Chapter 1
“If you move, I’ll pull the trigger.”
I’d never had a gun pushed into my body before, but there was no doubt in my mind that the hard steel below my ear was just that—a gun. My knees trembled, threatening to give.
“Another inch down and you’ll be meeting dead relatives, son.” His voice was cultivated—free of the Southernism that marks most folk in Eden. I grimaced and stuck the fingers of my left hand into the knothole that helped bring about my predicament, my face hot with shame and panic. Beads of sweat rolled from my armpits as a yellow butterfly fluttered over my head. I thought of William Chandler at church on Sunday, advising that fishing was always good while the fragile creatures were floating about.
Then, there was Miss Ginn. The last time I cut her grass she had advice as well. Miss Ginn always had advice. You’re going to get into big trouble running around town spying on folk the way you do, you little pervert. Miss Ginn had a lot of room to talk with her ever-present birding binoculars. I moved, ever so slightly, to glimpse the owner of the voice and gun.
“Ah, ah, aaahhh, put your nosy little eye right back up to the knothole there and tell me what you see, youngster,” he said, forcing my head back with the gun. I stuck my eye to the hole.
“What do you see?”
“A yard.”
“What else?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re about to die for spying on a yard?”
“Oh, God,” I whispered. I closed my eyes and wished for Kansas, Dorothy style. My little voice had warned me, but I’d done what I always do. I shut it down, justifying my actions because that’s what I wanted.
“You’re in a spot. You could run, but then I’d shoot you in the back. You might get to spend the remainder of your days in a wheelchair, drooling on yourself. You can sit on the porch with Miss Ginn’s dear brother—I believe they call him Pug—and drool in concert, so to speak.”
I was fourteen. In recent months I’d become increasingly convinced that I knew everything worth knowing about life. What a difference a spying episode can make. Pug was, indeed, Miss Ginn’s disabled brother. Whoever was pressing the gun to my head was no stranger, and this realization brought his identity.
The Edenites would love it. A murder would beat adultery, weekend violence on Bangalang, or illegitimate children hands down. I closed my eyes again and saw my name on the obituary page of The Weekly Observer, right there in black and white with the old people, perhaps a freak accident, and those taken by disease. “George Parker, local Peeping Tom, killed Sunday, April 24th, 1966, while indulging his perversion.”
I’m not a crier for the most part, but tears threatened with stinging power. I shouldn’t have been spying on my odd neighbor. I shouldn’t spy on anyone, but I was having trouble viewing my transgression as a killing offense.
He’d been working at a painting on an easel. I’d never seen an easel, an artist’s smock, or a beret, live and in person. Suddenly, he stood upright, looked around a bit, and then disappeared into his house. I assumed to use the bathroom or retrieve more paints.
Yes, I’ve heard the one about assumption and what it can do, but I’m fourteen, remember? I know everything, and my strange new neighbor had turned my sneaky little game around with perfect execution.
“I’m going to ask you once more. What’s so fascinating about a hole in a fence, Spy Boy?”
“Nuh-nothing.”
I listened to his even breathing. He was no doubt enjoying the drama playing out on a lazy Sunday afternoon in our sleepy small town. I was not.
“I believe that you Edenites have a saying. Isn’t ‘he needed killing’ a common defense for offing Peeping Toms?”
I gritted my teeth. I hated the phrase Peeping Tom. A sudden end might be a lot less humiliating. “The boy,” I stammered. “I was looking for your son.”
“Son? There is no son.” Something had crept into his voice—frustration, or perhaps a twinge of suspicion. “There’s only me in my great big house, Spy Boy. If you were better at your job, you’d know that.”
“I saw him,” I insisted, “gazing from a second-floor window while I was playing with Buster one day. I heard the music and when I looked up, I saw him.”
The would-be murderer’s response was to ignore my response. “I wonder how spying would hold up in a murder trial. I know how well it holds up in wartime.” Discussion of the boy who’d spied on me first wasn’t going to happen.
He’d given himself away, and I was growing more angry than afraid. I turned to look at my executioner, my next-door neighbor. I blinked. Blinking is my mind’s way of betraying to the world that I’m confused, stymied, or just plain stupid.
“Gerard Free, at your service,” he said. “I must tell you that those tears aren’t very becoming on a spy. Perhaps you should stick to playing with Barbies.”
I stared at the big hole in the end of his big gun and wiped another tear. Mr. Free smiled with disgusting smugness; his pencil-thin mustache twitched, and his clear, slate blue eyes glittered. He was as cool as a man can be, and as sharp up close and personal as he was at a distance—artist’s smock and beret, or no artist’s smock and beret.
His pale eyes bored into mine, and I felt as if he were reading my thoughts all the way back to birth. I looked at the ground. “I’m sorry, Mr. Free,” I muttered.
“You don’t have to be sorry, young man.”
“I don’t?”
“No, in a bit you’re going to be dead. You’ll no longer have to worry about idiotic parents commanding that you do things you don’t want to do, or teachers with pesky homework who don’t have a clue, or old women who don’t know what they’re talking about when they warn you about the perils of spying on folk.”
“Please don’t kill me, Mr. Free.” The plea came out like a child’s whine—a boy-child who plays with Barbies.
“Son, I don’t want to kill you. It’s just that I have to.”
“N-no, you don’t. Why do you think such a thing?”
“Why, it’s in the rules, of course.”
“What rules?”
“The International Code of Spy Conduct dictates that all enemy combatants and sympathizers caught behind enemy lines must be summarily executed.”
“But I’m not behind enemy lines. I’m in Miss Ginn’s back yard. I’m in Eden.”
“Each is a minor technicality, Spy Boy, I assure you.”
He dug in a pocket of his smock with his free hand, produced a gold case, and then leaned in close to me.
“Open that for me, please.”
I smelled oil paint, Old Spice, tobacco, and a hint of alcohol. I let go of the knothole and collapsed against the fence with a heavy sigh, took the case, and opened it with trembling hands. Two neat rows of cigarettes lay inside.
“Well, don’t just stare at them.”
I retrieved a cigarette but fumbled it immediately into the grass. “Careful, they’re Gauloises. You don’t buy those at the Piggly Wiggly.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, gingerly plucking the foreign cigarette from the grass while he removed a collapsible ebony holder from his smock. He extended the holder and poked it at me. The holder was another of his fascinating affectations. I’d only seen them on television.
“Put the cig in and don’t break it. What sort of name is ‘Piggly Wiggly’ for a grocery store anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, attempting to insert the cigarette with trembling hands. “It’s just a name. It’s always been the Piggly Wiggly.”
“You Southerners are an absolute riot.” He waved the pistol at me again. “I’m done talking here, and I’m done having you spy on me at every turn. Would you like a smoke? A condemned man is entitled to a last smoke.”
“I don’t think I should, Mr. Free. Mom would kill me.”
“I’m going to kill you, Spy Boy, not your mother,” he reminded me, raising the pistol to a point between my eyes.
I squeezed my eyes shut and waited. I heard a ‘snick’, but nothing happened. His weapon had misfired. I bit the back of my hand to keep from throwing up and opened my eyes. A happy little flame danced from the tip of the gun with which he gleefully lit his fancy cigarette. He exhaled luxuriously and grinned, exhibiting perfect white teeth.
I wanted to curse him but smiled despite myself.
* * *
It hadn’t been difficult for Mr. Free to sneak up on me. The wooden fence I used for cover separated his property from the Smith house behind him. Mr. Free’s house sat on a corner lot, bordered on its east and west by Main and McAlister Streets respectively, and by a six-foot high brick wall that ran up to the Smith’s wood fence at the rear of his back yard, separating his house from ours. Miss Ginn lived on Lafayette Street beside the Smith house and behind me—unfortunately.
A wrought iron fence with brick columns separated his front yard from the sidewalk that ran parallel to Main Street. When Mr. Free moved into the widow Jowers’ house, mystery came with him. I rode my bike up and down the sidewalk a hundred times in a not-so-subtle attempt to catch a glimpse of our enigmatic new resident.
While sitting with my face hidden behind a Spider-Man comic at Mr. Allen’s barber shop, I’d learned that Mr. Free and Sarah Jowers were related in some way. Supposedly, he was a Yankee. I was the only one in the shop who believed there was about as much Yankee in Mr. Free as there was in me, but I chose silence and Spider-Man rather than an opinion. I was also the only one in the entire town of Eden who believed that Mr. Free didn’t live alone.
Mr. Jowers had built the brick wall up to within about a foot of the Smiths’ fence. On our side, the gap at the corner of the fence is covered by ivy and, from a distance, the fences appear connected.
My father calls Mr. Free’s wall the Great Wall of China. It serves as the boundary between the last of the grand old Eden homes and what passes as the middle-class neighborhood. While standing in our back yard, all you can see of Mr. Free’s place is the second floor. That’s where I had seen the boy.
By all appearances, my victim appeared to take a break, or forgot some artist’s tool. While I waited attentively for him to return to his painting, he was gathering his .45 caliber cigarette lighter, walking out his front door, down the sidewalk toward my house, and rounding the Great Wall of China. He walked the length of the wall, undetected by my parents, who were no doubt doing what they always did on a Sunday afternoon, watching television, reading, or snoozing in the den.
In less than a minute from disappearing into the bowels of his house, Mr. Free was standing behind me with his deadly cigarette lighter. My illusion of being undetectable by the average Edenite while pursuing my furtive hobby was shattered handily by a suspected Yankee who wore smocks and berets—a man who planted flowers that were the envy of every woman in Eden, a man who knew all about covert operations. I wasn’t pleased in the least, but I was fascinated.
“That’s real funny,” I said, alternating between anger and shame with no way to control the gyrations. He ignored my discomfort with detached coolness. He sat cross-legged in the grass and smiled. “Tell me, George, why would a young man in a thriving metropolis such as Eden spend his time spying on his neighbors?”
“How do you know my name?” I asked, far more demanding than my situation gave me a right to be.
He shrugged and inhaled from his ebony holder, directing the plume of blue smoke skyward with his lower lip when he exhaled. “It’s a small town. All one has to do is listen. Between the post office and your wonderfully quaint little Piggly Wiggly food store, one can hear practically anything worthy of hearing, and a great deal that isn’t.”
He was a quick study in the ways of a small town. Most of what I knew that I wasn’t supposed to know I learned at Mr. Allen’s barber shop and while tagging along behind Mom at the Piggly Wiggly. I made a mental note to spend more time in the post office. Most adults are more than happy to pretend that an inattentive kid isn’t there. In a small town, gossip is hands down more addictive than booze and cigarettes.
Mr. Free didn’t wait for me to answer. He removed his beret and wiped his forehead with the back of his smock sleeve. “It’s hot as blazes out here, Spy Boy. How about we enjoy a libation?” he asked as he rose and disappeared into the ivy. I stood and followed but stopped at the green gate.
“What’s a libation?” I asked into the ivy, shooting a glance toward the back of Miss Ginn’s house. I was a goner if she had her binoculars out. I’d be cutting her grass for free for the rest of my life.
“You’ll never know unless you screw up a bit of courage,” he replied from the other side.
This was it—the forbidden moment—the moment all prior forbidding was intended to prevent. The apple glistened beneath a summer sun, beckoning with sweet promise.
I glanced back at my house then slipped through the ivy with a joy in my heart that had escaped me since the day my father and I got my first kite airborne. Refusal to follow the mystery man into his lair wasn’t among the remotest of options.
