My grandfather built my parents' house in 1977, and they moved in that November. Their neighbor was an old man named Buster. The following summer, Buster went on vacation. Except he never went. The paper boy found him. He had been dead a few days.
When the new owners, the Howleys, found out that someone died there, Mrs. Howley had a priest bless the house. The Howleys and my parents got along when I was a kid, but then something happened. I don't know what, exactly. I think it has something to do with a crab apple tree and/or their cat. Regardless of the resason, the Howleys disdain for my family grew so large that they eventually built a house in their back yard and moved into it. The Howleys' old house was vacant for a few months, until one day during the summer between sixth and seventh grade, we saw a moving truck pull in. My neighbor Jen and I saw some kids in the driveway, and hoped maybe someone our age was moving in. But it didn't look like it, just a baby and a kid who couldn't be older than seven. He came over and introduced himself. His name was Al. He was twelve, same as us.
We started to hang out a lot. He had a golden retriever named Betty and a two year old sister that liked to run around without a shirt. At least once a day Natalie would say "Look!" and pull her shirt up (forshadowing a career in Girls Gone Wild videos perhaps?) He had a big screen TV in his basement. We used to play Nintendo games down there. Duck Hunt is much easier on a giant TV. The house had a free-standing garage with it's own attic, and we found old newspapers and WWII army rations up there. Another time we went down to the river and followed it as far as we could in both directions. Turned out there was a big tree trunk bridge at one point, and towards the opposite end, we found a gravestone from the 1800s. Al was cool.
When school started that fall, he fit in suprisingly well. All the girls loved Al, all four feet, two inches of him. Maybe he evoked some kind of maternal instinct in them or something. Normally, it's hard to start off at a new school where you don't know anybody, but seventh grade was the first year that kids from different parts of town were together in one school. So nobody knew anybody else, really. It wasn't new to him; he'd been on the move his whole life. His father was in the military. I think he was in the military. Actually, I think it was his step-dad. Anyway, they moved around alot.
I was having a harder time adjusting. Sixth grade was probably the best year of my life, and then all of the sudden I was in a new school and instead of the same group of people I'd known since kindergarten, there were all these...new people. I ran for class president. Each homeroom had one, I figured I'd give it a shot. Four people ran in our homeroom, including Al. It ended with a three-way tie for first place. I wasn't one of those three people.
The year just kept getting worse. My dad got laid off that year. I never saw my old friends and I hadn't made any new ones. Then, just before Halloween, our dog Toby had a stroke and had to be put to sleep.
My parents deny it now, but at the time they said my cooking killed her. I was always critical of my mom's "cooking," so one night she told me to make dinner. I made some eggs. They were pretty bad, and they went where all bad food goes; into the dog's dish. The next day she had a stroke. Of course, it wasn't the eggs. If anything, it was the new flea spray that my dad drenched her new bed in, or the fact that she was pushing 300 in dog years and blind in one eye. My mom didn't really like the dog because she always threw up on the carpet. Not to mention what else she left on the carpet. But it didn't make it any less sad. She was family. I didn't go to school the next day. When I did go back, the kids I sat with at lunch moved their seats. All of them. The went somewhere else. Bastards. I sat down, helpless and alone.
Then someone came over and sat with me. Cindy DeChellis. She was flanked by two girls of equal beauty whose names weren’t important enough for me to remember. They asked why I was sitting by myself, so told them about how my dad lost his job, I hated school, my dog died and the kids I sit with left. She asked if she and her friends could sit with me. Hold on, maybe things weren't so bad after all.
About six seconds went by before Al showed up. I didn't even know he had lunch the same time as me. I never saw him there before.
"Hey, John, what's up?"
The beautiful girls turned and looked at Al.
"You know him?"
Sure, he lives next door. We hang out all the time." He said.
"Really? That is so sweet of you!"
And just like that, all three of them...all three of them went off with him. Amazing. He could have stayed and the five of us could've talked. He could have at least left one of them with me. I just sat there until the bell rang trying to figure out what the hell just happened.
One day a girl called my house asking for Al. I put her on hold and went next door and told him he had a phone call.
"Thanks, Bob (his step-dad) won't let me use the phone, so I told her to call your house. Is it alright if I take this in here?"
A year later, Mrs. Howley got drunk and decided to kick Al's family out. So they packed up and moved again, this time to Brookline, MA. I haven't seen Al since then, but I'll always remember the tiny kid with the inexplicable hold over women.
