“Watch this,” I said to Dennis, a classmate.
“Wait. Mr. Young’s here.”
“I know. Don’t worry.”
“Who ya wanna hit?”
“Bobby Marks. Over there, see?” I said, setting my catapult lower than the table so that no one could see. I bit back my prankish grin, forging an innocent expression.
“That’s too far. You’ll never hit him,” Dennis said, daring me, watching.
“Let’s see. Here it goes,” I said, releasing, feeling the faultless force of that one perfectly forty-five degreed launch, catching its glossy greenness with my vision as it ascended, soaring, way off the mark (Bobby Marks), but dead on toward Mr. Young.
“Wow!” said Dennis, watching with wonderment. “That one’s really goin!”
“Uh-oh!” I said, as we both saw in disbelief as that especially large, intentionally squished, pulpy grape collapsed, smashing onto Mr. Young’s mouth—at least unquestionably somewhere between his nose and chin—splattering, avalanching fleetly down to his tie, then his thigh, then to the floor.
“Holy macarolly!” I said, turning my head, restraining nervous laughter.
“Oh my God, you hit Mr. Young! You hit Mr. Young right in the face! You hit him right in the mouth! Holy smokes!” Dennis kept marveling.
So quickly surprised, Mr. Young jerked back, his face forward—sort of like a chicken—his hand immediately wiping as he pivoted, searching, scanning hopelessly across the din of the junior high multitudes. He stomped his foot in fury, said something to the nearby aid. She blew her whistle, steadily, loudly until everyone got quiet.
Mr. Young began shouting, “Not another sound! Everyone! Be quiet! Right now! Sit in your seats!” The meter in his raspy voice made him sound like a poet with a cause. “Are you a bunch of animals, or what!”
Some distant kid’s voice shouted, “What!”
Another voice shouted, “Animal!”
“Everyone stay seated, with your hands folded! If one more piece of food is thrown, everyone of you will be in detention!” This exploded from a red face, arteries popping in his neck, fists pinned to hips, hairy forearm sinews flexing.
I didn’t know what was going to happen. I could see a slight glistening on his chin. I didn’t know if it was his saliva from his fury, or some of the grape.
Just then, Dennis whispered to me, “There’s a piece of grape on his shirt. See it? See it on his shirt?”
I could see the green speck stuck on his white shirt. I had a really hard time harnessing my laughter with this, even though I was terrified. I wondered if anyone else had seen that grape strike him. This was like a dream. I couldn’t believe I hit the principal with that grape! I kept praying under my breath. My prayer went something like this: “Please God! Please don’t let him know.” A few minutes of tense endurance lapsed, and I was safe. The pounding of my heart eased. Recess ended. I eluded a capital repercussion.
Well, the next day, still cooped up inside because of all that slow melting snow, exiting the cafeteria with Dennis, I saw Anthony, who was now in eighth grade, who was still living with the Roccos, standing by the exit to the hallway, chubbier than I’d ever seen him. He had this sarcastic, scornful grin on his face. He stood beside one of my classmates, Alex, a big kid who was sometimes a trouble-maker, who now thought he was special because he was hanging out with an older, eighth-grade thug, Anthony. Well Alex said something to Anthony that I couldn’t hear. They both looked at me, and then they both laughed. I had this bad feeling. Stepping passed them, I looked at Anthony.
Alex said, “Hey scuzzy skin!”
I looked at him, astonished. He looked at me, giggling, while Anthony laughed obnoxiously. I said nothing.
Before I went to the classroom I stopped at the boys’ room to look in the mirror. As I’d expected, my winter eczema blazed red, chafing, ugly. Sometimes my cream worked; sometimes it didn’t. I was always revolted and sickened with my skin, especially my face; and the more repulsed I seemed to feel about my skin, the more it acted up. Stress affected my eczema and asthma.
I heard this twice more from Alex that afternoon. I didn’t know what to do. I was tempted to just punch Alex, but I really didn’t want to get into trouble. I didn’t want to disappoint Shironda, and I knew I was supposed to control myself. I wanted some help, but I’d never tell the teacher. I wanted to fight my own battles; but more than fight, I wanted this or them to just go away. It didn’t, and they didn’t, and I was afraid of getting upset.
The next day three other kids called me scuzzy skin, and I’d begun to sense the dregs of anger surging inside of me. As this anger churned, I felt my asthma also activating. I felt stifled, smothered, hearing a slight wheeze. As I made my way out of the cafeteria, moving into the hallway with the drove, there stood big Anthony and big Alex as usual, like they owned the place or something, commenting about girls, tripping kids as they walked by, just being plainly obnoxious. I cringed, because I really hated confrontation. I didn’t trust myself. I wanted to turn the other way, but there was no other permissive way. So I braced myself, and sure enough, just as I thought that perhaps I had eluded their notice, knowing full well that Alex was prodded by Anthony, who’d never said a word to me—good or bad—I heard Alex once again, “Hey, scuzzy skin, burn down any sheds lately?”
I immediately looked at Anthony, saying, “Wadya tell ’im for, Anthony, ya big fat pig?” I saw in his face that guilty look for having his disloyalty discovered. Then this look transformed, became erased by a suddenly defiant, gloomy mien.
I thought at first he might deny saying anything, but instead, abreast with his proud, second facial response, he said, “Cause I felt like it, Dillon!”
Now I was Dillon, I thought. Now that I was just some other kid at the intermediate school, I was Dillon. Back at the Roccos’ where we were once foster brothers, I was Silas. What a cheat! I thought, with wrath. “Ya big elephant!” I said, making myself no less perfidious than he, even feeling the poisonous venom of anger inside of me.
I saw his expression battle off injury, contesting against more stabs. His pout always exclaimed the same agony that I’d felt. I saw it flare into fury, into a countenance that declared war. He didn’t know what to say. He just shouted, “Yeah, ya twerp! Ya fire maniac!”
I followed the rest of the flock into the hall toward the classrooms.
“What’s he wanna fight ya or something?” Dennis said.
“I don’t know.”
“He looked like he wants ta fight ya!”
“Yeah, he’s mad—for sure.”
“He wants ta fight!”
“Prob’ly.”
“He’ll squish ya!”
“Yeah,” I said with fear, moving, not looking back. This fear was less about Anthony squishing me than it was of his shouldering his way into my sphere of classmates, instigating things.
I had this eagerness to get back to learning. I wanted to run away, and academics was all I had to run to for escape.
That night I went to bed with a lot of this on my mind. I couldn’t seem to focus on my school work since all of this opened up. My sleep was shallow, and I kept waking, worrying, feeling pent-up with anger. I dreamed a vivid dream that I couldn’t find a pencil with an erasure—a common daylight hours dilemma.) I searched drawers and floors for one of those school bus-yellow, number two pencils with an erasure. Finding none, I tried to erase some class work mistake with the one discovered pencil that still had a thin, pink bulge of erasure from the base; but it was too thin; and I couldn’t hold the pencil perpendicularly enough as the wheat-colored, metal sheath that clasped its rosy softness within and to the putrid pencil scratched and tore my paper, shredding. I tried to bite the clasping sheath to squeeze out the malleable pink, but it all disintegrated, disappeared the way things do in dreams.
Then, somehow in the indistinct, blurry, meshing lacework that often makes up dreams, these pencils became people. They became lives, visually, with compressed faces and f
rames confined into the slenderness of the pencils, with faces jammed in the wheat-colored, erasure-fastening tops; and legs blended down into the pencils’ points. I blearily saw people of my life, mostly kids from school—their faces in smiles and sneers, eyes evil—clustered together. I vaguely heard their utterances. I saw Anthony, Alex, intimidating with glares. In this delirious way these pencils became lives.
As I lay lapsing into alertness, I imagined the architect-God as the plentiful source of semi-diamond shaped, dawn-tinted erasures poised for all the dark flaws of humanity. I then awakened fully, recalling this.
That next day brought more of this ridicule. Alex and Anthony kept calling me scuzzy the dog killer. I guess I’d told Anthony years earlier about my slaying that dog on the way back from Staten Park after my bike had been stolen. I don’t know. My asthma got so bad during recess in the cafeteria, I had to go down to the nurse’s office for my inhaler. It helped some, and I sat there until recess ended, mostly because I wanted to avoid the constant harassment. I’d somehow become the brunt of jokes, the target of fatuous kids, and I was at my wit’s end. I finally went back to class.
For most of the afternoon in social studies we learned about President Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee Indian nation and other stuff around that time in American history. I felt so bad for those native people, chased off their land like that, dying on their way to Oklahoma and all. Then, for the last forty minutes of the day, Mrs. Slack, who taught us in the afternoons after Mr. McClarty in the mornings, allowed us to get started on our social studies homework early. Only a few kids ever really did concentrate on that at this time of the school day; most of us talked or goofed around or just waited until it was time to leave for the buses. Mrs. Slack was just tired of teaching. Well, this one afternoon, big Alex, who sat in front of Marissa, decided to start in again. He got freckle face Brandon and black Maxwell to start in with me again.
“Scuzzy!” Alex whispered out loud. “Scuzzy!” he said over and over, looking for my stir.
I looked down, pretending I concentrated on my Cherokee Indian questions.
“Hey scuzzy boy!” Maxwell said, deforming his voice, deepening it, making it more nasal to gain more of a giggle from the others.
They laughed.
“Scuzskin. Scuzskin. Scuzskin….” Brandon said rapidly, repeatedly looking over at Alex for his approval. I knew that Brandon, typically a decent kid who minded his own business, felt elevated as he felt a part of big Alex’s circle.
I glanced over toward where Alex sat, careful not to make eye contact with him. I could see he had his thick torso swiveled around to focus on me. I could see his bulging, fleshy protoplasm overlapping his belt. I couldn’t stand him. I looked at the clock. Twenty minutes remained. That would be eternity. Mrs. Slack stood in her closet, out of touch with what was going on anywhere in the classroom.
“Scuzzy face! Hey scuzzy face! Eczema man!” Alex persisted.
“His skin’s fallen off! He’s like a lizard. He’s sheddin his scuzzy skin,” Maxwell said, laughing.
The other two laughed.
“When he itches it starts snowin’!” Brandon added.
I looked at Marissa. She watched me. It was hard to tell, but I think she was waiting for my reaction. I didn’t want to look at her long, for fear of disgrace; so I looked back at my book, pretending to write. I just kept writing her name over and over, disguising it, covering it. I was so in love with her.
I felt my asthma averting my breathing, but imagined it may have just been in my mind because of the intensity. I felt pressure to save my dignity, but I didn’t know exactly how to do it. I felt so solely isolated, like a feeble herbivore fighting off a pack of wolves.
“Scuzzy face got dandruff! Hey dandruff face, ya better wipe the skin off ya book or else ya can’t read it!” Alex said.
Suddenly about five people burst out laughing.
I looked up, locking my eyes directly onto Marissa’s, seeing her laugh as she tried to smother her laughter with fingers over her lips so Mrs. Slack wouldn’t catch her and exhort her. This made me want to die. I suddenly felt so stupid, imagining that she might have feelings for me, with my skin. I’d been so glowingly infatuated with her, and now she was laughing at Alex’s taunting me. I was crushed. Nothing worse could have happened. Why was this happening? I wanted to scream, roar, bark, bite.
Mrs. Slack stopped whatever it was she was doing by her closet, and looked over toward us threateningly, to get us quiet. She said nothing. Everyone looked forward with heads down, muffling giggles. She turned her focus back into her closet, peeking out again seconds later.
What happened next is hard to account. I felt something, like an invisible primate with claws, descend on me. I imagined it was a demon that fastened onto me, injecting me with fury, or stirring my own fury. Dread asphyxiated me. This horrible tangibility seemed to sit upon me, on my shoulders, head, and back. I saw red. I saw beautiful Marissa Mellina, my dream, my escape, my puerile hope, as she continued to struggle at submerging her laughter behind sluggish, vexatious Alex. I felt this sure, definite tug in my conscience toward controlling myself, to be still, to leave it alone; but at the same tempo I felt that driving push of pride, self, and vengeance intoxicating me, envenoming me, urging me. My heart raced. The surrounding giggles lingered. One, two, three seconds expired.
I yielded: my chair slid back. My hands reached into the open slot of my desk, hauling out my bulky math book, squeezing. I could feel the enslaving inebriation of rage radiating in my chest, in my neck, in my face, like heedless heat. My eyes wouldn’t blink. I stood. No one seemed to notice; this all happened so fast, so strangely mechanically. My feet took my frame into the isle, four steps forward, behind Alex. Marissa and Brandon noticed, bewildered, saying nothing, wondering. Alex, unaware, faced forward. My eyes beheld the top of his head, pupils fixed on his hair where it parted in the center. Like a mechanical sanitation truck hoisting a dumpster, my red sleeved arms elevated the mammoth math book, up, high, over my head, its red cover facing the ceiling. The book swung down, slammed brutally down, was thrown so much faster than gravity could drop it. It thumped directly onto Alex’s head. He hollered. Screams, shouts!
My feet took me back to my desk. My legs bent and brought me to sitting. My hands shoved the book back into its slot. My eyes finally blinked as my face was momentarily covered with those same hands.
Alex’s heavy chest pressed against his desk, with his head—face down—upon it. He unwillingly rested. He cried, screamed, labored, unable to move as his large frame convulsed under an apparent seizure. Students gathered around him, touching his shoulder.
“Alex, are you all right?”
“Take it easy Alex.”
“I’ll get the nurse!” Brandon dashed out the door.
“He’s hurt bad! Oh, Alex is hurt bad!”
“Silas hit him with the book!”
“Mrs. Slack! Alex is hurt!”
“Alex was makin’ fun a Silas n’ Silas got mad and hit him with the book, Mrs. Slack!”
This demented, unforgettable commotion gripped the room; maniacal, unforgettable cries drained from Alex’s mouth.
I sat with my palms on my forehead, elbows on the desk, staring at the floor, at my sneakers, at the green-gray V of the chair between my parted thighs. I wanted to crawl away somewhere and curl into a fetal ball and cover myself. I couldn’t look up, at anyone, anything. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my core I could feel tears, cryptic sobs that wanted to burst; but couldn’t. They were down there, held down somehow by the hard hand of anger. I stared. I didn’t blink. A flashback reached me: that hour years earlier when I’d leaped up from the deep soft chair in the residence house, burying my face into Daddy Sparks’ shoulder, crying out loud after he’d told me they were moving to Cincinnati.
I sat there in that classroom’s commotion that afternoon, feeling neither remorse nor relief, just wishing I could cry like that time I did on Daddy’s shoulder, but I was powerless,
haunted, stone, temporarily insane.
SIXTEEN
TWELVE NIGHTS
Cary Island’s small hills sat idly and wet in April, rolling down gray rain, filling lowland pools and dirty brooks. Bars of sunset light broke in the heavens, shattering shiny, glistening fragments over all that had been gray. Three ducks flitted smoothly and swiftly above the kills that spread like veins in the neighborhoods. They darted through the dampened air in formation, quacking and quacking and quaking a calm silence.
The snow had melted, and like thawing beef the water soaked earth softened, swelled. Like a tired man, the earth, having slipped off that thickness of late winter, that quilt of early spring snow, sliding slowly, as though earth legs, waking, had kicked it to the foot of its bed. Twelve days of mostly gray had come and gone, some with driving rain chasing March’s wind into corners, or away. For twelve days and nights grass blots had enlarged through white, disclosing themselves like confessions, like green eyes peeking from frozen sleep through blurry windows of slush.
I walked alone, stopped. It became early night, with stillness and blackness at the edge of black woods beside water, a small pond somewhere in the preserve in the interior of this grand island. I could see swans like angels in white moving beneath the high heavens in the clean, clearing, lavender evening. Saintly, slowly upon a smooth and waveless surface, like ancient ships that once wore masts in white canvas, silent and distant on indolent water they drifted, sailing. Nothing excited; no one spoke in those moments of moving time, until, suddenly their wings widened, slamming upon the air, against water, under forward stretched necks. Their hurried feet ran across the surface of water in that soft twilight, suddenly swallowing silence in turbulence, then launching, lifting, softening their noise, lifting farther upward, rising in gigantic, white flight. As I watched, listening, it was as though all earth was fixed on that moment, with this flock, this sound, this motion, and was still.
Silas Dillon of Cary County Page 18