1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: “BOY", THE BADBOY

I was mad enough to attack an armadillo if I could find one. I needed to vent my childish rage on someone or something. Stomping across the gravel driveway, past the recently bloomed purple dahlias in mother's flower bed, I jerked open the screen door and let it slam.
"Mother! I yelled. "Are you here?"
"In here," came a muffled voice.
I followed the sound to my parents' bedroom. It was the only room in the house with a temperature less than 80 degrees today because it had the only air conditioner. Sometimes I would beg to sleep in my parents' room, cajoling, crying, whatever it took. They occasionally relented and let me make a pallet in the area that abutted the outer wall of the large walk-in closet. It had been built as an afterthought, after the need for storage trumped the need for space in that room. My sister Susan, along with me and our friends, liked to play in the closet, but always posted a lookout since Mother strictly forbade it. More often, the sleep request was denied, but I tried to remember to bring it up every two to three days during the summer.

"Felisa, you need to sleep in there with Susan. She will be lonely without you." Mother often offered a lame excuse for the refusal. "Anyway, you'll be in third grade in September. You're too big to sleep in here." What did that mean? I certainly didn't know! How do you get too big for air conditioning?
Susan, hearing this whole exchange, rolled her eyes. She was three years older than I, her calm bookishness a clear contrast to my proclivity for perpetual activity. The large room we shared had been the dining room, but was converted to bedroom space after my birth. I was the fifth child of six, the second or third to be greeted with consternation by our paternal grandmother, who had only raised one child, our father, to adulthood. Her firstborn child, a boy, had died at age 18months after tragically drinking coal oil. I heard vague stories that a babysitter was responsible for leaving the coal oil on the floor, but I never got up the nerve to ask Nettie about it. It was one of the few taboo subjects in our home.
Our bedroom was large, and each of us three girls had her own twin bed, two of them set end-to-end, lining the outside wall so that each faced a big window, the third placed opposite them on the inside wall. The windows were open every season except winter and permitted air to freely enter the room. In the daytime, the air was often warm or hot, but at night, it was fresh and cool, no matter how hot the day had been. A huge and heavy gray steel fan, its two-part shape resembling some huge round robot, kept the air circulating in the room, and shorty pajamas were the standard uniform for summer nights. Cottons were cooler than nylons and the preferred material for nighttime.
Occasionally, Mrs. Bittner, our neighbor, told Mother how she heard me talking in my sleep. It embarrassed me, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was known to have a very active sleep/dream life, and once scared my grandmother, Molly Jeanette, whom all of us called Nettie , when I was spending the night at her house in Corsicana. Nettie told me the next morning that she had been awakened by a commotion and woke to see me jumping up and down on the small twin bed that occupied space in the same ample bedroom with her. I was also making sounds like an ape . It took a few seconds, but then I remembered that my cousin Phil, about seven years older than I who was also spending the night , had read me a bedtime story about apes kidnapping a woman and taking her into the jungle. Then I remembered my dream about apes taking me into the jungle.
"I guess I was fighting off the apes," I laughed.
"Well, tonight, you and Phil need to find another sort of bedtime story to read," Nettie cautioned.
"MooooTHER!!!!" I yelled again, impatient this time.
"Right HERE, Felisa. In the closet."
"I'm mad at Boy!!! I wailed.
"Oh?" Mother paused, folding clothes and putting them in a brown pasteboard box. The pause…..I noticed that Mother often did this with me. My brothers and sisters seemed to get instant answers.
"He stole my yellow metal race car and now it's silver because he scraped the paint off it, but I know it's mine. He says it's his. He stole it and scraped the paint off it and he's lying about it." I stomped my foot hard. My face was contorted, but Mother seemed to be suppressing a smile.
"Where is the car?", Mother asked tentatively.
"Right here," I unfolded my palm to reveal the small car.
"Oh, I see. Well, how did you get it?"
"I just grabbed it and ran. I threw some dirt at him too when he started chasing me."
"Well, I suspect he could have caught you if he'd really wanted. He's ten, you're only seven . And he's a foot taller than you are."
"That's wrong, isn't it? He wouldn't admit it."
Mother hesitated a minute. A soft look moved like a shadow over her face.
"Yes, it's wrong for someone to take what is someone else's. She paused. "How many cars do you have, Felisa?"
"Five or six," I guess.
"And how many does Ed…uh, Boy, have?" Ed possessed a name, but for some reason no one ever understood, not even me, I called him Boy, and my family honored it, as did Ed.
"I guess he only has the one he stole," I retorted, feeling my cheeks flush as hot lines ran up my face.
"Felisa, I'm not going to make you do this, but I want you to think about something. Boy may be having trouble admitting that he took something from you, and that's wrong. But if you have six cars, and he only has one, and if you give him the car, then you don't have to be mad about it anymore. You and Boy can still play together, and if you give it to him, it's a gift, not something that is stolen. If Boy did steal it from you, maybe he will realize he was wrong. Would you like to go over there and give it back?"
I kicked at the floor and studied the Chinese pagodas and wise looking men in Chinese hats on the wallpaper.
"Ok" Mother said, sensing this might not be easy.
"Well, I will, but he has to say he's sorry."
"We'll see," Mother clicked her tongue, and her eyebrows were raised. "Do you want me to go with you, or do you want to go alone?"
"I'll go by myself," I said, resigned.
Tennis shoes squeaked softly on the wooden floor, the back screened door whipped open with a whack, popping loudly against the facing as it slammed shut, pulled sharply by the tightly wound spring at its base. Gravel, kicked roughly, flew in all directions. Small feet pounded away at the spare Bermuda runners, hungry for water, crushing them further into the hard black earth. By the time I reached Boy's house, 40 yards southeast of ours in what used to be a pasture, my chest hurt and I was breathing like a mad bull, red-faced, and spent. I leapt the three steps up to the wide front porch and fell against the screen, my tiny fists rapping on the door. Evelyn, Boy's mother, answered.
"You here to see Boy?" she asked flatly, with what I interpreted as a scowl, a permanently etched sour look to her face. I saw only the etching, not the acid of events that formed those hard lines. She opened the screen door before I could answer. Boy was slouched on the old navy blue brocade couch, his legs loosely attached to his body. He was assiduously avoiding the springs that were poking through letting the cotton stuffing escape. He looked dejected, and he was not laughing even though he was watching one of my favorite episodes of I Love Lucy where she was dancing down the stairs in a nightclub dance routine with a six foot tall feather hat.
I scuffed my shoe on the pink linoleum, actually on the gray wood floor beneath, since I was standing at a worn place in the doorway. Years of feet stepping across the threshold had worn completely through the linoleum to the floor beneath.
"Here Boy," I said, looking slightly down at those pink flowers, never letting myself look directly at him. "I brought you this." I handed over the now unpainted car, the silver primer glowing in the glare from the television.
Evelyn gave Boy a questioning look that seemed to become accusing, and he squirmed uncomfortably. He slowly rose, his legs seeming to reattach themselves as he got to his feet.
"Aw, that," he said. "You can keep it if you want it. It ain't no big deal anyway." He seemed to be acting nonchalant for Evelyn's sake. She was watching him very closely. I felt tensions flittering around like hummingbirds, moving back and forth between Evelyn and Boy.
"Here," I thrust it toward his hands. "Whosever it was, it's yours now. It's just an old car. Girls don't play with cars anyway."
"Thanks,Felisa. Wanna play in the dirt for a while?"
Some unseen emotional force exited the room. Evelyn stopped looking suspicious, Boy started smiling as he opened the door off the screenedporch at the side of the house, and I didn't feel like throwing dirt or kicking rocks. I sat down with Boy, strange playmates though we were, and dug, spooned, poured and sifted dirt for an hour until I heard the back door of my house slam as usual and my oldest brother Elton call me to supper.
When I headed home, Boy didn't chase me and I didn't throw dirt at him. And I don't know why, the idea just seized me as I stood up and took off running for home; I reached down and scooped up the metal car where it sat in the dirt and stuffed it into the pocket of my cotton shorts . As I glanced back, Boy stood watching me, his mouth agape.
Installed