“Is your dad mad at me?” Nick asked. His dark hair was buzz-cut, his skin still brown from summer, his face round, his cheeks pooled with color. There were dirt rings on his neck, and I could smell the heat and dampness in his clothes from playing all day.
“Why would my dad be mad at you?”
“I didn’t help you when Vernon rubbed his spit on you.”
I felt my eyes film at the image he had used. “I didn’t tell my dad anything,” I said.
“When I get bigger, I’m gonna break Vernon’s nose. He’s not so tough with big guys,” he said.
But Vernon was tough with big guys. We found that out the next week when Nick and I started our first afternoon paper route together. The paper corner where the bundles were dropped for the carriers was across Westheimer. Not only was it a block from Vernon’s house, it was the same corner where Vernon and his brothers rolled the papers for their route. I couldn’t believe our bad luck. We sat on the pavement, our legs splayed, rolling our papers into cylinders, whipping mouth-wet string around them to cinch them tight, while Vernon did the same three feet from us.
A jalopy packed with north side kids, the top cut away with an acetylene torch, ran the stop sign, all of them shooting the bone at everyone on the corner. They parked by the drugstore and went inside, lighting cigarettes, running combs through their ducktails, squeezing their scrotums. Vernon got on his bicycle, one with no tire guards and a wood rack for his canvas saddlebags, and rode down to the drugstore. He calmly parked his bike on its kickstand, flicked opened his switchblade, and sliced off the valve stems on all four of the jalopy’s tires.
Ten minutes later, when the jalopy’s occupants came out of the drugstore
, Vernon was back on the corner, rolling his papers. They stared at their tires, unable to believe what they were seeing. So they would make no mistake about who had done the damage to them, Vernon stood up, shot them the bone with both hands, followed by the Italian salute and the eat-shit horns of the cuckold sign. Then he bent over and mooned them and shot them the bone again, this time between his legs.
He took a tire iron from his saddlebags and clanked it on a fireplug until the northsiders got back in their jalopy and drove it on the rims out of the neighborhood.
For a moment I almost felt Vernon was our ally. He disabused us of that notion by hanging Nick’s bicycle on a telephone spike fifteen feet above the street.
That spring, Nick and I collected old newspapers, coat hangers, tinfoil, and discarded rubber tires for the war effort, and hauled them down to the collection center at the fire station. We used baling wire to attach the staff of our flag to the wooden slats on the side of Nick’s wagon and worked our way up and down alleys throughout the neighborhood, the wagon creaking under the load of junk stacked inside it, confident that in some fashion we were fighting the forces of evil that had bombed Pearl Harbor, Warsaw, and Coventry.
At the outset of the war, families in our neighborhood had hung small service flags in their windows—blue stars on a white field, inside a rectangle of blue and red—indicating the number of men and women from that home who had gone to war. Now, in the spring of ’43, some of the blue stars had been replaced by gold ones.
The Sweeney boy from across the street parachuted into Europe and eventually would be one of the soldiers who captured Hitler’s fortified chalet at Berchtesgaden. My cousin Weldon gave up his ROTC deferment at Texas A&M and came home with the Silver Star, three Purple Hearts, and one lung. Nick and I began to collect meat drippings from people’s kitchens and take them to the local butcher, who supposedly shipped them in large barrels to a munitions factory where they were made into nitroglycerine. Everyone in the neighborhood knew us by the flag on our wagon. My father’s friends at the icehouse bought us cold drinks. Nick and I glowed with pride.
“Y’all think your shit don’t stink?” Vernon said to us one day on the paper corner.
Nick and I buried our faces in our work, rolling the top newspapers on the stack, whipping string around them, pitching them heavily into the saddlebags on our bikes. Vernon grabbed my wrist, stopping me in mid-roll. “Which one are you—Frump or Snarf?” he asked.
“I’m Frump,” I said.
“Then answer my question, Frump.”
“My shit stinks, Vernon,” I said.
“You a wiseass?” Vernon said.
“Why don’t you leave him alone?” Nick said.
“What’d you say?” Vernon asked.
The only sounds on the corner were the wind in the trees and a milk truck rattling down the street.
“Your brothers went to the pen. That’s why they’re not in the army. Charlie’s cousin won the Silver Star. I heard your sister dosed the yardman,” Nick said.
I could hear the words no, no, no like a drumbeat in my head.
“Tell me, Snarf, did you know Hauser is a Kraut name?” Vernon said.
“My dad says it’s a lot better than being white trash,” Nick said.
Vernon lit a cigarette and puffed on it thoughtfully, then flicked the hot match into Nick’s eye.
After we threw the route, I put my bike away in the garage and walked unexpectedly through the back door of the house, into the kitchen, where my mother and father were fighting. They both looked at me blankly, like people in whose faces a flashbulb had just popped.
“Why y’all got to fight all the time?” I said.