Gentlemen by Michael Northrop Page A

probably would’ve called his mom down at the town hall for that, and she was always ready to get out from behind that desk. But like I said, no answer, just ring ring ring.I let it ring, hung up, and tried again. Nothing. Tommy lived over in North Cambria, and Mixer and me were in Soudley. Bones was, too, but farther out, almost in North Cambria. Tommy’s house was way too far to walk and too far and too uphill to bike. And there was no one around to give me a lift.
    It’s funny because, the four of us, where we lived, it was like a line. It was stretched out from the center of Soudley over to North Cambria. It was like connect-the-dots, like four links in a chain, and that sort of made sense. Once we’d met Tommy at the Tits, he clicked right into place with us. He was a scrapper, a headbanger, and just kind of a good guy.
    What I mean by that last part was that he was maybe a little friendlier than the rest of us. I don’t mean that in a bad way, and not like that was saying much anyway. He was just kind of nicer. Like once we were making fun of some freshman for wearing an honest-to-god sweater vest. (Seriously, not kidding, he was wearing a sweater vest.) But Tommy was like, “Give him a break. He’s just doing his thing.” Of course, I was just like, “Well, his thing totally sucks,” and we all broke out laughing.
    Anyway, half an hour later, I got a call from Mixer. “No answer,” I told him, and he said, “Same here,” meaning he’d tried Tommy, too. But that’s not why he was calling. He’d scored a sixer and he wanted to know if I wanted to head out to the house in the woods and help him drink it. I was like, “Damn straight.”
    We hung up and like two minutes later, there’s Mixerbanging on the door. It’s a real small town. He was banging hard with his palm. He was hitting the wood part, not the glass, but I still thought he was going to do some real damage this time. He always did that, like he was half knocking and half trying to bust in.
    â€œI’m coming, knock it off!” I yelled through the glass.
    The door opens onto the kitchen, and I was right there by the fridge eating a slice of Kraft cheese. I threw the wrap per away, and Mixer stepped back so I could open the door and duck out. He had a paper bag rolled up under his arm, and there were water stains on it from where the beer cans were sweating.
    â€œHey, man,” I said.
    â€œHey,” he said and lifted his chin in a quick nod.
    â€œHey, bring the Daisy, huh?” Mixer said when we were halfway across the lawn. That seemed like a good idea, so I headed back into the house, shot up the stairs, and grabbed the old junker of a BB gun I’d had since I was ten or eleven. The thing’s like a toy: a little brown plastic stock, a Winchester-looking lever to cock it, and a black barrel maybe two feet long.
    Mixer was just waiting there in the middle of the yard. There were no cars coming so we crossed the road, him with a bag of beers under his arm, me with a BB gun under mine. No one gave a damn, but because Mixer had the beers, we cut through the O’Learys’ backyard instead of walking farther up Route 44 and entering the path there.
    It didn’t look like anyone was home at the O’Learys’. Their black dog barked at us, but he was penned in and he didn’t mean anything by it, just bored. Mixer nodded down toward the Daisy, but I was not going to shoot the dog. Not that it would do any real damage—no way the BB would even break the skin—but that’s just stupid. Besides that dog was from the same litter as our old dog, Bullfeathers, and Bully was a good dog, until he got loose out front and got hit by a truck on 44.
    It’s not that big a lawn and pretty quick we were on the trail. You think of towns getting bigger as time goes on but Soudley had gone the other way. There used to be a lot more to it, back