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Just Boys

David Sapp

    When we were just boys, I knew Ben Baxter only as Boomer, for his age, an easy, generous young gentleman whom everyone liked and wanted to be around. Boomer was three years older and I followed him about, looking up to him as he seemed to know more of the breadth of the world by living in the rougher west end of town. The origin of his nickname was obscure. He was called “Boomer” to distinguish him from his dad, the older Ben. (Male kangaroos are known as boomers.) He was certainly born an official baby boomer, but more likely, “Boomer” was the result of something funny he did as a toddler.
    My mom was jealous as I loved Boomer’s mother, Maggie, more. If Maggie was around, I brought my tears and scraped knees to her to tend. I begged to stay for supper when she made ham and beans. When she was a cashier at Big Bear Supermarket, I looked for her when Mom dragged me shopping and after my ration from the gumball machine. I’d plead in my mind, “Take me home with you, Maggie. I’ll be no trouble. Boomer will be my big brother.”
    (When Maggie was a schoolgirl in the early 1950s, a clerk at Heckler Pharmacy downtown, a man with an English accent asked for raincoats. She said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we only have umbrellas.” Seeing her confusion, he rephrased, matter-of-factly, asking for rubbers. She replied, “Oh, we don’t sell boots, either.”)
    I was in love with Boomer’s sister, Brenda. Mom was slightly worried when I was happiest playing house with Brenda and her sexless dolls – on her bed on long, rainy afternoons. As teenagers, when I didn’t seem to fit anywhere, she patiently tutored me on the social hierarchy of nerds, jocks, loners, freaks and geeks. When she married a guy named Ed with two children in Columbus, she chose not to have kids of her own. After they divorced, I saw her by chance when I also, coincidentally, stocked shelves at Heckler Pharmacy. She was beautiful, and I wondered if I could be a good husband.
    Our families, along with the Wheelers, went camping, gathering around many campfires with hot dogs and toasted marshmallows. Brenda was always left out when the boys went tubing or canoeing in the muddy shallows of the Mohican River. We soaped windows, papered trees, stuck horns, and traded loot after Halloween Trick or Treat. Together, we watched the ball drop on the TV every New Year’s Eve. And there’s evidence in snapshots of happiness – of boys in crew cuts circling a chronology of flaming birthday cakes.
    Ben, Boomer’s dad, was a scout master and painted the ends of his hoe, rake, and shovel red for easy identification. My dad owned Jet Quality Cleaners on West Gambier Street. Ben worked for Baer’s Cleaners on West High, near the Yellow Jackets football stadium. The cleaning chemicals eventually ravaged Ben with cancer, and near the end, there were vivid hallucinations. Ben carried on elaborate conversations with Satan. Then again, it was said that Ben acquired a nasty STD in the Navy and passed it on to Maggie and through her, their kids. Maybe the disease caught up with him.
    After dropping out of art school and in between jobs, after Boomer also joined the Navy and Brenda moved out, I helped the older Ben one hot July day re-build his sagging porch roof. I bashed my hand with the hammer and fainted on the shingles. Somehow Ben coaxed me down the ladder while I was semi-conscious. A burden that day, I didn’t see much of the Baxters after that. At Ben’s funeral and after hearing of Maggie’s Alzheimer’s, it was suddenly too late to get reacquainted.
    Though I idolized him, Boomer and I were just boys, buddies, not intimates, but there was some sexual play in the bathtub together and in the backyard pup tent with Duke Wheeler, a confused jumble of sweaty boy bodies and flashlights. I suppose it was all harmless. We were unaware of the etiquette of labels and gender, and I doubt we knew what a vagina was, its existence, let alone its function or location. Still, I was the youngest and I always wondered where they learned of these secret pursuits. Neither were Catholic like me. (My time as an altar boy was, thankfully, brief and uneventful.) I could not chart any lasting effects, though these memories stuck in my mind years later. And in high school, Boomer and I rarely spoke as Boomer was abruptly transformed into Ben. He puttied and sanded rusted holes in his Plymouth Barracuda. I was content to draw and paint alone in my room. (When Duke became our quarterback and prom king, he offered me odd, sidelong glances of regret.)
    I loved Boomer. I recall an idyllic summer day when I was nine and Boomer twelve. I tagged behind him through alleys and old ladies’ backyards searching the west end for empty soda bottles for deposit return. We dug our treasure out of the dirt and cleaned it up for an acceptable presentation to buy baseball cards and a fresh, cold pop at the little candy store across the street from West Side Elementary. Afterward we ignored the school playground and walked to the levee, peed into the Kokosing River, and chucked rocks into the water, all the while experimenting with the foulest words we could conjure and arrange in creative linguistic variations. We rated our profanity, the heights of our stones, and the sound of our splashes with simple satisfaction. That was all Boomer and I needed or wanted on that day when we were just boys.

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