The Hill
Friday, November 21st, 2008
Behind the house rows and fence lines, the boys sit in tree shadows felled by the moonlight. One takes a matchbook from his coat pocket and turns his back to block the wind as he lowers the small flame to some lose sticks the other has collected. Cloud breath lifts around them in a miniature fog while the brush is lit. Pushed into the close pile are rocks and burned coal once imbedded in the dirt but now a loosened base for the fire.
Freight trains rolled through these hillsides years ago atop the slope the boys climbed as even younger boys, where they’d occasionally pull rusted rail spikes from the ground and once thought the coal that’d been buried here when the rail line was aborted as natural, valuable, and could be exchanged for big bank accounts they could sit on the rest of their lives, dipping into only to buy a favorite toy or something for their mothers.
The coal was worthless, though, as coldly pointed out by an older boy from a foreign land, a boy with no imagination who lived a half-block away, rode buses to a different school and was three grades removed from the small band that ran the steep grades and the narrow paths on this hill. They felt something like power in this world unto themselves – in the privacy gotten in a place their parents would never venture. They could look down on the house tops or listen quietly to the adults’ conversations while lying flat on their bellies in the wild grass, the same color as their hair, or move up and down the block without being seen or interrogated or simply greeted by adults. They could play games and war here free from interruption, and they did so as if the games were films being directed and they were the stars acting in them, yelling cut, starting over again when the plot went askew by announcing “Rrrrriiiiight NOW!” This was the cue that the action was now being filmed and the dialogue somehow began to mean something to the fictitious audience.
The hill where they kneel and light a small fire in the December night, now as much older boys, is still a refuge. Their eyes have changed and so have their hearts. They know they can be intruded upon at any time in this vast world where anything can happen and often does. Any superiority they once felt is gone, now replaced with the man’s invincibility. Privacy is not so special anymore. Privacy can be found in basements, under bridges, abandoned houses, open fields, homes where parents are on vacation or simply care less than to discipline children. And, the hillsdie scenery has lost its mysticism. Layered with rotten trees, debris piles dug into by mice building winter homes, potholes dug up for other fires burned last summer, overturned dead logs that still functioned as outdoor furniture but had been worn by the elements and termites down to dust. They sat on the log in the same order yet overcome with new concepts – pornographic magazines pilfered from one of their father’s closets or discussions about untouchable girls from places much grander than their block (or girls from rougher places grand for what they did.)
Still functioning – though imperceptibly – as a club house with dirtier games, the stakes raised, the competition more severe and the rules changed. They were older but afraid as they warmed their hands over a fire a few inches tall. Their houses were warmer, but they were on their own, the masters of the hillside, burning a fire that paled to the one inside each of them.
