It

She became aware that Ben’s upper body was heaving up and down in short, sharp movements; he was pulling air into his lungs and letting it out in sharp little bursts. For one alarmed moment she thought he was starting to cry, and then she got a closer look at his face and realized he was struggling against laughter. His eyes, leaking tears, caught hers, rolled madly, and looked away. In the faint light which leaked in through the cracks around the closed trapdoor and the window, she could see his face was nearly purple with the strain of holding it in.
‘Club em if they want an ole clubby-dubby,’ Belch said, and sat down heavily right in the center of the cap. This time the roof trembled more alarmingly, and Bev heard a low but ominous crrrack from one of the supports. The cap had been meant to support the chunks of camouflaging sod laid on top of it . . . but not the added one hundred and sixty pounds of Belch Huggins’s weight.
If he doesn’t get up he’s going to land in our laps, Bev thought, and she began to catch Ben’s hysteria. It was trying to boil out of her in rancid whoops and brays. In her mind’s eye she suddenly saw herself pushing the window up enough on its hinges for her hand to creep
out and administer a really good goose to Belch Huggins’s backside as he sat there in the hazy afternoon sunshine, muttering and giggling. She buried her face against Ben’s chest in a last –ditch effort to keep it inside.
‘Shhh,’ Ben whispered. ‘For Christ’s sake, Bev — ‘
Ctrrrackk. Louder this time.
‘Will it hold?’ she whispered back.
‘It might, if he doesn’t fart,’ Ben said, and a moment later Belch did cut one — a loud and fruity trumpet-blast that seemed to go on for at least three seconds. They held each other even tighter, muffling each other’s frantic giggles. Beverly’s head hurt so badly that she thought she might soon have a stroke.
Then, faintly, she heard Henry yelling Belch’s name.
‘What’?’ Belch bellowed, getting up with a thump and a thud that sifted more dirt down on Ben and Beverly. ‘What, Henry?’
Henry yelled something back; Beverly could only make out the words bank and bushes.
‘Okay!’ Belch bawled, and his feet crossed the cap for the last time. There was a final cracking noise, this one much louder, and a splinter of wood landed in Bev’s lap. She picked it up wonderingly.
‘Five mo re minutes,’ Ben said in a low whisper. ‘That’s all it would have taken.’
‘Did you hear him when he let go?’ Beverly asked, beginning to giggle again.
‘Sounded like World War III,’ Ben said, also beginning to laugh.
It was a relief to be able to let it out, and they laughed wildly, trying to do it in whispers.
Finally, unaware she was going to say it at all (and certainly not because it had any discernible bearing on this situation), Beverly said: Thank you for the poem, Ben.’
Ben stopped laughing all at once and regarded her gravely, cautiously. He took a dirty handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face with it slowly. ‘Poem?’
The haiku. The haiku on the postcard. You sent it, didn’t you?’
‘No,’ Ben said. ‘I didn’t send you any haiku. Cause if a kid like me — a fat kid like me — did something like that, the girl would probably laugh at him.’
‘I didn’t laugh. I thought it was beautiful.’
‘I could never write anything beautiful. Bill, maybe. Not me.’
‘Bill will write,’ she agreed. ‘But he’ll never write anything as nice as that. May I use your handkerchief?’
He gave it to her and she began to clean her face as best she could.
‘How did you know it was me?’ he asked finally.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just did.’
Ben’s throat worked convulsively. He looked down at his hands. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’
She looked at him gravely. ‘You better not mean that,’ she said. ‘If you do, it’s really going to spoil my day, and I’ll tell you, it’s goin g downhill already.’
He continued to look down at his hands and spoke at last in a voice she could barely hear. ‘Well, I mean I love you, Beverly, but I don’t want that to spoil anything.’
‘It won’t,’ she said, and hugged him. ‘I need all the love I can get right now.’
‘But you specially like Bill.’
‘Maybe I do,’ she said, ‘but that doesn’t matter. If we were grown-ups, maybe it would, a little. But I like you all specially. You’re the only friends I have. I love you too, Ben.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. He paused, trying, and brought it out. He was even able to look at her as he said it. ‘I wrote the poem.’
They sat without saying anything for a little while. Beverly felt safe. Protected.