Toll Booth. Michael Aronovitz

and Ring-Dings. There is no physician worth his salt that would ever tell you that there is a correlation between cholesterol and anemic need, but please believe me when I say that you could not survive the booth with an LDL or triglyceride count under 330. When I started there I was five foot-eight inches and a cool one hundred and fifty-four pounds. Though I have quietly cheated any overt sort of obesity with a lightning metabolism passed down from my mother’s side of the family, my small pear-shaped paunch and respectable weight of one eighty-four is deceiving. Stuff like this catches up with you, and I have been a poster-boy for a stroke, blood clot, or heart attack for some time now.

      That which you are reading at this moment, I composed on my Dell. It took me four months to say it exactly the way it needed to be said, and since I wanted you to get the whole picture I put the thing in story form. I even added italics at times to express inner monologue and recent flashbacks. Though I am no professional, everyone knows that even a high school dropout can up his level of discourse through reading. And I have had nothing but time on my hands. I have had time to read, to write, to mourn, and adapt.

      Reed Road is a one-way thoroughfare that cuts through Scutters Woods for five miles and eventually opens out to Main Street. To use Reed Road up until now, you would have had to come off the Route 79 overpass and pay me a toll anywhere from fifty cents to two-seventy-five, depending on where you originally picked up the turnpike. So to all my customers, to my acquaintances in the past, to my mother God rest her, my relatives, and those of you that will hear of this through the media, know and try to understand my story.

      And to you, my contractor friend with the hangover, he who has just found this packet under the bolted-down cabinet. I finally want to confirm something before you dismantle the walls, stack the safety glass, put my cash drawer and F9 500 POS touch screen on eBay, and start busting out the concrete pad below your feet.

      The toll booth still erected around you is haunted.

      I am going to tell you how it got that way.

      This is my confession.

      1.

      She’s a pussy-dog, and you know it, Jimmy.

      No she isn’t.

      Is! She looks like a leprechaun.

      She’s half beagle and half fox terrier. That’s why her ears stick up like that. And she’s really nice.

      Nice! Dog’s ain’t supposed to be “nice.” They’re supposed to be faithful. They’re supposed to have big paws and lots of hair. They’re supposed to chase after sticks, guard the house, and flush rabbits and pheasants out of the brush and shit.

      She barks when strangers come . . .

      She yips! She’s a yip dog.

      Well, I like her.

      I know you do, Jimmy. Hell, I like her too. I was just kidding.

      Really?

      Yeah, she’s awesome. For a gay, faggot, pussy-dog.

      *

      Kyle winked, pushed out of the pit, and crawled under the caution tape. On tiptoe I peered over the lip of our new hiding hole and watched him walk across the abandoned job site. He stopped by a stack of cinderblocks and a pile of long steel bars with grooves in them. He turned and scratched his head. He stroked an imaginary beard. He hawked up and spit into a red wheelbarrow with a flat tire, then spun away, spread his feet, and fumbled with his pants. He started pissing down the side of a dented fifty-gallon drum. His shoulders were shaking as were mine, and his stream went through a number of unsteady spurts in rhythm with his laughter. He started gyrating his hips and the urine that dissolved the old dust in shiny splatters became a pattern. He was writing his name.

      “Kyle, don’t.”

      He zipped up and climbed into the cab of a bulldozer.

      “Don’t what?” He grinned and started yanking on the gear handles. He was not quite tall enough to reach the floor pedals with his feet.

      “Don’t mess around.”

      “But Jimmy, this piece of shit won’t move.”

      More yanking. Hard. His teeth were clenched beneath the thinnest of smiles and sweat ran through his dirty blond crewcut. The scene was becoming a familiar one. It was a hot summer day in Westville, we were thirteen years old, I was Kyle’s new pal, and we were out making mischief.

      “C’mon,” I said. “You’re gonna bust it.”

      He stopped.

      “So? What are they going to do, take fingerprints? Next, you’re about tell me that the Chief of Police is gonna connect some busted dozer gear with my name written in piss over there on that drum. You’re a paranoid little jerk-weed, ain’t ya?”

      I shrugged. He shrugged back and we both laughed. It was the usual standoff. My base instincts screamed “foul” long before we chucked apples at the Levinworths’ tin roof, or doused the church doorknobs with bacon grease, or lit up a bag of dogshit on the top step of Mr. Kimball’s front porch. I was the worried voice of what could go wrong and Kyle would twist my words around to prove we wouldn’t get caught.

      I rested my forearms on the edge of the trench and looked for a place to draw pictures in the dirt. There was a half-buried tube of liquid nails and a scuffed-up red gas cap next to a fanned-out toss of broken green glass pieces. The bent-up Genesee Cream Ale bottle cap was a foot to the left, and I made note to possibly flip it at Kyle if the moment was right. I rubbed my index finger into the ground. It was good dirt. Soft, with pretty little mica specs in it. I drew a cartoon penis and a cartoon vagina. A stalk with a bulb and an oval with an upside down “Y” in it. Why did vaginas look like peace signs anyway?

      “So,” I said. “This is the big secret?” I looked up. “We rode bikes five miles just to trash some old dozer? You said you had some new surprise out here that was ultimate pisser.”

      Kyle put his elbow up on the steering column.

      “Still drawing pussy instead of getting it, Jimmy?”

      I frowned and rubbed out my dirty cartoons.

      “So, how much kootchie are you getting?”

      “Enough,” he said. Just ask Billy Healy.”

      I had heard the stories. Supposedly, Kyle had copped a feel of Jeanette Wallman’s crotch at the Thatcher Park Shopping Center in the back bed of a pickup parked behind the Overbrook Deli. The legend was that she was wearing tight white jeans and his dirty hand left actual prints.

      “Got any gum, Jimmy?”

      He was staring. It sort of hurt to look back at it. For the millionth time that day, I looked down, and to my dismay, started drawing in the dirt again.

      “You know I don’t,” I said. My mom didn’t let me have gum. She didn’t let me have Twizzlers or corn chips either. She was a health food freak-a-zoid and stocked the house with granola, wheat germ, and soy products. She also did regular room checks.

      “That’s OK,” he said. “I do.”

      He fished a square of Bazooka out of his pocket and chucked it to me. It fell a bit short and I reached out for it eagerly. It felt like Christmas when you could scarf up a freebie. I ripped it open, licked the sugar powder off the comic no one ever read anyway, and jammed the gum in my mouth. I had chewed it three good times before I realized that Kyle was still wearing that hard, blank expression.

      “That’s all right,” he said. “I didn’t want my half anyway.”

      My shoulders sagged. Kyle Skinner was the most wild and obnoxious boy that went to Paxon Hill Junior High School, but he also had these cast-iron rules of etiquette. Figuring out the boundaries was a constant source of pain for me, but it also fascinated me in some deep, secret place. Somehow, these were the laws of growing up your mom never told you about.

      He turned