Malchiks

A few weeks ago I reconnected, on Facebook, with a very long-lost friend from my childhood. 

Travis and I were friends from about Grade Four until the end of Grade Ten.  It was a strange group of friends - kind of like the Sandlot Gang, but with more cigarettes and pornography than baseball.  Looking back, it's a wonder that I survived it at all, and it's difficult to flip through those memories and try to find some dormant glimmer of the person I would eventually become.  It was a tumultuous time - summers full of sling-shots and ravines, firecrackers, trampolines, du Maurier king-sized lights.

But through it all there was one thing that never changed: my friendship with Travis.  The rest of it fades into the background and I am always left with this one relationship.  And even though we haven't spoken in well over a decade, I am forever thankful for it.

Somewhere in North Delta, or here in Victoria, there is a box or an album or an envelope that contains a photograph of two pink-faced boys holding two rainbow trouts.  My Grampa would have called us Malchiks - snot nosed boys.  In fact, he called us that all the time.  Now, I haven't seen this photo for years, but I know it's out there, and for some reason it's how I always remember us - our entire friendship in one picture:

A photograph of you and me standing behind a truck at the lake

How old are we here? Ten? Eleven?

Your face is dirty and dimpled,
my hair thickly curled and blonde.

I'm fat, like I always was.
You're as skinny as ever,
all lean muscle and sinew,
your small body constantly poised for flight.
Or fight - it didn't much matter back then.

I'm wearing overalls and a purple shirt,
so maybe we're only nine.
I wore those overalls for our fifth grade class photo,
one buckle undone.
You made fun of me for it.

You're wearing a Charlie Brown shirt:
striped, faded, cheap.
You were more like Snoopy, really.
I was Charlie Brown.

We both hold fish,
great-bellied rainbow trouts wrestled from the lake,
our arms outstretched, wrists up,
a finger hooked through their mouths.
My face is twisted with pain and pride - the fish is heavy.
Your face is twisted too, but that's just your smile.

Behind us, the trees wander into the Cariboo horizon.
It's those trees that matter, those trees are how I remember you:

our small legs disappearing
into the thin branches
the forts

the hideouts
the escape.