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by David Halliday
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War
Copyright 2010 David Halliday
David could not have been standing more than a few minutes outside the school doors when a thin kid with long spider like legs, arms, and fingers, named Marcus O’Reilly, approached him. David was glad for the attention. He was a new kid and recess was boring when you were alone.
“Don’t look at me,” Marcus said, his voice almost a whisper, as if the present correspondence was taking place under a veil of secrecy. Marcus stuck his fingers in his mouth and padded down a cowlick on the back of his head. “I shouldn’t even be hanging around here. Penny warned me that it was not a good idea, but I seen ya here the last few days and I figured you’d be alright.”
Marcus was in David’s class. He sat at the back of the room. Mostly it seemed Marcus was in trouble with the teacher. He was one of those boys who seemed to have a long list of excuses why work was not done in class or completed at home. It appeared to David that Marcus was running a messenger service between home and school. There was a constant exchange of notes between the Marcus’s parents and Mr. Wickenhauser. Several times a week Marcus would be hauled up to the front of the class and forced to take a seat beside Miss Ponick at her desk. To David’s surprise, Marcus did not seem to be bothered by this punishment. The other boys were delighted when Marcus made some lewd expression. The girls giggled. Only Mr. Wickenhauser seemed oblivious to Marcus’s attention.
“You alright?” Marcus asked again.
David nodded, pretending not to notice Marcus standing beside him. He looked across the trench at some grade one’s fishing through one of the flood grates with a string and hook
“Sure,” he said. David noticed a group of girls nearby bouncing a ball off the school wall. One of them, Dorothy from his class, was looking at David suspiciously and saying something to her friends.
David looked away.
“Alright for what?” David asked out of the side of his mouth. “And what’s with all the secrecy?”
“Come on,” Marcus barked idly stepping away from the school building.
David followed.
“You like Miss Ponick?” Marcus asked. Miss Ponick was the grade one teacher. Before David could respond Marcus added, “My old man thinks she’s a real dish. He comes to all the teacher parent interviews now that my sister is in grade one. Never came last year when I had Mrs. Upper. You want to join our gang? I’m going to marry her one day if old man Wickenhauser doesn’t jump her bones first.”
“What do you mean, you’re going to marry her?” David asked.
Marcus pointed toward the end of the schoolyard. Mounts of earth were piled there.
“We’re the Hill Gang and we don’t take prisoners,” Marcus said.
“Come on,” Marcus said. They ran to the large hills that marked the Hill Gang’s home.
“You can’t just run,” Marcus said.
“What do you mean?” David asked.
“You’ve got to run as if you’re riding a horse,” Marcus explained. “Like right now your horse should be in a trot. When you’re standing still you’ve got to occasionally reach down and pat the horse on the neck. It reassures him that everything is alright. Sometimes the horse strolls and sometimes when we’re in a battle your horse will bolt into a charge.”
David looked around. He didn’t see any horse. And Marcus certainly didn’t look like he was trotting.
“When my legs start moving, they just keep going,” David said.
“Well, you’ve got to learn,” Marcus said.
Marcus turned to David with the same look of impatience David had often seen that look in his mother. Marcus spoke brusquely.
“Well, that’s not the way it’s done. You run full out all the time and you’ll ruin your horse. A horse is life itself on the range. You can’t run him into the dust. A man’s got to take good care of his horse. It’s one of the laws of the trail.”
“What trail?” David asked.
Marcus shook his head. “You really are green.”
“Green?” David asked.
When the boys reached the hills David saw pyramid like stock piles of clay along the hills. There were also a large number of boys lying on the hill looking up into the sky for no discernible reason. David looked up. There was nothing there but a few small clouds anchored in place for the afternoon. Marcus pulled David to the ground beside home. David could read the impatience in Marcus’s eyes, but he could not understand why he had to lie on the ground. Still, a certain amount of trouble had to be expected if he was to make any friends at school.
“We was wondering whether you were going to join us,” Marcus said. “Everyone thought that you would have been conscripted by the Trench Gang. Penny thinks you might be a spy but I spoke up for you. You ain’t a spy, are you? We know there’s a spy. There’s always a spy but you ain’t that spy, are you?”
“I ain’t no spy,” David responded looking out over the schoolyard. “What are we looking for?”
Marcus smiled.
“The Trench Gang.”
David looked across the schoolyard but couldn’t see anything but kids playing.“So, its like cowboys and Indians,” David said with a short lived smile.
Marcus looked at David in disbelief.
“This ain’t no damn game,” Marcus cried. “We’re at war.”
“Who are the Trench Gang?” David asked.
“The enemy.”
“What did they do?” David expected that there was some reason for hostilities: someone had gotten beaten up on the way to school, someone’s sister had been called a name, something had been stolen.
“Nothing,” he responded. Marcus had that look of despair in his eyes again.
David turned and noticed three boys huddled behind the hill talking. One of them, Penny, looked at David suspiciously. Penny was a tall boy with a gap between his buck teeth. His head was shaved to the skin and he wore a black and white striped shirt like a referee. There was a tear in the knees of Penny’s jeans and the souls of his running shoes were falling off so that the bottom of his shoes hung open like a mouth yawning.
“Don’t worry about Penny,” Marcus said then laughed. “He suspects everyone. And don’t call him Bugs.”
A moment later there was a hustle of activity as everyone started collecting pieces of clay. This was in addition to the carefully gathered mounts of clay that he had noticed earlier.
“What’s the clay for?”
“Ammunition,” Marcus explained, his voice growing tired with explanations. “For the invasion.”
David joined the other boys in gathering ammunition. Looking across the schoolyard he still could not see an enemy. A boy wearing an orange t-shirt and ripped jeans ran past David. His loose black hair flopped up and down as he ran..
“That’s Flannery,” Marcus explained. Flannery was described in glowing terms by Marcus. He was brave and just. Marcus counseled David not to assume that because Flannery was small that he was not dangerous. At times, he could become ferocious. His temper was legendary. He was not a kid to fool with. Last summer in Echo Valley he picked a fight with a high school kid. He didn’t win the fight but he didn’t lose it and Greg, the high school kid, honoured Flannery with the title as the toughest kid in the area. It was Flannery who had inaugurated the sport of bumper hopping. In the winter the boys would run behind cars, grab onto the bumpers and ski along the slippery side streets.
The Trench Gang was led by Flannery’s best fri
end, Cormier. The two boys walked to school each day together, played together on the weekends, were fast friends, but during school hours they were sworn enemies. David learned that Cormier was the most respected kid in the school, even by members of the Hill Gang who were supposed to be his sworn enemy. Cormier was up to almost any dare, which quite often led him into the principal’s office and the strap. Once, David had been told, he had snuck into the girl’s washroom and put corn syrup on all the toilet seats.
“I’d go to hell with that guy,” Penny boasted.
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Brady cried. Brady was a small boy, the only one in the group who looked like he was dressed by his mother. His hair had been smoothed down and parted in the middle. His white shirt was buttoned to his neck and his corduroy trousers were neatly kept up by a brown leather belt. Fragile in frame and manner, Brady aspired to be tough but none of the boys would accept his challenges to fight. He was considered an untouchable. David learned that the first rule of the yard was - no one picked fights with little kids, girls, or Brady.
“You might get sent to hell,” Brady added.
“Where do you hear things like that?” Joe asked, shaking his head. Joe was a big kid with large shoulders and big hands and a trace of an Italian accent. Honourable and honest to a fault, Joe had been born in Rome and claimed to have seen the Pope.
“My grandmother,” Brady replied. Brady was
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