I took a deep breath.
“I remember him saying just that. The ignorant and the doomed. Then the principal said to me, ‘Hap. He picks on you again, you have my permission to pick up a stick and just whack the good ole horse hockey out of him. I catch you lying in wait for him again, or doing it because you can, then that’s different. That makes you just like him, a low-life bully. He had this one coming, but he’s only got it coming now if he starts it. But he picks on you, you give it to him back, and I won’t do a thing. I won’t say a word.’”
“There you have it,” Leonard said. “That’s the way we should have kept it. Self-defense is permissible.”
“A stick was a little much,” I said.
“Yeah, but these kids in school now, they’re being taught to accept being victims. Why there’s so many goddamn whiners, I think.”
“That right?”
“You don’t learn justice by taking it like the French. That’s not how it works. Someone doesn’t give you justice, you got to get your own.”
“Or get out of the way of the problem.”
“Alright, there’s that. But then the motherfucker just moves down the road a little, and picks a new victim.”
“I think you’re trying to justify what we do sometimes.”
“I don’t need to justify it. Here’s the thing, you get more shit from the meanies because the good folks don’t stand up, don’t know how, and don’t learn how. And they’re taught to just take it these days, and do it with a smile. Principal then, he knew what was up. You have any more trouble from the bully after that?”
“Not an inch worth,” I said. “We became friends later, well, friendly enough. I think in his case it cured him across the board.”
“So he didn’t pick someone else to whip on?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen that way. I think he wasn’t really a bad guy, just needed some adjustment, and I gave it to him. I think he had problems at home.”
“Fuck him and his home,” Leonard said. “Everyone now, they don’t have an idea what’s just, what’s right, because they punish everyone the same. Ones that did it, and ones that didn’t. I can see that if no one knows what went down, but now, even when they know who the culprit is, one who started it, it comes out the same for both. The good and the bad.”
“Could have gone really bad. I could have killed that kid with that stick.”
“That would have been too much, I guess,” Leonard said.
“You guess?”
“Alright, maybe too much, but there’s still something to learn there, still something your dad taught you that matters and has guided you ever since. Don’t treat the just and righteous the same as the bad and the willfully evil, or you breed a tribe of victims and a tribe of evil bastards. Learning to be a coward is the same as learning to be brave. It takes practice. And that, my good brother, is the parable of the stick.”
2.
Tire Fire
We went to the dojo where we trained and had a session in self-defense with the Shen Chuan instructor, and when that was over we had some free mat time. We sparred and did ground work and practiced throws until we were exhausted. We sat down on the mat with our backs against the wall, sweating and breathing hard. Everyone else had gone home, and since we had keys, we just sat there with the lights out and talked.
“Neither of us ever cross the line,” Leonard said.
“I beg your pardon?” I said. “I think we have crossed a few lines.”
“I mean in here, anywhere we train. We spar, and we go at it pretty hard, but we always hold back.”
“We should. Someone might lose an eye.”
“I mean we don’t quite take the big step.”
“That’s because I don’t hate you, Leonard. And, of course, I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.”
“It’s like that, is it?”
“Pretty much . . . No, it’s exactly like that.”
“We could find out whose best, you know,” Leonard said.
“There was that one time,” I said.
“That was almost the real thing. I mean it hurt, and we came close to some damage, but we stalled most of it.”
“I don’t remember that much stalling,” I said. “I thought you might be trying to prove something to yourself.”
“Haven’t you wondered which of us is the best?”
“Nope.”
“Liar.”
“I’ll be honest,” I said. “I don’t want to find out.”
“You got a point there,” Leonard said.
“We might not like how we feel about one another afterwards.”
“And your point sharpens.”
“And, again, I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.”
“Oh, you are an asshole,” Leonard said.
“You know, I will say this, first time I saw you, at that tire fire fight, I thought you were better than me then.”
“Then and now,” Leonard said.
“You’re not going to give that up, are you? I’ve gotten a lot better.”
“Yeah, but you’re lazy. I train harder.”
“Probably,” I said. “That night, I think you might could have whipped anyone in the world, and I include one of my heroes, Muhammad Ali.”
“Greatest fucking boxer that ever lived.”
“But he was a boxer. We cheat a lot more. Boxing, maybe he does get you, but the whole enchilada, not so much.”
“Kick, bite, head-butt, lock, throw, do ground work, and pick up a stick if it’s available,” Leonard said.
“What I’m saying.”
“It was a hell of a night.”
“You know that’s right.”
It was a night hunt, and I was sick of the whole thing already. I didn’t want to shoot any coons or possums, or much of anything. I was ready to get home and shower and pick the ticks off my balls. Sure, coon can be eaten, and I knew families who did, mostly black families, but I didn’t want none of it, and unlike my uncle, I didn’t sell the skins.
A lot of people ate possum, our family included, if there was nothing else. To me it tasted like greasy pork, and the best way to eat possum was catch it and put it up and feed it some corn for a week or two, and then kill and eat it. But I didn’t like to do that anymore, on account of I got attached to the damn things. I was still sick over the hogs we had butchered. I had got to know them. There was a thing Winston Churchill said in a book I read, about how dogs looked up to you, cats down on you, but hogs treated you as equals. This was true, and on that account I was through butchering hogs myself, and from then on my parents, to placate me, bought our pork chops and bacon wrapped in cellophane and found in the freezer section at the store. I preferred being a hypocrite, eating meat someone else killed.
It was finding an animal in a trap that was still alive, seeing my uncle dispatch it with a shotgun butt, that had put me off the idea of trapping and hunting, that and me shooting a bird for no good reason other than to see it fall, and finding it lying on the ground, its beak open, trying desperately to draw in air, its eyes glazing over like a sugar donut. It got to me. One dead bird and thousands of bird songs unsung for no goddamn good reason other than I wanted to see a bird fall.
So there we were out in the woods at night, and I was thinking this was my last hunt, though it wouldn’t be, but it would be for a long while. There was a can of Wolf Brand Chili at home, and that was good enough for me. Me and Roger had been hunting and fishing together for years, and on this night we had gone into the woods to spotlight critters, shoot them out of trees, bag them and take them home to be dressed and cooked, but as I said, I knew that night I had completely lost my interest in hunting unless I was actually hungry. Girls were far more interesting. Some of the boys called chasing girls hunting squirrel, which came from the idea that their pubic hair was a pelt. It wasn’t exactly forward thinking, but there you have it. Everything in East Texas was compared to hunting.
Our trek had brought us down by th
e riverside, using our head band lights to travel by. Down close to the river I could smell fish, and then a smell that took me a moment to figure out. It was burning rubber.
We could see the fire after a moment, and it was pretty big. There was an old abandoned, tumbling-down sawmill on the other side of the river where the fire was, and there was a clearing in front of the mill, and it wasn’t unusual for kids to drive down there to smoke dope, drink and screw, throw rocks in the water and fire off guns.
The fire was really big, and we could see the silhouettes of people cast off by the firelight. Two of the shadows were moving quickly, and the rest were still, forming what looked like a dark tree line, or the craggy shapes of a mountain. We could hear voices too, some of them yelling. As we neared, moving along the tree line on our side, the voices rose up and rolled over the river like a tide, and came to us in excited cries and yells. There was the sound of grunting, and a slapping sound, as if someone were beating a car seat from time to time with a belt.
Finally we could see the people making the shadows, but we couldn’t figure out who was who or what was what. We turned off our headlamps and took them off our heads, and from what I could tell it didn’t matter. No one had noticed us when our lights were on.
Roger said, “You want to go see what’s happening?”
I didn’t, but I was seventeen and didn’t want Roger to think my balls hadn’t dropped, so I said, “Yeah, let’s go see.”
We had to go down a pretty good distance before we came to the Swinging Bridge. It was a bridge that had been put across the river by some oil company so they could get down there and drill for oil. It had been built back in the thirties during the oil boom that had engulfed that region. Whole towns had been created by the oil boom overnight. The oil was pulled up and out, and then it was gone, and so was the bulk of the towns. Some survived, like Marvel Creek, made up of a handful of folks rich from the oil boom, and about three or four thousand others, oil field trash, whores, white trash, and poor blacks, a few you might call middle class.
Roger and I went over the bridge, but when we were about halfway over, Roger caught my arm, said, “I changed my mind. I don’t want to see what’s over there. I can see enough already. Lots of white boys down there, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m black.”
“Hard to miss that,” I said.
Where we were on the bridge it was dark, and there were trees that ran alongside the river, and where there was a gap in them. Through the gap we could see a heap of tires stacked on top of one another, all of them set ablaze, most likely by a nice coating of gasoline and a tossed match. In the light of the fire two young men were fighting. There were two other men lying on the ground. The others were standing or sitting on a rise above them, watching. There was no one along the river’s edge, and the firelight licked out and sent burnt orange light against the shoreline and fell into the water and wavered with its movement. The fighters’ shadows hopped about.
“It’s a money fight,” Roger said.
I knew about them. I had been told I ought to fight in them myself, as I was good with my hands and feet and the money was alright. You could also get bad hurt. Some of the folks involved were school kids, but the fighters came from all around, and could range from eighteen to thirty. It was said a young man from over Mineola had been killed somewhere out here, and that his body had been dumped in the river.
I don’t know if it was true or not, probably not, but it was a story that went around like the flu. I knew a lot of the kids in the group, and I knew one of the fighters, the white guy, Charlie. He was an asshole and a bully at school. We had words now and again, but hadn’t exchanged blows; it was close a few times. I knew I was tough, but he scared me a little. He carried a knife and had pulled it at school a couple times.
The young man he was fighting was black. Firelight flickered over his skin like a fevered tongue licking chocolate. He moved smooth and quick, up on his toes, his right side forward, his right hand flicking out and jabbing Charlie as fast as a hungry chicken pecking corn.
Roger said, “I ain’t going down there after all. There’s enough white boys down there to make a surfing movie, and them white girls being there too, they’re bound to show out, and they might show out on me. I can’t believe that nigger is down there. What the fuck?”
“He’s got balls, alright,” I said.
“What he ain’t got is brains,” Roger said. “I do. I don’t want to go down there.”
“I’m going over,” I said. “You got to go on, go. I won’t hold it against you.”
“Hap, them other boys, they don’t see things like you. They haven’t been listening to Dr. King on the TV. They ain’t never read Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
“That book’s a slow go, by the way,” I said. “But you know what, Roger?”
“What?’
“You got a rifle and I got a shotgun.”
“Nothing says they ain’t got cannons of their own.”
“I hear you,” I said. “Go on back you want. Wait for me up by the truck.”
“It’ll take me two hours or so to get back, and then I got to wait on you?”
“Then wait on the bridge for me.”
“Damn, Hap. I can’t let you go down there by yourself.”
“Yeah you can.”
“Shit, but I ain’t. Goddamn me.”
We crossed the bridge and went walking along the riverbank, toward the fighters, past where all their cars were parked. We came first to the two white guys, shirtless, laying out on the ground near the river unconscious. When the fire flicked just right I could see how badly their faces were bruised and cut up. The black fighter was still moving catlike, and Charlie was taking his beating like he was tied to a post. When Charlie moved at all, he dragged one leg behind him as if it was in a bucket full of concrete. If he’d ever had any spring in his step it was well sprung.
The black fighter was smiling, and I thought I could hear him laughing, a kind of deep gurgle that came up from his chest. When we got closer I saw that Charlie’s face looked as if someone had been to work on it with a razor. It was cut and bleeding all over.
“Call me a nigger again, you shit-cracker. Go on, call me one.”
Charlie wasn’t saying anything, and in fact, he seemed to have trouble breathing. But I had a good idea that the word “nigger” had left his mouth earlier during the fight. It had come out of Roger’s mouth too, but that was different. Roger owned it, but people like Charlie used it like a knife. It was like poor folks calling themselves white trash. It was alright for them to say it, but unless you wanted to wake up in a ditch with a fence post up your ass, might be best you didn’t call them that unless you were meaner or had a bigger gun.
Finally Charlie went down on one knee and held out a hand, palm forward.
The black fighter quit dancing, smiled with blood-coated teeth.
“Get up, peckerwood. I’m not through with you. Get up and let me knock some of those teeth down your throat. Come on, man. Call me nigger again.”
I saw then that Charlie’s buddy Kilgore, another of my least favorite people, was coming down the slight rise toward them, carrying an axe handle in his hand. Three other big boys came down from the crowd then, and a kind of cheer went up from the folks gathered there, as if lions had just been released into the arena. I heard Kilgore say, “I’m gonna sort you out, nigger.”
“Bring it,” said the black fighter. “And I hope you brought a sack lunch, motherfucker, ’cause you’re gonna be here all night.”
I checked the two guys knocked out and on the ground, to see how things with them were. Same as before. I hadn’t seen either of them move a muscle since I came up. For all I knew they were dead.
I walked over then, and the black fighter wheeled toward me, saw that I had a shotgun. There was only a moment of hesitation, and then he gave me a look like: Go on and shoot me, and watch the goddamn buckshot bounce off.
I yelled out to the boys coming down the hill
.
“This looked to be a fair fight to me. You fuckers ought to go on back up the hill and put your hands back up the dresses of the whores you came with.”
“Hey,” I heard one of the girls say.
I saw it was a girl I knew. I said, “Sorry. Juliet. I’m assuming you’re an independent.”
Kilgore said, “Hap Collins, you cocksucker. You taking up for a nigger?”
I said to the fighter, “You a nigger?”
“In some circles,” he said. “But I like to think of myself as well-tanned.”
“In the circles that count,” I said loud enough the crowd of about twenty could hear me, “this fellow thinks of himself as well-tanned.”
“Oh fuck you,” Kilgore said.
“Nigger lover,” someone in the group yelled down.
“Told you,” Roger said.
I walked around on the other side of the black fighter and looked up the rise at Kilgore, the crowd behind him, the old, tumbling-down saw mill behind all of them.
I said, “Why don’t you come down and see if you can spread my legs for that fucking.”
Kilgore didn’t move, and the others with him had sort of drifted off to the sides, like maybe they just realized they had left something in their cars that they badly needed.
“You’re a big man with a fucking shotgun,” Kilgore said.
“Yeah,” I said. “What if I let Roger here hold it, and then you and me step up to the plate and see who’s the best batter?”
“Nothing would please me more. I’d take great pleasure in that, Collins.”
“He’s pretty big,” the black fighter said, and grinned at me. I could see me and him were about the same age.
“He is, isn’t he?” I said.
“Yeah, he is,” Roger said.
“If I lose, Roger, you can shoot him with your rifle.”
“Oh, nice,” Roger said. “Be a nigger lynching come morning. If it takes that long.”
“Give me your shotgun,” said the black fighter. “I’ll hold it for you.”