Time slipped away from Miki when he finally took a step forward and his foot hit the concrete walk. Within a blink of an eye, he was a child again, edging past the house in a slink. The boards fencing off the backyard were still loose, and he used the shillelagh’s heft to hold them to the side so he could slip past the splintery wood. Familiar scents assaulted him: a drift of pine from the trees bristling between the houses, a whiff of mildew from the partially open basement windows, and the odd pungency of the cheap paint Vega used to coat the house in its weary colors.
The ground beneath his sneakers was damp, and he nearly slipped when his foot hit a patch of lichen spreading outward in a black ripple. Miki slammed his hand against the house’s outer wall and hissed at the pain of his palm being scraped open on the rough paint. Shaking off the weeping sting, he picked his way through the weeds and recycle bins filled with empty aluminum cans to reach the ramshackle shed sitting at the back of the property.
At one point in the shed’s past, it served as a place to park a car. Adjacent to the alley running behind the houses, its single open wall had been boarded up, rendering it useless as a garage. Past owners made the space their own, either as a workroom or a space to tinker on mysterious projects, but the Vegas used the space for storage.
Miki had used it as a place to hide and dream.
He’d spent several afternoons moving boxes around until he carved out a good amount of space along the far wall. Now confronted by a wall of cardboard, Miki wondered if his hidey-hole was gone, but the flap of a washing-machine box remained in place. Slender windows cut along the eaves of the old garage let in enough light to see, and dust motes clotted the air, spiraling away in great waves as Miki moved about.
“Shit, I was a skinny kid,” he grumbled when he whacked his elbow against the wall trying to squeeze through the space. The shillelagh tucked under his arm rattled against the wood frame with each crab-walk step he took. A few seconds of dimness, and he was free of the tunnel and standing in what he’d always thought of as his lair.
It was as if time stopped and he was a kid again, trembling in fear at hearing Vega’s car rumble down the alleyway to park behind the house.
The painful-to-the-eye orange beanbag he’d rescued from a trash pile was still there, covered with a thin layer of dust. Strips of duct tape stitched together its torn sides, keeping its guts from spilling out. The edges of the tape were lifted up from age, and while he wouldn’t trust it to sit on, Miki grinned at the idea of it lying in wait like a vampiric tangerine blob. Shelves above the beanbag held what he came looking for, treasures he’d hidden away from grasping adult hands and judgmental eyes.
Pulling out a large box marked “roofing nails,” Miki eyed the beanbag suspiciously, deciding the decrepit vinyl probably wouldn’t hold its guts in if he sat on it. Squatting was another option, but an upside-down milk crate served readily enough as a stool. Miki opened the box flaps and stared down into his remains of his childhood.
A curled-up Playgirl held a prominent spot against a cardboard wall, and Miki laughed when he pulled it out and leafed through the pages. He couldn’t remember spending a lot of time on the images of the heavily endowed men between the covers, recalling only reading the sexual encounter stories, but the stickiness between the middle pages told him otherwise.
“Huh,” Miki murmured, turning the book so he could stare at the sculpted, muscular form of the blue-eyed centerfold model. “Guess this means I’m really gay. Kane’ll be happy.”
Emptying out the box took very little time. A few CDs he ripped off from the music store at the top level of the Japantown mall rattled when he drew them out. He set the L’arc disc aside, promising himself to go back and pay for them now he had money. A few papers boasting test scores low enough to qualify as Death Valley residents reminded Miki he’d hated school and an insect got to the string of gold stars he pasted together during a nearly funerary art class he had to take in the seventh grade. The art teacher showed up drunker than one of the unwashed men loitering down at the pier, and he’d taken great care to rub his leg against Miki’s thighs when he went around the class to look at their art projects.
“Maybe I can get Kane to shoot him too,” Miki sniffed. He reached down to stroke at a furry ear that wasn’t there and then sighed, suddenly missing his dog terribly. “Come on, it’s got to be here.”
It was under the papers. He’d not been careful with it, not as careful as it probably deserved because, like the beanbag, it showed the wear of time and the grimy effects of belonging to a little boy. Still, Miki drew it out with a special reverence, a tiny flicker of warmth flushing his cheeks as he uncovered his first friend.