Big C and Old Blue: of days gone by

“My ass”, thundered Clyde, exhausted and winded, “Big C”, climbing like an orangutan onto the back tire of the old truck, holding the rim of the bed where other trucks had rails. He went up and over like a bear cub, climbing, and deposited himself into the bed of the truck and let out a big guttural great belch-wind of a sigh that was at once relief and resignation; he then lay there in his boots and jeans, one legged crooked and the toe of the engineer boots pointing oddly down, unconscious of himself, unset and uncoiled.

Gordon laughed and laid one hand on the bed-rim in his own resignation and triumph over Clyde; Clyde had chased him, but did not catch Gordon: he chased him, and when Gordon finally slowed, Clyde went on past him, out of breath and ankle-hurt, in his darn engineer boots that he thought were the cat’s meow. But they were all the cat’s meow anyway, far too cool for it, too smart, too confident, too everything, and too much for everything, and nothing could contain them, save for that pickup bed containing Clyde, by his own submission, laying there perhaps as if dying, but just winded, really, perhaps at the very beginning of pulling a new adventure out of his brain.

It was a good afternoon for it. Blessedly hot, it was, and so much so that there weren’t a lot of other people out and about. Clyde and the rest of his bunch were too young to be much perturbed by the killing heat, the momentous stupid humidity of the days, but yet they were old enough to drive around unsupervised for long periods of time. The were in the sweet spot, perhaps, of age, floating somewhere between care and mercy, but so far from each they could not be touched, like aliens, or demons or something unearthly, though it happened every summer in the area, the coming of age, a new particular thing, a new peculiarity among people that held only for a season, and then was gone, to be remember and made something of only after it was hopelessly departed.

Maybe it perturbed, too, the egotistical Clyde not to catch the egotistical Gordon, and the egotistical Gordon, to himself and thrust forward at Clyde, had demonstrated something of his own superiority, not a superiority of body, not in hiding or running, but in using his mind to evade the slightly older man, the slightly older young man; he had outwitted a supposedly smarter man-one older and thus smarter, more enigmatic, stronger, further along towards that Christmas gift that was the age of 18 years old.

He would be able to buy cigarettes anywhere in the county, then, and that privilege brought him one more step towards a kind of divinity, and if only, they all wonder, if they could cash in that future ability a few years earlier, borrow against it; but karma never allowed it, and it was the maddeningly delicious fist of fate that kept them away so long and made the months between stretch into years, or the hours might seem like days, until it was a school day, and then it burned away like gunpowder, and left them scrambling always for this or that, bags or books or pencils or whatever.