The Thunder in His Head

by Gene Gant

  I sulked, slumping down in the seat. “For all the good that’ll do.” A few moments later, I felt ridiculous. I was way too big to pout, but I couldn’t help myself. With a glance at Dad, I said, “They’re talking about getting married, you know.”

  Dad’s face froze for a second. “Who?”

  “Mom and Reece.”

  “Oh.” Dad’s face got sort of weird, again just for a second. “Well, congratulations to them.”

  He didn’t look as if he meant it.

  I WALKED to my locker after homeroom, wondering where Dwight was at that moment and what he was doing. As I was dumping off the books that I wouldn’t need until after lunch, Chain came rushing up to me.

  “Hey,” he said, “you seen Jill today?” He seemed overly worried, even for a pint-sized kid in high school.

  “Oh, you’re talking to me again?” I asked, still feeling testy from him showing me attitude all day Friday.

  He shifted impatiently on his feet, looking up at me with anxious eyes.

  “Come on, man. Have you seen her?”

  “Nope.” Neither Jill nor Chain had shown up at our usual spot this morning. I spent the time clowning around with Raj and Scarecrow, two of the guys from the basketball team. “Maybe she didn’t come to school today.”

  “No, she was here. I saw her at her locker this morning before the bell.” He leaned to one side, scanning the hallway behind me. His breathing was rapid, as if he’d been running. “She didn’t come to homeroom. Where the hell did she go?”

  “Chill, dude,” I said. “She could’ve been called to the office or something.” Chain looked as panicky as the mother dog my ten-year-old self thoughtlessly teased by hiding her newborn pups after she had gone off for a bathroom break. I was afraid he’d freak if I didn’t distract him. “Hey, guess what? I had my first date this weekend.”

  “With a girl?”

  I gave him a what-the-hell look. “Uh, dude. How many times am I gonna have to come out to you?”

  “Well, you flirt with girls all the time.”

  “That doesn’t mean I wanna date ’em. This was a guy Ty knows, name’s Dwight. I went out with him twice, actually, Friday night and Saturday afternoon.”

  “You get lucky?”

  “He almost did.”

  Chain looked confused for a moment. Then he looked surprised. “You mean… you were gonna let him… he was gonna… you were gonna give him some…?” He leaned to one side, his eyes drifting rather indelicately toward the area of my behind.

  “I don’t know what he was gonna do, man. My moms and her boyfriend came home right while we were getting into it.”

  Chain was positively aghast. I thought he might hyperventilate. “Your mom came home and caught you and that dude doing it?” he blared.

  Kids up and down the hall stopped, turned, and looked at us.

  I wanted to swat Chain in the back of his head. Cupping a hand to my right ear, I turned my head to the side and leaned toward him. “Say that a little louder, man, please. The folks in Beijing didn’t hear you.”

  “Damn,” Chain barked. “I’d freaking die if my moms ever caught me like that. I’d die right there.”

  “You’re close to dying right here.” I slammed my locker shut and marched off down the hall.

  Chain came hurrying after me. His discretion finally kicked in. Walking on tiptoe, he craned up to my ear, whispering, “I can’t believe it. Your mom caught you with your dick out? Was the other dude’s dick out too?”

  “Nobody’s dick was out, idiot,” I muttered back at him. “Dwight took my shirt off. He had all his clothes on. That’s what my mom came in on.”

  “Oh.” Chain sounded disappointed. I never knew the guy had such an appetite for dirt. “Well, I gotta get to class. If you see Jill, tell her to text me, okay?”

  “If I see Jill, I’m telling her to run far from your crazy self. Later, dude.”

  IN THE cartoons, when Superman gets ready to use his heat vision, his eyes fix on his target with this intense stare, his face gets this hate-your-guts scowl, and you know whatever villain he’s looking at is about to get nuked to high heaven.

  Ty’s girlfriend, Carla, was staring at me across the cafeteria heat-vision style.

  Her death glare made Raj nervous. He was a strapping dude, just south of six feet, and scrappy as hell on the basketball court. In an apparently subconscious desire for self-preservation, he scooted away from me on the bench where we sat eating our lunches. “Dang, man,” he said, looking at Carla from the corner of his eye. “What the hell did you do to that girl?”

  “Nothing,” I answered, shaking my head, completely mystified. “I barely even know her.”

  Raj sent me a nervous look. “Well, she’s making my skin crawl, and I ain’t the one she’s pissed at. Man, you better watch your back.”

  I WAS the only teenager living on Mom’s street, so I always made the walk to and from school alone. The solitude didn’t bother me. It gave me time to think about life and such. This afternoon, the make-out session with Dwight drifted back and forth across the sea of my memory, tugging me now and again into a kind of zoned-out bliss that had me humming with pleasure. As much as I liked thinking about him, however, my thoughts were mostly on Mom and how I could figure out what was going on with her. She’d always been a stickler for kids staying out of “adult business,” but since she and Dad separated, she’d become flat-out secretive.

  My rumination was interrupted about halfway home when I picked up a couple of tailgaters. They fell in behind me as I passed the entrance to McWherter Park, stepping out from among the tall bushes growing on either side of the little gate there.

  “What’s up, gay boy?”

  I caught only a glimpse of them initially. They were both white, one of them redheaded with a big red, white, and blue tattoo on the left side of his neck, the other dark-haired. Neither was particularly tall, but they made up for it in bulk. When I heard “gay boy,” my entire body stiffened, and I hesitated for a second in midstep. The skin on the back of my neck burned.

  “Hey, man, you see that? I think you hurt her feelings.”

  “I hurt your feelings, gay boy? Huh? I hurt your little feelings?”

  “You want to do something about what he said, faggot? You want to, don’t you. I can tell.”

  “Yeah, faggot, go ahead, do something about it. We hear you like to mess with straight guys. Well, we’re straight. Come on. Make a move, sweetheart.”

  They followed me for half a block. I don’t remember every nasty thing they said to me. I tried my damnedest to tune them out and keep walking, as Mom had repeatedly asked me to do. I might have succeeded if I hadn’t had to stop at the corner of Whispering Oak Drive and Catalina Avenue to wait for the light to change. The verbal assault became physical then.

  “Hey, fag, tell me how you like this.” The redhead lifted his foot to my butt and tried his very best to utilize the pointed toe of his cowboy boot as a proctoscope. The other guy hooted out a laugh.

  It felt as if my brain did a rapid boil inside my skull.

  My body reacted without conscious thought. In a single move, I spun around, my right foot blasting up between the redhead’s legs. He managed to get a hand over his crotch just as the blow connected. Maybe he hopped at the last second to lessen the impact. Or maybe I was just that furious. Whatever the reason, the kick lifted him off his feet, a loud gasp exploding from his throat.

  The dark-haired guy stood stunned as the redhead fell backward onto the sidewalk. He held a cell phone in front of his face as if he were about to make a call. He recovered quickly when I spun on him. He had small, dark eyes, and they burned with disgust and fear. He jabbed at me with his right fist, leaning into the swing with all his might. My fist got to his mouth first, knocking him sideways and down before his blow could land. His cell phone went clattering along the sidewalk on a jaunt of its own.

  I crouched over them, waiting, hoping they would get up. The redhead had vomited, an
d he lay on his side, long, deep moans coming up from his chest, his knees drawn up and both hands holding his plumbing. The other guy rolled from side to side, hands over his mouth, blood streaming through his fingers along with garbled cries of pain.

  The urge to kick the crap out of them both was strong. A frantic part of me knew that if I lit into them again, they’d end up in the hospital and I’d wind up in jail. Grunting like a bull, I turned to go and felt a strange lightness. My backpack was gone. I looked around and spotted it a few feet away in the gutter. Snatching it up, I stormed in blind rage across busy Catalina Avenue, against the light, forcing startled, angry drivers to swerve their cars around me.

  Eleven

  MY CELL phone rang in my pocket. Again. That was the third call since I’d left school. I didn’t bother pulling out the phone even just to check the caller ID. I didn’t want to know who was calling. I didn’t give a damn.

  My head hurt like the devil.

  I went straight up the driveway and around to the back of the house, opening the door to the screened porch off the kitchen. There, I dropped my backpack to the ground, fell into a chair, and hefted my right hand—which somehow felt both heavy as a boulder and ghostly as vapor—onto the tabletop. I stared into the infinite and fumed.

  What the hell gave them the right to humiliate me like that in front of a whole street full of people? What the hell gave them the right to even say anything to me?

  The thought of what they did to me was making my head hurt even worse. It made me feel so helpless. I should’ve stomped both their butts, even if it did land me in jail. Why can’t people like that just leave me the hell alone?

  I felt tired. I didn’t want to move, but at the same time, it was hard for me to sit still. My right knee began to bounce. Mom used the screened porch as a green house. Pots of various sizes and shapes lined the floor along the walls. She changed out the plants in them every spring and every fall. Now they were filled with violet and white pansies and bright orange chrysanthemums. The scent coming off them this time of year was usually heartening, making me think of crackling fireplaces and hot chocolate and pumpkins. It reminded me of Mom and Dad and me having Thanksgiving dinner with Grandma and Grandpa, with Aunt Nina and Uncle Rudy and the cousins.

  Now the scent was just making me sick.

  I closed my eyes.

  A door squeaked open. “Hi.” Mom’s voice sounded cheery. Maybe she had gotten over whatever had her ailing Saturday. “What’re you doing out here?”

  I didn’t answer. I was afraid my voice would shake, giving away my anger, and I’d have to tell her what I’d done. Then she would get that disappointment in her face, and I simply could not take that. I’d bawl like a baby if she looked at me that way right now.

  I heard her footsteps as she came out onto the porch. “Kyle?” Then, “Oh, my God! What happened to your hand?”

  I looked down. My right hand was covered in blood. Some of it probably belonged to the guy I’d slammed in the mouth, but most of it was mine. There was a wide gash that ran from the knuckle of my middle finger down the back of my hand to the wrist. My hand felt dead. “Uh… it’s nothing, Mom….” My voice trembled.

  She had on blue slacks and a white sweater. Suddenly it struck me how cool the afternoon air was. She took my wrist and gingerly lifted my hand for a closer inspection. “Kyle, you’re going to need stitches. Are these teeth marks on your knuckles?” Still holding my hand aloft, she leaned back, trying to look in my eyes. “Have you been fighting again?”

  My throat felt hot. I made this funny little strangled noise and turned away.

  Mom paused for a second. She gently placed my hand back on the table and went inside. She came back about a minute later with her purse and a wet bath towel. She wound the towel carefully around my injured hand.

  “Come on.” She slid one arm around my shoulder. “We’d better get a doctor to look at this.”

  THE doctor at Minor Emergency Medic not only looked, he sanitized and stapled up the back of my hand, which, by that time, had begun to throb like an exposed nerve. He gave me a shot in each deltoid, one for pain and the other a tetanus booster. Armed with a prescription for pain pills, I followed Mom back to her BMW, and we started for home.

  “We’ll stop by the pharmacy and get that filled,” she said.

  “Okay.” Although my hand ached and both shoulders were stiff from the injections, I felt much better than I had an hour ago.

  Mom must have sensed that. She seemed to feel it was okay to tear into me now. “Kyle, I’m so disappointed in you.”

  “Mama, please don’t say that. This wasn’t my fault.”

  “Why wasn’t it? Your fist didn’t just smash into someone’s mouth by itself.”

  “You don’t even know what happened.”

  “Then tell me.”

  I told her everything.

  She seemed distressed at the nastier details, especially the part about the guy pushing me with his foot. “You say you never saw those boys before?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they had to know you, or know of you, to come after you like that. But their behavior doesn’t excuse yours.”

  I looked at her incredulously. “Mom. The guy tried to shove his boot up my butt. What was I supposed to do? Bend over?”

  “I just think you could have handled the situation better than you did, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, next time, I’ll just run away. Or go ‘Pretty please, don’t call me a fag, don’t hit me.’ That’ll solve everything.”

  “Kyle, I just worry about you with all this fighting. You provoke people—”

  “Mom, that is so not what happened this time.”

  “Still, you do provoke people sometimes. You could hurt someone badly and wind up in the criminal justice system. That system swallows black boys your age whole. I’ve written about cases like that a dozen times over the years. I’m not going to have that happen to you.”

  My headache seemed to be revving up for an encore. Time to move on to another, more important topic. “Mom, what happened to you Saturday?”

  Her face clouded over. “Oh, I just got a little dizzy. Reece and I decided to get dinner before I did my final interview for the day. The restaurant was crowded, and while we were waiting outside, I got a bit overheated. So I had Reece bring me home.”

  “Mom, I saw you. You weren’t just a ‘little dizzy’.”

  “Kyle, I said I am fine. Now drop this.”

  It was pointless to argue with her. She’d just get upset, accuse me of being disrespectful, and ground me. “Okay. But if something serious ever happens to you, if you get really sick, will you please tell me?”

  “Kyle, if I have a heart attack or stroke, you’ll be the first person I call. Now promise me you’ll stop this fighting.”

  “If it will make you happy, the next time some guy wants to kick my head in, I’ll take it off and hike it to him. How’s that sound?”

  Mom wrinkled her nose at me, something she used to do with Dad when he got sarcastic with her. It made me feel nostalgic.

  AS WE arrived at the drug store, I held up my swollen, bandaged right hand. “I can’t write, Mom. Can I skip doing my homework tonight?” I was just trying to get a rise out of her. Most of my assignments tonight were strictly reading.

  “Yes, skip it for now,” she answered, surprising the heck out of me. “As a matter of fact, you’re staying home from school tomorrow. The doctor said you should use that hand as little as possible for the next twenty-four hours.”

  Hey, that worked for me.

  After picking up the pain meds at the pharmacy, Mom stopped at a Burger King and got me a double cheeseburger combo. I looked at her in astonishment, wondering just when this pod person had replaced my mother. Lela Manning was of the firm opinion that eating fast food was the equivalent of pumping a can of motor oil into your arteries.

  She caught the look I gave her. “I was talking to Reece just before you got home,” she explai
ned. “He invited you and me to his house for dinner this evening. You’re obviously not up for that now, and I haven’t cooked a thing, but you have to eat something.”

  “Reece is expecting us for dinner tonight?”

  “It’s okay. I called him while you were in with the doctor and told him we’d have to reschedule.”

  My happy little mood took a sudden nosedive. “Dang, Mama.”

  She flicked a puzzled scowl at me as she drove. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “You’re spending, like, every day with this dude. That’s bad enough, but now I gotta see him every day too?”

  “Kyle, it was an invitation to dinner. Reece was just being polite. How is that a problem?”

  “Let him be polite to you. Me, he can ignore.”

  “You’re impossible sometimes, you know that? Your dad says you have no problem with his girlfriend. I don’t know why you don’t like Reece, but there is one thing you should understand. He is a part of my life now, and that is not going to change. You don’t have to like him, but I expect you to treat him with respect.”

  “Mom, I respect the man. Okay?” Petulant, I wanted to push the whole idea of Reece out of my head. The smell of hot grease was making me delirious. I opened the bag Mom had dropped into my lap, used my good hand to scoop out the carton of fries, and gobbled up a mouthful. “Can I get my ears pierced?” I asked through the munching.

  “Excuse me?”

  “May I get my ears pierced?” I corrected, as if it were my grammar that bothered her.

  “We’ve been over this, Kyle. Your dad said not until you’re eighteen, and I’m standing behind that.”

  “Well, what about a tattoo? Can I get one of those?”

  Risking a collision, Mom turned her head and stared at me as if I had sprouted petunias from my noggin and cursed her in Klingon. “Where is all this coming from?”