logging road called Buzzard Lagoon. The three of us sat in the back of the bus, where the driver couldn’t see us. Ever since Toni was caught selling dime bags to a couple of sixth graders, the bus driver had had it in for us. But Toni, he didn’t care. He was crouched down in the backseat taking fat rips out of a peace pipe he’d made in woodshop earlier that day and was blowing the smoke out the back window. We smoked so much weed back then, it’s a miracle I can remember anything at all.
Buzzard Lagoon REID MARUYAMA
“God, I like the way those Indians think,” Toni said. “I think I might’ve been one in my past life.” With a pencil, JB punched a hole in the seat in front of us and was showing me how to properly fingerbang a chick.
My good friend Toni brought a gun to school on Wednesday, said it was his dad’s. He showed it to me and JB during lunch, in the bathroom behind the cafeteria. It was much heavier than I expected.
“See what you got to do,” JB said, “is you take your finger, and you stick it in like this.” He jabbed and poked at the hole with his middle finger and slid it in and out, and in and out, and in and out, again.
“This, my friends,” Toni said, “is what you call a nine millimeter.” He thumbed back the hammer and pulled the trigger, and the gun made a click sound.
“See,” he said. “Like this.” “JB, would you please shut the hell up?” Toni said, coughing up smoke. “You don’t know shit about that. No chick in their right mind would ever let you finger fuck them.”
“Pretty cool, huh?”
JB defended himself, “I’ve fingered tons of chicks before.”
Toni said his dad had just bought a whole bunch of guns, just like this one and bigger ones too, that were now hidden in the wall in his basement. JB thought Toni was full of shit, but Toni said he’d show us the rest of them on Friday, after school got out.
JB flipped him off. “I’m not fat,” he said. “Don’t call me
***
fat.”
My mom had warned me many times about hanging around kids like Toni, said he’d only get me into trouble. But both she and my dad were at work all day, which meant there was no one to look out for me, no one to tell me what to do. Friday after school, me and JB and Toni took the bus to Toni’s house in Corralitos, way out in the boonies. Toni’s dad owned this house out there, deep in the foothills, up the old 182
“Bullshit,” Toni said. “You’re a liar and you’re fat. That makes you a fat ass liar. The only thing you’ve fingered is your fat fuck asshole.
Reid Maruyama
Then Toni took the pistol out of his backpack and pointed it right at JB. “And what are you going to do about it, fat ass?” he said and he pulled the trigger. The gun clicked. *** The bus dumped us off at the bottom of the logging road, and we hiked the two miles up to Buzzard Lagoon. Toni’s house Berkeley Fiction Review
183
