Chapter Thirty-Three

Here’s the next Chapter of Lost and Found.

Whoops! I almost forgot to get this Chapter on the blog today. This has been “one of those weeks”. The good news is the sun is shining. It feels so good to see the evidence of spring showing. There are people out picking up limbs, raking their lawns, doing many other spring-like chores even though it might be a bit too early.

I noticed there have been some new readers in the past week. Welcome! I hope you enjoy your stay here. I know I’m certainly delighted to see you!

Be well — Be in peace,

Ron Rink
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At close to eight-fifteen that night I left my house and rode my bike over to Billy’s house where we had decided to meet. It seemed to take forever to get through dinner and wait for my parents to leave for their church choir practice. It felt like the clock was just creeping along. I think it was more trepidation than it was excitement. All I had been doing since I left the bowling alley after work was think about what I was going to be doing later. I had no idea what it would be like to rob a store. Becoming a thief had never crossed my mind as something that would be necessary. I always had enough money on me to buy what I needed, or I would get food out of the Victory Gardens.

Billy was waiting for me in front of his house when I rode up.

“Put your bike in my back yard. We’re going to stay in the alleys tonight,” he said as he quietly led the way around the side of his house and out his back gate to the alley.

It wasn’t quite dark yet so we could see where we were going. I noticed that the alleys in his neighborhood were much dirtier than they were where I lived. Garbage cans were turned over. Dogs were scrounging around in some of them. I heard some cats yowling but didn’t see them. There was one place where garbage was spread all over the pavement. There were several, huge, black, hairy rats scurrying around in all the mess. We could hear them squeaking at each other. When they heard us approaching, they stopped eating, stood their ground and stared at us with their beady, little eyes. After we took a few more steps, they thankfully darted off in every direction but ours, and disappeared.

We kept walking at a fast clip as we worked our way from one alley to another, all the time leading us closer to the Seven Mile Road area and several blocks away from the street where Billy lived. Every time we came to a place where we had to cross over a street or move from one block to another, we would stop and peek around the corner of a garage to make sure there weren’t any people or cars in sight, and also to check for any police cruisers patrolling around. It was getting more difficult to spot the cops when they were cruising. They weren’t riding in well-marked police cars as often—now they were using these big, black sedans—they might have been Cadillacs or Buicks or some other make of car that was big. We called them Black Mariahs. I don’t know why—that’s just what the guys called them. There would usually be one guy in a cop uniform driving, and three other cops in plain clothes—two in back and one in front.

The darkness of the night was settling in. There were no streetlights in the alleys so it was getting harder to see where we were going. We slowed down so that we wouldn’t trip over something or make any noise.

“Just remember that we can’t talk any louder than a whisper from here on,” Billy said into my ear. “You never know when someone might be getting into a car in their garage or bringing something out to a garbage can by the alley.”

I just nodded my head so he would know I heard him, plus I was too scared to try to say anything.

“We don’t want anyone to remember seeing or hearing a couple of kids in the alleys tonight,” he said.

We must have been sneaking through the alleys for at least thirty or forty minutes. We kept getting closer and closer to the area along Seven Mile Road where there were several stores. Most of the stores in this area closed by six o’clock in the evening, but some of the smaller grocery and confectionery stores stayed open until eight-thirty or nine. We came down an alleyway which intersected with another alley that ran behind the stores. There was an area off to our left that had a bunch of bushes growing next to a tall wooden fence. Billy seemed to slink between the back of the bushes and the fence, then motioned for me to follow him. I followed Billy’s lead and hunkered down on the ground next to him.

I felt myself shaking from both fear and excitement. I reached into my pocket for a cigarette – I needed something to help me stop shaking.
Billy reached out his arm and stopped me while he shook his head no and leaned over to whisper in my ear.

“We don’t want to attract any attention. We’re too close to the stores, and sometimes the owners will come out into the alley to dump trash or bring empty boxes. They’d be able to smell the smoke, or see the glow when you took a drag,” he whispered. He made the “be quiet” sign with his index finger to his lips.

We sat and waited for what seemed an eternity. When we first got there, I could only see one store much further down the alley that had any lights showing in the back. Those lights went out several minutes ago. The rest of the buildings were dark and they were all in deep shadow. There were garbage cans, stacks of cardboard boxes and some wooden crates lying behind the stores. Further down the alley I could make out a couple of old cars parked across the alley from the backs of the stores. I wondered if they were abandoned or if someone was going to be coming out of a store door and get into them. It was completely quiet except for the sound of the occasional car driving on Seven Mile road in front of the stores.

Still we sat and we waited. Billy had his knees bent up with his arms around them and his head down on his arms. I wondered if he was just resting or if he had fallen asleep—he was so quiet. I knew that I couldn’t ask him, so I just continued to wait, watch and wonder what was next.
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