W<\/span>e met the day they carried my mother away.<\/p>\n

Summer was just underway and someone had started a game of freeze tag.\u00a0 Kids swarmed the yards, dodging outstretched hands, finding themselves petrified for whole minutes until a friendly touch set them free.\u00a0 Brand new to the neighborhood, I didn\u2019t even know the names of my captors or liberators \u2014 but I was grateful for the chance to be chased.\u00a0 Mammoth, our cat, watched from the bushes, terror in her green eyes.<\/p>\n

I first heard the siren while balancing on one leg in the front yard: I\u2019d been tagged mid-stride.\u00a0 The faint peals waxed and waned with every turn, and as the wail grew closer, the kids gathered in the front yards.\u00a0 I let my foot drop to the ground, and my heart swelled with excitement as the long nose of an ambulance slipped around the corner of our block, not two hundred yards away.\u00a0 The last stragglers joined our group, and we stood wide-eyed, as still as if we\u2019d all been tagged at once.\u00a0 The vehicle slowed at the curb in front of my house.\u00a0 And suddenly the siren held its tongue.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t remember exactly how my giddiness dissolved into panic.\u00a0 Car doors slammed and white-clad attendants scurried.\u00a0 Our front screen door smacked shut as they entered the house, and I heard voices and shuffling within.\u00a0 Heavy steps sounded from inside, and soon the screen door burst open again, pressed to the side by broad shoulders covered in hospital white.\u00a0 As the first figure backed out, the rounded form of my mother came into view, laid out on a stretcher.\u00a0 They carried her down the sidewalk, and my mother turned her head toward me, pulling her lips into a smile.\u00a0 Her hair still perfectly in place, a small blond curl by her ear.\u00a0 She lifted the fingers of her left hand weakly, suggesting a wave.\u00a0 My stomach hurt, and the back of my neck tingled.\u00a0 I tried to swallow, but my throat wouldn\u2019t cooperate.<\/p>\n

The doors slammed closed and the engine revved.\u00a0 The vehicle looked somehow longer now, vast and solemn.\u00a0 Then the siren started its slow whine, and the ambulance pulled away.\u00a0 I surveyed our ragged group: all eyes were now on me, and mouths stood open wide enough to catch flies.<\/p>\n

Only one among us seemed untouched by the drama.\u00a0 Sweeping his greasy black hair to the side, Donny Wellek spoke his first words to me: \u201cYou see?\u201d he said with a nod.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s what happens when he sticks his thing in hers.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he was right, of course: my mother\u2019s disappearance into the maw of the ambulance didn\u2019t lead to the dramatic future that flowered in my imagination during that instant of panic.\u00a0 I had pictured myself half-orphaned, pitied, suddenly singular and interesting.\u00a0 But thanks to Donny\u2019s biology lesson I understood the course of events I was witnessing.\u00a0 And when Mom returned home three days later, accompanied by the wrinkled, yellow creature thereafter known as my brother, I realized that I had, indeed, lost my mother \u2014 to a rival.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the way they did it in 1968, when I was ten.<\/p>\n

With Michael\u2019s arrival in the family I was not just displaced from the center of the Ripple family universe, I was relegated to the status of a distant planetoid.\u00a0 Often I\u2019d have to tuck myself in while my parents tended to Michael\u2019s bouts of colic.\u00a0 Or I would eat breakfast alone, my mother too exhausted to crawl out of bed.\u00a0 My parents orbited around this new son, and since I still hadn\u2019t made real friends, Mammoth was the one I felt closest to.\u00a0 A fan of interesting smells, our cat spent the lion\u2019s share of her time in my room, leaving my bed in order to curl up on my desk chair, which she would later abandon for the windowsill before heading back to my bed.\u00a0 Sometimes I draped her over my shoulder like an enormous orange scarf.\u00a0 Whenever my loneliness overwhelmed me, Mammoth made an excellent pillow into which to spill my tears.<\/p>\n

Donny lived just two houses down.\u00a0 It was in part this proximity that brought us together, but also the fact that Donny was more available than other kids, less locked into the jigsaw puzzle of relationships.\u00a0 That probably should have been a warning, but I was in need of a companion.<\/p>\n

We were in the same grade, but Donny was nearly a year older and what felt like a foot taller.\u00a0 His skin was oily, and he reeked of adolescence.\u00a0 He seemed grown up.<\/p>\n

Through the first days of June we spent swaths of time playing Monopoly together, and many evenings we sat at one of the houses watching the Far West.\u00a0 Lorne Greene and Michael Landon shot their way out of dilemmas we would find ourselves re-enacting in late afternoons, often armed with little more than fingers for six-shooters.\u00a0 Clayton Moore set high standards for honor as the Lone Ranger, occasionally outdone by the tragically misunderstood Chuck Connors, in Branded<\/em>.\u00a0 \u201cThat one\u2019s going to get it,\u201d he\u2019d say while we watched, pointing at some newcomer to the Ponderosa Ranch.\u00a0 The life expectancy of guest stars on these shows was short.<\/p>\n

When we reproduced these tragic scenes outdoors, Donny always played the part of the bandit or the Indian \u2014 or whatever kind of villain the previous day\u2019s shows had offered.<\/p>\n

Our programming of adventure was interrupted early in the month when a man with a double name plugged three bullets into a presidential candidate in a hotel kitchen in California.\u00a0 To be honest, I hadn\u2019t quite understood the function of a president, and I\u2019d only seen Robert Kennedy a few times on TV.\u00a0 Scores of people had died from shootings in our living room before, but to my knowledge this was the only episode that had sent tears streaming down my mother\u2019s cheeks.\u00a0 She sat on the sofa, staring at the still pictures on the screen, clutching baby Michael to her breast, my father\u2019s arm around her shoulders.\u00a0 \u201cNot again,\u201d she kept saying while rocking forward and back.\u00a0 \u201cNot again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon even the assassination became grist for Donny\u2019s mill.\u00a0 Out in the yard, in a variety of situations, I obediently crumpled under my friend\u2019s sniper shots.\u00a0 Time after time.\u00a0 I knew Mom wouldn\u2019t like our playing at this, but Donny soaked it up.\u00a0 He wanted me to call him Sirhan Sirhan, but he settled for Donny Donny.\u00a0 He liked having a sidekick.<\/p>\n

Even more gripping than television was Donny\u2019s family, which appeared to be governed by a wholly different universe than my own.\u00a0 If the laws of gravity had stopped applying in the Wellek household, it wouldn\u2019t have surprised me.\u00a0 Membership in my family included weekly chores, with my mother playing the role of drill sergeant, but the Welleks had given in to the forces of entropy.\u00a0 Donny\u2019s mother had brought no fewer than five new Welleks into this world (which explained Donny\u2019s expertise regarding reproduction) and the effort of such labor had apparently prompted her to retire early from the duties of motherhood.\u00a0 While my mother dusted, mopped, shopped and cooked until she was ready to scream (an urge to which she occasionally surrendered), Mrs. Wellek enjoyed life to the fullest.\u00a0 I did sometimes encounter her in their kitchen, but she was usually passing through to refill a glass before returning to her magazines or the telephone.\u00a0 Her children did not so much eat as graze, scrounging through the cupboards like modern hunter-gatherers, collecting handfuls of Cocoa-Puffs or grasping at stray Pop-Tarts.\u00a0 That\u2019s where I first encountered Donny\u2019s older sister, Sylvia, who slipped through the kitchen one day wearing nothing but a towel, the bottom edge of which was perfectly aligned with the rising curve of her buttocks.<\/p>\n

\u201cGet a load of that,\u201d Donny whispered to me as he signaled toward Sylvia\u2019s rump.\u00a0 And although I didn\u2019t think he should be as interested as I, I was grateful for the permission to stare.<\/p>\n

Donny was my connection to this other world \u2014 and, as I would soon learn, to galaxies beyond.\u00a0 In my own family sex belonged to the unspeakable; it was the burning secret, fully absorbed within the world of adults.\u00a0 It had something to do with the gallantry of Zorro, when the women saved by the masked hero awoke from their swoons; one caught whispers of it in Dick and Laura\u2019s relationship on the Dick Van Dyke show; on occasion it even manifested itself in our own home, when Mom and Dad engaged in a rare and unhygienic smooch.\u00a0 Recently my mother pointed out that Mammoth had gotten herself pregnant, but she volunteered only vague answers to my pressing questions about this feline event.<\/p>\n

But someone had let the genie out of the bottle at the Welleks, and despite my ambivalence about Donny, I let myself be invited over with regularity.\u00a0 There was always the chance of glimpsing Sylvia.\u00a0 And Mr. Wellek was not above pinching and patting certain contours of his wife \u2014 who often positioned herself so as to encourage such molestations.<\/p>\n

Donny enjoyed a kind of terrifying freedom.\u00a0 For instance, when he picked his nose he wiped the boogers on the wall in his room, just behind his bed \u2014 a stunt that would have cost me my arms back home.\u00a0\u00a0 Then there was the time he showed me what a turd looks like as it emerges from the sphincter \u2014 a little number he referred to as \u201claying an egg.\u201d\u00a0 It was a fascinating sight, to be sure, but not a form of knowledge I could ever imagine passing on to others.\u00a0\u00a0 Once, when Mammoth slinked past us in my back yard, her belly starting to round, Donny suggested with a laugh that we cut her open to look at the babies.\u00a0 The shiver that rippled through my chest made me realize he might not have been kidding.<\/p>\n

Donny knew the scales of grown-up sentiment, and he played the notes with a mixture of ease and confidence.\u00a0 When there was trouble in the group, Donny was always in the area, but never pinned with the crime.\u00a0 Although one of the coarsest people I ever met, he had mastered the use of \u201csir\u201d and \u201cma\u2019am,\u201d powerful forms of address that gave him a patina of maturity and almost antebellum politeness of which few ten-year-olds could boast.<\/p>\n

These manners made him into a convincing liar.\u00a0 When Jonas Trent\u2019s brand new transistor radio went missing at his birthday party, it was Donny who strode up to Jonas\u2019 mom.\u00a0 \u201cExcuse me, ma\u2019am,\u201d he said, his eyes wide, looking up from under a slightly bowed brow, \u201cbut something has happened to Jonas\u2019s radio.\u00a0 Can you help us find it?\u201d<\/p>\n

The fact that I later spotted the red plastic device in Donny\u2019s room did not surprise me.\u00a0 In fact, I admired the mask of deference and sincerity he had adopted so casually, not to mention the bold move by which he had placed himself above suspicion.<\/p>\n

I suspected that Donny and I were of different species, and I feared that his was the superior one, fitter for survival.\u00a0 His raw intelligence, unharnessed for academic achievement, remained as a vast, untapped resource available for other, more illicit pursuits.\u00a0 When he introduced me to shoplifting, the victims of our spree consisted of three neighborhood shops aligned along Lake Avenue, only a few blocks from home.\u00a0 I lost my legal virginity at the Five and Dime on the corner, a slightly decrepit and over-stocked store run by old Mr. Manning, a frail specimen of a bygone era, always outfitted with a bow tie and red suspenders.\u00a0 Bird-like in his movements, he wore glasses of such abnormal thickness that they magnified his eyes twofold.\u00a0 While I should have deduced from this that he was as blind as a mole, the sheer size of the orbs behind those lenses suggested to me the very incarnation of Vision.<\/p>\n

I met Donny outside the store on a Saturday morning, where he gave me the digest of essential instructions: Keep quiet and follow my lead.\u00a0 That was the sum of my lesson before he pushed through the jingling door, heading straight for the counter.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood morning, sir,\u201d Donny said, looking Mr. Manning in the eye.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood morning, boys,\u201d the old fellow croaked, beaming back.<\/p>\n

I followed dumbly in Donny\u2019s wake.\u00a0 He scanned the comic book rack next to the register, picking out a Batman<\/em> and perused the opening pages.\u00a0 I kept waiting for the move, expecting him to slide the book up his shirt or to wad it into tiny balls in his cheeks, and my staring must have irritated him, because he finally pulled another comic off the rack and thrust it into my hands.\u00a0 I stared stupidly at the pictures, turning the occasional page to make it appear I was reading.\u00a0 My temples pounded and my fingers left small, sweaty smears on the pages.<\/p>\n

At length Donny put back the comic and moved on.\u00a0 Mr. Manning smiled at us as we headed to the back of the store.\u00a0 We sidled past two women selecting cosmetics, past the toys and models, past the cleaning supplies, all the way back to stationery.\u00a0 There he slipped an elegant Parker pen out of its case and into his back pocket.\u00a0 The gesture was entirely natural and unhurried.\u00a0 Then he stepped across the aisle to a stand of greeting cards.\u00a0 I had seen enough movies to know that now was the time to run for it; in seconds the alarms would go off and we would hear sirens in the distance.\u00a0 But Donny took his time.\u00a0 He fingered the cards on display, stopping at some as if reflecting on their possible effect on the recipient, and giving me a couple of icy stares to stop my fidgeting.\u00a0 After careful consideration he selected a Get Well Soon card with a green envelope and then headed up to the register.\u00a0 I was ready to bolt, but Donny actually slowed during his approach.\u00a0 As he leaned on the counter and began to chat with the smiling Mr. Manning, I could see the diagonal bulge of the pen in his back pocket.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have a wonderful card section,\u201d Donny said.<\/p>\n

\u201cGlad you like it,\u201d Mr. Manning replied, clearly amused at Donny\u2019s mature tone.\u00a0 \u201cDid you find what you were looking for?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh yes.\u00a0 No problem at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSomebody you know not well?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy aunt,\u201d Donny replied.\u00a0 \u201cMy aunt Lily.\u00a0 She broke\u2026\u201d \u2014 I saw the wheels spin for an instant \u2014 \u201c\u2026 her collarbone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a wonderful choice: not so banal as an arm or a leg, but more probable than a finger or a knee.<\/p>\n

Coins were tendered and change received while Donny gave details of the imaginary accident of a make-believe person.\u00a0 The transaction completed, Mr. Manning looked over to me, his head canted slightly back so that his enormous eyes could bring me into focus through the bifocals.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd anything for you, young man?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

As Mr. Manning\u2019s gaze drilled in, I felt a slight flutter in my chest and my vision flickered.\u00a0 For a moment I feared I might black out entirely, leaving my small, felonious body collapsed on the linoleum of the Five and Dime.\u00a0 But after a final shudder, I regained my calm.\u00a0 Off to the side I saw Donny Wellek dip his hand into a plastic bin of fingernail clippers, and in slow motion he slipped one into his front pocket.\u00a0 Always thinking, he was.<\/p>\n

More than his success, I admired Donny\u2019s style.\u00a0 The principle of purchasing something at the same time you thieved made perfect sense, upon reflection.\u00a0 But the selection of a greeting card \u2014 that sign of selflessness and compassion for others \u2014 it put him absolutely above suspicion and elevated petty theft nearly to the realm of art.<\/p>\n

Donny was unburdened by conscience, and his delight at playing with a newly palmed object was not obscured by the clouds of guilt that swirled around me.\u00a0 Still, I found the terror experienced in Manning\u2019s Five and Dime strangely thrilling.\u00a0 Better than playing with fire \u2014 which was another pastime Donny introduced me to that summer \u2014 shoplifting was more like juggling with high explosives.\u00a0 In the unwritten criminal code of my home, burning down the house would have figured as little more than a misdemeanor in comparison to the capital offense of thievery.\u00a0 One showed an error of judgment, while the other demonstrated an absence of scruples.<\/p>\n

Donny was gifted at stealing.\u00a0 And adventurous: we acquired some fine looking tools wrench from the hardware store, a large array of desk supplies from Manning\u2019s, and at one point he smuggled a live neon tetra out of the pet store.\u00a0 Bit by bit Donny\u2019s room started to look like Ali Baba\u2019s cave, piled high with treasures.<\/p>\n

In addition to on-the-job training, Donny gave me general pointers.\u00a0 Never linger in the back of the store: it gives rise to suspicion.\u00a0 And calculate your turns: if leaving the register requires you to show your left side, pocket your items on the right.\u00a0 These principles were simple enough \u2014 although sometimes challenging for me, who had never quite mastered the difference between right and left.\u00a0 If I had time to look at my hands, I knew which way to go, but when Donny whispered a direction in my ear, it introduced a dangerous hesitation in my execution.<\/p>\n

For my first solo job I had settled on a prism from Manning\u2019s, a satisfyingly heavy pyramid of glass that divided the visible world into planes of light and color.\u00a0 Faithful to the teachings of the master, I made a purchase at the same time I stole, but I bungled my calculations: on my approach to the cash register, with Mr. Manning\u2019s unblinking fish-eyes peering down at me, our gazes met and locked.\u00a0 I felt a surge of panic, and with it came a familiar tingling at the back of my neck and a slight dizziness.\u00a0 I willed myself to focus, and in an attempt to allay suspicion I reached out to the nearest shelf and the first item to come under my hand became my decoy purchase.\u00a0 At the register I found myself paying for an elegant pocketknife, priced at twice the cost of the prism.\u00a0 Red-faced under Mr. Manning\u2019s gaze, I spent precious moments counting out the coins while the lump of glass, hidden inside my sagging sock, threatened to roll out onto the floor.<\/p>\n

The prism heist was not the only time I erred on the side of extravagance during my criminal adventures.\u00a0 In fact, this practice soon became more deliberate, for I discovered that larger purchases eased my conscience.\u00a0 Indeed, it occurred to me years later that Mr. Manning may have caught on to our operation early on but allowed it to prosper because it proved so good for business.\u00a0 Soon the bulk of my allowance was subsidizing my thievery, and I found it hard to make ends meet.<\/p>\n

Eventually Donny ratcheted up the stakes.\u00a0 In the back of Manning\u2019s, on the highest row of the magazine rack, there was a series of publications tucked behind a blue metal panel, above which only titles showed.\u00a0 While most magazines were arranged so their vivid covers caught a customer\u2019s eye from halfway across the store, these were nearly hidden.\u00a0 The idea that a store would actually conceal the merchandise it had for sale was sufficiently puzzling to give rise to suspicion.\u00a0 The titles of these publications composed exotic words that were difficult to peg: Penthouse<\/em>, Vue<\/em>, Gaze<\/em>, Playboy<\/em>\u2026.\u00a0 At the time, the only magazine I knew intimately was Boys\u2019 Life<\/em>, and to me the pinnacle of journalistic production was reached in the \u201cGrin and Bear It\u201d humor section found at the back of each issue.<\/p>\n

The copy of Gaze<\/em> that Donny smuggled out in his trouser leg was thus to shape the future course of my reading habits.\u00a0 The creatures I discovered in that issue shared only the slightest anatomical resemblance to women I had met in real life, but that shred of similarity was enough to pique my curiosity.\u00a0 The idea that the beings I had found so insufferable in the fifth grade would one day look like that<\/em> outstripped my powers of imagination.\u00a0 I found myself studying other candidates from the world around me \u2014 and among these was Donny\u2019s sister.\u00a0 It was a stretch, but if anyone I knew resembled the models in Gaze<\/em>, it was Sylvia Wellek.<\/p>\n

Donny thus led me from shoplifting to more prurient pursuits.\u00a0 I scrutinized girls with new interest, scoping out the Liddel twins from next door, and studying the young brunette who walked her terrier past our house every day.\u00a0 As far as I could tell, clothing played the same role as the blue metal panel on Mr. Manning\u2019s magazine rack, and I found myself yearning for the penetrating gaze reserved for superheroes.\u00a0 Donny pointed me to a solution: the wrapper from a piece of Bazooka Joe bubblegum invited me to send in for \u201cX-ray Specs,\u201d advertising that I\u2019d be able to see people\u2019s bones beneath their clothing.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t actually the skeletal structure that interested me, but the patter was vague about what was visible and what wasn\u2019t: \u201cLook at your friend,\u201d the text read, \u201cIs that really his body you \u2018see\u2019 under his clothes?\u201d\u00a0 Although the ad gave us the benefit of the doubt, assuming we would use the specs only in the knee-slapping camaraderie of male bonding, the sketch of a buxom female figure in the background of the gum wrapper ad, smiling at the use of this very practical joke, tipped me off to the idea that their power could be harnessed for other uses.\u00a0 And so, three weeks and a dollar thirty-five later, I received my eyewear, which I had had shipped to Donny\u2019s address for safety\u2019s sake.\u00a0 But whom to select for my inaugural leer?\u00a0 Briefly I considered my mother, but the very thought triggered a shiver down my spine, and I quickly banished that mental image.\u00a0 The obvious model was Sylvia, who obligingly posed before us as Donny and I passed the specs back and forth.\u00a0 But her ample forms yielded only a dark, fuzzy profile, which no amount of fiddling with the lenses or the lights seemed to remedy.<\/p>\n

During this period I found myself wracked with guilt each time I headed home.\u00a0 I saw other kids out in the neighborhood, but they kept their distance from me the way they steered clear of Donny.\u00a0 I would come into the house while Mom made chili or sloppy joes \u2014 my favorite dishes \u2014 but crime cut my appetite.\u00a0 At night, in my room, I buried my face in Mammoth\u2019s warm fur, wondering what I was turning into.\u00a0 Mammoth never judged me; she was happy with her imminent motherhood, purring as hard as she could to ease my misery.<\/p>\n

To compensate for my guilt, I found myself purchasing ever larger items in the Five and Dime, and to swing this financially I was doing chores around the house for extra money.\u00a0 Most of my loot and many of the decoy purchases ended up in Donny\u2019s room \u2014 sometimes because I gave it to him for safe keeping, but sometimes he had simply swiped it.<\/p>\n

Finally, in August, I stopped stealing altogether: I couldn\u2019t afford it any longer.<\/p>\n

I tried to disentangle myself from Donny, but he knew my weak spots.\u00a0 It was the carrot and the stick: threats to denounce me to my parents, and gifts of dirty magazines.\u00a0 One evening he called me on the phone \u2014 a rare occurrence, since my back door was only a hundred feet from his.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou got a sec?\u201d he said, not even pretending it was a question.\u00a0 \u201cGet over here right away.\u00a0 Come up quietly.\u201d<\/p>\n

The urgency in his voice made the invitation irresistible, and soon I was creeping up the stairs toward his room when his hand shot out of the darkness and pulled me in another direction.\u00a0 In moments he had led me into his parents\u2019 bedroom, his finger to his lips as we crept toward a door at the back.\u00a0 It was the second entrance to a main bathroom, and through crack between the jamb and the poorly fitted door, there was an opening to which Donny and I applied our faces.\u00a0 Inside the steamy room, behind the mottled glass of the shower doors, we could see vague movement, flashes of skin tone.\u00a0 Although we could make out no discernible shape \u2014 not even the blurred masses perceptible with X-ray specs \u2014 there was an unmistakably naked body on the other side of the glass.\u00a0 Piled on the floor in front of the shower door was a large white towel, and I imagined how Sylvia had glided through the hallway to the bathroom, allowing the towel to slide down off her body as she stepped under the streaming water.\u00a0 I guessed at which body parts we were viewing based on the height of the flashes of color.<\/p>\n

The mix of sensations visited upon me in that moment is difficult to describe: certainly a sweet and sudden hardening of that little organ between my legs; just as surely a rush of excitement, and an irrepressible urge to continue to stare.\u00a0 But also a sense of panic and guilt, similar to what I had felt in Manning\u2019s Five and Dime: a fear that I was stepping over the line.\u00a0 There was that familiar itch at my neck, and the room began to turn.\u00a0 I knew the wooziness would settle down if I stopped looking, but Donny and I stood riveted to the spot.\u00a0 His hands were already busy below deck.<\/p>\n

The shower water stopped, and we heard shuffling feet inside the shower stall.\u00a0 I felt light-headed.\u00a0 We watched breathlessly as Door Number One began to open for us.<\/p>\n

That was it: after surprising Mr. Wellek in the shower, I decided it was time to reform.\u00a0 I vowed to turn over a new leaf.\u00a0 Cold turkey, I stopped hanging out with Donny.<\/p>\n

But it isn\u2019t always easy to do the right thing.\u00a0 In fact, it was not enough to set out on a new course: I had reparations to make.\u00a0 And so I amassed some of the goods I had stolen and began a campaign of shop-putting.\u00a0 This consisted of returning goods to the stores I had stolen from.\u00a0 However, since I had already made use of many these wares \u2014 having extracted them from their packaging and left them with the blemishes of wear \u2014 it was only fitting that I should repurchase them myself.\u00a0 The whole process became dizzyingly complex, and it proved far more dangerous, and considerably more expensive, than the original thefts.\u00a0 This was especially true at the Five and Dime, where Mr. Manning was already keeping a look-out for me, despite his impaired vision.\u00a0 Since I was entering shops with concealed goods I had not purchased, I constantly ran the risk of being accused of theft while in the very act of making restitution.\u00a0 After successfully depositing a stolen object back on its shelf or in its bin, I would peel a sales sticker off a different article and apply it to the freshly returned one, which I would then carry up to the register and purchase.<\/p>\n

My closest call came in the hardware store, where I mistakenly shop-put a cigarette lighter I had actually stolen from Manning\u2019s.\u00a0 The puzzled sales clerk was about to point out that it was not their merchandise, but he suddenly thought better of it and rang the lighter up anyway.<\/p>\n

Once I crossed paths with Donny at Manning\u2019s.\u00a0 I was in the midst of returning a stapler, and I saw him slip a silver penlight into his pocket.\u00a0 He smiled at me and raised his eyebrows before turning to leave.\u00a0 I just shook my head: my work was like trying to fill a leaky bucket.<\/p>\n

During our crime wave I had concealed my stolen goods in order to protect my reputation.\u00a0 But now, since I was actually paying for them, such discretion seemed superfluous, and so my room became progressively cluttered with what my father referred to as \u201ccrap.\u201d\u00a0 My mother eyed the growing collection with suspicion, evidently wondering if I had come by it all honestly.<\/p>\n

The magazines were too precious to give away, and yet too dangerous to keep.\u00a0 I lived in fear that my mother, in some act of zealous housecleaning, might discover my stash, and I was unable to concoct a reasonable explanation for why so many photographs of breasts and buttocks had accumulated in the folder under the box of train track in the back of my closet. I flushed red just thinking about it.\u00a0 I needed to distance myself from this booty, and so one night I snuck out into the yard and dug a shallow grave for these beautiful young women.\u00a0 I buried them in the garden, wrapped in plastic, using part of an old pea pole to mark the spot so I could find them when needed.\u00a0 I startled at a noise in the bushes, and looked up to see two luminous green eyes watching my every move.\u00a0 It was Mammoth.\u00a0 She had grown huge around the belly, soon to give birth.<\/p>\n

The world began to return to normal after I distanced myself from Donny.\u00a0 Although I missed our closeness, and felt guilty about abandoning him, I was glad to find myself playing more with other kids, and the cloud of guilt that had smothered me for the past months began to lift.\u00a0 By late August I was out again with others, relishing evening games of tag or capture the flag \u2014 although Donny rarely joined in.\u00a0 Sometimes I\u2019d see him eyeing me from his yard as I ran with other kids.\u00a0 I wanted him to swear or yell at me so I could hate him, but he just stood by himself, quiet and unsettling.<\/p>\n

In July the summer had seemed too long, but now, as the dog days dwindled, I savored my fleeting liberty.\u00a0 I recall vividly the sensation of being frozen in tag \u2014 standing stock-still in the twilight, waiting for the touch of a friend to thaw me, to release me from my petrified state.\u00a0 For whole minutes I was arrested in time, action whirling around me, oddly out of step with my own surroundings.\u00a0 Sometimes the magic of this position \u2014 utter inaction in the midst of chaos, tinted with the anticipation of imminent release \u2014\u00a0sent a tingle down my spine, one that I wished to prolong, and which vanished as soon as a friendly finger freed me from my bondage.<\/p>\n

This was the state I found myself in on the Friday evening before Memorial Day: poised in the darkness, listening to the crunch of footsteps on the brittle grass and the sounds of a television through an open window.\u00a0 The innocent hum of noise was rent by a screech of tires from the front of our house.\u00a0 I held my freeze as long as I could while the other kids lit out to see what had happened.\u00a0 Car doors slammed and there was an explosion of voices, first the small sounds of children, and then the lower tones of adults.<\/p>\n

Nobody came to free me.\u00a0 When I abandoned my pose and headed around the house, there was a group standing by the road, and a long white car I did not recognize parked at the curb.\u00a0 As I approached, faces turned.\u00a0 The voices quieted as people saw me.\u00a0 As if in a dream, the group parted silently, opening a path before me.<\/p>\n

On the asphalt lay Mammoth on her side.\u00a0 Eyes half open.\u00a0 Immobile.\u00a0 I moved forward as if in a game of freeze tag: everyone was motionless; only I could move.\u00a0 I could touch them, and they could move again; I would touch Mammoth, and she would spring from her frozen state.\u00a0 But when I knelt down and felt her fur, my fingers worked no magic.\u00a0 Her pupils were but slits, even in the light of dusk, and the tip of her tongue showed between her teeth.\u00a0 I knew what had happened, of course, but I slipped my hands under her and scooped the body into my bare arms.\u00a0 She was perfectly intact.\u00a0 There was no blood.\u00a0 Nothing was broken.\u00a0 Her fur was soft and clean.\u00a0 But the unbearable limpness of the body told all.\u00a0 Her pregnant belly, full of promise, sagged, the tautness of life gone slack.\u00a0 I was too late.<\/p>\n

When I stood and turned, I saw Donny in the crowd of kids, his lips pursed and his brow furrowed, a look poised between sympathy and satisfaction. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

a young boy’s flirtation with danger…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":773,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions\/773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}