Day Twenty-Six: Digging in the Dirt

SPECIAL DELIVERY

As a child, I was not allowed
to dig in the dirt of our back yard
and so I took to the streets with Ricky and Joey,
the two boys who lived down the block from me.
All three of us possessed a passion for excavation.
Through parental suppression
this had mutated into a sordid desire
to discover what lay beneath the sewer lids
in the alleyway sidewalks
next to the brick apartment buildings
that stiffly lined Roscoe Street
like huge,dirty cereal boxes.
We pried the metal lids open
with butter knives, and watched the sewage
rush underneath us like a thick brown river.
On top of the sewage were glossy fat bugs
that seemed vaguely cockroach-like,
only larger,
and we scooped these up in plastic cups--
freeing them temporarily
from the bondage of the sewer,
reveling in our roles as insect liberators--
at least until Joey stomped on them.
Strange liquid squirted from the heads
of the demolished beetles,
and Joey's favorite trick was to carefully
scoop up the bodies, place them in envelopes
and insert the envelopes into the mailbox
of a particularly vile old woman who lived
in the bottom floor apartment of their building.
She had dirty shades
drawn permanently across her windows,
and we assumed she couldn't see us,
but one afternoon, she stuck her head out of her door
and threatened to tell our parents.
We were terrified for days,
but she never snitched on us,
probably because
this would have required her to actually
leave her apartment.
I eventually moved out of the neighborhood,
and I wonder sometimes what happened to Joey
whether he ever found an outlet for his anger--
or if he's still squashing things
and then running away furtively
while looking over his shoulder,
making sure that no one is following him.