River Beads

Two boys, about 1955

 

 (Note: The grammar in this story is adjusted to the age of the participants)

  

  RIDING double, in the middle of summer, only one of us had a bike. An old Schwinn, my aunt had given me.... fat tires, one wheel drive. A "girls" bike with low handle bars , the frame bending down to the chain, so when a girl got on, she wouldn't have to lift her leg, and show her panties.

  JIM and me , both ten, was the kind of buds we heard our fathers speak of. Friends they fought the Natzees with. What a Natzee was, we didn't know. It sounded like some kind of a bug, maybe a giant 'skeeter. I heard my uncle say
one time he shot one out of the sky with a cannon..Sheesh! we were sure glad that there weren't any Natzees hanging around our swimming hole.
    
   WE swam everyday, in summer, and every time, before we went, one of us would steal a Lucky Strike or Camel from one of our parents. We took turns, at getting pinched doing that, in order to share the possibility of getting caught. We shared everything in those days. But the paths we turned down, are no more, as well as the puddles, August showers left,..all was temporary....  We didn't know that the wakes of drug sneakers, and that special chill a kid feels after a thunderstorm, is like puddle water, left behind, that sought the level of its previous existence, like
we would do when we got older.
 
   WE didn't know what bashful was, without shame, jeans fell off, even though we knew some girls might come by ( As they swam there to.)
 One time we saw a group of them, peeking through the jewel weed-pointing , we wondered what that was about,and we wondered why they were giggling? Funny thing is, that they didn't come out from hiding, maybe they knew something we didn't. Crimenees!, we were always smarter than them, and still were, if you'd of asked me.

 

 We didn't pay them much mind, we just pulled up on a rock, and lit the nail.

  The lacy shade of a walnut made a kind of dappled camouflage on our backs...
The river beads, slowly drying, on our sun-browned bodies.

 

  I remember calling to the girls, but they wouldn't come out, they just ran away. Scared them, I guess, or maybe their moms warned them about something we had, that they didn't want them to see.?

 

  We weren't ready for their company yet anyway, we were happy being boys, and not yet , men. We thought, good riddance. We had seen how girls clung to our older brothers, hung on them like the leaches, we pulled off our ankles. With wise guy sarcasm, we shouted."We don't need you".... something that would surely change.

 

 

 

Author's Note

Set in summer, ages ago, but it could happen today, and the result would probably be about the same...
My first story posted here, actually, my very first story that I ever wrote. I have been enjoying the other posted stories, thought I'd try one, hope you like it.

Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

Some might say that the past is always much sweeter than the present, and I know we do tend to think that way. In this case, I can't help but think that it's actually true. What do today's youngsters know about riding double on a fat-tired Schwinn or peeking at the opposite sex through bushes? You express some wonderful memories of that simpler time, and I find it magnificent.

[Judy Ponceby]

Wonderful. Love stories about boys being just boys. :) Well written and great imagery :)

[Poeticadia]

Beautifully written and well-paced. You have a very natural writing style that captures the innocence and close friendship of the boys perfectly. Great ending - and it completes the 'hint' given in the first paragraph that leads the reader into the story. Very well constructed. One point I hope you don't mind me making, is that it might be worth using a spell-checker (if that's what they are called in the US) to pick up words like 'sarcasim' -> 'sarcasm' and 'somethig' -> something as well as different spellings of the same word i.e. 'wern't' and 'weren't'. But otherwise, I think the story is excellent.