The summer didn’t take as long as it used to. I did all the same kind of stuff, playing in the basement, in the backyard, in the park. Playing with Paul or Danny or Gabe, or Molly on Saturdays. Riding my bike to my friends’ houses, though not Molly’s because it was so far away. Climbing Kenny’s cherry tree with him to eat the cherries. Seeing Marybeth in the park playing with other older girls. Going to the bookmobile when it was by the park and “checking out” books with words and pictures on the cover that looked interesting.

Now it was August. That was the last month of summer. Next month was September. That would be fall, and that was when I had to go back to school. I didn’t want to, but all the other kids went to school and said I had to too. Some of the older kids said that if I didn’t go to school the police would come to my house and “arrest” me and make me go to “reform school”, which sounded really bad. And because mom and dad liked school so much, I never told them that I didn’t want to go back, because I figured they’d think I had turned into a bad kid. I wondered sometimes if I WAS a bad kid, but I didn’t want anybody else, specially mom and dad, thinking that I was.

I heard mom and dad have one of those “arguments” yesterday in the kitchen when I was down in the basement. I snuck up the basement stairs so I could hear their words better. Mom was using her mad voice and dad was using his friendly quiet voice. I didn’t like it when she always talked that way when he was always trying to talk nice.

“Eric, I can’t take it anymore”, she said, “I can’t go on like this.” I heard her start to cry and then say, “All I do is housework and looking after David. And we have no furniture and all my clothes are rags.”

“Oh Liz”, dad said with his nice voice. He always said that when mom started crying, then he’d try to think up something to make it better.

“David’s out of diapers now and Coop pretty much takes care of himself”, he said.

“Eric”, she said fiercely, not crying so much now, “Are you hearing what I’m saying? It feels like TOO DAMN MUCH!”

“We can fix it, Liz”, he said, still talking in his quiet voice, “I’ve submitted a second draft of my dissertation, and once I get my committee’s approval, I’m basically done!”

“Jesus Christ, Eric”, she said even more fiercely, “If I had known how long and how much work this damned dissertation was going to be, I don’t know if I’d’ve signed up for it.”

“Oh Liz”, he said again, “You don’t mean that. We’re finally almost there.”

“YOU’RE almost there”, she said, starting to cry again, “But where the hell am I? Do you even care?”

“Of course I care, Liz”, he said, like he was so sad she felt that way, but also that it wasn’t right what she said.

“We had a deal”, she said, trying not to cry anymore, “I was going to play the housefrau so you could get your dissertation. Then I was going to go back to school and get my Art degree.”

“I know, Liz”, he said, “It just took longer than everyone told me it would. I’ve done everything I possibly can.”

“I guess you have, Eric”, she said, still kind of crying, “But just because you have the damn doctorate, you’re still just an assistant professor, they’re not going to pay you any more.”

“Well, eventually”, he said, but mom didn’t let him keep talking.

“EVENTUALLY is sounding to me like NEVER right now”, she said, starting to cry some more.

“Look Liz”, dad said, his voice still quiet and friendly, “My time’s freed up now, and with David out of diapers I can take the kids out for the day on a more regular basis. I’ll throw them in the car and we’ll just head off for the day and leave you be.”

“There’s not going to be any money for Art school”, she kind of said it but asked it too, “Is there?”

“Well”, he said, and I knew he was trying to figure something out. “At least you could paint. Use the living room as your studio, since we don’t use it for anything else.”

I didn’t hear mom say anything else

***

Mom was by my top bunk bed when I woke up the next morning.

“Morning Cooper”, she said, using my regular name that she didn’t usually use unless she was saying it to other grownups who didn’t know who I was. “Your dad’s got a car adventure planned for you and your brother today.” She looked at me and did her biggest smile. “He said he’s taking you two on an adventure to some new place.” Her eyebrows went up and down as she said it.

“Your dad will tell you all about it”, she said, “Best get dressed and get yourself some breakfast, because I think he wants to leave as soon as possible. Your brother already finished his.”

David always got up before I did. I wondered why he did that, and what he was up to. Now that he was three, and talking more like a regular kid like me, I was worried about him more.

Dad was in the kitchen with David, putting stuff in two canvas bags. Stuff to drink and a book in one. Towels and our bathing suits in the other bigger one.

“Your other passenger is finally up”, mom said to him about me, “Ya got everything?” she asked.

“Let’s see”, he said, rubbing his chin with his hand, “Drinks. My books. Bathing suits and three towels. Band-aids and Bactine. Washtenaw County map. What else? What else?”

“Sounds like a good list Eric. Sorry there’s no food in the house to make sandwiches, but I still haven’t gotten to the store”, mom said, seeming more worried than she usually was. I thought about their argument I had sneaked up and listened to last night.

“Don’t worry about it Liz”, dad said, “We got it covered!”

***

We had a different car now. It was one of those “station wagons”. I had gone with dad in our old car to this place that had lots of cars and dad gave them our old one and they gave dad this one. When I asked him if it was “new”, he shook his head and said it was “used”. I liked it because it had a “wayback” seat like Molly’s mom’s car. That’s where I wanted to sit, and when David saw that I did, he did too. He liked to copy me like that, which made me worried sometimes.

“I think I know the route”, dad said from the front seat, “That is, the roads I want to take. But Coop, maybe you can follow along on the map.”

He held it up all folded in his hand and waved it so I could see it. He looked back at me like he was saying, “Are you ready?” I nodded. He “tossed” the map to me making it spin when it went through the air. I think that spin helped it keep from opening up. He and mom really liked to “toss” things to each other, so they could catch it like it was a ball, not just giving it the regular way, which wasn’t as much fun. I guess they tried to make all those “chores” they did more fun by tossing stuff.

As the car wheels crunched over the stones in our driveway, I opened up the map. You had to be careful opening folded paper stuff like maps or they might rip. I could tell David wanted to see the map too, but I looked at him kind of fiercely, like he should let me open and hold it by myself. I could tell by the way he wrinkled his nose that he didn’t like that, but then he nodded, but just a little bit.

The map had the “Ann Arbor” words in the middle of it, then a bunch of lines mostly going up and down or sideways that I figured must be roads. There was a red circle with an “x” in it below the “Ann Arbor” words. Dad said that the red roads were the biggest ones, the “freeways” and “highways”, but we’d be going mostly on the smaller blue ones, the regular “roads”, and the red circle with the “x” was where our house was.

“Just to the right of the red ‘x’ on the map you can see that blue street going up”, Dad said, “That’s Main Street. By the Stadium. Find it?”

I looked and saw the blue line by the long circle that I guess was the Stadium. The tiny letters said, “Main Street”. I liked that I could find it by reading the words. I nodded but then remembered I better say “yep” because he was driving and wasn’t looking at me.

“Good”, he said, “So we’re going to head up Main through town and by the river it turns into Huron River Drive and we’ll go west along the river.” I thought it was interesting that a street could “turn into” a different street, so I was waiting to see that.

Dad turned the car at the Stadium and we went down that main street that I had gone down many times since I was little. Grownups didn’t call it “THE main street”, they just called it “Main Street” or just “Main”. It was what it was, but it was also like a name, like all the other streets like our “Prescott Street”. It was Saturday, and there were lots of other cars. Once we got to the part with all the stores there were people too. We went kind of down and by the Kiddie Korner, then over the railroad tracks and up to where most of the other stores were, that “downtown” part. As David and I looked out the back window, we went by that “bakery” place on the left that dad liked to go to to buy donuts and those “long johns” with nuts and cream inside. Now there were people walking on the sidewalks or going in and out of the stores. There were even those buildings farther along that were taller than the other buildings. Dad said those were “office buildings”.

Then we went down again, and it wasn’t downtown with stores and offices anymore and the train station was on the left. We went under a bridge and dad said, “We’re on Huron River Drive” now. I didn’t see anything turn into anything else, though we WERE by the river instead of stores, so maybe that’s what he meant by turning into. Grownups were strange sometimes, thinking things had changed when they seemed to be the same, or thinking things were the same when they seemed really different. It was more about how they wanted things to be than how they really were.

“Do you remember where this road goes?” dad asked. David shook his head and looked at me.

I remembered being on this road, with mom and dad, but also in Molly’s MOM’S station wagon, in the wayback with Molly. We went to that place with donuts and that apple cider stuff, and that little island in the middle of the little river.

“The place with the cider and donuts?” I asked.

“Yep”, dad said. “David, do you remember when we went there last fall?” he asked. David looked worried, like he kind of knew but kind of didn’t. Because he was three years old, he was just starting to figure out that things could have happened a long time ago, and I was trying to tell him about the four parts of the year that went in a circle like the clock. I wasn’t sure if mom had told him about that yet, like she’d told me.

“I think so”, he said. He was starting to talk like a regular kid, instead of a little one.

We went over the bridge across the river, and now it was on the right side of David and me as we looked out the back window. Finally we turned off the road and went over another bridge and David and I could see the cider place on our left. I could read the words on the sign.

I leaned over towards David and pointed at the sign and said, “It says, ‘Dexter Cider Mill’.”

He looked and pointed at it too and turned his head to Dad in the front and said, “Dexter Cider Mill”, just like I had said it to him, but like he was telling dad he had figured it out himself instead of me telling him first.

“Yep”, said dad, “And we’d stop and get some donuts, but it’s not open yet, not until next month. But there’s another place just up the road a bit.”

Now we were driving down a road with houses and those special houses that had the tall pointy things on top that mom and dad called “churches”. Then we turned again and we were on a road with stores on it.

“So this is Main Street again”, Dad said, “But Main Street in DEXTER. Dexter is a lot smaller than Ann Arbor so it’s called a ‘village’ instead of a ‘town’ like Ann Arbor, or a big ‘city’ like Detroit.” I had thought that “Dexter” was just the name of the cider place like “Quality” was the name of the bakery that we went by before.

“Dexter Bakery”, dad said, “Haven’t been there in a while.”

This time we stopped the car and went inside and dad bought a box of donuts. David wanted the chocolate covered ones like me. Dad got the plain ones for him. Dad got a cup of coffee for him and water with ice in it for us. We sat at a table in front of the place and ate our donuts. David and I each had one. Dad had two. David got chocolate all over his mouth, so dad took one of those “napkins” and licked it with his tongue and then wiped the chocolate off David’s mouth. David didn’t like that very much.

When we got back in the car, before dad started driving again, he said to me, “Okay Coop, open up the map and see if you can figure out where we are.”

That seemed like an interesting thing to try to do. I liked maps, because they helped you do adventures to see what the stuff on the map, like woods, towns, rivers and lakes really looked like. Grownups mostly looked at maps to figure out how to get somewhere that they’d never been to before or maybe another place that they couldn’t remember how to get to. But I looked at maps like they were a book, where it helped you use your thinking to “imagine” somewhere different that you hadn’t been to before. That was the word grownups used for pretending. A kid would say, “Let’s pretend we’re in a giant cave.” A grownup would say, “Imagine we’re in a giant cave.”

And what was really neat is that maps didn’t have to just be about real places, they could be about made up places that weren’t real. Like when mom read me that Winnie the Pooh book. Hearing the story and all the places in it, I used my thinking to pretend what all those places in the “Hundred Acre Wood” looked like. The book only had a few pictures and they were really small. But she also showed me a map in the book of that “Hundred Acre Wood” place. I asked her if it was a real place, but she wasn’t sure if it was. So I started making my own pretend maps of places I just made up, which was really fun, and easier than having to write all those sentences about a place and where the towns, roads and rivers were.

So I looked at dad’s map to try and figure out where we were on it. I knew we were in “Dexter”, and I knew what that “Dexter” word looked like. There was more than one “Dexter” word on the map. Some of the lines, those were the roads, had a tiny “Dexter” word, but the biggest “Dexter” word I figured was the “Dexter” place we were in, because the word wasn’t along a road line but went over different ones.

I pointed at the biggest “Dexter” word and asked dad, “Are we here?” He looked back from the front seat at where I was pointing.

“Yep”, he said, “Very good.” David looked at me.

It was interesting the difference between “roads” and “streets”. Streets were in towns, like our “Prescott” street, and were usually straight and had houses or buildings on them. “Roads” weren’t usually so straight and went from one town to another town through places where there weren’t many houses or buildings, places that grownups said were “outside of town”.

Dad started driving the car again and we went by more buildings and stores. We stopped because one of those “lights” above us was red. There were now two roads ahead of us instead of one.

“They call this a ‘fork’ in the road”, he said, “We could go either way, so which way do you guys want to go?” I always wanted to go left, because I was left-handed.

“Left it is”, dad said, and the green light above us was now turned on instead of the red one, so we went that way. Now there weren’t any more buildings or stores and just a couple houses. There were some trees, but mostly these other kinds of plants that were all the same and next to each other in straight lines.

“How about we sing a song”, dad said, “I’ve got a good counting song. It’s a BACKWARD counting song, so it’s a little tricky. Just listen and when you catch on, join in.” He looked back at us and David and I nodded. He sang…

A hundred bottles of beer on the wall
A hundred bottles of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall

Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall
Ninety-nine bottles of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall

Those were really big numbers he was singing but I knew what they were. Since a hundred was the next number you counted after ninety-nine when you were doing REGULAR counting, when you did BACKWARD counting, you counted the ninety-nine AFTER the hundred, and ninety-eight after the ninety-nine.

Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall
Ninety-eight bottles of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
Ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall

Yep. That’s how it worked. So I started singing the next one with him…

Ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall
Ninety-seven bottles of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
Ninety-six bottles of beer on the wall

I was still trying to think what the next number was before ninety-seven when he sang ninety-six. David looked worried and looked at me, I guess because he didn’t know how to count that way. It felt good to be able to do something with dad that David couldn’t do yet, so David remembered I knew more stuff than he did.

Ninety-six bottles of beer on the wall
Ninety-six bottles of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
Ninety-five bottles of beer on the wall

I liked it because it was one of those silly grownup songs, and you could sing it for a really long time without knowing any new words except the next number. Beer was one of those things, like punch and “Bloody Marys” that grownups drank at parties. I guess punch and Bloody Marys made them talk silly, and maybe beer made them sing silly.

We got down to eighty-four when we got to where this other road crossed ours and there was one of those red stop signs so dad stopped the car and stopped singing. Then he turned right onto that other road and started singing the song again…

Eighty-four bottles of beer on the wall
Eighty-Four bottles of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
Eighty-three bottles of beer on the wall

David and I liked singing the song, though David couldn’t figure out the next number until dad and I sang it the first time, so dad kept singing it as we drove down this road. There were lots of trees and only a few houses, and they were way back from the road with really long driveways. Some of them had these giant gardens out in front and all around them that had all the same kind of plants in straight lines.

I stopped singing and asked dad, “Why are all the houses so far apart?”

He stopped singing too and said, “Because we are out in the country. These are farms, where they grow some of the food that we eat.”

I had heard that “country” word before. Sometimes the guys on TV who said the news said that word. I guess we had a “country” and other places, like Germany, England and the Soviet Union, had countries too. I think it was really big because people would say stuff like, “in the entire country”. And we were supposed to like ours a lot because they had us sing that song at school…

This is my country
Land of my birth
This is my country
Grandest on Earth
I pledge you my allegiance
America the bold
For this is my country
To have and to hold

OUR country was called “America”, and we were supposed to like it best. Better than Germany, because they were the badguys in the war, though maybe not anymore. And better than the Soviet Union, because they were kind of badguys too, or at least the other “team”, like mom said.

But then some grownups would say stuff like, “It’s not in town, it’s out in the country”, like the town, where we lived, was different than the country, where these “farm” places were. So maybe where we lived, in Ann Arbor, was not in the country, but it was all around us and we still liked it a lot, maybe because that’s where we got some food.

David said, “Sing the next number dad”, and dad said, “Sure, but where were we?”

David pointed at me and said, “Coob knows.” He said my name like Molly did. I liked it that way.

I liked it that I was the only one who knew. Not even dad knew. So I decided to just start singing by myself.

Eighty-three bottles of beer on the wall
Eighty-three bottles of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
Eighty-two bottles of beer on the wall

Dad looked back at me and smiled like he did when he was “proud” of me. I liked that a lot. Even though I was a kid and not a grownup, I could do regular stuff that grownups did, like start the singing.

The road wasn’t straight like the streets “in town”, it had turns in it without going on a different road. Maybe that’s why you called them “roads” instead of “streets”. But then we did get to another road and dad stopped the car at the stop sign.

“North Territorial”, he said, “We’re getting there.” He started the singing again at the next number…

Sixty-seven bottles of beer on the wall
Sixty-seven bottles of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
Sixty-six bottles of beer on the wall

“Sixty-seven” was really hard to sing and fit it in with the other words in the song. “Seventy-seven” had been even harder, and I couldn’t really say all of it without my mouth getting messed up, though dad could.

There were trees all around us now, a “woods”. We could see way up in front of us one of those “fork” things in the road. Dad said, “Well Coop, which way should we go?”

“Left”, I said.

“Somehow, I KNEW you’d say that”, he said, laughing through his nose, “Turns out that’s the right way to go to get where we’re headed.”

“It’s the LEFT way to go”, I said. This time he did a regular laugh, with his mouth.

“The word RIGHT has a lot of different meanings”, he said, “Making it confusing depending on the other words around it. RIGHT also means CORRECT. If I want to speak clear, easily understandable English I should have said, ‘It’s the CORRECT way to go’.” He smiled like he had said something really good, but I didn’t like it that “right” meant “correct”, but “left” didn’t. But I guess more people were right-handed than left-handed, so they had more votes. We kept driving by a lot more trees on both sides of the road.

“Here we go”, dad said, and he turned onto a dirt road that made a crunching noise below the car, and made all those brown clouds behind the car too. We stopped the car next to all the other stopped cars and got out. There were big puffy white clouds floating under the blue parts of the sky, and I could tell that the sun was behind one right now. The air was really warm and the skin on my arms and legs felt kind of wet. Even my hair felt kind of wet. Dad let me carry one of the “canvas” bags we had brought with stuff in them to go swimming. He carried the biggest one. David wanted to carry a bag too, but there wasn’t a third smaller one, so dad said he could help me with mine, which I didn’t like, because I had to walk more slowly so David didn’t accidentally fall down.

There were other people sitting on the beach by the lake, mostly grownups. The kids were either playing in the water or building things with the sand by the edge of the water. Dad pulled a folded up blanket out of the big bag he was carrying and spread it out on the ground so we didn’t have to sit on the regular ground part. He gave us our swimsuits and we went into a bathroom to put them on. It was kind of like the bathrooms at the park, there was one with a sign that said “Men” and was for boys too, and another one that said “Women” and was for them and girls.

I had always thought it was interesting that these “Men” bathrooms didn’t just have those regular toilets in those tiny rooms with doors, but also the other toilet things against the wall that you couldn’t sit on. But even the regular toilets you could sit on you weren’t supposed to if you just had to pee. Other boys said that only girls sat on toilets when they peed, and if a boy did he was a sissy, which you really did not want to be. I didn’t want to take any chances, even when I was in one of those tiny toilet rooms by myself, because you could see someone’s feet in one of those rooms, under the door, so you could tell whether they were sitting on the toilet or standing in front of it.

So I changed into my bathing suit in one little room, and dad and David were in the next one, so dad could help David. Then we went back to our blanket and then all three of us walked into the water, dad holding David’s hand. The water felt kind of cold, but it was okay because the top part of me above the water felt so warm.

I didn’t want other kids to see me standing next to dad like I was still a little kid, so I walked farther into the water than dad and David did, and it came up above my belly button. There were older kids even farther out than I was. Two of them were sitting on one of those big round things that looked like a giant donut, that kept them above the water. As I walked out further and the water got up to the bottom of my shoulders I started getting worried, but I didn’t want the older kids to see me worried like that.

One of the kids on the big round thing looked at me and smiled and said, “Hey kid, want to sit on our inner tube with us?” I nodded, because I always wanted to play, and really liked it when older kids would let me play with them. I reached out toward them and they each grabbed one of my hands and pulled me onto the round “inner tube” thing. I had to slide my legs into the middle part so I could sit like they were, so we could look at each other. It was hard but I did it, and being able to do it made me feel more like a big kid like them.

“Pretty neat”, the other kid said to me. I nodded, but then thought I should be more like a big kid and say something.

“It’s really neat”, I said, “Like we’re on a boat.”

“Yeah”, the first kid said to me, “We’re on a boat, sailing the seven seas.” I nodded my head and smiled at him. That was a good thing to pretend. The two of them swished their hands in the water to make the inner tube go farther out.

The other kid looked at me and said, “You can swim, right?”

I didn’t say anything, and moved my shoulders up and down because I didn’t know. Other times when we went here with mom, she had tried to show me how to swim. But I hadn’t really figured it out yet, because when she showed me I felt like a little kid. I knew you were supposed to splash the water in front of you and kick the water behind you.

“Jeez”, said the other kid, “We better not go out any farther.”

The first kid nodded. “Yeah we better not”, he said, then looking at me he said, “You need to learn to swim.” When he said that, I felt like I used to when I was riding my tricycle and the kids around me were riding bicycles and looking at me.

Then this big black fly thing came buzzing around us. It was so big I could see its eyes. Big flying bugs always scared me because they made me remember those super scary flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz movie that I had seen again on TV a while ago. The two kids tried to hit it with their hands but it flew around their waving hands and finally landed on the first kid’s back. Then his eyes opened wide.

“Ouch”, he said, “That hurts really bad!” He tried to wave his hands behind his neck but couldn’t hit the giant fly.

“Go into the water”, the other kid said, “That’ll get him off you!”

The first kid let himself fall backwards into the water. When he did his side of the inner tube went up in the air and I felt myself falling off the other side. My back smacked against the water and suddenly my head and the top part of my body was underwater, and then my legs too, which went down farther. I tried to put my feet on the bottom but it wasn’t there. I got scared and grabbed at the water above me to try to get my head out of it. My head came out and I started to breathe, but I went under again. I grabbed at the water above me again and when my head came out. I wanted to yell for dad, but that would make me seem like a little kid. By slapping the water really hard and kicking with my legs I could just keep my mouth out of the water, and I tried to breathe but all the splashing made some water go in my mouth. I got even more scared.

I felt a hand try to grab my arm and pull me, but I still could barely keep my head above the water. Then I felt a bigger arm wrap around my stomach and pull me up.

“I got ya”, I heard dad say from behind me. “Thanks, son”, he said to that kid who was holding on to my arm.

That kid said to dad, “He needs to learn how to swim.” Dad nodded.

“Thanks again for helping him”, dad said, and then turned around so I was looking at David farther in front of us. David was looking at me and looking really worried. Dad pulled me in towards David.

“Here”, he said, “You should be able to touch the bottom now.” He took his hand off my stomach and I slid down until my feet felt the bottom and I was okay. “You need to be careful how far you go out until you learn to swim”, he said. Those two older kids had swum back out and gotten back on the inner tube, but were both looking at me, and then at each other. I felt like a stupid little kid.

“That was really scary”, I said to dad. I usually didn’t tell him stuff like that, stuff that I was feeling. He didn’t look at me, but shook his head slowly and pushed his lips together like when he got mad and said, “You’re fine. You just got flustered. Nothing to be scared about!”

“I’ll have a talk with your mother about getting you swimming lessons”, dad said, “Why don’t you come in for a while and play with your brother on the beach?”

David, standing in the water up above his suit, looked at me and said, “I can’t swim too!” I didn’t like that he’d said that, like I was just a little kid like he was.

Feeling mad, I looked at David and said, “That’s not what happened. I was just surprised”, and I turned away from him and walked in toward the sand part on the edge of the water.

I let myself fall down on my knees in the sand and started digging it up to make a mound. It made me not think so much about what just happened, though I was still thinking about it some. I had to dig right by where the water was so the sand would be wet and stick together better. It was interesting that sand was different from the dirt in our backyard. When sand wasn’t wet, you couldn’t really make any shapes with it, it just kind of fell down. Maybe you could make a hill, but that’s all. When dirt was wet it turned into mud and just fell down too. But regular dirt you could make things with when it WASN’T wet. Mom said the dirt we got from that gravel pit place had “clay” in it, which made it kind of stick together. We had made things with “clay” in art class at school. It was pretty neat stuff that you could squeeze and roll and even bend into different shapes.

David came up behind me and just stood there looking at what I was doing. I could tell he was there even though I wasn’t looking at him.

“Me too?” he asked. I wanted to say no, but I knew that would be bad, and dad might get mad at me. But I also just wanted to build my own stuff, so I had an idea.

“You build yours over there”, I said, pointing, “And then we’ll hook them together.” David nodded, and didn’t look worried anymore. He got down in the sand near me and started digging like I was.

The really warm day felt good on my skin after being in the cold water. The sun came out from behind a cloud and that felt even better. I started thinking about the fort I was going to build, and then maybe a town around it. When I had a big enough pile of sand I started building the walls and the “tower” parts in the corners. Then I made a road that went from the pretend doors of the fort around it in a circle, and then I had it keep going over to where David was trying to build his own fort. He had watched how I made mine and he was trying to do the same thing but he couldn’t do it very well.

“See”, I said to him, “I’m hooking our forts together. You can build your road to hook to mine.” He nodded and smiled at me.

“I’m going to make a really long road before I hook it to yours”, he said. He really did more talking than I did when I was a little kid like him. I guess I could have been mad that he was trying to build a longer road than mine, but I knew it wouldn’t look as good as mine, so I wasn’t mad anymore.

We built our forts and our roads and towns for a long time. Other kids would come up and look at them and say things like it was really neat. I would nod and maybe say “yep” but keep working, though I liked that they liked it. A couple kids said they would build their own forts next to mine and David’s and hook those together with roads too. But it got bad because other kids trying to go in the water from the sand part just walked over our roads and towns and wrecked parts of them without even looking or knowing that they were doing that. I don’t think any of them did that on purpose. One of the other kids building his fort said he would be the “walking police” and tell the other kids to be careful where they walked.

By the time we all got done building and hooking our stuff together with what became a really neat long road, I could feel my shoulders hurting. Not the inside parts, but the outside parts. Dad came over carrying David and my t-shirts and said we should put them on or we’d get “sunburned”. I guess the sun wasn’t just bad to look at, it could do other bad things too, even though it felt really good. That was strange. So I put on my shirt and dad helped David with his. Then dad went back up to our blanket where he was reading one of those big soft books that he and mom called “magazines”.

As the four of us kids all stood and looked at what we had made together, David said, “Now let’s be monsters and wreck it!”

“Not yet”, I said. I just wanted to look at it for a while and make up stories about the different forts and what they did in the different towns. But the other two kids liked what David said and started wrecking stuff. David did too, he always really liked wrecking stuff. I just let my body fall down and sat in the sand and imagined all the people in the houses running down the road to get to the forts where they thought they’d be safe. But turns out they weren’t, and lots of them were killed or wounded.

David and those two other kids had fun wrecking it all, but the problem was, once you did that, it wasn’t fun anymore. Those other two kids didn’t want to make something different so they just went off. Dad came over from where he was sitting on the blanket reading.

“You guys getting hungry?” he asked. David and I both nodded.

“Well why don’t we take one more dip in the lake to wash the sand off”, he said, “Then we’ll change and get back in the car and find a place to get lunch.”

“Okay”, said David, and he started running into the water by himself. I looked at dad, made a funny face, and did that rolling thing with my eyes when you can’t figure something out. Dad looked at me, his eyes twinkling, and shook his head.

“Your brother has absolutely no fear of water”, he said, “He’s like a fish, though he doesn’t have gills like a fish, so he scares me a bit”, and he ran out into the water after David. I decided I could be a fish too, and ran into the water as fast as I could, lifting my knees up high as I ran so the water wouldn’t slow me down. I ran past David who was up to his swimsuit in the water. I looked at him and made a face like he should watch me and then stuck my arms out and jumped head first into the water. My eyes hurt as I opened them underwater, but it was an interesting different kind of place where I could only see the bottom parts of everybody else in the water around me. I looked towards the bottom part of David behind me and I saw his top part come down under the water too, and he saw me and waved his hand. I thought of that Captain Nemo movie where he and his crew did stuff underwater. Then I felt my chest kind of burning which meant I needed to breathe. I had held my breath many times, and knew that feeling.

When I came out David’s head was still underwater, but he finally came up too. Dad just used his hands to splash water on his body. Then the three of us walked back to the sand part where our blanket was. There were a lot more people around now than when we got here earlier.

“We came at the right time”, dad said looking around and smiling, “We beat the crowds.” He seemed to really like that we had beat them, like beating the other team. We dried off with our towels and then put our regular clothes back on in the bathroom, dad helping David again. Then we went back to our blanket and David and I, mostly me, helped dad roll it up so it could go back in the big canvas bag. Once we had everything “packed up”, we walked back to the car.

“I think it would be fun to go to a place we’ve never been to before”, dad said, sounding more like a kid than a grownup.

“Where’s that?” I asked, like I was asking another kid. David tried to say “where’s that” too, but it sounded more like “where sat”.

Dad looked at us, did a big smile with all his teeth, then moved his eyebrows up and down and said, “It’ll be a fun adventure, you’ll see! While you guys were building your sand forts, very impressive by the way, I was studying our Washtenaw County map. The place I’m looking for is not ON the map, at least not that one, but I think it’s just over the county line north of us. Let’s see if we can get there from here.”

We drove back into the trees on the road with the dirt and the dirt cloud behind us back out to the regular road. Instead of going back the way we had come, we turned right on this other dirt road into a bunch of trees.

“The sign says Silver Hill road”, dad said, “It goes off the top of the map. Let’s see if it goes through to Livingston County. Otherwise we’ll have to drive all the way around the lake.”

We drove down the long dirt road, which was really bumpy. We bounced up and down in our seats, which was really fun. David and I pretended we were bouncing around even more than we really were. We got to a place where we had to go to the left.

“Hmm”, dad said, rubbing the bottom part of his face as he continued to drive, “This may not go through. But let’s take it to the end and see.” Then he looked back at us and said, “We’re on an adventure, right? Things don’t always turn out as planned.” David and I nodded.

But then on the road ahead there were no more trees, and no more road because there was another lake.

“This must be Crooked Lake”, he said, “And a dead end for the road. Guess we have to turn around and go the other way.” Dad had to drive backward and then forward again so the car could drive the other way.

“Okay”, he said, as we bounced up and down back the road, “Where were we in our song?” I remembered.

“Sixty-six”, I said, and dad started singing…

Sixty-six bottles of beer on the wall
Sixty-six bottles of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
Sixty-five bottles of beer on the wall

David and I sang too. I sang louder than I had before. We got back to the regular road that wasn’t bumpy and dusty, and drove some more until we came to another road and we turned left. We drove back into a bunch of trees, but then there was another lake on our left, and those wood things that you could walk on going out above the water with boats next to them. The other side of the road had houses with trees all around them.

“Can you see all those people on the other side of the lake where the brown sand is?” dad asked. I looked hard and could see them.

“Yep”, I said. I didn’t know that David could see them, but he looked at me and decided to say “yep” too.

“That’s the Silver Lake beach we were just at”, dad said, “We’re driving around the other side of the lake.

Then we drove by a place where there was the big Silver Lake on one side of the car and this other really small lake on the other side. Then there were some roads and houses on the left side, but not the lake anymore, and only trees on the right side. Then there were just trees on both sides of us, and dad started singing again the next number…

Forty-five bottles of beer on the wall
Forty-five bottles of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
Forty-four bottles of beer on the wall

As we kept singing our road finally ended at a different road that just went to the left and right. There was one of those yellow signs with a black arrow with pointing parts going both ways.

Dad turned his head to look back at David and me and asked, “Well… which way do you think we should turn this time?”

“Left”. David said it before I could.

“That’s what I was hoping for”, Dad said, smiling and his eyes twinkling, “I guess if you’d said ‘right’ then I would have tried to talk you out of it.” He laughed through his nose as he turned the car to the left. This road was another one of those bumpy dirt ones that made dust behind the car.

“This is Tiplady road”, he said, “I wonder what that’s all about. So where were we in our song?” I think dad knew where we were, he just liked to see if I could remember what number it was.

Like before, I just started singing by myself again, and he and David “joined in” as grownups would say…

Thirty-eight bottles of beer on the wall
Thirty-eight bottles of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
Thirty-seven bottles of beer on the wall

We sang as dad drove, but then dad stopped singing to say, “Look! A bridge!”

David got up on his feet and I got on my knees in the wayback seat and turned to see out the front of the car from the “control room” where dad was driving. There were two little walls, one on either side and there was a little river, one of those “stream” things, going under it.

“Well not much of a bridge”, dad said as we bumped across it, “But where were we?” He looked back at me and winked and I started to sing again and they joined in again…

Thirty-three bottles of beer on the wall
Thirty-three bottles of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
Thirty-two bottles of beer on the wall

Now our road ended, but another road went left and right.

“So HERE we are”, dad said, like he had finally figured something out, “This is Silver Hill road!” He pointed to the left down the road. “That’s the road we were coming up when we left the beach but it didn’t go through, remember?” I nodded and then David did too. “So my instincts weren’t wrong, I just didn’t expect that it didn’t go through. My map of Washtenaw County doesn’t include any Livingston County, that’s the county just north of ours. And the big Michigan roadmap doesn’t have all these little dirt roads.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll see”, he said, his eyes twinkling again.

We drove up to this house that kind of looked like our house. It had a screen door, like our house, but it had this giant American flag sticking up from the corner of the roof. It had big words on each of the windows. I could read “LUNCHES” on one of the windows and “POST CARDS” on another. Then the third window had a word, “SOUVENIRS”, that I didn’t know. Above one of the windows was a sign that said “RANCH HOUSE GRILL”, and I knew the “RANCH” and “HOUSE” words, and I figured out how to say the other “GRILL” one. I knew what a “ranch” was from seeing those Western shows on TV, but I didn’t know what a “grill” was, but maybe I would find out. Mom said that usually the most important word on a sign was the last one. There was also one of those red and white “Coca Cola” signs, and a big picture of that “Devil” guy with the horns on his head and a tail that had an arrow thing at the end, though this guy looked pretty silly instead of scary.

Some older kids in the park liked to talk about the “Devil”, at least for pretending, but some said that he was real. Those older kids sometimes said stuff that wasn’t right just to scare you, but I think some others really “believed” it. That was a word grownups used sometimes about stuff that maybe wasn’t real, or maybe was, but you WANTED it to be real, like Santa Claus. Some older kids used that word too, I guess to sound more right like grownups.

That Devil guy could be really scary when kids talked about him, because they said he was in charge of this place called “Hell”, where some kids said you would go after you die if you were bad or if you didn’t “believe in” that other “God” guy. Kids would say that Devil guy was the worst badguy of all, worse than that Hitler guy who was in charge of Germany during the War.

And that God guy was supposed to be the best goodguy of all, and he was supposed to help you if you believed in him. He was supposed to be in charge of another place called “Heaven”, that you went to when you were dead if you had believed in him before you were dead, and also didn’t do any really bad stuff. But then other kids said that if God was such a good guy, why did he make you go to Hell if you didn’t believe in him.

It was all interesting, but also scary and made me worried if I thought about it too much. But this picture of the Devil I was looking at was pretty silly, so I don’t think the person who made it really believed in him.

So dad opened the screen door and we walked into that house with the flag and all the signs. One part had one of those eating places with tables and chairs where you could sit and eat the food you got.

The other part was pretty strange. It had a window that was open, but when you looked through it you saw another room but not the outside. Then next to the window, coming out of the wall, was this head and front part of some big animal. It LOOKED real, and I was afraid to touch it. But it couldn’t be real, because how could you take it off the rest of the animal? It made me really worried and I looked at dad and he figured out what I was worried about.

“That’s the head of a deer, or some animal like that”, he said, “Some guy probably shot the animal when he was hunting and then had its head cut off and mounted like that as a trophy of his hunting ability.” What dad said made me even MORE worried, that grownups did that kind of stuff. I wondered if they did that to people too, but I was afraid to ask.

A sign on the top of that strange window said “POST OFFICE”, and I knew what that was, because mom had taken me to the post office on that Stadium street. It was where you went to get those “stamps” you put on letters before you put them in one of those “mailboxes” out next to the sidewalk. We also went there to send “packages” to other people, like Aunt Pat or my grandmother and grandfather. Mom said a “package”, was a box that you put stuff in and wrapped up in this special brown paper and wrote somebody else’s “address” on so the post office people would take it there, even if it was really far away.

But then the sign below it, in the middle of the window, said “POST OFFICE HELL, MICH.” I pointed at the sign and looked at dad.

“Yep”, dad said, nodding slowly with his lips pushed together, “We’re in Hell. Well… at least Hell, Michigan. I always knew it was up here north of Silver Lake, but never been.”

“But we’re not dead”, I said. He laughed through his nose.

“Not since I last checked”, he said, his eyes twinkling. Then I could tell he was thinking about something that would be fun.

“Let’s send your mom a postcard”, he said, with a big smile on his face, “from Hell.” I nodded. David nodded too but he still kept looking at that animal head thing on the wall.

In the store and eating place part of the house there was this metal thing that you could spin around with a bunch of different postcards in it. There was one with a picture of this place we were in and this red Devil guy with a long tail with an arrow on the end. Then red letters said “U.S. POST OFFICE HELL, MICHIGAN”.

“Shall we send her that one?” dad asked. David and I both nodded. I knew we were being silly, like grownups sometimes were, specially at parties. But I couldn’t remember the last time dad was silly, but I liked that he was. Dad paid money for the postcard and then got us hotdogs to eat and Seven-ups to drink. While we ate we helped him write on the back of the postcard to send to mom. We all figured out things to write on it, though David just wrote his name.

Dad read to us what he wrote. “Liz… People have been telling me to go here for years, so I decided to finally take their advice. And by the way, the road here was mostly unpaved.”

Then I wrote, “It’s not so bad. The hotdog was good.”

David wrote his name, though it was hard to read. Dad and I wrote our names too. Then dad wrote mom’s name and our “address” on the other part of the back of the postcard, next to where we’d done our writing.

The same woman that we gave money for the postcard and gave us our hotdogs went through this other door and then was behind that strange window. Dad gave her more money for that stamp, and dad licked it with his tongue and stuck it on the top right part and gave it back to her.

“Do a lot of people do this?” he asked her, “Send postcards from here?”

“Oh yes”, she said, smiling, “You folks are probably the tenth today.”

***

When we finally got back home, we had sung that beer song all the way down to the last number.

One bottle of beer on the wall
One bottle of beer
Take one down
Pass it around
No more bottles of beer on the wall

Dad sang “no more”, but I sang “zero”, because it was my favorite number.

Mom had her “easel” in the middle of the living room and the room smelled like that “paint” stuff. I could tell she was making a picture of that shiny “pitcher” thing she poured those “Bloody Marys” out of at my birthday party. When she saw us she smiled and looked happy.

“Gentlemen”, she said, “I had the best day! How was yours?”

Dad looked at me, his eyes twinkling and his head nodding just a little bit that I should say what we had talked about saying to her.

“Mom”, I said, “We’ve been to Hell and back!”