There's Blood on the Moon Tonight (14 page)

“Don’t pick on retards, gimps, or real little kids,”
the old man would often tutor them.
“That won’t gain you any respect or fear from the herd. Though it might make them hate you! There’s a fine line, boys, between hate and fear, and you
gotta
keep your herd on the safe side of fear! Let ‘em stray on over to
hate
, and you’ll end up with nothin’ but mutiny on your hands. ‘Cause
hate
leads to
anger
, which is an
emboldening
emotion! Get ‘em angry enough and they won’t even feel your foot up their ass!”

At which point Andy would pause meaningfully, glaring at his sons.
“Such a fool is hard to beat down. And if you should let one of those fuckin’ faggots kick your sorry ass, then you best not let me hear about it!”

             
That was Andy Noonan for you…rednecks’ very own version of Yoda. Wisdom for today’s white trash.

             
According to Charlie’s self-serving logic, Bud Brown had always fit in this category as a mental gimp; someone who didn’t have all his marbles upstairs. Therefore, someone with the sympathy of the herd.

Only Bud didn’t act like any retard he’d ever known! Bud was smart.
Real
smart. And everyone knows how bullies loathe their intellectual betters. Maybe Charlie Noonan decided it was time to put Mental in his place. The other kids were starting to look at Bud with the same sort of awe usually reserved for him and his little brother Lester. Whispering in the bathrooms and in the hallways that Charlie was in fact
Scared
of Bud.

If so, who could blame him? Bud Brown, with his size alone, was definitely an unknown commodity.

This theory gained legs when Bud started hanging around with Josie O’Hara and Rusty Huggins—the latter being the Noonans’ former favorite punching bag. How else to explain it when suddenly those two became off limits? Then again, maybe Charlie was feeling invincible that day. After all, he’d managed to do something that even his father hadn’t been able to accomplish: Graduate from high school. Besides, as Charlie approached Bud Brown (minding his own business, his head buried in a monster magazine) he knew that Lester had his back that day.

In predictable bully fashion, Charlie knocked the magazine out of Bud’s hands and kicked it down the front steps of the schoolyard.

              The story goes that Bud didn’t even look up or acknowledge the assault. Instead, unperturbed, he bent down and picked up his magazine, in tatters now.

Charlie kicked him in the ass for good measure…

And
still
Bud Brown didn’t retaliate! To a gaping asshole like Charlie, this was a sure sign of weakness, and it cleared up any doubt he might’ve had in his mind.

Bud Brown was most
definitely
of the herd!

Bud was stuffing the remnants of the monster magazine in the back pocket of his Levi’s, ignoring the laughter of the Noonan brothers and their gathered toadies, and had already walked several feet past them, when Charlie Noonan made a mistake he would lament the rest of his miserable life.
“Hey, Mental! I heard the loony what killed your ma got hisself some head before tossing it in your lap!
Get it?
He got some
Head
…from your mama’s
head
! Hee! Hee! Hee! Hee! Hee!”

The schoolyard fell silent. Every kid there gaped up at Charlie in utter disbelief. Even Lester Noonan ceased his hee-hawing. His mouth dropped open at his brother’s colossal lack of decency. In the adolescent world, where almost nothing is off limits, Charlie had not only stepped way over the line, he’d taken a shit on it as well.

              Bud stopped dead in his tracks and slowly turned around. His ice blue eyes found Charlie at the top of the steps, locking onto him like two heat-seeking missiles.

The assortment of kids, who only moments before had been happily leaving another school year behind them, now stood rooted in place. Something historic was about to take place in their little world and they didn’t want to miss a second of it. The air felt heavy, like before a big storm.

Every kid on the island would later swear to have witnessed the momentous event, even though only a dozen or so remained behind that day. Who could blame them? What happened next was the stuff of legend.

             
Bud walked slowly back up the steps…and here, once again, Charlie made an unfortunate assumption. He decided that Bud’s dull deliberation was due to a lack of confidence in his abilities. Poor bastard couldn’t have been more deluded. If Josie and Rusty had been there, they would have begged Charlie to run for his life!
Literally
.

The few kids standing between the two combatants parted like a curtain to let Bud pass.

Those closest enough to see into Bud’s eyes, swore they’d seen madness in his Artic glare. For them the result of the impending battle was a foregone conclusion.

Charlie Noonan was dead meat on two feet.

              By the time Bud was halfway up the stoop, Charlie was beginning to regret his lack of tact. Or more likely, he’d seen the same glacial glint in Bud’s eyes.

“My bad, Buddy boy. I shouldn’t have said that about your Ma. What say we forget all about it—”

             
Charlie’s rare entreaty for peace fell on deaf ears. Or maybe it was because Charlie called him
Buddy boy
. An unfortunate choice on Charlie’s part, since that was what Bud’s
Ma
had always called her baby boy.

Without taking his eyes from Charlie’s, Bud spat a bullet loogey between Noonan’s splayed sneakers—just as neat as you please. He now stood level with the Noonan brothers, his lack of fear evident in his blunt stare and oddly calm body. His respiration was slow and even, barely negligible. Charlie on the other hand was clearly unsettled. Breathing hard, nostrils flaring. Adrenaline and dread surging through his veins. Trembling uncontrollably. He’d overplayed his hand, and Bud was calling his bluff. His only option now:
End this quick!
He threw the first punch.

It was also his last.

Bud caught the older boy’s fist in his hand, inches from his own face. Bud didn’t so much as blink, nor did his big hand budge from the wicked force of the blow.

Time seemed to stand still…

Then a calamitous sound befell the schoolyard
:
CCCRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAACCCKKKKKKK!!
!

In one swift motion, Bud had wrenched Charlie’s arm into an impossible angle behind his back; his right hand ending up somewhere behind his left ear. The following fracture of Charlie Noonan’s arm was raw, rude, and resounding. The fight drained out of him instantly.

Charlie fell to his knees, ashen faced and on the verge of fainting. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Snot percolated from his nose. Behind him, his brother Lester bent over and threw up on the Air Jordan’s he’d stolen from Freddy Orville in gym-class. Moments later, though no one but Tansy Wilky noticed, Lester turned tail for home, deserting his brother to his just desserts.

Several girls in the crowd began weeping at the incredible violence they’d just witnessed.

The boys just gaped in disbelief.

For most of them, Charlie was like a terrible god, wreaking havoc in their lives. An angry deity that could be appeased with money, food, and abject servility.

A known commodity.

Now, in front of their very eyes, Bud Brown had just cast their terrible Zeus from the storied heights of Mount Olympus! What did it all mean?

Would Bud now turn his wrath on
them
?

             
No. His wrath knew only Charlie Noonan.

If it had ended then and there, with no further injuries inflicted, the whole thing might have blown over. After all, everyone there was witness to Charlie’s loathsome comment. And lest we forget, Charlie
did
throw the first punch. If ever there was a case for a justified arm breaking, then this was it. Only it didn’t end there.

Not even when Noonan pleaded for mercy.

Some of those present said as soon as Charlie began weeping, his fat tears
plopping
off his tormentor’s boots, Bud seemed to become even more unglued. The beating that ensued, however, came not from a wild-man pushed over some invisible brink. Bud didn’t
wail
on Charlie Noonan. His punches were well aimed and timed, each one finding its mark. The meaty
Thuds
soon replaced by liquid
Splats
, as the blood began to flow and spatter.

When Charlie finally fell to the ground, bloody and unconscious, Bud actually took a moment to catch his breath…before picking up right where he’d left off.

It was Mr. Frazier, the Academy’s Headmaster, who finally answered the screams of the children witnessing the massacre. A short and pudgy middle-aged man (the kids all called him Mr. Weatherbee behind his back), Mr. Frazier was no match for Bud Brown. Even so, as soon as he pushed his way through the ring of students standing on the front stoop, Bud ceased his assault.

His rage had finally run its course.

He stood up from what looked like a battered corpse, shook the lank hair from his eyes, and looking directly down at the Headmaster, Bud rasped, in that gravelly growl of his:
“It…Won’t…Stop…Dripping.”

             
It turned out Charlie Noonan wasn’t a corpse after all. What saved his life that day was his complete and utter surrender to a superior force. That, more than anything else, had cooled Bud’s rage. If he had lifted even so much as a finger in his own defense, Bud probably would’ve killed him. Nevertheless, it was seven weeks before he was well enough to leave the hospital on the mainland.

The results of the savage beating left Charlie without a single tooth in the front of his mouth. Those he hadn’t swallowed lay on the steps of the school like scattered Chiclets. Along with a severe concussion, and spiral fractures of his upper and right forearm, Charlie suffered a cracked skull, a splintered orbital bone—including a ruptured eyeball that he would never see out of again—a flattened nose, shattered jaw, four broken ribs, and a shoulder so badly dislocated, it took three nurses and one doctor to set it back in place. Thrown in for good measure was a veritable bouquet of bruises and contusions that seemed to cover every square inch of his body. Even his toes. These were all obvious injuries that, except for the eye, would heal in time. The injuries that would linger till the end of his days were the ones you couldn’t see with the naked eye or X-ray. His bloodied psyche had suffered such a brutal assault that it would never mend.

              When he was wheeled into the Emergency Room at the Beaufort County Hospital, the on-duty doc asked the paramedics: “Was this man in a head-on collision?”

             
His presumption was certainly understandable, given the extensive state of the nineteen-year-old boy’s injuries. When the paramedic told the doc that a lone, unarmed, sixteen-year-old kid was responsible for all the damage, the physician retorted:
“Unarmed, my ass.”

             
After his release from the hospital, Charlie Noonan decided to stay put in Beaufort. You could now find him selling gas and groceries at the Starvin’ Marvin, just outside of town. Ham Huggins had seen him not three weeks ago. He told Betty Anne that the boy was just a whisper of his old nasty self. He was thinner, due to having his jaw wired shut for over two months, but that wasn’t what Ham was getting at.

Charlie Noonan no longer looked you in the eye.

He kept his eyes (make that
eye
—the dead peeper just kinda floated around in its diminished socket) on his shoes, and kept peering fretfully over his shoulder. To see if Big Bad Bud Brown had finally run him down to finish the job. After all, Charlie Noonan was of the herd now.

“Bad, bad Leroy Brown didn’t have
nothin’
on our Big Bad Bud Brown,”
Ham had laughed unsympathetically.

He knew how Charlie Noonan had once made Rusty’s life a living hell, and truth be told, he took some pleasure in the bully’s schoolyard Waterloo. Many a time he’d thought of intervening on Rusty’s behalf, but as he’d told Betty Anne, barely holding her back
from giving that no ‘count trash Andy Noonan a piece of her mind
, “ ‘We wouldn’t be doing our son any favors, fighting his battles for him like that. He’ll never get over his fears until he learns to face them on his own.’ ”

After a psychiatrist’s report cleared Bud Brown of any “Knowing” responsibility for the assault—
according to the doctor who interviewed Bud, it was a clear case of Post-Traumatic Shock Syndrome. Bud’s second bout with it, as it turned out
—his father took him to an altogether different hospital on the mainland.

He stayed there throughout most of that summer; whether from a court order or voluntarily, no one but Bud and his father knew. And Bud wasn’t talking about it.