Danny Donaldson lives next door. When he gets out of the hospital tomorrow, he’s gonna pound me.

He’s tough, Danny is—Moe from Three Stooges tough, with the grim expression and bowl-cut black hair to match. He can take a punch, but what he really likes is giving them. I have the bruises to prove it. Danny’s the kid who hits first, who wrestles without rules, who bugs you to come down to his basement, lace up his cherry-red boxing gloves, and go some rounds with him while his weird uncle Derek coaches. If you don’t watch out in the basement, when you’re not boxing, uncle Derek might get you in a tickle attack, and he never lets up. I usually make an excuse and avoid Danny’s basement: “Michael needs help with his paper route today, Danny. Sorry. Bye.”

Danny’s in fifth grade, two grades ahead of me. Mrs. Klacker had his whole class draw a big Get Well Soon card, and then she delivered it to him at the hospital. I bet Danny sucked down all that attention.

Danny likes to talk. Usually about himself and the things he’ll do some day. Or the things his dad is about to buy him. “My dad is gonna take me to Epping on Saturday,” he said on Thursday, before the accident. “The car show is huge, you wouldn’t believe it. He usually shills out for whatever I want, so I’m gonna go for an army troop truck, even bigger than last year. Can’t wait to chug that sonofabitch out here, in the mud with these guys.”

We were playing army in his back yard, with his yellow plastic Tupperware full of green men. We’d set up a base in the pit under an old steel upside-down-U cemented into his yard. I think it was left over from a laundry-pulley setup, but who knows. Everyone has dryers now. The U thing had a good mud and gravel pit under it, and we used it for war, for gravel fights, for worm emergency room—for just about anything.

Danny is rich. His dad is named Danny, too, and he works in advertising. He always has a shiny new Lincoln. He smokes cigars that smell like a skunk and he plays pool and drinks Scotch in his den at home. Danny’s dad doesn’t like me, you can tell. He never asks me any questions when he’s around, and his face looks like he’s smelling sour milk whenever he has to be in the same room with me. I don’t know why.

Besides Danny Donaldson and his dad Danny Donaldson, the other Donaldsons are his mom Deborah Donaldson, his older sister Dina Donaldson, and his two younger sisters Danielle Donaldson and Daisy Donaldson. I swear I’m not making up these goddam Donaldson names. You gotta admire their commitment to keep the douchey D-names going through four kids. If they’d had a dog, they probably would’ve named him Dusty Donaldson or Dash Donaldson or some other D-word, but Mrs. Donaldson is allergic. They have a grandma who comes over sometimes, and they call her Deedaw, but I never call her anything.

Danny isn’t Catholic, even though he lives right next door to me, and across the street from our church. Almost everyone around here goes to our church, St. Margaret’s, but the Donaldsons walk down to Cliftondale Square every Sunday to go to their church, which I know is called Methodist but I have no clue what that means. Do they have priests? Do they eat Christ’s body and blood? Does their church basement smell like wet laundry like ours does? When somebody gets sick or has an accident, do they pray?

I watched Danny’s family walk to their church without him yesterday.

When school got out on Thursday, Danny and I started lining up the men and planning the assault. After a few minutes, he got up and went into his house and came back with two of his bearded G.I. Joes. They looked like Dan Haggerty if he went to the world’s worst barber. “We need generals,” Danny said, “but I’m the only one who gets to move them. You wouldn’t know how.” The G.I. Joes towered over the green grunts, looking up in their frozen poses. Danny got to make the rules because it was his yard, he told me once. But in my yard, he made the rules because he was older. Danny came up with rules wherever we were.

We had about two dozen infantrymen arranged in two long rows, and Danny pulled out a couple of rusty Matchbox cars that he said could be the tanks.

Man, I hate playing with Danny. And not just because he talks and talks, or because he likes to boss me around. Everybody bosses me around. I’m used to that. My sister Ann told me about people who could see auras. They get a sense of someone by perceiving a color that sort of surrounds them. After she told me that, I could see Danny’s aura, and it was the same green as the army men, but not shiny, and it made me a little sick to my stomach whenever I was around him.

“I have a great idea!” Danny jumped up and ran into the garage. I followed him. He pulled an old gray window weight from all the junk on a dusty shelf. It was the shape of a short torpedo, about two feet long, with a point at one end and about four feet of grimy frayed brown rope tied to the other end.

“Lemme see,” I said, and he handed it to me.

“Don’t drop it on your foot,” Danny said. That thing must have weighed ten pounds, and now my hands were covered in the oily dirt coating the torpedo. I used to help my dad replace the window weights in our house, but he never let me hold one.

“C’mon,” called Danny and he headed back to the army guys. I followed, dragging the weight on the grass using the rope like a leash.

Danny grabbed the rope and flung it over the cross bar that connected the U-frame, about five feet above one end of the mud pit. “Here, pull this and hold it tight.” He handed me the end of the rope.

Danny picked up about ten of the grunts and moved them directly under the weight, which was now dangling from the cross bar. “We can have a bomb attack!” Danny cried proudly. You could see how pleased he was with himself, his blue eyes all lit up, as if he was already watching the mayhem we were about to unleash on those unsuspecting nobodys.

I wanted to get a closer look, so I grabbed a stick from the grass, wrapped the end of the rope around it, and wedged the stick into the mud. I stuck it in there good and moved toward ground zero.

“Chris! Jesus!” Danny yelped just before the torpedo came plummeting down into the front of his skull with a crack. He was looking up at the weight as it landed smack in the center of his forehead. I watched, transfixed, as the whole scene played out in front of me. The way his eyes went more and more cross-eyed as he saw the ten-pound hulk hurtling toward him, helpless. The ruthlessness of the dead weight, which cared nothing about what was at the end of its descent. The slowed-down movement of everything that you can see but can’t control. The instant regret and shame I felt when I realized that my stick anchor was such a stupid idea.

You’re a piece of shit, Danny would have said right then, if he’d been conscious. But he was silent finally, not even moaning, and there was sticky blood oozing from his forehead down into his black Moe hair and Protestant ears. Sprawled motionless on his back on top of the Dan Haggerty generals and the uncomplaining grunts—and the tiny four-door Ford tanks—Danny Donaldson had lost his sick-green aura, but now I was ten times more afraid of him.

“Shit!” I said out loud, to no one. “Shit! He’s gonna kill me! . . . Shit! Danny?!” My palms were sweaty and I got that chill on my neck skin that happens when I have to poop at school and I can’t hold it any longer.

Deedaw must have heard Danny yell, or maybe she heard me talking to myself, but she cranked open the kitchen window and called “Is everything all right out there?”

I scrambled for possible excuses in my head:

I didn’t know he was under there!
Danny told me to do that!
He grabbed the weight and pulled it down onto himself!
I was over at my house and I heard a noise and found him like this!
Timmy Shaw was here and he did it!

I ran as fast as I could to my house and hid in the basement. Danny’s gonna kill me.