by William Poe
Mr. Klinghoffer’s fury was evident as he hid the embarrassing stack of construction paper under the flap of his coat and snatched me from my desk. We marched to his office. The principal had threatened me many times with the “board of education” that he kept hanging on the wall of his office—a relic of his Lutheran school days. Now he was beyond threats. Mr. Klinghoffer took the paddle from the wall and smacked my thighs so hard a person could practically hear the blood rising to the surface of my skin.
Even a principal supported by the virtues of Lutheran parochialism cannot beat a child to that extent, not even in the backwoods of Arkansas. The police arrested him. Mrs. Deshaw, horrified by the terror she had unleashed, called them herself. She also telephoned Vivian, who then managed to contact Lenny. All three were at the hospital, beside my bed, when I awoke from heavy sedation, resting on a special foam pillow. The man had caused a hairline fracture in my tailbone. I barely escaped paralysis.
Lenny went on the television newscast that night, telling the public that no child deserved such treatment for drawing a picture.
“Don’t make no difference what my boy draws,” Lenny asserted. “It’s just art.”
That was the closest Lenny ever came to understanding me.
CHAPTER 7
Mr. Klinghoffer’s violence produced two positive results. For one, Lenny paid more attention to me. He stayed at the bedside during much of my convalescence, even risking his job because he missed so many days of work. One day, he brought me a Spirograph drawing kit to help relieve the boredom and watched as I created kaleidoscopic designs, even lauding them as “nice to look at.”
The other result benefited everyone at the school. Strict rules put in place forbade the application of corporal punishment. The school board replaced Mr. Klinghoffer with a well-known administrator, Mr. Bertrand Lloyd, whose reputation as a reformer of public education was legend. The man was near retirement and decided that repairing the damage done by Mr. Klinghoffer would be an appropriate swan song to his career.
Mr. Lloyd announced at an all-school assembly in the lunchroom that my injuries prevented me from running and jumping and that no one should poke fun if I sat on the sidelines and didn’t participate in sports. The artistic transgression that sparked Mr. Klinghoffer’s rage went unremarked. The new principal encouraged me to pursue my art but, with a friendly wink, asked that I pick my subject matter with a little more discretion.
In gratitude for the encouragement (and the relief of not having to participate in sports), I applied my artistic skills to painting slogans for competitive events, incorporating “go team” into designs with the school mascot. The banners stretched across the top row of bleachers during Little League games, intimidating the other side and inspiring ours.
Even with my propaganda art on display, I rarely attended the events—that is, unless Ernie was going to play. He continued to excel as a pitcher, and I enjoyed watching him. In whatever way it is possible for two boys that young, I was falling in love with him. It wasn’t the same for Ernie.
As our physical encounters behind locked doors intensified, our already shallow public friendship dissolved completely. People would never guess we knew each other from our behavior at school. If I approached Ernie after a game, even if it was just to congratulate him, he ran away.
Once classes were over, though, and the sun went down, Ernie crept across the field to climb the trellis to my room. We fell into routine behavior that grew more intense as we reached puberty. When we crossed the threshold where true childhood ends with the first ejaculation, we experienced it together.
Well into the years of our mutual obsession with getting each other off in new and increasingly experimental ways, Ernie arrived home from his Methodist church one Sunday and rushed to see me. He breathlessly explained the minister’s fire-and-brimstone sermon about “Sodom and Gomorrah.” We trembled as we sat in mournful silence staring at the floor—that is, before we couldn’t stand it anymore and threw off our clothes.
This time, the sex was nearly violent in its focus. It was as though we had recognized the sinfulness of our acts, and that knowledge made the encounter all the more explosive. We ended any pretense that still existed from the sex games we had once played and made each meeting strictly sexual. There was no conversation, no acts of tenderness. The one time I put my arms around Ernie, wanting to show affection, he pushed me away.
The afterschool encounters went on for years. Vivian hardly knew that Ernie and I were still friends. Only occasionally did she see him crossing the creek on his way home when she was outside on the back porch catching some privacy to read a romance novel under the porch light. If she asked me about it the next day, I would say that I had been helping Ernie with his homework. If Vivian realized how Ernie managed to get into the house unnoticed, she never said anything.
By ninth grade, Ernie and I weren’t just doing it in my room, or outside at the bauxite pit if it was summer. A few times, we dared to do it in the boys’ shower in the school gymnasium. I worried that one of the jocks would find us and we’d both end up dead. The risk seemed to enhance the experience for Ernie.
I wanted desperately to kiss Ernie. But having already experienced his reaction to a simple hug, I was afraid to try. When I ventured to ask Ernie what he would think about kissing, he responded coldly, “Let’s just get each other off.”
My worst fear was that Ernie would start dating girls and no longer want to see me. Girls adored him. With each new school year, Ernie had grown more handsome. The white-blond hair darkened as he entered puberty, and his skin glowed with a bronze luster.
The inevitable happened. Ernie asked a girl on a date—one of the classmates we’d known since first grade. I had won playing hopscotch with Melinda Bower, though I had lost to her at jacks and jumping rope. She was a formidable opponent at six years of age; she was my archrival at fifteen. I made a shaky truce with my fears and held out hope that Ernie would climb my trellis when he tired of Melinda.
One Friday night, Ernie appeared at my window. He and Melinda had done it. Ernie insisted on describing the encounter in gory detail, gushing with red-hot enthusiasm when describing how he slid into her and how remarkable it was—how the parts “fit” so well. I was about to stab him with a kitchen knife if he didn’t shut up. Then he said, “Be a girl for me, Simon.” It was more a command than a request.
I’d long kept women’s clothes hidden behind a panel in my closet, including the fox stole from Mandy’s armoire. While Ernie lay naked in my bed, I went inside the closet and prepared myself. I put on panties and a tissue-padded bra, and then I slipped on a dress that I had secretly ordered through Sears and Roebuck. I draped the fox stole around my shoulders and donned a black wig that Vivian had thrown in the trash because Lenny said it made her look ridiculous.
The feminine illusion produced the desired effect. Ernie threw back the covers to expose his excitement. I hovered over him, teasing with the fox stole, brushing the tip of his flesh with its furry tail. Ernie ran his hands up the sides of my legs. We kissed for the first time, a puckish touching of the lips. Ernie masturbated while staring into my eyes. At the crucial moment, he snatched the stole from my shoulders.
“Don’t get it dirty!” I yelled.
Ernie laughed while using the stole to wipe his chest.
Years of pent-up frustration overtook me. I snatched the soiled fox stole and smacked Ernie in the face. He jumped to his feet, grabbed my arms, and shoved me against the wall.
“You fucking sissy,” he said, punching me hard in the stomach.
I doubled over, gasping for air.
Ernie dressed, climbed out the window, and snaked his way through the underbrush toward his house. I dragged my aching body to the window and caught a last glimpse as he disappeared into the darkness.
CHAPTER 8
Not long after my falling-out with Ernie, Mandy collapsed while standing before the dressing mirror. I found her on the floor with a strangely twisted leg
. She didn’t seem to be in pain, but her speech was slurred. Paramedics carried Mandy downstairs on a gurney. They were loading her into the ambulance when Vivian arrived home. Lenny said he would meet us at the hospital, but I couldn’t get ahold of Connie.
Doctors advised a hip replacement for Mandy. During the operation, her blood pressure went dangerously low. When she regained consciousness, Mandy didn’t recognize anyone. There was little choice but to put Mandy in Bobwhite Nursing Home, a facility not far from the grocery store. Every afternoon, Vivian picked up Mandy’s laundry and stayed long enough to spoon-feed her so she could be sure Mandy ate at least some food each day.
Mandy started picking at her hands to the point that sores developed. The nurses put her wrists in padded cuffs, tethered to the arms of her chair during the day and connected to the bed rails at night. I tried to visit Mandy a few times a week. Often, she confused me with my grandfather.
“Bart,” Mandy would say plaintively as she struggled against her restraints, “why are you doing this to me?” Other times, there would be vague recognition as she studied me with eyes made owl-like by her large glasses. She’d twist her face into a scowl and say, “You’ll remember this when I’m gone.”
Mandy wasn’t gone yet, but I knew I would never forget her, not for the fascination with storytelling that she had implanted in my young mind, not for making me aware that imagination can be as real as the world around us. I would never be totally free of her persistent need to command my complete attention. That need, in the absence of Vivian or Lenny’s affections, was both desirous and repellant.
I would always remember Mandy’s fox stole—the ruination of my secret life with Ernie. When Ernie left that day, I got a grocery sack from downstairs and scooped the soiled garment into it. Perhaps my attraction to men would go up in flames if I burned it, or at least I might lose my desire for Ernie. I carried the package to an oil barrel incinerator behind the barn. As flames ate away at the long-dead pelt, the stinking fur accosted my senses. But I wouldn’t move, figuring the poisonous smell simply added dimension to the ritual. I rubbed Aunt Opal’s quarter between my fingers and recited an incantation, something I hadn’t done since I was a small boy.
The failure of the magic I tried to invoke became painfully clear as I pressed my forehead against the bedroom window each night hoping to see Ernie making his way through the honeysuckle and brambles. Early in the evenings, the bats sifted through a hole under the eve of the barn’s roof, the bravest raccoon in the area headed toward the creek to wash vegetables it had stolen from Vivian’s garden, Lenny’s coon dog strained against its heavy chain when a bevy of quail scurried across the yard, but a sighting of Ernie never interrupted nature’s drama.
At school, everyone gossiped about Ernie’s relationship with Melinda. I felt some satisfaction when she dumped him. Most people blamed the cruel rumors spread by Melinda’s competition among the cheerleaders who plotted to dethrone her as captain of the squad.
“Melinda got pregnant, but she lost the baby,” claimed Lois Ann, the girl who was queen to my Halloween carnival king and was now the runner-up as cheerleading captain. The accusation was believable. Several girls I had known since elementary school were pregnant as early as eighth grade. In Melinda’s case, the rumors proved false. The reason Melinda had broken up with Ernie was that she was done with him. Melinda had simply been honing her skills on the cute star of the Little League pitcher’s mound. She actually had her sites on Heath, the quarterback and Lois Ann’s steady. Melinda began flirting with Heath at the most public spot available—the newly opened Burger Chef, where the roller-skating waitresses were a social encyclopedia. She had Heath in her grasp within the week, but the battle between Melinda and Lois Ann was to continue for years.
In high school, I worked on the yearbook staff designing layouts. Though baseball was not as important as football, I made sure there were plenty of pictures of Ernie winding up to throw a winning curveball or digging in his heels as a batter preparing to hit a home run. Sophomore year, we had fewer images of Ernie. As I studied the pictures, I realized that, in past years, he had been a head taller than everyone else on the team. Now he was considerably shorter. Ernie found himself more often on the bench than in the spotlight. It didn’t seem fair.
By junior year, I was writing for the high school newspaper, the Hawkwind Journal, named for our sports team, the Hawks. I had two columns. One was dedicated to reviewing concerts. I covered Jethro Tull and Uriah Heep when they appeared in Little Rock. Students read my entertainment column, even if they didn’t agree with my assessments. The other was an editorial column. I touched on topics the administration wished to ignore, such as the prevalence of drug use among students. A considerable number of my classmates were sniffing airplane glue. Some had moved on to shooting up heroin, smoking marijuana, and inhaling Freon, a chemical used as a coolant in air conditioners. I wasn’t in anyone’s clique, but we all knew each other’s business. After all, we had been together since we lost our baby teeth. My fellow students didn’t know how closely I watched them, and felt sadness, as they started down a road to self-destruction. On the other hand, I understood the loneliness and sense of alienation that led to their behavior. It’s a miracle that I didn’t consider their option sooner.
Perhaps due to my tendency to observe the consequences of mainstream culture on the lives of those along the margins, nothing outraged me so much as social injustice. It was bad enough that ineptitude at sports had caused me such misery. Now sports were causing Ernie to give up on life.
In one issue of the Journal, I put down my thoughts about the harmful effects of competitive sports. To the journalism teacher’s credit, she allowed publication of my article, “Letting Others Win.” The opening paragraph read as follows:
The Hawks are the most successful sports team in county history, and probably the best team in the state of Arkansas. They beat all competitors, and our athletes have multiple trophies. It is time to let others win.
Any sympathy toward me as astute reviewer of rock concerts, whatever goodwill I had earned as the person who contributed to team spirit by painting artful banners, evaporated overnight. To summarize the community buzz, what I wrote was sacrilege, if not outright blasphemy.
Vivian took the brunt of the indignation, since she pretty much saw everyone at the grocery store within the span of a week. Lenny got an earful on jobs to unclog a sink or fix a backed-up toilet. Our telephone rang off the hook with anonymous callers.
“Your son’s a Communist!” one voice told Lenny.
Another said, “You damn Powells have been nothing but trouble since time began!”
I picked up the phone when the high school principal called. He wasn’t shy about using his name when he demanded that I bring Lenny to the phone. I ran upstairs to listen on the extension.
“Sir,” the principal began, “your son’s editorial, while I commend our journalism department for publishing it, was an act destructive to school spirit. Please talk to your son, because we don’t want a Communist arising from within our school district.”
Lenny growled into the phone.
“We are in a war!” the principal continued. “Our boys are fighting in Vietnam, and here is your son telling students they shouldn’t compete to win. Americans are forgetting what victory means!”
Lenny had just started to give the man a piece of his mind when the stalwart principal hung up on him. Lenny shouted for Vivian. “That son of a bitch didn’t have the balls to come out here and call my son a Communist to my face!” he fumed. “Ain’t puttin’ up with it, Vivian. I’m going down there right now and punch the lights out of that mealy-mouthed prick!”
I practically slid down the oak banister to reach the first floor before Lenny made it to the door. He had just taken his keys from the hook when I grabbed his arm. He wheeled around to face me.
“Don’t do it,” I said. “Things are bad enough without you beating up the principal.”
“
Hell, boy,” Lenny said. “You’re out of your mind writin’ crazy things, but goddamn it, no one talks to me like that and gets away with it!”
“The article was a joke,” I lied, willing to compromise my integrity for the sake of peace.
Lenny stopped in his tracks.
“I can’t explain why some people misunderstood. My friends got the joke.”
“Hell, son,” Lenny said, emotionally confused. “Don’t be so goddamn smart-alecky all the time. Just say what you mean! People ain’t quick enough to figure out your nonsense.”
Lenny headed toward his chair and the solace of a Lucky Strike cigarette. As he collapsed into the recliner, he kept on cursing, not at me, but to the world at large: “Goddamn it, boy. God damn it.”
School spirit, when it came to sports, was as much a part of Sibley’s religious landscape as the spirit invoked on Sunday mornings—and the passions that came to the defense were just as strong. Each day, walking home, I worried that incensed neighbors might stage an ambush. I started riding a horse to school instead of walking—not an unusual practice among Sibley students. The school had set up hitching posts in a field beyond where the buses parked. Certain codes of conduct took precedence. I was safe while riding a horse.
Before the controversy subsided, I found notes that someone had slipped through the vents in my locker. They cautioned against going into the bathroom at lunchtime or staying alone in the library. The author had deliberately disguised his handwriting, but I recognized Ernie’s scrawl. I followed his advice.
After two weeks without incident, I began walking home from school again, taking a circuitous route that led me past the Corley house. Mrs. Corley called out as I passed by one afternoon. She sat under the gazebo next to the swimming pool, holding a glass of wine and waving flamboyantly. She started to rise from the chair but fell back clumsily. I said a polite hello, but didn’t tarry.