Religion briefly entered our lives, uninvited, six weeks earlier (about three before school started) during the dirty month of August in which the grass is thick with hoppers and Scotch broom pods crack and let loose their dusty spawn. We were hiding in the bushes on a Saturday afternoon, waiting…

A Richard Speck-type in a primered Ranchero stopped and dropped three stacks of jackrags in the alley behind Elmo’s Adult Books and rang the bell. This happened every other Saturday, like visitation rights. Sometimes the Speck waited for old Elmo to waddle back, sometimes he’d drive off before the fat fuck unlocked the back door. It was one of the times the Speck drove off first. Tess stood lookout, and I dashed from our side of the alley, snatched a bundle, and got back under cover with seconds to spare. Then it was off to Fort Oxenfree, leaving Elmo a little poorer.

We moved as silently and swiftly as Indian scouts toward Fort Oxenfree. The alley ran about a mile and bisected Callow Avenue and Wyckoff Street. The Wyckoff side of the alley lay at the foot of Torqwamni Hill (forever “T-Hill”), and stood fifteen to twenty feet higher than Elmo’s and the other trashy businesses along Callow. It was a verdant bluff choked with brambles, weeds, struggling dogwoods, ivy, and switchgrass so riotously out of hand that it topped six feet in some places. Tess and I had created a secret world in the bluff, and as we made our way through the paths we had previously formed in the foliage, our feet automatically adjusted to the varying slant of the ground as though we were biped mountain goats.

Fort Oxenfree lay about a hundred and fifty yards south of Elmo’s, directly behind the White Pig Tavern. This meant we had to cross “the gorge,” which was the only relatively bald spot on our route, yet it was partially concealed by a peeling madrone which grew sideways and at a weird angle out of the bluff. Tess deftly crossed the short chasm, which stood over a good long drop, by using the exposed roots of a hemlock for handholds. I hurled the bundle across the gorge, she stopped it with her foot and I crossed even more quickly than she had.

A noisome swirl of portly bluebottles greeted us upon our arrival at “Fort O.” They were attracted by a recent explosion in a flat of Shasta tiki punch, which Tess had left in the sun. Soon there would be yellowjackets.

“Your pets missed you.”

“Hardee har har.”

We had selected the site for Fort O because you’d need a Sherpa to find it. It was a wildly overgrown flat spot we’d knocked down to about the size of a jail cell. It lay at the highest point in the bluff, atop an old stone wall gone over to blackberries and feral primroses. The front and the far side of Fort O were protected by a very long and sticker-bush laden fall to the concrete below. Entry from the bluff required a five foot climb up the side of the stone wall and through a trapdoor that Tess had made sticks and switchgrass. No friendly way in from behind, either. The alley side of Wyckoff Street was mostly a redundant series of vacant lots overwhelmed by Scotch broom, discarded washing machines and tires–as well as a seemingly sentient network of hiding, grabby ground brambles that would wrap around your ankles if you forgot to lift your feet, and goddamn stinging nettles that raised such hell with your skin that you never overlooked them twice. The Jesus of that kind of vacant lot lay behind Fort Oxenfree. It was such a shitty and hazardous little hellfield that not even the stew bums dared to flop in it.

I dropped the bundle and heard the typical Saturday afternoon din of the Pig below. Our vantage point behind a wall of switchgrass placed us about fifty feet from and twenty above the Pig. As always, drunken Specks bellowed and roared, and their pig-like women squealed and roared–all of it accompanied by the unsatisfying twunk of misstruck cue balls and a steady flow of C&W music coming from the jukebox.

Tess sang along in her sweet little girl voice:

“I turned twenty-one in prison,

Doin’ life without parole–

No one could ever steer me,

But Mama tried, Mama tried…”

We’d hit Elmo’s in preparation for the upcoming school year. The boys at Charleston Elementary were by and large sick perverts to begin with, but even more so when they hit ten; it was like some kind of alarm went off in their pants. Dirty pictures sold well and for a good price in the playground; Elmo’s wares were as disgusting as it got.

“Looky here,” Tess said, showing me the latest issue of Sweet Cocksucker, after we opened the bundle. “Must be a fiver here for sure.”

“Let’s bag ‘em for now,” I said. Which was exactly what we did. We wrapped them in polyurethane and packing tape, then placed the waterproofed booty inside the cache. Although Fort O was nothing special, the three-by-three square cache hole was. We’d dug it out that spring and reinforced it with planks, and waterproofed it with the same never ending roll of polyurethane we had boosted from behind Minder’s Meats.

What made the cache special was the cover Tess had connived from discarded bamboo and endless blades of switchgrass. There wasn’t as much as a screw or a nail in it. Using what she found lying around, she’d somehow created a dead match with the ground, as she had with the trapdoor. She’d also designed a system of “drapes” in the grass wall between us and the alley, which involved pulling strings to get and keep a view of the alley instead of using your hands, but wouldn’t open so wide as to blow our cover. Just nine, Tess had already long displayed superior artistic and mechanical talents–Not that it mattered to the fossilized fuckheads who ran the City of Charleston school systems. Girls who made the mistake of getting born around 1960–welfare brats to boot–had yet to experience much in the way of Women’s Lib. Besides, the district produced more felons than intellectuals, and we’d both realized early all you had to do was show up and do a minimal amount of work to pass to the next grade. A lot of tax money is fed to hopeless causes.

Tess opened a can of tiki punch that had been properly stored (It had to be piss warm, at best; my stomach clenched at the thought of it). She saved the ring top in a baggie with many others. Years later she gave me a stunning hippy art Statue of Liberty created from a thousand or more ring tabs. She’d painted each of them an outrageous color, and had meticulously looped them together over the course of hundreds of hours. Told me it was Janis Joplin singing into the torch. People offer me money for it all the time. I always say no.

Fort O faced east, which allowed us to luxuriate in the afternoon shade cast by Torqwamni Hill, listless from our labor and the heat, shooing bluebottles.Tess drank that stomach-turning tiki punch, sang along with the juke, and kept sneaking peeks at the Pig through the drapes because she found entertainment in the frequent sight of a Speck taking a leak in the alley (I later learned that the heads were one seaters–so you saw a lot of that). I began to fiddle with the slingshot I had reluctantly accepted in trade for a copy of Juggs during what you might call our “End of School Sale.”

I was three months shy of twelve; I’d get my first period for Christmas. Yet throughout that last year of my childhood something had already begun changing in my mind. It was a feeling especially keen during the progression of late summer afternoon shadows; a causeless anxiety underscored by the incessant cracking of broom pods in the quiet moments; a forlorn certainty that all was lost though hardly begun.

And there were times when I’d look at my gifted little sister and feel guilty about what I was doing to her.

I had plenty to feel guilty about. You see, every last thing–from the dirty magazines right on to the can of tiki punch Tess was drinking was stolen, even the returnable soda and beer bottles we had hidden in the grass because there were too many for the cache had been lifted from one place or another. If something could be boosted from a loading dock or a car in our little realm, we had it up there at Fort Oxenfree. Besides a substantial amount of hardcore porn, we had filled empty pickle jars with parking meter change we cleaned out of car ashtrays, some folding money, endless amounts of penny candies and gum lifted from a dozen different stores, several packs of cigarettes, lighters, a box of shotgun shells, sunglasses galore, prescription pills, lids of grass. We also had a bunch of cameras we didn’t know what to do with because we weren’t old enough to pawn stuff. Tess got the notion to “Robin Hood” them. We’d walk around and stick them in front of doors and in mailboxes of the shittiest looking places. We even left one for Mom and Anna Lou. They both pawned theirs.

And shoplifting was a scream. We’d dress for school and go into a store downtown (never shit in your own yard), and while Tess charmed the clerk, I’d get after everything that wasn’t nailed down and shove it in my pockets and underwear. Then we’d buy some stuff to make it look good. Alas, even the slingshot had been paid for with stolen titties. Only an incredibly gross 14-inch dildo that somehow oozed out of Elmo’s and just lay there in the alley had been gained in an honest finders-keepers sort of way. (I eventually tossed that beaut through the open window of my teacher’s car and hid in the bushes for the payoff.)

And it was all my idea.

If discovered and linked to us, the contents of the cache (especially the dope and porn) probably meant two tickets to the Mission Hill Academy for Girls. My guilt figured that I had it coming, but since none of it had been Tess’s idea, and since I was supposed to protect her, I figured I’d better try to do something.

“Tess?”

“Huh?”

“If we ever get busted, you don’t know shit about the stuff in the hole.”

“Half’s mine, Sarah.”

“I’m not sayin’ it’s not,” I said. “Just sayin’ if Mom or the cops or some other fucker we can’t do nothing about comes round and has a look in the hole, then there’s hell to pay. Just act like you know nothing about it. Let me do the talking. Don’t be such a molecule.”

Tess sometimes got shitty about being called a molecule, even though she heard it plenty. She handled the situation by fetching at least six Bazooka Joe’s from the cache and sticking them in her mouth. So gross. She sucked on them until they got soft enough to chew. That was her way of making certain she could give me the silent treatment. Pink drool dribbled down her chin.

I sighed. So much for the high road. Anyway, it must’ve sounded pretty cheap coming from me. There was something people saw in me that was different from “just a girl.” I was tall, strong and as unnecessarily violent as I needed to be. Some called me “Psycho” behind my back, but I didn’t discourage it because it added weight to the “Tell and I’ll kill you” I dispensed at the end of every porn transaction.

Tess never stayed mad at me long. Even when the years came that saw me extract her from one shithole squat to drag her to rehab for the God-only-knows-how-manyieth time, she’d be quick to forgive me. I’d strong-arm her to the car and she’d be screaming just how much she hated my faggot guts, and that for a hummer she could have my dyke cunt raped and murdered. Then she’d cry and promise it would be different this time. And I’d say my lines, those sincere there for you words that were never enough.

She tapped me on the arm, trying not to choke on the wad of gum in her mouth because she was laughing. I was rooting through the cache for a handful of the thousand or so shooting marbles we got hung with that spring (marbles as a game was always around, but sometimes it rose to a faddish level as it had that April. We stole untold dozens of bags from several drug stores and sold them at half price. Couldn’t give the fucking things away come May). I had gotten real good with the slingshot and could take a blackberry off its stem from twenty yards.

“What?” Then I saw.

Tess had parted the grass to check on the wild side of life and sure enough there was a Speck urinating behind the Pig. There were an inordinate amount of Specks in Charleston. All were skinny creeps who brylcreemed their hair into a pomp as though it was still 1950-something; and they had boney faces and small muddy eyes that conveyed an overall dullness of mind. Still, even a Speck usually had the decency to piss on the wall, but he was facing us. It wasn’t the first dick we’d ever seen. On the top floor of our building was a grown man yet forever a child with Down syndrome who lived with his aged mother. He’d see kids, and if his mother wasn’t around, he’d ask “Wanna see my elephant?” His name was Eddie but we called him Dumbo. Sometimes there was talk about sending Dumbo away to a “special school.” But that never happened partly because he never touched anyone and mainly because he was retarded.

“I’ll shoot him in the weiner,” I said, taking aim with the slingshot.

A horrified expression raced with consent to fill Tess’s face. She was that way. Her eyes and face were extremely expressive and often contained contradictory messages vying for control.

I was just playing around–I’d no more shoot the Speck in his elephant than yell out our secret location. For I may have been antisocial but I wasn’t reckless; I reckoned that even a Speck could figure out where the shot had come from. But Tess would have done it; she wasn’t big on thinking ahead.