Land of the Blind (3 page)

“Okay.” She stands to leave.
Statement of Fact.
This guy’s a lawyer, she thinks.

“One more question, Caroline,” he says as she’s on her way out.

She turns back from the door. His hair has fallen over his eye patch and he looks like a kid all of a sudden. That’s the thing about men, even crazy ones; after a while, they all turn into boys.

“Why’d you become a police officer?” he asks.

Caroline doesn’t hesitate as she reaches for the door. “I like the snow.”

E
li Boyle’s dandruff was more than enough indignity for one child. In fact, the word “dandruff” barely did it justice. He was like a snow globe turned upside down, drifting flakes on the Empire State Building or the St. Louis Arch or the Golden Gate. Our classmates made sudden noises—clapping their hands or dropping books—just to see Eli’s head snap around and the snow dislodge and cascade from his head, drift onto his desk and settle on the floor of the classroom. When he sneezed, teachers would stop lecturing until the ash settled. It was hard to believe a human head could flake so much without losing actual mass, and the glacial till of Eli Boyle’s scalp was discussed with some seriousness as a potential science project. Walking down the hall, the dead, flaking snow covered his shoulders like two lesser peaks beneath Boyle’s Everest of a head. So, as I say, at least the way I remember it, Eli Boyle’s dandruff would have been enough humiliation for one kid to bear, enough embarrassment to ruin his life the way lives are ruined in elementary school, before they actually begin.

But dandruff was only the first of Eli’s afflictions. I will list them here, but please don’t think me cruel, or blame me for piling these horrors upon him. I was not his Maker; Someone Else visited these burdens upon Eli Boyle, Someone Far Crueler Than I. Or just more indifferent. And don’t think for a moment that I take anything but the most humble responsibility in relating these difficulties. When I am finished with this confession, this affidavit, this statement of fact, it will come as no surprise that Eli Boyle turned out to be a better man than I, and nothing would make me happier than to report now that the adolescent version of that good man started life with a clean slate, or at least a clean scalp. But I cannot. So I offer this accounting with no great joy, but with a fidelity to truth and a desire to re-create for those who care, for the record, I suppose, an Eli Boyle whole and pristine,
just as he was then, all the more amazing when you consider the list of ruined parts that comprised him:

He had bad breath, like he’d eaten sour cream from a cat box. He wore braces on his teeth and his legs; had acne and a unique bacon-flavored body odor; picked his nose and ate what he mined; exhibited a zest for epic, untimely flatulence (the Social Studies Incident of 1976; the Great 1980 Pep Assembly Blowout…); wore black-framed, Coke-bottle glasses; had thin red hair, skid marks in his underwear, and allergies to pollen, cotton, peanuts, and soap. He had a limp, a lisp, a twitch, waxy ears, gently crossed eyes, and was—how to put this—afflicted by the random popping of inappropriate erections, boners as we would say then, as we
did
say then, through his gray, standard-issue PE shorts.

His overprotective mother dressed him like a janitor in Dickey overalls and flannel shirts at a time—the mid-1970s—when everyone else wore designer jeans and varsity T’s. He was the oldest kid I ever knew to wet his pants at school, to cry, to sit in the front of the school bus, to call out for his mommy. He rode a three-wheeled bike with a flag on the back because of “balance” problems; ate a special lunch with no milk or cheese or whole grains; and had grand mal seizures, blackouts, muscle spasms, and fits of gagging. He had to wear corrective shoes because of a deformed foot. He had scoliosis, skin lesions, and scabies, and the nurse was always hauling him off for impetigo or indigestion or impacted turds or any of the other nasty bugs that he carried around like his only friends. The fact that he lived in a trailer wasn’t awful in itself, because the great, prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale also lived in a trailer, but Eli Boyle lived alone with his mother in the worst park in the worst trailer, an old gray can with a dirt lawn and stained sheets for curtains.

He was what we called then “a B-Flat SpEd,” which meant that while he was in special education, there was nothing really wrong with him. He was brighter than the other SpEds and was able to pull B’s and C’s in regular classes, with the occasional A, although he was a miserable failure in that rigid and unforgiving society that is really the only society. It occurs to me now that he may have been mildly autistic, but we didn’t know that word and so we felt accurate then in calling him a spaz, a loop, a ’tard, a dork, a
dweeb, a dick, a freak. It was said that even the other ’tards in special ed made fun of Eli.

So that’s him, as complete and flawed and tragic and sad, as wonderful as I can remember him, as pure and imperfect, as unforgettable as anyone I’ve ever known. Eli Boyle. The man who saved my life.

And the man whose life I have taken.

Y
ou must forgive the formal informality of this tract or report or confession, this statement of fact. Even before this trouble I was told that I write like a disgraced lawyer (so is that irony or premonition?) and since my ambitions and insecurities pulled me toward a political career that anyone with a local newspaper would know flamed out brilliantly and prematurely—here I go offering the obvious as proof of the obvious—I have developed that unique, self-serving, solipsistic style of intellect that arises among attorneys, politicians, and strip-club dancers (I plead guilty to two of the three) and that is why I might now and then lapse into the kind of writing that we lawyers are trained to commit, using language to obscure and obfuscate rather than clarify and communicate.

So, when I say that it is Eli Boyle’s life that I have taken, you may ask yourself, Is he simply being metaphoric? Yes and no. But let me say, there is nothing metaphoric about this confession, nothing metaphoric in my hatred and rage and my thirst for revenge, nothing metaphoric about the person I set out to kill, the handgun I held in my hand, the blood that crept across the floor beneath my feet.

But that is all ending, and before I tell the ending I must tell the beginning:

Start by picturing my neighborhood in the mid-1970s: poor and uneducated and ignorant of even those facts, a strip of sorry homes three blocks wide and a mile long, a thin cut of plywood shacks, trailers, and single-story war-era baby boomer starters that kids at school called the “white ghetto,” weeds and falling shingles and axle-rusted pickup trucks parked on gray yards next to vacant lots where kids smoked pot and cigarettes; a grocery store on the near end, the gravel pits of an excavation company on the far, a long street of houses pinched like an ant farm between the dirty plate glass of the Spokane River and our rutted, potholed road, after which my neighborhood was named:

Empire.

Life on Empire Road began at the bus stop. I have heard that our first conscious memories occur at four or maybe three, but my first sense of myself was in the socialization of later elementary school, fourth and fifth grade, and it was as a fifth grader, a short, insecure eleven-year-old, that I first remember seeing Eli Boyle.

He had decided to walk down the long row of dreary houses to our bus stop because the torture at his own stop had become unbearable. Once again, I ask you to imagine a neighborhood stretched like a rubber band until it is too long and too thin and strained in the center. Picture six bus stops along this strip of despair, mine second in line. My family was typical of the Empire neighborhood: poor and white, father a night custodian, mother what was called then a housewife. There were four of us kids. My sister Meg was five and in kindergarten, so Mom drove her to and from school. Shawna was four and didn’t go to school yet.

So that left little brother Ben (two years younger than I) to trudge with me the long block to our bus stop. There, twenty-five kids gathered beneath a willow tree that wasn’t so much weeping as oozing. Beneath this tree, a nest of kids aged six to sixteen quickly found places: the older you were, the deeper you went into the tree and the more adult your behavior. The willow tree sat in the front yard—although I hesitate to call that tangle of bunchgrass and clover a yard—of Will the Hippie, who wasn’t a hippie and wasn’t really named Will, but such was the intelligence that flowed around the bus stop because he used an American flag as a curtain on his broken living room window. Add the fact that he’d painted the word
WILL
on his garage and certain assumptions were made, assumptions which were deflated two years later when the man whose name was not Will sat on his roof with a Korean-made assault rifle and shot out the windows of about a dozen cars and houses in the neighborhood and murdered two dogs and six mailboxes before walking up to the county sheriff’s car and surrendering to the two frightened deputies huddling on its floor.

Like me, Eli was a fifth grader the first time he made his way to our stop. I was in the process of leaving my brother and venturing deeper into the willow, not quite to where the oldest girls and boys were making out and doing research on the tensile strength of bra straps, but to the midpoint, where the sixth and seventh graders stood smoking cigarettes and the occasional joint. I had pilfered four of my dad’s Pall Mall cigarettes, running my finger along
the luxurious, cellophane-encased package and the lion crest. “Pall Mall.” I said it over and over. It was so elegant. I wanted it to be my name. “Hello. My name is Paul. Paul Mall.”

“Good God Friday, where are you going, Clark?” my brother Ben whispered, but I ignored him and kept moving, past the smaller kids and deeper into the branches. The bigger kids did not look up when I arrived at their denim circle in the midway point of the willow, shuffling in my bell-bottom corduroys, the one pair of “cool pants” I owned and the only pair I ever wore to school. They didn’t acknowledge me when I reached in the pocket of my yellow polyester BMX polo shirt and they didn’t flinch when I removed a single white cigarette, squinted my eyes, placed it between my lips, and pretended to pat my pockets like a man who’s lost his wallet.

“Anyone got a light?” I asked. And then, finally, horribly, they noticed. Bushy heads turned and from that clutch of lanky, narrow-eyed trouble stepped Pete Decker of all people, who looks in my memory like a seventh-grade Clint Eastwood and who, it was rumored, had been kicked out of Golden Gloves boxing for cheating or biting or paralyzing a kid, depending on which version of the story you heard. Flame leapt from Pete’s lighter and he narrowed his eyes and took me in, the cigarette dangling from my mouth. Below that, my Adam’s apple bobbed with a nervous swallow.

“Good, huh?” he asked.

I nodded, inhaled, and coughed twice, my eyes smoking red. By now the sixth and seventh graders were watching, because they’d never seen Pete go out of his way to do anything to a smaller kid but take his money and knock him into the street. But Pete just stood there, watching me hack away on my first cigarette, eyes watering, nose burning.

“Smooth,” he said.

I nodded, unable to speak, and had the sense that the crowd was moving in on us, surrounding us. Even Tanya Bentitz and Eric Mullay looked up. Usually they were entwined, bobbing for tonsils during the entire wait for the bus, rolling around in the furthest reaches of the tree, beyond our imaginations. I remember wishing (or perhaps I have constructed it now; you need only run your own elementary school memories to test the accuracy of mine) that I could step away too, that I could go back to being part of the circle instead of the meat inside it.

“What’s your name?” Pete asked.

“Clark,” I said.

“Been smoking long, Clark?” Pete asked.

“Couple years,” I said. Which means I would have started at nine.

I once imagined tracking Pete Decker down. I thought about starting a smoking clinic in which Pete got smokers to quit by giving the same treatment he gave me that day. Quickly, without dwelling on my pain, because it’s not my pain that matters, here’s what happened:

Pete stepped up toward my face, his eyes slits. He formed his index finger and thumb into an OK sign, lifted them to my face, and performed a perfect example of what we used to call
flick-the-cherry,
knocking the burning ember from the end of the cigarette so that it was no longer lit. Before I knew it Pete had me in a headlock, had pulled me to the ground, yanked my arm up into my back, let go of the headlock, and with his other hand grabbed a handful of my hair. He beat my face into the gravel at the spot where the road blended into Will the Hippie’s yard. I remember the sound of my nose hitting the ground. I remember opening my bleary eyes and seeing the tiny pieces of blood-spattered rock scatter before my face. And I remember that Pete dragged me—eyes clouded, nose clogged with blood—a few feet to where the burning cherry sat smoldering in the grass.

“Eat it,” he said. I did, reached out with my tongue and enveloped the burning ash, pulled it into my mouth and swallowed.

“Cool,” Pete said, and he let go of me. Of course it’s easy to criticize Pete Decker’s behavior at the bus stop that day. Easy to imagine him a bully or a criminal and assume that he has made nothing but trouble of his life since. But as someone who has done wrong, I have to tell you: I never smoked another cigarette after that day. Which just proves my point. There are a hundred ways to save someone’s life. And, I suppose, just as many ways to take one.

But Pete Decker’s impromptu smoking intervention is not the story I set out to tell and, in a way, it is simply prologue to the real story, which began that day as well. As I crawled, whimpered, and bled out of the long arms of the willow tree, the crowd turned away from me, rather than earn a beating for sympathizing. From the ground, I watched as even my brother Ben turned away, hiding the family resemblance. Every pair of shoes faced away from me except one, a pair of smudged black shoes with metal braces hooked to the soles and connected to straps at the calves. And when I looked
up at the bent legs and scoliatic back, at the pinched, dandruffed shoulders that owned those shoes, I saw the only person in the crowd who measured me with anything but disdain. There, standing at my bus stop, a line of snot on his upper lip, grease in his hair, a look of sheer empathy and…fucking beatitude on his miserable face, was Eli Boyle.