Now its name sounds to me like a leather bar, under an elevated train, in some narrow strip of Gomorrah. Here rebellious sons and strict daddies dare to break the city's smoking ordinance, in a designated section, determined by the management, unprotected by the yawning red-and-white-striped awning, still dripping from the rain. (Cigars are permitted on Thursdays). Rather, Martin's Meat Market was a butcher shop, one block from the school and three blocks from the edge of town where a hill named for a condiment--Hill 57--rose out of the plains like a dust storm or a mirage.
It was our ritual, Danny and mine. When school got out at 3:10 (the hour and minute that I was born, in summer which I suppose negates the significance), we would walk to Martin's to buy Garbage Pail Kids or Swedish Fish. Or maybe our hunger would demand a Ho Ho or a Ding Dong, the chocolate already beginning to sweat in the clear plastic wrapper. Pausing to look at the headless cadavers, to watch the saw separating bone from bone, we would giggle at some joke that, had we been asked, we would not have been able to translate out of the language of twelve year old boys. Then with our booty, a brown paper bag packed with that day's delights, we would head behind the gas station.
Martin, the real name of a real man who's bloody apron clung to real muscle, had purchased the shell of a Chevron and converted into the meat market, a modest answer to a modest dream. Marty, as his wife called him, was a stoic man. He was a mystery. He said nothing to us, ever. He grunted at his wife, animal to animal, and she was able to transmute his wordless mood into an at times hostile impatience with the indecisiveness of sixth graders.
But convenience controlled us. The still unpainted gas station stood at the crossroads where Danny and I separated. There, he headed up the hill to his parents modernist palace (his father was a doctor, I think, who had purchased a view) and I headed around the bend to a place at the base of Hill 57. The white cracker box had been, before the second world war, a country school. Once this school turned house had been crowded with my sisters, loud with fights and laughter, saturated with hairspray. But I was a straggler, meandering, even before Danny I would find the long way home.
On the way, Martin's was the perfect weigh station Behind it, beyond the rusting remains of some nameless mechanic's forgotten hobby, six ponderosa pines towered in the northwest corner of an uneven, weedy unfenced field. These trees were history, two rows aligned with three to a side with branches straining (to touch) and tangling into a ladder that easily lifted us agile apes up to our usual perches thirty feet, forty feet in the air. The wind ran its hand over the land, playing an instrument, pulling a tune out of these giants as the branches danced with us, laughing, in their arms. For the duration of our sugar-dipped afternoon snack (and sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes after) Danny and I would chat. Up above the world so high, I had his undivided attention.
It was our ritual, Danny and mine. When school got out at 3:10 (the hour and minute that I was born, in summer which I suppose negates the significance), we would walk to Martin's to buy Garbage Pail Kids or Swedish Fish. Or maybe our hunger would demand a Ho Ho or a Ding Dong, the chocolate already beginning to sweat in the clear plastic wrapper. Pausing to look at the headless cadavers, to watch the saw separating bone from bone, we would giggle at some joke that, had we been asked, we would not have been able to translate out of the language of twelve year old boys. Then with our booty, a brown paper bag packed with that day's delights, we would head behind the gas station.
Martin, the real name of a real man who's bloody apron clung to real muscle, had purchased the shell of a Chevron and converted into the meat market, a modest answer to a modest dream. Marty, as his wife called him, was a stoic man. He was a mystery. He said nothing to us, ever. He grunted at his wife, animal to animal, and she was able to transmute his wordless mood into an at times hostile impatience with the indecisiveness of sixth graders.
But convenience controlled us. The still unpainted gas station stood at the crossroads where Danny and I separated. There, he headed up the hill to his parents modernist palace (his father was a doctor, I think, who had purchased a view) and I headed around the bend to a place at the base of Hill 57. The white cracker box had been, before the second world war, a country school. Once this school turned house had been crowded with my sisters, loud with fights and laughter, saturated with hairspray. But I was a straggler, meandering, even before Danny I would find the long way home.
On the way, Martin's was the perfect weigh station Behind it, beyond the rusting remains of some nameless mechanic's forgotten hobby, six ponderosa pines towered in the northwest corner of an uneven, weedy unfenced field. These trees were history, two rows aligned with three to a side with branches straining (to touch) and tangling into a ladder that easily lifted us agile apes up to our usual perches thirty feet, forty feet in the air. The wind ran its hand over the land, playing an instrument, pulling a tune out of these giants as the branches danced with us, laughing, in their arms. For the duration of our sugar-dipped afternoon snack (and sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes after) Danny and I would chat. Up above the world so high, I had his undivided attention.
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