Small Change

                   The reign of terror ended in late August, a week before the start of Junior High School. Billy Marshall and Jake Towle had been scolded a dozen times by neighbors they’d known all their lives, chased out of backyards by broom-wielding mothers, and hid out at the train trestle on Lake Makinachook after Officer Endicott called them over to his blue police cruiser, asking if they knew anything about Mr. Flaherty’s woodpile floating in the mill stream.

                   “It’s a shame when a retired fella like that won’t have more’n half a cord left to keep himself warm come fall,” he said. “The chief’s gone over there himself, and brought along every piece of equipment in the department to examine the evidence those perpetrators left behind. Oh, he’ll find them, too. Let me tell you, Roland Flaherty used to walk the beat in this town twenty years before you boys were born. If you can help us out, I’m sure it’d go a long way towards settin’ things right. So do you know anything about it?”

                   Billy shook his head, and Jake scratched his neck in the warm breeze of the cruiser’s dashboard fan against their faces, agape at the radio, the nightstick, and the holstered gun. Officer Endicott rested his elbow on the window edge, waiting.

                   “No, Sir,” Billy said. “I’ll bet they weren’t even from Wentworth. Nobody around here would do something like that to Mr. Flaherty.”

                   “What kind of evidence?” Jake asked.

                   “Well, that’s confidential information, Jake,” Officer Endicott said. He jotted a few notes in his black leather log book. “Let’s just say more’n enough already.” At least, that’s the word at the station.”

                   The cruiser’s radio crackled with a voice. Officer Endicott lifted the silver-meshed microphone from its mount, his gaunt, weathered face alert but composed. Half-moons of perspiration seeped through the underarms of his dark blue uniform, and he tossed his police cap off his glistening gray crewcut. Wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, he swept it around the back of his neck.

                   “Got’cha, Charlie,” he said. “The Burse Road past Folsom’s farm. I’m heading out that way now. No need for sirens and the cherrytop for a stray pooch, though, huh? It’s probably heat struck. Tell the chief I’ll catch up to him at Roland Flaherty’s before long. Right. Ten-four.”

                   Officer Endicott slipped on a pair of olive-green aviator sunglasses, then slapped a hand on Jake’s shoulder from the driver’s seat window.

                   “I’ll be back this way later just to see if you might remember something you hadn’t thought of,” he said. 

                    The cruiser lurched forward along Hanson Street, gliding past the sedate houses and trim sun-bleached gardens, the tin mailboxes and shade-drawn parlor windows.

                   “Jeezum Crow, Jake,” Billy said. “What’d you have to say anything about

evidence? That was really stupid. We shouldn’t of done it, but I think he’s on to us now. Maybe we’d better get out of here before he comes back.”

                   Jake yanked the frayed brim of his black baseball cap down over his forehead, tightened his lips, and spat.

                   “Yeah,” he said. “We’d better lam out of here.”

                   On the long walk around the perimeter of Makinachook Lake on Memorial Drive past the summer camps and pine groves, Billy didn’t talk much. He thought about everything they’d done over the past few weeks.

                   It was no secret that they had been raising hell since early August. In the dog day afternoons of ninety-eight degree temperatures when electric fans whirred musty air through shade-drawn houses, and sprinklers flicked feeble arcs of water on the tawny sun-parched lawns of Hanson Street, most adults had suffered enough without heated words to the boys’ parents. Anyone in Wentworth knew that most twelve-year-old boys should have been swimming at the public beach at Makinachook Lake rather than hiding out at the train trestle on its far side, where teenagers guzzled beer after dark, had make-out sessions with girls, and dared each other to dive.

                    Unfortunately, Billy and Jake had been banished from the beach by John Hartley, the life guard, Wentworth High School’s star quarterback, after they lobbed ice cream cones onto the bare abdomen of Missy Gallagher, who sunbathed in a lawn chair with queenly recumbence. It didn’t help when they rode Jeanette Pendleton’s bicycle off the dock, or tied the line of Tommy Gillen’s fishing pole to Mr. Leighton’s boat until the reel snapped off. In his orange swimsuit and sun lotion-greased nose, John Hartley leapt from his lookout chair, sprinting after Billy and Jake to the enthusiastic applause of picnicking families, toddlers building sandcastles on the shore, and a contingent of wheelchair-bound residents from Ryerson’s Nursing Home.

                   “Both of you, beat it!” John Hartley yelled, chasing them as far as the Legion Hall. “Don’t let me catch either of you back here unless you really want trouble!”

                   At the train trestle, Billy and Jake swam beneath the moss-reeking stanchions, floating in the cool tea-colored lake, and stared at the fluorescent graffiti on the iron bridge panels above.

                   “What’dya say we take a dive from up there?” Jake said. “We could do it.”

                   “Kenny Drew split his head open last year trying that,” Billy said. “He got twenty-six stitches.”

                   Jake paddled to the shore and hoisted himself up on a lichen-crusted rock.

                   “He didn’t jump out far enough,” Jake said. “All you gotta do is jump headfirst. Unless you’re yellow, that is.”

                   “Forget it, Jake,” Billy said.

                  He backstroked further away from the shore, treading at the center of the inlet between the trestles, the water deep and cold against his wavering legs. Jake clambered up the rocky slope and hopped along the hot, creosote-stinking ties until he reached the middle of the bridge.

                   “Don’t be a damn fool! ” Billy called up at him. Get off it, Jake!”

                  “You said it, pal!” Jake called back.

                   Billy watched his friend dive from the edge, plummet through the air, and splash into the water not three feet away from where he floated. An uproarious explosion echoed between the stone and mortared stanchions. A blue heron rustled out of the cattails, taking flight with ungainly flaps of its long bluish-white wings. Lily pads wavered in the ripples. Jake emerged to the surface with a triumphant grin, gulped a mouthful of water, and spit it in a stream at Billy.

                   “At least I got the guts,” Jake said.

                   “Yeah, all guts, no brains,” Billy said.

     For Billy, the return to Hanson Street, then, was less siege than retreat. He cursed himself in dour silence for not having the courage to dive like Jake, and determined to make up for it.

                   The next day, Billy staged a number of covert misdeeds closer to home with Jake. They tried to empty Mrs. Trombley’s bird feeder with a B-B gun fired from the roof of Billy’s garage, until the heat on the tin roof burned their bare elbows and scorched their knees. They pitched ripe tomatoes from Mr. Bernier’s garden from behind a forsythia bush at a laundry van that only thudded against the rear cargo door and rolled off beside the curb. Finally, they dropped a string of lit firecrackers through the sewer grate in the torrid calm of noon, but didn’t elicit a single shout of surprise or raised shade on the block.

                   In the tree fort above Billy’s backyard, shaded by the pine boughs, Jake recounted their misdemeanors as if they had been criminal exploits from one of the gangster movies he loved so much at the Starlight Theater during Saturday matinees. With a tart pine needle between his lips, Billy listened to Jake imitating the terse citified dialect of a mob kingpin.

                   “Yeah, we showed ‘em, all right,” Jake said. “This berg know who’s boss around here now, don’t they? You just gotta have the guts to pull off jobs like that, and now it’s our turf. Get it?”

                   Angry with himself for re-igniting the series of misdeeds that had failed so miserably, he bristled at Jake’s boasts.

                   “Get what, Jake?” Billy said. “They were just stupid pranks. Nobody’s going to give a damn about stuff like that. Jeezum Crow, it’s bad enough we got run off the beach, and I’ll bet’cha Officer Endicott’s got it all figured out about what we did to old man Flaherty’s woodpile. He’ll be coming back to talk to us anytime.”

                   “That copper ain’t gonna slap the cuffs on me,” Jake said. “He was just tryin’ to give us the third degree. But we ain’t gonna crack.”

                   Billy flicked the pine needle from his lips with a bitter laugh.

                   “Oh, we’re cracked all right,” he said. “Cracking up maybe. Listen to yourself. Copper. Slap the cuffs. The third degree. Ha! What do you think we are, a couple of racketeers?”

                   Jake retrieved a wilted cheroot cigar from his shirt pocket, bit off the end, and spat.

                   “Gimme a light, will ya?” he said.

                   “Where the hell did you get that?” Billy asked.

                   “I got my ways,” Jake said. “You got that light?”

                   Billy fished out a damp packet of matches from his pocket, and tried to light one after another. Jake snatched the pack away from him, struck the match, and cupped his hand around the flame until a sweet cloud of bluish smoke billowed in the shade of the pines.

                 “That’s your problem, Billy,” Jake said reflectively, with a hint of disdain. “You ain’t got no fire. You gotta get hot if you don’t wanna get burned. Get it?”

                   Jake took a long puff on the cigar, exhaling a luxurious cloud of smoke, and handed it to Billy. Billy inhaled. His lungs rumbled until he coughed and sputtered, the acrid taste of the smoke stinging his nose and throat.

                            “Jeezum Crow,” he gasped. “That stinks.”

                    “Well,” Jake said, taking the cigar back and inhaling deeply, “if you can’t take the heat, I guess it’s a good thing you can’t even light a match.”

                   A plume of smoke blossomed in Billy’s face, and he coughed again.

                   “Knock it off, Jake,” Billy said. “You think you’re some kind of tough guy, huh? What the hell are you so scared of that you’ve got to keep this up? You’re acting like some kind of two-bit punk, that’s all. Maybe that’s the kind of language you get. Everything we’ve done is small change. Get it? Small change. Hey, there’s some real words you can use for all your phony gangster crap.”

                   “Shut your trap, Billy,” Jake said.

                   He flicked the lit cigar at the tree trunk in a spray of sparks inches past Billy’s face; it dropped to the tan circle of pine needles on the ground.

                   “You get out of my tree fort and put that goddamned cigar out, Jake,” Billy said. “You trying to burn the place down to the ground? The police aren’t enough for you? Now you’ve got to take on the fire department? You put that thing out now. Get it?”       

                   “Make me,” Jake said.

                   Billy climbed down the nailed two-by-four rungs, swung off the lowermost branch, and stomped on the cigar. Jake started down after him, leaping off from the fourth rung up. Billy ground the cigar under his heel and crossed his arms.

                   “Maybe you ought to get this through your thick head, Jake,” he said. “No matter how much of a goddamned gangster you think you are, you’re just a stupid kid. And I guess I was just as stupid for going along with it. All your small change.”

                   Billy started across the front lawn for his house on the corner, a pastel green split-level ranch with a screen porch. He didn’t look back. Jake traipsed after him on his heels.

                   “Hey, Billy,” Jake said behind him.

                   Billy swung around to face him.

                   The fist caught Billy on the chin by surprise. He’d never been hit like that before—a sudden, fierce blow. His jaw snapped shut, his teeth clicked together, and he stumbled two steps backwards. Then he felt the sting of the punch. He tasted the warm, coppery blood of his gashed tongue. Lunging at Jake with both hands, he rammed his shoulder against him, knocking him to the ground, and pounced on him. The boys swung their arms and rolled, kicking and cursing, across the lawn in the fiery summer sun.

                   “You son of a bitch!” Billy shouted. “Sucker punchin’ me!”

                   Billy saw a glint of fear in Jake’s eyes and pummeled him in the ribs. Jake glanced Billy’s chin with a weak uppercut that sent him into a frenzy.

     The stout figure of Mrs. Couture appeared on her front porch next door.

     “Stop it! Both of you!” she shrieked. “I’ll call the police if you don’t!”

                   But the fight didn’t stop. Billy pinned Jake’s shoulders against the bristled grass with his knees and punched him across the cheek with a savage blow. Jake began to whimper. Billy got up, rubbing his chin. Mrs. Couture flounced toward them in her white apron, her face florid with anguish.

                  “That’s enough, both of you!” she cried.

                   “Who the hell do you think you are, Jake Towle?” Billy shouted over her. “You and your goddamned stupid ideas! Tough guy, huh? Maybe you just want to act tough because you haven’t got the brains to know any better!”

                    Billy’s voice sounded strange to him, as if he were someone else talking. Jake straggled to his feet, wiped the tears from his face, and started to brush himself off. Mrs. Couture arrived beside them, harried and panting.

                   “Haven’t you two hoodlums done enough around here already?” she said.

                   Billy and Jake stared at each other with smoldering contempt, ignoring her frantic presence. Jake spat and stalked down Hanson Street to his house, pulling his the brim of his black cap low. Heat waves blurred the distant asphalt. Billy headed up the porch steps to his house. Mrs. Couture stood in the blazing sun, dabbing the doughy folds of her neck with the edge of her apron.

                   “You both ought to be ashamed of yourselves for the way you’re behaving,” she called after them. “I ought to call both your parents.”

                   Billy caught a glimpse of Jake limping down Hanson Street, his shadow dragging after him. Storming inside, Billy slammed the screen door behind him. His mother would be home from grocery shopping in a few hours, his father from the office by five-thirty. The house was empty; for that, he was thankful. Billy held his tears until he got into the bathroom. He locked the door, examining his bruised features in the mirror: a split lip, a puffy eyelid, and the ruddy pulp of his tooth-gashed tongue. His eyes stung, his chin quivered. He splashed cold water on his face from the faucet again and again.

                   After a few minutes, Billy went into the living room. He peeled off his t-shirt and sat down in front of the electric fan. Warm air brushed over his bare chest. He tried to soothe himself with deep, sobbing breaths. But his hands still shook, and his mind whirled with thoughts of vengeance and surrender: one minute he wished he had continued to punch Jake when he had him pinned, the next minute he considered marching down Hanson Street with two cold bottles of Moxie from the frigidaire.

                   Billy knew they had both gone too far. Now they were paying the price for it with their friendship. He and Jake had been friends since Kindergarten. Soon they would be Sixth graders—almost teenagers—and they had been talking about their induction into the ranks of the Junior High School for weeks. Billy hated to think of going it alone.

                   The telephone rang. He got up from the couch and picked up the black receiver in the kitchen.

                   “Hello?” Billy said.

                   “Who’s this?” a man’s voice asked.

                   “Billy,” he said.

                   The voice had the deeply animated tone of one of his father’s business associates, another of the clients who were always calling about his father’s tax business to inquire about their financial status with the federal and state government. Sometimes they even showed up at the house with reams of documents, disheveled in their tie-strangled white shirts, hopeful, taciturn, or too talkative. Billy’s father had a knack for allaying their concerns over a cup of coffee with a few optimistic words.

                    Billy expected a shout of familiarity, a quickly rattled off message of minor import punctuated by the phrase, “Atta boy.” Billy took a pencil out of the drawer and a used envelope, ready to write down anything that needed to be related to his father. Instead, there was silence.

                  “Hello?” Billy asked.

                  “Where are your parents?” the man asked.

                  “My father’s at his office in Augusta, and my mother’s gone grocery shopping,” Billy explained. “They should be back—”

                  “And you’re alone?” he asked.

                  “Well . . . yes,” Billy said.

                  “So what are you doing all by yourself?” he inquired with sudden interest.

                  “Nothing,” Billy said.

                 “Oh, come on, Billy,” the man laughed. “You must be doing something. I’ve never heard of a boy who wasn’t up to something. That’s the way it is with boys. Always up to something.”

                 “Not much,” Billy said. An involuntary smile formed on his lips, and he stifled the odd impulse to laugh. Billy wanted to bring the conversation around to the point of the call, to interrupt the man’s chatter amiably, but he felt he’d spoken too long to ask the man’s name or purpose without seeming rude. Probably the caller was some ‘card’ his father knew from the office.

                “Not much? Now just what kind of boy are you? Not much? You can tell me all about it, Billy,” the man said, amused by Billy’s reticence. “Scout’s honor, I won’t tell a soul. Say, how old are you, anyway, kiddo?”

                “Almost twelve,” said Billy.

                “Twelve-years-old!” the man exclaimed. “Why I thought you were at least sixteen. Oh, I remember the things I did when I was your age.”

                “Like what?” Billy asked, giddily.

                “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you,” the man said. “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve done in my day. Now, you wouldn’t do anything wrong now, would you, Billy?”

                “Nope,” Billy said. “Jake neither.”

                “So you have a friend then,” he said. “I know how boys can be. I was twelve myself once, you know. Why, I still can’t believe half the things I did with my friends. Don’t you think grownups can be too hard on young fellows sometimes?”

                “We didn’t do anything too bad,” Billy said, soothed by the impromptu confidant he’d suddenly encountered, a stranger who remembered what it was like to be a boy.  “I mean, we shouldn’t have done most of what we did, but it wasn’t like we meant to—”

                “Meant to what?” he said. “What did you do, Billy? I’m only asking because I can tell you’ve got something to get off your chest. Look, we’ll keep this between us, man to man. I think it’s important for boys to have that chance. I think it’s important to get it out in the open. I’ll bet it’ll make you feel better.”

               “I suppose we did everything Jake wanted us to do,” he said, “but I know that’s no excuse. Just fooling around stuff. That’s all.”

               “Let me tell you something, Billy, the man said. “You’re not the first boy to ever fool around, and you won’t be last. That’s the nature of life. What did you do with Jake that was so bad?”

               “It wasn’t so bad,” Billy said.

               “I’m sure it wasn’t,” the man said. His voice softened, and though Billy did not know who he was, he realized that the man understood intuitively that everything he and Jake had done wasn’t as serious as it seemed. Other than the fight between them, nobody had gotten hurt. “Maybe you and Jake are acting like big boys now. Or let’s say, young men, shall we? That’s all. I’m sure it was all just small change in the long run.”

              “That’s right,” said Billy. “That’s what I called it, too. Small change.”

              “And it probably doesn’t add up to much when all’s said and done,” he said. “I’m sure you didn’t rob a bank or anything.”

              Billy glanced nervously around the kitchen. He held the black receiver against his bare chest, listening for the rumble of his mother’s car in the driveway, or the jangle of keys at the front door. There was only the insinuating buzz of the frigidaire, and the fan whirring in the living room.

             “Well,” Billy began, “Jake shouldn’t have done what he did at the railroad trestle because that got me going about doing other stuff. We had a fight about it. That’s all.”

             “That’s too bad,” said the man in a hoarse whisper. “The railroad trestle . . . hmm. I’ll bet nobody else was around, either. Just the two of you, right?”

             “Right,” Billy said. “I didn’t dare him or anything. He just did it.”

             “And I’ll bet he wanted you to do it, too,” the man said. “But you were afraid.”

             “Yeah,” said Billy. “I wanted to, but I just didn’t have the guts.”

             “Billy, you don’t have to be afraid of anything Jake did to you,” the man said. “And punishing him for doing those things won’t make it better. He’s your friend, and he was just trying to share something special with you. Something only boys understand.”

            “I suppose so,” said Billy. “I’m not trying to punish Jake, though. It’s just that he hit me first.”

             “Because of the bad things you did with him at the railroad trestle,” said the man. His voice dipped to a whisper. “And all the other things you did with him.”

             “No,” Billy said, “because I called him—”

             “Calling names won’t help,” the man interrupted. “You’re both doing what boys like to do, and there’s no crime in that. But punishing each other for those bad things won’t make them go away, Billy. You’ll keep on doing those bad things with Jake because you like them, don’t you? You may as well admit it. They make you feel good, don’t they?”

             “No, Billy said. “I don’t like what we did and—”

             “Maybe you should both be punished,” the man said. His voice rasped frantically. “And I know just how bad boys should be punished, too, Billy. I know just what to do. I’d make you do those bad things with each other and whip you both like you’ve never been whipped before. I’d whip you both ‘til you’d do anything to make me stop. I’d whip your bare asses with your pants down and—”

             Billy hung up the receiver. He inhaled deeply. A mild nausea assailed him, and the parlor walls seemed to spin. Leaning his naked back against the smooth white surface of the frigidaire, Billy closed his eyes.

            “Jeezum,” Billy said aloud in the empty kitchen. “Jeezum Crow.”

             The weather turned cooler before early September and the start of Junior High School. The powdery-sweet scent of goldenrod and lilacs swept over the backyards. White clouds tumbled across the blue sky. In late afternoons, the air sparkled as clear as cider. Along Hanson Street neighbors assessed each others’ deliveries of cord wood, exchanged mason jars of strawberry preserves, and left baskets of late summer squash and rhubarb on doorsteps. With the end of barbeques and garden-tending, the citizens of Wentworth prepared for fall with the brisk efficiency of northern New Englanders.

            Billy took his place as a Sixth grade student at Junior High School. In his stiff leather shoes and tartan sweaters, he applied himself to his studies and maintained excellent grades. He tried out for the football team, distinguishing himself as a running back and apt wide receiver.

           Although they were in different classes, Billy still waved to Jake. Once he even walked him to the door of the remedial classroom at the far end of the hall.

           “Hey, Billy,” Jake said. “There’s a new movie at the Starlight coming on Saturday night. I hear it’s a really good one about a gang and G-men with big shoot outs and everything. Maybe we can go. What’dya say?”

            Billy looked at his watch and then down the length of the hall.

           “I can’t, Jake” he said. “I’ve got practice with the football team. The bell’s going to ring so I’ve got to run.” Billy trotted down the hall.

           “Yeah, that bell’s always ringin’, ain’t it?” Jake said. “Maybe some other time then, huh?”

           “I’ll give you a call sometime, Jake,” he said.

Darren J. Akerman is an administrator for a Maine school district. Previous publications include Rosebud, North Atlantic Review, and on-line journals including Sugar Mule, Prick of the Spindle, and Terrain.org. He has completed two novels, Fables of the Fatherland and City Song.