by Rich Balling
On the sidewalk the fight was over. The victim lay in a heap. One of his attackers reached down and grabbed him by the hair, forcing him to look skyward. He barked a few last words right into his swollen face and then spit directly into it, before letting the poor bastard drop back down to the pavement.
Satisfied, the gang turned and walked away, laughing and tapping knuckles.
The kid rolled onto his back, brought his palms to his eyes as if just waking. There was nothing Nick could see to separate him from his attackers. He looked like every other young man born and bred in that corner of the city. Sometimes it was hard to tell if they were actually teenagers who looked as hard and weathered as the thirty-year-olds or if they were thirty-year-olds who still dressed like teenagers.
Slowly he made his way to his feet, wiping his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt and spitting mouthfuls of black onto the sidewalk. He didn’t seem all that devastated or shaken by what he’d just been through, even waving off the help of a passerby, as if it had all just been a normal part of his day.
Nick watched as he walked out of view and was then forced to sit and ponder, not for the first time, the one ingredient that could make life in an otherwise decent little neighborhood so trying. Those roaming packs of bored teenagers, clogging storefronts and street corners, the threat of violence, forever simmering, just beneath their surface. Nick had been living among them in a tiny basement apartment since he was a sophomore and, in the three years since, had witnessed his share of savage behavior.
One night on the Avenue, he passed a boy being loaded into an ambulance. He’d been stabbed in the stomach with a screwdriver. His girlfriend was crying on the curb, screaming to the police that he hadn’t done anything. Another night he came out of a convenience store just as a gang of them was walking by. One of them, carrying a large, Styrofoam cup, stopped, turned, and then spit a mouthful of whatever was in the cup right into the face of a man who was merely standing on the corner, talking on his cell phone. Completely shocked, the man stood helpless, cell phone by his side, face dripping, and watched as the gang continued down the street, as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. There was the morning he woke up to find the passenger side windows of his and every other car on the block smashed to pieces. Nothing had been stolen and everyone knew who did it, it was simply them, vast and vague enough for no one to do anything about it.
Or the eeriest night of all: while driving home late from the school library, the Avenue was quiet and deserted, except for four shadowy figures sitting against the front entrance of a liquor store, blasting a boom box. Nick had to do a double take to believe his eyes. There were no faces. All four of them appeared to be wearing gas masks.
Some nights he would lie awake. He could feel them out there, running around unchecked, un-judged. On the other side of his room sat a white cardboard box filled with the adventures of Daredevil, Captain America, and Green Lantern, of men who were ready, at the drop of a hat, to do whatever it took to set things right.
Why not him?
Because he hadn’t hurt anyone in his life, because he came from upper-crust parents in a peaceful Massachusetts suburb. A scary night where Nick came from was when the police made you pour out your beer and sent you home. People hurt you by gossiping behind your back, by not inviting you to their parties. Nobody was out in the streets fighting for their lives.
But, God, did anything and everything feel possible to him at that moment, sitting there, picking at a salad that his stomach was too knotted to accept. It was a strange time for Nick, he’d been feeling off for months, restless, right on the ledge, looking down.
Very suddenly, every second that ticked by seemed to hold in its grasp the lure and the promise that he could be more than just some quiet, overachieving medical student. Somewhere deep within him a dark-hearted beast was slowly stirring awake.
When he had sat to eat that evening he had no idea what to do with his summer, he had three wide-open months stretched out before him, the longest block of completely free time he’d had in forever. No summer courses, no tutoring job, no track practice, and no girlfriend. It had been nearly a year since Kathryn had broken up with him, although sometimes it still hurt like it was only a week ago. No one was waiting for him, nothing was expected of him and for the past week he’d been haunted by the feeling that this may the very last time his slate would ever be this clean, and he had no idea what to do with it.
“Take a drive cross-country,” Dr. Beacon, his anatomy professor, had suggested a few days earlier, when Nick stayed late to help clean up after a lab. “Every young man should see this country through a bug-stained windshield.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Nick replied. “I just feel like there’s gotta be some kinda excitement for me out there. I know that the next four years of school are gonna go by just as fast as the first four, and before I know it I’m gonna turn around and be this thirty-year-old guy who never really had any idea how crazy or … or epic, life can be.”
“That’s hogwash,” Beacon waved. “It’s never too late to stir the pot up a bit. A few years ago when the missus and I were feeling restless and uninspired, you know what we did? We took a skydiving course! Now you wanna talk about shaking up the regularness of life, try looking at the world from thirty thousand feet.”
Still, Nick couldn’t help but think there had to be an even more dynamic way to lay to rest a youth that, to this point, had almost entirely consisted of preparing to be a man, a doctor, just like his father.
Anything would be better than sitting around his humid apartment, reading comic books and making obsessive trips to his computer to check for e-mails from her. Signing onto instant messenger to see if she was also logged on. Too stubborn or wounded to start a conversation, he would simply stare at her name on his buddy list, Koalakid84, and wonder how she could really not have anything left to say to him. Tortured by the thoughts of who she must be talking to instead.
Maybe it was time to deal with himself, with the city he called home, with the neighborhood that confused him and all of the little troublemakers who kept him up at night. No more running off to sunny Santa Barbara the moment he had a few free days from school, like he’d been doing since the weekend when he and Kathryn went from living three minutes from each other to over three thousand miles.
She had been weaving her vines around his heart since they rode the bus together to grade school. They played in the same soccer league, rode their bikes together to the library on weekends, wrote letters to each other from their respective summer camps, and stood side by side through the death of pets and grandparents. At twelve they shared their first kiss, exchanged plastic engagement rings at thirteen, and by high school you couldn’t say one of their names without the other.
So, when they found themselves heading off to opposite coasts for college there really wasn’t even a question of, “how will we make this work?” Nick simply guaranteed that they would. Whatever it was going to take to get them through the years apart he would do.
For the first year it felt like he was on a plane or in her dorm room more than he was in his own. They met back up in Massachusetts for all of the major holidays and once he got his own place she even made a few visits to Baltimore. The plan had always been that when she graduated from Antioch she would come to stay with him in Baltimore while he finished his MD.
Even when they couldn’t be together he fought to give her all the attention his day would allow with e-mails and three-hour-long IM conversations. For the first two years, every day they weren’t together, they called each other to say goodnight. Throughout the day his cell phone was constantly vibrating in his pocket with text messages.
Hey cutie I just touched a starfish!!
Can you believe they don’t have Count Chocula in this grocery store?
Holy mother of Christ this professor will put u to sleep … just wanna be back on yr dad’s big comfy wraparound watching a movie … not watching a movie xox
Even
when she decided, last year, that she would stay in California beyond graduation, take some courses at UCLA, it didn’t occur to Nick that she could be slipping through his fingers. It wasn’t until his final visit, last August, that it became clear things had changed. They hadn’t seen each other since the Fourth of July, yet the entire week was strained. She seemed distracted, cold, and short with him far more than usual. She kept mentioning friends he had never heard of before, Tom said this, Danny and Alex did that. Her face constantly buried in that cell phone of hers, sending and receiving text messages that made her grin far more than he was able to make her. The day before he had to leave he sat her down to ask what was going on. She told him she was stressed over the upcoming semester and had friends out there who were going through the same thing. That night he fell asleep on her couch while she talked on the phone in her room. She never came out to get him.
At the airport the next morning, he looked and could see that she had really bloomed. His smiling, high school sweetheart from all the pictures in all the scrapbooks was no more. The way she talked was different, her clothes were smaller, more stylish. That once quiet, understated beauty had given way to something staggering. The California sun had gently tanned her face, sent streaks of gold through her hair. Her green eyes had never shined so electric.
A week later she ended it in an e-mail. Claimed that the distance had become too great for her to bear. That she wasn’t ready to be some doctor’s wife. That he would find somebody better. In the month that followed, the miles between them grew wider than any map could show. His every instinct screamed for him to fight harder, to fly to Santa Barbara and fall to his knees, but somehow he knew in his head and what remained of his heart that it would do no good.
He tried to stay in touch but his messages fell flat. Tearstreaked voice mails went unanswered for days, weeks. While he was home at Christmas, she stopped by to drop off a wine basket for his parents and a leather wallet for him. Standing there, forcing awkward conversation, he realized it had been three months since he’d heard her voice at all.
There would be no lying on a Santa Barbara beach this summer, smiling about what their house would be like, what color the kid’s room would be.
The girl he loved was gone.
With nothing left to do and no shoulder to cry on, he threw himself into his school work; impressed every professor he came across, found himself published in one of the more prestigious medical journals, was offered the residency of his choice, and little by little his knuckles healed. But in the end he knew he was just going through the motions, doing well because he didn’t know how not to do well. None of it meant anything without her. His every road, no matter how well paved or brightly lit, seemed to lead right to the same dead end.
Back out on the Avenue the shadows were growing longer, the sun sinking below the tree line. Nick hadn’t taken a bite of food in over an hour. He was a hawk perched on a wire, watching the after-work race of humans darting in and out of banks, restaurants, and liquor stores, everyone in a rush to get somewhere, anywhere but where they were. Among them a large crew of teenagers was ambling its way down the other side of the street, led by two menacing pit bulls on thick chain leashes. The gang stopped to talk with a couple of trashy, teenage girls pushing a baby stroller. Nick recognized one of the boys from the fight earlier; he had been right there in the mix, stomping his Timberlands down mercilessly.
Now he was just standing right out in the open, like he was untouchable, cigar sticking out of the side of his cocked baseball hat, laughing openly, as if he had already forgotten about the whole ordeal. Nick didn’t know where the crew would go that night or what kind of trouble they would cause, but the thought of them being able to go home afterward and sleep with big, safe, smiles on their faces, began to tear him apart inside. Nobody was watching them and they knew it. There was no balance of power and, in a flash, it suddenly became ferociously clear exactly what Nick needed to do with his summer.
What he needed to be.
Could he do it? Did it even make sense? Would he really wear some kind of costume … carry a gun? Creep around in the shadows waiting for something to happen … begging for something to happen? What would he call himself? The Fear? Chief Justice? The Crusader?
Was he crazy?
Or had his whole life been leading to that night, sitting there staring out a restaurant window, all of the puzzle pieces clicking together.
He could pull it off; he’d excelled at everything he’d ever set his mind to.
Well everything but one. There would always be the one wild card that was Kathryn, forever blemishing a mantel, back in Massachusetts, that was bursting with trophies, medals, and accolades. If his father had instilled anything in him it was that whatever was worth doing was worth doing right. And if he were going to do this thing, it would be with the same focus and intensity that he brought to all of his endeavors. If he couldn’t be stronger he would be smarter, if not faster then he would be more frightening than anything they had ever known.
Whatever he could possibly need was right there on the Internet, a virtual Batcave, sitting on the desk in his bedroom, filled with weapons, gadgets, and crime reports, 1,001 ways to kill a man, just a click away.
It wouldn’t be like it was in the comic books and he knew it. He wasn’t one of those strange guys up at the comic shop on weekends, discussing the physics of Wolverine’s claws. There would be no bursting through the window in the nick of time, no clever remarks in speech bubbles but, then again, these weren’t exactly super villains he was dealing with. They were some of the softest Baltimore had to offer, bored bullies and petty dealers, upset because they didn’t live in the hell that existed on the other side of town, or in their beloved rap videos, so they tried, with all their might, to create one for themselves.
There was no rationalizing with kids like that, threats won’t do and you can’t throw a sixteen-year-old in jail. There was only one way to get through to them.
It was all spelled out, right there in bloodstains on the sidewalk.
You needed to stomp the evil from their very souls, had to keep them in a constant state of panic.
It would mean yanking some young punk into an alley, placing a pistol right to his forehead.
“This is just a warning.”
Close enough to smell the stale cigarettes on his breath.
“You tell your boys that I am watching.”
Tiny marble beads forming on a bottom lip.
“These streets do not belong to you.”
All of that tough guy bravado being sucked right from him, like a balloon, as he stands face-to-face with the masked avenger.
“The next time you see me you will not hear a word … do you understand?”
Eyes filled with that crystal-clear realization of being nowhere near ready to die, he slowly nods his head.
Then, once he was done with them and the streets were safe at last, he could move on to worse neighborhoods, to the projects on the other side of the park, to the places even the police didn’t want to go.
His heart was racing full speed now, a fire raging in his belly, melting the doubt.
The two girls and the gang went their separate ways, one of the girls flipping them off over her shoulder, the boys laughing and disappearing into the night.
The time was now, not later, not soon, but right now.
They were out there, searching for the next night to ruin. The whole city was holding its breath, waiting for him. No superpowers necessary. It was as simple as marching right down to the pawnshop before it closed. If they wouldn’t sell him a pistol, they would sell him a stun gun, if not a stun gun, then mace. He needed nothing more than a hoodie, a ski mask, and the will to do the unthinkable, not because he wanted to, but because no one else would.
His every nerve ending was alive and screaming as he rose, grabbed his things, and moved quickly to the register. A voice deep inside, begging his mind to stop spinning and be reasonable, to think it th
rough for just one more minute.
He could see the ambulance sirens, police cruisers blocking off the street. His father’s disappointment as he quietly shook his head.
His poor mother’s shrieking voice.
“He did what?! To who?!?! I knew it! Knew those goddamn Superman books were gonna lead to no good.”
Medical school, the future he had worked so hard for, spinning down the drain.
In line at the register, the music was too loud, his mouth bone dry. He could feel his pulse as clearly as if there were a blood pressure strap around his arm. There was no turning back. Get down to the pawnshop, see what they’ll sell him. Soon it would be late, the bars would close and the streets would grow quiet. The ones not out looking for trouble would be home in bed and those that were would be easy to find, out there in the alleys with the rats, on the corners with the serpents. It was like he could already feel the brass knuckles, cold and heavy in his hand. He would find the biggest one, the worst of the bunch, grab that motherfucker right by the throat and …
“Was everything all right?” It was his waitress, pulling him off the roller coaster in his mind
“Um, yeah … yes, fine thanks.”
“Sorry about that ruckus out there earlier.” She shook her head. “So stupid.”
