Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters Volume 4, Issues 1 & 2 | Page 42

! MARK SAFRANKO THE EXECUTIONER It was the start of trout season, early April, but the air was still more freezing than warm. Mack set out with a gang that included his good friend Frankie and a few others -- Eddie, Dave, Wally. Wally’s father gave them a lift from the city to the banks of the Assunpink Creek. On the trip the car was filled with the acrid smoke from the old guy’s cigarette. He didn’t say a single word all the way out; it was like he really wasn’t there, which was the fate of most grownups when they were in the presence of kids. Mack already had a nicotine habit and he wished he could smoke too, but he didn’t have any cigarettes and he wasn’t brave enough to ask one of the parents. Instead he stared at the weird short gray and silver hairs that stuck out of the back of Wally’s father’s monkeylike head. The sight was repellant and fascinating at the same time. There was a sense of wild, electric expectation in the stinking air. They’d all been waiting for months for this moment. When you were young, the world was marked sharply by seasons born and dying -- baseball season gave way to football, which gave way to basketball, which gave way to fishing -- and so on. The trout season was the gateway to the warm weather, when they would all escape the indoor prisons of home and school and church after a boring, cruel, interminable winter. Finally there would be sun, and longer days, and, in the distance, baseball gloves and bats and the end of books and teachers. Today they were all one year older than they were the last time they dropped their lines. The restrictions of the past no longer held. More of the boys smoked in the open now and used crude language without fear of being reprimanded. Frankie, with his slick, jet black hair and powerful build, was the acknowledged leader of the pack, and when they jumped out of the car and pulled their tackle from the trunk, they all followed him onto the big, sandy bank that separated the Assunpink from the Shabakunk, and before long everyone had a line in. !!Assisi!!!36!