Grist Mill Road

by Christopher J. Yates

  So, a little further down the line, I was born, January 2, 1968, the first of two sons, my brother, William, arriving twenty months later—on the very same day that Ho Chi Minh died, September 2, 1969, as it happened. I do believe this was the achievement in life my daddy was proudest of, the propitious timing and flourishing of his second seed. Henceforth, my brother’s birthdays became a kind of double celebration, the day always prompting misty retellings of my daddy’s war stories. His favorite tale was all about the time he shot a Viet Cong while the goddam gook was crouched down hopin to enjoy his mornin shit. Whenever he told the story, he took great delight mimicking the look on the Viet Cong’s face as he strained to move his bowels, exaggerating the eyes by stretching them out with his fingers, while exhaling in an apparently Asiatic manner—Aaaah-sole, aaah-sole, aaah …—and then he’d break off halfway through the third iteration, making a gun-shape with his hand and slamming down his thumb with a loud exclamation of bang! After that he’d spit something out like, Now we gonna see if you can shit metal, Charlie. Funny guy.

  Anyway, because this was the only war story my daddy told with such cartoon levels of grotesquerie, I’m more than a little convinced this was the only Viet Cong he ever actually killed.

  At any rate, however many men my daddy killed, and in whatever state of grace he found them, something had left him unsated. Or maybe his brief stint in Vietnam just turned him into a guy who went looking for trouble and found it in all the predictable places—a nose for whiskey and fistfights, he spent his nights downing Four Roses and throwing his knuckles around. If he couldn’t find a man to fight? Well …

  You might have thought that, what with my having a baby brother, the burden of my daddy’s mood swings might eventually have been shared. However, little Billy was, to use the word the doctors employed when informing my parents of their baby’s condition, a mongoloid. I remember how, growing up in the 1970s, gradually the terms mongolism and mongoloid would be heard less and less and the term Down syndrome used more and more, but human niceties and linguistic fashions were something to which my daddy never subscribed. However, he did have principles—little Billy was disabled, and he never laid a serious finger on the son he referred to as The Pug.

  Anyway, none of this felt unnatural to me, I wasn’t unlucky or mistreated, this was just the way the world turned.

  I spent the first ten years of my life growing up in a narrow green-painted apartment in Woodside, Queens, our walls being pretty much the only greenery I’d ever experienced until, not long before my eleventh birthday, we moved upstate to Roseborn, Ulster County. I don’t remember which of my daddy’s short-term jobs was the stated reason. No doubt he didn’t last long in it because every brief period of employment in Roseborn came to an end after some kind of trouble. He worked in body shops, fixed farm machinery, built fences, plowed drives, painted houses … He was good with his hands. Hilarious, huh? Anyway, when my daddy wasn’t working, he got into even more fistfights than usual. You know that phrase, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree? The townspeople of Roseborn looked at me like I was trouble a long time before I was anything like it.

  The nicest thing my daddy ever did for me was steal a bicycle. He told me it was salvaged. Anyway, that bike got me out of the house plenty, as far away from my daddy as I could pedal for as long as possible. Win-win.

  I liked living in Roseborn. Although Queens was a much bigger place, it felt somehow smaller, everything squeezed down to neighborhoods from which you never broke free, but in Roseborn I could ride my bike anywhere on the streets, along the dirt trails outside of town and all the way up to the Swangum Ridge. It was wide open country, a place where a child could have secrets and fantasies, a place for building hidden forts. You could shape your own world up there in the mountains, even if there were only two of you doing the dreaming—me and Tricky.

  Tricky’s real name was Patrick McConnell. (I think you met him only a couple of times.) I suppose I gave him that nickname because part of me must have realized there was something dark and evasive about Tricky. Most of the kids at school used the innocent moniker Patch for him, but I guess they didn’t see in Patrick what I saw, that he might have seemed like a quiet kid, only that was all just a front. I could always tell there were secret wheels turning inside his head. Patrick didn’t keep his own counsel because he had nothing to say; quite the opposite, it was because he didn’t want anyone to know what he was thinking. However, everyone went for the misdirection, the quiet kid act, and to my mind at least, that was his trick.

  Anyway, the truth about me and Tricky is the first reason I wanted to be his friend was jealousy, and it might sound stupid, but this is absolutely true—I was envious of the way he rolled up his shirtsleeves.

  My first day of school in Roseborn was the start of sixth grade. I was the new kid in town, so no one spoke to me, but that was fine, it gave me time to size everything up, a chance to identify who I might want to befriend.

  Everyone came to school in hoodies, sports jerseys, sweaters, or T-shirts, but Patrick McConnell came to school in clean white shirts, button-downs that were as bright as the teeth in whitening advertisements, clean cotton as crisp as hotel linen, and every day, Patrick had the sleeves of those shirts rolled up just past his elbow. Now this might not sound like much to be jealous of, I’ll admit, but something about the way those cuffs were folded spoke to me about everything missing from my life, because this wasn’t a technique you were born with, someone had to show you how to roll and fold something so neatly, so crease-free. Hell, maybe you even needed a special kind of shirt designed for sleeve-rolling. I spent a few quiet weeks just breathing him in, marveling at those revelatory shirtsleeves.

  Our mom was vaguely Catholic, taking me and little Billy to Mass maybe once a month (although we knew our place, we weren’t good enough to go to Sacred Heart, where the McConnell family prayed alongside the more important burghers of Roseborn), and I had one good white churchgoing shirt in my closet. Getting home from school one afternoon, a little way into the first term, I took that shirt from my closet and snuck off to the bathroom, the only room in our house with a mirror, pulled off my tee, buttoned up the shirt, and proceeded to fold and roll the sleeves. Only, by the time I’d flipped the cuffs twice it was already creased as hell. I started again, but the result was the same. While Patrick’s folded shirtsleeves were as smooth as a priest’s collar, whenever I tried to roll up my own sleeves, after a few turns it seemed some wrinkle was already there and there was nothing I could do but repeat it.

  The next day, while we were all sitting in English class waiting for the teacher to show, I turned to Patrick and said, Hey, Patch, I like your shirt.

  Patch looked at Jonny the Spin, Jonny the Spin looked at Patch. No one said anything. I could tell they were trying to figure out whether I was being sarcastic or just plain weird. I was used to that.

  Christie Laing, a few seats farther behind, said, Hey, did you hear that everyone? Weird Matt is a faggot for Patch.

  My name’s Matthew, I said to her.

  Fag-hew, said Christie, her goons letting out a squeal.

  Matthew, I said a bit harder. She didn’t come back from that. I’ve never found a situation where a clever line worked better than firm intent.

  How’d you do the sleeves? I asked Patch.

  His axis of glances with Jonny the Spin tilted back and forth a little more.

  Rolled them up. He shrugged.

  Nice, I said.

  The teacher came in.

  * * *

  I’VE NEVER KNOWN HOW TO make friends. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t. In the end, my friendship with Patrick McConnell came down to dumb luck.

  Christie Laing had a cousin, a boy in eighth grade called Ryan McMahan, who was known to most people at school as Ryan McMeathead, the football team’s one-man wrecking ball. By the age of fourteen Ryan had developed a linebacker’s neck and immense puffed-up arms. The Laings and McMahans were the northern equi
valent of my daddy’s side of our family, purebred hicks and Republican down to the bone.

  So what with Patch being smart and neatly presented and having a lawyer Democrat for a father, he quickly became a target for Ryan McMeathead who had this fun game he liked to play where he’d fold and fold pieces of paper into thin strips, about three inches long, bend them into U-shapes, wet their ends, and let them dry out on a radiator until they turned hard as rock. Between lessons he’d sneak up on his victims with a rubber band stretched between thumb and forefinger, slip one of those hard U-shaped pellets over the band, draw the thing back and snap!

  Patrick was one of his prime victims. The seat of his pants, crack! The cartilage at the back of his ear, thwack! His neck right above his shirt collar, blam! That time he snapped Patch on the neck, the welt stayed there in furious red for three whole days.

  Like I said, I always thought there was more to Tricky than mere shyness, and what happened next made me want to become Patrick’s friend even more, because goddammit if the button-down boy didn’t go away and make his own pellets.

  I guess McMeathead had driven him so mad, he didn’t even think it all the way through, he just snuck up on McMeathead in the hallway and loosened his pellet so hard against the back of his skull, smack, you could’ve heard the hollow thud from several miles away. McMeathead screamed and started running around like a balloon losing air while Patch stood there in shock, unsure what to do until McMeathead stopped yelping and dancing and turned on him—

  You are a motherfucking dead man, McConnell.

  At which point, Patch ran. He ran straight down the hallway and then out the school doors, zoom, pursued by McMeathead and his cohorts—Meatbrowski, Meatchini, O’Meatneck—but Patch was a lightning bolt compared to the lumbering meat-pack and they never got close to him. Round and round the sports fields they ran until Patch pulled a spin move and sprinted straight back to school, out of breath and trembling slightly when he sat down for geography.

  It seemed like the whole room was in shock.

  Way to go, Patch, I said, though he didn’t acknowledge me.

  Unfortunately, however, that wasn’t the end of the McMeathead story. The world tells you to punch a bully on the nose and he’ll leave you alone, and isn’t that precisely what Patrick had done? The world knows less than shit.

  Patch did a pretty good job of sneaking around for the rest of the day, avoiding the pack, staying well away from their meat lockers, but in homeroom, the day after his act of defiance, Christie Laing handed him a note. I didn’t see the words, but everyone in the room knew what it said. Day, time, place.

  Patch went pale and started to shrink like a sack of grain with a hole slashed in its belly, and then word got around between lessons. Behind the bleachers, lunchtime.

  I could pretend that I came up with a plan right away, but the truth is I never made one.

  A few hours later, I followed the small group of boys that ushered Patrick toward his fate, the large crowd that had gathered parting to let Patch into its ring.

  I was pretty tall for my age, plus I was thirteen years old already, having been held back a year at school in Woodside, so it wasn’t hard to find a spot from which I could see. I stood at the back of the crowd watching McMeathead in front of his pack, moving his fat head in circles. Ten yards away stood Patch, a kid two years Ryan’s junior and weighing in at a hundred pounds less. How was any of this fair? Patrick had chalked up a solitary act of retaliation in return for how many provocations? Nine, ten? A dozen?

  You ready to settle this one on one? said McMeathead.

  One on one? Patch was half the guy’s size and shaking in terror. He moved his lips, but nothing audible came out.

  McMeathead put his hand to his ear and laughed. This here was The Ryan McMeathead Show. In daily conversation he employed the vocabulary of a coloring book, and yet when it came to fighting talk, McMeathead was fluent.

  Hey, kid, you know what? he said. I’ll make you a promise. I won’t go easy on you.

  The pack snorted.

  Patrick’s arms went stiff, his fingers spread wide at the ends of his hands. Look, he said, I’m really sorry, OK?

  Correction, said McMeathead, you will be. Now, you want some more time to piss your little pants or are they all good and pissed? At which point McMeathead started his slow lumber forward, flexing his fists in front of his huge barrel chest.

  Like I said, I never came up with a plan, but there was a sense of anger running through me that began somewhere in my gut and then started to grow. As the anger got closer to my skin, it turned to rage, and the rage was electric, the rage needed to burst out from within.

  I don’t remember much about what happened next, just a few flashes of flesh and a humming in my ears that changed pitch whenever McMeathead landed a blow. In every fight I’ve had, and I’ve had my share, it’s as if you move into a shadow world, a bubble forming around you, a place in which all of life becomes simplified, existence reduced to a single question—

  How far are you prepared to go?

  I’ve always known my answer to that question.

  How far am I prepared to go? I will go further than you. However many weapons you’re willing to bring, I will bring more. However low you go, you will never dig deeper than me. I will win, because what this will cost me in pain, I will pay. My resources are limitless, I will always outbid you and I will never back down.

  As soon as your opponent understands this, you have him defeated.

  No one held me back, no one pulled me off. I don’t remember much. At the end I was standing and Ryan McMeathead was down.

  * * *

  I WENT TO A RESTROOM to wash his blood from my hands along with some of McMeathead’s skin, which was stuck under my fingernails. Every now and then, someone would open the door, perform a rapid one-eighty, and the door would close again.

  When recess was over, I headed back to class, but Patch wasn’t there. I found out later he went to see the nurse, threw up in front of her, and got himself sent home for the afternoon. As for the other kids in our class, no one was looking straight at me, as if it were one of those schoolyard games, because every time I turned my head the children in that part of the room froze like statues. I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy the sense of power, the feeling of respect. Now everyone knew my potential.

  Only potential isn’t worth all that much when five of them come at you from behind. It happened right after I stepped out of the doors at the end of the school day. They dragged me off to the side of the building, up against the wall, four-fifths of the meat-pack pinning each of my limbs to the brickwork, leaving Ryan McMeathead free to do whatever he wanted, his fat hands making fists, his arms swinging and swinging.

  I closed my eyes and waited for it to end.

  * * *

  IT WASN’T THE WORST BEATING I’ve ever had, some bruising and swelling, nothing broken, although bad enough I would have to take the next day off school.

  It was only me and Billy when I got home, me being my brother’s de facto babysitter much of the time. Little Billy cried when he saw me and tried to stroke my bruises better, the way he often did. Several hours later, when I saw headlights swinging over the broken blinds of the living room, our mom being dropped off after her workday at the Blue Moon diner, I snuck off to bed.

  Fortunately my daddy was passing through one of his brief phases of employment, so I didn’t have to see him the next day. Three days later, when he noticed my faded wounds, I was able to say to him, Yeah, but you should see the other guy.

  He liked that and chuckled.

  But when my mom saw me the morning after it happened, she gasped. Oh, Matthew, she said. Oh, baby, this is the last time, I swear it, I promise. (How many times had it been the last?)

  No, it wasn’t him, Mom, I said, just some dumb kids at school.

  Mom looked relieved and then fussed over me all morning, seeming to enjoy the chance to tend to some wounds, my daddy never letting her touch him
after one of his brawls. It’s nothing, Lucille, lucky fuckin shot, that’s all. She heated tomato soup and fed it to me, wiping my chin while I struggled to swallow, and kept bringing me ice wrapped in a dishcloth while we watched her daytime shows. When she left for her shift at the diner in the afternoon, I fell asleep on the couch.

  I was woken up by a knocking at the door. When I looked out the window and saw it was Patch, my first thought was not to answer, embarrassed to see him standing outside our run-down shack of a home, barely better than a trailer, Patch looking church-neat in his shirtsleeves.

  I opened up, Patch looking at me, horrified and confused.

  Fucking cowards, I said. Jumped me from behind, needed five of them.

  Oh, shoot, he said. You OK?

  I will be, I said. How about you?

  Me? he said, sounding shocked. I mean, good, but … Look, the reason I came here, about what happened, I just wanted to say—

  Hey, I said, interrupting as fast as I could, you wanna come in?

  Sure, he said, nodding uncertainly. When Patch stepped inside, you could see he was looking for some kind of doormat on which to wipe his feet, but then, finding nothing, he crouched down and started untying his laces.

  Don’t worry about it, I said.

  Patch pulled off his shoes anyway. That was the start of it all.

  NEW YORK, 2008

  MATTHEW

  I loved it in the Swangums, the summer of ’81 one of the best of my life, me and Tricky spinning up the hill together and gazing down at shadows, the clouds in the sky painting dark lakes on the earth and our friendship growing little by little as we played our own games, turning life into a daily adventure. When the heat rose, we’d jump into the cool waters of Lake Swangum or spread-eagle ourselves against the damp flanks of the ice caves. We plunked cans, built forts, ate wild blueberries, showered beneath waterfalls …