Boogie

Chapter 1

I’m not sure when I first met Boogie, but I think it must have been that day he wandered by the game. One minute we were playing ball, me and the dirt lot bunch, knocking the ball way up and gone and running and screaming our lungs out, and the next minute there was this new kid standing on the sidelines, just quietly watching everybody. He was all by himself, just standing there scratching and smiling. He hung around for a while and finally went over to sit under a big old tree to watch the rest of the game from the shade. The Texas sun in the summertime isn’t anything to fool around with so I guess he was smarter than the rest of us in some ways.

He was kind of a funny looking kid and he had a thing about him that wasn’t quite right, if you know what I mean. He wore those farmer’s pants. The kind with the shoulder straps, bib overalls they call them. He never wore a shirt or shoes, just the overalls. His hair was always mussed like his momma never combed it for him and he didn’t seem to know how.

He was a big old boy though, blond hair, blue eyes, and taller than the rest of us by a long shot. Joey Farley was the oldest of the gang. He was almost fourteen and he was a head shorter than this new kid. He was about our age, because I had just turned twelve at the time and he was about a year older than me. Come to think of it, most of us were pretty close in age. It seems like the youngest of our bunch woulda’ been Billy Markle. He was only ten although he had been kind of sickly most of his life and looked a lot younger.

Then there were the twins, Floyd and Lloyd Hickson. They were twelve. They were what were called fraternal twins rather than identical twins but I could never tell them apart and they were always having fun with me over that. Let’s see. Mikey Snyder was eleven. He was the brain, and Calvin Kuykendahl and Porter McNeese were both twelve. We were always pretty much the eight of us, but after a while we became nine because the new kid hung around long enough and just became part of the gang.

It didn’t take long to figure out there was something different about him. All you had to do was talk to him and watch his reaction and you’d know. I guess it usually took about three whole seconds to have what you said hit the bottom of his brain and bounce back up. All of a sudden he would blink and give you that goofy smile he had and then answer your question. You knew you were pretty close to getting a response once you saw that blink. At least that’s how I figured it. Well, it turned out the kid’s real name was Roland Obermeyer. His sister, Karen called him Rollie and his parents called him Roland, but before anyone had a chance to get used to either name, he got tagged with Boogie.

The Obermeyers were a Swedish family who moved in down the road and took over the old Smith farm. They were from somewhere up north, Wisconsin I think. I heard that Mr. Obermeyer wanted to raise some dairy cows but the idea never took off and they became just another dirt poor farm family. I guess cows are too expensive. Mr. Obermeyer was a serious, no- nonsense kind of man. As it turned out he was a magician with engines, any kind of engines, it didn’t matter which. He could make just about anything run, so why he wanted to fool with a bunch of old cows was always a mystery. He was the type who never smiled though, and he always seemed to be worried about where his next meal was coming from. Of course in their situation it was probably a good idea to worry. I never knew anyone so poor as the Obermeyers.

Mrs. Obermeyer was a nice lady who genuinely liked us kids and always had a minute or two for us. Even though they were always struggling to make ends meet, she always managed to have a cookie and a glass of ice-cold milk for us when we stopped by. She used to get after her husband all the time because he never liked to speak English and was always going off in Swedish about one thing or the other. "Olan," she would tell him, "you’re in America now, you have to talk American." She used to call it talking American.

The Obermeyers only had the two kids. Karen was the younger one, probably about eleven years old and Roland was about thirteen or so when we first met him. I think Mrs. Obermeyer was really pleased that we took her son under our wing, so to speak. I guess she figured he’d never make any friends because of the way he was and she was grateful for our support. It didn’t seem like that big a deal to me, but then I guess kids have different things to worry about than adults.

I kind of liked the Obermeyer kid from the start. It never bothered me that he was a little slow. Shoot, some of us had lots worse problems. Take old Russell Mackey and Warren Cullen. Now there were two boys with some real problems. Momma used to take me by the shoulders, look me straight in the eyes and say, "Travis, you stay away from those no account roughnecks." That’s what she used to call them, a bunch of no account roughnecks. Like staying away from them was all that easy.

Russell was the local bully and Warren was his sidekick. They were about as mean as two people could get and the bad part was they seemed to enjoy causing pain and hurting others. They also had that little retard Maurice Frances running with them, but I’ll get to him a little later on.

Russell was a tall skinny kid with crooked teeth and a really bad case of pimples. I think he was about fifteen. He was the local tough guy; there was no question about that. Wearing his blue jeans so low the crack of his butt always showed, and a white T-Shirt he rolled all the way up to his shoulders. When he wore a shirt with a collar, he always kept the collar turned up real high in the back. That was a sign that he was not to be messed with because he was really bad. He had just started to smoke and I guess he thought it made him look tough because he always walked around with a Lucky Strike cigarette dangling from his lips. He had greasy black hair that was always falling over his forehead and combed into a D.A. in back. If he didn’t have a cigarette in his hand he had a comb. We all hated him and were scared to death he would pick one of us out for a beating. He didn’t seem to need a reason; he just liked to beat on us.

Warren was a little shorter and fatter. He was about fourteen and mean as a scorpion. He would stand next to Russell and challenge us kids to fight, knowing full well none of us ever would because we were afraid of Russell. We weren’t that crazy. Warren had a butch haircut and liked to show off his muscles. He was always ordering us around and couldn’t talk to someone without shoving them. We hated him too. So after they were through pushing us around, they wandered off, arms around each other’s shoulders laughing and calling us names, Russell blowing smoke rings and both of them making the chicken sound.

I guess it was Russell who gave Boogie his nickname. It was sort of mean the way he did it. I mean we had already figured out Boogie was a little different but we accepted him as long as he wasn’t any crazier than the rest of us. There was no reason to call attention to it. Russell decided he acted more like a Boogieman than a real person and the name stuck. Well, eventually we dropped the Boogieman part and he just became plain old Boogie. I think it was our way of telling Russell he couldn’t always order us around.

Boogie didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He was about as good-natured as they come, I guess. He reminded me a lot of Baby Huey in the cartoons.