city’–a phrase everyone understood to mean Lewiston-Auburn.
They took me to Dr Clarkson in the station wagon–Dr Clarkson, who is still
alive today, was even then old enough to have quite possibly been on armchair-to-
armchair terms with God. He set my nose and my fingers and gave my mother a
prescription for painkiller. Then he got them out of the examining room on some
pretext or other and came over to me, shuffling, head forward, like Boris Karloff
approaching Igor.
‘Who did it, Gordon?’
‘I don’t know, Dr Cla-‘
‘You’re lying.’
‘No, sir. Huh-uh.’
His sallow cheeks began to glow with colour. ‘Why should you protect the
cretins who did this? Do you think they will respect you? They will laugh and call you stupid-fool!
“Oh,” they’ll say, “there goes the stupid fool we beat up for kicks the other day.
Ha-ha! Hoo-hoo! Har-de-har-har-har!”‘
‘I didn’t know them. Really.’
I could see his hands itching to shake me, but of course he couldn’t do that. So
he sent me out to my parents, shaking his white head and muttering about juvenile
delinquents. He would no doubt tell his old friend God all about it that night over their cigars and sherry.
I didn’t care if Ace and Fuzzy and the rest of those assholes respected me or
thought I was stupid or never thought about me at all. But there was Chris to think of.
His brother Eyeball had broken his arm in two places and had left his face looking
like a Canadian sunrise. They had to set the elbow-break with a steel pin. Mrs
McGinn from down the road saw Chris staggering along the soft shoulder, bleeding from both ears and reading a Richie Rich comic book. She took him to the CMG
Emergency Room where Chris told the doctor he had fallen down the cellar stairs in
the dark.
‘Right,’ the doctor said, every bit as disgusted with Chris as Dr Clarkson had
been with me, and then he went to call Sheriff Bannerman.
While he did that from his office, Chris went slowly down the hall, holding the
temporary sling against his chest so the arm wouldn’t swing and grate the broken
bones together, and used a nickel in the pay phone to call home–he told me later it
was the first collect call he had ever made and he was scared to death that Mrs
McGinn wouldn’t accept the charges-but she did.
‘Chris, are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Chris said.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t stay with you, Chris, but I had pies in the-‘
‘That’s all right, Missus McGinn,’ Chris said. ‘Can you see the Buick in our
dooryard?’
The Buick was the car Chris’s mother drove. It was ten years old and when the
engine got hot it smelted like frying Hush Puppies.
‘It’s there,’ she said cautiously. Best not to mix in too much with the
Chamberses. Poor white trash; shanty Irish.
‘Would you go over and tell Mamma to go downstairs and take the lightbulb
out of the socket in the cellar?’
‘Chris, I really, my pies -‘
‘Tell her,’ Chris said implacably, ‘to do it right away. Unless she maybe wants
my brother to go to jail.’
Vern and Teddy took their lumps, too, although not as bad as either Chris or I.
Billy was laying for Vern when Vern got home. He took after him with a stovelength
and hit him hard enough to knock him unconscious after only four or five good licks.
Vern was no more than stunned, but Billy got scared he might have killed him and
stopped. Three of them caught Teddy walking home from the vacant lot one afternoon.
They punched him out and broke his glasses. He fought them, but they wouldn’t fight
him when they realized he was groping after them like a blindman in the dark.
We hung out together at school looking like the remains of a Korean assault
force. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but everybody understood that we’d
had a pretty serious run-in with the big kids and comported ourselves like men. A few
stories went around. All of them were wildly wrong.
When the casts came off and the bruises healed, Vern and Teddy just drifted