by Jason Mott
“Can I sit down?” Tommy asked.
“Go for it, Slick,” the black boy said. He was looking at the menu and salivating, as if he hadn’t eaten in years. The others seemed to notice his hunger and find their own at the same time. They all turned their attention to the menus as Tommy pulled up his chair and sat down.
“So, when do you ship out?” Tommy asked. “I’m guessing you guys just graduated.”
“Two days,” one of the blond boys said proudly. “Two days and then it’s the beginning of the end, eh?” The others erupted with noises of agreement.
“What do you mean?” Tommy asked.
“What he means,” the other blond boy said, “is now that we’re getting into this war, shit’s about to stop. The war ain’t never seen the likes of us! The world ain’t never seen the likes of us. I promise you,” he continued, “six months from now there’s going to be world peace, long and everlasting.”
“You’re so full of shit, Hammond,” the black boy said, still staring at the menu as if he could smell the letters that described the food he would soon order.
“Yeah,” Rodriguez said. “I’ve got a bet going that you piss your pants as soon as your boots hit the sand, you pussy!”
More laughter all around. Tommy only smiled to let them know that he was in good spirits, just as they were. “So you’re not scared?” Tommy asked.
“Shit no,” someone at the table said, but it came so quickly that they all seemed to say it at once, as if they had all said it without any of them moving their lips.
“I think I’d be scared,” Tommy said.
“That’s because you’re a civilian,” one of the blond boys said. “We’re a different breed than you. We’re the people who make the world safe. We’re the people who make changes. We’re the life takers and heartbreakers!”
“Hoo-ahh!” shouted the table.
“I still can’t believe that would make you not afraid of going over there and getting killed, though.”
Rodriguez turned and looked at Tommy. For the first time, the unremittent bliss of the young recruit seemed to crack. “What the hell are you trying to say, man? Are you saying we’re not well trained?”
“Training keeps you alive,” the black boy shouted, but it was in a hard, rehearsed voice, as if it had been told to him a thousand times and he had no other way to think of the words than with total and complete faith. There was a religion to his devotion.
“And we’re all going to make it home,” one of the blond boys said. Then he looked around the table, eyeing each of his fellow soldiers. They all nodded in turn, confirming and affirming not only what he had said, but what he believed.
“But you can’t know that,” Tommy said.
“What the fuck!” the mixed-looking boy at the end of the table shouted. Suddenly the whole restaurant fell silent. Everyone turned and looked. “What the fuck are you trying to do, asshole! Are you one of those pacifist fuckers? You trying to talk us out of defending our country? Of doing the right thing? Of protecting people?”
“Something the matter here, boys?” came a voice from behind Tommy. It was the old man who had shown the boys his picture. He stood just behind Tommy’s right shoulder, looking down at him with a slight scowl on his face.
Tommy never got to see who hit him first. There was only the hard thud of the fist landing against his jaw.
He could have sworn there were twenty of them. Just a blur of hammering pain. There was a good blow to his head and a few to his stomach that made him curl up into a ball in the middle of the restaurant. Whether it was just the boys who were beating him or the old men or the entire world, he couldn’t quite say. All he knew for certain was that it was all crumbling down around him. He struck out a couple of times, like trying to punch a hurricane, and with almost as much effectiveness.
Back when he was wrestling he had learned that the only thing a person could do when there was more pain than logic was drift away from it. Curl up inside themselves and go far, far away from everything. It was almost like forgetting, like giving up everything that had happened to them, like turning away from the world and disappearing, finally and thankfully.
It was the sound of thunder that brought him back.
But the thunder turned out only to be Gannon’s voice. “Hit him again and I will open fire!”
The beating stopped. Tommy looked up through bloodied eyes and found Gannon standing in the doorway of the restaurant, holding his gun on what seemed like the whole room. The five boys were still huffing and panting from the exertion of beating Tommy. The two old men, thankfully, didn’t seem to have taken part in anything.
“Step away from the boy,” Gannon barked.
The five soldiers took their steps back.
“He started it,” shouted one of the blond boys, his fists trembling at his sides. But he still wasn’t able to take his eyes away from Gannon’s gun.
“You okay, Tommy?” Gannon asked.
Tommy spit, finally uncurling from the ball. His spit came out as blood. “I didn’t start it,” was all he said. He rose to his feet on weak legs.
“Outside!” Gannon barked.
Tommy did as he was told and started toward the door.
“All of you,” Gannon added. Tommy turned back and watched the confusion spread through the soldiers. All except the two handsome blonds had their hands in the air above their heads. Rodriguez looked as though he wanted to cry.
“Outside!” Gannon barked again.
In a long, slow train, Tommy led the five boys outside, followed by the two old men. Gannon carried his invalid father, still managing to keep the boys in the field of the gun barrel, and when they had reached the back of the diner he found a decrepit old chair to set his father in, as if the man could watch and enjoy the show.
Gannon ordered the boys lined up against the stone wall of the restaurant. They did as they were told. “You got a weapon on you?” Gannon asked them each. They all said no. Rodriguez had gone from almost crying to sobbing softly. The black boy hissed for him to stop.
After they were searched, Gannon barked for them all to turn around. Finally he holstered his gun. One of the blond boys started to speak but Gannon barked for him to shut up and the boy instantly fell silent.
“You okay?” Gannon asked Tommy in a whisper.
Tommy looked away as he spoke. He didn’t want to look Gannon in the eye. He was ashamed of something, but he didn’t know what it was or why.
“I’m fine,” Tommy said. His voice was soft.
“What happened?” Gannon asked.
“They started it.”
“We didn’t start shit,” the mixed boy yelled.
“Shut the fuck up!” came Gannon’s reply.
Silence from the soldiers.
“Let me see,” Gannon said.
Tommy lifted his chin. He could feel the blood trickle from his mouth. He spat on the ground and it came out red again. A car drove past the diner just as he spat and Tommy wondered what he must have looked like to the people in it. Gannon held up three fingers. “How many?” he asked.
“Five of those fuckers,” Tommy replied.
Gannon chuckled. He grinned for a moment. Then the grin faded. “Okay,” he said.
The soldiers looked at one another, each seeking the answer as to whether they should be afraid or confused.
“Now!” Gannon barked.
* * *
“Five of y’all and one of him,” Gannon said, pacing in front of the boys, his hand on his holstered gun as a reminder of his authority. “My granddaddy used to call that a dogfall.”
Tommy watched, now and then dabbing the back of his hand to his lip to staunch the bleeding.
“Take ’em off,” Gannon said. The five boys looked at one another. “The uniform coat and tie,” Gannon continued. “Take ’em off. They’r
e just going to get in the way of things.”
Reluctantly, the boys began taking off their jackets. The two old men—who had followed the action from the beginning—took the jackets and held them.
Rodriguez, who had finally stopped crying, suddenly began to sob again.
“So here’s what’s going to happen,” Gannon said. “Five of y’all chose to jump on my boy here. The only type of people that do that type of thing are those who know they can’t handle themselves one-on-one. Cowards. So we’re going to try this again. One-on-one. Tommy against all five of you.”
Tommy’s eyes went wide. As did the rest of the boys’. Except Rodriguez, who only closed his eyes and continued to sob.
“Now, look, mister,” the black boy began.
“This isn’t a debate,” Gannon said. “It’s just a fair fight. That’s all.”
“I don’t want to do this,” Tommy said.
“Yes you do,” Gannon replied in a low whisper.
Tommy knew he was right.
* * *
The taller blond boy was the first one to step forward. He had a hard voice and blood on his knuckles from when he had busted Tommy’s lip in the restaurant. Tommy thought for a moment that the boy might say something. Call him a name or something to get himself ready for the fight. But the boy never did. He only raised his fists and stepped forward, and after a moment, he and Tommy began circling each other.
Tommy couldn’t decide what to feel. Sure, there was fear, but only because there were five of them, each one waiting one after the other. He had wrestled long enough that he was confident he’d be okay, but still, five people was a lot to handle.
But then again, there wouldn’t be any break when the war finally came for him.
The blond boy started things off with a quick punch aimed at Tommy’s eye. A nice light jab. Tommy backed away. The boy threw another punch and Tommy backed away again. The other soldiers started cheering for their friend, seeing that he was taking the initiative and Tommy seemed hesitant.
“Kick his ass!” shouted the other blond boy.
“Fuck him up!” added the mixed boy.
Rodriguez had stopped crying. Maybe his friends gave him courage. Maybe that’s how things would be when Tommy eventually got in the army: he would do things for his friends, not because of the war, not because of ideology, but because of the person next to him, the person getting shot at, the person walking each day through landmine-filled terrain, the person who cried with him in the late hours of the night when the fear couldn’t be quieted and all anyone wanted was to go home to the life they remembered.
It was the blond boy’s jab finally finding a home in Tommy’s eye that brought him back to the moment.
* * *
Tommy beat the first blond boy, but it took a long time. And when it was over, Tommy’s left eye was almost swollen shut. His knuckles were bleeding and his left ear was ringing from a sweeping hook the boy had thrown that had made Tommy see stars for a few seconds. But in the end, the blond boy lay on the ground, huffing and gasping for air with his hands held over his face saying, again and again in a soft voice, “...you win...you win...”
Tommy won all four other fights.
But it was never the boys Tommy was fighting. Nor was it Gannon or the draft or the war or our dead parents Tommy threw himself against that day. It was the sister who had betrayed him. It was the sister who had spent a lifetime being jealous of the fact that he was easier to understand for most people and that was why the families always wanted to adopt him. It was the sister who had spent a lifetime reminding him that even if he was the one people liked, he could never be as smart as me. If the war didn’t get him first then his life would flow down one tributary of mundanity until it joined with all the other lives in this world that came and went without fanfare or exception, all those lives that were a type of grinding, day after day, grinding against the promise of TV and movies and magazines and books that all said that things should be full of magic and fantasy and that declared that, deep down inside, we were all entitled to stories worth telling. “Movie moments.”
The stranger that leads to love. The scenic countryside where all a person’s cares drift away because, after all, beauty and pain can never coexist in the movies and books that lull us to sleep some nights.
Tommy fought against a sister who had given him this demoralizing speech for years by reminding him just how smart she was and how she remembered everything and how, in the end, life would be better for her than it was for him.
Even though he never meant to, Tommy had believed all of it. And now, with those boys right there in front of him, he could see his own fate. He would go to the war just like them. No better. No worse. And when it was over the rest of his life—if he happened to get one—would be just like there. No better. No worse. He would always bear the sin of being normal. And I spent my lifetime making him hate himself for that.
So every time his fist landed into one of those boys, it was my face he saw on the other end of his knuckles.
* * *
When it was all over the five soldiers sat on the ground together in varying stages of defeat. And when Gannon came over and patted Tommy on the shoulder and told him it was time to leave, all of the boys stood—even Rodriguez, who had stopped crying and, when the time came, had turned out to be the toughest fighter of them all—and walked over to Tommy and, one by one, shook his hand.
“I’m sorry,” they said, each one in his own voice.
Tommy didn’t reply. He only shook hands until there were no more. He was only there in body. His mind was far, far away. Everything hurt and everything felt fine. It was like floating and falling all at the same time. For a long time he stood with his eyes closed, trying to resist the urge to slump to the ground and pass out.
“Come on,” he heard someone say as he lingered in the darkness.
* * *
When Tommy opened his eye he was in a bed in a small motel room. He could see only darkness through the nearby window. He heard the passing of trucks as their tires moaned over pavement of the world. There was no pain until the moment he tried to sit up. Then it ran through him like lightning. There wasn’t a single part of him that didn’t hurt. It was as if someone had hollowed him out and filled him up with rust and salt. The pain made him tremble.
So he closed his eyes and went back to sleep.
The next time he opened his eyes Gannon was squatting in front of him. “Here,” he said, holding a bottle of Gatorade and two pills. They looked like ibuprofen.
Finally Tommy sat up. The fiery pain was still there. But it was a little bit more manageable. He could smell the sugar in the Gatorade and so could his body. His body wanted it, no matter how bad he felt.
When he lifted his head from the pillow it stuck to his mouth from dried blood that had seeped from his lip as he slept. It hurt as it pulled away from the wound and left a dark splotch on the pillowcase.
“Cleaning lady’s going to think there’s been a murder,” Gannon said with a chuckle.
Tommy hurt too much to smile. But not too much to take the ibuprofen and chug down the Gatorade in one long, continuous gulp.
“I can imagine how it feels,” Gannon said.
“Hurts,” Tommy replied.
“That’s what I imagined.”
Gannon took a seat next to his stretched-out father on the other bed in the room. It was dark outside and there was the sound of traffic, but it was quiet. Tommy guessed it was very late at night.
“Hell of a show, wasn’t it, Pop?” Gannon asked his father. Then, to Tommy: “I brought you something.” He reached across the bed and retrieved a McDonald’s bag.
Tommy’s stomach immediately growled.
He couldn’t eat the food fast enough nor could he eat enough of it. The whole moment was a blur of moving hand and endorphins rushing throughout him.
And when it was over he was drowsy and drunk all of a sudden.
“Anything broken?” Gannon asked.
“Don’t think so,” Tommy said. He tried to ask his body if the answer was true, and when his body told him no he mostly believed it.
“You did good today,” Gannon said.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you make me do that?”
“Because you needed to,” Gannon replied. He grabbed the remote and switched on the television. Then said, “And because you wanted to.”
“I didn’t want to fight them,” Tommy said, defensive as a rattlesnake.
“It wasn’t about fighting them,” Gannon said.
“Then what was it about?”
“It was about knowing that you would be okay. That’s all any of us are ever doing: trying to be okay.”
Gannon flipped channels and didn’t bother looking over at Tommy as he spoke.
“This doesn’t make anything better,” Tommy said.
“I never said I was trying to,” Gannon replied.
“Just because you think you’re being nice to me doesn’t mean I’m just going to forget about everything that’s happened.”
“I know what you mean.” Gannon rubbed the back of his head where Tommy had hit him. “Didn’t I tell you that you had one hell of a punch, though?” Gannon smiled, still never taking his focus away from the television.
Knowing that it wouldn’t be seen, Tommy flashed a grin.
“He’s a hell of a fighter, huh, Pop?” It was a childish and goofy thing to say, but Gannon said it anyhow.
“Why do you keep talking to him like that?” Tommy asked. “He can’t hear you.”
“You don’t know that,” Gannon said.
“You don’t know that I’m wrong,” Tommy replied.
Gannon sighed, then thought for a moment. Finally he said to Tommy, “I guess it’s different for you on account of how your parents died when you were so young. But family...family’s all a person has. And with this Disease, people are learning that.”
“Is that why you take care of him like you do?”
“Maybe,” Gannon said. “But maybe I take care of him because I know the person he was when I was a boy. Yeah, he did some things wrong, but he did some things right too. And since I’ve been a parent to you and your sister I’ve done some things wrong and some things right too, so maybe now I know how the old man felt.” He swallowed. “They shouldn’t just be tossed out when they’re of no use anymore, Tommy. Whether this is the end of everything or not, that’s one thing this world got wrong.”