I think they were from Alabama, the Watsons. The mother, wide and fleshy, was a good deal taller than her husband; he, thin and nervous, was a dead ringer for the famous Jack Sprat and spent most of his day sitting on an upturned wooden box dodging the hot sun in a pair of shorts and sockless shoes, painting boats.

     They had three children. Their oldest, Karen, was the one I knew best. All the kids had blonde hair and had the southern drawl—noticeably different from the Texas twang, by the way—of their parents when they spoke, even the little boy, who was always sticky and had a dull expression like a scrap of wood found beneath the boats in dry dock in their yard. Frankly, it was not a yard really but a kind of anonymous grassless field that stretched up the hill behind our house, randomly decorated with unidentifiable parts of machinery, motorless motorboats hoisted up on sawhorses, and one shabby camper, also on two spindly-legged sawhorses, which should have been sitting snuggly on the back of a sturdy pickup truck.

     It is a mystery how Karen came to be my friend, since we did not go to the same school. Probably, just crossing the field by her house one day one of us happened to say a word to the other and, at that age, it’s enough of a recipe for friendship. Whatever it was, that was one of the causes of our meeting in the camper one slow afternoon in the sizzling heat of late summer.

     Leaving her sticky brother outside to play alone in the dirt, she climbed up the stepladder first and unhitched the door to the camper, determined, as if she had an appointment with a decision. I followed her into the musty room full of yellowed newspapers, empty paint cans, and stained coffee cups, the air sickly sweet with the smell of linoleum and plastic seat covers. If any splinters of sun happened to trespass the Venetian blinds, Karen efficiently sealed them off with the authority of a landlady until whatever light was left in the room turned dark sepia, the color of an old photograph.

     At the time I wasn’t sure what the game was exactly but soon realized that we were supposed to be doing something in secret, something between us that only we should know about and no one else beyond the confines of this disheveled vacant room on stilts. When everything was ready according to my friend’s inscrutable criteria, I was asked and simultaneously pushed into the camper’s closet with her following close behind. In there the dark was so complete that whatever was to happen was sure to be hidden from all—except memory.

     She was instructing me in something I knew nothing about, that much was certain, and I was supposed to allow myself to be instructed. Moments later, hearing outside the clank of paintbrushes being swished around in a coffee can full of turpentine near the front door of the house Karen judged that her father had gone inside to take his nap on the lawn chair in the cool of the breezeway.

     That was her cue apparently, for without missing a beat, face to face as we were in pitch blackness, I felt something damp and sudden on my mouth. She had given me a kiss lightning fast and accurate. Then, in a fit of giggling embarrassment she exploded from the closet. The lesson was over; never repeated; that was all I needed to learn. For the next ten minutes, though, we prolonged the unfamiliar confusion by teasing each other and clowning the way we knew best.

     Then, in one abrupt movement, Karen unlocked the trailer door and a flash of light painfully stabbed through the open doorway and cut a rhomboid patch out of the darkness. I squinted my way through the camper and climbed down the stepladder behind my teacher into the fresher air.

     The shade of the upraised camper protected us now against the harsh sun. But, there was a nagging, awkward new tangle in the knot of our childish relationship, one that my friend drew still tighter when, without a word, she scooped up her waiting brother from the dirt, carried him dangling reluctant and whining in her arms to the house, and without looking back at me, let the screen door slam behind her almost triumphantly, hoping to startle her father out of his customary porch-deep sleep.

©Vincent Montenegro

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