Blue Boy (21 page)

I’m not sure why Beverly thinks this is such a feat, considering that the Ulrichs eat pizza almost every day of the week and use paper plates each time. But Donny and I stir with anticipation anyway, sensing that the tide may be turning our way.

“Please, Mom! Pleeeeease!” Cody falls to his knees in mock-desperation, wailing like a little girl and making Beverly lough (laugh + cough).

“Okay, okay,” she says, picking up the remote again. “Go, but you better be back in a half hour. Now git; I’m missing my soaps.”

Cody leaps up and comes back to us. We all run back up the stairs, stumbling over them in the process. Donny slaps me on the back at one point, but instead of hurting, it makes me smile even more. Once again, he has acknowledged my particular genius.

Cody pulls a jean jacket out of his closet while Donny and I both put on our own jackets. Donny’s is a big, black nylon jacket with a hood and a thin, linty white flannel lining. Mine is the usual neon madness.

“Okay, we got four bikes. Donny, you can take my dad’s, but ya have to careful. He’ll be pissed if anything happens to it. Keern, ya can take my mom’s bike.”

“I have to take a girly bike?” I ask. I feign frustration but deep down am excited because I’ve always wanted a bike with a basket and pom-poms on its handlebars. My own bike at home, which I rarely use, is a red Schwinn with handles like bare bones.

“No, my mom’s is just a regular blue bike. I don’t even know why she has one. She hasn’t ridden it in years.”

When we get to the garage, though, it turns out that Beverly’s bike has pretty much disintegrated from neglect. The frame is rusty and the tires flat. So I “have” to take Becca’s bike. Becca is Cody’s older sister, who is at her own sleepover tonight. Although her bike does not have a basket or pom-poms, it is pink, and though I whine and frown dramatically, I feel like I have just won a raffle.

The garage door opens with a creaky trumpeting, and the three of us push down the driveway. Donny and Cody take the lead side by side while I follow behind. And then, emboldened by the thought of the recorder being back at my lips, I push between them and say, “Last one there’s a rotten egg.”

The park is definitely a different place at night. It’s startling how dark it is. Where the trees were individual skeletons in the daylight, they now coalesce into one impenetrable fortress, the tips of their branches like spikes atop a castle rampart. The moon hides behind thick clouds, and the sparse light does little to light our way. I am no longer in the lead, my tiny legs nothing compared to Donny and Cody’s sturdy, basketball-honed limbs.

“We have to look out for park rangers,” I say, thinking back to Rodney—although I realize that he would have to have the most unforgiving boss ever to have a shift that lasts the whole school day into the night. Still, there must be someone on duty right now, especially given the situation that Donny has told us about. “We should leave our bikes over here and stick to the perimeter of the trees.”

“What’s the ‘perimeter’?” Donny asks. I explain what it is to him, baffled at how he could already have forgotten what it is, when we learned about perimeters last year. Once I’ve explained it to him, we proceed to creep around it, getting pricked here and there by an errant branch or a waist-high crackle of underbrush. At one point, Cody warns us to look out for poison ivy, prompting us all to realize that it’s way too dark for us to differentiate it from any other plant in this darkness. I already begin to itch, remembering the time that my dad got it and spent a week grunting on the couch with his legs looking like something a Doberman pinscher had gnawed on. Cody notices me scratching and begins to mutter “sissy” under his breath like a spiteful mantra.

I take the lead soon enough, trying to find the trail that leads to the creek of sin. After a ten-minute period of walking back and forth and getting annoyed sighs from both Cody and Donny, I finally find it. Just before we try to follow it, however, we hear the distant roar of an engine and snap our heads to the front entrance, where, across the expanse of a field, we can see a park ranger’s white jeep approaching. I dart onto the trail, looking behind me to make sure Donny and Cody are following, but they stay where they are, gesticulating toward each other nervously. I stop and whisper to them as loudly as I can to come along. They finally get a move on, running up to me. Like I did on my last trip here, I abandon the path and push my way into the tall grass and gnarled branches lining it. The other two follow, practically stomping me into the ground in their haste.

Slowly, our pace lets up and we stop in a huddled triangle. The jeep is distant again, and its beams barely light up our sneakers now.

“That was close,” Cody says.

“You guys almost trampled me,” I say. “Let’s not forget whose idea this was in the first place.”

“Well, excuuuse me,” Cody says. “We haven’t even seen nothin’ yet. Where are all the people, Keern?”

I open my mouth to remind Cody that Donny was the one who told us about coming here in the night in the first place, but then I think better of it. I don’t want to say anything negative about Donny.

“Come this way,” I say. I proceed farther through the brambles, smacking away branches strongly like the boys did before, now propelled forward by the fear that I’ve led the boys astray. It hadn’t really occurred to me that I could fail. True, Donny was the one who told us that people come here at night, but it was my original story about the woods that brought us to that subject in the first place. If I don’t show them something truly sex-ridden tonight, they will not only neglect me the way they did before but will discredit my story about the woods entirely. As my sneakers thresh further through the tangled mess, I have the terrifying fear that these boys will spurn me as publicly as Sarah and Melissa did. And it will be worse in this case because I will have been spurned by my own kind. Just as these thin switches of wood are smacking me in the face now, even more sissy comments than usual will be hurled at me.

Then, about ten feet in front of me, I see the deep ridge where I spied on the threesome. I hear the small tinkle of the creek, which sounds so creepy in this darkness that it makes me shake a little. But there is the promise of someone being down there, so I turn around and put my finger to my lips. “Shhhh. This is where I saw them.”

The guys tiptoe behind me as I move toward the edge. It’s still so dark, but I can slowly make out the water below. I guess all those carrots that my mother has always made me eat have helped my eyes because I can even make out the tiny pebbles at the bottom of the creek. Unfortunately, I can’t make out any canoodling teenagers. Because there aren’t any canoodling teenagers.

I can feel Donny and Cody’s disappointment, and I swear that I can even see with eyes in the back of my head the look of collective exasperation that they give each other. I am about to push past them back into the underbrush, but then we all hear it: the far-off sound of older voices moving somewhere nearby.

Instinctively, the three of us kneel down on the ground, no longer caring about poison ivy but caring only for what we might witness. The voices we hear are mixed, some deep, some girly, and I know that all three of us are fantasizing about a wild orgy.

After about a minute of the three of us trying to breathe as lightly as we can, we see the people pass by. They are walking parallel to the creek, not toward it, and they are on our side, so that for a second I think they may find us. But their conversation is more brazen than ours; they do not whisper but chat as if they are moving down a high school hallway, laughing here and there with raspy voices. Their voices are probably like that due to the cigarettes they are smoking. The tiny fires of the cigarettes look spectral, like some devious fairies moving through the trees. The smoke surrounds them like the small clouds of their breath in the night chill. As they pass where we are kneeling, I can see that there are three guys and two girls. All of them have long hair. Even the guys have earrings, and I can make out a mustache on one of them. I can’t hear what they’re saying, even though one of them, the shortest guy, seems to be making quite a ruckus, jumping up and down in his jean jacket.

The group starts to move toward the creek, although they have now passed out of our range of hearing. They start down a decline toward the creek that I hadn’t noticed even in the daylight, and for a second, they disappear from view. Once Donny, Cody, and I have all turned ourselves back in the direction of the creek, I can make them out. One of the guys throws his cigarette into the water, then begins kneeling down and arranging something. I hear the things he is setting up making a tiny clinking noise.

“What is he doing?” I whisper.

Then I hear glass shattering. I almost scream out, and I hear Donny and Cody startle, as well. The group of kids is laughing harder now, harder as each shattering sound happens. They have set up bottles of some sort to use as target practice, but the way they are cackling does not make it sound like child’s play. Somehow, they seem even more sinister than the other group of kids, their cackles and the destruction of the glass almost demonic.

“Let’s get out of here,” says Cody, turning to leave. Donny follows him stealthily.

But: my recorder.

I hate to think of it surrounded by all this destruction. Worse, I imagine that one of these cretins will find it, pick it up, and wreak havoc on it with his devil-mouth. I shudder, thinking that with all the glass that has shattered everywhere, it’s quite possible that a few shards have already scratched its surface.

“Keern, what are you doin’?” Cody asks in the loudest whisper-yell mix that he can muster against the carousing below us. “Let’s go!” I see him dart off through the underbrush, hunched over even more than he normally is. He resembles a frightened mole scurrying through the brush. Donny, ever the contrast, lumbers behind him, a jungle-lost giraffe. But I do not follow their lead. An overwhelming sense of futility has come over me. Sure, I did provide these guys with quite a sight, but it was far from the one that I had seen or that, more important, I wanted them to see. And then I realize that what’s weighing me down is the disappointment of not having seen that exhilarating tangle of bodies again. Already in my mind, I’ve envisioned the rugged yet sturdy bodies of these misfits painted in the chameleon glow of the burning fire below. I’ve recast the earlier images from the daytime threesome into a nighttime wrestle of pasty white limbs burned orange-yellow against a stark blackness. But as in so many other instances in life, the dream is greater than the reality, and now I am left with nothing but a loud, unruly, and unkempt bunch of hooligans who don’t even have the decency to fuck each other in front of me.

I sit down on my haunches, resting my arms on my knees, and continue to watch them. From this angle, they look like some sort of tribal party. It is one of the more exotic sights I’ve seen in this city. Really, I wonder if this is the sort of activity that kept people like Krishna’s fellow villagers happy ages ago. Perhaps they, too, took clay pots that they had fashioned with their hands and stacked them in a pyramid, like the staggered temples lining the Ganges that I’ve seen in picture books on our coffee table. Perhaps Krishna started off their party by taking a slingshot and a tiny rock—or, on grander nights, a shining golden arrow from the golden holster on his back—and dashing the first pots apart with a flick of his fingers against string. Perhaps the villagers would drink their salty tea or sugary milk or grainy, dark wine and laugh and dance and practice their yogi positions, then punch each other in the shoulders until the skin looked as blue as Krishna’s. What do people really do, anyway, when there is nothing to do? The bowery of a thick Indian forest, the dirty basin of a common Ohioan park—how different are they, really? They both act as de facto playgrounds for local people, all of them looking for a way to escape the mundane together.

But unlike these people, unlike that forest full of yogis, I experience these forests alone. My companions—the modern equivalents of Krishna’s loyal brother, Balarama—have deserted me. I, like Krishna, must see the world alone and process its beauty by myself.

My recorder. Still knelt over, I scan the dirt down there for it but again do not see it. I remember that Cody and Donny are somewhere behind me, but I am pretty sure that they did not hesitate all that much to hoist themselves up on their bikes and take off (Cody cursing me because his sister’s bike had to be left behind). I guess I wouldn’t be so happy if I were those guys right now, either. I know that if someone had promised me what I promised them and then came up empty-handed, I would not only desert him but push him off the cliff.

At least if I got pushed off the cliff I’d die with my recorder, though.

The kids run around in the mess they’ve created and the sound of glass tinkling against the dirt continues for so long that one would think they had bought all of the beer in the world to blow up. And still no sex of any kind. Maybe they are so drunk that they can’t even attempt it. Their grunts would indicate as much.

I hear noises to my left, a flick of sticks and leaves that hint at the presence of another person here. The hairs on my neck stand up as I remember the way that Rodney crept up on me, but the sounds are thankfully too far away to be centered on me. Again, the flicking continues, and for a second I panic, thinking that what I’m hearing might be some sort of wild animal. Are there coyotes in Ohio? I can’t remember. Maybe it’s a deer.

As I have found myself doing more and more these days, I sate my curiosity by deciding to sneak toward the source of that sound. Once more, the fear of wolves comes over me, but then I hear the sound again and realize that it’s more deliberate, more human. Someone else has decided to view these proceedings. Every time I hear another flick, I creep forward a little more. The kids below the ridge are so loud and ridiculous that one’s attention almost certainly has to go to them before it comes to me.