Sightings Read online

  “They do act kind of entitled,” Jim grumbled. “Like just because it’s called Indian Village they think they’re the freaking chiefs.”

  Ronald nodded vigorously, offering up various body parts they could kiss or suck.

  “There aren’t so many of them,” someone pointed out. “Not even a full tribe.”

  “You think I care how many there are?” Ronald asked as several of us bobbed all around him. “Even if there were a million . . .”

  Ronald paused mid-speech as Jim pointed toward the fence.

  It was Pony, his mountainous pectorals and biceps rattling against the chain link. We huddled close like a herd of lawn ornament rabbits.

  “Oh, Chief Tiny Dick’s just trying to intimidate us,” Ronald shrugged. “Don’t pay any attention.”

  But we did, we paid a lot of attention.

  He kept staring and we kept staring, until eventually, I broke our stand off the only way I knew how – submerging myself, drowning the world away.

  Things got worse before they got better. For the rest of the summer, each night we skulked past the teepee we’d hear the familiar yips and screams from our Indian neighbors, which put a halt to all further diplomatic efforts. And in the rare instance we mustered the courage to shout back, our action seemed only to embolden them further. Some nights I’d wake to watch the entire tribe tearing through the neighborhood, capsizing trash bins and spilling their insides out. They were thrill-seeking marauders, except for the nights they weren’t, the nights they terrified just by loitering on the sidewalks outside our homes.

  One June night I woke to tapping. I could hardly hear it at first – I was still lost in slumber land – though a second round of taps confirmed the first. I didn’t look over. I stayed in bed with my eyes shut tight because it was easier. I thought: Maybe my real secret power is my amazing ability to fall back asleep. It wasn’t. I couldn’t. The knocking continued – tink, tink, tink – and when I finally rose and headed toward my closed curtains, hand extended, I waited for the sound before pulling it wide.

  There it was again – tink, tink, tink – so I tore open the curtains to spot them, or at least a part of them – four little Indian asses crammed tight against the glass.

  “Gah!”

  They turned, grinning, and as they hoisted their shorts, Pony pressed his face to the glass and offered a final tink, tink, tink with his fingernail.

  I watched his mouth as he enunciated each syllable:

  Huck-le-ber-ry.

  The next morning, upon returning to the baseball field, we found our bases flung to the trees, third base dangling from a low hanging maple, while home plate was recovered two pine trees over. The field, too, was covered with trash, the remnants of TV dinners and cake mixes and eggs shells scattered along the baselines.

  Things had turned personal – they’d desecrated our home – and it was suddenly clear that Ronald had been right about retaliation.

  “It’s psychological,” Ronald said, explaining his plan a few nights later while filling a bag with dog shit just outside the Rosses’ perimeter. “They call this guerilla warfare.”

  Several of us had gathered near the oak tree in preparation for the assault. Jim thought it a good idea to dress up like Indians ourselves (“You know, like how they did for the Boston Tea Party!”), but in the end, he was the only one among us to don the war paint and feathers.

  Ronald distributed our explosives – black cats and cherry bombs, mostly – before ordering us to fan out on all sides of the Rosses’ residence and wait for the signal (a piss-poor owl hoot, courtesy of Ronald). Clutching our matches, we did just that, spidering across the street in perfect silence, our heads down and running heel to toe, which Jim (the closest thing to an Indian we had) had heard was how the real Indians used to do it during horse raids.

  We all reached our drop zones, but after a few minutes of silence, we began wondering if maybe we’d missed the signal. The plan seemed simple enough: Ronald was to light the bag of shit, chuck it against the door, and then let sound the owl screech.

  But there had been no screech – nothing even close to a screech – so Jim plucked one of his headdress feathers and pointed it toward the other side of the house, indicating that I should check on Ronald.

  I began army crawling along the edge of the house, and in one instance, accidentally peeked inside the living room window to find the Ross family deeply engaged in a game show. Some of the younger brothers sat on the floor (Indian style, no less), while their parents and the older ones littered themselves on the couches. I glanced at the front steps (not a flaming bag of shit in sight) and so, continued crawling until spotting Ronald on the opposite side of the house.

  He was in reconnaissance mode, his unblinking eyes pressed tight to the basement window.

  “Psst,” I hissed, “hey, Ron. You gonna give the signal or what? These black cats are burning holes in my pockets.”

  He didn’t hear me.

  “Psst.”

  This time, his head swiveled just enough to reveal the sunburned bridge of his nose.

  “What?” I asked.

  He motioned me toward the basement window, and upon peering in, I witnessed something remarkable by the light of the hanging bulb – Pony pressed hard against the orange flowered couch and a topless Georgia Ambler grinding against him. On the floor beside them were the remains of her now bunched blue and white striped bikini, but all we could see was her body thundering against his like some great rebellion, sweat beading from the tops of her breasts and sliding through the canyon that separated.

  I thought all sorts of things, but the last thing I thought was the strangest:

  Some day she will be old.

  Ronald tapped my shoulder, breaking the spell, whispered, “This was never part of our plan.”

  Moments later, a cherry bomb cracked through the night (also not part of our plan, though Jim’s itchy fingers had gotten the best of him), and as the sound echoed past the trash bins and telephone poles and two car garages, it eventually bounced back to Georgia. She pressed herself to Pony’s shoulders as that Indian’s ink eyes turned toward us.

  We ran, tripping over Georgia’s bicycle.

  We were nothing but shadows by then.

  The rest of the summer felt like we were down by seven in the bottom of the ninth – we all just wanted it over. Nevertheless, in an attempt to maintain Georgia Ambler’s purity for the sake of our friends, Ronald and I kept what we’d seen to ourselves. We were demonstrating yet another secret power we hadn’t known we possessed: our ability to carry an impossible weight. It was a burden we lugged alongside us throughout each swing in the on-deck circle, during every glimpsed interaction of our girl. Some days we’d lean against the baseball fence and watch Georgia ride past, and while the others started in on what they wanted to do with her and how, Ronald and I stayed silent. How could we break it to them that everything had already been done, that the world held no more mysteries?

  Despite our burden, we continued in our routines: baseball in the morning, pool in the afternoon. It was pleasant enough, though while the others continued peacocking past Georgia’s lawn chair every chance they got, Ronald and I stopped bothering. Everything we’d hoped to see we’d already seen secondhand.

  June crept into July, July into August, and soon, much to our horror, school supplies began lining the window displays where once a sunscreen pyramid had towered six feet high. Eighth grade was nearly upon us, and yet we didn’t feel any more powerful than before. In fact, most of us just felt a whole lot more tired. Whether we were willing to admit it or not, those Indians had taken a toll on us, and while the remainder of our interactions with them had proved mostly innocuous, this was only the result of our having redrawn the boundary lines – never stepping foot near the teepee, while they steered clear of the baseball field. Some afternoons we overlapped at the pool, but they stayed in the deep end and we in the shallows while Georgia Ambler, quite tactfully, ignored all of us equally
while sprawled on her lawn chair.

  For a few nights that summer, Ronald and I wandered back to that basement window, crawling up to the soft glow of the hanging bulb in the hopes that we might realize that none of it had been real. Just some dream we’d dreamed up. Some wild trick of the light. We never saw Pony and Georgia alone together again, and most nights, when we peered down, all we’d see was old Pony (Chief Tiny Dick) staring at the television while lying shirtless near a box fan. From our vantage point, his skin looked ghostly – a fresh pallor coating his body – while the rest of us just grew darker.

  In the rare instance when Pony and Georgia passed each other at the pool, they never looked at one another directly, adding further credence to our dream/“trick of the light” theory. Still, every once in awhile I’d catch Pony glancing up at her from behind a crinkled Sports Illustrated, turning pages without reading a word.

  While I’d never known love myself, in my fourteen-year-old estimation, Georgia seemed to have left a mark on him. In the days following what we assumed was the abrupt end to their relationship, Ronald pointed out that Pony resembled a young warrior who’d just lost his favorite horse.

  “So broken-hearted,” Ronald whispered, peering down at Pony from our place outside the basement window. “Horseless with a hell of a long way to walk.”

  If we, like Carrie, did possess secret powers, most remained undetected that summer. Sure, I could run like a coward and keep a terrible secret, but neither of these powers would give us our neighborhood back. Where was my invisibility? My super human strength? Some days it was all I could do to keep my eye on the ball and swing.

  That final Thursday evening in August a platoon of weathermen bombarded our TV screens, pointing out areas on the map that looked suspiciously like where we lived. Those men used words like “doppler,” “humidity” and “perfect storm,” drawing even the most inattentive eyes toward the screen. The Emergency Broadcast System seconded the weathermen’s warnings, its harsh beeps bleating from the radio, warning us of tornado watches until midnight, reminding us that this was not a test. Ronald was over (we’d been comparing class schedules), when my father peeked his head into my bedroom and told him he might as well stay over, that there was no sense braving a “goddamned whopper like this.”

  Arrangements were made – sleeping bags unfurled on the living room carpet, grape soda put on ice – while Ronald and I watched the storm from the porch. We watched as a slow wind began tearing through the leaves, and how our front yard oak trees – once the target of an unprovoked mass toilet papering – now faced a far different foe.

  One moment there was nothing and then, everything. The thunder came first, followed by the flash. And then the rain began flying in sideways, like Unser’s rain, and as the howling picked up and the stars receded, we turned back toward the screen door.

  We stopped.

  From our place on the porch we spotted movement in the corners of our eyes. There was somebody out there, or several somebodies – it was hard to make out who. Ronald and I squinted until they came into focus, Pony and his tribe scurrying across their yard, collecting what remained of their lawn ornaments. Their mother shouted inaudible directions to them from the doorway, her finger pointing in a hundred different directions as her children scattered, tucking the rabbits and bunnies and deer into their chests like footballs.

  They were drenched, Pony’s long hair sticking to the left side of his face, and through all the shouting, somehow their dog slipped from between their mother’s thick legs and burst across the street to our yard. This only caused Mrs. Ross’s shouting to raise a pitch higher, and I was reminded once more of all the shouts and yips I’d endured throughout the summer, all the Indian asses pressed to my bedroom window.

  I left the porch and called out to him – “Come here, pal,” – and sure enough, after releasing a nice, steaming dump on my mother’s gardenias, he trotted over as if to claim his prize.

  I grabbed him by the collar and then – faster than a speeding fastball – ran him home as the world fell apart all around us. Thick limbs cracked and collapsed on all sides of me, but I dodged everything, swooping over branch and under water to return that dog to safety. I leapt the trash bin lids that rolled down our street like tumbleweed, sidestepped the water-choked sewers. I was suddenly fearless, even as the sign for Kickapoo Drive rattled in the wind. I arrived at their home, handing the trembling dog over to his rightful owner, felt the leathered hand reaching back.

  I heard a single word whispered over the sound of the crashing thunder:

  Huckleberry.

  I can’t say if it was Pony or not – it was just some old, Indian hand – and by the time the hand laced its fingers beneath the dog’s collar, I was already soaring back toward my porch. There was no thank you, just a change in grip, the charge safely passed and then silence.

  Ronald began shouting to me upon my return, though I could hardly hear him over the wind chimes.

  “Jer! What the shit man! What the shit?”

  I didn’t say anything, just stared at the dog fur stuck to my palm and thought about saving lives.

  After another few minutes of peering into the night we watched the neighborhood teepee teeter and crash to the ground, its long poles clattering like a pile of pickup sticks, the canvas deflating.

  It was the closest thing to a premonition I ever experienced, and less than a week later, long after the storm subsided, the Indians were gone. Their father had gotten transferred to Indianapolis, and while the rest of us were out trying on school clothes and stocking up on boxes of Kleenex, their tribe worked in reverse – reforming their assembly line and passing boxes from littlest Indian brave to the biggest.

  I watched from the safety of the garage, their brown arms tightening beneath the weight, their eyes sullen and twice as tired as ours. Occasionally, I’d catch Pony turning around as if expecting someone, but she never came. Not a single squeak of the brakes. Then, a sharp whistle, and the father locked the front door while the mother ushered the rest of her tribe into the truck.

  An engine started. A gearshift thrown into reverse.

  Pony peered out the truck window to see my hand raised high, my fingers tight.

  It wasn’t goodbye – not exactly. It wasn’t an apology, either.

  Schooners

  My sister Sandy always says, “Roger, you’ve got a mind like a sieve. You’ve got to make lists.”

  I’ve got to make lists.

  Today I will tell you about:

  1. Felicity Blanket

  2. My father’s Hitler painting

  3. A raccoon

  I think this is a good, strong list.

  To begin, you may be interested to hear that a pretty sad thing happened two weeks back, though I suppose it’s still happening.

  Her name is/was Felicity Blanket (which is the first item on my list), and she lived three houses down from Sandy and me.

  I won’t try to tell you that we were best friends because we weren’t. Not really. She is/was six years old, so we didn’t really run in the same circles, though I worked the bowling alley during her last birthday party, and I even put the bumpers in her lane. I guess you could call us mutual acquaintances.

  I remember that day like it was tomorrow. I can still picture my freckled-red-haired-glasses-wearing acquaintance quite clearly, her arms and legs flung to the air, pins crashing behind her like sports cars on a bumper car track.

  When she disappeared, people figured she probably just fell down a well like lost girls always do. Like maybe her shoe got untied and she slipped on a banana peel and ended up trapped in some well. But the thing is, there aren’t too many wells in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the searchers checked all of them. Also, people don’t just go around throwing their banana peels all hapdash. It’s not like we’re in Muncie.

  I really can’t tell you much about Felicity, though if memory serves, she was an above average bowler, especially when taking age and bumpers into consideration. Probab
ly, she finished most games in the mid-fifties, which is good, I think, since my high score is forty-six and I’m a full ten years older.

  Anyway, my mind is a sieve, and this is not on my list of things to tell you.

  But like I was saying, Felicity rode a pink scooter, and I know this for a fact because one time she blurred past me as I was walking to work. She screamed, “Hiiiiiyaaaaaa!” so I launched myself into a sticker bush to keep from getting run over, but also because I thought I saw a silver dollar.

  After the kidnapping, news reporters began camping out on Felicity Blanket’s front lawn, and last Thursday, lo and behold, there was Mrs. Blanket on The Today Show. She wore so much make-up that she resembled a woman who obviously wore quite a bit of make-up. Also, she wore a green sweater with an American flag pin pinned to her right side. As soon as I saw it, I crushed my hand to my heart in the style of a patriot. Then I realized it was just some stupid pin, so I stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance halfway through.

  “I just want whoever did this to know that we will catch you,” Mrs. Blanket told the camera. “That we will catch you and that my baby never deserved this, and if other parents out there can just tell their own children that they love them, tell them this very minute, then maybe you won’t ever end up on national television . . .”

  Holy cow! National television!

  Long story shorter, I leapt out the door, hurdling two doghouses and a fence, and sprinted to Felicity Blanket’s front lawn so I could get on national television and maybe even land my big break in the movie industry.

  It was such a funny feeling, watching my neighborhood on TV like that. Or maybe, it was less funny than sad. I don’t know. I’m no comedian, but I do know that emotions can be complicated, like a Rubik’s Cube or a pinsetter or the Foxtrot.

  None of these things are on my list of things to tell you.