Hide-and-Go-Seek

 

We called the game “Hide-and-go-Seek.”  It had a different name in the rest of the town.  Others said “Hide and Seek,” easier to pronounce and, I think, less aggressive sounding. But up on 27th Street NW, we were proud to do things differently.  

Our street ended in a dead end, isolated by grassy hills awaiting development into suburban housing.  A frontage road ran along the new freeway that whined and raged with traffic at all hours of the day.  We lived in houses built before the freeway isolated our block.  On one side, a slope rising out of our backyards climbed over retaining walls and, then, past a marsh in a little grassy hollow between the hills up to the water tower on the height of land.  Across the street from the fronts of our houses, the same slope continued downward, undulating with grassy ridges and potholes, to the Quality Homes subdivision, forty or fifty identical dwellings lining a tangle of roads twisted around a small creek that flowed through a tunnel of sumac and black chokeberry. 

Our neighborhood was blue collar and Catholic.  So there were many children, five, at least, to each household. There were so many kids that some were, apparently, superfluous – little Jeremy had leukemia and was hairless with big bulging eyes like a Chihuahua; Katy drowned in the pond, a sump in the field across from the row of houses on 27th.  We used to make rafts from construction materials stacked on vacant lots where new houses were being built.  Either the water in the pond had peculiar characteristics or the construction materials, mostly two-by-fours and dry-wall, were particularly dense.  Our rafts never floated.  When we launched them, they sunk to the bottom of the murky marsh-water.  In the winter, we skated in tight circles on the little oval pool hedged by cattails and reeds.  One of Katy’s older brothers was supposed to be watching the toddler but she wandered away and ventured onto thin ice edging the pond in late March, slits of open water near the center of the pool.  She broke through the film of ice and drowned in three feet of water.   The afternoon was gloomy and the flashing lights of the ambulance and police cars inflamed the pale stucco facades of our homes.  Later, we marveled at Katy’s tiny white casket.  It was pretty and the color of a wedding cake.  The thing inside the casket was an approximation of Katy made from buttery wax.

Late in the day that I now recall so clearly, we played our first game of hide-and-go-seek at twilight on a fine evening in early May.  Growing darkness enhanced the appeal of the game.  We spread out to hide in the fields rolling down to Quality Homes, scattering behind irregular grassy mounds and little pits remaining from trenches that we had dug in the warm weather the year before.  An older kid was It, searching for us.  When we were discovered, It picked us up by the scruffs of our necks, throwing us around like sacks of potatoes.  It tickled the girls until they screamed that they were going to pee their pants.  Delicious to be found and battered by the hunter – this gave the game an edge of adventure and excitement.  I don’t recall any parents or teenagers intervening.  I can’t explain why supper was delayed, but it must have been.

It was after nightfall when the second game began, dark in the great grassy fields.  Someone was counting, a monotonous drone on the hillside.  We charged down the slope, skirting the pond where the little girl had drowned six weeks earlier.  The sedge rustled and the air smelled of rotting mud.  Then, we separated, darting to our separate hiding places on the little prairie.  I recall looking up from where I was crouched and seeing flashlights, several of them twinkling as they approached.  It was odd to see the flashlights bobbing up and down in the field as we were hunted.  But, then, suddenly, the lights vanished and the darkness rose up out of the grass and I could hear trucks on the Interstate, frogs chanting in the marsh, night birds skimming over the grass, a woodchuck or muskrat scuttling through the weeds.  I put my face down in the moist, soft grass and felt that the earth was heaped up over me so that I was protected.  The darkness was immense and imponderable, but not oppressive.  Rather, it was a soft dim cloak that shielded me in my burrow.  When the kids higher up the hill were found, I heard their happy cries, laughter, a chorus of voices and, then, stillness.  It was as if I had become blind and deaf – I was wrapped in a great remote solitude, hidden in the vastness of the night.  Perhaps, I would never be found.

I don’t remember what happened next.  Maybe, I drowsed off.  

Then, I was looking out the window of my home, gazing into the velvety darkness.  The leaves and grass seemed to glisten with star-shimmering dew and the shadows were tremulous with faint, indirect light.  Our parents had come into the fields to retrieve their errant children.  Fathers, smelling faintly of beer, tugged at their kids’ hands.  One by one, my playmates passed before my eyes on the street led home by their mothers or fathers.  I saw each child.  All of them were there, even poor bald Jeremy holding his sad father’s hand and little Katy in her sopping wet clothes toddling along the street unsteadily next to her mother.  

The Hide-and-go-Seek game was over.  Everyone had been found and it was time for bed.    

Is it “Hide and Seek” or “Hide-and-go-Seek”?