by Kyle Minor
What has this to do with the Jews, their songs? You shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace, sure, but first you will undergo great hardship. This from the prophet Isaiah, a truly mystifying figure, the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, come onto the scene at a pivotal point in Israel’s history. Twenty years after Isaiah accepted his prophetic mantle, the Assyrians crushed the Northern Kingdom, and the better part of ten of the twelve tribes were taken into exile. (Twelve years old, and I know these things. They teach us these things at my school.) And not long after that, Jerusalem itself found the fearsome army of Sennacherib at its walls, and despite King Hezekiah’s recent embrace of what Isaiah had called a “covenant of death” with a political faction that wanted Israel to be more like the Egyptians who had once held their ancestors as slaves—worship their idols, sleep with their women—Yahweh (YHWH; He whose name cannot be uttered on pain of death) delivered the city, and Sennacherib could only brag like a loser. I shut Hezekiah up in his cage like a bird, reads the famous inscription; not Jerusalem is mine.
Like all the prophets, Isaiah was both trouble and troubled, his destiny sealed when the seraphim cleansed his lips with a burning coal; and then, no doubt blistered and in great pain, he said, “Here am I, send me!” And then he wrote great, painful, angry poems of warning: Your country is waste, your cities burnt with fire; Your land before your eyes strangers devour—and—the desert owl and hoot owl shall possess her, the screech owl and raven shall dwell in her—and—Take a harp, go about the city, O forgotten harlot; Pluck the strings skillfully, sing many songs, that they may remember you.
I am twelve years old, standing beneath the starfruit tree, on the asphalt path, both hiding from and waiting for my daily beating. I know it is coming, because this morning the other science teacher, Mr. Guy, showed the filmstrip from Answers in Genesis about the fossil record—the dinosaur tracks with the human footprints embedded in them; the fragments of the Cro-Magnon man shown to be a hoax in a side-by-side comparison with a baboon skull; satellite imagery of the petrified remains of a massive seagoing vessel found lodged in the side of Mt. Ararat, in contemporary Turkey, where the Ark of Noah was said to have come to rest—and after class my head is so full of possibilities—a trip, perhaps, to Muslim Turkey, undercover, perhaps smuggling Bibles . . . perhaps even long hours under the sunlamp so I could pass for a Turk, following the example of the author of Black Like Me . . . and a daring climb with a Sherpa guide who would be proud when I bestowed upon him the Anglicized name of Henry . . . and a dig through snow and ice and earth to uncover, in person, what the satellites had already suggested: the Ark of Noah, proof beyond doubt, real archeological evidence of the worldwide flood that created the Grand Canyon, the Seven Continents, the washing-away of the Garden of Eden and, at last, rest for the angel who had been guarding it with his shining sword for all those many centuries . . . and also refutation of all the theories, the lies, that modern science has been serving up to support its religion of secular humanism—the Ice Age, Plate Tectonics, maybe Evolution itself— . . . my head so full of possibilities that I forget to go the long way to my math class, around the front of the gym that faces the administrative buildings, instead of the short way, around the back of the gym, near the locker rooms where Drew McKinnick and his boys lie in wait for me at this time every day. A careless, careless mistake that could have been so easily avoided, but I don’t give one thought to it until I pass the pale green locker room door and forget to notice if it is cracked open or not, and then—WHACK!—McKinnick makes a weapon of the wooden door. It hits my arm with a velocity I could not begin to measure, and sends my body hard to the concrete, and—I have good reflexes; I’m used to this sort of thing—I manage to twist at the last moment, to wrench my body around so I land front-first rather than flat on my back, and hands-first rather than head-first—bruise the hands, cut the hands; protect the head. A teacher—good, Mr. Sanders, a good man—comes running from behind, and McKinnick is standing in front of my body—I see him up there, scratching his head, feigning concern, and feigning it in a manner that makes very clear his utter lack of concern—and Mr. Sanders says—he yells, really—“Why did you have to go and do that?” and McKinnick says, “I had no idea he was standing there,” and Sanders says, “I doubt that sincerely,” and McKinnick says, “On my honor, sir. I feel as bad about it as he does.”
I know better. I know better than to say it. But I say, “No one feels as bad about it as I do.” McKinnick can’t help himself—it’s only a moment; the slightest moment; the slightest of slightest moments—he smiles, flashes those dog teeth. In those teeth I see real pleasure, and it’s not the first time, not by dozens. And then the smile is gone, and what’s back is feigned regret. Sanders has his number, but who is Sanders? What can Sanders do? Sanders is already on thin ice for wiping boogers on the blackboard—to make us laugh; to make us feel better about ourselves; compassionate boogers—and before that, Sanders was already suspect, because Sanders moonlights as the school nightwatchman, because they don’t pay him enough money, because he doesn’t have a wife or children so he gets less than the other teachers, and sometimes he watches reruns of Star Trek on a black-and-white television at midnight in the principal’s office, his feet up on the desk—he was caught once, and everyone knows—and another time he was caught falling asleep at two o’clock in the morning, and another time at five. They—They—say that Sanders jogs home at six-thirty every afternoon after coaching the junior varsity soccer team and sleeps until eleven-thirty, takes a quick shower, eats some Frosted Mini-Wheats, then humps it back to campus to nightwatch until dawn. That’s Sanders, and what’s Sanders next to McKinnick, whose father is the mayor of the village of Golfview, a veterinarian wealthier than God who paid for half the new football bleachers? And what’s Sanders next to McKinnick, varsity linebacker in the eighth grade, second-string already, a mean two-twenty, putting hits on twelfth-grade running backs that they’ll remember into their old age? McKinnick, who can crush a baseball, hit a three-hundred-fifty-foot shot to left-center. McKinnick, who could crush Sanders more ways than one.
The locker-room door cracks open. Jones, Dodd, Graves—McKinnick’s boys. Sanders sees them. He says, “You boys get on to class.” They pause for a minute. “Now,” Sanders says, and they go, and McKinnick starts on his way, too, but Sanders says, “No, you wait,” and I want to tell him . . . I want to tell him that what he is doing is a very bad idea. That it’s a very bad idea for me. But I can’t tell him. I can’t say anything, because no matter what I say, it will make matters worse for me later. So I keep quiet. It’s very hard to keep quiet.
“So what you’re going to do right now, right at this very moment,” Sanders is saying, “is apologize to Mr. Minor here.”
McKinnick makes a sound in the back of his throat—the gathering of spit and phlegm—and then he turns his head and spits for distance in the direction of the hedges that line the sidewalk outside the gym and locker rooms. The spit lands a few feet from the hedges, and—I can’t help myself—I say, “Airball,” and then his eyes flash like they can, the way I imagine the eyes of killers must flash in the moment before they become killers—and, be advised, I believed, then and now, McKinnick, given the right circumstances, fully capable of killing a man, or a boy, especially a boy, with his bare hands.
He looks right at me and smiles, and this time I detect nothing but the utmost sincerity in that smile—and I know that the sincerity does not attach to the apology he is about to offer, but instead to the retribution, the beating, that will follow—and he says, “Minor, I’m truly sorry.”
And Sanders says, “Good, then. It’s settled. Now, both of you, off to class.”
I let him get a head start before I start walking. I know when we turn the corner, mean Mrs. Tatham, the grammarian, will be waiting outside her classroom door, watching, looking for an excuse to jump down some poor kid’s throat. God bless Mrs. Tatham.
McKinnick takes his head start. He rounds the
corner, then I do, and he is ahead of me, passing Mrs. Tatham, but then he slows down. She is still watching, so he doesn’t touch me, but when I get within earshot he says—loud enough for me to hear, but soft enough that she can’t—“It’s not settled”—and though I knew, now I know.
I am twelve years old, standing beneath the starfruit tree, possessing this terrible knowledge . . . and yet, and yet, above me are starfruit, a great many, and I have been picking them for all the years I have gone to this school, ever since I was four years old, and I know how to pick one that is sweet enough but not overripe, and not overly bitter, either. It is truly amazing to me that I am the only person I know, student or teacher, who picks from this tree.
The fruit are green or yellow or brown, their color a measure of their ripeness. I reach up and pick a yellow one, the five points of its star just starting to turn brown. This is how I like them. Just a little sweet, but still firm, not mushy. I bite into one of the points of the star and some juice runs down my face and down onto my hands and into the cuts and abrasions from where I caught myself on the concrete behind the pale green locker-room door after McKinnick hit me with it. There is citric acid in the juice, and when the acid touches the cuts and abrasions, it stings, and I make a fist involuntarily, and squeeze the starfruit I am holding, and squeeze more juice, more acid, into the wounds. You shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace is the song I am hearing in my head. The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you—all this from the naysayer, the prophet of doom who also wrote, Your country is waste, your cities burnt with fire; Your land before your eyes strangers devour—and the difference, you see, between Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and New Testament disciples is that the joy in these old Jewish writings always rises from the deepest of darkness, and there is no gloss on the darkness. No purpose for the darkness, except sometimes testing, sometimes judgment, sometimes spite, all this attributed often enough to God. No all things work together for good to them who love God, to them who are called according to His righteousness. No. All things do not work together for good. All things are in opposition, and the darkness more often overtakes the light than the light the darkness. The darkness is the darkness is the darkness.
And what would bring God joy? A final separation from sin. The destruction of the wicked. The destruction of the world.
And what would bring me joy? The destruction of Drew McKinnick.
I am twelve years old, standing beneath the starfruit tree, holding in my hand the most beautiful fruit any tree in the world has ever borne, and now softly humming the most beautiful, sad song I have ever heard—You shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace—and contemplating the destruction of Drew McKinnick.
There is the baseball bat. Maybe his baseball bat. I could carry it with me around the corner, make a show of showing it to Mrs. Tatham, talk a little shop about the relationship between baseball bats and grammar. And wait. And when McKinnick rounded the corner, I could draw back that baseball bat and swing it at his head and explode his skull . . . no, watch it swell like a balloon, and then swing it again, and watch it pop, watch the splatter of gray matter and crimson blood stain the sidewalk, and then, in the moment before they wrestle me to the ground, kick that mouth with my black penny loafers, kick every last dog tooth from that mouth.
There is the baseball bat, but perhaps it is not practical. But then there is the gun. My grandpa has a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun mounted above his bed in his trailer. And a kid in my second-period study hall, Lee Paterson, has a book called The Anarchist’s Cookbook. He says it is easy to make napalm. I told him once I’d like to napalm Drew McKinnick, and Paterson said it would be easy, that his skin would melt off, that he had tried this himself on a Barbie doll, and it had been only too easy.
“But what about a bomb?” Paterson had said.
“A bomb?”
“Two or three. Five or ten. Ten or twenty. Plant them all around. Blow the whole school down.” He showed me a drawing he had made, a diagram of the school, and where the bombs would be placed. A few of them would go inside the air-conditioning units that lined the walls, because the component parts inside would become shrapnel and take out more people.
Paterson is small, smaller than me even, and I am the second smallest person in the whole secondary school. Some of the fourth and fifth graders are bigger than us. When he showed me the drawing, it scared me, first because I thought he might be serious, and second because I thought maybe I might be capable of doing it myself if I knew as much about chemistry and military strategy as he did. Looking at those diagrams, I thought I could maybe do it.
I am twelve years old, standing under the starfruit tree, eating a starfruit, thinking about blowing up the school, humming a song written by the Jewish prophet Isaiah, holding all these contradictions in my head and not knowing that they are contradictions, waiting for my beating; and then it arrives.
But not the way I think it will.
Because usually when McKinnick finds me to beat me, he brings Jones and Dodd and Graves with him. They make a circle, a loose circle at first, and they yell obscenities and push me from one of them to another and sometimes push me down and kick me and make me get back up so they can push me some more, but then the circle tightens and McKinnick slaps my ears, hard, with his open palm. First my ears ring, and then I lose most of my hearing and it doesn’t come back for a couple of hours, and when it does, it comes back with louder ringing and an awful headache. Then Jones and Dodd and Graves hold me and slap the top of my head and stick their spit-moistened fingers into my ears and nostrils while McKinnick stands over me and flicks the cartilage at the tiptops of my ears with his fingers until the cartilage turns purple, and he keeps asking if I’ve had enough, and when I say yes, he says, “No, you haven’t,” and when I say no, he says, “You need to get some humility, boy,” or, “Who do you think you’re talking to, boy,” or, “Say I’m a dirty nigger. Say it. Say it.” And then I say it—“I’m a dirty nigger”—or—“I’m a queer, I’m a homo”—or—“I fuck my mother”—or whatever other thing he wants me to say, but even then it doesn’t stop. Drew McKinnick knows how to hurt a person a hundred ways and more, and there is nothing in the world funnier, so far as I can tell, to Jones and Dodd and Graves than to hold my arms while McKinnick lifts up my shirt and grabs my nipples between his thumb and forefinger and tries to turn them one-hundred-and-eighty degrees (this he calls a One-Eighty), or to hold my arms and legs, to hold my whole body up in the air while McKinnick slaps at my testicles like he did my ears, with an open palm.
I’m waiting for that. I’m waiting for all that to happen.
But that’s not what happens. What happens is I hear my name—“Minor”—and I hear it behind me, from the direction of the band room, where the Sonshine Fellowship meets to pray and sing. I turn around. It’s McKinnick, and he’s alone. And the fact of this—his aloneness—is more terrifying to me than anything I have ever seen or heard or known or imagined in my entire life.
I am deeply, deeply afraid.
McKinnick starts running, takes off at a sprint, and I turn, too, and start to run. But I am very slow. I get five steps, maybe, and he tackles me from behind.
I fall face-first on the asphalt. I catch myself with my hands, and my right hand goes through the starfruit on its way down and rips fresh wounds into my hands, and those wounds are bathed in a tiny new pool of citric acid.
McKinnick is on top of me. He mounts me from behind, starts slapping my ears. “How’s that?” he says, and slaps and slaps and slaps and slaps, gets a rhythm going. He reaches into my pants and grabs hold of my underwear with his hand and jerks the cotton into my anus, and pulls, and pulls. I am already bleeding. I can feel the warmth.
McKinnick says, “How’s that? You like that? You feel it burn? Burn, baby, burn!” He pulls my underwear up and down and from side to side.
He says, “You know what? I could ass rape you right now and no one would know. And if they found
out, it’s you would be the faggot, not me. You hear me, faggot? Are you listening?”
What does it feel like? It is the most helpless feeling in the world. No one will come for me. If I try to tell on him—as I have done in the past—no one will believe me. I am at his mercy, and I am not sure he has any.