Burning Second Street Park

A Novel

by Tom Bessette

Copyright 2009 BessetteBooks

Chapter 3
Dicky Boulerice

My brother is such a jerk!  Baseball, baseball, baseball, Dodgers, Dodgers, Dodgers!  Sheesh!  There’s more to life than stupid baseball. And, too, there’s gooder teams than the Dodgers.  And I kind a like the Beatles more than the Beach Boys, but my dumb-o brother just tells me to shut my trap every time I try to tell about it.  My dad says that Pauly is smart as beans, but I think he is pretty dumber than anybody thinks. He’s not even a whole year older than me, and I even get better marks in school, but everybody, even my parents, say he’s the smart one. It’s all because a baseball, because my dad played it when he was, well before he married my mom, I guess. And Pauly can hit and catch balls and slide into home so good.

Anyways, I guess I like baseball OK enough, but I really like going up past the tracks into the fields and looking at the animals, like pheasants and rabbits and sometimes a deer that I can see up there if I’m being real quiet.  I started to figure out where rabbit holes were, and could sit for a long time real quiet, and maybe one would poke its head out of its hole and wiggle its nose.  The pheasants liked to crouch way down in the tall grasses that growed up there, and I was starting to be able to guess where they would be, and sneak up on them, and sometimes even get real close to see them pecking around in there.  If they saw me before I saw them, you’d hear a big whirry flapping sound as they jumped up out of the grass and flew away.  Even when you knew it was gonna happen, it would still make you jump and make your heart go thumping like mad. They had really boss rings around their necks.  Bobby Nolette’s dad said they tasted like chicken, and he knew because he was a hunter, and went out and hunted the pheasants right here in these fields.

When we were riding back in our car after seeing Billy get his cast on, after he crashed into Jimmy Yoder in the game in the park, Bobby rode back with us, and too came Gilly Beauchamp and his messy sister. I was glad there wasn’t room for Yoder.  He gave me the creeps, like he could see me with X-Ray vision or something.  Pauley liked him, though, so I had to, too. My dad said Gilly’s family was real poor because their dad was a nerd-doo-ell, which meant that he couldn’t ever make himself do anything right.  I felt real bad for him, because I thought I would be the same way when I grew up.  I couldn’t hardly do anything right already, even when I tried to make myself.  I always dropped fly balls, and almost always struck out when I was up to bat and the team needed a hit.  I kept forgetting the rules to games, even though Bobby tried to help me to remember, if I could. The only stuff I could do OK was school and the fields, and that didn’t count for nothing.

I know Gilly hated his dad, because he always called him his stupid old man, which wasn’t very nice.  He even joked about ways to steal from his father, which wasn’t really right, too.  Bobby told me in the hospital that Gilly’s dad broke himself falling down the stairs because Gilly and Bobby stole his cigarettes.  I had told Bobby that smoking was bad, because my dad said so, but, actually, my mom and dad were about the only grownups in the neighborhood who didn’t smoke, so maybe it was just them being spoilsports.

There was another family near us that was a different kinda poor, the Molinari’s.  They were Eye Talions and lived down below Galarneau’s store, right next to the tracks.  Not the tracks behind our house, which only had a couple slow trains a day go by, but the big tracks down the hill, where big, long, super trains whizzed by like you couldn’t believe.  The Molinari’s had eight kids and their house was real small, hardly bigger than our shed out back where we used to keep our cats, when we had some. Nicky Molinari was the one that was close to our age.  He had one older brother named, um, well, I can’t remember it now, but I really do know it.  He’s twelve and doesn’t always hang around with us, anyway.  Then they have a whole bunch of littler kids who nobody really knew, except they were always running around like madmen, knocking stuff over and spilling food and stuff whenever you were there.

I think Eye Talions were Catholic too, most of them, like us, but my mom said that they had to have as many babies as they could, just like the Eye Rich.  There was a Eye Rich family down the street that also had a lot of kids, I don’t know how many, but they weren’t poor, for some reason, and lived in a bigger house, that wasn’t right next to the big tracks.  I guess the french people like us didn’t have to have so many kids, but when I asked my mom why, she just laughed and said I’d know when I was older.  I get told that a lot.  They prolly think I’m not so smart enough to get it.

Bobby and Gilly were riding with us because Mr. Nolette had asked my dad to bring them to our house, or their house, I don’t know which.  I don’t like Gilly at all.  I know I’m supposed to feel sorry for him because he’s so poor and has that pretty bad father, but he was just too big and mean for me to like.  He was about the worst tease there was, and liked to flick you with his fingers so it hurt, and was always laughing and getting in trouble, too much for me.  He didn’t bother my brother, though, and my brother had told everybody that they couldn’t beat me up or anything, so pretty much nobody did.  I think big Jimmy Yoder wanted to, beat me up, that is, but he didn’t try, probably because of wanting to play baseball with my brother.  My brother was only ten, like Bobby, but he was big himself, and real fast and a good baseball player, so everybody liked him and treated him good, and did what he wanted.

We didn’t know what to do with Gilly’s sister, Ginny.  My dad decided she shouldn’t come to our house, because we really didn’t know her and she wasn’t old enough to play with us, so he pulled up to her Grandma’s house.  Her and Gilly’s grandma came out and she took Ginny and said Gilly could come to our house, although I really wished that Gilly would stay with his Grandma, too, because he was really pretty bad and I was afraid of him.  Bud dad said he could come with us and get lunch and play with the boys, meaning me and Pauly and Bobby, so I didn’t say anything.

When we got to our house, it was just about lunch time, so we all went up into our kitchen and my mom made us lunch.  We have a kitchen table that is in a corner of the kitchen and we can all squeeze around the back of it, right next to the wall, so that my parents can sit at the chairs that are easier to get to.  My brother Pauly always makes me get in first and then squeezes in just about right on top of me, so that I can hardly breathe, all shoved and squashed into the corner.  He can really be mean, sometimes.

My mom made a whole bunch of baloney sandwiches with cheese in them, on that really smooth Sunbeam bread that we liked.  Pauly started asking to have Kool-Aid with them, but my mom said no, we had to drink our milk; Kool-Aid was only for a special treat, like potato chips, which we hardly ever got to eat.  Mom cut the crusts off mine like I asked, and, as usual, Pauly said I was a weakling for not eating the crusts.  He and Bobby started laughing and fooling around, making those stupid jokes they always did, about how our food was digested and ended up becoming poop, which was disgusting and always made me want to throw up.  I had to watch it, though, because if I said so, then they’d start saying it even more, saying how I was making poop right now and would I even finish my sandwich before it started coming out the other end. It could be really hard to eat when the two of them got going with their poop talk.

Usually, Gilly, too, would tease as much as anybody, and even more, when we were together, but today he just glommed down baloney sandwiches, one after the other.  I never seen somebody eat so many baloney sandwiches at once, he must have been real hungry, like maybe he didn’t eat in a long time.  He ate four sandwiches, and the rest of us hardly finished one, especially Bobby, who never ate much at all, like me. My mom said Gilly maybe had a hollow leg or something, which made sense, because he couldn’t fit all those sandwiches in his belly, that’s for sure.

Bobby and my brother Pauly were still making stupid jokes at each other.  Bobby was telling about how they ran from the fire behind St. Patrick’s Church and Pauly was laughing so hard that he squirted a whole gob of milk and booger out of his nose.  My mother saw it and got all excited like she always did, like it was the end of the world, and started yelling at Bobby and Pauly to stop making messes and show some manners, which, of course, they never would.  They liked stuff like sandwiches becoming poop and milk and boogers squirting out of their noses and were always thinking up new gross things to do.

Pretty soon my mother said she had had it, and told us to go outside to play and stop making messes in the kitchen.  She always did that after us being in the house a while.  I guess when we were around it was always too noisy for her and she’d start getting her Mine Grade headaches and have to go lie down in a room with the door shut. My dad was out working in the yard, burning some poison ivy next to the tracks, and he wouldn’t come in except to get lunch. Other than playing baseball, we never saw him much.

Pauly right away wanted to go get Yoder and some of the other guys and get up a game, but I wanted to go up into the fields and build a fort.  I figured Bobby would go play ball, but asked him anyways if he wanted to go with me and he about made me fall down when he said sure. Gilly said he’d come too, which was really unusual. Pauly called us all sissies, and Bobby said “I know you are, but what am I”, and Gilly gave him a rough shove, which knocked him over, and we left him and crossed the tracks and got on the path up the hill to the fields.

Bobby and I were pretty good friends, even though he was really supposed to be Pauly’s friend.  He and Pauly were in the same grade at Saint James’s Catholic Elementary school and were the two smartest kids in the class, even smarter than the girls, and everybody said so, even the nuns.  Bobby played Leaners with Pauly and pretty much usually played baseball with him, even though he wasn’t anywhere nearly as good at it.  But sometimes, he also liked to go walking in the fields and woods with me and treated me just like I was in the same grade as they were.  Bobby was a good kid, even if he did play with Gilly a lot. 

Gilly scared the tar out of me.  First, he had that bad father that I was worried I would be just like.  Then, he was always really dirty and smelled pretty bad, like he had rotten food in his socks or something.  But the worst was that he smoked those cigarettes and had even drank beer a few times and was rough and tough and hard to play with, always shoving people and laughing that mean laugh of his.  I didn’t like to be around him much and probably wouldn’t, but with Bobby there, it would probably be OK.  Even though Gilly was always daring Bobby to do bad stuff that he knew he shouldn’t, it somehow seemed that Gilly really looked up to Bobby, and always wanted to be with him.  I couldn’t figure it; it was too confusing to me.

Anyways, I wanted to build a fort and Bobby said he knew a tree that was losing it’s bark and we could use that for walls and build a great fort.  So, we walked up a valley between hills to this big old dead tree that had big sheets of bark peeling off it.  Some of them were a lot bigger than we were.  You could grab their edges and pull around the tree and they would come off in big pieces. It was so neat, on the insides of the bark there were all these bug tracks, whole messes of squiggly lines leading in all directions, and even dug into the tree itself.  Bobby said his dad had told him it was bugs that had crawled into the tree and ate their way around and that was what had killed the tree.  We didn’t care about that, because now we had these cool pieces of bark to use as walls for our fort; we were happy.

A ways farther up the valley, there was a bunch of thick brush and we found this neat-o spot for our fort behind a big mess of picker bushes.  Picker bushes are about the best protection a fort can have, because grownups don’t want to go into them and get all pickers all over their good clothes.  You want to get away from grownups, just go into a picker bush and you’re safe. We kids didn’t wear nice clothes, except to church on Sundays, and to school, so we didn’t care if we got all pickers, though my mom would really yell if I came home all pickers.  Bobby said his would, too.  Gilly only said nobody better dare yell at him for anything, or else.  I don’t know ‘or else’ what.  Was he going to beat up on his dad?  I don’t think his dad would worry about chasing him into a picker bush, somehow.

We got a bit distracted there for a minute, because Gilly picked a handful of pickers and started whipping them at me and Bobby.  I didn’t like it, but Bobby right away grabbed a bunch himself and started whipping them back at Gilly, and at me, although I hadn’t done anything to him.  You expect Gilly to whip pickers at you if he felt like it, not Bobby. I started to get all upset but Bobby said, “Come on, Dicky, it’s fun!” So I got some and threw too, though I was nervous the whole time.  I just don’t like rough stuff. It’s scary.

In about two minutes we were all covered in pickers.  I had them all in my hair and everything. It was a pain, because when you pulled them off, pieces of picker hair stuck to you and it took a real long time to pick them all off.  Gilly and Bobby just pulled off the big ones and left the little picker hairs stuck in their clothes and said don’t worry about it.  But I knew my mom would yell. Each stupid picker hair had a hook at the end of it which grabbed onto anything it could and didn’t want to let go for nothing. Bobby finally came over and helped me pull the hairs off, while Gilly just stood there laughing and calling us babies.

Pretty soon, Bobby said I was all un-pickered and we started to build our fort.  This was what I was good at.  We collected a bunch of dead branches and criss-crossed them together to make a frame, and then hung our pieces of bark on them, tying them with thin viny-things we found, using them like rope. It was a lot of work collecting the branches and bark and dragging them up to the fort but with three of us, we did it pretty quick.  Boy, Gilly could work.  He was strong and didn’t mind doing the hardest dragging, and he was also good at climbing up on the rickety frame we built to get the bark covering up to the highest places.  He didn’t look like he was afraid of anything, especially of getting hurt. He acted like he wanted to beat up the whole world and do everything there was to do.  I could almost start to see why Bobby liked him; compared to us he was brave and strong.

In about an hour, we had finished our fort.  Right away, we figured we should have a fireplace in it so we could be warm in winter.  I started to think that it wasn’t hardly even fall yet, and winter was a long ways away, but Bobby and Gilly said we had to learn to plan for the future, so we figured we better do it. They knew all about fires, having just lit one behind the church near Gilly’s house, so I figured it was OK.

We crawled into the fort, which was a little longer and wider than we were when we laid down stretched out. The door was too low for us to walk in regular, so we got on our hands and knees. There was light inside because we didn’t get the bark on completely tight and there were cracks, which ended up being good anyway because we had forgot flashlights. We cleared an area in one corner, and Bobby said we better make a roof hole above where our fire would be, so that the smoke could escape and not choke us. Gilly went to a steam a ways away and came back huffing, lugging a big flat rock that he said would be our ‘harf’, or something, and the fire would burn on it and not burn the ground.

We gathered a whole bunch of kinda dry leaves from a gulley and piled sumac sticks on them.  Gilly had matches with him and lit the leaves to start our fire, and used the flame to light a cigarette while he was at it.  The leaves were a bit wet and kinda smoldered for a while, filling the hut with smoke that was thick and hard to breathe through.  I couldn’t see anything, but could feel some heat when I reached to feel if the fire was going.  We coughed around in the smoke for a couple minutes. I was just starting to wonder if I should get out for some fresh air, when all of a sudden there were sparks and then orange-y flames shooting around the fort.

Holy Cow! In a second, the whole fort seemed to be on fire, us too, and we scrambled out the little door. I was wearing some new clothes my mother had bought me, a blue checked jacket and a matching cap with a snap brim that mom was real proud of, but I thought it was a little sissy. 

When I got outside and saw the big flames eating up our fort, I felt real hot and dizzy, and suddenly Gilly knocked me down on the ground and he and Bobby started rolling all over me.  I thought they were being perverts or something until I realized that my nice blue jacket and hat had been on fire and they were crushing it out. It was made of a special kind of cloth that sort of melted instead of burned, and some of it was stuck to me. It was black and almost glassy and where it touched my skin it felt like somebody had dripped hot candle wax on me.  Gilly and Bobby finished putting me out and we saw right away that more than just the fort was burning, the whole valley was going up. Holy Toledo!

I was still a little woozy from the heat and the melting, but Gilly and Bobby right away got me running down the valley towards the tracks, and it seemed the fire was following us, it spread so quick.  We got to the tracks in the nick of time, but Gilly said we better not run down through my yard because then it would be obvious to everybody that we had started the fire. 

We had all been lectured a lot about not starting fires and would all get in the biggest trouble ever. So, we ran down the tracks toward the city line, figuring to come out near the hot dog factory at the end of Robin Street.  People that saw us there wouldn’t think we had anything to do with the fire, right?

We plopped down to rest in front of Old Stupo Bergeron’s house, and I searched all over myself to see if I was all burned up.  Other than wearing a charred black jacket and half a hat (the other half had burned up), I was pretty much OK, so didn’t have to start crying.  Gilly would have teased me if I cried, so I didn’t want to if I could help it.

Bobby, though, started crying right away, blubbering out that his father was really going to kill him this time, cause this was two fires in one day and his mother had already threatened to dock his allowance if he got in any more trouble.  Gilly right away told him to shut up his baby crying already, we had to think about what to do.

He said, “Geezum, will ya quit it already, ya stupid baby?  Your stupid old man ain’t gonna kill ya, he ain’t even gonna know if ya shut up, already.”

Bobby started snorting boogers through his nose, he was trying to stop so hard.  Big gulps of snot that he swallowed down and burped back out, his eyes red and cheeks wet.  He looked like a fat kid for a minute.

As he started winding down, I suddenly figured that my mom and dad would know right away that I had been in the fire because my clothes were burned all up.  So I started crying, too.

“My mom’s gonna kill me,” I said, “This was her favorite jacket and hat on me and she liked it so much, and now I’ve gone and burned them all up and ruined them, and money to buy clothes doesn’t grow on trees…” and all stuff like that, until I was red in the face and had wet cheeks and probably looked like a fat kid too, for all I knew.

Gilly just looked all disgusted, like he couldn’t believe he had bothered to save me from the fort fire, I was such a big baby.  He never cared about getting in trouble, he was too brave and strong.

He said, “Ya stupid Doodles, you an Baby can cry till tomorrow; yer cryin’ will tell on ya’s as quick as anything anyways, anybody can see it.”

So Bobby and me calmed ourselves down, and pretty soon we figured we should just walk up Main Street to my house like we had been down to the canal or something, anywhere but beyond the tracks where the fire was.  Gilly said we should just toss away my burned jacket and hat and then just say some stupid bully stole them, and I would be alright.  Mom would be upset about it but it wouldn’t be my fault. So we ditched the jacket in Bergeron’s garbage can.

We got going and walked to the end of Robin, cut around down the side of the hot dog factory to Main Street, and then headed up towards my house.  We got as far as first street when we saw my brother Pauly and Jimmy Yoder and Nicky Molinari and his brother and a bunch of other guys coming back from Galarneau’s store, where they had been buying baseball cards and shooting Leaners and drinking Tru-Ade’s and planning a ballgame and all that fun stuff.  I should have gone with my brother like I usually did.

Gilly yelled out to my brother, Pauly, “Hey Moose, ya grow any stupid antlers yet?”

Gilly was always asking crazy questions like that, probably just to show off how brave he was or something.

Yoder laughed and my brother yelled back, “Well, if I ever do, I’ll for sure jab it up your stinking rear, to see how you like it!”

Everybody laughed, even quiet old Nicky Molinari and his brother, whatever his name was, neither of which usually laughed at all about anything.  If it was anybody but Pauly that said it, or if Yoder wasn’t there, Gilly might have started a fist fight just to show who was boss, but he didn’t, either because he thought Pauly and Yoder could beat him up, or maybe he just liked them, I don’t know.

Pauly asked me where my new jacket was and I said some stupid bullies took it away from me.  Yoder right away said that we should go hunt them down and beat the crap out of them and torture them and cut out their guts.  He said, “Was they niggers?”

Gilly said, “Yeah, they was, big brown ones, and they runned down the tracks, and said if we foller’ed ‘em they’d rip off our dicks and smoke ‘em like cigars.”

Gilly and Yoder wanted to go catch the Negroes, especially Gilly, and so we all ran off back to the hot dog factory to see if we could catch them. 

While we were running that way, I started to realize that there weren’t any bullies or Negroes, that it was a story we made up to keep people from thinking my jacket got melted up in the fire and what would we do if we actually saw some Negroes.  Then I thought more and figured that Yoder was the only one of us that ever saw a Negro before and so we couldn’t be expected to identify them anyways. I know I had no idea what a Negro looked like.

Yoder kept yelling, “Dirty, stupid, bastard niggers, I’ll show ‘em to come up here and mess with my friends.”  I half wanted Yoder to catch them so I could see him beat them up, if he could, then remembered again that there probably weren’t any, cause we had made them up.  I kept hoping that nobody would think to ask what they looked like, because I had no idea.

Old Yoder sure got mad real easy.  All of us little guys were scared of him. It seemed like he was just waiting for a chance to hurt somebody, you know?

We looked all around the hot dog factory, and then followed the tracks down towards Watervliet a bit, but we didn’t see any Negroes, so finally we turned around to head back home to my house.  Yoder and Gilly were real disappointed, because they really wanted to beat up some Negroes, I guess.  Gilly definitely forgot that it wasn’t Negroes that had stole my jacket.  He was out for revenge.

The hot dog factory, being right near the edge of town, was close to Devil’s Cave, probably the coolest place on the earth, if you ask me. It was a cave that run under the tracks, and you could walk right through it, if you didn’t mind getting your feet wet in the stream that flowed through it.

Yoder and Gilly figured that maybe the niggers that stole my jacket might have hidden in the cave and we should surround it and catch them and show them what for.  So, we all ran off to the tracks again and then split up and some of us ran down one side of the tracks and the rest of us down the other.  I was with the bunch that ran down the downstream side, which was especial steep and muddy and we had to slide a lot and get mud up our shorts a lot.

At the bottom of the cliff, the cave came out of the cliff at the top of a waterfall that was about twice as high up as we were tall.  You could climb up it but it was all shaly and cut your sneaks and hands.  Bobby and the Molinari brothers were in my group and Nicky’s big brother said we had to climb up so as to catch the niggers when they came out.  The plan was that Gilly, Yoder and my brother would surprise them at the other side and the niggers would run through the cave to us and we’d catch them.

I started thinking right away that this was a pretty stupid plan because our side was mostly the smaller kids and maybe the niggers would crash right through us and get away, or even beat us up again and steal all our coats, or something. You never knew what niggers might do, Yoder always said, and he knew, too.

So, anyways, me and Bobby and Nicky crawled up to the cave and looked in. Nicky’s brother said he’d stay down to make sure the coast was clear. It was dark and we couldn’t see anything or hear anything, and we knew that the other guys would have already got down to their side.  What’s his name, Nicky’s brother, said we had to go inside the cave so as to bushwhack the niggers when they came running through the tunnel.  Me and Nicky didn’t want to do no bushwhacking, figuring it would probably be us who got bushwhacked.  After all, the niggers had already beat me up and stole my coat once, even with Bobby and Gilly with me.  I thought we should just wait until Gilly and Yoder and my brother came through chasing the niggers.

it was dark and cold in the cave.  Quiet, like, and all.  Nicky’s brother started telling us we were chicken because we were too scared-y cat-y to go in like a man. It was Bobby who finally said that maybe the niggers had killed the other guys and we better go look.  Holy Cow, if the niggers had killed Gilly and Yoder and my brother, I didn’t want to go look, I wanted to run home and get my mother. And, maybe even the cops.  Cops knew what to do about niggers that killed your brother, I think.

Bobby said, “Naw, we gotta go in and see, cause if we just get the cops all riled up and the niggers didn’t kill the guys, we’ll just all be in trouble.”

“But, it’s all spooky and everything, and what if the niggers are in there just waiting for us, huh?”
Bobby got real mad and started whispering quiet to me:

“Geezum, there ain’t no niggers, remember?  We made that all up. Probably Gilly and that crazy Yoder are just looking to scare us. I know your brother would.”

Nicky said, “Wataya mean they ain’t no niggers?  You said!”

Bobby got that mad look he gets when people are being stupid.

“it’s because Dicky’s coat got burned in a fort fire back of his house and we had to say something so he wouldn’t get in trouble.  So, Gilly made up the thing about the niggers.  Geezum, you know we ain’t never seen no niggers around here; they all live way off in Albany or clear across the river in Troy, for cripes sake. We don’t even know what niggers really looks like!”

“They gots brown skin an’ frizzy hair,” Nicky said.

“Yeah, and how would you know, stupid. Yoder tell you that? Seen pictures in a  book?”

Nicky just looked all embarrassed.

So, now I started thinking that there weren’t no niggers in the cave after all and it was probably just my stupid brother and stupid Gilly and Yoder trying to scare us. Figures!  it’s something Yoder would do.  He was usual trying to scare us, especially the littler ones.  He’d smile and laugh real weird, like it was the best thing ever.

We crept further into the cave.  The cave walls were wet and slimy and it was hard to find a dry place to walk because the stream took up most of the cave.  We got to the middle part where you kind of went around a bend. It was where it was the darkest, where you couldn’t see the light at either end. It was way creepy and we three of us all hung on each another to keep from getting lost or in case a monster grabbed one of us and tried to kill him.

Nicky and me kept trying to follow right behind Bobby.  We neither of us wanted to be last because it was easiest for monsters to grab the last guy and run.  We neither of us wanted to be first either, because then we’d be the first one to run into the monsters, or Negroes, or whatever we were going to find in here.  So, me and Nicky kept on shoving each another and Bobby kept having to go “Shush!”

Then, all of a sudden, Bobby tripped and splashed right into the stream.  Almost at the same time, I felt something under my foot, like a snake or something and let out a yell.  Nicky screamed and right away started crying and turned around and crunched right into eth side of the cave, because he couldn’t see where to run to.  Then strong arms grabbed all around me and I knew the Negroes had caught me.  I twisted and turned my self to try to get away, screaming my lungs out.  I figured Bobby was already dead and so was Nicky and it was only a minute or two at the most before I’d be all killed to.

Then up started this big echo-y laugh, like the same what I saw in that old Frankenstein movie my dad took us to at the old second run movie place. It was like the laughing was bouncing off all the walls, like fifteen or twenty Negroes, or monsters screaming “Bu-Wah-Ha-Ha-ha-Hah” over and over again and all criss-crossing each another.

I got my arms kind of free and slapped them on the side of the cave up over my head near the roof and felt some furry things, which right away squealed and started flapping all over my head.  Bats!  Cripes!  They’s all get in my hair and my parents would find me the next day, dead from being half eaten by monsters and all dead bats stuck in my hair.

Suddenly a flame went on and there was Gilly with a lighter, and in the flame you could see him and Yoder and my stupid brother making all the Bu-Wah-Ha-Ha sounds.  Bobby was lying in the stream all surprised and poor old Nicky was all hunched in a ball, leaning against the sides.  We could see bat wings fluttering back towards the end we came in from and we all ran chasing them out.  When we got to where we could see the end, you could see black fluttery shapes whipping around the end.  They didn’t want to fly outside because it was pretty bright for their squinty eyes, but we had scared them from their perches in here.  Geezum, we were trapped.

Gilly and Yoder ran to the end screaming at the bats and the bats flapped all over the place and then flew out of the cave.  I thought for sure that they’d grab Gilly and Yoder’s hair and carry them away up the canyon, but they never did.  We heard Joey yelling, “Holy Cripes, lookit all them bats!”  By now, pretty much everybody was laughing, even me, mostly because we were probably all relieved not to get eaten by monsters or bats or killed by Negroes.

My brother looked hard at me and said, “So, no Negroes, huh?”

“I guess they must have got away,” I said.

“I bet,” he said.

Yoder said, “Well if we’d a caught ‘em, I would a toasted their rotten guts over a fire right in that there cave.  We’d teach them to come around here and bother our little guys!”

He was looking at Nicky as he said it, with his weirdest smile yet.

On the way back past the hot dog factory, the two Molinari’s and Gilly searched through the garbage cans out back, saying that there was always perfectly good meat thrown away, there.  The rest of us watched, kind of worried, in case the watchman came out and yelled at us.  We were also kind of embarrassed, because our parents all told us that only dastard-toot people ate from garbage cans and we should never do it.

Gilly found a whole box of hot dogs in one can, that had hardly any green spots on them at all, and he and the Molinari’s started chomping them down like nothing, green spots and all, like they did this all the time.  There was enough to share, but I was still full from lunch and the others said no, too.  They ate the whole box between them, and then tossed the box on the ground, just as the watchman came out and started yelling at us.

“Ya goddam bastard kids, if I ever catch ya, I’ll goddam kill ya. Yer like rats, ya bastards!” 

I sure hated getting yelled at, and the Molinari’s were looking pretty embarrassed, too. But Gilly was his usual self and yelled back at the watchman, “Yeah, Yeah, see if ya can ever catch us, ya lard ass, ya stinkin’ stupe!” 

I was pretty sure that the watchman wouldn’t ever catch anybody, because he was real fat, with his belly hanging down over his belt, and he walked real slow, in a waddle like a penguin, with his suspenders hanging down behind his hiney. The big front of his shirt always had stains on it from the sloppy food he ate, and if you got too close to him, he smelled even worse than Gilly did. He always yelled that he’d sick the dog, but we never saw any dog there. Heck, the dog would eat the hot dogs, too.

Anyways, we all runned away up the street, with the stupid watchman still jawing after us. I had forgot all about the fort fire until we heard the sirens screaming up Main Street near our house.  I was just about thinking we better head over there when Pauly and Jimmy yelled, “Hey, sirens, let’s go see.”

So we all ran up the street to see what was burning.