by Jess Walter
I caught up and peeked in the gym, but he was gone. There was an entrance to the boys’ locker room at the end of the gym, but no way he’d have made it there before I got to the door. He’d simply disappeared. I wondered for a second if I’d made the whole thing up. Imagine. Eli Boyle walking two miles to school. Two miles back. With his gnarled legs and crooked feet? Imagine the fear he had of the bus stop, of the bullies of Empire. Imagine him going into the gym, of all places.
Then, in the gaps between the bleachers, I caught a glimpse of greasy hair, of overalls and flannel. I crept up behind the wood bleachers, which were pulled out so that only the bottom two rows were accessible. But it was enough that someone could slide underneath, and that’s where Eli sat, on the floor beneath the bleachers, amid the gum and candy wrappers and smashed popcorn, slats of light coming in between the bleacher seats. He sat with his notebook open, writing something, or drawing, possibly the tanks and airplanes that he was always sketching.
His back was to me, and if he knew someone was watching he gave no indication, just sat curled up on himself, as if he could pull in more, disappear from the world. I opened my mouth to say something—I’m sorry—but nothing came out. I backed out of the gym and made my way down the hall. I peeked in the office, but the principal was now gone and the secretary was staring out the door, her head tilted, mouth wide open, like she wasn’t seeing whatever was in front of her eyes, like she was imagining something entirely different.
My movement into her field of vision snapped her out of it, and she wiped at her eyes. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I go to school here,” I said.
She straightened some things on her desk and swallowed. “I know. I mean…it’s very early.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but the principal’s door opened and Mr. Bender popped his head out. “Look, Peg, I’m sorry if I led you to believe that this was anything other than two people—”
She cleared her throat and nodded toward me, and Mr. Bender followed her gaze to me, standing flat-footed in the doorway.
“Oh, hello, Mason. What are you doing here?”
“I go to school here,” I answered again.
“Right,” he said.
He came out, his eyebrow up, like he was figuring a problem. “Okay then, well. I was just having a discussion with Mrs. Federick. And…if I led you to believe, Mrs. Federick, that”—and now he looked from me to her and back again—“that…uh, that the other bus driver I was telling you about would approve of me…you know, riding your bus…well, obviously, I’ve got a lot of time invested with that bus driver. As you do with your…bus driver. One ride on another bus doesn’t…”
He seemed confused by his own words and he turned and went back into his office. Mrs. Federick stared at his door and I slipped away.
That day we cleaned out our desks and went outside for a huge game of tug-of-war with the other fifth-grade class. In a rare moment of kindness, Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley allowed Eli to skip the game, but his parole was cut short when she forced him to stand in the middle and be the judge of which team won. A ribbon was tied in the center of the rope and two lines were painted on the grass, about fifteen feet apart. We had to pull the ribbon over the line closest to us and Mr. Gibbons’s class had to pull the ribbon over the line closest to them. In the middle stood Eli, staring at the ground.
“Go!” Mr. Gibbons said, and we pulled with everything we had, boys and girls alike. The rope snapped tight and then began moving toward their side, and something about the screams and the strain on that rope transformed Eli. He skipped to his right, holding up his right hand to indicate that Mr. Gibbons’s class was winning. Fletcher and I were in the front; we led a charge back the other way and Eli sidestepped toward us, raising his left hand. Now the ribbon changed direction again and Eli, caught off guard, lost his balance but then regained it and began sliding away from us again. Staring at that ribbon, his eyes seemed engaged for the first time I could remember, and he smiled and made a funny noise that I realized was a kind of rusty laughter. I had to block Eli out to help my side stop the erosion, and the ribbon settled in the middle, and when I looked up, Eli had his arms straight out, indicating we were back at equilibrium. Behind me I felt something give, and then Fletcher lost his balance and kicked my legs out from under me, and the rope was pulled quickly the other way and from my back—as I was dragged across the grass—I saw Eli sliding sideways quickly, his right arm straight in the air, his glasses having fallen to the end of his nose, so intent was he on calling the progress of this match. The ribbon crossed their line, and he threw both his hands in the air to indicate that the match was over. Then he bent his knees and pointed both hands at Mr. Gibbons’s class. They had won. He stood there for the longest time, both his hands pointed to his right, panting, a half-smile on his face. Then he straightened up, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and looked from one side to the other, shyly, as if asking, Did you see what I just did?
Everyone let go of the rope, the teachers blew their whistles, and we were escorted back to our classrooms to wait for the bus to take us home for the summer. No one said a thing to Eli; he simply curled up on himself again, slinking away before the moment could be taken from him.
7 | I’VE BEEN THINKING
I’ve been thinking about the purpose of a statement such as this. It is intended as a confession, obviously, something of a legal document (even scrawled on yellow pad, like some manic trial note). And yet this statement also has more than a whiff of memoir, of the commission of my death to paper. After all, who writes a memoir but the man whose life is over? The memoirist believes that he will live on in transcription, but in fact he is describing a life rather than living one, abandoning the visceral for the verbal. It is a kind of surrender.
I am finished. All the pretty detectives in the world can’t change that. There is only one ending to a story like mine. And before I get on with that long and unforgettable summer of 1975, before I finish telling how Eli saved my life, and how I conspired to commit a murder twenty-five years later, I will reveal that ending—not just the ending of my own story, but the ending of all stories. It is this:
I died alone.
Now perhaps I should have confined myself to a strict legal document, wherefore and in furtherance and the like. But such a document could never begin to convey the depths of my misdeeds, nor of my contrition; there are facts here that simply do not adhere to the rigid structure of the Revised Legal Codes of Washington State.
Take the summer, for instance. What statute covers the feel of the sun that summer, its immediacy and grace, its heat on my browned forearms, on the tanned skin of my neck and shoulders? How can a lawyer explain the rush of pavement beneath my bicycle tires or the defiance of gravity committed by my tennis shoes? Perhaps you remember the length of your own July days, the endless possibilities that existed from the seat of a Schwinn, the swagger of boys moving down a suburban street with the streetlights beginning to hum and spark, the fearless poise of it all. The longing.
That summer, days lasted forever. Somewhere a scientist is proving that time is bent and yawned by the forces of childhood and summer, and the jury awaits his inevitable arrival in Stockholm open armed, individual jurists sobbing because this temporal genius has finally proven that our childhoods are longer than our adult lives, and that time is not a line, as they have been trying to deceive us into believing, but a slope, picking up speed and danger as it goes on.
For myself, in that long June of 1975 I rose early and patted my long, thick hair rather than comb it. I fought with my brother and sisters over the last bowl of Cocoa Puffs or Super Sugar Crisp or King Vitamin; no matter what kind of processed, sugared cereal we ate, my mother bought only last bowls of the stuff. We planted ourselves in front of the TV with zealous punctuality, and yet we never so much as smiled at the crap that played before us: Underdog and Dick Tracy and the Go Go Gophers and Mr. Peabody and Klondike Cat (“Savoir Faire has stol
en my cheeses!”). The point of cartoons is not enjoyment. Check the faces of any kid planted in front of the tube. It’s not fun. It’s a business. They don’t like cartoons any more than we like work; it’s what they do.
By ten each morning, I was on my bike. I’d ride down to Everson’s house and we’d pretend to have karate fights or play touch football or just tool around on our bikes, acting like kids instead of the pot-smoking losers we were about to become. Some mornings I’d scrounge through the dryer for change, and Everson and I would race off to the store for baseball cards. I can still see the 1975 Topps baseball cards. They made them a shade smaller that year, for what reason I couldn’t possibly say, with the team name shadowed on the top, the player framed just below that set against two-tone cardboard, his name in all caps, his position in a tiny baseball on the bottom right, unless he was an All-Star (the Dodgers had four that year: Messersmith, Garvey, Cey, and Wynn), in which case his position was written inside a star. I tore these tiny men from the package and marveled at the afros and sideburns and mustaches that peeked out from under their ball caps and wondered at the world that opened up to people with afros and sideburns and mustaches, at the vast number and range of boobs that they must be exposed to. I flipped the cards over and read through the stats as if they contained some secret—map of the human genome, key to the universe. To this day, my mind is full of the detritus printed in six-point type on the backs of those cards. I can’t remember my bank account number or my sisters’ birthdays, but I remember that Richie Zisk had exactly one hundred RBI’s for the Pirates, that Pat Dobson won nineteen games for the Yankees, and that Ralph Garr hit a cool .353. I scraped and stole for the quarter that each package cost and never gave a thought to Everson, who must’ve had thousands of dollars from his school-year dope sales, but who bought exactly the same number of packs as me, peeling singles off a thick roll.
For the first half of that summer, stoic Everson never mentioned pot; nor did he ever have any, at least when I was around. He was just a kid, like me, but with longer hair and a shorter vocabulary, and even though he was going into eighth grade and I was going into sixth, that disparity disappeared that summer in a haze of tag and hotbox and bike races and baseball cards and mud pies and dandelion soup and ice cream trucks and corn on the cob on soggy plates…a life. A real life, ordered and meaningful and simple.
And then Pete Decker got out of juvenile detention.
I don’t think I realized that the neighborhood was peaceful until it stopped being so. For the first month and a half of the summer, as long as we stayed in our turf and didn’t venture into Matt Woodbridge’s fiefdom four blocks down the street, we were safe, seemingly able to stay out until the sun was completely gone without fear of being beaten up. And then, on the day Pete got out of the clink, it all ended.
He’d been gone six whole weeks—a sentence deferred until summer so that he could finish the school year—for stealing car stereos. A whole pile of eight-track players had been found behind Pete’s garage. Six weeks in juvenile hall wasn’t likely to mellow Pete, a fact I realized when I finally saw him, on a Friday at the end of July, walking down the street, a cigarette dangling from his fingers—ambling, really, like he wasn’t even going anywhere, like he was pacing a long hall.
That very weekend, summer ended. The weather stayed hot and school remained closed, but from then on the world didn’t feel the same. Bikes were stolen and their parts were seen on other bikes; rocks were thrown through windows; garbage cans were spilled out on the street, and mailboxes were knocked from their posts. That weekend Everson and I stopped playing, and started just hanging out. Waiting. We knew that at any time Pete could come out of his house and take charge of things. Little kids like my siblings continued to play, of course, because that’s all little kids can do (their ability to “hang out” still unformed) but it was with one eye on the street, in close proximity to their houses, riding their bikes in small circles in their driveways or on the strips in front of their houses, no longer venturing down the block. Bike traffic fell by two thirds. No one dared walk anywhere anymore, lest they be caught out on the street.
Still, Pete stayed to himself those first days, walking the mile strip of Empire as if he were the only one on it, cigarette in the left corner of his mouth, left eye squinted shut against the curling smoke. It felt as if he were taking the measure of the neighborhood, seeing if anything had changed, who needed to be put in his place, whose ass needed kicking.
We convinced ourselves that maybe things had changed, and gradually, the next week, we ventured out with our bikes and our baseball cards, but stayed close to our own yards. Then, one afternoon while I engaged in the exquisite task of sorting my baseball cards in the front yard, Pete was suddenly there, leaning against the fence next to my house. Everson was with him, looking as if he’d been kidnapped.
“Hey,” Pete said in his preternaturally scratchy voice. “What the fuck are those?”
“Baseball cards.”
Pete held out his hand and tipped his head back and I looked up at Everson, who shrugged. I stood and brought him the card I happened to have in my hand, an outfielder named George Hendrick of the Cleveland Indians. Pete held it in his hand, turned it over, and made a face like he’d eaten something sour. “What do you do with it?”
I shrugged. “You collect ’em.”
“Why?”
I shrugged again. “For fun.”
He looked down at the card. “So what, you look at the pictures and beat off? Are you queer, Clark? I mean, Clark’s kind of a queer name, ain’t it?”
“No.” And I don’t know what came over me, but I really believed I could explain myself to him. “See, you try to collect all the guys from every team and then you see who’s better by the stats on the back. You can measure them against each other and they all start to make sense. That’s the only way baseball makes sense, is if you understand how the numbers work against each other.”
Everson closed his eyes. Pete turned the card over.
“See,” I said, “George Hendrick hit nineteen homers. Reggie Jackson hit twenty-nine and had more RBI’s, too. So he’s better. In fact, he’s the best.” My voice lost any force behind it. “See?”
Pete stared at George Hendrick’s card for a while and then he tossed it back at me. “We’re gonna go party. You comin’?”
I looked at Everson, who was staring at the ground.
Pete stepped forward. “You ain’t a puss, are you, Clark?”
“No,” I said. “No, I’m ready to go.” I left the baseball cards on the porch and we crossed the rabbit hills on our bikes and walked them through the weedy railroad fields until we reached the riverbank where Pete had stashed a six-pack of warm beer that he’d stolen from someone. The three of us passed those beers around and Everson brought out a joint and we drank and smoked and then Pete collected whatever money we had, to pay for the beer—which he’d stolen—and the joint, which he expected to be paid for even though Everson had provided it. These were, in order, my first beer and my first taste of marijuana, and if I felt anything other than a sore throat and nausea I don’t remember it. Since that day I have seen people loosen up and become wild on the effects of alcohol and dope, but I don’t remember any of us smiling or laughing that day, and I guess that’s because Pete drank most of the beer and inhaled most of the pot.
The next day, he organized a kind of boxing tournament with gloves he had left over from his Golden Gloves days. He enticed a couple of little kids into the tournament as lightweights; they sent each other home bleeding and crying. Next were Everson and me, whom Pete called the middleweights. We swung wildly and connected each time with the other’s ear, until our ears were red and sore, which is when Pete realized we were purposefully not hitting each other in the face. He stopped the fight and informed us that we were pusses and that if we didn’t fight each other, we’d have to move up in weight class and “get your pussy ass fucked up by me.” So we ventured out slowly, our gloved ha
nds in front of us, jabbing each other in the nose or the chin or the brow. Then I caught Everson with a shot to the jaw and he got mad and nailed me in the nose, and the rest was just a mess of bleary eyes and blood in my mouth and swinging fists, until I remember looking down on Everson on the ground and Pete pulled me away, whooping and shouting that I had scored the upset.
That night we went with Pete to steal bicycles from the other end of the neighborhood. We rode the bikes over the rabbit hills, then put them in Pete’s garage, where he stayed up all night, taking them apart and putting them back together with parts from other bikes, trying to make them unrecognizable, although when kids saw Pete riding their stolen bikes they never said anything anyway.
In the morning, Pete gave Everson and me each a stolen bike and had us sit a block apart, facing each other. He gave us each a crutch from when he’d broken his leg.
“Now ride at each other,” he said.
“What?”
“You know, like them old guys used to do.” Pete struggled for the word. “What’s that called? You know, guys on horses, with them long spears?”