At four years old I lived in a rural area that had just been
bought up by developers. There was a big
pit next to my apartment complex where a large building was already under construction. My neighborhood was set to be leveled within the
following year.
In the meantime, me and my friends killed time by chasing
jackrabbits in the fields and riding around the empty streets in stolen grocery baskets.
“I wanna show you something.
Don’t tell anyone,” a friend told me one day.
We used to love playing in the dirt hills and construction sites around
our shrinking neighborhood. I followed
her down to the large pit. It was just dirt down there. Large light
fixtures hung from the side of the building.
“Look, I swing on these,” my friend said and demonstrated. “Try it.”
At my house we used to swing on the doors too, pushing them
open and closed while one person held onto the knob and tried not to fall off. We were poor, okay. No swing-sets. I was the only one with a pool, one of those
plastic things you get at K-mart with a built in slide. I used to push my dog down it. Anyway...
I climbed onto the light fixture, swung a few times,
laughed, watched my friend swing on the other one. Then, CLANK!
I accidentally ripped the whole thing out of the wall. Wires were hanging out. I tried to put it back. No luck.
We just looked at each other and decided to bail. But a few seconds later, we heard sirens.
"Crap.” All I
could think of was how the cops were gonna get us and make my mom pay for the
damage I’d done. Then, I thought, No. We’re
down in this pit, there’s no way that
anyone even saw us down here. We began scampering back home when I looked up
and saw that two police cars had just arrived in our complex parking lot. I couldn’t believe how fast they’d gotten
there. My friend looked really scared
and kept running, but then something got my attention.
There was a man hanging from a chain link fence that
separated the parking lot from the edge of the pit. But he wasn’t just any man. He was the here-today gone-tomorrow father of
a kid in my neighborhood. I saw the son and
his mother looking down while cops circled the area. Apparently, his father had been on the run
and tried to escape over the fence, but his shirt got caught, so he was just
dangling there.
Awkward.
I just took my ass on home, probably invited my friend over
for dinner or something and just forgot about the whole thing. The kid with the escape-artist father was
sort of a friend of ours. We played together,
but nobody ever asked about his dad. The
event was pretty commonplace in a town like ours.
