Which just proves my point. There are a hundred ways to save someone's life. And, I suppose, just as many ways to take one.
But Pete Decker's impromptu smoking intervention is not the story I set out to tell and, in a way, it is simply prologue to the real story, which began that day as well. As I crawled, whimpered, and bled out of the long arms of the willow tree, the crowd turned away from me, rather than earn a beating for sympathizing. From the ground, I watched as even my brother Ben turned away, hiding the family resemblance. Every pair of shoes faced away from me except one, a pair of smudged black shoes with metal braces hooked to the soles and connected to straps at the calves. And when I looked up at the bent legs and scoliatic back, at the pinched, dandruffed shoulders that owned those shoes, I saw the only person in the crowd who measured me with anything but disdain. There, standing at my bus stop, a line of snot on his upper lip, grease in his hair, a look of sheer empathy and… fucking beatitude on his miserable face, was Eli Boyle.
3
His pitiful presence that day was undoubtedly what kept Pete Decker from completing the remodeling project he'd begun on my face. Had I known the importance of what would happen at that bus stop that day with the appearance of Eli Boyle, I might have begun studying it myself, for it would turn out to be a near-perfect real-world expression of an experiment that microbiologists have long re-created in the lab. They know that viruses and pathogenic bacteria will adhere to damaged cells in the human body, that the real nasty bugs are attracted to those broken and bruised places that blood has trouble reaching, and that the body will sacrifice a foot, say, to save the rest, and that if you have an infection in your throat and sprain your ankle, the virus or bacteria or parasite will do its best to make the journey from your throat to your ankle.
Eli became my broken ankle. That day, still full from the meal of me, Pete Decker retreated to the back of the tree and, presumably, picked my bones from his teeth, but I have to think he also had his eye on the horrible newcomer. Because the very next day Pete was all over Eli Boyle, knocking his glasses off, snapping the buttons off the cuffs of his flannel shirt, and grabbing his underwear and yanking them out of his pants and giving him – and here I defer to each reader's age, socioeconomic class, and basic geographic orientation – a wedgie or a melvy or a crack-back or a slip-and-slide or a jam sandwich or a thong-along or a line-in-the-sand or a famous-anus.
Eli took his punishment in stride, picked up his glasses, quietly pocketed the snapped button for his mother to sew on later, and left his dirty underwear wedged up his cakehole until Pete Decker had moved on to terrorize elsewhere. After my own beating I had resumed my place at the street, with the terrified little kids, who stood with chattering teeth, clinging to their lunch money and repeating in their minds, Don't turn around, Don't turn around. In those early days I never ventured to help Eli Boyle – although, honestly, what could I have done?
Every day after that, Eli tried to arrive just as the bus did, hoping to limit his exposure to Pete. Our driver, Mr. Kellhorn, was notorious for his erratic timing, though, showing up at various times between 7:22 and 7:29, which might not sound like a big deal to adults, but for kids hoping to avoid having their underwear winched into their asses, it was a horror. The other bullies allowed Pete to have first – I apologize in advance for my word choice – crack at Boyle. Some days, when Pete missed school (we whispered about juvenile detention, or theorized that maybe he'd finally gone ahead and killed his parents), some lesser bully would make sure to spit on Eli or yank on his underwear or make him lick shoes.
For his part, Eli attempted the defense that every afflicted and hunted beast attempts, the defense of a sand dollar that settles into the ocean floor or a beaten dog that cowers beneath his forepaws, the worthless twin defenses of shrinkage and anonymity. Eli stood with the little kids, his big, greasy, flaking head a foot above theirs, staring at the ground, sniffling with whatever airborne bug he was carrying that day, trying to look inconspicuous as the dandruff flaked down around his greasy head.
I stood only a few feet away, but Eli and I never spoke. In fact, none of the underclassmen at the bus stop ever spoke, staring instead at our shoes or looking down the road, praying to the God of afflicted children that we would see our bus – the color of sweet potatoes – rising over the hill behind us and making its way to our stop. My little brother Ben would whisper under his breath: 'God's noggin, would you hurry?' He had recently become an inveterate taker-of-the-Lord's-name, and he'd taken to jotting down new ones when they popped into his head, eager to amaze and thrill us older kids with the range and poetry of this one sin. Even then, Ben planned to have this sin be his signature. 'Christ on a bike, what is taking so long?'
The air went out of us when the bus arrived – two hydraulic sighs as a matter of fact, the first when the brakes set and the door opened and the second when all of the smaller kids finally exhaled and pressed for the door. These littlest got on first, sliding three to a bench seat in the second and third rows; then came Eli, spinning right around the pole into the seat behind the driver, the safest seat, obviously, but also the worst seat socially, because it marked him as a coward and a brownnose and a boy with no friends. After my failed attempt to smoke, I had become a sort of leader of the third, fourth, and fifth graders – king of the geeks – and so I settled into the fifth or sixth row, sharing a seat with only one other kid.
After we little kids had boarded the bus, the older kids emerged from the leafy curtains of the willow tree, Pete Decker and the other delinquents grinding their cigarettes into the gravel ashtray of Will the Hippie's front yard, blowing smoke down the rows of little kids, pushing their way to the back of the bus, Pete pulling his fist back and causing some poor kid to flinch, before he and the other seventh and eighth graders settled in the back three rows, all stretched out and reflecting a chilled boredom.
I suppose Eli had been at our bus stop two weeks before I actually made eye contact with him – the eye contact of death-row prisoners, part better-you-than-me, part but-for-the-grace-of-God, part empathy, part worry that his terrified face reflected my own. Obviously, I had noticed Eli Boyle before; he was a billboard for adolescent horror. But I had been so overwhelmed with my own self-loathing that I hadn't really contemplated his, which I saw must be both epic and lonesome. I stood in the aisle of the bus, in the first row, staring at Eli until it crossed my mind that I could sit next to him, that in my improved role as the kid who tried to smoke at the bus stop, I might effect some social change by sitting next to the least of us all, the spazziest, dorkiest, queerest, loosest nut on the tree. We would face the beatings together after that, the two of us, and we would slowly change the world.
Then again, maybe not. Behind me, my brother Ben was pushing me in the back, hurrying to be seated before Pete Decker emerged from the willow tree and climbed onto the bus. But even with Ben pushing me, I couldn't break eye contact with Eli. Once I'd taken hold it was like a live electrical wire, and I shook at the depths of his anguish. He seemed not only to suffer – what was life, after all, but suffering, and who knows that more than a kid – but also to understand his own position, to know that there was something more than crippling in his physical appearance, in his personal odor and his bad eyesight and his lack of coordination and the host of bugs and bends and sprains that comprised him. It was as if he knew the future offered no reprieve and yet he kept showing up anyway.
'Sweet cheese of Jesus, move it, Clark!' Ben groused behind me. 'They're coming.'
I found my seat and Ben slid in behind me, just ahead of Pete Decker, who walked with his elbows out, smacking the heads of every kid on the inside of the bench seats. A couple of those kids ducked and Pete balled up his fist or pushed out the knuckle of his middle finger, smacked the offending kids, and moved down the row.
Eli had turned to face the window again; he would stare out that window right behind the driver until we pulled up at school.
It is hard to fathom, I suppose, but the next bus stop – Eli's old stop – was even worse than ours. While we at least had the willow and the cover of Will the Hippie's house, this stop stood at a bare corner and so there was no cover at all; it was the difference between jungle and savanna. The dominant male at this stop was a twice-flunked eighth-grade goon named Matt Woodbridge, who had driven out all the little kids until it was just him and his crew: three slope-headed seventh graders, all of them smoking in broad daylight and daring anyone to say anything about it. The day Eli and I made eye contact, I thought about how Eli had arrived to take my beatings for me, how he'd looked down on me with such sympathy, and I was suddenly hit with the realization that Pete Decker and the button-popping, glasses-slapping, underwear-yanking routine of my bus stop was an improvement for Eli! I mean, hard as it is to believe…
