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CHAPTER THREE
1.

With a whole week before the fair was to open to the public, Fat Bobby and I needed something to do to occupy our minds. We’d spent a couple hours reading comics, and I’d let him go through my boxes and pick and choose what he wanted to read. But I stayed close by as he read them, never leaving him alone for even a second.

I’d instructed him on how to hold and care for the comics properly so as not to crease the covers or bend the binding. Nervously, I pretended to read as well, but watched my friend’s elbows and legs shuffling as he sat on my bedroom floor and flipped through the books. He came frighteningly close to trampling the comics at times, like a large circus elephant dancing dangerously close to the gleeful, pointing children, but disaster was always averted.

Finally, filled to the brim with mutants and krytponians, radioactive spiders and dark knights, even Fat Bobby had had enough superheroism for one morning and looked up and asked what we should do next.

I wanted to get out of the house as well, but was afraid to, and so didn’t immediately respond.

Sleep the past couple nights had been fitful and restless. I tossed and turned beneath the sheets, disturbing Bandit at the foot of the bed. Outside my window the branches of the apple trees tapped and clicked constantly, as if imploring my attention. Little nubs on the branches looked like switchblades, and every time headlights passed I was sure it was a sleek black Mustang out there cruising through the night.

I hadn’t told Mom or Dad about the guys in the car trailing me, or the driver with his gleaming knife. I knew I should; I knew Mr. Smirk—Dillon—was a dangerous kind of guy, not someone who’d be satisfied with just a fistfight. But I thought of the fuss and drama that would follow if I told them. How I’d probably be under house arrest until Dad got a hold of the police and the police got a hold of Dillon, his two friends, and their parents. The thought of missing even a single day of the summer was intolerable.

That was a foolish train of thought. What we as adults call irrational. I knew that even then. But kids aren’t the most rational of beings, as I’m sure you know. And boys the least of all.

Gathering up the comics we’d been reading, Bobby and I started slipping them back into their plastic sleeves as we silently considered his question. Light from the dresser lamp shone off the clear plastic sleeves in streaks and whorls of color. Thus bagged, we filed the books into their respective boxes, pushed the boxes back into the closet.

The light off the comics made me think of the light I’d seen from atop the hill on the dirt road overlooking the woods. I told Fat Bobby about it—he seemed vaguely interested—and we got up, went to the kitchen, grabbed a couple sodas and, with Bandit between us, we headed out.

As we walked, Fat Bobby’s interest seemed to grow, almost reaching a minimum level to qualify as excitement, and so mine did also, by proxy. He asked questions, and I found myself answering eagerly.

“Was it like a ghost light?” he asked. “I’ve heard that sometimes people see strange lights floating about in swamps. Was it like that? Ghost lights?”

I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t like that at all. Besides, there aren’t any swamps here. It wasn’t no ghost lights.”

He looked vaguely disappointed, a scowl scrunching his face and making it look like a pile of unbaked dough grimacing. Then he smiled as some other idea struck him, something better, and the disappointment was a memory.

“Was it UFO lights?” he said, the eagerness in his tone raising his voice an octave and making me remember uncomfortably those high, whiny pleas that had first led me to the crying, nearly naked kid in the stream. “You know, all flashes of blue and green and white as the ship lands and the aliens get out and laser some holes into some cows and stuff.”

“No, no.” Shaking my head briskly, irritation gaining a foothold, I tried not to let it show. “No, it wasn’t no spaceship landing.” I wondered if maybe I should put Bobby on some sort of comic book restriction, give his brain a few days to come down from the clouds. “It was like a twinkle or something, you know, when the sun flashes off of something glass or metal.”

“Oh,” Fat Bobby said, “I think I know what that is.”

The disappointment returned to his face, and he started walking ahead of me up the dirt hill. I had to trot to catch up to him. Up at the top, the woods ahead of us a carpet of green, Fat Bobby pointed into the distance.

Away from the woods.

My eyes followed the line of his finger and arm and, sure enough, there it was: the light I’d seen—the fallen star—the sun reflecting off some surface in fiery flashes that made me squint. I swiveled my head like a periscope, looking back towards the woods where I’d originally seen the reflective light.

I saw nothing there among the trees as I had the first time.

But turning my head the other way, in the direction Bobby was pointing, and there it was, that bright light like some sort of signal, twinkling, sparkling.

How had it moved? What was it?

I scanned the landscape this way and that, and with each turn of my head I saw something surprising. There wasn’t just one flashing light out there among the hills where Fat Bobby had directed me to look. There were several. It was a veritable village of flashing lights, like bits of shattered glass or grains of sand on a beachfront catching the sunrays and throwing them back.

“What is it?” I asked, mystified.

“Come on,” Fat Bobby said, “I’ll show you.”

* * *

The junkyard held mostly dead and dilapidated cars, parked side by side and fender to fender on dirt so barren that I felt sad for the sparse and dry weeds growing out from the cracks, like fingers of penitents from hell reaching through the grating of the earth. We walked the perimeter of the chain-link fence that surrounded the yard, heading towards where Fat Bobby said the entrance was located. As we walked we heard short and harsh sounds like firecrackers exploding, and I again thought Guns! Guns! Run! Duck! as the sounds cracked the silence like small thunders.

Bobby saw me flinch, and I looked to him seeing that he hadn’t, and he gave me a wry smile that seemed to say Not always so tough, are we, dumbshit? and I thought: good for you, maybe there’s hope yet.

“That’s Jim and his dad,” he said. “They run the place.”

We reached the sliding gate that served as the entrance to the yard, and there a sign read “NO TRESPASSING.” As I gazed into the yard I realized that it wasn’t as haphazard and slapdash as I’d first thought. There was a large garage in the center of the automotive graveyard, three bay doors rolled up, and inside were various cars and trucks elevated or with hoods propped open. Parts and pieces littered the floor of the garage among shelves and tables full of tools. This wasn’t just some scrap or auto yard. This was a mechanic’s shop.

“Come on,” Fat Bobby said, grabbing the fence. He started to push, and the large entrance gate wheeled open with a screech in its rusty tract.

“Wait!” Looking at the sign and hearing the loud firecracker sounds coming from somewhere in the yard, I hung back. “It says no trespassing!”

“Don’t worry.” He looked back at me as he slipped inside. “I know them.”

Hesitantly, I followed.

As we crossed the yard towards the garage, walking around the cars in various states of disrepair and stages of rust, stepping over flaking tires and old engine blocks like the remnants of machines after Armageddon, I took in the fading chrome and metal, the shattered windshields and sun-cracked bumpers, and thought to myself: So these are my fallen stars, my great treasure in the woods. That realization carried with it a light sadness, and a soft sigh, barely perceptible, escaped me as the loss of possibilities played out in my mind. Maybe Bobby’s talk of ghost lights and UFO landings had sparked an excitement in me despite my pretenses otherwise. At certain angles, the sunlight glared off of the dead vehicles as intense as it had from far off on the hill, yet this close up the magnificence had left the display and it was just daylight bouncing off scrap metal.

Fat Bobby led me around the garage. The building in the middle of the refuse was like the last fortress on a battlefield, itself pockmarked by age or mortar fire. Then we turned a corner and there, a few feet away, were black people with guns, and with California memories like wartime flashbacks I once more thought Guns! Guns! Run! Gang war!

Bobby called out over the gunfire to the duo. Bottles and cans set up on a segment of wooden post some distance away jumped into the air, shattered, or ripped into aluminum shreds as I looked on, and I thought of the anxiety-filled freeway trips through Compton or Long Beach of years past.

The larger of the two, a tall and wiry black man with close-cropped curls of gray peppered hair, turned, saw us, flashed a bright white smile, and holstered his weapon. The second black person, a kid really, no more than a year older than me, if that, saw this, turned to look at us too, and lowered his gun also.

“Hey, my man!” the man said, in jeans and a sleeveless undershirt, grease and oil-stained, looking very much the mechanic. He stepped over to Fat Bobby, held out his hand palm up, and Bobby gave him a mighty slap, a smile brightening his fat face as I hadn’t seen it do since my dad had given him the comic book money.

Bobby gestured to the older man, then the boy, and looked at me as he said: “Joey, this is Mr. Connolly—”

“Ernest,” Mr. Connolly interjected, and shook my hand with one of his, large and long-fingered and hairy so that I thought of a tarantula as I shook it. I put him at around sixty or so, and yet he carried himself with a mild swagger and confidence of a man thirty years younger.

“—and his son, Jim,” Bobby finished, and my hand was released and taken up by the smaller hand of the black kid, wiry like his dad, but his head bald as a baby’s. Jim smiled that same flashy ivory smile his dad had, genuine and friendly, and I thought to myself for a fat kid with no friends Bobby sure had a lot of friends.

Tara bloomed in my mind briefly like a puff of smoke, and I smothered the thought and what accompanied it (the fair the fair a beautiful girl and the fair) and brought my thoughts back to the here and now.

“Joey saw the light shining off all your cars and wondered what it was,” Fat Bobby explained, “so I brought him here. Hope it’s not a problem.”

Mr. Connolly dismissed this with a combination snort and bark of a laugh, and waved the very idea away.

“No problem at all,” he said. “You know you can come around here anytime, Bobby.” With that Mr. Connolly gave Bobby a massive slap on the back, which he probably meant to be friendly but rocked Fat Bobby on his heels. Turning to his son he gathered up the pistol his kid had been using and started to walk away. “You kids have fun,” he said to all of us. And this just to Jim: “Be in for lunch.”

Then it was the three of us: Fat Bobby, myself, and the first black kid I wasn’t afraid of being shot or stabbed by in a long, long time. And Bandit, of course, off somewhere nearby, sniffing the cars and parts of cars, and the dirt and the thin, dying weeds, scents invisible in the air, there but unseen.

I felt it again, that sense of things moving and me being carried along for the ride. Another link in the chain of events, the moving of the gears, and I felt I was on a trail myself, following it like Bandit to wherever it inevitably led.

2.

“It actually wasn’t one of the cars here I saw,” I told Jim as the three of us strolled casually through the yard, like three buddies on a fishing trip. I’d answered all the initial questions boys always had when meeting each other, like where I was from, where I lived, what I liked to do, things like that. Of course he took to Bandit real quick, which was a point in my favor: a good dog like a sign that said, Hey, I ain’t so bad. I’m pretty damn okay, actually. See, I have a dog!

“Oh?” he said, twirling a metal pipe he had scooped up off the ground. I noticed his motions weren’t clumsy, that the pipe whizzed in circles and semicircles in his hand with deftness and ease, and as sure as Bandit was a sign about me, this was a sign about Jim. It said I know how to take care of myself and like a telepathy of some sort I knew Mr. Connolly had bestowed a similar philosophy upon his son as Dad had done with me.

Don’t let fear control you.

Don’t take shit from anyone.

With just the right twist of his wrist, I knew Jim Connolly could whack something good with that small pipe. Probably without the pipe too, and I knew this was one kid I didn’t want to get in any pissing contest with. I was glad we’d hit it off so well.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was a lot like the sun shining off these cars here, but it wasn’t here. I saw it off in the woods.”

“You probably just forgot exactly where you saw it coming from,” Fat Bobby said, picking up a stick, trying to twirl and spin it like Jim. The stick went flying out of his sausage-like fingers, sailed dangerously close past my face.

I slugged him on the arm. I checked the punch at the last moment, not hitting him too hard, but Bobby still gave me an injured What’d you do that for? look.

“There’s at least half a mile between the woods and here,” I said. “I’m not fucking blind.”

“Geez,” Fat Bobby said, rubbing his shoulder where I’d hit him. “Sorry.”

“Actually,” Jim said, “there’s service roads that run all through the woods.”

“Service roads?” I asked.

“Yeah, you know, for forest rangers and firefighters and shit like that.” He had given me a look when I’d hit Bobby that said: Don’t hit the fat kid. To his credit he didn’t make a big deal about it, and so I made a mental note to myself not to hit Fat Bobby like that anymore, even in play. That Jim would come to Fat Bobby’s defense, even with just a look, was kind of cool in my book, and my respect for the kid rose a notch or two. “So it’s possible you saw something where you said you saw it.”

“I did see something where I said I saw it.” The note of challenge in my voice made Jim look up at me, and he flashed his bright smile again. I knew that he was liking me more as well, what with me not backing down from him, even about something as dumb as where some ghost lights or UFO beams had come from.

“Only one problem,” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

We came to the far rear fence of the yard at that moment, and Jim pointed off to where the woods started a hundred yards off or so. A dirt road led off that way into the trees, and there was a barricade across it, large metal crossbeams in the shape of an X. As if for added determent, thick coils of chain looped around the crossbeams, then around two trees on either side of the barricade, and a thick padlock hung at the center where the ends of the chain met up.

“Those roads have been closed for some time,” he said.

* * *

I lay in bed that night wondering how the car I had actually seen gleaming with reflected sunlight deep in the forest—not the cars at the Connolly yard that Fat Bobby assumed I’d seen—had ended up where it was.

According to Jim the access road barricades were put in place a long time before, when careless campers or hunters would improperly put out campfires; the embers would be caught in a breeze after the people had left, and acres were burnt to crisp and ashes. Only rangers and the fire department had keys to unlock the chains of the barricades, and hefty fines and jail time kept most people from messing with them.

This left me with only a few options and conclusions.

One, the access road at the Connolly yard that Jim had shown us seemed to be the closest route to the general area in which I had seen my single, distinct, reflective surface, me presuming it’s a car. Since that road was barricaded, obviously if anyone had used it, it had been someone with the keys to the chain. This would mean a ranger or the fire department. But Jim hadn’t said anything about seeing rangers or fire trucks use that road, and it was a pretty good chance, him and his dad working there, one of them would have seen or heard a vehicle driving that road. Add to that the fact that I hadn’t seen any smoke or fire when I had seen the shiny object in the distance, my fallen star, and that pretty much ruled out the rangers or fire department.

This led naturally to conclusion number two. If it hadn’t been a ranger or fire truck out there, someone authorized to pass through the barricades, then maybe it was someone with no legitimate right whatsoever. Maybe someone had busted through one of the barricades; an off-season poacher possibly, or kids doing the fleshy tango in an out of the way place, or perhaps a coven of Satanists for all I knew, dancing naked smeared with blood and chanting to the Dark Lord. Sacrificing goats, having orgies, all that crap. But the access road barricade at the Connolly yard, the most direct route to the general area of the light I’d seen, obviously hadn’t been run down or forced open.

That didn’t mean another access road hadn’t been used, and I’d asked Jim how many there were. He said several, exactly how many he didn’t know. But they were all barricaded, he said, and the rangers were real regular with their duties, checking on the barricades and patrolling the woods. Fat Bobby verified this by saying that Tara’s dad was a ranger, and he always saw the man out and about in his park jeep or truck around town, and when he wasn’t around town he was presumably out in the forest, checking on things.

I nodded at this like it made sense, which it did, but inside I was cursing up a storm at Fat Bobby for once again knowing more about this beautiful girl than I did.

So, if only rangers and the fire department could easily get vehicles into the woods, and neither one of them had been there when I saw the bright light on the ground, then that left only one other option I could think of. And it was this one that left me tossing and turning for some time, thinking of adventures and mysteries and all things that made a boy’s heart and mind race with life.

What if the car I’d seen shining back the sunlight like a beacon had been there in the woods before the barricades had gone up? How long ago would that have been? Years? Decades? And why was this possible car still there after so much time had passed? Was it forgotten? Or did people just not know where to find it? I’d only seen it myself because I’d been on high ground, looking in a particular direction.

That last intrigued me the most for some reason.

If people didn’t know where to find it, why not? Had someone put the car out there intentionally? Was there something there that wasn’t supposed to be found?

For me, in the long stretch of summer with nothing but time on my hands and a fertile imagination, this wasn’t something I could just forget. Plans were already forming in my head and the morning seemed too far away, dangling like a carrot in front of a horse, beckoning, teasing. The night lingered, taunting me, and sleep seemed a misty thing to catch, slipping through my fingers in ethereal tendrils.

3.

Fat Bobby lived north down the highway heading into town, about a quarter mile from our place. I hadn’t been to his house before, but he’d pointed it out once from a distance when we’d been walking home from town. Whereas my neighborhood seemed something of a checkerboard with immaculate well-tended lawns and freshly painted, manicured houses interspersed with weed-strewn dirt expanses where a lawn had once been, and run-down affairs that could have been boxes and rusted shingles slapped together disguised as houses, Fat Bobby’s neighborhood was nothing but the latter. Houses with exteriors of peeling paint like flaky scabs, rusted automobiles parked out front like the husks of dead creatures, and mangy beasts with matted hair chained to posts that I could only guess were some sort of dog, were tossed about his street as if by a tornado.

It was because of these last, the dirt encrusted, sun beaten animals I thought were dogs, that I left Bandit home this time around. That might seem counterintuitive, leaving behind my dog and best protection when I was planning on walking a neighborhood populated by canine monstrosities. But that was exactly why I left him behind. Not wanting Bandit in any sort of dogfight with these sad and horrid beasts, perhaps hosting an early stage of rabies, I trusted myself to outrun these mangy mutts, but not Bandit to avoid getting into a scuffle where he might end up poisoned by the contaminated spit sluicing about their jaws.

Turning off onto Fat Bobby’s street, I moved warily along the dilapidated and depressing dirt landscape of his neighborhood. This area held not a hint of the Old West vibe that the town of Payne proper had held for me when I’d seen it from atop the hill. Rather, this neighborhood seemed like a Calcutta or something akin to one of those African villages seen on the Give-Us-Your-Money heartstring-plucking Christian Children’s Fund commercials. These weren’t homes I was seeing, but hovels, trailers weather-beaten and uncared for so that they seemed not like trailers at all, but like the shells of structures after a nuclear blast. Trees tried growing in a few of the dirt lawns and seemed like the emaciated skeletal structures of ancient beasts, gnarled and twisted by age and decay.

I approached the trailer Fat Bobby had pointed out before, a rectangular thing with duct-taped windows and flaky wisps of what might have once been blue paint fluttering down from its walls, like dying butterflies. Empty lawn chairs sat before it with loose flaps slapping about in a light breeze, like little flags.

I don’t know what I expected Bobby’s dad to look like; I guess maybe I leaned towards something like Fat Bobby himself, just a larger version. A fat and lazy man with a gut like a beach ball stuffed beneath his shirt, and beer cans littered about his feet like carelessly delivered babies.

But the man in the yard that the trailer sat on, leaning over the hood of a white Toyota pickup, wasn’t fat, and the thick cords of muscles glistened by sweat and shiny by sun showed he wasn’t lazy. He heard me approaching, stopped fidgeting with whatever part under the hood he’d been fidgeting with, and withdrew from beneath the hood to stretch to full height.

And the height was mountainous.

As I’ve said before, my dad was a large man. I was used to being dwarfed by the larger of my gender. But whereas Dad was lean and muscled like a fast stallion, Fat Bobby’s father was thick and solid like a bull. Mr. Templeton’s face was likewise bulbous, as if it was permanently swollen. This wasn’t a swelling by anything like a bee sting neither, but a red swelling of meanness, as if there was something on the inside of him that wouldn’t go away. Maybe a volcanic pressure, and at any moment he could explode with the force of the heat inside him. He looked at me like he was looking at a fly that had alighted on his food and taken a shit.

He wanted to squash me, no doubt in my mind.

Yet it wasn’t personal either. I remember thinking he wanted to squash anyone and everyone. Like the existence of other people was offensive.

Dad was no pushover by any definition of the word, but seeing this man, in torn jeans and a faded flannel shirt like he was some lumberjack-Sasquatch hybrid, I thought of the two of them tangling, Dad and Mr. Templeton, and I didn’t think I’d want to place any bets either way.

“What the hell you want?” he asked.

His lips moved beneath a wild beard like a miniature wilderness. I wondered if food crumbs and bugs lived in that tangle somewhere, in a little world separate from the one we were in. Maybe there was a whole civilization of lost bits of food and beetles in there somewhere, and when he talked it was like an earthquake and the voice of God from on high to the wee beard folk.

For a moment I thought I’d laugh.

Then I knew if that happened, I’d die, and so I didn’t laugh.

“I’m here to see Bobby, sir.”

I tried sounding as respectful as I could muster. Afraid of my head being popped like a grape, I think I did pretty good. Fear’s a fabulous motivator.

“Are you the kid he’s been hanging out with so much?” I thought about answering but he kept on talking, and so I clacked my mouth shut. “He’s been shirking his chores, the fat lazy bastard. Gone all day long, comes home late, like this is some sort of motel he can just come and go from whenever he likes.”

He paused like maybe he wanted me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say so I continued to keep my mouth shut.

“You shirk your chores too? Out here running around like you got nothing to do.” Silence still seemed the best option on my end. Then: “Your parents some kind of fucking hippies? Let their kids run around and shit?”

“No, sir,” I said, not really knowing which part I was answering to.

“Yeah right,” he said, and I didn’t know which he was referring to either. Not that it mattered, even with him talking bad about my parents in some offhand manner. I imagined myself briefly trying to stick up for my folks, flipping this guy off or something, and him coming at me, and me trying to use one of the tricky leg maneuvers that Dad had taught me. This guy just laughing as I tried to tangle his legs with mine, or kick at a kneecap like a boulder, and he just twitched a big toe or something and I busted like a little glass figurine.

“May I see Bobby, sir?” I said, deciding politeness was still the best course of action.

“You talk like a fruit, kid.” He smiled, and he had teeth yellow-stained by years of nicotine. As I watched he pulled a crumpled pack of Camels from a breast pocket, pulled out its last inhabitant, and lit it up with a lighter shaped like a little pistol. “‘May I?’” he mocked, murmuring around the cigarette. “‘Sir,’” he said in a high and whiny voice. “Goddamn queers everywhere nowadays.”

At that moment the door to the trailer swung open and hit the wall it was attached to with a metallic rattle. We both turned at the sound, and there was Fat Bobby standing in the doorframe. It took a second or two for me to notice what was different about my friend. The dark ring around his right eye seemed to call my gaze to it, like the target circle of a dartboard.

I looked back at Mr. Templeton.

He looked at his son, then looked down at me. It was clear he knew what I’d seen but he didn’t seem much concerned. As in not at all.

“You know what happens in another body’s family isn’t none of your concern, don’t you, fairy boy?” he asked, and immediately, obediently, I nodded. “You don’t doubt that if you caused me any sort of trouble I wouldn’t think twice about bouncing you around some, do you?”

I shook my head. No, I didn’t doubt it one bit.

“Good,” he said, then he looked from me back to Bobby, still standing silent and slouched in the doorway of the trailer. “Get out of my sight.”

Turning back to the Toyota he leaned once again under the hood.

Bobby stepped off the porch lightly, making almost no sound, which, with his girth, was a tremendous feat of skill. Slowly, he walked towards me, moving as if he were trying to avoid disturbing a beehive. When he was close, he waved for me to follow and together we walked softly away from the miserable trailer, out of the neighborhood like a Third World ghost town, and onto the highway. After several minutes of silence like a period of mourning, I finally opened my mouth and told him what I wanted to do.

Fat Bobby smiled as I spoke, and with that smile the effect of the black eye seemed to dwindle. Though we cheered up considerably talking about what we were going to do, time and again I turned to look at my friend and that shiner and, in my mind, I saw the fist that caused it coming down like a hammer.

* * *

On the way to the Connolly yard, we stopped at the hill on the dirt road overlooking the woods. I immediately saw the object casting back the sunlight that I’d seen before, far out into the forest among the thick carpet of trees. Fat Bobby saw it too, and I actually heard him breathe out something like an ‘ahhhhh’ of amazement.

“That isn’t ghost lights or a UFO,” he said.

“No, it isn’t,” I said and looked at my watch. It was approaching noon, and I tried to think back to that day I’d first met Fat Bobby, and what time I’d been standing on this very hill. It could have been around noon. Which meant that the object down there, be it abandoned car or something else, for some reason only reflected the sun at a certain time of the day and from a certain angle.

This was intriguing, and I was eager to get on with our plans.

“Come on,” I said and started to walk again. Bobby lingered for a moment, as if the light down there held him by a tether and was reluctant to let go. I knew the feeling. It’s that thing between boys and the mysterious, the unknown. Like an umbilical cord that gives and returns life.

* * *

Before hitting the Connolly yard we stopped by my house to pick up Bandit. The aroma of fresh cookies wrapped about us like tantalizing fingers as soon as we walked inside. We stayed awhile, watching my mom in the kitchen pulling out trays lined with brown baked delights and scooping them onto the counter to cool. We wanted them hot and begged for them, and Mom gave us each a handful. A glass of cool lemonade that fogged the glasses just a bit accompanied this feast, and we ate slowly, enjoying every bite and swallow as if they might never come again.