Dirty Feet and Saggy Diapers

It was the kind of summer where the heat was like someone took a hammer and layed it on a furnace for half an hour then handed it to you, not by the handle, saying, "here, hold this while I go and have a freezing Kool-Aid," and the heat was also so anxiously bad that it drew your eyes downward, to the ground, where little black ants lived in small cities and combed the edges of the trail for dropped food.

For the first time I wore my clothes to bed, to save time, and when I got up, the sun was already beating a path down the barely rested earth, and I knew if I hurried, I could get to A&B before the ground was too hot for my feet; so I grabbed my dollar from page 351 of my Guinness World Records book and ran out the door, but not before I felt a pain on my left foot which felt like someone threw my body into a hot tub full of porcupines and rubbing alcohol. I'd stepped on a nail, and before I knew it, was laying on my back with my foot elevated and dark brick colored lines of blood drying on my ankle. Earl found me in a panicked state on the front lawn and he ran, his diaper sagging low with a faint darkness inside, and returned with Francis, our neighbor, a giant Italian man.

Francis scooped me off the ground like I was a bundle of dried corn stalks and hauled me inside. Mom never hung up the phone, but directed Francis to lay me on the counter, the one we're never allowed to sit or climb on, which she made fudge on only last week, but today became an operating table. "I'll be twenty-nine, again, if you need to know. Chop off my leg and count the rings," she said, laughing, into the phone while running water over her hand and holding my ankle with the other. John woke up and joined Earl, watching. Mom washed, rinsed, flushed, irrigated, wrapped and kissed my wound, and I took off wearing sandals. The offending nail was clean enough, Francis said, so I wouldn't need shots.

On the corner was CameronPollock and some other bad kids. I crossed the street not looking at them, but keeping my face forward, like flint, and feeling their stares all the way. The corner couldn't have come quicker, and when I was out of their sight I ran. I ran to the beginning of the trail across the abandoned field, which was a residential zoned five-acre plot that was never bought by rich developers then, but is now adorned with the nicest condominiums in the valley. Back then it was just a field, with tall white grass and garbage, including a turned over shopping cart, and some cardboard, and from the head of the trail through the field you could barely see A&B over the top of the grass.

Halfway through the field, I heard bikes, gaining on me. I didn't look, but did nice and moved to let them pass, expecting some kind of token of their evil, such as spitting on me or bunny hopping a rear tire onto my foot. I thought they'd spit, like Rolling Johnson did from the roof of Madrone School. But they just rode by. Cameron Pollock was deep in conversation about himself and his new bike, which he probably stole over the weekend. My nerves were strained so that my body went into long term battle stations, which is where any ballasts are sent to be jettisoned. In other words, I needed to go number two, badly.

When I saw the evil boys one-at-a-time jumping their bikes over the hump toward the end of the field, it was safe to speed up my pace. I had to get somewhere fast, because I had something like a sock-full of marbles pressing on my butt. A&B had a smelly public restroom, probably because of a drainage or ventilation issue, but I had no choice. The store was cool and the floors were shiny, and the place smelled like Dolly Madison pastries and floorwax. The bathroom was through a door behind the butcher's counter so I briskly walked down the candy eisle to get there.

As I went through the door, it was cold except for a gust of smoke and hot wind, and I saw a door ajar to the alley, where people go for their breaks or where drivers come in to open the rollup door and empty their trucks, but this time, there was Cameron Pollock and his friends, smoking cigarettes with an A&B guy. I dropped behind a stack of boxes of lettuce and peered through the holes therein, hoping they wouldn't see me, but Cameron Pollock must have, because he looked right at me, and yet his business was much more important, because their friend, the A&B guy, handed him a case of Budweiser.

I waited for them to leave and let me go to the bathroom which was right by the door they were loitering behind, because they would never let me go in there, and I knew of no other bathroom I could get to in time without a long explanation why I needed to use it. So I waited, testing different poses to see how I could rest without exploding like a shook up Coke bottle.

The manager came through the meat department and saw me immitating the movements of a speed skater, staring intently out the door at Cameron Pollock and his friends, and so he asked me what I was doing there.

"What are you doing here?"

"Looking for the restroom."

"Right there," he said. He had long, important sideburns, and the voice of a man who went to war and then smoked for twenty years. He saw the open door where Cameron and the employee stood, and by then Cameron was gone, and the coast was clear, and besides I had to do obey the manager and quit standing there for no reason, so I went to the smelly bathroom and came out feeling light, like I took off a heavy backpack and my shoes and pants and jumped into a cold quarry, naked.

Now I was an empty void and walked right through the candy eisle and picked out a dollar's worth, down to the penny, of Hershey's and M&Ms and Reeses, and took them to the cashier, and waited while old jazz music played, weakly, in benediction over me. I bought my candy, and by then, Cameron Pollock and my pierced foot were old memories, and even older when I opened the M&Ms.

I headed down the trail toward home.