A Bad Penny

It was a miserably hot day. The heat was augmented by oceans of humidity until it felt like the air would boil, but not a drop of rain fell to soothe the ground. I spent the afternoon by the air conditioner, nibbling string cheese and wishing I was a more ambitious cook. At about eight in the evening, though, the nauseating pall of heat lifted. We went outside to play.

Everyone was outside: all the neighborhood parents on their porches, and almost all the neighborhood children on their bikes. I helped Rose bike back and forth down the sidewalk. We biked a few houses down, where two of her friends were playing– we’ll call them Isaac and Ishmael, because they’re closely related. Isaac lives in a big house, and Ishmael in the apartment across the street. Isaac has both his parents living with him, a rarity for this block. He’s a respectable Catholic boy a few years older than Rose, who goes to a charter school and wears a uniform. His father yells at him for being afraid of bees.

Rose played soccer with Isaac and Ishmael and a few other neighborhood boys. She told them how she was going to invite them to a party. They teased her by saying they didn’t know if they’d invite her to theirs. At the game’s most exciting point, there were four boys, my one girl, and no less than three soccer balls darting about on Dustin’s lawn.

Then there was a fourth ball, a dollar store ball with whirring colored lights inside, rolling toward us from across the street.  I saw Ezra the autistic neighbor boy I’ve written about before, wandering out from between two cars to fetch it. He stopped and stared when he saw the other children.

“Get out of here, Ezra!” demanded Isaac. “This isn’t your side of the street!”

The ball had rolled under a parked car. Ezra bent to watch it glimmer in the shadow.

“I said, get out, Ezra!” Isaac bellowed. “You’re not allowed on this side of the street!”

His parents did nothing to stop him. They sat on the porch, not saying a word.

“You don’t own the street, Isaac,” I said.

“He’s not allowed over here.”

“You don’t control the street,” I said. “Is the street yours?”

Isaac was puzzled. “Well,” he blustered finally, “He’s not allowed on this property. You’re not allowed on this property, Ezra!”

“You’re always welcome on mine,” I called to Ezra.

Ezra forgot his ball and backed up to his side of the street.

In a moment, Rose tired of the soccer game. She started to cross the street to visit Ezra, but it was getting so dark I told both of them to come play on my porch. Ezra ran inside unbidden and got out the wood blocks. He likes to build villages with them; then, he and Rose pretend to be Godzilla and knock them down.

“This is a bad penny,” Ezra told me, pointing to one of his buildings.

Rose roared with laughter at the idea that a penny could be bad. I tried to explain the adage as Ezra knocked the bad penny building to the floor.

In a moment, Ezra was on the lawn crying “Come back to me!”

“What is it?” I cried.

Ezra didn’t answer. He clapped his grubby hands in the air and– very gently, without even harming the wings, he caught a firefly. He and I admired it together; then it flew away. He, laughed, caught another, and it too flew away.

Ishmael, Isaac and the other respectable boys wandered over to see what all the noise was about.

“Those are lightning bugs,” said Ishmael. He caught one too.

I started to babble about the properties of fireflies, as grown ups do, but Ishmael wasn’t interested. He mashed the bug in his clean, respectable fingers, and handed it to me.

I held the curled-up creature in the flat of my hand. There was still a faint light coming from its thorax; its legs jerked in spasm after helpless spasm. “Why did you do that?”

“The light means it’s still alive,” said Ishamael in a disappointed tone.

“You shouldn’t kill fireflies!” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because they’re harmless.”

“I knew you were gonna say that.” He slapped the palm of my hand, hard, with his own. “Now, it’s dead.”

The firefly rolled to the sidewalk, motionless.

All the other boys went back to their soccer game, but Ezra stayed. He picked up a stick and talked to it. “You’ve been bad,” he said to the stick. “You said a bad word.”

He threw the stick onto my porch roof.

Rose laughed again.

“What did the stick say?” I asked.

Ezra said the word, a very foul word for a stick or a boy to say. I tried not to laugh too hard when I told him the stick did deserve to be punished.

Heartened by our laughter, Ezra the avenging angel picked up litter, twigs and anything else he could reach, to throw them one by one onto the roof in punishment for their sins. He has an excellent throwing arm. When he ran out of projectiles, he threw handfuls of grass that fell back to the earth like chaff. He showed us his jar of bright green noise-making putty, which he called “fart poopy,” how he could make it fart by squeezing it and how he could stretch it into long strands. He spun in a circle, holding out the putty in one hand like David’s slingshot; it grew longer and thinner until centrifugal force snapped it into two. The fart-poopy being put to the test and found wanting, it too was thrown on my roof. Then the jar it came in was stuffed with grass and thrown on the roof.  This went on until it was quite dark, and Ezra’s mother called him inside for his medicine.

Ezra ran home, still clutching one of the wood blocks.

“He can keep it,” my daughter said.

The firefly corpse on my sidewalk glowed in the twilight, long after I knew it was dead.

(image via pixabay)