Ate lunch yesterday with Sammy and Boyce on the curb of the Kentucky Fried Chicken. Sammy, who works at Arby's and always gets us free food, asked us if we couldn't eat on the curb of the KFC next door so he could say that he went some place different for lunch. It was a nice day. Boyce gave some house sparrows bits of curly fries, even though he knows I don't like that.
At one point Sammy pulled apart a piece of roast beef that hung over his bun, and he held it up in the air. He said he thought it looked like one of those ultrasounds of a baby. He asked Boyce if it was a boy or girl, and Boyce told him it was meat. Sammy asked me if birds eat roast beef. I didn't even respond because I knew Sammy was going to give the roast beef to the sparrows no matter what I said. A few of the sparrows fought over the piece of ultrasound baby roast beef, and one of them flew away with it to the other side of the parking lot. Look at that, Sammy shouted, Baby Alice can fly!
Sammy Clifton is the only person I know who both reads constantly and has lost fingers to a hatchet on two separate occasions (one involved attempting to split a walnut in half, the other was from his brother). He's distantly related to Charles Brockden Brown, who's an old writer. He's tried to make me read a lot, the same way Rachel tried to make me religious a lot. Neither have really stuck, and all I do is make up the details that I can't properly remember. Once I thought Sammy was going to have an aneurysm when I said, "Captain Eh-rab." If you saw all the books he's read you wouldn't think he works at Arby's. But then when you saw he only has eight fingers you might think it all balances out.
I met Boyce when he punched me on the school bus. He climbed on the bus, asked who Cyrus Wetherbee was, and then walked up and slugged me in the side of the neck. Someone told him Cyrus Wetherbee was making fun of his mother. It wasn't true, though. I never even heard the name Boyce Lancaster before. He apologized and asked if I wanted to borrow some of his old Christmas records. That seemed just as weird as punching me in the side of the neck. When I asked him why he punched me there, he told me that it's not right to do wrong to someone's teeth. I think he'd cut a man's heart out before he hurt his teeth. Boyce has an enormous music collection, mostly old records. He listens to the music because he likes the album covers. He says that means he's got some pretty terrible music, but it always looks nice.
When I told Sammy and Boyce I was going to write this blog they thought it was a good idea. I told Boyce I'd link to some of his favorite record covers.
After lunch Sammy went back to work and Boyce gave me a ride home in his locksmith van. Sammy called me later that night to apologize about giving roast beef to the house sparrows. I told him Alice was passing through some sparrow's cloaca as we spoke, and he wouldn't stop laughing. He made me call Boyce and tell him that. Boyce didn't laugh until Sammy said a cloaca was another word for the bird's crapper. It's also the canal the egg passes through, but I didn't want to ruin their fun.
