We stood facing each other, or rather our silhouettes through the cold, opaque milk at the bottom of the Sink.

I’d invited Armen to a game of tag football at the high school. I would not usually have invited him, knowing it was not his sport, but we needed bodies for the contest. There was usually a game there among neighborhood middle school boys around ten on Saturday mornings and fog days. Armen resisted the suggestion at first, but he folded when I applied a little pressure.

All the usual characters were there: Chuck, Curt, Cora, Brent, and so on. Chuck lived for sports, and for good reason. He seemed to be skilled at just about every sport. Brent had foot speed. Cora, being a girl, would not volunteer for any game, but she’d get invited because she could play. The same went for Curt, who couldn’t care much less for football, but was often solicited for his raw talent. There were other regulars, and always a couple of new faces as well.

The milk was particularly creamy that morning. It was so thick that on the first snap, Chuck had to call his receivers back because he couldn’t see them when they ran a deep pattern.

Armen covered Curt, the receiver on the right side. Chuck called out the snap count.

As soon as Chuck took the snap, Cora started barking out the rush count and the receivers took off. Armen turned and did his futile best to keep Kurt close. When he heard the rush count complete, Armen turned to check the action at the line of scrimmage, and immediately realized that he couldn’t see that far. They were all shrouded in the milk.

Suddenly, Chuck materialized through the murk, cutting across the field from the right. Before Armen could figure out what was going on, Chuck split the field between Armen and the left cornerback, while Kurt and the left receiver turned to block, and Chuck was home free, until he ran into something in the fog.

It was one of the new kids. He was a big, stone-faced, blonde kid. It seemed he’d tagged Chuck a little too hard when Chuck had tried to break around him, and Chuck fell hard, and he wasn’t happy about it. The big kid held out his lanky arm to help Chuck up. Chuck leapt up and tried to pay the stranger back with a shove, which the big kid took, but he didn’t seem intimidated. He just said “Name’s Sam, and you don’t want to that.”

Chuck was mad. He was about as competitive as they come, and he thought he’d been tagged too hard, but he wasn’t one to start fights. It was a good thing for him that he didn’t pick a fight with this kid.

Sam’s presence out in the milk put a lid on the deep game for Chuck’s team that day, and he only got more intimidating as time went on. Chuck and Sam would turn out to be teammates in high school, and they would learn a lot from each other, but that day they were opponents.

Armen’s new bike transformed the Sink, and then it transformed the world. It expanded his view of his surroundings enough to get him to pick up a map. Suddenly, the immense grid of roads beyond town became endowed with names, and towns began to appear on the grid, and those towns had not only names, but stores, drive-ins, city parks, and libraries. All Armen needed was that bicycle and a map. And one map—it turned out—led to another.

The maps began to multiply. Armen began by exploring the places around Slough City. He began to bicycle farther and farther out, pedaling as far as the naval base, the river, and Visalia, where he could see hills appearing through the smog.

When his feet could pedal him no farther, Armen continued to explore the world with the help of maps. He discovered a trove of maps at the county library. To see more, he ordered maps. He obtained maps with his parents’ auto club membership. He wrote chambers of commerce all over the state.

Maps became Armen’s personal window into the world. Armen discovered that maps present the world in a form that is at once abstraction and art. They showed him the world in a way that text and photos never could. They facilitated both exploration and imagination. They were things of beauty. Armen always seemed to have a map in his immediate possession, which is how he was given the nickname “Atlas.” Whether the name was granted as ridicule, he didn’t care much. At worst, it seemed to be better that being invisible.

But girls can get violent too if head games prove ineffective. One particular girl, frustrated by Cindy’s resistance to humiliation, took to physically bullying Cindy. Her name was Christine. Cindy, as I’ve said, was quite strong for any kid her age, but nobody enjoys being pushed around. One day, Christine took to watching Cindy entertain herself with a cootie catcher, as girls that age sometimes do. After a short while Christine approached Cindy, and demanded the device.

Cindy kept her face down to the cootie catcher, but her eyes rolled up to meet Christine’s. “I have a fortune for you.”

Christine paused, glanced over to her minion, and then back at Cindy. “It better be good!”

“It is!” Cindy answered, and opened the device to reveal a fat, black spider. Cindy declared “cootie!,” and jerked the device forward, sending the spider hurtling toward Christine, who, frozen with fear, failed to move out of harm’s way. The spider landed on her sweater while she waved frantically but speechlessly. Cindy stepped forward with a glowing look of mock sympathy, brushed the spider off the girl, and pleasantly strode away.

His teacher glanced at him from her desk, and he uncoiled from his desk. He watched the carpet sweep beneath him as the doorway approached him. He turned into the covered walkway, and once clear of the door, stalled beneath the overhead vent windows. When he heard his teacher grab her things, he resumed walking out to Monroe Drive, then he turned around and headed for the Cortner Street gate.

He sprinted across 11th Avenue into Hidden Valley Park. Several carp carcasses were partially visible through the murk. He stepped to the bank and poked a carcass with a stick several times, watching it bob in and out of sight.

He threw the stick in the pond and walked along the bank. The grass was a sickening dark green along the shore. He noticed the ditch as he came around the far side of the pond. He followed the ditch down to his street, and turned home. He watched asphalt and concrete pass beneath his shuffling feet.

His teacher glanced at him from her desk, and he uncoiled from his. He watched the carpet sweep rhythmically beneath him as the doorway approached him. He didn’t need to look toward the door; he could track its approach from the light that poured from it. He turned into the covered walkway, and once clear of the door, stalled beneath the overhead vent windows. When he heard his teacher grab her things, he resumed walking out to Monroe Drive.

Oregon Holocaust Memorial by P. Medved

“I don’t like it when you make me wait,” lashed Stewart. “what have you got for m—what’s in there?” Stewart ripped the violin case out of Armen’s grip. He opened it, pulled out the violin, and began strumming it like a guitar. The bridge collapsed under Stewart’s pounding. He complained, “this thing is cheap!”, and shoved it into Armen’s arms, forcing Armen to drop his books.

Soundtrack: R.E.M., King of Birds

After several years, Cindy took to crafting bows and arrows herself. I would sometimes watch her as she listened to the twang of a bowstring. She might adjust it, try it with an arrow, or replace it, depending on what the music of the bowstring told her.

She was always on the hunt for feathers. She wanted real feathers, “for my birds,” she would say.

She tried different arrow materials. “Different stuff for different birds,” I remember her explaining. She tried copper and steel tube, or just about any material she could craft into an arrow.

Then she would take her birds out and fly them, with two quivers, each stocked with arrows no two alike, each with a name. There was one particularly strange bird that caught my attention. It was a steel bird. It had a metallic streamer coiled at its tail that would unravel at speed. I never guessed what the point to that bird might be until much later.

She could let them fly at a stunning frequency. Her motion to the quiver and her perching of the bird seemed a fluid part of her release. It was a beautiful thing to watch.

She didn’t always use a target. I once asked her why. She told me she was more interested in their flight. It was their flight that would see them to the target. If you watch the flight, you don’t need a target. “But a target board serves a practical purpose,” she said.

Armen hurried off to fetch the baseball bat.

The Adoration of the Magi — Leonaert Bramer, ca. 1634.

Armen thought about what his grandfather had said about Armenians having once been something his grandfather called “Magians.” Grandpa-A tossed him the pomegranate and he foul-tipped the fruit-ball down at the ground.

Armen let out a question. “Grandpa, was our family Magian before they were Christian?”

Grandpa-A replied that he didn’t know for sure and he reminded Armen that Armenians have been Christian for a very long time, and tossed the next pitch.

Armen missed it completely. Strike two. Cindy waited at Grandpa-A’s side, hoping to field anything that Armen might manage to hit. She turned to Grandpa-A and asked, “what’s a Magian?”

Her grandfather answered that he didn’t really know, except for what he’d said about prophecy and astronomy, and also that they kept fire temples—that they had a high regard for fire, just as Armenians still do.

Armen hit the pitch, cracked the game ball open. “You get the next one, Cindy,” promised Grandpa-A, and they sat together in the shade of an apricot tree, picking the red arils out of their respective shards.

One day after church in Autumn, Cindy and Armen were helping their grandfather harvest pomegranates in his backyard. Armen observed that the fruit resembled red Christmas tree ornaments. Grandpa agreed and tossed one down to Cindy, who stopped the fruit with her grandfather’s glove, which was a short, old-style finger glove, but still too large for her. The fruit fell from the dangling glove into Cindy’s other hand.

pomegranate arils

Grandpa Adroushan would impart upon Armen and Cindy whatever stories or facts came to mind at times like these. Inspired by the pomegranates, this time the Magi occurred to him. He told his grandkids how the Magi had traveled all the way from Armenia, which he said was a Magian country at the time of Christ, that the Magians were known for their knowledge of prophecy and astronomy. He continued, having established that these alleged Armenians were the first Christians, he could not allow himself to neglect to mention that Armenia had been the first Christian country. Cindy and Armen’s parents did not speak so proudly or quite so often of their Armenian heritage, but they did not seem to mind if Grandpa did if it made the kids proud of their deep Christian heritage. They did not seem so alien among their peers when they thought of that heritage.

Grandpa Adroushan imparted pomegranates and heritage down upon the two children, his foot ladder his pulpit, and when he determined that enough had been said, he determined that enough fruit had been plucked from the tree.

Cindy did not approach the ruins of the fire for days, but spent hours in front of her own house keeping an eye on the wreckage, as if on a fire watch. Cindy got precious little sleep. Finally, Armen talked her into getting a closer look so that she’d know that the fire was truly dead.

Once Cindy gained the courage to approach the corner, she would walk by it often, over and over again, looking into the black, saturated ruins. Neighbors, kids at school, and people at the supermarket checkout line all wondered aloud about the cause: Arson? A casually discarded cigarette? A gas leak? A grease fire? Cindy listened, and she silently inquired into each suspect and brooded.

How could grease start a fire?, she asked herself. Nobody in her family gave her a very good explanation, so she tried asking a librarian. She was given a book that gave an explanation, but she needed help understanding the explanation. It occurred to her that a firefighter might know, so she dropped by the fire station that was a block out of her way on her way home from school. A friendly firefighter took the time to explain to her how water can expand quickly when heated, and how steam could blast out of pan like steam from a kettle, or even an old locomotive. Then the firefighter showed her some superheated grease. The firefighter then explained to Cindy how the steam could carry the grease very far very fast, and Cindy began to understand. She understood that even water and cooking oil could conspire to burn a building down. She could see it quite clearly. But this enlightenment only deepened Cindy’s fear.