Billy Bradshaw was my best friend. We’d grown up together in Sand Hill, and we did everything together. We had a bond that was closer than brothers, nothing in the whole wide world could come between Billy and me.
Billy was a tad bit shorter than I was, and at the ripe old age of nine, neither of us were exactly giants. Billy had bright blonde hair, such a shade of yellow that other kids often teased him by asking if he was growing dandelions on his head. He didn’t care, we didn’t really let the taunts of others bother us too much. “I am rubber, you are glue, whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you!” Still, kids could be mean. It had been worse before Billy’s ninth birthday. See, Billy’s mom thought her son looked “so cute” with long, curly hair. Golden locks that came down past his shoulders, and curled up around them, and long bangs that he always swept out of his face if he really wanted to see clearly. The other kids had bugged him something fierce, “girlie boy, girlie boy, why don’t you braid your girlie hair, girlie boy?” As always, Billy had just shrugged his shoulders, tossed his long bangs to one side, raised his middle finger, and using a saying he’d picked up from his dad, replied, “why don’t you go fuck yourselves?”
It was on Billy’s ninth birthday that his dad took him to the barber shop, and Billy came back with short, spiked hair. His mom had cried, but Billy thought his new haircut was “awesome” and so did I. It hadn’t stopped the taunts, but it had lessened them a bit. At least nobody called Billy a “girlie boy” anymore.
Billy’s parents were pretty easy going, if a bit weird. Jeremy Fisher had stated bluntly, “your folks smoke like chimneys, and drink like fishes, but they still be pretty cool.” I’d gotten a vision in my head of a fish, swimming around in the smoke inside a chimney. It made me laugh. Jeremy always had funny saying like that. He was 13, so to a pair of 9-year-olds, he was like an Elder God. Not that Jeremy hung out with us much. He was a big kid, and had big kid friends, and couldn’t be caught hanging out with a couple “little kids”. Especially when one of them was “that girlie boy” and the other, “that weird kid.” He had a reputation to uphold, and being seen hanging out with us, would have been a death-blow to his standing in the “in-crowd”.
Billy also had two sisters. His older sister, Megan, was 16. She had a drivers license! She always talked about how once she was done with school and old enough to move out, she was heading to the big city: Glensmore, or maybe somewhere even bigger (although Glensmore was the biggest city within 7 hours of any direction.) His little sister, Lexi, was only 5, and as cute as she made herself out, she was annoying! She loved following us around like a lost puppy. She was convinced that she was old enough to go exploring with us, even though her mom had clearly said she was only allowed in the yard, or in the play park near the middle of the trailer park. A park in a park. We spent a lot of time there. Anyway, whenever Lexi came with us to the park, we had to forget our plans for wilderness exploration. There was no way we were going to bring her with us into those dangerous places. Well, there may have been once or twice, but nobody found out about it, so everything was cool. Megan and Billy’s dad were the only ones in his family without the dandelion-yellow hair. Lexi’s was even curlier than Billy’s, about as curly as Shirley Temple in those old movies my mom was fond of watching. Billy’s mom had hair that came down to her knees. It wasn’t as curly, but it was frizzy and seemed quite wild, it was also bright-dandelion-yellow. Megan on the other hand had slightly wavy, but not curly, pitch black hair. It was as far from yellow as you could get. Good old Jeremy Fisher had plenty to say on that subject as well, “wonder who your mom was fucking when your sis was planted.” Jeremy was crude that way. Billy was pretty sure that his mom hadn’t been doing any such thing with nobody but his dad, but Jeremy just laughed and said, “yeah right.” Billy’s dad may have once had black hair. In those days though, it looked more like salt and pepper that had gotten thrown together on a plate. Rough, coarse, fairly thin hair, that was alternating strands of black and white, with some bits of grey thrown in, with no pattern to it at all. He also sported a beard that was the same mix of colors as his hair.
I spent a lot of time at the Bradshaw house, as Billy did at mine. Whenever I was over there, we’d play in the big front room, if Billy’s parents were home, they were usually sitting in the kitchen, sorta watching the big TV, smoking constantly, and grabbing beers from the cooler they kept under the kitchen table. They went through who knows how many packs of cigarettes every day. The trailer’s walls may once have been white, but now they were yellow, and not the dandelion yellow of Billy’s hair, but that brownish-yellow that is a tell-tale sign of smoking. In those days you could still smoke in restaurants and even on airplanes, so it wasn’t too surprising that the Bradshaw’s had no qualms about smoking in a house full of kids. It’s not like all that smoke was bad for people, right? I remember one time, I met Billy at the park, Lexi wasn’t there, so we headed out into the wilderness. When we got out to a well secluded spot, Billy had pulled out a couple of cigarettes, and a pack of matches. “Not like ma or da will really notice a couple missing, right?” We sat in our spot, stuffed those cancer-sticks into our pre-teen mouths, and lit up.
I coughed so hard, I thought I was going to puke my insides out. Billy wasn’t much better. Didn’t stop either of us from finishing those nasty things though. No way either one of us would show weakness, and for Knights like us, suffering a bit of poison was a rite of passage. No pussies allowed, as Jeremy would have said. One thing that experience did, was keep both of us from trying cigarettes again for many years.
Now, when Billy’s parents weren’t smoking cigarettes, they were smoking what Jeremy called “wacky tobaccy”. Weed, pot, ganja, bunk, dope, bud, whatever you wanted to call it, it was green, and when it burned, smelled even weirder than the cigarettes. After the experience with the cancer-sticks, neither of us were apt to try stealing any of the magic smoke. That didn’t stop us from trying some green cookies though, but that's another story.
Anyway, although we were sometimes joined by other kids, be it Lexi, or Jeremy, or several others of the many kids that lived in the park, it was always Billy and I that went out exploring the Wilderness of Sand Hill.