It’s the summer of my 8th year, I’m sitting, cross-legged, on the ground in my worn-out blue-jeans and a white T-shirt, holding a broken compass up close to my eye so I can check it out.
I’m not trying to fix the compass, I want to see the tiny printing near the middle of the face, for no reason. It's around ten on a sunny July morning and the temperature is already 92°F and the heat doesn't matter to me or my friend because there’s a little breeze here in the shade of some tall elm trees and sweating is part of being a kid.
Bruce is lying on his back a few feet away reading a beat-up Superman comic that he found on the playground at the end of school. It has no cover, but it has the cool last pages with the ads for great things like trick pepper gum and a how-to book on ventriloquism. I don't personally know of anyone who ever got one of those things from the back of a comic book, but we can daydream.
We're waiting for Terry who's going to meet up with us after he finishes mowing his folk’s yard. It shouldn’t be much longer but it doesn't matter, Bruce and I are having a good time.
We're on the other side of the alley, behind Bruce's house, on a small city block that's mostly trees and weeds. Behind us there’s a gully with a creek running down the middle. Last fall we found a dead cat in a deep spot in the creek and we checked on it all through the winter and spring. It went from being a dead cat, to being a cat skin on bones, to being a few bones and a cat skull with teeth. You could even see it through the ice that formed over that part during the winter. Pretty cool!
Cars are passing by on the street but we can pick out the whine of approaching bike tires on the pavement. Terry turns from the street into the alley and skids on the gravel raising a little cloud of dust, on purpose. Bruce and I look up, nodding appreciatively, as he pedals toward us and skids to a stop, a couple feet away. He looks serious, and so do we.
"Hey," he says, and we say hey back. He lays his bike down on its side and pulls a folded advertisement out of his back pocket. "Here's that picture of the Moped I told you about." He throws the folded Spiegel flyer down on the ground by my leg.
I set the compass housing down, pick up the flyer and open it up to the page he's marked and circled. It shows a red boy's bike with a small gas motor mounted near the pedals. The picture is of a real bike but it has cartoon "wind" lines rushing past it to show motion. There's a kid with a blue windbreaker jacket riding it and it looks like he's having a blast. The price is in black in a red circle, $79.99.
"Cool." I hand it over to Bruce who looks up from his comic.
Terry's still standing but he's bent at the waist with his hands on his hips while he catches his breath from the ride over. After recovering, Terry stands up and, with great seriousness, says, "If you pick up a hamster by his tail, his eyes will fall out."
Bruce and I both stop and look up at him, considering his words. Sunlight comes through the moving elm branches and leaves high above his head. Bruce speaks first.
"I've heard that. My cousin told me that at Thanksgiving, but I didn't really believe him. He's come up with shit like that before. I figured it was just more of his shit." Bruce said “shit” a lot.
"It's true, though," Terry confirms. "Scott Marshall, my brother, Keith's friend told him last night when he was over. I heard them in the garage. There were goofing around with Keith's motorcycle."
"Huh," I say, thinking back on the hamster my sister used to have. Nice enough animal. It was soft. If you gave it sunflower seeds, it would take them and then stuff them into its cheeks. The more seeds you gave it, the more it would stuff into its cheeks until they bulged way out. It would run on the inside of a little rolling wheel in its cage too. That was about it. It didn't do a lot else. Sometimes I had to help clean the cage. It smelled like sour crap, but not as bad as a turtle.
In a way, the news about the eyes didn't surprise me a lot. When I thought back on it, it had little beady black eyes that stuck way out and they looked a little loose to begin with. It never occurred to me to try picking it up by its tail. I'm glad I didn't. I would have caught hell about that.
I picked up the compass again and turned it over.
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