinner together on trash day! And then after dinner, the horsefly might ask the firefly for a light. ``Sorry, I'm a little burned out. Better try the dragonfly.´´

Herbie had been catching a bunch of lightning bugs and putting them in a skinny olive bottle with holes in the lid that I punched for him with an ice pick. I guess you really can bottle lightning. He had about twenty of them in there and was keeping them in the holly bushes in our backyard. I saw him back there this afternoon feeding them fish food or something. I hope he wasn't giving them any holly berries.

That night, a whole bunch of us were playing Kick the Can. It was getting dark, and I was IT. I'm always IT, I guess because I'm the youngest - actually Herbie and Melinda are younger, but they don't know how to play too good and get distracted too easily. I couldn't see anything or anybody hiding until I heard a sneeze and some giggling. Sure enough, I saw Melinda lying on her stomach like a dead tree branch behind the mimosa tree.

``Melinda, I see you. You have come to jail now. Come on out.´´

``Can I have some bread and water?´´ she said.

``Sure, and one phone call, but you won't be here for long,´´ I said. ``There's the hose over there, help yourself.´´

The street lights hadn't come on yet. Herbie rolled up on a purple skateboard with a flashlight taped to the end like a headlamp. The jail wasn't very secure, and instead of getting water, Melinda chased after Herbie to see where he was going. As he rolled passed, the headlight was flickering like it had a bad battery, and then I realized what it was. Herbie was riding the board balled up with his head resting on his knees. He used his hands to push him along almost like he was in a wheelchair. He picked up some speed going down the Parkers´ sloping driveway and coasted into the carport with the ``bug light´´ shining a blinking path.

Walt had been squatting behind the station wagon and had moved out into the open when he heard something rolling his way.

I heard Walt say, ``HEY, what are doing here?´´

``Walt over in the Parkers´ carport,´´ I called out.

Walt was my second prisoner. I was teasing him saying, ``Stee-rike-three you're out,´´ like an umpire. And as I did that, I could hear a big old jaybird call, STE, STE, STE like they do. ``Hear that jaybird - now you are a jailbird.´´

``I tell you this, there ain't no jail can keep me locked up.´´

``Well, you'll have to get past my deputy first,´´ so Melinda pulled at his arm to make sure he went straight to jail.

``That was pretty good though…did you see that flashlight?´´ Walt said.

``Lightning bugs,´´ I said.

``I gotta get me one of those,´´ Walt said.

``Me too!´´

``What if they put them up in street lamps? That'd sure be cheaper than electricity,´´ Walt said.

``I know, put electric eels up there.´´

``Them things don't light up but do give a good zap.´´

``What if you ate one?´´

``It'd burn your heart right out. You ever heard of heartburn?´´

``Sure, but I've never eaten an electric eel.´´

I heard a pecking noise that sounded a little like a woodpecker drilling into a tree. I heard it again, but I couldn't tell exactly where it was coming from. We had three big trees in the front yard where we were, an elm, a mimosa, and an oak tree. It could have come from one of them, but as I heard it again, it sounded more like it was coming from on top of the house. Maybe the thing, whatever it was, was trying to get into our house. All went quiet again followed by a whip-poor-will, or what sort of sounded like one, but it might have been a mockingbird trying to sound like a whip-poor-will. The bird sounded sick like it needed a cough drop. Then it went, ``Hoot, hoota hoot´´ and sounded like a girl's voice. I knew that voice.

``It's your sister,´´ said Melinda.

``Are you sure?´´

``Yes, I see her.´´

``Where?´´ When I looked, she was nowhere to be seen.

``He Haw, He Haw,´´ said Keri. As I tried to spot her, Herbie came rolling by and knocked over the can which freed the prisoners and ended the game. That was ok with me because I was tired of being IT.

Belinda and Truck were still hiding, so Walt yelled out, ``Ollie Ollie In Come Free.´´ Belinda crawled out from under the jalopy with some oil spots on her arm, and Truck hopped out of the jalopy. He'd been lying down on the backseat looking up at the stars.

``The big dipper is out,´´ said Truck.

I heard some tree twigs snap and saw that Keri was backing down off the roof and onto the oak tree limb. From the limb, she climbed down to a lower branch and jumped to the ground from it, landing in a squat position.

``Looks like your prisoners took off on you.´´

``I told you no jail could hold me,´´ said Walt.

``Who are you, Kittywoman?´´ Truck asked Keri.

``If I'm Kittywomanthen you are the not so incredible Bulk.´´

``I meant it as a compliment,´´ said Truck.

``I did too,´´ said Keri.

Muscle Car Guy

I was at an apartment complex pool the other day with Belinda and Walt. This guy pulls up in his new orange convertible muscle car with out of state plates. I've seen him and his car around; actually, you can hear his car a mile away - it sounds like a giant bullfrog with the hiccups trying to gargle. He drives it too fast all up and down the hilly roads of Lakewood. He sure likes showing it off. I heard he bought it out there on Broadway at some shop that customizes cars, but Dean said he couldn´t have because the car is new and has out of state plates. The thing has two fat wheels on the back, but it's not a dragster even though the muscle car guy tries to race every car on the road. Nobody takes him seriously or his car. As fast as it is, or at least sounds, it's not the fastest car around here. That'd go to this high school senior who has a blazing fast blue muscle car with the rally stripe and louvers covering the backglass. He had the engine modified to make it even faster and had holes put in the hood, which look like nostrils, to make it breathe better. Maybe it runs on rocket fuel, but I´m not sure where he'd get it. The GX station in Lakewood sells premium gas, but not rocket fuel. They might have a pump down near Protho Junction, where you can diesel up a truck, but that would be the only place I know of besides Adams Field. Dean says there's no contest between the two cars, and that the guy with the orange muscle car knows it. I´d love to see those two cars race. Dean says my dad's baby blue jalopy with the one windshield wiper stuck in the middle of the glass could probably take down the orange convertible. I'm not so sure about that. I'm actually pretty sure the bathtub with flat tires can't take anything down, not even Gagan´s riding lawnmower. For starters, it is already down - it won't start and hasn't for a while and may even need a starter. It looks more like a giant squirrel's nest which could either be a nest for a giant squirrel or maybe a flying squirrel or a nest for a giant family of squirrels. Funny, a squirrel making a nest out of a car named after a bird. And with flat whitewall tires, I don't see it moving anytime soon, but who knows? With a little work, it could turn into a muscle car, and if anyone could transform that car, Dean could. He's actually been eyeing it for a while and was asking my dad if he wanted to sell it, but my dad thought he was joking. Dean´s a convertible guy. My dad prefers roadsters, and my granddaddy likes any car that came out of Detroit where he used to work when he was a young man. He had to come back to Arkansas because of the cold that whipped right through him and his overcoat, which wasn´t too hard to do because he was and still is a very thin man. I´m not really sure how my dad ended up with the car, but it might have been a gift or some kind of trade, but I don't think he bought it. I do know he's not very happy with the thing, so maybe he will sell it to Dean or just give it to him.

So the muscle car guy pulls right up to the pool fence close to the aqua blue diving board that doesn't have much spring. The bright orange of the car against the aqua blue around the pool are a good color combination. He gets out, walks inside the gate, and sits in one of the white and green laced aluminum pool chairs. He plunks down a glass bottle of day glow green sports juice and a brown plastic bottle of sun tan oil that looks like prescription cough medicine. He takes off his shirt, oils up, and tries to lounge back, but the chair won't stretch out. He picks it up, beats the back trying to push it to the reclining position, but it doesn't work. He then slams it to the ground, bending the aluminum frame and finally just sits back down in it mad that it tilts a little to the left and doesn´t sit firmly on the concrete anymore. You can smell the oil a mile away, and it's kind of like that new car smell stuff or whatever it is that people hang from their rear view mirrors. Then he gets up, takes off his shades, and walks around the pool with a hitch in his step looking at everybody like he's something special. He eyes Belinda and winks at her.

Belinda says to him, ``What are you looking at?´´

``Just you, what is there a problem Honey?´´

``There most certainly is. First of all, I didn't say you could look at me, and second of all, my name is not Honey.´´

``Well, what is your name?´´

``Wouldn't you like to know.´´

And he started laughing and said, ``You´re funny, Honey.´´

He walked up to the diving board. I heard Belinda say under her breath, ``Creep.´´ And he was creepy, especially his rickety gait which was slightly out of balance like the pool chair. He walked on the balls of his feet and kind of twisted them with each step like the concrete was too hot. The guy was mysterious too. No one knew who he was, where he lived, or what he was all about except that he seemed to be quite a lot about himself.

One thing was clear - muscle car guy shouldn't have messed with Belinda who has a brown belt in Judo.

Walt and I had a plan, not that Belinda needed any help, but we didn't like the guy either. He had been doing these pretty swan dives and back flips, just showing off. It looked like he was a gymnast with all the tricks he was throwing. After every dive, he'd get out of the water and smile at Belinda who wasn't paying him any mind at all. Walt walked out to the end of the board pretending to be an Olympic diver, turned around like he was going to do a dive with a high degree of difficulty, and then turned back around, jumped out and did a can opener. I followed doing one of those diving approaches for a double with 12 twists or something and then did a preacher's seat, slapping the water like a thunderclap.

The muscle car guy started swimming the backstroke and doing those flip turns like they do at competitive swimming meets. Walt and I started swimming as if we didn't know how, dog paddling, splashing, kicking real hard with our legs, spitting water out, pretending to drown. He kept swimming, only faster like he didn't see us. Then we got out, snuck up to his chair, and took off the caps of the sport juice and the tanning oil and put them on their sides and watched the liquid ooze out onto the concrete, making an oil slick all the way to the edge of the pool.

Then we went off the diving board again, doing cannonballs, can openers, and preacher seats, spraying his towel and his muscle car which had the top down. We got off about 12 before he realized what was going on.

``Hey you twerps, that's my towel.´´

Then Walt did the best cannonball I'd ever seen and made this hydrogen bomb like splash that nearly drained the pool and soaked the muscle car inside and out.

``Hey, hey, you're dead son,´´ and he started running toward Walt looking fiery red in the face. Walt got out of the water and started backing up.

``Man, I didn't mean to, but you shouldn't have parked so close to the pool.´´

As the muscle car guy ran past his pool chair, he slipped on the oily juice and went crashing to the ground scraping his arm and leg so badly that he was bleeding all over the concrete. He was furious at this point. ``You little...´´ and he was now the blood orange muscle car guy with veins popping out of his neck, and he charged Walter like a bull, sort of snorting, and I thought I could see smoke coming out of his nostrils and ears. Walt was backed up against the fence. There wasn't much I could do as I was still in the pool, so I splashed him with water which distracted him momentarily and made him wince with pain when the chlorine hit his wounds. Walt was able to move away from the fence and run over to Belinda to try to hide behind her chair. He was about to grab Belinda´s arm to get at Walt when she flipped him onto

the grass and put her knee to his back holding his twisted arm like she was about to arrest him. Good thing that she didn't throw the guy onto the concrete.

Then Truck, who had just arrived with Dean, walked over and asked Belinda if there was a problem. And she said, ``No, I believe I have the situation under control.´´

``What did he do?´´

``He was bothering me.´´

``Let me go; you're breaking my arm.´´

``Let go of him Belinda,´´ Truck said, and she did.

And the bloody muscle car guy got up, wiping away the grass that had stuck to the grease and blood on his body and said, ``I'm calling the police on you animals. You can't get away with this.´´

Then Truck put him in a head lock. You could see Truck´s bulging arm muscles and veins the size of fat night crawlers popping out of his neck, and he said, ``If you ever bother this young lady again or her friends, you'll have to answer to me,´´ and released his hold and gave him a push.

Muscle car guy staggered off. I was relieved that Truck didn't actually explode. Muscle car guy mumbled something again about calling the cops.

Dean had caught up with him and said, ``I don't think you want to call the police because they will arrest YOU for disorderly conduct, trespassing, harassment, assault, threatening a minor, reckless driving, and property damage. And just look at the environmental mess you made. Management may have to bring in a costly hazardous waste cleanup team. Talk about lawsuits.´´

``Go on now and dry out your car,´´ Truck said. As the guy approached his car, he could see Herbie standing on a purple skateboard blowing dandelion feathers onto the wet black interior.

``Hey!´´

Herbie quickly darted off on his board.

The muscle car guy was off too, peeling rubber out of the parking lot and racing down North Hills Boulevard. Just seconds later, a police car sped down North Hills, possibly in pursuit.

``Busted,´´ Dean said.

Muscle car guy had also left his towel and sunglasses. Truck scooped the shades up and put them on and said, ``How do I look?´´

``You look like a cop,´´ I said.

``You know, I could have made a citizen's arrest just then,´´ Truck said.

``I nearly cuffed him,´´ said Belinda.

``You nearly killed him,´´ said Walt.

``He nearly killed himself when he slipped and fell,´´ I said.

``One thing is clear, he won't be visiting this pool anytime soon,´´ Truck said.

``Did you see Herbie? That was classic!´´ said Walt.

Hurricane Camille

``Tell the one about Robbie on the beach,´´ said Isabel.

``Well, I don't remember it too well,´´ said Papi.

``You know the one with Robbie on the waves,´´ said Isabel.

``Oh, right,´´ Papi said.

``Do I have to tell it as Robbie, or can I tell it as Papi?´´

``Tell it as Papi, Papi. I think Robbie is tired from swimming and splashing the car.´´

It all started when Robbie's family went on vacation to Florida. It was a bad time to go because Hurricane Camille was on the way, but they didn't know that at the time. They packed up their 1967 deepwater blue four-door with the black vinyl top and hit the road. They had originally planned to vacation in Biloxi, Mississippi, near where the hurricane made landfall.

``I can spell Mississippi: M-I-crooked letter crooked letter-I-crooked letter crooked letter-I-humpback humpback-I,´´ said Isabel.

``You got it!´´ said Papi.

They had even made motel reservations in Biloxi, but their mailman said Ft. Walton Beach, Florida was cheaper and nicer with white sandy beaches. So that's where they headed, but they didn't know they would meet Hurricane Camille along the way.

``Who is Camille?´´ said Isabel.

``The Hurricane.´´

``I know, but WHO is Camille?´´

``I don't know, that's just the name they gave the Hurricane.´´

``Why couldn't they name it Stormy or Wendy?´´

``Well, I guess they could have, but they named it Camille, and it was one of the meanest hurricanes the Gulf Coast had ever seen, with 190 mile per hour winds that blew a Sea Food restaurant right into the ocean.´´

``I bet the lobsters were happy,´´ said Isabel.

``Yes, they were.´´

And Camille made sideways rain, tornados, and produced lots of flooding from the storm swell that breached the levees. Camille wrecked the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Ft. Walton Beach and even caused heavy flooding in Tennessee and Virginia before it was done.´´

``Was she driving a car?´´

``No, but she sure did damage a lot of cars. You could say she was reckless.´´

``Why was Camille so mad?´´

``I don't know. I think a hurricane is just nature's way of reminding us of who is in charge.´´

They drove all the way to Mobile, Alabama in the driving rain that was so heavy the windshield wipers couldn't keep up with all the water. The wind howled like a wolf and shook the car like it was a toy.

``Like a toy car,´´ said Isabel.

``Yes, like a toy car,´´ said Papi.

``Like the ones you used to play with Papi,´´ said Isabel.

``Yes, just like them,´´ said Papi.

``And the wind was you, Papi, playing with the car when you were my age.´´

``Yes, that's right, when I was about your age.´´

When they got to the Vacation Inn in Biloxi, it was closed. It had been boarded up and evacuated.

``Bearded up?´´ said Isabel.

``No silly, boarded up,´´ said Papi.

And so they drove on into the storm, with tree branches flying all around the car and strong rains and crosswinds slapping and rocking the car like it was in a carwash until they made it to Mobile. They stayed there for the night but were awakened early by sirens. Robbie thought it was a fire truck and Keri thought it sounded like the tornado warning sirens in North Little Rock, where they lived. When those sirens went off, everyone in the neighborhood rushed over to the church basement, but usually, Robbie and his dad and some of the men just stood outside their houses watching the funnel cloud pass over them. They lived in an elevated area of the town safe from twisters.

``They lived in an elevator area?´´

``No, no, an elevated area. That means high up, like on a hill.´´

Then they heard a pounding on their door and some tall man with bib overalls on but no shirt said in a funny accent, ``Y´all best va-key-ate and get the heck outta dodge and head down yonder to the high schoo.´´

Robbie thought the man said that they had better vacation in a lodge at the high school, but good thing his dad had understood, so they packed up and got the heck out of dodge. But instead of going to the high school, Robbie's dad decided to drive Southeast on Highway 98 toward Florida after hearing on his short wave radio that the hurricane was tracking Northeast. It was a big gamble. Their family sedan was the only car on the road to Florida, but as they drove more and more, the weather got better and better, and they finally made it to Ft. Walton Beach. When they got there, the town looked like a disaster zone. Palm trees and power lines were down. Two big fishing boats from the bay had blown inland near the main road and sat in a heap all twisted and tangled as if they'd been dropped from a tower onto the ground.

``No, Papi, not from a tower, dropped by a giant!´´

``Oh, that's right, it was a giant!´´

The motels on the Miracle Strip and Santa Rosa Boulevard were boarded up. The place looked abandoned. They drove into the parking lot of the aqua blue motel where they had reservations. It too was partially boarded up but was in better condition than most of the other motels around. The owner was surprised to see Robbie's family and asked if they had run into the hurricane. Robbie's dad said that they had outrun the hurricane. The owner was happy to see them and said that they were one of only a few guests and could have any room they wanted. So they picked a room with a sliding glass door that opened right onto the beach.

Now the beach was not exactly as the mailman had said. The sand was littered with all kinds of aquatic debris - dead fish and sea cucumbers, seaweed, and even some old beer bottles.

``With messages in them,´´ said Isabel.

``And starfish,´´ said Papi.

``And peanut butter and jelly fish sandwiches,´´ said Isabel.

``That too. Stop - you're making me hungry!´´

And it stunk ``to high heaven,´´ as one of the other guests from De Queen, Arkansas put it. The motel owner said the city was going to clean up the beach sometime that week and offered to let us stay for another week for free. Robbie was so excited to be on the beach that he didn't even care how dirty and smelly it was. He just stood out on the edge of the beach and let the foamy waves roll over his feet and splash his legs. He noticed a baby sandpiper trotting down to the water's edge, pecking around and then running back to escape the tide that rolled in. So when the tide receded, Robbie ran down to the water's edge, just like the sandpiper, and as the tide came rolling in again, he turned around and ran back to the safety of the white sands, but unlike the crafty sandpiper, the bubbly water caught up with him, and something strange like grass jumped onto the back of his legs.

Keri yelled, ``Robbie, a jellyfish´´ pointing to his legs.

Robbie started stomping up and down and screaming, ``Get it off, get it off,´´ but it was only some seaweed, and Keri knew that.

With all the stomping around, Robbie had gotten some of the white sand in his mouth, so he scooped up a little ocean water for rinsing, and as he slurped it up, he spit it out and shouted, ``Yuck´´ and kept spitting out sand and salty saliva. He was really surprised about the salt.

Keri laughed and said, ``Don't you know the sea is salty? Hey Robbie, if we have steak tonight, we can salt the steaks with the sea, like an ocean marinade.´´

``No, like an ocean MERMAID,´´ said Robbie and he hop scotched down the wet beach with the little sandpipers that happily pecked for food as the older sandpipers lounged in a straight line on the beach parallel to the ocean drying out their feathers.

Robbie loved the ocean. It was impossible to keep him away from the water. The ocean was like his long-lost home; it was where he belonged. He loved everything about it - the waves, the fresh briny ocean breeze, and the many birds, especially the blue herons taller than Robbie that walked the beach close to the water like curious tourists. And of course, he loved the pecking sandpipers with their long needle-like beaks. He loved the warm sand that was so white it looked bleached. And what impressed him more than anything was the power of the sea - the force of the crashing waves that snapped like lightning and the never-ending thunderous roar of the ocean, majestic, and mysterious.

The only thing he didn't like about the beach, really the only thing, was all those washed up slimy, stinky, dead sea cucumbers that were rotting away like road kill, ocean kill in this case, that littered the beach. To Robbie, those big slugs looked like giant rotten bananas and played tricks on his mind. He thought he heard one bark and ran away from it as fast as he could go imagining that it was chasing him like a snake slithering at breakneck speed snapping at his heels, barking and snarling like a German Shepherd.

When he realized the slug was no longer chasing him, Robbie slowed down to a walk and got closer to the water. He saw three big seabirds, pelicans maybe, flying low in formation, skimming the water. He was so fascinated by the birds that he wasn't paying attention to the angry wave coming right at him. As Robbie lost sight of the birds, the current from a powerful wave knocked him down and carried him out to sea. Robbie may have only been a kid, but he was a good swimmer. He was born under the sign of Aquarius and good thing because he found himself atop a wave and he dove from it, like a pelican diving for fish, to swim back to the beach. But as he began to swim, the strong undercurrent swept him down parallel to the beach toward the fishing pier. He could see jellyfish in the water and lots of seaweed that looked to him like spinach.

``And he could see a shark,´´ said Isabel.

``Sharks and electric eels,´´ said Papi.

``And a whale,´´ said Isabel.

And he realized that he wasn't riding the current, but a white whale. From its blowhole, it shot him up into the air like a rocket, and he landed on the crest of another large wave. He could see Keri waving her arms frantically. She dove in with her styrofoam surfboard and scooped Robbie out of the water, and they rode another rogue wave right onto the wet sand where they lay motionless like beached whales. And Robbie bounced up and said, ``Let´s do it again!´´

But Keri was not in the mood to play. She angrily grabbed his arm, putting the surfboard under her other and dragged him back to the motel.

``Don't you ever do that again,´´ said Keri.

``What, what did I do?´´ said Robbie.

``You nearly drowned, that's all. I'm telling Mom,´´ said Keri.

``No please, don't tell Mom,´´ said Robbie.

``I tell you what. If you find me some seashells and starfish, I won't tell,´´ said Keri. Robbie broke free of her grip and ran back down the beach toward the ocean, stopping just short of the tidemark and began scooping up the sand with his hands looking for shells. He heard Keri shout, ``THEY BETTER BE GOOD ONES.´´ As Robbie dug, he thought he might even find some diamonds.

``And then you found one, Papi, you found one!´´ said Isabel.

Down in the sand, deep down where a warm pool of ocean water had formed, Robbie saw something shiny. He thought it really might be a diamond. He carefully picked it up, examined it and realized that it was only the foil from a stick of chewing gum. He folded it up, then crumpled it a little so that it kind of looked like a diamond and ran back to Keri.

``Hey, look what I found, look what I found!´´ He held up the fake foil diamond and just as Keri reached for it, Robbie said, ``It´s mine!´´ and closed his hand.

``What is that? Looks to me like foil from a cigarette pack.´´

``No, it's a diamond.´´

``You won't find a diamond in the sand unless it's somebody's diamond ring. And what you might think is a diamond, could just be a piece of glass from a bottle.´´

``It's not a ring or glass; it's a diamond. Don't you know diamonds are made from sand?´´

``Is that true, Papi?´´ asked Isabel.

``Well, they aren't exactly made of sand, but they might have been buried in the sand where the ocean once was or washed up from the ocean and covered by the sand.´´

``Good grief, sounds like you've been talking to Walt again. What you've discovered in the sand was somebody's trash,´´ said Keri.

``No, I've been talking to Dad, and it IS a real diamond.´´

``Get lost before I tell Mom and Dad.´´

``Here, you can have it.´´

And he dropped the foil and a sand dollar at her feet and raced off down the beach pretending he was an Olympic sprinter, jumping over sea cucumbers like they were low hurdles.

And just as...

``Good night, Isi. Sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite.´´

Comments

Thank you for reading Numbered Lakes. For information about the writing of the book, including some key themes, interesting facts, and references, click on the link to the homepage: http://wp.me/p78mdV-6.

Digital and hard copies of the book can be purchased on Amazon.

About the Author

William Robert Hibbard grew up the North Little Rock suburb of Lakewood. He graduated from the University of Arkansas with a BA in English and studied Communication in graduate school at North Texas State University, since renamed the University of North Texas. He later earned an MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Rob worked in the field of education for over 30 years as a teacher, administrator, and professor. He and his wife live in Boston and have two daughters and a cat. Numbered Lakes is his first published book.