but don’t blame me if he snaps at you. He has some places he doesn’t like when you touch.”
Sam said, “So who else is in the club?”
Alice said, “I’m about to ask some other kids on this street. That little boy, the one who’s a year younger and always sits with the white-haired girl on the bus, the two of them. And that red-haired girl who plays piano during recess.”
Sam said, “Wait, so you don’t have a club, you’re starting one.”
Jimmy added, “Like from scratch.”
“What difference does that make?” Alice said, arms crossed, her tone both pushy and cavalier.
Sam was quiet for a bit. Then he said, “Can I be vice president?”
“What?”
“I want to be the vice president or we won’t be in your club.”
Alice considered this for a moment, then she said, “Fine, sure, whatever.” She turned to Jimmy. “You wanna be something?”
Jimmy blinked. His eyelashes were black feathers framing those blue eyes. He said, “Maybe like treasurer? I’m good at money.”
Alice said, “Okay. We’ll have that piano girl be the secretary, and the other two can just be there unless they think up something special to be.”
Alice, Sam, and Jimmy made their way up Ingram Street and successfully recruited Lynn, Sally, and Mikey. Alice had already scoped out The Gunner House as a potential gathering place, and they held their first official meeting later that afternoon. Alice brought her mutt, Jake, and a slotted spoon in case he pooped inside. “His bowels are rotten,” she explained. Sam dragged in a taxidermied sheep’s head that he had found on the curb just up the block. The place smelled strongly of mildew and cat piss, and dust hung thick and motionless in the hot, hot air above the children’s sweating heads and their eager, happy voices.
Chapter 4
When Sally was eight years old, she and Mikey decided to walk all the way to Gasser Park. It was August. They were the only Gunners who weren’t either enrolled in Bible School at St. Mary’s Parish or away at summer camp in Ellicottville on this particular week.
Sally and Mikey had both been to the park before, but never without a parent. They knew that it was far to walk, but that they would reach the park if they took Ingram to Lakeshore, then followed that east for a long while. They filled a backpack with ham and mustard sandwiches, Fritos, Twizzlers, and a canteen of water. They had all day to make it there and back; Sally’s mother would not be home from work until after five—much later than that if she went out drinking with one of her boyfriends—and Mikey’s father would return around seven. Both Sally and Mikey were already capable at this very young age of letting themselves in and out of their homes using a key. At Mikey’s home, this key lived under the doormat; at Sally’s it was in a fake football-size rock that opened and closed on a hinge.
It took them an hour to reach the park.
Along the way, they talked about the upcoming school year. Sally told Mikey what he could expect from all the different teachers. She told him about the live crab that lived in Mrs. O’Casey’s classroom and all the amazing facts about animals he would learn in her class. How ostriches can run faster than a horse, and that male ostriches roar like a lion. She told him about the strange and unpredictable migration of the snowy owl. She told him about the wood frog, which didn’t hibernate like other animals but instead buried itself in the ground and allowed itself to freeze.
“It stops breathing,” Sally said. “Its heart stops beating.”
Mikey said, “But it’s not dead?”
“Nope,” said Sally. “In the springtime, or whenever it wants to come back into the world, it thaws with the ground and its heart beats again.”
Mikey stopped when they passed a bed of clover along the side of the road, and he showed Sally how to pluck the tiny white-purple petals from the stem, how to bite on the inner tip, which was damp and sweet and edible. Sally loved spending time with Mikey. He never seemed to have a nasty opinion about anything. Like her, he seemed equally satisfied to talk or not talk, and he never asked hard questions. This suited Sally just fine. There were things she didn’t want to talk about, things that Mikey would never think to ask.
It was quiet outside, and very hot.
When they finally reached the park, Sally felt grown-up and accomplished, and she gazed around the parking lot and picnic area, seeking some sort of acknowledgment for the thing they had just done. There was only one car in the lot, a dusty old powder-blue Crown Victoria, and no one else in sight.
The two of them stared at a large map of the park behind Plexiglas. They filled their canteen at the nearby fountain, then followed the trail leading to Turtle Pond, where they had decided to eat their lunch.
Turtle Pond was the size of a football field. The water was army green and the air smelled of burned grass and sewage. Dragonflies skirted through reeds and a black flip-flop was stuck upright in the muck. A charred Budweiser can floated aimlessly a little ways out. They stood at the edge of the pond for a minute, looking for turtles, then took a seat in the shade and ate their hot, damp, and deformed sandwiches and opened the chips.
Mikey ate a Frito, then inhaled sharply and pointed out at the water. “Turtle,” he whispered. A little black head bobbed casually at the surface, six feet out from the edge of the pond. They rose to get a closer look.
“It’s okay, fella,” Mikey whispered. “You’re so good, fella.”
Sally could see down through the surface of the water that it was a box turtle, its shell no more than six inches in length. Its wary little half-closed eyes were sleepy and annoyed. Mikey inched a bit closer, Fritos in hand.
“I’ve got something for you, pal,” he said, tossing a chip in the turtle’s direction so that it landed at the water’s surface just inches from its face. The turtle’s head instantly dipped below the water, but a moment later, the chip disappeared, snatched from underneath. Mikey giggled. The sun was on his face, and his pale eyes were all iris, the color of honeydew melon.
Sally tossed another chip in, and the same thing happened. Mikey tossed in another one, this time a little bit closer in their direction, luring the turtle toward shore.
Mikey said, “I’m going to catch him if he comes close enough.”
He took a very slow step into the silt at the water’s edge, and his foot sank into it, a puddle quickly forming around his shoe. He took another step into the water, and then both feet were fully submerged. The turtle disappeared, and Mikey tossed five or six chips in a wide arc in that direction. He took another step in.
Sally said, “Don’t you want to take your shoes off?”
Mikey said, “No, there might be a leech. Then we’d have to burn it off before it sucked all my blood out. The water feels good anyhow, might keep my feet cool on the way back.”
Mikey took another big step out into the water, so that it reached his calves. He laughed and made a face.
“It is so squishy!” he said.
He looked like he was having fun, and Sally liked
