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Show 10 not to startle them, and there was Dad, with the radio moved into the kitchen and playing jazz, Dad in shiny black shoes and shiny brilliantined hair, my own father, watching this woman called Marie demonstrate a dance step. I was so surprised that I forgot what I had come for, closed the door and went back to my bed. I'd probably have been too shocked to let down my water anyhow, for I kept seeing my own mother with a cigarette dangling from her lip and doing something so loose and fluid with a dance step that I knew they were both in sin. I hadn't realized sin might be such fun. I was learning though, out in the backyard. I was a very backward child about sin (I never even heard of playing doctor until I had children of my own) and Joan Plummer had come over to help us younger kids out. Summer evenings! She had a simple version of Truth or Consequences wherein you were asked a question, and since the questions were either too personal or too hard to answer, and since the consequence of not answering one was to take off an article of clothing, the game seemed most promising. But no one had the courage to strip all the way, the yard was a little too dark to see much anyhow, and so, after some giggling about underwear, we all went down to the corner under the arc light to play Tin Can Nurkey. Then Bobby Newcome turned his garage into a pipe factory. His cousins in Grand Junction had taught him: take a square block of wood about 2 x 2 inches, lock it in a vice, drill a large hole down in it for the bowl; turn the block in the vice, from the side drill a small hole through into the large one; then get a sucker from the base of a box elder tree, trim it, cut it, hollow out the soft center with a wire, and insert it into the small hole for a stem, a sweet-tasting stem, box elders being poor relations of the sugar maple tree. For smoking we began with the dry rust-colored seeds of the curly dock, called Indian tobacco, pounded and pulverized and puffed in the privacy |
