Empty Lot (Short Story‪)‬

Seasons passed, and years, and still the Canadians would not fill our vacancies. Eventually the old man lost the Maple Leaf Motel. He was bartending at a bowling alley that summer, and my folks, never all that guarded in their despair, were always holding forth on how far and how fast we'd come down in the world. As if it needed mentioning. We had moved to an apartment complex that was sided in teal Masonite and situated in the ugliest block of our town's only industrial neighborhood. It hadn't escaped my notice that our rooms there were sweatboxes, or that bacon, cookies, and real milk were now nearly absent from our diet, but for a long time my family's misfortune remained obscure to me, for I was only rarely to be found in my own body or my present predicament, a lad completely devoted then to my future as a self-made man. This was when flights of fighter jets roared over every picnic or pet show, a time so replete with masculine example that I was always moonstruck by my possibilities, and even if the folks were pissing and moaning and rolling their own cigarettes, I delivered the Lake City Ledger to more than a hundred homes, so I usually had some money in my pockets. You force yourself to it every morning. A boy never wants to leave his bed. But then you're up, a wedge of dry toast in your mouth, and you're on the Commander, and fifteen seconds later the NuVue Apartments are completely at your back, and you pick up your papers, learn once again to accommodate the misery of that canvas strap over your shoulder, your neck, and you ride out, your legs pulsing, and when you've breathed enough grassy air to get your second wind, then you're loose in the larger thing. Battle sounds appropriate to the various centuries erupt from your mouth, bronze thuds on hide, steel rings on steel, muskets chuff, machine guns trill, you reproduce the tympanic rolling of ack-ack from the depths of your throat. You bomb Nuremburg. You ride, if you care to, with Achilles against the doomed defenders of Troy, and you may die in these encounters, but you must never lose.