Gentlemen by Michael Northrop Page B

before I was around or even my grand parents probably. There used to be a lot of iron in the ground and people who worked digging it up and melting it down. There were even train tracks, a little railway back here behind town to ship the stuff out on.
    The tracks are dug up and gone now, and we were walking on what was left of them, just a sunken dirt walking path, maybe twelve feet wide. People called it the bike path, but you really needed like a mountain bike or something. The dirt was worn smooth in the center, but there were rocks sticking up and sticks lying around and little ditches here and there. It’s tough on my ten-speed, but it’s fine to walk.
    Every now and then, an old path shoots off the bike path into the woods, because there used to be houses back there. Maybe there were a dozen, scattered around like a little townbehind the town. Mostly they were pretty beaten down now. A few were leaning halfway over and a few others had gone ahead and fallen down so that the foundations were open to the air, just overgrown pits with rotted boards scattered in and around them. You could definitely fall in at night and break a bone or three.
    The only one that was still safe to go in was the house in the woods. It must’ve been built later or lived in longer or both. Anyway, it had its problems, too. There were gaps in the roof and there was no glass left in the windows. The glass wasn’t knocked out, it was just gone. I guess whoever lived there must’ve taken the windows with them. I’d never heard of something like that before. I mean, didn’t the place they were moving to have windows? Anyway, the house had been empty for as long as I’d known about it, which was most of my life.
    Mixer and I turned onto the path that led there. The path started out good, but it faded out fast and before long we were pushing through grass and weeds up to our knees. You can’t wear shorts out there or your legs’ll get all torn up. We were in jeans and boots and sure enough, Mixer was kicking his leg free of something, probably prickers.
    â€œLet go!” he said, swearing at it.
    That seemed funny for some reason, yelling at a plant. We laughed a little and then, like that was the sign he’d been waiting for, he decided to dig into the beers. He lifted the six-pack out and tossed the wet bag off into the grass.It was Meisterbrau, which is not great beer but, you know, still beer.
    He popped one out of the plastic and handed it to me. It was still pretty cold and the can was wet so it sort of stuck to my palm. I pressed the BB gun under my other arm so that I could pop the top, then I shifted things around so that I had the beer in my left hand and was holding the Daisy in my right. My finger was on the trigger, but the thing wasn’t cocked.
    Mixer popped the top on his. He held his open beer in his right hand and we both stopped for a bit to take a big first gulp. When we started up again, he hooked his fingers into the two empty plastic loops and carried the rest of the six-pack that way, hanging low from his left hand and trailing through the grass.
    We went down the little dip there and headed into the field that probably used to be the yard, and there was the house in the woods, still standing square on its foundation, its white paint peeling and its empty windows open to the wind. We stood there looking at it and finishing up our first beers. Mixer shook his, to show that it was empty, and I downed the last mouthful of backwash and shook mine, too. Then we both chucked the empty cans toward the house—right at the same second, like we’d planned it—but they were too light and came up short.
    The door’s around back, or the door frame is anyway. What’s left of the door itself is laying on the ground like a big black welcome mat. We didn’t bother to go around, justhoisted ourselves up into the empty windows. It was only four o’clock or so, and the sun