Meet Tiger Mendelbaum......

Tiger Mendelbaum was flummoxed. Stopped dead in his tattered high top Chucks. He closed his eyes, thinking maybe some new scene would appear after the rigorous automatic rubbing of both the sockets, and sure enough, when he reopened his deep set blue eyes, what he thought he had seen before was gone.

He stood next to his red Radio Flyer wagon in the cracked concrete driveway that connected the backs of the brick row houses on Solly and Hoffnagle Streets, a place he knew well having lived here for most of his twelve years except for the time when his parents lived in an apartment with his older brother which they outgrew when Morris aka Tiger was born. But that didn’t count because they moved before he was two and all he can remember about that time in the apartment on top of Rubenstein’s Pharmacy was a vague uneasy memory of screaming in the dark.

He’d slept with a night light after that for as long as he can remember, this latest one in the shape of a cowboy whose white hat constantly shone from the wall on Tiger’s side of the small bedroom he shared with his older brother Bernie, aka The Brain, now fifteen and a senior in high school. Bernie stopped making fun of Tiger’s need for that light after their father beat The Brain for destroying Tiger’s last night light, the one he’d had since he was three, of the cow jumping over the yellow moon, because the light bothered him. That night, Tiger woke up screaming in sheer terror, and that was the only time Tiger had ever seen his dad hit anyone and the only time he had seen Bernie the Brain shed a tear.

Back in the driveway, seconds before, Tiger had seen something, but what? He stood peering intently at the spot at the end of the driveway. Fidgeting beside his wagon, Tiger was waiting for Mr. Krumpnick to come lumbering down the driveway in his battered red and black Chevvy station wagon, like he did every afternoon at 4 o’clock, and dump the 100 Bulletins into his Raido Flyer that Tiger was going to deliver to his neighbors the way he did since Bernie had joined the Chemistry Club and started staying after school and passed his paper route down to his little brother. Tiger didn’t mind at all. He loved money.

Tiger looked towards the corner again. The small figure wearing the a Phillies’ cap and those unmistakable Coke bottle glasses seemed to have been sitting atop a large wheel, and with his arms outstretched to the side. And before the image could even register, the boy and the wheel whizzed past Tiger towards the end of the driveway and effortlessly made a perfect right hand turn onto Lorreto.

Tiger Mendlebaum was flummoxed. He reached into the pocket of his brown corduroy pants and turned off the transistor radio while taking the plastic bud out of his left ear. He needed to concentrate. Had he really just seen Bobby Oh Say Can You See Olansky riding a one-wheeled bike down his driveway? The last time he had seen Bobby…. Tiger shuddered. There were some things that were better left in the dark.

The woods, that day, for one, and Tiger’s identity for another. He was sure that Bobby had no idea who had untied him, helped him onto a wagon facing backwards, and pulled him out of that nightmare.

I guess he found his way home, Tiger thought, for an instant, knowing only that when they made their way with the wagon through the woods and onto Algon Avenue, Tiger told his passenger to get out now.

“Do you know where you are?” he had asked the boy with the vacant eyes and stone face. Then he turned on his heels and stared his walk home, without looking back, convincing himself that he had seen the smaller boy nod.

Sometimes at night that summer, when Tiger would wake up in the dark and turn for comfort towards the illuminated cowboy ( one of dozens of cowboys keeping watch from the fading wallpaper) he would feel a chill and his stomach would flip, hearing the pitiful sound of Bobby’s pleading and the angry words of the boys of Egypt. Those were the nights that Tiger wanted to go back into the woods and find Bobby’s glasses, that the biggest boy from Egypt grabbed from his face, snapping the elastic strap that encircled Bobby’s small head and then tossing them carelessly towards the creek.

But, when daylight came, Tiger never did go anywhere near the woods. He tried not to think about it – the helpless shamed boy tied to a tree with his wet pants around his ankles and his hat pulled over his face. He knew that that boy was Bobby Olansky, but who was that boy with Bobby’s stone face and a new pair of glasses flying like the wind, his little yellow jacket forming wings as he disappeared around the bend on a unicycle?