Grist Mill Road (20 page)

Christie Laing had a cousin, a boy in eighth grade called Ryan McMahan, who was known to most people at school as Ryan McMeathead, the football team's one-man wrecking ball. By the age of fourteen Ryan had developed a linebacker's neck and immense puffed-up arms. The Laings and McMahans were the northern equivalent of my daddy's side of our family, purebred hicks and Republican down to the bone.

So what with Patch being smart and neatly presented and having a lawyer Democrat for a father, he quickly became a target for Ryan McMeathead who had this fun game he liked to play where he'd fold and fold pieces of paper into thin strips, about three inches long, bend them into U-shapes, wet their ends, and let them dry out on a radiator until they turned hard as rock. Between lessons he'd sneak up on his victims with a rubber band stretched between thumb and forefinger, slip one of those hard U-shaped pellets over the band, draw the thing back and snap!

Patrick was one of his prime victims. The seat of his pants,
crack
! The cartilage at the back of his ear,
thwack
! His neck right above his shirt collar,
blam
! That time he snapped Patch on the neck, the welt stayed there in furious red for three whole days.

Like I said, I always thought there was more to Tricky than mere shyness, and what happened next made me want to become Patrick's friend even more, because goddammit if the button-down boy didn't go away and make his own pellets.

I guess McMeathead had driven him so mad, he didn't even think it all the way through, he just snuck up on McMeathead in the hallway and loosened his pellet so hard against the back of his skull,
smack
, you could've heard the hollow thud from several miles away. McMeathead screamed and started running around
like a balloon losing air while Patch stood there in shock, unsure what to do until McMeathead stopped yelping and dancing and turned on him—

You are a motherfucking dead man, McConnell.

At which point, Patch ran. He ran straight down the hallway and then out the school doors,
zoom
, pursued by McMeathead and his cohorts—Meatbrowski, Meatchini, O'Meatneck—but Patch was a lightning bolt compared to the lumbering meat-pack and they never got close to him. Round and round the sports fields they ran until Patch pulled a spin move and sprinted straight back to school, out of breath and trembling slightly when he sat down for geography.

It seemed like the whole room was in shock.

Way to go, Patch, I said, though he didn't acknowledge me.

Unfortunately, however, that wasn't the end of the McMeathead story. The world tells you to punch a bully on the nose and he'll leave you alone, and isn't that precisely what Patrick had done? The world knows less than shit.

Patch did a pretty good job of sneaking around for the rest of the day, avoiding the pack, staying well away from their meat lockers, but in homeroom, the day after his act of defiance, Christie Laing handed him a note. I didn't see the words, but everyone in the room knew what it said. Day, time, place.

Patch went pale and started to shrink like a sack of grain with a hole slashed in its belly, and then word got around between lessons. Behind the bleachers, lunchtime.

I could pretend that I came up with a plan right away, but the truth is I never made one.

A few hours later, I followed the small group of boys that ushered Patrick toward his fate, the large crowd that had gathered parting to let Patch into its ring.

I was pretty tall for my age, plus I was thirteen years old already, having been held back a year at school in Woodside, so it wasn't hard to find a spot from which I could see. I stood at the back of the crowd watching McMeathead in front of his pack, moving his fat head in circles. Ten yards away stood Patch, a kid
two years Ryan's junior and weighing in at a hundred pounds less. How was any of this fair? Patrick had chalked up a solitary act of retaliation in return for how many provocations? Nine, ten? A dozen?

You ready to settle this one on one? said McMeathead.

One on one? Patch was half the guy's size and shaking in terror. He moved his lips, but nothing audible came out.

McMeathead put his hand to his ear and laughed. This here was The Ryan McMeathead Show. In daily conversation he employed the vocabulary of a coloring book, and yet when it came to fighting talk, McMeathead was fluent.

Hey, kid, you know what? he said. I'll make you a promise. I won't go easy on you.

The pack snorted.

Patrick's arms went stiff, his fingers spread wide at the ends of his hands. Look, he said, I'm really sorry, OK?

Correction, said McMeathead, you will be. Now, you want some more time to piss your little pants or are they all good and pissed? At which point McMeathead started his slow lumber forward, flexing his fists in front of his huge barrel chest.

Like I said, I never came up with a plan, but there was a sense of anger running through me that began somewhere in my gut and then started to grow. As the anger got closer to my skin, it turned to rage, and the rage was electric, the rage needed to burst out from within.

I don't remember much about what happened next, just a few flashes of flesh and a humming in my ears that changed pitch whenever McMeathead landed a blow. In every fight I've had, and I've had my share, it's as if you move into a shadow world, a bubble forming around you, a place in which all of life becomes simplified, existence reduced to a single question—

How far are you prepared to go?

I've always known my answer to that question.

How far am I prepared to go? I will go further than you. However many weapons you're willing to bring, I will bring more. However low you go, you will never dig deeper than me. I will
win, because what this will cost me in pain, I will pay. My resources are limitless, I will always outbid you and I will never back down.

As soon as your opponent understands this, you have him defeated.

No one held me back, no one pulled me off. I don't remember much. At the end I was standing and Ryan McMeathead was down.

*   *   *

I WENT TO A RESTROOM
to wash his blood from my hands along with some of McMeathead's skin, which was stuck under my fingernails. Every now and then, someone would open the door, perform a rapid one-eighty, and the door would close again.

When recess was over, I headed back to class, but Patch wasn't there. I found out later he went to see the nurse, threw up in front of her, and got himself sent home for the afternoon. As for the other kids in our class, no one was looking straight at me, as if it were one of those schoolyard games, because every time I turned my head the children in that part of the room froze like statues. I won't pretend I didn't enjoy the sense of power, the feeling of respect. Now everyone knew my potential.

Only potential isn't worth all that much when five of them come at you from behind. It happened right after I stepped out of the doors at the end of the school day. They dragged me off to the side of the building, up against the wall, four-fifths of the meat-pack pinning each of my limbs to the brickwork, leaving Ryan McMeathead free to do whatever he wanted, his fat hands making fists, his arms swinging and swinging.

I closed my eyes and waited for it to end.

*   *   *

IT WASN'T THE WORST BEATING
I've ever had, some bruising and swelling, nothing broken, although bad enough I would have to take the next day off school.

It was only me and Billy when I got home, me being my
brother's de facto babysitter much of the time. Little Billy cried when he saw me and tried to stroke my bruises better, the way he often did. Several hours later, when I saw headlights swinging over the broken blinds of the living room, our mom being dropped off after her workday at the Blue Moon diner, I snuck off to bed.

Fortunately my daddy was passing through one of his brief phases of employment, so I didn't have to see him the next day. Three days later, when he noticed my faded wounds, I was able to say to him, Yeah, but you should see the other guy.

He liked that and chuckled.

But when my mom saw me the morning after it happened, she gasped. Oh, Matthew, she said. Oh, baby, this is the last time, I swear it, I promise. (How many times had it been the last?)

No, it wasn't him, Mom, I said, just some dumb kids at school.

Mom looked relieved and then fussed over me all morning, seeming to enjoy the chance to tend to some wounds, my daddy never letting her touch him after one of his brawls.
It's nothing, Lucille, lucky fuckin shot, that's all.
She heated tomato soup and fed it to me, wiping my chin while I struggled to swallow, and kept bringing me ice wrapped in a dishcloth while we watched her daytime shows. When she left for her shift at the diner in the afternoon, I fell asleep on the couch.

I was woken up by a knocking at the door. When I looked out the window and saw it was Patch, my first thought was not to answer, embarrassed to see him standing outside our run-down shack of a home, barely better than a trailer, Patch looking church-neat in his shirtsleeves.

I opened up, Patch looking at me, horrified and confused.

Fucking cowards, I said. Jumped me from behind, needed five of them.

Oh, shoot, he said. You OK?

I will be, I said. How about you?

Me? he said, sounding shocked. I mean, good, but … Look, the reason I came here, about what happened, I just wanted to say—

Hey, I said, interrupting as fast as I could, you wanna come in?

Sure, he said, nodding uncertainly. When Patch stepped inside, you could see he was looking for some kind of doormat on which to wipe his feet, but then, finding nothing, he crouched down and started untying his laces.

Don't worry about it, I said.

Patch pulled off his shoes anyway. That was the start of it all.

 

NEW YORK, 2008

 

MATTHEW

I loved it in the Swangums, the summer of '81 one of the best of my life, me and Tricky spinning up the hill together and gazing down at shadows, the clouds in the sky painting dark lakes on the earth and our friendship growing little by little as we played our own games, turning life into a daily adventure. When the heat rose, we'd jump into the cool waters of Lake Swangum or spread-eagle ourselves against the damp flanks of the ice caves. We plunked cans, built forts, ate wild blueberries, showered beneath waterfalls …

Adventure was the opposite of school, adventure was a real education.

However, we were boys and often there was an edge to our fun. Sometimes I'd hide in our fort and let Tricky attack with a slingshot to see if it could withstand a raid. Other times we'd roughhouse a little, which I thought might be a learning experience for Tricky, useful if he ever found himself embroiled with another McMeathead. There was also the time we made a spear and I threw it at Tricky, grazing his leg, and then told him to throw it at me, only Tricky seemed upset and wouldn't do it.

Nothing scared me. To this day nothing does. I thought I might grow up to be a stunt man or a fighter pilot. I liked jumping between the outcrops at Steeple Rocks, Tricky telling me to stop
because it made him feel sick just watching me, which was something I never understood at all. Every time I'd just laugh and find a larger gap to launch myself across. When we'd play Tarzan, swinging across the stream, Tricky always wanted to pick a spot by some deep water, but I wanted to go where the rocks were sharp. I loved the thrill. I've always felt a supreme sense that nothing will ever go wrong.

If anyone was to hold a gun to my head, for example, I wouldn't be scared because I wouldn't believe they had any intention to pull the trigger, even though I understand that they might—I'm not stupid.

That's just how I feel. That's how everything feels.

Eventually winter intruded on the games of '81 with its inevitable snowfalls, each new layer of crust building on the next beneath the air's deep freeze, and being snowbound made me feel itchy, although at least we could hang out at Tricky's place shooting tanks or flying biplanes on his Atari and watching shows the McConnells had taped off TV,
The Dukes of Hazzard, Fantasy Island
. But still, I couldn't wait for the thaw, glancing hopefully out of my bedroom window each morning, about to begin another turgid day, school always rolling so slowly, the same changeless routine every day—move from point A to point B, wait forty minutes, go to point C, wait forty minutes, D, E, F … How was it that no one else could see this? We were all being trained as drones, everyone just waiting to be dropped into the appropriate box. The whole thing made me restless, my agitation with school often getting me in trouble, although mostly for nothing more than mouthing off or not doing homework. I didn't get into any more fights—didn't need to.

Only then something happened that shook up those school days a little.

The two most attractive girls in our year were Hannah Jensen and Christie Laing. Hannah Jensen was sweet and seemed smart and was pretty as hell—although she came across kind of young for her age. Christie Laing, on the other hand, wasn't sweet. Christie Laing was a nasty piece of work, the kind of girl who
brought out the worst in others. Normally I stayed away from people like her if I could, but the problem was, Christie was hot, a hot blonde, and then one day, she kissed me.

In my defense, although I might not have liked Christie at all, theoretically speaking, I was a pubescent boy, fourteen years old. What was I supposed to do? At a certain age, most boys would fuck a bucket if you gave it long hair and a girl's name. Well, I was definitely at a certain age—and also the only boy in seventh grade who had reached that age, as far as I could tell, more than a year older and foot taller than almost any other kid in my year, seventh grade being a particularly strange stage of growing up anyway, what with the fact that half the girls in our year were taller than two-thirds of the boys. Some of those boys were still doing all the same things they'd been doing since five years of age, happy just playing with plastic trucks or toy soldiers or
Star Wars
action figures.

I'm pretty sure that at this point in our lives there were only two people in seventh grade prepared to make a fully fledged commitment to their puberty. So you could say that when it came to Christie and me, it was nothing more than a coupling of convenience.

It didn't take long for it to go beyond kissing and groping. One day during recess, Christie slunk up to me. (We never made a show of being together—which was fine with me, by the way—because Christie didn't want her cousin Ryan to know. This was probably the most sensitive thing she'd ever done in her life.) In a half-whisper, she then went on to tell me that her house would be empty after school that afternoon. Did I want to come for some fun?

That was my very first time with a girl, with anyone in fact, up in Christie's bedroom, me concentrating on performing the role properly while two posters stared down at us from above the headboard, one from the movie
Grease,
the other of Michael Jackson looking sultry in purple silk, the shirt open to his waist, his skin darker and nose fuller than in later years.

While Christie was wiggling beneath me, considerably more
adept at playing her part than I was, I looked up at the
Grease
poster. There was Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) pictured after her transformation in the movie from sweet Sandy to slutty Sandy, a hot tousled blonde with big hair. Down beneath me was Christie, a hot tousled blonde with big hair.

Up, down, up, down, up, down …

Sandy from
Grease
had her arms around Danny (John Travolta). I looked at his hair, dark and slick, his eyes twinkling twice as blue as Sandy's. His lips were fuller than hers as well and he was coming across as both masculine and vulnerable at the same time.

Sandy, Danny, Sandy, Danny, Sandy, Danny …

That's when John Travolta broke character and launched into one of those trademark smirks of his. That's right, John Travolta was looking at me like he knew where I'd rather be—and with whom.

I thrust a little harder. Christie gasped, her nails digging into my back.

The second time we had sex beneath Christie's posters, it was Michael Jackson who volunteered himself to my gaze.

OK, so this was getting complicated, and there was an odd feeling inside of me, possibly something a little like fear. Although wasn't I bored of life with its pointlessly black-and-white rules? And hadn't the world shaken things up for me?

Only life was about to get even more complicated than posters of John Travolta and Michael Jackson.