“I found a bed,” he said. “Hurry before someone takes it.”
Quickly, I slid down the air ducts. I walked the fence and then jumped down to the alley. Together we ran the few blocks to where Buff had spotted the mattress.
It was small. The mattress was from a cot or a child’s bed. It was sitting folded over in a dirt patch off the cement of the alley. I pulled it open. It was stained in the middle, soiled like the mattresses in the attic of my house, old mattresses left over from whoever had lived there before, kids not potty-trained, old people unable to get up, drunks. Buff must’ve seen the look on my face.
“This side it’s not that bad,” he said. He twisted the mattress so I could see the back side.
He was right. The other side was cleaner.
We carried the mattress through the alleys of the neighborhood. Every half block or so we set it down to adjust our grip. Other kids from the neighborhood stopped their baseball games, their football games, to let us pass.
Finally, we were home. We dropped the mattress in the gangway of the pierogi factory. We rolled it up like a thick sausage. The mattress smelled dank, sweet almost, like weeds in the sun, like an alley in the summer.
Buff climbed the roof and let the rope down. I wrapped it around the mattress. “Okay!” I called up to Buff. The yellow line went taut.
The bed was actually easier to lift than the piece of tin or even the wood had been. The bed seemed to bounce right up the wall, and when it got to the ledge, another strong jerk popped it right over onto the gravel roof. Immediately, we carried it into the house. We undid the knot and let it flop onto the floor. It was a perfect fit. The mattress lay snug against the rear wall, snug between the two side walls. Along the wall that held the doorway, there was enough space to walk in, enough space to put a table in if we wanted. Buff paced the small gap. He flapped his arms in and out as if doing the chicken dance.
“See, bro,” he said. “In case we have parties.”
I sat down on the bed. I sank down to the gravel. I forgot about the pee stains on the other side. The whole room took on the sweet smell of the dirty mattress. I leaned back and rested my head against the wall, our wall. Along the opposite side, sunlight piped in through cracks and nail holes in the planks. The wall looked like what I thought a nighttime sky in the country might look like, busy, crowded. I searched for constellations, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, ones I’d heard about in school. I closed my eyes.
“This is awesome, bro,” Buff said.
“Yes,” I said. “Awesome.”
The fantasy lasted three days. Each night I was the one who called “time” and said we had to go. Each night got longer. I’m afraid of what might have happened had Buff never thrown that rock, the one that brought everything down. We were so close already, another day and maybe we would’ve stayed forever. Maybe we would’ve disappeared, like I wanted to back then, when I was young. Of course, things never work out the way you want them to. And then all you do, the rest of your life, is dream about what would’ve happened, or could’ve happened, had you done what you wanted to do in the first place.
In his defense, that rock was probably the biggest the gravel roof had to offer. In his defense, we should’ve hurled that rock months earlier, when the summer had first started, when I first met Buff. In his defense, no rock had ever glanced off a windshield, not like that, and really, what an odd set of circumstances, to have that little girl rounding third base in the park across the street at just the right time for the rock to go sailing into her temple, breaking her little head open, sending her chest-first into the concrete, her feet kicking up behind her, one lone white shoe cartwheeling over her body, landing somewhere up near her head, which had already begun to spout blood.
I remember this all as individual events. In my mind I can freeze each frame. Like when Buff and I turned to look at each other. Like when I saw Buff, not smiling but somehow shrugging, like he’d known this was going to happen, like he’d known something was going to happen to spoil everything.
They hadn’t even seen us yet, the family of the little girl, the gangbangers across the street. They hadn’t even called out like I remember them doing, “Hey, up there! Look, there they are! There’s those little fuckers!” None of this had even happened yet when Buff turned to me and said, “Sorry.” I wonder what he saw in my face. I wonder if he knew it wasn’t just his fault, that we were accomplices, friends.
In another moment the gangbangers were on the roof. I was punched in the stomach hard enough to make my back ache.
“Who threw the rock?” one of them asked me.
I looked to Buff. “Me,” he said. I am aware now that the noble thing would’ve been for me to say that I had done it, that I had thrown the rock. And I can see the nobility in Buff speaking up — even though he had done it, he didn’t have to say he had done it. At the time, though, the thought of taking the blame didn’t even cross my mind. I just watched one of the gangbangers approach Buff and without any warning, a windup, a step, a twist of the body, punch Buff square in the side of the face.
Buff didn’t make a sound. His knees buckled. He looked down. The side of his face was red. But he didn’t whimper or cry. When the kid who punched Buff turned, I saw that it was Junebug, the kid Buff had claimed was his cousin, the ugly kid.
They tore our house apart. They kicked in the flimsy walls. I hadn’t realized how weak the structure actually was. We’d sat in the house during rain, but we’d never have survived any kind of strong wind. It was only a matter of time.
I was dragged across the roof, handed down the air-conditioning ducts. Once on the ground I heard sirens, saw the flashing lights of ambulances and fire trucks. Police officers were pulling up. They saw Buff and me being led down the street in opposite directions. They saw that we’d been roughed over, beaten. They didn’t stop any of the gangbangers to ask questions. We were on our own then, and for a split second I had a flashback to when Buff had first suggested that we could build a house, a flashback to when I’d first called up to Buff, “Hey, how’d you get up there?” And, as I was presented to my father and yanked by my collar into the house, I longed for that feeling again. The feeling that I was all alone, that I was entirely free.
I’ve had other moments, since then. When I graduated college, for about five seconds I felt free. Or when I rode my first motorcycle down the alley behind my house, for about ten seconds I felt free. Then I realized I had to turn. But up there on the roof, when I was alone with Buff, I knew it, that it was all us; our lives were what we made of them. Never again have I felt as free as I did then.
Years after the pierogi factory incident I heard that Buff had been shot dead. This was in high school, my sophomore year. I was hanging out with friends in Barrett Park, where we played ball and drank beer. Ramiro said it. He always had the neighborhood news: “Hey, did you guys hear Buffster from the Latin Counts got killed? A drive-by, bro, right there on Wood Street. Got blasted in the head. Dead on arrival.”
“You mean bald-headed Buff?” I asked. “Short guy, blue eyes?”
“Yeah,” Ramiro said. “You knew him?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We grew up together.”
“No you didn’t, bullshitter,” Alex, another in our group, said.
“No, I did,” I told them. “One summer me and him, we built a house. Over there on top of the old pierogi factory. You should’ve seen it. We were going to live there.”