Storm in Summer

        The next day was hot and muggy. In the west, storm clouds were gathering menacingly, but they hung back, waiting to gather enough mass to sweep down on Olney and wash the streets clean. The boys responded like living barometers, growing increasingly irritable as the air pressure steadily dipped. They’d completed the manic initial days of summer, when they struggled to do everything they could think of before summer disappeared and school started again. Now Steven found himself thinking about when school would start, but he wouldn’t say anything about that just yet. The weight of the soggy air and the sun burning pale, newly uncovered legs and arms added to their lethargy. 

       They’d started a touch football game on Second, but quit when arguments slowed the game to a crawl. Jimmy suggested stick ball, but no one even responded. They considered play Jailbreak, hiding in some shaded corner was appealing, but no one was willing to be the searchers or to run to tag the light pole and free anyone who’d been caught. No one felt like moving around at all, so they flopped onto the Harper’s porch, chased Jeannie inside, and absently occupied themselves.

       The boys drifted into separate worlds. Doug sat on the top step, stripping small, oval leaves from the hedge and deliberately ripping them into tiny pieces. The little, green mound forming between his feet was attracting the attention of scavenging ants. Two ants were exploring his Converse, but Doug was far away, lost in thoughts he never shared with anyone. His unfocused eyes seemed to be watching the coming storm, but they weren’t seeing anything.

      Tony sat deep in the shadows, leaning against the house and carefully picking at the loose threads of the cut-offs his mother had salvaged from from a pair of tattered jeans he’d outgrown. A fringe was forming on the shorts as he pulled more threads to increase the complexity of the knot. 

      Of all the boys, Jimmy was the one least able to occupy himself. He wanted to do things. He kept suggesting things to do, but he was slowly worn down by the grumbling, or even worse, by the silence of his friends. Fed up with the inactivity, he walked to the curb and began throwing pebbles at the light pole across the street, but he stopped when the old lady who lived in the house behind the pole yelled at him to stop throwing stones at her cats. He began to explain, but the weight of the day bore down on him and he turned, went back to the porch, and sat down, dejected and defeated.

      Steven flipped through Doug’s baseball cards, seeing if there was a possible trade to suggest. He didn’t have his cards, but he kept a copy of his checklist in his pocket, and Doug didn’t have any duplicates he needed. Steven lined a dozen cards against the wall at a varying angles. He began firing cards at them, trying to knock the leaning cards down. He was curious what angle could best deflect direct hits. The cards would catch the wind that blew in increasingly strong gusts and flit off at odd angles. Soon the porch was littered with Doug’s cards. Jimmy, pointing to the porch, nudged Doug, to direct his lost attention to the disarray of his cards. Maybe something might happen after all.

     “Hey,” Doug called to Steven, “What’re you doing with my cards?” He crawled onto the porch and began scrambling around on all fours gathering them up. 

     “I’m not hurting them,” said Steven, as he began collecting the cards near him. “I was just playing tops.”

     “You can’t play tops with someone else’s cards,” answered an agitated Doug, straightening a fistful cards. “You can’t take my cards when you top them with my cards. That’s not fair. You have to put your cards out there so I have chance to win them.”

     “I wasn’t going to keep them, you moron,” said Steven, offended at Doug’s accusation of dishonesty. “I was just fooling around. There’s nothing to do.”

     Tony helped clean up the mess and soon the cards where in a several ragged stacks. Doug wouldn’t allow them to be put in their box because they were out of order.

      “They weren’t in order,” said Steven, unwilling to accept any blame regarding the cards. “They were all mixed up.”

     “They were in order,” insisted Doug, dealing the cards into piles. “I always put them away in order.”

     “They were jumbled up,” insisted Steven, who kept his cards the right way, in numerical order, so he could keep his checklist up to date.

    “I had all the positions rubber banded together,” said Doug. “And I had the right-handed and left-handed pitchers in different stacks.”

    “That’s stupid,” said Steven, the irrationality of Doug’s system offending his sense of order and increasing his irritability. “What do you do with guys like Tony Taylor or Johnny Briggs who play all over?”

      “I have a separate pile for them.”

      “That’s crazy. You should use the number on the card that goes with the checklist.”

       “Why?” asked Doug. “I don’t mess with the checklist.”

        Steven was at a loss for the words. How could anyone not keep the checklist up to date? How did they know who they needed? How would they know when they had the complete set? How could they make smart trades?

       He tried to find the words to explain all this to Doug, but before he could the sky darkened and a gust of wind ripped across the porch sending baseball cards in all directions. The boys leapt to their feet and began racing around snatching at the swirl of colored cardboard. Jimmy grabbed the railing and vaulted into the front yard to rescue cards swept into the stiff needles of a young blue spruce that nearly filled the small, hedged space. They tossed the cards into the box, all order forgotten under the imminent threat of rain. 

       Jimmy handed the cards he saved from the tree to Tony, who was leaning over the porch rail. He dropped them in the box. A flash of lightening in the west caught Jimmy’s eye. He waited, but he couldn’t hear thunder. “It’s a ways off still,” he announced, but he’d barely completed his report when a much closer lightening bolt flashed across the increasingly dark sky. This time they all counted. Steven counted aloud softly, “One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi.” He reached eleven Mississippi before the rolling thunder reached them. “Eleven miles away,” Steven and Tony announced simultaneously. 

      The boys stood on the steps and watched the storm blow in. Doug realized he was holding the box of cards under his arm, so he ran to the front door and slipped them inside. He returned to the steps and the boys felt their scalps tingle as the air pressure dropped. Tony unthinkingly ran his hand over the short bristles of this summer mouse cut. The coming storm drove the boy’s lethargy before it. Their senses perked up in anticipation, as the temperature dropped and the lightning drew closer. The rain arrived in a wind driven curtain of water that swept across Second Street, scattering the debris of the street before it. Two lightning bolts followed by nearly instantaneous crashes sent the boys scurrying for the protection of the porch. An soggy, old dog staggered by, then broke into an ungainly, shuffling sprint when the thunder echoed off the houses. It barked in confused defiance, but the winds muffled the pointless noise.

      The boys stared at the approaching storm, energized by the noise and commotion, tapping on the railing, bouncing on their toes, and slapping each other on the back and arms. Steven automatically counted the time, in Mississippis, between lightning and thunder, and announcing its distance. When the distances began to increase, Jimmy disappeared into the house. He returned with a rubber football and carefully put the old leather one they’d been using against the house to keep it dry. “How ‘bout we finish the game?” he said, a huge smile on his face.

     Tony, Doug, and Steven looked at the rain, looked at each other, and then they broke into in a run, leaping down the stairs, bouncing off each other, to be the first one in the street, the first one soaked by downpour. Jimmy yelled, “Heads up!” and fired and the ball at the boys. They pushed and shoved to catch the pass, rain pouring down their faces, soaking their clothes, their sneakers splashing through the rivulets racing down the hill toward Clarkson.

     They played in the rain for a half-hour, stripping off their soaked t-shirts, laughing and shouting as the wet football slipped through sodden hands. Jimmy threw a pass that slipped from his grip and sailed high. Steven jumped to reach for it, but it skidded through his hands, hit him in the forehead, and deflected straight up a good twenty feet. Steven, a little disoriented, looked down to find the ball. Doug snatched it out of the air and raced toward the goal line, only to slip in the small lake created by the backed up sewer just as he was about to score. The ball bounced directly to Jimmy, who had been trying to catch Doug. He turned and ran all the way up the hill for a touchdown. Tony was laughing too hard to catch him. 

       Later that night, after lectures from several angry adults about the foolishness and/or stupidity of playing outside in a thunderstorm, the boys were in the Harper’s basement watching a Phillies game while helping Doug sort his baseball cards by position. Steven had the first and second basemen and he was surreptitiously putting each position into numerical order. They talked about the wild storm and decided that the play they’d called “Steven’s Header” was the funniest play ever seen on Second Street. Steven had to agree, but he lobbied, unsuccessfully, for the name to be changed to “Jimmy’s Lousy Pass” or “Doug’s Drowning.”