by Billy Coffey
“Well, I know who you should be scared of, and right now she ain’t waiting tables at the diner, she’s fighting a gaggle of wilding kids to get in here and handle the mess you made.”
“Think Chris made all the mess,” Abel says. He grins, can’t help it, and finds Miss Ellie grinning too.
“Don’t you be so smart.” Miss Ellie glances up through the windows.
Abel imagines a river of children churning past behind him, laughing and yelling as they share what they’re doing for summer, trips to the beach and sleepovers and adventures, all those things he won’t do.
“Your arm just itch? Or does it hurt? I can get you something out of Rachel’s office.”
“No,” he says. “Momma catches me taking drugs, she’ll skin me alive.”
“Don’t think aspirin counts.”
“It’s okay. I only itch.”
Miss Ellie glances up and makes a grin. “Here she comes. Gird your loins, Abel.”
The door swings wide to a new smell—not flowers, but cooking grease and cigarettes. The brown bun that Lisa Shifflett tied her hair into this morning has gone sagging now, pressed down along her stooped shoulders from the weight of the breakfast rush, the first of the lunch crowd, and the life Abel knows they both struggle through. She is pale in spite of the June month, waiflike with her skinny arms and legs. Deep lines have formed beneath her eyes. Streaks of gravy and meatloaf are stuck to the front of her apron, a preview of what Abel knows will be their supper.
She bends low and runs her hands over Abel’s body, checking his good arm and then his bad one, his chest and legs and feet. “What’s wrong?” she asks. “Abel? Did you get hurt again?”
“I’m fine, Momma.”
Miss Ellie says, “Nothing to get worried over, Lisa. I’m sorry I had to call you down, but Mister Rexrode insisted. There’s been a little trouble.”
“Trouble?” Abel glances up to find his momma’s eyes have caught a spark. “Chris? Was it Chris again?” She sighs like she most often does and lays a hand to her forehead, pressing back tears and rage. “You’d think that boy’d let Abel be on the last day, Ellie.”
Abel says, “Well, Momma . . . ,” thinking this may be the only chance to tell his side of things, but now here is Principal Rexrode’s door opening and Principal Rexrode stepping out, telling Lisa hello and y’all come back, let’s get this thing straightened out. Abel hears his momma say come on, she’s got to get back to the diner before Roy fires her for good. He picks himself up off the bench and follows. The walls tilt with each step, hurting Abel’s back and hips and his bad arm now where the itch was, and what Abel is left with is a feeling of doom and sadness—still not for what he’s done to Chris, but for whatever is about to be done to him.
He glances back toward Miss Ellie. She stands as though her heart is full to breaking, like she is the maiden who will wait in purity and prayer and Abel the knight off to battle a great dragon. Her hands are clasped at her flat stomach. She winks.
Abel turns back and waddles on. He wishes he could disappear.
That’s never been a trick he could master either.
-2-
Lisa Shifflett cannot count the number of times she’s made this walk to Charlie Rexrode’s office. Too many, she knows. And yet this time, which she understands will be the last—next year it will be the office at the middle school and after that the one at Mattingly High and then, she supposes, the dean’s office at some college (ha-ha)—things feel different somehow. It’s as though someone has added an extra forty feet to the hallway since she last visited, or as though Lisa has stumbled into one of those dreams where she’s running from something but her feet are stuck in sand. She needs to hurry, yet everything is happening slowly.
People tell her it’s not all that different, raising a son like Abel, but they don’t know. They say it’s no different for any momma who must raise a boy on her own. Always with a tinge of guilt in their voices as though they know their words are a lie, leaving her a small stack of quarters or the occasional dollar bill for a tip—just like that tone in Lisa’s voice when she answers Thank you and I appreciate your prayers, her own praying long past. But it is different. That’s what Lisa wants to tell them but never does. It’s different because Abel is special and none of you can know that because none of you are like him, and that’s why none of you will ever understand and why it’ll always be us against you. Me and Abel standing alone against the stiff wind, my boy and his momma and no one else, because we’re all we have.
That’s what Lisa ponders as she steps into that measureless hallway with Charlie Rexrode’s dimpled face way at the end. Not how Roy was mad because she had to leave her tables again or that the tips Lisa would miss were to be set aside for their bill at the market, but that a day that dawned as one more fight of attrition has now skewed toward full-on battle. Her hand reaches back and meets Abel’s fingers, her arm swaying, her shoulders dipping and jerking in time with his uneven hips.
Charlie Rexrode steps aside. Lisa ignores his smile, her eyes too full of the god-awful boy slumped in the last of three folding chairs laid out in front of the principal’s desk. Chris’s daddy, Royce, stands behind him, three hundred pounds of fleshy rolls and a scowl beneath his beard. With Royce is Rachel Barlow, the school nurse. Already Lisa is yelling. She cusses Chris Jones for whatever thing he’s done now and cusses Royce for siring such a demon of a child, her voice shifting from the tired though happy one that is her usual to the raised one of work, the voice that calls out orders of scrambled eggs and chicken potpie to Roy. Screaming at them, at Chris, this boy from over the hill who has been Abel’s torment since kindergarten. The cast was on her son’s leg then, not his arm. It was red instead of yellow.
“What’d you do to my son now, you little—”
The last word is cut off, not by Royce’s hard glare but by his boy’s appearance. Chris Jones has always been a big child, fat and strong like his daddy, everything Abel will never be. Yet now he looks feeble, hunched in the chair like a trapped animal half-starved. His face is the pale yellow of the sunlight leaking through the windows. His brow shines sweaty and slick.
Lisa asks, “What in the world happened to you?”
“Your boy,” Royce answers, “that’s what. He near killed my son.”
Charlie Rexrode clears his throat and moves from the door. “Now let’s not get all dramatic here, Royce. Lisa, sit on down. You too, Abel.”
Abel sits in the chair next to Chris. Lisa takes the other, leaving Royce to stand. Everything is happening slowly again, only this time the sand isn’t on the floor, it’s in the air. Even breathing comes hard.
“Sorry again, Lisa,” the principal says.
Royce huffs. “She ain’t the one needs apologizing to, Charlie. Ain’t her boy been upended.”
“Shut up, Royce”—still smiling, Charlie’s always doing that, even though Lisa sees a weariness behind that smile she knows well—“already gave you my sorry. Won’t be another.”
The worn leather chair behind the desk wails as it takes the principal’s big frame. He reaches into a drawer and pulls out a torn and empty box that he places at the center of the desk. Everyone regards it but Abel.
“Excuse me,” Lisa says. “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”
“I know Abel’s had his problems,” Charlie says.
Abel looks up—to his principal, not his mother, though Lisa can still see the expression on her son’s face. There is no anger there, more a hurt, as though Abel has just been offended.
Charlie corrects himself. “With Chris, I mean. Lord knows these two been in here more than once, and Lord knows it’s always Chris’s doing.”
Royce opens his mouth. Charlie shuts it with a single pointing finger.
“But this time, Lisa, I’m afraid Abel was the instigator.”
Chris squirms in his chair, bringing Nurse Rachel to life and causing Royce to step backward. Lisa cannot make sense of Rachel’s hand on Chris’s
back and why she’s whispering a question of if he needs to go. Why everyone but Abel is looking terrified and embarrassed at the same time. And that word Charlie used to describe her son—instigator. It’s as though Lisa’s mind cannot process what that word even means.
Charlie says, “Abel came to school today with what Chris believed—and Abel said—was a peace offering. Chocolate. Quite a bit of it, actually. Isn’t that right, Abel?”
Abel shrugs. He reaches into his pocket and draws out a nickel that flutters between his fingers.
“We don’t have chocolate in the house,” Lisa says. “Can’t afford it.” Somehow this seems to her the only explanation needed.
Charlie taps the empty box on the desk. “Found this in Abel’s backpack. He must’ve taken them out before giving it. Chris ate it all before Missus Heizer knew. By then, things had . . . commenced.”
Royce explodes: “Your little runt poisoned my boy. Fed Chris a whole box a laxatives.”
The slow motion of the room unfolds in hours rather than seconds: Lisa’s mouth dropping wide, her head shaking no, fingers searching for something to grip. Chris doubles over at the word—laxatives—as though he will blow right here and now. Rachel’s eyes go to moons. And Abel, looking at no one, making that coin appear and vanish, appear and vanish. He rests his cast on the edge of Charlie’s desk, thumping it hard against the wood. Trying, Lisa thinks, to drown Chris’s wailing. Asking them all without saying it, What about me?
“I wanna know what you’re gonna do about this, Charlie,” Royce says. “My boy needs satisfaction.”
“What your boy needs is a roll of toilet paper and some privacy. I’ll not have you telling me my job, Royce. Abel, you got something to say to Chris.”
Somehow Lisa finds the presence of mind to do what she must. She forces her foot through the thick office air and finds that air not thick at all. The slow-motion world drowned in clear molasses must exist in her mind alone, because her kick propels Abel’s chair into Chris’s. Abel flinches and squeaks a “Sorry.”
Charlie raps the desk with two fat fingers. “Royce, you get Chris on home. He’ll be fine by morning and probably five pounds lighter. You want, get him over to Doc March. He’ll tell you the same. Dumb Willie’s already disposed of the underwear. I’m afraid it didn’t survive the ordeal.”
Royce says, “What? Charlie, this ain’t—” then stops at the sudden dawning of some hazy truth. He folds his arms across his wide chest, covered in sawdust from a morning’s work felling trees. “I see how it is. My son gets laid upon, but the cripple gets off. You’ll fawn over the little bastard boy.”
Now the slow turn of time gives way, bringing everything to happen at once. Lisa shoots from her place a hairsbreadth after Abel does the same, pushing him back into the chair just as Charlie tries to corral her, his purpose being clear: Charlie Rexrode seeks not to protect Lisa from Royce, but Royce from Lisa and Abel. Royce snatches his boy up too fast. Rachel backs away as Chris’s insides rumble. The sound of him breaking wind reminds them all that they are in the presence of live ordnance.
“Get. Him. Out,” Charlie says.
Royce turns his boy by the shoulders as Rachel moves to open the door. Chris’s face has gone from the yellow of the sun to the white of the walls. He walks with a ginger step that would draw his own mockery would he witness it in Abel. For this split second, Lisa allows herself the belief that Chris Jones has received what he deserved. Chris bends low as he crosses past Abel, as though gripped by another spasm. Lisa watches as he whispers into Abel’s ear. She wants to say something, demand Chris repeat what he just said, but her eyes are fixed upon her son as Royce retreats into the hall. Abel sits broken and defeated in his rage. It’s as if all light in him has gone silent now, blown cold and dark.
*
Charlie exhales once the Jones boys are gone and says, “I’m sorry about all this, Lisa. I am. Please, y’all sit back down here.”
Lisa’s hands are clenched at her sides, her posture rigid. She sits and produces a pack of cigarettes from her purse. Charlie opens his mouth and shuts it at her glare.
“Momma,” Abel says. “I—”
“Nope. Not right now, Abel. You’ll have plenty of time to talk to me later. Right now I’m going to have a conversation with Charlie, and you can just sit here and be quiet. You can listen while we talk honest. We’re going to talk honest, aren’t we, Principal Rexrode?”
Charlie leans back in his chair. The corners of his mouth curl into something of a smile. “Honesty ain’t a virtue bandied about much around here, Lisa. Especially from that side of my desk. But sure, let’s be honest. Off the record. Last day and all.”
He opens another desk drawer, this time with a key hooked to a chain in his pocket. The empty box Abel brought from home is whisked aside. In its place appear a bottle of whiskey and a single glass.
“Shouldn’t be doing this,” the principal says. “With y’all here, I mean. But then, you’re sitting here in abeyance of the law by sucking on that cancer stick, so I figure I can at least do this. You could say it’s a tradition of mine, one I’ve come to take a shine to. This bottle sits in my drawer a hundred seventy-nine days a year. I never touch it. Not once, Lisa, and you got my word. But come that hundred and eightieth day, after the last bell rings and all them kids scamper out for three months?” He shakes his head and pours. Half of the glass disappears in a swallow. Principal Rexrode shivers like he’s come in from being in the cold a long while. “Christ A’mighty, this job’s killin’ me slow.”
Lisa rubs her eyes. “Charlie.”
“Apologies.” He holds out the glass. “You want some?”
“No, thank you.” But she does. “It’s just lunchtime still, what’s left of it, and . . .”
Principal Rexrode glances at the clock above the door. His eyes squint and then bulge. “Shoot, Lisa, I’m sorry. I know you got to get back.” He turns the glass up again, winces, then smiles. “I don’t care you did it, Abel.”
Abel blinks, as does she. Lisa would blame the alcohol for what Charlie said, but she knows from experience it takes time for drink to go from the mouth to the stomach and then all the way up into the head. Sometimes it takes near half an hour before Lisa lets slip things she doesn’t mean. Or things she means but wouldn’t otherwise say.
She talks low and slow: “What you mean, Charlie?”
“Just what I say. Off the record, of course. Me being honest. On the record, I’d tell you Abel near sent a classmate to the hospital today—I don’t know, get his stomach pumped or something. Even though I reckon Chris’s stomach’s ’bout near empty as it can get now.”
He snorts—the whiskey, Lisa knows. Now Principal Rexrode goes quiet and still, staring into that glass like he’s thinking to himself. Almost in a whisper, he says, “Don’t y’all look at me that way. I’m a tired man, Lisa. Come to this job thirty-five years ago, thinking it was my time to do some right in the world. Most the people in this town come through me. All their kids. I done my best with all of them, including you, Abel. Good kids, mostly. You get the usual stuff thrown in, ’course. Fights on the playground and taking peeks off each other’s tests. Talking back to the teacher. Get all these kids’ parents thrown in too—mommas and daddies and step-thisses and step-thats, grandparents near the end of their days having to raise up their kids’ kids instead a walking down some beach in Florida, enjoying their golden years. Awful. Seems like every year gets worse. Like they ain’t got no center, you know? No foundation. Nothing kids can cling to when the world goes bad.”
Lisa can’t seem to line up the right words with her thoughts.
“Good kids,” Principal Rexrode says again. “Like I said. But then you get ones you know been spoilt the minute they walk in here. Not spoilt like they been given everything, but like whatever good they came out their mommas with is gone already. Torn-like, I mean. From the inside. And it don’t matter how much you try and stitch them back, it won’t hold. It’s like their pieces don’t
fit together no more. Chris Jones is one a them spoilt ones. Half the kids here are scared to death to be caught in the same part of school as him, Lisa, much less the same grade. Much less the same class. He’s the guy you’ll see on the six o’clock news in a few years, getting caught for something that’ll make people like you and me shake in our boots and wonder when the Lord’s coming back.” He pauses, swallows again. “Off the record.”
Abel scrunches his eyebrows, which look like two thin strands of hair taped to his wide forehead. When he speaks, it’s as though the only conclusion he can reach is one he has neither planned for nor considered. “You mean I ain’t in no trouble?”
“I know what that boy’s put you through. Ask me, it’s high time somebody gave Chris a taste of his own medicine. ’Sides, it’s the last day of school. You’ll be moving on, Abel. Won’t even be back here in the fall.”
Lisa, who has gone from angered to screaming to silent in a span no longer than it would take to clear one more table and pocket one more dollar, can only let her Marlboro Red smolder in her hand. Half of her is trying to decide if Charlie means what he says and there will be no trouble. The other half is beholding the offended look that has grown back on Abel’s face.
“But I done wrong,” Abel says.
Charlie looks at the tiny yellow cast. “Known you six years now, Abel. Seen you in all your pain and discomfort. I’ve lifted you up in prayer even though I know your momma’d skin me for it. I know your grades slipped this semester. Maybe Chris had something to do with that, maybe it’s something else. But we’re being honest here, Lisa?” He waits for her nod, which arrives after a long pause. “Well, if I’m honest I’ll say punishment does no good here. It’s grace Abel needs, and grace is what I’m bound to give. All things considered, son, you been punished enough.”
“But you gotta.”
“Maybe, if it were any other time. But my conscience forbids it just now. I’ll give you a little advice, though. Don’t let people like Chris get to you, Abel. You’re a good boy, a smart boy. And you’re—”
