by W. D. Wilson
He greeted me with a nod and rubbed his palms together. He smelled like campfires and wood lacquer. It was late May, so his old man would have taken to hotdogs over the firepit and Mitch probably wore the same T-shirt into the smoke the night before. We started our trek home, along the side of the school where Mitch dragged his hand against its stucco.
—I got out early, he said.
—How?
—Mr. Simmons went to the office for something and never came back.
He smiled because he really hated Simmons. I never understood Mitch’s hatred, the things he selected.
—I heard his son went blind, I said.
—He just lost an eye.
We passed the tetherball pole and Mitch gave it a running punch. Big signs posted nearby said: Do not punch the tether-balls. This was one of the few rebellions Mitch ever dared. The ball swung around and Mitch cocked his arm back for a second hit, but he lacked the coordination. His knuckles grazed the side and the arc bent up like a coat hanger. —Everyone else is still waiting, he said. —I hate sitting.
—My dad would give me hell, I told him.
His eyebrows tilted like he was mad but they weren’t thick enough to be convincing. He came from a religious family, old-fashioned Bible folk, but not the kind that hang pictures of the crucifixion over their toilets. Mitch’s old man was a world-famous naturalist named Larry Cooper, which sounds more like a plumber than a bird scholar but there you go. Larry liked looking at photos, talking about birds, and making jokes about boyhood that parents found hilarious. He’d wear big glasses and a coonskin hat, clothes all greys and greens. But he didn’t tower like other dads I knew, didn’t make you stop and think, Hey, I’m going to listen to you. My old man, all two hundred and twenty pounds of him, cold stare and dark glasses, towered. Larry sort of dawdled. He had a retired-cowboy look, would curl one thumb under his belt and give his pants a slow hike. My old man could tell stories about choking out drunks or eating a five-second taser blast or smashing a crook’s teeth on the cell bars, and Larry would talk about the time he watched a grizzly bear toboggan down a snowy hill on its ass.
We crossed the playground. Every couple steps Mitch turned to see if anyone was coming. We headed to the gully, a forested area separating the subdivision where we lived from the grade school. A ringwire fence rimmed the playground, and Mitch ran and tried to vault it but didn’t quite make the height, and as he descended he took a nasty gash down his back.
He balled up his T-shirt for me to see. —How bad is it? he said.
The scratch spanned from his kidney to his shoulder blades. It was deepest and reddest at the hip. —It’s welting, I said.
—Is it gonna get blood on my shirt?
—Maybe.
—Is it?
The scratch looked like someone had drawn a red line across his back with a felt pen. —I don’t know, I said.
—If you see it getting stained let me know, alright?
—It’s just a T-shirt, I said.
—Yeah, but let me know.
Then a green Ford Ranger screamed by us with teenagers piled in the bed. One of them pointed at Mitch and even though I couldn’t hear him over the muffler I knew exactly what he’d said – fag, or jew, which made no sense but which the hicks used to describe things they hated. The truck braked and U-turned and cars honked at it to no avail.
—Let’s go, I said.
The truck eased up beside us and kept our pace as we walked along the street. Rat-faced hicks in the cab snickered and smoked and one of them raised his arm to throw something. The guy in the passenger’s side was a kid named Jordan who wore a blue hockey jersey and a ballcap on backward. He could recite any of the speeches from his favourite WWF wrestlers, had a half-finished cigarette tucked behind his ear and a loose grin on his face, as though his cheeks had come unyoked from the jaw.
—Hey, piglet, Jordan said.
My old man had told me to ignore people like him because they’d always be there, because there were guys who truly hated cops and would tell their kids to pick on me, and because if I didn’t ignore them then I’d have to live every day by the bone in my knuckles. I’d have kept going without even looking at them, but Mitch – Mitch stopped dead in his tracks. The hicks in the truck hooted; this is what they wanted. I gave Mitch a sharp order to keep going, but he didn’t. One of the truck’s doors clicked open.
—Leave us alone, Mitch said.
Jordan looked at his buddies in the cab and smiled as if Mitch had made a joke. —Why? he said, and moved his jaw in a chewing motion.
Mitch had nothing to say to that. He eyed me and I motioned with my head that we should go. A car behind the truck laid on its horn and Jordan gave them the finger, turned away for just a moment, and Mitch and I burst into a sprint.
We cut along the road against traffic. Mitch was a good runner but I wasn’t. The hicks had pulled over and guys spilled out the doors. They ran at us with wobbly legs. I thought the only hope we had was the gully and Mitch must have thought the same. Jordan and his friends hadn’t even covered half the distance when we veered through the ditch and down a path we’d taken home for the last four years.
Behind us, Jordan yelled threats. He’d find us. The gully wasn’t that big.
But, well, it was – the gully served as a gateway into the vast, undeveloped wilderness of the Kootenay Valley. Mysteries happened there: hunters claimed to watch animals withstand deer-slugs through the jugular; some teenagers erected a fort where the forest relinquished to beach, and a month later that fort was gone and three girls with it; fires glowed in the distance, always out of sight, and people whispered about the feral things that can never be tamed. Hooligans built rope swings and smashed beer bottles on pine trees but nobody ever found the glass. Boys were broken, body and spirit – claimed by the gully – and people would remember them and cluck their tongues and think, They could’ve gone far.
In the gully truckloads of teenagers didn’t threaten to beat us with their bike helmets. In the gully Mitch knew the quickest way anywhere. He pretended to be a great hunter, would kneel before a footprint and run his index along the shape, push his tongue into the corner of his mouth. He’d pick a name he hated, like Ford Helmer, and when I asked him how he knew he’d note the depth of the impression. —Helmer’s a big guy, he’d say. —He has heavy feet.
Wherever we went in that gully, Mitch led. We never took the easy way. We’d sneak about on the dirty hillsides and search for others like ourselves and, if the coast was clear, Mitch would skid down to the path on the heels of his sneakers. There, he reached for low-hanging branches and coiled them down to hook onto roots – if a kid came by, those branches would whip them in the teeth. At least that was the plan. But each day the branches were unhitched and swaying like power lines, and I dare you to tell Mitch the wind had blown them free. It was other kids. Getting hit in the teeth.
The gully was just practice for him, small change. As an adult, he’d ward off a cougar with one-liners from Dirty Harry and a pair of sticks held akimbo. He once lost three thousand dollars of camera equipment down a chasm on Jumbo Glacier; he fought a bear, at a cabin in Dunbar – scurried onto the roof and when the beast clambered after him he bludgeoned it with the chimney bucket.
But he was one hell of a woodsman even that day in grade seven. We moved with extra caution because we figured Jordan and his friends would be back. You never really defeat the hicks. Not in that town. Not at that age. They had nothing better to do. They were unavoidable, like chicken pox, and they never lost a fight because even if you knocked one down they’d just lie to their friends.
Mitch crouched low amid the foliage. His T-shirt was muddied and dirty and I didn’t tell him this but the blood from his back had soaked through. He picked at a nearby bush and snapped its branches as he sat.
—Think we lost them? he said.
—It’s quiet.
He bit the corner of his lip. There were more than a dozen places where we could have
climbed out of the gully, could have got off scratch free.
—Think they’ll be watching the entire road? he said.
—They have better things to do.
Mitch didn’t answer. He picked at that bush and snapped the twigs and tossed them one by one onto the ground, squinted his eyes. I sat and waited for him to finish thinking. I could see schemes whirring in his mind, the way his forehead pulled in, the way he played with a twirl of his brown hair. He didn’t get to rebel much.
—I bet they’re watching the road, he said.
—Maybe.
—Are you scared?
—No.
—Let’s go check the rope swing, he said.
—Why?
—In case they’re there. So we know not to go that way.
—They’ll beat us up.
—I’ll take a stick, he said, and wandered a small distance on his knees and hefted a stick from the ground. It was long and a little green and not brittle. A good stick.
—Are you scared? he said.
—No.
Mitch could have cut circles around those guys, even if they were at the rope swing. He could have picked any number of ways to get home. Even back then I knew this, but I had an idea why Mitch was dragging out this chase. Once, when we were in grade three, Mitch hucked a clump of yellow clay at a group of kids several grades above us. They gave chase immediately but we evaded them by hiding in a hole beneath the natural gas tank in his backyard. He grinned the whole time we spent under that tank, pressed against the warm dirt, the tinny metal above us smelling like a boiler room.
We picked our way through the gully because the hicks might have been on the paths. Mitch lifted branches out of his way and eased them back so they wouldn’t smack me in the face. Every time a twig broke beneath him, every time a branch held its sway too long, I expected Jordan or one of his friends to burst from the trees and drag us away by our hair.
The rope swing hung in the gully pretty much halfway between Mitch’s house and the school. It dangled from a tree and was visible from the road, but only if you knew where to stand and where to look. Over the years, kids’ hands had frayed the thing from cinch to tip. It had knots along its length like fists. Mitch could climb the entire thing and then shimmy down the tree trunk, but, back then, I didn’t have the strength to get more than a quarter of the way up.
As we neared the rope swing I heard the sound of a bottle breaking and froze. Mitch went motionless mid-step and cocked his head. It would take me years to realize just how good Mitch was at that moment; where I had heard the sound of breaking glass, he heard something else. Footsteps, maybe. Wood snapping. A heavy, unnatural breath out of sight. He looked back at me and he seemed to have aged. His fingers furled and unfurled around the stick. His lips moved like he was counting.
Then he took off.
One of the hicks bolted from the trees nearby. He chased after Mitch and gave a yell. Voices joined him, feral sounds like dogs that divide the world into things they can kill and things they can’t. I stayed hidden, chest flat against the earth and the smell of dirt and bugs so close I could taste them. It seemed like it took forever for them to catch Mitch.
When I heard them laugh, a ways off, I dared move enough to peer at the rope swing. They had Mitch inside a circle. He held his stick like a quarterstaff, in front of him. Jordan was inside the circle too. Mitch would be able to smell him, the cigarettes and booze and the muskiness a kid gets when he hasn’t showered in days – a scent as though he’d been sitting in front of a fire and someone had pissed in it.
The hicks passed around a beer and someone lit a cigarette. Jordan peered over his shoulder at them with a grin on his face like an ape. He faced Mitch again and offered the beer in his hand. Mitch leaned away from it and his nose curled up.
—Want to get drunk? Jordan said. He had his hand around the bottleneck, the mouth capped with his thumb, wagging the beer in Mitch’s face. He told Mitch religion was stupid and God hated him and that he had stupid pants. He poured a bit of beer on Mitch’s head.
—Have a sip.
—No.
—Drink it or I’ll take you on a trip down smack-down lane.
His friends chuckled. Mitch turned away and prodded the ground with his stick. I knew Mitch for a long time back then, and I never saw anything on his face like that day in grade seven. He was going to do something stupid but I didn’t yell a word of warning, and I still don’t know if I should have. Jordan stretched his arm out to pour more beer and Mitch spun around and rammed him in the nuts with the stick. It was lightning-fast. It was a direct hit. Jordan dropped the beer, wheezed a long breath onto the forest floor, and without him having to say anything, the circle closed and I lost sight of Mitch in the throng.
WHEN IT WAS OVER, when they left Mitch on the ground with his hands over his face, when Jordan limped back to his truck with his buddies, I came out from the trees. I went to Mitch and sat down beside him. He sniffled loud and swallowed. I helped him sit up and he leaned against the rope swing’s tree. His eye was swelling and his lip was split and he favoured his left side. I brushed dirt off his shoulder, tugged moss from his hair.
—I got him good, Mitch said.
—Yeah.
—Good thing I took that stick.
He dabbed his mouth with the back of his hand. When he saw it was red he curled his lip in and sucked on it. I’d never seen someone actually beat up. My old man once came home bleeding, but it was just his nose. I saw a kid wipe out on a bike and scrape his face along the asphalt. I’d seen it in movies. It’s not the same. They never wince like Mitch did. You don’t smell the sweat on them, the sourness and the rustiness of their breath. People are not stoic; they do not suffer prettily.
—You could have taken him one on one, I said.
—He’s a bit too big, Will.
—Maybe.
Mitch cringed as he stood up. I saw his stick in the distance and brought it over.
—Let’s go home, I said.
Mitch held his stick in front of him. He turned it over in his hands and ran his finger across it in a wood-cutting motion. Then he slapped the stick against his palm and shook his head. He told me his plan and I was too stupid to object. First, he’d need a handsaw, which he could get from home, but before going home, he wanted to clean himself up, in case his folks caught him.
We trekked to the beach where he could wash himself in the lake. He kicked off his shoes and socks, rolled his jeans to his knees, and waded into the water. The sun was setting over the Purcell Mountains, out across the lake. Mitch went deep enough for the water to touch the bottom of his kneecap, and then he scooped it against his face and scrubbed away the caked blood and tears.
When he took a sip, I said: —You shouldn’t drink it.
—Why?
—Swimmer’s itch.
He rubbed his moist fingers against the tender parts of his face. —But I’m thirsty.
—I can go get you some water.
—I’m alright.
—The swelling is going down, I told him.
—It still hurts.
—We can stop by my place if you want.
—No, he said.
He dipped his hand in the lake again, laid his cooled knuckles against his cheek and the bones around his eye that were going blue and purple and shades of yellow-brown. He smacked his lips and they looked cracked and dry as hide. I wish I hadn’t told him not to drink the water.
We went to his house. He crept into his garage and swiped a handsaw from his dad’s toolbox, as well as two Cokes and a length of twine. I didn’t open my Coke in case Mitch wanted it later. He pressed the cold aluminum against his lip for a second, then cracked it. He drank in long, heavy slurps.
It was starting to get dusky by the time we made it back to the rope swing. Mitch handed me his Coke, and then he put the sides of his shoes against the trunk and hugged the tree. He scaled it in inches. Each time he moved it was up, and he looked down only once. I nodde
d. I had an inkling of what could happen, even then. Mitch hoisted himself onto the branch and pulled the saw around where he could use it.
In less than a day one of Jordan’s friends would hop onto the rope and rip the whole thing, branch and all, down atop himself. He’d bang his skull and die on the operating table and the papers would print a photo of the boy cradled in two uniformed arms. I’d see the picture and miss three days of school, and Mitch would walk around like a beaten kid for months. One day after a sleepover my old man would catch my arm and ask, softly, if I knew everything was alright with him, at home.
That branch took Mitch a long time. He didn’t have a great position and he got sore fast. It darkened but he was not swayed, just sat on that branch and shifted when he had to. I threw him the other Coke underhand and he plucked it straight from the air. He sawed and sawed and sawed until that branch was cut within half an inch.
After he finished, we walked around the gully for a while. He had a new, gnarled stick in his right hand and the handsaw slung over his shoulder. A woodland creature had hollowed a bowl in the middle of a stump and filled it with debris and I wondered how deep that hole went. The air smelled like paving salt and pine needles and the cadaverous swell of the lake. Saplings as high as my shin jutted from the moist dirt. We didn’t say much. Someone’s bass thumped in the distance. We were, I hope, too young to understand what could happen.
We walked home. The last light seeped behind the Purcells and the stars appeared. Mitch tried to talk about how awesome the chase was. He pointed at the stars because his class just finished studying the solar system. He said he couldn’t quite make them out because of his swollen eye, and then he touched the puffiness on his face, winced. It was all very superficial.
—You alright? I said.
—Yeah.
—Wanna stop at my place first to get cleaned up?
—Your dad will be mad.
—No, I said. —He won’t.
Mitch shrugged. He tossed the stick aside. —It’s probably too late.