"No shit."

His glasses were cocked on his face, and thin shadows from the willow branches fingered across his forehead. Flies buzzed his nose and gray mustache and gray lips.

Soda Springs had (and has) a handful of people you might call town drunkards and Willie Carter was one of them. He was tall, had silverish-brown hair, and always looked gaunt. His face hung in grisaille shades of gray like it had been lifted from a fresco. He wore metal-rimmed glasses with brown lenses. He donned suit trousers, a button up shirt, and red suspenders crisscrossed at the back.

"Watch this shit," B.J. said. He bent down, snatched up a chunk of red cinder, and buried it deep in the sling-shot's leather thong. He stretched back the Wrist-Rocket's cords with his elbow fully cocked, and let it fly: Whap! We heard the chunk of cinder smack Willie in the ribs. "Holy shit!," I said, grinning.

Willie let out a moan and rolled over, seemingly unfazed. We took off on our bikes laughing so hard we could barely pedal.

It wasn't long before it turned into a game, a way to pass our afternoons. "Let's go fuck with Willie," we'd say. The highest point on Geyser Hill is an old spring that died out, and looks like a six-inch deep volcanic crater with the diameter of a manhole cover. It is covered with patches of black lichen and tiny springs bubble around its perimeter. Dubbed “Eagle's Nest,” this favored lookout spot rises some thirty feet directly above Geyser Park. From there, we could see almost everything -- the back of the Enders building, the railroad tracks that cut through town, the phosphate mine to the north, a sea of rooftops, stands of cottonwoods and box-elders, and of course, Geyser Park and its resident, Willie, who had made it a habit of passing out on the grass.

One day we socked a hundred or more bottle-rockets, a lighter, and a long-neck Coors bottle into a duffle bag and scurried from our clubhouse up to Eagle's Nest where we had a good aim at Willie. At thirty feet, he was an easy target. One after another we fired the rockets at Willie and watched them explode into a fit of smoke and shredded paper. We took turns shooting. Time and again, we nailed him. One in the crotch, and one in the ribs. One in the arm pit. One in the neck. Several to the legs. A gut-shot. Each one seemed better than the last, each one exploding into confetti. Willie flailed drunkenly and kicked in the bright green grass under that summer sun. He shrieked and cursed and spat. We had never laughed so hard in all our lives. Our arsenal spent, we simply wiped a few tears from our eyes and said, "Now what?"

One day bled into another as that summer burned on. We shot water-snakes with our pellet pistols, and dragged their tangled mass in gunny sacks a quarter-mile from the spongy banks of Soda Creek back to the clubhouse where we lopped off their heads. With our pocket knives, we split open their white bellies, scooped out their entrails, and pitched them into the Junegrass where they drew a blue veil of summer flies. We tacked the snake skins to warped wooden planks with rocks and crooked nails, and set them on the roof of the clubhouse to dry under the baking sun. We wanted to make snakeskin belts or boots and sell them at the next swap meet, but in a matter of days, the skins brittled and blew away into a hot wind. On alternate days, we squatted in the dank recess of our clubhouse, where we smoked Lucky Strikes, looked at Playboys, talked about junior high girls, or listened to Rock 103 on my battery-powered radio.

That was the summer, too, when we began dumpster diving behind the bars. Counting ours there were three bars on our side of the block. And their trash cans contained the detritus of the secret adult world, clues that hinted at forbidden rites. You can learn a lot about adults by observing what they keep, but you can truly know them for what they discard. We fished out any number of telling remnants—toothpicks that looked like swords, lipstick tubes, cigarette lighters, busted pool sticks, playing cards boasting naked ladies, and on and on. But what we sought most of all was liquor. The bottles the bartenders tossed weren't completely empty. In fact, we learned that if we collected enough of like-bottles and accumulated their residual contents, we would, over time, have enough to get drunk on. We gathered Jose Cuervo bottles, Popov Vodka, Jack Daniels, Southern Comfort, Crown Royal, and Black Velvet. Over the course of that summer we had several ounces in each. On weekends, we mixed the booze in our Pepsis that I lifted from the café, got tipsy, smoked some cigarettes, and veered our bikes into the night looking for something to happen under that sky, so moon-slung and wild with stars.

Like so many men before him, Vic asked my grandfather, a recovering alcoholic who established an AA chapter in Soda Springs, to help him stop drinking. One alcoholic to another. "You've got to want to, Vic," Grandpa had said. "That's the only way I know of."

It was a common thing, the swaying figure rattling our door at two in the morning, begging for help, that sour stench of men, of piss and booze, spilling into our apartment. The darkness suddenly rich with the scent of brewing coffee. Cigarette smoke. Lulled conversations. Sometimes weeping. Once it's Vic. Once it's my mother. Once it's B.J.'s dad: he was wrecked, he had said. Needed thousands of dollars to save his home. Grandpa gave him the thousands. Never got it back, never expected to. That was another unspoken world. Something I knew but never told B.J. Something he might have suspected but never said aloud. Still, my grandfather took these men in, talked to them, and drove some of them, the earnest ones, fifty miles to Pocatello in the frail light of morning where he would check them into treatment. He took with him on those drives a pot of coffee and two things he kept in our kitchen cupboard but never used: a pack of Camel studs and a pint of Everclear.

"Sometimes they need it. To get them there," he told me once. I remember putting that dusty pint to my lips one day and jerking when the ravenous liquor touched my tongue. Some of it splashed in my eye. It burned my skin and I never touched it again, preferring instead the stuff we pulled from the dumpsters and diluted with cola. I knew somehow that when a man like Vic put that pint to his lips, he wouldn't jerk like I had. I admired that and feared it too.

One day during that summer, I crossed paths—literally—with Vic. I was in the lobby on my way into the café, and he was on his way into the bar. A powdery blue, short-sleeved, button-down shirt  hung loose over his dark jeans. He fixed his eyes on me in an unflinching squint. I noted his nose, large and red, and how crow's feet raked out from his temples. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He eyed me up and down, and then chuckled. He reached out, palmed my head with his large hand, and mussed my stringy straw-colored hair. "Where's granddad?" he asked. I was eleven years old and terrified of Vic because of his size and presence, and because of what I knew.

"I dunno," I said.

"You keeping your nose clean?" he asked and inhaled a drag.

"Yeah."

He nodded and his right eye clamped shut against the smoke while he forced his massive hand into his jeans pocket. He pulled out a green, rubbery coin purse and squeezed it open. He jabbed at its contents with his index finger, snatched out a fifty-cent piece, and flipped it to me. But I was too slow, fumbled, and dropped it. I crouched, grabbed the coin, and looked up at Vic who was jamming his purse back into his pocket. "Don't spend it one place, huh?"

I nodded and said, "Thanks."

I do not know why Vic gave me that fifty-cent piece. But I felt both vaguely satisfied and alarmed. Satisfied that he had drawn me into his confidence and had given me something. Alarmed that he noticed me at all, that he touched me, that I had locked eyes with him, and that there was now something between us.

Later in the summer, B.J., his older brother, David, Sherrod (a mutual friend), and I were kicking through Geyser Park en route to the clubhouse when, on a whim, Sherrod shimmied up the trunk of a weeping willow. We paid little attention until he jumped out of the tree and yelled, "Jesus, you guys! Check it out!" Sherrod held two brown paper sacks, each containing a pint of vodka. I knew what it was. It was Willie's stash. Finding that Vodka was like finding a suitcase filled with hundred dollar bills. It was beyond our paltry collection of dumpster booze--so random and unexpected. It was a gift.

That afternoon all of us rode our bikes east of town to Ledge Creek. We stripped down to our white underwear, found a deep, cool spot in the creek, and jumped in. We thrashed around in the water, then got out, and mixed the vodka in paper cups with cola. We held guzzling contests and diving contests. Guzzle a cup, dive into the creek. Get out and repeat. I remember cannon-balling off of a culvert pipe that emptied into the stream. I plunged into the deep part of the pool where the water's surface looked as black as obsidian. It felt good with the water over my head. I could see the flickering, foreshortened images of B.J., David, and Sherrod standing on the edge of the rusted culvert pipe. I could hear them talking. But their words were muted and garbled like dialogue in a dream. I let myself sink to the bottom. Bright green scarves of moss wavered in the glimmering pool and I could feel their tendrils licking my sharp, white ankle bones. Everything was cool and quiet and clear and clean. Then B.J. jumped in. I dug my foot into the pebbly bottom and shot to the surface, gasping.

"Dip shit!" B.J. said. "Are you trying to drown yourself?" He slapped his hand on the water splashing me in the face. We both laughed and got out, scrambling up the muddy bank, and continued to drink. All of us drank until we were running naked through the dark reedgrass, stirring up indigo dragonflies and yellow-headed blackbirds. Sunburned and covered with mud and scrapes and cuts from bulrush, thistle, and rocks, we finished or mostly finished the two pints. And there in the middle of rural Idaho we stood naked in a circle, sick on Willie's vodka, with stupid, slackened smiles dangling from our faces like field sickles; and there, on the weed-choked edge of the world, we pissed on each other, dousing ourselves in hot streams of urine under a full, yellow sun.

I did not think about Willie Carter again until I saw his bloody body in Geyser Park one morning on my way to school. Fall had come and the morning was cool. Two police cars and an ambulance idled near the park. Their radios squawked. Willie had been knifed several times in the middle of the night. Farmers in the café would later say that he had been "rolled." I rode by slowly, watching the EMTs load Willie's bloodied, motionless body into the ambulance. To me everything was quiet but a morning wind that stung my eyes and wailed in my ears as I pedaled into it. It was so cold and clean I thought I could drink it, thought I might drown in it. Gray willow branches rattled and clicked above, and inside, I felt my stomach sink.

Some say it was Vic who rolled Willie, that it was the thick-chested ex-con who took a knife to the old man. It was Vic, the man who rented a room upstairs, the one who had a daughter out there somewhere. It was him. People knew it was Vic as surely as they knew what season it was. He rolled him, they said. He took a Buck-knife and sliced him up, they said. And for what? For money, booze, or spite? Because Vic himself was restless or callous, or worse, indifferent? Because Willie mouthed-off to him? Made a comment? Because he had bothered him?

Willie survived and Vic disappeared. Vanished. It is like he had taken his knife—still brown with Willie's blood—slit open the white sky, stepped through, and closed it behind him. Maybe he thumbed his way across rural highways to find his teen-aged daughter I had heard about. Or perhaps he found another crumbling hotel in another crumbling town, a place he could throw down a bedroll and ward off whatever it was that haunted him.

As autumn again turned into winter, and as temperatures dropped, I spent less time with B.J., and  more time in the Enders by myself. On some nights I read books or magazines or hung out in the café. I flipped through my baseball cards. I did what boys do. But occasionally, when caught unaware, I found myself panicked by the possibility that Willie might come in the café and order some coffee, that he might see me.

Willie was a weak and core-sick man, and I was a boy sick on the idea of manhood. It was all around me. But I could no more enter that world than I could steer my bike into the sky. No more than B.J's dad could save their house or Vic stop drinking. They are settled things. There are other settled things too, like how boys behave. What I did to Willie was cruel but also a kind of rite, a way to touch the world of men, and have it touch back.