For ten bucks he’d take a cup filled with Skoal spit and cigarette ashes, swish it around like a rich-bitch wine taster, and in one shot swallow it all. Applause, bows. Then he’d will it back up with his fuck-you finger, pucker up and kiss the wrinkled bills. His Cadillac was green, a convertible, with a bumper sticker that read I brake for all critters, great and small (except people). And Big Al’s tattoo: semper something, something semper. It had to do with fidelity.
The kids from Bootjack High were scared of him. By association, scared of me, of us: his teenage friends, his followers. We were all from Windfall and Big Al was dedicated to Windfall’s cause: for one of the annual fights between us and Bootjack, he shaved a V into both of his butt cheeks. When pressed together, the V’s made a W. W for Windfall. Dedicated and artistic for the yearly battles we never thought we’d lose.
My first fight was after a home game. We waited for Bootjack at the old drive-in theater lot. The football game had ended half an hour before: Windfall 17, Bootjack 6. I was fifteen.
The Bootjack boys and some of their girls made their way there. We got out of our cars and trucks carrying tire irons, bicycle chains. I had a thirty-four-ounce Easton with a rubber grip that smelled like exhaust.
This was October, when people raked leaves from their front yards into big piles just beside the street, and set the leaves on fire. Sometimes the leaves burned well after midnight, filling the neighborhoods with sweet white smoke. We smoked, too, all kinds of good stuff, waiting for something to happen.
After thirty minutes our man Big Al got two cans of Aquanet from the trunk of his car, put matches to their nozzles, and made flame throwers, screaming, spinning his arms, drawing circles of blue. He looked like the Chinese firewheels we used to get on the Fourth. The Bootjackers hurried to their cars. I threw my bat at one of them and knocked a hubcap free. They left.
Then Big Al bought us a case of beer.
We drank, stacked the empties into pyramids, and bowled our rolled-up socks at them in my parents carport. We used the hubcap I’d knocked free as an ashtray. Big Al wasn’t with us for the party, but his wildness still infected us, made us howl at everything, the moon and the streetlights and a pair of pantyhose whipping on a clothesline in the moonlight. We were nursing the inspiration, the sheer fact of Big Al’s existence, and our own.
In the trunk of his car he had a rod and reel, a staple gun, a tennis ball, and a box full of scissors, knives, and cleavers—I think he earned some extra money by sharpening them. We imagined him shaving with one of those knives, drinking in the dark, throwing his tennis ball as far as he could, bouncing the fucker off the moon.
Next year the football game was in Bootjack, and the fight as well. During the game we walked around the outer track. Both bands played fight songs. Parents cheered and pounded fists on their knees.
At halftime Al told us that he had a surprise. “It was tricky,” he said. “I had to use a mirror.” We asked him what he was talking about. “Follow me,” he said.
We walked over to Bootjack’s side and leaned against the fence near their cheerleaders. The players were still in the locker room. The band marched as Bootjack’s cheerleaders, in orange pleated skirts and white sleeveless sweaters, arranged themselves into a pyramid. Then Big Al turned his back to them. He started laughing. “I have to push them together to get the effect,” he said. He pulled his pants down and pushed his butt cheeks together. We made a semicircle behind him to see. Shaved into the hair on his ass were two V’s, mushed together across his butt crack into a nearly perfect W. It was amazing. We laughed and turned quickly to see how the cheerleaders would react. They had just completed the pyramid and we were sure they would get distracted and fall.
The girl on top saw Big Al and lost her balance, tried to regain it by putting her hand on a lower girl’s head, then folded her arms across her chest and fell forward. I jerked toward the cyclone fence to leap over and catch her, then righted myself, all in an embarrassed half-second. Two other girls, their arms interlocked in a cradle, caught the falling girl and sprung her up onto her feet: it was part of the act. She kicked and hooted, but not with the enthusiasm of the others—she had fallen a second too soon.
Big Al was still squatting with his pants down, laughing so hard he finally toppled over and pulled his pants up. We looked at the girls. They ignored us, going through a new routine.
I watched them with a kind of affection I had for plain girls who were trying very hard to be beautiful. I didn’t like the cheerleaders at Windfall. They were distant and exquisite and didn’t pay attention to me. Bootjack’s cheerleaders seemed different, less peppy about the game and more interested in their own performance. They were all lovely in a ruddy, rough-cut way, like fireplace logs as opposed to finished timber. None of them smiled. They were serious.
One cheerleader in particular got my attention, a sturdy girl with hair a shade shy of white. She was one of the two who had caught the falling girl, and was now in the frontmost of the three rows, calling out like a drill sergeant for responses that came from fans in the bleachers behind us. I imagined her practicing her routine in front of a mirror, and I admired her strength, her timing, her dependability: a small girl had fallen and this strong girl had caught her. She looked at me. I looked back. Then Al pulled his pants down again and mooned the fans in the bleachers, a call to which they responded by launching paper cups of pop at us. I caught one in the front of my shirt and the pop ran down into the front of my pants. We started back to the visiting side, back to friendly territory.
When we went to the fight place—a softball field in Bootjack—only a few of the Bootjack crew showed up. They stayed in their cars. We shouted at them, sitting cross-legged on our hoods, our cars in perfect alignment. Our usual battle gear—pipes, an axe handle, a cracked boomerang—was spread out beside us like medieval surgical instruments. There was a bat flying around. It swooped under a cone of light from a street post into a constellation of moths. One of our guys was a kid called Emmet. He had a BB gun with him, and was sitting on the hood of the car next to me, spilling BBs into the barrel. He jumped off the car, pumped the handle a dozen times, aimed in the area of the streetlight, and fired a shot. Then a second shot.
“Don’t shoot the light out,” I said to him.
He pumped, aimed again, moving the barrel along the horizon like a skeet shooter.
“I ain’t shooting at the light.”
Big Al, who was sitting in his car with the top down, got out, grabbed the BB gun and pumped it. He counted out loud with each pump—twenty-five times.
“Run,” he said to Emmet. He pointed the barrel at Emmet’s face.
Emmet ran. Big Al took aim, let Emmet get farther away, then plugged him with a BB in the shoulder. Emmet stopped running and shouted: fuck. He was in the middle of the field, halfway between us and Bootjack, rubbing his shoulder through two flannel shirts that at least had kept the BB from breaking the skin, although he’d have a welt already and a bruise to last three weeks or more. He looked back at us, his lips sucked into his mouth, then at Bootjack’s kids. As if weighing a change in allegiance. But by now the Bootjackers were leaving, and quick: Big Al was pumping the gun again.
Emmet came back. “What the fuck did you do that for?”
“First,” Big Al said, “don’t shoot animals, especially bats. They’re an important part of the life cycle.”
“Okay,” Emmet said, “sorry.”
“And second,” Big Al said.
We waited. He closed his eyes. He bit his lower lip and let a burst of air shoot from his nostrils. “I just cut one,” he said, his eyes open once more.
Al loved animals more than himself, and we loved Al more than animals, and in that mix was Al’s Cadillac. He lived somewhere out on Mill Run, a shabby section our mothers called the other side of the tracks, which was blockheaded: there are so many sets of tracks. To go across town, from Old Station Street to the overpass at Highway 91, you have to cross six sets of them, so the town is like a stash of old scars that overlap. We cross all those tracks, we cross them and go back, but rarely have to wait for a semaphore: although there are plenty of trains, few budge from the shop yards.
During the school year we saw him only on weekends. All of us—except Big Al—would meet at the Muleshoe Bridge, and from there cruise around Windfall, get cheap squares of pepperoni pizza at Civarelli’s, and look for Big Al’s Cadillac. It was dark green with a soft top, the only one in Windfall, a seventy-three, classic. Usually we’d find him around ten or eleven at night in the side parking lot of the bowling alley. He had a tennis ball he liked to bounce off the brick wall. When we pulled up we couldn’t wait to talk to him and get him to buy us some six-packs, but he would just keep tossing the ball up and catching the rebounds, maybe five minutes, sometimes half an hour. We leaned against our cars, waiting for him to milk the magic clean out of the ritual.
One time, after he’d stopped, he looked at me and said, “What’s up, Shane?”
I was surprised; I didn’t know that he knew my name. I’d always assumed that his liking us depended on our not caring whether he knew our names or where we lived. We all shared a common lot, living in Windfall. Guys like Big Al didn’t seem to need to know anything else for you to be on his side.
“We’re just killing time,” I said.
Big Al turned back to the wall. “Killing time.” He was wearing a sleeveless gray sweatshirt and brown corduroy pants, plus his shit kickers, tied up with red laces. “Who’s going to get your beer for you when I’m gone?” he asked, smiling with teeth so stumpy they couldn’t seem to meet in the middle.
You’re not leaving, I thought at first. And I realized he had moments when he thought we must have been interested in him only because he could get us beer. But I couldn’t explain that to him. He would think I was a pussy if I told him how much we admired him. “I’ll be old enough to buy beer on my own soon enough,” I said. “Are you going out of town?”
“No time soon,” he said. Then we followed him to Tubb’s and he got us a case of beer. I collected the money, counted it, and handed it to him. He took one of the six-packs as a tip and left. He seemed upset by something. Usually he let us keep all the beer and only once in a while asked us to give him a few bucks for gas.
Big Al came to my house one night, when my parents had gone to see my grandma in Parsippany for the weekend. He brought a case of Old Germans, and we had a party, about twelve of us all together. The TV was on and the stereo: we watched wrestling and listened to Metallica and drank. Except Big Al. He gave himself a slow tour of the house then asked if he could look at some family photo albums. He sat on my parents’ bed going through pictures, asking who everybody was, where they were, how long it took to get to where they lived.
I watched his face as he turned the pages. He looked like a double-chinned general, with a tiny pink nose. His forehead and his ears were very small. A scent like pine tar seemed to come from his skin.
“You got a girl, Shane?” he asked me. Recently he’d been talking to me more than anybody else. I guess he liked me. Or he liked my name. People are sometimes surprised by the poetry of it: Shane Wayner.
“I don’t really have a girl,” I said.
“You like them fat or skinny, Shane?”
I was eager to please him. Even when he asked me that question, I wanted to give the answer that he would agree with. I’d never seen him with a girl, but I’d seen him look at them. He seemed to be the type who would like our school’s cheerleaders. “Skinny,” I said.
“That’s my man,” Big Al said. “But don’t be afraid of the big ones. I used to go with this sasquatch girl named Gervell.”
“Sasquatch?”
“Like Bigfoot.”
“What happened to her?”
“She had an injury. She started limping. She was sunbathing in her yard and her dad didn’t like it so he threw a door on her. After that she didn’t believe me when I said I still wanted her. She was like, ‘you just feel sorry for me.’ And you know what, Shane? I did feel sorry for her, but I feel sorry for everybody.”
“How come?”
“I’m a very spiritual person,” he said. Then he went to the refrigerator and ate a jar of pickles, sliding them in one at time, pushing them back so far he had to breathe through his nose and his eyeballs got glossy.
Big Al seemed pleased that I liked them skinny, but I didn’t know if I liked them fat or skinny or what. I liked them like Wendy. She wasn’t skinny. She could do one-handed pushups. She had big pink lips and brown eyes. The first time we kissed I could taste the chewing tobacco she’d just spit out.
I had lied to Big Al. I did have a girl, and she was from Bootjack, my Wendy. She was the girl I’d had my eye on at the football game, the one with the white hair.
Big Wendy. She had huge feet, and could run very fast. We ended up meeting when I went with my parents to a fair in Claylick. Her parents had taken her as well, and we were the only two people there who were too old and self-conscious to go on any rides, and too young to drink the beer they were serving in big plastic cups. She said she remembered me from the game. I listened to her talk about her favorite music videos. Later we started going out once in a while, both of us in our junior year of school. She liked purple Popsicle’s, and put the sticks in the ashtray of her Camaro.
When we were hanging around in Windfall we’d go out to the water-tower park and sit under one of the pavilions that had a hole in the roof. We’d lie down on a picnic table, facing the blue sky, and then the stars and arching moon. Sometimes she would sit up, get a brush from her purse, and run it through her hair from scalp to the ends fifty times, and sometimes I brushed it for her. One night, after a month of stillborn attempts to touch her, I took her hand. It was white and solid; the nails gnawed raggedy with remnants of blue polish. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Wendy asked me, surprised, I guess, at how long it had taken me to make a move.
Star-crossed lovers, I sometimes thought—we were reading Romeo and Juliet at my school.
We spent some evenings in Bootjack as well. Once in a while she had to baby-sit her little brother Kyle. She made him go to bed around ten and then came back down to the rec room, where I was waiting for her. We played pool, or watched a video, or kissed in the dim basement light. She could squeeze me very hard.
Her hair started peach at the roots and by the ends—two feet later—was white, almost translucent. It smelled like fresh-cut grass, and I liked to have it in my hands as much as possible.
Junior year ended and we had the whole summer to catch fireflies and put them in jars. Wendy once strung a dozen of them on a piece of thread and made me a necklace that blinked. “Don’t watch,” she said, and then she started to practice her routines. She was intense and severe with herself, in her backyard, the light from the swimming pool glowing behind her. She whispered the chants, her eyes closed, her suntanned body kicking and punching and doing splits right there in the grass, with no shoes. I’d never seen anything so wonderful. The fireflies died and the necklace stopped blinking. “You’d die too if I stuck a needle in you,” Wendy said, pulling the necklace over my head.
Big Al: fidelity. Big Al: dedication.
The fights came each September, October, or November, depending on the football schedule. At the start of the school year we’d be studying and taking notes, and Big Al would then put himself in training. He started with a three-day fast to clean out his system. I even heard that he would take fifty-feet of dental floss and slowly feed it into his digestive system, sliding a few feet a day down his throat. After a while, he’d pull a few feet out of his ass: fifty feet altogether, it took a week. It’s quite possible that this was true: he was dedicated, he was disciplined. Imagine the relief you’d feel pulling that last foot of floss out of your ass: you’d be ready to start bulking up to pound the shit out of a motherfucking Bootjacker. He could put on thirty pounds in two weeks, go from 195 to 225. He did this, too, in preparation for the fights.
I didn’t do anything to prepare for the fights. I’d never hit anyone in my life. I hardly ever touched anybody, for any reason, except Wendy. Plus with Big Al there, I didn’t have to hit anybody, though we weren’t always glad for it: some of the guys wanted to see blood, but not me. And I didn’t want to see Big Al hurt somebody. He lived behind a kind of wall that he only occasionally leapt over. The longer he went without jumping over the wall, the higher it got. But then once he jumped over it at its highest peak, he’d tear someone to stumps and threads. And then, not having the energy to get back over the wall, he’d be in a rage forever, and looking for outlets.
Wendy was a piece. The summer before senior year, she and I would see each other about twice a week, sometimes in Windfall, sometimes in Bootjack. Other nights me and the gang would do our cruising, wait for Big Al to stop bouncing his tennis ball, and get drunk somewhere: under the Muleshoe Bridge, in the old drive-in lot, outside the bowling alley, or at someone’s house, if his parents were on vacation.
One night Big Al took me and Westover for a ride in his Cadillac. As far as we knew, nobody had ever been allowed to even look at his car up close before. We sat in the backseat, in shorts, slouching so that our legs wouldn’t stick to the leather. We looked up at the sky while he tweaked the radio. This was a big deal, being in a convertible Cadillac, in Big Al’s Cadillac. I don’t know why he asked us to go with him. Maybe he wanted to test us to see if we’d ask him to slow down. But we were game for the ride; we trusted him more than we trusted our own fathers.
Big Al put his seat belt on and told us to do the same. Then he edged it up to eighty miles an hour along Old Station Street where there are no streetlights for two miles until you get to Mill Run.
Then the speedometer was at ninety, and trembling. I felt free, and careless, though I don’t know the difference between those two feelings, if there is one at all. I’ve had a feeling since then, once or twice, of being so helplessly happy I wouldn’t mind at all if someone were to shoot me in the head.
Then we hit something—an animal, a rabbit. It sounded like someone pounding an anthill with a shovel. For a second we saw it in the headlights, spraying off bits toward the left side of the front end. Big Al hit the brakes, pulled over.
“That was fucking great,” Westover said.
Big Al turned around in the seat. “What was great?”
“Nailing Bugs fucking Bunny. Snap.”
Big Al got out of the car, grabbed Westover by the collar, and pulled him up over the door and put him down on his feet: one-handed. “Go bury it,” Big Al said. His face seemed shrunken on his head, as if his features had all crowded together. Westover looked at me. I got out of the car to help him do it. We saw the rabbit strung up in a thorn bush, killed then crucified in a thick barbed web. I reached into the bush, but couldn’t get the rabbit without cutting my arms. I looked back toward the car. Big Al wasn’t watching, so we just knelt down and pretended to smooth some dirt and stones over a fake grave. Westover whispered to me, “He’s the one who fucking killed it.” We came back to the car and Big Al told us to get in. He turned around and sped toward town. In the rearview mirror it looked like his eyes were closed.
Then he bought us and the other guys some pizza at Civarelli’s.
Westover was my best friend. He was moody and his parents had him on some kind of herbal pills that made him sweat and get really quiet. He had asthma too and had to take hits from an inhaler. Once in a while he would freak out and start calling everybody a soggy bitch. Maybe he hadn’t taken his pills.
At Civarelli’s Westover started eating the pizza with his dirty hands. I went in to the bathroom first to wash up, and when I came back out Westover was waiting for me right outside the door.
“What’s the name of that girl you’ve been going out with?” he asked me.
“Wendy,” I said. “Why?”
Westover slurped his pop and gestured to his left. “She’s here.”
She was sitting in a booth by the window with her parents and her little brother. I didn’t want her to see me so I slipped out a side exit and watched from the parking lot. Wendy and her parents looked like three strangers who’d been assigned the task of smiling in turn at nine-year-old Kyle. After the smile and a nod at something he’d said, they’d look back down at their food, barely eating.
I wanted to go in and take her away from that miserable family scene. I was thinking of drama and romance, all I needed was a horse. But I was dressed in ratty clothes and smelled like beer and smoke. And I didn’t want her or her parents to see me with my friends.
As I stood watching from the parking lot, a few of the guys walked past Wendy’s table and said something: Wendy looked up, and her parents looked at her. The guys came out and in a few seconds were all outside looking in on Wendy and her family, shouting for them to climb back up the hill to Bootjack. “This must be weird,” Westover said. “I bet you want to get out of here.”
“What did you say when you went past the table?” I asked him.
Westover laughed. “Nothing she didn’t already know.”
Wendy was talking to her father, who was looking at the bill and ignoring her. Big Al got something out of his trunk. When Wendy and her family got up to leave, I ran around to the other side of the building and started walking home, wondering what would happen.
Westover called me that night and told me that, when they walked past Wendy’s table, he asked her if she’d shaved her pussy recently.
His asking that question was my fault; Westover had been nagging me all summer for details: What’s her bra size? Who gets on top? What’s it taste like? At one point he asked me if she shaved down there.
And I nodded, even though I didn’t know. She tried once to guide my hand into her pants and I said, I’ve never done this before, and she laughed and lay down to rest her head on my lap. She looked up at my flushed face, she looked at me and smiled. She tried it again another time, outside the panties, not in. It was warm. It was damp. When I brought my fingers up she guided them to my mouth.
Westover also told me that when Wendy and her family came out of Civarelli’s that night, Big Al tried to blow an air horn in her father’s face. Her father swiped at Big Al and caught him pretty good on the ear. Big Al didn’t retaliate, and Wendy’s family left.
The next weekend there was a spray-painted message on the front glass of Civarelli’s: this year you die—probably painted by Wendy’s Bootjack buddies—and after that the summer dropped out from under us. Senior year would start soon, and the football schedule was listed in the paper: Bootjack at Windfall, September 12. The first game of the year.
Wendy’s family took a two-week vacation to Parker Dam at the end of August. She sent me a few letters but since they were camping I couldn’t write back.
My family hadn’t taken a vacation in a few years. I was a little embarrassed, a little envious. My dad drove a rig and my mom answered the phone at a car-detailing outfit. I rarely saw them, though I can’t say I was ever hungry or without some cash. I liked my dad more than my mom. He once brought me a key chain from a place called Arkadelphia. I asked where Arkadelphia was and he told me he couldn’t remember, but probably Arkansas. “It’s the city of brotherly Arks,” he said. He thought it was funny, so I laughed. “What’s in Arkadelphia?” I asked him. He said he didn’t know, and that’s what was interesting about that place. Sometimes I felt sorry for him. He’d been through forty-seven states and always came home to Mom, who was really boring.
I waited for Wendy to call me at the end of August, but she didn’t, and then school started, and we were getting ready for the fight. We would have the home-field advantage, and we would have Big Al. That was the plan, which a deer, leaping across the road, fucked up for us.
There are a lot of deer in the woods and hills around Windfall; usually you’ll hit them in the spring when they’re more likely to jump across the road. I think they get horny: they rut. And leap stupidly into traffic. I could imagine that driven stupidity, jumping everywhere out of erotic joy until a hunter mounts your head in a den.
I was riding with Big Al, the top down; he was taking me home the day before the fight. I saw it first, the buck bounding out of the brush, its next step in the middle of our lane. Big Al saw it and said go. His foot stayed on the accelerator. The buck met the front fender with its weight forward and its head lowered, burdened with antlers. Then a great clack like a spike pounded wrong. The deer’s body flipped over the hood, its antlers pricked the windshield, its already bloody eye looked at me in the second of suspension, and the whole thing landed in the backseat of Al’s decelerating Cadillac. “Holy shit,” he said, almost impressed. It was as if he had done it on purpose, had colluded with the deer to produce this spectacular suicide. But the deer wasn’t dead. It squirmed and kicked at the upholstery, spraying blood.
Al stopped the car in the middle of the road, got out, and moved toward the backdoor and leaned over to pet the deer’s head. The pets turned to sour and then fiercer punches. He climbed up on the trunk, kicking the deer and bawling it out. Then he went up to a nearby porch and sat on the steps to catch his breath and rest. I got out of the car and stood by the road, not knowing what to do. I didn’t want to get in the car with him; I didn’t want to sit on the porch with him. No cars came. After a few minutes he went back to the car. He stood on the backseat. He kicked the deer some more. He crouched down and pounded his fists into the buck’s face. Eventually he drove away with the deer still in the backseat and me on the side of the road. Somebody called the cops and let me call my mom for a ride. She wasn’t home; I walked. It was chilly and dusk was coming.
Alvin Detwiler. That’s how his name was printed in the paper after the incident.
Big Al the animal lover. I couldn’t figure out why he had beaten that deer. Maybe he was pissed off at it for putting itself in harm’s way, for making itself a victim and making a slaughterer of Big Al. Or else Al was pissed that the deer had fucked up his car.
Whatever Big Al’s reasons were, this was powerful news. The Bootjackers would have seen the story—the Windfall Register is the only paper in the county. We guessed they wouldn’t show up that night, which meant they’d never show up again, next year or any other year.
After school that day I went home and thought about Wendy. Since that night the guys gave her a hard time at Civarelli’s, she and I had spoken only a few times on the phone, and then she went on vacation, and I hadn’t heard from her since. I wanted to call her, but I was afraid our conversation would lead up to that moment Westover asked about her pussy.
I dialed. I wanted to find out if she and her friends had heard about Big Al, about how merciless and crazy he was, we all were. Twenty rings. No answer.
A little while before the game, Westover called me. “We have to find Big Al. I don’t want to say anything yet, it’s just that I heard something.”
We didn’t know exactly where Big Al lived so we drove out along Mill Run, looking for his Cadillac. The one with the bloodstains, we joked—except Westover. “Don’t get excited until we know for sure,” he said.
We drove out a mile, two miles through thick forest. There were occasional lots cleared of trees and piled up with shacks and trailers and junk and people standing on the front porch banging metal sheets straight with a hammer or just staring at the abandoned appliances that turned brown in the yards. We could smell garbage burning in barrels out back. Some of the houses—they weren’t really houses, not the kind of houses we lived in—had names on their rural-route mailboxes—Brumbaugh, Zonfrilli, Swonder, but no Detwiler.
It sounded strange to us: Alvin Detwiler. In all that time we’d never known his full name. We’d imagined him without parents, a spawn of some beastly coupling.
“There,” Westover said. “Look.” We’d come around a bend and down a ridge to a trailer with a rusted rig chassis in the front yard; it looked like a whale’s skeleton. The Cadillac was there, dented, the windshield cracked. The top was down. The deer was still in the backseat, and this was a day later. Parked behind the Caddy was a sleek navy-blue four-door with federal plates, and a military jeep: MPs.
“All this over a fucking deer?” I said. “Are they arresting him or something?”
Westover eased the car along the road. We tried to see something through the trailer windows, but there were no windows on the front side, just vents. Chains hung from a tree branch out back, where a dog was barking at a rabbit hutch.
And goats—we drove around the bend a little more and saw five or six goats fenced inside a rectangular pen.
We pulled off to the side of the road and stopped the car. “Listen,” Westover said. “My mom knows his aunt or something. Anyways she heard that Big Al has been fucking AWOL from the Marines for ten years. He just quit one day and came home. He lives in there with his mother. Someone from the Marine recruiting office in Altoona must have seen his name in the paper.”
We sat in the car a while, me and Westover and two other guys, Darren Harlenburg and Josh Dudek, waiting for a car to pull out of Big Al’s place. We didn’t talk but I guess we all had the same questions. I wondered why he had left the Marines. And why had he come back here? My uncle worked at the bus station: people, he’d say, mostly buy one-way tickets. People don’t come back here from anywhere, he always claimed, not even hell. But that wasn’t true. Few people ever left. And though my father left all the time, he always came back, even from the city of brotherly Arks.
“The game starts in twenty minutes,” Westover said finally.
We turned around and drove past Big Al’s house again, the cars still parked there, the deer rotting on the white upholstery with swarms of flies working its eyes and nose.
Back at Westover’s place we took our cars and went home and stayed there. None of us was planning to go to the game. I called Wendy again. Of course she wasn’t home: she was a cheerleader.
I heard on TV that Bootjack High beat Windfall 42-zip.
After the game Westover drove a bunch of us past the lot where the fight was supposed to be. We hoped maybe that the Bootjack kids had been scared off by the story of Big Al. Maybe they wouldn’t even show, or maybe Big Al was there waiting for us. But no.
Dense blobs of black smoke hung in the sky. The Bootjack boys were already in the lot; they’d taken all the spare tires out of their cars, piled them up in a huge tower, a rubber totem pole, and set them on fire with some gasoline.
“Now what?” Westover said. The Bootjackers had spotted us.
“Roll the fucking windows up,” I said. “Lock the doors.” We sealed ourselves off and waited until one Bootjacker was close enough to start pounding his fist on the hood of the car. Two other guys started taking off their jackets. I’d never really seen one of them up close before. They were filled with a rage that was cumulative and so pure it was beautiful. They were angrier than we could ever have been. We started away. Since the Bootjackers had run so far from their own cars, Westover decided to make one last pass, right through the middle of the lot. That’s when I saw Wendy. She’d taken her spare from her trunk, and the Popsicle sticks out of her ashtray, and was getting ready to heave them into the fire.