The Red Bandanna

by Tom Rinaldi

  He became part of a group called “the mosquito defense.” The name fit—a bunch of light, quick players who took pride in being pests. Persistent, annoying, buzzing around the ball. In their Pop Warner league that year, the team went undefeated—and, to the great joy of the mosquitoes, unscored upon—to win their league title.

  • • •

  He wanted a sleepover at the house to celebrate his eleventh birthday. About ten boys on a Friday night, eating pizza and watching movies, talking about sports and laughing at one another’s fart jokes. What could go wrong?

  Jeff smiled seeing Welles’s collection of buddies coming through the door, from a few down the street who were a couple of years older to the brothers Dickie and Alexander Perry to longtime pals like Jon Hess. The smartest boy in the class, Jonathan Sperman, made the gang for the night as well.

  Alison was away on a business trip, leaving Jeff in charge. No heavy lifting. Have some pizza delivered, set out the snacks and soda, get a stack of VHS titles, and herd the boys downstairs into the finished basement—plenty of floor space to spread out the sleeping bags and blankets for the night. Dragnet, the 1987 movie with Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd, was selected as the marquee feature.

  Jeff was smart enough to set himself upstairs, alert for any disturbing sounds, reading the paper on the couch. He made his last check on the boys shortly after ten P.M., when the movie was just getting started. All settled in for the night, including Dad.

  Jeff slept soundly on the couch, the paper folded by his side, until snapping awake at nearly two A.M. He swung his feet down to the floor and headed toward the basement to check on the sleeping boys.

  The lights were all on; that was odd. He walked down the stairs. There was not a towheaded middle schooler to be found. The sleeping bags and blankets were as empty as the room. No one was there.

  Jeff ran back up the stairs. He began flying around the house, not calling out—he didn’t want to wake the girls, who were asleep in their rooms (thanks be to God). He started opening closet doors, looking in the shower tub, even peering into the larger kitchen cabinets. No trace. No boys.

  Just then, he saw a prick of light out the windows looking over the deep backyard. Then another, and another. Small, weak beams were sweeping across the grass and into the trees, pointing in opposite directions. He rushed outside and heard the voices. The boys.

  “Welles Crowther!” First and last name. Never good. “Get here NOW!”

  Welles came across the yard to the back of house. His father tried very hard to hide the swell of relief and maintain a proper degree of outrage.

  “Dad, we were playing flashlight tag and . . .”

  “Do you know what time it is?!”

  Welles admitted he knew only that it was late.

  “All you boys! In the house right away. Get inside and get downstairs . . .”

  The boys came quickly, sweaty and flushed.

  “Now,” Jeff said, “keep quiet and get downstairs. Get in those sleeping bags. Lights out immediately.”

  They bounded through the house and down to the basement, Jeff behind them. Each went straight to his part of the floor, and once they were in their sleeping bags or under their blankets, Jeff gave a last stern look, walked up the stairs, and turned off the light.

  Flashlight tag? At two in the morning? He swallowed a smile as he made his way to bed.

  Morning came, the boys left, the episode went unmentioned. Until a few days later, when Welles came to his father, a pained look on his face. He wanted to talk.

  “Dad,” he began, “the other night during the sleepover, when you came out to the backyard . . . we didn’t just play flashlight tag.”

  Jeff hadn’t forgotten, but the panic had long receded.

  Welles explained. When Jeff came out to the backyard, the boys were actually returning from a bigger adventure. After the movie finished, they were not ready for sleep. Someone suggested heading over to their old elementary school, where several temporary classrooms had been erected. The buildings were close to the boys’ real destination, the roof over the school’s large all-purpose room, used as a gymnasium, auditorium, and lunchroom. Vast and flat, the roof held a schoolboy’s treasure: all the lost tennis balls, baseballs, rubber balls, and footballs thrown errantly across its space, collecting up there over a few months’ time, never to be returned to sender.

  The roof was flat but more than two stories high, reaching twenty-five feet. It was used by the volunteers at Empire for ladder training. A fall back onto the schoolyard would mean a trip to a hospital, at the least. The boys found a route up to the gym rooftop using a walkway attached to the modular classrooms. One by one the boys made their way up, Welles near the back of the line, hesitant. Sperman, the class brain, was last and refused to go, noting the danger and urging Welles to stay with him. Welles knew his friend was right, that it was foolish to go up, but all the other boys were already up, running around, scavenging for balls. Welles gave in and made the climb, leaving Sperman behind.

  With their collection secure, they made their way down, across the schoolyard and through the darkened streets, into the Crowthers’ backyard. That’s when the game of flashlight tag commenced.

  After explaining what happened, Welles looked at his father, understanding that this was his first experience with peer pressure and its powers, and ashamed for having caved in to it. He didn’t need the balls. He wasn’t searching for the thrill. The need for approval put him on the roof.

  He wasn’t relieved after telling the truth. He was waiting for Dad’s shoe to drop.

  “What kind of punishment do you think you should get?” Jeff asked.

  Welles didn’t hesitate. “No TV for two months,” he said.

  Jeff dismissed it out of hand. Too severe.

  “How about two weeks instead?”

  The defendant accepted. Happily.

  • • •

  Eleven. Where does that age fall? Both feet still planted firmly in the grass of boyhood, but starting to peer over the fence, to pull gently away from the absolute rule of home, to examine its laws—deciding when to apply and what to obey, and which to amend or ignore.

  For Welles, it was also a time to have a taste of bullying, that phenomenon as old as schooling itself. Boys, like little nation-states in blue jeans and striped shirts, tested one another. Some were neutral, some targets, others aggressors.

  Bullying wasn’t the catchall term yet, however. Picked on was the phrase most often used to speak to what happened. More simply put, it was cruelty. Petty, timeless, endemic to childhood, and rarely acknowledged or stopped. So it was for Welles.

  In time he would grow into his body, not only fast but strong, rounding out as an athlete, but that time was still a ways off. He would never grow to be imposing in a purely physical way, but his frame would broaden, adding bulk and sinew. Welles wasn’t the biggest in anything, really—not in his classes, among his friends, or on his teams. For a while growing up he’d be the opposite—smaller and shorter than teammates, undersized compared with friends and peers.

  His sister Honor, younger by two years, remembered an excruciating period when they were both in middle school and, for just a few months, she was a bit taller. He hated being the shorter brother. And every chance he got to deliver kid punches to her arms, he brought the sting. She remembers the small bruises and Welles’s smiles afterward. The lack of size invited a range of reactions and responses. He handled the ribbing as best he could, up to a point. Like most kids who endure their moments of being teased, he kept his feelings inside. It was a rare wall erected between him and his parents. His mom and dad didn’t know how much the pestering bothered him.

  As he entered middle school, many of the boys in his grade were head and shoulders taller than Welles. He wasn’t yet five feet tall. One bigger boy in particular used the bus rides with Welles to and from school to b
adger him. They’d board the bus near the bottom of Birchwood Avenue and N. Midland in the village. A crossing guard stood sentry at the intersection, protecting the students in their comings and goings, but also serving as witness to their alliances and disputes.

  It wasn’t the crossing guard who called. It was the president of the PTA, a friend named Rikke Stone. Working at the time as a saleswoman for an upscale women’s clothing line, Alison was out of the house, covering part of her territory in Long Island, when she answered the call.

  Apparently, Stone was driving up Birchwood, past the Crowthers’ house, and saw two boys fighting on the front lawn. Well, it wasn’t a fight, really. More like a pummeling, at least as Stone reported it. Welles was the boy throwing the blows.

  “Pounding on him,” Alison heard from Stone. And then heard it again. “Pound, pound, pound.”

  Alison was baffled. The only details she got were the plainest: Welles was on the front lawn of the family house on top of another boy and hitting him repeatedly. She knew she needed to get home and talk to her son.

  After getting back to Upper Nyack, she saw that Welles was unhurt, and in fact unmarked. He was calm.

  “Welles,” she asked, “what on earth happened? Who is this kid?”

  “He swung at me with his lunch box,” Welles said. “He was swinging at my head. So that’s when I just took him down.”

  The crossing guard at the intersection would corroborate Welles’s story. She had watched the tension building between the boys, and described it to the school administrators. She sensed the fuse.

  “Mrs. Crowther,” she said, “that boy picked on Welles every single day. Picked on him, tormented him.”

  Welles never spoke about any type of bullying with his mother at all, never betrayed that he was being picked on or harassed by another student. She knew her son well, and she knew his friends. But when asked, Welles told her plainly. The crossing guard’s account was spot on. He beat the snot out of the other boy.

  If there was any glint of pride in her, she hid it. But Alison understood, and inside she approved. She knew that Welles was doing what his father had told him to do. “Don’t ever start a fight,” Jeff had told his son years before. “But if one starts, be sure you finish it.”

  After finding out what happened, Alison paid a visit to the boy’s mother.

  “You’ve got to get your son to stop this,” she said. “He’s got to stop picking on my son.”

  It was maternal instinct guiding her, but unnecessary. Welles had delivered the message on the front lawn with his fists, settling the matter. He would have moments when he would be picked on as he continued through school, but not the same way, and never by the boy he felled on the front lawn.

  • • •

  It was the sound—the worst the boys had ever heard.

  Jon Hess and Keith O’Brien were friends and neighbors to Welles, frequent visitors to the Crowthers’ house on Birchwood after school, always ready to play the game of the day. They were competitive with one another, as most young athletes are. The pecking order eventually grew clear. Hess would become the best athlete among them, and among most of the boys his age in Nyack. Strong, fast, and instinctive, he was fluid on a field, a natural performer and leader in multiple sports in town, but lacrosse would become his focus. Later, at Princeton, he would have one of the greatest collegiate careers in the history of the sport, winning three national championships and being named the NCAA tournament’s most outstanding player as a junior in 1997. He would go on to play professionally, in the National Lacrosse League and Major League Lacrosse. Welles admired Hess deeply, to the point of idolizing him.

  O’Brien, like Hess, was a year older than Welles and a grade ahead of him in school. The two older boys would be his teammates in high school in Nyack, as well as friends after they’d all graduated.

  One spring day in 1989 when O’Brien and Hess were thirteen years old and Welles was twelve, they were playing at the back of the Crowthers’ driveway when they made the discovery.

  The Crowthers had a passion for prize boxers. They entered them in shows and competitions, and doted on them accordingly, as most owners of purebreds do. The dogs were four-legged siblings for the kids. At any given time, there were several purebreds in the house or in the wire-fenced dog run they’d built for the dogs in the yard.

  Blazer, the male, was older now and no longer ready for show, but the family kept him at Welles’s urging. He was Welles’s dog more than the others. There were two female boxers in the brood as well, Molly and Socks. They were all outside in the dog run that day as the boys played.

  Over their own shouts from the driveway, none of the boys heard or saw exactly what happened. But at some point, one of them noticed the evidence. Apparently, a groundhog had lost its balance on the retaining wall above the dog run and fallen into the pen. On instinct, the dogs attacked, mauling the animal. The boys found one of its detached limbs, a leg, lying just beyond the fence.

  The groundhog was barely able to escape, wedging itself between a gutter pipe and a retaining wall where the dogs could no longer reach it. Bleeding heavily from the stump where its leg had been ripped away, the animal breathed wildly, unable to move.

  The boys were stricken by the sight. They tried not to hear the yelps, or look at the fresh wound. They turned to one another. What do we do?

  Welles went inside the house and called his father.

  “Dad,” he said, “there’s a groundhog that got into the dog run, and the dogs went after it and chewed on it.”

  “How bad is it?” Jeff asked.

  “Bad.”

  “Well, then,” Jeff said, “you’ve got to put it out of its misery.”

  Welles didn’t understand.

  “You have that aluminum bat, the one you used to play Little League?”

  “Yes,” Welles said.

  “Take the dogs out of the run, put them in the house, and then use the bat. Hit the animal on the head.”

  Welles now understood what his father meant. He hung up the phone, found the bat, and came back outside, where Hess and O’Brien were waiting. He told his friends his father’s instruction. He didn’t offer the bat to either of them, nor did they ask for it. They could still hear the animal’s moans and, when they forced themselves to look, still see the blood.

  Welles began to cry as he walked to the spot where the groundhog lay, wounded and trapped. He raised the bat, brought it down on the animal’s head with a sickening crunch, the noise of bone shattering, and then did it again. Blood smeared the barrel of the bat and splattered, spraying upward toward Welles’s face. He struck down on the animal’s skull half a dozen times or more.

  “Keith and I were cowering in the corner, not even looking,” Hess said, remembering the scene outside the house. “One swing of the bat, and we covered our eyes and didn’t want to see anything anymore. . . . The sound was, it was breaking bones, there was blood. Welles was standing now, in full tears, swinging the bat. It was very difficult for him to do that.”

  O’Brien remembered it clearly as well. “It was traumatic for me,” he said. “You’re a kid. It’s not something you see, that kind of brutality. . . . It was something that had to be done, and he was the only one man enough to step up and do it.”

  After the final blows, Welles paused for a moment, and then went back inside the house to call his father.

  “I did it,” Welles said, in tears. Jeff could hear his son breathing hard through the line.

  “You did the right thing,” his father told him. A short time later, Jeff left the office and made his way home. When he got there, he found the groundhog’s shattered body, picked it up with a shovel, and carried it to the far edge of the backyard. He dug a small hole and buried it there. Welles didn’t watch his father, and didn’t ask what he’d done with the remains.

  Beyond the last phone call, neit
her mentioned it again.

  • • •

  Small, at five feet two inches and just over a hundred pounds, Welles still entered high school with a certain self-assurance—he was a good athlete, getting better, and a strong student on an honors track. Still, there were those who mocked him, sometimes good-naturedly and to his face, other times harshly and behind his back. He was different in ways easily spotted, even if he spent less time dwelling on the differences than others did. He was no rebel, nor was he caught up in anyone else’s desire to conform.

  One of the easiest targets was his wardrobe. In the early nineties, as the grunge scene took over suburban America, Nyack was no different. Ripped jeans and heavy flannels were the uniform of the day. Not for Welles.

  Michael Barch, a classmate and buddy, remembered the style years later. “He was the opposite,” Barch said. “L.L. Bean, Vineyard Vines. Nyack was old, grungy, plaid. Welles was wearing Polo shirts.”

  Keith O’Brien, who played hockey with Welles, remembered a time earlier when he got a new bag to carry all his gear—the skates, sticks, and pads that came along with the sport. The bags were massive, with handles large enough to slip over a player’s shoulder, perfect as a prop to use in a prank where Welles was the target.

  “We used to always make fun of Welles because he was so small,” said O’Brien. “We bet Welles, ‘I bet you can’t fit in the bag.’ So of course we got Welles to go into the hockey bag. Well, once you put him in the bag and zipped him up, what’s the next thing you do?”

  They looked to test the limits of the bag and its human cargo.

  “We lifted the bag and threw him down my stairs,” O’Brien said. “I remember that he fit into the hockey bag, and once we got him in there we said, okay, he is going down.” Welles emerged unhurt and, according to O’Brien, wasn’t a crybaby, in this case, or any other he could remember.