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It was 1961, Halloween night. The air was brutally cold, and my brother Bill and I wore four layers of clothing: T-shirts, shirts, sweaters, and coats. On this night, the air froze in my throat. The weather was not unusual. During October in the Treasure Valley, an area stretching from Payette on the Oregon-Idaho border to Boise, temperatures routinely drop below freezing. I was thirteen, severely asthmatic, and Bill was twelve. It was 7:30 in the evening, and I felt hollow. Having just returned from an evening meal at our church, where Pastor and the elders had knelt around Dad and prayed over him, we were standing on the corner just behind our house, waiting for Mark. We lived in Boise, which had close to 40,000 people. Mark was a large blonde kid whom my father called "the big dumb Swede." The neighborhood bully, Mark was the best student in our eighth grade class. Dad despised Mark because Mark enjoyed beating up on kids that were smaller than him, which included almost everyone in the neighborhood. Two summers ago, when I caught him holding Bill's head under water in a ditch out back of our house, I had grabbed the board that Dad used to redirect water onto our property and hit Mark to the side of the head as hard as I could. Mark had bellowed like a calf and bled a lot, but he never picked on me or Bill again. In 1961, Bill and I were too old to wear costumes and go from house to house, saying "Trick or Treat" for candy bars. In fact, for a couple of years now, we had turned our interests towards tricks. The tricks were not destructive. On the previous Halloween we had soaped up car windows, spilled the contents of trash cans onto the yards of neighbors that we didn't like, and rung an occasional doorbell, placing burning paper bags containing shit on the porches and running and hiding in the bushes. After Mark arrived, we all started walking down Laurel (the street directly behind my house) towards Food King on Fairview, a store about half a mile away, when we saw two figures seemingly materialize out of darkness. Wheezing from the cold, I couldn't make them out at first. But the moon was bright enough to allow us to distinguish Dave and Pete, two older boys from the other side of Fairview, the main street of Boise. David was a short red-head with a shorter fuse. I'd seen him nearly beat his dog to death once. Pete was a little taller than me, very skinny, and always dirty. Pete was carrying what looked like an air rifle. They were both smoking cigarettes. "Hey, what you little pricks doin'?" Dave asked, laughing in a hoarse voice. Dave always laughed when he talked. Hoarse meant he was sick again. "Gonna ask you the same thing, ass holes," Mark responded with a laugh of his own. Once, I'd seen Mark and Pete in a fight. It had taken Mark about two minutes to bloody Pete's lip and put him on the pavement. "Ass holes?" said Pete, his voice high and sharp. Pete was like an animal, tense, ready to spring. I didn't trust Pete, who had never liked Mark. Pete raised the rifle slightly in Mark's direction. The three of us walked up to Dave and Pete, and I looked down at the Pete's rifle. "What's that?" I asked. "Air rifle? B-b gun? What you doin' with that, Pete?" "What you think we're doin' with it?" Pete snapped, lowering the rifle so that it pointed at the ground. I looked at Pete. We'd been good friends for years until he'd insulted my mother a couple years back. I was, nonetheless, the only one in the group Pete would talk to. "Whattya gonna do with it, Pete?" I asked again, almost a demand. "You guess, Pork. You guess. You're smart. You're the hunter," replied Pete. Then he held out the rifle towards me with one hand. I took it, examined the tip, felt the open barrel. "Hey, this isn't an air rifle or a b-b gun. This is a real gun." The back of my neck felt cold and numb, and breathing became difficult. "This is a shot-gun. Single barrel. Maybe .16 gauge." "It's a .20 gauge, " said Pete. "You seen shot guns before, right?" "Of course," I said. I had grown up learning to use a shotgun, in fact, and just this past October had gone pheasant hunting for the first time with Dad and Mom. But, in those days, most all of my friends knew how to use a shotgun. It would have been easy for Pete to walk out of his home with a shotgun, particularly since his parents were rarely home. I looked at Pete, then at Dave, the smaller of the two. His mouth open, Dave was smiling hugely, as if he knew a joke that I didn't. "Gonna do some business," Dave laughed. Dave laughed even around his own parents, who wore sun glasses and were hung over most of the time. "It's time for a payback, " he added. My brother, the smallest one of the group, had remained silent. Because of his size, Bill was always treated like an outsider when he was with me and my friends. Now he moved up next to me and whispered: "Pork, we need to go. C'mon, Pork." "I wouldn't kill a dog," I said, ignoring Bill. In the past couple of years, Pete and Dave had already proved they could be crazy. They claimed that they had been the ones to set fire last Thanksgiving to the brush running down the hill across the street from my house and overlooking Garden City, the small farming community surrounded by Boise. At school, over lunch, I'd recently heard Pete brag about killing dogs and cats. Since I had been raised with German short-haired pointers, I didn't like to think about killing dogs. "We're not after dogs," said Pete, looking coolly at Dave, then at me. "What then?" asked Mark. Coming from Mark, the question was a demand. "You're not gonna shoot someone, are ya?" At this, the conversation stopped for about a minute, and I felt the cold October breeze blowing through my four layers of clothing. I still struggled for air. Pete wasn't going to answer Mark; he'd just as soon shoot the Big Swede. "Come and watch," Dave finally laughed, pushing through us. Pete followed. Mark, Bill and I followed Pete and Dave several blocks down the street away from Fairview and to a vacant lot next to Mountain View Drive, the street that wound in front of my house. As we walked onto the lot, I saw we were headed for some bushes that Bill and I had used to hide from our parents or other adults who, for one reason or another, wanted to find us. Bill and I had called this place "the fort." Someone could lie in "the fort," a hole perfectly concealed us from anyone driving by on the road sixty feet away. Dave and Pete jumped into the hole behind the bushes and sat down in the dirt. The three of us followed. The full moon blazed cold overhead. Before they talked, Dave and Pete took out their packs of Camel cigarettes, lit up, and began smoking. Pete offered me a cigarette, which I accepted and lit. Smoking was bad for me; I did it any way. Forcing smoke into my lungs, I looked at Dave and Pete, and then at Mark and Bill. "Just wait," Pete said, taking a drag off his cigarette, squinting in the moonlight, and holding the rifle steady and pointed up on his lap. "Just wait. You'll see." "For what?" I asked, coughing slightly. The smoking had warmed me up but made it a bit more difficult to breathe. "For the perfect car, dumb ass," he said, suddenly calm. I could feel the back of my neck going cold and numb again. I was still sweating, too. "Hey, wait a moment," Mark said. "You said 'car'? That what you said?" Mark was laughing now, the notion of an adolescent shooting at a car striking him as either hilarious or insane - or both. "That's what he said," murmured David. "Perfect car." We waited for fifteen or twenty minutes as Pete, Dave, and I smoked one cigarette, then another, then a third. Mark didn't smoke because his folks were Mormon, and no one offered any to Bill. I wondered if I should leave, for I knew what the rifle was for now. Thrilled by the prospect of doing something unthinkable, I sat in silence. As Pete, Dave, and Mark stood up and looked down the road for a victim, I glanced at Bill, seated across from me. He glanced at me and kicked me gently in the foot, made a motion with his head that we should leave. I inhaled my cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke at him. I watched Pete look down the road. I could see him getting excited, his face twitching, his head slightly bobbing. Then Bill and I stood, all of us hidden from view by the leafless vines of the bushes in front of us. From our vantage point we could look through a parting in the bushes and easily see the headlights of traffic four or five blocks away. The night air, suddenly, became cold, thick, almost leaden. "Get that one," whispered Dave, pointing at a pair of headlights that had just rounded the bend on Mountain View and was headed in our direction. It had been several minutes since the last car. I thought it curious that not many people were out tonight. "Sure?" asked Pete, his voice shrill, noncommittal in tone. Pete would do anything Dave asked him to. "This the one?" "I'm sure," said Dave. Dave wasn't laughing now, his voice cold as steal. I took a deep breath, and in the cold night I could hear the distant dry whoosh of the car of cold dry asphalt as it approached. Since Dad had sold Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles for a living, I had been around automobiles most of my life, and I could tell from the roaring of the engine that the car had a bad muffler and was speeding. I wondered what kind of car it was, and considered if the driver was a man or a woman. I wanted to see if Pete would pull the trigger. As the car neared, I saw Pete lean forward against the rim of the hole, put the stock of the rifle against his right shoulder and his left arm on the earth above the hole. Fingers dancing on the stock, his left hand gripped the rifle and his right forefinger touched the trigger as he leaned over the barrel to aim. I wondered if he were aiming at the window, a headlight, or a tire. At that moment, I felt light-headed, almost borne out of myself, just two eyes watching the night. I kept my eyes on the car, wondering if I would hear the pellets thudding into the metal or the tire explode, thinking that tonight I might see someone die. I kept watching the car as it sped forward; when Pete pulled the trigger, the gun exploded and the windshield shattered, and suddenly the car lurched sideways into a skid, rolled over into the vacant lot right side up, its front and side windows broken by the impact. I still couldn't see inside the car now barely forty feet away. We watched in dead silence, waiting for someone to open the door and get out or for the car to explode in a ball of flame. I wondered how much blood was on the inside and if the blood belonged to a man, a woman, or children. There was no explosion, no one thrown from the car. Death, if it had come, was toneless as dirt. I wondered if this is what dying is like. My temples were numb, and I felt drenched in sweat. I watched maybe for another thirty seconds until a pickup slowly pulled off the road twenty feet or so from the car and stopped, its engine running, no one getting out. What the hell is this, I asked myself silently. It was like one dead thing watching another dead thing. The hollowness inside of me grew. "Pork," Bill whispered, tugging at my coat sleeve, "let's get way the hell outa here." Dad always said "way the Hell" when he was tense. I blinked, turned, looked at my brother, smelled the dead night air, shook my head. The spell partially broken, indifferent about whether we were seen, Bill and I leaped out of the hole and began to sprint to the far side of the vacant lot, away from Mountain View. I noticed that Mark, Pete, and Dave were about one hundred feet in front of me, just climbing over the wall that separated the big Mayflower Insurance building on the other side from the vacant lot. Numbed in my arms and legs, still feeling like two eyes, I ran to the wall, stopped, helped Bill over, and then scaled the wall myself. When I landed on my feet in the bushes on the other side, I saw Mark kneeling on the pavement, his head down. Pete and Dave were walking away, towards the building's entrance. Bill and I slowly walked over, and when he looked up I could see that Mark was gasping for breath and bleeding from the mouth and nose. It looked like his nose was broken. Apparently, Dave and Pete had been the first over the wall, and when Mark had jumped off the wall and walked over to the other two waiting for him in the parking lot, Pete had taken the barrel of the rifle in both hands and hit Mark in the face. Now as I stood over him, Mark finally laughed nervously, sniffed and said "I think I'd better go home; I gotta do my home work; I gotta go to bed; I gotta get up for church." I wondered how Mark would get past his bullying bigger brother or his generally inebriated Mother without a question being asked about the state of his face. "See ya in school Monday," I said to Mark. "Yeah. See ya Sunday," came the reply. I actually felt sorry for Mark sensing that he, like all of us, were victims of circumstances we could neither understand nor control. "C'mon, Bill," I said to my brother, who stood by my side. The sirens were growing louder. Leaving Mark, who didn't seem to know what to do, Bill and I walked out of the side entrance to the building's parking lot and onto a side street, and went about a mile away from the accident before we took a side street, then another side street, and began the slow walk home. In the ice cold breeze, I don't think we said anything to each other. Periodically puffing on my inhaler, I struggled to catch my breath. When we walked into our driveway and headed toward the back door, we saw that three or four police cars gathered down Mountain View where the overturned car would be, their lights flashing into the night and we could hear the shouts of adults trying to save whoever was still in the vehicle. In the cold October air, the shouts were sharp yet muffled. When we opened the back door, always unlocked, and walked into the kitchen, we saw Mom and Dad seated at the table, playing canasta or pinochle or whatever they played at night. At the time, knowing that he was slowly dying of cancer, my dad was going through a series of depressions, and judging from his gaunt expression I knew this was one of those times. I could hear myself wheeze as I looked at him. "You boys seen what's goin' on way down the road outside?" Dad said, sounding hollow, looking up from his cards. I had noticed before that when Dad looked at me or Bill, it sometimes as if he didn't really see us. "Yeah," said Bill, suddenly coming to life, "looks like some real bad trouble down the road, police cars and everything. I think someone had an accident." Mom stood and walked to the kitchen window, which overlooked Mountain View Drive. From the window, we could see the road for about a mile in each direction. "Can't see what it is. Just a lotta lights. And at this time of night. Maybe we should walk down and see, Daddy." "I don't wanna go out, Momma," Dad said, again hollow. Dad didn't like to go outside on a cold night. I wanted Dad to stay inside anyway. I sighed, loudly enough to be heard by Mom and Dad. "Can Bill and me play?" I asked, moving around the table to my chair. I wanted to cry. "Sure," said Dad in the friendly tone he had used before he got so sick. "You boys pull up a chair and Momma will deal you in." It always made Dad happy when Bill and I joined in. My breathing slowly got better, and Bill and I sat in the warmth at the kitchen table for the rest of the evening, concentrating on the card game. I forced myself to think about church the next morning and imagined myself sitting two rows back from the front in the old Baptist church, listening to blind preacher Ray proclaim the gospel of healing and salvation. I'd wondered for a long time if Dad were going to heaven or to hell. By the time Bill and I went to bed, the accident was only a bad memory. I didn't read the newspaper or listen to the news for three weeks. Everything got better after those weeks, and Daddy lived for another five years.
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