Brawler

by Neil Connelly

  Grunt reached into the bag, which was resting on the floor between our seats. He selected one envelope, counted its contents, then pulled a few bills from another and added them to the first. This he handed to the cop, who took it with a grin and used the envelope to give a little half salute. “Tell Mr. Sunday we all appreciate the steady tithing.”

  He disappeared from the window and walked around the rear of the van, pacing slow as if he were inspecting it for clues. When he came to my side, the door was still cracked open, and he swung it wide. “And who the hell are you now?” he asked.

  I looked at Grunt, who stared my way impassively. The cop said, “Don’t worry, boy, I’m not out to make trouble. I just like to know who I’m doing business with.” Up close, and without the light in my eyes, I could see the cop was on the far side of middle age. He was pudgy and had a mustache in bad need of a trim. Taking my cue from Grunt, I said nothing.

  “Don’t tell me Sunday’s gone and hired himself another damn mute! What’s your name?”

  I couldn’t tell if he didn’t recognize me or was testing me, seeing what I’d say. But he wouldn’t quit eyeing me up, so finally I turned, got into my role as fully as I could, and told him, “Call me Wild Child.”

  He laughed. “One of those,” he said. “Shoulda figured.” With that, he walked back to his car and drove off. I wondered just how far Sunday’s circle of friends extended.

  By our final stop, it must’ve been nearing 3 a.m. After sending a quick text, Grunt followed tree-lined side streets from that strip mall through suburban neighborhoods. We passed a school and a playground, lots of picket fences and minivans, the promised land of book clubs and low-interest second mortgages. My eyes lingered on one house with a “For Sale” sign out front.

  Finally Grunt pulled into the driveway of a nice-looking Colonial. It seemed a lot like every other middle-class house on the street, hard to even distinguish one from the next. All the windows were dark.

  Grunt killed the engine, and a row of stepping-stones in the lawn led us to the front door. A ceramic leprechaun grinned at us from under a hedge. All around us there was only quiet. Grunt thumbed the doorbell and the chime echoed really loud. He waited just a few seconds and then banged his fist into the door, and now a light flashed on inside. The door swung open to reveal a sleepy-eyed guy in his thirties. He was wearing a Penn State T-shirt and zipping up a pair of jeans. He stopped when his eyes found Grunt’s face, and he’d barely gotten out, “You!” when Grunt pushed in the door and stepped inside. I followed.

  “Come on now,” the guy said. “This is my home. This is where I live.” All the while, he was backing up and Grunt was advancing. I stayed in his shadow.

  The guy retreated to the bottom of a blue-carpeted staircase and bumped into the banister. His face was white and sweat dotted his forehead. “I explained this to Mr. Sunday. I explained!” he said. His voice trembled and his eyes, hopeless with dread, reminded me of Leonard from the boxcar.

  At the head of the stairs, a woman appeared in a white nightgown. She held a phone in one hand, and as she came down the steps, she said, “Get the hell out of here, whoever you are.”

  The man said, “Melissa, no! Put that down.”

  She paused, midway down the flight, and Grunt jabbed a thick finger at me and then at her. I understood. A couple quick strides brought me to her, and I snatched the phone away. I smashed it into the wall, and only after it burst into a thousand plastic pieces did I ask myself why. It simply seemed the thing to do, the next action in the script I’d somehow committed to.

  The wife went to run upstairs, but she only made it up a few steps before I snagged her one wrist. She twisted and tugged, and I thought of my mom on the hill outside Perkins. “Quit struggling,” I snapped quietly. “I don’t want to hurt you.” This was totally true. Yet something in my tone when those words came out, something whispering even in the back of my head, promised to us both, but I will if I have to.

  The wife, sufficiently freaked out, stopped squirming and asked, “Marty, what the hell’s going on?”

  Marty held both hands up, then rubbed one through his hair. “I can handle this. Please.”

  I couldn’t be sure if he was pleading with Melissa, Grunt, or both.

  Grunt pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and gave it to Marty, who read it and said, “He can’t be serious. There’s no way I can make this happen. It would mean —”

  The slap came swift and fast, Grunt’s open hand snapping Marty’s face sideways. He looked shocked and his wife screamed his name, but Grunt did it again anyway. I thought it was especially insulting, to be slapped instead of punched. But if Grunt unloaded on a guy like Marty, there would be permanent damage. Marty hunched and held a hand to his cheek. “Beat me all you want,” he said. “I can’t make money appear from thin air.”

  After a quick scan of the foyer, Grunt took hold of one of the wooden spindles of the banister. He snapped it free and held it in both hands, a yardstick-long rod of carved curves. With a backhand swat, he drove a hole in the drywall above Marty’s head, and now Melissa said, “Oh God.” Something in her tone turned my head, and I followed her eyes to the second floor.

  There, out on the landing, looking through the railing, stood a girl in footy pajamas. Her feet poked through the spindles, toes over the edge. She gripped an upside-down stuffed animal by a leg and said, “My throat is still scratchy.”

  Her mother tried to pull away from me, stretching her arm and leaning up the stairs, but I anchored her. And then Grunt was plodding our way, boot by boot, eyes on the child. The mom screamed and blocked his path, and there was a second when I could’ve gotten in his way, but I didn’t. I let him pass me and he latched a huge paw on the mom’s face and shoved her down, hard, so hard her head banged on a step with a sickening crack.

  “Mom?” the little girl asked, and the woman began crawling up the steps after Grunt, still gripping the splintered wood.

  I froze.

  The husband cried out, “Okay! Okay! Tell Sunday it’s a deal. I’ll find a way. I have no freakin’ idea how, but I’ll find a way damn it.”

  Grunt smiled. He stepped over Melissa and deposited the broken banister spindle in a tall bucket that held umbrellas just inside the door. Then he looked at me and tipped his head toward the exit. I started down the steps. The little girl bumped past me, joining her father on the ground by Melissa, who had begun to sob.

  Again I felt the urge to apologize, but doing so would’ve opened up something inside me I knew I couldn’t touch, not with who I had to be then. So when I spoke, it was with a voice I didn’t recognize. “This is all your daddy’s fault,” I said. The little girl looked up at me, and I told her, “He needs to take care of things better.”

  Grunt opened the door and I walked out into the cooler night air. We drove away from the family, and Grunt turned off the radio. It was clear that we were finished for the evening and heading back, and I was grateful we were done. So we rode in silence, back to the highway and then down toward Camp Hill. All the while I couldn’t stop thinking about that little girl, how lodged now in her brain was a memory of two scary men who invaded her home while she was sleeping and attacked her parents. She’d never get back to sleep that night. She’d lie in bed between her parents, clinging to that stuffed animal, and wonder who the men were, why they came, and if they’d come back. Decades from now, maybe the memory would fade, or perhaps she’d categorize it as a nightmare. But for now, that child knew something more about grim reality, and I’d helped introduce her to it. And what would’ve happened, I wondered, if Grunt had signaled me to climb those stairs? What if he’d sent me after the girl? Sunday’s line came to me, the one about wolves and sheep.

  “Pull over,” I told Grunt just as we approached the exit ramp for Camp Hill. “Now.”

  Maybe something in my voice told him what was up, because he did what I asked. The van came to rest just before the overpass, and I lurched out onto the shoulder. I made it
to a patch of weeds, just in time to double over, grip my thighs, and retch. My gut clenched and I threw up again, hard enough that I dropped to one knee. A truck roared by overhead, thundering, and my vision swam. A last spasm emptied my stomach and then I just stayed there, trying to gather myself. When I finally rose to return to the van, I nearly passed out, but soon enough my steps grew steady. At the open door, I leaned into the roof, but I didn’t want to get back in. “Go on,” I told Grunt. “I’m going to walk. The fresh air will do me good.”

  It was miles, though Grunt clearly didn’t care. He shrugged and tapped his own belt, and I pulled the gun from my waist, returned it to the glove box. I asked him, “Will you need to tell Mr. Sunday about this, or can we keep it between us?”

  Grunt’s impassive face gave me no answer, and I wondered when I would learn to stop trying to communicate with him. I leaned back and slammed the door. He merged into traffic and drove off.

  On foot, I followed the swoop of the exit ramp, walking along the solid white line. In the darkness, I couldn’t make out the roadway beneath it, and it felt as if I were balancing on a thin beam, treading over a bottomless black chasm. I found myself trying to remember some poet’s line from DJ’s class, something about gazing into the abyss. Another line came to me too, from some British guy, about how when we wear a mask, sometimes our face grows to fit it.

  For a long stretch my legs carried me through Camp Hill, and I didn’t care that I had no destination. In fact, wandering felt just right. Up on the bypass, I drifted past the Panera where Mom always got me smoothies after a trip to the dentist when I was a kid. Without pausing to pray, I crossed the moon shadow cast by the steeples of St. Sebastian’s, where Mom had surely been praying for me for weeks. Block to block, I zigzagged through the sleepy neighborhoods. I went by that fancy house for sale, where we’d pretended for the last time. At the high school it’s true, I wished it were open. Not so much so I could hit the weights, just so I could walk the halls again, go back to my locker, get jostled in the rush of students in the hallway. I wanted to bitch with Shrimp about the horrible cafeteria food, debate LeQuan about music, worry about the atomic number of palladium. Having lost the life I had, I didn’t find it quite so miserable. Maybe that’s called nostalgia.

  And I guess it was this sense that drew me to the yellow house on Seventeenth Street. I had to lean into the steeply slanted hill it’s near the top of, but this reminded me of the sloping yard behind it, perfect for a young boy’s sledding adventures. When I stood in front of the house, I saw that not much had changed. The front porch still had a swing, the azaleas were even more overgrown. The new owners had the fractured sidewalk fixed, so my old bike ramp had been flattened out.

  Just like at the high school, I felt the impulse to go inside. I wanted to walk into the basement, with its dehumidifier rumbling and musty smell and tableful of LEGOs. I wanted to climb into my old bed and set my cheek on my mom’s chest, feel her heart beat as she read to me about Narnia or Hogwarts. And when I didn’t know a word, I wanted her to reach for the dog-eared paperback dictionary. I wanted to feel the cool linoleum floor in the kitchen pulse with bass as my mom paused from cleaning dishes to crank the classic rock station and spin me around in an impromptu dance party. I wanted to be alone with my father in the garage, my chin barely reaching the workbench, and have him hand me each tool, listen to him explain the difference between a socket wrench and needle-nose pliers. “You can’t do a job right with the wrong tool,” he told me, and I remembered thinking, I will never forget this simple moment.

  As I climbed the wooden stairs, even the creaks felt familiar and perfect. It was like I was walking back in time. And the screen door’s whiny protest told me no one had WD-40ed the hinges in forever. I gripped the smooth doorknob and took the deepest of breaths. What exactly was I doing? I didn’t know. But I found myself in the grasp of the strangest of fantasies. Because what I imagined then was that I would open the door and stride not just into my old home, but into the past itself. I would walk into the living room, where the Civil War documentary would be playing on the TV and my father’s beer would be on the coffee table. He would be in his armchair and my mom and me on the couch. She would have already asked what year the war began and if Lincoln really wrote the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope, not noticing his rising irritation. When she asks the third question, something about why all the generals had such long beards, the boy I was will have his first prophetic vision. He will know with certainty that his father is about to upturn the coffee table, that our mom will flee from his rage, down the hallway, hoping to lock the bedroom door behind her. The boy will see that she will be too slow.

  And he’ll be powerless to stop it. Everything will happen just as he foresaw, and the screams will be horrible.

  As it happened that fateful evening, he’ll try to help. But tonight, he won’t be alone. Because as my fourth-grade self, gangly and awkward, charges down that slim corridor, I’ll be at his side. Together we’ll barge into their bedroom and see the dresser mirror already smashed, the nightstand toppled. The boy I was will jump onto the bed, and from there he’ll see what’s on the other side, our father’s hulking shape on top of our mom. Her face is already half covered in blood, and she’s wailing and contorting, but our father’s one hand has a hold of her hair, pinning her to the ground, and his other is shaped into a fist, and he’s raising it up and bringing it down, deaf to the cries of his wife and son.

  I know from memory, from the hundreds of times this scene visited me in my nightmares, that the boy is about to leap onto his father’s back. I know he’ll wrap his skinny arms around his father’s thick neck, try in mighty desperation to pull him off his mom. And I know that when the father rears back like a bucking bronco, he’ll toss the boy across the room, that he’ll crash in a heap in the corner near the upturned nightstand. When his father faces him, with his eyes wild and his teeth bared, Mac will see him as part man, part beast.

  Rather than trying again to stop this creature, he’ll run and hide in his boyhood closet. Plenty of times he’s seen his father lose his temper before, and more than once his mom’s had black-and-blue marks she explained away as falling down the stairs or being clumsy. Little by little as he got older, the boy had learned. At six, he’d seen him slap her hard in the garage. At eight, coming back from a Christmas party, the boy had sat in the back seat cowering as his father pulled the car over and banged her head into the window. So by ten, he knew the truth behind his mom’s bruises — and he’d faced his wrath himself. There were plenty of nights he could feel things escalating, and he’d try to defuse the bomb by acting goofy or even draw fire to himself by acting bad. Sometimes it worked. But many times he’d wake from sleep to sounds straight from the land of nightmares. His headboard was up against the wall to their room, so he’d leave behind the warm blankets, drag his pillow to the darkness of his closet, crouch amidst his snow boots and old stuffed animals and try to pray. The darkness stank of mothballs.

  So now, he’ll rise from the corner with the overturned nightstand, and he’ll flee. In the mothball dark of the closet, he’ll hear his mother crying out for her husband to stop, crying out for help, and the boy won’t run to the kitchen phone and punch three simple digits. Instead he’ll quiver and feel that shameful release, the warm wetness soaking his pants.

  Some random neighbor will do what he couldn’t, and that call will summon sirens and Officer Harrow and an ambulance and everything will change forever, but the boy will never escape the truth. The truth that he is a coward.

  In my fantasy though, the dreadful script is revised. I fix history. The boy never leaps from the bed. I am there, and I set a hand on his frail chest to steady him, and I nod to let him know I’ll take care of everything. I say, “Don’t worry. I got this.”

  I grab the overturned nightstand with two hands, heft it over my head and crash it down on the back of my father’s skull. He collapses on my bleeding mom, and when I roll his body o
ff her, he is groggy and helpless. And I can feel it now, the power I never had then, swelling in my blood and filling me with a calming rage I can’t describe. She is safe now and he can’t defend himself, but I know I am not done. The act is not yet complete. There must be something else. I don’t care if Khajee calls it revenge or retribution or violence. But I will punish this man, and he will know it is me. I’m trying to decide the exact nature of his pain when a sleepy female voice from the other side of the yellow house’s front door says, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  I released the doorknob and stepped back on the porch, shocked to be in the present.

  The tired woman asked me more questions, threatened the police, but I was already retreating, down the steps and down the hill. The foolishness of my fantasy made me feel silly. It’s the dream of that ten-year-old boy, paralyzed with fear of his father’s wrath.

  That night, huddled in the bitter stink of my own soaked clothes, I vowed to myself to become stronger, strong enough so no one could hurt me or threaten my mom. We would be safe and I would be her hero. My plan was to fix everything. That’s what was supposed to happen. But instead, I found myself now running away from the yellow house and my past, with no clear idea of where the hell I was supposed to be going.

  Two nights after my shift with Grunt and my return to the yellow house on Seventeenth Street, Blalock drove me and Khajee down into New Cumberland. It’s a sleepy town on the banks of the Susquehanna, not far from Three Mile Island. For a long time, when people moved into the surrounding area, they were given potassium iodide capsules to take in the event of a nuclear accident, something to minimize radiation poisoning. That quick fix always seemed strange to me, a false comfort. Disaster strikes? Take a pill. Then everything will be all right.