LITMIR.BIZ

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Fat Bobby said, grabbing the fence. He started to push, and the large entrance gate wheeled open with a screech in its rusty tract.

      “Wait!” Looking at the sign and hearing the loud firecracker sounds coming from somewhere in the yard, I hung back. “It says no trespassing!”

      “Don’t worry.” He looked back at me as he slipped inside. “I know them.”

      Hesitantly, I followed.

      As we crossed the yard towards the garage, walking around the cars in various states of disrepair and stages of rust, stepping over flaking tires and old engine blocks like the remnants of machines after Armageddon, I took in the fading chrome and metal, the shattered windshields and sun-cracked bumpers, and thought to myself: So these are my fallen stars, my great treasure in the woods. That realization carried with it a light sadness, and a soft sigh, barely perceptible, escaped me as the loss of possibilities played out in my mind. Maybe Bobby’s talk of ghost lights and UFO landings had sparked an excitement in me despite my pretenses otherwise. At certain angles, the sunlight glared off of the dead vehicles as intense as it had from far off on the hill, yet this close up the magnificence had left the display and it was just daylight bouncing off scrap metal.

      Fat Bobby led me around the garage. The building in the middle of the refuse was like the last fortress on a battlefield, itself pockmarked by age or mortar fire. Then we turned a corner and there, a few feet away, were black people with guns, and with California memories like wartime flashbacks I once more thought Guns! Guns! Run! Gang war!

      Bobby called out over the gunfire to the duo. Bottles and cans set up on a segment of wooden post some distance away jumped into the air, shattered, or ripped into aluminum shreds as I looked on, and I thought of the anxiety-filled freeway trips through Compton or Long Beach of years past.

      The larger of the two, a tall and wiry black man with close-cropped curls of gray peppered hair, turned, saw us, flashed a bright white smile, and holstered his weapon. The second black person, a kid really, no more than a year older than me, if that, saw this, turned to look at us too, and lowered his gun also.

      “Hey, my man!” the man said, in jeans and a sleeveless undershirt, grease and oil-stained, looking very much the mechanic. He stepped over to Fat Bobby, held out his hand palm up, and Bobby gave him a mighty slap, a smile brightening his fat face as I hadn’t seen it do since my dad had given him the comic book money.

      Bobby gestured to the older man, then the boy, and looked at me as he said: “Joey, this is Mr. Connolly—”

      “Ernest,” Mr. Connolly interjected, and shook my hand with one of his, large and long-fingered and hairy so that I thought of a tarantula as I shook it. I put him at around sixty or so, and yet he carried himself with a mild swagger and confidence of a man thirty years younger.

      “—and his son, Jim,” Bobby finished, and my hand was released and taken up by the smaller hand of the black kid, wiry like his dad, but his head bald as a baby’s. Jim smiled that same flashy ivory smile his dad had, genuine and friendly, and I thought to myself for a fat kid with no friends Bobby sure had a lot of friends.

      Tara bloomed in my mind briefly like a puff of smoke, and I smothered the thought and what accompanied it (the fair the fair a beautiful girl and the fair) and brought my thoughts back to the here and now.

      “Joey saw the light shining off all your cars and wondered what it was,” Fat Bobby explained, “so I brought him here. Hope it’s not a problem.”

      Mr. Connolly dismissed this with a combination snort and bark of a laugh, and waved the very idea away.

      “No problem at all,” he said. “You know you can come around here anytime, Bobby.” With that Mr. Connolly gave Bobby a massive slap on the back, which he probably meant to be friendly but rocked Fat Bobby on his heels. Turning to his son he gathered up the pistol his kid had been using and started to walk away. “You kids have fun,” he said to all of us. And this just to Jim: “Be in for lunch.”

      Then it was the three of us: Fat Bobby, myself, and the first black kid I wasn’t afraid of being shot or stabbed by in a long, long time. And Bandit, of course, off somewhere nearby, sniffing the cars and parts of cars, and the dirt and the thin, dying weeds, scents invisible in the air, there but unseen.

      I felt it again, that sense of things moving and me being carried along for the ride. Another link in the chain of events, the moving of the gears, and I felt I was on a trail myself, following it like Bandit to wherever it inevitably led.

      2.

      “It actually wasn’t one of the cars here I saw,” I told Jim as the three of us strolled casually through the yard, like three buddies on a fishing trip. I’d answered all the initial questions boys always had when meeting each other, like where I was from, where I lived, what I liked to do, things like that. Of course he took to Bandit real quick, which was a point in my favor: a good dog like a sign that said, Hey, I ain’t so bad. I’m pretty damn okay, actually. See, I have a dog!

      “Oh?” he said, twirling a metal pipe he had scooped up off the ground. I noticed his motions weren’t clumsy, that the pipe whizzed in circles and semicircles in his hand with deftness and ease, and as sure as Bandit was a sign about me, this was a sign about Jim. It said I know how to take care of myself and like a telepathy of some sort I knew Mr. Connolly had bestowed a similar philosophy upon his son as Dad had done with me.

      Don’t let fear control you.

      Don’t take shit from anyone.

      With just the right twist of his wrist, I knew Jim Connolly could whack something good with that small pipe. Probably without the pipe too, and I knew this was one kid I didn’t want to get in any pissing contest with. I was glad we’d hit it off so well.

      “Yeah,” I said. “It was a lot like the sun shining off these cars here, but it wasn’t here. I saw it off in the woods.”

      “You probably just forgot exactly where you saw it coming from,” Fat Bobby said, picking up a stick, trying to twirl and spin it like Jim. The stick went flying out of his sausage-like fingers, sailed dangerously close past my face.

      I slugged him on the arm. I checked the punch at the last moment, not hitting him too hard, but Bobby still gave me an injured What’d you do that for? look.

      “There’s at least half a mile between the woods and here,” I said. “I’m not fucking blind.”

      “Geez,” Fat Bobby said, rubbing his shoulder where I’d hit him. “Sorry.”

      “Actually,” Jim said, “there’s service roads that run all through the woods.”

      “Service roads?” I asked.

      “Yeah, you know, for forest rangers and firefighters and shit like that.” He had given me a look when I’d hit Bobby that said: Don’t hit the fat kid. To his credit he didn’t make a big deal about it, and so I made a mental note to myself not to hit Fat Bobby like that anymore, even in play. That Jim would come to Fat Bobby’s defense, even with just a look, was kind of cool in my book, and my respect for the kid rose a notch or two. “So it’s possible you saw something where you said you saw it.”

      “I did see something where I said I saw it.” The note of challenge in my voice made Jim look up at me, and he flashed his bright smile again. I knew that he was liking me more as well, what with me not backing down from him, even about something as dumb as where some ghost lights or UFO beams had come from.

      “Only one problem,” he said.

      “What’s that?” I asked.

      We came to the far rear fence of the yard at that moment, and Jim pointed off to where the woods started a hundred yards off or so. A dirt road led off that way into the trees, and there was a barricade across it, large metal crossbeams in the shape of an X. As if for added determent, thick coils of chain

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