Bare White Knuckles

Pat’s eyes were draped with purpling black bruises and his knuckles were swollen red. The skin was torn off the peaks of his knuckles, leaving hollow pussy scabs. All throughout that first day, I can remember Pat Gardener laughing in his casual hick way, “Hey-ho.” We all noticed, but no one asked him about how he got those black eyes.

That was the day when Pat ran to make the yellow bus at my bus stop for the first time. His ruddy face blotched up from running when he boarded. He laughed and said “Hey-ho” as he scooted past the bus driver and sat down next to me.

That was the day when yellow caution tape around a police cruiser parked by the gym entrance indicated a policeman had committed suicide in the early morning hours. We learned later that it was because the parents of a girl in our class found out they were sleeping together and threatened to press charges.

As a kid, it seemed odd that someone would throw their life away over a scandal. No matter what the consequences, there had to be a way through it. But, I would come to learn that there were a lot of things that could happen to someone where you don’t ever see your way through it—things like this made more sense as time went on.

Pat laughed as we were ushered inside. I would have never been exposed to his hick ways if it wasn’t for us having last names both starting with G. 

That was the same day the entire school was cleared back out to the yellow caution tape because of a bomb threat. We were always having bomb threats. I really don’t know what it was that made people do it—obviously, in this day and age you could get expelled if you were caught—but people really couldn’t stand homeroom, I guess.

The policeman’s body was gone when we came back outside as if it hadn’t been there soaked in blood only an hour before, what was left of the head cocked lifelessly to the side. The blood was still caked on the front windshield and the fog was still warm on and dissipating on the bloodied driver’s side window.  Even though he was gone, little spots of pink remained visible on the windshield like wads of chewed bubble gum.

Pat would tap a pencil on the desk or put it behind his ear, and leave his Geometry book open, face down on the little music stand he used as desk space in the band room where we had homeroom. Sometimes he would pick up sheet music and scribble on it so it would be impossible for whomever would be using it later to read and he’d make fun of the kids in the band. 

During homeroom, in halting conversations about rock bands and cheerleaders, Pat would make fun of the balding Hispanic boy in the corner. His name was Reno Savides. I laughed at the jokes even though it made me sick. Reno’s head had splotchy tufts and clumps which were rearranged with the seasons or were replaced by bandanas. We knew Reno was balding because of chemotherapy treatments for his leukemia. 

We were too loud with our early morning jabbering and Mr. Simon would walk over to stand by us with his retro tie-die t-shirt and long blonde hair and when we got quiet he’d say, “I hate this as much as you do, but just behave as long as we’ve got to be here.”

* * *

One day in September I was over Pat’s house, and we were sparring. It was what we did after school when we didn’t have practice and it was nice enough. Both of us had trained in the martial arts. We thought we were undertaking a spiritual quest by continuing our training, that the act of play fighting was cleansing. We romanticized the violence. Really, we just liked to fight. We stayed outside bare-chested on one of the last warm evenings of September and moved like mirror images for hours. 

Sweat formed into sticky candy under the plastic sparring gloves. There were moments when I hated him and wanted to see blood drip down those round bear cheeks, cutting off the cocky grin that would flatten and tense just before a foot landed in the soft tissue of my stomach. 

The sweat felt cool against my body, and the speed and exertion of the strikes and the grappling that ensued after each flurry of blows blurred out everything else, like a camera focusing in on a tight shot. But it was always the sweat that anchored me to the reality that this was somehow different than Mortal Kombat the video game.

The body blows left real bruises. The strikes to the face stung, whether giving or receiving. The possibility of irreversible injury—even death—was real.

The sounds of slapping skin, the whoosh of a fist cutting the air, an elbow joint cracking under the weight of a fully extended punch, the metallic taste in the mouth when some blood was loosed from the gums by a face shot, the heightened smell of the warm plastic gloves, the thud of blocks jarring the bone of the soft inner arm, and sharp screams, then slow riposte—the flatness returning—the interlude between strikes. 

That one elongated moment, however, was disrupted, as it always must be, by a too-swift, too-hard blow that put me on my back. I coughed and gasped, trying to suck some air into my burning solar plexus.

Looking up past his outstretched hand, all knuckles, I got a good look at Pat’s physical presence. From the vantage point of the ground, he appeared larger, his shoulders as wide as the saddle of a mountain pass and his arm as large as the branch of an old Oak tree. How could something so solid be so fragile, I thought.

The large GMC pick-up truck Pat’s father drove pulled onto the driveway. Pat’s father looked over at his son as soon as the red door closed, and he moved around the shining fender. “Pat, get inside, ay wanna talk to you ‘for suppa.”

Pat’s father was the largest trucker I’d ever seen. He wore jeans, a torn white V-neck t-shirt, a flannel jacket, and beneath his browning white and red Budweiser trucker cap, his red hair streaked out and draped his shoulders. His whiskey breath made it hard to stand near him as he spoke. 

I looked through the windows of the small kitchen as I left Pat’s to go home for dinner. Pat’s father was yelling at him, hands jabbing in accusatory juts by his face. Pat’s father pushed him against the kitchen cabinet. 

Pat hit the wood panels with a sharp clear clack before straightening up. He was cocooned in a fetal pose against the wall now, brown eyes averted toward the window where he could see me watching. His father tossed him back across the little room and he squealed like a dog whose foot had been stepped on inadvertently. 

I heard the crumple of Pat’s body against the linoleum floor next, and I saw the look in his father’s eyes, though I could no longer see Pat—he was gone out of frame. 

Pat stood up oafishly, regaining his footing. He threw weak deceptive stunt punches. He tried to defend himself by pushing his father’s shoulders and screaming shrilly, “Don’t, stop s-t-uh.” His arms moved fast.

But every boy is scared of his father. 

* * *

Later that September, Pat came in with a shaved head. I asked him about it. He told me he had a card. He was excited as he showed it to me. He pulled it from his wallet with a serious look. It was white with little blue letters and his name was signed with a black ballpoint, thick letters searing the otherwise muted face of the little paper. “You do you,” I said, and didn’t ask anything else about it or spend much time with Pat after that.

One night we were all out at the bowling alley though. It was a school night, and everyone was bored. Pat had brought his friend Jeremiah. We let Pat bowl with us, and Jeremiah. Jeremiah Cotton looked like an Irish demon. Jeremiah was a large fat white boy whose gut was adorned with strange tattoos. Long streaming red hair accented the tattoos of flames and daggers which ran down his neck and became naked women at the top of his chest. 

His mouth formed a gaping grin above the little wheat fields of orange stubble that pecked out of the ground of his face. His beady blue eyes twinkled with some unnatural laughter, the only smooth thing about his countenance. 

When Pat and Jeremiah left, they encountered some trouble. We didn’t hear about it until the next day, and we got it secondhand. Jeremiah and Pat got jumped by seven black men with baseball bats – though they might have just as easily been boys are age – it's easy to exaggerate with out-of-towners. It’s easy to say a lot of things when no one sees what went down. 

I can see the whole thing unfold in my mind’s eye. The car pulling up to the curb. That defiant gleam glazing over Pat’s eyes like he had that day in the kitchen. Jeremiah’s face all splotchy and flushed with blood. The bloodlust of a boy who really does like to be hit. The first kid to attack with his bat after all the shouting, as he goes for Pat. 

Pat levelling him with a swift kick into the soft tissue behind the ribs like he had done to me after school. The ruthless look in his muddy eyes as he kicks the kid on the ground repeatedly, the eyes becoming glassy as Pat’s work boots dig into the ribs and guts of the man again and again. The other boy’s body softening with the blows, elbows going limp. His head, solid. Like kicking the gymnasium wall. The hardness and solidness of the skull bones stubbing and jamming his toes in the steel-tipped work boots.

By the time Pat had dealt with the first of them, Jeremiah showing the rest what he is capable of. Jeremiah getting hit in the head by one of the baseball bats, which makes a sound like a hatchet against firewood. The bat cracking into two pieces on that bowling ball of a head. Jeremiah laughing dismissively, his eyes gleaming with a strange sadistic mirth, as he grabs the kid by the throat with his bear paw of a hand. 

As Jeremiah tosses the first kid to the ground, he violently swings his big pork-chop arm into the nose of one of the other boys. The kid’s nose exploding in a splatter of red which looks milky against his dark skin. Screams muffled by the blood in his mouth. And finally car tires squealing in the night.

Jeremiah had done hard time, and he was blessed with the ability to return a threat without regard for himself. We’d seen it in that fight in the woods out behind the gymnasium when he slammed Dave Parsons's head into a big, knotted Oak tree until blood coated the tree and he’d then brought him out to the chicken wire fence and tied him up out there, arm’s to the sides, like a crucified scarecrow.

Jeremiah’d left him out there and no one had the stones to cut Dave loose until after Jeremiah was gone.

The story was that Pat and Jeremiah beat up the entire gang before the cops got there. I’d bet even money the whole thing could have been avoided. 

* * *

When Luke and I heard about the incident, we knew there would be problems. The gang had left word with their friends at our school and Pat got a note in his locker that they wanted to finish this on Saturday. They gave Pat the name of a field to meet them at in Tabernacle. 

Pat had been our friend once, and we hadn’t entirely disassociated ourselves from him. He asked for our help.

“Luke, we aren’t going down there.”

“Pat needs our help. Right or wrong. We’ve got to be there. That’s the way it goes. We don’t have to fight. But we have to be there in case something goes wrong.”

I knew this line of logic. I knew Luke just wanted to fight, to test himself in battle, to say he’d been brave enough to show up. God damn it! Was he really willing to get us killed for bragging rights that he sacked up against some Willingboro gang? 

“Luke, this is dumb. It’s suicide. These kids—men—are from the city. They will probably have guns,” I said.

“Guns? Give me a break,” Luke said. 

“All your fancy footwork won’t stop bullets. We can die.” Even as I said the words, I also believed I was invincible.

“We are going.”

I was only a sophomore in high school. These were my friends. I couldn’t get around the fact that I had only one choice; I could be there, or I could not be there.

If I went, I could get hurt or die. 

If I didn’t go my friends might get hurt or die, and I would be powerless to do anything about it.

And I’d never live it down.

“John, I am going, with or without you. If you don’t come through, I would understand,” Luke says.

* * *

That Saturday, Luke and I drove down the familiar streets of our town with a strange feeling in our stomachs. We drove down Main Street. Passed the convenience store. Out onto the back roads out to the country. The sky was clear blue, and the sun shone like a golden emblem. Here we were driving into the heart of battle. The world never seemed so clear or beautiful as it did with the expectant question in the back of my mind.

We arrived at the field. Pat was dressed in camo military fatigues, and he was swinging his fists in the air with brass knuckles. He was also swinging around a black-coat Louisville Slugger training bat—the thing was big enough to cave in a man’s jaw. 

A large mongloid-looking tree of a man, Stevo, walked over to the bicycle rack and pulled a metal bar out of it. He grunted and beat his chest. He proceeded to swing the metal bar against the bike rack again and again. The sound was like a guard in a prison drumming a baton against the metal bars of a prisoner’s cell. 

Others mulled around looking vaguely threatening.

Luke and I had agreed to stay in the car until we saw what happened. We watched our friends, our team, our gang, our mob, our boys. They were like animals. 

It was four o’clock. Luke and I looked at each other.

“We aren’t going out there if there are guns.”

“John, you can do what you want.”

“Luke, this is ridiculous, you can’t dodge bullets.”

“Dude, they attacked our boys, John. If somebody draws a gun we are driving right at them – even up the score. I’ll fucking run down every one of them if there’s any foul play.”

“When they get here, I’m going to talk this out. This isn’t baby playground shit anymore. The lot of you are psychopaths.”

“Chicken shits. They should be here already.”

Our boys mulled around and after a time they started talking.

“Pat, they ain’t comin’ man, they all a bunch of pussies, moth-a-fuckin pussies,” Stevo said

“Aww, damn, and I wanted to thrash 'em again,” Jeremiah said.

“Nothin’ to see here then. Damn pussies,” Pat said.

Luke and I sat and watched. We talked for a while. We admitted our fear to each other like young children parlaying secrets about our friends that we weren’t supposed to tell. 

“Yeah man. I’m actually glad they didn’t show.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. This is crazy shit, man. Who needs this.”

“What are we doing here?”

“I don’t know. No more. We watch out for ourselves from here on out.”

“Luke, I know this is gonna sound weird, but in the middle of all this shit . . . dude, we could be dead right now . . . look, man. It's 4:30 and we’re alive.” As I said this, “Only the Good Die Young,” by Billy Joel blared out of the speakers of Luke’s old beat-up green Grand Prix. 

I looked out at the field behind the old school. Our friends looked like a group of fighter ants against the golden sun, standing at arms, in organized rows, muted bodies meant for combat.

They had no great cause to sacrifice themselves for. 

* * *

The next day at the lunch table in the cafeteria we were all sitting around talking about the previous day's events. Pat was up in line getting his food. 

A red-headed little jabber mouth named Sam who was friends with Pat said, “Hey did you guys hear about Pat’s father.”

“No, what about him?” I asked.

“He’s in the hospital, yeah. Got messed up bad in some bar fight.”

“A bar fight?” I asked. It was hard to imagine anyone who could actually hurt Pat’s father.

“Shit, from what I hear he got his whole damn jaw caved in. Pat said the bastard took down six of ‘them’ before they cornered him with a baseall bat.”

“Six of ‘them,’ huh” I said.

Pat came walking over to the table with his classic hello. “Hey-ho, how you all doin.” He had a little bit of hair coming in. 

“Hey Pat, did your dad get in a bar fight last night,” I asked.

“Somebody finally beat the shit out of that big fucking, red-eyed bastard. ‘Bout time.”

After a little painful silence, I said, “Hey, are you letting your hair grow in?”

“It’s too much of a pain in the ass to cut it every day,” Pat said.

“I see.”

As Pat shoveled spoonful after spoonful of the cafeteria entre of the day “Beeferoni surprise” down his gullet, he flicked the little plastic spork up to his mouth exposing a fist full of bare white knuckles.