A Better Kind of Hate

by Beau Johnson

  I mean, less is more, right?

  He laughs at that. And then I laugh. But where my laughter ends, his continues, there as I leave him in the hall. Not until we see him wheeled out through the common area does Vera remove her teeth.

  “Your just reward,” she lisps.

  “My best gal,” I state.

  Back to TOC

  A Full, Upright and Locked Position

  I have been many things to many people. I could take the time and name each one but I think I’d like to try something a little different seeing how we’re all together as we are. By the sound of things back there in the galley, it seems some of you might already be aware as to what’s going on. That’s good. I think it’s needed.

  All told, it reminds me of my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Doring. Verbatim, he used those exact same words as he held my head in a way no adult ever should. You remember that, don’t you, Mr. Doring? I suppose it’s just Bill now, seeing where we’re at, but I’d still like to know if you ever thought of me through the years. Hell, there could’ve been more you took advantage of, but I don’t really care. Not anymore.

  What I do care about is the man sitting next to you. If he’s still there, his name’s Ben Mackleford and he was my best friend up until the summer before college. This is when he and my girlfriend decided they deserved each other more than I deserved them. It’s fine. It happened. And I hope that’s you out there banging on the door, Tonia. I sincerely do. If not, my second choice, without a doubt, would have to be Greg Malloy. Not many people know this about old Greg, but his mean streak—it pert near matches the color of what remains of his teeth. Our time together took place in ninth grade, where I was introduced to the benefits of toilet water and the ingesting of certain flavors which often accompanied said liquid.

  Quite a time we had, Greg. Yes, quite a time indeed.

  Nothing compares to the rituals of Monica Porter, however. You listening, Monica? Would you like to explain how our dynamic works or should I? Long story short is Monica likes to belittle her co-workers on a daily basis. Not overtly, but in the passive aggressive ways certain flight attendants tend to perfect.

  Am I doing a good enough job explaining myself, Monica? Have I enunciated enough?

  Maybe you could take a moment and ask Robbie Dunn how I’m doing. He’s there somewhere. I checked. Robbie’s the dude who always had my back at the job I had before this one. Stand up all the way. Until he decided it was time to stand on my back and throw a certain someone under the bus for a promotion which equated to pennies a glass. It’s how I ended up becoming a pilot, really, and now that we’re talking about it, how this business was set in motion in the first place.

  I wonder, when I speak these things, when you hear them aloud, is the recall each of you envisions as true as it should be or is there a type of denial which manifests? It’s a heavy question, sure, but I state it not in search of an answer but as a means to tell you this: all of you, even the ones I have failed to mention by name, you are who have made me who I am today. Know this. Embrace it. That being said, there are two others who have just as much skin in the game as you. I couldn’t get them to join us here today, not without jeopardizing what must transpire, so in the spirit of all things being equal we’ll be bringing the festivities to them.

  Full disclosure: this was always going to be a one-way trip, no matter how you received your ticket or the accommodations some of you might still believe are pending. I’ll admit I was a bit on the nose with the name as well. The You Deserve It Foundation? I mean, come on. But it happened, you’re here, and in time the P.O. boxes and answering machines will be linked back to me. Not all of you fell for it, of course, but when the majority of you did bite—this is what impressed me most. Your screaming and pleading though: music to my ears. Might be cliché, sure, but in a roundabout way it brings us back to who we’re about to “drop” in on.

  I found them in the pool house, my brother into a place my penis had never been, a place my wife assured me she would never, ever tolerate. What did I do when this occurred? I lost my mind. What else? But I continued to function as I have had to my entire life. Do you know why? Of course you do. Each of you preparing me in ways I would wish upon no one. It also meant I learned to adjust, to watch and wait and plan.

  Means our descent began with a target in mind; a pool which took ten years of my life to pay off. And hey, would you look at that. Someone’s home.

  Back to TOC

  Toad Baseball

  I was eleven when I accidently killed my younger brother.

  This is not the type of thing one hopes for while growing up, but there it is all the same, the power of it draining, drawn from me like a knife that eats at memory, the boy who was my twin.

  I would say it defined me as well. How could it not?

  Born John and Jason, we came into the world six minutes apart on the working side of West Virginia—two brothers, the McBlains, wailing at the world from the onset; two brothers awake and there to stay. This is what I tell myself whenever I think of the time we had together, there before it began—before I realized just how small we really, truly are.

  Both of our parents were hard working and both of them held jobs. Mom ironed all day for the upper class, the dividing line of our town being Brock, which ran all the way down to Carrington. Dad was factory, pressing pipe until the fumes ate what lungs the place had left him to live his days with. We never wanted is what I’m saying. That is not to say that we were rich, not in the monetary way. They loved us is all, and both of us loved them—until what happened happened, of course.

  It wasn’t like I could blame them either. Hell, I hated me! Wanted nothing more than the power to wring my own neck as punishment for what I’d done. It didn’t happen, of course, but boy had I wanted it. Years later, I continued to want it, but not as much as that first year; in time learning how to contain the self-hatred that seethed within me, allowing it to simmer and no more than for the waking hours of my day.

  Night was a different beast altogether, chock full of all the ingredients every nightmare needs. They lessened as the years wore on, but they never went away, not fully. Sometimes I am in these dreams and sometimes I’m on the outside looking in, as if in third person. Jason is always there, every time, and so is the blood I took from him. He never speaks to me, not with his mouth. He usually just stands there on the patio and stares as the blood from the wound (a wound which, in the dream, has always been more exaggerated than it was in real life) at the side of his head slowly slides toward the ground where it will clump and collect like red cottage cheese. His eyes are empty in this dream, big white Os that look right through me. Occasionally he will lift his arm and point on toward something I never see. They are odd, these dreams, and I would be a liar if I said they no longer affect me.

  So yes, I would say ending my brother’s life holds a part in defining me. Hell, you could even argue it created someone altogether new. And for the record, I did not mean to, not ever, but it still does not change the fact that my hands were the ones swinging the bat that day.

  Our backyard was small. Tiny, really, and almost identical to every other in the row of townhouses in which we lived. On either side of the sliding patio doors were window wells, each about three feet deep. They held stones, gravel, and the like at the bottom, forming a kind of bed. These window wells would sometimes hold toads as well, the creatures getting in there and nestling for warmth between what rocks they could negotiate. It is because of these toads that Jason and I were outside of our backyard that day—a place we both knew we should never go, not without some sort of protection. Be it Father, Mother, or tactical nuke.

  His name was Rodney Bowers. He was the block bully and, man, did he live up to his name. A terror, really, and large for his age, which seems to be the way it goes, no? With bullies I mean, that they always seem big for their age; perhaps that’s why they become bullies in the first place—too much mass and not enough brains to fill in the requisite space. To
go with his size Rodney had a shovel for a face, wide, with his chin ending in somewhat of a point. Small beady eyes overlooked a flat nose covered in freckles. He wore overalls too, if that helps set the scene.

  And we knew to steer clear; all of us knew that Rodney and his band of terrors ruled the roost and woe the child crossing him and his boys coming to or from school, or just around the block. His cohorts were smaller than him, but no less mean—sometimes meaner if given the chance. They were the Brady boys, Randy and Jeff, each brother not much more than a puddle in T-shirts and jeans. A year apart, they shared the same sense of god-awful humor—the type which seemed to laugh at a joke far too hard for far too long. They were nowhere near as funny as they thought they were either. But underneath that laughter laid meanness, as I have already mentioned. It was bone-deep in those two, double sharp and quick to cut. I have often believed that as Rodney became entwined with these two he was nothing more than accelerant to an already burning flame. Time would tell, and did. But that was after, near the end of their lives.

  It is before I would like to discuss. Rodney, Randy, and Jeff were such tyrants that lunch money would be given over without even being asked for; that kids would push over one another to get out the door once the bell rang just to sprint their entire way home. They wanted no piece of what Rodney brought, no taste of what his kingship decreed. And who could blame them? We were smaller, weaker, each of us struggling to survive not only the current day at hand but what we knew to be coming: high school. Where bullies like Rodney became a dime a dozen, each a leader to the pack they chose. It would only get worse for kids like Jason and me. The way the world worked and had worked since time out of mind. Welcome to wonderland, people! Hang on to your hats and leave your money at the door!

  He’d made a kid eat his own feces once—this being the story that stuck, the one which made the legend. After this the block became Rodney’s, and more or less the school. Adam Clarke, who became Shit-Breath after the fact, had been the unfortunate soul in the washroom that day. In the first floor lavatory this was, between the fourth graders and the fifth. You would think something like this couldn’t happen, not in elementary school, a civilized place of four hundred kids. Not too big a number nor too small. You would think a boy who had to move his bowels would be able to do so without fear of having to chew it up and re-swallow it down in front of a captive, laughing, guffawing audience of three. You would, wouldn’t you? Not where Jason and I grew up. Not even close.

  Poor kid had braces, too—the large kind, solar system and all.

  Which more or less brings me back to the toads and the day we found them; back to the day when my brother’s heart came shining through.

  He always liked animals, always, ever since we were small. Dogs, cats, birds, what have you. It didn’t matter. Be it insects or fish, spiders or frogs. He loved them all, always giving whatever creature catching his attention the best of what he was.

  “How do you think they got in there?” This is what Jason asked me once we discovered the toads in the window well that day. I had no concrete answer for him—the well appearing much too high for a toad to climb. I suggested they burrowed their way in from somewhere we couldn’t see. This seemed to appease him. It did not deter him from his objective of freeing them, however, which had become the goal the moment he noticed them.

  “What if they starve,” was his argument. I could not disagree with him. Nine toads later, all of them secured in Mother’s Tupperware, our quest began.

  I must stop here, but only for a moment. I wish to stress how much my brother loved animals. I know I have already mentioned this, but I don’t know if I have explained it as fully as I could have. We had a dog once, a puppy. It developed cancer. Jason slept with that dog for three months straight while it succumbed. My parents finally had to take it away from him as the disease brought the dog close to the end. Jason would have none of it. He kicked and screamed, he cried and raged. It was his dog, his, and he was the one meant to help it home. I didn’t understand what he was saying at the time, not then. But I came to years later, realizing just how mature my brother had been for his age. I think he thought he could heal, or that he was meant to be a protector of some kind. I’ll never know, not for sure, but it’s what I try to tell myself whenever the blackouts return.

  Toads in Tupperware, we ventured out from the backyard, toward Rodney and his pals, though we didn’t yet know it. We should have though, seeing as we had been living in fear of them for the better part of three years.

  “Well whadda-ya-know! It’s the freakin’ Bobbsey twins!” Rodney exclaimed, his bushy brows gathering into the usual position. The one that says it is time to play, fuck you or otherwise. Immediate laughter followed this—the braying kind, from both Randy and Jeff. What came next was Rodney noticing what Jason held within his hands.

  “What-choo got there, retard?” Rodney Bowers, ladies and gentlemen—the apex of our race.

  “Toads,” Jason said, no more. And to tell you the truth, I was surprised he had said anything at all. If there was one difference between my brother and me, I was the braver one. I do not say this to gloat. I say it simply as fact. I also do not say this to suggest I wasn’t scared of Rodney—quite the opposite, matter of fact. It’s that I have a line, and afraid or not, pushed hard enough, I will push on back. Fight or flight I believe it’s called. Still, I should have realized.

  “I can see that, numb-nuts. What? You don’t think I can see!?” And there it was—what all bullies live and breathe on. They make it about themselves, projecting whatever junk they have on the inside onto whatever is readily available. They are self-loathers, each and every one.

  “No, that’s not what I said.” Besides what his words represented, I think it was a combination of them and what Rodney’s eyes did—how they widened in disbelief—that caused my jaw to hit the ground. To be honest, it was amazing. My brother never showing me what he showed me that Saturday afternoon, never once in his too short life. Randy and Jeff stood exactly the same, their mouths replicas of mine, and perhaps time stood still there for a second or two, or perhaps it did not. Either way, the moment broke, replaced by an anger we knew all too well.

  “Alright, fuck-o, you want to play, we can play!” Randy and Jeff came forward at that, as if soldiers at attention, but soldiers with greasy hair and unbrushed teeth. They had ball gloves as well, hanging from their hips, and in Randy’s hand was the bag which contained their bats and balls. I then realized how we’d run into them; that the ball diamond was on the other side of the road past the end of our parking lot. They had been on their way to play a game, the two of us landing right in their way. As ever, I was a second too slow in registering what Rodney was about to do, but I saw it all in slow motion once it began; saw him ask Randy for a bat; saw Randy give him one as Jeff snatched the Tupperware container from out of Jason’s hands; watched Rodney state that it was time for he and his friends to play a little of what he liked to call toad-baseball; saw him take up a toad, a larger one, watched him loft it into the air; listened to him shout “Batters up!” as he began to swing, his body all torque, his body coming round. Connecting, time turned normal, or seemed to, and the guts of the toad struck my face, entered my mouth. I was dumbfounded, shocked, but it was nothing compared to seeing my brother go at Rodney the way that he did.

  It was a sight to behold. And I mean that, truly. Primal will be the word I use, because that’s what I feel I saw.

  He went to town on Rodney, first hitting him in the nuts and then right to his face as the bigger boy went down. The reason it worked is because it was the last thing Rodney expected. Remember, we were shorter than him by a foot, each of us fifty pounds lighter. Not to mention the fact that he’d had the neighborhood by the balls for the better part of three years. I imagine it was new to him. What he was feeling, I mean—because that’s what I saw in the widening of his eyes: fear; big and round, dilated and yellow.

  If only Randy and Jeff hadn’t been there that
day, then everything would have turned out differently. They were there however; each of them equal in becoming Rodney’s saving grace.

  They pulled Jason off their leader, scratching and clawing like girls. The grabbed and hit, they kicked and spat. Not until Rodney himself stood back up did it all turn to shit. Up, he went at my brother, sneering, hitting him hard in the gut not once, but twice. It was as he punched Jason in the face that I exploded; when I unleashed an amount of anger I have yet to feel again.

  We were not angry children, neither of us. I want you to know this. It was the situation is all, and more than likely the entire three years prior; the whole time we had been subjected to the evil that was Rodney Bowers coming to a head right there on the dried out grass not thirty feet from the backyard we never should have left.

  Bending down, I picked up the bat.

  Going forward, I increased my pace.

  Screaming, I swung.

  Whenever I look back on that moment many things go through my mind. Not only what happened, but how I see it happen; how it seems I now see it as I sometimes see myself in dreams, from that third person point of view. Years are the answer for this, I suppose; how time can be known to wear down a memory if it so chooses, fading it into a former version of itself. True or not, it is as clear as my picture comes when I think of that day.

  I am swinging full bore. Not for Rodney’s head, but for his shoulder. He is hurting my brother. I only want him to stop. I swing and I swing and again it all seems to slow down on me; the swing I have begun the only one I ever take. I continue to swing, to swing that same swing, and then slowly I begin to see Rodney move, to pull back and evade. Doing so, the bat misses him, but continues on the arc I have placed it on. I continue to swing, momentum imprisoning me. Too late, I realize I am powerless to stop what is about to occur.

  The doctors tell us it was a perfect strike, or as close to a combination of a perfect strike as one could come; that the way Jason had been bent down, his head just past Rodney’s hip—that the arc of the bat and the angle of his head…