Hopscotch

Those damned kids were on his damned property again.

Wesley Fellows lifted his aging, creaking body out of his armchair and muted his favorite news program, interrupting the newscaster’s particularly heated argument against putting litter boxes in elementary school bathrooms. The armchair left an imprint of his body molded into it as he stood. Dust danced through the sheets of Saturday sunlight cutting through his dark living room, one whose furnishings hadn’t changed much since the early nineties.

He leaned close to his window and poked open the wooden slats to see one--two--three--no, four neighborhood kids on his asphalt driveway, coloring on it with chalk, yelling and laughing and carrying on. His old eyes couldn’t tell what they were writing from so far away. 

“The hell are they doin’?” he muttered to himself as he snorted a glob of phlegm out of his sinuses. The brats were probably writing some new-fangled slurs all over his fresh-paved driveway, he imagined. It angered him, not only because he never would have dreamed of doing such a thing at their age, but because he feared he wouldn’t understand what they’d written about him. 

It didn’t matter. He had a perfectly functioning garden hose, and he wasn’t afraid to use it.

He left through his front door, which was just as creaky as he was, and let the screen door slam loudly behind him. That caught the little monsters’ attention. All four of them stood up and stopped what they were doing, staring at him, wide-eyed, like deer frozen in front of a semi truck. Wesley was happy to play the part of the truck. 

He sneered and waved his hand dismissively at them as he shouted, “What do you think you’re doing? Huh? Don’t you know how to respect other peoples’ property? Didn’t your mothers teach you anything?”

They continued to stare at him, terrified, until a little Black boy spoke up, the youngest and smallest of the group. 

“It’s just chalk,” he said, his reedy voice barely audible over someone’s overly loud exhaust sputtering in the distance. 

“Just chalk?” he repeated mockingly. “I don’t care what it is. It’s on my property!”

“But--” began a lanky, dark haired girl with glasses, but Wesley cut her off.

“Go on!” he shouted, as if shooing away squirrels from his birdfeeder. “I know where all of you live, and I’ll go and tell your mothers, next time, or whoever’s in charge of you.”

That was a lie. Not about the will to snitch to their guardians, but about knowing where they lived. He hadn’t kept track of his neighbors for twenty years. What was the point? No one really cared about each other, anymore, not like in the old days before the internet ruined one-on-one human conversation.

The kids continued to stare at him, and gave each other worried glances.

“Didn’t you hear me?” he barked. “Go! You want me to call the cops instead of your mothers?”

That finally got them to move. They gathered their big sticks of colored chalk into a huge, yellow bucket, and trudged off together in the direction of the neighborhood park.

Good. That’s where they should be. Far away from his house.

He glanced at what they’d drawn on his nice, black asphalt. Nothing lewd, thank god, but an awful lot of rainbows, and a badly drawn unicorn. 

He sniffed disdainfully. There were two boys in that group. One of them had been working on the unicorn before he’d startled them. Didn’t boys know how to act, anymore, or what they were supposed to like?

Wesley unraveled the hose from the front of his house, turned on the water, and made short work of their drawings. A flood of brightly colored chalk-water trickled down his driveway, through the gutter, and into the storm drain, where it belonged.

Later that evening, as he was eating his microwave dinner for one, a bit of nostalgia floated into his brain from his clogged-up subconscious, as clear as day.

Summer, 1959. He remembered that it had to be 1959, because his parents had thrown the biggest, wildest basement party the block had ever seen on New Year’s Eve to usher in 1960, and it was before then. Also, his very best friend, Greg, hadn’t yet moved away to a military base in Juneau, Alaska.

He and Greg, utterly bored on one terribly hot August day, had decided to scratch up Mr. Butcher’s brand new, cherry red Cadillac Coupe de Ville, for no other reason than they thought it would be hilarious.

Well, admittedly, the initial idea had been Wesley’s. Greg had nearly chickened out, but Wesley had goaded him on, calling him a ‘big dumb scaredy-puss.’ That bruise to Greg’s honor had finally convinced him.

As they were scratching random curse words into the driver’s side door, Mr. Butcher had rushed out of his house, screaming and roaring at them like a bear, wearing nothing but a robe and boxers.

Greg dropped his house key on the pavement and ran like the blazes. Wesley hadn’t been so lucky. He’d gotten up a second too late, and Mr. Butcher had grabbed him by the overalls and beaten his backside black and blue. He had to go to school with a limp the next day, he’s gotten whooped so bad. 

The memory made Wesley chuckle between bites of microwaved ravioli. Those were the days. He missed Greg, too, wondered where he’d ended up, and if he was still alive.

After dinner, Wesley started his computer, closed all the pop-ups about ‘critical driver updates’, and logged on to Facebook. He searched for Greg Jensen, got a few results, but the one he thought looked most like his old friend hadn’t posted in four years. That didn’t bode well, but Wesley didn’t want to find out why he’d gone silent. Lots of people stopped using social media for no reason.

That was probably for the best.

Wesley got ready for bed at nine-o-clock, started up his CPAP machine, and fell into a deep sleep.

It was early Sunday afternoon when Wesley woke up, several hours past his normal wake-up time. He had no need for an alarm clock anymore, but getting up so late irritated him anyway. He’d have to skip breakfast altogether, and his coffee would hit him too late and keep him awake into the night. Already miffed, a high pitched screech reached him from out in the front of the house.

He ripped the CPAP mask off of his face and coughed angrily. Damned stupid kids again!

Wesley got dressed and stomped outside in his old, foam flip-flops. It was those same four kids. Of course it was. He folded his arms across his chest, somehow vaguely disappointed that they weren’t technically on his property. They were gathered on the sidewalk in front of it, though, and that was almost as bad. Morally, and legally, he couldn’t do a damned thing about it.

They didn’t stop playing on his account, knowing they were relatively safe. Wesley edged a little closer to them, down the driveway, on the pretense of picking up his newspaper off the ground. They had drawn a passable hopscotch game in a multitude of rainbow colors. 

He sniffed to himself. Well, that wasn’t so bad, he supposed. At least it wasn’t unicorns.

“Hey!”

Wesley looked up in surprise. It was the little Black boy again, standing precariously close to his asphalt driveway, literally toeing the line. For some reason, he gave Wesley a gap-toothed smile.

“Hello,” he grumbled. What were they up to? “I… see you made a game of hopscotch.”

The little boy nodded, while the other three looked on, cautiously. “Do you know how to play?”

Wesley scoffed. “Do I know--kid, my generation invented hopscotch!”

That wasn’t true, and Wesley knew it, but he didn’t much care, either.

“Do you want to?” he asked. “It goes on forever!”

Wesley gazed down the sidewalk, surprised to see that, indeed, it looked like it went all the way down the drive and out of sight.

“Deshawn, don’t,” hissed one of the girls, the portlier one, who was either Mexican or Indian, Wesley couldn’t tell.

“Yeah,” piped up a sandy-haired boy, the one who’d drawn the unicorn. “He might break a hip or something.” The boy pursed his lips hard, trying to hide a smirk.

Wesley should have been furious at that, but something stopped his anger in its tracks. He tilted his head at the snarky little kid and gave him a grin and a nod.

“You know what?” he said, coming to the sidewalk. “I will. Why not? Let’s see if your little game of hopscotch can beat Old Man Fellows.”

He nearly chortled at himself. Old Man Fellows? He’d never called himself Old Man anything before.

Wesley started on the first square with the band of kids behind him, spectating. The game came back to him as easily as riding a bicycle. Muscle memory made his legs move the way they were supposed to, with surprisingly little arthritis pain. His flip-flops flipped and flopped as he jumped from one block to the next, to the next, to the next. Before he knew it, he was all the way to the end of the block, and on to the next one. They’d drawn the game across the street, as well. 

From far behind him, he heard one of the girls remark, “Wow, he’s really doing it!”

Wesley laughed, feeling as light as air. He’d driven down that street thousands upon thousands of times to get to the main road, but he hadn’t walked down it in years, much less hopscotched down it. Things had changed. The tiny tree someone had planted years ago had turned into a beautiful, healthy peach tree, whose blossoms rained down on the street like snow. He passed a yard which had been owned by a hoarder, but someone must have recently bought the house and cleaned it up nicely. Three maniacal Chihuahuas came running to the border of the fence, yapping at him.

“Hi, doggies!” He waved at them as he hopped past, which only made them yap faster.

Wesley hopped and flopped for blocks, wondering at all the things he hadn’t noticed, good and bad. Some nasty graffiti was gone from the base of a bridge, replaced by a nice mural. Someone had ripped up a bench that he would have liked to sit on.

Before he knew it, he’d reached the end of the game, all the way at the beginning of the neighborhood, at the entrance to the main road. The kids had stopped numbering the squares several blocks ago. Wesley looked behind him, amazed at how far he’d gone. He wouldn’t be able to see his house again until he’d gone back several blocks.

He looked down at the final square, the one he was standing on, feeling suddenly very, very tired.

“Oh well,” he sighed to himself, with a smile. “I guess it’s back to square one.”