The barn windows that seemed so far away from the house, the ones that suddenly sported little BB-sized holes while we were visiting my grandparents? I'm guessing that damage probably wasn't all that mysterious to them.
And I doubt if they thought I was just reading the articles, too.
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So I will now get into some events that may actually need a bit of heavenly cleansing. Living thirteen miles from town, I would never go home between the end of the school day and that evening's high school ballgame. Instead, I would head to the pool hall, where I could play pool and hang out until it was time to board the bus or hit the locker room. Racks of 8-ball cost a dime, or you could play snooker for a quarter. Oddly enough, cases of beer, conveniently stacked by the rear door that led to an alley, were sometimes free. We didn't abuse this handy little small-town perk, but we didn't ignore it, either. And for that, I am truly repentant.
My firm belief in the option of making a deal with unknown, all-seeing beings hovering somewhere "up there" was reinforced at an early age. When I was in the fifth grade, a friend and I relieved his dad of the thankless chore of smoking a couple of cigarettes. We would do the deed ourselves, carefully lifting them from the open pack and sneaking up into a grove of trees behind his house. His father apparently possessed the same otherworldly powers as my dad, or at least the investigative skills of the CSI folks, because he was soon crawling up to our hiding place, using his bat-like sense of hearing to follow our adolescent coughing and laughing that led to our ultimate bust. Fearing that he would tell my dad what he had witnessed, I immediately promised any spirit listening that I would neversmoke another cigarette if I could just skate on this current deal. It worked. I didn't light another one, and the rest is karma history. I am forever grateful to Jake Jacobson for not ratting me out.
But he knows that now. Not because I told him at the time, or even several years later. And certainly not because he will be perusing the pages of Westword this week. Jake is dead, and I believe that people in the great beyond have the power to see in our hearts, to witness in retrospect the events that will be or have been recorded in our ultimate naughty-or-nice ledger. Santa might threaten to leave us a lump of coal for Christmas, but powers greater than him may be using usfor coal, stoking eternal flames with our rum-soaked carcasses if we list too heavily to the bad side. And being a formerly human Sterno can is a sobering thought for a soul, no matter how drunk we may be.
My mother is also in that position of knowing and seeing all, peering down at the rest of us as dead people living in heaven are wont to do. So for all the bad things I have done -- the eggs on the police car; cheating my way through algebra; sharpening a cutting wit on the defenseless, warm goo of my schoolmates' teenage self-esteem; voting for Ralph Nader; all those times my friends made me do something against my will, especially that time we...oh, crap. She can see right through that "friends" story now. Let's just say, to Mom and everyone, "I'm sorry." -- Neal Combs
