Christian Kiefer - The Animals

Chain broke, you say.

Bummer. The boy wears a bright blue T-shirt with a rubbery soccer ball iron-on that looks hot and damp in the summer heat. A red bandanna is wrapped around his forehead, most of it covered by dark shaggy hair that falls in wild curls nearly to his eyes.

Your brother has disappeared inside the trailer now and you and the boy say nothing while you stand waiting for him, both of you staring at the bike. When Bill reappears a few moments later, he is lugging the heavy red toolbox that had been your father’s.

That’s a cool bike, Rick says to him again.

Yeah, thanks, Bill says. He is already kneeling in the dust and has clicked open the toolbox but he looks up at Rick now. You new around here?

Yeah, we just got here.

Moving into Mrs. Brown’s?

Who’s Mrs. Brown?

That one, Bill says, pointing to the trailer.

Oh, yeah, Rick says. Me and my mom and dad.

I’m Bill, he says and he puts his hand out and the boy shakes it briefly. This is Nat.

You nod, wondering if you and the boy should shake hands as well but the boy only nods and says, Cool, and then turns his attention back to the bike.

Bill has pulled the chain loose and squats there upon the dry earth, staring at where the links have broken free.

Hey, uh, Bill, Rick says, can I bum a smoke?

Bill looks up at him, squinting at the new kid through a tousle of thick brown hair bleached almost blond by the summer sun. Heck, no, you cannot bum a smoke, he says.

Come on, man, Rick says. I’m out.

How old are you?

Thirteen.

Bill looks at him. No way.

Am too.

What year were you born?

Nineteen …

Bill waits, smiling, and then says, Yeah that’s what I thought. How old are you?

Twelve.

Twelve?

Almost twelve.

How old are you now, Champaign? Bill says.

Same, Nat says. Almost twelve.

Bill chuckles.

Oh come on, the new boy says. When’d you start smoking?

Maybe I never started smoking, Bill says. That shit’ll kill you.

Life’ll kill you.

Where’d you hear that?

Just made it up.

Sure you did. Bill makes a sound, an exhalation that is like a tire losing air. No sale, kid, he says.

Shoot. I had to try.

And you did. Bill swivels around to look at you. This is gonna take a while. You might as well go find something to do.

The disappointment shows on your face. We were gonna go to the gravel ponds, you say.

Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna happen, he says. Maybe tomorrow. I gotta figure out how to fix this thing.

Dang, you say.

Maybe you can show this guy the sights. Take him on back to Lemaire’s and get a Coke or something.

Can I have a dollar? you say.

Jesus, it’s like the mob, Bill says, but he reaches into his pocket and hands over a dollar.

OK. You turn to Rick now: You wanna come?

Heck yeah I wanna come, Rick says. Then, to Bill, Nice to meet you. He extends his hand again.

Yeah sure, nice to meet you too, kid, Bill says. He wipes his hand on his jeans and they shake. Bill is smiling as if the whole thing is completely absurd. Stay out of trouble, he says as you turn to walk away, the new boy, Rick, at your side.

All right, you call back.

I wasn’t talking to you, Bill says.

You half turn and wave the dollar. Rick continues to walk, as if he already knows the way, stumping through the weeds and thistle that gap the asphalt and concrete as if it represents some forgotten and unused path. Occasionally he kicks a can or a bottle into the air, an action that seems somehow miraculous. Metal shining in the sun. The sparkle of green glass. Things made free.

IT HAD been, for four years, just you and Bill, fatherless, sharing the bedroom at the back of the trailer, sleeping next to each other in the twin beds, a scant aisle of floor space between you, your mother sleeping most often in the old green recliner in the equally tiny living room where, on Sunday nights, you and her and Bill would watch Marlin Perkins wrestle with wildlife on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom .

But now there is Rick and it is different somehow: not an older brother or a father figure but a friend, a real friend. The two of you are inseparable from that first moment in the dust by the broken bicycle, crisscrossing town every day, exploring its edges, its interstices, sometimes walking far out into the sagebrush wilderness that lines the settlement on all sides, Rick taking you farther than you ever would have gone on your own. Out there in the flats, you see coyotes, rabbits, kangaroo rats. Sometimes you bring along the book you were given by your uncle, Wildlife of the Intermountain West , and use it to give names to the thistle and scrub, all the while Rick in motion, his engine miraculous, so full of energy it can hardly be believed. Even during that first year you wonder how he keeps going and you wonder why. He is everywhere at once. Later you will realize that his motion had been that of an animal probing a fence for weakness.

At night you will sometimes hear Rick’s father’s voice through the walls of their trailer, your window cracked open, your child’s ear listening to the roar. Close the window, Champaign, your brother will call from his thin mattress across the room. That’s Rick’s dad? you will ask. Yeah, Bill will say, but you don’t need to listen to that. Trust me. It’s better to not have a dad at all if that’s what he’s going to do. And you will wonder if such a statement can be true. Your own father was a truck driver and was gone more often than he was home. It has only been four years but you sometimes have difficulty remembering much about him at all.

Sometimes the noise from Rick’s trailer will end with the door crashing open and the sound of a car starting and then that car blasting off the gravel and onto the asphalt and screeching away. The following day Rick will not tell you what happened, not ever, but you know that Rick’s father hits him sometimes, hits him and hits his mother as well, a fact you will learn only by accident when you playfully slap Rick on the back and his response is to howl in pain, his back covered in a patchwork of purple bruises.

But all of that — the yelling and the beatings and the screeching away of the car in the dark of the night — all of it ends soon after you learn of Rick’s bruises, for Rick’s father simply drives away in the family car one night not long after dinnertime and does not return, not to the trailer and not, Bill tells you later, to his job at the Duval mine. He is simply gone. You try once to ask Rick about it but in response Rick only tells you that his father had to go do some work stuff out of town, that he will return, that his absence is only temporary. So that becomes both the story and the waiting game, Rick believing — or at least telling you that he believes — that his father will return at any moment. You have no reason to argue with him even though Bill has told you Rick’s father is not likely to return to Battle Mountain at all, not after what he has done. What did he do? you ask him but Bill only says, Maybe when you’re older, Champaign, and will tell you no more.

DURING THE bicentennial summer your brother takes you and Rick shooting for the first time. You are thirteen now. Your brother has a rifle, an old Savage 99 lever action, and Rick is able to borrow his absentee father’s.38 Special from his mother so there are two weapons between the three of you. Your brother takes you out into the sagebrush country, much farther than you have ever been able to explore on foot, and you set up some cans on a rock and Bill teaches you and Rick how to hold the guns, how to check to see if they are loaded, how to sight, how to squeeze the trigger. You will never get accustomed to the sound — each time you wince — but you love the way a can jumps when hit, the sound like a baseball bat striking a metal plate.