Full Frame
1
The Edge of the World
CORNFIELDS AND WHEAT FIELDS and bean fields and God knows what other kind of fields. I wished I was young enough to get excited about seeing one more cow.
“What is that awful smell?” I moaned, rolling up my window. My eleven-year-old sister held her nose and glared at me.
“He who smelt it dealt it,” she snarked.
“That’s enough, Kat,” Dad said. “We just passed a rendering plant. Think of it as a substitute for the smell of refineries.”
“Great,” she growled and hid her face in her sleeve.
It took more than a mile for the smell to fade. I rolled the window back down. It was too hot to leave closed. For the end of June, weather in Chicago and Northern Illinois had been unseasonably hot for over a week. Perfect time to be moving across the damn state.
I guess I sighed a little and started fiddling with my camera bag. I needed to get a couple cassettes of film rolled from the spool or I wouldn’t be able to record our big move, first impressions of the new town, and all that. I put the can and the spooler into my dark bag and then reached into the bag with a couple of empty cassettes. I always felt a little more peaceful when I was rolling film. I couldn’t see a thing that was happening, but I could feel exactly what I needed for thirty-six exposures.
It wasn’t like this move was really a bad thing. Dad had been laid off work at the refinery two years ago. There was some big consolidation that I didn’t understand when I was fourteen. All I knew was that Dad was out of work and we were living on government surplus again. I didn’t mind the peanut butter or the cheese, but the powdered eggs and powdered milk were just gross. Dad went into manpower retraining, a great program started by John F. Kennedy. He collected unemployment for as long as he was in the retraining program. He got trained in refrigeration and air conditioning, but he’d never found a job. He’d been doing odd jobs and maintenance work during the past few months.
Mom hadn’t been idle. She’d been studying correspondence courses for the past few years and took two terms at Garrett Theological Seminary. For the past school year, she’d been gone to Evanston three nights a week and Dad picked up most of the cooking and making sure Kat and I were in school on time. She was ordained as a deacon in the Methodist Church at Annual Conference two weeks ago and was appointed to Tenbrook Methodist Church at the edge of the damned world. One more step and you fall off into Iowa.
It was really a big deal. Mom was the first woman ordained and assigned a church by the Methodists in Illinois. I guess before long we’d be calling them United Methodists when the unification with the EUBs went through. Then her status would change because the EUBs had already ordained a woman. Mom knew her and I guess they were friends, even though she was all the way down in Springfield.
Mom thought I was going to follow in her footsteps and be a preacher. I’d worked through a lot of her coursework with her as she studied. Maybe if there was a ministry of photography, I might follow through with that, but I just couldn’t see preaching as a career. I wasn’t that committed. It’s just that the closing program at Senior High Institute at Asbury Woods last summer was pretty high pressure and I said I’d become a minister. Well, it’s not a binding contract.
Anyway, Mom got assigned to this little church and we packed up the family to move. At least they sent a truck for our furniture and stuff. We didn’t have to do all the moving and hauling. I packed every item in my darkroom myself, though.
Kat hadn’t taken kindly to the move.
“You’re making me leave all my friends! I hate you!” she’d argued.
“Name one,” Mom said as she sat to face my sister.
“Um… Janie.”
“Janie who told you that you were fat and she never wanted to see you again?”
“But Marcie.”
“Marcie moved to Wisconsin last year.”
“Angela is still there.”
“Angela is a very nice girl and I’m glad you think of her as a friend, but you’ve never attempted to get together, to play, or even to go see a movie.” Kat continued to sulk. “Honey, we’re doing this to get a fresh start where you can make real friends and not be afraid to go outside all the time. Things have been getting bad in the city. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more riots this summer. I don’t want my children to be too afraid for their lives to go outside.”
“It’s not fair.”
“No, I suppose it isn’t, but God will take care of us. You’ll make some real friends and will have them all your life.”
I hoped that went for me, too. I’d never been any better at making friends than Kat was. The friends I made were different than us. We never saw each other except at school. A new town out in the country? I could see myself out riding down a country road on my bicycle, stopping to get a picture of some dilapidated barn that spoke of Americana.
Except I didn’t have a bicycle. Mine was stolen last summer and we hadn’t seen any sense in getting a new one that would just be stolen again. There was plenty of public transportation. That was one of the good things about living in the city. I could catch the Lake Shore and be downtown in an hour. But Mom was right. There was always danger around. Especially if it looked like I was carrying anything valuable—like my camera.
I kind of dumped this story on you right in the middle. I should say that I’m Nate Hart. I’m sixteen and will be seventeen in the fall. I’ll be a junior at Tenbrook High School. Go Trojans. Why the hell would anyone name their sports team after the losers of the biggest war in ancient history? Or a condom. Take your pick.
You already met my little sister Katherine. We call her Kat—and she scratches like one, too. Mom, Rev. Joyce Hart. Dad, Richard Hart. I’ve got two older sisters. Deborah is twenty-four, married, and has a new baby. Her husband, Sergeant John Lindal, is in the army and they live on base near Kansas City at Fort Leavenworth. We’re all pretty worried about him because there’s always a risk of being sent to Vietnam soon. They’re really ramping up some gnarly stuff there. Personally, I wouldn’t go. If I get drafted, I’ll move to Canada. No way am I carrying around a gun instead of a camera. My niece’s name is Cameron, by the way. Deborah jokes that she named her after me.
Naomi joined up. She’s twenty-two and is in officer training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. She says she wants to be a pilot, but fat chance of that ever happening. Right now, she’s a mechanic. She’ll probably end up married and pregnant, too.
Yeah, apparently Mom and Dad decided to take a break before they launched me. They weren’t sure they wanted any more kids after the war. World War II that is. I wasn’t born until ’49. Kat in ’55. She might have been an accident. For that matter, I might have been, too.
So, we’re getting close to the end of June. In two years, I’ll graduate as a proud member of the class of ’68. At least I hope I’ll be proud of it. I don’t know a single person in Tenbrook. I’m told it has a population of about 750 and my class has 55 kids in it. I’ll make 56—at least until someone gets pregnant. I don’t know a soul there and I don’t expect I’ll meet anyone before school starts.
I rolled three cassettes of film and loaded one in my 35mm SLR. I got this baby and three lenses for a real deal at Camera Warehouse—about my favorite store in The Loop. It was used, but it still took me over a year to save up the money to buy it. I wouldn’t have made it then if it weren’t for Uncle Nate, Mom’s brother, my namesake. He’s the one who got me my first camera when I was about Kat’s age. I still have my Kodak Brownie Hawkeye he gave me for my tenth birthday. Mom was shocked that he’d buy me such an expensive gift, but I loved it. I’ve been hooked on photography ever since. Anyway, when he heard I was saving for a new SLR, he slipped me $100. Unlike our side of the family, Uncle Nate always seemed to have a little extra money. I overheard Mom whisper something about it being mob money. I don’t know what he did for it—or them.
I was still using my Brownie when I entered a 4-H photography competition. Dad’s friend, Mr. Harris, had a darkroom and offered to develop my photos and print them for me. I sat with his son, Dennis, while he and Dad went into the darkroom. They chose the photos off the four rolls I’d shot—twelve exposure rolls. I was really pleased with them and they won the championship prize at the Will County Fair. Cook County didn’t have a fair, but 4-H was allowed to exhibit at Will County.
My exhibit was slated to go to the state exhibit in Springfield. I got a blue ribbon, but not the championship purple. We went over to see Mr. Harris to show him the ribbon. That’s when Dennis told me that the only reason I won at all was because of what his dad did in the darkroom. That lit a fire under me and I checked out a book from the library on film processing and darkroom techniques.
The next time I saw Mr. Harris, I asked him if he’d show me his darkroom and teach me how to develop film. He was impressed that I already knew the terminology and was so interested in learning the process. About once a month, I was allowed to go to Mr. Harris’s house to develop my film and print pictures. I found out Dad was paying for my supplies and was relieved that I didn’t have to shell out for that. I got my first 35mm camera soon after that. It was nothing spectacular. I found it at Camera Warehouse for ten dollars. It was a viewfinder camera with a fixed focus lens, and I soon discovered it needed a different size film than my Brownie. It also had settings for different lens speeds and f/stops.
By the time I was in high school, I was carting my new 35mm SLR camera around everywhere. That’s when Mr. Harris offered to sell me an old darkroom setup he had. It included various developer tanks, an enlarger and even a small supply of chemicals and paper. I couldn’t wait to get it home. Then it sat in boxes for almost a year because I couldn’t make any place in the house dark enough to call a darkroom. I ruined a lot of film trying. But I learned a lot. That’s when I started going back to the shops in the Loop. We always went to the city a couple of times a year to get clothes and anything we really needed, but I managed to wander off to the pawn shops and the huge Camera Warehouse on Wabash. That’s where I started buying film in cans and winding my own cassettes. Levi, the manager, liked to show young photographers the ropes and always gave me a good deal on film.
Everything was black and white, of course. I finally managed to turn my closet into a reasonable darkroom with my clothes all shoved in my dresser drawers and a portable rack that I got at a church rummage sale. And I started processing and printing my own film. Wow! What a learning curve that was. I was just getting good at it when Mom announced that we were going to move.
Now my entire darkroom was packed in boxes waiting for a new location in our new home.
We got to Tenbrook and found the truck wasn’t there yet. Besides, we were all hungry, so we didn’t bother to even go in to look around. As we drove through town, we saw three or four restaurants but they all served alcohol. Mom wouldn't stop at an establishment that served alcohol until she knew the local reputation and whether it was really a restaurant or if it was a bar. Geez. In Chicago there was at least a White Castle every few blocks. We just drove on fifteen miles to Huntertown, the county seat. It was about four times the size of Tenbrook and we found a café called Gertie’s. It wasn’t much to talk about, but I found out it had great coleslaw. I didn’t order it on purpose. It just came with the burger plate. I was going to ignore it, but decided to give it a taste.
It was sweet and creamy, and I had a new favorite food instantly. The burger and chips were nothing memorable, but I’ve loved coleslaw ever since that day.
After we’d eaten, we headed back to the house. The truck was parked in front, but the driver and crew had taken a lunch break and were gone for almost an hour as we poked around the empty house. They called it a parsonage. It was owned by the church and was just there to house the preacher and his family. Her family in this case. It was a pretty simple layout. We walked into the front and Mom immediately said that the room to the right was her office as there was none in the church itself—a brick structure across the corner. It had a nice big front porch, like most of the other houses in town. It had a big living room and past the office, there was a dining room. A stairway led upstairs and beyond that was a big kitchen with a table.
We headed upstairs. Mom and Dad immediately said the bedroom at the end of the hall was theirs. Next to the stairs was a bathroom. Two front bedrooms looked identical and I gave Kat her choice. She took the one on the right. My closet was actually smaller than the one I had in our rented row house in Calumet Heights. It would be interesting trying to fit my darkroom into it.
The movers arrived and we spent the rest of the day moving in and organizing our stuff. There was an old Victorian walnut bed in my bedroom. Mom said that the church just had part time ministers the past few years and they only stayed overnight in the parsonage on the weekends.
“I asked if we could keep the bed for you,” she said. “I checked the mattress and it’s much better than the one you had in the city. If you don’t like it, we can still keep your old mattress, but that frame was falling apart and we ditched it. We’ll be making a trip to the dump sometime later this week, so anything that isn’t really usable will go out to the garage.”
I tested the mattress and pronounced it suitable. My old mattress went to the garage. Kat had her own little princess bed and wasn’t about to part with it.
We went back to Gertie’s for dinner and by the time we got home, Kat and I were both ready to collapse into our beds.
I woke up feeling a little disoriented. It was quiet. I mean really damn quiet! No traffic. No trains. No airplanes. I frightened myself for a minute thinking that the rapture had happened and I was left behind. Leave it to God to know I was faking it. Then my room came into focus. I remembered that we moved. Damn! How did people sleep with all this quiet going on?
Then I heard a truck rumble by on Main Street. My ears became more accustomed to picking out different kinds of sounds. I heard birds. And they weren’t just crows. Songbirds like you hear at camp. I grabbed a pair of sweats and stumbled downstairs.
“Oh, good morning, honey,” Mom said. She was sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee and her Bible open. Dad was opposite reading from an Upper Room devotional booklet. I looked around for a clock and found our old familiar kitchen clock hanging above the refrigerator. Six o’clock. The sun was shining. “You’re welcome to join us. I haven’t been out for groceries yet, but you can have coffee if you want some.”
I didn’t usually drink coffee, but if I was going to sit through the morning devotion, I needed something. Dad kept reading, knowing better than to even offer to start over. He finished and Mom prayed, thanking God for bringing us safely to our new home. She made it sound like we’d just arrived in the promised land and I gladly said Amen and stood up as soon as she was finished.
“Why don’t you go out for a run and scout out the neighborhood,” Dad suggested before I escaped.
“A run? Outside?”
The idea was kind of foreign to me. Oh, I ran when I needed to. In the gym. Sometimes we were allowed out on the track at school. It’s not like I’m an athlete, but I guess I’m not in too bad shape. It just sounded weird to go outside and run. You just did not do that in South Chicago. There were too many street toughs, drunks, and a growing number of druggies out there. If you were running, someone was chasing you.
But it sounded kind of cool in its own perverse way. I nodded my head and put my half-full coffee cup in the kitchen sink. I saw a thermometer on the window frame outside. Seventy already. It would be eighty-five this afternoon. If I was going to do this, I’d better do it now. I went up to change into a pair of shorts.
I wasn’t much of a runner when it came down to it, but I saw a bit of the town. When I headed out of town on River Road, I saw a good-sized farm dog sitting by the road ahead of me. I turned around where I was to head back into town. I wasn’t going to depend on my ability to outrun a dog. Maybe on a bicycle.
I got home and waited for Kat to get out of the bathroom so I could take a shower. By that time, Mom had been to the local grocery store and got enough food for breakfast. When we sat down to eat, she asked how my run had been.
“Not bad. Nobody was chasing me. There’s a big dog out on River Road that I decided not to race, so I headed back to town,” I said.
“Can we have a dog, Mom?” Kat asked. “I want a cute little fluffy dog.”
“We’ll think about it,” Mom answered. I jumped back into the conversation.
“It would be a lot better out there with a bicycle,” I said, hinting broadly. “I could carry my camera then and take some cool pictures.”
“That’s true,” Dad said. “Come to the garage with me.” We cleared our dishes and went out the back door. “When we were putting things in the garage, I saw this back in the corner.”
Dad led me into the garage and we worked our way around a bunch of boxes, tools, and miscellaneous stuff. We’d lived in the house in Chicago all my life. You collect a lot of junk in that period of time. Especially if you’re my dad. In the corner was an old bicycle. It was a pretty simple single speed roadster with a lot of rust and dirt on it.
“Why don’t you try cleaning this up and see if it’s worthwhile. If you can get it cleaned, I’ll get a couple of cans of Rust-Oleum and you can repaint it. I’ll bet a new chain and it will work just fine.” I looked at it critically.
“Might need a new seat and handlebar grips, too,” I speculated. What else did I have to do? I stood no practical chance of meeting anyone until church on Sunday. Might as well see if I could get this rust-bucket cleaned up. It would be a lot cheaper than buying a new one. “Black paint, okay?”
I wheeled the bike out into the driveway and tried just getting on and riding. The wheels turned and the brakes worked, so maybe it wouldn’t be too bad to get in good operating condition. Dad pulled the car back so I had room to work and attached the garden hose to the outside faucet. I ran inside to get my camera and took a couple of pictures of the bike in its ‘before’ condition. I scrubbed the bike down with a brush while Dad pulled out various tools and a parts pan. He’d always been a tinkerer and had more tools than Ace Hardware. I couldn’t name what half of them did.
“You know how to use the wrenches to disassemble it. Be sure you keep your parts organized. Here’s a parts pan and a can of kerosene and a cleaning brush. The WD-40 is in one of the boxes back there, but you should use grease for the bearings and regular machine oil on the chain. Not sure where those are, but I’m sure you’ll find them. Feel free to organize and put away anything you unpack,” he grinned. Then he headed for the car.
“Where are you headed, Dad?”
“Into town. I need to start looking for a job. And Mom gave me a shopping list of things to get at the supermarket in Huntertown. Apparently, the little grocery store here in town didn’t have enough to please her. Wish me luck.”
“Yeah. Good luck on finding a job, Dad,” I said. It was good to see him enthusiastic about going to work. The past year, especially, he’d been slowing down and had less energy. I didn’t like seeing my dad as a beaten down man. Especially now that Mom was the apparent head of the family.
I unpacked a box of what looked like car maintenance things and put the stuff on shelves in the garage in some semblance of order. Then I took it all off the shelves and found a broom so I could sweep the dirt and nests off before I reshelved the things. I tore apart the box and laid it out next to the bike, as I tried to figure out where to start disassembling and cleaning it. I guessed the wheels were first.
Taking the bike apart and cleaning each piece was actually kind of fun. Dirty, greasy fun. Kat came out to see what I was doing and turned her nose up in disgust.
“Mom said I can walk downtown,” she said. “Alone!”
“It’s a different world out here, for sure,” I answered. “Just don’t get so relaxed you aren’t aware of things. Some of the trucks that come through town don’t even slow up. Be alert.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.”
She turned and headed into town. I wasn’t really worried about her being unaware of the trucks. Traffic was something we always had to be aware of in town. But I didn’t completely trust this town yet. I wanted her to be careful.
I stood up and watched her as she headed to the street. Mom came out the back door.
“I forgot a couple of things at the grocery,” she said. “I’m just going to go down and pick them up.”
“Kat told me you said she could go downtown alone,” I said. Mom smiled.
“That doesn’t mean I’m going to let her out of my sight.”
That’s my mom. She wanted Kat to have her freedom, but she wasn’t going to abandon her youngest child in a new town.
After I’d gotten all the parts disassembled and scrubbed in kerosene, I started in with a wire brush and steel wool to take care of the rust on the frame and fenders. The fenders weren’t going to be restored to a shiny chrome finish. They were too pocked and flaky. As I cleaned everything up, I decided the bike would look good if everything was gloss black—fenders included. Yeah. I’d need to get new reflectors and a light… maybe one of those odometers. Back when I had a bicycle, I’d seen a simple odometer in the Sears wish book. It fastened to the fork of the bike and each time the wheel turned, a little prong on a spoke advanced the clicker. There was a setting for the size of the wheel and it moved a mechanical odometer forward by the circumference of the tire.
I took pictures of my progress during the morning, and at noon I went into the house and cleaned up a bit to have some lunch. There wasn’t much in the fridge yet, but Mom had gotten bread and peanut butter. And dill pickles. No problem.
While I was eating, I noticed a door under the stairs I hadn’t paid attention to yet. I opened it and found rickety steps that led to a basement. I turned on the light—a single bulb hanging in the middle of the room—and made my way carefully down, ducking my head. At the bottom of the stairs, I saw an old wringer washing machine. I looked back up and wondered how anyone had ever gotten it down there. It turned out that was the only ‘finished’ part of the basement. I pushed aside a curtain to look into the rest of the room and found a room with a dirt floor, a single lightbulb, and concrete walls. And shelves. Shelves full of vegetables and fruit in glass jars. I carefully picked one up and blew the dust off the lid of the Mason jar.
“Pickled beets, August 1957.”
Crap! Nine years old food! I’d let Mom and Dad decide if any of it was edible. The floor was damp and there were cobwebs all over the little room. I guessed they called this a root cellar. I discarded the idea of using it for my darkroom, though it was certainly dark enough. It gave me the shivers to think that some kid might move in here in ten years and find the remains of my enlarger and developer tanks with pictures still hanging from a line like the canned goods on the shelves.
I went back to work on my bicycle, using 220 grit sandpaper to smooth out all the rough spots left by the rust. I was reminded of a joke. One thing you get when you hang around ministerial students and preachers, like my mom, is a lot of preacher jokes.
There was once a preacher assigned to a church in a small town like Tenbrook. It was a poor community and the preacher was poor, so he only had a bicycle to get around on. He rode to make calls on his parishioners, rode to visit people in the hospital, and rode to run any errands he needed to do. All was well until the day he went out and discovered his bicycle was missing. What would he do?
His neighbor saw him and asked what was the problem. The preacher explained the situation and said, “What am I going to do? I can’t call on the sick or visit the shut-ins. I can’t even get groceries.”
“I have an idea,” the neighbor said. “You are a fine and popular preacher. Everyone in the community comes to our one lone church to hear you preach on Sunday mornings. This Sunday, preach a fire and brimstone sermon on the ten commandments. I’ll watch the congregation for you and when you get to the eighth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ I’ll spot the person who blushes and looks guilty and we’ll have the thief.”
It sounded like a good idea to the preacher. He had no time to prepare such a sermon for service the next morning, but he stepped into the pulpit confidently and began to expound on the text with great descriptions of the reward sinners would receive in hell for their unrighteousness.
He was almost there when the tone of his sermon changed dramatically. He began to talk about the love of God and how no sin was too great for God to forgive. He had the congregation in tears and five people came to the altar at the end of the service to be saved.
Later he talked to the neighbor, who was still wiping his own eyes.
“It was beautiful, pastor. The best sermon this town has ever heard. But it bothers me that you never got to the eighth commandment and we’ll never know who took your bicycle.”
The preacher blushed and scuffed his feet.
“Well,” he said. “I got to the seventh commandment and remembered where I left it.”
If you haven’t had the church and the Bible force fed to you for sixteen years, like I have, I’ll just say that the seventh commandment is ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ I have a pin that shows I have sixteen years of perfect attendance in Sunday School.
Well, that would sure be me if I was a preacher. Even while working on my bicycle, I was thinking about whether I might meet a girl whose house I could ride to while her parents aren’t around so we could make out in her bedroom and maybe finally do the deed. I could about set a clock by the frequency of my hard-ons.
When Dad got home, he inspected my work and grinned.
“There’s not much finish left on it, is there?” he said. “Should make the paint go on real smooth. Here’s the Rust-Oleum. Gloss black like you said.” He handed me two cans of spray paint. “Why don’t we see what’s for dinner and come out afterward to get a coat on this baby?”
“That’d be great, Dad.” I was always inordinately pleased when Dad praised something I’d done. I walked him back into the garage and showed him the boxes I’d emptied and shelved. He said he’d start repacking boxes for the dump and this would sure make it a lot easier.
At dinner, the talk was all about his search for work. It seemed like there wasn’t a lot available, even driving the fifteen miles into Huntertown.
“It’s not a career move, but for now, I landed a job at the gas station just as you go out of Tenbrook. It’s the only garage in town, so they stay pretty busy. Of course, the farm equipment goes to the implement dealer, but Henry has a good reputation as a mechanic and most folks take their cars there for maintenance. It just has him swamped, so I’ll be on the pumps from early until the high school kids who work there get out of school. I should be home about three most days and that means I can still pick up odd jobs and fix dinner. I figure the pumps will be a good place to meet people and let them know I’m available.”
“That’s wonderful, Richard. It’s important that we be seen as a family that works hard, not just that preaches the Word. It’s a good example.” We all nodded our heads. “What about you, Kat? What did you discover today?”
“It’s little. I walked all the way to the school. It’s clear on the other side of town. Then I went to the store.”
“Which store?” I asked.
“The only one that’s open,” she said, rolling her eyes. “It’s funny. It has some work clothes and groceries. And odd stuff. Like a shelf full of sewing stuff and one of school supplies.”
“A real General Store, huh?”
“Yes,” Mom said, “but as I found out when I went shopping this morning, its depth of supply is limited. For example, you can get a can of soup there, as long as you want Campbell’s Chicken Noodle, Tomato, or Cream of Mushroom. Any other kind, you have to go to Huntertown. For cereal, you have a choice of Corn Flakes, Cheerios, or Wheat Chex. Or oatmeal.”
“There’s a funny old man next door who has a soda fountain,” Kat continued as if no one had interrupted her story of the day. “He doesn’t have Coke. He said he had soda and flavored it however he wanted. I had a lemon soda and it was really good.”
“How’d you get money for a soda?” I asked. I had a few dollars, but I was going to need work before I could even buy more film.
“Oh, I happened to run into Kat when I finished my shopping and we went in for a soda. I had a vanilla cream soda. It was perfect. And they were only twenty cents each,” Mom said. “I guess he only opens when he feels like it, but he’s usually there on Friday and Saturday evenings and more during the summer. He says it’s a popular place for kids to come on date night.”
“Everybody seems to be really friendly,” Dad said. “I’m sure we’ll meet more people on Sunday at church.”
“Well, don’t expect too many miracles all at once,” Mom said. “It’s summer and attendance always falls off once school is out. I’ll need to spend tomorrow working on my sermon notes. I scarcely got my office set up today. I still have all my books to unpack. Now, Nate, did you do anything besides work on that old bicycle?”
“Not much. But it’s actually going to be pretty cool when we get it finished. The tires are in pretty good shape and Dad brought home paint for it. I should be able to put it back together tomorrow,” I said. “Oh, but I discovered something. There’s a basement… sort of.”
“I knew there was a storm cellar, but I hadn’t been down there,” Dad said.
“Yeah, I don’t even know where that trapdoor leads. I mean a basement right through the door over there in the kitchen. It has a little room with an old wringer washing machine in it. And then there’s an unfinished space with shelves full of canned goods.”
“You mean like soup?” Kat asked.
“No. I mean like green beans and pickled beets. Canned in jars. It looks like it’s nine or ten years old.”
“Oh, dear. Stores put away and forgotten about. I might need one or two of the church women to come over and help sort it out.”
“Stuff will last forever if it’s canned right,” Dad added.
Dad and I got the bike painted after dinner. The only bit of silver left on it was the handlebars, cranks, and spokes and rims. The rest of it was shiny gloss black. It was going to look pretty cool. I hoped it rode okay.
I got to bed around ten and dug around in my dresser for my watch and my bottle of hand lotion. The watch was so I knew what time it was when I woke up in the morning. I didn’t want to go downstairs while Mom and Dad were having devotions again. The lotion was for… I guess what every sixteen-year-old boy uses lotion for. I got a hard-on while I was brushing my teeth, just from my cock bumping against the sink in my sweats.
I settled in and thought about Theresa Newman in my class. Well, former class. I guessed I’d probably never see her again. She was cute. My fantasy girl. I think she knew it, too. I suppose she was lots of guys’ fantasy girl. We hardly ever said anything to each other, but she sometimes smiled at me. She liked to dance with Nancy and me at school dances. I looked over at her one day in English class and saw her rubbing at her breast while she read. They weren’t very big, but I imagined what it would be like to rub her breast and was lost in thought—with a painful erection—when she looked up and saw me staring at her. She kind of froze and glanced around. I was afraid she was going to scream or something. Instead, she just kept lightly rubbing at her breast, but her motions got smaller. Like at first, I thought she must be rubbing at where her bra cut across her chest. Then she started just rubbing circles around the tip of her breast and she shifted her position slightly. She moved her hand away and I could see the stiff point of her nipple pushing out against the fabric of her blouse. I looked up at her face, but she’d gone back to reading and was ignoring me completely.
In my room, I relived that event and rubbed my cock with the lotion. The explosion was epic. Wow! If I could just touch Theresa’s breasts and feel that little nipple poking out so strong. The very thought brought yet another pulse of come from my cock.
I grabbed one of my socks and mopped up the mess all over my chest and stomach. Damn, that was good! I drifted off to sleep with my dreams filled with Theresa’s breasts. Too bad I’d probably never see her again.
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