The four of us came together accidentally. I’d played on a Little League Baseball team with Eric years before, when we were like five, so I knew him that way. But we went to a big elementary school and because none of us had any of the same classes, we recognized each other but didn’t know each other.
Then, about three years ago, about the same time I was sharing my first kiss with Lisa Rodriguez in the nose cone of the Rocket, my parents bought the house on Clearcrest, across the street from Jeff’s family. Jeff and I started hanging out together, and quickly became good friends.
I played defensive end for the football team, and he played clarinet in the band. His family was really into church; mine had never set foot in one. I liked Marvel; he liked DC. We should have been natural enemies, or at least given each other a disdainfully wide berth, but we just got on great. Or, as my dad sometimes said, like a house on fire.
Jeff told me he hung out with two other guys who lived a few blocks over. I knew Eric from before, so that was an easy fit. And even Alan, with his big black-framed glasses and his knack for always saying the worst thing he could possibly say, was kind of a known element. His older sister, Heather Crawford, had been my babysitter for a while, and though I’d never talked with him until Jeff introduced us, I’d heard plenty of stories from Heather about her nerdy little brother. And he was cool, like I said, in his own way.
So our little gang came together.
* * *
We turned our canoes toward the end of Dunmoore, Eric and Alan’s street, where it connected with Brook Forest Blvd. From there it was a quick ride up to Clearcrest, where the shrimp boat waited in Mr. Moore’s pecan tree. Eric was drilling me with questions about the severed head I’d seen when I caught a flash of movement and heard something thunk into the side of Alan and Eric’s canoe. A moment later, a rock landed in our canoe and bounced around in the well between Jeff and me, eventually settling at our feet.
“What the hell?” Jeff said.
I looked at the rock, looked at Jeff, and then looked toward the line of houses off to our left.
“What happened?” Alan asked.
We saw them then, Billy Steyn and Matt Drake and Lee Johnson. They were standing behind some bushes on a dry patch of grass about forty feet away, and at that point there was no doubt about what had happened. They’d collected an impressive mound of rocks, almost like they’d been expecting us. As we were caught out in the middle of the street, with nothing to use for cover and the current running strong against us, it seemed like they’d chosen the perfect place from which to ambush us. No matter which direction we went it would take us several minutes to get to cover, so we were sitting ducks.
The air filled with stones.
Billy Steyn and his friends had been picking on us for about two years at that point. We got on their radar because of these homemade nunchucks Jeff made. One morning, Jeff and I and a couple of other kids from our block were waiting for the bus to take us to school–under the pecan tree in Mr. Moore’s front yard, in fact. We’d watched Enter the Dragon the night before and Jeff started swinging his nunchucks around like he was Bruce Lee. He even did a pretty fair imitation of those little chirpy noises that made Bruce Lee so much fun to watch. The next thing we knew Billy Steyn, who was a sophomore but already had his license, skidded his ratty old blue Buick up to the curb next to us. He and Lee climbed out, Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” still blaring from their radio, and yanked the nunchucks out of Jeff’s hand.
Jeff was too surprised to put up a fight. He just looked at me and shrugged.
There must have been nine of us 6th and 7th graders standing around then, and none of us knew what to do. Billy and Lee were both sixteen, and outweighed every kid at that bus stop by an easy thirty pounds, and nearly all of that in muscle.
Billy and Lee looked around like they expected at least one of us to put up a challenge, but when none of us did they just laughed and got back in their car.
I came to my senses then.
Or perhaps I didn’t.
Maybe I exposed some fatal flaw in my genetic engineering, a predisposition to self-destructive behavior.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. I spit a big loogie on the back fender of Billy Steyn’s crappy old Buick and called them both assholes.
Even gave them the bird with both hands.
The results were predictable. I should have been able to predict them, at any rate. Instead I thought merely of my pride. I was still thinking of things like honor when the two of them jumped out of the car, threw me down, and proceeded to beat my ass six ways to Sunday.
I went to school that day a mangled wreck: but strangely, with more pride than ever before.
But I’d also managed to put myself squarely in Billy’s crosshairs. The Circle K down by the elementary school had a little arcade in it–Galaga; Tempest; Centipede; Asteroids; Defender–and every time he’d catch me and the rest of my friends down there he’d mess with the controls to make us die and then maybe play a few games himself using the quarters we’d lined up along the rails at the base of the monitor.
Once I was on my bike–I rode a Mongoose BMX back then–going over to see Alan and Eric, when Billy and the rest of his gang drove up behind and threw a beer bottle at me. It missed and bounced off the front tire of my bike.
I think it made them mad I didn’t crash because they stopped right in front of me and made me stop.
Billy got out and grabbed my handlebars and dumped my bike over, spilling me into the curb.
Satisfied, he drove away.
Another time, and I have no idea what he was doing at my intermediate school, he was walking the upstairs hallway and saw me. I’d been in Mrs. Durham’s health class at the time, and she’d sent me out to the hallway because I’d made her mad, again. Mrs. Durham was easily the cruelest, nastiest, most wrinkled old bitch at Clear Lake Intermediate School, and I made her mad pretty much on a daily basis. But this time, it made me a sitting duck. Billy pushed me up against the lockers and asked if I wanted to spit any more loogies. When I didn’t answer he spun me around, grabbed the hair on the back of my head, and smashed my face into the lockers.
He didn’t leave a mark but there’d been about thirty seconds when I couldn’t breathe. When Mrs. Durham finally came out to the hall to tell me I could come back to class my hair was a mess and my eyes were red from crying and Billy was of course long gone.
It went that way every time he saw me.
Now was no different.
The hail of rocks continued.
The three of them were throwing stones as fast as they could pick them up, and all we could do was swat them away with our paddles.
I hit a few, but that did little good.
Jeff caught one in the cheek and the rock that hit him landed in the well of our canoe. He dropped his paddle into the water and put a hand up to the wound.
“Get the paddle,” I said. “Dude, don’t let it go.”
I stopped paddling, and we drifted back in the direction we’d come, floating even with the paddle.
“Grab it,” I said.
“Am I bleeding?” he asked.
It was just a bruise, no blood. “You’re fine,” I said. “Get your paddle. We need to get out of here.”
Just then I heard Eric cry out. I turned their way and saw him cradling his face in his hands, his fingers red with fresh blood. More rocks hit their canoe and Alan pulled his paddle close and curled into a fetal ball in the belly of his canoe.
The rocks kept coming.
For a moment I thought: Get out of the canoe; flip it over and use it as a turtle does its shell.
But then I got pissed. My dad told me once that he became a cop because he wanted to make sure the working man got the justice he worked so hard to deserve. He said bullies defined the world, and if he could do his little part in his little corner of the world to change that, he would consider his life well spent.
That impressed me when he’d said it, and it impressed me still, as I entered my teenage years. Most of our interactions just ended with me being pissed off, but that thing he said mattered.
It still mattered.
Bullies deserved to get it shoved back in their face.
In many ways, those few words from my father were my inspiration, the source of my courage.
Mad as I was, hurt as I was, I picked up the rock that had bruised Jeff’s cheek and I threw it toward our hated Gang of Three.
I’ll tell you now I do not believe in divine providence. Or karma. Or any of that other religious nonsense. My dad had no problem whatsoever bending his head whenever someone called for a prayer, but my mom was different. She was the only person I’d ever met who would regularly sneer at a church as we passed it by in the car. When someone randomly called for a prayer, I noticed she never bent her head. I thought that courageous, and honest, and I did the same, whenever I could.
But back to the rock.
I can only tell you that I heaved that rock with everything I had. Billy just happened to come around the side of the house at just the right moment. He was looking the other way at just the right moment. He caught my rock right in the forehead and never saw it coming. Though I was forty feet away I heard the crack of stone on bone plain as day. He sagged to his knees and put his hands over his face and when he took them away to yell at me he had runners of blood coming down his face.
“You’re dead, Eckert! You hear me? I’m gonna kill you! I am going to beat your ass into the dirt!”
I caught Alan and Eric staring at me, both of them frozen in fear. We’d seen Billy mad before, but never like this.
“Go suck it, Billy,” I yelled. “I hope I gave you a concussion!”
“Oh Jesus,” Alan said.
Beside me, Jeff sat up and said: “Mark, what are you doing?”
I ignored him. “You hear me, Billy? I hope it hurts, you stupid son of a bitch. I hope it hurts bad! Go on and cry about it, little girl!”
“Man, you’re dead,” Billy said. “Get him!”
He and Lee and Matt charged into the water.
Alan said: “Mark, what do we do?”
“Oh crap,” I muttered. I picked up my paddle and motioned for the others to do the same. “Go with the current,” I said. “Let’s go, let’s go!”
We’d been fighting the current, but now we turned back in the direction from which we’d come and beat the water for all we were worth. Billy and his gang gained on us for a moment, and Billy even got to within a finger’s length from our canoe, but once we got going we managed to create some distance between us; and when I looked back Billy and the others were standing hip-deep in the water, staring death rays into our backs.
“You’re dead,” Billy yelled after us. His face was still bleeding. “You hear me? You’re dead, Eckert.”
“Yeah?” I yelled back. “Looks like you’re the one who’s bleeding.”
“Dude,” Jeff said, “don’t make it worse.”
“Yeah,” Alan said. “He’s gonna beat your ass.”
“Yeah?” I said. I was pissed. But more than that, I was sick of running. “So what? Let him do what he’s gonna do. I’m sick of his crap. I’m sick of being bullied.”
I turned to Billy.
“You hear me, Billy? I hope it hurts!”
Nobody had an answer for that.
I thought of George C. Scott in Patton, that scene where he’s standing on the cliff, looking down at his tanks thoroughly routing Rommel. “I beat you! I beat you, you son of a bitch,” he’d said. “I beat you because I read your book!”
I loved that from the moment I first heard it, sitting next to my dad on our couch with a big thing of Jiffy Pop between us.
Now I was living it.
There’s something to be said about getting under your enemy’s skin.
* * *
I got home in time for dinner.
My mom had lit a bunch of candles and the inside of the house glowed with a warm, soothing orange light. She was sitting at the kitchen table, reading one of her medical journals, when I walked in the back door. On the island was a platter of raw, cut up vegetables and some raw chicken marinating in soy sauce and honey in a Tupperware tub.
“Are we having fondue for dinner?” I asked.
She looked up from her reading and I could see she wasn’t happy. “Where have you been? Where’s your father?”
“Well, I was out with Jeff. We took his canoe down to the park. Dad must still be down at Mr. Moore’s house.”
“Your dog has been whining by the back door since you left.”
A sense of relief welled up inside me. If she was trying to play the dog-missed-you-guilt-trip on me, clearly she wasn’t that mad.
I looked over at the corner where Max was sprawled out on the floor. He had perked his head when I entered, but hadn’t bothered to come over and greet me. He was watching me, his eyes sad and reproachful.
“Hey Max,” I said. “Want a Milkbone?”
“I’ve already given him plenty today,” my mom said, too late. He jumped up and trotted over to the refrigerator, eager for his snack.
“Fine. Go ahead,” my Mom said. “When your dad asks why his dog is so fat you’ll be the one to answer for it.”
I got Max his biscuit and scratched his ears while he wolfed it down.
“I thought you said you were going to help him.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Your father,” my mom said. “I thought you said you were going to help him.”
“Well, I did. I brought him his police radio.”
“What for?”
I paused before I answered, wondering how much to tell her of what I’d seen. It wasn’t much of a decision to make, though. What I didn’t tell her Dad would as soon as he got home, and if she knew he was doing his police thing I figured she wouldn’t be mad at him for being out of the house all day. So I laid it all out for her, everything I knew.
“You’re not joking, are you?”
“No, Mom, I swear. That’s what I saw.”
“That’s horrible.”
I thought about that severed head and I had to agree. It was horrible.
Just then my dad came in through the front door. Max raised his ears, barked once, and went running for the door.
“We’re in the kitchen,” my mom said, calling out to him.
He came in with Max and sat down at the table next to my mom. He was dripping wet and filthy, and he looked exhausted.
“Is it true what Mark said?” Mom asked. “Were those bodies really…eaten?”
He nodded.
“How does that happen?”
He shrugged. “There are some sick people in this world. Ten years ago it was that Dean Corll guy who killed all those kids in the 2nd Ward. Five years ago Jim Jones and all those wackos down in Jonestown killed themselves. Now we’ve got some lunatic running around eating people. It’s a crazy world.”
“Are we safe here, Wes?”
He took a moment to answer her. His eyes were bloodshot; his face caked with grime and grease. For the first time I realized that his hair was starting to turn gray at the temples. Then he reached out and took my mom’s hands in his.
“We’re gonna be fine,” he said.
“You promise, Wes.”
“Yeah,” he said. He suddenly sounded breezy, like this was no big deal, though I thought maybe he was just putting on an act for my mother’s benefit. “Yeah, I promise.”
* * *
After dinner my dad and I went around prying the boards off the windows. Then my mom gave us each a bucket of soapy water and a sponge and sent us off to our respective showers to get cleaned up. When I was clean I took a bag of Twizzlers up to my room and lit a candle and read Tarzan of the Apes until I drifted off to sleep.
I had thought the horrors of the day were behind me. The severed head; the rock fight with Billy; my hometown under water: I thought I’d wake up and it would all be in the past, just some cool memory in an otherwise boring summer.
But as I read about Tarzan’s battles with Kerchak, a real battle, and one far more savage, was raging down the street.
The real horror of that summer was just beginning.