The Grief of Others (24 page)

It came from overhead. They both looked up. It was Prager, that sociopath, crouched in the lower branches of a knobby tree. He looked funny, crouched like that, his feet on one branch, a hand hanging on to a higher one; you could spot the primate in him, you could grasp the verity of evolution, seeing him there.

Paul stood still. He heard Baptiste mutter, “Just ignore him, man,” could feel Baptiste willing him to move on.

But Paul, working hard to keep his voice in the lower register, responded. “What did you say?”

“You heard.” Prager dropped to the ground. He stood a few inches shorter than them, but it played as no disadvantage. The muscular breadth of his chest and shoulders—Paul could picture him lifting free weights in his basement or garage, rep after rep, pumped—struck him as grotesque, not in themselves, but for the way they made obvious a kind of effort and aspiration. Prager’s Adam’s apple was a protrusive, hypnotic lump; his voice seemed to emanate directly from it. “I asked if you like eating chocolate bars.” His eyes flicking to Baptiste.

“Fuck you,” Paul said, but breathily, without conviction. A hoot of laughter came from higher up in the tree, and a Slim Jim wrapper floated down. He looked up, trying to appear bored. It was Kenneth, Kenny Something; Paul didn’t really know him. He was an eighth-grader, with coppery hair and a leather wristband. Paul had admired his skateboarding skills from afar.

“You’d like that, huh?” sneered this Kenny now, clambering down a ways and dropping beside Prager. He’d dropped from so high that his hands touched the ground when he landed, but when he straightened he was taller than any of them, and didn’t bother brushing the dirt off his palms.

Paul had not moved. He saw, from the way Kenny regarded him, that while he had imagined his immobility conveyed strength, this was not necessarily so.

“I told you, man,” Baptiste said, louder this time, “just walk away from these assholes.” He began to do exactly that, stride on through the orchard, and Paul saw too late that he should have followed this advice in the first place.

Still he remained unmoving, even as he watched Kenny’s foot come up, watched it connect with Baptiste’s backside, watched Baptiste stumble forward and sprawl flat, his backpack flying off his shoulder and skittering down the slope. He watched Baptiste scramble to his feet and swivel around, looking from Kenny to Prager and back as if trying to figure out which had done it. He had grass stains on his shirt, dirt on his face, blood on his teeth. He spat. Kenny and Prager were laughing. Baptiste said something in his language. French, Paul used to think it was, but Baptiste said it was Creole. The words came out in a torrent, rapid and full of vitriol.

“What the fuck is that,” said Prager, “voodoo?” and he and Kenny laughed harder and more derisively, as if by cursing in his mother tongue Baptiste had contributed to his own humiliation.

The filthiness of their laughter—the
incongruity
of it, amid all the creamy blossoms, all the languid, unbothered bees—seemed to Paul to break with reason.The world about him reeled.

Justice would have been a black panther springing, saliva pouring from its fangs as it lunged; an invisible, pitiless hulk with a knife, ripping his blade jerkily upward through their spinal columns. So quickly he didn’t have words for the action, Paul charged them from behind. He punched Prager in the side of the head, hard enough to make him stagger left, hard enough to feel pain in his own knuckles and wrist, reverberating straight up along the nerves of his arm. He pivoted, his hunger whetted, wakened, lusting now for a second taste of this, but Kenny was fast. Kenny looked older than fourteen, come to think of it, looked like he might have been left back a grade or two. That was Paul’s oddly detached thought as Kenny’s foot rammed his gut. He heard a dismaying sound come from his throat as he went down: a moist, involuntary expulsion.

He landed on his rump, which did not hurt, clutching his middle, which did, unable to retch for want of wind. The tears in his eyes infuriated him; they were a result of physics, mechanics—not emotion. Or if emotion, then only the cold burn of frustration, of having been robbed; he ached to feel his fist impact Kenny’s face.Yet somehow he was down here, an ungainly clod on his ass, the wind knocked out of him, ineffectual once again, while Kenny was up there, sneering. And ugly—so ugly!—all things ugly gathered and amplified in the squint of his eyes, the curl of his soft, freckled lip.

For just a moment then things turned brilliant, became the living realization of Paul’s comic book fantasies, as, from nowhere, flashed Baptiste, lissome and gleaming. He seemed actually to enter the frame horizontally, as in a kung fu movie. He grabbed a fistful of shirt and jabbed, and his fist landed with an audible crunch—surely it had made a crunching sound, or maybe that was only the sound of twigs underfoot, or the sensation of Paul’s own ribs expanding as air at last rushed to fill the vacuum of his lungs, a sensation at once reassuring and searingly painful. But this much was true: Baptiste’s fist came away bloody. This, too, Paul saw as though on screen, the cinematic surprise of crimson glistening on Baptiste’s brown knuckles, and the whites of his eyes very bright as he regarded, amazed, what he had done. Kenny, whose face Paul could not see, drew his arm back in what seemed almost leisurely fashion—as if the whole thing were a play-fight, boys acting out their fantasies in slow motion—then brought the point of his elbow smashing against Baptiste’s chest. Baptiste staggered several steps back, doubling at the waist. Kenny finished with a kick in the balls and Baptiste dropped to the ground.

Through this Paul was aware, dimly, of other kids not far from them, classmates cutting in twos and threes through the orchard. If any noticed a fight going on (and how could they not?), they gave it wide berth. They were like figures belonging to another world, and they passed as no more than slivers of clothing and fragments of speech through the flower-studded branches. It lent the whole scene an inconsequential, almost serene, air, as if it were no more than a skit or a dream.

In the next instant, though, any illusion of serenity dissolved. Prager, having recovered (sort of: he was openly crying) from the blow to the side of his head, appeared above Paul, raging with a shrillness that bordered on hysteria: “You fucker, you motherfucking dirty fucking gay retard cocksucking shit . . .”

“Hit him.” Kenny’s face, too, appeared above him now. Blood ran thickly from his nose. He kept wiping it with his arm. There was something horribly workaday in his tone as he coached Prager: “Get him back.”

But Prager, whose fists were clenched at his sides, only continued to choke out filth through a welter of tears.

So Kenny pushed him aside and straddled Paul himself. As he knelt, his knees pinned Paul’s arms to the ground. He did it automatically, as though this were how it was done. The weight of Kenny’s body, coupled with Paul’s grasp of his own helplessness, revolted him. He lay there. During the beating, his attention sought out small things. Parts. He was conscious of minding the sun in his eyes, of feeling inconvenienced by the stone or root that was digging into his shoulder blade. Also of Kenny’s breath, which made a sharp hiss each time he landed a punch: it was a piston sound, as regular and impersonal as a machine.

When he was done, Kenny got off and muttered, “C’mon,” and he and Prager left. A bird was chirping. It was a chickadee, one his grandma had pointed out a hundred times. According to her, it was saying,
See-me
.
See-me
. There were warm places and cool places on Paul’s face. That was interesting. He adjusted his body so that the stone or root no longer pressed so painfully against his scapula. He closed his eyes against the sun. That was better. Something smelled sweet. Apple blossoms? Or just spring. It was nicer with his eyes closed and the thing not digging into his bone.
See-me
.
See-me
. He didn’t always like his grandma, but the thought of her seeing him as he lay like this on the ground, the thought of her outrage and shock and concern filled him with sudden tenderness for her, even pity.

A shadow crossed his face. He opened his eyes. Baptiste was squatting beside him.

“Yo, man.You okay?”

Paul sat up. He did not cry. He used the front of his shirt to wipe his nose, which felt wet. The shirt came away bloody and he began to touch his face gingerly, visiting each quadrant in exploratory fashion.

“It’s not your blood,” Baptiste told him. He added, unable to keep a trace of pride from his voice, “I think I broke his nose.”

Paul considered his shirt again in light of this revelation, and then his fingertips, which had picked up and smeared speckles of blood as he’d touched his own face.
“Gross.”
He touched the area around his left eye, his fingertips gloriously cool on the skin. “I look bad?” His lip felt hot and puffy; he touched there, too.

Baptiste considered him with some thoroughness. “No. But hold still.” He reached toward Paul’s hair.When he took his hand away, he held an inchworm on his fingernail, tiny, and bright, bright green. He transferred it to the ground where it reared up its front end, probed the air unhurriedly, then latched onto a blade of grass, sliding its back end along. A wind stirred through the grizzled trees above them. The blossoms shook on their branches like mute bells.

“I’m sorry,” said Paul. He looked at the inchworm, not Baptiste.

“What are you talking about?”

“What they said,” he near-whispered.

Baptiste sucked his teeth. “Don’t be a fool, yo.”

But no. Everything was different. A vast chill came over Paul. It was like entering a cavern: a dank, essential coldness pervaded him. He was as somber, perhaps as sad, as he had ever been. The boys stood and retrieved their backpacks, along with the cell phones and loose change and lunch tickets that had fallen from their pockets, and continued down the hill.

He was like Biscuit now, Paul thought. Beyond pretense. For the past year and a half, he’d spent so much energy sustaining the frail hope of being popular again, of being liked. Of not being disliked. Every insult he’d pretended not to hear, every snub he’d pretended not to mind, every missing invitation he’d pretended not to have wanted—all of these had drained him, but none so much as the act of dissembling to himself. Prager and Kenny, Boyd and his cronies at the pizza shop, even Fiona Conley—who, in sticking up for him had been the most hurtful of them all, as singularly devastating as only a nice girl could be—Paul had them to thank, in a way. It was done.

They walked a long way in silence, Paul and Baptiste. They crossed 9W, went over the overpass, turned down Depew. It was not bad walking like this: the wind cool on his swollen eye and lip, his somberness upon him, him free and unaccountable for it. Halfway home it came to Paul there was something lush about giving up hope, something peaceful, even powerful, in it.

“You sure you okay?” asked Baptiste as they turned onto Elysian Avenue. His house stood at the end of the block.

“Yeah.”

“You got him good in the head, man.” He stopped walking and turned to Paul. “Yo, man, he
cried
in front of you. Don’t worry about the other guy. He’s like twice our age. A’ight? Prager knows he can’t give you shit anymore.”

Paul almost managed a smile.

“Look, you want to come in, get some ice?”

“So I do look bad.”

“Not that much.”

Paul hesitated. He cupped a hand around his left eye. In the time it had taken to walk here, it had swollen up so much he could barely see out of it.

“My Grann wouldn’t mind.”

At that, Paul did smile. And, perceiving the lie, declined.

 

 

N
early two weeks ago she’d broken the egg, cracked it right into the Hudson. But the string—Biscuit had burned it many times over in her mind, but not yet in real life. Until last night, she hadn’t known what string to burn. She’d been rehearsing mentally on different strings. Lying in bed at night she’d ignite the cord on her window blind, see it burning straight up like a fuse. In the car on the way to school she’d set fire to her shoelace, or to the loose thread dangling from the cuff of her sleeve. In the bathroom, getting ready for bed, she’d incinerate a curl of dental floss someone had discarded in the wastebasket. And yesterday, sitting at her desk, Biscuit had missed the whole of that day’s lesson on the Sugar and Stamp Acts of 1764 and 1765, so caught up had she been in the fantasy of burning each strand of fringe, one by one, on her teacher’s scarf.

Her brother’s birthday had passed and the anniversary of his death had come and gone and no one but Biscuit seemed to care or even realize. She was positive of the dates because she had written them down in her denim-covered diary that had its own tiny lock and key. It was last year’s diary, but she’d taken good care not to lose the key. She always put it back, together with the diary, in one of her mother’s old figure skates, the pair of which Biscuit kept under her bed while she waited to grow into them.

On his birthday she’d wondered if there was going to be a cake. She knew it was probably a silly idea—the sort that, if she gave it voice, would make Paul laugh at her, not nicely—but she couldn’t help imagining the scene in different ways, each admittedly more overwrought than the next: her parents baking a small round angel cake and writing
Simon
on it in yellow cursive, both of them holding the tube of icing together, her father’s right hand over her mother’s left. She saw them finishing the
n
and saying, “He really would’ve liked that,” and each of them wiping a tear. In other versions, her mother alone wiped the tear, her father then putting his arm around her. In still others she saw them casting their eyes heavenward, but this really was silly, as no one in her family believed in such things.