I crossed Westheimer and pushed my bike through the oak grove by the watermelon stand and followed the path through the canebrake to Nick’s house. I knocked on the door, then unfurled the flag as I waited. My heart dropped when I saw the streaks of grease and dirt and pinlike separations across one side of the cloth, printed there, I suspected, by the chain or spokes of Vernon’s bicycle. But he had hung it from his porch anyway, like a scalp rather than the symbol of his country.
Nick opened the screen door and stepped outside. “Wow! You got it back. You slam ole Vernon upside the head with a brick or something?” he said.
“It’s ruined,” I replied.
Nick placed his hand on the bottom side of the cloth. The pinkness of his palm showed through the separations in the thread. “What are we gonna do?” he said.
My father had taught me not only how to care for the flag but also how to dispose of it if it was soiled or damaged. That night, Nick and I conducted a private ceremony under our tree house. We built a fire of grass and decayed oak limbs, and spread our stained flag on top of the flames. We stood at attention like toy soldiers and saluted the thick curds of smoke and black threads of cloth that rose out of the heat, some of them sparking like fireflies among the oaks where people were still eating watermelon. Someone called the fire department, and the owner of the watermelon stand told us he would have our tree house torn down. Almost simultaneously Mr. Dunlop and his sons showed up, enraged that I had stolen and destroyed their flag.
It was a year of Allied naval victories in the Pacific, rationing about which no one complained, and Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller on the jukebox. It was the year in which a group of good-natured firemen and the Dunlop family and the patrons of a watermelon stand stood in a circle around two small boys, like creatures whose exteriors were made of tallow, warping in the firelight, exposing for good or bad the child that lives in us all.
It was 1943, the year my father died in a duck-hunting accident down at Anahuac and the year Nick Hauser and I beat the world and never told anybody about it.
Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine
In 1947, Nick Hauser and I had only two loves in this world—baseball and Cheerio yo-yo contests. That’s how we met Benny, one spring night after a double-header out at Buffalo Stadium on the Galveston Freeway. His brand-new Ford convertible, a gleaming maroon job with a starch-white top, whitewall tires, and blue-dot taillights, was stuck in a sodden field behind the bleachers. Benny was trying to lift the bumper while his girlfriend floored the accelerator, spinning the tires and blowing streams of muddy water and torn grass back in his face.
He wore a checkered sport coat, lavender shirt, hand-painted necktie, and two-tone shoes, all of it now whip-sawed with mud. But it was his eyes, not his clothes, that you remembered. They were a radiant blue and literally sparkled.
“You punks want to earn two bucks each?” he said.
“Who you calling a punk?” Nick said.
Before Benny could answer, his girlfriend shifted into reverse, caught traction, and backed over his foot.
He hopped up and down, holding one shin, trying to bite down on his pain, his eyes lifted heavenward, his lips moving silently.
“Get in the fucking car before it sinks in this slop again!” his girlfriend yelled.
He limped to the passenger side. A moment later they fishtailed across the grass past us. Her hair was long, blowing out the window, the pinkish-red of a flamingo. She thumbed a hot cigarette into the darkness.
“Boy, did you check out that babe’s bongos? Wow!” Nick said.
But our evening encounter with Benny and his girlfriend was not over. We were on the shoulder of the freeway, trying to hitch a ride downtown, flicking our Cheerios under a streetlamp, doing a whole range of upper-level yo-yo tricks—round-the-world, shoot-the-moon, rock-the-cradle, and the atomic bomb—when the maroon convertible roared past us, blowing dust and newspaper in our faces.
Suddenly the convertible cut across two lanes of traffic, made a U-turn, then a second U-turn, horns blowing all over the freeway, and braked to a stop abreast of us.
“You know who I am?” Benny said.
“No,” I replied.
“My name is Benjamin Siegel.”
“You’re a gangster,” Nick said.
“He’s got you, Benny,” the woman behind the wheel said.
“How you know that?” Benny said.
“We heard your name on Gangbusters. Nick and me listen every Saturday night,” I said.
“Can you do the Chinese star?” he asked.
“We do Chinese stars in our sleep,” Nick said.
“Get in,” Benny said, pulling back the leather seat.
“We got to get home,” I said.