—

The boy is six and wearing nothing but a pair of white underwear with Supermans patterned everywhere. You know this story. He has just finished crying and is now entering that state where his jaw shudders to calm itself shut. His snot-plastered nose, its salt on his lips, his tongue, he’s at home. His mother, you remember this, has locked him in the basement for wetting his bed again, the four or five Supermans near his crotch now soiled dark. She had dragged him out of bed by the arm, then down the stairs as he screamed, begged, “One more chance, Ma. One more chance.” The kind of basement no one goes down, all around him the dank scent of damp earth, rusted pipes choked with cobwebs, his own piss still wet down his leg, between his toes. He stands with one foot on the other, as if touching less of the basement meant he was less inside it. He closes his eyes. This is my superpower, he thinks: to make a dark even darker than what’s around me. He stops crying.

* * *

—

Summer was almost gone as we sat on the toolshed roof by the field’s edge, but the heat had stayed, and our shirts clung to us like unmolted skins. The tin roof, touched all day by the heat, was still warm through my shorts. The sun, now waning, must still be stronger somewhere west, I thought, like in Ohio, golden yet for some boy I’ll never meet.

I thought of that boy, how far from me he was and still American.

The wind was cool and thick up the legs of my shorts.

We were talking, as we did those days after work when we were too exhausted to head home just yet. We talked about his guns, of school, how he might drop out, how the Colt factory in Windsor might be hiring again now that the latest shooting spree was three months done and already old news, we talked of the next game out on Xbox, his old man, his old man’s drinking, we talked of sunflowers, how goofy they looked, like cartoons, Trevor said, but real. We talked about you, about your nightmares, your loosening mind, his face troubled as he listened, which made his pout more defined.

A long silence. Then Trevor took out his cell phone, snapped a picture at the colors at the sky’s end, then put it back in his pocket without reviewing what he took. Our eyes met. He flashed an embarrassed smile, then looked away and started picking at a pimple on his chin.

“Cleopatra,” he said after a while.

“What?”

“Cleopatra saw the same sunset. Ain’t that crazy? Like everybody who was ever alive only seen one sun.” He gestured to indicate the whole town, even though we were the only people there far as the eye could see. “No wonder people used to think it was god himself.”

“Said who?”

“People.” He chewed his lip for a moment. “Sometimes I wanna just go that way forever.” He pointed his chin beyond the sycamores. “Like just psssh.” I studied his arm propped behind him, the thin, flowing muscles, field-toned and burger-fed, shifting as he talked.

I flung the last rind from the grapefruit I was peeling off the roof. What about our skeletons, I wanted to ask, how do we get away from them—but thought better of it. “It must suck to be the sun, though,” I said, handing him a pink half.

He put the whole half in his mouth. “Hob bob?”

“Finish chewing you animal.”

He rolled back his eyes and bobbled his head playfully, as if possessed, the clear juice dripping down his chin, his neck, the indent under his Adam’s apple, no larger than a thumbprint, glistening. He swallowed, wiped his mouth with the back of his arm. “How come?” he repeated, serious.

“’Cause you never see yourself if you’re the sun. You don’t even know where you are in the sky.” I placed a wedge on my tongue, letting the acid sting the place where I’d bit the inside of my cheek all week for no reason.

He looked at me thoughtfully, turned the idea in his head, his lips wet with juice.

“Like you don’t even know if you’re round or square or even if you’re ugly or not,” I continued. I wanted it to sound important, urgent—but had no idea if I believed it. “Like you can only see what you do to the earth, the colors and stuff, but not who you are.” I glanced at him.

He picked at a hole in his grass-stained white Vans. His nail scraped at the leather in the sneaker, the hole widening.

I hadn’t noticed, until then, the crickets chirping. The day dimmed around us.

Trevor said, “I think it sucks to be the sun ’cause he’s on fire.” I heard what I thought was another cricket, a closer one. The throb, a thudded beating. But Trevor, still sitting, legs spread, had let his penis, soft and pink, hang out from the pant leg of his shorts, and was now pissing. The stream rattled on the slanted metal roof before falling off the side, dribbling onto the dirt below. “And I’m putting out the fire,” he said, his lips curled in concentration.

I turned away, but kept seeing him, not Trevor, but the boy in Ohio, the one who will soon be found by the hour I had just passed through, unscathed. Together, with nothing to say, we spat, one by one, the grapefruit seeds stored in our cheeks. They fell on the tin roof in big fat drops and blued as the sun sank fully behind the trees.

* * *

—

One day, after overtime at the clock factory, the boy’s mother came home to a house littered with hundreds of toy soldiers, their curled plastic lives spread like debris across the kitchen tiles. The boy usually knew to clean up before she came home. But this day he was lost in the story he made of their bodies. The men were in the midst of saving a six-inch Mickey Mouse trapped in a prison made of black VHS tapes.

When the door opened, the boy leapt to his feet but it was too late. Before he could make out his mother’s face, the backhand blasted the side of his head, followed by another, then more. A rain of it. A storm of mother. The boy’s grandmother, hearing the screams, rushed in and, as if by instinct, knelt on all fours over the boy, making a small and feeble house with her frame. Inside it, the boy curled into his clothes and waited for his mother to calm. Through his grandmother’s trembling arms, he noticed the videocassettes had toppled over. Mickey Mouse was free.

* * *

—

A few days after the shed roof, the grapefruit, I found myself sitting shotgun in Trevor’s truck. He fished the Black & Mild from the chest pocket of his T-shirt, laid it gently across his kneecaps. Then he grabbed the box cutter from his other pocket and cut a lengthwise slit along the cigarillo before emptying its contents out the window. “Open the glove,” he said. “Yeah. No, under the insurance. Yeah, right there.”

I grabbed the two dime bags, one half-filled with weed, the other with coke, and handed them to him. He opened the bag, placed the weed, already broken, into the gutted cigarillo till it filled. He threw the bag out the window, then opened the second bag, tipped the white grains over the row of weed. “Like snow-capped mountains!” he said, grinning. In his excitement, he let the second bag fall through his legs, to the floorboard. He licked the Black & Mild’s hem, sealing the slit until it stuck into a tight joint, then blew on the hem, waved the joint in front of him to dry. He marveled at it between his fingers before placing it between his lips and lighting. We sat there, passing it back and forth until my head felt thin and skull-less.

After what seemed like hours, we ended up in the barn, somehow lying on the dusty floor. It must have been late—or at least dark enough to make the barn’s interior feel immense, like the hull of a beached ship.

“Don’t be weird,” Trevor said, sitting up. He grabbed the WWII army helmet off the floor and put it back on, the one he was wearing the day I met him. I keep seeing that helmet—but this can’t be right. This boy, impossibly American and alive in the image of a dead soldier. It’s too neat, so clean a symbol I must have made it up. And even now, in all the pictures I looked through, I can’t find him wearing it. Yet here it is, tilted to hide Trevor’s eyes, making him seem anonymous and easy to look at. I studied him like a new word. His reddish lips stuck out from the helmet’s visor. The Adam’s apple, oddly small, a blip in a line drawn by a tired artist. It was dark enough for my eyes to swallow all of him without ever seeing him clearly. Like eating with the lights off—it still nourished even if you didn’t know where your body ends.

“Don’t be weird.”

“I wasn’t looking at you,” I said, diverting my gaze. “I was just thinking.”

“Look. The radio’s working again.” He played with the knob on the handheld radio in his lap and the static intensified, then a robust and urgent voice poured into the space between us: Fourth down-and-goal with twenty-seven seconds to go and the Patriots line up for the snap . . .