If you wanted a social life you could always get in a fight. On the way home from school one afternoon one of the public school kids started walking alongside me. His tone was insulting, and I took offense, and soon we were rolling in the grass struggling for supremacy. I finally was able to hold him down, get in a couple of punches, and force him to say Give. We sneered at each other and I walked on home.
Our apartment was on the third floor of a large house, and we had a stairway out back that served as a fire escape. I was reading a comic book before dinner when Mom called me. "There is a boy here to see you," she said, and went back to her preparations.
At the back door was a larger kid whom I had never seen. I stepped out onto the landing and he grinned evilly. "You the kid who fought my friend Jimmy? "
"Was that his name? Yeah, I guess so."
The big kid had blond hair and a round face. He was holding a paper bag out of which he pulled a knife, a rope, and a pair of pliers. "These are what I use to torture kids who beat up my friends. And I'm going to use them on you if you go after Jimmy again." He tried to look menacing, but he had a dumb expression.
I was skeptical. I could not believe that someone would torture me. I looked down into the yard. "It's a long way down. You better get out of here."
He frowned. "I better not see you around." He descended.
Mom asked, "who was that?"
"Just some kid who wanted to play. I told him we were eating dinner."
I asked the son of our landlady, who was older and went to the public school about the big kid and he laughed and said not to worry.
The next few days I kept my eyes open but I never saw either of them again.
One day we had a terrific rain storm, and afterward I went outside to float a wooden boat in the rushing gutter. The water emptied down an opening in the side of the street, taking my boat with it.
I followed the street to where I could see a small crowd of boys playing. There was a storm sewer opening into a big field, creating a creek where none had existed before. The boys told me this happened when there was a heavy rain, and we spent an hour or so making dams and throwing sticks in the water, then the flow slowed down to a trickle, revealing a tunnel with a sandy bottom. We began exploring the tunnel. Our was was lit by the openings in the street, little windows above us. Because we were small, we were able to crawl through them out onto the street. This was very exciting for me, because I was just reading about Jean Valjean escaping Javert in the sewers of Paris, and here I was, in a tunnel under the street!
I spent many happy days under the streets of Denton after this.
One morning Mom woke me up. "Nicky, you've got to see this. There's been a silver thaw."
Everything was covered in ice. I slipped on the sidewalk on the way to school, and the teachers let us out of class to walk around campus and look at all the trees encased in ice. The sun came out and it was like living in a world of glass. By midday it had all melted.
