Before he shot that teenager, we only knew Mr. Weiser because we stole crabapples out of his yard. We’d inherited the idea from kids we didn’t know, kids who’d already gone off to college, who came back for Labor day picnics to pinch our cheeks and drink Miller out of plastic coolers and tell us about the old days, when they were young and Mr. Weiser’s wife still lived there. The college kids stood around barbeques and told us about running through his yard until Mr. Weiser came home from work. Climbing out of his car, already yelling at them, he would threaten to go and get the shotgun, and the college kids, when they were our age, ran away.
We said that we would never have run. Secretly, we worried about the mysterious shotgun. We told them we were tough, and that anyway Mr. Weiser never went to work anymore, and therefore couldn’t come home to yell at us.
The college kids said “Everything changes.” They tossed bottles into recycling bins and climbed into used cars and drove back to university towns. We didn’t believe they had ever been our age. We snuck away from the picnics and ran to the crabapples, hard little knots the size of our tightest fists, hundreds of them, enough to throw for weeks, which were the largest units of time we could understand.
We started in September, with summer camp over and the season for violins and karate still ages away. The afternoons and evenings were long and slow and there was always time, to sit in front of the television, to eat store-bought cookies dipped in Kool-Aid, to change out of our school clothes and into our big sisters’ hand-me-downs, to spill into the cul-de-sac and run until our lungs froze full of fall wind. We pushed each other off of our rollerblades. We punched Lily Trimble, who swore she could feel no pain. We shot each other with guns made of tree branches, we lay down dead in the street, we traced outlines of our bodies in chalk, we drew in the faces, the teeth, and added tentacles. We threw crabapples at each other until purple bruises floated up in the skin of our arms, round and obscene as suction marks.
We fought out of a backyard next door. A garden shed was one base and the corner of a house was another. We clustered and scattered and flattened ourselves against the ground, chucking fruit at each other from close range. When our ammo ran down we sprinted into Mr. Weiser’s yard, to the two dwarf trees bowed low under the weight of heavy fruit. Mr. Weiser never came out but the sight of his back screen door made our hearts race. We didn’t mind the pain of heavy crabapples. We hit each other from three feet apart and went home after every fight covered in purple checkerboards of bruises until Glory Hammond hit Fatty Pembleton with a rotten crabapple and Fatty went home with a stained shirt and was grounded and we decided, out of respect, to change the rules.
Sheryl Morse laid them out for us. No one could get hit until they crossed an invisible line in the middle. Everyone was part of a team. No one could get hit while running unarmed. And there was a goal, and an end to the game: we were supposed to grab a trophy from the other team – a stray t-shirt, a home plate, a bucket, a broom – and once you got it, the game was over.
When we got bored we found wildonions and snakestrawberries and put them in buckets of water and fed them to our little sisters as soup. We broke a plastic skip-it Lucy Strickland got for her birthday. We sold Crystal Lite lemonade to our fathers, coming home from work in their cars, for five dollars a Dixie cup. When Fatty Pembleton came back we explained the new rules of the crabapple game. She told us they were stupid, and grabbed an apple and hit Sheryl Morse on the shoulder. Sheryl went home crying, and we never saw her again. Fatty picked up three more apples, and we sprinted back to our bases and waited, breathless for attack. We nearly killed each other that day, we said to each other, as we trooped back to our dinners with our arms around our best friends’ shoulders.
We painted portraits of our younger sisters and hung them on our refrigerators. We went to bed talking, asleep before our heads hit the pillow, asleep before we finished our sentences, telling our mothers we were old enough to watch the late show already.
By October, all of the crabapples started to rot. We kept apart from each other as the apples belched and splattered in the grass. Within a few days we were barely playing, frozen on opposite sides of the yard, unwilling to get hit and unwilling to quit. With our backs pressed against the garden shed, we held our breath and ignored the tight knots of excitement in our stomachs and stared at the brown places on the apples in our hands, looking for the worms in the soft spots. Then we looked up and saw Ellie Koontz, running straight into Mr. Weiser’s yard. Someone screamed but she was already there, climbing into the tree closest to his house, sitting on the third branch, and reaching for the unrotten fruit, green in the top of the tree. She pulled one down and tossed it towards us, but none of us moved, because behind her, the screen door had opened.
A teenager came out of Mr. Weiser’s house, in a hooded sweatshirt and bangs reaching down past his eyes. He stood on the edge of the brick patio, under the girl in the branches, and didn’t see her. He hunched his shoulders and cupped his hands, and when he stood up straight again there was a cigarette in his mouth. He inhaled while we all held our breath, and then when he exhaled he looked up at Ellie. “What are you doing?” he asked, and we saw, then, that he was smiling.
“Trespassing,” she said, “I’m sorry I won’t do it again.”
“It’s okay,” he said, we heard him laughing. He smoked his cigarette again.
“What are you doing?” she asked. She was brilliant and brave and we admired her, and were a little bit afraid of her then.
“Smoking is bad for you,” he said, “Don’t do it.”
“Tobacco is whacko,” she said. “Are you related to Mr. Weiser?”
“He’s my Dad,” the kid said.
“He was so cute!” she told us later, “I don’t know how he came out of Mr. Weiser.”
“What do you mean?” we asked. The hard little bumps under her shirt grew up the next day, and after that she wore body spray and held hands with a boy in the band room at the middle school, and never talked to us again.
All at once, like starlings, we stood up and picked up the rotten apples at our feet and then charged, towards Mr. Weiser’s yard and his son and Elli, and before they knew what was happening we had hit them both three times, shouting as we went.
“Shit!” the teenager said, dropping his cigarette and holding his hands over his face, “You fucking kids, I’ll kill you.”
We stopped, and laughed, and said, “oooOOooo.” The kid turned into the house, slamming the screen door behind him. Ellie climbed down out of the tree, ignoring the applesauce in her hair, and picked up the cigarette out of the grass. Dan Diddlemeyer said we should smoke the rest of it, but it had gone out and none of us had any matches. “I wish you hadn’t interrupted us,” Ellie said, sighing dramatically and looking towards the screen door. We left her, scattering home.
Fatty Pembleton was the next to grow out of her shirts; she followed Ellie onto the back of the school bus and, after school, to her bedroom where, Ellie’s little sister told us, they giggled and practiced kissing their palms and each other.
We went skidding on trashcan lids in the drainage ditch, even though we might break our bones. We spent two hours trying to get a stray orange cat off the top of a garage. We tried to climb the drainpipe outside of Ellie’s window, to spy on the two girls kissing. We wondered why Dan Diddlemeyer, older than both Fatty and Ellie, never left.
Nobody told us what was happening when the police cars came screaming down our street one Saturday evening. “Stay in the house,” our mothers said, “We’ll check,” and then when they came back they shook their heads and frowned. Maggie Nguyen’s parents believed in the truth, and told her. “But I’m not supposed to tell,” she said, and made us guess.
“He shot someone,” Tina Taylor said.
“Of course, everyone knows that,” we said. Some of us had heard the gunshot; one of us lived next door. “But who did he shoot?”
“A burglar,” we said. Maggie closed her eyes and shook her chin, tilted solemn and upwards.
“A trespasser?” We shivered. She shook her chin.
“That boy Ellie talked to.”
“An escaped lunatic.”
“His ex-wife.” We all looked at Tina Taylor, whose father had split, and who had only come to us a couple of weeks earlier. She left us again a week later.
Maggie rolled her eyes and whispered, “Guess a drug addict.”
“A drug addict?” we said.
“You got it!” Maggie cried, “A teenager.”
We all felt bad for Mr. Weiser then, and stopped going into his yard for a week. Not because we were afraid, but out of respect. We hated teenagers, too.
He walked out for his mail every evening. He came home with single paper bags of groceries at a time, clutching one like a baby between his arm and hip, with nothing green or sweet to eat poking out over the brown paper top, and he turned off all his lights at eight p.m. It was November and there was still time to see who could jump from the highest rung on the ladder to Gracie Strickland’s tree house, and to lose the games we’d invented and then change the rules. Little by little our parents let the story out, and we compared notes until we had the whole thing: Mr. Weiser’s son was on a bad road, he mixed with a bad crowd, and he’d been kicked out. Then a drug dealer (same thing as an addict, Maggie swore) came looking for the son, and Mr. Weiser threatened to shoot him if he didn’t stay away. The drug addict didn’t stay away and Mr. Weiser shot him dead. We traced outlines of our hands on construction paper and drew in the faces, the teeth, and wings of turkeys. We hung them on our refrigerators next to our math quizzes. We played video games with the Kinsey twins, who were too young to remember the crabapple fights, and who were rich. We were driven away for hours at a time, to play co-ed soccer and sing in community choruses. Mr. Weiser never went to jail, and the lawyers and police stopped coming by, and his yard started to look like Fatty Pembleton’s hair, and we stayed out of it not only out of respect but because slugs lived in leaves. And then one Saturday afternoon Dan Diddlemeyer was raking it. “What are you doing?” we yelled, from the other side of the street.
“My mom is making me,” he said, and shrugged. There was a thin line of darkness at the edge of his chin, and pimples in between his young beard. I knew we’d lost him then.
We played horse on Sunday afternoons with the girls from Shipley’s Court on the basketball hoop behind the Methodist church. We made long necklaces out of elbow macaroni for our tiny cousins to wear and we hung our bigger cousins upside down by their ankles when they came for Thanksgiving dinner. I hid in my closet with a flashlight to keep reading after bedtime. We played four square in the garage when it rained, and made the loser go out to the gutter and pick up a drowning worm. I skinned both of my knees through my school jeans and stopped rollerblading. We re-recorded our parents’ answering machine messages using whoopee cushions and Georgia Miller’s Donald Duck voice. I looked at my palm and at the cold worm wiggling and searching for a soft spot, and I cringed as it pushed its cold nose against my skin. We finished the pages in our homework folders and came home with gold stars. I kissed Tom Holland in his basement, sitting on the carpet, his cold tongue reaching towards the hard little knot in my stomach. I faked sick and skipped choir practice. I told more lies than I could keep track of and I watched the porn channel through the cable fuzz in the afternoons when I was alone. I thought that when you got your period you never stopped bleeding and I sat in the bathtub all day the first time, afraid to tell my mother. We found a half cigarette on the ground at the bus stop and Louise Cotter smoked it and threw up. I wanted to throw up just watching her.
Then on a Sunday before Christmas my mother handed me a crockpot full of spaghetti and meatballs, and told me to march over to Mr. Weiser’s house and give it to him.
“You’re going to his house?” The Kinsey twins screamed from their bikes on the opposite side of the street, “He’s a murderer!” They were still babies, just stupid babies who had never been in his yard and didn’t know that we’d sworn not to ever be afraid of Mr. Weiser. I turned my back to them and climbed up his front steps.
I pressed the doorbell twice and then held the crockpot with both hands. Down the street behind me, the others were playing dodgeball on skateboards, falling onto the pavement with hard little thumps. They were riding their bicycles downhill, holding their hands out to their sides and over their eyes. They were screaming. I couldn’t hear anything from inside the house, and then I heard the door unlatch, and Mr. Weiser opened it.
I had never seen him so close. His face was scrambled, the blood vessels on his nose broken like Dickie Wilson with pink eye, the corners of his mouth yellow and cracked. I said, “Here is something to eat,” and held the ceramic lidded dish out towards him.
He sniffed, and took it out of my hands, and said “Thank you.” His nose was red, swollen and tight as a fist. I wiped my palms against my pants. “You’re very kind. Would you like to come inside for a cookie?” he asked, and I thought about how doing nice things for other people didn’t feel at all good the way everyone said it did. I was standing in the spot where he’d shot that poor kid. “Are you alright?” he asked, and I looked down and shook my head as I turned and ran, cutting across his front lawn, dashing around the far side of my house, to stand with my back against the wall until I’d caught my breath. When I went inside my mother asked how Mr. Weiser looked.
“Terrible,” I said.
“Poor man,” she said, “Ever since his wife left.” Then she shook her head, and stopped talking.
We didn’t go into the cul-de-sac anymore. The new kids who ran havoc through the neighborhood were smaller than we had ever been, and more vicious. They didn’t even know that Mr. Weiser had ever had a wife and they didn’t like climbing trees. We pretended not to see them when we walked by, but secretly we stiffened, afraid they would hit us from behind.
We had always said we would never be old or lonely or sad. We thought that the bad things that happened were a person’s own fault. We said we would have never run away. When Mr. Weiser died they found him four days later, the television turned on and all of the lights in his house turned off. I had lain awake in my bed all three of the nights he’d been dead in the house next door to me; I had stared at the bare tops of the winter trees and the dark windows of my neighbor’s house, knowing he was going to die soon, shivering, and waiting, desperate for it to happen.
