Mike Ford
Start on the Red Flag
Roger said Nate Morris would lie, and Tyler believed him. "Just a warning," Roger said, pointing across the slot car tracks to the older kids lined up on the other side. "Don't believe anything he says. He'll lie to you."
Tyler nodded. They stood in their own line, Roger holding his car and Tyler with the remote control for it. When the adults let the line move forward, one man put his hand out as Tyler tried to pass.
"Don't you have a car?"
Tyler shook his head.
"He's helping me," said Roger.
"Only boys who have cars," the man said.
They stood next to the judge's stand, and as Tyler surrendered the remote control to Roger, one judge leaned over in his chair and said, "Would you like to help me?"
Tyler nodded, and the man explained. Tyler was to hold one of three flags up high so everyone could see. They were green, red, or checkered. Tyler looked back at his mother sitting in the first row of metal chairs. When she nodded, he went over to begin his job of hoisting colored flags into the air.
Roger didn't win, and neither did Nate. No one told Tyler to leave after the races finished, so he remained beside the judge's table as they handed out trophies. When people began leaving, the judge who had asked him to hold up the flags said, "Would you like this?" He picked up the red flag and handed it to Tyler. "For a job well done."
Tyler smiled. "Thank you."
It was a triangle of stiff felt stapled to a dowel in a pine base. Tyler rolled the flag around the dowel and put it in his jacket pocket.
On the drive home, he took it out and showed it to his mother. "Look what I got."
"That's a serious trophy," she said.
That gave him an idea. When they got home, he went down into the rec room. On a shelf against one wall, near the sliding glass door that opened onto the backyard, stood two trophies his brother Blake had won the year before. Afternoon sunlight slanted in and made them bright. One was for placing second in a track and field meet at school, the other was a scouting trophy for best camouflage at the yearly jamboree. The sliding door was open and his father sat out of sight on the porch. His mother came out a few moments later and Tyler heard her say, "Haven't you left yet?"
The sudden rustle of turning newspaper pages drifted through the door. "I think I have time."
"Poor Tyler. It doesn't seem fair."
"I know it doesn't. But then why did you buy Blake that pocket knife? That thing cost a lot of money."
"He's been away so long. He must be getting lonely."
"Well, sure. But he's coming home. Why not just wait and save on the postage?"
"It was his birthday, Stephen. And you really should hurry. You're going to be late."
"You're right." He shuffled the newspaper and said, "We'll have to do something for Tyler. He deserves it."
She told him about the flag the judge had given him at the Community Center. As she did so, Tyler placed it on the shelf between Blake's trophies.
He came down again much later in the day, when the summer sun had slumped low over the backyard gate and the last of its light fell across the carpet just inside the sliding glass door. On a folding table lay an open box filled with puzzle pieces. Next to that was a square of cardboard covered with completed fragments of the puzzle. He had been working on it for some time, but the pieces didn't seem to match. There were jagged blue pieces and jagged yellow pieces, but few fit together and none looked like the beautiful trees on the cover of the box.
He moved them carefully to the good light on the floor. There, with his chin propped up in a palm, he looked over the pieces once again to see if he could get them to fit properly.
On Saturday, he was bored. He tried flipping through TV channels looking for cartoons but couldn't find any. There was a comedy with a woman saying to a man something about sharing how badly he felt over losing his job, and the man saying where do you think we live, California? And people laughed. There was a documentary saying something about all wars being fought over resources, and something else about patriotism. And a news reporter interviewing a man who complained that very few people in society determined how the greater mass lived. Then something about computers that explained the way graphics worked by showing a simple circle expanding by an algorithm into a complicated mass of colors and shapes. After that, a priest telling a group of people in a church that life was tough, there was no certainty, they all lived on shifting sands.
Tyler didn't live on sand and he knew nothing about why people fought wars. He gave up when he came across a group of people sitting at a long table before an audience, and one woman, answering a question, said, "Look, consider it this way. If one person says something that isn't true, it's a lie. If a group of people says something that isn't true, it's not a lie. It's culture."
The audience laughed and applauded. Tyler turned it off and went outside.
He walked past the swing set, through his mother's garden, and behind his father's workshop to a plot of unused dirt. The dirt was not muddy, but it was moist, and pliable, and easy to dig without a shovel. He spent some time pushing his hands into it and piling it up into amorphous, indistinct heaps. He had quite a collection of amorphous, indistinct heaps when Roger poked his head above the fence and said, "Hey, Tyler! You busy?"
"No."
"Come on. They're building a house down the street."
"That's what my dad used to do!"
"They threw away a bunch of plywood and we're building a fort."
Tyler's clothes were already dirty. "All right. I'll be right back."
He ran into the rec room, took down the red flag and put it in his pocket, and ran out again. Roger had been kneeling on one of the trashcans on the other side of the fence. He jumped down as Tyler came through the gate and together they walked down the street to a construction site where the workers had piled debris on the curb. Some of the other kids were already there, picking over a stack of plywood cutoffs, and Tyler helped them find the better sheets.
The first problem was where to build the fort. One boy had a large backyard with a stand of trees, so they carried the plywood to his house. Next was finding the right spot. They couldn't build anything useful against a single tree standing upright, but one tree had a low branch that would support the plywood walls. Tyler helped lift boards as the others figured out which oddly shaped pieces should go where. Some were cut into triangles, some into squares, and some into awkward shapes, and they had to experiment to find the best combination. After a few tries, they decided on two walls over the branch and a front wall with a hole through which they could enter.
Then came the problem of securing the pieces together. One boy's father had a nail gun, but there was no electricity to run it. Another ran home and returned with hammers and nails, and they began a pounding ruckus that caused birds to fly and Tyler's ears to hurt. Some of them, without thinking, pounded nails through to nothing or into flaking bark that did not hold, and after some discussion they figured out where the nails would work best.
Dusty and with sore hands, they soon had their three-walled fort, though none of them had figured out how to install anything like a swinging door and they had agreed to work on that problem later. Standing back to admire it, the boy whose yard it was said, "You know, when my brother finds this, he's going to take it over. He's older than me."
"It's defensible," said Roger. "We need a sign or something to warn them what'll happen if they go inside."
"How about this?" Tyler said. He pulled out the red flag and unfurled it.
"When are you going to stop dragging that around?" said Roger. "You take it everywhere. Throw it away."
But one of the others said, "What do you mean?"
"Like this." Tyler stretched up on his toes and set the flag on the apex above the door. "It's loose, but we could nail it down."
"That's stupid," Roger said. He grabbed it and tossed it to the ground. "I've got a better idea. Be right back!"
He ran off. Tyler retrieved the flag, carefully rolled it up, and returned it to his pocket. Roger came back a few minutes later with a staple gun and a flag that had a picture of an eagle with a snake in its claws. He stapled it to the fort so it jutted into the air above the door.
"That's better. It'll scare anyone away."
Roger looked proud. When everybody else nodded, Tyler nodded too.
On Wednesday, he sat reading on the bed when his mother came home. He wanted to know what had happened, so he put the book aside and slipped down the hall almost to the living room. There, just before the threshold, he leaned back against the wall.
She came in a moment later. His father said, "That took a long time. How'd it go?"
"Confusing."
"Wow! Look at that."
There came a thump. Books and papers dropping to the table.
"We don't have to read all of it," she said. "He threw a lot at me. And he talked for a long time."
"Give me the summary version."
"Well, Tyler is going through a change. Kids are self-centered."
"Don't I know!"
"But at a certain age they move beyond the family. Different kinds of authority, different kinds of problems. It's a task, it's hard. It's like being expelled from paradise."
"What?"
"You can't go back. There's even some people who think it doesn't happen automatically. You look around, you realize people are different, there's peer pressure, and sooner or later you make a decision."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
She laughed. "Neither do I. We have to read more before we take him in. Oh, and we're supposed to be doing something called 'scaffolding.'"
He sighed. "I don't know about this. I think we just have to get him into something besides that Community Center. It's good enough, but Little League, Cub Scouts. Maybe track and field when school starts again. It's sink or swim. Once he gets a wider experience, it'll all fall into place." He paused, then said. "You have that dreamy look."
"Poor Tyler. I was thinking about that movie the other day. Remember?"
"Oh, yeah. Something about adolescence."
"Sexual awakening."
"Ouch, my ears!"
"Sex, sex! Why is it always about that? Or adulthood, old age, death. Everything after sixteen years old, as if nothing before that ever changes. Poor kid. It's because it's sex and violence, that's all anyone is interested in. Sex, sex, sex!"
"Emily!"
Tyler had stopped listening. He stared at the wall, wondering what movie they had seen and if it was any good. A rattling sound from his room woke him up. He walked back in time to see a clod of dirt hit the window. He opened it to find Roger in the front yard.
"Come on! We're going to play capture the flag."
"What's capture the flag?"
"I don't know. It's the older kids, my brother invited me. It's like an army game."
Tyler felt prepared because he had his own flag. He grabbed it going through the rec room. He joined Roger outside and they hurried down the street toward the hills at the end of the block. It was late in the day, but summer with a couple hours of light remaining. Roger took him up into a small valley thick with trees. They met Roger's brother, Henry, in a clearing at the end of the path. Tyler immediately felt out of place. Besides Henry, only three others were there. Nate Harris from the Community Center, who was the older boy Roger had warned him about, and another boy and girl. All were older than Tyler.
Henry looked surprised. "What are you doing here?"
"You said I could come," Roger said.
"No, I didn't. I just told you where I was going."
The other boy leaned toward Henry and said, "Wouldn't it be funny if they won?"
They both laughed out loud. The girl folded her arms across her chest and Nate looked angry. "Get the midgets out of here," he said.
"No," Henry said back at him. "They stay or we leave."
The two laughed again. The girl rolled her eyes and ended up smiling at Nate. Tyler had no idea what was going on, but Nate finally relented. He went through the rules. The girl, whose name was Amber, would hold the flag. She would wait at an abandoned shack at the top of the valley. Nate would defend her and they would have to get through him. The first to reach the shack would win.
The two older boys complained that the rules were overly complicated. He hadn't even told them exactly where the shack was. But he said that was it, take it or leave it, and he pulled from his back pocket a square flag made of plastic and taped to a drinking straw. It was not nearly as good as Tyler's. It was larger, but looked as if it had been hastily cut from a raincoat. He handed it to Amber. She pressed two fingers to her lips and kissed them twice, then waved them at Nate. Then she turned and walked into the trees.
Nate watched her, then said, "I'm going halfway up. When I yell, you can start."
He followed after her. The two older boys began gathering up small stones, so Tyler and Roger did the same. Some minutes later, Nate's distant shout came drifting through the trees. The four of them started off together, but once they got into the trees the two older boys split off.
Unsure where to go, Tyler stayed with Roger, until Roger said, "Don't stand so close."
Tyler hung back a few steps. The rocks hurt his hands, so he dropped some of them. They hiked up into the valley, listening for sounds of Nate but hearing only the breeze in the trees and the scarce calls of birds.
Roger was jumping over a log when he suddenly said, "Ouch!" Tyler stopped with one foot about to crack a branch. From somewhere in the trees to the right, Nate called out, "That's it! You're dead!"
"What do I do?"
"Just stay right there."
Roger sat down on the log. Nate appeared from the trees on the right, hands filled with stones and moving so quickly that he missed Tyler standing just behind Roger. He shot to the left and disappeared again. Tyler was worried for a moment. If Roger was "dead," what was he supposed to do? But Roger looked over his shoulder and laughed. "Here," he said, and extended his handful of rocks.
Tyler took them and kept going. He had not thrown even one yet, and after a few minutes he dropped most of them again. He was still unsure where to go, but he continued on up the valley as it narrowed and the steep hillsides crowded in. He was startled when it suddenly opened up again into another little field. Ahead was a neglected one-room shack with a flimsy porch along the front. Amber sat there, flag beside her, idly swinging her legs back and forth with her sneakers digging furrows in the dirt and leaves. The doorway behind her had no door, but it was so deep in shadow that Tyler could only see darkness inside.
Amber had not seen him. He took another two steps. She looked up and said, "Oh, crap!"
"I win!" he said.
"Well, I guess."
He dropped the stones and walked over. She stopped swinging her legs. "What do I win?" he said.
"Ten minutes, but forget it."
"But I won!"
She looked at him closely. But then she slid off the porch and handed her flag to him..
He hadn't really wanted it. He took it anyway and said, "Thank you." And then he felt awkward. He had never been quite sure what the game was or how to play it, he wasn't completely sure he had won, and he didn't know why she had awarded him the flag. So he reached into his pocket and took out his own red flag, which he liked better. He unfurled it and handed it to her.
She smiled again. "Well, thank you."
"What the hell, Amber!"
They turned. Nate charged into the field with the others just behind. When they saw Tyler they all snickered, except Nate, who rushed up and grabbed the red flag from her hand.
"What's this!"
"The kid gave it to me."
Nate turned on Tyler. "Do you know what you did? You didn't win, you have to fight! You were supposed to fight me! Those were the rules!"
He pulled his arm back. Amber said, "Don't do it, Nate!"
He glared at her. Then he heaved. The flag arched over Tyler's head and tumbled somewhere in the brush. Amber sighed loudly. She said, "Don't call me again," and stormed past him, back down the valley.
Nate frowned at Tyler, then followed after her. The two older boys went with them, leaving Tyler and Roger standing alone before the shack. "What was that all about?" Roger said.
"I don't know. He's your brother."
Tyler put the flag she had given him back on the porch. He walked to the bushes where the flag had landed. "You want that back?" Roger said.
"Yeah, it's important."
They searched until darkness fell, then Roger left for home and Tyler searched alone. He finally found it under the protruding root of one of the bushes.
On Monday, he couldn't sit still. He spent the afternoon stacking blocks together and knocking them down with paper wads. He rode his bike up and down the street and bounced a ball against the garage door. He threw rocks over the back fence, trying to guess what they hit by the sounds they made. He spewed a deck of cards in a chaotic mess across the floor of his room, gathered them back into a stack, and spewed them again. He zipped up and down the hallway, then ran loops around the living room couch until his mother said, "It's going to be a couple hours yet, Tyler. Let's do something productive with that energy."
She brought out the math books and they sat on the couch. He leaned his head against her shoulder while she explained the associative property.
"Look," she said. "Three plus seven is what?"
He counted on his fingers. "Ten."
"Right! Plus one is?"
"Eleven."
"Good. So the whole thing equals eleven. But what if we move the parentheses over to here?" He looked at it and only shrugged. So she said, "Seven plus one."
"Eight."
"And that, plus three?"
He counted fingers again. "Eleven."
"So they're the same however you add them. See?"
He looked at it for a long time, then pointing at the numbers, he said, "Three plus seven is ten."
She sighed. "Yes, it is. But do you see how they're the same? It's just logic. If you do this here, then you do that there. Just put it all together."
They kept trying. Tyler leaned forward and stared hard at the book. He added numbers over and over. He flipped back and forth through worksheets. They went on to commutative properties, identities, fractions. Finally he said, "I don't see why I have to do math over the summer. Roger doesn't have to do math."
"I know. But you're way behind. We have to get you up to speed before school starts."
He leaned against her shoulder again. She said, "Do you remember when we used to sit here and I'd read to you?"
He nodded. "That was easier."
"Well, sure! I did all the work!" They laughed. She said, "But you're reading on your own now. That's good. Well, back to the salt mines."
She picked up the book again, but he was saved by the sound of the truck pulling into the driveway. He sprang from the couch, shot across the living room, threw open the door, and ran across the lawn just as Blake came around the back of the truck. He jumped into Blake's arms even before noticing his brother's skin was darker than when he had left.
"Hey, kid!" Blake said. "How are you?"
"Fine. Did you like the knife?"
Blake dropped him to the ground. "I liked the knife. That's a great knife."
"We all sent it to you."
They bustled about as if caught in a rushing stream. Blake pulled a duffel bag from the back of the truck and their mother wanted to know how the bus ride had been. His hair was shorter and he wore a t-shirt with the camp's logo, and why did he wear sandals on the bus instead of shoes? He went to his room and barely had time to change clothes before they called him back to sit down for a welcome home dinner. They wanted to know all about hiking and canoeing and volleyball. They wanted to see pictures. They wanted to know if he had met a girl, and he didn't say yes but he didn't say no.
After they had finished eating, with the table still a jumble of plates and glasses, their father said, "So, you're voting age now. How does it feel to be a man?"
Tyler didn't hear the answer because he had leaned his head against his mother's shoulder and looked up at her. She said, "Stop it, Tyler. Act your age." Then she turned back to Blake.
Tyler sat up straight. They talked a while longer, then she said, "You didn't have a cake for your birthday, so I baked you one."
She brought out a cake with eighteen candles. She placed it in the middle of the table and they sang happy birthday, then told him to make a wish. While Blake thought about it with his eyes closed, Tyler leaned forward and blew out half the candles.
"Tyler!" his father said.
Tyler stood and ran from the room. Behind him, his mother said, "Stephen, please. It's been Tyler all summer."
What else they said faded as he ran down the hall. He bounced onto his bed and stared at the ceiling for some long moments, then he went down to the rec room and stared at the trophy shelf. His red flag stood proudly between Blake's trophies. He reached up and pulled down the scouting trophy. He slid open the door and walked out to the dirt behind the workshop. He flopped down onto his knees, stuck his hands into the soft dirt, and dug a hole. Into this he dropped his brother's trophy and covered it up again.
He got in trouble for it. They had seen him from the living room window, crossing the yard with the trophy in his hands. There was yelling. They sent him to his room. He watched them from his own window, digging up the trophy and brushing it off as they walked with it back to the rec room.
He went to the rec room again much later, when everything was quiet and no one was there. For a long time he stared at the red flag.
Blake came in and said, "Hey, kid."
"Hey."
"What's wrong?"
Tyler shifted his weight. The carpet was digging into his elbow and it had started to hurt. "I've been trying to put it together. There's blue things and brown things and yellow things, but I can't get the pieces to fit. It's frustrating."
Blake sat cross-legged on the carpet beside him. He squinted through the light reflecting off the puzzle pieces.
"I remember this."
"Yeah. I thought if you could do it, I could do it."
"Well, you know what the problem is? There's two different puzzles here. When I did them last year, I just threw them all in that box. It's not even the right box."
Tyler looked closely at the little bits of broken pictures. "Oh!"
"The blue one is an ocean with a beach and the yellow one is a mustard field. Here, I'll help you."
They worked on it for a long time, even after it got so dark that they had to turn on a light. Blake went to bed, but both puzzles were half done and Tyler continued until he had a complete picture of an ocean and a complete picture of a yellow field. He sat on the carpet for a while, admiring them. Then, as he stood, he happened to glance at the flag on the trophy shelf.
It wasn't really a trophy. He thought for a moment of giving it to Blake for helping with the puzzle, but then he thought, no, that was stupid.
Instead, he took it out back. The air was clear and warm, and refreshingly bright, and he knew he wouldn't sleep tonight. He crossed the yard and opened the back fence. The trash would be collected tomorrow, so the can was full. He lifted the lid and laid the flag on top. Then he thought twice and stood it upright.
