Alligator Candy by David Kushner Read Free Book Online Page A

murder didn’t seem to hamper the sense of freedom that the other kids and I felt at IDS. The nightmare had left us shaken but with an even greater appreciation of what it meant to be alive. This sentiment was written into the school yearbook from 1973. A full page is dedicated to Jon, and shows a black-and-white picture of him against a black background. Jon stands barefoot in front of our house, arms at his side in a white muscle shirt and shorts, head tilted, smiling. The final page of the yearbook shows a photo of a long-haired girl named Betsy, kneeling by IDS’s cypress-lined pond, leaning back against her mud-crusted Converse sneakers, hands in her lap, staring up at the sky. The text of a poem that she had written in the wake of Jon’s death appears above her. It describes the natural wonders around her and concludes: “Death whispers in my ear; I look once again to see. Life is beautiful.”
    Life was beautiful at IDS. After starting kindergarten there in 1974, I spent my days drifting between the brown circular pods for classes, passing peacocks in my path. A pony-tailed teacher in a flowered skirt taught us how to sauté green beans and onions. We sculpted pottery and fired it in the kiln. A skinny, funny hippie with a long beard taught us how to make whistles from clay. At nap time, we stretched out on thickly woven fringed mats.
    Greater freedom awaited us outside on the vast wooded lakeside acreage. There didn’t seem to be any limit on how far we could go for recess and lunch. Every tree begged to be climbed. We conquered one tree at a time, and each had its own personality: the fat oak on the main field with the thick gray branches that shot out horizontally, the tall, straight cypress with the rough, scratchy bark. Down by the lake, we pulled ourselves up the melaleuca “paper” tree, a twisting Tolkien-esque giant with a papery bark.
    There was a palpable collective energy during free time, a self-organizing tribal urgency that took over my friends and me as we set off on our missions. The moment the door of our pod opened, we’d sprint into the woods, grabbing long sticks and preparing for whatever it was we were to accomplish that day. There were forts to build, treasures to hunt, every knot in every tree a place of hidden fortune.
    I fashioned myself as leader of the adventure club. One day I convened my legion to excavate a knothole that, I imagined, housed a giant lost diamond. You could see the diamond down there, I said, if you backed up and stood in the right spot. My friends Michael, Kevin, and Robbie elbowed each other for a look, and claimed they saw it—the glimmer of light reflecting off the crystalline shard. The fact that the glimmer was actually coming from an old sandwich bag didn’t faze us; it was a diamond if we said it was.
    The explorations didn’t come without risk, which made our capers all the more exciting. We could plummet out of trees, eat a rotten kumquat, fall into the lake. But we never heard any mention of words like liability and lawsuit from the teachers; everything was fair game. Most of the danger came in the form of fire ants, nasty little red stingers that burn when they bite. The fire ants were everywhere, scurrying over one another in giant gray mounds of sand that dotted the fields and the bases of trees like camouflaged land mines. Once, I slid down a slide right into a huge pile of ants, much to the delight of my friends. But the teachers kept bottles of calamine lotion on their shelves, and the pasty, cool swabs on my skin made everything okay.
    If the teachers were giving me special attention because of Jon’s murder, I wasn’t aware. No one ever said anything or asked how I was doing, not that I expected them to or even desired this. They treated me like a bomb they didn’t know how to defuse, so they just left me alone. I made it relatively easy for them. Despite what had happened, I was generally a