Me and Howard

Mildew and his older sister were the children of a drunken father and a hard-working mother. He used to pour out his father's booze and refill the bottle with water. His father never knew the difference. Mildew was immensely talented in smart remarks, which sometimes got him in trouble at school. Each school day began with Morning Music, played on a Zenith console record player/radio combination that stood in the lower hall outside the principal's office, with the volume turned up high enough that we could hear it on the second floor. It was supposed to teach us music appreciation. One morning "The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies" from The Nutcracker Suite was playing, and Miss Healy asked if anyone could identify it. Mildew said out of the corner of his mouth that it was "The Dance of the Bucktooth Dolls," earning my brother's admiration and a trip to the cloakroom. By the miracle of creation that endows teachers with eyes in the backs of their heads and hearing like bats, Miss Healy was the equal of any modern military reconnaissance mission. No student ever pulled anything over on her. She died of cancer in my last year at the school, and I felt strange about it, as though somehow we ornery kids had caused it. We four musketeers devised inventions to add spice to our rather mundane lives: ramps in the cinder alley for jumping our bicycles (Doc's collapsed on landing and we had to extricate him from the wreckage, and Corky Lyons's Silver Flyer went all to pieces); a wild excursion in which we rode our bicycles hell-bent-for-leather down the alleys with our legs akimbo, raking the empty garbage cans into a clattering wake behind us; a backyard circus in which two or three neighborhood kids performed such astound-ing feats as balancing a broom on the chin, cartwheeling, and a sensational leaping from the garage roof onto a wicker settee, which flipped up into my stomach and knocked the wind out of me. I had begun the events of the afternoon by climbing inside a doghouse purloined from some neighboring yard. I sold tickets out of the small window near the top. One of the boys had brought a box of Chuckles candy, a gift of his father who owned a store, and they proved to be the highlight of the day. We gave everyone's nickel back when Mom called us at suppertime.