Sleepy

On weekends he and Hal would slip into sandals and ride their bikes to the creek. They’d peddle slowly through the neighborhood—weeping willows arcing gracefully to the sidewalk, wooden fences guarding lawns in various states of repute, kid’s toys strewn across front yards or gathering dirt on the porch, the youngest of the children riding on trikes or using training wheels while their bored parents feigned interest and tried to read the paper or fix the hose and gain one moments respite behind sunglasses before the crushing weight of another work week and another work week beyond that weighed them down.

When they’d cleared the neighborhoods and hit the park—old live oaks mostly, a few white birch and sycamores scattered amongst them, these all ringed by reams of waist high star thistle and saplings—the boys would stop at the first available sandbar on the muddy path and dump their bikes into the sand, careless as boys often are. Tree limbs, weighed down by thick foliage trailed in the water, and fish swam through skeins of light above moss covered rocks. The creek reached, Hal would usually take the lead, picking out some piece of flotsam—soda cans, plastic bags, beer glasses—that often got hung up in the eddy near the farther shore, which became a target for the boys to skip rocks at. Hal usually threw first, a side-armed thing of grace, bending slightly at the right hip to generate a good arm angle and turning his left shoulder from his target so he could create good torque when he turned and sent the rock sent skittering across the water like a toad across lily pads before pinging on impact.

Unlike Hal, he was inexpert at selecting rocks, always impatient, a weakness that would dog him from the rest of his life from small fender benders to poorly written cards and poorly chosen wives. Thus, this impatience born of a desire for more time wound up being a great waste of time, and so he was always left holding some misshapen rock, or lifting the veil of some ill-conceived woman, the sort who loved to fight but not make up. And when he hurled the rock towards the stream, regardless of arm angle and torque, neither of which fell between the bounds of respectable, the rock always plunked down in the middle of the stream and sank quickly, skipless and sad. He seems to remember a pair of mallards floating by and making idle chit chat as ducks often do.