“What would I want with a plastic —,” he started to say. He may have finished the question or he may not have. Strings of liquid lightning blew out from his hand and engulfed the world.
His name is Leo. He is eight years old. It is raining in the sunshine and a new family is moving into the house across the street. A little boy his age jumps out of the back of an old timey pick up truck. He is black and Leo knows they probably won’t get to be friends.
But they do get to be friends. They get to be best friends. The other boy is Martin. He is a year older than Leo. Their friendship is a secret. Not a soul knows or will ever know of the friendship they share. Martin says to Leo as they sit backs against a stone wall behind the old baptist church that if the people around here found out about them they would both hang from a tree. Probably not the same tree though, Leo says and Martin stares back at him with an incredulous frown wrinkling down his forehead. Come to think of it, Leo continues, how do they pick hangin’ trees? I mean; I ain’t never seen a tree labeled Colored and never seen one says Whites neither. Maybe same tree, says Martin, but different sides. They laugh the scariness off. The world does not.
They don’t talk anymore about what they can’t do together. Everything they can do together they do. One day Martin shows up with a bruised face and a swollen eye. I’d say you have a black eye, Leo says, but that’d be redundant.
That day is the day Leo gives Martin his prized Pez dispenser. It is a plastic blue robot full of Pez candy. Martin takes it and cries. Leo says it will bring him luck. It does for a while. Martin keeps the Pez dispenser under his mattress. Leo brings him peppermint Pez to keep it full.
For Christmas that year Martin gives Leo a wooden ukulele he made at his fathers wood shop. Leo says that it’s too big and he won’t be able to hide it and together they can’t figure out a way Leo would be able to keep it without someone figuring out where he got it from. They dig a hole by the old stone wall. Martin makes a box for the ukulele and they hide it in the hole. By the next summer Leo has learned how to play three songs from the radio and is working on a song for Martin.
That summer passes quickly. They spend all their time in the woods making up songs and eating Pez candies from the blue robot. Martin decided that their gifts to one another should live in the same hidey hole. Every night, before they return to their houses, the ukulele and the robot go into the same hole. Leo jokes that they are going to need a bigger hole in fifty years. Martin laughs and says they should just move away together. Both of them know there is nowhere in the world for their kind of friendship.
One night Leo’s father takes him on a camping trip with a group of other boys and their fathers. They are gone for an entire week. He is no good in the woods with these other boys. They are all tougher than him. He knows the boys don’t really like him. They are all nice to him because the fathers are around. He knows if they were not there they’d be using pieces of him for fish bait.
On the morning they leave all the fathers are gathered round Leo’s father. They all pat him on the back and shake his hand erstwhile stealing embarrassed glances at Leo. A couple of the fathers even give his father a hug. Leo is sure something is very wrong. He’s never seen his father hug another man. Not even his own brother. On the way home he falls asleep. He wakes up three hundred miles later. His father tells him they had to move and they wanted it to be a surprise! Only three hundred more miles to go and they’d be wearing cowboy hats and eating barbecue.
Martin figured it out way before Leo did. The day Leo left to go camping the movers were loading up all the furniture from his house. When he turns thirteen he digs up the box and takes the robot Pez dispenser and the ukulele to the woods. He throws them both off a high cliff and walks away. He made a vow that he would never think of Leo again. The next day he comes back and hikes down below the cliff looking for the things he threw away. They are not there. He searches until dark but finds nothing.
Every year he returns to the old stone wall, digs up the box meant for their gifts and puts a poem in it. He hopes one day that Leo will come back. Martin will make him a nicer ukulele and Leo will put all Martin’s poems to music. After the hole he returns to the cliff where he threw the gifts into the void. He hikes down year after year looking for the presents they gave each one another. Year after year he finds nothing.
The crow came down at him like a dagger falling through the sky! Instinctively he dropped over the side of Avalanche gripping the reigns. The crow sliced through the air ,its claws missing the top of his head by hairs! Sir Tickle swung himself back up, unholstering his slingshot and drawing a smooth stone from his pouch! He cradled the stone in the sling while he searched the sky!
