Angels in Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page B

buddy, somehow, or
I’ll die in this hole. Money no object. For Christ’s sake, please. Gray Wolf,
known here as John Brown.
     
    Were you ever a kid? Did you ever
build a treehouse or maybe just a shack in the woods with your best friend? And
did you ever nick your fingertips and press them together and, using your
secret Indian names, bond yourselves together in blood?
    Old Running Deer did once. With my
best friend Billy, Billy Baker, aka Gray Wolf.
    I read the epistle a second time,
then a third, then looked, I suppose somewhat blankly, out of the window for a
spell.
    Davenport , Iowa . Way back in the long ago. Lux Radio Theater. Camay. Modess
Because. Quick, Kato. Jell-Q, folks. Mortimer, how can you be so stupid?
    The Daniels (us) lived at 114 Elm,
the Bakers in an almost identical house on Oak, number 113, one street over. It
was a house I knew almost as well as my own, as our backyards not only adjoined
each other but had over the years practically merged into one, a process hastened
by the tail end of a summer storm that flattened the wooden fence we shared in
common and that no one had ever bothered to replace.
    Billy, nicknamed Sabu for some
long-forgot reason—perhaps his size (short) or his coloring (olive, from an
Italian pandmother)—had been my closest friend for as far back as I could
remember, except when we fell out about something serious like the Dodgers vs.
the despicable Yankees; or why Terri MacPherson, age nine, had sent him a
Valentine’s card out had sent me some highly realistic fake caca in a small
jewelry box, gift wrapped; or how come Billy would never let me fire even one
shot from his Red Ryder BB rifle. We sat beside each other in grade school and
in high school and even lined up beside each other on the left side of the line
(he was end) for the mighty Packer High Panthers. We once got disciplined
together by the principal for vulgar behavior: when our cheerleaders begged the
spectators to give them a “P” during a game, we stood up and pretended to have
one.
    I liked football. It let me bully
smaller kids legally. Billy hated it, but remember I’m taking about days so
long ago that everyone who wasn’t a girl or in a wheelchair had to turn out for
the team, even sissies, even fat kids with funny shoes and glasses.
    Oh, dear. Billy Baker. Billy was
smart. He could do fractions. He knew where Czechoslovakia was. He could even
spell it. He read books that weren’t on the official reading list, and I’m not
talking about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Gang-bang or God’s Little
Acre —we all read those. Strangely enough, I became something of a reader
myself, later. Orphans may daydream a lot, but so do people in the clink,
whatever type of clink it may be, and is not reading a type of daydreaming too,
Evonne, my precious?
    Well. Billy’s pop owned and ran a
small trucking business and was also a useful all-round handyman, and when Mr.
Baker and my pop found us kids wanted to put up some sort of a clubhouse using
the wood from the blown-over fence, they decided to draw up the plans for us
and took to sitting out back in one or the other’s garden drinking lemonade
that we knew was spiked but we weren’t supposed to, filling page after page
with highly detailed plans until me and Billy finally built the thing ourselves
without plans, and for all I know it’s still there. It was, of course, in that
shack that Running Deer and Gray Wolf swore brotherhood until the last smoke
signal rose and the last tale had been told.
    Sabu and I used to work for his pop
weekends and summertimes, me as slave labor doing chores like toting two
thousand bathroom scales from the warehouse along a plank into one of the
trucks, him on the road with his older brother, Ed, learning the true trucker
creed—which stops had the greasiest foods, the biggest tits, and the worst
music.
    Different as we were, we shared one
common dream (two, if you count getting Marge Freeman’s trainer bra off):
getting