The goons dragged Eli back and pushed him toward me. Still he didn't look up.
'Are you gonna fight, or are you a fag?' Pete asked Eli.
He didn't answer. He stood in front of me, staring at his shoes. He shifted his weight and his leg braces clacked together.
Pete pushed Eli in the shoulder. 'Come on, queer.'
I raised my fists slowly and moved forward. He looked up then, and I realized I'd never seen Eli full-on like this, from the front. He was usually looking sideways or averting his gaze or covering his mouth or looking away before you could get a fix on his face. It was egg shaped – too much forehead and chin, all the features and pimples packed in between, the black glasses, the braces on his teeth, like some perfect rendering of the collective nightmares of adolescents.
Pete Decker stepped away and it was just Eli and I squared off in the gravel between the street and Will the Hippie's front yard. Our eyes met and I tried to let him see that I was sorry for what I had to do. He sighed.
And then he hit me. Twice. The first punch connected with my nose, the second clipped my ear. I kicked at him and caught him in the leg and he hit me again in the face, a hammer that buckled my knees and sent me sprawling, crying, onto the ground. From my side I looked up through teary eyes to see Eli running away, crying, his knee braces rattling, Pete Decker a few steps behind. Pete caught him and dragged him to the ground and by the time I got to my feet, he was pounding on Eli. I felt my nose. It was bleeding. Twenty yards up the road, so was Eli's. Pete just kept cocking his fist and letting Eli have it. Eli was crying for help, honking like a goose, trying to squirm away. Pete's goons were cheering the beating their boss was delivering. Finally Pete climbed off him, opened Eli's book bag and scattered everything, set his lunch pail on the ground and stomped it into scrap metal. Then he kicked Eli once in the side and came back toward me.
'That was a good fight,' he said, slapping me on the back. 'That fucker jumped you, man. He didn't fight fair at all.' Pete was panting. There was sweat on his upper lip, making the hair below his nose look almost like a mustache. I looked at one of the goons, who seemed ready enough to accept Pete's description of the good fight and the idea that I had somehow been jumped, and I wondered if Pete's goons even processed their own thoughts. 'You'd have killed him if he fought fair,' Pete said. And he began walking toward his house, a goon on either side.
I looked up the street, to where Eli had already gathered his things. He was no longer crying, and he seemed oblivious to the damage he'd done to my face. He walked home, bent at the waist, as if nothing had happened.
At home my sisters were playing Barbies on the porch, and they stared at me wide eyed as I came up the sidewalk. Being all of five, Meg saw her job as explaining the world to Shawna, and so she bent over and whispered, 'Clark got all beat up.'
'By bad guys?' Shawna asked, and Meg nodded.
Ben had stayed home sick that day and he was on the couch, reading a Flash comic book. He looked at me as if I were covered in blood – which, of course, I was. 'Hot Christ buns,' he said, 'what happened to you?'
That brought my mother from the kitchen, where she usually spent the afternoons sorting through the Avon cosmetics and sundries that she stockpiled in the house. She was supposed to sell these Avon products door-to- door in the neighborhood and at swanky Avon parties that she shamed friends and relatives into attending, but my mother didn't like to bother people, and so the Avon products had taken over our house and our basement was filled with boxes of foundation eyeliner and birdhouses and perfume (I got regular nighttime erections just thinking about the case of 'Nights of Romance' perfume underneath my bed.) 'Who did this to you? Was it that boy, Pete Decker?' She waved a pair of Avon candlesticks at me. 'I'm going to march down there and talk to his mother.'
'No,' I said. 'I just fell down.'
But she wouldn't buy it, and finally I had to admit that it was in fact Eli Boyle who had done this to me.
Ben slapped his forehead. 'Jesus meet the neighbors!'
Even Mom was changed by this bit of news. 'Huh,' she said. 'The boy with the…' She gestured around her face as if we were talking about the Elephant Man.
'Yeah,' I said, staring at the ground.
'Oh,' she said, and looked down at the candlesticks in her hands. The idea of waving candlesticks at the mother of such a boy was less interesting and my mother just sort of shrugged and half turned back toward the kitchen, suddenly faced with a problem potentially worse than her son being beaten up by a bully: her son being beaten up by an Eli Boyle. 'You… um… you should talk to your father about defending yourself, Clark,' she said. 'And you shouldn't get into fights.'
Staring at my bloodied face, Ben shook his head. 'I'll say.'
6
Muhammad Eli disappeared from the bus stop the very next day. I guess his mom began driving him to school, but however he got there he was in class when I arrived, sitting in his desk, open-pit nose mining. The nickname – Muhammad Eli – was Ben's idea and I have to say that I was happy that it didn't catch on. In fact, I was shocked that day to hear that I'd actually kicked Eli's ass. Even the people who'd witnessed my beating bought into Pete Decker's fiction and suddenly I understood the power of propaganda. At the bus stop guys clapped me on the back and told me they'd heard it was a great fight.
'That asshole's lucky he ran away,' said one of Pete's thugs. 'Clark was about to kick his ass.'
'About to?' Pete asked. 'My boy whipped his ass.' At recess, Dana Brett strode up to me in her suede boots and miniskirt and told me matter-of-factly that I was a bully. I didn't know what to say: cop to being a bully (which I wasn't), or admit that a spaz like Eli had actually beaten me up? At lunch I watched Eli work the edges of the playground, the way he always did, picking his way along the chain-link fence. I wanted to apologize. I really did. But how do you apologize to someone who has, in fact, beaten you up?
Eli wasn't on the bus that afternoon either. I sat staring out the window, the sun high and bright, washing the blue from the sky.
'Clark the Hammer,' Pete Decker said. 'Big Bad Clark Mason.'
The next morning Eli still didn't show at our stop, and Pete and his gang took this as proof that – despite what they'd seen – I actually inflicted great damage upon my opponent. I slumped past Eli's empty seat behind the bus driver and sat near the back. When Woodbridge got on the bus he stopped at my seat, stuck out his lower lip, and nodded slowly, approvingly, as if checking out the latest model of bully.
'I heard you beat that fat, greasy-haired faggot's ass,' he said. 'Queer probably transferred to another school.'
'Fuckin' retard fag queer,' Pete muttered.
'Yeah,' Woodbridge said. 'Fuckin' fag.'
At school, I looked for opportunities to make eye contact with Eli, a shrug that might communicate that we were both victims in this, that we had both come out with bloody noses, that no harm was done. But Eli had found his place beneath the rest of us, and he scurried around with his head bowed, staring at his black shoes.
I tried to catch sight of his mother driving him to and from school, but they left early for school and apparently left late for home. Spring was a blink, just a suggestion of time, all shadow and no cast; it was the first season that I remember going faster than I expected, and the first time I realized that time actually moved in a certain direction, toward something that wasn't just the piling up of days and weeks and school years, but a point that had its own weight. It was like the first time you realize, as a kid, that all the escalator steps aren't collected in the basement. That spring I saw myself in junior high and high school and beyond, and I saw the kids before me and after me as fellow travelers, and like any whiff of mortality it was powerful and frightening. I'd like to say that I found in this season of epiphany the time to offer a quiet apology to Eli, but to be honest the days were made up of Presidential Fitness Tests and Smear the Queer and the accidental grazing of Marcia Donnely's left boob, one of only two actual boobs in our class (Marcia Donnely's right being the other). And then, one day, it was the last week of school and we cut off the brown grocery sacks that had covered our textbooks, and we used knives from the
