“Did you see Sarah Byrnes?” Mom asks as I walk in looking rode hard and put up wet, thanks to our three-hour workout earlier. She wears a green-and-blue Gore-Tex running suit over her sweats, and her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, bangs plastered wet against her forehead. Mom’s been running.
I nod. I almost fell asleep sitting on the couch beside Sarah Byrnes thinking of new things to say to her brick wall self. “Yeah.”
“And?”
“Would have been a good time to do my homework.”
“Still no response, huh? What did the counselor say?”
“Same old thing. Told me to talk about things that might jar her back. Remember Crispy Pork Rinds?”
Mom laughs. She spent more time up at school than I did during that corrupt chapter in my life. She provided the paper and the printer, though Mautz still doesn’t know that. “Yes, dear, I remember Crispy Pork Rinds. Is that what you’ve been talking to Sarah Byrnes about? No wonder she won’t talk to you.”
“No way, man. She loved that rag right up till the final word of the final sordid exposé. If it hadn’t been for trouble within the ranks she’d have brought it right on into high school with us. Hell, we brought Mautz.” I pull a half-full quart of Gatorade from the refrigerator and drain it like a college kid sucking down a Bud, placing the empty bottle back on the rack.
“Prepare to die,” Mom says, and I come to my senses, grabbing the bottle before the door can close and flipping it across the kitchen into the garbage can on survival reflex. Of all my dysfunctional behaviors, she hates me putting empty containers back where they don’t belong. “I don’t care if you weigh seven hundred pounds the rest of your life and don’t stop picking your nose till you’re forty,” she told me once, “but if you put one more empty container anywhere but in the garbage, I’ll have you put to sleep.”
“You remember Dale Thornton?” I ask.
“The kid that used to come over here and bully you out of your junk food?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure, I remember him. Pretty rough customer. Why?”
“One of the counselors up at Sacred Heart—his name’s Sam—asked if Sarah Byrnes had any other friends. Dale was the only one I could think of. Man, that’s shitty. Her only other friend than me she hasn’t seen for more than three years.”
“That is shitty,” Mom says. “Did the counselor think Dale Thornton could do some good?”
“Didn’t know. I think he was just fishin’.”
“Is Dale still around?”
I laugh. “I don’t know. If I were going to hunt him down, I’d probably start at the state pen. But you know, when I was driving home I remembered something he said once.”
“What was that?”
“He got really pissed off at Sarah Byrnes one day when she was ragging on his family and told her he didn’t believe her story about the pot of spaghetti.”
“About how she was burned?”
“Yeah. At the time I thought he was just trying to get her goat. Man, he got the whole herd. Anyway, I’ve wondered about it sometimes. It was a pretty strong reaction if it wasn’t true; she like to ripped him a new one.”
The conversation dies because Mom has to get ready to go out. Her latest boyfriend, a guy named Carver Middleton, on whom the jury is still out, is taking her to the recreational vehicle show at the trade center. Now there’s my idea of an exciting night on the town.
I think it’s safe to say Dale Thornton took exception to his personal profile in Crispy Pork Rinds. He wasn’t the publicity hound we might have expected. And let me say it was one thing to have him rough you up when you didn’t have enough lunch money to keep him happy, but it was something else altogether to get him really mad. I feel truly fortunate not to have been the first in a succession of Dale Thornton serial murders.
By the end of that day of our first edition, I really did consider locking myself in the school furnace room until Dale was about a month into his first three-to-five for first degree assault on some other kid. But Sarah Byrnes thought she could get me out under cover. I actually thought there was a chance because Sarah Byrnes was—and is—one tightfisted kid with a buck, and she had three of them bet that I would get home that day with all my blood in its original container.
I hung around school talking with Mr. Webb, who was one of the few teachers I liked—and who liked me, I think. Mr. Webb was one of those small oases for those of us who spent most of our time scorched on the deserts of humiliation. Someday I’ve gotta stop over at the junior high and tell him thanks. Anyway, he knew Dale was after me and he offered Sarah Byrnes and me a ride home, but the bet was off if I rode in a car or if an adult helped get me to the bus.
I said, “Hey, what’s more important, your bank account or my life?”
Sarah Byrnes looked at me like I’d turned yupster before her very eyes. “Man, you’re lucky to have me around,” she said. “If you start using adults to save you, Dale will just wait till the one day there isn’t one around. And waiting pisses him off. Then you not only get your butt kicked, but you worry every day till it happens. This way, the more times you outsmart him, the smarter you get—you know, like a forest animal. Pretty soon you’ll be so good nobody will ever get you. You have to always think about survival, Eric. Trust me.”
One of the reasons I hung out with Sarah Byrnes, besides that I was as fat as she was ugly, was her brains. I’ve always been considered pretty smart (a genius, if you ask me) but I consistently play Watson to Sarah Byrnes’s Sherlock Holmes, and from where I stood at the time—petrified by fear—her thinking seemed sound. Looking back, however, I think she said it more to win the money than to turn me into some kind of environmentally wise escape artist. I have to say in her defense, though, that just before I lost consciousness I heard her screaming at Dale that she wrote the newspaper with me.
No help. Dale’s last words were, “Mautz only said it was him.”
To back up a bit, I was with Mr. Webb, refusing a ride home like a moron while Sarah Byrnes was down in the janitor’s room getting an empty cardboard generator box and Mr. Otto’s dolly truck. She told Mr. Otto she had to move this huge science project from the science room to the storage room so no one would mess with it until after the science fair. Sarah Byrnes was a stickler for detail when it came to telling a good lie. She even got Mr. Otto to write DANGER—FLAMMABLE on the side of the box in adult handwriting so it would look all official.
I was to get into the box so Sarah Byrnes could wheel me eight or ten blocks to the edge of the arboretum, where I would jump out and run through the trees like a bowling ball dodging pins. Dale Thornton would be lurking in the halls and out in the parking lot waiting for me to show, and I’d be scooting the back way toward my house and great riches for Sarah Byrnes, which she promised to share with me, though not fifty-fifty because I furnished only the body while she provided the brains.
So much for the difference between how smart Sarah Byrnes was and how dumb Dale Thornton was. He got one look at Sarah Byrnes wheeling a hundred-seventy-five-plus pounds of FLAMMABLE Eric Calhoune down the sidewalk, followed her out of yelling range from school, and made his move like the true thumb crusher I believed he would grow up to be.
I was bouncing along inside the absolute darkness of this box, feeling like a bat in an earthquake down in Carlsbad Caverns or someplace and thinking how Sarah Byrnes and I ought to go to Southeast Asia and see if Chuck Norris had missed any MIAs that we could spring, when I heard, “Uh-oh.”
“What?” I whispered.
“Shhhh.”
I shhhhed.
“Don’t breathe,” she said, as if I were.
Now give me a little fear and a small enclosure back then and I’d heat it up like a steam room, pronto. Give me a lot of fear and a small enclosure and I’d combust spontaneously.
I closed my eyes (which didn’t help because it was already darker than a tomb) held my breath, and listened.
“Hey, Scarface.”
Sarah Byrnes didn’t answer and we kept rolling along.
“Scarface!” Closer. Still we rolled. Then I felt us stop. “What’s in the box?”
“None of your stupid business,” Sarah Byrnes said. “It’s my science project. I’m taking it home.”
“Lemme see.”
“Get away from me.”
“Just lemme look in there. I wanna see your science project.”
“You wouldn’t know a science project from a box of fish guts,” Sarah Byrnes said. “I’m warning you, Dale Thornton, you better leave me alone.”
“Flame-able, huh?”
“See what I mean? It’s flammable,” she said, pronouncing it correctly.
“Either way. That means it starts on fire easy, right?”
“That means it explodes easy. You better not mess with it.”
I hear a click, then the sound of a stalled cigarette lighter. “Let’s see,” Dale said. “Let’s just see if it explodes.”
“You better stop that!”
“Know what I think, Scarface?”
“I don’t think you think.”
“I think if this thing really exploded it would look like when they blow up one of them whales that swims up on the beach sometimes. You know, like down in California? I think you got a big ol’ fat-ass whale in there.”
“That’s just what I’d expect you to think,” Sarah Byrnes said. “God, you’re just so stupid.”
“Oh yeah? Tell you what. I’m gonna just go ahead and light this thing. If what you got in there doesn’t come out all cooked up with an apple in his mouth, I’ll let you go.” I heard the lighter again, pictured myself as Box-O-Bar-B-Q, and was suddenly wailing and battering at the lid and sides like a box of cats headed for the river. Once free, my running escape lasted all of three steps.
That’s when I discovered Dale Thornton’s true reaction to humiliation.
It should have ended there, right? Unconsciousness. Threat of serious injury. No more Crispy Pork Rinds, right? Right?
Wrong.
“So we can put this bad boy to bed?” I said, nodding at a copy of the underground newspaper as I tore the cellophane from another package of Nutter Butter cookies, bought to soothe the pain pulsating through the left side of my face. Sarah Byrnes and I were holed up safely in my attic.
She shook her head defiantly. “No way. They turn up the heat on us, we turn up the heat on them.”
I said, “Great. We hurt their feelings, they hurt our faces. It’s a good thing we’re so smart, Sarah Byrnes.”
“What’s the matter with you, Eric? I thought you were tough. You get roughed up a little by some two-bit bully and you crumple. Don’t you know the price in human lives our forefathers paid for freedom of the press?” Then, more seriously, “Don’t you get it that words are the only way people like us can fight back?”
I extended the Nutter Butters toward her, but she batted them away. I said, “They died for it so we wouldn’t have to. Besides, our paper was supposed to be anonymous. It’s no good if it’s not. If they know who we are, anyone we write about can pound us into mush.”
Sarah Byrnes stared at the bare bulb above and to the right behind my head to let me know my words were falling on deaf ears.
“Listen, Sarah Byrnes,” I said. “It was a good idea. But it’s only good if we’re not getting killed.” I moved closer and touched her knee. “Man, I was scared. I thought Dale Thornton was going to really kill me. Toward the end I could hear him hitting me, but I quit feeling it. Like I was already part dead.”
“You learned a good lesson about pain,” she said back. “When you can’t take it anymore, your body stops feeling for you. That was just your body being your friend.”
“If my body were my friend, it would have run faster.”
“But you’re right,” Sarah Byrnes went on. “If they know who we are, it’s not good. They’ll just treat Crispy Pork Rinds the same way they treat us.” She scooted over and took the Nutter Butters out of my hand and said, “Listen, who’s the real enemy here?”
I felt my eye. The entire left side of my face was dark purple and sore and soft as a sack of dead birds. “That’s easy,” I said. “Look at your face, Sarah Byrnes, and then look at mine. Dale Thornton’s the enemy.”
“I used to stay with my aunt—my dad’s sister who’s not alive anymore—for a couple of weeks every summer. You know what my aunt used to do when she was mad at me?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “She told my cousin I used his bike or ate his candy bar or told some bad secret about him.”
“So?”
“So do you know why? Because it got us after each other. We tried to kill each other, and she could give us any punishment she wanted because there was a rule against fighting. My dad isn’t the only person in our family who treats people like shit. His whole family is like that.”
“So our enemy is your dad’s family?” I asked facetiously.
Sarah Byrnes rolled her eyes. “Humanity’s enemy is my dad’s family, but that’s not the point. Who told Dale Thornton you wrote Crispy Pork Rinds?”
“Mautz.”
“Who told you Crispy Pork Rinds was a piece of trash?”
“Mautz.” I was getting the idea.
“Bingo. He tells you it’s a piece of trash, but he uses the piece of trash to get the goods on Dale Thornton for the chewing tobacco. Dale gets punished at school for skipping, then probably gets hammered at home. Then Dale puts it to you after school because Mautz tells him who wrote the trash about him. Mautz sits back and lights a cigar. He’s got all the people he hates on different sides. Now. Who’s the enemy?”
It was my theory about how the police secretly like warring street gangs. “Mautz,” I said.
“Right.”
“So what do we do about it?”
Sarah Byrnes shook her head. “Boy, are you limited. I long for my intellectual equal and I get you. For twenty dollars in the Second World War category: Who fought on the side of right in World War II?” We had recently studied WWII in social studies.
“Easy,” I said. “The good old US of A.”
“Correct for twenty dollars. For forty dollars in the same category, who did the good old US of A fight against?”
“Germany and Japan. And Italy, I think.”
“Correct again for forty dollars. Now for Double Jeopardy, Final Jeopardy, and all the Daily Doubles on the board, who fought with the good old US of A?”
“England.”
“Who else?”
“Russia.”
“Right for a million dollars and the right to put out a dozen more issues of Crispy Pork Rinds. Russia. Until 1991 our very worst enemy in the world. The Evil Empire. Why do you think we were fighting on the same side as the commies in World War II?”
“Maybe they were different then. Maybe they weren’t commies. That was a long time ago.”
“Zooooooonk! Back to zero. Your consolation prize is three days and two lovely nights locked in a room with my dad. They were just the same. They fought on our side because we had a common enemy. If that common enemy won, Russia and the USA were hamburger. Now, Final, Final, No-More-Last-Chance Jeopardy. For all your money back and the chance to be my friend long enough to put out another issue, our new friend is going to be…”
“Oh, Jeez,” I said as the bulb above my head flashed bright.
“Close enough!”
I froze. We were going to make friends with Dale Thornton.
On their return from the R.V. show, Carver and my mother find a perfect indentation of my body in the couch, and I’m in it. I know it’s after midnight because there’s major skin all over the screen, in living color. Always the best on HBO.
Mom sees the woman in the flick touching herself in a full-length mirror and elbows Carver in the ribs. Carver is obviously embarrassed—probably because of his uncertain position with me—but he needn’t be, because Mom has always been completely open about sexual stuff with me, so I don’t react like a lot of my friends would if they saw their moms getting itchy.
But I decide to make him squirm a little anyway. “I’ve got the safe sex video here, Mom. Want me to slip it in?”
The woman on the screen has turned from the mirror, approaching the guy on the bed, who looks to have the IQ of a cucumber. He also looks to have a cucumber. “I better get your blindfold,” Mom says. “Carver will call Child Protection Services on me for letting you watch this.”
Carver eeps out an embarrassed laugh and says, “What’s that number again?” It’s a feeble attempt.
“What happens behind my eyelids is a lot hotter than that,” I say.
Carver retires to the bathroom.
“When he comes out,” Mom whispers, “you can it, okay? No more. Carver’s a little modest for this family.”
“I know topless exotic dancers who are a little modest for this family,” I say. “Carver’s too modest for a Barry Manilow concert. God, Mom, get a life.”
We hear the toilet flush. “You get some manners,” she says, “or you’re going to be doing your own cooking and cleaning.”
“Yes, Mommy Dearest.”