by David Klass
We treaded water side by side for a minute, as the motorboat headed for us, to fish us out. I was gasping for breath, but he seemed totally fine. “You okay?” he asked.
“Never better,” I told him, trying not to gag.
He smiled at my bravado. “Joe, I can’t promise anything for sure,” he said, “but here’s what I do know for sure: I don’t let people on my boat with C’s and D’s. You’re no knucklehead. Work your butt off and lift your grades.”
“I’ll try.”
“Do more than try. And keep your nose clean,” he said. “Senior year, people go a little wild. I understand from Victor that your high school’s been having trouble lately. I don’t like trouble on my boat. And I don’t like troublemakers. I want a scholar and a gentleman. You got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
The motorboat arrived and they fished us out. “Good job!” the teenage crew member who pulled me out said. “Dan swims this every day, and no one’s ever beaten him before.”
Back on the sloop, I headed below to change out of my wet bathing suit. When I returned to the deck, my father was shaking Dr. Rossini’s hand in an exchange of viselike grips, and making small talk with him. They were an odd pair—they seemed on the surface to have absolutely nothing in common, but I could tell they enjoyed bantering. Dr. Rossini soon excused himself, and disappeared belowdecks, and my dad turned to me. “C’mon, let’s go home. I got you a burger, and fries,” he said. As we walked away, he put his arm across my shoulders and whispered, “Nice swimming, Marlin Man.”
We drove back even faster than we had come. The sun was out and I felt good. I didn’t know if I had passed the interview, or won a place on the Sea Gypsy, but I felt like I had given a good account of myself. Dr. Rossini understood who I was, and what I had to offer, and now it was up to him.
I finished off the burger and fries. I hadn’t been in a good mood for so long that I had almost forgotten what it felt like. “So,” I said to my dad, “weren’t you going to tell me everything I need to know about women?”
He passed a few cars and then muttered in a low voice, “The prettier they are, the crazier they are. And I only like the pretty ones. But I can’t stand the crazy ones.”
The car was silent for a few minutes while I thought that over. “That must explain it,” I said.
“What?”
“Why you’re alone so much.”
“I’m not alone so much,” my dad protested. “I’m surrounded by people. And I can get a date anytime I want. You know that.”
“Yes, you can. No question. You’re a dating machine.”
We were about fifteen miles from Lawndale now, on the top of the Palisades cliffs, with the Hudson glinting beneath in the warm sunlight. From this vantage point, it was hard to believe the gleaming blue water down below was so cold.
My father asked unexpectedly, “So you think she was right?”
“Who?”
“Dianne Hutchings. When she said that I was afraid to go out with a woman I like, ’cause I don’t want to get hurt again?”
“Well, you have dated a lot of women,” I observed quietly.
“What’s wrong with that? So you think she was right?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You were going to explain things to me.”
“Here’s the weird thing,” Dad noted. “I haven’t been able to get her words out of my mind. It’s like they keep digging around, annoying the hell out of me, like termites in a house.” Dad made a sour face and shook his head, as if trying to dislodge something and shake it out through his ears. “Believe it or not, I’ve lost sleep over them,” he admitted in a soft growl. He drove in silence for a few seconds, and then went on, “And I haven’t been able to forget the way she looked when she was throwing those dishes at me, with her hair flying, and her eyes blazing. I’ve never had a woman get that angry at me before. I figure she must have really liked me to get that pissed off at me.”
“I think she did really have a thing for you,” I told him.
“Ah, what does it matter,” he said. “First of all, she’s completely bonkers. And, second, even if I called her, she wouldn’t talk to me. Not that I would do it. It would violate all my rules about women. But even if I did, she wouldn’t take my call. So I won’t.”
“If you called her,” I told him, “she would take your call.”
“Yeah, to tell me I’m a bum and a coward.”
“She would probably call you much worse than that,” I agreed. “But she would take your call.”
He looked over at me. “You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
30
It was strange to return to Lawndale High the next morning. I felt like I had taken a long detour away from it—longer than just the one-day car trip to visit the Sea Gypsy—but now I was back, entering through the arms of the metal detector, looking out from behind iron-grated windows, and all the time sensing a growing, ominous anger.
The tension between Banksiders and Lawndale kids that I had felt after the Phenom broke Ray Hutchings’s ribs had not diminished. It might not have been photographed by the security cameras or been noticed by any of the police patrols, but it was simmering there all the same, just beneath the surface. And I knew that somewhere, sometime soon, it would explode.
I stuck around after advanced bio on Friday to thank Mr. Desoto for saying such nice things about me to Dr. Rossini. He insisted on hearing all the details of my interview. I told him everything, and when I described the final swimming race, he chuckled. “So you beat him, did you? No mercy on old scientists, huh?”
“Should I have let him win?” I asked.
“Are you crazy? Did you know he swam for Stanford years ago? I bet he didn’t like losing to you. He might put you on his crew just to set up a rematch.”
That was the biggest sports weekend of the fall for Lawndale. On Saturday morning our soccer team won our first game in the county tournament, two to one, against an angry team from Rosewood. They were angry because they were a top seed, expected to contend for the championship, and they were defeated by a bottom seed led by a Brazilian soccer Phenom who refused to back down.
The Rosewood team had read the sports pages and knew what to expect and who to go after. They tried to intimidate Antonio, hacking him and shoving him and threatening him when the ref was out of earshot. As the first half ended, they scored to go ahead one to nothing. But Antonio struck almost as soon as we ran onto the field to begin the second half, tying the score with a brilliant shot that whistled in from nearly forty yards out, and then he put us in front with a perfectly placed penalty kick after one of their fullbacks tackled him in the box. Rosewood tried desperately to tie the score, but our defense was able to hold the lead. Once again, in the final few minutes, I saw Antonio retreat to our fullback line, and we defended together shoulder to shoulder to the final whistle.
Our football team fared less well. They were a top seed, expected to win in the early rounds, but without Jack and Ray Hutchings they couldn’t put the game away. They allowed a late comeback, and as the seconds ticked down, a final long field goal sailed over their desperate arms and through the crossbars, ending their season.
I was at that game, and saw how hard our team’s seniors took it as they trudged off the field, helmets in their hands. They had sweated and bled and vomited for four years to win this tournament, and now it was all down the drain in the very first round. I suspected it wouldn’t be long before their disappointment turned to anger at those they held responsible.
The attack came very soon, and at a most unexpected time—on Monday afternoon, during our first ever school evacuation drill. I found out later that Antonio and Andy Powell and two other guys from the Lawndale popular crowd decided it was beneath them to evacuate with everybody else. So when the bells rang and the halls started to empty, the four of them headed beneath the bleachers in the gym, to hang out and pass a cigarette around. My best guess is that some Banksiders spotted them sneak
ing into the gym, and somebody figured out that if the school was completely empty, there would be no one around to break up a fight.
Unfortunately, I was around. Mr. Hart, the athletic director, had collared me a few minutes before, on the way up from my gym class, to let me know that ten new soccer balls had arrived. We have a constant problem with theft—sports equipment in general and balls in particular can disappear in a matter of hours. So, just to be safe, I carried the balls over to the soccer room myself to lock them away. Coach Collins wasn’t there, but I have my own key. I was just trying to open the door when the bells and siren went off.
My key is not a very good duplicate. Sometimes the lock wants to open for me, and sometimes it doesn’t. On Monday afternoon it took me a minute or two to get the door open, and stow the balls in the equipment locker. By the time I got the door locked again, the school hallways were nearly empty. I didn’t know if there was a penalty for being late to evacuate, but I headed down at a fast jog.
As I passed the gym, I heard the unmistakable sounds of a beating in progress. I guess I could have just kept jogging, but someone was howling in pain. Instinctively, I headed for the screams, to find out what was going on, and see if I could help.
Four hard guys from Bankside were kicking the crap out of four of the popular crowd from Lawndale. They had paired off, so the beatings were going on all over the big gym. I saw Slade pick up handsome Andy Powell, the captain of the tennis team and Jewel Healy’s sometime boyfriend, and hurl him to the wooden floor as if he was slamming down a tennis racket. “Stay down, pretty boy,” he shouted, “or I’ll break your face .” Jack Finn was kicking Stewart Roddick, our stuck-up class treasurer, stomping on his ribs as Stewart rolled over and over and tried to cover up. Glen Barrett was screaming as Tony Borelli squeezed him in a headlock. But the real battle was the fight between Antonio Silva and big Chris Coleman.
Chris was more than a foot taller than Antonio and must have outweighed him by fifty pounds of solid muscle. He was one of the very hardest of the hard guys, in the sense that every muscle in his body was sharply defined from thousands of weightlifting reps. Chris was best friends with Jack and Ray Hutchings, and now he wanted revenge for his football season and his two buddies. He had the Phenom backed up in a corner of the gym, and he was lashing at him with a weapon—it looked like a bicycle chain.
As I watched from the stairs, Antonio didn’t make a sound or look scared. He was ducking the chain and warding it off his face, taking the blows on his elbows and thighs, waiting for an opening. And then he struck back.
I’m not sure what martial art Antonio had studied—maybe jujitsu—but it wasn’t just limited to kicks. He waited his chance, and then he reached up and caught Chris’s right hand just as the chain started to swing down. Antonio ducked low and pivoted sideways, and used Chris’s own momentum to throw him. The big water rat literally became airborne—he sailed through the air, and landed hard on his back. He got up shakily, but Antonio was already sprinting for the stairs.
And that was when Slade moved in. You don’t expect big guys to move quickly. But Slade left Andy Powell lying on the floor of the gym and intercepted Antonio at the foot of the stairs. It was like a steamroller running over a skateboard. He blindsided Antonio, who went down hard. Slade stayed right on him, wrapping him up in his huge arms. Chris came limping up with his bicycle chain, ready for a few free shots, and that was when I found myself moving.
I can’t say for sure why I went down those steps. I certainly didn’t like the Phenom, or owe him anything. But we had played defense side by side in several tough soccer games, and he had won my respect. I had never seen him leave a teammate or take a backward step. And there was something else. He was being ganged up on, just the way Ed the Mouse had been ganged up on. And something about the way my dad had brought me up just couldn’t permit that.
I jumped the final three steps and flew into Slade from behind. The impact knocked him off his feet, but he didn’t let go of Antonio. The three of us crashed to the floor. I stayed behind Slade, slipping my arms under his shoulders and knotting my hands around the back of his head, snapping on a full nelson. Then I applied enough pressure to pry him off Antonio.
“I don’t want to fight you,” I said to him. “Just let the two of them fight it out fair and square.”
Slade recognized my voice and let out a roar. He lurched and thrashed and reared, and it was like riding a Brahma bull. His strength was unnatural, improbable. But I had him from behind, in a control position, and brute strength alone couldn’t possibly help him. I pulled him sideways and tripped him up, and rode him down to the wooden floor.
And that was when a lookout yelled, “Cops! Cops!”
I let Slade go, and we all scattered in different directions. Even the Lawndale guys who had been covering up and taking the beating got up and began to run. I guess we had all been conditioned to avoid cops. With a zero tolerance policy, anyone involved in a fight would be automatically suspended and probably expelled.
I got out of the gym through a side exit and hid in a janitor’s closet. I’m not sure how the rest of them got out, or where they hid, but it was our school and after four years we knew every door and hallway. All the cops found was a bicycle chain and a sleeve that had been ripped off a T-shirt. I guess they figured it was a false alarm, and nobody was fighting after all.
Soon the bells rang and the siren blared, and the hallways filled up with students again. Vice Principal Tobias’s voice came over the loudspeaker announcing that the evacuation drill had been a success. But sitting in history class, my arms still tingling from the fight, I knew better. I had taken Slade on, I had put my hands on him in combat, and a summons to battle was coming.
It arrived just before last period, in a form I didn’t expect. It wasn’t the Banksiders who came for me but four of the toughest kids from my own town. There was Roger Gray, who wrestled with me, and Eric Olsen, the catcher on the baseball team, and the captain of the baseball team, Troy Baptiste, and the co-captain of the football team, Ron Evans. The four of them intercepted me in the hall and just looked at me, and I looked back at them, and I knew. “Coming?” Troy asked.
“Sure,” I said. And he didn’t have to say anything else, and I didn’t have to ask. Because I knew why they had come, and where we were going.
31
We met in the subbasement bathroom, the four guys from Lawndale and me, and four Banksiders and Slade. As soon as the door closed in the tiny bathroom, Slade got right to business. “This is me against him,” he said, pointing a finger at my chest, “for starters. Later it can be whatever you guys want, but that’s what it is now. It’s you and me, Brickman. We’ve had this coming for a long time, and now it’s come, so let’s go get it on.”
It was the strangest thing, but I wasn’t scared. I looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t want to fight you, Slade.”
“You already made that decision,” he said.
“You were jumping in. I pulled you off. That was nothing against you.”
He stepped forward. “I’ll rip you apart right here,” he growled.
I felt myself tense, but the eight other guys in the room got between us and held him back.
“If he says he don’t want to fight, then there’s no fight,” Troy said. “At least right now.”
“He’ll fight,” Slade said confidently. “I know you’re a little scared, Brickman. I know your knees are knocking.”
I looked back, right into his eyes. “Do I look scared?”
“Then what is it?”
“I just don’t want to do it,” I told him.
“Your best buddy was too scared to fight back, too,” he said. “We stripped him down and taped him up and he never threw a single punch. He just cried like a girl—‘Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.’ You gonna start crying?”
I thought of Mouse when we had unwrapped him, and how he could have died in that closet. I felt my anger building, and I tried to swallow it down.
“No, I’m not gonna cry. But I’m also not going to give you what you want right now.”
He laughed in my face. “Coward and son of a coward. No wonder my uncle whipped your father’s butt. And I hear your mother was a whore. What about that?”
The room got very quiet. “I didn’t know my mother,” I said. “And I don’t think you know much about her either.”
“I know all kinds of things about you,” Slade said. “You’re a poor, broken-hearted lover boy, huh? I heard all about it from Dianne. I was curious, so I told her we were friends, and I was worried about you. She told me the whole sob story. You were sweet on that Kris chick, but you didn’t have the balls to go out with her, and you don’t have the balls to let her go, even though she’s getting all she can handle from that Brazilian—”
Before I knew what I was doing, I had my hands on his throat, and he had his hands on mine. And even as we choked each other, and eight guys strained to pull us apart, he smiled. “Let’s go,” he whispered.
And then, as if by magic, we were outside the school, walking through the marshes. The reeds got thicker around us, the air was heavy with a salt tang, and blood was roaring through my head and behind my eyes. I had felt a tiny bit like this a few times before, when I stepped onto the mat for big wrestling matches, and heard the crowd clapping, and looked across into the eyes of my opponent. But this was of a scale that wiped everything else off the map. There were no crowds, no ref, no rules, no laws. We were warriors about to go into battle. It was kill or be killed.
