On the long, hot drive back from Narragansett Beach, the bickering in the back seat is intense and monotonous.
“Kenny, Dad said you have to share it,” my daughter says for the millionth time, speaking as much for my benefit as her brother’s. She knows I am staying out of it, which is, of course, unacceptable.
“Dad, he’s still not sharing it!”
“ ‘He’s still not sharing it!’ ” my son mimics his sister in a voice he knows will kick her into an even higher order of outrage. Furious, she tries again to muscle free whatever it is they are fighting over, but he’s got twenty pounds on her, so good luck with that.
My hair, ears, even my teeth are gritty with the sand that they buried me in earlier at the beach, so when I spot the coffee shop off the highway I turn into the dirt lot and park next to a pod of teenagers in swimsuits.
Inside, I head straight to the back of the store and rinse my head off under the men’s room spigot, then go find the stainless-steel carafes among a scatter of stirrer sticks and hand-lettered placards saying Sumatran and Free Trade and Cold Brew Whatever. The smells are rich and it is tempting to linger here in the air conditioning and let the brat pack in the car tire themselves out, but their mother wants them back by five, so I grab lemonades for them, fill my coffee cup, and wait in line for the cashier to ring me up.
The guy at the register has an aging hippie look – tie-dyed shirt and silver hair gathered back in a ragged ponytail – but it’s his eyes that catch me – deep-set, alert, metallic – and suddenly the years fall away and I know it’s him. The bitterness and shame that flavored the ending of our friendship all those years ago – suddenly I can almost taste it. Something in my stomach flips over and for a minute I want to ditch everything and flee. I’m not so much afraid of him as afraid for him, like you might feel watching someone’s child approach the edge of some precipice. But I really want the coffee, so fuck it, I cradle my phone in my hand, stare down at it, and pretend he can’t see me.
We just called him Lebeau – it was his last name, we assumed, but in that neighborhood and on those streets that type of question rarely came up. Kids just had the names they had. Even the poindexters among us could never have translated the surname, but if they had, it would have been the source of even more ridicule. With wispy strands of hair covering an outsized brainpan that made his head resemble a lightbulb with a comb-over, Lebeau could be picked out in a crowd at great distances. He was anything but “beautiful.”
It would be wrong to take from this that Lebeau’s ugliness subjected him to inordinately cruel treatment among our group of free-range juvenile delinquents. Any shortcoming in any one of us was fair game, and the surest way to earn even more abuse was to defend yourself against an insult. We learned early the art of playing along and, better yet, deflecting. Lebeau, for one, would occasionally attribute his odd appearance to his mother’s having dropped him as an infant, causing a stone to enter his skull and thus enlarge it to its grotesque dimensions. The logic of these self-deprecations was less important than the willingness to myth-build at one’s own expense.
This particular day must have been in summer. In the mind’s eye it has the feeling of spaciousness that took over our lives each June when teachers reclaimed our textbooks and sent us packing. Here are the things our gang of four – myself, Lebeau, Earl, and Henry – did each summer: digging up slugs from the muck out back of a neighbor’s garage; buying bottle rockets that the Venturini brothers peddled from their car trunk and firing them off at each other; playing rundown at Bean Hill, with chunks of cement serving as bases; smashing bees with said cement; doing cannonballs off the high board at Fairlawn pool — and, during this particular summer, squirreling into the basements of condemned houses.
The two-block area north of Sisson Street had been cleared of its residents over the previous year for what the city called Urban Renewal, leaving it populated only by the derelict shells of 12 three-story tenement buildings. This, our parents told us, was where our new school would be erected over the next year and a half. The debris-strewn expanse resembled a war zone. Half of the structures had already been leveled, their remains trucked away or bulldozed.
On rainy days especially, our routine that summer included forays into the few houses yet to be razed. The buildings’ first-floor entry points — doors and windows — had all been securely boarded up, but their tiny basement window frames had inexplicably received less scrupulous treatment from the city’s demolition crews; the thin sheets of plywood covering them were easily jimmied. To avoid the prying eyes of adults, we entered these houses from the rear, sliding like soldiers through paint-chip litter to drop into the dark, musty cavities.
We assembled that afternoon at our chosen building, crouching out of sight of sidewalks and streets, each of us wearing long pants and tattered long-sleeved shirts that we’d snagged from the rag bins at our homes. We were a practiced bunch by then: Earl’s old man had administered some hard learning on him after he came home one afternoon smudged from head to toe like some coal miner.
On this day Lebeau was the last to enter. We watched from the darkened basement as his legs dangled over the open maw of an old top-loading washing machine, and Henry remarked with a snicker that these window frames were not constructed to accommodate such prodigious skulls as Lebeau’s.
“Never in doubt,” Lebeau said, ignoring our laughter and dusting the cobwebs from his clothes. “Crammed your Fat Albert ass through, didn’t you?”
Henry wasn’t actually fat but his brother was, and in our families the custom of wearing your older siblings’ hand-me-downs was a given. For Henry this meant shirts that billowed and pants that bulged – and wisecracks from his pals.
It took some minutes for our eyes to adjust to the subterranean dark, which was interrupted only by the light from the window we’d entered, and to a lesser degree from the other portals high up on the basement walls, where faint etchings of daylight seeped through the edges of the nailed-up plywood. The air in these places had a viscous quality that you could taste as much as smell, and they were eerily quiet despite the faintest rumblings of dump trucks and other traffic outside.
Like all children, we were always, everywhere, alert to the possibility of mislaid treasure – on sidewalks, behind seat cushions, in the coin-returns of vending machines. And we knew from earlier investigations that of all the things that families took with them when relocating, what they’d stored in their basements was often an afterthought for them, and so our first few minutes in these dusty cellars were rich with anticipated discovery. Rarely did we find money, but there was much that we valued even more than cash. Things concealed and forgotten held a transcendent appeal.
Henry began his explorations by feeling his way toward a huge oak wardrobe and tugging open a door. Inside, shadows obscured everything, but from its top shelf came a faint, slithering rustle. A pair of beveled claws and a thin, furry muzzle launched itself upon him, and Henry stumbled backward, panicked.
He got up slowly, peeling the creature from his lap. “Aw, hell.”
It was someone’s ratty old fox stole. Earl’s grandmother had worn one just like it, we remembered, draping it from her shoulders like a carcass she’d bagged on a hunting expedition. Embarrassed at his momentary alarm, Henry grabbed the nape of the stole and charged each of us in turn, menacing us, thrusting its dark-eyed mask into our throats.
Against a far wall stood a workbench, littered with curled-up scraps of sandpaper, rusted tins of linseed oil and turpentine, and a few tools. Small condiment jars, their metal lids nailed into the bottom of a shelf, displayed shiny tangles of screws and nails as if they were specimens.
Such utilitarian clutter was beneath us, but our attention was piqued by a wooden crate on the floor, inside of which nestled layers of well-thumbed magazines. We dragged the box over to the dimly lit space beneath the window we’d entered. Among the Popular Mechanics and National Geographics was a Playboy magazine.
Our hands struck like cobras for this prize. Earl was quickest – always was, I recall – and he hugged the magazine to his chest.
“Give it here!”
“Like hell.” Earl folded himself inward like a fullback determined not to cough up the football. “Back off and I’ll show it.”
When we relented, he lowered the washing machine’s top door and spread the magazine out as if on a lectern. We hovered at his shoulders as he turned the pages quietly at a measured pace. After 10 minutes an inventory was complete, and like privateers parceling out freshly minted pieces of eight, we divvied up the booty: photo spreads first, then the stylized Vargas drawings of negligeed women, creatures almost spritelike in their allure, even more mesmerizing than the actual models. There was a modest street value in our neighborhood for such images, and so after each of us had selected the glossy pages we most desired, we tore them out with exacting precision and pocketed the folded sheets.
This painstaking distribution of spoils was our rule, rigidly enforced: What one of us found, all of us shared. This code came from a book he’d read about pirates, Henry had explained to us very early on in our adventures, and was inviolable.
With the magazine’s cannibalization complete, we returned to our scavenging. The Sisson Street basements were like our own: Half of each sprawling cellar space was walled off into two or three smaller sections, thus allowing each tenant to lock up their more valuable goods. The four of us made it a practice to save these inner sanctums for last. Our most celebrated coups came from them.
On this day, one of these compartments had been cleaned out; only a pile of desiccated newspapers and dusty pieces of lumber remained. The second, however, was protected by a formidable padlock, hooked into a solid hasp that bound door to wall.
We scoured the basement for something strong enough to break the lock. Eventually, Earl and Henry stumbled forward as one, straining under the weight of a cinder block that they held from opposite ends. It might have done the trick but the lock was at head level, too high for us to strike downward with enough force to separate the lock’s shank from its ribbed casing.
The two of them finally resorted to swinging the cinder block back and forth, counting to three, Stooges-style, for maximum effect, and then launching it toward the hasp. All they succeeded in doing was gouging knee-high dents in the wall and in the doors’ dark planking.
When they’d tired of their repeated assaults, Lebeau walked over, sat on the cinder block, and with exaggerated drama held up a Phillips head screwdriver he’d found on the workbench. He swung it from side to side like a pendulum and aimed that steely gaze at each of us in turn, waiting for our understanding.
“Yeah. That’s right,” he said, nodding his light-bulb dome when our eyes at last lit up. He stood and went to work on one of the four screws holding the hasp to the wall. He leaned into his work, straining and swearing, until the screw gave up its grip, twist by twist, and he could use his fingers for the final counterclockwise twirls. Turning back to us, he dangled the screwdriver once more.
Again, Earl was the first to snatch it. He labored on a second screw, and within minutes we had all joined in springing the door open.
“You’re welcome,” Lebeau said.
Inside, the long room was even darker than the chamber we’d explored earlier. A smell of mothballs was the first impression we registered, perhaps a sign that the room would be less fruitful than we’d hoped, being full of little more than old clothes. But soon we could see more clearly; towers of boxes rose before us, some so high that, with a little rearranging, they could have formed the walls of a maze.
We fanned out and began digging, like teenagers in a vintage record shop, calling out our finds to each other across the stacks.
Most of what we uncovered was the dull stuff of grown-up life. But there was real treasure too: shoeboxes full of baseball cards; a Davy Crockett coonskin cap; pileups of die-cast metal Hot Wheels cars; Marvel comic books going back years; sleeved 45s with plastic adapters in their center holes; platoons of little olive-green soldiers standing on little olive-green islands in various postures of battle.
We heaped these and much more into the trash bags we’d brought with us. Some of the loot we would keep, shared out carefully, of course; other items could be converted into cash or candy. The coonskin cap, for example, would be sold and the money it netted divided among us.
At some point we became aware that Lebeau’s contributions to our chatter had dropped off to an occasional “uh huh” or some other distracted grunt. Henry signaled to each of us, and we crept close to our silent partner.
His back was to us, blocking our view, but he seemed to be nestling something lustrous in his hand.
“What you got, Lebeau?” Henry gave his shoulder a push, which made Lebeau’s hand close instantly, like a sea anemone curling up when you tap on the aquarium glass.
“Nothing.” He turned toward us but kept his clenched fist behind him.
This was the wrong move, like running away when a dog comes at you barking.
“Yeah, right,” Earl snorted. He made a quick stab downward, but Lebeau twisted away, shielding himself with a forearm.
This resistance to our code was unprecedented, and we immediately swarmed Lebeau, tackling him and toppling first one stack of boxes, then all of them in that dark corner of the basement.
We scuffled for many minutes, our arms darting indiscriminately at any flailing limb we sensed in the dim shadows, determined to force it to yield its secret. Earl caught a fingernail to the eye and Henry an elbow to the throat, but the ferocity of our struggle continued amid a shifting jumble of old photo albums and Christmas ornaments and moldering paperbacks. Eventually one of us forced Lebeau’s arm behind his back in what had to be an excruciatingly painful position, and another slid the side of Lebeau’s face against the rough concrete floor like a carpenter using a plane.
Still, Lebeau twisted and punched and kicked like some condemned prisoner. Finally, unobserved by the others, I pried loose his glossy prize, and in the shadows I examined what turned out to be the most pedestrian – and useless – of treasures. My older sister had a drawerful. I stared at it blankly, then looked at Lebeau, puzzled at his violent struggle for this trifle.
At last, the others ended their assault, defeated, at least for the moment. Lebeau’s face was bloodied and tear-streaked when he rose, panting, leaning against the cement wall and glaring at each of us, perhaps wondering which of his friends now held his secret and at the same time unwilling to brave our certain ridicule. Abruptly, he lurched past us and stalked back to the room we’d first entered, climbed atop the washing machine, and launched himself back into the outside world.
As we watched from the floor below, I called for him to wait. Jumping up on the washing machine, I held my hand out in the daylight. He took back the shiny tube of lipstick without a word, and he was gone.
When I climbed down, the others surrounded me, pumping me for what I had passed to him.
“His house key; it fell from his pocket.” They seemed to accept this. Later, I wondered why I had lied: Was it to protect Lebeau? Myself? But from what, I couldn’t say.
The next day, when we gathered at our usual place to divvy up our loot, Lebeau didn’t show up. We weren’t surprised, really; our faces the day before, eyes averted from each others’, had shown that we were all shaken at what we had done.
Lebeau’s family moved away that fall. He never walked the shiny new classrooms built a few feet above the underworld we had explored the year before, and I never told Henry and Earl what it was that Lebeau had fought so fiercely to keep for himself.
When I step up to the cash register, the guy there sees my damp suit and my flip-flops and he ventures a “How was the beach today?”
I put down the lemonades and my coffee cup and try to detect recognition in his eyes. If he is to remember me, I think, it will be now, as I study his face. I am surprised to see that the adult Lebeau displays none of the deformity that we all saw in him as a boy. He is, I’m pretty sure, what my ex would consider a handsome man. Neither do I detect anything “queer” about him. For all the assumptions that I made that day upon learning what the boy had guarded so closely – assumptions about sex and boys and girls and what each liked and did and wanted – nothing about the man bears them out. For a minute, I wonder if it is really him.
“Beach was great,’’ I say. “Good body-surfing.”
I push my credit card toward him, and Lebeau slides it through the register’s scanner and glances at the name embossed on the plastic.
He looks at me, his brow knit, like he’s doing some complicated math in his head. Finally, I say, “Yeah. That’s right.”
“Son of a gun,” he says and launches into a detailed exposition of our varied adventures from decades ago. Lebeau’s memory is much sharper than mine; I don’t recall half of what he relates in an excited narrative. He is like a superfan recounting the plot of his favorite cult movie. Details about each one of us are recalled with embarrassing exactitude and zeal. When he asks about Henry and Earl, I update him as best I can and he nods with a knowing sense of I-could-have-predicted-that. I keep waiting for him to tear me a new one over that day in the basement, but nothing in Lebeau’s face suggests he has the faintest recollection of the dismaying conclusion of our friendship.
Other customers begin to line up at his register. I step aside and we begin the halting dance of goodbyes and promises to call and maybe even reunite the gang – vows even more illusory than the memories we have kindled. More than anything, I want to ask about what I stole from him that day and later returned, but instead I hold out my cup to him in a silent toast.
Outside, the cool caress of the shop’s AC instantly fades; it is as if I have emerged from that dank basement years ago into summer again. In the car, I toss the bottles of lemonade into the back seat. The kids are still at it.
“Dad, he keeps sticking his big foot over onto my side. Tell him to stop.”
“No, it’s you with your elbow. See, this is the line, right here: my side, your side.”
They demand that I arbitrate their grievance. As I sip my coffee and watch Lebeau ring up customers, each presents their side. They’re funny, these kids, when they fight. It’s amusing, really, to hear how their stories differ, how sure they are of what happened when, how hard it is to determine which is truthful and which is a brilliant fiction.
David Desjardins is a writer with roots in Rhode Island, having worked at The Boston Globe, The Providence Journal, and other newspapers. His short stories have been published in Ruminate, Pangyrus, The Westchester Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Arlington, Mass. with his wife.