I ran back to get Mom, and she ran into the forest with me to see what she could do. Someone at the park volunteered to call an ambulance from home. I led Mom to Jeff and then ran back to the forest entrance to wait for the paramedics.
It looked like Jeff hit his head on a boulder lying near the creek bed. It was lucky that he hadn’t face-planted into the water. He could have drowned.
I mean, I led her most of the way, pointing her down the final bend of the creek. I was too afraid to see him again. I didn’t even look in his direction when they carried him out of the forest.
Mom camped out in the ICU overnight and I stayed over with Aunt Wanda. Mom was upset, but also angry, angry at Jeff for injuring himself, and angry at herself for fighting with him on the way to the park. I think she wondered, too, if she had driven him to it, like it wasn’t an accident at all, but a weird form of revenge. I mean, it seemed to me like she thought that but she never articulated it that clearly, probably because she knew to suggest that would be seriously crazy. He was just a kid. He slipped.
The next morning they said his condition had stabilized and they took him out of intensive care. I went to visit him with Aunt Wanda around ten o’clock. He was sleeping and the whole right side of his head was swollen, a gross purple blotch. There was a bandage wrapped around his head, and some of his hair was shaved. He had to get the whole thing shaved later to even it out, and it didn’t grow back in properly until the first week of school, at least not according to his complaints.
I was afraid that if he woke up he might start mewling again, and eyed him cautiously from across the room. Mom smiled wearily from the chair next to his bed when Wanda handed her a Thermos of coffee and a muffin that she’d picked up on the way over.
“I’d strangle him if I wasn’t so happy he was okay,” she said.
Wanda laughed.
Jeff opened his eyes slowly, as if he hadn’t been sleeping, only play-acting.
“Hey,” he said.
“Look who’s up,” said Mom.
“I was trying to sleep, but I couldn’t,” said Jeff.
He looked at me.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said.
“I saw those kids again,” he said. Obviously I knew exactly what he meant, even though we hadn’t talked about them in a while.
“What kids?” asked my mom, suddenly concerned.
“No, you didn’t,” I said. In his dreams, maybe.
“What kids are you talking about?” Mom asked.
“You’re right,” he said to me. “I didn’t.”
“You sounded like a bird,” I said. I was already warming up to him. When he spoke I was somehow able to look past the purple blotch and see through to his real face. But only when he was animated. Otherwise he was unreadable, an abomination that I didn’t want to confront.
“I know, Mom told me. Although she said I sounded like a mouse.”
“Kent, what kids?” asked my mom.
“That was a joke,” said Jeff.
“Yeah,” I said.
“What do you mean, a joke? Kent, were there any other kids out there?”
“No,” I said, feeling worried.
She lowered herself to my level. “Are you sure?”
“Trish,” said Wanda.
“Wanda, will you stay out of this?”
She turned back to me and grabbed my arm.
“Mom,” said Jeff, “I was joking.” He sat up a little bit and then winced in pain and lay back down.
“Why would you joke about a thing like that?”
“I don’t know!”
“I think he’s telling the truth,” said Wanda, looking very confused.
“What if someone hurt him?” asked my mom.
“No one hurt him,” I said.
“What? Who did?” said my mom, snapping her attention back to me.
“No one did,” I said, bursting into tears. “No one hurt him.”
Somehow I’d broken the spell. Mom suddenly softened, pulling me close and putting her arms around me. I hid my face in her shirt, embarrassed because Jeff and Aunt Wanda were there.
“No one hurt him,” I repeated.
“I’m so sorry, baby, I’m so sorry,” she said, running a hand through my hair.
“It was just me, Mom,” said Jeff.
“I know that, Jeff.”
“Maybe you should get some rest,” said Wanda, cautiously.
“You’re right,” said Mom, standing up again, very slowly. “I’m exhausted.” She looked down at me. “How are you doing, buddy?”
“I’m okay,” I said, wiping tears from my eyes.
Wanda patted Jeff’s arm.
“I think the real question is, how are you doing?” she asked.
“My head hurts,” he said.
“I’ll bet it does,” said Wanda.
Mom laughed and kissed Jeff on the forehead.
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” she said.
Jeff tried not to smile.
* * *
Jeff didn’t change after the accident, but I sometimes thought of him that way, as if there was a before and after that could be separated into two distinct periods. But in reality maybe that process had already begun long before then.
He outstripped puberty, growing larger — in every direction — weight piling on his frame, lumbering from the kitchen to the couch like a bear stumbling home after gorging himself on turned berries, his eyes intent on whatever was playing on the screen. Not that I didn’t have the same rounds — we both ate constantly, when we were home, but somehow it stuck to him and not to me. Maybe I got out of the house more, or ate a little less, or watched less TV, or maybe I was just lucky.
He still fought with Mom. But the fights changed — it took less, a lot less, for him to get angry — though that anger didn’t always show itself immediately. His anger was always on the surface, but it often manifested itself in quieter ways. In silence. In brooding. In comments that hid their aggression, but were aggressive nonetheless. But it could lead to real violence, too — once he utterly annihilated a Super Nintendo and ten-inch television that he’d set up in his room. When I asked him what had happened he told me that it was the fault of whichever fucking asshole had designed Donkey Kong Country. I was angry that he had wrecked a thing that belonged to both of us but it seemed pointless to get upset about it in the face of his anger. All I could do was shrug.
Mom told him that he was lazy, that it was his fault that he was unhappy, that he needed to get a job, to do better at school, that he had an anger problem, that it would help him to have more friends, that he was going to grow up miserable. I’m ashamed to say now that I usually agreed with her. I wanted him to be happy so there could be peace at home.
He never really came out of his shell, but when Wizard Palace comic book shop opened and he got into Magic: the Gathering, he at least started leaving the house more. He made friends that he spent time with outside of school. This was when he was in either grade nine or ten, I don’t remember. Before, he would do his best to ignore Mom whenever she asked him who his friends at school were or whether he wanted to invite any of them home. After Wizard Palace, he could at least name them. First, kids his age, Spink and Ted Linnean. Later, Watt and JC, Watt in my grade and JC two years above. There were other players, too, on the periphery, guys in their twenties and kids in middle school, whom they occasionally talked about but who were never officially part of their group.
Wizard Palace ran casual games at a table in the back, and he usually went there after school, coming home first and dropping his things off in the mud room, eating a snack and maybe watching an episode or two of The Simpsons, then heading back out again, eschewing homework most nights, and only picking at dinner at nine o’clock, after the Palace had closed and he’d already filled up on Doritos and Mountain Dew. He got his spending money from a job that he held in the summer, and sometimes on the weekends, sautering simple circuit boards in the garage of our neighbour, Mr. O’Shaunessy.
Jeff built me a deck out of his cast-off cards so we could play, and he was always trying to encourage me to purchase my own, so that the games between us could become more heated. When we played I had brief flashes of insight that caused me to get more involved, that made me rush to my pile of extras and trade cards in and out of my deck, brief thrills when I managed to pull off something that Jeff hadn’t anticipated (because he hadn’t thought I was capable of it), flashes where I could see what drew him and his friends to the game. It was the feeling of control, of dominance, of mastery, of creativity made into a corporeal force that could inflict itself on your opponent. But those moments were fleeting, and whatever gains I made were always paid back double in the next match, when Jeff — eager to compete — would totally adapt to my strategy and blow me out of the water. Eventually Jeff had to beg me to play, which took the fun out of it for both of us.
But there were other things that threatened to draw me to the game: the little fantasy portraits and scenes on each card almost always showed something in motion — between two actions, making it impossible not to speculate on the before and after, on the context that established the rules of our encounter. The cards were little pieces of another world thrust into ours, and their mannered presentations raised questions in my mind. But I made sure not to become too intrigued. I was happy for Jeff, but careful not to get too wrapped up in that world. Watt, JC, Linnean, even Spink, though everybody loved him, they were all just a rung or two higher than Huddy, and maybe only because of their ability to blend in, to remain out of sight, to seem innocuous and mundane by comparison.
Maybe something I had been trying to do with my documentary was discover what separated Huddy from them, to trace their respective outlines, to see him through that lens, inhabit the terror that Jeff must have felt even if he didn’t cop to it, what they all must have felt, the worry, constant, that it was possible they could slip even lower.