Land of the Blind (6 page)

“That was a good fight,” he said, slapping me on the back. “That fucker jumped you, man. He didn’t fight fair at all.” Pete was panting. There was sweat on his upper lip, making the hair below his nose look almost like a mustache. I looked at one of the goons, who seemed ready enough to accept Pete’s description of the good fight and the idea that I had somehow been jumped, and I wondered if Pete’s goons even processed their own thoughts. “You’d have killed him if he fought fair,” Pete said. And he began walking toward his house, a goon on either side.

I looked up the street, to where Eli had already gathered his things. He was no longer crying, and he seemed oblivious to the damage he’d done to my face. He walked home, bent at the waist, as if nothing had happened.

At home my sisters were playing Barbies on the porch, and they stared at me wide eyed as I came up the sidewalk. Being all of five, Meg saw her job as explaining the world to Shawna, and so she bent over and whispered, “Clark got all beat up.”

“By bad guys?” Shawna asked, and Meg nodded.

Ben had stayed home sick that day and he was on the couch, reading a Flash comic book. He looked at me as if I were covered in blood—which, of course, I was. “Hot Christ buns,” he said, “what happened to you?”

That brought my mother from the kitchen, where she usually spent the afternoons sorting through the Avon cosmetics and sundries that she stockpiled in the house. She was supposed to sell these Avon products door-to-door in the neighborhood and at swanky Avon parties that she shamed friends and relatives into attending, but my mother didn’t like to bother people, and so the Avon products had taken over our house and our basement was filled with boxes of foundation eyeliner and birdhouses and perfume (I got regular
nighttime erections just thinking about the case of “Nights of Romance” perfume underneath my bed.) “Who did this to you? Was it that boy, Pete Drecker?” She waved a pair of Avon candlesticks at me. “I’m going to march down there and talk to his mother.”

“No,” I said. “I just fell down.”

But she wouldn’t buy it, and finally I had to admit that it was in fact Eli Boyle who had done this to me.

Ben slapped his forehead. “Jesus meet the neighbors!”

Even Mom was changed by this bit of news. “Huh,” she said. “The boy with the…” She gestured around her face as if we were talking about the Elephant Man.

“Yeah,” I said, staring at the ground.

“Oh,” she said, and looked down at the candlesticks in her hands. The idea of waving candlesticks at the mother of such a boy was less interesting and my mother just sort of shrugged and half turned back toward the kitchen, suddenly faced with a problem potentially worse than her son being beaten up by a bully: her son being beaten up by an Eli Boyle. “You…um…you should talk to your father about defending yourself, Clark,” she said. “And you shouldn’t get into fights.”

Staring at my bloodied face, Ben shook his head. “I’ll say.”

M
uhammad Eli disappeared from the bus stop the very next day. I guess his mom began driving him to school, but however he got there he was in class when I arrived, sitting in his desk, open-pit nose mining. The nickname—Muhammad Eli—was Ben’s idea and I have to say that I was happy that it didn’t catch on. In fact, I was shocked that day to hear that I’d actually kicked Eli’s ass. Even the people who’d witnessed my beating bought into Pete Decker’s fiction and suddenly I understood the power of propaganda. At the bus stop guys clapped me on the back and told me they’d heard it was a great fight.

“That asshole’s lucky he ran away,” said one of Pete’s thugs. “Clark was about to kick his ass.”

“About to?” Pete asked. “My boy whipped his ass.”

At recess, Dana Brett strode up to me in her suede boots and miniskirt and told me matter-of-factly that I was a bully. I didn’t know what to say: cop to being a bully (which I wasn’t), or admit that a spaz like Eli had actually beaten me up? At lunch I watched Eli work the edges of the playground, the way he always did, picking his way along the chain-link fence. I wanted to apologize. I really did. But how do you apologize to someone who has, in fact, beaten you up?

Eli wasn’t on the bus that afternoon either. I sat staring out the window, the sun high and bright, washing the blue from the sky.

“Clark the Hammer,” Pete Decker said. “Big Bad Clark Mason.”

The next morning Eli still didn’t show at our stop, and Pete and his gang took this as proof that—despite what they’d seen—I actually inflicted great damage upon my opponent. I slumped past Eli’s empty seat behind the bus driver and sat near the back. When Woodbridge got on the bus he stopped at my seat, stuck out his lower lip, and nodded slowly, approvingly, as if checking out the latest model of bully.

“I heard you beat that fat, greasy-haired faggot’s ass,” he said. “Queer probably transferred to another school.”

“Fuckin’ retard fag queer,” Pete muttered.

“Yeah,” Woodbridge said. “Fuckin’ fag.”

At school, I looked for opportunities to make eye contact with Eli, a shrug that might communicate that we were both victims in this, that we had both come out with bloody noses, that no harm was done. But Eli had found his place beneath the rest of us, and he scurried around with his head bowed, staring at his black shoes.

I tried to catch sight of his mother driving him to and from school, but they left early for school and apparently left late for home. Spring was a blink, just a suggestion of time, all shadow and no cast; it was the first season that I remember going faster than I expected, and the first time I realized that time actually moved in a certain direction, toward something that wasn’t just the piling up of days and weeks and school years, but a point that had its own weight. It was like the first time you realize, as a kid, that all the escalator steps aren’t collected in the basement. That spring I saw myself in junior high and high school and beyond, and I saw the kids before me and after me as fellow travelers, and like any whiff of mortality it was powerful and frightening. I’d like to say that I found in this season of epiphany the time to offer a quiet apology to Eli, but to be honest the days were made up of Presidential Fitness Tests and Smear the Queer and the accidental grazing of Marcia Donnely’s left boob, one of only two actual boobs in our class (Marcia Donnely’s right being the other). And then, one day, it was the last week of school and we cut off the brown grocery sacks that had covered our textbooks, and we used knives from the cafeteria to clean the gum off the bottoms of our desks, and we prepared for the last days of fifth grade with the awareness that life was beginning.

Every summer I took over a newspaper route for an older guy in our neighborhood, and this time I promised to let my brother Ben help me out. We started the last week of school; I got up at four-thirty and pedaled around with him pointing out the houses that took the paper and then sliding it into the rusted metal tubes and snazzy-looking new plastic boxes. It was almost six when we came riding back down Empire Road toward our house. We pedaled through a couple of backyards and came out at the RiverVu Trailer
Park—the only accurate word of that title being
Trailer,
since there was no
Vu
of the
River
and this was certainly no
Park
. I rode past the trailer of the great, prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale, his cherry GTO in the driveway behind his parents’ Mercury Sable. I stood on my bicycle pedals and tried to look into his window, trying to imagine the things he must do to cheerleaders in that little trailer.

And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eli emerge from the last trailer on the street and begin walking down the strip of houses. I circled around and watched from a block away as he shuffled in that familiar walk, the clattering of his leg braces the only noise competing with the birds in the neighborhood.

When I got home, my mom had made pancakes for my little sisters. I can still see Mom at the counter in the kitchen, short and slender in one of my dad’s big gray sweatshirts, which covered her like a bulky dress, and a pair of fuzzy slippers, smelling like a catalog of Avon products, the smoke from her cigarette curling around the long hair piled atop her head. “Clark? I’m making the girls some pancakes.”

“No time.”

I ran past her, got my book bag and my Nerf football, and ran back into the kitchen, grabbing my brown sack lunch off the counter.

“What do you mean no time? There’s always time for breakfast.”

“Not today. I’m riding my bike to school.”

Finally, she turned. It’s funny. The small things I took for granted then torture me now in their simple perfection: a plate of pancakes, a hand on my shoulder, a look of deep concern. You have no idea when you’re so eager to escape your own house, your own life, your own childhood, of the sad truth that no one will ever care for you like that again.

“You can’t ride your bike, Clark. It’s three miles.”

“I can ride three miles.”

My dad came out in pajama bottoms and no shirt, rubbing his head and patting his belly, inadvertently mastering the test of coordination that we used to dare one another. He kissed Mom on the top of the head and she handed him a plate of pancakes.

“You’re not riding your bike to school on an empty stomach.”

“I’ll eat there.”

I started for the door and she put her hands on her hips. “But school doesn’t even start for an hour and a half.”

“Gotta go,” I said, and ran out the door, tossed the canvas newspaper bag on the porch, and climbed on the banana seat of my Schwinn Scrambler. Maybe I could apologize on the road. But Eli was nowhere on Empire and so I pedaled down the busier Trent, keeping my eyes open until finally I saw him, a hundred yards ahead of me, walking along the railroad tracks on the other side of Trent. He moved with that same inward shuffle that he used at school. He favored his bent left leg, but since the toes on his right leg pointed in a few degrees it was a kind of double limp, exaggerated by his leg braces. Something about his walk had always seemed familiar to me, and as I shadowed him down Trent I understood what it was: some old black-and-white movie I’d seen in which a gangster was shackled and cuffed and hobbled down death row while the other prisoners hissed and made catcalls. With his leg braces, his hippity-hoppity, stare-at-the-ground gait, that’s what Eli Boyle appeared to be, a prisoner on his way to his maker.

I checked my watch. It was six-thirty in the morning. I had been assuming that Eli’s mother drove him to and from school every day to keep him from being beaten up; in fact he had been walking all this time, leaving two hours early to avoid Pete Decker and Matt Woodbridge. But no, that wasn’t quite right; he hadn’t walked to school to avoid those two bullies. No, he hadn’t started walking until the day he and I fought. My belligerence was his last straw.

I rode so slowly on the shoulder of the road that I could barely stay up, zigzagging my front wheel to keep my balance. Every few minutes a tractor trailer or molten-aluminum truck from the Kaiser plant would blow by and I would nearly lose my balance, but I kept at it, watching Eli on the tracks, across twenty feet of weeds and scrub grass. He never looked up. He arrived at school at a quarter after seven, a full hour before the bell would ring. I padlocked my bike and followed a safe distance behind, unaware that the school even opened this early. He walked past the janitors, who smoked cigarettes and carried rolls of toilet paper into the bathrooms. I followed him past the office, where the principal, Joe Boner, leaned against the secretary’s desk, pleading with her about something. Past the glass trophy case with its pictures of former students who’d died in Vietnam and the award named for Woodbridge’s brother. Finally, he turned into the gymnasium. I was
stunned. Of all the places for Eli to kill an hour before school, I would never have guessed the gym, a veritable torture chamber for a kid like Boyle.

I caught up and peeked in the gym, but he was gone. There was an entrance to the boys’ locker room at the end of the gym, but no way he’d have made it there before I got to the door. He’d simply disappeared. I wondered for a second if I’d made the whole thing up. Imagine. Eli Boyle walking two miles to school. Two miles back. With his gnarled legs and crooked feet? Imagine the fear he had of the bus stop, of the bullies of Empire. Imagine him going into the gym, of all places.

Then, in the gaps between the bleachers, I caught a glimpse of greasy hair, of overalls and flannel. I crept up behind the wood bleachers, which were pulled out so that only the bottom two rows were accessible. But it was enough that someone could slide underneath, and that’s where Eli sat, on the floor beneath the bleachers, amid the gum and candy wrappers and smashed popcorn, slats of light coming in between the bleacher seats. He sat with his notebook open, writing something, or drawing, possibly the tanks and airplanes that he was always sketching.

His back was to me, and if he knew someone was watching he gave no indication, just sat curled up on himself, as if he could pull in more, disappear from the world. I opened my mouth to say something—
I’m sorry
—but nothing came out. I backed out of the gym and made my way down the hall. I peeked in the office, but the principal was now gone and the secretary was staring out the door, her head tilted, mouth wide open, like she wasn’t seeing whatever was in front of her eyes, like she was imagining something entirely different.

My movement into her field of vision snapped her out of it, and she wiped at her eyes. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I go to school here,” I said.

She straightened some things on her desk and swallowed. “I know. I mean…it’s very early.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but the principal’s door opened and Mr. Bender popped his head out. “Look, Peg, I’m sorry if I led you to believe that this was anything other than two people—”

She cleared her throat and nodded toward me, and Mr. Bender followed her gaze to me, standing flat-footed in the doorway.

“Oh, hello, Mason. What are you doing here?”

“I go to school here,” I answered again.

“Right,” he said.

He came out, his eyebrow up, like he was figuring a problem. “Okay then, well. I was just having a discussion with Mrs. Federick. And…if I led you to believe, Mrs. Federick, that”—and now he looked from me to her and back again—“that…uh, that the other bus driver I was telling you about would approve of me…you know, riding your bus…well, obviously, I’ve got a lot of time invested with that bus driver. As you do with your…bus driver. One ride on another bus doesn’t…”

He seemed confused by his own words and he turned and went back into his office. Mrs. Federick stared at his door and I slipped away.

That day we cleaned out our desks and went outside for a huge game of tug-of-war with the other fifth-grade class. In a rare moment of kindness, Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley allowed Eli to skip the game, but his parole was cut short when she forced him to stand in the middle and be the judge of which team won. A ribbon was tied in the center of the rope and two lines were painted on the grass, about fifteen feet apart. We had to pull the ribbon over the line closest to us and Mr. Gibbons’s class had to pull the ribbon over the line closest to them. In the middle stood Eli, staring at the ground.

“Go!” Mr. Gibbons said, and we pulled with everything we had, boys and girls alike. The rope snapped tight and then began moving toward their side, and something about the screams and the strain on that rope transformed Eli. He skipped to his right, holding up his right hand to indicate that Mr. Gibbons’s class was winning. Fletcher and I were in the front; we led a charge back the other way and Eli sidestepped toward us, raising his left hand. Now the ribbon changed direction again and Eli, caught off guard, lost his balance but then regained it and began sliding away from us again. Staring at that ribbon, his eyes seemed engaged for the first time I could remember, and he smiled and made a funny noise that I realized was a kind of rusty laughter. I had to block Eli out to help my side stop the erosion, and the ribbon settled in the middle, and when I looked up, Eli had his arms straight out, indicating we were back at equilibrium. Behind me I felt something give, and then Fletcher lost his balance and kicked my legs out from under me, and the rope was pulled quickly the other way and from my back—as I was dragged across the grass—I saw Eli sliding sideways quickly, his right arm straight in
the air, his glasses having fallen to the end of his nose, so intent was he on calling the progress of this match. The ribbon crossed their line, and he threw both his hands in the air to indicate that the match was over. Then he bent his knees and pointed both hands at Mr. Gibbons’s class. They had won. He stood there for the longest time, both his hands pointed to his right, panting, a half-smile on his face. Then he straightened up, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and looked from one side to the other, shyly, as if asking, Did you see what I just did?

Everyone let go of the rope, the teachers blew their whistles, and we were escorted back to our classrooms to wait for the bus to take us home for the summer. No one said a thing to Eli; he simply curled up on himself again, slinking away before the moment could be taken from him.