Magic Street Page 0,11

can't help it, you buy fake weed."

"Just give me the bag and fly on home to Mama," said Raymo. "Dumb little - "

"No, I'm okay with it, I'll smoke it with you."

"I don't want you to," said Raymo. "You a virgin, I don't want to be your first time."

Ceese hated it when he twisted everything to be about sex. "Let's just smoke it," said Ceese, and he started walking through the wildflowers growing profusely between the road and the lawn.

"Not here," said Raymo. "Somebody pack your head with stupid?"

"You said we going to smoke the weed up by the pipe."

"On the way back down the hill."

"We got to walk all the way up to the top?"

"When your daddy call somebody to see if you really go to the top, they say yes, they saw us go up there, we rode back down."

"My daddy don't know anybody higher up Cloverdale than his own house."

Just then an old homeless man came out of one of the houses on the downslope side of Cloverdale, carrying a bunch of grocery bags, some full, some empty. The old man winked at them and Ceese couldn't help it, he waved and smiled.

"You know that guy?" asked Raymo.

"He told me he your long-lost daddy, come to see how you turn out, decide if your mama be worth - "

"Shut up about my mama," said Raymo.

admitted that - Ceese only knew because his own mama told Miz Smitcher once.

They walked farther up the hill.

Word Williams was standing at the curb, looking down the street.

"Look at that kid, wishing he was us," said Raymo.

"He ain't even looking at us," said Ceese.

"Is so."

But he wasn't. As they got closer, he moved back onto his yard so he could look around them, down the hill.

"Whazzup, Word?" said Ceese.

Word looked at him like he'd seen him for the first time that moment.

The door to Word's house opened and his older sister Andrea leaned out and called to him.

"Get in here, Word, it's time to eat."

Word looked back down the road, then glanced at Ceese as if he wanted to ask a question.

"Word!" said Andrea. "Don't act like you don't hear me."

Word turned and walked back toward the house.

Raymo was a half-dozen steps ahead. Ceese ran to catch up.

"What you talk to that boy for?"

"Look like he was having some kind of problem," said Ceese.

"Just a little kid."

"My mama used to tend him and his little sister in the summer," said Ceese.

"She ever tend that older sister?" asked Raymo. "She hot."

"She wasn't then," said Ceese. It was weird to think of Andrea being "hot." Or maybe it was just that Raymo never thought that any girl was too rich or too smart or too pretty for him. Nothing out of reach for Raymo.

"Keep up," said Raymo.

They got to the top of the hill but Raymo insisted they walk right to the end of Cloverdale, where a fence blocked the road off from the upper part of Hahn Park. You could see the place where the golf course bottomed out, like a big green bowl. Or more like a green funnel, because at the lowest point you could see where a big culvert split the grass to capture all the runoff from the rain. Ceese didn't know if that water was piped down to the little valley by the hairpin turn where the drainpipe stood up like a totem pole. So he asked Raymo.

"How could it?" said Raymo.

"It's got to go somewhere."

"They got that huge drainage up there, you think they dump it down in that little valley so that one little pipe carry it all away? That little pipe just for the runoff from below the park."

Like you know everything, thought Ceese. But he didn't say it, because there was no reason to make Raymo mad, and besides, he was probably right.

"All right," said Raymo. "People seen us up here. Now they see us ride down."

"You know I can't make that hairpin turn."

Raymo looked at him like he was the stupidest kid in the world. "We don't want to make the hairpin turn, Cecil. We want to get off the road and onto the grass and up into the trees to smoke that weed you're carrying. Or did you think you just started growing weed in your pants?"

"I just don't want to fall down on the asphalt," said Ceese. "Scrape myself all up."

"Well, here's what you do," said Raymo. "You go real slow, back and forth across the road.

And then tomorrow, when you