Eli Boyle's dandruff was more than enough indignity for one child. In fact, the word "dandruff" barely did it justice. He was like a snow globe turned upside down, drifting flakes on the Empire State Building or the St. Louis Arch or the Golden Gate. Our classmates made sudden noises – clapping their hands or dropping books – just to see Eli's head snap around and the snow dislodge and cascade from his head, drift onto his desk and settle on the floor of the classroom. When he sneezed, teachers would stop lecturing until the ash settled. It was hard to believe a human head could flake so much without losing actual mass, and the glacial till of Eli Boyle's scalp was discussed with some seriousness as a potential science project. Walking down the hall, the dead, flaking snow covered his shoulders like two lesser peaks beneath Boyle's Everest of a head. So, as I say, at least the way I remember it, Eli Boyle's dandruff would have been enough humiliation for one kid to bear, enough embarrassment to ruin his life the way lives are ruined in elementary school, before they actually begin.
But dandruff was only the first of Eli's afflictions. I will list them here, but please don't think me cruel, or blame me for piling these horrors upon him. I was not his Maker; Someone Else visited these burdens upon Eli Boyle, Someone Far Crueler Than I. Or just more indifferent. And don't think for a moment that I take anything but the most humble responsibility in relating these difficulties. When I am finished with this confession, this affidavit, this statement of fact, it will come as no surprise that Eli Boyle turned out to be a better man than I, and nothing would make me happier than to report now that the adolescent version of that good man started life with a clean slate, or at least a clean scalp. But I cannot. So I offer this accounting with no great joy, but with a fidelity to truth and a desire to re-create for those who care, for the record, I suppose, an Eli Boyle whole and pristine, just as he was then, all the more amazing when you consider the list of ruined parts that comprised him:
He had bad breath, like he'd eaten sour cream from a cat box. He wore braces on his teeth and his legs; had acne and a unique bacon-flavored body odor; picked his nose and ate what he mined; exhibited a zest for epic, untimely flatulence (the Social Studies Incident of 1976; the Great 1980 Pep Assembly Blowout…); wore black-framed, Coke-bottle glasses; had thin red hair, skid marks in his underwear, and allergies to pollen, cotton, peanuts, and soap. He had a limp, a lisp, a twitch, waxy ears, gently crossed eyes, and was – how to put this – afflicted by the random popping of inappropriate erections, boners as we would say then, as we did say then, through his gray, standard-issue PE shorts.
His overprotective mother dressed him like a janitor in Dickey overalls and flannel shirts at a time – the mid-1970s – when everyone else wore designer jeans and varsity T's. He was the oldest kid I ever knew to wet his pants at school, to cry, to sit in the front of the school bus, to call out for his mommy. He rode a three-wheeled bike with a flag on the back because of "balance" problems; ate a special lunch with no milk or cheese or whole grains; and had grand mal seizures, blackouts, muscle spasms, and fits of gagging. He had to wear corrective shoes because of a deformed foot. He had scoliosis, skin lesions, and scabies, and the nurse was always hauling him off for impetigo or indigestion or impacted turds or any of the other nasty bugs that he carried around like his only friends. The fact that he lived in a trailer wasn't awful in itself, because the great, prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale also lived in a trailer, but Eli Boyle lived alone with his mother in the worst park in the worst trailer, an old gray can with a dirt lawn and stained sheets for curtains.
He was what we called then "a B-Flat SpEd," which meant that while he was in special education, there was nothing really wrong with him. He was brighter than the other SpEds and was able to pull B's and C's in regular classes, with the occasional A, although he was a miserable failure in that rigid and unforgiving society that is really the only society. It occurs to me now that he may have been mildly autistic, but we didn't know that word and so we felt accurate then in calling him a spaz, a loop, a 'tard, a dork, a dweeb, a dick, a freak. It was said that even the other 'tards in special ed made fun of Eli.
So that's him, as complete and flawed and tragic and sad, as wonderful as I can remember him, as pure and imperfect, as unforgettable as anyone I've ever known. Eli Boyle. The man who saved my life. And the man whose life I have taken.
You must forgive the formal informality of this tract or report or confession, this statement of fact. Even before this trouble I was told that I write like a disgraced lawyer (so is that irony or premonition?) and since my ambitions and insecurities pulled me toward a political career that anyone with a local newspaper would know flamed out brilliantly and prematurely – here I go offering the obvious as proof of the obvious – I have developed that unique, self-serving, solipsistic style of intellect that arises among attorneys, politicians, and strip-club dancers (I plead guilty to two of the three) and that is why I might now and then lapse into the kind of writing that we lawyers are trained to commit, using language to obscure and obfuscate rather than clarify and communicate.
So, when I say that it is Eli Boyle's life that I have taken, you may ask yourself, Is he simply being metaphoric? Yes and no. But let me say, there is nothing metaphoric about this confession, nothing metaphoric in my hatred and rage and my thirst for revenge, nothing metaphoric about the person I set out to kill, the handgun I held in my hand, the blood that crept across the floor beneath my feet.
But that is all ending, and before I tell the ending I must tell the beginning:
Start by picturing my neighborhood in the mid-1970s: poor and uneducated and ignorant of even those facts, a strip of sorry homes three blocks wide and a mile long, a thin cut of plywood shacks, trailers, and single-story war-era baby boomer starters that kids at school called the "white ghetto," weeds and falling shingles and axle-rusted pickup trucks parked on gray yards next to vacant lots where kids smoked pot and cigarettes; a grocery store on the near end, the gravel pits of an excavation company on the far, a long street of houses pinched like an ant farm between the dirty plate glass of the Spokane River and our rutted, potholed road, after which my neighborhood was named:
Empire.
Life on Empire Road began at the bus stop. I have heard that our first conscious memories occur at four or maybe three, but my first sense of myself was in the socialization of later elementary school, fourth and fifth grade, and it was as a fifth grader, a short, insecure eleven-year-old, that I first remember seeing Eli Boyle.
He had decided to walk down the long row of dreary houses to our bus stop because the torture at his own stop had become unbearable. Once again, I ask you to imagine a neighborhood stretched like a rubber band until it is too long and too thin and strained in the center. Picture six bus stops along this strip of despair, mine second in line. My family was typical of the Empire neighborhood: poor and white, father a night custodian, mother what was called then a housewife. There were four of us kids. My sister Meg was five and in kindergarten, so Mom drove her to and from school. Shawna was four and didn't go to school yet.
So that left little brother Ben (two years younger than I) to trudge with me the long block to our bus stop. There, twenty-five kids gathered beneath a willow tree that wasn't so much weeping as oozing. Beneath this tree, a nest of kids aged six to sixteen quickly found places: the older you were, the deeper you went into the tree and the more adult your behavior. The willow tree sat in the front yard – although I hesitate to call that tangle of bunchgrass and clover a yard – of Will the Hippie, who wasn't a hippie and wasn't really named Will, but such was the intelligence that flowed around the bus stop because he used an American flag as a curtain on his broken living room window. Add the fact that he'd painted the word WILL on his garage and certain assumptions were made, assumptions which were deflated two years later when the man whose name was not Will sat on his roof with a Korean-made, assault rifle and shot out the windows of about a dozen cars and houses in the neighborhood and murdered two dogs and six mailboxes before walking up to the county sheriff's car and surrendering to the two frightened deputies huddling on its floor.
Like me, Eli was a fifth grader the first time he made his way to our stop. I was in the process of leaving my brother and venturing deeper into the willow, not quite to where the oldest girls and boys were making out and doing research on the tensile strength of bra straps, but to the midpoint, where the sixth and seventh graders stood smoking cigarettes and the occasional joint. I had pilfered four of my dad's Pall Mall cigarettes, running my finger along the luxurious, cellophane-encased package and the lion crest. "Pall Mall." I said it over and over. It was so elegant. I wanted it to be my name. "Hello. My name is Paul. Paul Mall."
"Good God Friday, where are you going, Clark?" my brother Ben whispered, but I ignored him and kept moving, past the smaller kids and deeper into the branches. The bigger kids did not look up when I arrived at their denim circle in the midway point of the willow, shuffling in my bell-bottom corduroys, the one pair of "cool pants" I owned and the only pair I ever wore to school. They didn't acknowledge me when I reached in the pocket of my yellow polyester BMX polo shirt and they didn't flinch when I removed a single white cigarette, squinted my eyes, placed it between my lips, and pretended to pat my pockets like a man who's lost his wallet.
"Anyone got a light?" I asked. And then, finally, horribly, they noticed. Bushy heads turned and from that clutch of lanky, narrow-eyed trouble stepped Pete Decker of all people, who looks in my memory like a seventh-grade Clint Eastwood and who, it was rumored, had been kicked out of Golden Gloves boxing for cheating or biting or paralyzing a kid, depending on which version of the story you heard. Flame leapt from Pete's lighter and he narrowed his eyes and took me in, the cigarette dangling from my mouth. Below that, my Adam's apple bobbed with a nervous swallow.
"Good, huh?" he asked.
I nodded, inhaled, and coughed twice, my eyes smoking red. By now the sixth and seventh graders were watching, because they'd never seen Pete go out of his way to do anything to a smaller kid but take his money and knock him into the street. But Pete just stood there, watching me hack away on my first cigarette, eyes watering, nose burning.
"Smooth," he said.
I nodded, unable to speak, and had the sense that the crowd was moving in on us, surrounding us. Even Tanya Bentitz and Eric Mullay looked up. Usually they were entwined, bobbing for tonsils during the entire wait for the bus, rolling around in the furthest reaches of the tree, beyond our imaginations. I remember wishing (or perhaps I have constructed it now; you need only run your own elementary school memories to test the accuracy of mine) that I could step away too, that I could go back to being part of the circle instead of the meat inside it.
"What's your name?" Pete asked.
"Clark," I said.
"Been smoking long, Clark?" Pete asked.
"Couple years," I said. Which means I would have started at nine.
I once imagined tracking Pete Decker down. I thought about starting a smoking clinic in which Pete got smokers to quit by giving the same treatment he gave me that day. Quickly, without dwelling on my pain, because it's not my pain that matters, here's what happened:
Pete stepped up toward my face, his eyes slits. He formed his index finger and thumb into an OK sign, lifted them to my face, and performed a perfect example of what we used to call flick-the-cherry, knocking the burning ember from the end of the cigarette so that it was no longer lit. Before I knew it Pete had me in a headlock, had pulled me to the ground, yanked my arm up into my back, let go of the headlock, and with his other hand grabbed a handful of my hair. He beat my face into the gravel at the spot where the road blended into Will the Hippie's yard. I remember the sound of my nose hitting the ground. I remember opening my bleary eyes and seeing the tiny pieces of blood-spattered rock scatter before my face. And I remember that Pete dragged me – eyes clouded, nose clogged with blood – a few feet to where the burning cherry sat smoldering in the grass.
"Eat it," he said. I did, reached out with my tongue and enveloped the burning ash, pulled it into my mouth and swallowed.
"Cool," Pete said, and he let go of me. Of course it's easy to criticize Pete Decker's behavior at the bus stop that day. Easy to imagine him a bully or a criminal and assume that he has made nothing but trouble of his life since. But as someone who has done wrong, I have to tell you: I never smoked another cigarette after that day. Which just proves my point. There are a hundred ways to save someone's life. And, I suppose, just as many ways to take one.
But Pete Decker's impromptu smoking intervention is not the story I set out to tell and, in a way, it is simply prologue to the real story, which began that day as well. As I crawled, whimpered, and bled out of the long arms of the willow tree, the crowd turned away from me, rather than earn a beating for sympathizing. From the ground, I watched as even my brother Ben turned away, hiding the family resemblance. Every pair of shoes faced away from me except one, a pair of smudged black shoes with metal braces hooked to the soles and connected to straps at the calves. And when I looked up at the bent legs and scoliatic back, at the pinched, dandruffed shoulders that owned those shoes, I saw the only person in the crowd who measured me with anything but disdain. There, standing at my bus stop, a line of snot on his upper lip, grease in his hair, a look of sheer empathy and… fucking beatitude on his miserable face, was Eli Boyle.
His pitiful presence that day was undoubtedly what kept Pete Decker from completing the remodeling project he'd begun on my face. Had I known the importance of what would happen at that bus stop that day with the appearance of Eli Boyle, I might have begun studying it myself, for it would turn out to be a near-perfect real-world expression of an experiment that microbiologists have long re-created in the lab. They know that viruses and pathogenic bacteria will adhere to damaged cells in the human body, that the real nasty bugs are attracted to those broken and bruised places that blood has trouble reaching, and that the body will sacrifice a foot, say, to save the rest, and that if you have an infection in your throat and sprain your ankle, the virus or bacteria or parasite will do its best to make the journey from your throat to your ankle.
Eli became my broken ankle. That day, still full from the meal of me, Pete Decker retreated to the back of the tree and, presumably, picked my bones from his teeth, but I have to think he also had his eye on the horrible newcomer. Because the very next day Pete was all over Eli Boyle, knocking his glasses off, snapping the buttons off the cuffs of his flannel shirt, and grabbing his underwear and yanking them out of his pants and giving him – and here I defer to each reader's age, socioeconomic class, and basic geographic orientation – a wedgie or a melvy or a crack-back or a slip-and-slide or a jam sandwich or a thong-along or a line-in-the-sand or a famous-anus.
Eli took his punishment in stride, picked up his glasses, quietly pocketed the snapped button for his mother to sew on later, and left his dirty underwear wedged up his cakehole until Pete Decker had moved on to terrorize elsewhere. After my own beating I had resumed my place at the street, with the terrified little kids, who stood with chattering teeth, clinging to their lunch money and repeating in their minds, Don't turn around, Don't turn around. In those early days I never ventured to help Eli Boyle – although, honestly, what could I have done?
Every day after that, Eli tried to arrive just as the bus did, hoping to limit his exposure to Pete. Our driver, Mr. Kellhorn, was notorious for his erratic timing, though, showing up at various times between 7:22 and 7:29, which might not sound like a big deal to adults, but for kids hoping to avoid having their underwear winched into their asses, it was a horror. The other bullies allowed Pete to have first – I apologize in advance for my word choice – crack at Boyle. Some days, when Pete missed school (we whispered about juvenile detention, or theorized that maybe he'd finally gone ahead and killed his parents), some lesser bully would make sure to spit on Eli or yank on his underwear or make him lick shoes.
For his part, Eli attempted the defense that every afflicted and hunted beast attempts, the defense of a sand dollar that settles into the ocean floor or a beaten dog that cowers beneath his forepaws, the worthless twin defenses of shrinkage and anonymity. Eli stood with the little kids, his big, greasy, flaking head a foot above theirs, staring at the ground, sniffling with whatever airborne bug he was carrying that day, trying to look inconspicuous as the dandruff flaked down around his greasy head.
I stood only a few feet away, but Eli and I never spoke. In fact, none of the underclassmen at the bus stop ever spoke, staring instead at our shoes or looking down the road, praying to the God of afflicted children that we would see our bus – the color of sweet potatoes – rising over the hill behind us and making its way to our stop. My little brother Ben would whisper under his breath: "God's noggin, would you hurry?" He had recently become an inveterate taker-of-the-Lord's-name, and he'd taken to jotting down new ones when they popped into his head, eager to amaze and thrill us older kids with the range and poetry of this one sin. Even then, Ben planned to have this sin be his signature. "Christ on a bike, what is taking so long?"
The air went out of us when the bus arrived – two hydraulic sighs as a matter of fact, the first when the brakes set and the door opened and the second when all of the smaller kids finally exhaled and pressed for the door. These littlest got on first, sliding three to a bench seat in the second and third rows; then came Eli, spinning right around the pole into the seat behind the driver, the safest seat, obviously, but also the worst seat socially, because it marked him as a coward and a brownnose and a boy with no friends. After my failed attempt to smoke, I had become a sort of leader of the third, fourth, and fifth graders – king of the geeks – and so I settled into the fifth or sixth row, sharing a seat with only one other kid.
After we little kids had boarded the bus, the older kids emerged from the leafy curtains of the willow tree, Pete Decker and the other delinquents grinding their cigarettes into the gravel ashtray of Will the Hippie's front yard, blowing smoke down the rows of little kids, pushing their way to the back of the bus, Pete pulling his fist back and causing some poor kid to flinch, before he and the other seventh and eighth graders settled in the back three rows, all stretched out and reflecting a chilled boredom.
I suppose Eli had been at our bus stop two weeks before I actually made eye contact with him – the eye contact of death-row prisoners, part better-you-than-me, part but-for-the-grace-of-God, part empathy, part worry that his terrified face reflected my own. Obviously, I had noticed Eli Boyle before; he was a billboard for adolescent horror. But I had been so overwhelmed with my own self-loathing that I hadn't really contemplated his, which I saw must be both epic and lonesome. I stood in the aisle of the bus, in the first row, staring at Eli until it crossed my mind that I could sit next to him, that in my improved role as the kid who tried to smoke at the bus stop, I might effect some social change by sitting next to the least of us all, the spazziest, dorkiest, queerest, loosest nut on the tree. We would face the beatings together after that, the two of us, and we would slowly change the world.
Then again, maybe not. Behind me, my brother Ben was pushing me in the back, hurrying to be seated before Pete Decker emerged from the willow tree and climbed onto the bus. But even with Ben pushing me, I couldn't break eye contact with Eli. Once I'd taken hold it was like a live electrical wire, and I shook at the depths of his anguish. He seemed not only to suffer – what was life, after all, but suffering, and who knows that more than a kid – but also to understand his own position, to know that there was something more than crippling in his physical appearance, in his personal odor and his bad eyesight and his lack of coordination and the host of bugs and bends and sprains that comprised him. It was as if he knew the future offered no reprieve and yet he kept showing up anyway.
"Sweet cheese of Jesus, move it, Clark!" Ben groused behind me. "They're coming."
I found my seat and Ben slid in behind me, just ahead of Pete Decker, who walked with his elbows out, smacking the heads of every kid on the inside of the bench seats. A couple of those kids ducked and Pete balled up his fist or pushed out the knuckle of his middle finger, smacked the offending kids, and moved down the row.
Eli had turned to face the window again; he would stare out that window right behind the driver until we pulled up at school.
It is hard to fathom, I suppose, but the next bus stop – Eli's old stop – was even worse than ours. While we at least had the willow and the cover of Will the Hippie's house, this stop stood at a bare corner and so there was no cover at all; it was the difference between jungle and savanna. The dominant male at this stop was a twice-flunked eighth-grade goon named Matt Woodbridge, who had driven out all the little kids until it was just him and his crew: three slope-headed seventh graders, all of them smoking in broad daylight and daring anyone to say anything about it. The day Eli and I made eye contact, I thought about how Eli had arrived to take my beatings for me, how he'd looked down on me with such sympathy, and I was suddenly hit with the realization that Pete Decker and the button-popping, glasses-slapping, underwear-yanking routine of my bus stop was an improvement for Eli! I mean, hard as it is to believe… he actually chose to come to our bus stop.
Even today I have trouble fathoming it, trying to imagine the tortures that Matt Woodbridge had devised, persecutions horrible enough to make Eli walk three blocks to catch the bus with an animal like Pete Decker. I did a paper on torture in college and I can never forget the worst ones: the glass tube shoved into the penis and then broken while the tortured person is forced to drink glass after glass of water, the legs encased in a vise and put in a burlap sack and then pounded with hammers until the burlap is the only thing holding them together. Right after these horrors I place whatever Woodbridge did to drive Eli down to our bus stop. And so that day, on the bus, I looked up as Woodbridge passed and at that moment I hated him, and I must have betrayed something on my face because he stopped in the aisle and turned to face me, a look of disbelief on his pockmarked, wispy-mustached face.
"What?" he asked. "What, motherfucker?"
The bus erupted in a chorus of "Ooohs," and someone yelled from the back of the bus, "Kick his ass! Kick his fuckin' ass, Woodbridge!"
"Nothing," I said quickly, and dropped my eyes.
"You bet nothing," Woodbridge said. "Nothing and a fucking ass-kicking if you ever look at me again, motherfucker." And he continued sidling back toward the end of the bus, toward his seat in the back, the polar opposite of Boyle's seat. "Little shit."
I knew what we all knew about Woodbridge, that his brother Jesse had been an A student and a good athlete who had been killed in the eighth grade in some mysterious way (I'd heard, variously, that Matt shot him with their father's gun accidentally, that he got drunk and fell out of a pickup truck, and that he slashed his own wrists) and that Matt dealt with his brother's death and with his parents' grief by beating the shit out of every kid he saw, by flunking his classes, by riding his motorcycle across the flower beds of all the houses in the neighborhood, by stealing our bicycles, by selling pot to little kids, by shoplifting, fighting, fingering, smoking, dealing, shooting up, vandalizing, and generally being the worst form of life on the bus. I think that while he didn't know it, he was trying to live up to his dead brother, trying to remain a perpetual eighth grader like Jesse.
I stared straight ahead, hoping Woodbridge would ignore me, but of course he couldn't. "Who is that motherfucker?" he asked the back of the bus.
"That kid?" Pete Decker laughed. "That's the fuckin' Marlboro man." His gang erupted in laughter. Pete and Woodbridge had an interesting cold-war relationship; like nervous superpowers, both knew the only thing they couldn't afford was to lose a fight, and since each was the only one who had a chance of beating up the other, they existed in a kind of strained equilibrium. As long as there were pathetic little shits like me to terrorize, they had few dealings with each other, except maybe to bum a cigarette or fence some stolen property.
Now that I had crossed one of the superpowers, I tensed, waiting to be nuked.
"Nah, that's just Clark," Pete said then. "He's all right."
The air seemed to leave the bus just then, and a great light and warmth rose up inside of me. I don't recall, but the other underclassmen must have snuck glimpses at me then, glimpses of admiration and envy. To be pronounced "all right" by Pete Decker was more than just the commutation of my death sentence; it seemed almost a coronation. I had been plucked from the ranks of the pathetic and small, and given a place among the Pete Deckers and Matt Woodbridges of the world. Clark Mason? That motherfucker? Aw, he's all right.
The bus rumbled down Empire toward the last stop on our strip before it turned out of our neighborhood and came up for air on Trent – the busy industrial street that cut us off from the rest of the world. The whole world felt different. I remember staring at Boyle, wondering if he had heard the exchange, if he'd realized what had just happened, my sudden ascension out of his world. But he just sat with his thick glasses against the window, his index finger working his nose like a puppeteer on speed, Eli alone in the nightmarish world of his freakishness, his apartness, and, I suppose it's safe to say now, his seething ambitions. I see him in my mind now and I realize that all of these forces of his personality were concentrated then on the humble goal of sheer survival, the cold, flat wish that he be left alone, and he was being forged in a way by the challenge of his youth. What did he see out that window while he sat there, catatonic and seemingly impervious to the beatings and taunts and stares? I think now, looking back, that his fear may have amounted to less than I ever imagined, that he had actually figured out a way to shut down, to distance himself from his broken self.
Or maybe that's just what I want to believe, an idea that I cling to for my own peace of mind – that Eli had figured out a way to leave the awful physical world behind, to block out the bullies and assholes, to ignore the scorn, to somehow be on our bus and soar above it too, riding on the thinnest of daydreams.
I shot someone in the face with a rubber band that I had stretched along the length of a ruler. I don't recall the victim or my motive (I acknowledge the irony, of course, this casual parallel to the trouble before us today), but my fifth-grade crime doesn't matter except to explain why I was alone in the school office on a late-fall day in 1975, sitting with my head in my hands, waiting for the principal to come back.
I sat in a chair across from the desk of our distracted principal, Joseph Bender, and I practiced looks of contrition and sorrow and prayed that I not slip and call him Joe Boner, the name by which we all knew him. I recall his office as a massive tomb, windowless and cold and the place I waited for my hack – a quick swat or two on the ass with a thick wooden paddle, the gold standard of school punishment circa 1975. Joe Boner was a tame hacker because he kept his emotions under control. There were other teachers – being an attorney with a working knowledge of libel, I won't name them – who could take out years of their own frustration by blistering the asses of children like me. I only saw Joe Boner go overboard once, when Dennis Gilstrap asked the lunch lady if he could kiss her "boobies" and Mr. Bender promptly pulled Dennis out of line, bent him over, and swatted him so furiously that his gum flew across the room and – I know this part of the story must sound apocryphal, but I saw it myself – stuck to the wall of the cafeteria, where it stayed for two weeks as a kind of monument to adult boundaries.
As I sat in the principal's office that day, I was understandably nervous, even though I didn't really fear a hack like the one that had de-gummed Dennis Gilstrap. More likely I would get a reasoned swat and be sent back to my classroom to study our poetic spelling list, which I repeated in my mind – distance, influence, affluence, confluence – as a way to keep from dwelling on the swat I was about to receive.
That's when I heard, outside Joe Boner's office, the principal talking to a woman, trying to calm her down. "No, I'm very sorry. It is unfortunate." I leaned toward the door, as if a few inches might help me hear better. "No, Mrs. Boyle," the principal said, "I assure you, it won't happen again."
When he opened the door I looked back and saw Eli Boyle's mother, wearing a kind of peasant's dress and a scarf over her head, an almost pretty woman in her early forties who looked that day, and every other day that I saw her, like a person who has lost something very important.
"Eli is a very special boy, Mr. Bender," she said. "He's sensitive."
"Yes," the principal was saying, "I know he is and I'm sorry he's had to go through this. We are taking care of it, Mrs. Boyle." And that's when Joe Boner saw me sitting at his desk. "Oh, Mr. Mason. That's right. Why don't you go back to your class? And no more rubber bands, okay?"
He tousled my hair and I sat there a moment longer than I needed to, amazed to be escaping my punishment. Once again, Eli had indirectly saved me. I nodded to Mrs. Boyle, hopped out of the chair, and hurried for the door, turning at the last to see Eli's mom settle into the chair, and to see Mr. Bender close the door behind me.
I suppose that meeting was the reason that, the very next morning, Joe Boner escorted Eli Boyle into my classroom. Eli had started the school year in the other fifth-grade class, taught by Mr. Gibbons, a cross-eyed alcoholic who had been at the high school until two years earlier, when he was asked to leave after some vague complaint by the parents of a girl who had been getting "extra credit" for "correcting papers" as Mr. Gibbons's "after-school aide." Now Eli was standing in the class of my teacher, the eternally cute Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley, who had been teaching at our elementary school for fifteen years and at least three divorces and who seemed incapable of forsaking any of her ex-husbands' last names. We gathered that there had been some problem in Mr. Gibbons's class involving Eli, but we had trouble getting details. Actually, that's not entirely true. We had no trouble getting details, but their context and order eluded us, and so we knew little beyond the glimpse of a meeting that I'd seen between Eli's mom and Joe Boner and the rush of playground intelligence:
Kevin Klapp, who was in Eli's old class, claimed that the trouble began when everyone went out for recess one day. Eli stayed glued to his chair and when Mr. Gibbons came over to see why, he found that Eli had shit his pants. According to Kevin, Mr. Gibbons then yelled at Eli and slapped him. Heather Lindeke said that what actually happened was that after the pants-shitting episode, Eli's mom came in and Mr. Gibbons called Eli "a retard," and Mrs. Boyle demanded that he be put in our class. No, said Marshall Dickens, what actually happened was that Eli only farted, and when everyone went out to recess, Mr. Gibbons yelled at Eli that he'd "prefer it if you did not shit your pants in my classroom anymore" and that was why Eli's mom pulled him out of that class. What did I believe? All of it, I suppose. I didn't put any of it past the people involved, that Eli might shit his pants, or that Mr. Gibbons might make him feel even worse than he did or even slap him, or that Mrs. Boyle might come to Eli's defense.
Whatever the reason, Eli limped into our classroom that day, staring at his corrective shoes, ready for new humiliations. He stood in front of the class, while behind him, Mr. Bender whispered to the teacher and gestured with his hands. Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley, her high hair spun like soft vanilla ice cream, frowned and shook her head and even covered her mouth as Joe Boner spoke quietly, relaying the actual story of Eli's banishment from Mr. Gibbons's class. But while she listened with obvious sympathy and perhaps even empathy, she made no move to ask Eli to sit down and he stood there like a courtroom exhibit while they whispered about him. Finally, we saw our teacher mouth the word "terrible" as the story reached its critical juncture. Just then Eli twitched, as he often did, in some leftover spasm or convulsion, the brackets on his leg braces clacking together, a late-autumn snowfall loosed from his head. Twenty-eight sets of eyes followed those dandruff flakes to the floor.
Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley thanked the principal and walked him to the door. Then she put her arm around Eli, who was a foot shorter than she.
"Welcome to our class, Eli," she said. "Class, say hello to Eli."
We said hello. He never looked up. For all her good intentions, Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley was torturing Eli.
"Eli? You may sit wherever you want," said Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley. "Do you have any friends in this class?"
This seemed to me like classic adult stupidity. Do you have any friends? Why not just knock the boy down and let us stab him to death with compass needles? Eli looked up through his thick, black-framed glasses and one of his cockeyes went directly to me and – to my endless shame, I prayed that he not say my name – he looked back at the teacher and shook his head no. Do you have any friends? What kind of question is that? While Eli stared at the ground, our teacher moved a few kids and put Eli smack in the middle of the classroom.
Jeff Fletcher, who was now sitting behind Eli, plugged his nose and stuck his tongue out to indicate that Eli stunk, and when Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley turned her back Fletch pulled his desk back away from Eli's. The students on his right and left did the same thing, their desks screeching as they slid across the tile floor. Eli didn't look up, just stared at the notebook open on his desk, drawing pictures of tanks.
I have yet to mention Dana Brett. I suppose I haven't known how, in this ugly world that I am relating, to describe someone so wonderful. Cute? The girl was entirely composed of porcelain, tiny features on a round face beneath black hair that curled up at her collar so that her face was perfectly framed. She wore ribbons in her hair. Ribbons! A redundant bit of packaging perhaps, but still. Ribbons! Miniskirts and vests. And suede boots that laced up the front. There is nothing so hypnotic as the romantic daydreams of the hopelessly presexual, and back then all of my daydreams involved young Dana Brett and unlacing those boots.
She sat in front of Eli and was the only one who didn't move her desk when Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley turned her back to address the class on Hopi Indians or adding fractions or whatever she was selling that day. She droned on as the desks moved away, until Eli was an island, or rather an isthmus, connected only by the honorable Dana Brett's desk. And when the teacher finally turned around and saw what had happened – the desks magnetically repelled from Eli – she became intent on making it worse. "All right. Move those desks back. Jeff Fletcher, why did you move your desk away from Eli's?"
Of all the cruelty exhibited that day, I still think that question – no matter its intent – was the pinnacle. In one question, she codified what we all knew, made it official and made a horrible mistake: she gave a lousy prick like Jeff Fletcher the opportunity to actually be funny.
"Well," said Retch, looking around at us, gathering strength, "he smells like a bag full of turds."
In the laughter that followed, Eli never looked up from the tanks he was drawing.
I smoked weed every day as a kid. Not so much during the time I'm relaying now – the fifth-grade hell that Eli and I shared like some awful creation myth – but from that summer on, pretty much nonstop until the tenth grade. Looking back, those fifth-grade days were the night before battle, the last days spent in complete sobriety. I'm not sure why I offer that bit of information now except to interrupt this harsh story with the reminder that these were different and difficult times – the mid-1970s, after all – when a preteen might be expected to smoke dope every day. It is probably the least endearing and most enduring habit of a whole generation of politicians, this desire to confess, and I can't help wondering if – in admitting fumbling around with a few joints, a smart Arkansas redneck could win two terms – I might not secure a white-trash landslide by acknowledging that I toked regularly at twelve and never had trouble inhaling, that, in fact, I carried the respectful nickname Old Iron Lung.
Still, as I said, I feel the need – perhaps the political necessity – to halt the narrative momentarily and take refuge in the time and place of all of this: the desperateness, the poverty, the harsh world in which I was raised. I would kill (once again, I acknowledge irony) to be able to report that I simply went to school and got good grades; that I sat next to Eli Boyle on the bus and demanded that he be treated with respect; that I insisted that he, in fact, did not smell like turds (sadly, though, he did); that I did not crave more than anything the respect of my classmates, this societal juice, this cultural cachet, this… approval, this immeasurable measure of popularity, not only from the suede-booted Dana Brett – love would be more defensible – but also and more importantly from the school toughs, the pubescent dictators, the dope-selling jefes, the Pee-Chee-carrying warlords of the Empire bus stops.
This is the only way I can think to explain what happened at the end of that school year. Throughout that year my lot was improving incrementally, Pete Decker's pronouncement that I was "all right" having thrown open the door to the middle of the willow tree, where the tough kids hung out, although I was still a year away from the furthest depths of the branches, where the mystical act of making out was occurring, glimpsed only as a clutch of arms and legs and sweaters and jackets and hair and the occasional flash of braces and skin.
I never tried to smoke at the bus stop again, but I continued to steal my father's cigarettes to give to Pete Decker, who honored my new status by not demanding such bribes, but rather accepting them with prejudice, a fine distinction that would serve him well in his later career of Mafia capo or generalissimo of some Latin American junta.
"Whatcha got for me, Marlboro man?" he would ask.
His gift to me was allowing it to seem as if I had a choice. I would pretend to be checking to see if I had cigarettes on me. "Oh, here you go." Then I'd stand there and nod with admiration at his stories of stealing bikes out from under little kids or shooting stray cats in garbage cans. And the midtree circle wasn't the only new access I acquired. I crept toward the back of the bus, too, abandoning the fifth and sixth graders I used to huddle with in the front until I ended up ten rows back, next to a sweet kid named Everson, a flutter-eyed seventh grader who spent every morning bent over in his seat, rolling joints and putting them into little Sucrets cough drop boxes. He hummed songs while he did it, Southern rock tunes that I didn't really recognize, but which were familiar enough. I guess he must've sold all the joints in that Sucrets box each day, because the next day he'd be at it again, rolling joints and humming. Everson was bone skinny and had long blond hair like a girl. He was nicer than the other seventh and eighth graders, though, and he seemed to get a pass from Decker and Woodbridge, I guess because he supplied them with dope.
"Where do you get the papers?" I asked.
"Stepdad's stash," he answered as quickly as possible so he could get back to his song and his job.
"How much does that stuff cost?"
"Ten a lid."
"How much is a lid?"
He looked right at me and just kept humming. "Nobody knows for sure. That's the cool thing."
It seemed okay with Pete that I sat with Everson and one day I even held out one of my dad's Pall Malls to give to my new friend. He looked at it and made a face. "I hope you don't smoke those," Everson said.
"What do you mean?"
"Cigarettes? Disgusting. Filthy habit." And he flipped his blond hair and went back to rolling joints.
I didn't ride the regular bus home in the afternoons. In the fall I played flag football, and in the winter basketball. Except for the great prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale, I was the only guy from my neighborhood who played sports, and so the only people on the activities bus to Empire were me and Everson, who told the teachers he was staying after school for drama and the school paper, but who actually sold the last of his dope to the football team. The bus would cruise past the high school, then the junior high, then come pick up us elementary school kids, and I'd sit in the seat in front of Everson, who never hummed or had anything to say in the afternoons, since his joints were all rolled and sold. He just stared out the window, like Eli.
So I never had to see what Eli endured in the afternoon bus rides, only in the mornings. And in those mornings, while it may sound unlikely and defensive, I began to try to protect him from Pete Decker. Sometimes I saved my cigarettes until Eli arrived at the bus stop, hoping I could distract Pete. Other times I picked up a rock and threw it at a passing car, hoping I could interest Pete in some cruelty that didn't involve knocking Eli down or wedging his briefs in his shithole. But Pete was relentless; he continued to torment Eli, dropping burning cigarettes in his backpack, flicking his ears, and, at least once a week, giving him a wedgie. One day in the winter, Pete reached in Eli's pants to yank on his underwear and immediately withdrew his hand. "Oh, that's sick!" he yelled, and he hauled off and decked Eli, knocking his glasses off and dropping him to the ground. "He isn't wearing any underwear!" On the bus that day, I watched Eli's reflection in the window and I swear I saw him smile a little bit.
I think it was the underwear thing mat upped the ante for Pete. He actually began walking up the block to meet Eli, taking the backpack off his shoulder and spreading all the books and papers as he walked back to the bus stop, Eli bent at that crooked waist in his flannel shirt, picking up his things and limping along toward the bus stop in his corrective shoes, pausing to push his glasses back up on his nose.
In the spring I turned out for baseball, but on the first day I forgot to wear a cup and a line drive short hopped me in the nutsack and I had to go to emergency, where the doctor told my mom I had a twisted testicle and would have to take the baseball season off, or at least until my right nut reacquired its flesh color. So I started wearing special underwear and riding the bus home right after school, where I got to see the second half of Eli Boyle's nightmare. Pete treated him the same way at 3:00 P.M. that he had at 7:20 in the morning, calling him names, making fun of his clothes, knocking him down. It was about that time, in the spring, that Pete Decker decided he was tired of beating Eli up and that someone else needed to beat up Eli. Me.
He talked about it for a couple of days, telling me things that Eli had allegedly said about me, that I was a fairy and a fruitcake and that I had humped my own grandma. I remember wondering, if I were a fairy, would I want to hump my grandma?
I managed to avoid fighting those first days, saying that Eli wasn't worth it, or I didn't want to get snot on my fists, stuff like that. But Pete kept bringing it up, saying that if I didn't fight Eli people would assume it was because I was his boyfriend. Still, I avoided it. And every day Pete would hover over me. "When are you gonna fight that punk? He's making you look stupid."
One morning, sitting next to Everson, I leaned over and asked what he would do.
"I don't fight," he said, without looking up from the joint in his lap.
"Why not?"
"No one expects me to."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "Against my nature."
"If I don't beat up Eli, then Pete's gonna kill me."
"Yeah," he said. "It works that way."
At recess, I sought out the lovely Dana Brett, who had impressed me with her courage and humanity when she didn't scoot her desk away from Eli's that day. I explained to her my dilemma, without looking up into her angelic face, her Nestle's brown eyes. She listened patiently, while a few feet away the other girls in our class asked questions of romance to a Magic Eight Ball. She would always be unlike those other girls, more measured and rational.
"Are you afraid of him?" Dana asked when I'd explained my problem.
"Eli? Of course not."
"Well," she said, the long lashes flashing down once on those big, round eyes, "then you better fight. If you don't, they're gonna say you're a puss."
I think we are capable of fooling ourselves in a lot of different ways. People talk about what makes a child an adult, as if there is some physical or emotional or mental threshold we cross, but I tell you this, and if you are honest with yourself you will know it is true: the thing that makes us adult is our ability to delude ourselves. That's all. Children know what they are. Try telling a fat kid he looks good, or a child who is a bad athlete that he just needs to try harder. He knows better. But as adults, we start to believe the bullshit. We tell ourselves that cheating on our taxes isn't really stealing and that the job candidate with long legs is really a better fit for the company. We look at our lives and pretend that we aren't money hungry and consumed by status, that we have kept the morals and ethics of our college years, that we are healthy and not fat, distinguished and not old, that gray looks sophisticated in our hair, that it doesn't hurt her if she doesn't know, that it's not really lying if he doesn't find out, that we deserve a break now and then, that we had no choice, meant no harm, didn't know what would happen, would take it back if we could, that we are still liberal and open minded and easygoing and not afraid. We come up with rationalizations and justifications after the fact, and then we convince ourselves that these things are true. We pretend we are doing the best we can.
But every man dies the death of his own making.
Me? I took a step toward being an adult that day. I told myself that if I didn't beat Eli up, Pete Decker would pound us both. I told myself that I would go easy on Eli, that I'd pull my punches. I told myself that we would make eye contact and he would see that I didn't really mean this, that I could do this and not actually do it, that I wasn't beating him up, not like Pete Decker and Matt Woodbridge did, that I was different from them. That I was different. That is the biggest lie – that we are different than they are.
The brakes squealed on the bus and Pete was up behind me, rubbing my shoulders, extolling me, whispering random combinations of guttural words in my ear.
"Fuck up that fat dickbreath cockbite fuckball!"
"Kick that smelly fag dipshit's ass!"
We moved along the aisle. Below our feet, the floor of the bus was lined with a grooved rubber strip and my tennis shoes squeaked as I moved to the front of the bus. Pete hovered behind, inches from my ear: "Break his fuckin' four-eyed, pig-nosed face!"
Such trouble has a way of congealing the passengers of a school bus, and I felt their oozy, collective eyes on me as I moved down the aisle. I was about to beat up the most pitiful kid in twelve grades. I, the kid who offered cigarettes in fealty to Pete Decker, was about to join his ranks. In their eyes, how could I be any different?
Eli was the first off, of course, and he'd begun moving in his quick crooked shuffle, bent at the waist, trying to hide in his own clothes.
"Boyle!" Pete yelled from behind me. "Hey, Boyle!" I felt Pete gently take my book bag and set it on the ground. Eli just kept moving, and Pete dispatched his two goons to run after him and drag him back. I stood under the willow tree, my mouth dry. The bus pulled away and I watched it go, the faces pressed up against the back window, kids having flooded to Pete Decker's seat, hoping to see the first moments of our fight before the bus pulled away.
The goons dragged Eli back and pushed him toward me. Still he didn't look up.
"Are you gonna fight, or are you a fag?" Pete asked Eli.
He didn't answer. He stood in front of me, staring at his shoes. He shifted his weight and his leg braces clacked together.
Pete pushed Eli in the shoulder. "Come on, queer."
I raised my fists slowly and moved forward. He looked up then, and I realized I'd never seen Eli full-on like this, from the front. He was usually looking sideways or averting his gaze or covering his mouth or looking away before you could get a fix on his face. It was egg shaped – too much forehead and chin, all the features and pimples packed in between, the black glasses, the braces on his teeth, like some perfect rendering of the collective nightmares of adolescents.
Pete Decker stepped away and it was just Eli and I squared off in the gravel between the street and Will the Hippie's front yard. Our eyes met and I tried to let him see that I was sorry for what I had to do. He sighed.
And then he hit me. Twice. The first punch connected with my nose, the second clipped my ear. I kicked at him and caught him in the leg and he hit me again in the face, a hammer that buckled my knees and sent me sprawling, crying, onto the ground. From my side I looked up through teary eyes to see Eli running away, crying, his knee braces rattling, Pete Decker a few steps behind. Pete caught him and dragged him to the ground and by the time I got to my feet, he was pounding on Eli. I felt my nose. It was bleeding. Twenty yards up the road, so was Eli's. Pete just kept cocking his fist and letting Eli have it. Eli was crying for help, honking like a goose, trying to squirm away. Pete's goons were cheering the beating their boss was delivering. Finally Pete climbed off him, opened Eli's book bag and scattered everything, set his lunch pail on the ground and stomped it into scrap metal. Then he kicked Eli once in the side and came back toward me.
"That was a good fight," he said, slapping me on the back. "That fucker jumped you, man. He didn't fight fair at all." Pete was panting. There was sweat on his upper lip, making the hair below his nose look almost like a mustache. I looked at one of the goons, who seemed ready enough to accept Pete's description of the good fight and the idea that I had somehow been jumped, and I wondered if Pete's goons even processed their own thoughts. "You'd have killed him if he fought fair," Pete said. And he began walking toward his house, a goon on either side.
I looked up the street, to where Eli had already gathered his things. He was no longer crying, and he seemed oblivious to the damage he'd done to my face. He walked home, bent at the waist, as if nothing had happened.
At home my sisters were playing Barbies on the porch, and they stared at me wide eyed as I came up the sidewalk. Being all of five, Meg saw her job as explaining the world to Shawna, and so she bent over and whispered, "Clark got all beat up."
"By bad guys?" Shawna asked, and Meg nodded.
Ben had stayed home sick that day and he was on the couch, reading a Flash comic book. He looked at me as if I were covered in blood – which, of course, I was. "Hot Christ buns," he said, "what happened to you?"
That brought my mother from the kitchen, where she usually spent the afternoons sorting through the Avon cosmetics and sundries that she stockpiled in the house. She was supposed to sell these Avon products door-to-door in the neighborhood and at swanky Avon parties that she shamed friends and relatives into attending, but my mother didn't like to bother people, and so the Avon products had taken over our house and our basement was filled with boxes of foundation eyeliner and birdhouses and perfume (I got regular nighttime erections just thinking about the case of "Nights of Romance" perfume underneath my bed.) "Who did this to you? Was it that boy, Pete Decker?" She waved a pair of Avon candlesticks at me. "I'm going to march down there and talk to his mother."
"No," I said. "I just fell down."
But she wouldn't buy it, and finally I had to admit that it was in fact Eli Boyle who had done this to me.
Ben slapped his forehead. "Jesus meet the neighbors!"
Even Mom was changed by this bit of news. "Huh," she said. "The boy with the…" She gestured around her face as if we were talking about the Elephant Man.
"Yeah," I said, staring at the ground.
"Oh," she said, and looked down at the candlesticks in her hands. The idea of waving candlesticks at the mother of such a boy was less interesting and my mother just sort of shrugged and half turned back toward the kitchen, suddenly faced with a problem potentially worse than her son being beaten up by a bully: her son being beaten up by an Eli Boyle. "You… um… you should talk to your father about defending yourself, Clark," she said. "And you shouldn't get into fights."
Staring at my bloodied face, Ben shook his head. "I'll say."
Muhammad Eli disappeared from the bus stop the very next day. I guess his mom began driving him to school, but however he got there he was in class when I arrived, sitting in his desk, open-pit nose mining. The nickname – Muhammad Eli – was Ben's idea and I have to say that I was happy that it didn't catch on. In fact, I was shocked that day to hear that I'd actually kicked Eli's ass. Even the people who'd witnessed my beating bought into Pete Decker's fiction and suddenly I understood the power of propaganda. At the bus stop guys clapped me on the back and told me they'd heard it was a great fight.
"That asshole's lucky he ran away," said one of Pete's thugs. "Clark was about to kick his ass."
"About to?" Pete asked. "My boy whipped his ass." At recess, Dana Brett strode up to me in her suede boots and miniskirt and told me matter-of-factly that I was a bully. I didn't know what to say: cop to being a bully (which I wasn't), or admit that a spaz like Eli had actually beaten me up? At lunch I watched Eli work the edges of the playground, the way he always did, picking his way along the chain-link fence. I wanted to apologize. I really did. But how do you apologize to someone who has, in fact, beaten you up?
Eli wasn't on the bus that afternoon either. I sat staring out the window, the sun high and bright, washing the blue from the sky.
"Clark the Hammer," Pete Decker said. "Big Bad Clark Mason."
The next morning Eli still didn't show at our stop, and Pete and his gang took this as proof that – despite what they'd seen – I actually inflicted great damage upon my opponent. I slumped past Eli's empty seat behind the bus driver and sat near the back. When Woodbridge got on the bus he stopped at my seat, stuck out his lower lip, and nodded slowly, approvingly, as if checking out the latest model of bully.
"I heard you beat that fat, greasy-haired faggot's ass," he said. "Queer probably transferred to another school."
"Fuckin' retard fag queer," Pete muttered.
"Yeah," Woodbridge said. "Fuckin' fag."
At school, I looked for opportunities to make eye contact with Eli, a shrug that might communicate that we were both victims in this, that we had both come out with bloody noses, that no harm was done. But Eli had found his place beneath the rest of us, and he scurried around with his head bowed, staring at his black shoes.
I tried to catch sight of his mother driving him to and from school, but they left early for school and apparently left late for home. Spring was a blink, just a suggestion of time, all shadow and no cast; it was the first season that I remember going faster than I expected, and the first time I realized that time actually moved in a certain direction, toward something that wasn't just the piling up of days and weeks and school years, but a point that had its own weight. It was like the first time you realize, as a kid, that all the escalator steps aren't collected in the basement. That spring I saw myself in junior high and high school and beyond, and I saw the kids before me and after me as fellow travelers, and like any whiff of mortality it was powerful and frightening. I'd like to say that I found in this season of epiphany the time to offer a quiet apology to Eli, but to be honest the days were made up of Presidential Fitness Tests and Smear the Queer and the accidental grazing of Marcia Donnely's left boob, one of only two actual boobs in our class (Marcia Donnely's right being the other). And then, one day, it was the last week of school and we cut off the brown grocery sacks that had covered our textbooks, and we used knives from the cafeteria to clean the gum off the bottoms of our desks, and we prepared for the last days of fifth grade with the awareness that life was beginning.
Every summer I took over a newspaper route for an older guy in our neighborhood, and this time I promised to let my brother Ben help me out. We started the last week of school; I got up at four-thirty and pedaled around with him pointing out the houses that took the paper and then sliding it into the rusted metal tubes and snazzy-looking new plastic boxes. It was almost six when we came riding back down Empire Road toward our house. We pedaled through a couple of backyards and came out at the RiverVu Trailer Park – the only accurate word of that title being Trailer, since there was no Vu of the River and this was certainly no Park. I rode past the trailer of the great, prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale, his cherry GTO in the driveway behind his parents' Mercury. I stood on my bicycle pedals and tried to look into his window, trying to imagine the things he must do to cheerleaders in that little trailer.
And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eli emerge from the last trailer on the street and begin walking down the strip of houses. I circled around and watched from a block away as he shuffled in that familiar walk, the clattering of his leg braces the only noise competing with the birds in the neighborhood.
When I got home, my mom had made pancakes for my little sisters. I can still see Mom at the counter in the kitchen, short and slender in one of my dad's big gray sweatshirts, which covered her like a bulky dress, and a pair of fuzzy slippers, smelling like a catalog of Avon products, the smoke from her cigarette curling around the long hair piled atop her head. "Clark? I'm making the girls some pancakes."
"No time."
I ran past her, got my book bag and my Nerf football, and ran back into the kitchen, grabbing my brown sack lunch off the counter.
"What do you mean no time? There's always time for breakfast."
"Not today. I'm riding my bike to school."
Finally, she turned. It's funny. The small things I took for granted then torture me now in their simple perfection: a plate of pancakes, a hand on my shoulder, a look of deep concern. You have no idea when you're so eager to escape your own house, your own life, your own childhood, of the sad truth that no one will ever care for you like that again.
"You can't ride your bike, Clark. It's three miles."
"I can ride three miles."
My dad came out in pajama bottoms and no shirt, rubbing his head and patting his belly, inadvertently mastering the test of coordination that we used to dare one another. He kissed Mom on the top of the head and she handed him a plate of pancakes.
"You're not riding your bike to school on an empty stomach."
"I'll eat there."
I started for the door and she put her hands on her hips. "But school doesn't even start for an hour and a half."
"Gotta go," I said, and ran out the door, tossed the canvas newspaper bag on the porch, and climbed on the banana seat of my Schwinn Scrambler. Maybe I could apologize on the road. But Eli was nowhere on Empire and so I pedaled down the busier Trent, keeping my eyes open until finally I saw him, a hundred yards ahead of me, walking along the railroad tracks on the other side of Trent. He moved with that same inward shuffle that he used at school. He favored his bent left leg, but since the toes on his right leg pointed in a few degrees it was a kind of double limp, exaggerated by his leg braces. Something about his walk had always seemed familiar to me, and as I shadowed him down Trent I understood what it was: some old black-and-white movie I'd seen in which a gangster was shackled and cuffed and hobbled down death row while the other prisoners hissed and made catcalls. With his leg braces, his hippity-hoppity, stare-at-the-ground gait, that's what Eli Boyle appeared to be, a prisoner on his way to his maker.
I checked my watch. It was six-thirty in the morning. I had been assuming that Eli's mother drove him to and from school every day to keep him from being beaten up; in fact he had been walking all this time, leaving two hours early to avoid Pete Decker and Matt Woodbridge. But no, that wasn't quite right; he hadn't walked to school to avoid those two bullies. No, he hadn't started walking until the day he and I fought. My belligerence was his last straw.
I rode so slowly on the shoulder of the road that I could barely stay up, zigzagging my front wheel to keep my balance. Every few minutes a tractor trailer or molten-aluminum truck from the Kaiser plant would blow by and I would nearly lose my balance, but I kept at it, watching Eli on the tracks, across twenty feet of weeds and scrub grass. He never looked up. He arrived at school at a quarter after seven, a full hour before the bell would ring. I padlocked my bike and followed a safe distance behind, unaware that the school even opened this early. He walked past the janitors, who smoked cigarettes and carried rolls of toilet paper into the bathrooms. I followed him past the office, where the principal, Joe Boner, leaned against the secretary's desk, pleading with her about something. Past the glass trophy case with its pictures of former students who'd died in Vietnam and the award named for Woodbridge's brother. Finally, he turned into the gymnasium. I was stunned. Of all the places for Eli to kill an hour before school, I would never have guessed the gym, a veritable torture chamber for a kid like Boyle.
I caught up and peeked in the gym, but he was gone. There was an entrance to the boys' locker room at the end of the gym, but no way he'd have made it there before I got to the door. He'd simply disappeared. I wondered for a second if I'd made the whole thing up. Imagine. Eli Boyle walking two miles to school. Two miles back. With his gnarled legs and crooked feet? Imagine the fear he had of the bus stop, of the bullies of Empire. Imagine him going into the gym, of all places.
Then, in the gaps between the bleachers, I caught a glimpse of greasy hair, of overalls and flannel. I crept up behind the wood bleachers, which were pulled out so that only the bottom two rows were accessible. But it was enough that someone could slide underneath, and that's where Eli sat, on the floor beneath the bleachers, amid the gum and candy wrappers and smashed popcorn, slats of light coming in between the bleacher seats. He sat with his notebook open, writing something, or drawing, possibly the tanks and airplanes that he was always sketching.
His back was to me, and if he knew someone was watching he gave no indication, just sat curled up on himself, as if he could pull in more, disappear from the world. I opened my mouth to say something – I'm sorry – but nothing came out. I backed out of the gym and made my way down the hall. I peeked in the office, but the principal was now gone and the secretary was staring out the door, her head tilted, mouth wide open, like she wasn't seeing whatever was in front of her eyes, like she was imagining something entirely different.
My movement into her field of vision snapped her out of it, and she wiped at her eyes. "What are you doing here?" she asked.
"I go to school here," I said.
She straightened some things on her desk and swallowed. "I know. I mean… it's very early."
I opened my mouth to say something, but the principal's door opened and Mr. Bender popped his head out.
"Look, Peg, I'm sorry if I led you to believe that this was anything other than two people-"
She cleared her throat and nodded toward me, and Mr. Bender followed her gaze to me, standing flat-footed in the doorway.
"Oh, hello, Mason. What are you doing here?"
"I go to school here," I answered again.
"Right," he said.
He came out, his eyebrow up, like he was figuring a problem. "Okay then, well. I was just having a discussion with Mrs. Federick. And… if I led you to believe, Mrs. Federick, that" – and now he looked from me to her and back again – "that… uh, that the other bus driver I was telling you about would approve of me… you know, riding your bus… well, obviously, I've got a lot of time invested with that bus driver. As you do with your… bus driver. One ride on another bus doesn't…"
He seemed confused by his own words and he turned and went back into his office. Mrs. Federick stared at his door and I slipped away.
That day we cleaned out our desks and went outside for a huge game of tug-of-war with the other fifth-grade class. In a rare moment of kindness, Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley allowed Eli to skip the game, but his parole was cut short when she forced him to stand in the middle and be the judge of which team won. A ribbon was tied in the center of the rope and two lines were painted on the grass, about fifteen feet apart. We had to pull the ribbon over the line closest to us and Mr. Gibbons's class had to pull the ribbon over the line closest to them. In the middle stood Eli, staring at the ground.
"Go!" Mr. Gibbons said, and we pulled with everything we had, boys and girls alike. The rope snapped tight and then began moving toward their side, and something about the screams and the strain on that rope transformed Eli. He skipped to his right, holding up his right hand to indicate that Mr. Gibbons's class was winning. Fletcher and I were in the front; we led a charge back the other way and Eli sidestepped toward us, raising his left hand. Now the ribbon changed direction again and Eli, caught off guard, lost his balance but then regained it and began sliding away from us again. Staring at that ribbon, his eyes seemed engaged for the first time I could remember, and he smiled and made a funny noise that I realized was a kind of rusty laughter. I had to block Eli out to help my side stop the erosion, and the ribbon settled in the middle, and when I looked up, Eli had his arms straight out, indicating we were back at equilibrium. Behind me I felt something give, and then Fletcher lost his balance and kicked my legs out from under me, and the rope was pulled quickly the other way and from my back – as I was dragged across the grass – I saw Eli sliding sideways quickly, his right arm straight in the air, his glasses having fallen to the end of his nose, so intent was he on calling the progress of this match. The ribbon crossed their line, and he threw both his hands in the air to indicate that the match was over. Then he bent his knees and pointed both hands at Mr. Gibbons's class. They had won. He stood there for the longest time, both his hands pointed to his right, panting, a half-smile on his face. Then he straightened up, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and looked from one side to the other, shyly, as if asking, Did you see what I just did?
Everyone let go of the rope, the teachers blew their whistles, and we were escorted back to our classrooms to wait for the bus to take us home for the summer. No one said a thing to Eli; he simply curled up on himself again, slinking away before the moment could be taken from him.
I've been thinking about the purpose of a statement such as this. It is intended as a confession, obviously, something of a legal document (even scrawled on yellow pad, like some manic trial note). And yet this statement also has more than a whiff of memoir, of the commission of my death to paper. After all, who writes a memoir but the man whose life is over? The memoirist believes that he will live on in transcription, but in fact he is describing a life rather than living one, abandoning the visceral for the verbal. It is a kind of surrender.
I am finished. All the pretty detectives in the world can't change that. There is only one ending to a story like mine. And before I get on with that long and unforgettable summer of 1975, before I finish telling how Eli saved my life, and how I conspired to commit a murder twenty-five years later, I will reveal that ending – not just the ending of my own story, but the ending of all stories. It is this:
I died alone.
Now perhaps I should have confined myself to a strict legal document, wherefore and in furtherance and the like. But such a document could never begin to convey the depths of my misdeeds, nor of my contrition; there are facts here that simply do not adhere to the rigid structure of the Revised Legal Codes of Washington State.
Take the summer, for instance. What statute covers the feel of the sun that summer, its immediacy and grace, its heat on my browned forearms, on the tanned skin of my neck and shoulders? How can a lawyer explain the rush of pavement beneath my bicycle tires or the defiance of gravity committed by my tennis shoes? Perhaps you remember the length of your own July days, the endless possibilities that existed from the seat of a Schwinn, the swagger of boys moving down a suburban street with the streetlights beginning to hum and spark, the fearless poise of it all. The longing.
That summer, days lasted forever. Somewhere a scientist is proving that time is bent and yawned by the forces of childhood and summer, and the jury awaits his inevitable arrival in Stockholm open armed, individual jurists sobbing because this temporal genius has finally proven that our childhoods are longer than our adult lives, and that time is not a line, as they have been trying to deceive us into believing, but a slope, picking up speed and danger as it goes on.
For myself, in that long June of 1975 I rose early and patted my long, thick hair rather than comb it. I fought with my brother and sisters over the last bowl of Cocoa Puffs or Super Sugar Crisp or King Vitamin; no matter what kind of processed, sugared cereal we ate, my mother bought only last bowls of the stuff. We planted ourselves in front of the TV with zealous punctuality, and yet we never so much as smiled at the crap that played before us: Underdog and Dick Tracy and the Go Go Gophers and Mr. Peabody is not enjoyment. Check the face of any kid planted in front of the tube. It's not fun. It's a business. They don't like cartoons any more than we like work; it's what they do.
By ten each morning, I was on my bike. I'd ride down to Everson's house and we'd pretend to have karate fights or play touch football or just tool around on our bikes, acting like kids instead of the pot-smoking losers we were about to become. Some mornings I'd scrounge through the dryer for change, and Everson and I would race off to the store for baseball cards. I can still see the 1975 Topps baseball cards. They made them a shade smaller that year, for what reason I couldn't possibly say, with the team name shadowed on the top, the player framed just below that set against two-tone cardboard, his name in all caps, his position in a tiny baseball on the bottom right, unless he was an All-Star (the Dodgers had four that year: Messersmith, Garvey, Cey, and Wynn), in which case his position was written inside a star. I tore these tiny men from the package and marveled at the afros and sideburns and mustaches that peeked out from under their ball caps and wondered at the world that opened up to people with afros and sideburns and mustaches, at the vast number and range of boobs that they must be exposed to. I flipped the cards over and read through the stats as if they contained some secret – map of the human genome, key to the universe. To this day, my mind is full of the detritus printed in six-point type on the backs of those cards. I can't remember my bank account number or my sisters' birthdays, but I remember that Richie Zisk had exactly one hundred RBI's for the Pirates, that Pat Dobson won nineteen games for the Yankees, and that Ralph Garr hit a cool.353. I scraped and stole for the quarter that each package cost and never gave a thought to Everson, who must've had thousands of dollars from his school-year dope sales, but who bought exactly the same number of packs as me, peeling singles off a thick roll.
For the first half of that summer, stoic Everson never mentioned pot; nor did he ever have any, at least when I was around. He was just a kid, like me, but with longer hair and a shorter vocabulary, and even though he was going into eighth grade and I was going into sixth, that disparity disappeared that summer in a haze of tag and hotbox and bike races and baseball cards and mud pies and dandelion soup and ice cream trucks and corn on the cob on soggy plates… a life. A real life, ordered and meaningful and simple.
And then Pete Decker got out of juvenile detention.
I don't think I realized that the neighborhood was peaceful until it stopped being so. For the first month and a half of the summer, as long as we stayed in our turf and didn't venture into Matt Woodbridge's fiefdom four blocks down the street, we were safe, seemingly able to stay out until the sun was completely gone without fear of being beaten up. And then, on the day Pete got out of the clink, it all ended.
He'd been gone six whole weeks – a sentence deferred until summer so that he could finish the school year – for stealing car stereos. A whole pile of eight-track players had been found behind Pete's garage. Six weeks in juvenile hall wasn't likely to mellow Pete, a fact I realized when I finally saw him, on a Friday at the end of July, walking down the street, a cigarette dangling from his fingers – ambling, really, like he wasn't even going anywhere, like he was pacing a long hall.
That very weekend, summer ended. The weather stayed hot and school remained closed, but from then on the world didn't feel the same. Bikes were stolen and their parts were seen on other bikes; rocks were thrown through windows; garbage cans were spilled out on the street, and mailboxes were knocked from their posts. That weekend Everson and I stopped playing, and started just hanging out. Waiting. We knew that at any time Pete could come out of his house and take charge of things. Little kids like my siblings continued to play, of course, because that's all little kids can do (their ability to "hang out" still unformed) but it was with one eye on the street, in close proximity to their houses, riding their bikes in small circles in their driveways or on the strips in front of their houses, no longer venturing down the block. Bike traffic fell by two thirds. No one dared walk anywhere anymore, lest they be caught out on the street.
Still, Pete stayed to himself those first days, walking the mile strip of Empire as if he were the only one on it, cigarette in the left corner of his mouth, left eye squinted shut against the curling smoke. It felt as if he were taking the measure of the neighborhood, seeing if anything had changed, who needed to be put in his place, whose ass needed kicking.
We convinced ourselves that maybe things had changed, and gradually, the next week, we ventured out with our bikes and our baseball cards, but stayed close to our own yards. Then, one afternoon while I engaged in the exquisite task of sorting my baseball cards in the front yard, Pete was suddenly there, leaning against the fence next to my house. Everson was with him, looking as if he'd been kidnapped.
"Hey," Pete said in his preternaturally scratchy voice. "What the fuck are those?"
"Baseball cards."
Pete held out his hand and tipped his head back and I looked up at Everson, who shrugged. I stood and brought him the card I happened to have in my hand, an outfielder named George Hendrick of the Cleveland Indians. Pete held it in his hand, turned it over, and made a face like he'd eaten something sour. "What do you do with it?"
I shrugged. "You collect 'em."
"Why?"
I shrugged again. "For fun."
He looked down at the card. "So what, you look at the pictures and beat off? Are you queer, Clark? I mean, Clark's kind of a queer name, ain't it?"
"No." And I don't know what came over me, but I really believed I could explain myself to him. "See, you try to collect all the guys from every team and men you see who's better by the stats on the back. You can measure them against each other and they all start to make sense. That's the only way baseball makes sense, is if you understand how the numbers work against each other."
Everson closed his eyes. Pete turned the card over.
"See," I said, "George Hendrick hit nineteen homers. Reggie Jackson hit twenty-nine and had more RBI's, too. So he's better. In fact, he's the best." My voice lost any force behind it. "See?"
Pete stared at George Hendrick's card for a while and then he tossed it back at me. "We're gonna go party. You comin'?"
I looked at Everson, who was staring at the ground.
Pete stepped forward. "You ain't a puss, are you, Clark?"
"No," I said. "No, I'm ready to go." I left the baseball cards on the porch and we crossed the rabbit hills on our bikes and walked them through the weedy railroad fields until we reached the riverbank where Pete had stashed a six-pack of warm beer that he'd stolen from someone. The three of us passed those beers around and Everson brought out a joint and we drank and smoked and then Pete collected whatever money we had, to pay for the beer – which he'd stolen – and the joint, which he expected to be paid for even though Everson had provided it. These were, in order, my first beer and my first taste of marijuana, and if I felt anything other than a sore throat and nausea I don't remember it. Since that day I have seen people loosen up and become wild on the effects of alcohol and dope, but I don't remember any of us smiling or laughing that day, and I guess that's because Pete drank most of the beer and inhaled most of the pot.
The next day, he organized a kind of boxing tournament with gloves he had left over from his Golden Gloves days. He enticed a couple of little kids into the tournament as lightweights; they sent each other home bleeding and crying. Next were Everson and me, whom Pete called the middleweights. We swung wildly and connected each time with the other's ear, until our ears were red and sore, which is when Pete realized we were purposefully not hitting each other in the face. He stopped the fight and informed us that we were pusses and that if we didn't fight each other, we'd have to move up in weight class and "get your pussy ass fucked up by me." So we ventured out slowly, our gloved hands in front of us, jabbing each other in the nose or the chin or the brow. Then I caught Everson with a shot to the jaw and he got mad and nailed me in the nose, and the rest was just a mess of bleary eyes and blood in my mouth and swinging fists, until I remember looking down on Everson on the ground and Pete pulled me away, whooping and shouting that I had scored the upset.
That night we went with Pete to steal bicycles from the other end of the neighborhood. We rode the bikes over the rabbit hills, then put them in Pete's garage, where he stayed up all night, taking them apart and putting them back together with parts from other bikes, trying to make them unrecognizable, although when kids saw Pete riding their stolen bikes they never said anything anyway.
In the morning, Pete gave Everson and me each a stolen bike and had us sit a block apart, facing each other. He gave us each a crutch from when he'd broken his leg.
"Now ride at each other," he said.
"What?"
"You know, like them old guys used to do." Pete struggled for the word. "What's that called? You know, guys on horses, with them long spears?"
"Jousting?" Everson asked, and was immediately sorry.
We passed twice without touching, just holding our crutches out in front of us, but Pete was becoming impatient, and the third time Everson caught me in the shoulder with the rubber stopper on the bottom of his crutch. The impact spun me sideways and my front tire slammed into his back tire and we were both thrown onto our knees and elbows, instantly skinned, our bikes collapsed in a heap of spokes and gears.
"Motherfuck," Pete said reverentially. The next day we shoplifted cigarettes and sunflower seeds and looked at dirty magazines. On and on the summer seemed destined to go, an ever-descending spiral. We drank bottles of sweet red wine that Pete liberated from a neighbor and took pills that Pete said were speed, although, again, the only thing I remember feeling was slightly sick and edgy. We broke into a garage and stole gasoline, which we proceeded to sniff until we were dizzy and sick. We used the rest of the gas to start fires, and burned things that Pete had stolen: purses and clothes and toys. We engaged in all of this behavior with no sense of fun or purpose – other than fighting off Pete Decker's boredom, but that was enough. We feared Pete's boredom far more than we feared being caught stealing or drunk.
"I'm bored," Pete said one day, after he'd been out of juvie for about two weeks. "Let's do something." We sat in the draw between the rabbit hills, in the thick weeds, smoking one of Everson's joints. He and I exchanged a worried glance, but Pete just stood up and wandered away and Everson and I sighed with relief.
The next morning, something felt different in my house. I wandered around the house, scratching my head, trying to put my finger on it. My parents didn't seem to notice it, nor did my sisters or my brother. They went about their business, Dad getting ready for work at the cement plant, pulling on his coveralls and packing his aluminum lunch pail, Mom folding clothes, my brother and sisters eating their cereal in front of the TV. Dad couldn't find his wallet and he stormed around a little bit, but finally he just headed off for work without it, kissing my mom and ruffling my hair, like I was still a little kid. Then it hit me. I ran back into my bedroom. Something was different in my room. The top of my dresser was clean. The top of my dresser where I kept my baseball cards. I looked behind the dresser, knowing that four hundred baseball cards were not going to fall back there. I checked the drawers and under my bed, and asked Ben if he'd taken them. He looked up from his Count Chocula cereal, a spot of milk on his lower lip, and then shook his head and turned away from me to the TV.
Pete. Pete Decker had broken into my house and stolen my father's wallet and taken my baseball cards. He could have killed us or taken one of my little sisters away or… there was no telling the damage he could've caused, and there was nothing I could do. I went outside and threw a baseball against our front porch, grinding my teeth together.
"Hey, queer."
I turned to see Pete standing in the street, Everson at his side, looking sheepish. They were both dressed in several layers of clothing, heavy winter coats and hats, making them appear to be bloated. It was already almost eighty degrees, and yet they stood there under heaps of heavy clothing, as if they were preparing for the final assault on Everest. I even forgot my stolen baseball cards for a minute, venturing toward them. "What-"
Pete held out a handgun. "You comin'?"
I must've looked horrified, because Pete laughed – giggled, almost. "Change your shorts, junior. It's a BB gun." And to prove it he turned and shot my neighbor's German shepherd in the ass, sending it yelping around their yard. "Get dressed."
"Where'd you get the guns?" I asked.
"Found 'em," Pete said, and he smiled at me, a smile as cruel as that particular arrangement of lips and teeth can be made to appear.
Mom looked in on me as I put on sweatshirts and extra pants and my heaviest coat. "What are you doing, Clark?"
"Nothing."
"But why are you dressing like that?" I shot her a glare. "I'm not doing anything, Mom." She stared as if she didn't know me. I went outside, and Pete and Everson began walking before I reached them, and together we headed down the street, bulked up in our winter clothes like the sons of some fat gunslinger. Pete tossed me the BB pistol he'd shown me; Everson was carrying one just like it, an air-powered gun that fired one BB at a time, in a slow arc that you could see from behind the gun. For his part, Pete had a more dangerous weapon, a rifle that shot pellets that gained speed by being pumped as many times as a bony pair of arms could pump.
Pete seemed giddy with the dangers that lay ahead as we walked across the rabbit hills and toward the river. "Fuckers ain't gonna know what hit 'em." He walked a few feet ahead of us and my fist kept tightening around the air pistol, watching his back, thinking about my baseball cards, about Pete roaming our house while we slept. I imagined the BB going into the back of his neck, then rolling him over and firing over and over into his face. Finally we reached the spot where Pete hid his stolen beer, marked with a two-by-four stuck in the ground, and Pete went into the woods and returned with three welding masks. He gave one to each of us and we put them on, lowering the green glass visors over our faces. We walked toward the river like valiant white trash, like knights of the end table, knights of the TV tray, knights of the white ghetto.
As we walked, Everson leaned in toward me and whispered, with dread, "We're fighting Woodbridge. And some of his friends." But I could only imagine killing Pete.
"Here's what we do," Pete said as we entered the rail yard above the river. "We pin 'em down in a gunfight, and while you guys keep 'em down, I'm gonna circle around and ambush the motherfuckers from behind. Got it?" He began pumping his rifle, bringing his arms together in a scissor motion until he strained against all the air pressure he'd built up in his gun. "You mother-fuckin' got it?"
We nodded and kept walking. We heard them before we saw them. We had come down a hill onto the flats overlooking the river. They were in a stand of trees just on the other side of an old gravel pit at a bend in the river. Pete lowered his welding shield over his face. Then Everson lowered his. I tightened the strap on my forehead and lowered my shield. We ducked down. It was quiet: the only noises were the babbling river and my own breathing behind the dark-tinted welding mask.
We crept up on the stand of trees, Pete in the lead, Everson and I behind him. My hands were shaking and sweaty, the stand of trees suddenly empty.
"Crap," Pete said, and almost as soon as he said it I felt a shot, like a bee sting on my hip. The air was filled with the popping of air guns. They had outflanked our plan to outflank them.
"Get down!" Pete yelled, and we did, diving for cover in the stand of trees that Woodbridge and his army had just evacuated. I remember seeing Pete dive forward, roll, and shoot back over his shoulder, the pneumatic thuck of his pellet gun. I fired too, a higher, popping sound, blindly aiming into the brush just above the river, where the shot had come from.
Pete yelled and Everson and I looked over, frightened, but he wasn't hurt, just excited, pumping his gun and firing into the brush. "Come on, motherfuckers! Come on, Vietcong pussies!" Even through two shirts and a heavy coat my side hurt where I'd been shot, and I could feel a welt forming.
Everson and I pressed ourselves to the ground and fired over our heads as quickly as our single-shot BB pistols would allow us, pulling the trigger, then releasing the hammer and pushing it into place, firing again. Throwing the BBs would have been as effective. After a few minutes Pete slapped me on the shoulder, pointed with two fingers, ran his hand along his neck, gestured with his eyes, and ran away. Apparently our counterattack was beginning. I watched as he ran serpentine, bent at the waist until he disappeared into the brush along the river. We kept firing until we realized no one was shooting back. For a moment it was quiet.
Everson lay next to me, breathing as heavily as I must have been.
"Do we keep shooting, or what?" I asked.
He just shrugged. "It hurts," he said, and he lifted his sleeves to show me a purplish bruise on the inside of his forearm.
"Yeah," I said. We lay there on our stomachs, listening to the river.
Next to me, Everson fumbled in his coat pocket. I figured he was going to produce a joint; Pete got mad at him now if he was ever without dope. Instead he pulled out my George Hendrick baseball card, which had been folded in half.
I just stared at him.
"Pete sold 'em to me."
"All of 'em?" I asked. I took the ruined card from him.
Everson nodded. "This morning. He came to my house and said I had to give him twenty bucks for all of 'em."
"Were they all like this?"
"Burned or crinkled up or folded like that. I'm sorry, man. He's an asshole."
From the brush along the river we heard a few pops and we tensed, then a voice from far off: "Where are you guys?" Everson and I both started. It sounded like Pete.
"Were we supposed to follow him?" I asked.
"I don't know," Everson said.
There were a few more pops from down near the river. "Come on, you pussies!"
My side ached where I'd been shot. I looked over my shoulder, wondering if we could just run home.
But Everson pulled his shield back down over his face, and I did the same. I swallowed and stood, and Everson and I began running toward the river, our footfalls sounding like air rifle shots. I spun my head from side to side trying to find Woodbridge and the seventh-grade goons he stood with at the bus stop, but there was no one.
"Come on, you pussies!" Pete yelled again. His voice was coming from a draw along the riverbank that Everson and I were approaching. I tried to picture Woodbridge and his guys down there in the draw, with Pete pinned down between them. I imagined Everson and me bursting into their camp – which looked in my mind like a machine gun nest from one of those black-and-white war movies my dad watched – and spraying Woodbridge's army with BB's. But in my mind it was Pete I would be shooting, firing over and over into his sinewy body, my baseball cards falling from his pockets.
When we reached the top of the draw, we could see what had happened. Pete was at the bottom of a short depression, pinned down by Woodbridge and his friends on the far end of the draw. From the lip of the draw, I could see Pete's back, as he pressed himself into the ground, and I could see Woodbridge's guys at the other end, their air guns now trained on Everson and me. There were three quick pops, like the first popcorn in an air popper, and on my left Everson yelled "Ow!" and fell. I watched him go down as something zipped past my head, but I kept running, my breath heavy behind the welding mask. Somehow none of the shots hit me, and I just kept running toward Pete, my air gun now trained on his back, my teeth clenched.
Woodbridge and his guys fired another volley, and I heard one of the shots ping off the welding shield. Finally I dipped into the depression where Pete was hiding, and they couldn't hit me anymore. I lifted the mask away from my face and stared down on Pete, who cowered there before me. I was amazed at how small he looked from this angle, realized for the first time, maybe, that Pete was just a kid like us, same skin and bones and lean muscle. I was five feet from him when he spun around suddenly, deep fear in his eyes, his pellet rifle pointed at my face.
It felt like someone hit me with a bottle or a baseball bat. My head snapped back and I dropped to the sand. I reached up to cover my face. Something warm and gooey mashed between my fingers. I wondered what could have been in the bottle that I'd been hit with. I tried to open my eyes, but there was a rush of pain and everything went a dark purple and that color was my pain for just a minute, so that I could see how badly this hurt and it was a pain that I could hear, too, a scream that came from deeper than my voice box, deeper than my lungs, and I was surprised to hear it sounded like my voice. I screamed until my air was all gone.
I could hear Pete's voice, too: "Oh fuck!"
I was rolling around on the ground, both hands covering my left eye. The world seemed to expand into this purple and then contract, all of the pain and blood and everything pulling back into the socket of my left eye.
I pried my right eye open and blearily looked up to see Pete running away, climbing the bank of the draw. He was pulling Everson with him.
"Wait," I said quietly, but they were gone.
There was no noise except the trickling river at my side. I began to cry. That brought more of the purplish pain, and I felt like throwing up. My hands were covered with blood now, and I pulled them away and the blood ran down my face and pooled in the sand. I put my hands back on my face, thinking maybe I could hold my eye in its socket. I lay there a few minutes, moaning and trying to figure out the sinewy things I felt against my fingers.
I stood and fell back into the sand, the pain seeking out new levels. I got back up and began walking. I made it a few steps and sat down in the sand again. I got to my knees and threw up. That's when I fell back in the sand, beaten. I couldn't do it. My first thought that wasn't pain was that they would name an award for me, as they had done with Woodbridge's dead brother. I hoped Ben would fare better without me than Woodbridge had without his older brother.
I lay back in the sand and cried, suddenly picturing my mother standing on our porch, wondering where I was. "Here I am!" I yelled, and the salty tears boiled in my mangled eye. Then I just started yelling and crying, scratching around in the sand, panicking, I guess. I don't know how long I yelled and cried but finally I felt a hand on my chest, patting me, reassuring me, and at first I thought it was my mom, but then I realized that Everson had come back. Of course he had.
"It's okay," Everson said.
I opened my right eye and stared into the black-rimmed glasses of Eli Boyle.
"It's okay," Eli said again. "I called for help." And he held my hand.
The lady smiled; for the gallantries of a one-eyed man are still gallantries.
– Voltaire, "The One-Eyed Porter"