by Frank Zafiro
Being called “Beanpole” by some, “Ichabod Crane” by the more literate and “Bone” by the rest might have been tolerable. Every kid is different somehow and every kid gets teased about that difference sooner or later. But names weren’t the end of it. They were barely the beginning.
“Remember me?” The voice comes again.
I cast my eyes around wildly, not caring where the voice is, only looking for escape. Panic rises in my chest, first seeming to stop my breath and heart, then accelerating both.
“Bet you never thought you’d see me again,” I hear him say.
I open my mouth to protest, but I have no voice. Only a wet croak escapes my throat.
The bullies were inventive. At least, they thought so. I suffered through every traditional scenario imaginable.
Books knocked from my arms.
Tripped in the cafeteria, food scattering all over the floor.
Shoved into lockers or stuffed into garbage cans.
A couple of swirlies, one of them in a toilet full of someone’s piss.
Rick Grantham was the ringleader. Sometimes he did the bullying himself and with relish. Other times, he stood back and watched with glee as his flunkies did the deed. He’d cross his arms over his fat belly and laugh.
“What a pussy you are, Bone,” he’d say as I bounced off of the lockers or watched my textbooks go skittering down the hallway.
The bubble of blood and spit extends from my lips, muffling my scream. When it pops softly, nothing more than a strangled gurgle comes out.
“I remember you,” the disconnected voice sneers.
I look up at his silhouette, haloed by the streetlight behind it.
By the time I hit high school, I’d spent two years listening to my principal’s advice to be passive. He assured me that Grantham and his gang would get bored and move along if I just didn’t fight back.
He was wrong.
It got worse.
I spent my days scurrying from one class to the next. Instead of studying, I planned the route and timing for getting to my next class without running into Grantham or his gang. Lunchtime was hell time. I looked for safe havens, where teachers were present. It didn’t help that the last thing most teachers wanted to do during lunch was be around us kids. Most of them got their hot lunch and hurried to the teacher’s lounge.
In the week before eighth grade ended, they stole my bicycle. I found it halfway through the summer in the woods behind the portable buildings. The tires were slashed and the rims destroyed. The handgrips were gone and the message Bone is a Fag was scratched into the red paint.
First week of high school, the challenges began.
“Let’s fight, pussy.”
“After school, Bone, you faggot.”
“Come on, chicken shit.”
Grantham outweighed me by seventy pounds. He started shaving in seventh grade. All his pals were the same way—big. Except maybe for Scott Dean and he was mean. I heard that he went to a Mötley Crüe concert one time with a knife stuck through the toe of his cowboy boot so he could kick the people in front of him and then run away.
“Come on, Bone, let’s fight,” they all said. “You skinny fucking pussy.”
He waves the shadow of a knife at me.
“Real tough guy,” he growls. “Come on, you pussy. Get up and fight.”
By my sophomore year, I started to fill out and suddenly I was bigger than most of Grantham’s gang. They grew a little wary, limiting most of their attacks to verbal ones. I didn’t respond to those. But when Grantham himself blind-sided me in the hallway and drove me into the locker, I’d had enough.
His laughter, somewhere between a cackle and a snigger, was all I heard as I stood up and faced him.
“Leave me alone,” I told him.
“Leave me alone!” he sang in a mocking falsetto. Then he lowered his voice to tell me, “You’re such a pussy, Bone. Such a total—”
Someone’s fist drove into his nose and blood erupted from the center of his face. His eyes crossed and watered up and his hands flew to the blood flowing from his nostrils. It took a couple of seconds before I realized it was my fist that had done the damage.
Grantham turned and scurried away, hands to his face. I looked down at my fist, still clenched and with a smear of blood across the knuckle.
That had felt good.
Real good.
I don’t dare let go of my belly. It is too wet, and too warm. I worry that if I let go with either hand, my guts will spill out onto the street.
Instead, I try to get my knees underneath me. I only succeed in sliding an inch or two on the asphalt.
Grantham and his flunkies left me alone after that. I took up with a couple of guys in my class, Curt and Jeff. None of us had more than one parent at home and though we were only fifteen and couldn’t drive, we enjoyed as much freedom from our parents as we could steal away that year.
Jeff had been picked on, same as me, but he had the double-whammy of being skinny and short. Curt was bigger than both of us, even me as I filled out, but he had a softness about him, too.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before we started picking on kids ourselves. It started casually, occasionally messing with a freshman in the hallway, but it soon escalated to become major sport.
Walking home from school one afternoon, we came up on two Junior High kids. One of them cast a worried glance back at us. The other one ignored us entirely. I recognized them both. The worried kid was Ray Dunbar and the one who ignored us was Tommy Fitz.
We walked along, two strides behind them, and started talking about finding somebody’s ass to kick and so forth. Ray kept glancing over his shoulder and the fear in his face just urged us on. Tommy Fitz just kept walking.
After about ten minutes or so, Jeff piped up, “Why don’t we just kick these kids’ asses right here?”
Before Curt or I could answer, Tommy Fitz let out a long, ripping fart. He accentuated the juicy noise by shaking his ass and stomping his feet as he walked. I had to give him credit for that. Not only did it take guts, but bodily control as well.
Jeff didn’t take it too well, especially since he was directly in the line of fire. He took two short steps, jumped up in the air and half-kicked, half-pushed Tommy Fitz right in the center of the back. That sent Tommy flying to the ground.
I reached out and grabbed Ray Dunbar by the back of the neck. I tried to turn him around so I could pop him one, but he cried out in fear and toppled to the ground. He covered the back of his head with his hands. I let go of his neck and gave him a shot in the ribs with my fist. He squealed and curled up into a ball.
“No, please, please,” he cried.
Meanwhile, Tommy Fitz came up from Jeff’s kick fighting mad. If Jeff were alone, I think Tommy would’ve tore him up. Even with Curt’s reluctant help, he was holding his own. He lashed out his fist and caught Jeff in the eye.
“You stay here,” I growled at Ray, giving him another punch in the ribs for emphasis. Then I went to help with Tommy.
It only took another minute or so before Curt and I had Tommy pinned down so that Jeff could take a few free shots at him. Jeff’s eye was red and it would swell a little and turn a nice shade of purple over the next few days. He was furious and hammered Tommy directly in the face.
“Don’t you ever—”
Punch.
“—fuck—”
Punch.
“—with me—”
Punch.
“—again!”
His final punch broke one of Tommy’s teeth.
I let go of Tommy and went back to Ray. He was still curled up in a ball. His crotch was wet and I could see a small puddle of urine under him. I grabbed him by the hair and pulled his face up to see mine.
“You pussy,” I told him. “Look at this face. You mess with me again and this is the last face you’ll ever see. You understand me?”
Ray nodded frantically, moaning deep in the back of this throat. Tears spilled out
of his eyes and rolled down his cheeks.
I pulled him to his feet. Tommy was already up, holding his mouth. I gave Ray a shove and they both headed on their way.
We went ours. Jeff was jacked up, already recounting events to us as if we hadn’t been there to see the whole thing. Curt was his usual reluctant self. I was remembering Grantham and feeling like shit.
Tommy never told a teacher, his parents or the cops about it, though. A year later, when he started his freshman year, I came across him at a football game and apologized. We never became friends, but I think he accepted my apology. Curt moved the summer after that school year and Jeff…well, Tommy found Jeff alone one day after school and he and Jeff worked things out, a tooth for a tooth.
Ray was a different story. Word got around that he’d pissed himself. After that, he became the school punching bag. Even casual bullies seemed to sense his fear as he skulked around the school, looking left and right with an expression bordering on constant panic. He was constantly getting books knocked out of his arms or body-slammed into the locker walls.
Every time I saw Ray, a small black lump settled into my stomach. I never joined in with the teasing or the other bullying antics, but the truth is, I never apologized to him, either. I knew an apology might lead to some sort of friendship or at least a tacit admission of some kind of debt I owed, and I wasn’t willing or able to take that on at the time.
“Get UP!” the voice bellows.
I can’t get up. I can’t speak.
“It all started with you!” he shouts. “Do you know how fucked up I was? For years!”
His voice is high-pitched, furious.
“Do you realize what you did to me?”
I search for his face in the dark, hoping the yellow tendrils of light pouring from the streetlight will reveal him to me.
Ray moved away at the end of our freshman year. By that time, he was like a shadow in that school. He flitted from classroom to classroom, head down, trying to avoid any contact. It never worked, though. Someone always found him, if only to send a barb his way.
I figured things out, eventually. By the end of tenth grade, I quit hanging out with Curt and Jeff. They’d graduated to shoplifting and smoking pot and I just decided to get off that train before it became a wreck. I didn’t know what I wanted to be yet, but I knew I wouldn’t get there by picking on kids, stealing stuff and smoking dope.
For a while, I wondered what happened to Ray. He hadn’t taken the physical beating that day that Tommy Fitz took, but in a very real way I think something worse happened to him. It was like I planted the seeds of fear in him that plenty of other people were happy to harvest, season after season. I used to wonder where he went after freshman year. Did he get a new start somewhere else, free of that fear and that role in the group? Or did it follow him from place to place like a curse?
Eventually, the entire event faded with time, though I suppose the emotional resonance of it never quite let go. During my junior and senior years, I concentrated on getting good grades. I even spent some time as a bully buster, trying to give some freshman kids what I would have sold my left arm for – a little protection.
In college, I figured out what I wanted to do and got my degree in child psychology. Within a year of graduating, with honors, I found some work with the Y counseling at-risk youth. I saw myself in most of those kids. Just riding along on the edge of a knife, not knowing which way life will cut. I got lucky. I made something out of my life. Something good. Something worth living for.
But you never know what part of your life might be the axis upon which your destiny turns.
“You’re just going to lie there?” he says. “You worthless piece of shit?”
I open my mouth, but only blood and spittle leak out.
“How many other people have you stomped on?” he asks. “Huh? Through all these years? How many?”
I blink.
“None,” I try to say, but all I can manage is a low grunt. My legs are cold.
He leans down and even through the years etched there, I recognize his features. With my vision slipping, I realized that his is the last face I’ll ever see.
“Bleed out, motherfucker,” he says. “What goes around, comes around.”
Wish
I wish I were Chinese.
I watched the young man through the rifle scope. My crosshairs bobbed from his chin to his forehead.
To be that small and compact. To move with that grace. Like Bruce Lee instead of a lanky, gangly nobody. That’d be much better.
The Chinese man stopped walking and sat down on the bench, draped his arms over the back and basked in the sun. Completely oblivious of his great fortune in being Asian. Unaware of me. I touched the trigger ever so slightly, but decided to wait. The heavy door at the clock tower base was locked. My boss had the only other key, but if I started shooting, I knew the cops would reach me quickly. The time wasn’t right.
I shifted the scope and scanned the pathway. Two pudgy secretaries in office clothing and tennis shoes hurry-walked past the Chinese man. I wasn’t fat like them, but I wished I had enough money for a gym membership. Some muscle on this frame would make a difference.
I pulled away and rubbed my eye. The backpack lay on the floor next to me. It was barely large enough to conceal the rifle when broken down. There wasn’t any room leftover for a lunch, which was where my boss thought I was. Eating lunch somewhere. Not at the top of the clock tower, looking down.
With a smile, I put my eye back to the scope. Both it and the rifle cost more than I made in a month, but it was worth it.
A ways further along the path, a trim brunette sat at another bench. She read a paperback intently and ignored all passersby. The swell of her breasts inside the small yellow blouse she wore created some wonderful cleavage. I focused on that image and wished for the thousandth time that I had a steady woman. I was tired of paying for it or settling for the ones that looked like the pudgy secretaries.
I adjusted the zoom and stared at her lovely chest and bare legs just below the hem of her short skirt. After a while, I don’t know how long, a rush of blue crossed my field of fire. I zoomed back.
A businessman walked by, ogling the brunette. She didn’t notice. He slowed, leered and moved on. I wished I had the money to look like that. I’d talk to that girl, book or no book. I date her and I’d fuck her and I wouldn’t have to pay her, either. What was he doing looking at her like that, anyway? I wish—
“Rodney?” squawked my walkie-talkie.
I muttered a curse and moved my hand from the gun stock to push the button. “Yeah, boss?”
“Where the hell are you?” Darryl asked.
I swept the scope far to the left and found the maintenance shed. Darryl stood by the open door, one hand on his hip. The other held his walkie-talkie.
“Lunch,” I answered.
“Lunch is over. Meet me at the maintenance shed. Whoever is running their dogs at night left a half dozen piles for you to clean up near the slides.”
I set the walkie-talkie on the ledge next to me and put the cross-hair between Darryl’s eyes. I wished I were the fucking boss. I wished he was the one that had to go scoop the dog shit.
“Rodney? You hear me?”
I tickled the trigger.
“Rodney, Goddamnit!”
I sighed and reached for the walkie-talkie. “On my way.”
“Now!”
Reluctantly, I unsnapped the scope and disassembled the rifle.
I wish I weren’t a coward.
Lead Time
He grunted in irritation and tossed the lottery scratch ticket to the floorboard. It fluttered down and landed next to nineteen others.
Goddamn tax on the stupid, and I keep paying it.
The coffee in his Styrofoam cup was cold, but he drank it anyway. Had to stay awake. Important work to do.
He stared down at the numbers on his paycheck stub in disbelief. Three thousand two hundred forty dollars and sixty-one cents.
For one week.
He’d cashed it, for sure. But there was no way.
Kathy, the payroll bitch, must have screwed up. If you moved the decimal point over one spot, you got three hundred twenty-four dollars.
That was more like it. Yeah, that was the shit pay he normally got.
It was a mistake. Had to be.
But it wasn’t his mistake, and there was no way he was going to suffer for it.
Because that is what would happen. Kathy was a snooty little piece who had turned her nose up at him when all he had asked was if she wanted to get some coffee or maybe see a movie sometime, but she wasn’t stupid. Monday would roll around and she would do her audit and she’d see that there was a huge mistake and then her mistake would suddenly become his problem.
Story of my life.
Fuck that. He was quitting. He’d head down to Texas and see if his cousin could get him a job on an oil rig or something. He just needed a little lead time. Some delay in discovering the mistake, so that he could get out of town and disappear.
He reached down and felt the wad of cash in his pocket. It was more money than he’d ever held before.
A pair of headlights appeared at the end of the block and he hunched down in his seat. The engine had the high-pitched whine of a Geo Metro and when the familiar red vehicle passed him and pulled in front of the small, two-bedroom home half a block away, he smiled.
Everyone would be so sad. They wouldn’t get to the books for days, maybe weeks.
“How do you like me now?” he hummed under his breath, as he watched her get out of her car. She wore a sweatshirt and shorts and looked like she’d just come from the gym. She locked the car and made her way up the walk.
He touched the wad of cash again, then hefted the small .22 caliber in his hand and slipped it into his jacket pocket.