along a bike path with a buddy, maneuvering the bike constantly, not to avoid the caterpillars that littered the asphalt, instead seeking them out, splattering them beneath my wheels so that their guts decorated my legs. We shoved bananas up the tailpipes of Land Rovers. We dragged rocks along the side of BMWs. We used a metal saw to hack the hood ornaments off the noses of Mercedes. We hauled a port-a-potty three miles in the bed of a pickup and dropped it off on the porch of a sprawling hillside home. We started with M80s-then upgraded to quarter-sticks of dynamite bought off the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. We would drive into the rich neighborhoods at night and we would light the quarter-stick fuses and shove them in mailboxes and sprint away and breathlessly watch the explosion, the twisted snarl of metal. And then we would go tearing off into the night, laughing. One time we shoved a plastic mailbox full of paper and lit it on fire and stood around watching as it melted, as the mouth of it closed like a dying trout. The caterpillars became moths, and the moths were wine-colored and as big as two hands brought together at the thumbs. They fluttered through forests, through city streets, thousands of them. We would chase them down with tennis rackets and swat them from the air. We would hit them with our cars, and their feathery antennae and powdery wings and yellowish guts would smear our grills and windshields. One time, during one of my baseball games, a night game, the moths swarmed the spotlights and threw their black swirling color across the diamond. They lighted on our gloves and our helmets, flexing their wings. We couldn't see the ball-and when my friend was struck in the mouth by a pitch, the umpire called off the game on account of moths.
88 I BENJAMIN PERCY