excerpt
Tunnel Vision
I WAS UP BEFORE DAWN, excited, but my sense of adventure was shaded by vague misgivings. There had been something in Buster’s voice I couldn’t quite identify, something everyone else understood, and their knowing smiles had made me uncomfortable.
I shrugged off the memory, slipped out of my pyjamas which I left in a pile on the floor, dressed quickly in a tee shirt, jeans, Keds sneakers, a Yankees baseball cap, and tip-toed down to the first floor kitchen. It was still cold, even on an August Saturday, and I shivered as I wolfed down my corn flakes with milk and fresh figs from the beloved tree in Z’Andonio’s next door garden. I left the dish and spoon in the sink and walked out into a brisk morning, sunlight just beginning to gain strength above the houses and trees.
An hour later I was crouched at the edge of a drainage ditch under the railroad bridge behind number five park. I had drifted off, imagining fish in the murky, slow moving water by the time they started to show up in twos and threes. They raised a hand or nodded or mumbled hi, but that was their only attempt at communication before they wandered off to sit by themselves.
Buster arrived around nine. He was Skinhead’s cousin. He’d come to stay with the Whalens for the summer and he hadn’t been on the block for more than a few hours before he’d organized everyone into a gang he called The Blue Damons. He meant Daemons, but I didn’t correct him when he called out to me as I sat on my front porch reading a Zane Grey western, and invited me to join them. My initiation was scheduled, he said, for Saturday morning, at dawn. I wanted to suggest high noon, but didn’t think he’d get it, so I said okay and went back to my book. It wasn’t dawn, or high noon either, but it was time. They all stood and walked over to meet him. I stayed where I was and just waited. After a brief exchange of low murmurs and a burst of laughter, Buster disengaged himself and came strutting through the criss-crossed shadows of the bridge.
“Did ya know dis is yer lucky day?”
Manolis Aligizakis 