Danger Boys

Dad’s rusty-red Ford station wagon—a family car, big and beefy—has a CB radio that looks like a telephone. His car is wired up to a switchboard at his office and a woman named Linda who connects him to the world if he wants. I tell the kids at school he has a car-phone. This is the seventies. Dad wears shirts with big collars, Highway Patrol sunglasses, and sideburns. He is huge to me in many ways—gigantic in both size and presence. He fills up spaces. In the car we eat from crisp plastic bags of fried pork skins and drink pony-bottles of Miller. We sing along to “Elvira” by the Oak Ridge Boys. Matt, the younger one, sits up front with Dad. I ride in the wide backseat—the orange vinyl rolled and glazed like a bread loaf—and I can’t yet imagine that there is anything dangerous about two boys drinking beer with their father, listening to country music, and shooting guns on the weekends.

We ride the bus to elementary school like the other kids in the neighborhood. I guess I’m supposed to watch out for Matt. He’s just a first grader, a year younger than I; but he doesn’t seem like he needs much watching. So I bounce through the front door like any other day, wearing my blue Bruce Jenner shoes (the ones that come with a replica gold medal), and carrying my NFL lunch box. Mom asks me where is Matt. I just look around the room and shrug my shoulders. Was he on the bus with you? Yes. Well, where is he now? I don’t know. Panic sets in. I can see it in her agitated hand movements. Did he get off at another stop? I don’t know. Are you sure he was on the bus? I think so. Frantic phone calls are made to friends of parents, teachers, the principal, and the bus company. I’m not really worried; but Mom holds the phone in her lap and bites her lip while they search. Mom has a lot of fear. Slowly, she’s teaching me to own mine. It’s not a bad thing, really—just the development of an active imagination.

The phone rings. Nobody has seen Matt. They’re pretty sure he boarded the bus after school. When the driver is located again, she has already dropped all the kids off and parked her bus in the lot. Are you sure he’s not on the bus? Yes, but she will check again. We wait, my mother and I at home, my father at work. They find Matt sleeping beneath one of the green vinyl seats in the back of the bus. It is well after dark when my dad picks him up at the bus barn. When he arrives Matt is not sitting in an office whimpering into his fist. He does not run screaming into Dad’s arms. He is playing cards with some of the drivers and mechanics, four or five of them sitting around a table in the garage. He doesn’t want to leave. He’s just made some friends.

Interstate-40 between Empire and Winter Park, Colorado is made for danger. A ribbon of asphalt clings to mountainsides and drops sheer cliffs down to rocky slopes. Every year, my family makes the trip up from Kansas. To us, sweltering in the flat humid days of summer, Colorado seems a promised-land of elevation and air. The drive up Berthoud Pass puts us out on the edge fast. There is no shoulder to speak of, nothing but space and gravity. Dad likes to nudge the right front tire just a hair off the pavement, just to frighten us. Even though I know it is coming, my heart still shudders when I hear the sound of gravel spitting up under the Ford and watch the car point off the edge, over the line, for just a split second. Dad smiles and chuckles at the white-knuckled grips Mom and I clamp down on door handles. Matt...