2. Abandoned City

There were always two or three new houses going up around the development. My across-the-street friend Michael McDonald and I liked these new houses better than any playground. The workmen were there most of the day, banging with their hammers and pushing wheelbarrows and climbing ladders, but there was usually and hour or two toward the end of the day after they left and before dinner when we could look around, marvel that what looked like just a wood scaffolding and dusty pieces of plasterboard could turn into a house.

We grabbed whatever we could, whatever it seemed like the workmen were going to throw away. We each had a collection of about a hundred nails, many of them rusted or bent from being hit wrong but some in perfect condition, like the workmen had just thrown them out for no good reason. We stored the nails in the empty cans of paint we salvaged, after we’d brought the cans into the woods and tried using the bottom skim to paint our initials on trees.

We also collected scraps of wood and pipe and rope, pieces of insulation, bits of electrician’s tape and wire mesh. We saved our collections in special, private spots in the woods behind my house.

The woods were another place we liked better than any playground. Both Michael and I came from New York City; we’d never been around woods before. We explored as much as we could, a little more every day, convinced no one had ever seen what we were seeing. One of our favorite spots was The Mossy Place, where the trees suddenly opened and there was a sunny spot covered in deep moss, so soft when you lay back down on it and let the warmth cover you. Then there was the Vines, a place where long vines hung from the trees, far out of reach even when we tried to climb the trees. We knew that if we only could reach them, they would be perfect for swinging on, just like Tarzan.

Back beyond the woods was the cow’s field. The cow’s fields weren’t nearly as much fun as the woods, just a big wide open stretch of high grass. You couldn’t even run back there, because some of the grass was the sharp kind that cut up your legs. And then there were the cow turds, which were everywhere, often hidden under the grass. If you stepped on a dry one it wasn’t so bad, but one time Michael stepped on a fresh pile and got so much stuff on his sneakers his mother had to throw them out and buy a new pair.

The cows didn’t pay much attention to us. We avoided them. We knew they wouldn’t hurt us, but they were just so big. We thought it was better to stay away.

Michael and I couldn’t believe it when we found the abandoned city at the edge of the cow’s fields. It wasn’t a whole city, just two collapsed buildings made of busted-up gray wood. But it was easy to imagine there’d been other buildings around these two, even streets. Through one of the collapsed walls you could see right into the dark basement of the buildings, just like we could see into the basement of the new houses being built on the block. This was different, though: these buildings were old, they were mysterious.

“It’s like an old Western town,” Michael said. “A ghost town.”

“It could have been,” I agreed. “It definitely could have been.”

I told my father about it that night as he was looking at my teeth. He did that every night, scraped at my teeth with a fingernail to see if I’d brushed them. “We found someplace cool today,” I told him. “A ghost town.”

He listened as I described it. But instead of being excited, he said, “That sounds very dangerous. I don’t want you two going back there anymore, okay? One of those old walls could cave in. Someone could get really hurt.”

I told Michael what my father had said the next day. He said his father had told him the same thing, that he wasn’t allowed to go back there either.

We never meant to. We would never say to one another, “Let’s go to the abandoned city.” But we’d just start walking in the cow’s fields and we’d end up there somehow.

We knew we were doing something we weren’t supposed to be doing. But we didn’t talk about that, either. Once there, we never touched anything. We believed what our fathers had told us about how dangerous it was.

One day we were sitting there in the abandoned city, talking about the night before’s Batman episode, whether the Penguin or the Joker was the better villain—everyone knew the Riddler was the absolute best—when we heard something. A whimpering noise. At first we were both scared. Michael said wanted to leave.

But I said, “No. We have to investigate.”

We figured out the noise was coming from underneath the buildings, from the dark basement.

“It must be a dog,” Michael said. “It must be a dog stuck down there.”

“You think?”

“Yes. Listen.”

He was right. It did sound like a dog.

“Here, boy,” I yelled, “come on out,” and then Michael yelled the same thing. We both tried to coaxing the dog out for a while, but it stayed in there, whimpering.

“It could be hurt,” I said. “It could have fallen in there and broken its legs.”

It was getting dark. We had to go home. But I thought about that dog all night, that poor dog with its broken leg in the dark basement. I wanted so badly to tell my father about it, so that he could call the Fire Department and they could put a ladder down and get the dog out. But of course I couldn’t tell my father, since I wasn’t supposed to be at the abandoned city in the first place.

I woke the next morning with a plan. I went over to Michael’s house early, waited at the bottom of his driveway until he came out.

“We have to go back,” I said. “We have to get that dog out.”

“How are we going to do that?”

I pulled up my shirt and showed Michael the hammer. It was from a set of tools my father had bought just a few months before at Sears, still silvery and unused, with a black rubber handle. “We’ll build something,” I told him. “We’ll use the wood that’s there and our nails and rope, what we’ve collected. We’ll make a pulley.”

Michael nodded. I took off running, into the woods toward the secret places where we kept our stuff. I didn’t need to look back. I knew Michael was right behind me.

But when we got to the abandoned city, tired from carrying our paint cans full of nails and scraps of wood and pipe, we didn’t hear anything. We got up close to the building, closer than we ever had before. We listened hard, lying flat on the ground because we’d seen in some movie that laying flat on the ground helped you hear better. But there was still no whimpering.

“Maybe he found a way out on his own,” Michael said.

“Maybe,” I answered.

“I hope he did,” Michael said.

 nodded. I was sad for the dog, of course, and like Michael hoped he’d managed to find a way to get out on his own. But I was also sad because I had my heart set on rescue, and now I wouldn’t get the chance.