My husband is just about the most perfect person I’ve ever met.  He is fully and charmingly rounded. He can write software programs that make helicopters fly without pilots, he can rebuild computers when I break them, he can rebuild car engines, he can build beautiful wooden things, he can sew, and he can cook.  Did I leave out anything?  Oh, and he will come to anyone’s rescue, day, or night, or pay their delinquent cable bill if their grandchildren are coming for Thanksgiving so that they can watch Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  And sometimes he can even get on my very last nerve, but not very often.

When we moved to Seattle in 2004, Boeing offered him college classes for free.  He had always loved to tell stories, but since he had missed the entire 7th grade due to a move to Nigeria (and that’s another story), he felt he could use some remedial English classes.  He took English 101, again.  In this class he wrote several excellent autobiographical stories, as well as other items of interest.  The following is a true story.  And he got an A+ on content. Another of his many talents.

Playing Hooky

The first and last time I was arrested was when I was in the first grade.  But the story really starts before that.

My family and I lived in a small, quiet neighborhood in Owensboro, Kentucky. The summer before first grade was a wonderful time for kids.  It was before the age of computers so we all played together outside.  Toward the end of summer, a new kid, Billy, showed up.

Billy was an older boy. He was nine.  I was only six.  He was taller, stronger, faster, and wiser than the rest of us.  Billy knew all kinds of things that the rest of us only pretended to know.  He knew about girls, and shhh, sex.  Those last few weeks of summer we all got to know Billy.  Everybody wanted to be his friend.  Billy was cool and if Billy liked you, you were cool, too.

One morning not long after school started, a bunch of us kids were walking to the bus stop.  Along the way, Billy says: “Hey, Joey, want to play hooky?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want to skip school?”

“Sure”

So off we went.  We just sort of took a right turn when we should have taken a left and our new life began.  Billy asked me: “What do you want to do?”

                “I don’t know.  What do you want to do?”

                “I don’t know.  What do you want to do?”

                “I know,” says Billy.  “Let’s go ride bikes.”

                “Great.” 

So, we headed over to Billy’s house.  I had never actually been to Billy’s house.  We always played in a field in the middle of the neighborhood.  He told me he had a couple of cool bikes we could ride.  We walked over and sneaked into the carport.  After all, we wouldn’t want his mother to catch us getting the bikes.

The world is a wide-open playground to a couple of boys on bikes.  We headed off to the river, a place we didn’t get to go. Alongside the river was a gravel road running through some woods.  We tore screaming down that road like demons, leaving a cloud of dust behind us.  We were having fun, going places, and doing things we normally wouldn’t get to do.  Life was good!

Somewhere down that road we came upon an old truck, it was green, and a little beaten up.  Obviously, this was a real truck.   Not a truck like you see today, all pretty and shiny.  This one had actually been used to do truck stuff.  We stopped to explore.  The doors were locked, but that didn’t stop us.  The bed of the truck was full of all kinds of stuff we had never seen before.  It was a whole new world to explore.  I was climbing in the bed and doing my best to figure out what all that great stuff was when I heard CRASH, and the sound of breaking glass.  I froze, looked up, like a prairie dog sticking its head up, there was Billy with a big rock in his hand and the side window of the truck was broken.

Billy opened the door, climbed in, and started exploring.  I got down off the truck and hollered to Billy, “Get our of there, someone is going to catch us, we’re going to be in real trouble, now.”  After a little rummaging around Billy got out of the truck and we took off on the bikes. 

Now we were running away, down that same road, but this time with imagined demons chasing after us. We rode and rode until we were deep in the woods.  When we finally stopped, panting, gasping for air, Billy says, “Look what I found.”  He pulled out his treasure to show me.  He had found a small change purse.  You know the kind, a plastic pouch you squeezed the ends and the middle pouched open, it had some money in it.  And, he had a gun.

                “Billy, you can’t keep that stuff.  It’s stealing.  When our parents find out we will get in big trouble.”

                This is when Billy breaks the news to me: “Our parents will never find out.”

                “Why?”

                “Because we can’t ever go home again.”

                “What do you mean?”

                “We stole these bikes,” Billy says.

                “What?”

Billy told me that the house we had gotten the bikes from wasn’t his.  We had stolen those bikes and if we ever went back home, we would get caught and go to jail forever!  Me being only six and Billy being so old, I believed him.  Going to jail forever was a bad thing.

So, we got on our bikes and now slowly peddled down the road along the river. We talked about what we were going to do.  We came upon a small country store.  It looked like it had once been someone’s house.  We went in and spent the money we had on candy and stuff.  Just the sort of junk you would expect a six and a nine-year-old boy to buy.

Then we went back to the woods to eat our stuff and figure out what to do.  After running out of candy, Billy pulled out the gun he had found.  It was a small one.  Billy had hidden it inside his pants, like you see people on TV do.  It was black, shiny, smooth with wooden handgrips, and it was semi-automatic.  What would you expect two boys to do with a gun?  They would shoot it, that’s what they would do.  But guns are complicated and semi-automatic guns can be very complicated.  They have safeties and you must cock them.  At first, we couldn’t figure out how to do it.   After both of us messed with the gun several times – I figured it out.  I was so proud of myself.  I figured it out, not Billy, me.  BOOM!

Once I figured it out, we took turns.  I shot it once, then Billy.  We did that a couple of times and then we decided to try to hit something.  Billy wanted me to pick up a horse apple and hold it while he shot it.  I can’t believe now how dumb I was, but he talked me into it.  He was older.  So, I picked up a horse apple.  A horse apple is a large softball sized nut pretty common in that part of the country.  Billy pointed the gun at it, pulled the trigger, and CLICK.  All the bullets were gone.

So now there was a new problem, we were out of bullets.  Our plan was to run away from home and use the gun to hunt and live off the land just like in the old movies.  Being young boys, we didn’t know any better, so that was the plan.  But without bullets the plan wouldn’t work.  So obviously. We would have to go buy some bullets.  But we didn’t have any money.  We had spent it all.  So, obviously we had to get some money.  How could we do that?

                Billie says, “Let’s go rob that store.”

                “We can’t”

                “Yes, we can.  We have a gun.”

                “But we don’t have any bullets.”

                “He won’t know that.”

So back to the bikes and back to the store we went.  We walked in.  It is hot and kind of dark inside.  Billy walked up to the counter, pulled out the gun, pointed it at the man, and demanded the money.

The man smiled at us.  He told us that it had been a slow day and that he didn’t have any money.  He did reach into his pocket and pulled out 35 cents to give to Billy.  We ran out of the store and back to the woods.

Obviously, robbing stores wasn’t going to get us the money we needed to buy bullets; we had to come up with something else. Billy says, “Let’s sell the bikes.  I know this bike shop that will buy them from us.  Then we can buy bullets.”

We got to the shop and asked if they would buy the bikes.  The man looked over the bikes and said, “Yes, maybe we can work out something.  I will have to clear it with the manager though and he isn’t here right now.  It will just take a couple of minutes.”  The man bought us a coke and we sat waiting for the manager to show up.

 A few minutes later a police car drove up.

I don’t think I have ever been as scared in my while life, not even when Billy dared me to jump out of a huge tree, not even when I crashed through a glass door and had to go to the hospital.  It was like my insides froze up.

This huge policeman in a dark blue uniform with a gun got out of the car, walked up to us, and asked, “Boys, are those your bikes?”

Billy answered: “Yes.”

The man we had talked to at the bike shop walked up and told the officer: “I recognize one of those bikes, officer.  A couple of weeks ago the red one was brought in for some work.  I had to do some welding on the frame to fix it.  See here on the frame.”  He pointed down to a place on the back of the bike.  Then he continued, “I know the family.”

The policeman looked at us and told us to get into the car.  He opened the door and put us in the back of the police car.  I remember how musty it smelled, kind of dirty, sweaty, and bad.  Billy and I sat there quietly as the officer got in and drove us down to the police station.

When we got to the station the officer took us into an office with some other policemen, but most of the people didn’t have uniforms on.  They had suits and ties.  They must have been detectives.  They asked our names, phone numbers and lots of other stuff like that.  They put us in a room to wait. 

I remember the room very well.  It was long and narrow.  Running down to the center of the room was a long table with chairs all around it.  The chairs were the old-fashioned wooden ones, kind of like the ones they have in school.  The room was stark white, but a little dingy, like the walls needed cleaning.  You could just imagine all that had happened in this room.  The criminals that had been questioned, the crimes that had been solved, the little boys that just waited, trembling in fear, for what was to happen next. The room smelled scary.

Billy asked me, “What are we going to do?”

                “We’d better tell the truth.”

Billy wanted to hide the gun; he still had it in his pants.  He wanted to put it in the trashcan, but I told him we should just give it to them.

After what seemed like hours or days later, the door opened and in walked several people.  A nicely dressed motherly type woman came in and walked down to sit at the end of the table.  Billy and I were sitting in the middle along one side.  Several detectives in their suits came in.  The officer that had picked us up also joined us.  The room starts to fill up.  I remember one man wearing just a white shirt and tie sat right across from Billy and me.  Eventually ten or twelve people were seated at the table.

The man in the white shirt looked at Billy and asked us about the bicycles.

Billy says: “We just took them to go riding.”

Then the man looks at me “Why were you trying to sell them?”

I was so terrified that I just broke down and started crying.  Tears ran down my face.  I spilled my guts!  I started talking and told them about playing hooky, taking the bikes, breaking into the truck, everything.  I just talked and talked.  During this time the man with the white shirt rocked back on the back legs of his chair and put his feet up on the table and listened while I talked.  When I got to the part about the gun, he asked: “What happened to the gun?”

Billy reached into his pants, pulled it out, pointed it at the man and said, “Here it is.”  The man’s face went white, his eyes got big and he lurched in his seat.  He started tipping over backwards and his arms windmilled to try and catch his balance but he fell over with a crash.  Everyone else in the room jumped up and pandemonium broke out.

         Billy said, “It’s OK, there aren’t any bullets in it.”

  I always remembered the look on that man’s face.

                The next thing I remember was waiting to see the judge in juvenile court.  Mom and Dad had me dressed up and we were sitting in this large room waiting for the judge.  It seemed to take forever.  The longer I sat there the warmer the seat of the chair I was sitting in seemed to get.  I remember thinking that there must be a heater in this chair.  The longer I sat there, the hotter it got.  It got so hot I was sure my bottom was going to be burned.  I squirmed and wriggled.  My mother told me over and over to sit still.

I don’t think I ever saw Billy after that day. He had been in trouble before so they sent him somewhere.  The judge told me that I had better not do anything bad again because if I did, they would have to take me away.

Two things changed in my life that day, I never played hooky again, and I was never quite as ready to just go along.

And this, ladies, and gentlemen, is the end of this tale.  If I had known I was marrying a hardened criminal, well……….