An Incidental Reckoning (2 page)

"All right. Let's go. And I want a real fight. I don't expect much from either of you pussies, but if it looks like you're holding back, I'll hurt you. Maybe not now, but it's a long time before summer."

"What's your name?" the kid asked.

"Jon."

"I'm Will. Sorry about this."

"Yeah, me too."

"If you two want to hug or hump, do it on your own time. Last warning."

The bell rang, a disheartening but apt signal to the beginning of the first fight of his life. Jon watched his fist fly out in front of his face, staring at his hand in fascination as though it were possessed by a mischievous devil. It was a weak punch and Will ducked and then countered with a right that stung Jon's cheek. Anger welled up, and, though he knew neither of them had a choice, he channeled the rage at his impotence and humiliation into the next blow and connected with Will's chin. At least with this opponent he had a chance. Both of them stepped back, breathing hard, and then Will ran forward with a little cry and tackled him. Jon flailed his fists, some of his wild attacks finding their target without any real effect, most missing entirely while he absorbed the same clumsy blows from Will.

He was aware of the laughing and cheering from Brody, Crush and Roger, but from a distance and he fought to push Will off and gain an advantage. A punch found his nose, and blood seeped from his nostrils. He stopped trying to hit back and focused all of his strength on dislodging him. The other boy fell off in the grass next to him and Jon rose up to try and straddle his chest.

"Hey! Stop it right now!"

Startled, Jon turned to see a broad-shouldered man with a goatee and wearing a tie- a pattern alternating Snoopy and Woodstock- enter their arena. He swooped down and grabbed them by their shirts, hauling them up to their feet. Jon felt a steady drip of blood from his nose and wiped it with his arm, leaving a scarlet smear down its length.

"That's enough."

The man turned to Brody and the others, now walking away, and said,"What's going on here, Stape? Did you have something to do with this?"

Brody held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "No, not me, Mr. Giles. I tried to stop them, but they wouldn't listen. I was just going to get a teacher, and then you showed up. Good thing."

Mr. Giles frowned. "Just get to class, all three of you."

"Yes, Sir. Hope they're okay." Jon heard laughter as they rounded the corner back to the courtyard.

"Did he put you up to this?"

Will shook his head, and after a moment of weighing a moment's satisfaction against prolonged future pain, Jon reluctantly followed the gesture with his own.

"Then you two will have three days of suspension to figure out how to get along. Great way to start the school year. At least you could have waited until later when you were off of school grounds. Not that I’m advocating fighting at all…anyway, let's go. We'll see the nurse first, and then you can sit in the principal's office while we call your parents."

Jon walked next to Will, ahead of Mr. Giles, back into the courtyard, vacant but for one kid that hurried away when caught in the headlights of approaching authority. At least they didn’t have to march through a gauntlet of gawkers, although it wouldn’t take long for news of the fight to wind through the grapevine. It surprised Jon that no one else had arrived before Mr. Giles, any fight between kids seeming to broadcast through a unique wavelength that only other students could detect. Through the plate glass windows ahead, Jon saw Brody standing inside and watching them with a neutral expression. But he read it clear as the warning intended, and planned to take heed. Maybe Brody had had his fun, and they would be left alone now. Maybe. Probably not.

“You okay?” Will whispered.

He nodded as they opened the door at the left corner of the courtyard, and then continued with their escort to the nurses’ office just down a narrow hallway. Jon’s nose had stopped bleeding, but it felt larger than normal, and throbbed with each rapid heartbeat.

After enduring the nurse’s ministrations and her tight frown of disapproval, they sat down in the hard plastic office chairs to await sentencing, the nurse’s scowl transferred to the secretary that faced them. Will’s father arrived, and he spoke softly but sharply to Will, and then put a hand on his shoulder. The man turned to look Jon over. Jon detected a discrete approval at his swollen nose and the blood drying on his shirt.

Jon’s father did not come, had simply relayed over the telephone that his son should suffer any punishment warranted. Jon preferred his absence to the public berating he would have brought with him. Later, at home, his father wasn’t even around, and Jon heated some Spaghettios and ate while watching music videos, hurt and relieved at the same time.

During the next three days, the two boys cemented their friendship, sitting alone in a classroom set apart for delinquents in a year too new for the others that would do their time after settling in. Will had just moved to Tanville, and Jon’s paucity of friends and their shared experience made the friendship a welcome thing for both boys. They even laughed about the fight, saying that in a way Brody had introduced them, and they owed him for that; but underneath was a shared certainty that it wasn’t over, that it had in fact only just begun.

Chapter 2

Jon had arrived at the campsite early, set up the tent and gathered kindling for the fire to add to the stacked logs already sitting by the fire ring, courtesy of the recent heavy winds and a park employee’s generosity after attacking them with a chain saw. With nothing else to do but wait for Will, he took a moment to survey the surroundings.

Will had suggested Ravensburg State Park, located in the mountains of the central region of Pennsylvania, as this year’s meeting site. Jon had looked it up on the internet and agreed it had potential, with nearby bogs and state forests to explore. The park itself did not work hard to impress; just a strip of woods sandwiched between a cliff and slides of boulders and loose shale at the back, and a highway on the opposite side uncomfortably close to the campsites. A stream cut through the acreage before the road, but appeared too shallow for the trout fishing they always did on these trips. At one end of the narrow park was a small dam and a pavilion, and on the other the loop of packed dirt accessing the campground. Payment for camping was done using the honor system and the park had no dedicated rangers.

So far, on this Friday evening in early May, only his tent broke up the monotony of the tall pines, their canopy of interlocking branches acting almost as a natural roof. Jon preferred solitude to a tent city populated with screaming children, barking dogs, and small tow-behind campers outfitted to haul civilization into the woods. He had never understood why those people came in the first place: building a fire in the backyard, roasting some weenies, and then sleeping in their own beds seemed easier.

A blue jay screamed from somewhere above, and then a crow dropped down from the trees and flew through the campground, followed by two jays that easily kept pace and darted in to peck at the larger bird. The crow didn’t attempt to retaliate, only sought escape from the angry birds’ territory.

If only it were that easy. But then, maybe if we had fought back…

He heard the clip-clop of horse hooves and turned around, discerned a black shape moving on the road but screened by the trees. A sudden vision of an old-timey horse-drawn hearse came to mind, ghostly and driven by shrouded figures, and an involuntary shiver ran through him. Then through a larger gap between tree trunks, he saw an Amish buggy driven by a young boy maybe sixteen years old. He did not wear a beard, which Jon understood, from his limited store of Amish lore, that he hadn’t married. The boy had been looking into the campground and through the open space their eyes met. The traveller raised his hand in salute without adding a smile, and Jon did the same. Then he was gone.

This trip marked the fifth time he and Will had reunited. Both of them would turn forty before January. They had kept in touch for a while after graduation, but it went as those things do: lives run in different directions, new people and places enter the mix, and at some point the lines mooring the present to the past are severed. And because of the pain they had suffered, he wondered if, consciously or not, both of them had intentionally cut them once their alliance had lost its necessity.

But when Will had called six years ago, he found the bullied high school kid within responding to his friend; like a Matryoshka doll, the hollow wooden nesting dolls that held a smaller version within, and another within the next, and so on until reaching a tiny solid figure the size of a bean at its heart. That part of him, though buried deep under the years, a job and marriage, still lived in its own special purity. He had worked hard to smother it, but talking to Will proved how deep old pain could still run, and how good it felt to have someone who shared it. He knew now why combat veterans sought each other out after so many years; only those that had felt the bullets fly a hairs-breadth away from punching their ticket to the afterlife, and had witnessed their brothers falling all around them, could understand. Their tears needed no explanation except to the wives and children and grandchildren at the center of their lives suddenly thrust to the periphery. Maybe his and Will’s experience didn’t have the same intensity as surviving a firefight, but he thought it an apt enough comparison.

Re-living those days, the pain stirred up into a sudden whirlwind by Will’s voice, nearly caused him to drop the phone. But in the end, they both realized a need to reconnect and allow the restless boys within expression; to look into the eyes of one who knew.

The annual camping trip was born.

They didn’t get sappy, didn’t hug and cry, but simply basked in the affirmation of that connection. They didn’t even talk about Stape much, because in a way he came too, sat by the campfire roasting hot dogs with them, and threw a third line into the cold mountain waters hoping for a sixteen-inch brook trout.

Jon had discovered that Will had never told his wife about those years: with a laugh shrugging off her suggestion that he attend his twenty-year reunion, explaining he had no desire to see those people again, but inside cringing at stepping through the double doors and seeing his memories reflected on every face that turned to look at him. This didn’t surprise Jon. He had never told anyone either that didn't already know. And even if no one at the reunion said anything - the reunion that he had avoided as well - he too would have suspected their humiliation behind every bray of laughter that carried across the room.

They had - after a discussion in a pizza shop after school following their second run-in with Stape and the certainty that he would not leave them be - come to a mutual agreement not to fight back. They decided to ride it out. Stape would graduate in two years, and between the classes he cut and the time spent in detention, they could often avoid him. But primarily, both boys were terrified of their aggressor. He had never struck either of them. That was the most galling thing. He simply enjoyed watching them fight so much that he arranged for it to happen again, off school grounds. And they did, while Brody carefully controlled who was invited and then charged admission. In future bouts, he even fixed the fights, telling them beforehand who would take a dive and when. He made sure they didn’t hurt each other too badly, and kept events spaced out so that blood and bruises wouldn’t attract the undue attention of Mr. Giles or any other authority figure. And other kids, even if inclined to do so, never told. The terror of Brody Stape taking a personal interest in them acted as a powerful deterrent.

They should have taken a beating for their freedom, he now knew from a man's perspective and far removed from any threat. But they hadn’t. They had become Brody’s property, forced to hurt the only true friend either possessed. Jon did not have the strength or the resources, or the support from his father (his mother gone since his infancy), but he did have Will. Perhaps if he’d been alone, he might have lashed out from sheer desperation and an irrepressible accumulation of rage. But he bore no grudge or placed any blame on Will. They had been kids, and done the best they could, or at least the best they knew how. And it had drawn them together in a way that nothing else could have, even as it after had torn them apart, only recently gravitating back together after so long.

Jon got up to stretch, and then stood listening to the rush of the fast but shallow stream fifty yards away, closed his eyes and smelled the earth and pine and odor of decaying leaves exhumed from their recent burial in the snow, allowed these present sensations to flood his being, forcing out the memories that had come on too thick for comfort.

He heard the sound of a car slowing on the road and recognized Will through the driver's window as he passed by to the entrance. Jon smiled, glad that his friend had arrived, ready for a few days of nature, relative solitude, and welcome companionship. He waved as Will drove slowly down the dirt track that led to their campsite.