"Who can tell me the name of the President of the United States?" Mrs. Perry asked, and hands shot up all over the room. I raised my arm so high I could feel the muscles pulling in my shoulder. I held up my arm with the other hand, strained my head until my eyes were closed, and waited to hear my name so I could tell her the right answer.
"Peter," she said, and I relaxed, disappointed.
"John F. Kennedy," Peter said, "and my father voted for him, but my mother didn't." He looked around at the rest of the class because he had been right.
"Now who can name the Vice President?" Silence. No hands were raised. I cupped my brow with my right hand and tried to make the answer come, but it wouldn't. I couldn't think of the name.
Scott Dials raised his hand and said, "Lyndon Baines Johnson." I was ashamed.
Scott and I were the two smartest kids in Mrs. Perry's first grade class, and he had shown
me up.
We walked home in single file, following the safety patrol. Some people whispered, but I didn't because talking was against the rules. When the line reached my house, I fell out and climbed the hill in the front yard. I waved a silent goodbye to Scott Dials. He was my best friend. I wouldn't see him until the next day because he lived three blocks away on Sanborn. My mother wouldn't let me go that far from home by myself.
"I'm home," I yelled, letting the screen door slam shut behind me.
"Doan be trackin' no mud in here, Ronald. I jus' be done sweepin' the rug." Sara Mae was holding the baby and stirring a big pot on the stove. The house smelled good. Sara Mae was a good cook, but Mama said she let us run too wild sometimes. Mama said maybe she'd have to quit her job so she could look after us herself.
"Where's Ray?" I asked, putting my books on the table.
"He out playin' at the Big Rock. You run 'long too. Doan be puttin' yo' nose in no book yet." I changed into shorts and a t-shirt and took off my socks and shoes. It was late May, and Mama and Daddy let us go barefoot anytime after May first. Even when May first was cold and rainy, Ray and I went barefoot, just because we could. It was fun to run around in the puddles, letting mud ooze between toes that had been cramped up all winter in shoes.
I ran through the kitchen, out the screen door, and up the hill to the Big Rock. Ray wasn't there. I looked around the Woods, but he wasn't there either. I sat on the Big Rock, my legs dangling over the edge, in the shade of the old sycamore tree, and stared up at the clouds moving by. I saw a goat, a car, and an elephant, all in a race to get to China or somewhere.
"Whatcha lookin' at?" I jumped, then saw Carol Simpson standing over me, her big body blocking out the sun.
"Just the clouds. There's animals and stuff in the clouds." She laughed with her mouth wide open, showing her crooked teeth and her huge red tongue. "Yeah, when I was a first grader, I looked at clouds, too. But now I'm a fourth grader. Now I know there ain't no animals in the clouds. Clouds is just a bunch of water drops." "I know that," I said, but it was a lie. I felt bad because I had lied. "I read it in a book." She laughed again, and her teeth scared me. "You don't read about no water drops in first grade. I read them books. You read about 'Run Dick run' and 'Throw the ball to Jane.' You don't read about no water drops." I knew I was caught now, so I lied again. "I already read all those books. Now I'm reading second grade books. I read about water drops there." That wasn't a whole lie. I had finished all the first grade books, and so had Scott Dials, and the teacher sent us to the second grade class to read those. But I had never read one that said clouds were made out of water drops.
I knew I shouldn't have lied in the first place. Once you tell a lie, you have to go on and tell bigger ones. That's what my Sunday school teacher told me. Jesus doesn't like liars. Liars can't live in heaven with Jesus when they die because they're sinners. Liars have to live in hell with the devil.
Carol was a big kid, a fourth grader, and she was even bigger than some of the boys her age. She wasn't fat, she was just big, with broad shoulders and muscles in her arms and straight blondish hair with some brown in it. I thought she might hit me when she figured out I was lying, but then she said, "Oh yeah, I heard about you. You're the brain. You're the smart kid. My mother and father were talking about you." She sat down on the Big Rock beside me, so close that I could smell her. She smelled like grass. "If you're so grown up and smart, I bet you know what neckin' is," she said with a funny look on her face.
"Sure I do," I said, but I knew she didn't believe me.
"Well come on then. Let's do some." She grabbed my hand and led me to a place where some of the big kids had built a fort out of logs, and I followed her inside. There were logs all around us and a roof made out of little sticks with leaves and stuff piled on the top. They had dug a hole first, and the ground was cold red clay. The roof was so low that even I had to bend over some.
"Take off your pants," she said, and she started pulling off her t-shirt. I didn't want to. It didn't seem right.
"Take 'em off," she growled, and I could see her crooked teeth in the dark and could smell her breath. I closed my eyes and took off my shorts.
"Now the shirt." I hesitated.
"Now, I said." Her breath smelled like wild onions after Daddy has cut the grass with the lawnmower.
I took off my shirt. I was in my underpants, and Carol was taking off her pants.
"Take off your underpants." I wouldn't do it, but something deep inside me, deeper than my stomach, wanted me to. I could feel tears behind my eyes trying to come out.
"Take 'em off, sissy!" she hissed, and yanked at them.
I pulled off my underpants and felt ashamed because my pee-pee was showing. Carol started taking off her underpants, and I wondered if her pee-pee was real big like Daddy's.
My eyes got wide when she pulled off her underpants. She didn't have a pee-pee! She didn't have anything but a crack and a hole, just like the crack in the sycamore tree beside the Big Rock that Rusty Hill said had been hit by lightning. I thought maybe the doctor had cut off her pee-pee and left a hole.
"I thought you knew what neckin' was, brain. Git over here!" She was sitting down now.
I was too afraid to move, so she grabbed me and pulled me down beside her in the red clay on the bottom of the fort. The dirt made my fanny feel cold and wet. Then the tears got real big and heavy, and I started crying. She bent over me and rubbed her neck against mine.
"This is neckin', sissy. My cousin Zack taught me. Old people do it when they want
a baby." I pulled away, grabbed my clothes, and tried to put them on. Carol was
laughing and calling me a cry baby. I ran out of the fort when I got my underpants and my
shorts on, tears streaming down my face. I felt dirty.
"I declare, Ronald. How do you get your clothes so dirty? Do you roll in the dirt? Look at these underpants. They have red dirt clay all over them. How'd they get so dirty?" I was in the bathtub, the water warm and soapy and turning red all around me. My mother was holding up my underpants. I could feel my face get hot.
"You and Ray been throwing dirt clods again? I'll whip you if I catch you. You
could put somebody's eye out like that."
The leaves crunched under my cowboy boots. I kicked them as I walked along, smelling the sweet smell of burning leaves and hearing distant whistles from the football field. Mama and Daddy wouldn't let me play Pop Warner. They said I might get hurt playing football.
I was in Miss Warburton's second grade class. I liked her. She was older than Mrs. Perry, but she smelled like flowers and she gave us all candy on Halloween. She wrote home that I was a pleasure to teach. Mama said she wasn't married, and that's why her name was "Miss" instead of "Mrs." Scott Dials wasn't in my class, so I hardly ever saw him anymore. My new best friend was Mac Ferris. He was bigger than me, but he wasn't as smart. He was the quarterback on the Mighty Mites, the Pop Warner football team.
I walked over to the field to watch Mac practice. Afterwards, he would throw me the ball and show me the three-point stance. Once he let me wear his helmet home. I felt like Johnny Unitas for a minute, but he took it back when we got to my house.
Practice was breaking up when I got there. All the guys were wearing shoulder pads and cleats. They were getting on their bicycles to ride home. Mac saw me and ran over with a football.
"Catch," he said, and threw me the ball. It hit my chest and bounced off. I picked the ball up and threw it back, but it only went halfway.
"Hey, Ron, let me show you something," he said. He went over to his bicycle and pulled his jacket out of the basket. There was something inside.
"What is it?" I asked, and reached for the bundle.
He jerked it back and put his finger to his lips to tell me to be quiet.
"Come over here behind this bush and I'll show you." He turned around to make sure no one was watching, then crouched down between the building and a big bush. He opened his jacket and pulled out a magazine.
There was a rabbit on the front and the cover said "Playboy." It was real thick and it smelled old, like it had been packed in a box in an attic.
"Take a look at this," he said, and started flipping through the pages.
There were all these color pictures of women with no clothes on. Their titties were real big and they were smiling the way Carol did when we took our clothes off in the fort that day. I looked down to see if the girls had pee-pees, but the pictures either didn't go down that far or the girls had their hands covering it up.
"Look at this one," Mac said, and unfolded a page in the middle.
It was a big picture of a naked woman beside an old barn. My mouth flew open, and Mac laughed.
"Bet you ain't never seen nothin' like this," he said.
A funny thing happened when I looked at those pictures. My pants kind of itched and I felt that same feeling deep inside behind my stomach, just like when Carol Simpson wanted me to take my underpants off. But I didn't cry this time.
That night in bed I thought about the girls in the magazine and about their big titties
and about the way they were looking at me. Then I thought about Carol and wondered if I'd
ever see her with no clothes on again.
"Wake up! It's snowing!" Ray shook me and pointed to the window.
Outside, the world had been changed. There were blankets of pure white covering the hills and bushes. Snow was still falling, and the sky was one big low grey cloud. My heart started beating faster.
"Looks like you boys gonna get to play today." It was Daddy. He was standing in the doorway holding a cup of coffee. "I just heard on the radio that school has been closed." Ray and I jumped out of bed and started looking for our boots and mittens and stuff.
"You're gonna have to eat some breakfast first," Daddy said, then turned and
walked down the hall.
I had on three pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, three shirts, a sweatshirt, a coat, mittens, a toboggan, and my cowboy boots. The snow crunched under my feet as I ran through the yard, making footprints where none had been before.
Ray and I threw snowballs, made a snow fort, built a snowman, and sledded down the hill that comes down from the sycamore tree. All the kids in the neighborhood were out. We chose up sides and had a snow war. Little Billy the Squealer got hit down the neck and started crying and went home.
"My feet are getting cold," Ray said. "I'm going in." The other kids left one by one, but I stayed out. The snow was still falling and I caught flakes on my sleeve so I could look at them. They were small and delicate and beautiful. I tried to see if I could find two that looked the same.
"Still lookin' for animals in clouds?" I looked up to see Carol in front of me. She was wearing a big red coat with a hood that had white fur around it.
"Bet your feet are gettin' cold in them cowboy boots." They were getting cold. I should have gone in when Ray did, but I didn't want to miss a minute of the snow.
"If you come in my house I'll make you some hot chocolate." I followed her
again, this time to her house, this time not so reluctantly.
"I saw my cousin Zack again," she said, pulling off her coat and mittens. "He showed me something new. Wanna try it?" I nodded yes, not sure what was going to happen.
"Take off your clothes. This is like neckin', only better." I started to peel off my clothes, first the boots, then all the socks, then the layers of pants and shirts. Carol was taking off her clothes, and I tried to watch her while I undid the snaps and buckles. We were naked, and I could see her better than in the dark fort.
She hardly had any titties, not like the girls in Mac's magazine. Her body wasn't curved like theirs; it ran straight down, just like mine. Her fanny looked like mine too, but my eyes were attracted to the place where her pee-pee should have been.
"Why are you staring there, brain? You've seen my pussy before." That's what she called it. Pussy. That's what girls have instead. My pee-pee started to feel funny, like it wanted to grow but couldn't.
"I . . . I was just wondering why you don't have a pee-pee." "A pee-pee!" She laughed real loud and showed her crooked teeth and fat red tongue. "A pee-pee! Boy, are you a little kid! It's not called a pee-pee. It's called a dick. My cousin Zack told me so. He's in the eighth grade. He has a big one." She grabbed my pee-pee and pulled on it. It hurt, but it sort of felt good at the same time.
"Now this is what my cousin Zack showed me. It's called fuck. Grownups do this after they neck. Lay down on me." She sat down on the floor. We were in her basement, beside the washer and dryer. I got on top of her. My head only came up to her titties, and my feet were a little below her knees.
"Now you put your dick in my pussy. That's called fuck. It feels real good." I tried. I honestly tried. But every time I tried to put my pee-pee inside her, it just hit up against a bone or something. Carol was grinding into me, hurting me, yelling at me to put it in, but I just kept bumping into that bone. I kept trying, and she kept telling me what to do. I started noticing a funny smell on my hands. It smelled like when a dog licks you and the spit dries. I couldn't get my pee-pee in her.
Finally she pushed me off and said I wasn't old enough. I put on my clothes and went
home.
I couldn't get the dogspit smell off. It was on my hands, my clothes, my pee-pee, everywhere. I was lying in the bathtub, face down, sloshing the water around, trying to wash the Carol smell off. The door opened.
"What are you doing?" It was Mama. I felt my face get hot again.
"I know what you're doing," she said. She shook her finger at me and left.
The sun was warm on my face. It made me feel like I was a loaf of bread Sara Mae had just taken from the oven. It was May first, and I was barefoot. I was sitting on the sidewalk watching the ants run around. They were going in a straight line across the sidewalk, passing each other in both directions, some going out to some crumbs of bread, others going back to the anthill. I took a blade of grass and made a green circle around one ant. He ran back to where he had been before, then came to the green grass stain and stopped and sniffed. He turned around and went the other way, but stopped when he came to the green ring. He went in every direction he could, but he always stopped when he came to the green ring. Finally he got up enough courage to cross over. He ran back over to the ant hill with his friends.
John Bird lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He has published previously in Cold Mountain Review, The Appalachian Journal, and Studies in American Fiction. His first novel, Eight Days A Week, has been rejected more times than he likes to tell, but he still thinks it's damn good.
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