Down the hall, my parents’ bedroom door closed at ten o’clock, the creaks and squeaks as they settled for the night carried softly through the walls of the house. Sarah had told me to be ready at midnight, and I lay beneath my covers already in my shirt, jacket, and jeans, watching the minutes on the nightstand clock pass.
Struggling to keep my eyes open, the lids fluttered shut like lazy butterfly wings. A couple times they snapped open, my mind screaming that I’d missed the appointed time and my sister had left without me, only to see but a few minutes had passed. Then came the gentlest of knocks on my door, and it swept inward slowly. With the fedora-wearing man still in the back of my mind, I thought of a crypt door opening, and I half expected a fanged monster to come leaping in at me.
No fangs, but a monster in her own right, my sister walked in and over to my bed. She leaned over and shook me. I slapped her hands away. She reached down and grasped my face, shook it. I slapped her away again.
“I’m up, I’m up,” I whispered. As I struggled out of the sheets she continued to poke and prod at me, just for the hell of it, so that I got up in a funny spastic dance.
Bandit was up, too, his eyes alight in the shadows of my room.
“Let’s get going,” Sarah said and gave me one last hard pinch on the upper arm, punctuating it with, “This better be worth it.”
“It is,” I said.
We crept out of the room like burglars, me shutting the door reluctantly on Bandit, afraid of the clacking of his nails on the hall floor waking my parents.
* * *
The dirt path made a pale stripe through the dark abyss of the night, and it seemed we walked a trail suspended in nothingness to either side and just the road at our feet. We had flashlights we’d filched from the foyer closet and the bright beams like lasers slicing the night proceeded ahead of us. Up the hill we trudged, pausing at the top where I’d first seen the light of the abandoned car, then down the other side. The woods stretched out before us and the trees reached hungrily for stragglers.
“Hope there aren’t any wolves or bears or anything,” Sarah said as we drew nearer.
“As a Sasquatch, you shouldn’t be too worried.”
She turned and shoved me.
At the edge of the woods we halted for a moment like we’d reached a barrier, some borderland whose crossing marked a certain passage. With a shared look and synchronized deep breath, we pushed through the trees and into the woods.
The bright, pale coin of the moon hanging above in the purple sky showed itself only intermittently between the roof of the branches above, like a child playing peek-a-boo. There were hoots and chirps and other sounds, and occasionally a bush or branch would rustle. We swung our flashlight beams in the direction we thought the noises came from. Sometimes a limb shook a bit as if something had just occupied it, or the quick flash of reflective eyes winked from the deep shadow. Subconsciously, we moved closer to each other: who was protecting who I can’t say.
We came to the stream and in the night it looked like a river of oil. Slick and black, the whispers of it running over stone was a constant white noise, like some fanatical survivalist had left a television with bad reception on somewhere deep in the forest. Leaves and twigs sailed the surface like tiny vessels.
Sarah looked up and down the stream, searching for large stones for footholds to cross the water without getting wet.
“Got to wade through it,” I said.
“Damn,” she said. “Probably cold this time of night.”
“It’s not the cold you have to worry about. It’s the piranha.”
“Har har,” she said, giving me a look colder than the night. “Very funny.”
“Don’t worry though. Since it’s only your feet in the water, I’m sure you’ll be safe. The smell should be a natural repellent.”
She punched me on the shoulder and, though I smiled, what I really wanted to do was rub my arm. My sister didn’t punch like a girl.
“If you could bottle the odor and sell it to deep sea divers, you’d be a billionaire,” I said, and she hit me again on the same spot. The throbbing there ached to the bone, and I shut up.
We took off our shoes and started across the water. The stream was indeed cold, and trying just my toes first didn’t do me much good, rather made me want to turn back, so I just took a deep breath and dunked them in and started walking. My sister was close behind, and I heard her gasp at the first feel of the water over her feet. I made melodramatic stomps through the water that sent up splashes, and her gasps went a few octaves higher.
“You ass!” she hissed.
I felt a shove at my back between the shoulders and I went stumbling forward, fell to my knees. The water splashed up to my face and each trickle of it hitting the bare skin of my hands and arms and neck and face was like a dagger poking. My knees and shins landed painfully on stones in the water, and between those aches and the cold I grimaced and clenched my teeth.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “We’re even. Help me up, please.”
I held out my hand, and my sister splashed up beside me and grabbed it.
“Serves you right, dork,” she said and started to pull me up.
I pulled back, fast and hard, and she fell into the water beside me. As she fell, I was already up and striding towards the shore. Both of us had had the presence of mind to keep our flashlights held high and out of the water, and as Sarah got to her feet she targeted my face with her beam so that I had to hold a forearm up to shield against the light.
“You’re so dead.”
Her jeans were soaked and her shirt and jacket up to the ribs.
“Have to catch me,” I said and started to jog, fast but not too fast so that we’d lose each other. I found the ruts of the access road soon enough, and my sister’s light chasing me I saw well enough to pick up my speed. That was the way it went for a bit: my sister cursing me, telling me she’d kill me, me laughing and running by moon and flashlight. Until we came to it, the old Buick, paint-flaked and rusted. A giant dead thing of metal there in the middle of the rutted road.
But something was different, and I stopped in my tracks.
Sarah skidded to a halt beside me, started to grab my forearm with both hands, began to twist the skin in opposing directions for one hell of an Indian burn. When she saw I wasn’t reacting, that something else had my attention, she stopped.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I pointed at the old car.
Its doors were all open, like the wings of a gigantic insect. We—me, Tara, Jim, and Fat Bobby—had closed the door we’d popped before we left. The trunk as well.
Slowly, I moved closer. Walking wide around the car, I shone my flashlight into it. The money was gone. All of it. Something else nagged at my mind then, something more terrible than missing money.
I took long sideways strides around to the rear of the vehicle. The trunk was open too. I stepped closer, peered over the lip of the trunk to see inside.
The body was gone.
“Look out!” Sarah yelled, still standing where she’d skidded to a stop behind me, several yards away.
The rustle of leaves was all I heard. A whisper of movement from the corner of my eye caught my attention. Something black moving. Something billowing like a curtain in an open window. I started to turn, caught a glimpse of a figure moving like liquid. Atop the figure, atop its head, a wide-brimmed fedora, like those hats detectives wore in old black-and-white movies.
Then I couldn’t turn any further because there was an arm around my throat. Another arm wrapped around me like a tentacle, pinning my own against my sides. I tried to struggle but it was like fighting iron. Flaps of cloth slapped my sides and legs, and I peered down, saw corners of the long coat flapping into view like little flags snapping in a high wind.
I remembered the figure from a few nights prior, walking the road in front of our house, looking up to my window like he expected me there. Strolling away like a passerby in the park.
“Let him go!”
Sarah, rushing forward.
A cool, sharp, and familiar pressure at my throat. My sister stopped, which I thought was wise. I didn’t much want a second mouth carved into my throat, to watch that new orifice spew blood like scarlet vomit.
“Where is it?”
A conversational tone, as if nothing was amiss.
“What?” I croaked, feeling the kiss of the blade at my throat.
“This is the night,” the voice said, and the words baffled me. “Great things can happen at night.” He spoke calmly but with a passion, as if he were reciting poetry. “This is the night. These are the times.”
Obviously, to this man these words meant something. To me it sounded like the ravings of a whack job. I thought of telling him so for just a fraction of a second, then realized a whack job who recited whack job poetry probably wouldn’t be too hesitant about relieving me of my head. I kind of liked my head right where it was. I looked at it every morning in the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t anything special, but it was mine and I kind of had an attachment to it.
“I … don’t understand …” I said, relying on honesty, or at least a semblance of it. I understood his first words—Where is it?—assuming that he was probably referring to the money. My declaration of ignorance was in response to his whack job-beatnik-spoken-word crap. The stuff about the night and the times.
“There was a sum of money,” he said, almost whispering into my ear like we were friends sharing a secret. His breath was sweet and minty, like he’d been sucking on candy preparing for a long awaited kiss. “It was in this automobile. Now it isn’t.”
“What do you want?” Sarah said, taking a daring step forward.
I felt the man’s head shift behind me as he fixed his gaze on her. Sarah stopped her approach immediately, as if she’d heard the command in a game of Red Rover.
“You may call me the Collector,” the man said. His sweet and minty breath and his snapping flag coat touched me delicately in different places. “I collect things that are owed, and at times I collect things for myself.”
The iron tentacle-like arm around my body suddenly loosened and fell away, but I didn’t move. That intimate touch of the blade was still there at my throat, and that held me rooted more than his arms ever could.
The ruffle of cloth on cloth as I felt and heard him go into one of his coat pockets was loud to my panic-heightened ears. He pulled the hand out a moment later and held something out for Sarah to see. I couldn’t see it, his arm too low and me not daring to lower my chin even a fraction of an inch, lest I stir the knife to action.
“Here is something I collected recently.”
He made a swift flicking gesture like he was tossing a coin. Something indeed was tossed, but it wasn’t a coin.
I followed it through the air as it rose into view in a wide arc, and Sarah’s light rose to trace its path. Pale and crooked like a large, dry noodle, one end red and raw, the finger sailed through the space between us and my sister, then dropped out of my view. It hit the ground with a faint sound like pebbles being idly and gently jostled by a foot.
Sarah screamed.
Then she had the presence of mind to realize what this might mean for me if she pissed off this nutjob, the Collector. She cut off her shriek with a hand clapped to her mouth like a clamp.
“It matters not whether you live or die,” he said, whispering to me, but I had no doubt including my sister as well. “All I require is what was in the car, and you may continue to live.”
“I … don’t know … where it is,” I squeaked.
The slightest pressure was added to the knife, and I felt it press into my throat. I felt its edge first kiss, and then bite. I felt a trickle of coolness down the slope of my neck. Blood-drool from the site of my proposed new mouth.
I pissed my pants.
I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed of it now or then. Have one big bastard of a knife pressed to your throat and see how brave you are. Besides, I think that was what saved my life, wetting my pants like a big fucking baby.
It was an honest response. It made me as genuine as any words could have.
“I believe you,” said the Collector. The knife left my throat and I heard the almost inaudible sounds of his footfalls receding. The rustle of leaves dancing as he withdrew from me and back into the shadows that birthed him. “You have two days to find where it has gone, and then I’ll be back to collect. Here. Midnight. Either the money, or you. Your choice.”
As he faded into the night, his voice drifted back to us once more like dark music carried on a breeze:
“I’ve disposed of one body already. If necessary, more can be added to that grave.”
Alone then, my sister and I, me in the warmth of my piss-soaked jeans, my sister breathing hard and fast, puffing a chill mist, and a lone finger in the space between us. That pale digit a reminder of what could have been, what still might be.
“Where is it?” I demanded, grabbing Fat Bobby by the front of his plaid shirt and shaking him.
Sarah had come with me to the meeting of the Outsiders’ Club atop Lookout Mountain. Though the light of day cast everything in summer hues of greens and browns and blues, the events of the previous night were just as fresh and urgent as they had been when they occurred, and all the world seemed darker to me, muted. Sleep hadn’t come at all the night prior, and I was tired and frightened and angry.
I shook Fat Bobby a few more times and then Sarah, Tara, and Jim pulled me away from him. Jim especially was rough with me, yanking me and propelling me away with a nice good shove, so that I clenched my fists and targeted him next. Bandit barked in confusion, not sure what was going on, who the bad guy was and who he should bite.
“Where’s the money, Jim?” I said through clenched teeth. “This guy wasn’t joking around.”
By shouts and curses I’d already told them what had happened the night before, about the Collector, and how he collected things owed and sometimes for himself. About the severed finger sailing through the air, its stub of bone poking out catching the moonlight and sparkling for a moment like a grim jewel.
“If you’d calm down for a fucking second,” Jim said, seeing my fists and making a couple of his own, just in case I guess, “that’s what we were going to tell you.”
“Then tell me.”
“You’re standing on it,” Jim said.
I looked at my feet, and the rounded and stoned peak of the mountain we were standing on. I saw nothing out of place: no freshly dug and refilled hole; no stones rolled out of and back into place to hide things under.
“What’re you talking about?” I said, getting angrier by the second. My throat was buzzing with that phantom sensation of the blade pushed up against it.
“Next to it might be more accurate,” Jim said and walked past Bobby, holding his shirt together where my yanking and pulling had ripped a couple buttons loose, to the tall upright stone that looked like an Easter Island statue.
I followed him.
Stretching on tiptoes, Jim reached for the top of the upright stone and boosted himself up to a sitting position atop it. I did the same. He leaned over, and so did I. There it was, in a recess made by the upright stone and others behind it, perhaps a yard deep and less than a foot wide: the canvas sacks, the green banded stacks of bills glimpsed through the open mouths.
Sarah strode over and boosted herself up also, leaned over, saw all the money, said: “Holy shit.” I scooted and leapt back down to the others. Jim did the same, dusting his hands on his jeans after he landed. Leaning over for a few moments longer looking at all that money, Sarah came down last, like she was reluctant to leave it.
I knew the feeling.
“Why’d you move it?” I asked.
“We were afraid someone might find it,” Fat Bobby muttered.
He had that hurt expression on his face, that pitiful slacking of his cheeks and mouth that made me want to slap him and made me feel rotten at the same time.
“Who the hell would find it?” I asked, knowing the stupidity of my question even as I voiced it, and not giving a shit. I’d had a goddamn knife to my throat the night before, and I’d pissed my pants in front of my sister, so I wasn’t in such a good mood.
“Well, Joey, obviously someone was looking for it,” Tara said in a soft, lilting tone, trying to defuse the situation at hand.
“And don’t forget Sheriff Glover saw us on the road with the car,” Jim added, his fists finally relaxing, fingers hooking into his pockets. “We couldn’t leave the money there after he’d seen the car.”
I couldn’t help but feel betrayed that Tara was the one who spoke the obvious truth. It had been foolish to leave the money in the car. Especially after the confrontation with Sheriff Glover.
That didn’t mean I had to like being kept out of the loop. I was the one who’d found the car and led us all to it. I’d brought us all together, and I should have been included in all things. Then I looked at Tara’s face, her eyes, her mouth, those brown curls, and I softened considerably. I took a deep breath and calmed myself.
“Did you recognize him?” Jim asked. “Either of you,” he added, looking at Sarah too. He still had a mild look of irritation when he looked at her, and each time he did he’d quickly look at me with a sort of accusatory stare. I knew what he was silently asking me: Why’d you bring her? As in: Why is she part of this now? And though I was irritated and angry, I guess I understood. I imagined how I’d feel if I’d arrived to find any of them had brought new people into the fold, so to speak.
“No,” Sarah said.
I shook my head.
“Nothing?” Jim said. “You didn’t get a look at his face? You didn’t recognize his voice?”
“No,” I repeated.
“And we have two days until he comes back?” Tara said. She and Jim exchanged looks, and I knew that they were thinking along the same lines. I felt left out, wanting to know what it was they were thinking.
Sarah and I nodded again.
“A finger?” Fat Bobby said and we all turned at the interruption. He had blanched, as he had when I’d first mentioned the finger. He kind of half turned, his cheeks puffing a bit, as if he might throw up.
Tara and Jim turned back to me, ignoring him.
“I say we do what the Outsiders’ Club does best,” Tara said.
Jim smiled, apparently knowing where she was going with this declaration. I had a vague idea, quickly forming, but didn’t want to say anything yet. I didn’t much like the idea that was forming in my head. I remembered what had almost happened last time.
“Let him come,” Jim said, sharing another look with Tara, and she was smiling now too. “We’ll be ready.”
Certain of what they intended now, or something close to it, I spoke:
“Throwing rocks isn’t going to stop this guy.”
“What are you talking about?” Sarah asked.
Reluctantly, but seeing no way around it, I told my sister about the confrontation with Sheriff Glover. How he’d hit me and Bobby, pulled his gun on us, and we’d all countered with rocks, beating him bloody. I thought Sarah would insist we tell Dad and Mom then, tell them everything, and the worried expression that passed over her face made me think she was considering just that. I needn’t have worried, however, as the look of concern was quickly replaced by a smile, and she high-fived me.
“Joey’s right,” Sarah said, and she got that irritated look from Jim again, and I got mine, and I knew he wasn’t happy about an outsider giving her opinion on things. “We’re not going to stop this guy with a bunch of rocks.”
“Then we use more than rocks,” Tara said.
What that implied I didn’t know or wasn’t ready to admit to myself, but it scared the hell out of me. It seemed we were being pushed in a direction, like maybe down the very hill we were standing on. Propelled forward and rolling down and gaining momentum we’d soon be going so fast that we wouldn’t be able to stop ourselves. Not until we crashed, that was, and that sense of losing control worried me. But I didn’t know how to share those thoughts with my friends. Didn’t know how to put them into words that would carry the weight of the feeling.
“Wait,” Jim said. He was still looking at Sarah. “Who said anything about ‘we’?”
He pointed at her to punctuate his words.
“I’m involved now,” my sister said, her hands on her hips and this look on her face like she was ready to walk over and rip his nuts off if he argued the point. I wouldn’t put it past her either. The line between noogies and testicular removal seemed a small and fine one to me.
Jim wasn’t so easily cowed.
He’d never had a sister. Didn’t understand his folly.
“The hell you are. This is our money.”
“It won’t be anyone’s money if the police hear about it,” she said, and she gave Jim this triumphant smile, like she was saying: Top that, jerk.
“You’d do that?” he said. Jim’s face had gone paler than I ever imagined a black person’s could. It looked like the transformation of Michael Jackson packed into a couple seconds.
“I just might.”
They looked at each other and the clash of wills was almost tangible, like a military skirmish was playing out right before us. I could almost hear the sounds of battle, and the screams of the dying.
I was fairly sure my sister was bluffing. The fact that she’d gone with me the night before to the woods and the access road, and her acknowledgement that it would take more than stones to stop the Collector, revealed that she was as invested in this as the rest of us. The car was our find. The woods and the road that had hidden it, our place, our realm. These things belonged to us, in ways not fully explainable in words. I’m not so sure I understand it even now. But it was our duty to protect these things—the car, the body that had been in it, and yes, the money—for as long as we could.
Yet I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried then and there, watching the battle of wills between my sister and friend. Everything seemed perched on a razor thin edge in those passing moments. If pushed the wrong way, it could all end in a moment.
Jim finally let out this deep sigh and then looked at me.
“Fine. She’s in.”
As if it was by his decree and not his submission that this was concluded.
Tara moved forward and gave my sister a hug, and for some reason this was embarrassing. The tension about us seemed a tangible force lifting and floating away. I sighed in relief, and my body eased.
“Nice to have another girl in the club,” Tara said, and Sarah smiled.
“You need a code name,” Fat Bobby said, and we all turned to him, like we’d forgotten he was there. I saw a steaming pile of something chunky on the ground beside him, and realized he indeed had vomited.
“Code name?” Sarah said.
“Yeah,” I said, and I began to go down the roster, gesturing at everyone. “Tomboy Tara, Nigger Jim, and Fat Bobby.”
“And what about you?” she asked.
“You can call me Master,” I said.
“Yeah, right. How about Joey Pisspants?”
My face turned red. I shoved her, she shoved me back. No one asked for elaboration on my proposed new nickname, and I was grateful.
“How about Ugly?” I suggested, shoving her again.
“How about I kick your ass in front of your girlfriend?” she said, and slapped me upside the head. Bandit jumped up between us, wanting in on the game. His paws left a smear on Sarah’s blouse, and she pushed Bandit away.
“Dammit, Joey,” she said, brushing angrily at the smear with her hands. “That dog’s retarded.”
“At least his nickname isn’t Ugly,” I said.
It went on like that for a few moments more, until she hit me a pretty good one on the shoulder, and I tried not to show how much it hurt. But I thought about her threat and didn’t much want to get a wedgie or noogie in front of Tara, and so ignored the further insults coming to mind and stood a safe distance from my sister, rubbing my tender arm. Jim and Tara took the opening to start talking about what we’d do, and “more than rocks” was the understatement of the year. What we were talking about doing was something, even at that age, I knew could never be undone and would be with me until the end of my days.
We’d finished our little club conference atop Lookout Mountain with Jim, Tara, and Bobby going back to the Connolly yard to see to some preparations. Sarah, Bandit and I headed home in the off-chance that we were being watched. We didn’t want the Collector to get suspicious or anything if he was the one doing the watching.
Jim had pointed out the fact that the Collector could have been watching us up on Lookout Mountain during our whole talk, and that maybe he saw us boost onto the upright stone and peer into the recess there. That when we left he’d come out of hiding, find the money, and that would be that.
When Jim said this, we all stopped what we were doing, even Bandit, as if he sensed the direness and inherent threat of Jim’s words, and stood and looked around at the trees around and below us. I watched for the slightest shake of a branch; listened for the slightest snap or pop of crushing footfalls; saw and heard nothing but the forest. No one else did either.
There was nothing else we could do but proceed as we had planned. Either the Collector was watching us and now knew where the money was, or he’d concluded last night that it had been hidden somewhere far away and discreet, and was confident in his promise of violence to see the money brought to him.
The Outsiders’ Club silently parted ways at the edge of the woods, without a goodbye or even a wave, as if the task we were about demanded solemnity rather than joviality. I was actually appreciative of my sister’s presence, along with my dog’s.
The weight I felt pushing on me seemed too heavy to bear alone.
* * *
Now, you’d think a missing body, a buttload of money, and a creepy guy in a fedora and coat calling himself the Collector threatening to kill you and your sister, would be enough for God or Fate or whatever ran the universe to put on one kid’s plate at any given time. But you’d be wrong, because apparently God’s got a mean streak or Fate was a neglected stepchild and is working out issues or something.
When Sarah and I arrived home we were greeted by the following scene: our dad in the yard face to face with the lumberjack-Sasquatch, Mr. Templeton. The way Bobby’s father stood, legs firmly set and arms crossed at his chest, and the close proximity with which our father planted himself before the bull-like man, made it clear that this wasn’t an impromptu PTA meeting.
The tension in the air was like a substance you could reach out and touch. We were in the driveway, Dad and Mr. Templeton a short distance away in the green summer grass of our yard, and though I knew Dad had seen us approach, he never once let his eyes drift away from the larger man in front of him.
I’d forgotten how truly huge Bobby’s dad was. He was a mountain sprouted legs.
I remembered that day at the trailer trash neighborhood, the street like a ghost town or a Third World village. Seeing the man turn to me. The feeling of being the focus of his bored and sleepy anger, like it was something that was always there, this rage, but dulled or lazy by its constancy.
I remembered how I’d thought the bearish man could break me like a twig.
I held that same conclusion as I watched him and Dad square off.
This wasn’t me he was facing this time, though, and my dad was no twig.
“Where’s my boy?” Mr. Templeton said.
He had the same or similar flannel shirt and jeans he’d had on the day I’d first seen him. His lumberjack outfit. He asked this question as if he’d asked it a time or two already, and there was something like a disinterested irritation in his tone, if that made any sense. Like he expected my dad to answer, but really didn’t give a shit either.
“I already told you,” Dad said. “I don’t know.”
Dad’s shirt was halfway tucked in, half hanging out like a drooping lip, as if he’d been in the middle of dressing when he’d become aware of his visitor outside. Mom was on the porch, a vague silhouette behind the screen and leaning on the handrail, wringing a dish towel or drying her hands or something else. All I knew was that towel was getting manhandled and hadn’t done a damn thing to anyone. Which meant Mom felt what I did. That thick tension like a fog or a curtain that you could brush at in front of your face.
Something was going to happen.
And it wasn’t going to be pretty.
“And I already told you I think you’re full of shit,” Bobby’s dad said, again, not losing his cool but just stating a fact. Bored and tired. “He’s been spending a lot of time with that brat of yours,” and he hooked one large thumb over his shoulder directly at me. That frightened me, him knowing I was there without even having turned to see me. Then he did turn to look at me, and I froze like an animal in the headlights of an oncoming car. “Where’s my boy, little faggot. He’s been shirking chores, that fat fuck, and I want to know where he is.”
He even took a step towards me.
And that’s what started it.
Dad grabbed Mr. Templeton—inches taller and many tens of pounds heavier—and spun the bigger man back around to face him.
“You don’t go near my son,” Dad said, and he was as cool as Mr. Templeton, only not disinterested or bored at all. He was very interested, and beneath his calm exterior, very mad. “You don’t even talk to him.”
Looking down at Dad, then looking to the side to see the hand clasping his shoulder, Mr. Templeton smiled a beast’s smile. I saw those yellowed teeth again, stained and worn like ancient tombstones. Then his eyes rolled back to Dad, and the smile grew.
“Take your hand off me,” he said to Dad, grinning in such a way that you knew he wanted exactly the opposite. He didn’t want Dad to take his hand off of him at all. He wanted Dad to leave it there, so he could take it off himself.
“Get off my property,” Dad said, leaving his hand right where it was.
“Tell me where my son is.”
“Fuck you.”
The fist came like a piston, so fast that I hardly saw it, nearly as fast as I’d ever seen Dad move, and Dad moved like an eel. I never thought such a large man could move so fast, and I wanted to shout out to warn Dad. But the motion was faster than my ability to form the words and I was stuck like Mom and Sarah, unable to do anything but watch.
Which was fine, because Dad wasn’t there when the fist arrived.
He’d somehow moved behind Bobby’s dad, came up and under the arm, hooked the larger man in some variation of a half nelson, lifted, swung with his hips, and Mr. Templeton went through the air, over my dad’s back, and slammed the ground like a falling tree. A grunt issued from the bigger man as his back struck the ground and the air tried to whoosh out of him, but the next moment he was back on his feet and facing Dad as if he’d done nothing but tripped and stumbled.
“You’re dead, little man,” Mr. Templeton said and took a strong stance, his legs spread and his knees bent. He lifted his large, meat-slab fists like a boxer, bounced a few times on the balls of his feet, and started throwing punches.
If possible, and if my eyes could be trusted since I hadn’t seen much the first time, Fat Bobby’s dad moved even faster this time around. The punches actually buzzed through the air like large insects flapping wings.
Dad batted the first couple away with ease.
Mr. Templeton moved in closer, quickly.
Dad batted a few others away, tried a swift kick at the bigger man’s legs. He may as well have tried kicking a redwood. The sound of Dad’s leg hitting the other man’s was like meat hitting brick. If there was any effect on Mr. Templeton, he hid it well. In fact he smiled.
Dad must have been as surprised as we were. I knew he’d kicked with his all and had expected the larger man to go down again. When he didn’t, Dad paused, and that was when the next punch caught him square in the head. He stumbled backwards. Mr. Templeton rushed in close, bent low, and threw some body shots. The pounding on Dad’s sides and stomach sounded like hammer blows.
He took them, and he still stood, but his face scrunched up in pain.
This close in, Dad brought up a few quick knees, striking the other man in the thighs and ribs and abdomen. More grunts and gasps from Mr. Templeton, but he kept swinging, at the body, the head, switching back and forth with a steady rhythm.
Dad had his arms down, and took most of the punches on the forearms, protecting his ribs. It was like two machines pounding each other, both fueled and fired, and it was impossible to tell which was getting the worst of it.
Mom was at the steps of the porch, the screen door open, wanting to come running down and do something. She knew better than to get in the middle of such flailing, though, and could only watch.
Sarah and I knew to stay away as well.
But there was one other, and his low and menacing growl let me know he was ready, just waiting for the word. I hesitated a moment, not knowing what my dad would want me to do. Dad wasn’t getting the worst of the exchange, but he wasn’t giving any more either. I honestly didn’t know what would happen if it continued.
Who would be standing.
And who would fall.
Somehow, unlike my dad, I didn’t think Mr. Templeton would be satisfied with a fall. He wouldn’t stop until my dad was a sack of pulp and broken bones.
That’s what decided it.
I gave the word.
“Bandit! Go!”
And like a bullet, he did.
In one bound my dog flew over the short brick wall dividing the driveway and yard. His feet landed on the grass with cushioned thumps. Two strides to cover the distance, and then he leapt into the air and I thought: Wow, he flies! and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see my dog sprout wings and flutter about the yard. His jump carried him into the center of Mr. Templeton’s back, right between the shoulder blades. Dad had the presence of mind to see Bandit’s approach, while still keeping his eyes on the other man, and when the dog struck he stepped aside and Bandit’s weight and impact sent dog and man tumbling to the ground.
A flurry of teeth.
Strands of spit flying.
The speckled red points of blood raining down on the marble garden stones and walkway.
Bandit snapped and his jaws clacked, and cloth and skin alike tore under his assault. Mr. Templeton, at first surprised by this attack, then sobered by his own blood, quickly recovered and started pounding at Bandit’s head and body with his fists, while trying to keep his forearms between my dog’s teeth and his own face. I watched fist after fist slam into Bandit’s head, his face, his body, and finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran and jumped the low dividing wall much as Bandit had done. I landed in the yard and kept running.
“Dad! He’s going to kill him!”
I screamed in pain and misery, with a fear deeper than what I’d felt when it had been my dad that had been taking the beating. Such is the irrationality, and beauty, of the love between dogs and boys.
Mom, somehow down the stairs of the porch without me seeing her, intercepted me, bear-hugged me, carried me away. I struggled, but somehow she held me in arms of iron, and I remember thinking: Who did I get my strength from?
I watched from within my mom’s arms, my dog and Mr. Templeton going at it, and there were a few more blows to Bandit’s head, each one a blow to my heart. Then Dad was there again, and he hauled Bandit off by the collar, dragged him a few feet away, told him to “Stay!” and he did, muzzle pink-smeared with blood, man’s or his own I didn’t know. Probably both.
Dad walked back towards Mr. Templeton. Shirt soaked in blood, the big man tried to stand. He was still smiling, and I thought: He must be the devil. Strings of spit and blood hanging from his mouth; clothes ripped, arms ripped; and he was still smiling.
He made it to one knee before Dad’s kick to the ribs sent him sprawling again.
Dad knelt over him and threw a few punches to the side of the head and between the eyes, and then Mr. Templeton was still. Dad checked the man’s pulse. Leaned in close to his mouth to hear the breathing.
He turned and nodded to Mom.
“Call the police,” he said through his puffy and swollen face, and then Mom let go of me and went back in the house. “And an ambulance,” Dad added after giving the prostrate bigger man another once over.
Free of her, I charged across the yard to my dog, kneeling and hugging him, squeezing him close, and in pain he looked wobbly and slightly delirious, and I knew my embrace must only be adding to his discomfort. But he endured it, my dog, my friend, my brother, smiling his wide smile and his long tongue hanging out, guardian of his family, proud and smiling.
Can you guess who the responding officer was? Yup, God was taking a nice big shit on me that day, and the arrival of Sheriff Glover in his black-and-white made me want to roll myself up in a big wad of toilet tissue and flush myself away.
The fat man got out of his car as haughty as can be, this kind of wry smile on his face and the blue and red of the siren flashing casting a glow on it that made the smile seem demented. Which it probably would have seemed anyway without the dramatic lighting. An ambulance had arrived first and the drivers had taken it upon themselves to restrain and wheel Mr. Templeton away, and so it was just us and the round and smiling sheriff.
All of us were on the porch, making this sort of semicircle around Dad and Bandit, each with cold compresses to their respective faces; Dad applying his own, me pressing the cold bundle to Bandit. We watched the sheriff waddle towards us and climb the porch, the wooden stairs creaking under his weight.
He gave me a not so subtle glance before he spoke, and I know it was so I could get a nice long look at the fading cuts and bruises on his face. It was his way of saying: I haven’t forgotten.
“Well,” he said, looking squarely at Dad now, “it looks like you folks are just all kinds of trouble. And not even here a month.” He made a tsk-tsk sound by clicking his tongue. “Not the best way to meet neighbors.”
The sheriff grinned like this was a triumph.
I felt proud then for pelting another human being with rocks, and wondered if that was a sin and if I was going to burn for it.
“I told your dispatcher what happened,” Mom said, a hand on Dad’s shoulder.
“Yes, yes,” Sheriff Glover said, nearly cutting her off. “Mr. Templeton has been a bad boy. That doesn’t answer the reason why he was here, though,” he said, and now looked at me again. “Have you seen his son around?”
I looked to Mom and Dad first, but they said nothing, and I knew this time around I wasn’t going to receive any pardons. I was expected to answer the sheriff. Feeling trapped, with no time to think of a good lie, I told the truth. I felt like I was betraying Bobby. Knew beyond any doubt what was in store for him when he and his dad were reunited.
“Last time I saw him he was heading to the Connolly yard.”
I wondered if Fat Bobby would look as bad as Dad next time I saw him. Inwardly, I shrunk and cringed, knowing I’d turned my friend over to a beating that could have been, if not avoided, at least delayed.
The sheriff nodded, and I knew what was playing in his mind, or at least an approximation, and it involved a lot of “niggers” and “coons” and “junglebunnies” with maybe a “spearchucker” or two thrown in for good measure.
“That man beats his son,” Mom said. Her tone revealed she knew she was talking to a wall for all the good it would do, but it was something that had to be said and so she said it.
“That’s a serious accusation,” Sheriff Glover said. Then added: “And none of my concern anyway.”
“This isn’t fifty years ago,” Dad said. “A man shouldn’t get away with hitting his kid.”
“Neither is this California,” the sheriff retorted, drawing the word out like it was distasteful and made his mouth bitter. “Where any kid can sue his parents for getting a spanking.”
“I have a feeling Mr. Templeton isn’t the only one that hits his kid,” I said, knowing I shouldn’t have but unable to stop myself.
The stare the sheriff turned my way said he’d heard that and marked it, and the tally against me was growing. Payment would come, it promised. I believed him, and said nothing else.
“Inside,” Mom said sharply, and, tail tucked between my legs, Bandit following me, I turned and went inside. I didn’t go far, though, and turned back to creep to the side of the door to listen.
“Be assured Mr. Templeton won’t be coming back on your property,” Sheriff Glover said. “But I’d suggest that you folks don’t stray too far from it yourselves, except for business and essentials that is, for awhile.”
“You threatening us?” Mom asked.
“No, ma’am,” he replied, and I was certain he had given one of his mocking tips of the hat with the “ma’am” there. “I’m just saying you folks aren’t none too popular right now, and in a town this small even turds like Templeton have got friends, and those friends are your enemies now, I reckon.”
With that I heard the porch creak and moan in torment as the sheriff turned and headed back down. I wondered if the Earth’s plates were realigning under his weight, or if he was affecting the planet’s axis of rotation and we’d be thrown into another ice age or something.
Then I thought of that look he’d given me, and things weren’t so funny anymore. I wondered if they ever would be again, or if this was what awaited me all the rest of my days.