The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [15]
I knew how to get between any two properties in the neighborhood, however tall the fence or impenetrable the hedge that separated them. I knew the cool feel of linoleum on bare skin and what everything smelled like at floor level. I knew pain the way you know it when it is fresh and interesting—the pain, for example, of a toasted marshmallow in your mouth when its interior is roughly the temperature and consistency of magma. I knew exactly how clouds drifted on a July afternoon, what rain tasted like, how ladybugs preened and caterpillars rippled, what it felt like to sit inside a bush. I knew how to appreciate a really good fart, whether mine or someone else’s.
The someone else was nearly always Buddy Doberman, who lived across the alley, a secretive lane that ran in a neighborly fashion behind our houses. Buddy was my best friend for the first portion of my life. We were extremely close. He was the only human being whose anus I have ever looked at closely, or indeed at all, just to see what one looks like (reddish, tight, and very slightly puckered, as I recall with a rather worrying clarity), and he was good-tempered and had wonderful toys to play with, as his parents were both generous and well-to-do.
He was sweetly stupid, too, which was a bonus. When he and I were four his grandfather gave us a pair of wooden pirate swords that he had made in his workshop and we went with them more or less straight to Mrs. Van Pelt’s prized flower border, which ran for about thirty yards along the alley. In a whirl of frenzied motion that anticipated by several years the lively destructive actions of a Weedwhacker, we decapitated and eviscerated every one of her beloved zinnias in a matter of seconds. Then, realizing the enormity of what we had just done—Mrs. Van Pelt showed these flowers at the state fair; she talked to them; they were her children—I told Buddy that this was not a good time for me to be in trouble on account of my father had a fatal disease that no one knew about, so would he mind taking all the blame? And he did. So while he was sent to his room at three o’clock in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day as a weepy face at a high window, I was on our back porch with my feet up on the rail, gorging on fresh watermelon and listening to selected cool disks on my sister’s portable phonograph. From this I learned an important lesson: lying is always an option worth trying. I spent the next six years blaming Buddy for everything bad that happened in my life. I believe he eventually even took the rap for burning the hole in my Uncle Dick’s head even though he had never met my Uncle Dick.
THEN, AS NOW, Des Moines was a safe, wholesome city. The streets were long, straight, leafy, and clean and had solid middle-American names: Woodland, University, Pleasant, Grand. (There was a local joke, much retold, about a woman who was goosed on Grand and thought it was Pleasant.) It was a nice city—a comfortable city. Most businesses were close to the road and generally had lawns out front instead of parking lots. Public buildings—post offices, schools, hospitals—were always stately and imposing. Gas stations often looked like little cottages. Diners (or roadhouses) brought to mind the type of cabins you might find on a fishing trip. Nothing was designed to be particularly helpful or beneficial to cars. It was a greener, quieter, less intrusive world.
Grand Avenue was the main artery through the city, linking downtown, where everyone worked and did all serious shopping, with the residential areas beyond. The best houses in the city lay to the south of Grand on the west side of town, in a hilly, gorgeously wooded district that ran down to Waterworks Park and the Raccoon River. You could walk for hours along the wandering roads in there and never