It was hard to get news of Bucky. The day he left Fort Bliss for Southeast Asia the Reporter-Telegram ran a full-color front-page photo of him in his military cap and uniform. He looked grim but resolute, as if a receiver had just dropped an end zone pass but the next play — fourth and goal — would do it. Pimples had spread to his chin. Next to him on the front page was an even larger photo of a three-year-old named Sheila. She had vanished from her home. She was laughing in the picture, wearing a pink hair bow and a lemony dress. Her family lived just four blocks from us. The paper urged anyone with information about her to contact police.
In the following days, she owned the front page. In television interviews, townspeople worried about her. “She’s a precious part of our lives,” one newsman said. Bronco Chevrolet ran a two-page ad in the Family section, saying, WE PRAY FOR YOU, SHEILA. Bucky rated no more stories for a while.
One afternoon, while Pat was visiting the “bone man”—his hip doctor — I scoured the alley for horned toads. Our plan was to keep them in shoeboxes inside the fort. If anyone, especially my sister and her friends, came snooping around, we could thrust the toads at them through gaps in the sheets and scare the intruders away.
The wires sang in the heat. I squatted to see an anthill. Busy figures building barricades. A shadow fell across the dirt: Michelle, gazing down at me, shielding her face with a Seventeen magazine. She wore yellow shorts. She puffed her lip. “It’s sad, isn’t it?”
“What? What’s sad?” Instinctively, I glanced at my crotch to make sure nothing stupid or embarrassing was happening there.
“Sheila.”
“Oh.”
With the toe of her sandal she rolled a pebble back and forth in the dirt. I stood. “I’m scared,” she said.
“Why?”
“What if someone took her?”
“Why would they take her?”
“It just makes me scared, that’s all. What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
She came close. The edge of her magazine touched my thigh. Sweat gathered in the ridge along her collarbone, just above her T-shirt. She smelled like cinnamon toast. “I don’t like being scared,” she said. Before I knew what she was doing, she rubbed her mouth on mine.
I jumped away, my right foot smashing the anthill. A red swarm erupted around us. Michelle didn’t seem to care. My ribs tingled and so did the backs of my hands, as if a current had leaped from the powerlines into my cells.
“Do you want to do that again?” Michelle said.
“Sure,” I said. “No. I mean, not now. Maybe later.”
“When?”
“Maybe later.”
She smiled and turned aside. Quickly, I bent and brushed an ant off her calf. Her smile widened. Her skin was warm. As she walked away along the cinderblock fence she didn’t look scared at all. She hummed “Mrs. Robinson” and swiped at tumbleweeds with her magazine. Wheezing, I retreated to the fort. I stared at the moon map, the coordinates that told you where you were if you were lost in an airless world. All afternoon I rocked back and forth, touching my lips, touching my lips.
One day, while Dad was home for lunch, my parents, Pat, and I stood at the front window watching two young cops talk to Mr. Wallace on his lawn. “Look like rookies,” Dad said. “Come to Mr. Wallace for advice.” The police had conducted house-by-house searches in the missing girl’s immediate neighborhood and stapled HELP us FIND SHEILA posters on phone poles all over town.
Mr. Wallace wore a checkered shirt, long-sleeved though the day was hot. He gestured toward the park. I was glad he was getting involved. The young patrolmen seemed unsure of themselves, fidgeting with their gun belts. In their tight blue caps they reminded me of Bucky in his military garb.
“It’s so sad,” my mother said. She sounded just like Michelle. “I wonder what’s happened to that little girl?” My father slipped his arm around her waist.
“Maybe she rocketed into space,” I said, “and she’s orbiting the moon!”
Mom smiled. “I’d better do the dishes.” When Dad dropped his arm from her hip I felt a lonely stab and wished I hadn’t opened my mouth. Pat suggested we head for the fort.
“That thing is starting to smell,” Mom said. “Your dirty feet and sweat … we’d better take it down soon.”
“Mom!”
“You didn’t think you were going to leave it up forever?”
Pat looked stricken.
In the fort we made plans to sneak a cassette recorder beneath my parents’ bed. On overnights, Pat had been amazed at my mother’s prodigious snoring. We often kidded her: “The rhino was on the rampage last night!” She said we hurt her feelings and threatened to stop making us lemonade, but she always relented. Now, Pat reasoned, if we recorded her snores and told her we’d expose the rhino to the world, she’d back off on the fort.
Soon we got bored. We’d read all the comic books we had. We pulled out an old Playboy, Miss December, a “butt shot,” Pat called it. “I like butt shots.” But we’d studied Miss December’s butt at least thirty times. I confessed to Pat what had happened in the alley.
“She kissed you?”
“I guess.”
“What do you mean, you guess?”
“I guess it was a kiss.”
“That’s how come no toads.”
“She wants to do it again sometime.”
“You’re not going to let her?”
I didn’t answer.
“You didn’t like it?”
I glanced at Miss December. Michelle’s butt didn’t look anything like this, I was sure. And yet …
“Creeps me out,” Pat said. Still, a moment ago he’d been mesmerized by the centerfold, despite its familiarity. It wouldn’t do to remind him of this. What was my point? The only thing clear to me was that it would shatter our trust if I started liking Michelle. Worse than ruining the moon.
“There’s only one thing to do,” Pat said.
“What’s that?”
“Attack.”
That summer, Mom often laughed at what she called “the kids’ new words,” but neither Pat nor I cottoned to expressions like groovy or far out. It was my father who had a language of his own. Now I began to interpret it. “The Shallow Oil Zone at South 162, thirty-six R … damn,” he’d say, skimming figures on the Reporter-Telegram’s back pages, next to the stock prices. “Less than six dollars a barrel …”
What this meant, I figured, was that we wouldn’t be buying a new TV, even though the tint on our old one was busted, greening everything. Jimmy, down at Slim’s Home Parts, had told us it was beyond repair. Walter Cronkite looked sick every night, talking about Newark, Berkeley, Watts. When he showed footage of American soldiers in the jungle, all I could see was a jittery green smudge. Better were the burning huts. The flames brightened the scenes, and I could distinguish uniformed men kicking down walls or pulling off a roof.
We wouldn’t be getting a new hot water heater despite the lukewarm shower. We wouldn’t replace the toaster or the waffle maker. Mom’s ledger had spoken, in Dad’s code.
One thing we did get, to Janey’s dismay, was a Carrier window unit for her bedroom. We had no central air, and portable fans weren’t cutting it as temperatures reached the nineties. Janey’s room got the most sun. The window unit would be too noisy, she complained, but Dad said that was the price of comfort. Mom worked out a reasonable monthly payment schedule, overriding Janey’s objections.