you been down to the scene of the accident?”
I nodded again.
The camera guy suddenly shined a bright light on the cologne guy and he started talking into the mic. “At the junction in Two Rivers, a passenger train carrying ninety-four people derailed early this morning on its way to Montreal. The number of casualties is not known yet as many passengers are still missing. We are here with Harper Montgomery, an employee at the Two Rivers station. Sir, can you tell us what you saw today?”
I don’t remember what I said, I only remember the smell of cologne, the stifling heat, and the blinding white light in my eyes as I tried to articulate the wreckage.
April Fools
I was the only one outside Betsy’s family who knew what really happened to Mrs. Parker. The official explanation for her absence was that she was suffering from a mysterious respiratory ailment and had been sent to see specialists somewhere in the Midwest. But everyone had their speculations, the most popular being that Mrs. Parker had run off with another man. A photographer , some said. From New York City . My mother, who was nobody’s fool, said, “Phooey. That poor woman is probably frosting cupcakes in the sanitarium as we speak.” My mother, who was also a self-proclaimed champion of all women (both meek and strong), offered, “I’d lose my marbles too, what with nothing to do all day but dust my husband’s bowling trophies.” (Mr. Parker was a local bowling phenom, having rolled a half-dozen 300 games in his lifetime.) Of course, I didn’t tell her that she was right. I only shrugged and said I bet Betsy missed her. Betsy and I never spoke about what happened that snowy day on her kitchen floor. But there was an understanding between us afterward. We shared a secret both terrible and sacred.
At Two Rivers Graded School, there were rules for boys and girls. Rules that were handed down from the older kids to the younger ones like commandments. Only these statutes were not etched in stone but whispered conspiratorially on the playground. If you had a mentor, an older sibling or friend, you might be privy to the secret order of things. But most of us learned the rules the hard way: by breaking them. The rules for boys were different than the rules for girls (much as they are for men and women). Boys should like girls or else they were pansies. Boys should not, however, let said girls know they liked them. In fact, the more ambivalent and cold you were to the object of your affection, the better. As a boy who carried his heart on his sleeve, I learned this one early on. It only took one longing glance in Betsy’s direction during lunch to earn me a cuff on the ear from Brooder. A conversation during recess resulted in a stern admonishment behind the gym after school.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, Montgomery?” Brooder asked. He had a wad of tobacco tucked in his cheek, making him look remotely like a chipmunk. He’d been stealing his father’s chewing tobacco since the fourth grade.
“Nothin’,” I said, though I could feel my ears red-hot still from the brief encounter with Betsy.
“You look like you got goddamned beets on the side of your head,” he said. “Over Betsy Parker?”
Just hearing her name made my stomach flutter. “Shut up,” I argued meakly.
Brooder smacked my back and spit a long black stream of tobacco on the ground next to my feet. “Don’t be such a pussy.”
And so, I kept my feelings for Betsy as quiet as I could bear. The rules for girls (and women I suppose) remained (and continue to remain) a mystery to me. There were intricacies to the girls’ rules. Nuances that escaped me. All I knew was that even after Betsy kissed me on the Parkers’ kitchen floor, she still pretended that she and I weren’t friends when we were at school. This was a charade I was willing to act out, however, because as soon as school let out, the world started spinning in the right direction again. When the last bell had rung for the day, and we made our way across the playing fields toward home, Betsy’s affectations of cool ambivalence toward me disappeared, our friendship restored in an instant.
It was fun breaking the rules. As far as we knew, we were the only boy and girl in our grade who were carrying on such an illicit relationship. If I’d been older, I might have compared our after-school trysts to the kinds kept by married men and their mistresses. But I was thirteen, and it just felt like we were doing something dangerous. Every cold shoulder in gym class, every snide remark, every snub was simply part of a necessary performance. It was okay, because I knew that it was just pretend and that out of sight of the school, as we ran across the expanse of wet green grass, she would reach out for my hand, dragging me behind her terrific strides. Home again. Where Betsy and I were best friends.
And then in the spring of 1959, Mindy Wheeler moved to town, and all of the rules (for both boys and girls) flew out the proverbial window. Mindy Wheeler was fourteen; rumor had it she’d been kept back at her old school, which was either in North Carolina or North Dakota—no one knew for sure. She had hair the color of hay, and boobs. Big ones. She was also almost six feet tall, a better basketball player than anyone in our whole school. Mindy Wheeler had the mouth of a sailor and the body of a goddess. She was the source of great confusion for all of us (boys and girls). What was one to do with someone like Mindy Wheeler?
It started when Howie Burke invited her to play a game of three-on-three during recess. Invited probably isn’t the right word; allowed might be better. When she grabbed the ball off the court midgame, dribbled it down to the rusty hoop, and made an easy layup, of the six boys, myself included, who had been arguing over whether or not a noogie constituted a foul, no one made a move to stop her. And Howie, perpetrator of the aforementioned noogie, said, “Okay, sub-in The Girl. Gauthier, you’re out.” And with that, everything I had come to accept as proper behavior became meaningless.
Boys openly fawned over Mindy Wheeler. She rendered poor Ray speechless. Even Brooder softened around her. On any given day, any one of my peers could be found stumbling and stuttering before her. We both feared her and worshipped her. And the girls, surprisingly, adored her. You’d have thought that a girl of Mindy’s stature, of her power to subvert an entire set of established social mores and, if nothing else, of her mere pectoral endowment, would have been more intimidating to the girls of Two Rivers Graded School. But instead, they fawned over her as well. They stumbled and stuttered. They feared and worshipped. Betsy Parker included.
Still, I didn’t see it coming.
I lived for the last bell. Usually after school, Betsy was mine again. After school, we could give up the pretense. Feigning indifference for six straight hours was a certain kind of torture for me. After school, at Betsy’s house, we spent hours going through her mother and father’s drawers, looking for forbidden things. We looked at her father’s dirty magazines, filled condoms with water and threw them over the fence into Mr. Lowe’s yard. We studied the complicated lingerie her mother left behind and her father’s jock straps. We once found a douche bag on the top shelf of a closet, and when Betsy explained what it was used for, I found myself so flustered I could barely speak. On less mischievous days, we mostly hunkered down in Betsy’s room listening to records, eating peanut butter straight out of the jar, and planning the next adventure. But after Mindy’s arrival, I couldn’t count on anything. Sometimes instead of racing home with me, Betsy would linger after school with Mindy, doing penny drops on the monkey bars or playing H-O-R-S-E. On those days I’d shove my hands in my pockets and kick dirt all the way home. Resign myself to another afternoon spent watching Brooder terrorize the little kids who were just trying to get home too. Betsy would always catch up with me later, but by then I was sunk so deep in self-pity even Betsy couldn’t pull me out.
It was spring then, and Betsy’s latest scheme was a complex one aimed at framing Howie Burke in an April Fool’s prank. Howie was notorious for his own annual April Fool’s high jinx. He bragged endlessly about
