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FIVE

  Our house was technically the last house on the left hand side of Cottonwood, but the street doglegged to the left and went on for another couple hundred yards. On the left, (the side our house was on) there was a seven-foot-tall hill that ran the length of our house until it met a brick wall that belonged to the neighbor behind us. His wall ran until it met the front of his house on Aspen Street.

  On the right side of the street (Cory’s side), there were about fifteen houses that ran down until it turned into Redwood Street. So the three streets made a sort of rounded ‘W’ shape that led out onto Fullerton Avenue at their west ends.

  With the sun to our right, we chose to stroll down the middle of the street rather than on the sidewalk. When we hit Redwood we turned left and headed on up to Fullerton. That long stretch of road would eventually lead to our destination; 7-Eleven. Along the way, telephone poles grew from the sidewalk. They were dead trees with electric branches. Staples riddled their split trunks from flyers and advertisements long gone. Jason and Cory took the lead, lost in idle conversation as I pulled my wagon full of bottles behind them.

  As we turned the corner, Cory said, “Oh, check this out. I almost forgot.” And with that he lifted the left leg of his tan shorts to reveal a nice sized raspberry that covered a good portion of his thigh. It was scabbed over and wet looking from ointment.

  “Jeez,” Jason said. “How’d you get that?”

  Cory dropped his shorts back down and began to explain.

  “Well, last night after you guys went in for dinner I took my bike out for a ride. I rode to the top off the street and came back down as fast as I could. When I tried to bunny-hop off the curb in front of your house the damn front tire came off. Aw, man, when I landed, I flipped right over the handle bars.”

  “Geez. You could have broke your neck,” I said from behind.

  “So what did you do?” Jason asked.

  “Got up and shook it off,” Cory said.

  We both knew he was full of shit, but didn’t say anything. Cory sometimes acted as if he were king turd of crap court, just as tough as could be.

  He went on; “That guy Mark was out in front of Chris’s house drinking a beer when it happened. He came over and helped me put the tire back on.”

  Chris Maherrin lived two houses to the left of Cory’s. He hung out with us sometimes. He was ten, like Jason and Cory, but was an only child. Unfortunately he was also an only grandchild, so he spent summers with his grandparents out of state.

  “Mark?” Jason asked.

  “Who’s that?” I was also curious.

  “That guy that moved into Chris’s parents’ guesthouse a couple weeks ago,” Cory explained.

  “Oh yeah,” Jason exclaimed. “I saw him moving his stuff in.”

  “Yeah, he’s way cool. After he put my tire back on, I went with him into the guesthouse through the backyard. He put some Neosporin on my leg for me. And then,” Cory said full of pride, “he let me drink a beer with him.”

  Jason said, “No way. He let you drink a…”

  “You're gonna fucking die!” a voice yelled at us.

  The three of us froze.

  Between Redwood and Acacia (the next street over), there was a cinderblock wall that separates the houses there from the noise and traffic on Fullerton. Halfway down that wall there was a set of stairs used to access Acacia on foot, a pedestrian shortcut. It’s also where the older kids would hang out at night and smoke their weed and cigarettes and drink beer. The comment that had stopped us in our tracks had come from these stairs as we were passing and we turned to see who had shouted at us.

  Sitting on the third step down with his back to the railing was Mike Wood. Mike lived halfway up Redwood on the left hand side and was notoriously know for being a drug user. His clothes were always in shambles and his long greasy brown hair was never combed. Every time we saw him on our streets he would be doing something odd, like talking to himself or licking tree bark. He had been in trouble with the law and had been arrested quite a few times. They were minor things though: breaking and entering, trespassing, assault. We always wondered how his parents had let him get the way he was. Maybe they didn’t care about him or were too busy in their own lives or were themselves just as screwed up as he was.

  He looked that day like he always did; ratty clothes and mousy hair. Like he hadn’t made it home last night and had spent the last few hours sleeping on those stairs, coming down from whatever drug he had taken the night before. He looked so much older than his seventeen years.

  Mike spoke again, only this time he didn’t yell, his glossy eyes looking almost through us. “You’re going to die.” He lit a cigarette and stuck it in the corner of his mouth, drew smoke and blew it in our direction. “Get out of here before I kick your little asses.”

  Jason and I taking the hint and not wanting to provoke this deranged loser started making tracks. Cory stood there looking at him. When we were about ten paces away I looked back and saw Cory do one of the stupidest and yet probably one of the funniest things I’d ever seen him do before. He brought up a loogey from deep within his throat and spat right into Mikes face, then bolted giving him the finger.

  “You little son of a bitch,” Mike yelled as he got to his feet to pursue Cory. He jumped up and took one step before his foot hit the top stair and he went sprawling on the sidewalk.

  The three of us high tailed it to the end of the block not looking back until we had gotten there. Jason had taken over command of the wagon making it easier for me to run.

  At Acacia, we stared back in Mike’s direction at the stairs and saw him, lying there on the pathway, smoking and waving to something high up in the sky.

  “What did you do that for, man? You crazy?” I said to Cory. “That guys going to kill us know. You heard what he said.”

  “No he won’t,” Cory told me with a little nudge to the same shoulder he had punched me on earlier. “That guy’s all messed up on drugs or something. He looked like he’d been smokin’ dope all night. He probably already forgot we were there.”

  “That was still pretty crazy,” Jason said chuckling. He gave his best friend a high five and then we all began laughing hysterically. I don’t think we stopped laughing for another two blocks or so.

  Five minutes later we were in front of Lincoln Elementary School. This wasn’t the school that we went to. We were Stallings Elementary kids. Our school was at the other end of Fullerton, back past Magnolia Glen and the hospital. Those who were a little more well to do than our families were enrolled their children into Lincoln. There was a dress code there that we thought was absurd and all made fun of.

  Off to our right, a lawnmower purred and sputtered and when I looked I saw George Manning pushing the machine across the great expanse of lawn in front of the school. Mr. Manning, his wife Emily and their mentally disabled daughter Jamie lived ten houses down from Cory-just before Cottonwood became Redwood. He was employed with the Corona-Norco Unified School District and did the grounds keeping for a few of the schools in our area.

  Near the south side of the school, his wife squatted, pulling weeds from around the base of the building. She didn’t have a day job-other than caring for their daughter-and sometimes helped her husband out with the maintenance work. I began to wonder where Jamie was and a moment later spotted her playing in a sandbox within relatively close view of her parents.

  When we came to the end of the school grounds, we decided to take the alley that ran down one side and behind the houses on Fullerton until it let us out at the back of the 7-Eleven. It was just over a mile from our houses to the store and had taken close to a half an hour to walk.