by Richard Cox
From a self-preservation point of view, it made sense for Todd to concede defeat and leave, or apologize and stay. Because if he fought this punk he would lose. Bobby was three inches taller and maybe thirty pounds heavier than him. He was likely a better fighter. But Todd also knew he would see Bobby again—either during the summer or afterward in school—and there was no way he could show his face in public if everyone knew he had backed down from this meathead. People would believe he was either a coward or that he was marginalized because of his head injury, and both of those things were patently false.
To Bobby he said, “Or maybe I’ll just stand here and see what you do about it.”
Surprise lit the kid’s eyes. Surprise and amusement. “What I do about it?”
“Yeah,” Todd said. “I don’t like being pushed around.”
Bobby chuckled. “You’ve got balls, buddy. I’ll give you that.”
“Yeah.”
“You can shove them up your ass.”
Bobby pushed him in the chest, and Todd stepped backward. He was helpless to stop himself. The pool was behind him but he didn’t go in.
“Fuck you, jock,” Todd shot back. He planted his hands on Bobby’s chest, but shoving him was like trying to shove an oak tree.
Bobby laughed. “You pussy.”
“Whatever, cocksucker.”
Now Bobby’s eyes widened, the lids opening like blinds. “That’s it,” he said, grabbing Todd by the chest, ready to toss him into the pool. “Bobby, come on!” Jonathan pleaded.
Todd was going in, of course. There was no stopping it. But as he was slung in the direction of the water, Todd grabbed Bobby’s arms, just enough to share momentum with him, so that together they crossed the threshold between dry land and pool. The two of them hit the water like a wild bull thrown overboard. Appendages flew through the air, wet, meaty smacks as fists collided with chests and arms and faces. And in the briefly infinite moment of it, Todd felt a certain kind of energy as he realized that it didn’t matter if he bled, if his nose got smashed, if he lost a tooth. He had already been hurt in a way no neighborhood bully could ever reasonably manage, and these injuries had nearly killed him. But he hadn’t died. He had lived. And now that he was here, back in the real world, what was a little pain in exchange for his self-respect, for standing here like a man and delivering blows to this brainless idiot? He realized any fear of fighting this fellow wasn’t borne from pain but the idea of pain, and any pain short of a life-threatening injury would go away. Nothing this kid could do would last forever, nothing except steal Todd’s self-respect.
He waded in closer, where Bobby made direct contact with his jaw, and the flaring pain almost made Todd reconsider. But then he landed a right cross of his own. Bobby stepped back. Todd could see in the kid’s eyes that he wasn’t used to getting hit.
Behind them Jonathan was yelling something, Todd couldn’t tell what, especially not after Bobby smacked him in the ear hard enough to make it ring. His hands went to his head, the world began to gray, and fear seized Todd as he imagined the white void coming for him again. If he went back there again he didn’t think he would escape a second time.
But he didn’t go back. He remained in the pool. And when Bobby leaned in to hit him again, Todd turned and threw all his weight into his right arm, connecting directly with Bobby’s nose. There was a cracking sound, like popping knuckles, and Bobby backed away. His hands cupped his nose as if he were afraid it would fall off. Blood dribbled between his fingers. It traced a crooked path down his wet arm and dropped into the pool, little red explosions in the pristine water.
“Holy shit,” Bobby said.
Jonathan waded up, splashing like a toddler. His voice was small, awestruck. “Are you all right? Bobby, are you okay?”
“Holy shit this hurts,” Bobby answered.
“Is it broken?”
“Maybe.” And then to Todd, “Thanks a lot, buddy.”
“Thanks for making me deaf. I think my ear fell off.”
Bobby sprayed blood into the pool. Red bubbles formed between his lips and popped. His eyes were narrow, as if he were scowling. Or smiling.
“Do you mind looking for it, Jonathan?” Todd said. “My ear? I don’t want it to get sucked into the filter.”
Now Bobby dropped his hands and laughed out loud. Todd joined him, in spite of his ringing ear. Jonathan looked bewildered, as if the two boys in his pool were not laughing but baying like hyenas. He shook his head and began to laugh himself.
13
Todd was trying to understand how these two guys had ever become friends.
“So you guys aren’t brothers, but you live together here?”
“I wouldn’t say I live here,” Bobby said.
“But that’s your football.”
“Yeah.”
“And those are your Atari cartridges?”
“Well, some of them are mine, I guess, but Jonathan’s mom paid for them—”
“His mom died,” Jonathan said. “My dad died. And my mom and his dad . . . after the tornado they . . . they sort of got together.”
The three of them were inside now, in a dark and messy game room, the blinds drawn. They were sitting at a round card table and a television stood a few feet away. Jonathan didn’t bother to store his Atari in any kind of organized way. It just sat on the floor, wires snaking into shadows behind the TV, and game cartridges were everywhere. So was the Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia, the oddly-shaped dice and adventure modules and hardcover reference manuals. Todd remembered the game vaguely, populated by fighters and wizards and monsters like bugbears. He never understood why anything would be called a bugbear.
“His mom got a big insurance settlement,” Bobby said. “She wanted to build a new house out here in Tanglewood, and my dad works in construction.”
“So they fell in love?”
“Pretty much,” Jonathan said.
The three of them had come in after the fight, and it was just like you saw on TV, just like you read about in books, where a kid stands up to the bully and becomes friends with him. Todd’s ear still hurt like hell, and Bobby’s nose was red and swollen, but they were sitting there talking as if none of it had happened. He had the strange feeling they weren’t actual boys at all but rather actors in an after-school television special.
“My dad was picked up by the tornado and dropped a few miles away near a highway,” Jonathan said. “His mom died in our back yard.”
“She ended up in a tree,” Bobby added. “She was stuck with . . . you know those big scissors. Pruning shears.”
Even though it had happened four years ago, Todd heard their voices wavering as Bobby and Jonathan recalled the tornado. He wished he could call upon memories of the storm to help describe his own experience. It seemed unfair that the tornado had extracted such a cost from him and yet he had no recollection of the freight train sound or the black sky or whole neighborhoods being flattened. But the story he did have was his and his alone.
“If you lived over by Weeks Park,” Jonathan said, “your house must’ve gotten hit. That’s not that far from where I used to live, and our place was blown away.”
“Our house was torn in half,” Todd admitted. “We rebuilt it, but later my mom decided we should sell it and move to Tanglewood. She said we needed a fresh start.”
“Four years after the tornado?” Bobby asked. “That doesn’t sound very fresh.”
“Wait a minute,” Jonathan said, and Todd saw recognition flicker in his eyes. “You’re that kid who woke up, aren’t you?”
Todd nodded. “The one and only.”
“Holy crap. You were like in a coma or something, right?”
“Sort of. It’s called being catatonic. In a coma you’re laid up in bed, and over time your body shrivels up. My brain was asleep but my body walked around and did stuff.”
“Like what?” Bobby asked. “Look through your mom’s underwear?”
Jonathan blew out an exasperated sigh.
“Wow,” Jonathan said. “Sleepwalking for years.”
“But what did you do?” Bobby asked. “I mean like every day, what did you do? Just sit there?”
“I ate three meals. My mom read to me. I watched TV even though I don’t remember it. And there were lots of exercises to keep my muscles from shriveling up.”
Bobby seemed skeptical. “You sure you don’t remember anything?”
“I dreamed a lot, but I don’t remember ever being awake. It’s hard to describe. I didn’t really know where I was . . . or who I was.”
“That’s far out,” Jonathan said. “It reminds me of this Stephen King book I just read called The Dead Zone. The dude in that was in a car accident and went into a coma for like five years or something. When he woke up he could see the future.”
“Can you see the future?” asked Bobby.
“Hell yes, I can. I guessed all your boxing moves and that’s how I smashed your nose.”
Bobby didn’t respond to this right away, and from the confused look on his face, it seemed the kid had taken the joke literally.
“I’m messing with you, man. I can’t see the future. If I could, I would pretend to get sick anytime my mom got the dumb idea to make tuna casserole.”
“Gross,” Jonathan said. “What’s in that?”
“Macaroni, mayonnaise, mushrooms.”
“Oh, gag.”
“Corn, tuna. Melted cheese!”
“It sounds like actual barf,” Jonathan added. “Like in a pan instead of the toilet.”
Seemingly out of the blue, Bobby said, “So can you see the future or not?”
“Dude, he was kidding. What’s wrong with you?”
“I just want to make sure is all. A lot of weird shit happened in that tornado. Sleepwalking for four years takes the cake.”
“I can’t see the future. At least not that I know of.”
“Well, let us know if that changes. We could make some money on the Super Bowl.”
Todd chuckled.
“Or you could tell this turkey what would happen if he finally got up the nerve to call up his wannabe girlfriend. Unless he already did.”
“You know I didn’t,” Jonathan admitted.
“He’s got a crush on this girl, Alicia. Who happens to know this, and who happens to like Jonathan, too. Believe it or not.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Everybody knows, dude. And every day you don’t ask her, the more you look like a wuss.”
“He’s right,” Todd said. “Not asking is more embarrassing than being turned down. It takes balls to ask. Girls like that.”
Bobby was about to say something else when a woman’s voice interrupted him.
“Jon-a-THAN!”
Her voice, heavy and ragged, bawled down the hallway.
“That your mom?” Todd asked.
“Yeah,” Jonathan said. He struggled out of his chair and slumped toward the door.
“JON-a-THAN! ”
“I’m coming, Mom.”
When Jonathan was gone, Bobby said, “His mom is a demon. I don’t know what the hell my dad sees in her.”
“Maybe he likes her because she’s feisty.”
“Feisty? You should hear her. All she does is bitch. At everything. Listen, I bet if we—”
But preface wasn’t necessary, because just then they heard the ragged voice again.
“What is this?”
Jonathan’s voice followed, low and indecipherable.
“New kid?” his mother said. “I don’t give a shit. I asked you what this was.”
The low voice again.
“I know it’s a shirt, you Dodo. You think I don’t know it’s a shirt?”
Todd said, “Is she like this all the time?”
“Every day, man. Every single day.”
“It’s inside out, Jon-a-THAN. How many times do I have to tell you not to put your clothes in the hamper inside out?”
Jonathan said something else.
“No, it does not, you Dodo! Stop acting like a stupid Dodo bird!”
“She calls him names?” Todd asked.
“Every day, man.”
14
At age fourteen, if David Clark had learned anything from his father’s values, it was that a man’s nature was measured by his character. Only character didn’t necessarily mean integrity, or moral fiber, but rather the hours of hard work a man had put in, the number of pleasures he had denied himself. Character was earned by these actions, measured in quantifiable units, and cumulative over time.
His dad said typical dad things, like Kids your age don’t even know what real work is and Money doesn’t grow on trees and It’s time you learned the value of a dollar. But what his old man didn’t seem to understand was that David already knew the value and importance of money. His lucrative cinnamon toothpick business could transform a two-dollar investment into twenty bucks in his pocket. He could buy a pack of bubble gum at Walgreen’s for a quarter and sell individual pieces at school for the same amount. The way to make money was to offer a product people couldn’t get anywhere else, and then charge them a little extra than what you paid for it. It wasn’t rocket science. But until someone else figured it out, David was a virtual monopoly when it came to selling snacks in school, and to him the income seemed limitless.
But as proud as he was of his business acumen, David knew these schemes would have enraged his father. They exemplified the worst of all sins: unwarranted income. Faggot musicians and athletes from the ghetto and trust fund babies were among the great criminals of the world. They flew around in private jets and married gorgeous models and skied in Aspen without having done an honest day’s work in their lives, and his father hated all of them.
So to demonstrate he was capable of hard labor, that he truly understood its value, David asked for a summer job at Lone Star Barbecue, his father’s restaurant. He was still too young to legally work, but volunteered to do any job his father wanted.
This was how David found himself in the pit room clutching a four-foot wooden pole with a tool on the end of it that looked like a giant ice scraper. The head cook, who called himself “The Turk” (but whose real name was apparently Tommy Guinn), was explaining how to clean the barbecue pits. The Turk was a little less than six feet tall, sported a basketball of a gut, and could have been twenty-five or forty-five. His stringy hair was dishwater gray and he was missing at least a third of his teeth.
“Okay, so before you can scrape the grease out of the pit, you gotta loosen it. The way you do that is set the pit on fire.”
“Set it on fire?”
“Right. Let me show you.”
The pit room was technically outdoors, a lean-to built against the restaurant’s western wall, a fenced-in area of thirty-by-thirty feet with a sloping roof made of corrugated steel. The barbecue pits themselves were iron cylinders, six feet in diameter and ten feet tall. There were three of them. They may have originally been sections of oil pipeline, The Turk wasn’t sure. Carved into each cylinder were three doors, arranged vertically. Through the top two you could reach the circular grates, the shelves on which the briskets cooked. You loaded firewood through the bottom door. Briskets expressed thick grease as they cooked, grease that dripped onto the fire and also coated the inside of the pit. This grease was a potent source of fuel, and if you didn’t scrape it out once a week, flare-ups would catch the grates on fire. Briskets could burn. Money could be lost.
“So what you do is, is you set a controlled fire. Like this.”
All three doors of the pit were open. The Turk stoked the fire and they watched together as long tongues of flame began to climb up the cylinder’s i
nside wall. As the flames lengthened, as they grew taller, they formed a sort of spiral shape. David noted with wonder that it looked like a fire tornado. The Turk closed the bottom door.
“It’s going pretty well now, the fire, so we can also close this middle door, too, and just leave the top one open. If you left ‘em all open, in a few minutes you’d have fire shooting out of all three.”
David looked and saw flames, deeply orange, flickering in shadows near the top of the pit. The whole interior was on fire, and it was unnerving how much it looked like a tornado in there. David himself had not seen the tornado, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t sense how it had changed Wichita Falls forever. How it had changed something in him.
“Okay, so now you take your straight hoe there, and you use it to hold the door halfway open.”
“What do you mean?”
“You want to get it nice and hot in there, so you have to let it burn for a while. If you shut all the doors the fire would suffocate.”
David held the top door partly open as The Turk had instructed. He didn’t want anyone to suffocate on his account.
“You can feel it,” he said. “The fire. Pushing on the door.”
“Yeah. Almost like it has hands. Like someone is in there, trying to get out.”
For an instant David imagined there was someone inside trying to get out. Like an innocent kid left for dead, buried alive, suffocating. The sensation was so strong that he was forced to stop himself from reopening all the doors to let the poor kid out, even though cognitively he knew there could be no one inside the pit.
“Okay, you can go ahead and push the door shut with your . . . yeah, like that. So now we wait a few minutes for the fire to go out, and then you get in and scrub the walls with your straight hoe there. You clean the grates with this wire brush.”
“You want me to get in?”
“Well, not completely. But you climb up on this scaffold and lean in and scrape away all the grease you can. Then you shovel it out of the bottom and dump it into those barrels over there. When you think you’re done, come inside and let me know. I’ll decide if it’s good enough.”