Eddie and Sandy and Me

Head south off the new state road back onto the old one where the land is as flat as if the gods had taken an iron to it and gravel dust fills your nostrils and eyes, and the first house was Big Biff’s. At maybe 5-10, 160 pounds at best, he was not so big and didn’t deliver much of a biff, and no one I knew had actually seen him fight, but he’d cultivated that reputation, and no one messed with Big Biff. He’d just give you that evil eye, and off you’d slink. But this isn’t his story. Next you’d come to Eddie’s old six-bedroom farmhouse. Eddie was an only child but, like an aging lady of the night, it was cheap, so that’s where he and his parents lived, rattling around the musty old giant, sometimes rarely seeing one another, often because Eddie was with me, two peas in a pod, the older people said. Young as we were, both with Biff and Eddie and his parents we were learning a life lesson—things aren’t always as they look. No more than a football throw away was our house, a yellow clapboard with a tin roof that sang when it rained. And then, where the river twisted like a snake, was Sandy’s, Sandy of the winsome smile, the long legs, the body of a seductive grown woman. For us all roads, even this miserable ribbon of dust or mud depending on the season, led to her land of exotic discoveries to which all of us Indiana Joneses aspired. Except no one was invited—but Eddie, whose good looks, humor, and overall decency all the schoolgirls adored. That’s when Eddie and I stopped being two peas in a pod, and I couldn’t blame him. Everyone wanted to spend their time with Sandy. Then one day they fought about some silly thing, and she asked if I minded giving her a ride into town that evening. So I did, Sandy and I alone in the dark of a spring night that smelled of flowers. And only the local radio DJ and the crunching of my tires in the rough gravel broke the silence until we reached the edge of town, where she asked me to let me out so Eddie wouldn’t see us and be jealous. Eddie jealous of me? Like snow in the Bahamas, but I seized the idea and held it for fifty years after I went off to college, married, and never returned to where the river made its undulations. Held it fast in my teeth like a dog with a prized bone. Held it while Eddie sold Fords and in good times a few Mercurys, and married Sandy and had three kids. Held it until Eddie died and I went back for the funeral, and we tried to soothe our souls by recalling funny stories of the young Eddie, and when talk turned to that night Sandy laughed and denied even a twinge of worry about Eddie ever being jealous of me, stripping me of my sole claim to teenage glory. Still it remains, just another faulty memory, but one that I cling to like a child in my mother’s warm, unquestioning embrace.