She lived just a few blocks east. Just down the road. She had questionable teeth but she was always in a good mood.  She was attractive. Fun.  I wasn’t used to my affections being paid any attention.  The first independent woman I ever met.

I was twelve.

I ended up at her place one day. There was a boarded up window at the front of the trailer and some huge vented machine on the roof sounding like it was drilling everything apart. It was quiet inside though, and dark.  Red sheets instead of curtains. The school bus driver’s son was there on the couch with a buxom red freckled girl named Belinda.  Turquoise eye shadow.  His name was actually Johnny. Skinny and hollow eyed. He was greasy and stank like a man in his tank top and bell bottoms.  Trying to get Belinda to make out with him.

The dead of summer.

The rare humid day in the high desert with a dark sky and the smell of rain whenever the breeze stirred. I remember a mere dozen days like it because of their peculiar jaundice and because they barely ever happened.

Her name was Donna Stevens. She seemed okay with me being there. It was morning because children were eating toast and cereal. There was chaos and confusion. Just a few streets down from where I lived the world was entirely different. They didn’t have a yard at all. It was all dirt and the discarded.  Cardboard and crates and mechanical parts. Identical plastic step stools to the front and back doors. Little kids running around yelling at pretending. People having nothing to do with anything walking through to the next street.

Donna’s older brother was Daryl Stevens. Friendly enough. I’d met him before on the bus. They were from Detroit. He wore a tight thermal shirt and a silver chain with tooth swinging from it. On his left fist he wore a giant steel ring that made me think of a piston. Muscular and quiet. He brooded and smiled. He rubbed his hands together a lot like it was cold. Like it was Detroit. I had no reason to be afraid of him but I was. He was coiled and you could see the mean in the way his jaw rippled.

We decided on the high school that day. A picnic. We had a bag of chips and a big bottle of soda. I’d never been there before but I watched it go by everyday from the bus. I don’t remember getting there that day. Three or four miles on the way into town on our bikes.

We broke into the cafeteria first. They had piled gym mats between the lunch tables for the off season. We fell on the mats from atop everything available. Inside a huge modern structure. There were murals and bridges. We broke into the auto shop next. It smelled familiar. We had contempt for the people who would be there during any other season somehow.

We vandalized.

We celebrated with barbecue chips and orange soda.

Outside it was darker, hotter and heavier.

There was a huge field in front with a track around it.

There was this guy named Shawn Hudson. A pole vaulter. He and his dad were working out that day. We were bouncing around on his landing mat in the middle of the field. They showed up fast from wherever they’d been. I don’t remember if this guy was olympic material at the time but if you lived in Carson City you knew his name. All sinew and formidable.  An angry nervous horse.

We were punks and they were up to serious business. I figured they were pretty much right about that after what we’d been up to. They got mean pretty fast though. His dad threatened us and taunted his son to fight, to kick our asses. He was hysterical. Adamant. Indignant. Resolute. Justified.  We started to panic but Daryl Stevens watched it come. Like he’d been waiting all day for this exact thing and was now able to relax because the time for it had finally arrived.

He was still. Waiting for it to start. Nothing about his outside changed at all.

It was the first time I ever witnessed two males not afraid of each other.

It scared the fuck out of me.

Because I understood that the pole vaulter was afraid. He didn’t want this but it was impossible for him. His dad. Right there. Punks on his equipment. His father beside himself.

I was afraid for him.

Once it started it kept speeding up.

Before I knew it they were swinging on each other.

The pole vaulter from Carson City had run into a saw he couldn’t have imagined when he woke up that day. Daryl hit him maybe three times before anything else was possible. The sound of those blows caused me a languid trauma that I just can’t describe any better. I could have pissed myself but I didn’t. My brain temporarily suspended sensation. My mouth tasted like a nine volt battery.

I heard the pole vaulter bounce off the mat and saw blood where his right eye should have been. It gushed down his face and he screamed he would kill us all. He was half blind and in shock. Stumbling and tilting.  His cheek caved in. The worst thing I’d ever seen. Before anything else, the father understood his son needed to be in a hospital.

The rain was hot and plump but only sparse enough to stir the desert dust like talc on the way home.

I could smell the brush and the animals.

It finally rained hard that night.

It flooded the next day.

I don’t remember what happened to any them.

Drinks for my friends.

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