The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Pretty soon all the other kids were gone, although we could hear them laughing and skylarking their way back to Rudolph Acres. Marlee was chitter-chattering along like always, anything that came into her head. I let it wash over me, saying Yeah and Uh-huh and Hey, mostly thinking about how I’d change into my old corduroys as soon as I got back, and if Mama Nonie didn’t have any chores for me, I’d get my glove and run down to the Oak Street playground and get in on the pickup game that went on there every day until moms started yelling it was suppertime.

That is when we heard someone hollering at us from the other side of School Street. Only it was less like a voice and more like a donkey bray.

GEORGE AND MARLEE UP IN A TREE! K-I-S-S-I-N-G!

We stopped. There was a kid over there, standing by a hackberry bush. I’d never seen him before, not at Mary Day or anywhere else. He wasn’t but four and a half feet tall, and stocky. He had on gray shorts that went down all the way to his knees, and a green sweater with orange stripes. It was rounded out up top with little boy-tits and a poochy belly underneath. He had a beanie on his head, the stupid kind with a plastic propeller.

His face was pudgy and hard at the same time. His hair was orange like the stripes on his sweater, that shade nobody loves. It was all sprayed out on the sides over his jug ears. His nose was a little blot underneath the brightest, greenest eyes I’ve ever seen. He had a sulky Cupid’s bow of a mouth, the lips so red it looked like he was wearing his ma’s lipstick. I’ve seen plenty of carrottops with those red lips since then, but none as red as that bad little kid’s were.

We stood and stared at him. Marlee’s chatter came to a halt. She had cat’s-eye glasses with pink rims, and behind them her eyes were wide and magnified.

The kid – he couldn’t have been more than six or seven – pooched up those red lips of his and made kissy-face noises. Then he put his hands on his butt and began to bump his hips at us.

GEORGE AND MARLEE, UP IN A TREE, F-U-C-K-I-N-G!

Braying just like a donkey. We stared, amazed.

You better wear a scumbag when you fuck her, he called over, smirking those red lips. Less you want to have a bunch of retards just like her.

You shut up your face, I said.

Or what? he said.

Or I’ll shut it up for you, I said.

I meant it, too. My father would have been mad if he knew I was threatening to beat up a kid who was younger and smaller, but he wasn’t right to be saying those things. He looked like a little kid, but those weren’t little-kid things he was saying.

Suck my dink, assface, he said, and then stepped behind the hackberry bush.

I thought about going over there, but Marlee was holding my hand so tight it almost hurt.

I don’t like that boy, she said.

I said I didn’t like him either, but to never mind. Let’s go home, I said.

But before we could start walking again, the kid came back out from behind the hackberry bush, and he had Marlee’s Steve Austin lunchbox in his hands. He held it up.

Lose something, fuckwit? he said, and laughed. Laughing wrinkled his face up and made it like a pig’s face. He sniffed at the box and said, I guess it must be yours, cause it smells like cunt. Like retarded cunt.

Give me that, it’s mine, Marlee yelled. She let go of my hand. I tried to hold it, but it greased out on the sweat of our palms.

Come and get it, he said, and held it out to her.

Before I tell you what happened next, I have to tell you about Mrs Peckham. She was the first-grade teacher at Mary Day. I didn’t have her, because I went to the first grade in New Mexico, but most of the kids in Talbot did – Marlee too – and they all loved her. I loved her, and I only had her for playground, when it was her turn to be monitor. If there was kickball, boys against the girls, she was always the pitcher for the girls’ team. Sometimes she’d whip one in from behind her back, and that made everyone laugh. She was the kind of teacher you remember forty years later, because she could be kind and jolly but still make even the antsy-pantsy kids mind.

She had a big old Buick Roadmaster, sky-blue, and we used to call her Pokey Peckham because she never drove it more than thirty miles an hour, always sitting bolt straight behind the wheel with her eyes squinted. Of course, we only saw her drive in the neighborhood, which was a school zone, but I bet she drove pretty much the same way when she was on 78. Even on the interstate. She was careful and cautious. She would never hurt a child. Not on purpose, she wouldn’t.

Marlee ran into the street to get her lunchbox. The bad little kid laughed and threw it at her. It hit the street and broke open. Her Thermos bottle fell out and rolled. I saw that sky-blue Roadmaster coming and yelled for Marlee to look out, but I wasn’t really worried because it was only Pokey Peckham, and she was still a block down, going slow as ever.