by Jess Walter
The bus rumbled down Empire toward the last stop on our strip before it turned out of our neighborhood and came up for air on Trent—the busy industrial street that cut us off from the rest of the world. The whole world felt different. I remember staring at Boyle, wondering if he had heard the exchange, if he’d realized what had just happened, my sudden ascension out of his world. But he just sat with his thick glasses against the window, his index finger working his nose like a puppeteer on speed, Eli alone in the nightmarish world of his freakishness, his apartness, and, I suppose it’s safe to say now, his seething ambitions. I see him in my mind now and I realize that all of these forces of his personality were concentrated then on the humble goal of sheer survival, the cold, flat wish that he be left alone, and he was being forged in a way by the challenge of his youth. What did he see out that window while he sat there, catatonic and seemingly impervious to the beatings and taunts and stares? I think now, looking back, that his fear may have amounted to less than I ever imagined, that he had actually figured out a way to shut down, to distance himself from his broken self.
Or maybe that’s just what I want to believe, an idea that I cling to for my own peace of mind—that Eli had figured out a way to leave the awful physical world behind, to block out the bullies and assholes, to ignore the scorn, to somehow be on our bus and soar above it too, riding on the thinnest of daydreams.
4 | I SHOT SOMEONE
I shot someone in the face with a rubber band that I had stretched along the length of a ruler. I don’t recall the victim or my motive (I acknowledge the irony, of course, this casual parallel to the trouble before us today), but my fifth-grade crime doesn’t matter except to explain why I was alone in the school office on a late-fall day in 1975, sitting with my head in my hands, waiting for the principal to come back.
I sat in a chair across from the desk of our distracted principal, Joseph Bender, and I practiced looks of contrition and sorrow and prayed that I not slip and call him Joe Boner, the name by which we all knew him. I recall his office as a massive tomb, windowless and cold and the place I waited for my hack—a quick swat or two on the ass with a thick wooden paddle, the gold standard of school punishment circa 1975. Joe Boner was a tame hacker because he kept his emotions under control. There were other teachers—being an attorney with a working knowledge of libel, I won’t name them—who could take out years of their own frustration by blistering the asses of children like me. I only saw Joe Boner go overboard once, when Dennis Gilstrap asked the lunch lady if he could kiss her “boobies” and Mr. Bender promptly pulled Dennis out of line, bent him over, and swatted him so furiously that his gum flew across the room and—I know this part of the story must sound apocryphal, but I saw it myself—stuck to the wall of the cafeteria, where it stayed for two weeks as a kind of monument to adult boundaries.
As I sat in the principal’s office that day, I was understandably nervous, even though I didn’t really fear a hack like the one that had de-gummed Dennis Gilstrap. More likely I would get a reasoned swat and be sent back to my classroom to study our poetic spelling list, which I repeated in my mind—distance, influence, affluence, confluence—as a way to keep from dwelling on the swat I was about to receive.
That’s when I heard, outside Joe Boner’s office, the principal talking to a woman, trying to calm her down. “No, I’m very sorry. It is unfortunate.” I leaned toward the door, as if a few inches might help me hear better. “No, Mrs. Boyle,” the principal said, “I assure you, it won’t happen again.”
When he opened the door I looked back and saw Eli Boyle’s mother, wearing a kind of peasant’s dress and a scarf over her head, an almost pretty woman in her early forties who looked that day, and every other day that I saw her, like a person who has lost something very important.
“Eli is a very special boy, Mr. Bender,” she said. “He’s sensitive.”
“Yes,” the principal was saying, “I know he is and I’m sorry he’s had to go through this. We are taking care of it, Mrs. Boyle.” And that’s when Joe Boner saw me sitting at his desk. “Oh, Mr. Mason. That’s right. Why don’t you go back to your class? And no more rubber bands, okay?”
He tousled my hair and I sat there a moment longer than I needed to, amazed to be escaping my punishment. Once again, Eli had indirectly saved me. I nodded to Mrs. Boyle, hopped out of the chair, and hurried for the door, turning at the last to see Eli’s mom settle into the chair, and to see Mr. Bender close the door behind me.
I suppose that meeting was the reason that, the very next morning, Joe Boner escorted Eli Boyle into my classroom. Eli had started the school year in the other fifth-grade class, taught by Mr. Gibbons, a cross-eyed alcoholic who had been at the high school until two years earlier, when he was asked to leave after some vague complaint by the parents of a girl who had been getting “extra credit” for “correcting papers” as Mr. Gibbons’s “after-school aide.” Now Eli was standing in the class of my teacher, the eternally cute Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley, who had been teaching at our elementary school for fifteen years and at least three divorces and who seemed incapable of forsaking any of her ex-husbands’ last names. We gathered that there had been some problem in Mr. Gibbons’s class involving Eli, but we had trouble getting details. Actually, that’s not entirely true. We had no trouble getting details, but their context and order eluded us, and so we knew little beyond the glimpse of a meeting that I’d seen between Eli’s mom and Joe Boner and the rush of playground intelligence:
Kevin Klapp, who was in Eli’s old class, claimed that the trouble began when everyone went out for recess one day. Eli stayed glued to his chair and when Mr. Gibbons came over to see why, he found that Eli had shit his pants. According to Kevin, Mr. Gibbons then yelled at Eli and slapped him. Heather Lindeke said that what actually happened was that after the pants-shitting episode, Eli’s mom came in and Mr. Gibbons called Eli “a retard,” and Mrs. Boyle demanded that he be put in our class. No, said Marshall Dickens, what actually happened was that Eli only farted, and when everyone went out to recess, Mr. Gibbons yelled at Eli that he’d “prefer it if you did not shit your pants in my classroom anymore” and that was why Eli’s mom pulled him out of that class. What did I believe? All of it, I suppose. I didn’t put any of it past the people involved, that Eli might shit his pants, or that Mr. Gibbons might make him feel even worse than he did or even slap him, or that Mrs. Boyle might come to Eli’s defense.
Whatever the reason, Eli limped into our classroom that day, staring at his corrective shoes, ready for new humiliations. He stood in front of the class, while behind him, Mr. Bender whispered to the teacher and gestured with his hands. Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley, her high hair spun like soft vanilla ice cream, frowned and shook her head and even covered her mouth as Joe Boner spoke quietly, relaying the actual story of Eli’s banishment from Mr. Gibbons’s class. But while she listened with obvious sympathy and perhaps even empathy, she made no move to ask Eli to sit down and he stood there like a courtroom exhibit while they whispered about him. Finally, we saw our teacher mouth the word “terrible” as the story reached its critical juncture. Just then Eli twitched, as he often did, in some leftover spasm or convulsion, the brackets on his leg braces clacking together, a late-autumn snowfall loosed from his head. Twenty-eight sets of eyes followed those dandruff flakes to the floor.
Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley thanked the principal and walked him to the door. Then she put her arm around Eli, who was a foot shorter than she.
“Welcome to our class, Eli,” she said. “Class, say hello to Eli.”
We said hello. He never looked up. For all her good intentions, Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley was torturing Eli.
“Eli? You may sit wherever you want,” said Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley. “Do you have any friends in this class?”
This seemed to me like classic adult stupidity. Do you have any friends? Why not just knock the boy down and let us stab him to death with compass needles? Eli looked up through his thic
k, black-framed glasses and one of his cockeyes went directly to me and—to my endless shame, I prayed that he not say my name—he looked back at the teacher and shook his head no. Do you have any friends? What kind of question is that? While Eli stared at the ground, our teacher moved a few kids and put Eli smack in the middle of the classroom.
Jeff Fletcher, who was now sitting behind Eli, plugged his nose and stuck his tongue out to indicate that Eli stunk, and when Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley turned her back Fletch pulled his desk back away from Eli’s. The students on his right and left did the same thing, their desks screeching as they slid across the tile floor. Eli didn’t look up, just stared at the notebook open on his desk, drawing pictures of tanks.
I have yet to mention Dana Brett. I suppose I haven’t known how, in this ugly world that I am relating, to describe someone so wonderful. Cute? The girl was entirely composed of porcelain, tiny features on a round face beneath black hair that curled up at her collar so that her face was perfectly framed. She wore ribbons in her hair. Ribbons! A redundant bit of packaging perhaps, but still. Ribbons! Miniskirts and vests. And suede boots that laced up the front. There is nothing so hypnotic as the romantic daydreams of the hopelessly presexual, and back then all of my daydreams involved young Dana Brett and unlacing those boots.
She sat in front of Eli and was the only one who didn’t move her desk when Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley turned her back to address the class on Hopi Indians or adding fractions or whatever she was selling that day. She droned on as the desks moved away, until Eli was an island, or rather an isthmus, connected only by the honorable Dana Brett’s desk. And when the teacher finally turned around and saw what had happened—the desks magnetically repelled from Eli—she became intent on making it worse. “All right. Move those desks back. Jeff Fletcher, why did you move your desk away from Eli’s?”
Of all the cruelty exhibited that day, I still think that question—no matter its intent—was the pinnacle. In one question, she codified what we all knew, made it official and made a horrible mistake: she gave a lousy prick like Jeff Fletcher the opportunity to actually be funny.
“Well,” said Fletch, looking around at us, gathering strength, “he smells like a bag full of turds.”
In the laughter that followed, Eli never looked up from the tanks he was drawing.
5 | I SMOKED WEED
I smoked weed every day as a kid. Not so much during the time I’m relaying now—the fifth-grade hell that Eli and I shared like some awful creation myth—but from that summer on, pretty much nonstop until the tenth grade. Looking back, those fifth-grade days were the night before battle, the last days spent in complete sobriety. I’m not sure why I offer that bit of information now except to interrupt this harsh story with the reminder that these were different and difficult times—the mid-1970s, after all—when a preteen might be expected to smoke dope every day. It is probably the least endearing and most enduring habit of a whole generation of politicians, this desire to confess, and I can’t help wondering if—in admitting fumbling around with a few joints, a smart Arkansas redneck could win two terms—I might not secure a white-trash landslide by acknowledging that I toked regularly at twelve and never had trouble inhaling, that, in fact, I carried the respectful nickname Old Iron Lung.
Still, as I said, I feel the need—perhaps the political necessity—to halt the narrative momentarily and take refuge in the time and place of all of this: the desperateness, the poverty, the harsh world in which I was raised. I would kill (once again, I acknowledge irony) to be able to report that I simply went to school and got good grades; that I sat next to Eli Boyle on the bus and demanded that he be treated with respect; that I insisted that he, in fact, did not smell like turds (sadly, though, he did); that I did not crave more than anything the respect of my classmates, this societal juice, this cultural cachet, this…approval, this immeasurable measure of popularity, not only from the suede-booted Dana Brett—love would be more defensible—but also and more importantly from the school toughs, the pubescent dictators, the dope-selling jefes, the Pee-Chee-carrying warlords of the Empire bus stops.
This is the only way I can think to explain what happened at the end of that school year. Throughout that year my lot was improving incrementally, Pete Decker’s pronouncement that I was “all right” having thrown open the door to the middle of the willow tree, where the tough kids hung out, although I was still a year away from the furthest depths of the branches, where the mystical act of making out was occurring, glimpsed only as a clutch of arms and legs and sweaters and jackets and hair and the occasional flash of braces and skin.
I never tried to smoke at the bus stop again, but I continued to steal my father’s cigarettes to give to Pete Decker, who honored my new status by not demanding such bribes, but rather accepting them with prejudice, a fine distinction that would serve him well in his later career of Mafia capo or generalissimo of some Latin American junta.
“Whatcha got for me, Marlboro man?” he would ask.
His gift to me was allowing it to seem as if I had a choice. I would pretend to be checking to see if I had cigarettes on me. “Oh, here you go.” Then I’d stand there and nod with admiration at his stories of stealing bikes out from under little kids or shooting stray cats in garbage cans. And the midtree circle wasn’t the only new access I acquired. I crept toward the back of the bus, too, abandoning the fifth and sixth graders I used to huddle with in the front until I ended up ten rows back, next to a sweet kid named Everson, a flutter-eyed seventh grader who spent every morning bent over in his seat, rolling joints and putting them into little Sucrets cough drop boxes. He hummed songs while he did it, Southern rock tunes that I didn’t really recognize, but which were familiar enough. I guess he must’ve sold all the joints in that Sucrets box each day, because the next day he’d be at it again, rolling joints and humming. Everson was bone skinny and had long blond hair like a girl. He was nicer than the other seventh and eighth graders, though, and he seemed to get a pass from Decker and Woodbridge, I guess because he supplied them with dope.
“Where do you get the papers?” I asked.
“Stepdad’s stash,” he answered as quickly as possible so he could get back to his song and his job.
“How much does that stuff cost?”
“Ten a lid.”
“How much is a lid?”
He looked right at me and just kept humming. “Nobody knows for sure. That’s the cool thing.”
It seemed okay with Pete that I sat with Everson and one day I even held out one of my dad’s Pall Malls to give to my new friend. He looked at it and made a face. “I hope you don’t smoke those,” Everson said.
“What do you mean?”
“Cigarettes? Disgusting. Filthy habit.” And he flipped his blond hair and went back to rolling joints.
I didn’t ride the regular bus home in the afternoons. In the fall I played flag football, and in the winter basketball. Except for the great prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale, I was the only guy from my neighborhood who played sports, and so the only people on the activities bus to Empire were me and Everson, who told the teachers he was staying after school for drama and the school paper, but who actually sold the last of his dope to the football team. The bus would cruise past the high school, then the junior high, then come pick up us elementary school kids, and I’d sit in the seat in front of Everson, who never hummed or had anything to say in the afternoons, since his joints were all rolled and sold. He just stared out the window, like Eli.
So I never had to see what Eli endured in the afternoon bus rides, only in the mornings. And in those mornings, while it may sound unlikely and defensive, I began to try to protect him from Pete Decker. Sometimes I saved my cigarettes until Eli arrived at the bus stop, hoping I could distract Pete. Other times I picked up a rock and threw it at a passing car, hoping I could interest Pete in some cruelty that didn’t involve knocking Eli down or wedging his briefs in his shithole. But Pete was relentless; he contin
ued to torment Eli, dropping burning cigarettes in his backpack, flicking his ears, and, at least once a week, giving him a wedgie. One day in the winter, Pete reached in Eli’s pants to yank on his underwear and immediately withdrew his hand. “Oh, that’s sick!” he yelled, and he hauled off and decked Eli, knocking his glasses off and dropping him to the ground. “He isn’t wearing any underwear!” On the bus that day, I watched Eli’s reflection in the window and I swear I saw him smile a little bit.
I think it was the underwear thing that upped the ante for Pete. He actually began walking up the block to meet Eli, taking the backpack off his shoulder and spreading all the books and papers as he walked back to the bus stop, Eli bent at that crooked waist in his flannel shirt, picking up his things and limping along toward the bus stop in his corrective shoes, pausing to push his glasses back up on his nose.
In the spring I turned out for baseball, but on the first day I forgot to wear a cup and a line drive short hopped me in the nutsack and I had to go to emergency, where the doctor told my mom I had a twisted testicle and would have to take the baseball season off, or at least until my right nut reacquired its flesh color. So I started wearing special underwear and riding the bus home right after school, where I got to see the second half of Eli Boyle’s nightmare. Pete treated him the same way at 3:00 P.M. that he had at 7:20 in the morning, calling him names, making fun of his clothes, knocking him down. It was about that time, in the spring, that Pete Decker decided he was tired of beating Eli up and that someone else needed to beat up Eli. Me.