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By Root 941 0

noticing Red’s half-arm, couldn’t help looking at it. I always made sure to look at it when I thought he was occupied with something else. It ended at the elbow, sort of rounded off, and I saw the little fingers. I didn’t want to stare real hard, but it seemed as if there were only three or four of them, very tiny, curled up there. They were very red and each of the tiny fingers had a little fingernail. Nothing was going to grow anymore; it had all stopped. I didn’t want to think about it. I dove under. I was going to scare Red. I was going to grab his legs from behind. I came up against something soft. My face went right into it. It was a fat woman’s ass. I felt her grab me by the hair and she pulled me up out of the water. She had on a blue bathing cap and the strap was tight around her chin, digging into her flesh. Her front feeth were capped with silver and her breath smelled of garlic.

“You dirty little pervert! Trying for free grabs, are you?”

I pushed away from her and backed off. As I moved backwards she followed me through the water, her sagging breasts pushing a tidal wave in front of her.

“You dirty little prick. You wanna suck my titties? You got a dirty mind, huh? You wanna eat my shit? How about some of my shit, little prick?”

I backed up further into the deeper water. I was now standing on my toes, moving backwards. I swallowed some water. She kept coming, a steamship of a woman. I couldn’t retreat any further. She moved right up to me. Her eyes were pale and blank, there wasn’t any color in them. I felt her body touching mine.

“Touch my cunt,” she said. “I know you want to touch it, so go ahead, touch my cunt. Touch it, touch it!”

She waited.

“If you don’t, I’m going to tell the lifeguard you molested me and you’ll be put in jail! Now, touch it!”

I couldn’t do it. Suddenly she reached under and grabbed my parts and yanked. She almost tore my dong off. I fell backwards into the deep water, sank, struggled, and came to the top. I was six feet away from her and began swimming toward shallow water.

“I’m going to tell the lifeguard you molested me!” she screamed.

Then a man swam between us. “That little son-of-a-bitch!” she pointed at me and screamed at the man. “He grabbed my cunt!”

“Lady,” said the man, “the boy probably thought it was the grate over the drain.”

I swam over to Red.

“Listen,” I said, “we’ve got to get out of here! That fat lady is going to tell the lifeguard that I touched her cunt!”

“What’d you do that for?” Red asked.

“I wanted to see what it felt like.”

“What’d it feel like?”

We got out of the pool, showered. Red put his arm back on and we dressed. “Did you really do it?” he asked.

“A guy’s got to get started sometime.”

It was a month or so later that Red’s family moved. One day they were gone. Just like that. Red never said anything in advance to me. He was gone, the football was gone, and those tiny red fingers with fingernails, they were gone. He was a good guy.

16

I didn’t know exactly why but Chuck, Eddie, Gene and Frank let me join them in some of their games. I think it started when another guy showed up and they needed three on a side. I still required more practice to get really good but I was getting better. Saturday was the best day. That’s when we had our big games, other guys joined in, and we played football in the street. We played tackle on the lawns but when we played in the street we played touch. There was more passing then because you couldn’t get far with a run in touch.

There was trouble at the house, much fighting between my mother and my father, and as a consequence, they kind of forgot about me. I got to play football each Saturday. During one game I broke into the open behind the last pass defender and I saw Chuck wing the ball. It was a long high spiral and I kept running. I looked back over my shoulder, I saw it coming, it fell right into my hands and I held it and was in for the touchdown.

Then I heard my father’s voice yell “HENRY!” He was standing in front of his house. I lobbed the ball to one of the guys on my team so they could