1952 Ford cut into the kerb in front of me. There was no mistaking that car. Gangster
whitewalls and spinner hubcaps, highrise chrome bumpers . and lucite deathknob with a
rose embedded in it clamped to the steering wheel. Painted on the back deck was a deuce
and a one-eyed jack. Beneath them, in Roman Gothic script, were the words WILD
CARD.
The doors flew open; Ace Merrill and Fuzzy Brackowicz stepped out
‘Cheap hood, right?’ Ace said, smiling his gentle smile ‘My mother loves the way I do
it to her, right?’
‘We’re gonna rack you, baby,’ Fuzzy said.
I dropped my schoolbooks on the sidewalk and ran. I was busting my buns but they
caught me before I even made the end of the block. Ace hit me with a flying tackle and I
went full-length on the paving. My chin hit the cement and I didn’t see stars; I saw whole
constellations, whole nebulae. I was already crying when they picked me up, not so much
from my elbows and knees, both pairs scraped and bleeding, or even from fear – it was
vast, impotent rage that made me cry. Chris was right He had been ours.
I twisted and turned and almost squiggled free. Then Fuzzy hoicked his knee into my
crotch. The pain was amazing, incredible, nonpareil; it widened the horizons of pain from
plain old wide screen to Vista Vision. I began to scream. Screaming seemed to be my best
chance.
Ace punched me twice in the face, long and looping haymaker blows. The first one
closed my left eye; it would be four days before I was really able to see out of that eye
again The second broke my nose with a crunch that sounded the way crispy cereal sounds
inside your head when you chew. Then old Mrs Chalmers came out on her porch with her
cane clutched in one arthritis-twisted hand and a Herbert Tareyton jutting from one corner
of her mouth. She began to bellow at them:
‘Hi! Hi there, you boys! You stop that! Let ‘im alone! Let ‘im up! Bullies! Bullies! Two
on one! Police! Poleeeece!’
‘Don’t let me see you around, dipshit,’ Ace said, smiling, and they let go of me and
backed off. I sat up and then leaned over, cupping my wounded balls, sickly sure I was
going to throw up and then die. I was still crying, too. But when Fuzzy started to walk
around me, the sight of his pegged jeans-leg snugged down over the top of his motorcycle
boot brought all the fury back. I grabbed him and bit his calf through his jeans. I bit him
just as hard as I could. Fuzzy began to do a little screaming of his own. He also began
hopping around on one leg, and, incredibly, he was calling me a dirty fighter. I was
watching him hop around and that was when Ace stamped down on my left hand,
breaking the first two fingers. I heard them break. They didn’t sound like crispy cereal.
They sounded like pretzels. Then Ace and Fuzzy were going back to Ace’s ’52, Ace
sauntering with his hands in his back pockets, Fuzzy hopping on one leg and throwing
curses back over his shoulder at me. I curled up on the sidewalk, crying. Aunt Evvie
Chalmers came down her walk, thudding her cane angrily as she came. She asked me if !
needed the doctor. I sat up and managed to stop most of the crying. I told her I didn’t.
‘Bullshit,’ she bellowed – Aunt Evvie was deaf and bellowed everything. ‘I saw where
that bully got you. Boy, your sweetmeats are going to swell up to the size of Mason jars.’
She took me into her house, gave me a wet rag for my nose – it had begun to resemble
a summer squash by then – and gave me a big cup of medicinal-tasting coffee that was
somehow calming. She kept bellowing at me that she should call the doctor and I kept
telling her not to. Finally she gave up and I walked home. Very slowly, I walked home.
My balls weren’t the size of Mason jars yet, but they were on their way.
My mom and dad got a look at me and wigged right out -I was sort of surprised that
they noticed anything at all, to tell the truth. Who were the boys? Could I pick them out of
a line-up? That from my father, who never missed Naked City and The Untouchables. I said I didn’t think I could pick the boys out of a line-up. I said I was tired. Actually I think
I was in shock – in shock and more than a little drunk from Aunt Evvie’s coffee, which must have been at least sixty per cent VSOP brandy. I said I thought they were from some
other town, or from ‘up the 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 win 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