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with an intuitive list grounded in the notion that blood must ever call to blood. If a particular spot of high ground near the side of a particular country road struck him as a likely spot to bury a strong box, then surely it was his own daddy’s ghost who’d whispered such directly into his heart. Next, he traced maps onto tissue paper and transposed in a prioritized color code selected locales he planned to investigate as soon as he was old enough to travel on his own.
    One fall, he discovered how much he loved girls. Few gave him so much as the time of day. He made a new study to determine which boys girls gave not only the time of day but their hearts and hands as well, concluding that sportsmen seemed to be granted the best of what a young girl might offer and still go to Sunday school with her head up. Lickety-split, he joined every team he could think of in junior high. In the course of a single year, he was a wrestler, a sprinter, a right fielder, and a tight end. As he’d hoped, his feminine classmates flocked to him, every kind of girl he could desire: short ones, tall ones, fleshy ones, skinny ones, girls with breasts already, girls with wide, luscious mouths, girls with hips that moved in a way that stole his breath, Jewish girls, of course, but Christian girls, too. When he went into the town, he noticed that Negro girls gave him shy, curious glances. By this he knew, as Uncle Dr. Howard would say, he had arrived.
    The shameful secret was he didn’t really like sports. He’d rather sit in the library pouring over maps or work in the garden or tag along after Bald Horace while he tended that ornery tribe of goats he kept in a rented patch of rocks and grass next to the village where the Negro folk lived. He much preferred the quiet study of river currents, the cheering sight of a tiny green shoot peeping out of the dirt to the crunch of bones on the thirty-yard line or the way his back hurt when he spent hours hunched over slapping a fist into his mitt, endlessly waiting for a ball to fly his way. He especially preferred pastoral occupations to the sharp jab of Bird Dog MacKenzie’s evil-minded elbow in his privates when they twisted on the mat. Since Mama always said it was a man’s job to make sacrifices for the women in his life, he considered his involvement with sports as well as the odd jobs he performed after school to help out at home his primary forfeitures in service to the fair gender.
    All of this had the effect of basting an adult patina over the whole of Mickey Moe’s boyish being. Weaker and younger boys looked to him for advice and protection. No Southern lad can resist the glamour of the heroic. He rose to the occasion every time.
    Mickey Moe, a cousin or classmate might ask, I got a cranky chain on my bike ruinin’ my every effort to beat my brother home after school. You help me straighten it out?
    He’d spit and roll up his sleeves and crouch over the bike getting his clothes and hands smeared with grease as he carefully removed the chain, laid it flat on the ground to correct any kinks, and with any luck got it back on again. Such was his reputation among his peers, if he could not fix something, it was declared dead broke and tossed away. If the stubborn object was a bicycle, it might resurrect, reappearing on the streets under the conspicuous bottom of a Negro boy who’d scavenged and coaxed it back to use. Out of respect for Mickey Moe, the original owner would refuse to recognize it, at least in public.
    Such deference was a burden to him. He felt it based on his participation in sports he did not like and a mechanical competence he only half possessed. He often felt a fraud, and yet he performed his role of good old boy in training with increasing prowess throughout his high school years, because it was what Mama wanted and what the boys at school wanted and heck, what the girls at school wanted, too. Sometimes, he needed to blow off steam when the frustration of what he was,