Sag Harbor

THE GANGSTERS

ALL THE ILL SHIT WENT DOWN ON THURSDAYS LIKE clockwork. Mondays we slept in, lulled by the silence in the rest of the house. The only racket was the carpenter ants gnawing the soft wood under the deck, not much of a racket at all. It was safe. When we met up with the rest of the crew, we traded baroque schemes about what we'd get up to before the parents came out again. The rest of the week was a vast continent for us to explore and conquer. Then suddenly we ran out of land. Wednesdays we woke up agitated, realizing our idyll was half over. We got busy to cram it all in. Sometimes we messed up on Wednesdays, but it was never a Thursday-sized mess-up. No, Thursday we reserved for the thoroughly botched, mishaps that called for shame and first aid and apologies. All the ill shit went down on Thursdays, the disasters we made with our own hands, because on Friday the parents returned and our disasters were out of our control.

The first gun was Randy's. Which should have been a sign that we were headed toward a classic Thursday. I never went to Randy's — he didn't have a hanging-out house. But everybody else was working. Nick at Jonni Waffle or in the city buying stuff for his B-boy disguise, Clive barbacking at the Long Wharf Restaurant, Reggie and Bobby at Burger King. I felt like I hadn't seen Reggie in weeks. We had contrary schedules, me working in town, him off flipping Whoppers in South Hampton. When we overlapped in the house we were too exhausted from work or gearing up for the next shift to even bicker properly. I had no other option but to call NP, not my number-one choice, and his mother told me he was at Randy's. Normally I would have said forget it, but there was a chance they might be driving somewhere, an expedition to Karts-a-Go-Go or Hither Hills, and I'd have to hear them exaggerate how much fun they had.

Randy lived in Sag Harbor Hills on Hillside Drive, a dead-end street off our usual circuit. I knew it as the street where the Yellow House was, the one Mark James used to stay in. Mark was a nerdy kid I got along with, who came out for a few summers to visit his grandmother, who was of that first generation. When I turned the corner to Hillside, I saw that the Yellow House's yard was still overgrown and the blinds were drawn, as they had been for years now. I hadn't seen Mark in a long time but a few weeks ago, by coincidence, I'd asked my mother if she knew why he didn't come out anymore and she said, “Oh, it turned out that Mr. James had another family.”

There was a lot of Other Family going around that summer. People disappeared. I asked, “What happened to the Peterses?” and my mother responded, “Oh, it turned out Mr. Peters had another family, so they don't come out anymore.” And what happened to the Barrowses, hadn't seen those guys in a while, Little Timmy with his crutches. “Oh, it turned out Mr. Barrows had another family so they're selling the house.”

For a while it verged on an epidemic. I found it fascinating, wondering at the mechanics. One family in New Jersey and one in Kansas — what kind of cover story hid those miles? These were lies to aspire to. And who was to say which was the Real Family and which was the Other Family? Was the Sag Harbor family of our acquaintance the shadowy, antimatter family or was it the other way around, that family living in that new Delaware subdivision, the one gobbling crumbs with a smile? I picture the kids scrambling to the front door at the sound of Daddy's car in the driveway after so long (the brief phone calls from the road only magnify absence) and Daddy taking a few moments after he turns off the ignition to orient himself, figure out who and where he is this time. Yes, I recognize those people standing in the doorway — that's my family.

How extensive was the transformation? The rules and decor and entire vibe changing from house to house. In that other zip code, Daddy was a pipe-puffing teddy bear in a sweater vest, a throwback to a sitcom idea of genial paternity, peeling off wisdom like “You know, son, sometimes a body's got to stand up for himself” and “We all get bruised sometimes, but then we dust ourselves off and say, Golly, tomorrow is another day.” Mommy was always taking the bird out of the oven, she dolled herself up on Our Anniversary and they walked out arm in arm, they never missed a year. Everyone tucked in tight. The family ate together and communicated. And then Daddy lit out for this zip code, changed his face, and everything was reversed. One man, two houses. Two faces. Which house you lived in, kids, was the luck of the draw.

You might call this speculation dumb. Each house made the other a lie. None of it was real. I'm not so sure.

Randy and NP were in the street. They were bent over, looking at something on the ground. I yelled, “Yo!” They didn't respond. I walked up.

“Look at that,” NP said.

“What happened to it?” I asked. The robin was lying on the asphalt, but it didn't have the familiar tread-mark tattoo of most road-kill. It was tiny and still.

“Randy shot it,” NP said.

Randy grinned and held up the BB rifle to show it off. It looked real, but that was the point. If it looked real, you could pretend it was real, and if you had a real gun you could pretend to be someone else. The metal was sleek, inky black, the fake wood grain of the stock and forearm glossy in the sun. “I got it at Caldor,” he said.

We looked down at the robin again.

“It flew over and landed on the power pole and I just took the shot,” Randy said. “I've been practicing all day.”

“Is it dead?” I asked.

“I don't see any blood,” NP answered.

“Maybe it's just a concussion,” I said.

“You should stuff it and mount it,” NP said.

I thought, “That's uncool,” a judgment I'd picked up from the stoner crowd at my school, who had decided I was “okay” toward the end of the spring semester and let me hang out in their vicinity or at least linger unmolested as a prelude to a provisional adoption by their clan next fall. (They had a Weed for Nerds charity and a strong commitment to diversity.) I liked uncool because it meant there was a code that everyone agreed on. The rules didn't change — everything in the universe was either cool or uncool, no confusion. “That's uncool,” someone said, and “That is so uncool,” another affirmed, the voice of justice itself, nasal and uncomplicated.

Randy let NP take the rifle and NP held it in his hands, testing its weight. It looked solid and formidable. He aimed at invisible knuckleheads loitering at the dead end of the street: “Stick 'em up!” He pumped the stock three times, clack clack clack, and pulled the trigger. And again.

“It's empty, dummy,” Randy said.

We headed into his house to get some more “ammo.” Randy lived at the end of the street in a long green ranch house with fading orange trim. I'd never been inside. He opened the screen door and yelled, “Mom, I'm inside with my friends!” and the sound of a TV disappeared as a door closed with a thud. I didn't know much about Randy's home life, but I knew his father wasn't in the picture.

There were fathers who worked in the city during the week and there were fathers who were a variety of gone. I knew Randy's father came out one weekend every other summer because I'd hear my parents talk about it. “Stanley's out this weekend with his young girlfriend/expensive car/speedboat,” whatever prop he was riding that year. I assumed he didn't stay on Hillside.

The blinds were tilted open, sending planes of light to charge slow-dancing motes of hair and dead skin. NP and I sat on the plastic-covered furniture while Randy went into his room. I smelled dog, and remembered a recent conversation with Randy about his dog, Tiger, a cocker spaniel who had choked on a piece of rope and died two years ago. I noticed some white fur trapped underneath the plastic on the upholstery and experienced a doctor's-office wave of nervousness.

“Can we sit down here?” I asked.

“What do you think the plastic's for?” NP said.

Randy returned and led us out through the kitchen into the backyard. Brown leaves drifted in tiny dirty pools in the butts of chairs. Behind the house was woods, allowing him to convert the patio into a firing range. He'd dragged the barbecue grill to the edge of the trees — I saw a line of ashes in a trail — and around its three feet lay cans and cups riddled with tiny holes. Randy set up a Six Million Dollar Man action figure on the grill's lid. It took a few tries to get him to stand up straight. We'd outgrown tying army men to bottle rockets, failure itself despite our delusions of NASA-like competence, so this was a logical extension of action-figure abuse.

“Lemme get a shot,” NP begged.

“I go first,” Randy told him, with the imperious tone he'd mastered during his stint as the Kid with the Car.

Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, who had been rebuilt at great expense with taxpayers' money, stood on the red dome, his bionic hands in eternal search of necks to throttle. Randy took aim. Steve Austin stared impassively, his extensive time on the operating table having granted him a stoic's quiet grace. It took five shots, Randy pumping and clacking the stock with increasing fury as we observed his shitty marksmanship. Steve Austin tumbled off the lid and lay on his side, his pose undisturbed in the dirt. Didn't even blink. They really knew how to make an action figure back then.

“I want to get the optional scope for greater accuracy” Randy explained, “but that costs more money.”

“Lemme try that shit now,” NP said.

I left soon after. I threw out a “You guys want to head to East Hampton to buy records?” but no one bit. I thought we were past playing with guns. I walked around the side of the house and when I got back into the street the bird was gone.

That was the first gun. The next gun was Bobby's. This one was a pistol, a replica of a 9mm. We were in his room. Bobby had invited me to play Lode Runner on his Apple II+, but when we got up there, he dug under his mattress and pulled out the BB pistol.

I jerked my head toward the open door. “What about your grandpa?”

He pointed to his alarm clock. It was 7:35 PM. Which meant his grandfather had been asleep for five minutes. Bobby's parents returned on weekends, like ours, but in his case he was not completely unsupervised. His grandparents came out for the entire summer to make sure he got fed. But after 7:30, Bobby crawled over the wall.

His grandparents were friends of the first generation, but they'd never bought a house during the gold rush. They stayed with pals on weekends, and then Bobby's parents started renting a house in the '70s, up the street from our old house on Hempstead, which is how he became such an integral part of our crew. His family had built the house up in Ninevah two years ago, an imposing gray beach house overlooking the bay from on high. I remember playing Alien Prison Cell in the cement foundation when the construction workers were off slacking. Splintery and vertigo-inducing stairs led down the dune to the water. It was a big place — most of the first-wave houses were single-story — with a guest room downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs.

Bobby's grandparents stayed on the first floor, so we had a state-of-the-art slipper-on-stairs warning system in case his grandfather, against all odds, was still puttering around past 7:30. In the great local tradition, his grandmother stayed in her room at all hours, occasionally summoning Bobby in for conferences from which he'd emerge with a five-or ten-dollar bill for “treats.” I don't think I saw her that whole summer. His grandfather was a real gentle guy, always kind to our mangy bunch when we came over. Gentle in that way that said he'd seen a lot of racist shit in his life and was glad that things had turned out better for his children and grandchildren. That cool old breed. His daughter had married another Brooklynite — not a Sag guy, although he grew up with Sag kids in the off-season and knew the myth — and now they had finally arrived. He had a right to be proud. And a right to get some damn sleep at the first hints of twilight.

“Me and NP went with Randy to Caldor and got one,” Bobby said. “He got the silver one, but I wanted the black one. It's the joint, right?” Of course Randy was the facilitator. Seeing Randy fondle his rifle, given its potential, had the paradoxical effect of making him look like a monstrously overgrown baby. He might as well have been sucking his thumb. Bobby's real-lookin' gun allowed him to indulge his hard-rock fantasies and bury his deep prep-school weakness. Hide his grandfather's soft features in the scowl of a thug, the thug of his inverted Westchester fantasies. A kind of blackface.

“Greg Davis's cousin has a gun like this,” Bobby said, squinting down the pistol's sight. “I saw it once at his house. You know what he's into, right?”

“No, what?”

“You know, some hard-core shit. He was in jail.” He held it out. “Do you want to hold it?”

“No, that's all right.”

“What are you, a pussy?”

I shrugged.

“Me and Reggie were shooting stuff over at the Creek today,” Bobby said. “He has good aim. He should be a sniper in the Army Corps.”

I'd seen Reggie before he went off to Burger King, asked him what he'd been up to. “Nothing.”

“Let me see that,” I said. It was heavier than it looked. Its insides dense with cause and effect. I curled my finger around the trigger. Okay. Got the gist. I pretended to study it for a few more moments and gave it back to Bobby.

“I'm going to bring this shit to school,” Bobby said. He put his crazy face on. “Stick up some pink motherfuckers. Bla-blam!”

Which was bullshit. Hunting preppies — the Deadliest Game of All — would cut into his daily vigil outside the college counselor's office. Despite his recent theatrics. This BB-gun shit was making people act like dummies.

To wit: he pointed it at me. “Hands in the air!”

I shielded my eyes with my hand. “Get that shit outta my face!”

He laughed. “Hot oil! Hot oil!” he said, rolling his eyes manically.

“Shoot my eye out,” I said. Reggie had started saying “Hot oil! Hot oil!” whenever I bossed him around or said something lame. After the twentieth time, I asked him why he kept saying that, and he said there was a semi-retarded guy who worked at Burger King through a special program, and he always got agitated when he walked by the fryers, squealing “Hot oil! Hot oil!” to remind himself.

“Don't worry. I got the safety on,” Bobby said, pulling the trigger. The BB shot out, hit the wall, ricocheted into his computer monitor, bounced against the window, and disappeared under his bed. “Sorry, man! Sorry, sorry!” he yelped. Downstairs, one might conjecture, grandpa stirred in his sleep.

At least it was a plastic BB. Randy had copper BBs and Bobby had plastic BBs at that point. The plastic ones didn't hurt that much. The copper ones could do some real damage, though, as I saw the next week when I found myself out on “target practice.” We were on our way to Bridgehampton to walk around. Me, Randy driving, Clive, and NP Then Randy pulled into the parking lot of Mashashimuet Park.

“I thought we were going to Bridgehampton,” I said.

“After we go shooting,” Randy said. He slipped the car keys into his pocket.

We walked into the trails behind the park. NP carried a moldy cardboard box. When I asked him what was inside he said, “That would be telling.” I followed behind Randy and NP, and ahead of Clive, according to a beloved survivor scenario from the old days. The trails, you see, were maintained by the wheels of pickups, motorbikes, and ATVs, which ground down foolhardy weeds, churned up the dirt, and snapped off the branches of the sad oaks and sticker bushes to the side. Where the trails opened into small clearings, we discovered proof of older kid/redneck presence — old beer cans and cigarette butts, sure, but also shotgun shells. The woods between towns were the domain of good old boys and their good-old-boy inclinations. Out of reach of the law, out of earshot, they could get down to the business of shootin' things. We never in all our summers came across another soul out there, but such a thing was just a matter of time, surely. Walk toward the rear of the pack but ahead of the last guy, and you had insulating bodies to protect you in case of ambush.

Or so my young self theorized. Today we were armed.

Randy had the spot all picked out. The abandoned Karmann Ghia. It made sense. We'd tried to make a plaything of it many a boredom-crazed afternoon, but it was too rusted to approach and properly incorporate into high jinks beyond throwing rocks through the dwindling windows. We were a dutiful and tetanus-phobic group, lockjaw being the most sinister villain we could imagine. “His face twisted into a grimace of horror.” But not anymore. The guns gave us the distance to hasten the car's ruin.

Whenever you saw the red Karmann Ghia, that debased victim of the Rust Gods, some other kids had ripped off another piece in the interim. The hubcaps, the mirrors. One day the windshield wipers were stuck out like antennae, and no one touched them because the effect was cool, satisfying adolescent aesthetics of destruction. Another summer we ventured out and the upholstery hung out of the driver's window like a ghastly tongue. Kids all over like to mutilate it. Since this is a What Happened tale, I wonder how the car got there, who owned it. Abandoned by joyriders, left to die by a summering specimen who couldn't keep up the payments. Had I seen them just the day before, these faceless elders, sailing through the crosswalk in their new fab ride even though I had the right of way, had I served them ice cream at Jonni Waffle for no tip, did they throw a Hush! our way when we got too loud at Conca D'Oro? We didn't know each other but we had this hidden link. We were related by rust.

Randy's first attempts were unspectacular. But as his aim improved and he figured out the key pressure points, a BB disintegrated a nice section of the car's weakened frame instead of zipping straight through and leaving a tiny fingertip-sized hole you had to get up close to see. “You see how I pump it?” Randy asked rhetorically. “The more you pump it, the faster the FPS.” Feet per second, I guessed, and later confirmed when I sat on some ketchup-stained rifle literature in the backseat of Randy's car. “Low FPS is good if you just want to scare a deer or another critter off your property. Higher FPS is when you really want to send a message.” Yee-haw!

NP and Clive took turns with NP's pistol — Randy clung tight to his baby today — and while it was diverting for a while, I started to wonder if we had enough time to drive to Bridgehampton and back before my shift.

“We just got here, dag,” NP said.

“I'm not ready to go,” Randy said as he reloaded his rifle. His car, his keys.

Clive had taken a few shots. He was the only sensible one among us, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. “Why don't you go and try it?” he asked me. Co-opt the complainer.

I thought about Reggie and Bobby taking potshots at squirrels and dead horseshoe crabs. I took NP's gun. Identical to Bobby's, except in silver. Clive offered the carton of BBs to me. In their small blue box, the copperheads turned molten in the sun. NP said, “Let's break out the stuff,” and opened the box he'd brought along. It was filled with items scavenged from his basement, a porcelain vase, a bunch of drinking glasses with groovy '60s designs, a Nerf football with tooth marks in it, a bottle of red nail polish, and other junk chosen for its breakable qualities.

“Here, do the radio,” NP said. “Don't shoot!” He dug into the box and perched an old transistor radio on top of the Karmann Ghia. I took my time. I wiped the sweat off my forehead. I held my shooting arm with my left hand, gunslinger style. Drew a bead.

The radio made a sad “Ting!” tottered in cheap suspense, and fell in the dirt. I'd hit the radio toward the top, knocking it off-balance. The words “Center of Gravity” occurred to me, secondhand track-and-field lingo from my vain attempt to place out of P.E. that spring through the glory of high jump. I couldn't throw a ball worth shit with my girly arm but somehow I'd hit the radio. NP and Clive whooped it up, slapping me on the back. Clive offered a terse “Good shooting,” like a drill instructor trying not to be too affirming. I grinned.

We positioned the other relics from NP's basement. The vase didn't explode, but each time it was hit, another jagged section fell off so we could see more of its insides. It finally collapsed on its own while we were reloading. I aimed at an old lampshade of rainbow-colored glass, and while I didn't re-create the swell marksmanship of my first attempt, I had to admit it was fun. Not the shooting itself, but the satisfaction of discovering a new way to kill a chunk of summer. It was like scraping out a little cave, making a new space in the hours to hide in for a time.

I placed the final victim on top of the car — the neon-green Nerf football. We'd saved it for last because nothing topped Nerf abuse. It was Randy's turn, but NP established dibs, as it was his Nerf ball. Which, looking back, was a rare case of one of us challenging Randy, since he had the car. It turned out NP couldn't hit it. Time after time. We'd been out there in the sun and were dehydrated. The rush, the novelty, was gone, and we all felt it.

Finally, NP gave up and handed his pistol to Clive. Randy said, “NP couldn't hit the broad side of a barn,” that hoary marksman's slur.

NP exploded. He had put-downs to spare, but now he grasped after his trademark finesse. “I could hit your fat fuckin' ass fine, you fuckin' Rerun from What's Happening—looking motherfucker.”

“What the fuck did you say?”

“You fuckin' biscuit-eatin' bitch!”

Randy's hours of picking off his old toys in the backyard finally found their true outlet. He stroked his rifle, clack clack, and started shooting the dirt at NP's feet. “Dance, nigger, dance!” he shouted, in Olde West saloon fashion, which was pretty fucked up, and the copperheads detonated in the ground in brief puffs. NP skipped from foot to foot, his bright white sneakers flashing like surrender flags. “Dance!” I don't think Randy was aiming at NP's feet, but I couldn't be sure. What if he missed? One of those BBs, depending on the FPS, would rip through the sneaker, definitely. “Dance!” How much deeper, I didn't know.

Clive and me shouted for Randy to knock it off. We were on either side of him, out of range, making it easier to confront him. Clive took a step toward Randy, hands out defensively. He was fast enough to rush him, but nevertheless. Randy glared at Clive, I swear he made a calculation, and then lowered the rifle with a “I was just playing.”

NP charged Randy, cursing like a motherfucker. Clive restrained him. “That's uncool,” I said, but no one chimed in with the other-shoe “That's so uncool.” The boys boiled off in their neutral corners and we left soon after, scratching the Bridgehampton excursion without discussion.

I HADN'T SEEN THAT in a long time, that old fighting thing we used to do. We used to fight each other all the time out in Sag. We honed special knuckle punches, wherein the knuckle of the middle finger was cocked underneath by the thumb for lethal blows, according to our lore. Reenacted kung fu poses from Bruce Lee's too-brief oeuvre while wrinkling our faces into Muhammad Ali frowns and trying to remember the positions of key nerve clusters. There were places on the body known to aficionados, vulnerable to a single blow. And that meant me, too, for a time, despite previous descriptions of my temperament and personality. No, really. It's how we were raised.

I got my training early. One night in the fourth grade I was playing with my Star Wars action figures when I heard my father yell “Benjamin!” from the living room. I dropped Greedo immediately. I'd moved on from playing the Caucasian heroes of the Star Wars universe, preferring instead the alien and armored and masked. I'd been Luke Skywalker for a long time, the bright rays of the whole “great destiny” thing appealing to my overcast soul, and then Han Solo, his wisecracking ease in the face of hardship a kind of tutelage. A light saber for a blaster pistol. Then I decided that being them was tainted. I'd seen something on TV about it. One Sunday morning my parents were watching the black affairs show Like It Is, when Gil Noble welcomed a psychologist who railed against Barbies and the cult of the blonde. Gray waves swept through his Afro and he wore a green-and-yellow dashiki, a silver Black Power fist hanging on a chain around his neck. Swear to God. He described a study where a group of black children was told to “pick the pretty doll,” and when they passed over the brown princesses, time after time, what was there to say? “Why are our children being taught to hate themselves?” Barbie, Luke. Brainwashed by the Evil Empire.

Black was beautiful, but black didn't exist in the pre — Lando Calrissian Star Wars universe beyond the malevolent black of Darth Vader. (And what about Lando's treachery in the Cloud City of Bespin once he did appear? Selling Han out, hitting on his lady. Some role model.) So in my games I became Greedo, the green, scalloped-eared, bug-eyed nemesis of Han Solo, or rather in my mythology, another alien from his home planet of Rodio — Greedo's cousin. Hence the family resemblance and predilection for ribbed bodysuits. He was a good kid, on the straight and narrow, unlike his relative. Or I was a Death Star Droid with human programming (not much of a stretch) or a defecting Stormtrooper, skin obscured behind the armor plates of the Empire. In my room, Greedo's cousin redeemed his people through his private war against the forces of evil. He was “a credit to his race.”

“Get in here!” I jumped up.

Someone had ratted me out. Reggie only ratted me out if we were fighting because it was a risky proposition — you never knew when our father would introduce an obscure subclause in the family rules of conduct, something along the lines of “You should have known better than to let your brother do that,” whereupon the rat was included in his brother's punishment. Take his belt off loop after loop and beat both of us. Don't cry or you'll get some more. Kept you on your toes. But we'd been getting along, Reggie and me, and in fact I had loaned him twenty-five cents that morning at my usual “it doubles every Monday” interest rate, for him to buy snacks. He fiended for Munchos, blowing through his allowance by midweek like a junkie.

I beat it out of our room and reviewed the last few days for any slipups. I couldn't think of anything. I had thrown two stalks of broccoli into the garbage, but I was sure that no one had seen me, and it had been almost a year since I got into trouble for not cleaning my plate. Maybe that rule was still being enforced, maybe it wasn't, you never knew. The rules came, the rules went, new rules were introduced. Then I remembered that I'd worn slightly wrinkled khaki slacks to school that morning. After being intercepted on our way out the door one day, we'd been admonished (that's not the word but that word will do) for wearing wrinkled clothing and from then on we had to lay out the next day's clothes before we went to bed, for inspection. It had to be the khakis. I'd taken a chance that my father wouldn't check them, and I'd lost.

He was on the couch. The TV was off, a bad sign. He said, “Your mother tells me you got into a fight at school today.” I had a bunch of thoughts all at once. 1. My mother had ratted me out. 2. I didn't have to revenge myself against Reggie, and I'd have to save the two or three plans I'd devised on the short walk to the living room for another day. 3. It wasn't the khakis, so I could risk another wrinkledclothes day in the future. 4. I had no idea what he was talking about. But this was a familiar situation. Familiar as in, family.

I looked at my mother. She didn't move. There was that way she used to sit in these situations, right, I remember now. I said, “I didn't get into a fight today.”

He looked at my mother and then he looked at me. He said, “Your mother said some boy called you a nigger at school today.”

Oh, he was talking about that. A week ago, during snack break, Tony Reece had done something weird to me. It was Tony Reece's first year at our school. His father was a bigwig at the French embassy. The headmaster and founder of our school was French and a number of French dignitaries sent their kids there, which meant that we watched a lot of François Truffaut movies and we celebrated Paris Day once a year, where we ate croissants and pain au chocolat while the French teachers shared some motherland tales, like childhood reminiscences about watching collaborators get their heads shaved. They snatched the hair from the ground as souvenirs. “You Americans were so shocked at Watergate,” our music teacher Madame Mamelock told us one day. “We have never believed in the powerful. The powerful are liars.” I was six.

Tony Reece only lasted a few years. He was a skinny little boy with dark eyes and a sinister up-curl to the left side of his mouth. On his first day, he ate his lunch on a white handkerchief that he unfolded delicately and placed on his desk. We all laughed at him and he never did it again, but he was constantly en garde from that moment on, fearful of these hot-dog-eatin' heathens and their New World cruelties.

The day my father was asking about, a bunch of us were goofing around during Snack. Andrea Rappaport had just come back from Saint Thomas and her face was pink, brown scales withering on her nose. We hadn't been on spring vacation — she'd gotten her school-work for the week in advance and done it in between trips to the pool. That's how her family rolled. There was a discussion about tanning while on vacation, the pros and cons, the various theories of how much was “too much tanning,” from which I abstained, and then Tony Reece reached over to my face, dragged a finger down my cheek, and said, “Look — it doesn't come off.”

He snickered, the right corner of his mouth curling up to complement the left, and I didn't get his meaning and then I realized, given the context of the conversation, that he was talking about my brownness. The other kids looked at one another, and what do fourth graders know about things, I don't know, but they knew wrongness when it happened right in front of them and Andy Stern who was my friend said, “Shut up, Tony Reece” and shoved his shoulder. “Where's your hankie, Frenchie?” Everybody laughed at Tony Reece. The bell rang for Social Studies, and we returned to our desks. I'd told my mother about it an hour or two before I was called to the living room, something to kill the time while she tossed pepper on the pork chops.

I said, “Oh, that was last week.” To get the facts straight. This was a misunderstanding. “He didn't say that.” I related my version of the incident.

My father looked at my mother and then he looked at me. “‘It doesn't come off,’” he said. “He was calling you a nigger. What did you think he was doing?”

“I don't know” slipped out of my mouth and I knew I had messed up because he hated “I don't know.” There was no purchase there. Actually, I think maybe he liked “I don't know” because then he got to pry you open.

“Why didn't you punch him like I told you?”

“I don't know.” I said it again, I couldn't help it.

“You were afraid he was going to hit you back.”

I couldn't say no and disagree with him. So I decided to agree with him. “Yes.” Surely if I stopped struggling, trying to wiggle out of this, I'd quickly be Greedo again.

“Like this?” His fast fast hand struck me across the face and iron rolled around in my head and my cheek pulsed with heat and felt like it had swollen up to twice its size. When I looked in the mirror later, it looked normal, if a bit red, but that's what it felt like. I heard Elena and Reggie close the doors to their rooms, but how could I hear that really, because they were too far away, but I just knew that's what they did because that's what we always did. In these situations.

“Can he hit you harder than this?” he asked, and he swatted me again, harder.

My eyeballs bobbed in their water. In the corner of my vision, my mother uncrossed her legs. I said, “I don't know.”

He swatted me in the face again, harder. This time I was ready and I told myself, don't fall over. “Can he hit you harder than that?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Then there's nothing to be afraid of.” A pause. I was breathing a lot through my nose. “Don't you cry now,” he said, so I didn't. “Who's going to protect you if you don't do it? Me? Your mother? The world's not going to protect you. That's what I'm trying to teach you.”

The lesson was, Don't be afraid of being hit, but over the years I took it as, No one can hurt you more than I can. The same end result, really. The next morning I went up to Tony Reece and punched him in his face and sent him flying against his desk. No repercussions.

SUMMERS WE BRAWLED. We were hungry for slight, for provocations big and small, and when one didn't appear, we trumped up charges. Turf. The more whole you were, the more turf you had. You could tolerate the occasional trespass. But if you had so little turf that you felt like you barely had any air? You told someone they had crossed a line they didn't know existed. Then you punched them in the face.

The first equations of manhood. Generally you punched someone younger and smaller. Common sense. A more even match was sometimes unavoidable. The standard fight was brief and awkward. A quick blow to the face sent you into your favorite stance, one that cannot be found in any boxing primer in the land, or sent you searching after a cherished martial-arts movie pose, Praying Mantis, Turtle Position. The traditional epithets were offered, strange personal oaths muttered, and things quickly degenerated into a slap fight, and then the inevitable pinning to the ground by this day's favored son. The other guy flopped in headlocked futility, dirt mashed into Afro and scalp that would take extra fingernail scrapes in the shower to remove, and we stepped in to break it up.

You never fought unless there was an audience. On the sidelines we picked our boy and heckled. “Oh, shit!” “He fuckin' whopped that nigger!” “Rope-a-dope!” Last week's throw down with one of the fighters came back in a flash — sunlight reeling as your head was knocked back, the arena lights through the leaves — forcing you to root for his opponent. Beefs and disagreements from years past perverted the conventional betting wisdom. We laid our bets based not on speed, weight class, or fighting record, but grudge. In August 1978, Nick broke the fin off Clive's Air Rocket and refused to pay for the damages. Hence Clive's insistence that Bobby “Beat that nigger!” during the Bobby-Nick Pugilists in Polo series of bouts in the summer of 1980. Marcus ate my last Twizzler during a matinee of Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, on purpose even though he denied it, and this was the backstory when I served, metaphorically, as Clive's cut man during the Showdown of '81. But short-term memory entered in as well. Spend a satisfying round of hanging out the previous afternoon with someone, and you were in their corner if something popped off, broken toys and stolen Twizzlers be damned.

The winner was generally whoever wanted it more, and generally that was someone who'd had a bad weekend or knew they had a bad weekend coming up, the Dreaded Impending. Damage reports came in: a ripped-open elbow already scabbing, a torn shirt that would lead to questioning from parental authorities. They dusted themselves off, saying, That was nothing. Losers cast aspersions on their opponent's technique (“He has long nails like a girl”), and winners overex-plained their mercy (“I coulda wailed on him if I wanted, but it wasn't worth it”). The mob dispersed, dissecting the fight in smaller groups until some new escapade bulldozed it all. Next time, next time was plotted out that night in bed when the fighters were alone at last, without an audience, under the chilly night breezes of regret.

As we got older we stepped in to break 'em up instead of hooting ringside. Break up someone else's fight and they might return the favor later. Then on universal order we stopped fighting altogether. We were relieved. For one thing, we got bigger, and could do some damage. Sam and TT, two older kids who were brothers, fought one day and Sam whipped TT's face with a piece of electrical cable and the skin on his temple was raw the rest of the summer like a warning. We honed our verbal dexterity instead, learned to signify, studied the uppercut of the quick remark. Discovered that we all had glass jaws and went down like a sack of potatoes at the right combo of words. Also — puberty. That infamous culprit. Hormones rechanneled stray energy toward the groin, and how to use that body part as opposed to the fists. (One day, God willing. All-Powerful Being, Most Merciful, Who in His Kindness might throw a brother a bone every once in a while.) In fact, in the telling it becomes clear that puberty rearranged my brain so thoroughly that this period belongs to another kid's history. What happened to him, Ma? Turned out he was this other boy. He doesn't come out anymore.

I must've liked it, up and hitting someone for no good reason, something stupid. For those few years. Ten, eleven years old. It gave it a place to go. It was somewhere to put it. Our father gave Reggie his own instruction, individually tailored, and on those nights it was my turn to close the door to the room, but when Reggie instigated with someone bigger, I stepped in and fought for him, that was my job, and I got knocked down or I didn't. Sometimes he instigated because he knew I was there to step in, but that was okay. We were in it together back then. Friends became enemies for a day or two and then the boredom was such that you forgot. You needed someone to play with. Or else you were alone.

TARGET PRACTICE BEHIND THE PARK was on a Wednesday I can't remember what happened the next day. Something bad probably happened to someone. On Monday we were back at the threshold of another empty week we needed to fill. We convened at our place that night. I bossed Reggie around to help get the place in shape. He glowered at me, standard operating procedure that summer. I told him to straighten up our parents' room, since it was his turn to sleep in there while they were away. There was a phone next to the bed, allowing our friends to close the door and prevent us from hearing their bitch-ass responses if they called home and got chewed out for something or other. “Okay … okay … okay.” They emerged with excuses about why they had to suddenly break out. We didn't gloat. Gloat, and karma said next time it was your turn.

I was washing the dishes when he came out and said, “Benji — what do you think this is?” I glanced at it and wiped my hands off so as not to leave any evidence that I'd touched it. It was our mother's handwriting, on one of our father's old pads, the ones we used for scratch after he got his new stationery. It was bullet-pointed in her work fashion:

yells at me in front of my friends

mean/verbally abusive

drinks every day

blows up and then forgets about it the next morning

I told him to put it back where he found it. We didn't mention it again, according to custom, and when it was my turn in there next week, I looked for it but I didn't see it.

It was getting dark when they came over. Randy, Nick, Bobby, and Clive. Randy brought beer, a new but permanent feature that summer. The drinking age was nineteen, which made Randy legal and Clive and Nick tall enough to buy take-out six-packs at the Corner Bar unchallenged. One beer and I was buzzed; two beers, I was drunk. We asked one another “Which one are you on?” to see who was ahead and who was falling behind. Pointing at the empties for proof.

“Why don't you open the screen door to let the air in here?” Randy said.

“It's a screen door. The air comes through,” Reggie said. “Plus the mosquitoes will get us.”

“Then leave the lights out. They won't come in,” Randy said. “I'm hot.”

Reggie opened the screen door and we hunkered in the gloom. We got down to business. We had three days. Clive suggested night bluefishing off Montauk. Nick grumbled about the price, for his own reasons, but the rest of us agreed that it was too expensive to go more than once a season, given the realities of minimum wage, and we'd already been once. Reggie, who this summer decided that he was no longer afraid of the water, disavowing a key tenet of the men in our family, said that we should borrow Nick's uncle's motorboat again. But Nick said his uncle was having the hull refinished, plus he thought maybe his father and his uncle were having an argument, from the frequency with which his father was talking shit about him. Like, hourly. Brothers — what are you going to do? Bobby busted out that old chestnut, Ask Mrs. Carter if We Can Go in Her Pool, but Clive and Bobby immediately said no dice. Mrs. Carter's son had died five years ago. He'd grown up in Sag in a crew with Clive's father and Nick's father, and the last time they used her pool, she kept calling them by their fathers' names and it creeped them out. She saw the brown bodies underwater and thought she knew them. Then these faces surfaced to scream “Marco!” and “Polo!” other boys suddenly up from the deep, and her brain misfired. Creepy, right?

Stumped, and it wasn't even August yet.

“Let's show dicks,” Randy suggested.

Cricket, cricket.

“Why the hell would we do that?” Clive asked, finally.

“To see who has the biggest dick,” Randy said.

“Next time we go to Karts-a-Go-Go, we should race for money and time ourselves to see who's the fastest,” I said, steering the proceedings like a good host. I wasn't much of a go-cart driver, but I thought the novelty of the scheme might appeal.

Bobby turned on his MC voice, “One Two Three, in the place to be,” and Reggie said, “Alright!” They started their routine and I rolled my eyes in the darkness. Bobby and my brother had memorized the lyrics to Run-D.M.C.'s “Here We Go” and had to perform it at least ten times a day. Bobby was Run; Reggie was D.M.C. Bobby took the lead, Reggie side-kicking after each line like an exclamation point. Back and forth. Clive kept the beat with his hands. They'd been practicing, because they had it down pat, a real fucking duo.

BOBBY: It's like that y'all

REGGIE: That y'all!

BOBBY: It's like that y'all

REGGIE: That y'all!

BOBBY: It's like that-a-tha-that, a-like that y'all

REGGIE: That y'all!

BOBBY: Cool chief rocker, I don't drink vodka,

But keep a bag of cheeba inside my locker

REGGIE: HUH!

BOBBY: Go to school every day

REGGIE: HUH!

BOBBY: Always time to get paid

REGGIE: HA HUH!

BOBBY: Cause I'm rockin' on the mic until the break of day!

Run-D.M.C. boasting about staying in school — quaint days in the history of hip-hop. “We played Go Fish before the Scrabble marathon — Ha Huh!” To my chagrin, I had never heard the song before they started singing it. Too much Buzzcocks. I thought I knew all of Run-D.M.C.'s records, the self-titled debut and King of Rock, but I was a square. The song was a limited-edition live recording made at a club called the Funhouse, taped “Funky fresh for 1983,” according to the lyrics. Any mention of a Real Club bedeviled me with scenes of silver leisure suits and telephone book — sized high heels, imagery drawn from the old eleven o'clock news segments tsk-tsking about “Decadence at Studio 54” that I used to endure before Saturday Night Live came on. Years later the sound of the crowd on the recording was a reminder that people were out chilling and I was still home in my pajamas waiting for a good video to come on Night Flight.

Bobby introduced the song to Reggie, who dubbed a copy of “Here We Go” on Nick's boom box. Distracted by their rhyme skills, no one followed up on my Karts-a-Go-Go plan, with its money-competition-fame glamour. In my jealousy, I saw Bobby and Reggie performing their bit behind the counter at Burger King, their clubhouse where I was not allowed, in their paper Burger King caps and hairnets, while the retarded guy chimed in with “Hot oil! Hot oil!” like an amen.

We continued to brainstorm. No progress. Then someone said, “We should have a BB gunfight,” and it stuck. The only thing to silence the new hunger. That was that. Our house was full of mosquitoes for a week, and me and Reggie had to sleep with our heads under the sheets to keep them out of our ears.

And then I had one. The next day Randy drove me and Clive to Caldor's. After consulting our savings, kept in battered envelopes in top-notch hiding places around the house to prevent each other from skimming some off the top, Reggie and me decided it would be best if we shared a BB pistol, with one of us borrowing Randy's spare for the fight itself. Sharing — the half that is always less than half. This arrangement also allowed me to keep track of Reggie's gun activity. He was going to hurt himself. Bobby'd cook up some dumb idea and Reggie would go along with it and he'd get hurt. I had to look out for him — in fact, the night of the Mosquito Summit, I decided to try and get the BB gunfight scheduled for during one of his shifts at Burger King. We all missed key shenanigans because of work. There was no reason this couldn't be one of Reggie's times to listen to glorious tales and rue his absence until the end of time. The BB gunfight was stupid, but this stupidity I reserved for myself.

Clive rattled a fist on the screen door. As soon as the last micrometer of my body passed the doorframe, he shouted “Shotgun!” dibsing the front seat. Clive was a man of priorities, and a peerless shotgun-caller. Those days, shotgun — calling it, planning for it, successfully disputing outcomes — was another popular brand of sublimated warfare, the brawling urge directed toward protecting front-seat passenger turf. Literally protecting your ass. He rushed ahead of me despite his indisputable victory, jumping into the car and slamming the door shut.

We took the back roads, arguing like real live grown-ups over the One True Route, murmuring the incantations. Right at Texaco, left at Scuttlehole, turn at the Farm. There was a secret combination that unlocked the East End and we all thought we had it in our pocket. The power of pure lore. You truly live in a place when you don't bother with chump stuff like street names, because the names of the streets are irrelevant. The Big Red Barn, the Burned-Out House, the second left, these were inarguable coordinates and all the map you needed.

The old Caldor complex is a big mall now. These days every brand name that ever befouled your mailbox with catalogues has a storefront, but back then there were only three entities of note: Caldor, King Kullen, and the Drive-In. Former playgrounds in less particular times. The Drive-In was closed, and had a postapocalyptic vibe. It was easy to picture the survivors of the Big One congregating in the lot, hair falling off, teeth bobbing in their gums, and flesh ablaze with God-awful rashes as they looked up at the dirty screen for messages from their fallen world. The weeds and grasses broke through the asphalt as if they were the last of their kind, they drooped in the air, fleshy kin to the gray speaker boxes flowing on their iron stalks. In our jammies, under the threadbare summer-home blankets, we'd lived for double features, the scratched-up Disney prints from the '60s and early '70s, then the scary second feature we tried to keep our eyes open for. We'd wake up for a glimpse of low-budget horror, stirring on cue from some lot-wide tremor to see the Good Parts we'd relive among ourselves the next day. Look, it's a young Dirk Benedict from The A-Team turning into a human snake, scale by scale.

The Drive-In was closed. Had been for a while.

Dapper dancing hot dogs beckoned us to the concession stand between features and we got lost in the vehicles, desperate for silhouettes of our acquaintance. In the daytime we also got lost and separated in search of food, among the gigantic aisles of King Kullen. A supermarket, although super is too weak a modifier for the formidable bounty of Kullen's realm. The meat aisle alone was a griller's paradise, a chunk of bloody plenty. We'd rumbled through the aisles, our feet tucked into the rails of the shopping cart. We were there to police our mother, who sometimes neglected to see the wisdom in a family-sized pack of Yodels. But that summer we were past our enthusiasm for that exercise. Downright unmanly, calling shotgun for a grocery trip.

And then there was Caldor, the East End's one-stop emporium for action figures and beach towels, insect-repelling candles and beach chairs, lighter fluid and flip-flops. The maintenance supplies that kept the vacation humming and going, as any lapse in movement forced contemplation of that off-season life waiting on the other side of Labor Day, when nothing in the shelves of Caldor could stop the inevitable written on the snappy breezes and quick sunsets. There was one aisle we never had cause to enter, the Man Aisle, full of accoutrements and props, gas tanks, barbecue paraphernalia of obscure purpose, chrome shapes worked over in the coarse lathe of male id, heavy and gleaming on hooks. And BB guns. That day we passed the toy section without thought, en route to our new toy aisle.

There was no attendant at the counter, and despite my imaginings no red-aproned drone rushed to shoo us away. Randy showed off his knowledge with the arrangements behind the glass. Those are the speed loaders, those are the scopes. And there, my boys, there are the guns themselves. You had to be eighteen or older to buy one, so we handed our ragged, balled-up dollar bills over to Randy and summoned a teenage lackey. She pulled out her key chain to unlock the case.

“Do you want the black or the silver?”

Black, baby. (Internal voice “baby,” not external people-voice “baby”)

Reggie and I didn't have toy guns growing up, so we had to catch up. Even when the house was empty, I got nervous walking around with it. Green or orange water pistols had been okay, but anything else sent our father speechifying. “That's some white-man shit,” he'd say, confiscating the cap gun from a birthday party goody bag. “Whitey loves his guns. Shoot somebody he loves that shit. So let him. No kid of mine is going to get that mind-set.” I practiced solo, deep in the recesses of the Creek, out of sight of beachgoers and homeowners. Why startle the happy vacationers with the sight of a skinny, slouching teenager, the sun glinting off his braces and handgun? All they wanted was to get out of the city for a few days and put their feet up. I rounded up some mussel shells from the dark sand at the edge of the Creek and stuck them in a thin black row. My great aim the first day was just dumb luck, a little taste to get me hooked. I nicked the shells, tinking off bits. The day of the fight, I'd have the bigger targets of my friends.

We armed one by one. Reggie told me he was “going off to practice with Bobby,” and disappeared for one of their secret confabs, probably a razzle-dazzle rapping/shooting extravaganza of great theater. It's like that y'all. Anticipating the hip-hop stars a few years off. Not that the rest of us were immune. NP tucked his piece into his belt like a swaggering cop on the take or the cracker sheriff of a Jim Crow Podunk, Clive was observed busting a Dirty Harry move when he thought we weren't looking, and Randy was often found cradling his rifle to his chest, a gruesome sneer on his face as if he were about to take an East Hampton bistro hostage. I myself favored a two-handed promising-rookie pose, favored by Starsky and Hutch extras who got clipped before the first commercial and were avenged for the rest of the hour. “He woulda made a good cop, just like his old man.”

When we all got together in the days leading up to the event, it was only a matter of time before we started posing for album covers. (The photographer always gets a kick out of taking pictures of these rap guys, they preen and strut more than supermodels.) We stood in a line, in character. The movie and TV comparison is the natural analogy, because back then we were informed by cop movies and cop shows, but given the future of rap music, the album cover is the better fit. Not one from innocent '85, but a few years in the future, when the music changed. We were a posse: the Azurest Boys.

We'd learned to change the character of our fighting and would continue to do so for the rest of our lives, readjusting for different provocations, different stakes. The music grew up, too, testicles dropping, voice changing, going from this:

Rhymes so def rhymes rhymes galore

Rhymes that you've never even heard before

Now if you say you heard my rhyme, we gonna have to fight

'Cause I just made the motherfuckers up last night

To this, in so short a time:

“Hey yo, Cube, there go that motherfucker right there.”

“No shit. Watch this… Hey, what's up, man?”

“Not too much.”

“You know you won, G.”

“Won what?”

“The Wet T-Shirt Contest, motherfucker!”

[sounds of gunfire]

Lyrics from the aforementioned “Here We Go” and then “Now I Gotta Wet'cha,” copyright 1992 by Ice Cube, born the same year as me, who grew up on Run-D.M.C like we all did. “Wet'cha,” as in “wet your shirt with blood.” All of us, the singers and the audience, were of the same generation. Something happened. Something happened that changed the terms and we went from fighting (I'll knock that grin off your face) to annihilation (I will wipe you from this Earth). How we got from here to there are the key passages in the history of young black men that no one cares to write. We live it instead.

You were hard or else you were soft, in the slang drawn from the territory of manhood, the state of your erected self. Word on the Street was that we were soft, with our private-school uniforms, in our cozy beach communities, so we learned to walk like hard rocks, like B-boys, the unimpeachably down. Even if we knew better. We heard the voices of the constant damning chorus that told us we lived false, and we decided to be otherwise. We talked one way in school, one way in our homes, and another way to each other. We got guns. We got guns for a few days one summer and then got rid of them. Later some of us got real guns.

ON WEDNESDAY WE WENT OVER THE RULES at Clive's house. Me, Marcus, Randy, and Clive. Clive's parents worked for the Board of Ed and only came out on weekends, and he had a nice deck on which to discuss matters of importance. The deck furniture was brand-new, fuming up a cloud of plastic musk. We weren't allowed to sit on it. The week before, according to Nick, he'd come over for a visit, and joined Clive at the table. Clive's mother summoned Clive into the house, and when he came out, he went around to the back of the house and fetched an old mildewy chair for Nick to sit on. The forbidden aspect made the meeting seem more official.

No face/No shooting at the eyes, that was a no-brainer. No cheating — if you're hit, you're hit, don't be a bitch about it. Sag Harbor Hills was the boundary of the battlefield, no cutting through to other developments and sneaking back to emerge ambush-style. I said we should all wear goggles just in case, and to my surprise they seemed to agree. There was talk of synchronizing watches, but no one wore a watch in the summer except me, because summer is its own time and I was the only one who didn't know this. When the scheduling question came up, I said, “Tomorrow night?” during Reggie's shift, and everyone at the table was free then so there were no objections. The weekend was out — too many people around — and no one wanted to put it off 'til next week. Reggie was benched and I was glad.

Not that it could have gone down any other way. Although we hatched the plan for the BB-gun war on a Monday, there was no doubt that in the end it would go down on a Thursday.

There was one matter left to discuss. Clive brought out some lemonade. Classy. I took notes. Me and Reggie's house was a hangout pad for the guys during the week, but Clive made better use of his Kid with an Empty House situation, bringing home girls from Bayside and even having girls from his high school out for a few days. He bused them in from the city, and didn't even pay for the Jitney. The boy had style, our Hefner in Kangol.

Sipping his lemonade, Clive raised the issue of Randy's rifle and the FPS. A metal BB out of one of the pistols, at the range we were going to be shooting at one another, hurt a little bit but not that much, according to hearsay. Pump the rifle enough times, however, and a copperhead BB was going to break the skin.

“But if I can't pump, I'll be at a disadvantage,” Randy moaned.

“We have to figure out how many rifle pumps is equal to the standard pistol shot,” I offered.

“How do we figure that out?” Clive asked.

“We can test it out on Marcus,” Randy said.

Marcus said, “Okay,” and we headed out into the yard. Midweek, midafternoon, we didn't have to worry about passersby Marcus took off his shirt.

Randy loaded his rifle. “Let's start at one,” he said.

I said, “Marcus, why don't you turn around so it doesn't go in your face or something.”

Marcus turned around and gritted his teeth. There was a routine he used to do when one of us got mad at him, where he pulled up his shirt and clowned, “Please, Massa, Massa, Massa, please,” anticipating the whip, Roots-like. He had the same expression on his face. Randy stood four yards away, aimed, and fired. The BB hit Marcus in the spine and bounced off.

“Shit, that didn't hurt,” Marcus said. “Do I have a mark?”

We told him no. Randy said, “Then let's try three times,” and stepped closer.

“Ow,” Marcus cried. But it still didn't break the skin.

Clack clack clack clack clack. I noticed that Randy kept creeping closer between shots, but I didn't say anything. Neither did Clive.

Five times and Marcus screamed and a crescent of blood smiled on his skin. “So don't pump it more than four times,” Clive said.

“Yo, that hurt,” Marcus said.

“Let's make it no more than two, just to be safe,” I said.

I couldn't sleep that night. The mosquitoes didn't help. Then it was Thursday and its tally through the years. When NP broke his ankle sneaking into his bedroom window after hanging out late at the Rec Room with those townie girls. When I didn't properly hose off the lounge chairs on the deck was a Thursday, and the next day I got confined to inside the property line for a week and obediently stuck around like a fool even when they were out of town and would never know. Fight after fight, too many to count. When the chain fell off Marcus's bike and he smeared his bare feet all the way across the gravel of the Hill trying to stop — that was Thursday all over. Our weekly full moon.

I woke up wrong. I heard noises in the living room. It should have been quiet. “Why aren't you at work?” I asked my brother.

“I switched my shift so I can be in the war,” he said. I later learned Nick had done the same thing, making it four on four.

I told him he couldn't go. He'd get hurt. “When they're away, I'm in charge,” I reminded him.

“You're not in charge of me.”

Odd. It always worked when our sister used that line, like every five minutes. “Yes, I am.”

“What are you going to do — tell on me?” he said, and he had me there. I couldn't rat him out or else I'd get it, too, just like the good old days except now I was actually guilty. He went off to get in some last-minute practice.

At fight time, I headed up Walker. I passed the stop sign at Meredith and noticed it was freckled with silver, the red paint chipped away — target practice for one of our friends, probably Marcus, who lived two houses down. Nice cluster on the T and O. He had good aim, depending on how far away he was standing.

I stood in front of the Edwardses'. They'd been some of the earliest victims of the Other Family bug. Yvonne Edwards was my sister's age, and had a rep for throwing heavy objects when she got angry, usually at her little brother. Ralph, who happened to be my final opponent in the days of summer smackdowns. Ralph was an in-betweener like Randy, too young for us to accept into our plans, and too old for the younger crop of kids. He was harmless, and occasionally we'd let him hang around us, but that had been years ago. I don't know what he did with his days, but with a crazy sister like Yvonne, he probably spent a lot of time ducking.

Like all of our fights, it started over something little. A pebble, actually. He was two years younger than me, and I was a head taller. Which probably enabled me to croon, “You're lost little girlllll,” from the Doors record our sister played over and over, when I saw him sitting on the curb that day. Forlorn, with his ashy elbows on his ashy knees and messed up 'Fro. The words just popped out. That's what occurred to me to say as I biked past him.

He gave me the evil eye and threw a pebble at me. It skipped on the ground and jangled about my spokes. No biggie but then I saw Marcus coming down the street, slapping a basketball, so there was a witness. I jumped off the bike and — pausing to knock the kick-stand down — said, “What the fuck are you doing?” Like I said, he was smaller than me. I'd wrap this up pretty quickly.

The fight was long and drawn out and went on for miles, if you untangled our paces and laid them out lengthwise. I'd never seen such fury before. In a little person, anyway. I punched him in the face and he took it and retreated, walking backward, and I advanced on him for a while up the road. Then he reached some internal border and started advancing on me, hitting me in the face, and I retreated for a while, walking backward until I was up against my own personal wall and advanced on him again. That's why pro fights have a ring — otherwise people would just walk all over the goddamned place, up the aisle through the seats, out the lobby, and into the avenues. We prowled after each other up and down Walker, back and forth, the moronic pendulum, as my friends came out one by one, sniffing this on the wind from all points and following alongside like a news crew, providing blow-by-blow for the folks at home. His evil eyes on me the whole time. I'd get him in a headlock but he wouldn't go down to the ground like he was supposed to. He was tough! I tried to do an Indiana Jones move, from when he's grappling with the Nazi bruiser on the airplane and slams the guy's head into the wing a bunch of times. I thought this was a spectacular gimmick and tried to re-create it with Ralph's head instead of the Nazi head, and the Andersons' red Volvo instead of the airplane wing. But I couldn't get his head to the metal. His neck was superstrong, probably from dodging his sister's bricks.

Eventually we got tired and put down our fists. He didn't beat me and I didn't beat him, but since I was the older one, the judges called it his way. If anybody asked, I would have said, Look, the other guy wanted it more. He was descended from a construction material — throwing peoples and was in serious training between that and the whole Other Family thing, which he probably wasn't aware of consciously but you know he had to bend before such fierce invisible gravity. Especially if his family was the Other Family in question, with the cheaper presents and fainter hugs. But no one asked. Reggie wasn't there, and he didn't mention it but I know he heard, so in the end I did lose, in the eyes of my inner ref I cut through the Edwardses' driveway. The summer of that last fight was the last summer they came out.

WHEN I GOT TO CLIVE'S HOUSE, we were all there except for Nick. He'd called, whispering about how his mom was home and he couldn't get out of the house with his BB gun. Marcus suggested we start without him.

“But then we'd have uneven teams,” Bobby said.

“One of us can sit out,” I said. “Youngest first?”

“Four is better than three,” Clive announced, and we caved.

It was going to be dark soon, so we got busy making teams. Everybody wanted to be on Clive's team because Clive's team always won, but Randy was a factor with his rifle expertise. Plus, if you appeared to value his Randy-ness in all its wondrous forms — driver, hunter … well that's all I can think of right now — he might rule in your favor during an upcoming shotgun dispute. He threw off years of sturdy mathematics.

Reggie said, “Me and Bobby are a mini-team because we've been practicing together,” and I was appalled. We'd never not been a mini-team, what with the whole “Benji 'n' Reggie, Benji 'n' Reggie” singsong thing through the years. The only thought that had calmed me that afternoon was that I could protect him better if he was on my team. Send him on a crazy mission out of the way until it was all over. He didn't look at me.

This historic severing of the Benji-'n'-Reggie alliance went un-remarked upon. But who was I kidding? Nobody thought of us as the old unit anymore except for me. Some brothers threw bricks, others simply walked away from each other. The final teams were me, Clive, Marcus, and Nick on the Vice (for Miami Vice) and Randy, Bobby, Reggie, and NP on the Cool Chief Rockers. When Nick finally got his ass over there, I pulled out the paint goggles I'd rescued from the cobwebs under the deck and NP said, “Goggles?” I'd brought them for Reggie.

“No one said anything about goggles.”

“I don't got goggles.”

“I'm not wearing any pussy-ass goggles,” Marcus said. And neither was Reggie, I didn't even bother to fight with him about it. I didn't wear them, either.

The sky was getting dark. We went over the rules again and counted to two hundred per the guidelines. Then it was on.

We ran away, scattering according to haywire teenage logic toward the highway, toward the beach. I jogged around the corner, checking to see if I was in anyone's sights, and jumped into the undeveloped lot next to the Nichols House. I waded in deep enough that I couldn't be seen from the road, but shallow enough that I could see anyone coming down Clive's street or the street Mrs. Jenkins's house was on. Fifty-two, fifty-three. Getting there. It was almost too dark to play at this point, but the poor visibility would help me. I was going to wait for one of the Cool Chief Rockers to recon my way and then ambush them, a favorite tactic of mine to this day. Wait for the right moment in an argument with a loved one, then ambush them with some hurt I've held on to for years, the list of indictments nurtured in the darkness of my hideout, and say, “Gotcha!” See how you ruined me. If I was lucky, Bobby and Reggie would stop right in front of where I was hiding, to regroup or break into song, and I'd take them both out.

A firefly blinked into existence, drew half a word in the air. Then gone. A black bug secret in the night. Such a strange little guy. It materialized, visible to human eyes for brief moments, and then it disappeared. But it got its name from its fake time, people time, when in fact most of its business went on when people couldn't see it. Its true life was invisible to us but we called it firefly after its fractions. Knowable and fixed for a few seconds, sharing a short segment of its message before it continued on its real mission, unknowable in its true self and course, outside of reach. It was a bad name because it was incomplete — both parts were true, the bright and the dark, the one we could see and the other one we couldn't. It was both.

I moved closer to the street so I could get a better view and someone hit me in the face with a rock.

Hot oil! Hot oil!

A rock. That's what it felt like. My head snapped back and the top half of my face throbbed like I'd been slapped. I cursed and stumbled out into the street. Who throws rocks at a BB gunfight? I yelled for a time-out.

Randy popped out of the woods on the other side of the street. “I hit you,” he said, in surprise and pride.

“Why are you throwing rocks?”

“No, it was a BB.”

I poked gingerly around my left eye. He'd hit me in the socket, in the hollow between the tear duct and the eyebrow. There may be a proper anatomical name for that part of the eye socket, but I don't know it. It felt like a rock. I couldn't see out of it. There was stuff in it. Randy reached forward and I batted his hand away. I heard NP say, “What's up?” I traced my fingertip along the lumpy hole in my face, the stinging flesh. It broke the skin. He'd pumped it more than two times.

“What happened?” Clive asked.

“Benji's out. I hit him,” Randy declared.

“I'm not out,” I said. “He pumped it more than twice! I'm bleeding! He's disqualified!”

Randy took my face in his hands and lifted my chin for a better look. He did this queasy thing. He bent his face down and stuck his tongue in the wound.

I pushed him away. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I was checking the taste to see if it was blood or sweat,” he said. “It's sweat. You have sweat all running down your forehead.”

I told him to keep the fuck off me, freakazoid. I touched the hole in my face and staggered into the cone of the streetlight. Fat june bugs crawled over one another on the ground in their wretched streetlight ritual. I held up my finger. It was blood.

Bobby and Reggie appeared, and then all the Cool Chief Rockers and Vicers, guns dangling. Reggie grabbed my arm and wanted to know if I was all right. I hadn't heard his voice like that in a long time. I shook my head drunkenly “What the hell did you do, Randy?” Reggie said.

“He pumped it more than twice,” I said. Everybody murmured dag, in their disparate dag registers. When they got a look at the wound, they re-dagged at how close it came to my eye.

Randy denied it, but to break the skin from across the street, he had to pump it a lot more than twice. We all knew it.

I realized the Horrible Thing. I said, “It's still in there.” I probed around the wound. The skin was tough and swole up, but beneath that was something harder, like a pearl. I shared the Horrible Thing.

Randy didn't believe it. “Let me see,” he said, his hands out.

“Get away from him,” Reggie shouted. He stepped between us. “Benji,” he started, squinting at the bloody hole in the poor light, “you have to go to the hospital.”

“We can't do that,” Marcus said. “We'll get in trouble.”

“We'll all be in some serious trouble when our parents come out tomorrow.”

I looked around. They had decided. Even Clive, who in his alpha dogness could have grabbed Randy's keys and taken me if he wanted, fuck everybody. He was looking down the street, as if he heard his parents pulling up, avoiding my gaze. Half gaze.

Randy said, “How are you going to get there?”

“That's uncool,” Reggie said. He was my brother. I loved him. The way he said it, I knew. He'd found stoners. Maybe he was going to be all right after all.

“That's so uncool,” I said. Justice according to brothers and stoners: if someone needs to go to the hospital and you got the car, you have to take them.

Reggie said, “Bobby, your grandpa can drive us!”

Bobby got weaselly “He's asleep — look, it's dark.”

“I don't have to go to the hospital. I'm okay,” I said. Reggie protested, but everyone else was so thoroughly relieved that it was someone else's Thursday that the point was moot. I'd take one for the team. I didn't care that that's what they wanted of me. I'd take the hit because that's what I did. The other guys turned on Randy for putting them in this position, bitching about the pumping and whether aiming for my face was an accident or not. He didn't give an inch—“It just happened”—but did offer me “automatic shotgun for two weeks” as compensation. But the next week Bobby got his car, and the girls finally appeared, and Randy's reign was over.

My plan was to go home and try and squeeze the BB out, pimple-style. Me and my brother walked away, one palm over my eye and my other hand on his shoulder.

“We can still play three-on-three,” NP suggested.

We tried to cut through the Edwardses' house on the way back, but the lights were on. Someone was home. We took the long way around.

In the bathroom mirror, my eye looked disgusting. Like I'd gone a few rounds with a real heavyweight. The socket was all swollen up, and blood trickled over my nose and older, dried trickles of blood. I washed my face off and got a better look. I could feel the BB in there. I couldn't move it. It was lodged in the meat or something. Reggie hovered around, trying to be helpful, but he freaked me out so I asked him to give me a minute. I tried to wiggle the BB again, applying time-honored zit-popping principles of strategic leverage like a modern-day Archimedes. Nothing happened, and the inflamed flesh was so tender that I couldn't really have at it. Blood with dark little bits in it dribbled over my fingers. We'd thought it all out and decided metal BBs were okay because in theory they weren't going to break the skin, but now I had a tetanus-covered time bomb in my head. I was going to wake up with lockjaw and waste away in bone-popping misery. Should I have occasion to fly between then and my deathday, to visit an international lockjaw specialist at his mountain-top clinic, for example, metal detectors would go off and I'd have to explain the whole dumb story.

We drank some of our father's seven-ounce Miller bottles. I put ice on it and we watched the last half of The Paper Chase. I'd try again in the morning.

The next morning the swelling had gone down a little and the hole was scabbed over. I tried squeezing it again. The BB wasn't stuck in the tough flesh anymore, but now the “entry wound” was closed over. Our parents were coming out that night and they were going to murder us. Playing with BB guns. Allowing Reggie to play with BB guns when I was in charge of the house. Both of us letting the other play with BB guns when we should have known better. Three capital offenses right there.

I was going to have to get it out.

I had a scalpel from my eighth-grade science class, but it was in the city. Our father's razor blades were the disposable kind, encased in plastic to prevent exactly this kind of misuse. I sent Reggie out to Frederico's. “Get some of those old-fashioned razor blades, the ones people use to kill themselves.”

I stared at my stupid face. Some kids rebelled to get attention. I did stupid things very carefully, spending all of my time thinking of ways to engineer small stupid things without getting caught. Things so small that no one else could see them and only I knew about them. But there I was last night, being stupid in a group, and of course that broke my rules and look where it got me. Who holds a BB-gun war at twilight? The dumb and the desperate. I had that thought, What if I could go back in time? Just thirteen hours. A simple time machine was all I was asking, a leftover prop from a science-fiction movie. You had to have real powers to pull that off, George Lucas — type special effects. Take the case of my friend Greedo. In 1997 when George Lucas rereleased his Star Wars trilogy, he fixed what he didn't like using modern special-effects technology, erasing the mistakes of his youth. He had a secret compound and an entire nerd army dedicated to this purpose. In Greedo's case, that meant rewriting the alien's history. In the original movie, the green-skinned bounty hunter is going to deliver the reluctant hero Han Solo to the space-age Mafia don Jabba the Hut, so Han shoots him to prevent this. But all those years later, that version of Han Solo, the one who shoots first, didn't fit in with Lucas's idea of how a real hero acts. So he changed what happened. He re-digitized the scene, inserted a laser blast of Greedo shooting first so that Han didn't shoot someone in cold blood. Han was a hero, Greedo the villain. There. Fixed.

Fans were angry. People don't like it if you mess with their childhood. But not me. Greedo didn't change. There was the first Greedo, the one we knew, and the other Greedo, the new one that emerged to change the meaning of things. To me they're both real. It's a simple thing to keep the two Greedos together in your head if you know how.

Reggie returned with a pack of real razor blades, each one individually wrapped like cheese slices. I peeled the cardboard off one. God it looked terrible. It was such a slim piece of metal and yet host to so much more potentiality than the BB guns. And I was going to put it in my face. Reggie's lip was trembling. His eyes watered. He said, “I don't want anything to happen to you.”

Don't cry or you'll get some more. “I'll be okay.” I kicked him out.

I cut a thin line into the scab and I squeezed. The BB didn't move. I cut deeper into it. Nothing happened. So I cut another line, and now I had an X. I squeezed as hard as I could. The BB was too deep. The FPS had been such that it was down in there, and the skin had closed around it in an embrace. I wasn't so much of a psycho that I was really going to dig in there, shit.

We didn't know what we were going to do. Like the good old days when we broke a lamp or put a hole in the couch and ran around each other like crazy cockroaches. Two fuckups waiting for the Big Shoe. Eye patch? We prayed they'd decide at the last minute not to come out. The odds were good. (“Never tell me the odds,” was a Han Solo — ism, hero talk.) We cleaned the house extra special, even used Windex for the fingerprints on the fridge. Maybe that would distract them. We stuck the bloody mop of Bounty paper towels and a blood-soaked washcloth into a plastic King Kullen bag and shoved it way down in the garbage.

In the middle of the afternoon, Reggie went out to sell our gun to NP, who bought it for fifty cents on the dollar. We rehearsed cover stories and settled on, We were running through the woods to Clive's house and I ran into a branch that was sticking out! I coulda poked my eye out! That way they could scold us for running in the woods, and leave it at that. But they got home and never noticed. This big thing almost in my eye.

The BB guns didn't come out again that summer. We weren't the only ones to get rid of them. The thrill was gone, plus the girls finally appeared, like I said, contorting our Thursdays into a new sort of miserable. For some of us, those were our first guns, a rehearsal. I'd like to say, all these years later, now that one of us is dead and another paralyzed from the waist down from actual bullets — drug-related, as the papers put it — that the game wasn't so innocent after all. But it's not true. We always fought for real. Only the nature of the fight changed. It always will. As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world.

An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless.

It's still there. Under the skin. It's good for a story, something to shock people with after I've known them for years and feel a need to surprise them with the other boy. It's not a scar that people notice even though it's right there. I asked a doctor about it once, about blood poisoning over time. He shook his head. Then he shrugged. “It hasn't killed you yet.”