Alton

This week’s new flash fiction is some suburban lost and found.

Alton

In Little League there was one kid who didn’t look like the rest of us. Lily white. One and only one. Alton. Back then, where I lived, it was segregated by town, almost completely. Back then and now.

I never thought then what that might have felt like for him. I was young enough that it didn’t mean anything to me. I would learn such inattention was not universal.

Alton and I bonded in the outfield where the lesser lights were consigned. He would come over to play after school. We never went to his house. I wasn’t exactly sure where it was. He’d ride his bike to me.

My mother didn’t ask for much. But she got in her head one year that she wanted a fancy watch. And Dad gave her one. A Bulova Caravelle. Nicer than a Timex, I heard her squeal.

Just as suddenly, it was gone. She remembered taking it off when she got home from the Safeway. What was the point of the damn thing if you couldn’t show it off to the other PTA moms. But it wasn’t on her dresser or in her jewelry box the next morning when she looked for it to put back on for parent-teacher meetings.

A daylong frantic search yielded no success. At dinner that night, as the endless postmortem rolled on, it was remarked by someone, not me, that Alton had been at the house the previous day. When the watch disappeared.

That didn’t mean anything to me. But to Dad it meant everything.

That was Alton’s last visit. Dad insisted. No need to press charges, Dad offered graciously. I didn’t understand. Moped. But soon, as is the way of youth, I moved on.

I was just a bystander. It never occurred to me then how it might have hit Alton. At school, when I saw him, we each looked away like we’d been caught staring at a cheerleader. I hardly saw him again.

About a year later my life had chugged on without incident. I’d developed a sudden and apparently inexplicable interest in yard work. I wasn’t yet qualified to cut the lawn, but I was deemed able to handle the hand trimming around the flower beds. It was tedious, hunchbacked work. None of the glory of steering the gas guzzling stand up mower, gripping and revving the handlebar like Evel Knievel.

But there was a silver lining to the toil. My father’s shed out back held the clippers but also housed the old man’s impressive reading library. Hidden Playboys. The best the pre-internet ‘70s could offer. So, ostensibly fulfilling my assigned duties, I would adjourn to the shack almost daily for quality time with Hef’s finest. On one of these “reading” breaks, I knocked over Dad’s toolbox in my excitement. And there it was. My mother’s watch.

I never did anything about that watch. Directly. Dad bought mom a new one. I knew we didn’t have that kind of money to throw around. That made me understand how important his little mission had been to him.

That summer I learned something else about old Dad. He’d been spending time at my friend Charlie’s house. Charlie never mentioned it. But I saw Dad leaving there. More than once. He didn’t see me.

Charlie’s own dad traveled a lot. So we’d have our run of his house when his mother would shop or play tennis.

Once, while Charlie was in the toilet, I snuck into his parents’ bedroom. Rummaged the dresser. Fished out a pair of ladies’ delicates. Fire engine red.

They looked too small to fit Mom. But in case of any doubt, I was pretty sure she’d know by the monogram.

I balled them into my jeans’ front pocket. Snuck them home. Put them in the dryer. God knows Dad wouldn’t see them there. I wasn’t sure if he knew where it was.

Ultimately, we never associated that summer with the lost watch. Or Alton. He joined the Marines and never was heard from. No, that was the summer we all remember as the time Dad lived at Olsen’s Motor Inn for a couple months.

He was home by Labor Day. After that, things seemed normal. But who knows what passed between the adults.

Maybe that year Dad didn’t come to any grand discoveries regarding the broader universe. Or himself.

But he sure as hell learned something about me.