Centerfold, by Patrick Crerand
Sunny, mid-afternoon Friday. Before all our fathers came home with belts, before pissing into manhole vents for kicks, before ghosts in the graveyard, our neighbor, Jerry, at whose wall we’d thrown and watched shatter bricks, GI Joes, and rotten walnut rinds, finally moved out. He piled all of his trash on the street and left rapture fast. An hour or two at most. I’ve never packed up and split that fast in my life. He left behind three or four big gray cans filled with papers, old knickknacks broken, a side chair with its stuffing disemboweled and curled around the mailbox canting to the side. One small gray can he’d backed over on his way out. It had a long crack down its rounded side. We spotted the colors through the crack: the sweet heart peering out the husk of some exotic, broken fruit. The Parson brothers tore it open. It was filled with old pornography. Playboy. Penthouse. Hustler. Jugs. Chris was my age, five or six then; Ryan was two years younger but braver. We all stood and stared at the pile as if it might combust on its own. Jerry’s final gift to us—we who had been so cruel.
All that stillness wasn’t in Ryan. He lifted a single issue from the pile and unfurled the centerfold so it covered him whole. He processed down Virginia Drive, no longer a little boy, but a resplendent brunette odalisquing on a mahogany desk: an unbuttoned letterman’s sweater draped across her smooth belly just above the nest of black hair above the V where her tanned thighs met, revealing all that I never knew about women, and surpassing all that I had ever imagined.
It was Ryan’s idea to stuff them in the mailboxes. That’s what we told our mothers because he was too young to punish. But they knew he was too short to even reach inside the metal box. They knew we were too young to use the magazines. We only knew they meant trouble, so all the older neighbors or anyone who edged ruts in their lawns by the sidewalk so our bike tires got stuck—they got one. We left each lid flat open so when we were done, each mailbox was a shocked mouth with its tongue lolling out, collecting rain and dust.
Later, I wrote apology letters on ruled paper. When I offered to deliver them, my mother put her hand up. She took them out to the mailboxes and lowered the flags herself.
Patrick Crerand is the author of The Paper Life They Lead. His recent work is forthcoming in BULL, Ninth Letter, and Third Coast. He directs the low residency MFA at DeSales University in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania where he lives with his lovely wife and three kids.