THERE ARE THOSE DAYS WHICH SEEM A TAKING in of breath which, held, suspends the whole earth in its waiting. Some summers refuse to end.
So along the road those flowers spread that, when touched, give down a shower of autumn rust. By every path it looks as if a ruined circus had passed and loosed a trail of ancient iron at every turning of a wheel. The rust was laid out everywhere, strewn under trees and by riverbanks and near the tracks themselves where once a locomotive had gone but went no more. So flowered flakes and railroad track together turned to moulderings upon the rim of autumn.
"Look, Doug," said Grandpa, driving into town from the farm. Behind them in the Kissel Kar were six large pumpkins picked fresh from the patch. "See those flowers?"
"Yes, sir."
"Farewell summer, Doug. That's the name of those flowers. Feel the air? August come back. Farewell Summer.”
"Boy," said Doug, "that's a sad name."
Grandma stepped into her pantry and felt the wind blowing from the west. The yeast was rising in the bowl, a sumptuous head, the head of an alien rising from the yield of other years. She touched the swell beneath the muslin cap. It was the earth on the morn before the arrival of Adam. It was the morn after the marriage of Eve to that stranger in the garden bed.
Grandma looked out the window at the way the sunlight lay across the yard and filled the apple trees with gold and echoed the same words:
"Farewell summer. Here it is, October 1st. Temperature’s 82 Season just can’t let go. The dogs are out under the trees. The leaves won't turn. A body would like to cry and laughs instead. Get up to the attic, Doug, and let the mad maiden aunt out of the secret room.”
"Is there a mad maiden aunt in the attic?" asked
"No, but there should be."
Clouds passed over the lawn. And when the sun came out, in the pantry, Grandma almost whispered, Summer, farewell.
On the front porch, Doug stood beside his grandfather, hoping to borrow some of that far sight, beyond the hills, some of the wanting to cry, some of the ancient joy. The smell of pipe tobacco and Tiger shaving tonic had to suffice. A top spun in his chest, now light, now dark, now moving his tongue with laughter, now filling his eyes with salt water.
He surveyed the lake of grass below, all the dandelions gone, a touch of rust in the trees, and the smell of Egypt blowing from the far east.
"Think I'll go eat me a doughnut and take me a nap," Doug said.
LAID OUT IN HIS BED AT HIS OWN HOUSE NEXT door with a powdered-sugar moustache on his upper lip, Doug contemplated sleep, which lurked around in his head and gently covered him with darkness.
A long way off, a band played a strange slow tune, full of muted brass and muffled drums.
Doug listened.
It was as if the faraway band had come out of a cave into full sunlight. Somewhere a mob of irritable blackbirds soared to become piccolos.
"A parade!" whispered Doug, and leapt out of bed, shaking away sleep and sugar.
The music got louder, slower, deeper, like an immense storm cloud full of lightning, darkening roof-
At the window, Douglas blinked.
For there on the lawn, lifting a trombone, was Charlie Woodman, his best friend at school, and Will Arno, Charlie's pal, raising a trumpet, and Mr. Wyneski, the town barber, with a boa-constrictor tuba
Doug turned and ran through the house.
He stepped out on the porch.
Down among the band stood Grandpa with a French horn, Grandma with a tambourine, his brother Tom with a kazoo.
Everyone yelled, everyone laughed.
"Hey," cried Doug. "What day is this?"
"Why," Grandma cried, "your day, Doug!"
"Fireworks tonight. The excursion boat's waiting!"
"For a picnic?"
"Trip's more like it." Mr. Wyneski crammed on his corn-flake-cereal straw hat. "Listen!"
The sound of a far boat wailed up from the lake shore.
"March!"
Grandma shook her tambourine, Tom thrummed his kazoo, and the bright mob drew Doug off along the street with a dog pack yipping at their heels. Down-town, someone threw a torn telephone book off the Green Town Hotel roof. When the confetti hit the bricks the parade was gone.
At the lake shore fog moved on the water.
Far out, he could hear a foghorn's mournful wail.
And a pure white boat loomed out of the fog and nudged the pier.
Doug stared. "How come that boat's got no name?"
The ship's whistle shrieked. The crowd swarmed, shoving Douglas to the gangplank.
"You first, Doug!"
The band dropped a ton of brass and ten pounds of chimes with "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," as they thrust him on the deck, then leapt back on the dock.
Wham!
The gangplank fell.
The people weren't trapped on land, no.
He was trapped on water.
The steamboat shrieked away from the dock. The band played "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean."
"Goodbye, Douglas," cried the town librarians.
"So long," whispered everyone.
Douglas stared around at the picnic put by in wicker hampers on the deck and remembered a museum where he had once seen an Egyptian tomb with toys and clumps of withered fruit placed around a small carved boat. It flared like a gunpowder flash.
"So long, Doug, so long…" Ladies lifted their handkerchiefs, men waved straw hats.
And soon the ship was way out in the cold water with the fog wrapping it up so the band faded.
"Brave journey, boy."
And now he knew that if he searched he would find no captain, no crew as the ship's engines pumped be-lowdecks.
Numbly, he sensed that if he reached down to touch the prow he would find the ship's name, freshly painted:
FAREWELL SUMMER.
"Doug…" the voices called. "Oh, goodbye…
And then the dock was empty, the parade gone as
the ship blew its horn a last time and broke his heart so it fell from his eyes in tears as he cried all the names of his loves on shore.
"Grandma, Grandpa, Tom, help1"
Doug fell from bed, hot, cold, and weeping.
DOUG STOPPED CRYING.
He got up and went to the mirror to see what sadness looked like and there it was, colored all through his cheeks, and he reached to touch that other face,
Next door, baking bread filled the air with its late-afternoon aroma. He ran out across the yard and into his grandma's kitchen to watch her pull the lovely guts out of a chicken and then paused at a window to see Tom far up in his favorite apple tree trying to climb the sky.
Someone stood on the front porch, smoking his favorite pipe.
"Gramps, you're here! Boy, oh boy. The house is here. The town's here!"
"It seems you're here, too, boy."
"Yeah, oh, yeah."
The trees leaned their shadows on the lawn. Somewhere, the last lawnmower of summer shaved the years and left them in sweet mounds.
Douglas closed his eyes, and in the darkness said: "Is death being on a ship sailing and all your folks left back on the shore?"
Grandpa read a few clouds in the sky.
"That's about it, Doug. Why?"
Douglas eyed a high cloud passing that had never been that shape before and would never be that shape again.
"Say what? Farewell summer?"
No, thought Douglas, not if I can help it!
And, in his head, the storm began.
THERE WAS A GREAT RUSHING SLIDING IRON sound like a guillotine blade slicing the sky. The blow fell. The town shuddered. But it was just the wind from the north.
And down in the center of the ravine, the boys listened for that great stroke of wind to come again.
They stood on the creek-bank making water in the cool sunlight and among them, preoccupied, stood Douglas. They all smiled as they spelled their names in the creek sand with the steaming lemon water.
CHARLIE, wrote one. WILL, another. And then: BO, PETE, SAM, HENRY, RALPH, and TOM.
Doug inscribed his initials with flourishes, took a deep breath, and added a postscript: WAR.
Tom squinted at the sand. "What?"
"War of course, dummy. War!"
"Who's the enemy?"
Douglas Spaulding glanced up at the green slopes above their great and secret ravine.
Instantly, like clockwork, in four ancient gray-flaked mansion houses, four old men, shaped from leaf-mold and yellowed dry wicker, showed their mummy faces from porches or in coffin-shaped windows.
"Them," whispered Doug. "Oh, them!"
Doug whirled and shrieked, "Charge!"
"Who do we kill?" said Tom.
ABOVE THE GREEN RAVINE, IN A DRY ROOM AT the top of an ancient house, old Braling leaned from a window like a thing from the attic, trembling. Below, the boys ran.
"God," he cried. "Make them stop their damned laughing.”
He clutched faintly at his chest as if he were a Swiss watchmaker concerned with keeping something running with that peculiar self-hypnosis he called prayer.
"Beat, now; one, two!"
Nights when he feared his heart might stop, he set a metronome ticking by his bed, so that his blood would continue to travel on toward dawn.
Footsteps scraped, a cane tip tapped, on the downstairs porch. That would be old Calvin C. Quarter-main come to argue school board policy in the husking wicker chairs. Braling half fell down the stairs, emerging onto the porch.
Calvin C. Quartermain sat like a wild mechanical toy, oversized, rusty, in a reed easy chair.
Braling laughed. "I made it!"
"Not forever," Chiartermain observed.
"Hell," said Braling. "Some day they'll bury you in a California dried-fruit tin. Christ, what're those idiot boys up to?"
"Horsing around. Listen!"
"Bang!"
Douglas ran by the porch.
"Get off the lawn!" cried Braling.
Doug spun and aimed his cap-pistol.
"Bang!"
Braling, with a pale, wild look, cried, "Missed!"
"Bang!" Douglas jumped up the porch steps.
He saw two panicked moons in Braling's eyes.
"Bang! Your arm!"
"Who wants an arm?" Braling snorted.
"Bang! Your heart!"
"What?"
"Heart-bang!"
"Steady… One, two!" whispered the old man.
"Bang!"
"One, two!" Braling called to his hands clutching his ribs. "Christ! Metronome!"
"What?"
"Metronome!"
"Bang! You're dead!"
"One, two!" Braling gasped.
And dropped dead.
Douglas, cap-gun in hand, slipped and fell back down the steps onto the dry grass.
THE HOURS BURNED IN COLD WHITE WINTRY flashes, as people scuttled in and out of Braling's mansion, hoping against hope that he was Lazarus.
Calvin C. Quartermain careened about Braling's porch like the captain of a wrecked ship.
"Damn! I saw the boy's gun!"
"There's no bullet-hole," said Dr. Lieber, who'd been called.
"Shot dead, he was! Dead!"
The house grew silent as the people left, bearing away the husk that had been poor Braling. Calvin C. Quartermain abandoned the porch, mouth salivating.
'Til find the killer, by God!"
Propelling himself with his cane, he turned a corner
A cry, a concussion! "No, by God, no!" He flailed at the air and fell.
Some ladies rocking on the nearest porch leaned out. "Is that old Quartermain?"
"Oh, he can't be dead, too-can he?"
Quartermain's eyelids twitched.
Far off, he saw a bike, and a boy racing away.
Assassin, he thought. Assassin!
WHEN DOUGLAS WALKED, HIS MIND RAN, WHEN he ran, his mind walked. The houses fell aside, the sky blazed.
At the rim of the ravine, he threw his cap-pistol far out over the gulf. An avalanche buried it. The
Suddenly, he needed the gun again, to touch the shape of killing, like touching that wild old man.
Launching himself down the side of the ravine, Doug scrambled among the weeds, eyes wet, until he found the weapon. It smelled of gunpowder, fire, and
"Bang," he whispered, and climbed up to find his bike abandoned across the street from where old Bral-ing had been killed. He led the bike away like a blind beast and at last got on and wobbled around the block, back toward the scene of awful death.
Turning a corner, he heard "No!" as his bike hit a nightmare scarecrow that was flung to the ground as he pumped off, wailing, staring back at one more murder strewn on the walk. Someone cried, "Is that old Quarter-main?!"
"Can't be," Douglas moaned.
Braling fell, Quartermain fell. Up, down, up, down, two thin hatchets sunk in hard porch and sidewalk, frozen, never to rise.
Doug churned his bike through town. No mobs rushed after him.
It seemed the town did not even know that someone had been shot, another struck. The town poured tea and murmured, "Pass the sugar."
Doug slam-braked at his front porch. Was his mother waiting in tears, his father wielding the razor strop…?
He opened the kitchen door. "Hey. Long time no see." Mother kissed his brow. "They always come home when they're hungry."
"Funny," said Doug. "I'm not hungry at all."
AT DINNER, THE FAMILY HEARD PEBBLES PINGING against the front door.
"Why," said Mother, "don't boys ever use the bell?"
"In the last two hundred years," said Father, "there is no recorded case in which any boy under fifteen ever got within ten feet of a doorbell. You finished, young man?"
"Finished, sir!"
Douglas hit the front door like a bomb, skidded, jumped back in time to catch the screen before it
slammed. Then he was off the porch and there was Charlie Woodman on the lawn, punching him great friendly punches.
"Doug! You did it! You shot Braling! Boy!"
"Not so loud, Charlie!"
"When do we shoot everyone on the school board? For gosh sakes, they started school a week early this year! They deserve to be shot. My gosh, how'd you do it, Doug?"
"I said, 'Bang! You're dead!'"
"And Quartermain?!"
"You broke his leg! Sure was your busy day, Doug!"
"/ didn't break no leg. My bike.. ."
"No, a machinel I heard old Cal screaming when they lugged him home. 'Infernal machine!' What kind of infernal machine, Doug?"
Somewhere in a corner of his mind, Doug saw the bike fling Quartermain high, wheels spinning, while Douglas fled, the cry of Quartermain following close.
"Doug, why didn't you crack both his legs with your infernal machine?"
"What?"
"When do we see your device, Doug? Can you set it for the Death of a Thousand Slices?"
Doug examined Charlie's face, to see if he was joking, but Charlie's face was a pure church altar alive with holy light.
"Doug," he murmured. "Doug, boy, oh boy." "Sure," said Douglas, warming to the altar glow. "Him against me, me against Quartermain and the whole darn school board, the town council-Mr. Bleak, Mr. Gray, all those dumb old men that live at the edge of the ravine."
"Can I watch you pick 'em off, Doug?"
"What? Sure. But we got to plan, got to have an
"Tonight, Doug?"
"No, tonight! Do or die. You be captain."
"Sure, sure. I'll get the others. So they can hear it from the horse's mouth! Meet at the ravine bridge, eight o'clock! Boy!"
"Don't yell in the windows at those guys," said Doug. "Leave secret notes on their porches. That's an
"Yeah!"
Charlie sped off, yelling. Douglas felt his heart drown in a fresh new summer. He felt the power growing in his head and arms and fists. All this in a day! From plain old C-minus student to full general!
Now, whose legs should be cracked next? Whose metronome stopped? He sucked in a trembling breath.
All the fiery-pink windows of the dying day shone upon this arch-criminal who walked in their brilliant gaze, half smile-scowling toward destiny, toward eight o'clock, toward the camptown gathering of the great Green Town Confederacy and everyone sitting by firelight singing, "Tenting tonight, tenting tonight, tenting on the old camp grounds…"
We’ll sing thatone, he thought, three times.
UP IN THE ATTIC, DOUG AND TOM SET UP HEAD-quarters. A turned-over box became the general's desk; his aide-de-camp stood by, awaiting orders.
"Get out your pad, Tom."
"It's out."
"Ticonderoga pencil?"
"Ready."
"I got a list, Tom, for the Great Army of the Republic. Write this down. There's Will and Sam and Charlie and Bo and Pete and Henry and Ralph. Oh, and you, Tom."
"How do we use the list, Doug?"
"We gotta find things for them to do. Time's running out. Right now we've gotta figure how many captains, how many lieutenants. One general. That's
"Make it good, Doug. Keep 'em busy." "First three names, captains. The next three, lieutenants. Everybody else, spies."
"Spies, Doug?"
"I think that's the greatest thing. Guys like to creep around, watch things, and then come back and tell."
"Heck, I want to be one of those."
"Hold on. We'll make them all captains and lieutenants, make everyone happy, or we'll lose the war before it gets started. Some will do double-duty as spies."
"Okay, Doug, here's the list."
Doug scanned it. "Now we gotta figure the first sockdolager thing to do."
"Get the spies to tell you."
"Okay, Tom. But you're the most important spy. After the ravine meeting tonight…" Tom frowned, shook his head. "What?"
"Heck, Doug, the ravine's nice but I know a better place. The graveyard. The sun'll be gone. It'll remind 'em if they're not careful, that's where we'll all wind up."
"Good thinking, Tom."
"Well, I'm gonna go spy and round up the guys.
First the bridge, then the graveyard, yup?" "Tom, you're really somethin'." "Always was," said Tom. "Always was." He jammed his pencil in his shirt pocket, stashed his nickel tablet in the waistband of his dungarees, and saluted his commander.
And Tom ran.
THE GREEN ACREAGE OF THE OLD CEMETERY WAS filled with stones and names on stones. Not only the names of the people earthed over with sod and flowers, but the names of seasons. Spring rain had written soft, unseen messages here. Summer sun had bleached granite. Autumn wind had softened the lettering. And snow had laid its cold hand on winter marble. But now what the seasons had to say was only a cool whisper in the trembling shade, the message of names: "TYSON! BOWMAN! STEVENS!"
Douglas leap-frogged TYSON, danced on BOWMAN, and circled STEVENS.
The graveyard was cool with old deaths, old stones grown in far Italian mountains to be shipped here to this green tunnel, under skies too bright in summer, too sad in winter.
Douglas stared. The entire territory swarmed with ancient terrors and dooms. The Great Army stood around him and he looked to see if the invisible webbed wings in the rushing air ran lost in the high elms and maples. And did they feel all that? Did they hear the autumn chestnuts raining in cat-soft thump-ings on the mellow earth? But now all was the fixed blue lost twilight which sparked each stone with light specules where fresh yellow butterflies had once rested to dry their wings and now were gone.
Douglas led his suddenly disquieted mob into a further land of stillness and made them tie a bandanna over his eyes; his mouth, isolated, smiled all to
Groping, he laid hands on a tombstone and played it like a harp, whispering.
"Jonathan Silks. 1920. Gunshot." Another: "Will Colby. 1921. Flu."
He turned blindly to touch deep-cut green moss names and rainy years, and old games played on lost Memorial Days while his aunts watered the grass with
He named a thousand names, fixed ten thousand flowers, flashed ten million spades. "Pneumonia, gout, dyspepsia, TB. All of 'em taught," said Doug. "Taught to learn how to die. Pretty dumb lying here, doing nothing, yup?"
"Hey Doug," Charlie said, uneasily. "We met here to plan our army, not talk about dying. There's a billion years between now and Christmas. With all that time to fill, I got no time to die. I woke this morning and said to myself, 'Charlie, this is swell, living. Keep
"Charlie, that's how they want you to talk!"
"Am I wrinkly, Doug, and dog-pee yellow? Am I fourteen, Doug, or fifteen or twenty? Am I?"
"Charlie, you'll spoil everything!"
"I'm just not worried." Charlie beamed. "I figure everyone dies, but when it's my turn, I'll just say no thanks. Bo, you goin' to die someday? Pete?"
"Not me!"
"Me either!"
"See?" Charlie turned to Doug. "Nobody's dyin' like flies. Right now we'll just lie like hound-dogs in the shade. Cool off, Doug."
Douglas's hands fisted in his pockets, clutching dust, marbles, and a piece of white chalk. At any moment Charlie would run, the gang with him, yapping like dogs, to flop in deep grape-arbor twilight, not even swatting flies, eyes shut.
Douglas swiftly chalked their names, CHARLIE, TOM, PETE, BO, WILL, SAM, HENRY, AND RALPH, on the gravestones, then jumped back to let them spy themselves, so much chalk-dust on marble, flaking, as time blew by in the trees.
The boys stared for a long, long time, silent, their eyes moving over the strange shapes of chalk on the cold stone. Then, at last, there was the faintest exhalation of a whisper.
"Ain't going to die!" cried Will. "I'll fight!"
"Skeletons don't fight," said Douglas.
"No, sir!" Will lunged at the stone, erasing the chalk, tears springing to his eyes.
The other boys stood, frozen.
"Sure," Douglas said. "They'll teach us at school, say, here's your heart, the thing you get attacks with!
Show you bugs you can't see! Teach you to jump off buildings, stab people, fall and not move."
"No, sir," Sam gasped.
The great meadow of graveyard rippled under the last fingers of fading sunlight. Moths fluttered around them, and the sound of a graveyard creek ran over all their cold moonlit thoughts and gaspings as Douglas quietly finished: "Sure, none of us wants to just lie here and never play kick-the-can again. You want all
"Heck no, Doug…"
"Then we stop it! We find out how our folks make us grow, teach us to lie, cheat, steal. War? Great! Murder? Swell! We'll never be so well off as we are right now! Grow up and you turn into burglars and get shot, or worse, they make you wear a coat and tie and stash you in the First National Bank behind brass bars! We gotta stand still! Stay the age we are. Grow up? Hah! All you do then is marry someone who screams at you! Well, do we fight back? Will you let me tell you how to
"Gosh," said Charlie. "Yeah!"
"Then," said Doug, "talk to your body: Bones, not one more inch! Statues! Don't forget, Quartermain owns this graveyard. He makes money if we lie here, you and you and you! But we'll show him. And all those old men who own the town! Halloween's almost here and before then we got to sour their grapes! You wanna look like them? You know how they got that way? Well, they were all young once, but somewhere along the way, oh gosh, when they were thirty or forty or fifty, they chewed tobacco and phlegm-hocked up on themselves and that phlegm-hock turned all gummy and sticky and then the next thing you know there was spittle all over them and they began to look like, you know, you've seen, caterpillars turned into chrysalis, their darned skin hardened, and the young guys turned old, got trapped inside their shells, by God. Then they began to look like all those old guys. So, what you have is old men with young guys trapped inside them. Some year soon, maybe, their skin will crack and the old men will let the old young men out. But they won't be young anymore, they'll be a bunch of death's-head moths or, come to think of it, I think the old men are going to keep the young men inside them forever, so they're trapped in all that glue, always hoping to get free. It's pretty bad, isn't it? Pretty bad."
"Is that it, Doug?" said Tom.
"Yeah," said Pete. "You sure you know what you're talking about?"
"What Pete is trying to say is that we gotta know with precision, we gotta know what's accurate," said Bo.
"I'll say it again," said Doug. "You listen close. Tom, you taking this down?"
"Yup," said Tom, his pencil poised over his notepad. "Shoot."
They stood in the darkening shadows, in the smell of grass and leaves and old roses and cold stone and raised their heads, sniffling, and wiped their cheeks on their shirtsleeves.
"Okay, then," said Doug. "Let's go over it again. It's not enough just seeing these graves. We've got to sneak under open windows, listen, discover what those old geezers are sick with. Tom, go get the pumpkins out of Grandma's pantry. We're gonna have a contest, see which of us can carve the scariest pumpkin. One to look like old man Qjiartermain, one like Bleak, one like Gray. Light them up and put them out. Later tonight we start our first attack with the carved pumpkins. Okay?"
"Okay!" everyone shouted.
They leapt over WHYTE, WILLIAMS, and NEBB, jumped and vaulted SAMUELS and KELLER, screamed the iron gate wide, leaving the cold land behind them, lost sunlight, and the creek running forever below the hill. A host of gray moths followed them as far as the gate where Tom braked and stared at his brother accusingly.
"Doug, about those pumpkins. Gosh almighty, you're nuts!"
"What?" Doug stopped and turned back as the
"It ain't enough. I mean, look what you've done. You've pushed the fellas too far, got 'em scared. Keep on with this sort of talk you're going to lose your army. You've got to do something that will put everything back together again. Find something for us to do or else everyone will go home and stay there, or go lie down with the dogs and sleep it off. Think of something, Doug. It's important."
Doug put his hands on his hips and stared at Tom. "Why do I got this feeling you're the general and I'm just a buck private?"
"WTiat do you mean, Doug?"
"I mean here I am, almost fourteen, and you're twelve going on a hundred and ordering me around and telling me what to do. Are things so bad?"
"Bad, Doug? They're terrible. Look at all those guys running away. You better catch up and think of something between here and the middle of town. Re-carving jack-o'-lanterns. Think, Doug, think."
"I'm thinking," said Doug, eyes shut.
"Well then, get going! Run, Doug, I'll catch up."
And Doug ran on.
ON THE WAY INTO TOWN, ON A STREET NEAR THE school stood the nickel emporium where all the sweet poisons hid in luscious traps.
Doug stopped, stared, and waited for Tom to catch up and then yelled, "Okay, gang, this way. In!"
Around him all the boys came to a halt because he said the name of the shop, which was pure magic.
Doug beckoned and they all gathered and followed, orderly, like a good army, into the shop.
Tom came last, smiling at Doug as if he knew something that nobody else knew.
Inside, honey lay sheathed in warm African chocolate. Plunged and captured in the amber treasure lay fresh Brazil nuts, almonds, and glazed clusters of snowy coconut. June butter and August wheat were clothed in dark sugars. All were crinkled in folded tin foil, then wrapped in red and blue papers that told the weight, ingredients, and manufacturer. In bright bouquets the candies lay, caramels to glue the teeth, licorice to blacken the heart, chewy wax bottles filled with sickening mint and strawberry sap, Tootsie Rolls to hold like cigars, red-tipped chalk-mint cigarettes for chill mornings when your breath smoked on the air.
The boys, in the middle of the shop, saw diamonds to crunch, fabulous liquors to swig. Persimmon-colored pop bottles swam, clinking softly, in the Nile waters of the refrigerated box, its water cold enough to cut your skin. Above, on glass shelves, lay cordwood piles of gingersnaps, macaroons, chocolate bits, vanilla wafers shaped like moons, and marshmallow dips, white surprises under black masquerades. All of this to coat the tongue, plaster the palate.
Doug pulled some nickels from his pocket and nodded at the boys.
One by one they chose from the sweet treasure, noses pressed against glass, breath misting the crystal vault.
Moments later, down the middle of the street they ran and soon stood on the edge of the ravine with the pop and candy.
Once they were all assembled, Doug nodded again and they started the trek down into the ravine. Above them, on the other side, stood the looming homes of the old men, casting dark shadows into the bright day. And above those, Doug saw, as he shielded his eyes, was the hulking carapace of the haunted house.
"I brought you here on purpose," said Doug.
Tom winked at him as he flipped the lid off his pop.
"You must learn to resist, so you can fight the good fight. Now," he cried, holding his bottle out. "Don't look so surprised. Pour!"
"My gosh!" Charlie Woodman slapped his brow. "That's good root beer, Doug. Mine's good Orange Crush!"
Doug turned his bottle upside down. The root beer froth hissed out to join the clear stream rushing away to the lake. The others stared, the spectacle mirrored in each pair of eyes.
"You want to sweat Orange Crush?" Douglas grabbed Charlie's drink. "You want root beer spit, to be poisoned forever, to never get well? Once you're tall, you can't un-grow back, can't stab yourself with a pin and let the air out."
Solemnly, the martyrs tilted their bottles.
"Lucky crawfish." Charlie Woodman slung his bottle at a rock. They all threw their bottles, like Germans after a toast, the glass crashing in bright splin-
They unwrapped the melting chocolate and butter chip and almond frivolities. Their teeth parted, their mouths watered. But their eyes looked to their general.
"I solemnly pledge from now on: no candy, no pop, no poison."
Douglas let his chocolate chunk drop like a corpse into the water, like a burial at sea.
Douglas wouldn't even let them lick their fingers.
Walking out of the ravine, they met a girl eating a vanilla ice cream cone. The boys stared, their tongues lolling. She took a cold dollop with her tongue. The boys blinked. She licked the cone and smiled. Perspiration broke out on a half dozen faces. One more lick,
one more jut of that rare pink tongue, one more hint of cool vanilla ice cream and his army would revolt. Sucking in a deep breath, Douglas cried: "Git!"
The girl spun around and ran.
Douglas waited for the memory of the ice cream to fade, then said, quietly, "There's ice water at Grandma's. March!"