“Don’t worry. We’ll stay out of fights,” says Tom quite seriously.
We go down the stairs, and Tom says, “Your mother is really nice.”
I’m sort of surprised—kids don’t usually say much about each other’s parents. “Yeah, Mom’s O.K. I guess she worries about me and Pop a lot.”
“It must be pretty nice to have your mother at home,” he says.
That kind of jolts me, too. I wonder where his mother and father are, whether they’re dead or something; but again, I don’t quite want to ask. Tom isn’t an easy guy to ask questions. He’s sort of like an island, by himself in the ocean.
We walk down to Fourteenth Street and over to Eighth Avenue, about twelve blocks; after all, exercise is what we want. The IND trains are fast, and it only takes about half an hour to get up to Inwood, at 206th Street. The park is right close, and it is real woods, although there are paved walks around through it. We push uphill and get in a grassy meadow, where you can see out over the Hudson River to the Palisades in Jersey. It’s good and hot, and we flop in the sun. There aren’t many other people around, which is rare in New York.
“Let’s eat lunch,” says Tom. “Then we can go hunting arrowheads and not have to carry it.”
He agrees the spaghetti sandwich is a great invention.
I wish the weather would stay like this more of the year—good and sweaty hot in the middle of the day, so you feel like going swimming, but cool enough to sleep at night. We lie in the sun awhile after lunch and agree that it’s too bad there isn’t an ocean within jumping-in distance. But there isn’t, and flies are biting the backs of our necks, so we get up and start exploring.
We find a few places that you might conceivably call caves, but they’ve been well picked over for arrowheads, if there ever were any. That’s the trouble in the city: anytime you have an idea, you find out a million other people had the same idea first. Along in mid-afternoon, we drift down toward the subway and get cokes and ice cream before we start back.