Marcus's brothers went along with him wherever he went, and they were named Julian and Seth. Coby was nuts. He was a bullshit-artist and no one was ever sure whether he was telling the truth no matter what he talked about. One of his brothers was queer, and this bothered Coby. He would pick on his brother all the time but if someone else called him a homo or a faggot, Coby would get angry and almost come to tears, and sometimes he would fight to stick up for his brother. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary to see Coby with a bloody nose or a fat lip. He was decent despite being a pathological liar, even though not everyone could see it. One time Coby told me that he had been with Dora before Marcus ever had her, and I knew that it was bullshit because Coby was even uglier than I was, and that was saying something. I would think to myself, doesn't he know that all I have to do is check his story by asking Dora and find out he's full of shit? Coby was a liar but he never bothered to back up his lies or to tell safe lies which couldn't be found out one way or the other. He told crazy lies. Like I said before, he was nuts. Troy was sort of the leader. He was a big black kid who could always get beer and cigarettes because he looked like he was of age. Of course Marcus could buy beer too, but he wasn't as generous as Troy, and he hardly ever had money anyway. Troy always had money. He would buy cigarettes and hand them out to us, and so we followed him around like he was the Pied Piper, at least those of us who smoked, which meant me and Coby and Noah. Noah and Troy were best friends, and this was strange because they were so different. Troy was loud and funny and friendly and full of high hopes and youthful energy, whereas Noah was quiet and depressed. Even Noah was in love with Dora, and Noah had never even kissed a girl. Some kids thought Noah was queer and only pretended to like girls. He was soft and delicate, like a girl. Troy looked out for Noah and no one picked on him when Troy was around. Troy used to say that he and Noah were "kindred", because they were "persecuted minorities". Troy was black and Noah was Jewish. Troy never made too big of a deal about being black when you really came down to it, but Noah seemed to think being Jewish was important, even though he didn't believe in God any more than he believed in Santa Claus or that good looks didn't count for anything, and despite the fact that sometimes he talked about God as if he believed.
It seemed like everyone had problems and I felt damn-near problem-free compared to Coby and Noah, even compared to Troy who had the problem of being one of only a handful of black kids in our school. Marcus had problems too, one of them being that he was half-deaf and when he talked he sounded like an idiot, and another was that he was having trouble in school which turned out to be a problem with his eyes: not a vision problem but something inside that made it hard for him to track from one line to the next. It seemed his difficulty with learning stemmed from a physical problem and not one that had anything to do with intelligence. Of course at this particular time Marcus wasn't aware of it, and so a lot of people, including his parents, were afraid that Marcus wasn't too sharp. Noah and myself, and Troy too now that I think of it, were certain that Marcus was no dumber than the rest of us. My biggest problem was that I was in love with Dora. Now I know I mentioned the fact that everyone was in love with Dora but the truth is boys will be boys and mostly everyone just wanted to get in her pants. But Dora had the kind of face that had to grow on you. The first time you saw her you didn't understand what all the fuss was about. She was small and had light blond hair and pale skin with a smattering of freckles. Her eyes were powder-blue and sometimes when she looked at you in a certain way it seemed she was somewhat cross-eyed. The first time Jack Atkins saw her he burst out laughing and had to duck into the boys' locker room to keep from offending Marcus who had pointed her out to him as being the girl he had a crush on. This was before Marcus and Dora were going together. But eventually even Jack came around to Marcus's way of thinking. From the neck down Dora was a wet-dream. She had big tits and the kind of rear-end that forced you to stare at it if she happened to be going down the hall in front of you; and if she happened to be passing by you in the hall you had no choice but to turn your head around and watch her walking off the other way, even though you risked looking like a mouth-breather. One day I had done that very thing. I saw Dora coming towards me and she smiled and said hi to me, and when I turned around to look at her rear-end I saw that she was looking back at me. Needless to say this was all I needed to become convinced that Dora had a crush on me. She was only going with Marcus to get me jealous. Of course that wasn't the case but I believed it.
Out behind the grange, past the cemetery, which was small and disorderly, was the woods. A short distance into the woods was a big rock and it was here that we stood around smoking and drinking beer. If Noah got drunk enough he would recite some of his poetry, and Troy would make everyone shut up and listen. I never could stand poetry but Noah's stuff didn't sound like the poems we had to read in school. Troy told everyone that Noah was going to be famous one day. Troy played in a band and Noah wrote lyrics for the songs they put together. The drunker we got, the more we wanted to go into the cemetery. Dora got drunk on a single can of beer and after that she and Marcus would go off somewhere and kiss each other into a stupor. Coby would try to scare us with made-up stories about the dead people in the cemetery. One time he had seen the ghost of a young girl floating through the trees. Troy would insist that there was no point in trying to scare drunk people since drunk people were past the point of being able to get scared by much of anything. Marcus's brothers, Julian and Seth, got scared, because they weren't drinking; but none of the rest of us did. Troy handed out the cigarettes and we smoked, except for Julian and Seth. Troy would tell them they were too young. Troy was generous but he had a conscience. I was becoming doubtful as to whether or not I had one, since all I could think of was Dora and Marcus off in the woods. Marcus told us that Dora was a virgin and that she planned on staying a virgin until she was married. Nonetheless I didn't care for the idea of Dora's tender parts being explored by someone who wasn't me. Troy was experienced and I had gotten laid twice before but Noah and Marcus and Coby were virgins. Of course Coby wouldn't admit to this fact but it was a fact just the same. What bugged me was that both girls I had gotten laid with were somewhat flat. I was dying to know what it was like to have tits like Dora's in my hands. Troy would tell me that small tits were nice, that big ones only wound up sagging down like empty water bottles when the girl got older; but I knew he was only trying to make me feel better. Troy was really an upstanding guy when you got down to it. If someone was getting picked on, he would interfere; if someone was feeling depressed, he would cheer them up; if someone needed some kind of help, or some kind of advice, Troy would do his best. Even if you just needed someone to agree with you, even if what you were feeling or saying was bullshit because you were angry or upset at something, Troy would agree with you, even if that agreement was only temporary. I thought Coby had a better chance of getting laid than poor Noah. Noah would be a virgin for life. He couldn't even talk to a girl. And he was too damned serious . He hardly ever laughed, unless he was very drunk, and usually at some point the laughing would turn to crying and everyone would get sick of him except for Troy.
At some point during the night Noah would join me and Troy in our intellectual debates. Maybe these discussions weren't exactly intellectual but I don't know what else to call them. Noah would side with me about death but not about God. Troy was a big believer in God but he was tolerant of your opinions, as some people who were big believers weren't. Noah was harder to pin down. He would say one thing that made you think he was a closet Bible-thumper and the next minute he was describing God in such a way that you hardly thought he was talking about God anymore. Noah's tongue would try to catch up with his brain and he would wind up sounding like Marcus. Troy would pat him on the back and laugh and act proud of him. I didn't believe in God at all because there were too many people with too many problems. I claimed that there was too much suffering in the world to support a belief in what some people called Providence, and then Noah would claim that God caused people to suffer so that they might learn something from it. He would say that God was messing with him, the way a cat toys with a mouse. You couldn't possibly win in your struggle with God, but only show Him what you were made of. Now that I think about it, Noah used to say God was a woman, and he would get wound up as he explained his theories. Not a woman exactly but female anyway. I couldn't follow him and I don't think Troy followed him either, though he would nod along and sometimes say "amen" like he was at a big-tent revival.
Eventually Marcus and Dora would appear out of the darkness, snapping sticks with their feet as they came back to join the rest of us. By this time we were good and drunk and we would go into the cemetery. Marcus and Julian and Seth stayed behind on this particular night but Dora wanted to come and walk around the old graves with Noah, Troy, Coby, and me. The Sicilian brothers were superstitious and asked us to show some respect for the dead people. Don't go pissing over there and cut out the swearing. If we had to piss we would go and piss against the side of the old grange. I don't know what Dora did when she had to go. She usually stayed behind with Marcus but she wanted to come along this time. Maybe she had knocked off two cans of beer instead of just one. Or maybe she was finally working up the nerve to confess her feelings to me. I felt hopeful as the five of us tromped down the path, back towards the cemetery. I hung back like always, and Dora walked along beside me. I could smell her perfume. Troy marched up ahead, first as always, like a general leading his troops into battle. Now I really had to wonder: if Troy believed in life after death like he said, why wasn't he afraid? If I thought there was such a thing I would be afraid to go traipsing through a graveyard. Noah was right behind him, ready for whatever test his Lady-God might see fit to give him, like a rat walking straight-on into a rat-trap. Troy called him a "glutton for punishment". He said that Noah believed he was special, that God had trained His sights on him, that there was a sort of divine spotlight shining right down on Noah. At this point I wasn't too interested since Dora was right beside me. I was already seeing things in my head, like the two of us ducking around the side of the grange and mashing our faces together, telling each other how it was about goddamn time. Like I said before I was learning something unsavory about myself. I was more than willing to betray my friendship to Marcus. I wanted to do it. There was no thinking involved, no reflection, no moral dilemma. I knew this was not right but there was nothing I could do about it.
The more I thought about it the more I decided people's problems stemmed from having too much of a moral dilemma over every little thing. For instance, I didn't take to the idea that we were walking on top of dead people and disturbing their eternal sleep. The people who were buried in the ground behind the grange were long gone. In fact, they were long gone as soon as they got those tags on their toes in the county morgue. There was nothing left but a carcass, like a peanut shell with no peanut inside. And that was nothing but garbage. You burned the dead people or you put them deep in the ground so they wouldn't make a stink. I stood on top of one of the graves with a rock in my hand and said, "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well." Dora laughed because we were both reading Hamlet in English class. Noah was over-joyed that I knew some poetry, but just how that bit I recited could be called poetry I have no idea. I wanted to take Dora's hand but kept talking myself out of it. It wasn't a moral dilemma, mind you, just cowardice. Sometimes a gentleman is not so much a true gentleman as a coward plain and simple. I had a can of beer with me and finished it off, then tossed the can aside where it rested along with the rest of the garbage. Dora snapped something at me and picked up the can. We wandered around for a while and soon I had to piss and so I went along one side of the grange. There was an old cracked window above my head. While I was pissing I wondered what I would do if a face appeared in the window. I was scaring myself and tried to piss in a hurry, but I had a belly-full. I pissed and pissed. Then I couldn't hear the voices in the cemetery anymore, and I wondered if they had gone back to the big rock. I stumbled into the cemetery again and called out, but I didn't hear or see a thing, except the grave stones and the little wooden crosses. God dammit, I thought, they went back without me. I had blown my chance with Dora. Lucky for me I was drunk enough to keep from getting too scared, and I felt this anger well up in me that put paid to that rising tide of fear anyway. I decided to sit right down, right smack in the middle of the cemetery, and see what would happen. I heard a shout from back in the woods and it sounded like Julian or Seth. Voices didn't carry too far in the woods but if someone shouted you could hear it. The wind blew against my face. It was late now and the air was cooler. I began to wonder if the whole crew had tromped on through the woods and come out on Paterson Road which went along on the other side. You just walked down Paterson Road in a big loop until you met up with Dowling Drive again. I wondered whose idea it was to leave me alone in the cemetery. Maybe it was Troy's idea. It was probably his since he was the idea-man. I got up and headed back through the woods. The moon was out and I could make out the path, though the deeper you got the darker it grew. There they were, hanging around the big rock having another beer. Coby was laughing, and Troy said, "There you are. We thought we lost you to the spirits!"
"Aw, fuck you," I said, and wanted to hit him, though if I did he'd have belted me back even harder. He was too big. He would have beat me easy.
"We thought you came back here," Dora said, diplomatically, her arm around Marcus's waist. "We didn't see you."
"What's the matter?" Troy asked me. "Lighten up."
"You guys left me there on purpose, to see if I would get scared," I said.
Troy said, "No we didn't. We thought you came back to get another beer. Dora was getting spooked so we came back."
"I wasn't gone that long. I just went to piss for Chrissake," I said. I went to the cooler to get another can of beer.
"Must have been a long whizz," Troy said.
"Yeah, it was," I said.
*
When the winter came we would make a fire in the woods. We put rocks in a circle and threw some sticks inside for kindling. One night it was real cold and Troy had brought along two bottles of Yukon Jack. One hundred proof Canadian Liqueur. It was easy to drink and it made you drunk fast. Noah wasn't with us that night because he had gone with his parents to get his sister situated in some institution or other. She was retarded. Troy told us that Noah was pretty torn up over the whole thing and warned us not to speak unkindly of Joanna when Noah came back. "If you do, I'll knock your teeth out." he told us. Marcus and Dora were fawning over each other, and Coby was there, but Julian and Seth were somewhere else. I sat there on the old stump I usually sat on and sort of fumed for a good long while. I didn't care for Troy's threat, not one bit. It wasn't anyone else's fault that Noah's sister was a retard. If the whole thing was tearing him up then that was his burden; and it wasn't as if I felt like being cruel about it but I didn't like being threatened either. Everyone had problems already, so what good was it to take one person's problem and make it everyone's problem? My oldest brother had Hotchkins and everyone knew it but I didn't make a big deal about it. The fact that it worried me was no reason for it to worry everyone else. They had enough to worry about without taking on my worries. How could I get what I was feeling across to Troy? Why in the world should I have to think about not getting my teeth knocked out because Noah's sister was retarded and couldn't live at home anymore? It wasn't right. I sat and stewed and took some pulls from the bottle of Yukon Jack Troy had handed to me. It left a sticky feeling in your mouth which you washed out with beer. After a little while the top of your head started to unhinge. But then Dora had come over to me and squatted down next to me. My heart jumped into my throat. It was something having the girl of your dreams squat down right beside you. But she only wanted to tell me that her friend, Tanya Cort, liked me. I was not pleased by this though it was somewhat flattering, because Tanya Cort was about as ugly as I was. And she was too fat for my liking. I told Dora that I wasn't interested in going with Tanya. Naturally Dora told me how sweet Tanya was. It was one thing when someone tried to get you hitched up with a girl. It was another thing when the girl was ugly and this was meant as a message to you. It was still another thing when this message came from the girl of your dreams. It was as if Dora was telling me there was no way I could have a girl like her, and I should be able to see that I was more suited for a girl like Tanya. So there went all my high hopes pissing out of me like stale air from a punctured tire. I was angry already and now I was depressed, and the two emotions didn't fight each other for dominance but held hands and got along together like old friends. "God dammit." I said, and got up. I headed off down the path toward the cemetery. I didn't like having problems. For a while there I didn't have too many problems, and the ones I had were manageable, but now I had a problem which seemed to have no solution. I wasn't like poor Noah. I couldn't think of this problem as something out of which some good would come, if only I gave it enough consideration. I was going to head home but then I turned around and headed back. I was now more angry than depressed. My head was already unscrewed because of the Yukon Jack but now it was hanging by a thread because I felt like picking a fight. And once that feeling came over me there was no way out except to see it through. I was drunk enough so that if I took a beating from Troy it wouldn't hurt too bad.
"Troy," I said, "It isn't right for you to threaten us like that. It isn't anyone's fault that Noah's sister is a retard."
"Joanna isn't retarded," Dora said, "She's autistic."
"I didn't threaten you, Ed," Troy told me, "I wasn't serious, just saying nobody ought to say anything about her when Noah comes back. Relax."
"Fuck you, Troy, who the hell are you to tell us what to do anyway?"
"Fuck you too, Ed. What's your problem?"
Troy would have let the matter drop if I had let it drop, but instead of doing the rational thing I charged him. I tackled him and was just about to try and hit him when he threw me over and had me pinned to the ground. He had his hand on my chest and the other was bunched up into a fist. Even in the darkness I could see the spark in his eyes, and his teeth.
"Alright, you want me to hit you?"
Dora and Marcus were talking to Troy, telling him to let me go. I felt like crapping my pants and most of my anger had been fisticuffed into oblivion by fear. Then I felt sick and needed to throw up. Troy let me go and I rolled over and spilled my Yukon Jack into the ground. "He's just drunk, Troy." Dora said. Coby wanted Troy to hit me and was disappointed. Marcus was holding Dora. Troy went to fetch the bottle that I had left over by the stump. Now I did go home, and Jesus, did I have problems.
*
I was embarrassed that Troy had nearly bashed my brains in. I was embarrassed about a lot of things, like picking a fight with Troy in the first place and puking all over the ground. I missed the old grange and the big rock in the woods. I started to hang around with Jack Atkins and a friend of his named Steve who had dropped out of school and was always stoned out of his head. Jack drove an old Chevy Nova that was jacked up in the back and pretty soon I was having such a good time with my new friends I had all but forgotten about the old crew. Jack couldn't stand Troy, for one thing. He called Troy "the nigger" or "that nigger." He didn't like the fact that Troy dated white girls, as that seemed unnatural to him, though to me it didn't seem unnatural since there were only a few black girls in our school and none of them were pretty. Jack didn't see it that way. Steve didn't sound like a bigot but then he was always so stoned you didn't know what he was thinking. He spent most of his time listening to the music inside his head and rolling joints. He always smelled like pot. And his eyes were always scored with red. I had never smoked pot with the others - though everyone knew Troy smoked it sometimes - but I tried it one night at a party down by the river with Steve and Jack and decided that alcohol was old news. Who needed beer when you could feel like that, and only after a few tokes? You coughed a lot but after you were through coughing you felt fine and smiled a great deal. Pot gave you a whole new approach to things. It filled your head with new ideas. It made you think that you had been missing the point all your life, and that suddenly you could see the reality behind the painted backdrop which was what everyone else saw as the real thing. To Steve, the great guru of pot, everything was a lie, everything was bullshit. To tell the truth, I think Steve used this as an excuse to get messed up. But sometimes when we were high we would talk and pretty soon there was this whole new communication going on. I understood what Steve was talking about. School was bullshit, he would tell me, and the only purpose behind it was to make people soft in the head, to make them susceptible to authority, to make them compliant and easy to manage. Religion was simply school for adults, he would say, and I had no trouble agreeing with that. Some people saw the truth but were too weak to do much about it, and their lives ended up being a miserable burden. Noah Crowley was an example of this kind of person, Steve mentioned. He and Jack had been friends with Noah a couple years back, before Noah cleaved himself more completely to his champion and savior, Troy. Steve told me he used to think about killing himself before he discovered all the bullshit behind those feelings and sailed out of his misery through the escape-hatch of pot. Noah would talk about killing himself but he didn't have the strength or the wherewithal to shake off those adolescent feelings, and so he would wind up actually doing it. Steve happened to be dead right on that one, though this was not to take place for several years. Steve was a prophet, a bleary-eyed Daniel or Jeremiah. He eventually made his way to the street and pretty much disappeared, and for all I know he's prophesying to the unwashed masses even as we speak.
Jack was a big guy who could drink and smoke weed all night without showing the effects like the rest of us. He could drive like a madman and never get arrested. He could put a dent in the hood of his car with his head. I'm not saying that was exactly my cup of tea but we had a good time most of the time. Most nights we went down to the river and stood around these big empty barrels with fires inside them, drinking beer and getting high. There were always girls around, girls from our school and girls from Milton and Montgomery. You could usually make-out with one of them if you were drunk enough to work up the nerve and if they were drunk enough to look past your ugliness and see some kind of rebellious status there which they didn't mind affixing their mouths to for a couple of hours. Most of the girls wore too much make-up or wore it badly, so that they looked like Indians, or gypsies. They almost always wore black concert tees and spoke of bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest as if they were gods in whole new a religion. At these parties down at the river there was always a lot of pot. Some smoked skinny little joints which someone had slathered over, some smoked pipes or bongs, and there was a guy named Jim who made pipes out of bullets. Don't ask me how but they were bullets: hard gold-colored bullets not the big plastic ones. Jim was a pacifist and he liked to smoke pot out of bullets since it put those deadly objects to a peaceful purpose. I took to Jim pretty well and we would wander along the side of the river smoking pot out of his bullet pipe. One night he asked me if I wanted to take a ride and I said why not, and off we went. In the car we listened to Steely Dan and to Jim this was the coolest music possible. I thought it was lightweight at first but after a while it grew on you. We ended up driving all the way up to Portsmouth which was a college town with all kinds of bars where jazz bands played. We couldn't get in the bars but we would stand out on the sidewalk where we could hear the music fine. I wasn't into jazz but since I was stoned out of my head I imagined I liked it well enough. There were good-looking girls everywhere, older girls mostly who might just as well have been from a different galaxy because they were so inaccessible. At least back at those parties by the river I could hook up with a girl if I got drunk enough; but all the liquor in the world wouldn't make it easier for me to hook up with the girls I saw in Portsmouth. I stood there on the sidewalk and thought of Dora, and while it was embarrassing and unpleasant it was also comforting to know that there was thirty miles between me and the old grange. I didn't look at Dora in school anymore, nor did I look at Noah or Coby or Marcus. I didn't look much at Troy either, though he was such a good guy when you got down to it he would call out my name and wave when he saw me, or pat me on the back when I passed him in the hall.
One night I asked Jim if he wanted to go and hang around by the old grange. He knew the place I was talking about but he never went over that way very often. So we went and on the way we smoked some weed from his bullet pipe and listened to Steely Dan. We went around the grange toward the back and I showed Jim the old cemetery. My heart was beating fast and I could hear some commotion out in the woods behind the cemetery. It was probably the old crew. I was nervous about seeing Dora and felt like crapping my pants, but I got Jim to walk along the path through the woods and there they were. I didn't see the Sicilian brothers, but I saw Coby and Noah. Coby was sitting on the stump where I usually sat and Noah was sitting cross-legged on the ground, like a snake-charmer or something. Then I noticed Troy and Dora over by the big rock. Troy was leaning up against the big rock and Dora was leaning up against him. Troy had his arms around her and her hands were on top of his hands. I felt sick to my stomach but I couldn't just turn back around and walk off. Coby said my name and I came forward and Noah was momentarily distracted from his praying or whatever the hell it was he was doing, and Troy broke away from Dora and came over to smack me on the back as if nothing bad had ever happened between us.
"Hey, haven't seen you around for a while," he said, cheerful as ever. He told me to go ahead and get a beer. Then he said hi to Jim and the two shook hands like old friends, which for all I knew they were at some point. Dora said hi to me and stood there in the dark by the fire with her hands in her coat pockets. It seemed she was bothered by the intrusion, what with her romantic goings-on with Troy. Now how in the hell this all happened in the course of a few weeks I don't know. Dora was in love with Marcus. The two of them were going to get married, the whole shebang. Now Dora was Troy's girl, and Marcus was somewhere else, in some other story. In the back of my head I wished Jack had come along with us, so he could see the big nigger and the little white girl in each other's loving embrace. I don't think I ever felt so depressed and so angry at the same time. You know, I never felt much like a bigot. I knew plenty of them, sure. My father couldn't stand black people, or the Puerto Ricans either, for that matter. Niggers and spicks was what he called them, and not a one of them could do any good. It was impossible to argue with my father about that so I never bothered. My mom wouldn't argue with him either, and for all I knew she felt the same way. Suddenly I was seeing things from Jack's point of view. I was angry so I didn't try to stop those feelings, I just let them build up steam until they started to feel genuine. I was fueled by this new anger, this intense anger that I suppose was more like hatred than anger. The difference was, anger wasn't cool and calculated. It came on you suddenly and raged like a fire until it was out, and if you were lucky you didn't do too many stupid things while the fire was raging; but hatred wasn't just an emotion. It was a whole structured way of thinking. It was planned. It had a calm formality to it. And the things that hatred made you want to do didn't seem stupid, even after a good deal of reflection; they seemed to make sense, even though there was a tiny little voice deep inside your head that made a tiny little protest. At least there was with me. Maybe with some deeply hateful people there is no little voice, it gets snuffed out maybe, or it's never there to begin with.
I didn't feel murderously hateful just hateful hateful, spiteful hateful. But it was a hatred that required some type of action. If you didn't funnel it into some type of action it got stored up and made you crazy, like clock-tower-and -shotgun crazy. Or at least that's my theory. So I came up with an idea that seemed mean enough and spiteful enough but not mean and spiteful enough to cause any real harm. One night while I was down at the river with Jack and Steve and Jim I took Jack to the side and asked him if he knew that Troy Van Buren was going with Dora O' Connell. He said no he didn't know that but it wasn't any great surprise. He said that big nigger was going to screw every white girl he could and possibly marry a white girl, just to show that he could, just to get one up on the white people. That's how they operated, ever since Abe Lincoln set them free. That's how they paid back the favor. And I'll be damned if that didn't seem like the whole truth of the matter after I gave it some thought. When I told Jack my idea about how to get back at Troy he thought it was the craziest thing he ever heard. So I asked Jack why he didn't just kick Troy's ass, but something in Jack's answer gave me the feeling that he didn't think he could beat him. It was one thing to get your ass beat, but it was something else to get your ass beat by a nigger, at least I imagine that was Jack's way of looking at it. Jack didn't care to take the risk, but to hear Jack explain it you might think he just didn't feel it was worth it, that is if you were soft in the head anyway. What I had in mind was to make a cross out of some two-by-fours nailed together and set it on fire in front of Troy's place. Being it was in a trailer park people didn't have big yards, and being that the houses faced one another toward the road that went down the middle Jack said there were too many places we could be seen from, too many windows. Besides, he said, just what kind of rednecks would burn a cross in some nigger's yard anymore? People didn't do crazy shit like that, at least not this far north, and even down south where people were more serious about that kind of thing it was still bird-shit. I thought about how my anger had turned to hatred and suspected that Jack hadn't gotten to that point yet. Like I said before I was beginning to wonder if I had a conscience at all. I searched myself and I thought maybe I didn't. Could I live with myself if I set a cross on fire in Troy's yard and in this way announce to the whole world the blazing fact of my hatred? So what if the idea was that no one would know it was me. I would know, and I would have to live with it even if no one else knew. Would I feel like a coward if I had done something by way of revenge but no one would know it was me, least of all Troy himself? I could live with that since if you recall I already told you I'm sometimes more of a coward than anything else; but what kind of revenge would that be anyway since he knew damn well he put me to shame, not once but twice, but still he wouldn't know that it was me who put some shame back on him? Would it stack up as revenge or not? And would it be shame I put on him or just more shame on myself?
After some thinking I decided my idea about burning a cross in Troy's yard wasn't going to amount to much of anything by way of revenge, even if it might make me feel a little better about things. School was hard for me during the next month or so because I had to see Troy and Dora together. They would walk down the hall and hold hands as if there was nothing more natural in the world. I don't know what bothered me more, the smile on Troy's face or the one on Dora's. I talked with Marcus one day and he told me Dora and him were having some problems: exactly what kind of problems he wouldn't say and I didn't care to know anyway. Plus he told me Dora always had a crush on Troy even though she wouldn't call it that and I put two and two together and decided it was jealousy that drove Marcus and Dora apart. I asked Marcus if he hated Troy for taking his girl from him but Marcus didn't care for how I phrased the question. Before I left him alone I told him, fine, believe what you want, but that big nigger took your girlfriend away from you and you haven't got the balls to do anything about it. Marcus wasn't a powder-puff like Noah but he wasn't the fighting type either, and even though he was pissed off at me he didn't say anything. He knew I was right is what I really think. The only satisfaction I could take over the whole mess was giving Troy the cold shoulder. I ignored him and when he called my name I didn't respond and when he said hi I ignored him cold. After a while he stopped trying to be friendly. He knew damn well Dora was the girl of my dreams so I don't think he was surprised anyway.
*
Some time passed and it was March, which around here means bitter cold and snow or warmer weather when the snow turns to slush or you get rain instead of snow and it comes down colder than snow and makes a big mess of everything. It was a good time to be depressed, and I was still depressed. I got my driver's license and my father bought me an old Ford Maverick to drive around in. I had some independence but what good that was supposed to be without money I couldn't tell you. I took a job in a supermarket stocking shelves after school three nights a week and wouldn't you know it, the kid who trained me was black and he was the first black kid I ever met who sounded like he was queer. In fact his name was Francis, which he insisted was a man's name but I insisted I never heard of a man named Francis. One night a week we had to do leveling, which means you had to go through every aisle in the store and straighten everything out, put all the same items together, make sure the labels were facing out, that everything looked even and square. "Like marching soldiers" the manager would say, coming up and leveling behind me where I had already leveled. One night when we were leveling I asked Francis if he ever went with a white girl, and he told me he went to a dance one time with a white girl but it was because they were friends and didn't have anyone else to go with. Then he asked me if I ever cut holes in my bed sheets and looked at me funny. I told him I wasn't a bigot just curious, seeing as there weren't a lot of black kids around. Then Francis laughed. He lived in Washingtonville, he told me, where there were plenty of black people. I had forgotten that I was out in the world now and not just in school. Black kids were scarce in my school and in my neck of the woods in general but that was not the way it was in other places. Well then, I told him, why go to a dance with a white girl seeing as there must have been plenty of black girls to go with? Francis started to get a little angry with me and we didn't talk much for the rest of the night. What I think was that the white girl was not only a friend but a beard, and that if he'd had his druthers, as the expression goes, he would have preferred to take along another guy. I let the whole matter drop anyway. I liked having my own car once I had enough money to keep the tank full and sometimes I would go out and drive around by myself. One day when I didn't have to work I decided to drive to the Dairy Queene where someone told me Sharon Baumgartner was working. Sharon was what you might call the other girl of my dreams, but like Dora she was pretty far out of my league. She was tall, taller than me anyway which was tall for a girl, and had long, straight brown hair and big dark eyes that looked almost black. But when you like a girl, even if it's a girl you know you can't have, that means you like to look at her and I wanted to park in the parking lot and see if I could spot her. It was one of those places where there was a window in front and you went up to the window and the girl was there in the window with her paper hat, or some kid with a cheesy mustache with the words "asst. manager" or "crew leader" on his badge who thought he was Diamond Jim Brady and the Six Million Dollar Man put together. I parked so I had a view of the window and sure enough it was Sharon Baumgartner in all her glory who was attending the window. I thought if I sat there long enough she might notice me sitting there, and I wondered if she would wave at me or if that was against the rules and might piss off Diamond Jim who shuffled around officiously behind her. Anyway it didn't look like she noticed me and I sat there for a good while. I had just about worked up the nerve to go and order something when Troy pulled into the parking lot in his mom's big green Dodge pick-up. It was then that I thought of poor Noah, the sad sack who thought everything that happened to him happened as the result of some kind of cosmic design which he had no control over. In a few months school would be finished and I wouldn't have to see that big nigger ever again. I had just got my car and a job and things were starting to look less dreary. Maybe Noah was on to something. Maybe there was some kind of grand scheme to things. Maybe God or whoever or whatever it was up there was putting me through my paces and being a real pain in the ass to boot, just to see what I was made of? Maybe criminals were God's chosen people, not people who were forsaken by Him. Maybe crazy people were the folks God liked to mess around with the most?
Anyway Troy went up to the window and I was too far away to hear any of the conversation but he seemed to be standing there a long time. Sharon was smiling as if she had just been told she won the lottery, and they were laughing it up quite a bit. Now two strange and rather unsettling things happened. First, I saw Troy holding Sharon's hand while he was jawing at her, and second, off he went after a while and never bought any ice cream or a burger, not anything. Now just what in the hell was that all about? What possible reason could that nigger have for just going up to the window to have some pleasant conversation and then go off again without buying anything? I'll be damned, I thought to myself, if he isn't two-timing Dora with Sharon. I'll be double Goddamned if that nigger hasn't horned in on the girl of my dreams and the other girl of my dreams, and all in the same lifetime. If you've ever been jealous then you know what was going on in my head while I drove off and cruised idly around, wondering where to go. Jealous thoughts trump any other kind of thoughts, as I don't need to mention. Deep down my reasonable thoughts were struggling to be heard. Troy was friendly with just about everyone and probably he was just passing by and decided to say hi to Sharon. She had been a cheerleader after all and he had played wide receiver on the Varsity football team, so of course they were friends. Besides that you can't go assuming he's screwing every girl he happens to talk to or touch in the least little way. But these thoughts were put in their place by the simple act of running what I had seen over and over in my mind. Sharon was happy as a pig in shit to see Troy. She was smiling from ear to sparkly ear. And he didn't just touch her in passing he had his hand on hers and he took her hand in his hand, and she was happy about it. And what were the odds that he would come for an impulsive, out-of-the-ordinary visit on the very day I was sitting there trying to get a look at Sharon? Not good, that's what they were. Odds were he went there a lot. And not only that but where was Dora? It was after school and he was gadding about so why wasn't his girl with him? Most likely he was on his way to get her, those little voices said, far down underneath the ones that clamored through my head like pots and pans falling onto a hard kitchen floor. Sure, on his way to get her and stopping off to see the next in line, hedging his bets.
So off I went and I got bored tooling around the old tar-patched roads. I drove by the old school and past the grange too, and felt nostalgic. I missed hanging out in the cemetery and out in the woods by the big rock, and mostly I missed being close to Dora. It occurred to me that I had spoiled everything due to my anger but I had no plans at all to try and do anything about the anger I was feeling. Maybe this will sound crazy but at this point it seemed that my anger was the only thing I possessed which made my life interesting in some respect; or, at the very least, it was the most interesting thing in my life at that time. I woke up to my anger and went to sleep with it. It gave me plenty to think about. I nursed my anger and examined it at every opportunity. Instead of coming up with reasons to stop being angry I looked for reasons to hold onto that feeling, which was sometimes like a high of sorts. It seemed to come out of nowhere but while I was driving around I remembered that Sharon was the only sister in her family and the youngest at that, and that she had three or four brothers who had all been star football players at one time or another at our high school. Two of these brothers were twins, but I don't remember their names, and they had graduated quite some time ago. There was a picture of them hanging down by the school's main office dressed in their football jerseys and holding a trophy in with a bunch of other pictures of star athletes and trophies behind glass that was locked and always polished. The only brother I knew anything about was Adam Baumgartner who had graduated three years earlier when I was in ninth grade. The reason I remembered him was because there was this big to-do over Adam. He had his face in the paper all the time and he was good at baseball and basketball as well as football. People were saying that he was a good enough baseball player to make it to the pros. Everyone called him "the Atom Bomb". As it turned out the Atom Bomb wound up dropping out of college after a few months due to a problem with drugs and went to work in an auto repair shop his father owned. So much for the best laid plans, I remember my mother saying. I knew where the shop was and so one day I drove down there and what do you know, there was Adam Baumgartner in a dirty monkey suit standing down in the pit. One of his older brothers, another high school superstar who came to nothing, was working there also. I surprised Adam by knowing who he was, and I think he was tickled pink if you really want to know. I flattered him somewhat and said that I used to watch him play, though the truth was I could never stand sports and didn't really give a shit about him or any of his brothers. When he came up out of the pit I was reminded of how big he was. He stood at least six-two and had put on weight since high school. In fact you could say he was leaning towards fat, though I doubt you'd want to say it to his face. His hand was big and black with oil and he clapped me on the back and called me his "fan", somewhat sarcastically I imagine. Anyway I ended up getting an oil change and I had no idea whether I needed one or not, but when I was paying my bill he took me into this little cramped office which had a desk somewhere under piles of invoices and parts catalogs and automobile manuals. The place was filthy. He wrote me out a receipt because the ancient cash register they had was broken, and I stood there wondering how I could get around to mentioning Troy and Adam's little sister. To tell you the truth I was ashamed of myself as I eventually got around to it. I had no real evidence that Troy was fooling around with Sharon, and even if I did, maybe it wasn't anyone's else's business when you got right down to it; but despite my misgivings I proceeded to tell Adam, in the most mealy-mouthed and back-handed way, that I had no idea Sharon was going with Troy Van Buren, that it was a surprise to me when I saw them together at the Dairy Queene that afternoon a couple of hours ago.
"What do you mean going with?" Adam asked me. "She was going with some guy named Jason last I heard."
"Oh, then I must have got things all wrong," I said, "It just looked to me like Troy and her were going together. Forget I even mentioned it."
"Well how did you get things wrong? What were they doing?" Adam asked me, and I saw by his expression that he wasn't thrilled over the idea of his sister getting romantic with Troy. I felt a twinge in my stomach so I told him what I had seen and nothing more. I didn't think I needed to feel guilty over telling the plain truth and adding nothing to it. I told Adam that I saw Troy holding Sharon's hand for a long time and that they talked for a good while at the Dairy Queene and that Sharon was giggling and smiling from ear to ear the whole time. Adam sat and thought for a while and then he seemed to get angry with me.
"Is that all you came here for, to tell me this crap?" he asked me. For a second I thought I was about to get a new hole tore in my ass.
"No, I needed to get my oil changed," I said, "Sorry I mentioned it. Probably I saw it all wrong."
"Yeah you saw it wrong. Jesus Christ," Adam said, and that was the end of that conversation.
So off I went in my old Ford with its guts full of new oil. As it turned out Troy took his first beating from somebody who was bigger than he was. It happened about two weeks later, and right in front of the school when all the busses were loading up and getting ready to go. I wasn't there but from what I heard Adam Baumgartner had approached Troy Van Buren in the parking lot at around 2:45. There was some discussion after which Adam put his hand around Troy's neck and continued on with the discussion. Troy got pissed and pushed Adam, at which point Adam belted Troy in the face and knocked him onto the pavement. People were standing around as people will when someone is getting the tar beat out of them, because people are a morbidly curious lot by nature. Nick Tamarro was there and he said you could hear Adam's fist crack against Troy's face and that there was blood everywhere. Troy considered getting up but then thought better of it, besides he was bleeding all over Nick said, out of his nose mostly, and no one would have thought less of him for staying put right where he was. To be honest with you I can't say I regret not seeing the whole thing happen. I'm glad I didn't see it, to tell the whole truth. I felt like a shit-heel as it was. Adam Baumgartner's reputation went straight into the shitter, after he was busted for assault and battery and got his name in the paper again. All-star high school athlete turns racist knuckle-dragger overnight. His problem with drugs got worse and the last I heard he was in some rehab down in White Plains. As it turns out Troy and Sharon were never anything more than friends.
Mostly I continued to hang around with Jim, and I saw Jack and Steve less and less. I can't really say I miss either of those two. Jim took a shine to the grange and the old cemetery, and every once in a while we would hang around out there with Coby and sometimes Noah. One night Dora and a friend of hers came by, a girl named Jesse. I was so surprised to see Dora come walking down the path into the woods that I could have fallen over. Troy wasn't with her and there was a reason for that, which I suppose was because of me and my anger and my running off at the mouth, though maybe more indirectly than not. After Troy got his face smashed in by the Atom Bomb Dora's parents insisted that she stop seeing Troy. It wasn't that they were bigots, just that they were afraid that something bad might happen to her, and maybe Troy would wind up getting his ass beat again, or worse. I got a feeling that Dora brought her friend along to try and hook her up with Noah. I was glad that she wasn't trying to hook the girl up with me because she looked like she had her face pinched in an elevator and she was a carpenter's dream if there ever was one. I hate to sound like a knuckle-dragger but I just can't get worked up over an ugly girl, even though I am no pretty picture myself. Anyway I got the chance to talk to Dora, and it was the first time since I ever laid eyes on her that she wasn't going with somebody else. My heart beat like hell in my chest and my hands were clammy. I was high and a little drunk but I think she scared me sober. She was being sweet to me and I asked her if she would take a walk over in the cemetery with me for old times' sake, and she said why not. It wasn't that she wanted to be alone with me, just that she wanted to leave Jesse with no choice but to chat it up with Jim and Coby and Noah, and since Jim was stoned out of his brain and Coby was nuts, Noah had the best shot of making a decent impression on her, though I didn't actually think he would make a play for her, and I turned out to be right. So there I was with the girl of my dreams who was now without a significant other, and we walked around among the old headstones and the little wooden crosses. We ended up going along the side of the grange and then we stopped. She just stood there with her hands in her back pockets in that way that some girls have of looking sexy without even trying, and the moon was bright enough that I could see her eyes gazing off toward the road.
"I was hoping Troy would be here," she said, and I felt my stomach sink down into my shoes. All my hopes went south like a big sack of cow shit, and I don't really know whether I was more stricken with sorrow or just one-hundred proof, undiluted, unmitigated anger. As it turned out I decided to save the sorrow for later and went with the anger, which like I said was like a high of sorts, more powerful and more compelling in its own way than pot or hooch.
"Aw, come on," I said, "Why do you want to go with a nigger for?"
Dora looked at me like I was suddenly a stranger. That was a word that just didn't pop out in conversation among the old crew. I remembered not caring much for the word but at this point it was somehow empowering. It felt like a bunched up fist coming out of my mouth. I think I even saw Dora's head go back, as if those two syllables had given her a good solid poke in the chops.
"Jesus, Ed, I can't believe you said that," she told me after a few moments of dead silence. It seemed like even the wind stopped whispering around the musty old building we stood next to. "Oh my God."
"Oh lighten up," I said, "I mean, I like him and all, but. For Chrissake he's always going with white girls. Why can't he go with a nigger? I mean, seeing as it's okay for you to go with a nigger, why not him?"
"Troy's a doll," Dora told me, and she was angry herself now. "He's one of the smartest kids in school and he's also one of the nicest. Who cares if he's black?"
"Some people seem to," I reminded her. "In case you forgot."
"No I didn't forget," Dora said. And suddenly the tone of her voice changed, and I saw her Achilles heel shining brightly in the darkness. I went for it. I couldn't see any reason not to and it seemed justified and reasonable to boot.
"Well, you know, if he hadn't been fooling around with Sharon Baumgartner that wouldn't have happened," I said, "He was two-timing you, Dora. There you were thinking he was some knight in shining armor and meanwhile he was out getting his paws all over some other girl."
"Troy and Sharon are just friends, Ed! Friends!" Dora told me. "Troy told me he only talked to her at school and saw her a couple times in town, and where she worked. They never even went anywhere together. Troy still has no idea why Adam thought he was going with Sharon! He was probably messed up on something and saw them talking, or something like that. I don't know."
"That's not what I heard," I said, and decided to lie a little. "I heard that he was messing around with her."
"Heard from who?" Dora asked me.
"Never mind that. I'm not gonna go and get somebody else in trouble over that damn nigger," I said, and for a second the way my words came out made me wish I could have reached out and stuffed them back in my mouth. But it didn't matter since Dora was already tromping off back toward the path into the woods. I caught up with her and my emotions got the better of me and I grabbed her wrist to stop her. "Dora wait."
"Leave me be, Ed. I'm gonna get Jesse and go."
"Dora..." I muttered, and then I leaned over and tried to kiss her. It was a pathetic last ditch effort, I admit, but I figured there would never be another chance. In the hundreds of times I had played this kind of scenario over in my mind there was a nice cool breeze in the air and off in the distance I could hear the sound of violins lifting up out of the silence as I put my lips to Dora's lips and she turned her head and opened her mouth and let out a tiny little groan that meant 'at last' from the back of her throat. But as it turned out I never made it to her lips. She recoiled as if from a person with leprosy plus a bad case of bad breath and yanked her arm away and practically vomited her last words to me:
"Ed, Jesus! Oh my God...Now I'm really getting out of here," And off she went.
I stood where I was for a while but then went and stood by the grange and hid in the shadows. I waited until Jesse and Dora came along the path out of the woods and through the cemetery. They were talking quietly and looking this way and that, wondering where I was. I was off in the shadows, my prick shriveled up like a busted balloon, my heart crushed and my soul as dark as the shadows I was hiding in. I squatted down when the two girls came along, and even after I heard Dora's car start and rumble away I stayed where I was. I had reached a low point, for sure, but there was something redeeming about it. It was somehow comforting to have finally made my move on Dora, even though it came to nothing. It was like scratching an itch on the bottom of your foot inside your shoe after you've been slogging through the mud for three hours. And I could already find comfort in the knowledge that I would be able to rationalize Dora's reaction to the point where my basic male ego wouldn't have to take too much of a beating, since I could tell myself that it was that nasty word I used which she had recoiled from, not good old Ed. It was the stink of my words that made her sick at the idea of kissing me. Even as I went back into the woods to rejoin Coby and Noah I had convinced myself of that.
I got drunk and smoked a good amount of weed out of Jim's bullet pipe, and by the end of the night I was too messed up to give much of a damn about anything. I sat there on my stump and listened to Noah talk. He was drunk too, and he was plenty shook up over what happened to Troy. Of course, poor Noah got shook up over pretty much everything. He missed his little sister and it was only him and his mom living out in the trailer park just down the road from where Troy lived before he moved on. Troy graduated with honors and went to a tech school where he got a degree in Electrical Engineering. Shortly after that he went to work for Con-Ed, got married to some girl I never heard of - and whether she was white or black I don't know and don't care - and moved away. He and his band still play club gigs in Poughkeepsie and Beacon, last I heard. It seemed to me that Noah missed Troy as much as he missed his retarded sister. He had a crappy job in a metal parts factory where a bunch of the kids from our school wound up working. He took a job there, so he says, because at least he could walk to and from it. Noah never did get a driver's license, and he didn't want to have to bother his mom for a ride. As for myself I stayed on at the supermarket and due to my dogged perseverance - not to mention the lack of anything else to do and any place else to go - I became produce manager within three years. Well what the hell do you know about that. To tell you the truth though, they paid me way too much to do that job, and they are still paying me to do it. Thank the Lord for labor unions.
There is no happy ending to this story, if it even is a story. I saw Troy a few times after he got his face smashed in but I never made any attempt to come clean. I never tried to make things right. I never told a single soul about my conversation that afternoon eight years ago with Adam Baumgartner. I believe I got lucky since it didn't seem that Adam had told Sharon who it was that saw her and Troy at the Dairy Queene, or maybe he just forgot my name. I'm a pretty forgettable guy when you get down to it, and for that I suppose I should be thankful. I drive around by myself a good deal now and still get nostalgic when I cruise by the old grange and see the little headstones behind it and the little wooden crosses. If I happen to be especially down in the dumps I drive out further and tool along by the old train trestle where some of us used hang out occasionally and get high, and where poor Noah Crowley did a swan-dive one night and put paid to his misery once and for all. I can honestly say I've never been truly miserable. I've had my frustrations, my sorrows, my heartaches, not to mention a truckload of guilt, but not misery. Even when my big brother Henry died of Hotchkins I was sad but I wasn't completely tore up over it. I think I can say that Noah was more tore up over his sister being put into an institution than I was over the passing of my big brother. But people are different. Noah's misery came from a lot of places I suppose but when all is said and done his misery was the result of the fact that he loved certain people in his life a God-awful lot, maybe even a bit too much, and he never hurt anyone, not a single soul. He was too busy being hurt to do any harm to somebody else. He didn't have the strength, even if he did have the will, which I doubt he ever did. Me, I hurt people, and I did it on purpose, and yet I can still look at my face in the mirror when I get up in the morning and before I go to bed at night. But as time wears on, the less and less it gets to me. I suppose maybe someday justice will get done and I will know my share of misery, but even if that were to come to pass I don't think I could do what Noah did. I'm too chicken-shit for that.
