Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2001 06:37:14 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: m/m young friends "You'll Live to Love, Another Day"

		    "You'll Live to Love, Another Day"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 It was the end of the last endless summer day before
school started again and the sky had caught brilliant, hurling,
waves of rolling flame. Reflecting its glow off the boys below.

 They were in a huge bowl shaped green meadow, the three
boys, Tommy and Johnny and Dwight. They had run and they had
tossed summer up and down and over to each other this season
with its long light and its late days, until the time had run out.
Until their eyes, so soon, would put their gray metal bars on
again. Already the shopping with moms for new clothes and
notebooks and Number 2 pencils.

 But it never seemed real until the sky turned flame on the
last moments of the last day of wonderment that had treated them
like gods.

 They were seated now, in the heat, in their shorts and
cotton short sleeve shirts and their sockless tennis shoes. In the
green grass high in this declivity next to a hill on which the light
shown like horizon grown into campfire. Sweeping the boys away
like they were to catch fire themselves. Be ashes and burn in the
sky. A light to get home by.

 Tommy was the kidder and Johnny was the studious and
Dwight was the forlorn.
They were a perfect group. Their own perfect gang. Johnny could
justify Tommy's practical jokes and Dwight could suffer for those
jokes, so the other two didn't have to.

 Tommy was somewhat heavy set. His crew cut was
somehow gray and silver, regardless of the light. It made him
seem younger and older as an equidistant. As though he had
neither years ahead of him or behind him. Just what he was right
now was what he would forever be. His cotton shirt was orange
with stripes around it, which, with his pouty little stomach, made
him seem a human bumble bee.

 Johnny wore glasses--horn rimmed of course--and he
seemed anemic, to Tommy's ruddiness. Johnny was tall and thin
and pale. His body seemed to have come out of a large oyster
shell one night when the rest of the world was sleeping and had
not let him totally emerge from the sea. He read books, not
because he wanted to, or particularly liked them. It was he was
supposed to. When your dad is a Professor at a university, even if
it was only a cow college the next town over, you didn't have
much chance at anything else.

 Tommy lay on his confident back and he put his hands
together like a maestro. As though he had been the author of the
summer. The heart tick clock bomb explosion of three p.m. all the
way back there on June 4, when school let out, and children ran
like mad monkeys away from the teachers and their tired and
eager to get away from it all too looks.

 He talked, did Tommy. He chattered. He made you laugh.
He cracked jokes like: "What does LSMFT" mean?" "I don't
know. What?" "Loose Straps Mean Flappy Titties." And Johnny
would laugh at the joke and Dwight would pretend to. Johnny
would laugh almost mechanically as Tommy lit up a  Lucky
Strike on which packs were the initials meaning "Less Tar Means
Fine Tobacco." But forever the joke. Like a long trail of thin
silver that Tommy rode on and carried with him far back there the
other two of them.

 Raids and midnight frog gigging with summer air so tight
and hot it seemed like cones of raw popcorn forced down their
throats. And summer boys continually trying to spit out the hulls
which were the material proper of summer to begin with. Which
was why boys always learned early on to spit. To spit manfully.
Because they were junior men and would hear nothing else about
it.

 Johnny sitting erect, pulling a dandelion apart, as Tommy
encapsulated all their adventures this summer, this trio of
unlikeliest who had had the summer blue capped sky all to
themselves or so it seemed. Who had had the train whistles of
noon to run to and they to try to pace the train as it pulled out
again from its water stop--faster chug faster chug wheels of iron
and steel and imagination hammered into gold vessels to carry
themselves out to the seas of the Midwest wheat and the golden
azure canyons of Colorado and the cold napes of Canada and all
the places that boys would love to see. Mounting dreams of
panning for gold in the 1880's in the mountains where a boy can
think and hear in all that clearness, the very deepest imaginings of
his soul.

 And of course, being boys, they were interested in the
contests boys are interested in. So there was the occasional circle
jerk. With their shorts unzipped, here in their meadow land
evenings. In the other recent nights, how they were coming on so
late, and Johnny already had more pubic hair than the others. A
thick tangle of it. His penis was hard and thick. Not that the other
boys cared. Or not much. So they would see who could shoot
silver into the brocade hot purpling air of coming quilt darkness.

 And Johnny was always chagrined that Dwight could
come first with his penis so thin and so small even when hard. A
little arch bridge that pulled to the right at the top and looked like
a stalk of boy celery. Innocent Dwight who was so eager to prove
himself this way. And so laconic about it. So stroke stroke sigh
and stroke again, watch out everyone, he would say in his pale
voice, and his little rainbow would arch liquid up and that she
blows one more time. The others racing to catch up. Their eyes
intent on their dicks. Their hearts in their throats and their veins
of their dicks. What good then to be a boy if not to vandalize
other boy's manhood in such a sweet innocent way?

 Jungle boys. With their jingle of change. Their delight in
things to eat, apples off trees, and skinny dipping at the lake. The
necessity of their bare behinds bright in the moonlight glades of
their world. That was special and sacred and had room for
nothing real. For real was too real. And real was what had
happened so long ago already. So short ago. So it was best to
continue in their own and each other's topography. If there were
tittie twisters and if there were hard ons rubbed at the crotches of
v'd legs in the movie theater, so cold in summer, when two
women in a cat fight Western tangled in the dusty screen of street,
exposing whatever they might be vaguely allowed to expose, then
so be it. The stickiness of their Coke cups and their thighs and the
joy of being wicked in such a serene state of mind. Whatcha
gonna do about it, then? Whatcha gonna do?

 That had nothing to do with sex. That had everything to do
with the fabric of being boys. Trees to climb and thoughts to soak
in lurid colored comic books with the pebbly pages. Things to talk
about. And dream silently about. But with each other. That was
the important thing.

 So they talked, under the fire sheet of last summer night of
freedom's bragging crescendo. Tommy played his hands across
the sky, which looked, those hands, as though he were really
touching it. Really making it catch flame and bleed red blood of
anger and resentment and sadness that the clock had reached over
and turned off another summer. And they were a year older. A
year closer to the next thing which one day would turn them
around and they would not be boys anymore. A curdling. A
huddling. If they had only dared. Girls they dared a little here and
there. Because they were supposed to, somehow. But mostly they
had themselves and that was just fine with them.

 Tommy of white teeth and reddened and tanned face
talked as though to himself, for boys are universes to themselves,
anyone knows that. Tommy spread the world in the breadth of his
hands this far apart and then this far apart, closer or further. He
was a summer boy. They all three were. Hated winter with its
coughs and whooping sicknesses. Hated its fevers that came from
the inside of a boy. But now, summer, fever coming to a boy from
the outside, that was a different drummer of magic altogether.
Liked to run naked in the night, whether in reality or in dreams.
Liked to stand on midnight moon dusted lawns, respectively, and
alone. And clock up their bodies in the sheer surge of nothing can
stop me growing-ness. And just look at the waterfall that is me
now. Look what hangs off me--studman. Look how it arches and
flexes and gets hard at one instant, not even having to touch it.
Just at my willing it so.

 Not above peeing off bridges when no one else but they
were around. A coil in their stomachs. Unreeling. Unloading. Hot
and unbothered. Scams were up ahead. And ties round their
necks. And jobs. Something unhinged would take them to that
soon. But, no, not now. They would not permit it.

 As Tommy reiterated their standard summers in this their
14th year of life, Johnny mentally calibrated it to books he had
read. Each segment of Tommy's story, Johnny remembered a
book or short story to which it was similar. And it haunted Johnny
that thing he had--that ability to remember so much of what he
read and so little of the life he lived even when it could be as
exciting. Writers wrote it down, didn't they? The parallels? To his
life and Tommy's and Dwight's, that had been real. But it just
seemed more important when his Coke bottle thick lenses, of
course, read the dancing words across the page and implanted
them in his mind. Never reality, that way to be.

 Huck and Tom swam naked. They were unashamed. Crazy
Horse dived boy naked into the rivers of his long ago youth. The
dimples of his buttocks glistening in the noon day breezes. His
penis a hard comma to break the waves head first. How grand to
imagine--to be--here in the clothing of himself and his friends and
his imaginary friends as well. Where bullets were eagles and
dreams were puppies frisking in their own dell. Where hands
could reach out to someone there or not there. And find a rising
adventure basking in the hot afternoon sun.

 A bell jar over him and his friends. Hot sticky close
friendly. Where boys lie abed in the early morning hours. In
un-air-conditioned houses. On their hot sweaty sheets. Their legs
apart like protractor legs. Their cocks proudly stiff. Their hands
playing that old black magic. Look at me, is what it's all about
then. Look at me, and not be stunned and frightened that someone
is. As the boys are strumming their bejeweled guitars. For
everything is sexual in those years. Let no one kid you. If they say
otherwise, they do not remember. They are idiots.

 And boys live in their dreams that turn everything into a
tureen of silver gulls holding their little or not so little warm
always watery squishy balls upward and tight to the scrotum.
Tight and no longer hairless. Legs that push them into summer
also push the coming manhood up into the bodies. That celebrate
life and still brave and daring animals and still okay. But the joy
of the sex rush also rushes them from what they love with all their
hearts. For it is a cheat. It is a con game and the stakes are
anything but penny ante. And when they find out--when they find
out how they were rooked, it is far too late.

 Here, Tommy said, we forever banish the Brothers Three,
Ron, Skip and Daniel who were bullies and who always gave the
littler boys or the different boys or the boys who stuck together no
matter what anyone else said such abounding grief. And Tommy
and Johnny and Dwight at the stream on the top of the mountain
that was now casting its shield of late late afternoon early evening
summer night on them, a preview of what was to follow. When
they had been at the stream up there, at the first of this summer,
the Brothers Three had waylaid them. But Johnny got the goods
from reading about Robin Hood and had helped Tommy fashion
some great battling rams that the boys were never without
wherever outside their homes they went that summer. Just in case
of a re-match. Huge heavy staffs with carved ram's heads in detail
and perfection on either end. Okay, they were just fishing poles,
but still boy imagination can do a lot with mundane objects.

 As the three had picked up their weapons and waved the
wind of heat and mites and mosquitoes and chiggers at the three
rough tough large gawky flat eyed flat thinking Brothers Three.
Tommy of course scrappy and looking for a brawl, but there had
been Johnny and Dwight too, swinging the poles, there was a little
scroll work on them--honest--designed by Tommy from Johnny's
specifications learned in the land of Nottingham on paper at the
library one lazy Saturday bee kissed afternoon, with the boys all
serious around in this place where they conjured with their minds
and fishing poles turned taffy and thick and stalwart and massive
as could be.

 All but Tommy, scrappy pugilist supreme, but our other
two heroes, swinging the poles like sissies, eyes closed, arms
turning round, poles out in front of them as though they were joy
sticks of a plan that was turning all spirals and sprints in the sky
of blue plate, before crashing hopelessly helplessly to the ground.
But the Brothers Three running away, shouting, afraid, banished.
It was possible the Brothers Three had been laughing their asses
off at these defenseless wusses and had shaken their hands at
them, dismissing them in the cruelest manner, not to waste their
time with these three girls any longer. It's possible it was that
way. But-it-was-not-so!

 Cause Dwight, Johnny and Tommy had won--they-did-it!
And the Brothers Three were never to bother them again. The
victors might have been three misfits, Tommy the most misfit of
all.  Because he was the cliche he was supposed to be. And they
couldn't forgive him that. Childhood demands complexity. Know
it or not. To others-- Little Tommy who had once been thrown
naked out of the locker room after gym class. Who had banged on
the door. Who had ducked behind bushes. The tennis courts
across the street saw him. The trees saw him. The sky too. And a
car that passed by--Tommy closing his eyes. Can't see me. Then I
can't see you. Running Bare, a hit song at the time. Running Bear
it really was. But not in this instance. Who had felt eyes on his
little pink white fat behind. Who had put his hands around his
genitals. Who was so red in the face. Who darted, zigged in his
mind, and zagged through the school yard, who had had to crawl
behind bushes under the classroom windows. How awful to be
caught out there all bare.

 His little zinger getting dirtier and smaller with fear all the
time as he slinked along the ground, like a little boy snake. What
are you doing to us? it seemed to ask him. You're making a fool
of all of us. His body inside hot like electric coils of a wall heater
fighting out the walls of winter. He knew the laughter was in the
spring hot breeze. He just couldn't hear it. That made it worse.
The terrible hot still period of silence that encapsulated him.

 Till he found a door open to a basement stair steps. Then
there was the sneaky duck and cover, he in a corner. Doubled into
a comma on the cold concrete floor. In the dark. Waiting for the
school bell to ring. Waiting for everything to empty out. And he
there little chubby boy with too much mind and too much
chutzpah who couldn't figure out why he had not thought of this
master torture first. And finally, finally making it through to the
gym, running like lightning, bare feet slapping on the hard wood
floor, dick dangling in front of him, showing him the way, and
then into the locker room and donning his clothes that had been
left scattered on the floor in the wet smelly room--why didn't they
take his clothes with them?, schmucks! Sinuous, circly, scared,
heart making drum beat. Slithery feeling and a cock that would
not forgive him probably, hiding its little red head in shame. No
one around in the school to see. No one in the locker room. Not
so's you'd know. Some great plan! But they saw, regardless. They
saw and their words pricked and their fat mouths laughed and
their barbs soaked in vinegar were slashed into the cuts that all of
this had caused.

 Because this is how people, kids especially, kill
undesirables. Plain and true. The jokes that followed. The eyes
that had seen him without his knowing it from windows where
teachers droned unawares, those eyes had mouths directly under
their noses, and those mouths would never let him live this down.
The Brothers Three had the most fun especially. His friends
though never mentioned it. Never embarrassed him. Let him lead
in the wanking contests now and then, and were quick to tell him
how impressed they were. That then was the purpose of friends.
Tommy didn't understand why that was such a hard thing to
figure out.

 Little whirrings inside that narrow flat skull that spoke its
own imaginations through teeth and tongue to Johnny who
fashioned the words, the inspirations into glass blown bubbles of
his own and thus lengthened and populated them with the right
frisson, the right spin, the right persons of fantasy villages that
dumbhead teachers who thought they were so smart, Old
Cromedome for example, never had a clue about.

 Thus making The Nomenclature Gang (Johnny's idea--no
one cared what the name meant, it just sounded so great!) the top
gang in school, when they could not have a gang at all, because
they weren't in the official groups and therefore were not really
seen as to exist. But they had to exist because they were the stars
of the school, which of course made no sense at all. But that's
how it goes in a kid's world from day to day, of pancakes golden
in the soft summer morning at Dungan's Diner and coming home
right after, to fill up on breakfast with family, as the summer day
stretches so longingly and languidly out before them. All the
plates filled and all the baseball gloves ready.

 As Johnny held their group baseball glove smelling
healthily of great doses of linseed oil that made the leathery skin
soft and supple, as he sat with the other boys this final night of the
world. As he bounced desultorily the Spaulding baseball with
some of the stuffing knocked out of it over the years, raggedy and
grass summer stained over the long months, in the glove's well
worn creased leather, boys' supreme rise. And Johnny who didn't
know a thing about baseball anymore than did Dwight or Tommy
did, would watch the games sometimes at Tommy's home on TV
of a Saturday afternoon, and be lost in the logic of the thing, the
somehow poetry rhymes of the slow hot day play, the way it was
all done on a fast curve or a descending sleight of hand parallel
that was half out of sight and just caught little tendrils at the edges
of your eyes. So you had to think, what just happened? But you
never dared ask. That would give it away. They just knew they
were in the presence of something--important.

  For it was right there in front of you on the black and
white Admiral set, with the small screen replete with the feel of
cheering people on bleachers, people hot dog stuffed and Coke
and Beer downed happiness. Their eyes and hearts cast wide on
the field and the bases and the players who somehow seemed
yellow sun essence more than men. With the bat thwacking the
ball out to center field or left or right or over the fence with the
advertising signs on it, to the tunes of the cheering screaming
mob-- home run! The boys in the living room getting caught up in
it as well, cheering too. Drinking their own Cokes. Eating their
own hot dogs. Mirrors of what they saw. Always. They thought
then they could always get by with that. A game that managed to
bore them and energize them at the same time. Being with friends
watching the mathematics, somehow, of summer played out
before their eyes. Could there ever be a better time than this?

 And that bothered Johnny, especially, as he and his friends
sat back on the soft pink covered sofa, the boys lined up like
ducks at a shooting gallery on the sofa that was perpendicular to
the TV so you had to look at the set from the side of your eyes or
turned catticornered. He loved these guys with him.  Loved
Tommy's getting so caught up in it. Loved seeing Dwight shrug a
little, he at the far end of the sofa, lined up to their interest in
what they were watching. Or Saturday night, ten thirty, the times
they watched the monster movie, here. For this TV set had the
best picture. And boys know what they like.

 That other rite of passage, Chiller Theatre. Dwight was at
the end of the sofa closest to the TV, for horror films of any kind
frightened him terribly, thus the reason he was closest to the set at
these times. With Johnny was in the middle, hunkered down by
the leverage and paleness of Tommy who laughed a lot at these
movies. Maybe a bit too much. Like three men in a tub, drinking
Cokes Tommy's grandparents had furnished them with, as well as
eating chips and sherbet. The ambrosia of summer. The royal
rings of the Coke glasses leavings on the table top in front of them
and the giggling and feasting and stories and laughing out loud for
no reason, which is the gift, the crown Mecca, the bedecking of
childhood.

 They were a happy group. Save for Dwight. He was sad
pretty much all the time. He didn't know why. No one else did
either. He was one of those kids who needed to be protected.
Though he never knew from what. He even jacked off sad. He
would cry when alone late at night. He would thrust his penis
through his shorts and he would stroke it. Thinking of Tommy
and Johnny in ways he shouldn't have. Felt badly about. The
others were just boys playing boy games. But there was something
about Dwight that was like he was going to fall off the edge of the
planet so he had to remember everything. So, when he came alone
in his bed, he was more alone than anyone in the whole solar
system, crying help me, oh god. Just that. And nothing more.

 Though all were forlorn this night. The red was not ruby.
The world was not going to burn up and destroy forever the hoops
of school they were in a matter of--jeez--hours, minutes, mere
seconds--going to have to dive through for another goddam nine
months. When  life was no longer their friend. The red was going
away from the roof of summer and purple was coming in. Not the
royal coats of flowers and the nights when the boys ran behind the
bug spray truck, because in those days, no one really knew, save
for Johnny who had read "Silent Spring." But running after the
bug spray truck in all that thick sweet smog and fog was for him
yet another childhood ritual. One he threw over facts for. A game.
A love. Like fighting in the trenches of WW I in the Battle of the
Marne. All the rifle fire round him and he shooting off round after
round himself. Bodies collapsing like clay men all about him and
he bayoneting some who would not stay dead even with their
grievous bullet wounds and their entrails hanging out and their
heads half decapitated from their blood gouting neck stumps.

 Tonight, there was still, if measured by just the hot
weather, summer to go for some time. Tomorrow was only Sept.
1. There was the county fair the end of next week and the
beginning of the next. School took off one day, always a
Wednesday, to go to it en mass. And the kids went at night and
stayed as long as they could in that marvelous gaudy tacky place
that was the only country they knew of that moved around.
Hitched its skirts up one dark night and wheeled away to
somewhere else, to begin again. It never made sense that it always
came when school started again, as kids were their biggest
customers. But, as Dwight had said often, that was the orderly
stupid way of the world. Johnny said order is not a bad thing, it
should just be adjusted into focus a bit more. And Tommy said
last one out of his clothes and into the creek is a dirty rotten egg.
Then all was forgotten. The delights played yesterday or the day
before. Not tonight though. Already even this young, the
memories counted more than tomorrow.

 But the game. The game. The doffing and running and
falling. And clothes exchanged for skin and even shy Johnny and
shyer Dwight jumping in, always falling behind Tommy who
always dived. The delight of bare skin out in the glowy sun
umbrella The delight at pushing and splashing and ducking and
waves of colder than bitter winter water that slapped their chests,
tightened their tits, shrank their balls, and giggled them to boy
tricks of exceeding venture and mirth. Prongs sprung. A willow
branch hung on each erection at a time. The hard boy cocks
bending not. Supreme and strong and forever. The boys in their
watery clothing. Coming out of the sea like mythological gods.
The sea that burbled around them and made them more naked
than any clothes doffing alone ever could. They were elemental in
it. The sun danced the waves. And far places like China called.
These puppies of summer.

 Even though the creek was shallow and there were enough
stories about boys diving head first in a creek or pond and
breaking their necks. Tommy knew though. Tommy always knew.
He was a child. They were all children. They would never age.
They would never break their necks in the creek, none of the
other two really really believed that could happen to them. It was
just precaution was a part of their make up.

 But they would break their heads on the creek flow of
school, starting tomorrow. Each had classes he hated, that he
couldn't understand. Math or English or science of Latin. All of it
rashes and eczema and mumps and diphtheria and summer ending
and cold winds blowing past brick gates in yards of damp black
where there were no dogs to frisk with of a summer afternoon.
Dogs bounding and bouncing up and down and yapping in the
yards of boys who rushed home from the brick and cement and
red dust buildings of learning, to rush pell mell to their very best
squiggly happy dancy canine friends again.

 Dwight watched his human friends now. From a distance
he still didn't understand yet. He remember how they flashed in
the summer sun. How they had their day and were living
sculptures of childhood. They were, he believed, simply perfect.
And they let him be there too. With them. They asked for nothing.
Everybody else asked for everything. And did not care if he gave
it or not. So he found he had to give more and more. One day
there would be nothing at all left to give. The rubber glove of
Dwight would fall. And autumn would find itself alone without
him. Would it, he wondered, care even? But that would be one
day. Not yet come. Belief then was everything. Regardless.

  He too, like Johnny, was sitting erect. He too was pulling,
not a dandelion apart, but a leaf apart. He watched it crumble in
his hands. He took it to pieces as though he were intent on a
scientific medical examination of its thin weak so weak pencil
lined black skeleton. He looked at his friends. They were busy
forgetting the summer, already leaving behind them the taste of
lime sherbet in the hot night as they watched old horror films on
TV in the hot air fan blown un air-conditioned house of one boy's
or another's. Forgetting the tasting the cold and bracing and lively
taste bud salutes on their tongues. The swallowing the sherbet
which had come from a carton with rainbows painted on it, so
Dwight always thought eating any brand at all of Sherbet,
Borden's was the best, was like climbing up to the sky and eating
rainbows. Just letting them waver into his mouth. Just letting
them flow into his mouth.

 Rainbows. Or rainboys, Dwight thought now. Dwight the
Quiet. But even if that was not what he was called by his two
friends, even had it not rhymed, he would have been a quiet boy
anyway. Gathering clouds white or dark. Secretive. Kept to
himself like he forgot to have an outside. Still and brooding.
Always at a distance especially when he was close up. Diffident.
Difficult. Alone. He scared others because they thought it might
be catching. So did Tommy and Johnny. He scared them. But he
was their friend. In the world of boys, again, go figure. He didn't
scare them at all. In other words.

 "It's been good," Tommy said, now sitting up straight,
himself.

 "Our summer. And Fall is pretty neat too," Johnny was
saying, trying to convince himself, in short, sharp almost flinty
flings of little words and Johnny rarely used little words, not that
he was a smart ass or a braggart, he just didn't like to show off.
But he thought what he had once read and deemed it here
appropriate--"cool and cold and leaf brittle and winds and dark
skies and ice skating and cocoa after the long run home." The
words like October late, come early to them now. They made
Tommy shiver. Gladly somehow. Gladly as though there had been
a sea change. As though gradually and too quickly, Tommy was
growing weary, just a little bit, of summer and doing the same
things year after year in that season.

 How many times could you poke someone's  naked rear as
they dived into the creek? How many times can you dissolve in
crinkly giggles before you were dissolving only in the memory of
how they used to be? How many times could you pretend that you
still cared about wanking off with the guys? How many times
could you feel good because you pissed farther than the others?
Or stripping at the creek and measuring your new pubic hair
against that of the others?--or of sweating 24 hours a day all
through it till finally mid or late fall arrived. Like he was in
harness. Pulling a wagon.

  Like he was a mule. And summer was the burden he had
to trudge on with. It made no sense. He jerked his mind away
from it. He wanted just once before he croaked, to hold someone
softer than he was. He wanted to quit smiling goofily when he
came last. Pretending it didn't matter. Cause it damn well did.. It
was no longer a magic circle. It hurt him sometimes. He had no
idea why. It just did. And sitting with his naked butt on the hot
green steamy grass along side the naked butts of Dwight and
Johnny made him feel a longing to be away. A longing to see
different scenery. This map had been run. He had excavated the
all of it. He had grown tired. And this scared him immensely.

 He told himself he was getting to be as big a nimrod as
Johnny. But then he remembered those huge battering rams he
and Johnny and yes Dwight too had used to fend away the
Brothers Three, the Sheriff's men in other words, while the poor
benighted peoples of Sherwood Forest cheered them on. And he
thought, Johnny you're okay. He started to think about Dwight
and then changed his mind. It was all gone now. They were
having their final summer in their life. They had tried to hold it
together this summer. But could not. It was a loser's game. And
the night, the world, was far bigger than they would ever be again.
How could anything be sadder than that?

 The dark was putting out feelers for the boys. It was
almost all dark now. Magic tricks and smoke and mirrors and
magic lantern shows and the night had come when a moment
before, a second before, it had been brilliant shadowless summer
like a wondrous sea of green stretched out for them, and only
them, to swim in. Tide receded. Water gone away in the moon
light of a moon that hadn't come yet and it was already so dark.

 They were silent a long time now. Johnny didn't know
what they would remember. What had been important and what
had not. He was losing his bearings. It felt like death. Everything
dissolved. Everything eased back. The clamps were loosening.
Prison, just up ahead. It was easier to put summer aside, like in
canning jars in "Dandelion Wine," easier just to take summer out
every now and then to remember and then put it back in the jars
where it could be contained. Where it would contain itself
without a boy having to throw his life away, his memory back,
trying to hold to what was not possible for the jelly heart or brain
to truly remember. Johnny's thoughts became more adult. More
and more often. Damn. How to stop it. You can't. It is the fault of
our mental abilities, the fault of our fast changing physiognomy,
the fault of how things are laid out. Summer comes sun rise.
Summer dies night. Autumn comes on a little less bright of light
and life and then winter up ahead and you forget there was once
hot acrid tasty butter thick summer sunlight at all, because it's
easier that way. That way you don't have to go mad trying to hold
on to your integrity.

 But Johnny said, "I'll miss it, anyway. Summer and all."
Then thought, they'll weave together a new one for us next year.
But then again, no they won't. Not for us. And we won't think
about the rest. Because Dwight was always far behind there and
really didn't count for that much. We liked him all right but he
was more of a hanger on, riding his inferior off brand bike, it and
he, so wobbly and unsure, struggling to catch up with us, trying to
catch up to our sleek palomino Schwinns. It was just that no one
else would take him, so we did, in spite of, in kindness, but
mostly because it just for some reason or another had to be. And
now we are beginning to find the waters clearer. The forest less
dense. We look at it straight ahead, to be sure, but we see less and
less, Johnny thought, and perhaps said, we're becoming adults
and that god fuck it all to hell is how the game is played.

 Tommy was standing up now. Brushing the grass and dew
and dark land off his shorts. Giving a hand to Johnny, who did the
same. They stood awkwardly side by side, not looking at each
other. Behind them, Dwight too stood and he looked at them and
he wanted to look at them forever because he was forgetting too.
It was all a land of nodding acquaintance. And they were lucky if
even that would stay with them a little time to come. All the
countries of it.

 Tommy shrugged his shoulders as though throwing off a
particularly encapsulating minute. And began walking off the
meadow, Johnny a little behind him. Mimicking Tommy's shrug.
Their good bye to summer. But then that was what Mason jars
with air holes in the lids for summer lightning bug catching and
placement and freeing again was for. Dwight looked after them.
He looked after them until they were only shadows within the
shadow of the night and it had swallowed them up totally. Or had
swallowed him up totally.

 He walked a step or two. Stumbling. How the hurts come.
No Band-Aid for this falling off the bike and scraping his bare
knees. Not the cuts that would only get more cruel.

 He held out his shaky south paw hand just a bit--not so's
you'd notice even-- to the sky that could no longer be seen. And
he remembered playing baseball with his friends, just catch
between him and Tommy and Johnny and occasionally one or the
other lobbed a soft throw to him, the sissiest of the world, Tommy
would some times say to him, smiling, making Dwight smile too
in spite of himself. Tommy bringing the world up close in times
like that, the catchers now at the edge of Dwight's eyes, but once,
right in front of him--the cheering crowd, the long distance over
the Clabber's ad posted section of the fence, and Pee Wee
Reese's and Dizzy Dean's voices going hysterical with sheer joy
of boyhood ecstasy, "Did you see that, ladies and gentlemen? My
lord, did you just see what happened? That's for the books. That
is for--the--books!" And that was how summer Saturdays had
gone.

 And this was how the last night of the summer world
went. A bit different this time. A bit deeper. More biting. But just
a bit. And Dwight standing lonely in a lonely dark night in a
meadow that maybe was not a meadow any longer at all. Dwight,
who had had a certain illness early this vacation. Just a little thing
at first. Be over it in a day or two. But not to be. Dwight who was
taken away slowly, eaten away slowly by time and his fading,
failing, paler and paler body until his friends could no longer
stand to visit him. Death had happened and Dwight was cut off
from them. They had sat like statues at his funeral. The funeral
home smell of pain and sick aroma flowers and the hush of cold
like in a grave, all of them there, themselves. Kids don't die. They
don't. That is reserved for grandmothers and grandfathers and
other people, strangers, of crepe paper skin and eyes that look too
weakly at the world and can't remember it, so they don't count. A
million years up the line. Not a boy who died, wasting away. Cold
face and colder hands. A body like a husk of a snake on his bed.
Melting to the skeleton so lewdly inside.

 Died in hot summer July noon Saturday. Pasty and distant
and dusty, like an old book opened to the hot winds and the dry
deserts of the West. Flaked off and words dimmed and diminished
as the pages burn in the sun and the print forgets and is dulled and
is gone so soon. So irrevocably. Summer got inside him. The sun
was swallowed in his mouth and it burned him up alive. How do
you explain such a thing? You don't. You hide from it. Like
Tommy did when he was pushed naked out the gym locker room
door that day. You close your eyes so you can't see it and it can't
see you. If he had broken his neck, diving in the creek. If he had
gotten hit by a car. If something collided from the world with
him, and rattled him off like rain on a tin roof in a summer
downpour. But this. Inside him the thing came. Like a stupid skin
pulling by the inch horror film monster. It!--Terror from Beyond
Space. But the terror was in the space inside Dwight. The
universe blocked out. Blacked out. It makes you scared of
stumbling. Breathing. Heart beating. Sleeping. Awakening. It
makes the world inside and out so damned real. And you can't
escape it. No one can. No purpose or point or rhyme or reason.
Who's in charge of this chicken outfit anyway?

 "Remember me, guys, " Dwight said in a voice softer than
it had ever been before. Even he didn't know if he could hear it or
just feel the shadow of the words. "Remember me. It would help.
Please."

 Then there was silence and the cicadas had gotten louder
and louder in their courses. The ants were in their little red hills
of dirt. The night was blind. And the meadow was only a
meadow, whose own end of summer was coming soon. And two
boys ran home in opposite directions. In a town where so many
children were running home in opposite directions. Each getting
to the right ones, hopefully.

 And hitting their front porches almost in syncopation
Their wood front porches with the lights on the posts or beside the
front door or shining out the opened windows. Lighting their
children's way. Children with hearts that beat a little faster, and
not from exertion alone, when they opened the screen doors and
raced inside. Something almost got them. Almost. Barely. Safe
again inside, though. Parents feeling relief to hear their children's
tennis shoes hit the first step or the first section of the porch floor.
Relaxing the tension they did not know had been in them, but did
now.

 And the world went into night. This part of the world
anyway. And if a boy whispered on the wind somewhere out there
in the night, the music of cicadas covered it up, loud and true.
And perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps that was the way it
should be. So when parents sat with their children in their
kitchens at their evening meal of sandwiches and watermelon
halves or perhaps cantaloupe halves, and cold tea or milk or Coke
or Dr. Pepper, they could concentrate on their food, their talk, and
other things as well. We can't protect you or ourselves or anyone,
their parents might say silently. Might think. Hold close. Last
night is a million miles away and tomorrow is so near at hand. As
they and their children ate at the wooden dinner tables with the oil
cloth coverings on those tables.

 And pretended that the night did not crease and cripple
right outside their windows too. The screened windows the bugs
hit at over and over again. Trying to get into the light. But always
failing. Except for the crafty ones who waited for a door opened,
or a window opened and screen raised, so they could fly in then.
Those were the ones you had to watch for. To wait for. To be
vigilant against. To later drift to their beds. And the boys in those
beds, late night, holding their penises. Will we ever have fine
consecutive minutes when we're not hard as a rock? Rubbing
them. Like a magic lantern. Almost coming. Not quite. Then
working up the seas again. Then letting go. Squeezing thanks into
them. Legs moving in and out. Breath faster. Stomachs tight. Till
the time they could stand it no longer. And in concert all over the
town, all over the sleeping world, they shot into their Kleenexes
always kept handy. And then they turned on their sides. Again,
perhaps in concert. And lay there open eyed till morning. They
had to. This would work. This would keep the bad things away.
But how do you guard against what is in you? That you can't even
see? That you don't even stand a chance of fighting? No battering
rams would work then. No matter how brave the Merry Men who
swung them.

 Only staying awake all night, of course, would not work,
because no one can be that vigilant all the time. There is always
tomorrow night. And the next one too.

 And that's how the heart beat of the last gasp of summer
came to an end this year for these two boys who were once three
and who soon would be only one. Only please not for too long.
And oh god did Tommy and Johnny want to live. Life was sweet,
even though their bones built them more and more out of
childhood on those bridges of calcium in bodies most fearfully
made. And even more fearfully worn. That's where they get you.
When you first have that particular thought. And there is no way
to un-think it. No way to go back, then, at all.


				  the end