Golden States Read Free

across the water, kicking up a spume with his high black boots. Billy dressed like a soldier, in camouflage pants and a fatigue jacket. He was small for twelve, even smaller than David, but more squat, his head hunkered down on his heavy rounded shoulders. The first few brown hairs of a mustache rode his upper lip, and you could see ideas quiver in his eyes like minnows trapped behind the pupils.
    David had been Billy’s best friend since they were both on tricycles. Billy’s father left years ago to work on the Alaska pipeline and never came back. Next year, in the seventh grade, Billy would ride a bus to a different school, because he lived on the other side of the district line. David would go to the junior high in the neighborhood, a sleek new building with a white roof like a nun’s hat, and no windows at all.
    “What ho,” Billy called.
    “Pip pip,” David replied. “Howd’ja do, old bean?”
    “Bit of a wet out here,” Billy said. He sloshed up to David, walking in his eager, hunched-forward way. Sometimes when he saw Billy, David felt a high, dreamy rising in his belly, and any little thing—the white hairs on Billy’s arms, or his quick, businesslike stride—stirred up a wave of pure feeling that immediately dropped down again into guilt and edginess that seemed to last for days. He could not remember just when he had started being so nervous around Billy.
    “Look here, old bean,” David said. “I’ve brought you something.” Lately he had taken to giving Billy presents. In the past two weeks he’d given him a petrified dinosaur turd from Nevada, a chip of tiger’s eye, and a rubber gorilla with fangs and black nipples. Though he’d liked the dinosaur turd and thetiger’s eye well enough, the gorilla had seemed to annoy and embarrass him, like a breach of a secret code.
    David reached into his pocket and pulled out a fossilized horseshoe crab.
    “What is it?” Billy asked.
    “A fossil.” David was careful not to use its fancier name.
    Billy hefted the crab in his palm and scrutinized it with one eye closed. David looked at it too. It was beautiful, a smooth pewter-colored stone with tiny blunt horns and two hooded indentations where, fifty thousand years ago, a pair of eyes had blinked.
    “Thanks,” Billy said. He put it carelessly in his jacket pocket.
    “You’re welcome,” David said. This one, too, was a failure, but not as bad as the gorilla. It was hard to predict.
    “Janet came home last night,” David said. “She decided not to marry that guy.”
    “Bet he’s got a little dick,” Billy said, holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart.
    “I don’t know,” David said. “She didn’t say what was wrong, or anything.”
    “Bet he hasn’t got any dick at all.”
    “Well, I don’t know—” David felt at a loss. Billy had made up a new way of talking, without explaining how it worked.
    Billy started punching the air, doing a little fighting dance that turned him around in circles. “No dick at all,” he said, punching away.
    “She’s going to be a doctor instead,” David said.
    “You got no dick either.” Billy punched in David’s direction.
    “I do too.” When Billy got pulled into himself this way, David might as well have been talking to a whirlwind. His words blew off like dust and leaves.
    “I do too,” David repeated, just to give himself the satisfaction.
    When Billy calmed down, David asked him what he wantedto do. “Punch somebody,” he said. He punched himself in the mouth.
    “Shall we go into town and do a bit of sleuthing?” David asked.
    “I’m sick of that. We’re too old for that.”
    “Oh. Okay. Well, do you want to go into town anyway?”
    “Yeah.”
    They walked together through the serpentine streets of David’s development, Billy stomping into puddles as if to kill them. David walked some feet away, so as not to get splashed, and Billy had to shout in order to tell him the story of how a graveyard in Pocoima had flooded,