Only Love Can Break Your Heart (4 page)

4

WE DID SEE PAUL
OFTEN,
for the first year at least. He always arrived unannounced, even for the holidays. He might appear a week before Thanksgiving, to my mother’s chagrin, loafing around the house, filling the upstairs with the smell of cigarette smoke. Or he might arrive on Christmas Eve, minutes before the Old Man’s beloved salt-cured Virginia ham hit the table. Sometimes he just showed up in the middle of the week, to do laundry or switch out some of the records he kept in his dorm room to play on the new portable turntable and cassette player the Old Man had given him as a graduation gift.

The Old Man could never exhibit anything but delight when Paul appeared. When Paul left, the Old Man invariably sank into a mood of quiet longing that might stretch on for days.

“That boy has you on a string,” I heard my mother tell him. “He’s a born manipulator.”

For the longest time, I thought “born manipulator” was a single word.

“He’s a man now,” the Old Man replied. “I can’t force him to do anything.”

“A man supports himself,” my mother said. “If you live off your father, you’re still a boy. And a boy has to follow his father’s rules.”

“You don’t understand, Alice,” the Old Man pleaded.

“No, Dick,” she said. “It’s you who doesn’t understand.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the Old Man moaned.

Almost every conversation they had about Paul ended with the Old Man invoking some holy personage.

Because of what had become or appeared to be becoming of Paul, mine was an excessively governed and supervised childhood. Mothers like mine—hovering, smothering, overinvolved parents who schedule their children’s lives down to the minute—seem now to be the rule rather than the exception. But at the end of the seventies, Spencerville still felt beyond the reach of the looming dread of American life. The worst thing anyone could remember in our neighborhood was Paul’s being shot by Brad Culver, an incident considered roughly equivalent to an old crank firing a round of rock salt into the rear ends of teenagers TP’ing the poplars or playing “ring and run.”

Nevertheless, I was imprisoned by my mother’s anxieties. After school, as my peers piled onto the cacophonous yellow buses or wheeled off on their dirt bikes to do whatever they pleased, I plodded sullenly over to my mother’s gigantic, faux-wood-paneled station wagon, ready to drive me off to voice or acting or dance lessons.

My mother could not, however, protect me from the slings and arrows of elementary school—namely, Jimmy Hutter.

We must all recall the incomprehensible spite of the schoolyard bully: The random selectivity of his malice, the helpless acquiescence of his prey. Perhaps worst of all, the pathetic betrayal of the victim’s so-called friends, who stand aside or perhaps even laugh and jeer, loyalty being a far less powerful instinct than self-preservation. Instead of forming a line of defense, they part and flee, like the herd of wildebeests on
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
, blithely trotting away as the lion gorges on the entrails of some unfortunate straggler while Marlin Perkins voices airy platitudes about the circle of life.

Surely Paul had never had to worry about being bullied—or so it seemed when I told him about Jimmy Hutter on one of his quick visits home to do laundry and hit the Old Man up for cash.

“If the kid messes with you,” Paul said with a shrug, “just kick him in the balls.”

“In the balls?”

“Do it quick,” he added. “He won’t expect it. Then sock him in the nose, as hard as you can.”

Paul explained his plan, which, it turned out, he’d learned from the Old Man, of all people.

“A firm kick in the balls will double a guy over,” Paul said. “A hard jab to the nose will make him see stars, which will sort of blind him for a minute or so.”

“Then what do you do?” I asked.

Paul admitted that the Old Man had said that after the second blow he should run away. The strategy was designed by the soldiers in the Old Man’s unit during the postwar occupation of Japan, for getting out of situations where they might be cornered alone in an unfriendly bar or back alley.

“Should I run?” I asked.

I felt certain that Paul had never run away from a fight himself.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just sock him again, I guess.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and hopped off the bed.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

On the rug in front of the windows, Paul taught me how to throw a punch.

“Don’t swing,” Paul said. “Get your dukes up and fire from right beside your head, like this.”

I mimicked how he held his fists up below his eyes.

“Plant your feet and get your legs into it,” he said. “Same with the kick. Lean forward so you don’t fall down.”

Paul demonstrated a few quick jab-cross combinations, followed by short, fast knee kicks.

“Here,” he said, holding out his palm. “Hit me.”

I aimed at his palm and punched it as hard as I could.

“Come on, Rocky,” Paul said. “The Italian Stallion can’t hit like a girl.”

He took out Led Zeppelin’s first album and dropped the needle on “Good Times, Bad Times.”

“Try again,” he said. “And yell when you do it.”

“Yell?” I asked.

He turned the knob up on the stereo. The floor buzzed with the heavy bass.

“Yeah. Yell.
ARGH
!” he bellowed.

“
AAAAAAAARGGHHH
!” I screamed.

By the end of the album side, I had it down: hard kick to the crotch, cross to the chin, jab to the solar plexus. After Paul left the next day to return to college, I continued my training. Each afternoon, I put on something heavy like Zeppelin or Black Sabbath and practiced, imagining Jimmy Hutter’s face floating in the air in front of me, waiting to be pulverized by my furious fists.

A few weeks later, the inevitable moment arrived. As I sat at the lunch table among the other nerds, runts, and oddballs, I felt Jimmy Hutter looming behind me.

“You know what I heard?” Jimmy said, his voice low and menacing.

“No,” I said.

“My dad says your dad is one cold-blooded son of a bitch.”

The other boys looked on, hushed and alert.

“Is not,” I said, my eyes fixed on the table in front of me.

“You callin’ me a liar?” Jimmy snarled.

I looked around, trying to spot Mrs. Goode, the lunch lady, who monitored the twittering crowd through the Coke-bottle lenses of her glasses. Mrs. Goode operated the traffic light used to regulate the noise level. If the children were too loud, the light turned red, which meant Silent Lunch, where everyone would be confined to a chair and could only get up with her permission. I prayed vainly that the chatter would rise and Mrs. Goode would turn on the red light, sending Jimmy back to his seat.

“I think you and me need to settle this in the bathroom,” Jimmy said.

I remembered something else Paul had told me when I explained Jimmy’s intimidation methods.

“How does he get away with pounding kids right there in the cafeteria?” Paul had asked.

“He doesn’t,” I said. “He always says, ‘Let’s go settle this in the bathroom,’ so the teachers won’t see.”

“And has anyone ever gone in there with him?”

“No,” I replied.

“So you’ve never really seen this kid beat anyone up.”

“No.”

“Huh,” Paul said.

Paul’s inference was clear, even to me. Jimmy Hutter was big and mean, and he acted tough, but it was easy to act tough if no one ever stood up to you. And Jimmy Hutter didn’t have training or a strategy. Jimmy Hutter didn’t have Paul.

“So are you coming, or are you too pussy?” Jimmy said.

An expansive knowledge of vulgarities was part of Jimmy’s special menace.

“No,” I said. “Let’s do it right here.”

The chair screeched on the floor beneath me as I stood and backed away from the table. The din of voices rose around us. But the aging, visually impaired Mrs. Goode, usually so reliably vigilant, made no sound; the traffic light remained green. There would be no rescue, no escape. I took in a deep breath, clenched my fists, reared back, and swung my foot toward Jimmy Hutter’s balls with all the force I could muster.

So intent was I on Jimmy’s crotch that I didn’t notice the steel leg of the red cafeteria chair obstructing the path of the blow. Instead of connecting with Jimmy’s scrotum, the kick sent the chair crashing into the table. With my foot twisted in the legs of the chair between us, I tumbled toward Jimmy, who fell to the floor with me, where we lamely slapped and pawed at each other while a cheering throng formed around us.

I felt a pair of powerful hands grasp my arms and lift me from the floor. Byron, the janitor, had stepped through the crowd to snatch the two of us up and scuttle us off to the Main Office. There we sat in front of the desk of Miss Hallenbeck, school secretary and assistant to Principal Powell, while we waited to be summoned, one at a time, for our interrogations.

Jimmy Hutter crossed his arms and stared at the wall, his lips pursed in a sullen scowl, trying to mask his fear. For my own part, I made no effort to disguise my distress. The tears flowed freely.

Jimmy was called in first. I listened intently through the door, hoping to pick up fragments of the conversation, all the while envisioning the stern visage of Mr. Powell, leaning forward with his elbows on the desk. Behind him, hanging on the wall, was the infamous paddle he’d personally constructed: a lean, varnished piece of rosewood with a dozen neat holes bored in two parallel lines across its surface to maximize the speed and force with which it inflicted its discipline. Mr. Powell had even given it a name, etched into its regulation four-inch handle: Swift Justice.

There was more to fear than Swift Justice. Fighting at school generally meant a lengthy suspension. I had never been suspended before; in fact, I’d never been in serious trouble of any kind. Paul was the bad seed—everyone knew this. I had overheard more than a few adults observe how fortunate my parents were that, after Paul, I appeared to be turning out so well.

The silence inside Mr. Powell’s office was punctuated by a muffled slap and a sniveling cry—Swift Justice connecting with Jimmy Hutter’s rear end.

As I sat there waiting to get hided, I searched my mind frantically to deduce how quickly and easily I had transformed into a “bad kid.” I wondered how being bad worked. Was it something that happened accidentally? Did all people start out good? I hadn’t invited Jimmy Hutter’s torments, but I knew I wasn’t innocent either. Was I born bad? I had the same birthday as Anne, after all. She was clearly bad. And Mussolini. Did Mussolini simply wake up one morning and decide to be bad? Surely not. Hitler must have made him that way, like Anne said.

A shape appeared in front of my downcast eyes. I looked up, expecting to see Mr. Powell, ready to take me in for my flogging.

“Hey there, Rocky.”

It was Paul, dressed in tan slacks, a navy blazer, and a white shirt and tie. He was clean shaven, and his hair was neatly parted and combed behind his ears. I hadn’t seen him in a tie since he graduated from Macon. As far as I knew, he’d never combed his hair in his life.

I was too elated by Paul’s sudden appearance at my moment of direst crisis to wonder how he had happened to arrive just when I was about to face Mr. Powell and Swift Justice. Paul must somehow have sensed my need, I assumed, and had come running to my aid.

Ever ready to improvise, Paul behaved from the start as if he’d known he was going to find me there.

“Hey there, Miss Hallenbeck,” he said.

He leaned over the desk to give Miss Hallenbeck a peck. Her cheeks flushed pink. As it turned out, even the meanest woman in the Spottswood County Public School System was a sucker for Paul, the “born manipulator.”

“So,” Paul said, “what has young Richard here gotten himself into?”

“Fighting in the lunchroom,” Miss Hallenbeck said, casting a scowl in my direction. Paul sighed and shook his head.

“Kids these days, right, Miss Hallenbeck?”

She giggled girlishly.

“Mrs. Askew didn’t mention she’d be sending you, Paul,” she said.

“Something came up at the last minute,” Paul said. “I’m in town for an alumni thing, so I offered to help out.”

A worried look came over Miss Hallenbeck’s face.

“Mr. Powell will want to speak with Mrs. Askew,” she said. “Or your father.”

“One of them will come in tomorrow,” Paul said. “They’ll call to set up an appointment later on, I’m sure.”

“Well, all right,” Mrs. Hallenbeck said. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

She stood and started toward Powell’s office. Another loud slap pierced the air on the other side of the door.

“If you don’t mind,” Paul said, “I’ll take the little pugilist here down to the bathroom to clean himself up.”

“Make it fast,” she said.

As we left the office, Paul winked at Miss Hallenbeck—not a quick, casual wink, but a slow, sensual, flirtatious batting of long, thick eyelashes. For a moment she seemed to lose her breath.

“Come on, slugger,” Paul said.

As we reached the end of the hallway, I turned toward the restroom. Paul touched my shoulder.

“Not that way, brother,” he said.

He tilted his head toward the entrance to the school, the tall glass doors glowing brightly in the midday sun.

“What about Mr. Powell?” I said.

“Have you ever had a taste of Swift Justice before, Rocky?” Paul asked.

“No.”

“I have,” he said. “Old Man Powell made me bleed when I was your age.”

“He made you bleed?” I whispered.

“That’s right,” Paul said.

I heard another faint smack and another, louder cry. I envisioned the paddle in Mr. Powell’s thick, callused hand, slicing through the air, making me bleed. Who wouldn’t run away from that?

We may well have passed Mom’s Buick station wagon on the way up the street, but I would have been hidden by the enormous dashboard of the Nova, gazing off to the right at the dogwood blossoms and the magnolia trees that spot the yards along the way to Pearsall’s Drugstore.

“So,” Paul said, holding the wheel with one hand and lighting a Camel with the other. “What happened?”