Hear the Wind Sing

28

Let me tell you about the town. The town were I was born, raised, and slept with my first girl. Ocean in front, mountains in back, and next to it is a large port city. It’s a small town. Speeding back from the port city, you decide not to smoke, because by the time you light a match you’d blow right by the town.

The population’s a little over seven thousand. This number has hardly changed after five years. Most of them live in two-story houses with yards, own cars, and more than a few of them even have two cars. This number isn’t my vague recollection, it was the number published by the municipal census bureau at the end of the fiscal year. It’s nice to live in a place with two-story houses.

The Rat lived in a three-story house which went to far as to have a hothouse on the roof. Set into the hillside was a garage, with his father’s Benz and the Rat’s Triumph TR III lined up snugly inside. Strangely, the part of the Rat’s house that emanated the homelike atmosphere the most was this garage. The garage was large enough that it seemed like a small airplane would fit right in it, and inside there was a collection of things that had fallen into disuse or were replaced by newer things inside the house: televisions and refrigerators, a sofa, a table and chairs, a stereo system, a sideboard; with all of these things arranged neatly in the garage, we had a lot of good times sitting out there drinking beer. As for the Rat’s father, I know very little about him. I never met him. When I’d ask about him, ‘He’s a guy, and he’s much older than me,’ was the Rat’s answer.

According to rumor, the Rat’s father used to be incredibly poor. This was before the war. Just before the war started, he scraped together enough money to acquire a chemical plant and sold insect-repelling ointment. There was some question as to its effectiveness, but as the front lines expanded southward, it practically flew off the shelves. When the war ended, he put the ointment in a warehouse, and shortly after that he sold dubious vitamin powder, which, after the Korean War ended, he repackaged as household detergent. Everyone seems to agree on this point. It seems quite possible. Twenty-five years ago, the insect repelling ointment-slathered bodies of Japanese soldiers piled up like mountains in the jungles of New Guinea, and now toilet cleaner stamped with the same insignia lies toppled in the bathrooms of houses everywhere. Thanks to that, the Rat’s father was loaded. Of course, I also had friends who were poor. One kid, his dad was a bus driver for the town. There’re probably rich bus drivers out there, but my friend’s dad wasn’t one of them. His parents were almost never home, so I hung out there quite a bit. His dad would be driving the bus, or maybe at the racetrack, and his mom would be out all day at her part-time job.

He was in the same grade as me, but our friendship began with a chance occurrence. One day, on my lunch break, I was taking a piss and he came over and stood next to me and unzipped his jeans. We pissed together in silence, then went to wash our hands when we were finished.

“I’ve got something you might wanna see,” he said as he wiped his hands on the ass of his jeans.

“Yeah?”

“You wanna see it?”

He pulled a picture from his wallet and handed it to me. It was a naked girl with her thighs completely spread out, a beer bottle jammed up inside.

“It’s great, yeah?”

“Sure thing.”

“If you come over to my house, there’s even better ones,” he said.

That’s how we became friends.

The town is home to many different kinds of people. In my eighteen years there, I learned lots of things. The town really took root in my heart, and most of my memories are tied to it. However, when I left town to go to college, I was relieved from the bottom of my soul.

For summer vacation and spring break I go back there, but I usually just end up drinking too much beer.