I am six. I still have one blond lock that curls down to the crevice between my shoulder blades. It is not a uniform blond. It starts dark at the root and quickly lightens to brown before shocking itself a true sunny yellow. My best friend calls it a rat-tail, and so does his sister. It’s not braided, so I know it can’t be a rat tail, and they are just being stupid. We have a neighbor who calls it a reverse bang. But he has a mullet so nothing he says we can take too seriously. But that’s what I think of it as. A reverse bang. My friend is a little taller than me and he is all blond. Other than the one lock, my hair is short-cropped and dark. He is also a little bigger and a little stronger than me. And in our territorial fights, over the crescent of land that separates our houses, he tends to win, but not always.
We fight a lot at six, even more at seven, and stop when we get big enough to really hurt each other at eight. Our first fight is over the removable red light saber from my Darth Vader toy that fits the hand of his Luke Skywalker. He wants that, and I want his Luke Skywalker. We always call action figures guys. It has been this way for as long as I can think. Even Princess Leah is a guy, even though we almost never play with her. In this first fight, it is grey outside, rainy and cold, so we have the benefit of many layers of protective padding in sweaters and thermals. There is a large rock in the center of the crescent. It is probably twenty or so feet long, and rises from the ground like a stegosauruses spike. It is smooth and wide enough on the top that we are able to stand facing each other on a square footing. We imagine this is what the Jedis must have felt like. Or what Indiana Jones and the French Nazi archeologist would have felt like if they’d got a chance to go at it in the movie. For fifteen feet or so, we know our parents can see us if they happen to look out a front window from either house. But we also know that the tree downed in a storm last year in front his house, and the mound of mulch that my dad gets each fall at my house, provides several feet of cover at the lowest plateau in both directions. This is plenty of room. He kicks me in the shin. This hurts because there is nothing but my jeans protecting my legs. I call unfair and, because of his dishonorable act, swipe at his face. I mostly miss, but land enough nail to get the small bloodless fluff of skin one gets from minor scrapes, like peach down, to puff up on the bridge of his nose. All of this is bad. We learn that when one of us breaks the unspoken rules of childhood combat, and the other one breaks the same rules for fairness, there can be no more fairness. He swings. It’s a real closed fist punch, a tiny knotted, knuckly fist aimed right at my face. He chips my left vampire tooth, a canine, very slightly, but it is his hand we both become pale over. His connection has ripped a small tear down the pinky side of his hand, and there is blood. Real blood that keeps coming. A panicking red. We both run to get my mom, because she will yell least, and we are not sure if anyone else is home. He is crying. I am about to too, as soon as I realize it is probably my fault, because it is my tooth that did it.
*
I am twelve, and he is almost twelve. Both of our houses are surrounded with woods. These woods belong to neither of our families, but because it is so big, we are allowed to play in it without fear of trespassing. There is a large clearing about a quarter mile back that we call ‘the meadow’. It is wide and hilly and we can see all the way to the interstate at the highest points. We are following the large electrical towers that follow each other in a straight, regular line across the meadow until they disappear over the last hill opposite the highway. There is a constant hum of electricity in the meadow that turns to vibration when you are closest to any of the towers. It is too cold out to look for salamanders under the rocks in the damp near any of the small ponds. We have already roamed the junkyard another quarter mile back, nearer the large pine forest that marks the end of the meadow and the beginning of a second woods. It is dangerous to spend too much time there. There is a small trailer that is occupied and many wild animals that make their homes in the piles of scrap metal and discarded farm equipment. We don’t know who lives in the trailer, but there are a few of them, and they yell if they hear us making too much noise, sometimes even coming into the surrounding woods to look for us. That has not happened in a while, but we are wary.
In the tall browning grasses that rise in patches over the otherwise mostly rocky, dust- yellow surface of the meadow, we hear a hissing that we would never mistake for electricity. It is a thick, longish snake the same color as the grass, and it wanders from its home out towards open land. It moves funny for a snake. It stops sometimes and turns in small, lazy circles before ambling crookedly forward again. We get close. It doesn’t seem quick enough to be dangerous. There is a small break in its scales near its tail. We think it has bitten itself, or else it is drunk on the cold and its blood is getting thick and soupy. My friend is afraid of snakes, but we’ve never seen one like this so he comes as close as me. I pull it from its tail to straighten it for better inspection. It is longer than I thought. My friend flinches at my movement and tells me to stop. I pull once again on its tail to bring it closer to us, just to scare him, but its head jerks towards my hand this time. It is still much too confused to aim properly, missing by several inches, but I draw my hand up anyway and figure I shouldn’t press my luck. We return home later and tell his father what we have seen. We learn it is called a copper-head. And to never approach one again.
*
I am fourteen and he is fourteen and we are at a neighbor’s house in the late afternoon. The house is behind my friend’s, separated by a row of old oaks and bits of an older rock wall. No one is there but us and the daughter of the neighbor. She is about two years older than us, but we are the closest to her age on either street. We watch Cinemax and HBO and find the on- demand channel with all the headings for all the different types of shows. One is ‘late night’. We are both on edge because we don’t know when her parents are coming back and we don’t want to get caught watching when they do. We may not be allowed to come back. She assures us that they are out for a while and not to be worried and that it’s not like we haven’t seen anything like that before, right? We are nervous and laugh and say yeah and go ahead we were just making sure. But she hears something in our voices. You haven’t had you, she asks, and laughs in a way that sinks us to the bottom of the ocean. My friend protests, says no, he has, but when asked who and when, he falters, his blush a bare lie on his face. We forget about the television and ask what she’s done. She only says stuff and laughs more but moves onto the same couch we are leaning against. She says we have to swear to god we won’t tell but we can, if we stop as soon as she says, touch under her shirt one at a time. She is pretty and tall and both of us have thought about this and we are nervous. We agree and nod at each other over her head to make sure we both heard right. She takes turns bringing us each into the kitchen. When it is my turn I am too afraid but I know that I’ll never let myself forget it if I don’t. I go to the kitchen. She giggles that my hands are cold and squirms but says I can keep going. But it is enough and I pull back in dumb wonder. We all decide to watch Aladdin in the living room.
*
I am fifteen and he is fifteen and we are roaming the junk yard with large branches, knocking exposed muffles and exhaust pipes, trying to break off either the part or splinter the wood. We see the exposed grill of an old Mack truck peeking from a shallow gulch. We go closer. The front of the body is still attached to it, along with the Mack dog front-piece. The part is loose and whole, only pocked with rust on the underside, and we think we can knock it off with our branches. I swing first and miss, cracking the windshield. We laugh; he swings next, and tears it almost from the hood. There is a shrill whining sound as I wrap my sweater around my hands and pull it from the hood. As I clasp it to my chest in triumph, I catch sight of something leaning above and behind a crumbling, rain-cracked concrete embankment to our left. It is the top part of a man and I am not so sure he is alive at first. He is so still but his eyes are open and he is not blinking, and it is as if he is staring straight at me. My friend follows my eyes and goes rigid when he sees him. The man looks old, is thin, and very hairy, mostly concealed but wrapped in several large coats caked to a solid brown-blue, stiff like a turtle shell. His chin lifts first and his body follows as he hurdles the embankment, which is not that tall, but he does so very quickly. He bears his teeth and hisses. It sounds more cat than snake-like. We hold our branches close and vertical. They are thick and sturdy but we are scared. We speak loudly and forcefully to fortify our nerves. As we do so we edge away, always facing him, until our backs face roughly homeward. My friend yells run and we do so, dropping the branches. We hurtle through familiar trails, somehow aware of our feet as we crash through brambles and bushes, until we realize we are in my backyard. We keep running until we are elevated on my back porch before we finally turn. He is nowhere in sight. We rush downstairs to tell my father who tells us we should never have wandered into the junkyard anyway and who knows what kinds of things are back there. I realize I am still clutching the Mack dog in my hand and my father asks where I’ve gotten it from. I tell him I found it. I later hear that the man was arrested trying to steal someone’s dog late at night on a street not too far from our own. It is on the local news which my television is tuned to on a low volume throughout the day. They don’t show a picture but I know it is him. I tell my friend later and that the report called him unstable and unidentified. We agree that we could have handled him if we had too, but neither of us is really that sure. I let him keep the truck ornament.
*
I am sixteen and he is sixteen and we share five mike’s hard lemonades on a large mound of upturned earth close to the interstate, but hidden behind a wall of pines. We call this place ‘bum mountain’. It has existed for only a couple of years, and there is a large bulldozer rusted and nearly sideways not too far off. It creaks in the wind like something that’s alive but will not be for too much longer. We heard there was supposed to be a housing development. Now they are working a piece of land farther into the second expanse of woods. We recognize when they are working from a distant grumble that starts as a throb and finishes as a brassy whine in a tireless cycle. The mound has become a real hill over the years. There are coarse, scraggly bushes that claw at us when we are climbing to the top. At the top, it is flat but indented, so we can lean low and hide from whomever passes by, which is usually no one. We know we are not the only people to know of this spot, or even the first. There is almost always something new each time we climb up. The first time we come up we find old chip packets, foil inside out, capping the taller growth up and down the sides. And in a space dug between an upturned root, we find beer cans, bottles, and cigarette butts. The leftover liquid and ash has pooled together, making a greyish paste in the dust. We cover it with more dirt to get rid of the smell. Another time, most times afterwards as well, we find limp condoms strewn across the lowest naked branches of pine surrounding us. Other times we find magazines, mostly porn and auto-trader, but rarely intact. They are usually just several pages collected and held from the wind under the rock. When we finish three of the lemonades we feel good and tired and lean on opposite sides, listening to the reedy drone of not too far off cars like hissing waves. We will wait until there is just enough light to make it back before night comes. Then we will drink the last two bottles as fast as we can and race home through the dull orange dusk of early autumn.
Garrett De Temple currently lives and works in New York City. His work has most recently appeared in Buddy (a lit zine), After the Pause, and Permafrost. He is a lyricist for the songwriting duo The Point (ThePointSongs.com) and one-half of the occasional glam-americana band SkyMagik (@SkyMagikBand).