Once You Break a Knuckle (12 page)

Wherever we went in that gully, Mitch led. We never took the easy way. We'd sneak about on the dirty hillsides and search for others like ourselves and, if the coast was clear, Mitch would skid down to the path on the heels of his sneakers. There, he reached for low-hanging branches and coiled them down to hook onto roots – if a kid came by, those branches would whip them in the teeth. At least that was the plan. But each day the branches were unhitched and swaying like power lines, and I dare you to tell Mitch the wind had blown them free. It was other kids. Getting hit in the teeth.

The gully was just practice for him, small change. As an adult, he'd ward off a cougar with one-liners from
Dirty
Harry
and a pair of sticks held akimbo. He once lost three thousand dollars of camera equipment down a chasm on Jumbo Glacier; he fought a bear, at a cabin in Dunbar – scurried onto the roof and when the beast clambered after him he bludgeoned it with the chimney bucket.

But he was one hell of a woodsman even that day in grade seven. We moved with extra caution because we figured Jordan and his friends would be back. You never really defeat the hicks. Not in that town. Not at that age. They had nothing better to do. They were unavoidable, like chicken pox, and they never lost a fight because even if you knocked one down they'd just lie to their friends.

Mitch crouched low amid the foliage. His T-shirt was muddied and dirty and I didn't tell him this but the blood from his back had soaked through. He picked at a nearby bush and snapped its branches as he sat.

—Think we lost them? he said.

—It's quiet.

He bit the corner of his lip. There were more than a dozen places where we could have climbed out of the gully, could have got off scratch free.

—Think they'll be watching the entire road? he said.

—They have better things to do.

Mitch didn't answer. He picked at that bush and snapped the twigs and tossed them one by one onto the ground, squinted his eyes. I sat and waited for him to finish thinking. I could see schemes whirring in his mind, the way his forehead pulled in, the way he played with a twirl of his brown hair. He didn't get to rebel much.

—I bet they're watching the road, he said.

—Maybe.

—Are you scared?

—No.

—Let's go check the rope swing, he said.

—Why?

—In case they're there. So we know not to go that way.

—They'll beat us up.

—I'll take a stick, he said, and wandered a small distance on his knees and hefted a stick from the ground. It was long and a little green and not brittle. A good stick.

—Are you scared? he said.

—No.

Mitch could have cut circles around those guys, even if they were at the rope swing. He could have picked any number of ways to get home. Even back then I knew this, but I had an idea why Mitch was dragging out this chase. Once, when we were in grade three, Mitch hucked a clump of yellow clay at a group of kids several grades above us. They gave chase immediately but we evaded them by hiding in a hole beneath the natural gas tank in his backyard. He grinned the whole time we spent under that tank, pressed against the warm dirt, the tinny metal above us smelling like a boiler room.

We picked our way through the gully because the hicks might have been on the paths. Mitch lifted branches out of his way and eased them back so they wouldn't smack me in the face. Every time a twig broke beneath him, every time a branch held its sway too long, I expected Jordan or
one of his friends to burst from the trees and drag us away by our hair.

The rope swing hung in the gully pretty much halfway between Mitch's house and the school. It dangled from a tree and was visible from the road, but only if you knew where to stand and where to look. Over the years, kids' hands had frayed the thing from cinch to tip. It had knots along its length like fists. Mitch could climb the entire thing and then shimmy down the tree trunk, but, back then, I didn't have the strength to get more than a quarter of the way up.

As we neared the rope swing I heard the sound of a bottle breaking and froze. Mitch went motionless mid-step and cocked his head. It would take me years to realize just how good Mitch was at that moment; where I had heard the sound of breaking glass, he heard something else. Footsteps, maybe. Wood snapping. A heavy, unnatural breath out of sight. He looked back at me and he seemed to have aged. His fingers furled and unfurled around the stick. His lips moved like he was counting.

Then he took off.

One of the hicks bolted from the trees nearby. He chased after Mitch and gave a yell. Voices joined him, feral sounds like dogs that divide the world into things they can kill and things they can't. I stayed hidden, chest flat against the earth and the smell of dirt and bugs so close I could taste them. It seemed like it took forever for them to catch Mitch.

When I heard them laugh, a ways off, I dared move enough to peer at the rope swing. They had Mitch inside
a circle. He held his stick like a quarterstaff, in front of him. Jordan was inside the circle too. Mitch would be able to smell him, the cigarettes and booze and the muskiness a kid gets when he hasn't showered in days – a scent as though he'd been sitting in front of a fire and someone had pissed in it.

The hicks passed around a beer and someone lit a cigarette. Jordan peered over his shoulder at them with a grin on his face like an ape. He faced Mitch again and offered the beer in his hand. Mitch leaned away from it and his nose curled up.

—Want to get drunk? Jordan said. He had his hand around the bottleneck, the mouth capped with his thumb, wagging the beer in Mitch's face. He told Mitch religion was stupid and God hated him and that he had stupid pants. He poured a bit of beer on Mitch's head.

—Have a sip.

—No.

—Drink it or I'll take you on a trip down smack-down lane.

His friends chuckled. Mitch turned away and prodded the ground with his stick. I knew Mitch for a long time back then, and I never saw anything on his face like that day in grade seven. He was going to do something stupid but I didn't yell a word of warning, and I still don't know if I should have. Jordan stretched his arm out to pour more beer and Mitch spun around and rammed him in the nuts with the stick. It was lightning-fast. It was a direct hit. Jordan dropped the beer, wheezed a long breath onto the
forest floor, and without him having to say anything, the circle closed and I lost sight of Mitch in the throng.

WHEN IT WAS OVER
, when they left Mitch on the ground with his hands over his face, when Jordan limped back to his truck with his buddies, I came out from the trees. I went to Mitch and sat down beside him. He sniffled loud and swallowed. I helped him sit up and he leaned against the rope swing's tree. His eye was swelling and his lip was split and he favoured his left side. I brushed dirt off his shoulder, tugged moss from his hair.

—I got him good, Mitch said.

—Yeah.

—Good thing I took that stick.

He dabbed his mouth with the back of his hand. When he saw it was red he curled his lip in and sucked on it. I'd never seen someone actually beat up. My old man once came home bleeding, but it was just his nose. I saw a kid wipe out on a bike and scrape his face along the asphalt. I'd seen it in movies. It's not the same. They never wince like Mitch did. You don't smell the sweat on them, the sourness and the rustiness of their breath. People are not stoic; they do not suffer prettily.

—You could have taken him one on one, I said.

—He's a bit too big, Will.

—Maybe.

Mitch cringed as he stood up. I saw his stick in the distance and brought it over.

—Let's go home, I said.

Mitch held his stick in front of him. He turned it over in his hands and ran his finger across it in a wood-cutting motion. Then he slapped the stick against his palm and shook his head. He told me his plan and I was too stupid to object. First, he'd need a handsaw, which he could get from home, but before going home, he wanted to clean himself up, in case his folks caught him.

We trekked to the beach where he could wash himself in the lake. He kicked off his shoes and socks, rolled his jeans to his knees, and waded into the water. The sun was setting over the Purcell Mountains, out across the lake. Mitch went deep enough for the water to touch the bottom of his kneecap, and then he scooped it against his face and scrubbed away the caked blood and tears.

When he took a sip, I said: —You shouldn't drink it.

—Why?

—Swimmer's itch.

He rubbed his moist fingers against the tender parts of his face. —But I'm thirsty.

—I can go get you some water.

—I'm alright.

—The swelling is going down, I told him.

—It still hurts.

—We can stop by my place if you want.

—No, he said.

He dipped his hand in the lake again, laid his cooled knuckles against his cheek and the bones around his eye that were going blue and purple and shades of yellow-brown. He smacked his lips and they looked cracked
and dry as hide. I wish I hadn't told him not to drink the water.

We went to his house. He crept into his garage and swiped a handsaw from his dad's toolbox, as well as two Cokes and a length of twine. I didn't open my Coke in case Mitch wanted it later. He pressed the cold aluminum against his lip for a second, then cracked it. He drank in long, heavy slurps.

It was starting to get dusky by the time we made it back to the rope swing. Mitch handed me his Coke, and then he put the sides of his shoes against the trunk and hugged the tree. He scaled it in inches. Each time he moved it was up, and he looked down only once. I nodded. I had an inkling of what could happen, even then. Mitch hoisted himself onto the branch and pulled the saw around where he could use it.

In less than a day one of Jordan's friends would hop onto the rope and rip the whole thing, branch and all, down atop himself. He'd bang his skull and die on the operating table and the papers would print a photo of the boy cradled in two uniformed arms. I'd see the picture and miss three days of school, and Mitch would walk around like a beaten kid for months. One day after a sleepover my old man would catch my arm and ask, softly, if I knew everything was alright with him, at home.

That branch took Mitch a long time. He didn't have a great position and he got sore fast. It darkened but he was not swayed, just sat on that branch and shifted when he had to. I threw him the other Coke underhand and he
plucked it straight from the air. He sawed and sawed and sawed until that branch was cut within half an inch.

After he finished, we walked around the gully for a while. He had a new, gnarled stick in his right hand and the handsaw slung over his shoulder. A woodland creature had hollowed a bowl in the middle of a stump and filled it with debris and I wondered how deep that hole went. The air smelled like paving salt and pine needles and the cadaverous swell of the lake. Saplings as high as my shin jutted from the moist dirt. We didn't say much. Someone's bass thumped in the distance. We were, I hope, too young to understand what could happen.

We walked home. The last light seeped behind the Purcells and the stars appeared. Mitch tried to talk about how awesome the chase was. He pointed at the stars because his class just finished studying the solar system. He said he couldn't quite make them out because of his swollen eye, and then he touched the puffiness on his face, winced. It was all very superficial.

—You alright? I said.

—Yeah.

—Wanna stop at my place first to get cleaned up?

—Your dad will be mad.

—No, I said. —He won't.

Mitch shrugged. He tossed the stick aside. —It's probably too late.

VALLEY ECHO

RATCHET

The boy's mother insisted her son be named Winston, because it evoked hints of rubbled London and because she remembered her old man, a gunned-down naval aviator who she eventually discovered had raped her mother. She announced her decision with one arm bent like a coat hanger behind her head. Conner liked
Winston
about as much as getting bitched at, and he couldn't even shorten it to anything worthwhile: Win, Winny, Winsy. A man called Winsy would shave his armpits and watch foreign movies. Conner's boy should have a tougher name, like Dick or Tim, or even simpler, and with an
r:
Ray, or Ern – a name he could wing pinecones at, a name that could torque a crescent wrench.

For ten hours each day Conner shaped steel pipe with a hydraulic choke while his buddies trawled 500-grade tech cable from great nautical spools. They were doing
re-haul on the local sawmill. He toiled alongside a metal-worker named Jack who wore a navy jumpsuit and a tinted mask that left his chin bare to sparks. All shift, the steel ionizing beneath his arc welder smelled like baseboard heaters. Some lunch hours, Jack's twenty-two-year-old wife rolled up in a Rocket 88, cherry red, all that muscle like an athlete. It had chrome accents and leather seats and straps that fastened in an X at a man's solar plexus. Jack's wife parked near the retaining wall where Conner ate jelly sandwiches with the guys. A handsome woman, Jack's wife – blond ringlets teased her collar, lipstick, and this way about her like a reliable set of knockouts. Jack and her would be forty-five minutes, tops. When they returned, he hiked his crotch and Conner eyed his wife and on more than one occasion she eyed him back.

At the end of every week a smudged envelope appeared on top of the pipe threader, Conner's name scrawled along the seal. No paper trail, of course – this was cash for cash's sake. He shuffled the bills into a lockbox he hid in plain sight on his bedroom windowsill beside a small cactus and a burned-out Maglite.

Some weekends he left Winston with a nanny so he and the boy's mother could spend fifty straight hours shitfaced on hash. She dribbled candle wax on her wrist and peeled it off like skin. Conner cruised cooking channels and mimicked master chefs' chopping motions on his leg with the remote. One time they watched a rerun marathon of
The Twilight Zone
, pawing each other's limbs while on the television a mud-soused huntsman Vietnammed his way
through the Mississippi wilderness. In those days, before the boy's mother fucked everything up, they could screw and he wouldn't be haunted by her handlebar ribs. He liked to hook his thumb in her mouth. She had shapely gums. He had decent stamina. They'd have separate, unremarkable orgasms.