Until second grade, we lived on Westmore Way. My first friends were David Jones and Linda Koutsky. (Linda still calls me her “first friend.” David died much too young, and he was my first friend. Linda remains first among my surviving friends.) Jimmy and Susie Innes lived two houses down and Bill Miller lived kitty-corner across the yard next door to David, and the twins Tim and Tom Scheunemann were across the backyard with their scary black lab. Across the street near Zane were the Koutskys, and Jeff Varner—who was a grade ahead and whose mom was sweet and had an obvious crush on my dad—was right across the street from us. The Haglins had eight or eleven kids and lived on the cul-de-sac behind the Koutsky’s house, on Zane. Dr. Haglin was an important surgeon, and his youngest son Jon-Jon was a year younger than me, and I wondered why he was called Jon-Jon. The quasi-bully Dougie Moberg also lived on Zane, up the hill from Jon-Jon’s house and across from David’s.
Then, I spent more time at the Jones’s house than David spent at mine. Later, my family moved three blocks south. To a second-grader, three blocks—across Duluth Street—was a world away. Duluth Street was busy. It could have been a mountain range. I had to make new friends.
But then, before the move, there were no worries or rules about where we kids went or who we played with. Our gang of kids ran free in our suburban neighborhood roughly defined by Westmore, Brunswick, Westbrook, and Zane. Basset’s Creek coursed across the back yards of the houses on Zane and that was the limit of our flat earth. Mostly we played in the unfenced range of swing sets, sandboxes, and improvised ball fields in the back yards from my house near one corner of the block to the Jones’s at the other. Then, that block was the world for our gang of neighborhood kids. I never paused to think how precious it was. Time is a place.
David could get his mom to let us do things. (I think maybe she was wise and let us think David could get her to let us do things.) Like set up the Creepy Crawlers set in the basement and take hooks from Mr. Jones’s tackle box to make creepy crawly fishing lures that Mrs. Jones said Mr. Jones would be thrilled to catch fish with! Or pull all the sleeping bags and blankets from a closet to spread across furniture in the rec room where the color television was to make tunnels that were really secret escape routes from episodes of Hogan’s Heroes we saw at night when Mr. Jones was reclined, watching his favorite program.
Sometimes David would beg his mom to take us places like Excelsior Amusement Park or “Up to Jordan,” a mysterious place where David’s cousins lived. David said they were the best, the most fun. I don’t recall Mrs. Jones ever taking us anywhere, but she never said no, exactly, just, “Not today, honey.” And then she’d come up with something to keep us entertained, like using an old electric iron to melt broken crayon pieces. We had great fun making random designs of drips and drizzles of 54 Crayola colors on sheets of thin white cardboard salvaged from Mr. Jones’s shirt packaging. Or she would tell us to go outside to play with the rest of the kids or go catch frogs and crayfish in the creek.
Mrs. Jones had rosy cheeks, doughy skin, and black hair usually wrapped in a red and white polka-dot scarf. I remember her in a white blouse and red skirt, a white apron. She always seemed to be baking, cleaning, or working the vegetable garden. She had a big upstairs kitchen with tall windows looking over the back yards, and spacious white countertops, cupboards, and appliances with rounded corners. The floor was big black and white square tiles in a checker pattern that I imagined we could play games on with big enough checker pieces. There were cookies and snack bars, and there was always a slice of homemade pie or cake after every meal except breakfast. She was older than my parents, and that made sense to me, since I was the oldest kid in my family, and David the youngest in his.
I kinda knew David’s older brothers Fred Junior, Doug, and Claude, and I figured there were more who weren’t around. David had an older nephew, which seemed impossible to me. Gradually I came to understand how that could happen. Something must have not gone according to plan if Mrs. Jones had been pregnant with David after one of her sons had a girlfriend or a wife who was pregnant. David’s nephew had an odd name, I thought—Harley or JD—but I overheard my mom once when she said that it wasn’t such an unusual name for a kid whose parents had tattoos and rode motorcycles. It didn’t matter because everyone called him Spencer, which I figured was his middle name.
I felt safe with Mrs. Jones. Once while playing in my backyard, I fell and cut my knee right open. (I still have the scar, nearly 55 years later, flat and thin now, no longer the lumpy keloid I remember from my youth.) Mrs. Jones came running. I was too stunned to cry, but the other kids made a racket. It was Susie who cried loudest about the blood rushing down my leg. Mrs. Jones must have been working in her garden. She scooped me up, carried me against her chest, her strong arms at my knees and waist. She rushed across my parents’ patio, flung the screen aside, got me to the countertop beside the kitchen sink. She crushed a cool cloth tight to my knee.
My mom rushed to the kitchen. “Doris, what happened?!” I was wondering whether she’d be upset that Mrs. Jones hadn’t knocked before going inside.
Mrs. Jones said it didn’t look like I’d need stitches, but she directed my mom: “Doris, bring some bandages and ointment.” (This was the moment I realized that my mom and David’s mom were both named Doris.) My mom disappeared and returned with an open tin of Band-aids. Mrs. Jones fished one of the big squarish ones from the tin and my mom helped get it unwrapped. Mrs. Jones dried the wound and smeared some ointment onto the white cotton square of the bandage and pressed it onto my knee while my mom went to wipe up the drops of blood like melted crayon from the linoleum floor, and I wondered, would my blood forever leave stains on Mrs. Jones’s white apron?
One day David asked if we could go to the junkyard. This sounded like a dangerous thing, and I was sure the answer would be no, but Mrs. Jones said maybe we could. I had no idea where the junkyard was—I don’t think I’d ever been to one. I imagined piles of garbage, wrecked cars, machinery with big jaws for crushing cars, and great steam shovel scoops moving trash piles from one corner of the junkyard to another.
David said the junkyard was his dad’s and it was super fun and that he and Spencer played there all the time, just like how he went to Excelsior and the swimming pool and up to Jordan all the time. I believed him, but I also wondered, where had I been all that time when I also felt like I was with David almost all the time. David said there were mountains of things to climb, and a German Shepherd guard dog named Cash that would bite anyone if David said sick ‘em, but Cash was super nice to David and anyone David said was okay. And there were old cars and trucks and tractors we could ride on.
Instead of telling us to go play outside or paint designs on old T-shirts with greenish glow-in-the-dark paint, Mrs. Jones said, “I’ll ask your father.” David ran upstairs ahead of her, yelling, “Pa! Pa! Ma says we can go to the junkyard!” Mrs. Jones, still standing in the kitchen drying her hands on a white towel, shook her head a little and smiled. Moments later, David clambered down the stairs yelling, “Ma, Ma! Pa says we can go to the junkyard!”
Mrs. Jones made a stack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and packed them into brown paper bags with apples and oatmeal cookies, and we climbed onto the dusty bench seat of Mr. Jones’s pickup truck. Mr. Jones was a quiet, broad-shouldered man with a head and face like a young Karl Malden’s. He often chewed a cigar that had gone out and I wondered why he didn’t ever light it again. I never saw him go outside without his old fedora hat, and he always took it off when he came inside and set it on a hook by the door. In the truck he removed his hat and put it on the seat between him and David. He put his big tanned and hairy elbow on top of the seatback while he twisted to look and back the truck up the long driveway from the detached garage, past the white house with the red trim and dark shingles with white specks in them that were different from the shingles on all the other houses in the neighborhood. (David said their house was the biggest and oldest in the neighborhood, the oldest for miles around. Their house was the farmhouse back before the Jones’s sold their land.)
It was a hot, cloudless day and one of David’s older brothers and David’s barely older nephew Spencer were at the junkyard already. Mr. Jones told us boys to go play a while, and then he went with David’s brother into a small white shed with windows that they called the office. I asked about the dog and David just said Cash wasn’t here today, and I wondered where a junkyard dog would be when it wasn’t guarding the junkyard. Spencer said let’s play king of the mountain and ran off toward a pile of scrap metal: vehicle bumpers and wrecked car doors, bed frames that were only springs with most of the fabric gone. We climbed carefully to the top of the rusting mountain but none of us dared push anyone off. We sat there at the top a little while. We looked around at the smaller piles of junk metal scattered between the office and a field of sad old broken cars with fading yellow and white numbers greased onto their windshields, tractors and rusted zombie appliances, a faded orange school bus with missing windows and just rims for wheels. Tires with evaporated rainwater rings inside were stacked near the office. Dandelions and thorny milk thistle weeds broke the gravel between the junk piles.
“I’m hungry,” Spencer said. “Did your ma make sandwiches?”
“Yeah,” David said. “Let’s see if the water in the office cooler’s cold.” We crabbed carefully down from our perch atop of the biggest pile in the junkyard.