Whatever specific acts of meanness were supposed to have earned him his reputation were shrouded in mystery; the meanness was a specific threat in itself, an energy that might land on you if you failed to take precautions. Don’t trick-or-treat at his house. Don’t dip your bike in and out of his driveway like you might with any other wide driveway on the street. Don’t try to read the bumper stickers on his car. I was a bookworm; telling me not to read something guaranteed that I’d read it: GET U.S. OUT OF U.N.! the sticker said. Gibberish; a profound mystery.
I was afraid of him. Everything about his address throbbed with menace. Every time Gage would reveal, or invent, some new detail—he yelled at me for stepping on his newspaper, it was right there in the middle of the sidewalk; a baseball rolled into his yard and he came out through his door in a robe, picked up the ball, and went right back inside with it—the tension between the Mean Man’s aura and the mundane nature of his malevolence would rise. Fear, at the right reach, is delicious. Once, through the front windows, I saw someone inside, possibly in a reclining chair, watching television. I averted my eyes and quickened my pace. I had this idea that Mean Men hate nothing more than finding that someone is staring at them.
Gage and I were fast friends, sometimes almost inseparable, and I luxuriated in his visions of shadowy threats never farther off than our voices could carry. If you let Gage set the terms of engagement, you could ride currents of myth all day, and dream terrifying dreams when you fell asleep. It was a fun way to be a kid on a sleepy street.
My parents divorced when I was five, and my mom remarried and we moved away, south of San Francisco; and that, until recently, was the end of those times for me.
2.
OUR HOUSE IN MILPITAS was a duplex. One of its rooms had an electric fireplace, with a plastic log that glowed orange when you flipped a wall switch. Inside the log was some rotating element to give the illusion of the movement of flame, but the entire apparatus was for mood: it didn’t generate any actual heat. On the day we moved in, I was thrilled by its novelty; I remember my mother and stepfather exchanging glances of pity over my excitement at this chintzy feature of the best place they’d been able to afford.
Gage’s letters arrived about once a month for the first year of my two-year tenure in Milpitas. It is a strange feature of the partial amnesia that blots out stray spans of time in my memory that I remember nothing about my sixth birthday except a card from Gage. I’d made new friends in town; there must have been a party, my mother was a natural at kids’ parties. But the whole day, in my memory now, exists only for the remembering of Gage’s reports from home.
He always talked about a time when we’d meet again, when we’d be able to compare notes on our lives: which TV shows were cool （the Planet of the Apes weekly series） and which weren’t, no matter who said otherwise （Emergency!）; what candies were keepers （Fun Dip, also known as Lik-M-Aid; Wacky Wafers） and which ones you traded for the keepers because some people had bad taste （Jolly Ranchers, excepting, occasionally, the cinnamon and watermelon flavors）。 I would write back, hoping my life seemed more exotic than it was.
I lacked Gage’s gift for the through line, but I scored a few points here and there. The monster movie being filmed in town, about a creature who ate all the garbage cans （The Milpitas Monster）; the 45 rpm record of its theme song that I played on my small stand-alone record player. My orders from the Scholastic Book Club, always aspiring a grade or two above my actual comprehension. The small black-and-white TV that my mother and stepfather allowed me to keep in my bedroom after they bought a color TV for the living room.
The TV was a big deal. I considered myself a book person, but every kid in the seventies knew all the action was on TV. I wrote Gage about the obscure pleasures of staying up late with the sound down low, discovering movies like The Crawling Eye and Twisted Brain; he told me about Ellery Queen Mysteries and Night Gallery. After a year, a month between letters became six weeks, and then eight. We kept our connection alive, but childhood is a busy place, and my new town had stories of its own to tell.
* * *
I MET DARLA when she was even newer to the block than me; she lived in the duplex opposite mine. Her father was in the military, or had been; I have only the vaguest visual memory of him, standing in front of their unit on a sunny day, his hair neatly cropped. Most of the grown-up men in my orbit looked like professors or hippies. For me, Darla’s dad stood out.
We walked to and from school together sometimes. She loved to tell stories, tall tales in which everybody or almost everybody died. I remember most vividly one in which a curse, or possibly a ghost, ended up causing a woman’s leg to swell to twenty or thirty times its natural size—a woman who’d heard one day of the curse, or the ghost, and said aloud to all who cared to hear that she didn’t believe in it.