The Wanton Troopers (16 page)

Oh, please God, no.

“— That okay with you, Key-von?”

Please God. Please.

“Speak up, feller! That okay with you?”

“No. I don't wanta!”

Kevin tried to edge away, but Riff grabbed his arm. “What's yer hurry, Key-von? What's yer hurry, eh?” He turned toward Av. “What about you, Avie boy? Yuh ready tuh fight Key-von again?”

Av buried his fists in the pockets of his shorts and kicked at a chip. “We fought once,” he mumbled. “There ain't no need fer us tuh fight again.”

Riff snorted. “My Gawd, Avie boy, ain't yuh never heard of a return match? Why, prize fighters is allus havin' return matches. This here is gonna be a return match between you and Key-von.”

“Billy Conn and Joe Louis!” Dink Anthony howled, running his tongue over his lips hungrily.

“Eh? Yeah. Billy Conn Farmer and Joe Louis O'Brien. Harold there is gonna manage Billy Conn Farmer and I'm gonna manage Joe Louis O'Brien. Ain't that worth fightin' fer, Avie boy?” Riff looked at Harold and winked. Harold scratched excitedly at the ripe pimples under his chin. “Bring yer prize fighter over here, will yuh, Harold boy?”

Harold laid hold of Av's shoulders and, despite his protests, thrust him forward. Kevin and Av, their knees, chests, and chins almost touching, stood in the centre of a tight circle of grinning faces. Av looked as tragic as a young bull whose horns had been sawed off. His eyes were dark with bewilderment and shame. Suddenly, Kevin felt a great rush of pity for the other boy. He would almost have preferred to face the old Av — the fox-eyed, arrogant tormenter.

He is just as scared as I am, Kevin thought wonderingly. He is every bit as scared as I am.

“Fight!”

“Fight!”

“Fight! Fight! Fight!”

“I guess we're gonna have tuh manage 'em, Riff.”

“I guess yer right, Harold boy.”

Harold stepped behind Av, while Riff stationed himself behind Kevin. The two fifteen-year-olds seized the wrists of the smaller boys and, “Now, fight!”

Kevin's limp arm was lifted and driven into Av's face. Then Av's dangling hands were brought down on Kevin's head like a club. The onlookers roared.

“Now a right tuh the jaw!”

Kevin's lax, imprisoned hand struck Av's jaw.

“— And now an upper-cut!”

Harold jerked up Av's hand and drove it against Kevin's chin. The smaller boys were rag dolls being manipulated in a violent, ludicrous pantomime. Then Riff forced Kevin to slap his own face —

“Whoa! Whoa, there Key-von! Yer supposed tuh be hittin' the other feller. What yuh wanta do, knock yerself out, boy?”

Laughter was like the bellowing of cattle in a burning barn.

“— And a left tuh the jaw!”

Ho! Ho! Hee! Ho! Hee! Ho!

“— And a right tuh the chin!”

Ho! Ho! Ho! Haw! Haw! Haw!

“— And a left tuh the ear!”

“Now, fight! Fight, damn it! FIGHT!”

“Hey, Riff, I jist thoughta somethin'.”

“What's that, Harold boy?”

“Well, if they ain't a-gonna fight, don't yuh think mebbe they oughta kiss and make up?”

“Damn good idea, Harold boy.”

“Come on now, Key-von, let's see you and Avie boy kiss and make up. Come on now —”

With Riff holding Kevin's neck and Harold grasping Av's, their faces were shoved together —

“Ain't that sweet! Ain't it sweet tuh see them two little fellers kissin' like that!”

Kevin's teeth rattled against Av's.

Ho! Hee! Ho! Haw! Hee! Ho!

Then the bell rang. Five minutes later, seated in class, Kevin's mouth was still full of the salty, fear-scented taste of the kiss . . .

*

When Kevin started home that afternoon, he saw that Av was following him. His first impulse was to run.

“Hey, Kevin! I wanta talk tuh yuh!”

He stopped and waited for Av to catch up to him.

Av's eyes were sly and he made little nervous movements with his head and hands.

“Look, I mean . . .” The voice trailed away. “Well, I mean . . . Look, damn it all tuh hell. I'm sorry I called yer old lady . . . bad names.”

Kevin flushed in embarrassment. He knew that it had been painful for Av to make this apology. He almost wept for sympathy with him.

“It's all right,” he stammered. “It don't matter none.”

“No, yuh licked me and I had it comin', I guess.”

They walked for a while in uneasy silence, watching one another out of the corners of their eyes.

“Riff Wingate is a bastard,” Av declared murderously. “Some day I'm gonna stick a knife in him.”

“Yeah.”

“Didja see how Stacey and Anthony and Allen howled their goddamn heads off this mornin' — didja see that, eh?”

“Uh-huh, I saw it.”

“Well, I guess me and you couldn't fight Riff and Harold. The big, overgrown sons-a-bitches would knock hell outta us. But what duh yuh say we knock the livin' Jesus outta Anthony and Allen tomorrow?”

They had come to the mill. In the thunder and roar of the engines, they had to shout to make each other hear. Inside the mill, Kevin knew, the men learned to read lips . . .

“Yuh beat me and if yuh can beat me yuh can beat Anthony. He's got a yeller streak a mile wide down his back. And I'd jist love tuh give that Jess Allen a mouthful of fist. What duh yuh say, eh?”

The splitter saw screamed. Some men — Judd O'Brien was one of them — could identify the variety of wood being sawed from the sound of the saw's scream. Steel tearing maple made a different sound than steel tearing spruce . . .

“Oh, gosh! I mean it wasn't them that made us fight, Av!”

“But they laughed! Yuh hear 'em laughin'.”

Again the splitter saw screamed. The men in the millyard ran to and fro like the members of a bucket brigade. Eben Stingle cracked his black whip over the drooping heads of his yellow oxen. The old mare tugged at the scarlet sawdust cart, a boy scarcely older than Kevin driving her. The boy whipped her with the reins as she staggered up a great yellow-green hill of sawdust. The top of this hill, Kevin knew, was a desert: a desert where sand-coloured cones of sawdust rose like dunes. He watched the scarlet cart reach the top and disappear . . .

“Yeah, I heard 'em laughin'.”

And they had laughed so many times before!
They used to
laugh when you tormented me. Don't you remember, Av?
But Kevin was shy and it was hard to find the right words, so he said nothing . . .

“Yuh gonna do it?”

The edger saws blatted like a slaughtered sheep.

“— Yuh gonna do it?”

“Gonna do what?”

“You know! Are yuh gonna do what we was talkin' about? Are yuh gonna fight 'em?”

Kevin sighed. Here on the shoulder of the road, sawdust and mud had mingled, creating something that looked and felt like black clay. The scarlet cart pushing her, the old mare staggered crazily down the sawdust hill, the boy with the reins laughing and yelling at her . . .

“No. I guess not, Av. I guess I ain't gonna fight.”

Av spat on the black clay.

“I guess we ain't got nothin' tuh talk about then,” he grunted.

“I guess not, Av.”

“Well, so long, Key-von.”

Av whirled and stalked away, his back erect and unforgiving. Walking backwards, Kevin watched until he vanished behind a clump of spruce. He felt — knowing the feeling to be foolish — that he had somehow betrayed a friend.

Nineteen

But, in the spring, Kevin had begun to read the Bible, and now the Book altered the very geography of his world.

Squatting in the field behind the hen house with the cool, black, faintly odorous volume on his knees, he read of how God created the heavens and the earth and of how the earth was without form, and void, while darkness was upon the face of the deep. Looking out over the heath, over the alders and maple saplings and young spruce nodding in the breeze, he tried to imagine how it had been on that first day. The sun had risen for the first time, a tumbling red-gold splendour in the east, and God had walked across the new, loam-pungent earth, grass and flowers and shrubs springing full-grown from the prints of His feet. God
had walked through this very field.
The very ground on which Kevin sat might once have been touched by the sandalled feet of God!

Grandmother O'Brien often spoke of the ancient time when God had lived among men. She would say that such and such a thing had happened in the days when God was still on earth. And the Bible told of how He had walked in the garden in the cool of the evening. Kevin imagined Him walking down the rows of vegetables, the skirts of his robe swishing against potato and turnip tops, His ankles brushing against sun-coloured pumpkins and green-gold squash.

Prone on his belly in the tall grass by the lilac hedge, he read of how God had created Adam, and of how He had put Adam to sleep and taken out his rib and made a woman. And he remembered that his grandmother had assured him that even to this day men had one rib fewer than women.

God had created woman so that man might have a helpmeet. But, sometimes, men did wicked things with women. The hot blood pulsated in Kevin's veins as he remembered Kaye Dunbar and June Larlee lying together on Kaye's bunk. How had they escaped from the wrath of God? Why had God not struck them dead?

Several times since that day when he ran from Kaye's cabin with June Larlee's laughter seering his ear drums like the wail of a banshee, he had met his uncle. But now there was an invisible wall between them. They were like two houseflies facing one another from opposite sides of a sheet of window glass. The barrier could be neither seen nor penetrated. They neither of them spoke of that day, but once or twice Kevin had caught his uncle giving him a strange look, half-mocking and half-pitying, that showed that he remembered . . .

And when, one night near the end of October, Kaye went jacklighting deer, tripped on a windfall, and shot off his big toe, Kevin was convinced that this was God's way of punishing him.

For God was a jealous god and quick to punish. The serpent had tempted Eve and she, in turn, had led Adam into sin. They had eaten of the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and God had driven them from Eden and stationed angels with flaming swords at the gates to see that they did not get back in.

But, after eating of the fruit, Adam and Eve had known that they were naked, and they had sewn fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. Why were they naked? Grandmother O'Brien said that nakedness was a great sin. And she was wise in the ways of God. Excitement stirring like a live thing in his belly, Kevin thought about nakedness . . .

He had seen Kaye naked. The man took off all his clothes when he swam. But Kaye's body, aside from its muscles and scars and hairiness, was not very different from his own. He had never seen his father naked. When Judd went to bed, he removed only his trousers, socks, and shoes. And Kevin knew that it annoyed and embarrassed him to be surprised in his shirt and underwear. On the few occasions when he had gone into a room and found Judd pulling on his trousers, the man had flushed and told him to get the hell out of there. Recalling the fate of Ham, the son of Noah, who had looked upon the nakedness of his father, Kevin blanched and shuddered. God had turned Ham's skin black. Judd seldom spoke of the Bible, but once he had told Kevin that Ham, when God cursed him, stood on all fours, like a dog. As a result, the palms and soles of Negroes were white, even to this day.

He wondered about the nakedness of women. He had seen June Larlee naked, but only for an instant. It was as though the darkness had been broken by a lightning flash. In that flash, he had caught a momentary glimpse of a white, palpitant mound of living flesh.

Surely, he had committed no sin in looking upon June Larlee's nakedness?

But there was his mother. Unlike June Larlee, Mary never wore shorts; both Judd and his mother said it was disgraceful for grown women to dress like little boys. Kevin had seen her only in fragrant flannelette pajamas. In these she was more fully clothed than in a frock. But the pajamas suggested something secret and intimate, something almost as private as nakedness. Hastily, he turned his mind away from his mother and to less terrible sins. There was Isabel Dubois, who had called him a snot-nosed runt because he had tried to keep the other boys from shaming her. And there was Nancy Harker, the daughter of Madge Harker, the bootlegger. A poplar-limbed, golden-skinned girl of about his own age. The boys who teased Isabel became almost diffident in the presence of Nancy. And once on the way home from school she had asked him (not teasingly, but as though it were the most casual question imaginable) if he liked girls. He wished now that he had — but it was a sin to make such a wish. A hellfire sin. For wishing such things, boys were thrown into a lake of never-ending fire. He thought of moths that hurled themselves down the chimneys of the kerosene lamps, of how the heat of the burning wick baked their frenziedly whirring wings. And he thought of the high-pitched whistling that sometimes came from the stove. Judd said that this was the sound of insects roasting in their burrows inside the wood . . .

And one afternoon, alone in the kitchen, Kevin lifted the lid of the stove and held his hand over the flame until the heat rasped his palm like sandpaper. This was what it was like in hell!
Oh, please God, forgive me,
he prayed.
I won't think any more about
sinful things. I promise I won't, God!
And he rubbed the tears from the corners of his eyes and set the lid back in place.

For the answers to some questions, the questions that were not so much weighted down with darkness and sin, he went to his grandmother. He asked her, for example, if Lot's wife, who had turned to salt when she looked back at Sodom, still stood upon the plains of Zoar.

And Grandmother O'Brien tightened her grip on the hot brick that lay against her waist and answered, “Yes, laddie, she's still a-standin' there, right where she was when the Lord turned her tuh salt! Why, I'n remember when I was a little wee tiny girl, there was an old sea captain came tuh our house. He'd sailed on every one of them seven seas, laddie. And I'n remember how he told mother and father about seein' Lot's wife — he seed her fer hisself, seed her with his own eyes. Right there on the plains of Zoar. She was still a-standin' there, jist like a statue made outta salt. An' yuh know what that sea captain done, laddie? Yuh know what he done?” Her voice sank to an awed whisper. “Why he broke off one o' her fingers! An' he had that there finger right there in his pocket! He showed it tuh us right there in the kitchen. I'n remember it jist as if it was yesterday. A woman's finger that had turned tuh salt!”