butts. There were also candy wrappers and old balls of toilet paper. Either the police did not consider this area relevant, or they had just given up.
People are disgusting, said Zack. This is way too much evidence.
I knelt on the ground with the bread bag. Ticks were crawling all over me. I said we should quit and drown the ticks in the lake. So we left the woods and stripped down on the beach. The ticks were mainly still in our clothes and not many were attached yet, except that Angus had one stuck on his balls.
Hey, Zack, I need some help!
Oh, fuck you, said Zack.
Cappy laughed. Why don’t you let him stay on till he gets really big? They’ll call you Three Balls.
Like Old Man Niswi, I said.
He really had three. It’s true. My grandma knows, said Zack.
Shut up, said Cappy. I can’t take hearing about your grandma doing it with a three-balled man.
We were in the water now, splashing around diving and mock-fighting. We’d been so hot and sweaty and itchy it felt wonderful. I reached down to make sure no tick had gotten me where that one had got Angus. I went underwater and stayed as long as I could. When I came up, Zack was talking.
She said they tapped against her ass like three big ripe plums.
Your grandma says all kinds of things, said Cappy.
She told me all about it, Zack said.
There are Indian grandmas who get too much church and Indian grandmas where the church doesn’t take, and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young. Zack had one of those last sort. Grandma Ignatia Thunder. She had been to Catholic boarding school but it just hardened her, she said, the way it hardened the priests. She spoke Indian and talked about men’s secrets. When she and Mooshum got together to reminisce about the old days, my father said they talked so dirty the air around them turned blue.
When the water numbed us, we got out and made fun of one another’s shriveled dicks.
Zack laughed at me, Aren’t you a little short for a Storm Trooper?
Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you?
Zack had a Darth Vader, circumcised, and I did too. Cappy’s and Angus’s still had their hoods, so they were Emperors. We argued over whether it was better to be an Emperor or a Darth Vader—which one girls liked better. We made a fire. We sat around it, naked, on logs already carved with the names of other boys, picking ticks off our clothing and flicking them into the fire.
Worf’s an Emperor, said Angus.
For sure, said Cappy.
Nah, I said. Anyhow, the important one would be Data’s, because they’d give an android the kind girls like best, right? And he would definitely be a Darth Vader. I don’t see him as anything but a Darth.
I think everyone on that ship’s a Darth, said Cappy, except for Worf.
But hey, said Zack, a Klingon? You’d think hung, man, but there’s no bump in his uniform.
Do you question Klingon power? said Cappy, standing up. He looked down. Rise, my friend.
No response. We started laughing at him. Cappy laughed too. After a while, we wished we had another cigarette and we were hungry again. Angus went off to take a piss. He walked into the lake and went around the fence, into the woods.
Holeee, he yelled.
Then he marched out of the woods with two full six-packs of Hamm’s beer. One in each hand. Cappy and Zack whooped with joy. I ran toward him. Every other can we’d crushed or bottle we’d found had been Old Mill or Blatz, the reservation beer of the time. In spite of the dancing, drumming, feather-wearing Indian bear in the Hamm’s commercial, we were a Blatz people.
Drop that, I yelled. Angus froze. He laid the six-packs carefully on the ground.
I think he left those, I said. I think it’s evidence. There will be fingerprints.
Uh . . . I could see that Angus was thinking as fast as he could. He talked fast, too. Does water erase fingerprints? I found these in an open cooler. The beer was covered with water.
You found his stash, I said.
Can I pick up the beer? asked Angus.
I guess, I said.
Can I crack one open?
I looked at my friends. Yeah, I said.
Their hands shot out and pulled cans from the plastic ring.
If there’s no fingerprints then the main evidence is that he is a Hamm’s drinker, I said. Make of that what you