Barefoot

The Boy, Part II: Washington, D.C., 1980

The July sun was making quick work of the morning haze and the boys were almost dry by the time they lowered down to the grass on other side of the chain-link fence, the dull bite of metal still smarting in their bare soles. Beyond the lawn, the wide sidewalk simmered with people headed to work, traffic grumbling along Wisconsin Avenue. The boys wore only damp swim briefs, the brown-haired boy in blue, his best friend in green. Small bodies, sunken chests with dime-sized nipples, the tips of their hair sharpened into chlorinated points. They tiptoed until their feet got used to the grit of the sidewalk. The smell of bacon and toast drifted from a nearby apartment building. They weren’t sure where they were headed. Home was a few miles away; they were just moving in the direction of not-here. It wasn’t the first time they’d run away. Last time it was Cub Scouts. Today, it was swim team.

“He got another one,” his best friend said as he stepped around a spill of cracked glass, a handful of shards stuck to the back of a label.

“Where’d they find him?”

He knew it was a boy, they’d all been.

“Under a bridge. Bloated like a Michelin Man baby. My brother said his eyeballs were hanging out of his sockets.”

Neither of them knew exactly where Atlanta, Georgia, was, but it didn’t feel far away, just below them somewhere. All summer, kids had been disappearing, killed, tossed in rivers, in garbage bags, naked. It was on the news every night.

“Yesterday, a van tried to get me to get inside,” his best friend said, wiping his blond bangs from his eyes, which were still bloodshot from the pool water.

“No way!”

“Totally way. Right in front of Jennifer Wooley’s house.”

“What happened?”

“I kept walking.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t know. Old white guy. He followed me to the corner, and asked if I wanted any candy.”

That brought the boy up short. Candy. A sliver of doubt seeped in. That detail felt unoriginal. He couldn’t put his finger on it at the time, but that warning had been repeated to children so often that surely no offender worth his salt would use it. The creep of disappointment wasn’t in his best friend, but in the story, the adventure, that somehow the excitement that had just surged through his ten-year-old body had been hollow.

The boys’ favorite activity (after street football and Little League) was playing detectives. The Agency was run out of his best friend’s basement, where his dad’s Vietnam War medals were framed on the wall, along with, for some reason, two colorful hands of poker splayed under glass. The boys carried magnifying glasses and talcum powder and special tape to lift fingerprints. They’d scour the neighborhood for lost dogs and cats, clutching flyers. His best friend’s older brother told them he’d heard there was a newborn decomposing in the woods by McLean Gardens and they spent a Sunday morning combing the underbrush, but came up empty; though they did uncover a water-wrinkled Playboy, which was carefully wrapped up and brought back to the Agency for closer inspection.

“Did you see the license?”

“I didn’t have my pencil.”

After a few moments, the boy said, “The other day, a guy offered me a joint on the way home from school.”

The two of them walked by the Zebra Room, with its white and black awning, where they had a condom machine in the bathroom. And People’s Drug Store, where the boy and his best friend stole baseball cards, the kind that were packaged with dusty sticks of gum. So easy to slip up a sleeve or down a sock. The boy wondered if the new Daredevil was out — last month’s cliffhanger with Dr. Octopus had been torturous — but was distracted by the fresh batch of Roy Rogers french fries filling his nostrils, seeping into his pores. Even the sky appeared golden-brown, the whole world suddenly soft and salty. He’d save up his allowance for weeks, order three or four larges, dump them all in one bag, find a sunny patch of grass and luxuriously pluck them out like bon-bons, staring at nothing in particular.

“Are you boys lost?” a female voice intruded. “Do you need help? Where are your clothes?”

They stared at the woman, who was dressed in a dark pleated skirt and seafoam-green blouse, a handbag over her elbow. The boy instantly felt charged, guilty.

“Do your parents know where you are? Do you want me to find a policeman?”

“I dunno,” the boy’s best friend said, his default answer to most adult questions.

“We’re almost home,” the boy said, and they hurried down a side street, leaving the woman to stare after them. The tree shade felt nice on sun-baked shoulders, but there were too many acorn caps scattered across the sidewalk, biting into their heels and toes. They walked the rest of the way in the road, hugging the curb.

The boys lived on the same block. They’d known each other since forever. People called them bobsie twins. At his best friend’s house, the Coke and Cap’n Crunch flowed freely, and the TV was always on. His older brother lived in an attic bedroom, went to rock concerts and wore black T-shirts with white lettering and lightning bolts. The epitome of cool. The family had a mutt named Trooper, who liked to chase car tires at 20 miles an hour, and would eventually die doing what he loved. The boy’s best friend knew about the finger-sucking, even the bed-wetting. He didn’t bat an eye when the boy fitted his plastic sheets over the mattress on the lower bunk and even sucked his thumb in sympathy. They looked out for each other. The other week, the boy came upon a neighbor kid chasing his best friend with a piece of fresh dog shit in a McDonalds fry bag. The kid had him cornered in the alley behind his house, waving the mess in his best friend’s face. The boy ran onto the scene and threw the kid to the ground. He straddled him, pinning his shoulders with his knees and began choking him, hard, both hands tight on his throat. Even though he was smaller, there was a rage in him. His best friend had to pull him off.

At the corner of 38th Street, the friends parted ways. The boy made his way down the sidewalk. The sun-faded blue VW bus was parked in front of the stoop. Pa was home. He could see the smoke wafting up in the backyard as he tended to the bee hives. The boy walked into the house, the screen door slamming behind him. His towel and street clothes sat in a pile on the stairs. He braced himself for his mom’s wrath, sure this one would earn him the wooden spoon. But she just gave him a quizzical, sideways look from the kitchen table (the same way she watched TV, from the corner of her eye, soft face trained on the rest of the room, on the boy). She didn’t say anything for a few moments, just stared at him, through him.

“You don’t have to go back. But you’re going to recite five Shakespeare sonnets at the dinner party tonight. The book’s on your bed.”