B009XDDVN8 EBOK (9 page)

T
HEY SAY
D
EREK
Grubbins k-killed a man,” said Ben, when I still was only ten and my life had not yet developed its malignant complications. The Derek Grubbins of whom Ben spoke with quiet awe was Tony Grubbins’s mysterious older brother.

“Only one?” said Augie.

“At least one,” said Ben. “Maybe five. But this one he killed by sticking a fork in the guy’s neck. Blood spurted out in f-four different directions.”

“That sounds like the pork roast my mom made last week,” said Augie.

Augie, Ben, and I were sprawled on the front steps of my house, idly flipping baseball cards but really just passing time so we wouldn’t miss the show. And it promised to be a doozy.

This was only a few months into my new life and already I was looking like a full-fledged Pitchford brat: plaid shorts and white T-shirt and high-top Keds bought at the Sears on Easton Road, my hair buzzed quick and neat at Fred’s Barbershop, right next to Milt’s Five-and-Dime. If you had walked down Henrietta Road you wouldn’t have been able to pick me out of the crowd slapping wildly at the puck. The country-club kid had morphed, on the outside at least. But even though I now lived in Pitchford, and looked like I lived in Pitchford, I still didn’t belong in Pitchford.

I was a spy behind enemy lines, watching everything I said and did, so as not to be caught out for what I really was.

And what was I, really? An outsider, thank God. It was the one thing that made everything else bearable, which was good, because it was looking more and more like we were here for the long haul.

My mother had roused herself to take a refresher typing course and then find a secretarial job at some machine shop in Horsham. She was drinking less and cooking better—she couldn’t have been cooking any worse—and with her new salary our family life had lost its sense of abject doom. My mother was settling into our rental house, settling into her job, settling into the couch in front of the television at night with her glass of comfort, settling into the pale un-Willing leftover her life was becoming. As for me, I was hanging out with Augie and Ben.

I don’t quite know how we became a gang of three, but in the weeks that followed my sad entrance into Pitchford, as I kept my distance from the rest of the neighborhood, first Augie started keeping me company, and then Ben joined in. I suppose each of us was an outsider in his own way and that was what drew us together. I was a filet-mignon boy in an olive-loaf suburb, Ben was the big black kid in a mostly white neighborhood, and Augie was just your average kicked-out-of-Catholic-school troublemaker. If you wanted to smoke, Augie would sell you the cigarettes he stole from his mom. If you wanted to stare slack-jawed at naked women—and, really, who didn’t?—Augie would sell you time with the
Playboys
he slipped from his father’s workbench in the garage. Later he would graduate to selling concert tickets and pornographic videos and drugs, yeah, but even in those early days he was the supplier of our darkest dreams and as such was always on the periphery. We were, all three of us, on the periphery. All we had was each other.

“They say Derek Grubbins buried two b-bodies in the crawl space of his house,” said Ben as he flipped another card and placed it on the pile.

“Only two?” said Augie.

“One was his older brother. One day he was hanging around, then there was a f-fight, and the next day he was gone.”

“Didn’t he join the army?” I said as I flipped a card.

“They said he joined the army,” said Augie. “But have you ever seen him hanging around in his uniform?”

“No,” I said.

“There you go, bub,” said Augie, turning over a card of his own.

“What about the other body?” I said.

“No one knows who the other one is,” said Ben, “but every night Derek goes down to the crawl space and spits on the graves.”

Augie hacked up a loogie and spat it onto the scraggly lawn next to the steps.

“Funny,” I said.

Tony Grubbins’s mother had died years ago and his father had been killed in a construction accident just the year before, when a steel beam shifted unexpectedly at a job site, smashing flat his chest. The accident had left Tony in the care of his older brother, Derek, who had moved back into the Grubbins house to take care of his sibling. Derek, a member of the notorious Devil Rams Motorcycle Club, was a bearded madman who roared onto and off of Henrietta Road on his chopped-up Harley, scaring little squirrels and potbellied war vets at the same time. And each afternoon, right about that time, as he barreled home from work, he inspected his lawn before parking in the driveway and stomping up the cement stairs to his front door.

“And the things I heard about them D-Devil Rams,” said Ben. He flipped a card and took the entire pile with a bright smile. “Evil things.”

“Like what?” I said.

“Like how if you just look at one of them wrong they tie you in chains and drag you on the street behind their b-bikes until your skin peels off.”

“Ouch,” said Augie.

“How d-do you think you’ll look, J.J., without any skin?”

“Lay off him, you pantywaist,” said Augie. “J.J. took a stand. He’s not going to let himself get pushed around for the rest of his life. Right, bub?”

“Right,” I said.

“He’s standing up for himself, just like I told him to.”

“That’s the mistake right there,” said Ben, shaking his head. “Never listen to Augie. He’s what my mom calls an instigator. You should have forgotten all about it. It can’t end good.”

“Maybe not,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach, knowing he was right, “but you didn’t get a football thrown in your face.”

This whole thing started in a chaotic netherworld of violence and mayhem, where all civil rules are suspended and the law of the jungle is the law of the land. I’m talking now of grade-school recess. At Pitchford Elementary, recess was a madhouse. Kids played snap the rope, when the only thing snapping was bones. Kids played six inches, pounding each other relentlessly on the shoulder until tears flowed. Kickball was a sadist’s dream, where any advance from base to base invited a big red welt on the jaw. And football was always tackle and always merciless.

Unused to such savagery at my private school, I determined early on to avoid it all. While pandemonium broke out about me, fights and chases, squeals of pain, I sat on the swing, hoping to be ignored until the bell rang and I could retreat to the relative safety of the classroom. And that’s exactly where I was, on the swing, minding my own damn business, when I looked up and saw a football whizzing through the air, coming right at me.

I decided to duck, but before my mind could send the message to my body the ball hit me smack in the face.

Knocked too senseless to actually cry, I simply fell backward off the swing. The earth spun like a top, my cheek felt like I had been stung by a swarm of wasps, a sob of bitter indignation rose up my throat. And then I saw Tony Grubbins standing over
me, grinning down as he spun in his hand the football he had retrieved from the ground. Behind him, in his usual position, was the skinny kid with the round glasses, the pilot fish, Richie Diffendale.

“I told you to keep your dog off my lawn,” said Tony Grubbins.

“He told you, Frenchy,” said Richie Diffendale.

“My brother saw a little pile of your crap,” said Tony, “and almost put my head through a wall.”

“How do you know it was my dog?” I said, my voice thin with whine.

“A little pile of French dog crap, that’s what it was. You’re the only weenie with a dog that small. And Richie said he saw your rat nosing our lawn.”

“And I did, too,” said Richie.

“Your dog does it again, it will be more than a football in your face, Frenchy. You’ll catch my fist and you’ll be missing teeth.”

I waited until he strode back to the game, with Richie Diffendale following, looking back every other step and sneering at me, before I climbed slowly to my feet. I was still rubbing my cheek, fighting the tears, when Augie sidled up to me.

“I warned you not to let your dog near his lawn, bub,” said Augie.

“How is everyone so sure it was my dog?”

“Are you saying it wasn’t?”

“No.”

“You look like a chipmunk with half a case of the mumps. You learn your lesson yet?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Atta boy.”

This wasn’t only the second time I had been humiliated by Tony Grubbins. He had begun to take an especial interest in me in our street games, checking me hard into parked cars at every opportunity, throwing the pimple ball at my head in stickball, touching me into a broken heap in two-hand touch. Now, Tony
was indeed a brutal bully, and I wasn’t the only kid to feel his wrath, but I suspected even then that his special distaste for me might have been well earned. He sensed all along the way I felt about him, and his friends, and his neighborhood, the way I felt slyly superior, yes, like a Frenchman. I was prideful and arrogant, I thought I was better than Pitchford, and in truth, if I were in his place I would have checked me extra hard into a parked Buick, too. But even so, for me Tony Grubbins had become an emblem of all the indignities imposed upon me by my new home.

Which was why I had led my dog to purposely crap on his lawn at every opportunity. And why three days after the football met my face I spent the day picking through the neighborhood with a bag and a small plastic sand shovel, following any dog I saw roaming around, leashed or not. I needed a pile large enough, and with pieces thick enough, that there could be no thought it came from my little Rex. I found a nice-sized pile, shoveled it into the bag, and kept looking. Later, in a quiet moment when Tony Grubbins was inside and Ben and Augie played lookouts on either end of street, I emptied the bag smack on the Grubbins lawn.

Holy Peter, it was perfect. It looked like a brontosaurus had made its way onto Henrietta Road.

“They say one guy who overheard something the Devil Rams didn’t want him to overhear,” said Ben on my steps, “they c-cut off his ears and sewed them onto his ass.”

“Whenever he sits down,” said Augie, “he goes deaf.”

“What’s that you say?” said Ben in his famous old-man’s voice. “What? What?”

“Stop it,” I said as the other two giggled. I tossed a baseball card onto the step to start a new pile. “Let’s play.”

“You’ll be sorry,” said Ben. “Yes you will.”

And I didn’t doubt it. But the son of a bitch had thrown a football at my face. I wasn’t going to sit back and take it. I was still at that age where consequences more serious than a schoolyard
tussle were not within my consciousness. I figured maybe I’d end up with a bloody lip, a swollen ear, maybe I’d lose a baby tooth a few months early. I never thought the whole thing could spiral so far out of my control it would endanger everything I ever loved. Though, to be perfectly honest, I was the kind of kid that would have done it anyway.

“Here he comes,” said Augie.

I cocked my head and heard nothing, nothing, until the clamor of a motorcycle engine in the distance squeezed at my bowels. “Maybe we should go inside and look out the window,” I said.

“Maybe we should all j-just go home,” said Ben.

“Maybe you girls should change your diapers,” said Augie. He tossed a card on top of mine. “He won’t even notice us.”

The sound of the engine grew louder, the individual piston-churning explosions came closer. Until he appeared, at the very end of the street: Derek Grubbins, helmetless on his Harley. Broad shoulders, brown beard, biceps bulging from his T-shirt, tattoos shining as he roared down Henrietta Road.

He cruised toward his lawn and then right past the pile as if it didn’t exist. He pulled into the drive, killed the engine, yanked the bike back on its stand, stomped up the steps to the front of his house, banged the front door open before disappearing inside.

“Nothing,” said Augie. “A bit fat nothing.”

I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed. It was as if a roller coaster I had been dreading closed before I could hop on. “I can’t believe he missed it,” I said.

“His eyes must be failing,” said Augie, “considering that the pile is as big as his head.”

“And it l-looks like him, too,” said Ben.

“Now what?”

“Now we go home,” said Ben.

“What about finishing our flip?” said Augie, gesturing to the baseball cards between us.

“Okay,” said Ben, settling down to finish flipping when—

Bam.

The front door of the Grubbins house blew open and Tony Grubbins flew out headfirst, landing splayed on the lawn. Derek Grubbins strode out after his brother. When Tony tried to scramble to his feet, Derek cuffed Tony hard enough to knock him to the ground again.

“Pick it up now,” said Derek.

“I don’t have a bag,” said Tony.

“I don’t give a fuck,” said Derek. “I told you to keep the damn lawn clean.”

“It’s not my—”

Before Tony could finish, Derek kicked Tony in the ribs, hard enough to send his brother spinning, and then stormed back into the house, slamming the door behind him, leaving Tony Grubbins on the grass, clutching at his side as if shards of bone were poking through the flesh.