The Girl with the Crooked Tooth. Chp.1

First Draft                 

Oct. 17,  2013



         1.

         The year was 1979 and I was ten years old when Bobby Sanders first brought the "Magic 8 Ball"  to the small strip of dirt and weeds that ran behind my Step-Father's garage. A place that was always referred to by us kids as  "the spot". That was the year that Randy Miller got his brains splattered out across the pavement at the end of Bacon Street. His blood had dried there, turning to a dark stain on the asphalt. None of us kids would dare to step foot onto that spot, and we would always steer our bicycles and skateboards to avoid rolling over it. The black shape of Randy Miller's dried blood whispered of dark mysteries that awaited us all, and by the end of October of that year, it had became a shrine of sorts to us kids. That was also the year that I met the girl with the crooked tooth.

         The garage itself was an immense structure that dwarfed the large three bedroom, ranch style house that my family called home. It was a fairly new building. Luther had built it board by board and nail by nail with his own two hands only three years earlier. As he had built the house a number of years before that. To me the "newness" of it's brick exterior always seemed out of place amongst the neighborhood lined with shotgun shacks and modest box shaped cottages. Luther was the man that my Mother had married when I was still waddling around in diapers. Although I never thought of my Step-Father as being a good man, he was one hell of a man when it came to his carpentry skills. Skills that he undoubtedly had learned while growing up on a working farm in the deep hills of Kentucky. That building had always seemed crowded sitting in our back yard. There were two large bays with those metal roll-up doors. These were offset to the right and opened onto the larger portion of the building. Hydraulic jacks and hand tools were loosely organized around the old car or truck that always seemed to be sitting there, hood up or tires missing. On the left side of the double bays was a spacious work area devoted more to woodworking and carpentry. There was always an inch or two of sawdust covering everything on that end of the building. This area is the only place that had a window other than the two small ones in the bay doors themselves, which were painted over black. This window was set in the upper portion of the walk-in door that sat in the side wall there. The door was always locked and the curtains were always drawn over that little window when Luther was working in the garage. He liked to build furniture as well as houses. He made book shelves, kitchen cabinets, tables and chairs. Once he even made a rocking horse for my little sister, Shirley Ray! He had always been partial to Shirley Ray.

         I did not know at that time  why Luther had chosen not to put any other windows in the entire structure other than the one on the door. Knowing what I know now, I wonder why he even put that one in. This absence of windows meant that there were no openings from which the eyes of prying adults could peer from to keep a watch on mischievous children. That made the strip of tall grass and weeds that lay between the blank, back wall of the garage and the metal chain-link fence that marked the boundary of our back yard a sort of secret sanctuary for all of us neighborhood kids that gathered there regularly.

         Bobby was the "rich kid" in our school, even though his family was far from being rich. He came from what would now be called a middle class family. A status that my Mother aspired to reach all of her life, and one that she not-so-secretly envied. I think that it was due to the fact that she grew up so dirt poor. He had received the eight ball as a gift from one of his Aunts on the occasion of his twelfth birthday celebration the week before. A party that none of us other (poor) kids had been invited to. This made him the oldest of our group. This also meant that he was about to cross that invisible threshold that lead into that fabled land of teen-aged-om. Teen-agers were mysterious creatures. Not as mythical as those ancient ones known as Adults, but still they belonged more to the land of grown-ups than the rest of us kids. Even though Bobby was one of us, he had somehow began crossing over into the realms of puberty and that made him just a little different from the rest of us. Us being the small group of kids who had grown up in our little neighborhood on the South Side of Indianapolis in the 1970's. More specifically the half dozen or so kids who knew about "the spot" on Bacon street in October of the last year of that long gone decade. There was myself, Bobby Sanders, Joey Miller, Arnold Estep, and later on there was April Summers. Oh there were others who came and went throughout those years, and a few younger kids who straggled around close by from time to time, but our little gang of friends was just the five of us.

         Bobby's family lived in a clean, modern home at the end of our block. The Sander's lawn had been raised a good six feet above the surrounding properties at the time of the houses construction. Robert Sanders Sr. claimed that it was to provide better drainage, but I suspect it was just so that Mr. Sanders could look out of his windows and look down on the rest of us. Bobby's Dad owned the company that had done the construction. It wasn't a huge outfit, but there were at least a dozen workers that were employed by "Sanders Construction" and Mr. Robert Sanders signed their paychecks each week. I can remember all of us kids looking on in awe as the back-hoe tractors and big dump trucks sculpted the ground like sand in a sandbox. They turned what had once been a bramble infested vacant lot into a small smooth mound covered with lush green turf. The oily smells of the thick billowing smoke from the machinery and the metallic thundering of their progress was a source of amazement for not only the neighborhood children, but for many of the adults as well. There was still a class war going on back then. I don't know if it was going on everywhere, or if it was as evident in other places, but in our little neighborhood in the 1970's it was painfully obvious. In an era of gas shortages and the introduction of compact cars to the American automotive industries it seemed that the bigger, the more ostentatious, was considered the better. Sanders construction was the biggest thing to hit our little piece of the world. This caused many of the adults in families who had less, and maybe thought of themselves as something less because of it, to hold deep resentments towards the Sanders family. That and the fact that good drainage for the Sanders large manicured lawn meant a swampy mess for the surrounding properties on all four sides. I am not so sure that the resentments were totally unfounded when it came to Mr. Robert Sanders Sr. He had a pride about him that gave him an air of smug arrogance. He was a man who had forgotten where he came from, and had worked and toiled his whole life to forget. You could see it in his eyes. The hard look that he would give to all of us neighborhood kids when we would come fetch Bobby to come out and play. It was a look of cold disdain. Even as a little kid I understood that he believed that he was better than not only us kids, but the whole rest of us that lived at a slightly lower altitude in the neighborhood than him.

         If Mrs. Sanders ever shared such beliefs with her husband, she never showed it. Bobby's Mom was always kind and friendly to all of us kids. Every time I saw her she was wearing a  frilly apron over some pastel colored dress. Her hair was always perfectly in place and her make-up was always flawless with not so much as a smudge. She had always reminded me of a hybrid of June Cleaver and Carol Brady.  Bobby's Mom was always bringing out large pictures of cold Kool-Aid on days when it got really hot, or warm mugs of hot chocolate to all of us kids after many a days filled with snowball fights. She was nothing like my own Mother. I remember the time Arnold got his tooth chipped during the "Epic Snowball Battle of 1978" the year before Bobby brought that cursed eight ball to the spot. What made it epic wasn't that Arnold got his tooth smashed, it was the record setting snow fall caused by the Mother of all blizzards that hit this part of the country that year. There were drifts so high that they covered the cars parked along Bacon street with thick white blankets. That made for plenty of snow forts and frozen ammunition. There were so many kids gathered in opposing ranks on  either side of the Sander's big yard that I did not recognize many of them. Even a few bigger kids were there taking part in the winter wonderland war. Someone, we never knew who it was for sure but suspected one of the older boys, had presumably by accident scooped up a rock in the snow while balling it up. That said snowball was then thrown during the heat of battle and struck Arnold right in the kisser! A flower of deep bright red blossomed from the snow covering Arnold's face. The rock or piece of gravel or whatever was in the snowball had busted his lip open pretty bad. Arnold's eyes were huge and wet above the crimson rose forming where his mouth had been just moments before. His hands simultaneously reached up to wipe the snow from his shattered lips and when his sock covered hands touched the open flesh of the fresh wound he burst out screaming. It was the terror soaked girly scream of a young boys horror and fear. Mrs. Sanders, undoubtedly having heard Arnold's screams, had raced out and was scooping him up into her arms. His blood dripped onto her pristine apron and began to spread. "Oh my!" She had exclaimed upon inspecting his injuries more closely. "You've chipped your tooth Dear." She had said very matter-of-factually. Upon hearing this Arnold poked his tongue out and ran it across the jagged edge of his right front tooth, then burst out with even louder wails of panic and pain. Bobby's Mom had picked Arnold up and held him close to her bosom as she crossed there big front lawn and carried him into the house. Occasional drops of blood trailed behind them staining the white snow,

         An ambulance was called, insurance companies were contacted, and arguments ensued among the adults. Arnold had to get ten stitches and ended up with a gap-toothed smile that only enhanced his already homely appearance. Ten stitches! It was like a warriors battle scar to all of us kids that gathered at "the Spot" the following day to admire the doctors thread work. Arnold was forbade by his parents from ever playing at the "Sanders Boy's" house again. That was just fine by Robert Sanders Sr. who, I was convinced back then and still am now, hated all of us "dirty poor kids" anyways. I think that our second-hand clothes and dirt smudged faces reminded him of those things that he had struggled to escape and to forget. It was like that for many of the adults that lived on Bacon street back then.

         Arnold Andrew Estep did not exactly live in the official neighborhood as it were. He lived with his rather large family in an disproportionately small shack of a house that sat over across I-65 in a neighborhood that the grown-ups openly referred to as "Nigger Town". All of Arnold's family members were as white as crackers, but each of them suffered from one form of a mental handicap or another in varying degrees of severity that caused  them to be considered outcasts from most social circles. Arnold's family reminded me of illustrations of cave people that I had seen in the history textbooks in grammar school. I am not exaggerating their appearances, nor am I trying to be mean in my description of them. I am merely trying to emphasize their abnormal physical appearance. I believe that it was the way that they looked, more so than any mental handicap, that caused them to be alienated by their peers and society as a whole. The Estep clan was a huge family, as I have said. I never knew exactly how many of them there were, but I could count at least a dozen kids and half as many adults that were permanent fixtures about the little ramshackle house.

         Oh jeesh, that house was horrible.

         I was only invited over to Arnold's house one time, this was at Arnold's request, and I don't think that any of  the other kids in the neighborhood ever were as far as I know of. His parents had been away visiting relatives or something along those lines at the time. Arnold and I had been sitting in the cluttered backyard working at rebuilding a couple of salvaged bicycles. Arnold Estep might have been more than just a little slow in the head when it came to most of life’s challenges, what some people would have called borderline retarded, he sure was a genius when it came to bicycles. He seemed to excel at working on most anything mechanical. He and his hunched-back Father were always tinkering with old lawn-mowers and the likes. There were a number of these strewn about the families little plot of dirt, like rusting skeletons. But working on, and riding, bicycles were Arnold's passion. It was a passion that I shared with him. That day was a scorcher of a day, and I had asked Arnold if there was anything to drink.

         "Uh, I think that there might be some Kool-Aid in the fridge". Arnold always began every sentence with an "Uh" as if giving his slow mind the chance to transmit it's message across damaged wiring to his mouth. He seemed to have hesitated at first, then stood up and motioned for me to follow him as he headed for the back door of the shack that his family called home.

         I stopped in the doorway. I was struck dumb by the depth of squalor and the amount of filth that was there in what was the Estep's small kitchen. Hordes of fat cockroaches scurried across the dirt encrusted and broken tile of the floor. There were piles of garbage bags, many of which had busted open to reveal their maggoty contents, stacked high against the cracked and moldy walls in every corner of the room. My stomach rolled and I had to stifle a gag in my throat as the smells hit me. The smells that permeated the air within that close space were thick and putrid. It reminded me of sour milk and decaying meat.

         "Uh, I know. Uh, It's disgusting." Arnold said. His voice was low and was filled with shame. He must have seen my initial reaction before I could hide it. I felt bad for him.

         "It's not that bad." I forced my eyes away from what looked like a four foot tall pile of rat shit next to the old gas stove.

         "Uh, the hell if it ain't!" His voice was loud and angry. Then softer, "Uh, I try to clean it up," almost pleading, "to make it better." he had said. His eyes went to the floor between our sneaker clad feet. "Uh, It's just too much."  His shoulders had slumped and I had seen that his eyes were getting all wet like he was about to start crying. "Uh, there's just too many of 'em." His voice was little more than a whisper as he said this last sentence. I wasn't sure if he had been talking about the roaches and the rats or about members of his own family. I suppose that it was both.

         "C'mon." I had said putting my arm around his boney shoulders. "Let's go to the Candy Store and get a Soda-Pop!" I pulled him towards the open door. "My treat!"

         The "Candy Store" was really not a "store" at all. It was nothing more than an old garage that been remodeled and fitted with a long and low glass fronted display cabinet that cut the interior in half long ways. On one side was stationed Mr. Shoemaker, the owner and proprietor of the establishment, and his round little wife. He perched atop an old bar stool at the far end of the counter, and she squatting in the deep cushions of a sagging love seat on the other side of an old freezer that stood between them. There was one of those big office calculators sitting in front of him, the kind that had a spool of paper attached and could print out your results, and a small pad of paper with a pencil attached to it by a piece of twine. In front of her stood one of those small portable television/radios on a frail looking television table, you know the kind that has a tray top and can be folded down to be stored away. On the opposite side of the big glass display case stood us kids. Inside of the long cabinet there was the largest assortment of sugar coated goodies and candied delights that any of us had ever seen on display in one place! It was Easter and Halloween all rolled up into one big decadent display of sweet goodness! Bazooka Joe and Babe Ruth sat side by side. Three Musketeers were all lined up in neat little rows. There were big jugs of Atomic Fire Balls and Lemon Heads, boxes of Red Hots and bins filled with Chick-O-Sticks. All of this is back before the days of artificial sweeteners, back when candy and soda-pop was made with real sugar and had a hell of a kick! Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I still had an unjaded pallet or maybe there were less chemical preservatives and artificial flavorings in the things that we found on the grocery store shelves, but it seems to me that back then that not only candy but food in general had a fuller, more genuine, flavor to it. I guess the same could be said about life from a child’s prospective.

         My finances were running on empty that day, I had already spent most of the money that I had earned delivering newspapers that week on comic books, but I had promised Arnold that I would buy him a Pop. I had done so in order to give us an excuse to leave his gawd-awful house. Any excuse at all. I never told no one about what I had seen there inside that place where Arnold Estep slept and ate and breathed. He never asked me not to. He didn't have to. I was well aware of what it meant to feel shame.

         "Howdy boys." Mrs. Shoemaker called out through a mouth full of chocolate covered cherries when we walked in. Joey was already there inside with his chubby face pressed against the glass of the display case. The bill of his Red Skins baseball cap had been knocked back when his face pressed against the glass and was resting askew far back on the top of his head. He was enraptured by the display cases contents and did not acknowledge our entrance even though the little bell over the door had announced our entrance with a loud and clear jingling.

         Joey Miller was the "fat kid" in our neighborhood. C'mon, you know the kid that I am talking about. Hell you might have even been that kid. Every circle of friends or group of kids had one. The kid that outweighed his or her peers and classmates by more than just a few pounds. The kid that would keep stashes of junk food and candy in their locker and book bag, and undoubtedly bedrooms at home, like well guarded treasures. It was that one kid among the group who could always be counted on to be carrying at least one partially melted candy-bar in their pockets. Joseph Paul Miller was that kid in our little rural hamlet.

         Joey's house was across Carson Avenue on the opposite end of Bacon street than my own. His Father ran Affordable Auto and Towing that sat over on Troy Avenue, just two blocks away from their house. Us boys were always hanging out around that old used car lot. Sometimes we could score odd jobs around the place to earn a little extra spending money, like washing the cars, sweeping the lot or cleaning up the garage. Joey's older brother, Randy, worked as a mechanic there. Randy liked to work on old  muscle cars. He was what they called a gear-head. He dressed like Arthur Fonzerelly and looked like James Dean with bad acne. Randy Miller cooler than ice to all of us kids. Joey Miller was everything that his brother wasn't. Joey wasn't exactly morbidly obese but he was more than just chunky. His pants were constantly riding too low on his squat frame and the shirts that he wore never could cover the bottom inch or two of his belly fat. The only thing that he did have in common with his older brother was the bad complexion.

         "Uh, heya' Joey!" Arnold called out and slapped Joey on his flabby back. Joey looked up, eyes big above the  freckled cheeks of his chubby face. He wore a pair of big cheap, black plastic glasses with lenses as thick as Coke bottle glass, which farther magnified his already bulging eyes. He blinked a few times, then smiled as he recognized who Arnold and I were.

         "Oh, hey guys!" He said exuberantly as he stood straight and tugged on his sagging blue jeans. "What's happening?"

         "See here Sonny, are you planning on buying something or did you just want to keep standing there licking the glass?" Mr. Shoemaker barked at Joey in his most crotchety voice. I smiled at Mrs. Shoemaker. She shot me a wink. "Be nice dear." She said to her husband with a smile.

         "I'll be right with you gentlemen," Mr. Shoemaker said politely looking from Joey over to Arnold and myself with a toothless smile. "just as soon as Mr. Miller here finishes his transaction." He was a small man, not frail but definitely on the scrawny side. His skin was covered in deep wrinkles and dark spots and his head was covered in a loose group of wispy white hairs that he combed over in an attempt to hide his bald and blotchy scalp. He looked to be about a hundred years old, but he could move as quick as a cat! I had seen him chase down an older boy who had tried to stiff him at one time. He chased that kid and had run him down. I saw that kid sweeping the floors at the Candy Shop for the next few days after that. I guess Mr. Shoemaker had made a deal with the kid to pay off the candy-bar that he had tried to pilfer, instead of ratting the kid out to the cops, or telling his parents which could be much worse than the legal system. Mr. Shoemaker's gray eyes sparkled just as brightly as any of the youthful patron's of his Candy Store. He was what my Gramma' would have "Spry for his age". A lit Pal-Mel bobbed up and down between his lips as he spoke. The smoke coalesced about the flickering neon lights overhead. He wore a red and white striped apron that had a big yellow button pinned on it. The button had "The Candy Man Can!" printed on it in groovy purple letters.

         "Come now Mr. Miller, make it snappy!" The old man chided. The ash fell from the tip of his cigarette an disappeared on the floor behind the counter. He paid this no mind.

         "Oh, all right." Joey said. "How's about a Chick-O-Stick?"

         "Great choice my good Sir!" Mr. Shoemaker snapped. He retrieved a candy stick from one of the big plastic bins inside of the case and dropped it into a small paper bag. "Let's see here." He mumbled as he examined the little sacks contents. "That's five pieces of Bazooka Joe, four Atomic Fire Balls and a single Chick-O-Stick". He said that last with a pretty good W.C. Fields impersonation. "That will be a total of thirty-five cents." His head tilted forward and he arched his eyebrow in mock seriousness. Joey slapped his hand down on the counter. He removed his hand to reveal one quarter, one nickle and exactly five pennies. There was also three empty Now and Later wrappers, a rusted washer, and a silver coat button laying among the coins. Mr. Shoemaker separated the change from the other items and scooped it into something metal under the counter and out of sight. It sounded like an old coffee can. "It has been a pleasure doing business with you once again Mr. Miller." The old man said, handing Joey the little brown bag. His voice was filled with exaggerated, but sincere, politeness. "Now move along and take that with you!" His gnarled hands made a sweeping gesture over the empty wrappers and other items. Then he turned his attention to Arnold and myself. "Now." He smiled that same big toothless smile. "How can I help you two gentlemen?"

         I handed Mr. Shoemaker the last coins that I had left to my name in exchange for two cans of Mountain Dew. We were just about to head out the door, the three of us, when a girl about the same age as myself burst through the door with her little sister in tow. The girls, sisters no doubt, paid us boys no mind and were already rushing towards the glass front of the counter when the little bell above the door jingled again. A tall blonde girl, much older than the other two sisters, walked in. Boy was she ever a piece of work! Her long curved legs were bare beneath a pair of blue-jeans that had been cut very short and seemed to strain at the seams to contain her full, round hips. She was wearing a t-shirt with the word "Foxy" printed across the chest. The shirt had been altered with a pair of scissors and the cotton fabric did little to conceal the rather large swell of her perky round breasts. I could see the bottom most part of her bright pink bra she was wearing peeping out from under the too short shirt as she moved. Her stomach was bare, and her exposed navel looked somehow inviting. Her hair was an unnaturally bright shade of blonde that contrasted sharply with the dark layers of make-up that painted the pale skin of her face. She stood a good head taller than myself, and I was the tallest boy in attendance. I was already straining to reach the six foot four inch stature that I am now. Even then, at only the edge of seventeen, Mitsy Summers was the kind of girl who "made heads turn".

         The three of us boys just stood there with our mouths hanging open. She looked at me and smiled. I felt my face go flush and manged to smile back. Her smile widened, then she burst out laughing. It felt like getting socked hard in the bottom of your guts. She laughed at us like we were nothing more than the silly little boys that we were. I remember us stepping all over one another's feet in our hurry to get out of the door and escape her cruel laughter.

         Once outside we had walked in silence for nearly two whole blocks. Arnold and I taking swallows from our cans of soda while Joey chewed on the Chick-O-Stick.

         "Uh, did you see those titties?" Arnold said from out of nowhere, breaking the silence and causing the three of us to burst out in a chorus of our own laughter and jeers. And just like that, as it often is in childhood, everything was once again right with the world.

         It was a few days later that I actually met April Summers, the middle of the three sisters, for the first time. It had been another hot summer day and I had been cooling off by wading in my little Sister's plastic swimming pool in our back yard. I was laying on my stomach, atop one of my Mother's good bath towels, to dry by way of the Sun when I here the familiar sound of our back patio doors sliding open. I had been laying there trying to decide what I wanted to dress up as for Halloween, but the sounds of Shirley Ray and her entourage of giggling minions pulled me away from such thoughts. I could hear their chattering voices as they came across the lawn and went past me laying there. I heard the shuffle of little girls feet as they swarmed around then on past me in their passing. "Mister Whiskers is going to be a princess!" I heard Shirley Ray's familiar voice exclaim. Mr. Whiskers was the latest of an ever revolving list of cats that my Sister had as a pets. There was "Boots" a black and white feline who had been found laying bloody and dead on our front porch one morning. Then there was "Frisky", an orange and white tabby, that lay moaning and wailing for three days in a box under Shirley Ray's bed before losing one of it's nine lives. It was suspected that she had been poisoned. After that was "Noble", solid black with a little white patch of fur on his neck that resembled a bow-tie, and "Noble the second" who was a plain gray tabby and did not look noble at all. Both "Nobles" had been found in the weeds at the side of the asphalt on Bacon street, presumably after being ran over. When it came to feline companions, my Sister was death in pig tails. "Nah-uh!" I heard one of the other girls protest. Then both of their voices were swallowed up in a river of giggles. I kept my eyes closed. My Sister, Shirley Ray, was only six years old back then. Being a ten year old boy (eleven in just two months!) and older Brother, there was nothing about Shirley Ray or her little friends that I found in the least bit interesting. I raised my neck and turned my head to face the patio and away from their annoying presence. My eyes remained closed.

         "You're a gonna' git a sunburn." A soft voice said from above me. This had surprised me. I opened my eyes suddenly and was blinded by the bright sunlight. I squinted my eyes and craned my head back. There in the grass, among the little yellow dandelions, were two slender feet. The feet were bare and dirty. There was a splotch of bright blue nail polish on tip of each toe. My head pivoted slowly as my eyes went up to follow two skinny and scraped legs. The sun at her back made her top half a dark silhouette. I could just barely make out the horizontal green and white stripes of the bathing suit bottoms that she was wearing. From where I was laying and looking up she looked very tall and slender. When compared to that of her older Sister's, her physique was almost boyish. But somehow not. There was just enough curves to her small shape in just the right places that made it impossible to mistake her for a boy. The sunlight formed a halo about her dull brown hair and petite shoulders. I remember thinking of how soft her skin had seemed so soft just to looking at it. My eyes adjusted slightly and I could see that she was wearing a miss matched two piece bathing suite. The top was covered in some hideous orange and pink flower pattern. I was looking at that pattern when she giggled and ran off towards the group younger girls. I continued to watch her. She picked the green and white fabric from the crack of her butt. Something stirred beneath me, on the opposite side of my hips as my asshole. I was a young boy on the edge of puberty at the time you must remember. A boy at that age can achieve an instantaneous, and often unexpected, erection due to the most mundane things. A cute girl picking her "wedgie" for example. She looked back over her shoulder as she did this and saw me watching her. That feeling down below crawled up into my stomach. She smiled at me, revealing a slightly crooked incisor on the left side of her mouth. That imperfection only added to the charm of her expression. I felt my face go flush. Our eyes met for just the briefest of seconds. Her brown eyes and my blue ones. Before my lips could begin to form a return smile she turned away back towards Shirley Ray and company. With that stupid half smile expression still on my face I turned away and closed my eyes. I must have dosed off or something, because the next time that I opened my eyes the back yard was completely empty. I winched in pain when I sat up. My back felt hot and tender. I looked down at my shoulders. The skin there was a bright, almost glowing, red. I looked up to wear I had last seen the girls playing. Shirley Ray and her friends were no longer there and there was no sign of the girl with the crooked smile. It was the first time that I can recall of thinking of a girl as anything other than gross. I had thought that she was cute.

         Later that day I had interrogated my little Sister about the new girls who had been playing with her and her friends earlier. "Oh that was Lizzy Summers." She said without interest. She had been in the process of undressing Strawberry Shortcake when I had came to her room.

         "They live across the street." She was pulling the green and white striped leggings from the sweet scented doll. This reminded me of the bathing suit bottoms that the girl with the crooked tooth had been wearing.

         "Across the street?" She must have been talking about the little house with the blue trim that the Furgusons used to live in. Had a family actually moved into that place without me even noticing it? Maybe one day while I was at school?

         That house had been sitting empty since the couple moved out last Summer. I had overheard my Mom talking about it with one of her Sisters on the telephone. She had said that Mr. and Mrs. Furguson were getting a divorce. I had heard this word before. I remembered hearing it in a song by some twangy voiced siren that played on the Country Music radio station that my Mother and Luther listened to." D-I-V-O-R-C-E" The woman's whiny voice spelled the word out in the lyrics. I had not, been able to recall any of the other words in the song but I knew that divorce meant splitting up. Mr. and Mrs. Furguson had taken turns loading up separate U-haul trucks and driving off in different directions. The house was left sitting empty. Occasionally  Randy Miller, that was Joey's older Brother, and groups of rowdy teenage kids would sneak in their late at night to drink their beer and smoke their weed. They did other things in there as well. Secret teenage things that teenagers did back then, and still do today. Other than that the house remained silent. The bare windows looked like empty eye sockets.

          "Do you mean the old Furguson house?" I asked.

         "Uh-huh." She continued yanking off the doll's clothing.

         "What is the other girl's name?" I crouched down and looked Shirley Ray in her chubby little face.

         "What?" She was looking up at me. "Oh you mean her Sister?" Her eyes went back to the doll.

         "Yes, her Sister. The older girl that was with Lizzy today" I reached out and touched the doll. "What is her name?"

         "Oh that's April." She paused. "She doesn't really play with us though." She pulled the doll away from my hand and went back to removing it's clothing.

         Satisfied, I started to walk away. "Have you seen Mister Whiskers?" Shirley Ray asked.

         "Nope." I said. It looked like Mr. Whiskers might be added to the feline fatality list soon.

         That night I laid awake in my bed. My skin was hot and raw beneath the Star Wars bed sheets. "You're gonna' git a sunburn." She had been right. I feel asleep feeling feverish and thinking about the girl with the crooked tooth who lived across the street. "Her name is April." I whispered to the empty shadows of my bedroom. "April Summers."

         I spent the next day in the cool shade on the front porch. I avoided the sunlight as fervently as any of the blood sucking fiends from the late night fright flicks that  I had seen on the television. I loved all those old horror stories and would sneak out of bed on Friday nights, the time slot that the local TV. station gave to showing these types of films, and wrap up in a blanket in front of the family's old console floor model Zenith. I was more than an audience member, I was part of a late night congregation. The clergy consisted of people like Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, and Peter Cushing. They presented sermons full of giant insects, hideous monsters and lurking shadows. I was a devout worshiper of such things as a child. Normally I would have just stayed indoors when suffering from such an affliction, but that day I wanted to be able to see the house that I still thought of as "the old Fergusons House".                    

         There were a number of visitors to the house across the street during the course of that day. There was a skinny kid with long greasy hair that pulled up in an old beat up Pinto. Def Leppard blaring from blown speakers. A lady in a business suit driving a nondescript sedan, the kind of automobile that our folks  always referred to as "Guv'mint Cahs". Around two or three in the afternoon a young couple dressed in tie-dye and fringes got out of a fairly new looking Volkswagen Wagon van. The Grateful Dead were dolling on from the radio and the girl and boy both looked to be "higher than kites". She floated with her arms in the air rather than walked and he danced around her twirling in big loopy circles. Both were laughing hysterically at absolutely nothing at all. Or at least I hadn't seen anything to warrant such laughter. When I had looked up from the comic book that I had been studying, their eyes had actually appeared to be closed as they waltzed up the path of dirt and busted concrete in the overgrown grass that served as the walkway. I knew what being "high" was about by that age. Or I had the vaguest of ideas about what it was about. I had learned it from observing my Uncle Teddy and his friends when I visited with my cousins one Summer. I had always been a quiet kid who kept pretty much to myself. I suppose I am still a bit of a wallflower. It gives me opportunity to watch and to listen. I remember one occasion when my Uncle came in through the back door carrying what seemed like a huge trash bag that was stuffed full of something. He took no notice of us kids, my three cousins and myself, who had been playing on the cracked linoleum of the kitchen floor as he rushed past. Upon reaching the dinner table he upended the trash bag and out poured heaps and heaps of some sort of green plant material. It had been marijuana, of course. I never told my Mother what I had seen while staying with Uncle Teddy's family, and I had seen plenty. My Mother, who was a strict Christian between bouts with the bottle, was opposed to drugs of any sorts. She believed fervently that drugs were the tools of Satan the Great Deceiver himself. All drugs, in my Mother's eyes, were dangerous drugs. She considered Marijuana to be just that, a dangerous drug. Now having a drink to calm the nerves, or popping one of those pretty little pills that the Doctor prescribed to relieve the stress headaches, that was different. Those things were acceptable. "I mean alcohol ain't even a drug!" My Mother would say. "As for them pills, why they ain't drugs either. Them's medicine! I got me a legitimate prescription for 'em from the Doctor!" It seems so silly to me now, but back then I half believed her. Regardless, I knew early on in life what it meant to be "high" and those two young people where as high as the heavens. This did not concern me. I was not interested in them. I went back to reading of the adventures of the Uncanny X-men and waiting in hopes to catch a glimpse of her. My shoulders reeked of a medicinal smell from the salve that my Mother had smeared over my sun burnt shoulders before I had walked out the door earlier. There was a bath towel, probably the same one I had used the day before, draped over the back of the lawn chair that I was sitting in to protect my sensitive skin from the roughness of the wood. I grew more and more disappointed as the day went by and still I had not caught sight of the girl with the crooked tooth. That evening as then Sun was setting and I was being called to dinner a big Lincoln Town Car pulled up in front of what was now the Summer's house and a tall figure dressed in a purple coat stepped out of the rear passenger door. The man wore a wide brimmed Fedora hat, also purple, atop his head and carried a cane with what looked like a gold handle. I was surprised to see that his skin was as black as night. It was almost unheard of for a colored person to be caught out East of Interstate 65 in those days, so far from Nigger-Town and so deep into "white man's territory". Segregation might not have been politically correct any longer by the late 1970's but it sure was still practiced in our part of the world back then. My Mother peeked her head out of the door. "Git your ass in here before your supper gits cold!" She said. Her eyes followed mine to where I was looking and saw the tall black man in the purple suit, who was now looking back at the both of us. "Dirty niggahs!" My Mother scowled when she said the words. "They ain't got no business being over here in our part of town!" Though she would never admit it no more than she would ever confess to being an alcoholic, my Mother was a racist. She once told me that it was because she had been raised back in the hills of Southern Indiana where there were no people of color and that "she never knew no better". Now as a man, I think that she did know better. I think that we all do deep inside. I understand that fear and ignorance exists and that these two things are what most often lead us to treat one another so poorly based on our differences. Differences like nationality, beliefs and yes, the color of ones skin. It's why Arnold and his slow witted family lived where they did. I recall a story my Mother told me more than once while I was growing up. Usually after getting drunk. The story goes that she had been a young uneducated teenaged girl from the country when her Mother had packed up her and her siblings and moved them to the big city of Indianapolis. My Mother had lied about her age so that she could get a job at the RCA plant. "We were dirt poor." She had said when telling me this story. "I couldn't even afford shoes of my own, so I had to share a pair with your Aunt Lilly." She got hired to work on an assembly line. "It was tiresome and dull work, but I liked it fine." She told me. "My little paycheck never amounted to much, and most of it went straight to the bills and such but I did manage to save up for a pair of shoes of my own." She would pause here as if seeing those shoes in her mind. " There was this group of colored girls that would give me a hard time almost every day. There must have been six or eight of them in all. I hadn't even seen any other kind of person other than a white person in my whole life so I was scared of 'em. They was always a teasing me about my raggedy old clothes or a pulling on my hair and saying "Eew-wee! Lookit 'dat long ol' hair a hanging. I sure do bet itsa' hot trying to work wit' dat' strangy ol' stuff a hanging down on ya' neck, Shoo-wee!". They was mean, they was!" Mamma would say. "Well one day I just up and got tired of it! I was plum fed up with all their a taunting and a teasing. So I walloped the biggest one right in the face!" Her fist swinging through the air as she spoke. "Them girls would have beaten me something good if your Daddy hadn't pulled up about that time and hauled me off in his old Plymouth. Them black folks is mean!" She would then take a long swallow from the can of Busch beer that was always present in her hand when the Good Book wasn't. The black man wearing purple flashed my Mother a wide grin. The white of his teeth clashing boldly with his dark skin. She hurried me into the house. None of those that visited the Summer's house that day had stayed for very long. I did not see April that day, or the next.

         Two days later was a Saturday. I was up early in the morning, despite having stayed up late the previous night watching old horror movies, sitting crossed legged in front of the television with a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles balanced on my lap. I ate the cereal in big heaping spoon fulls, slurping the chocolate tainted milk, while the Super Friends battled the bad guys on the TV. screen. This was another routine that I adhered to religiously. Sneaking out of my bed late on Friday nights to watch the Monster Movies then waking up early, still in front of the big Zenith, to the wacky sounds of the "Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner Show". That floor model Zenith was my escape from the dull and ugly world that I saw around me. I had finished eating and was returning from putting the bowl in the kitchen sink during a commercial break when there was a soft knock on the front door. I opened the door expecting to see a salesman or bill collector, the only people that I could imagine knocking at our door so early on a Saturday. It was neither.

         The girl with the crooked tooth was standing there on my front porch. She was wearing a pink shirt that was held up by strings of fabric that were tied at her small shoulders and a pair of cut-off denim shorts. Her feet were bare. She looked up when I opened the door. "Hey." I said trying to seem casual. My heart had began to speed up and my stomach was doing somersaults.

         "Hi." She replied and I saw that her little sister was with her. "Mah name is April Summers." She spoke with a heavy combination of accents that I can best describe as a southern Yankee twang. Her voice was as sweet as honey to my ears. "This here is my little Sister, Lizzy." She shoved here sister on the shoulder. "We live over across the street there." She tilted her head and I noticed that a strand of her hair fell across the side of her slender neck.

         "Hey." I repeated. It seemed like it was the only word I could muster up to say. I stood there looking at her, admiring her, through the screen of the door between us.

         She had smiled briefly, revealing her imperfections, and when she did the seemed to grow brighter. Then the smile fell away and she dropped her gaze as if looking for it. She seemed hesitant and unsure of something. "Lizzy here wanted to know if she could come over and play with Shirley Ray." She pulled her younger Sister up in front of herself.

         I stood there like a mute. It was as if my heart had shifted and was now blocking off my vocal chords. "I mean, if that is okay." She said and brought her eyes up to meet my own. I felt my testicles tighten. My head felt as if it had become detached from the rest of me and was floating like a balloon on a string above my body. 

         "Is it?" The question hung there in the air for what seemed like a number of long seconds. Lizzy smiled next to her. Her eyes looked down again as if defeated. She started to take a slow step back and this caused me to frantically search for my missing voice.

         "She's still asleep." The words came out sounding calm and collected even though I was not. My guts were quivering like a plate of Jell-O.

         I nearly panicked when she said "Oh, okay." and began to turn away.

         "Hey!" I nearly barked the word this time as I pushed open the screen door. She turned back to look at me. Lizzy had not moved and was still smiling. "You wanna' come in and watch cartoons with me?" I blurted out and was immediately embarrassed that I had asked a girl such a thing.

         "Yeah!" Lizzy said and rushed past me and in through the front door.

         April smiled her perfectly imperfect smile and said "Sure!" Lizzy was already sitting on her knees and watching Fat Albert.

         "Your name is Daniel right?" I stepped back to let her in.

         "Yeah." I said to her slender back. "Well, Danny."

         "What?" Her skin was tan, either from the Sun or dirt. Probably a little of both.

         "My name is Danny." I said. She turned and surveyed the big open front room of the house and nodded in approval. 

         "My name is April," She cocked her head. "and that there is my little Sister. Her name is Elizabeth but we just call her Lizzy." Her smile was just as effectual when her lips were lips were closed.

         "Like Lizzy Borden." I said. Her smile disappeared.

         "Who?" She asked.

         "Never mind." I replied and shut the door.

         "Anyways, we live across the street now." She plopped down on the blanket that I had been wrapped in earlier in front of the television.

         We spent the next hour or so talking and watching cartoons. That's not exactly right. What really happened over the next hour was that Lizzy Summers watched Saturday morning cartoons while April Summers talked almost nonstop and I stared at April and listened in silence except for the occasional nod or tilt of the head to show interest. She talked about the places where she and her family had lived. Places named Texas, Arizona and North Carolina. She talked about the friends that she had left behind and the schools that she had attended. Mostly, April Summers had talked about herself. I had bathed in the sound of her voice, but I heard less than half of what she was saying. I do not know if the puppy dog adoration of a ten year old boy, going on eleven, could be considered love or not. What ever it was, I was neck deep in it.

         A week later, on the sixth day of October of 1979, Bobby Sanders showed up at the Spot with that damned Magic 8 Ball.