I remember back when I had 3 or 4 thinkers and great aficionados of literature believing the following was a famous Hemingway "Short Story." I really haven't been back since.

So what's up DA? still DA?

Old Man Farley down by the train tracks.

Old Farley - what a memory! We used to throw rocks at his shack when the summer moon made the humid air hot and electric and we couldn't sleep. He'd tremble, turning fire-red in the oily lamplight of his porch, and shake his old blue-veined fist. But he had gout and couldn't catch us. Till the last time we went out there, that is. It was around midnight and I waited, holding our rough metal 'rock bucket' while Phil, my best buddy at the time, climbed down the latticework of the wall beneath his bedroom. We grinned at each other. I remember Phil was missing a front tooth. Those are the days I cherish most in memory - the almost physical recollections of a time when innocence lent optimism to each new moment. We followed the tracks for a few miles in pitch darkness. We'd been down there so many times, we didn't need a lantern; a light would warn old Farley anyway.

I remember wondering why his window stayed unlit after the brick put a hole in his corrugated aluminum roof. Then we heard something behind us. I froze. I knew what it was, but I didn't want to turn around. He caught hold of Phil with an animal shriek that froze my blood and started dragging him back to the shack. He must have waited in the bushes every night for a week to catch us. Phil was crying, clawing, and shrieking crazily. I started running towards them, but the old man turned around and grinned at me, lunging forward with a rutty gasp that I still hear in my nightmares. There was something in his eye, preternatural lechery that had been simmering long - pent up, solitary rage given sudden release. Those old eyes leaped fiery, outpacing age like apollo in his race across the heavens. I ran like a rabbit with hot, wet breath on its footpads.

I only talked Phil once after that. He was different, but it was his expression that stuck with me - not the inflated donut he had to bring to school with him that month. I guess he'll never get over the betrayal. Or, I guess, forget being pinned down in the back of a drifters shack with clammy, wrinkled hands clutching fistfuls of his soft shoulder. I was in the lunch line and I heard a familiar cough. I turned and Phil was behind me. I kind of broke down, sobbing like a baby - real embarrassing - and that got to Phil too. I guess he was planning to tell me off or punch me or something he'd been cooking up in his newly crazed mind, but the hard lines in his face went all slack and his eyes turned to water. I snapped out of it before he did. He was mouthing insane phrases. I couldn't make out most of it. Just "Naked Leapfrog" or something. I cut and ran out of there and convinced my parents to transfer me to White Oaks Elementary in the next county. They never caught Old Farley. Sometime, I go down to the old shack and chuck rocks at the remaining splinters of glass in the cracking window-frames and remember.

I remember one guy actually said something like, "Damn, that man [hemingway] can write.

is ndifference still here?