Ron Argo

THE SUM OF HIS WORTH

Summer, 1958
   Never mind what we were doing on government property past midnight, me and Herman, cause we could have drunk our beer lots of places and gotten away with it. Out here it was divinely cool, felt like you were up there floating in the coolness of space or something, like that sliver of a cold moon was doing.
   The chiggers still bit but that was nothing. At least for me it wasn’t. Herman, though, he swatted at them like crazy, mumbling little profanities. Dunce. The only thing that got me was the pine sap. I hated that stuff. It so happened just then—probably cause I was thinking about it—that I leaned off a tree and felt sap on the soft tissue behind my elbow.
   “Shit, man, let’s go,” I said. “I’m ready to go.” Pine sap could find me on a church pew, anywhere, and make me want to get out of there.
   “Just a minute. What’s your big hurry?” Herman was still looking for the phantom possum he had missed but said emphatically he hit. We never heard it fall and they’re noisy even if they come down wounded instead of falling deadweight through the branches. Possums are heavy, clumsy animals. It was too dense up in the tree to see anything, not even with the flashlight.
    I told him to at least turn the damn radio off. This late you wanted to let the forest critters be, not aggravate them. They guided you back to civilization and we had to go. I tried another approach to get him to leave, saying I had to get up early. “I got a appointment.” He turned off his portable but didn’t seem to take me seriously about the appointment. His eyes narrowed. “Appointment for what? Shit, what kinda ‘pointment you got?”
    I didn’t have to answer. I didn’t have an appointment with anyone except Vicki and you sure couldn’t call that an “appointment.” A rendezvous maybe, after her parents went to work. I wasn’t going to tell Herman that, though, cause he would just start advising me what to do with her, like I’d never been with a girl before. By the time you were fourteen years old, as both of us were, you had sure better been with a girl already. But I had to admit Herman knew what he was talking about when it came to girls. He was a real lover boy, no other way to put it. He had this mischievous James Dean/​Dean Martin way of talking to girls that sent them; they swarmed him at every party we went to together. I hated him for it. Girls rubbed themselves all over Herman, sticking their fingers in his greasy curly locks and parting their wet lips, just waiting till he got ready to plant one on them. He usually did. But Herman’s flaw was he fell in love and then hit hard when it came to an end. I still couldn’t figure why they would get their hands greasy in his hair. It was disgusting. He oiled his hair with Brylcreem and applied Vaseline to the ducktail when he chose to have one and sometimes used his sister’s rose oil on his Elvis sideburns. Me, I used Butch Wax because I had a flattop and wanted the front to stand up like a comb.
    “Your shot never hit.” I was getting aggravated with him now. I needed to get home so I could get the pine sap off my arm. “You probably hit a house a mile away and they’ve called the cops on us.”
    “Did, too. I heard him fall. He’s around here somewheres.”
    He was making it up, but it wasn’t doing any good arguing with a bullhead like Herman Zimmerman.
    We’d used up all our bullets two hours ago. That was about to become important because we might have been able to help that poor man with a couple of shots in the air. Not that either one of us would have stood out in the open and confronted the mob. They meant business and there were too many of them for us two to even think about taking on. We might have been a little crazy but we weren’t stupid, at least not me. Herman, you never knew.
    “Shh, listen,” I said in a low voice. “Hear it?”
   “Yeah.”
    And right away light began to flicker through the timber, getting brighter, like the ghostly figure in my mind’s eye of the headless horseman barreling toward you through the woods in the Sleepy Hollow story. That’s how fast the light was coming on. Too fast for us to even run, so we stood thin and still behind separate trees to dodge the wavering shadows off the lights. The voices grew louder and angrier. They were working their way right toward us.
    I didn’t know what to do. Maybe we should try and run, I thought, but then Herman put a finger to his lips, calmly, telling me without words to stay put and wait it out. The mob wasn’t twenty feet from us when they stopped in a little clearing and we could hear them breathing and spitting and cursing. Someone moaned.
    I peeked into the glare of their flashlights, jerked back into the shadow of the tree, and made myself even skinner. I looked with one eye and glimpsed them gathering in a tight circle around someone I couldn’t see. Maybe there were ten or twelve men. They wore white robes but didn’t have on hoods. I guess the formality out here in the woods wasn’t important at this stage. I knew a little about the KKK, since I’d lived in Alabama all my life. But it was the first time I’d ever seen them in action.
    I heard a rough voice saying, “. . . is it, you sonofabitchin’ nigger fag—” and then another one bellowing something deep I couldn’t figure out, something like “. . . not in God’s kingdom—“ or “. . . no home in God’s kingdom!” Either way, it was God’s kingdom they were talking about.Like we were all standing in God's kingdom right here. Then the voice got lost in the surge of the forest and other ghastly sounds that hurt me to hear, the sound of wood on flesh.
    I saw the faces of the men but didn’t recognize any of them. But there were two boys that I did know. One was from my school, Sugarman Cole, a smart but dangerous hood. The other boy, Leon Legget, was a redneck punk who didn’t even go to school but hung out with some of Lamar Junior’s delinquents. His daddy and uncles owned gas stations on the west side that served only whites. Made sure everybody knew it with signs saying, “We Reserve the Right to Serve Whites Only,” right over the pumps so you couldn’t miss the message. Everybody knew they were high-up klansmen, even when they were too mean and hot-tempered to be on the white citizen’s council.
    I couldn’t see the Negro but I saw the rope go up. They were about to do it.
    I tried to swallow a lump in my throat but it didn’t budge. I just held it. I looked at Herman again. He was mesmerized. Then he glanced my way, his opaque eyes wide and fearful. All of a sudden I had to pee something fierce. I’d never been so scared. I thought I was going to puke, too.
    I looked away, up to the treetops and focused on the black sky where you could see some stars in the small window of blackness. I thought about the depth of that void, of how many planets there were beyond my vision and if there might have been creatures like us on those planets in those faraway solar systems who might be looking down on me, on us, and if right then they might be in the middle of some anarchy or cruel, unfair behavior too, like this angry mob. The wonderment of it kept me from puking but not from being sick over them hanging that poor guy.
   They did it fast.
    He hadn’t gotten to say anything because they’d already stuffed his mouth with something and put a hood on his head to cover up his bulbous eyes under a white sack. The terrible sounds I’d heard were them beating him with boards, hard blows to his head and upper body. He didn’t take long to slump, thank God.
    I glanced again at Herman and saw that he was going to collapse. The tears running down his face glistened in the radiated light off their flashes. He was trying hard not to gasp and he managed to send the gasps through his nose, making muffled, strangled sputtering noises, which weren’t too loud. I looked pleadingly at him, hoping I could show him how important it was right then not to lose control. He didn’t look back at me again, I think out of shame because he was crying and he didn’t want me to see what a sissy he was. But I didn’t think that at all. Herman was too crazy to be a sissy.
    I think seeing him whimper saved me from breaking down. I didn’t remember seeing anything so grisly ever before. I was pretty sure Herman hadn’t either.
    All of a sudden, in an act of harebrained idiocy, Herman balked. He pushed off from his tree like he was starting a 400-meter race. Oh, shit! I thought. There was nothing for me to do but take off too.
    He was easy to keep in sight, his flashlight beam jumping around tree limbs like illuminated monkeys. The mob had to see it too. I wanted to shout, “Keep the light to the ground, you moron.” I looked behind me and saw them coming, their lights wavering all around like the woods was on fire. The mob started screaming at us.
    A hoarse voice rang out, “Hey, hold it. Don’t you motherfuckers run on us, you hear me? Hey, goddamnit!” The voice sputtered and vibrated from the man running.
    I knew what was good for us and it sure wasn’t stopping, giving up. Maybe the threat in that voice motivated both of us to speed up cause we were getting ahead of the main body. But the two boys stayed closer behind us. I knew how fast Sugarman Cole could run, I’d run against him in gym playing basketball, and he was fast.
    We slowed as the woods grew thicker. Tree limbs dropped lower and the ground growth and vines grabbed at our ankles. But it also slowed down our pursuers. They must not have had guns, since I didn’t hear any cocking and no shots.
    I made a decision to split off from Herman, thinking we stood a better chance that way because it might slow them down a little deciding who would go after which one of us. All I needed was a few steps lead and I could climb a tree and get out of sight. I could climb fast as lightning. There was no way to signal Herman; he was barrel-assing ahead. He could run like hell for how much shorter he was than me. I split off when we hit an oak grove. Oaks spread out and left open space and I could get through with less light. They were easier to climb, plus you didn’t get sap, like climbing pines. I hated pine sap, you couldn’t get it off no matter how hard you scrubbed, even using turpentine.
    I cut the flashlight and humped as quietly as I could and listened hard for footsteps, since I didn’t see light behind me. Somehow a low oak branch reached out and got me under the nose and I lost my footing and drop my gun. I went down too. My eyes watered from the pain but I didn’t need to see anyway, only to listen, and I still heard nothing close by, although I saw fragments of weak lights and heard noises from the mob a distance away. But I didn’t dare turn the flashlight on to find my rifle since I knew one of the boys was on my tail.
    I discovered something in that instant about myself that I hadn’t ever thought about before and probably wouldn’t have wanted to ever think about. Even if I’d had bullets left, I wasn’t going to shoot a person. Even the kind of murdering useless, redneck punks that were chasing me. All it took to learn that was to imagine what it would be like to fire a bullet into someone. I left the thought behind and climbed.
    I could make out the form of the tree that’d knocked me down and grabbed hold of limbs. I didn’t stop till I had laid thirty or forty feet under me, and then I stopped to listen again. My heart went like a hummingbird’s; I couldn’t seem to get air and I thought I was going to fall. I braced myself between limbs in case I got too dizzy to hold on. I may even have blacked out for a moment because there was no sound in my ears or light in my eyes for that long. Then I heard something. Then I saw lights below me and my gut started to churn and I grew so scared saliva dripped off my lip but my throat was too dry to swallow. I hugged what was left of the core of the oak and tried to think of something that would put me somewhere else, on the white beach at Panama City or in my uncle’s boat on the Coosa casting for bass.
    There was rustling below. I waited and didn’t breathe. One of them who sounded younger than older shouted, “You better keep your mouth shut, shitass. I got your gun. We’ll get you.”
*
    For the rest of that summer I hid in my room with the shades down and listened to my radio. I didn’t come out except to eat canned chili and crackers, deliver my papers and then eat supper. I didn’t think they had caught Herman since I didn’t hear he was dead, but he never called me. I was mad as hell at him for taking off like that when they would have never known we were there if he could’ve just stuck it out. I wouldn’t have this terrible death warrant hanging over me now and I wouldn’t have lost the .22 my grandfather gave me when I was seven.





Summer, 1959

1
    Somehow I made it the whole way through ninth grade, both of us, me and Herman, without telling a single soul about the lynching and without the KKK finding us. I cooled to Herman for a while but finally forgave him for running like that. It helped that he gave me three of his sister’s Elvis singles. They were a couple of years old but that was okay, they were ones I didn’t have and loved. The klan didn’t find his gun or his portable, thank God, cause they could have traced the gun down; I never worried about mine since my grandfather had had it since he was a boy. But I still didn’t have a gun, though.
    We seemed to be out of danger, as long as neither of us got loose lips, and I tried to put that whole episode to rest.
    But I had other problems.
    It looked like I was going to start high school without a girlfriend. Everybody had a girlfriend by the time high school rolled around; it was expected. I had two girlfriends but there was a complication with both of them.
    That wasn’t my only concern on the verge of high school. Ronald Henry would be waiting to fight me the first day of school. Last week, which was about a month still until the September 2nd school start, I was walking by the pool hall on West Tenth Street when he and his gang blocked me on the sidewalk and he popped me on the nose. He got some blood but not much. Ronald Henry was half a foot shorter than me, shorter even than Herman, and he had to look up to tell me he was too busy to mess with me at the moment but he would see me behind the school yard the first day of school and rearrange my face then. I thought about thanking him for letting me off till later but that would probably have provoked him as sarcasm. Never mind what I was doing on the west side of town by myself.
    But I had three weeks till then, so I still had time to work on my tan and with some good luck maybe even get something worked out with at least one of those girlfriends.
    It was Wednesday and on Wednesdays the paper was thin and easy to fold, which made it easier to sling, so I finished my route before three o’clock and pedaled fast to Scarborough Drug Store where I could sit at the fountain for awhile in the air conditioning. I ate a packet of peanut butter crackers and ordered a cold chocolate shake while thumbing through a Superman comic book off the rack. I scoffed down the crackers and grabbed another packet so I could get away with paying for only one. The soda jerk would get wise if you did it too often, so I only did it about once a week.
    A man waiting at the pharmacy watched me and knew what I’d done; I know because he cracked a grin. But he didn’t care; he was making hurry-up gestures to the pharmacist, wearing a pall of worry or sadness, I couldn’t tell which. It got me interested in him. He was in tennis clothes, everything on him white, from the visor on his head to his tennis shoes. He was tall and had a big head and that’s what stood out to me more than his dazzling brightness. He caught me staring. I was embarrassed but I guess I managed some kind of return grin.
    "How you doin?" I said, stupidly.
    "There's a dog in the alley that someone must have hit," he said in a confidential way, making me feel included. I liked that he would confide in me, a stranger, a kid. "I'm getting some stuff to clean him up."
   "Can I see?"
   "He's a mess."
    I ran out the side door and saw the blood trail that led from the sidewalk out front, meandering down the alley where the drips disappeared in the bushes at the back of the building. I pushed back the bushes and there was the injured dog. A mutt, not much to look at. It didn’t have a lot of color, mostly spotted gray with some white and a rusty brown front leg. And a lot of red, but that was blood. I figured it had crawled into the shrubs to die out of sight. Dogs will do that whereas cats, when they finally die, just die on the spot. It was breathing hard, in quick gasps, and bleeding something fierce from the underside. It yelped and tried to wag its tail, which made me feel awful.
    The tall man appeared behind me. "You can occupy him while I treat him, okay?"
    I didn't want to touch the bloody thing. You could see guts and white bone inside it. But I got down close to the wet nose and rubbed its ear. The dog was real friendly. It seemed to have tears in its eyes as it tried to lick me in the face. I let it.
    The man knew what he was doing. He worked fast, sticking a big needle into the wound then sewing up the big gashes in the dog's stomach and on its hip.
    "You think his back's broken?” I asked. “I mean he had to crawl, prob'ly to die. . . . Poor ole thing."
    "Most likely multiple fractures. I'll take him in for X-rays. What's your name?"
    The question caught me off guard. "Uh, Sonny. What's yours?"
    "I'm Joe. Nice to meet you, Sonny."
    "I better get going to the vet with our friend Pearl here."
    "Pearl? . . . Oh, I get it," I said, flustered that he'd made fun of my accent saying poor ole thing.
    He cradled the dog in his arms, getting its blood all over his white tennis shirt with the arrow logo on the chest. I followed him around to the street and saw his car, a brand-new looking T-Bird convertible. It was the most beautiful car I’d ever seen, solid white with slick white leather seats trimmed in red and wide white sidewalls on the tires. He started to put the dog in the passenger seat.
    "Wait a second,” I said. “Let me put some newspapers down first."
    He nodded and I spread four or five of my extra papers on the white seat. He gently put the dog down. There was no way that mutt was going to make it. It made no complaint at all and didn’t even move. I thought it was either asleep or already dead. He said, "Thanks for the help, Sonny."
    "Sure," I said and watched him drive away fast, those salved '56 cams rumbling and echoing off the asphalt.





2
    I didn't think much about the mangy dog after that or the guy that tried to save him. It had died and what benefit was there in going around thinking about dead dogs? None. It made me think about that man they lynched last summer and when the thought of death or dying came up that’s what I now always thought about. So I sure wasn’t going to mope over some dead mutt, especially when I was consumed right now with girl troubles.
    The problem was I had gone after two girls who, I quickly learned, lived on the same street, same block even, one on each corner of the north side of Calhoun Street. Vicki’s folks live in the apartments on the east end right at the city limit sign by the woods and Susie’s little house was at the other end at a four-way stop intersection where people coming could easily see someone waiting to be let in, on the porch or at the back of the house. The block wasn’t the longest in town, either, with only four houses separating Susie’s modest bungalow and Vicki’s larger apartment building. Out of all the girls at the pool I could have gone after, I had to go and pick two neighbors who were also good friends, but I couldn’t do anything about it. That was just the way it turned out.
    I’d been seeing Vicki since June third and Susie since a couple days later. I met them right after school let out and the swimming pool opened in Wells Park. It took over a month before they figured it out. That was close to three weeks ago, and the phone kept ringing till Mother finally told both of them not to call again. I heard her; she hadn’t minced her words. We shared a party line and Mother was keen on other people picking up to listen in on the smutty conversations her sons had with their girlfriends. It aggravated her something awful having to share the phone with who knows what strangers. But there was no way she could afford a private line, a widowed mother with three sons, the preacher’s secretary at the First Baptist Church of Woodstock who brought home $55 a week and nothing more, no pension or inheritance fund from our dead-and-buried father. He didn’t have a life insurance policy, no Social Security or veteran’s benefits of any kind even though Pops had been wounded in the war. At least we had a phone.
    That I had girlfriends at the same time living on the same block tells you something about me, that I'm either not too bright or just dense or even a little bit crazy, as in wanting to hurt myself, which seems like the only two choices. I think down in I must have wanted them to discover I was a two-timer just to see what would happen. The challenge of having to win back one or the other or both when they caught me could’ve been what thrilled me, not the deceit. A half-wit should have known they’d find out. But I wasn't thrilled, if that's the word, when they actually found me out.
    I tried to make up with Vicki first for reasons that are easy to understand. Vicki won the bikini contest at the county fair that spring. When I came over in the morning she would have on the very bikini she won the contest in and, seeing me coming up the walk, play peek-a-boo with the front door. We discussed what we would both wear on the phone the night before. I always had to not wear a shirt. Shoes were okay, but she didn't want me wearing underwear or a shirt, just cuffed blue denims. Vicki gave me the blue balls more than once in that pink bikini, but what I liked her in best was her mother's see-through negligee. I just didn’t like the stiff hospital bra she wore underneath it; you couldn’t even feel anything through it. Walking up to her screened door, I would catch a glimpse of her outline through the negligee, throwing her hip out or thrusting the pointy brassiere, teasing me. If it happened to be raining in the morning, I'd wait till I was on her tiny porch to take off my shirt before I rang the chimes. That porch shouldn’t even be called a porch, not even enough room for a rocking chair.
    It was always sweaty great near-sex with Vicki cause I could never consummate with her. I could not stay hard when it came time. While she writhed in bed, teasing me more, I hid behind the bedroom door trying to get the rubber on and my dick just would shrink to nothing. Panic closed all possibilities to actually get it in her, and oh I wanted to so bad. But sure enough, soon as I left her house I would get a throbbing boner and have to hurry home to do something about it before the blue balls set in. I probably should have just stopped at Susie's house; the only reason I didn't was because I knew it would be a really snaky thing to do. I still thought about it, though.
    I worked up the courage and called Vicki at nine the next morning, a crisp sunny morning that brought out the early songbirds in the lone crabapple tree outside my window. She hung up on me without a word. When I didn't call her right back the phone rang and it was her.
    "You shithead bastard," she said in a voice that wasn't loud. I felt the urge immediately. I pictured her in the negligee, screen door wide open and waiting for me, and without the nurse's prohibiting bra.
    "I'm sorry, I was going to tell you all about it yesterday. But since you found out I. . . ."
    I just couldn’t finish the sentence, it was such a crummy attempt at apologizing. I guess after her harsh words I’d started to think about Susie.
    "We're through," she said, sounding serious. "I don't want to ever see you again."
    "What did I do, Vicki?" I couldn’t help it. But I wanted Vicki to spell it out so I could see if she was mad about Susie or that I just couldn't do it with her.
    "You know what you did, Sonny. You shithead. You fartface—"
    "C'mon, Vicki. . . . I got an idea. Why don't I come over and take you to the pool? At eleven. I’ll buy you a Orange Crush, maybe some M&Ms."
    She was silent a moment, then, "What if I wanted a Milky Way? You don’t even know what I like! How are you going to take me, on your wobbly bike? Don't make me laugh."
    She hung up. And she didn't call back this time.
    Susie was rounder than Vicki but had exotic eyes and smooth, tanned skin. Her language was a lot nicer, too. I called her up but her little brother, Sir Steven, said she wouldn't talk to me and that I better never call again or she would sic Phil on me. Phil? Evidently, she already had a new boyfriend. Or maybe she had had this Phil guy for a boyfriend already, just like I had Vicki. And he was probably one of those bull-necked creeps on Lamar Junior High's wresting team. Varsity. Just my luck.
    I took Jody, our cocker, out for a ride in the basket of my bike so he wouldn’t have to run while I thought over my options. It didn't take long to realize I had no options because I no longer had either girlfriend. It left me in a state of ambivalence, as I was now free to run with my friends but I didn't want to go to the drive-in with a carload of boys on Friday night and get drunk and end up having to fight whichever Ronald Henry, or now Phil, cruised through the Hitchin Post looking for trouble. If you were with a girl you usually didn't have to fight. Fighting didn't appeal to me, it was why I didn't run in a gang, like my brother Stuart.
    The rest of the summer was a drag. The sweltering heat and humidity slowing everything down. Bugs came out that I’d never seen before, like nits and gnats and no-see-ems but bigger, almost as large as mosquitoes but you couldn’t hear them coming. Then, zap, ouch, you had another welt on your neck or leg or face or midriff if you were a girl. I slept late and ate chili beans and crackers and went to the municipal pool in the mornings and got myself a Milky Way out of the vending machine, swam a lot, then did my route in the afternoon. Neither one of my brothers got on my nerves. My little brother, Bag-a-bones, was at Boy Scout camp in New Mexico, going to Carlsbad Caverns. Which had been paid for by our church, the lucky twerp. He didn’t do anything to get sponsored; he had only joined the Scouts after Thanksgiving last year. It could have been me going if they hadn’t kicked me out of the troop, for “delinquency,” I think they called it. I didn’t protest; I hated the Scout leader anyway, a straight-laced Baptist proctor and pallbearer who didn’t even smoke. He caught me smoking in the basement hallway of the church once, where nobody ever went. The other reason Scout Master Crammer had me kicked out, though he never gave it as an official reason, was somebody unknown told him about me and Herman spying on this buxom waitress outside her bedroom window as she undressed for a shower, or got dressed after her shower. After the shower was sexier cause she was still wet and she would massage her tits drying them. And that’s why we spied on her, the tits. I hoped it wasn’t Herman who told him; that would be awful disappointing to find out.
    Anyway, Mother and Pops had named Bag-a-bones “Chance” on the certificate, but me and Stuart nicknamed him Bag-a-bones because he was a preying mantis, a grasshoppery Icabod Crane with the same long neck and eggy Adams apple, which he disgustingly bobbed from chin to collarbone when he got excited. So I only had my older brother to dodge and I was usually gone before he even got up.
    Only one good thing happened that August, that summer. On Saturday the Fifteenth, Mother and I signed the papers at 11:16 a.m. and I got my first motorbike, a Moped. It had pedals, like a bicycle, but it was no bicycle. It had power. It could climb hills.
    Mother was reluctant but it was easy enough for me to talk her into co-signing. I could tell she was trying to be positive by saying she thought I'd learn something about the value of money, which I guess I did. But that motorbike was my ticket to independence. The Moped came from Sears, Roebucks & Co. and cost $99. My payments were $12.89 a month for a year, including the insurance they made us take out. You didn’t have to have a driver’s license for a pedaled vehicle, I guess, cause they sold it to me and I never got one even though we got a tag from the state licensing bureau. If I collected every penny owed me from my customers every month, I could pocket around $46, so I had no problem paying those monthly notes—and I did and usually on time.
    My route was a two-mile haul from the newspaper plant straight uphill. The twelve hundred block of East Tenth was so steep you couldn’t pedal up it on a bicycle. Even pushing my Flyer got my thighs burning and sometimes both stomach and leg cramps set in. I especially dreaded those two miles on Thursday afternoons and Sunday mornings when a hundred papers could weigh upwards to two hundred or more pounds. I sweated a lot of dog slobber before I threw the first paper. For three years I hauled papers on the Flyer, getting up while my brothers slept on those pitch black Sunday mornings when you could see the cold wind throwing the streetlight hard against the brick apartment walls. Waking up in a rain or sometimes snow made it real hard to crawl out of the covers at three a.m. Those were miserably times. But I did it. Not like Stuart who couldn’t take the work and turned over the route to me after only a year, not even that, ten-and-a-half months.
    But on my new Moped, getting to the Star building and then to my route was fun. I could get almost forty-five miles per hour out of that baby on downward-sloped streets. Forty-five-mile-per-hour was a lot faster than I could pedal the Flyer downhill. Even when it rained I didn’t mind too much; on Sunday mornings, with all the extra weight, I cranked it to the max and got a flying start up that steep block. If the light turned red on me, I’d just go through it; the cops and nobody else were ever out that early. I pedaled in a blur to get the Moped up and over the crest. Or, if there was a reason I was delayed at the light, I could just go around that block, without having to pedal. On weekdays I sailed through the route tossing papers right and left. On the Moped, I could usually finish the whole route of over a hundred papers in eighteen to twenty minutes. Which gave me time to get back to the pool and cool off. I could have hauled Vicki over there, given her a thrill.
    The motorbike may have made my job easier and gotten me around to see my friends, but the scooter didn’t turn any girl’s eyes when I wheeled up to the pool and slowly circled the fence to see who was there. It didn’t take long for it to sink in my thick brain that the little bike was no Harley and I got zilch for respect when I had to pedal. One afternoon in late August I talked to a girlfriend of Susie’s who would still talk to me and she tried to keep a straight face asking if I wanted to race a cross-country against her brother who rode a Harley 165, and then to insult me further, “Can you make it go without pedaling off?” I burned rubber just to show her. But the stinger was in me.
    I drove up Vicki and Susie's street several times and bleated the horn the length of the block, not caring that they knew it was me, the boy with the pedal scooter. I talked myself into believing that down in they were wondering which one I was beeping at. But neither came outside when I went by.
    The rest of the summer I ran the Moped and let the wind hit my face as hard as it could. All I wanted to do was go faster, feel harder wind. I wanted a Harley. I was going into high school, I thought I deserved a Harley, even if I was destined to remain a virgin.