was cut short when she forced him to stand in the middle and be the judge of which team won. A ribbon was tied in the center of the rope and two lines were painted on the grass, about fifteen feet apart. We had to pull the ribbon over the line closest to us and Mr. Gibbons's class had to pull the ribbon over the line closest to them. In the middle stood Eli, staring at the ground.
'Go!' Mr. Gibbons said, and we pulled with everything we had, boys and girls alike. The rope snapped tight and then began moving toward their side, and something about the screams and the strain on that rope transformed Eli. He skipped to his right, holding up his right hand to indicate that Mr. Gibbons's class was winning. Fletcher and I were in the front; we led a charge back the other way and Eli sidestepped toward us, raising his left hand. Now the ribbon changed direction again and Eli, caught off guard, lost his balance but then regained it and began sliding away from us again. Staring at that ribbon, his eyes seemed engaged for the first time I could remember, and he smiled and made a funny noise that I realized was a kind of rusty laughter. I had to block Eli out to help my side stop the erosion, and the ribbon settled in the middle, and when I looked up, Eli had his arms straight out, indicating we were back at equilibrium. Behind me I felt something give, and then Fletcher lost his balance and kicked my legs out from under me, and the rope was pulled quickly the other way and from my back – as I was dragged across the grass – I saw Eli sliding sideways quickly, his right arm straight in the air, his glasses having fallen to the end of his nose, so intent was he on calling the progress of this match. The ribbon crossed their line, and he threw both his hands in the air to indicate that the match was over. Then he bent his knees and pointed both hands at Mr. Gibbons's class. They had won. He stood there for the longest time, both his hands pointed to his right, panting, a half-smile on his face. Then he straightened up, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and looked from one side to the other, shyly, as if asking, Did you see what I just did?
Everyone let go of the rope, the teachers blew their whistles, and we were escorted back to our classrooms to wait for the bus to take us home for the summer. No one said a thing to Eli; he simply curled up on himself again, slinking away before the moment could be taken from him.
7
I've been thinking about the purpose of a statement such as this. It is intended as a confession, obviously, something of a legal document (even scrawled on yellow pad, like some manic trial note). And yet this statement also has more than a whiff of memoir, of the commission of my death to paper. After all, who writes a memoir but the man whose life is over? The memoirist believes that he will live on in transcription, but in fact he is describing a life rather than living one, abandoning the visceral for the verbal. It is a kind of surrender.
I am finished. All the pretty detectives in the world can't change that. There is only one ending to a story like mine. And before I get on with that long and unforgettable summer of 1975, before I finish telling how Eli saved my life, and how I conspired to commit a murder twenty-five years later, I will reveal that ending – not just the ending of my own story, but the ending of all stories. It is this:
I died alone.
Now perhaps I should have confined myself to a strict legal document,
Take the summer, for instance. What statute covers the feel of the sun that summer, its immediacy and grace, its heat on my browned forearms, on the tanned skin of my neck and shoulders? How can a lawyer explain the rush of pavement beneath my bicycle tires or the defiance of gravity committed by my tennis shoes? Perhaps you remember the length of your own July days, the endless possibilities that existed from the seat of a Schwinn, the swagger of boys moving down a suburban street with the streetlights beginning to hum and spark, the fearless poise of it all. The longing.
That summer, days lasted forever. Somewhere a scientist is proving that time is bent and yawned by the forces of childhood and summer, and the jury awaits his inevitable arrival in Stockholm open armed, individual jurists sobbing because this temporal genius has finally proven that our childhoods are longer than our adult lives, and that time is not a line, as they have been trying to deceive us into believing, but a slope, picking up speed and danger as it goes on.
For myself, in that long June of 1975 I rose early and patted my long, thick hair rather than comb it. I fought with my brother and sisters over the last bowl of Cocoa Puffs or Super Sugar Crisp or King Vitamin; no matter what kind of processed, sugared cereal we ate, my mother bought only
By ten each morning, I was on my bike. I'd ride down to Everson's house and we'd pretend to have karate fights or play touch football or just tool around on our bikes, acting like kids instead of the pot-smoking losers we were about to become. Some mornings I'd scrounge through the dryer for change, and Everson and I would race off to the store for baseball cards. I can still see the 1975 Topps baseball cards. They made them a shade smaller that year, for what reason I couldn't possibly say, with the team name shadowed on the top, the player framed just below that set against two-tone cardboard, his name in all caps, his position in a tiny baseball on the bottom right, unless he was an All-Star (the Dodgers had four that year: Messersmith, Garvey, Cey, and Wynn), in which case his position was written inside a star. I tore these tiny men from the package and marveled at the afros and sideburns and mustaches that peeked out from under their ball caps and wondered at the world that opened up to people with afros and sideburns and mustaches, at the vast number and range of boobs that they must be exposed to. I flipped the cards over and read through the stats as if they contained some secret – map of the human genome, key to the universe. To this day, my mind is full of the detritus printed in six-point type on the backs of those cards. I can't remember my bank account number or my sisters' birthdays, but I remember that Richie Zisk had exactly one hundred RBI's for the Pirates, that Pat Dobson won nineteen games for the Yankees, and that Ralph Garr hit a cool.353. I scraped and stole for the quarter that each package cost and never gave a thought to Everson, who must've had thousands of dollars from his school-year dope sales, but who bought exactly the same number of packs as me, peeling singles off a thick roll.
For the first half of that summer, stoic Everson never mentioned pot; nor did he ever have any, at least when I was around. He was just a kid, like me, but with longer hair and a shorter vocabulary, and even though he was going into eighth grade and I was going into sixth, that disparity disappeared that summer in a haze of tag and hotbox and bike races and baseball cards and mud pies and dandelion soup and ice cream trucks and corn on the cob on soggy plates… a life. A real life, ordered and meaningful and simple.
And then Pete Decker got out of juvenile detention.
I don't think I realized that the neighborhood was peaceful until it stopped being so. For the first month and a half of the summer, as long as we stayed in our turf and didn't venture into Matt Woodbridge's fiefdom four blocks down the street, we were safe, seemingly able to stay out until the sun was completely gone without fear of being beaten up. And then, on the day Pete got out of the clink, it all ended.
He'd been gone six whole weeks – a sentence deferred until summer so that he could finish the school year – for stealing car stereos. A whole pile of eight-track players had been found behind Pete's garage. Six weeks in juvenile hall wasn't likely to mellow Pete, a fact I realized when I finally saw him, on a Friday at the end of July, walking down the street, a cigarette dangling from his fingers – ambling, really, like he wasn't even going anywhere, like he was pacing a long hall.
That very weekend, summer ended. The weather stayed hot and school remained closed, but from then on the world didn't feel the same. Bikes were stolen and their parts were seen on other bikes; rocks were thrown through windows; garbage cans were spilled out on the street, and mailboxes were knocked from their posts. That weekend Everson and I stopped
