Five
The grown-ups had their own sense of those Summer evenings (a too-brief space of time made restless by the work-day’s end, and truncated by sleep’s necessity), and the children had theirs. The children lived, as it were, that lightened Summer Life, untroubled by early risings or alarm clock distresses; it was a time of reveling. It was the revelry of thieves that made long and ecstatic those hours; for each child stole what no parent, even if pleaded with, would grant even for a single night — a true and addicting taste of self-government. Though the voice of parental control never completely faded from their ears, the experiences of a Summer night nonetheless awed and compelled the children with the power of a secret society. Many of them as young as six or seven, might at noon’s full glory catch themselves perfectly bored and wishing that a good, strong squinting of the eyes could whoosh away several hours of daylight and hasten night’s arrival. And none too soon, they surrendered themselves bodily to the shadowy crevices of unlit doorways, car porches, and backyards. But for all the delight of the child spirit, it might as easily have been a dark, enchanted forest that sprawled before them. The boys specifically, sought the southern end of the block, towards 38th Avenue, where at night the maples wore their Summer lushness like dripping tar, and choked the pale blue street-lamp light down to the threshold of visibility. It was in that dark, grassless forest that they played their one chosen night-game — Detective.
On the surface, the boys reckoned Detective was simply hide-and-seek played at night. At least that’s the only description that they would willingly confess to any adult who asked. But even within themselves, the reality of the game sat as an inexpressible ravel in the rear-mind that no boy struggled to understand for very long. Though they were burdened by no essential curiosity over the reasons, there was not a single boy who gathered for the game who did not appreciate its solemn ritual importance. It was an undertaking so serious that it displaced any other meditations that might have carried over from the daylight hours. This degree of seriousness was most surprising when observed in the youngest boys, for whom the necessary transformation and rejection of boyish frivolity seemed monstrously unnatural. The game put a weight on them, an oppression that squashed the lightness of boyhood right out. For the two or three hours that they played, little could convey more clearly the nature of the game than the sight of some eight-year-old face utterly dimmed with worry and woe.
Upward through their ranks, in the older boys, one could observe that the look of grimness and distress of the very young evolved, with age, into something else. So that by the time one reached the end of the file, the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old faces could be seen to exhibit no more the outward facial dimness of self-doubt, but rather the jeering cynicism of the disillusioned. Quite prematurely, they wore the mask of adulthood.
Like those of its daylight counterpart, the few rules of Detective were framed in a deceptive simplicity. The known and recitable rules could do nothing more than establish physical boundaries and provide definitions for such elemental things as the passage of the onus of being “it” from one seeker to the next. A slightly more discerning mind among them however, might have found the wisdom to express: One boy counts, while the rest evade him, either by the depth of their cunning or by physical superiority. But only those who played, and they were entirely mute in this respect, could ever speak of how the game was full of dread and terror.
The boys had gathered and formed together yet again, where the dim street-lamp light was a ridiculous effort at illumination. The effort failed the failure of the inadequate, like the illusory supervision of the near adult world. In that cradle of darkness and inattention, that no alien eye penetrated, or cared to, they set to playing their game.
The youngest boys nervously placed one foot in that size-mixed ring of Converses and Pro-Keds. They slotted in right beside the veterans, with so many Summer nights behind them, until by process of elimination, the night’s first seeker was singled-out:
“Engine, Engine, Number, Nine, going, down, Chicago, line, if, the train, falls off, the track, do, you want, your money, back?”
Thus the hand of one arbitrarily selected boy made its way indifferently around the ring, pausing briefly on each canvas-covered set of toes, then halting cold on one, to ask:
“Yes or No?”
“Yes!”
“Y, E, S, spells, yes, and, you, are, not, it.” And so one foot was happily withdrawn, while those whose feet remained, especially the very young ones, considered the ordeal ahead. All the young ones knew that by night’s end one of them will have surely suffered gravest humiliation, another, the pains of injury; penalties for lack of speed or strength. But behind those woe-laden contemplations, well back in their minds, the eight-, nine- and ten-year-olds fleetingly allowed themselves a fantasy of transcendence. They imagined the timely assertion of some precious piece of learned Detective wisdom. Perhaps a trick, a maneuver, a borrowed strategy from the domain of the older boys, might let one tyrannized youngster at last rise to stand in the pale, blue Mercury Vapor light of insurrection. And perhaps the next night, if only for one small boy, the next game of Detective would be a very different experience.
“…do you want your money back?”
“No.”
“N, O, spells, no, and, you, are, not, it…”
Willie regarded his ten-year-old foot, left alone in the shattered ring. He saddened visibly at being the night’s first seeker. He’d been “it” before, but he knew the first game of the night was hard on the seeker, as those who would hide and run, and dodge him, were at their freshest and most able. Already the others began to disperse, as Willie stood from his crouch. Instinctively, he felt for the plastic dagger that he always carried through a belt loop.
The dagger had at one time been a sword. Willie had accidentally broken the sword one day at play, and rather than throw it away, he rubbed the jagged end against the sidewalk until it was smooth to a point. Now he loved the resurrected toy more than he ever had the original sword. This dagger was a thing uniquely his; he had made it, and where the sword had had a harmless ball tip, a deliberate, manufactured harmlessness to it, the dagger was filed to a formidable spike. It was perhaps the most significant tangible expression of Willie’s identity. Whereas the squatting shoe box in his closet was a void unto itself that could speak of the boy only by way of negation, the sword was an affirmative, a protruding lobe of the self. Willie never played the game without it. So, resigned to the lot of being it, Willie walked with his hand over the fake gilded handle, to the telephone pole where he would count to one hundred.
The oldest boys seldom hid, preferring instead to flaunt how unlikely to be tagged they were. So when Willie saw Danny, his big grin visible even in the low light, doing a little shimmy, ready to dart off in any direction, he ignored him. Willie would stand a better chance of catching one of the younger boys who was presently hiding. Only a touch was necessary — that was the rule — and the full weight of being it would pass to another person.
Whenever things didn’t happen quickly enough, more and more players would grow impatient where they were hiding, and begin to emerge. So Willie’s slow, methodical probing of the favorite hiding places was unpopular, and invested the game with a singular, muffled exasperation. While Willie looked behind some garbage cans, Cesar ran by him, to within an arm’s length. The teenagers like Cesar wanted the satisfaction of having Willie chase them and fail, chase them and fall, chase them and cry. They ran in circles around him, and taunted from a tempting proximity. They hoped to hasten some strike, some betrayal of Willie’s masked but increasingly ardent desire to remove himself from the center of the game.
But Willie pretended he did not see them. Staring intently at the ground, feeling the peel, lift, and place of his sneakered feet, he slipped into a slowed-down reality. Through the corners of his de-focused eyes, he saw Danny, Cesar, and Eddie, all fifteen, bouncing to some Pagan rhythm of their age, their fists pistoning silently in the windless night, their mouths frozen in toothy, choked-vowel grimaces. Willie pivoted slowly where he stood, his mind caressing the slow, measured trickle of sensory information. He deliberately kept his eyes from meeting anyone else’s, however closely they might venture to him. His eyes could betray his intentions before he wished for them to be known. The ring of dancing teenage taunters opened into a horse-shoe shape, molding its way around a parked car, expecting to close in again around Willie on the other side and resume their wildness. But Willie held his ground a moment, and let an idea reveal itself to him.
Bobby Santos was Willie’s age, and they could trace their friendship back to the edge of remembrance. Bobby had, as was his unintended but habitual practice, hidden himself quite poorly. His stubborn inability to grasp the first of the game’s two elemental principles (1. Hide well or 2. Run fast), and his embarrassing forfeiture of the second by way of a mother with no love for a skinny child, had made catching Bobby a thing singularly empty of satisfaction or glory. Yet there he lay, wedged against the curb-ward side of that parked car. He made all the ridiculous efforts at invisibility too, like putting his face in his knees and draping one arm over his head, another arm stretched around his rump, that for reasons beyond Bobby’s understanding indirectly accomplished their aim.
Willie knew Bobby well enough to guess that under all his ineptness for Detective, there must be other games he played well. The important assumption here being that Bobby have some familiarity with the sensation of triumph. Though now he looked like nothing more than a silly piglet beside the bladder of a sow’s paunch, though no one had yet bothered to chase him all that Summer, and on those occasions when he had been made it by fortune of the sneaker-wheel, the round was prematurely ended by unanimous exasperation, Willie knew that Bobby must reckon himself to be just a few games shy of Detective mastery. Would Bobby now, given the barest chance of tasting respect, not give his all to a challenge? If Willie chased, would he not run, run as well as he could, run to elude?
Willie gambled yes, and pretended that he had not already noticed Bobby that long while ago. The pretense was walking Willie backwards, right at Bobby, where he still squatted beside the car. The fat boy was peeking up occasionally from under his fat arm, amazed that no one could see him. Had Willie just come after him directly, Bobby might have stood there in frozen disbelief at the utter failure of his concealment. But with the person who was it about to blunder right into him quite by accident, what else was there for Bobby to do but try his chubby legs, and…
There was a sudden flurry of cartoonish movement. The older boys were momentarily distracted from tormenting Willie, and turned their attention instead to delighting in what they had just seen. Laughter erupted everywhere from bright rings of teeth that seemed to float bodiless in the semi-darkness. While the after-image of the fat kid dodging what chased him was burning comically in every eye, Willie attended only to his engineered opportunity. He hunched over, leaning his palms on his knees, and began to pant conspicuously. He wanted time enough to be certain, to rehearse the leap before him, but the moment was streaking away with a dizzying wind. The dancing faces began to lose their expressions of suspended reality, and bodies were re-tensing for the game’s resumption. Time was cruelly liquid. And like a spark arcing telepathically from head to head, a whiff of Willie’s well-crafted sham was making its way around the group. In another moment, the tall boy with the long, black tousle of hair across his eyes would be wiser and out of reach. The necessity for immediate action insisted itself on Willie’s attention like a scream. Get ready!
Cesar was a well-practiced taunter of fifteen, and nothing, not even Bobby’s piggish flight, had interrupted his self-celebrating dance. Cesar carried the air of straining against boyhood’s loss more than any of the others who were aptly described as “young men”. His capacity for brief moments of utter grace and physical beauty often set him apart while running and climbing or rising to some boyish feat of ritual difficulty. Though most his age had already abandoned those tournaments for the pursuit of girls, Cesar mostly kept to the company of boys five or six years younger than he. Willie had correctly reckoned that Cesar possessed a special nature. Presently, Cesar was dancing the catch me dance, but Willie held him motionless in his gaze like a mounted insect. The tormented boy had singled him out, first for his physical proximity, and second because there was a vulnerability which could now be exploited. Cesar squirmed in the power of Willie’s scrutiny. As if caught in the ghostly-white bursts of some all-revealing strobe, the tall, thinly-muscled teenager felt himself stripped of all his empowering size. Then, more was lost. Willie looked into him, and his eyes whispered a secret, poured a poison into Cesar’s head. Willie put his own thoughts into Cesar’s struggling mind. There were pictures and there were words. “I saw you…” they said, “I know what you are.” But of course, the boy did not know exactly what Cesar was, only that there was an essential difference and that it was somehow washed over with shame. Like a thunder bolt to the forehead it hit him; Cesar knew in an instant that Willie had been there, had seen him, had seen it all