by Bryn Roar
It was also his last.
Bud caught the older boy’s fist in his hand, inches from his own face. Bud didn’t so much as blink, nor did his big hand budge from the wicked force of the blow.
Time seemed to stand still…
Then a calamitous sound befell the schoolyard:CCCRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAACCCKKKKKKK!!!
In one swift motion, Bud had wrenched Charlie’s arm into an impossible angle behind his back; his right hand ending up somewhere behind his left ear. The following fracture of Charlie Noonan’s arm was raw, rude, and resounding. The fight drained out of him instantly.
Charlie fell to his knees, ashen faced and on the verge of fainting. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Snot percolated from his nose. Behind him, his brother Lester bent over and threw up on the Air Jordan’s he’d stolen from Freddy Orville in gym-class. Moments later, though no one but Tansy Wilky noticed, Lester turned tail for home, deserting his brother to his just desserts.
Several girls in the crowd began weeping at the incredible violence they’d just witnessed.
The boys just gaped in disbelief.
For most of them, Charlie was like a terrible god, wreaking havoc in their lives. An angry deity that could be appeased with money, food, and abject servility.
A known commodity.
Now, in front of their very eyes, Bud Brown had just cast their terrible Zeus from the storied heights of Mount Olympus! What did it all mean?
Would Bud now turn his wrath on them?
No. His wrath knew only Charlie Noonan.
If it had ended then and there, with no further injuries inflicted, the whole thing might have blown over. After all, everyone there was witness to Charlie’s loathsome comment. And lest we forget, Charlie did throw the first punch. If ever there was a case for a justified arm breaking, then this was it. Only it didn’t end there.
Not even when Noonan pleaded for mercy.
Some of those present said as soon as Charlie began weeping, his fat tears plopping off his tormentor’s boots, Bud seemed to become even more unglued. The beating that ensued, however, came not from a wild-man pushed over some invisible brink. Bud didn’t wail on Charlie Noonan. His punches were well aimed and timed, each one finding its mark. The meaty Thuds soon replaced by liquid Splats, as the blood began to flow and spatter.
When Charlie finally fell to the ground, bloody and unconscious, Bud actually took a moment to catch his breath…before picking up right where he’d left off.
It was Mr. Frazier, the Academy’s Headmaster, who finally answered the screams of the children witnessing the massacre. A short and pudgy middle-aged man (the kids all called him Mr. Weatherbee behind his back), Mr. Frazier was no match for Bud Brown. Even so, as soon as he pushed his way through the ring of students standing on the front stoop, Bud ceased his assault.
His rage had finally run its course.
He stood up from what looked like a battered corpse, shook the lank hair from his eyes, and looking directly down at the Headmaster, Bud rasped, in that gravelly growl of his: “It…Won’t…Stop…Dripping.”
It turned out Charlie Noonan wasn’t a corpse after all. What saved his life that day was his complete and utter surrender to a superior force. That, more than anything else, had cooled Bud’s rage. If he had lifted even so much as a finger in his own defense, Bud probably would’ve killed him. Nevertheless, it was seven weeks before he was well enough to leave the hospital on the mainland.
The results of the savage beating left Charlie without a single tooth in the front of his mouth. Those he hadn’t swallowed lay on the steps of the school like scattered Chiclets. Along with a severe concussion, and spiral fractures of his upper and right forearm, Charlie suffered a cracked skull, a splintered orbital bone—including a ruptured eyeball that he would never see out of again—a flattened nose, shattered jaw, four broken ribs, and a shoulder so badly dislocated, it took three nurses and one doctor to set it back in place. Thrown in for good measure was a veritable bouquet of bruises and contusions that seemed to cover every square inch of his body. Even his toes. These were all obvious injuries that, except for the eye, would heal in time. The injuries that would linger till the end of his days were the ones you couldn’t see with the naked eye or X-ray. His bloodied psyche had suffered such a brutal assault that it would never mend.
When he was wheeled into the Emergency Room at the Beaufort County Hospital, the on-duty doc asked the paramedics: “Was this man in a head-on collision?”
His presumption was certainly understandable, given the extensive state of the nineteen-year-old boy’s injuries. When the paramedic told the doc that a lone, unarmed, sixteen-year-old kid was responsible for all the damage, the physician retorted: “Unarmed, my ass.”
After his release from the hospital, Charlie Noonan decided to stay put in Beaufort. You could now find him selling gas and groceries at the Starvin’ Marvin, just outside of town. Ham Huggins had seen him not three weeks ago. He told Betty Anne that the boy was just a whisper of his old nasty self. He was thinner, due to having his jaw wired shut for over two months, but that wasn’t what Ham was getting at.
Charlie Noonan no longer looked you in the eye.
He kept his eyes (make that eye—the dead peeper just kinda floated around in its diminished socket) on his shoes, and kept peering fretfully over his shoulder. To see if Big Bad Bud Brown had finally run him down to finish the job. After all, Charlie Noonan was of the herd now.
“Bad, bad Leroy Brown didn’t have nothin’ on our Big Bad Bud Brown,” Ham had laughed unsympathetically.
He knew how Charlie Noonan had once made Rusty’s life a living hell, and truth be told, he took some pleasure in the bully’s schoolyard Waterloo. Many a time he’d thought of intervening on Rusty’s behalf, but as he’d told Betty Anne, barely holding her back from giving that no ‘count trash Andy Noonan a piece of her mind, “ ‘We wouldn’t be doing our son any favors, fighting his battles for him like that. He’ll never get over his fears until he learns to face them on his own.’ ”
After a psychiatrist’s report cleared Bud Brown of any “Knowing” responsibility for the assault—according to the doctor who interviewed Bud, it was a clear case of Post-Traumatic Shock Syndrome. Bud’s second bout with it, as it turned out—his father took him to an altogether different hospital on the mainland.
He stayed there throughout most of that summer; whether from a court order or voluntarily, no one but Bud and his father knew. And Bud wasn’t talking about it.
Not even to his friends.
The sound of Josie O’Hara’s voice caught his attention as he pushed his way through the kids on the front stoop. He never stopped to think that this was exactly where his trouble with Charlie Noonan had taken place.
There was an anxious note to Joe’s voice that made Bud’s pulse quicken. Her Irish brogue, usually light and airy, was now thick and dark, the way it always got when she was driven to anger. “Cut it out, you feckin’ arsehole!” Josie shouted, somewhere ahead in the crowd.
Now Bud knew something was wrong.
Despite her proclivity with profanity, at least around her friends, Josie rarely dropped the F-bomb in public.
*******
Josie had watched silently with the others, trying to mind her own business, but the Noonans’ never knew when to leave well enough alone. She sent Joel on his way, not wanting him to witness this sort of ugliness.
She was just in time, too. Lester yanked up Tubby’s shirt and proceeded to play the bongos on his hanging gut. This had the desired effect of eliciting the laughter of the masses circled about him and the Tolson kid. Tubby cried out for help, but that was a mistake. Lester would eventually leave you alone if you took your degradation in silence. Resist or call for help and it really pissed him off.
Lester ripped the remnants of Tubby’s shirt away…and with it what remained of the poor kid’s dignity. He tossed the tattered shirt on top of the school roof, out of reach of Tubby’s desperate attempts to get it
back. It landed amid a scattering of objects Charlie and Lester had tossed onto the shingled slope over the years: baseball caps, schoolbooks, a veritable rainbow of trapper keepers, and oddly enough, a rubber chicken. Tattoos of Lester’s big hands covered Tubby’s torso and face. Every time he tried to retrieve his shirt from the roof, his boobs and belly jiggled like two hundred and ninety-nine pounds of pink Jell-O. It was a humiliating attack, even for a Noonan.
Josie had seen enough. “Leave ‘em alone, Lester!”
Tubby had given up on his shirt and was crying pitifully now, his face both purple and red. He lay curled up on the front step in a fetal ball, his lunchbox clutched tightly to his chest. In case Lester had designs on it as well.
Stepping in front of Lester, Josie saw Rusty go to Tubby’s side. The laughter, which had enveloped the small crowd just moments before, ceased at once.
Lester’s eyes, narrow, mean, and yellow, traveled up and down her body. Josie thought the feeling was akin to that of a palmetto bug crawling across her bare skin.
Humiliating Tubby had given Lester a feeling of invincibility. Or stupidity. He recklessly turned his attention to one of the only three kids in school who were Off-Limits to him and his minions.
“That your new boyfriend, Tits? What happened to Mental, is he out of the picture now? Shit, you would go for this fat-ass! He’s the only one in school with bigger titties than you!” For emphasis, Lester poked Josie in the center of her left breast.
“Cut it out, you feckin’ arsehole!” Josie swore, swatting his hand away.
A look of lust passed over Lester’s face. Josie, having seen that hungry look before, recognized it for what it was. Several girls in the crowd laughed shrilly, thrilled to see the arrogant redhead brought down a peg or two.
The rude-and-running commentary surrounding Josie fell to a few course mutterings and invectives, as someone in authority shoved their way through the avid mob, ruining all their good fun. In deference to their superior they cast their eyes downward.
Josie O’Hara’s reaction was quite the opposite.
Seeing who it was, she just grinned.
Chapter Five:
The Woods are Lovely, so Dark and Deep…
Lester’s face bleached white, his acne even going pale. Although he was almost as big as Bud—all of the Noonans’ ran to the extra large—there was no doubt in his mind who was the strongest and fittest in this particular environment. Even the roughest, salt-addled fishermen on Moon avoided Bud Brown. There was just something about that guy.
Something invulnerable.
The memory of Charlie’s beating still lingered as well. Lester seemed to shrink in size as Bud walked up to him. Behind Lester, his toadies deserted him—in the same fashion as he had deserted his older brother the year before.
“You all right, Red?” Bud asked his friend, though all the while his eyes drilled holes into Lester’s forehead.
As with Charlie, Bud’s respiration was barely negligible. Calm and cool, it was as if he’d just woken from a nap. Lester realized that Bud had absolutely no qualms at the thought of fighting him. Bud’s indifference to Lester as a threat had the adverse effect on Noonan.
It scared the living shit out of him.
In Lester’s walnut-sized brain a vision of his brother, laid up in the hospital, came to him: Eyes swollen shut, lips thrice their normal size, split through in two places, black stitches literally holding them together. A mouth nearly devoid of teeth, his skin a bruised and rotten piece of fruit. The awful sound of that fracture resonating in Lester’s head, over and over again. It wouldn’t have mattered if Bud had one hand tied behind his back—he could take any Noonan on their very best day.
Or all of them put together.
Lester accepted this as a bald-faced fact, and like the rest of the crowd, averted his eyes in deference to Bud. It was a deference that ran throughout the entire Noonan family now. Andy Noonan had had a run-in of his own with the Brown clan, and like his oldest son had come out on the losing side. The Browns didn’t fuck around…and this was something a Noonan could understand and respect.
Despite her contempt for the jerk, Josie saw the terror on Lester’s face, and took pity on him. “Over and done with, Buddy boy,” she said, pulling on the sleeve of his army coat. She didn’t want her friend getting in any more trouble, and she knew if she mentioned how Lester had just molested her, then that’s exactly what would happen. Rusty, likewise, knew to keep his big mouth shut. It was unfortunate that neither of them had been around to pull Bud off Charlie the year before. Since then, they’d been keeping closer tabs on their hotheaded pal.
“All right, Red?” he asked her again, seeking out the truth in her eyes this time.
“All right,” she replied, avoiding his direct gaze.
No longer under Bud’s scrutiny, Lester made himself scarce, just as the late bell sounded. Everyone on the steps groaned and hurried off to class before they could get in any more trouble, some of them destined for detention, having already been late twice before.
This included Josie and Rusty.
“I hope you’re happy, Tits,” Rusty said. He helped Tubby to his feet. “Thanks to your heroics, we’re late.”
Bud looked over at the fat kid and seemed to notice for the first time that he wasn’t wearing a shirt.
“Ouch,” he said softly. “What happened to him?”
“Lester happened to him,” Josie said.
She turned away from Tubby. The poor boy was obviously mortified without his shirt on. Even Bud, whose empathy didn’t usually extend past his father and friends, was genuinely embarrassed for the kid.
Josie’s brow wrinkled in wonder at the strange look on Bud’s face just then…
“I’ve got another polo shirt in my gym locker,” Bud muttered. He looked distracted as he went through the school doors. “Ya’ll wait here.”
Josie followed him in anyway.
Tubby and Rusty had a seat on the stone steps. “Thanks for helping me out,” Tubby said, in a quaking voice. He kept his eyes on his shoes, unable to look Rusty in the eye. Shame oozed from his naked pores.
Rusty shrugged. Despite being anxious about his second detention already that year, he couldn’t help but feel bad for Tubby Tolson. He had seen the Noonans’ hand out a lot of humiliation over the years, a good deal of it directed at him; never though had he seen a kid so thoroughly shamed before. Not even when Charlie pantsed him back in the fifth grade and ran his britches up the flagpole in front of the whole damn school! Besides his pipe-stem legs and Scooby Doo underwear, there really wasn’t that much to be embarrassed about back then.
Tubby, on the other hand, with all that puckered, quivering flesh…
“You can go now if you want,” Tubby said, covering himself as best he could with his lunchbox.
“Bud said wait,” said Rusty, as if reciting the law.
Tubby had heard a lot of whispers about this Bud Brown character, and despite his rescue by the big seventeen-year-old boy, he was more than a little wary of him. He wondered if he was only trading one bully’s attentions for another. He angrily wiped his face dry. More than the humiliation, Tubby hated the fact that Lester had made him cry. It was a first for him.
“Why did you guys stick up for me, anyway?”
“I was only backing up Joe,” Rusty said, a little embarrassed by the truth.