“Just a string, around my ears.” He tugged it off. There he was — Mr. Leery, the man with all the lights. In his lap, the beard looked like the cotton batting her grandmother used in making quilts. He set it on the swing. “I suppose what you want is for your mom to feel better?”
“Like out at the rodeo,” Sarah said. “Some kind of cure.” A car passed. Elvis was on the radio. “I want …” She thought. “Frog legs and lemonade,” she said.
“Well, now.”
A gust of wind. The tops of the trees bowed low.
“And fireflies. Do you remember?”
“Remember what, Sarah?”
“How they look in the summer, after dark? How bright they are?”
“You’re right,” Mr. Leery said.
“If I come into your store tomorrow, can I turn on all the lights?” she asked.
“I’ll be closed for Christmas. But any time after that, you’re my gal. Are you going to be brave, now, for your mother?”
“Brave like Pop?”
Mr. Leery’s eyes clouded, but he smiled at her. Sarah smoothed her fingers through the beard on the swing.
Power Lines
In the fall of 1967 Bucky Dean quarterbacked the Midland Lee Rebels to eight straight victories and a shot at the state high school championship. In the spring he received his draft notice and was headed to Vietnam. The town mourned while celebrating his patriotism and courage. I turned ten that summer, the day after Sirhan pulled the trigger on Bobby Kennedy. In still moments, when I thought about it, I felt something of the volatility of American politics and the fear that Vietnam had become a “quagmire” (a new word for me that year), threatening one day to swallow my pals and me.
The Rebs didn’t go far in the playoffs, but Bucky remained my hero. Through a friend of a friend, my dad arranged for him to come to our house one night to sign autographs for me and my buddy Pat. Up close, Bucky was gangly and tall with a rash of pimples on each of his cheeks. Pat and I didn’t speak. We sat at his feet, holding out paper and pens. My sister and her friend Michelle, both twelve, laughed at us on their way out the door. “Dorks,” Janey said.
Bucky seemed embarrassed, hunching his shoulders, shifting his weight; apparently, he hadn’t got used to adulation, though my dad said every car dealer in town was waiting to use his face in its newspaper ads. They hankered for him to turn pro, maybe with the Cowboys or the Oilers, so they could recruit him for endorsements — surely, when the neon lit him up he wouldn’t forget his hometown. The war was just an inconvenient break in the Bucky Dean saga.
“When you shipping out?” Dad asked.
Bucky etched his name on a sheet of notepaper. “Headed to Fort Bliss in early June, sir, right after graduation. ABAR maintenance training.”
“I was in the Navy myself.”
“That so?” He knelt and handed me the autograph. “You gonna be a star passer?”
“Sure,” I said, though I was asthmatic and, except for Pat, the least athletic boy in our school.
In the presence of celebrity, Pat had puddled with sweat. His grip had dampened his paper, and the pen wouldn’t work on it. My mother fetched a blank sheet from the back of her financial ledger. Bucky knew Pat would never be a quarterback. The crutches told him that.
“You take care of yourself over there,” Dad said.
“Thank you, sir.”
From the front window Pat and I watched Bucky cut through Mogford Park, which sat between our families’ houses under a series of powerlines. “We’ll have to keep following his exploits in the paper, eh?” Dad said. Bucky had written to me, Always give one hundred and ten par sent. Yr. pal Buck.
For our final school project that spring Pat and I made a model of the lunar surface with a cardboard mock-up of the LEM that, a year from now, NASA promised, would land on the moon. We slathered plaster of Paris, dyed green with food coloring, onto a piece of plywood and punched out craters with our thumbs. As accurately as we could, we followed a National Geographic map of the Sea of Tranquillity, one of the possible landing sites. To reinforce the adjoining mountains we used newspaper padding. We agonized over whether to shred the Bronco Chevrolet ads featuring American flags and GOOD LUCK BUCKY! wishes. Dad said Bucky would be preserved forever in our handiwork. As Pat painted our spacecraft, he steadied his arm with one of his crutches.
The teacher was so proud of our moon she asked us to show it to all of the classes. Pat couldn’t carry it, so I lugged it from room to room and held it while he explained the Apollo program to our schoolmates. By the end of the day my arms were tired. I dropped the model on some concrete steps. It wasn’t badly damaged — a small crack on a crater’s rim. But a month later, as school was letting out for the summer, the crack had opened like a faultline. We had donated the model to the school library, and it had been sitting by a globe at the front of the room. Now the librarian said she’d have to throw it out. The crack would only get worse; our moon was doomed. Pat slumped over a magazine rack as the woman carried it out back. I stared at the globe. Pink and yellow continents. The oceans were colored black.
Pat didn’t call for a couple of days. I nursed my shame in the backyard, sitting with my sea turtle, Bacon, brooding on the face of the moon, which rose early that week, pale as popcorn in the heatshimmery sky.
How a sea turtle wound up in a West Texas alley I never knew. Perhaps he was an escaped pet, imported from somewhere. In any case, he appeared one morning beneath the humming powerlines, his green and coral flippers knocking back pebbles in a desperate search for food. He weighed no more than a small box of Cheerios. I brought him into the backyard, and he spent his days under my mother’s rose bushes, soaking up spray whenever she watered with the hose. Each evening at five, he’d turn up on the patio by our dining room door. I’d feed him two strips of cut-up raw bacon. He’d smack his lips and sit calmly while I moistened his shell with a wet paper towel.
Now, he scrabbled in the grass while I decided that the moon was too fragile to bear human weight. “Look at it,” I exhorted Bacon. “It’s so thin. Like those Jesus wafers in church. Right?” Bacon blinked and munched a hunk of gristle.
Three weeks later my mother woke me around seven one morning. “Happy birthday, honey. Robert Kennedy was shot last night.” She was shaken. She apologized for rousting me out so early but she’d got me, as a gift, a new desk for my room. The delivery men had just arrived. Profiles of Popeye, Snoopy, and Speed Racer scarred my old desktop. I’d scratched them into the wood with dry Bic pens, along with the number 16, over and over: Bucky’s number. I hated to let go of my old desk, especially since Mom warned me not to ruin the lovely mahogany of the new piece, but its right front leg had come unglued. It popped out at the merest jostle. We put the crippled desk on the back patio. Dad said he’d fix it up enough to give it to Goodwill.
By now, Pat and I were playing together again. He rang the doorbell on the afternoon of my birthday, holding a stack of Spidermans. When he saw the abandoned desk he said, “Cool. Let’s get some boxes and sheets and make a fort. The desk will be our rampart.” He poked it with a crutch. The leg fell off.
All day we worked, borrowing old towels from Mom, dragging empty book boxes out of the garage, arranging, rearranging the patio space, stretching sheets, tentlike, above our heads, using brooms and mops for support. Pat did the brainstorming, waving his arms like Arthur Fiedler leading the Boston Pops on TV. The heavy lifting fell to me.