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Show 11 of our garage. Up and down the alley carriage houses had been converted to garages, the horses moved out, a car moved in. In ours the manger was still there and above the manger a ladder nailed solidly to the wall led up to the loft where hay had once been stored, now containing dust, a hornet's nest, and our collection of liquor bottles which we had started the previous summer, five of us picking up fancy bottles like Old Mr. Boston and Pinch, the prizes, but plenty of other ones too in varied sizes and shapes and labels, the collection growing very slowly until Ricky Carver discovered that behind the hotel across from the Denver and Rio Grande train depot there was always a large supply and then we dragged home so many cardboard boxes full that we grew satiated and stopped collecting, none of us realizing then that the hotel was the town's whorehouse. But we had moved within the ambience of sin, we stood the empty whiskey bottles shoulder to shoulder around the walls of the loft, and now we filled our pipes with Indian tobacco, making smoke. Later we mixed the seeds with roasted coffee, stolen by Ricky Carver, and later yet, better yet, we mixed the curly dock with real tobacco, rich mixture. Sometimes we stole a cigarette and shredded it, sometimes we picked up discarded butts. I'm the one who stole a bag of Dad's Bull Durham, Ricky who smoked it pure and got sick. The rest of us developed raw tongues and once again sin seemed a washout. Duaine Wilkinson's parents never smoked or drank coffee or certainly not liquor, never even swore that I knew of, being Mormons, and Duaine was as pure as they were, spending whole afternoons in the loft and not being tempted once, never took a single puff, but when smoking got dull for the rest of us he was the one who suggested we use the loft for Truth or Consequences: you could see better in the daylight. But only two girls would agree to play, both disappointingly young, Betsy Simpson who was ten and |