Even today I have trouble fathoming it, trying to imagine the tortures that Matt Woodbridge had devised, persecutions horrible enough to make Eli walk three blocks to catch the bus with an animal like Pete Decker. I did a paper on torture in college and I can never forget the worst ones: the glass tube shoved into the penis and then broken while the tortured person is forced to drink glass after glass of water, the legs encased in a vise and put in a burlap sack and then pounded with hammers until the burlap is the only thing holding them together. Right after these horrors I place whatever Woodbridge did to drive Eli down to our bus stop. And so that day, on the bus, I looked up as Woodbridge passed and at that moment I hated him, and I must have betrayed something on my face because he stopped in the aisle and turned to face me, a look of disbelief on his pockmarked, wispy-mustached face.
'What?' he asked. 'What, motherfucker?'
The bus erupted in a chorus of 'Ooohs,' and someone yelled from the back of the bus, 'Kick his ass! Kick his fuckin' ass, Woodbridge!'
'Nothing,' I said quickly, and dropped my eyes.
'You bet nothing,' Woodbridge said. 'Nothing and a fucking ass-kicking if you ever look at me again, motherfucker.' And he continued sidling back toward the end of the bus, toward his seat in the back, the polar opposite of Boyle's seat. 'Little shit.'
I knew what we all knew about Woodbridge, that his brother Jesse had been an A student and a good athlete who had been killed in the eighth grade in some mysterious way (I'd heard, variously, that Matt shot him with their father's gun accidentally, that he got drunk and fell out of a pickup truck, and that he slashed his own wrists) and that Matt dealt with his brother's death and with his parents' grief by beating the shit out of every kid he saw, by flunking his classes, by riding his motorcycle across the flower beds of all the houses in the neighborhood, by stealing our bicycles, by selling pot to little kids, by shoplifting, fighting, fingering, smoking, dealing, shooting up, vandalizing, and generally being the worst form of life on the bus. I think that while he didn't know it, he was trying to live up to his dead brother, trying to remain a perpetual eighth grader like Jesse.
I stared straight ahead, hoping Woodbridge would ignore me, but of course he couldn't. 'Who is that motherfucker?' he asked the back of the bus.
'That kid?' Pete Decker laughed. 'That's the fuckin' Marlboro man.' His gang erupted in laughter. Pete and Woodbridge had an interesting cold-war relationship; like nervous superpowers, both knew the only thing they couldn't afford was to lose a fight, and since each was the only one who had a chance of beating up the other, they existed in a kind of strained equilibrium. As long as there were pathetic little shits like me to terrorize, they had few dealings with each other, except maybe to bum a cigarette or fence some stolen property.
Now that I had crossed one of the superpowers, I tensed, waiting to be nuked.
'Nah, that's just Clark,' Pete said then. 'He's all right.'
The air seemed to leave the bus just then, and a great light and warmth rose up inside of me. I don't recall, but the other underclassmen must have snuck glimpses at me then, glimpses of admiration and envy. To be pronounced 'all right' by Pete Decker was more than just the commutation of my death sentence; it seemed almost a coronation. I had been plucked from the ranks of the pathetic and small, and given a place among the Pete Deckers and Matt Woodbridges of the world. Clark Mason? That motherfucker? Aw, he's all right.
The bus rumbled down Empire toward the last stop on our strip before it turned out of our neighborhood and came up for air on Trent – the busy industrial street that cut us off from the rest of the world. The whole world felt different. I remember staring at Boyle, wondering if he had heard the exchange, if he'd realized what had just happened, my sudden ascension out of his world. But he just sat with his thick glasses against the window, his index finger working his nose like a puppeteer on speed, Eli alone in the nightmarish world of his freakishness, his apartness, and, I suppose it's safe to say now, his seething ambitions. I see him in my mind now and I realize that all of these forces of his personality were concentrated then on the humble goal of sheer survival, the cold, flat wish that he be left alone, and he was being forged in a way by the challenge of his youth. What did he see out that window while he sat there, catatonic and seemingly impervious to the beatings and taunts and stares? I think now, looking back, that his fear may have amounted to less than I ever imagined, that he had actually figured out a way to shut down, to distance himself from his broken self.
Or maybe that's just what I want to believe, an idea that I cling to for my own peace of mind – that Eli had figured out a way to leave the awful physical world behind, to block out the bullies and assholes, to ignore the scorn, to somehow be on our bus and soar above it too, riding on the thinnest of daydreams.
4
I shot someone in the face with a rubber band that I had stretched along the length of a ruler. I don't recall the victim or my motive (I acknowledge the irony, of course, this casual parallel to the trouble before us today), but my fifth-grade crime doesn't matter except to explain why I was alone in the school office on a late-fall day in 1975, sitting with my head in my hands, waiting for the principal to come back.
I sat in a chair across from the desk of our distracted principal, Joseph Bender, and I practiced looks of contrition and sorrow and prayed that I not slip and call him Joe Boner, the name by which we all knew him. I recall his office as a massive tomb, windowless and cold and the place I waited for my hack – a quick swat or two on the ass with a thick wooden paddle, the gold standard of school punishment circa 1975. Joe Boner was a tame hacker because he kept his emotions under control. There were other teachers – being an attorney with a working knowledge of libel, I won't name them – who could take out years of their own frustration by blistering the asses of children like me. I only saw Joe Boner go overboard once, when Dennis Gilstrap asked the lunch lady if he could kiss her 'boobies' and Mr. Bender promptly pulled Dennis out of line, bent him over, and swatted him so furiously that his gum flew across the room and – I know this part of the story must sound apocryphal, but I saw it myself – stuck to the wall of the cafeteria, where it stayed for two weeks as a kind of monument to adult boundaries.
As I sat in the principal's office that day, I was understandably nervous, even though I didn't really fear a hack like the one that had de-gummed Dennis Gilstrap. More likely I would get a reasoned swat and be sent back to my classroom to study our poetic spelling list, which I repeated in my mind – distance, influence, affluence, confluence – as a way to keep from dwelling on the swat I was about to receive.
That's when I heard, outside Joe Boner's office, the principal talking to a woman, trying to calm her down. 'No, I'm very sorry. It is unfortunate.' I leaned toward the door, as if a few inches might help me hear better. 'No, Mrs. Boyle,' the principal said, 'I assure you, it won't happen again.'
When he opened the door I looked back and saw Eli Boyle's mother, wearing a kind of peasant's dress and a scarf over her head, an almost pretty woman in her early forties who looked that day, and every other day that I saw her, like a person who has lost something very important.
'Eli is a very special boy, Mr. Bender,' she said. 'He's sensitive.'
'Yes,' the principal was saying, 'I know he is and I'm sorry he's had to go through this. We are taking care of it, Mrs. Boyle.' And that's when Joe Boner saw me sitting at his desk. 'Oh, Mr. Mason. That's right. Why don't you go back to your class? And no more rubber bands, okay?'
He tousled my hair and I sat there a moment longer than I needed to, amazed to be escaping my punishment. Once again, Eli had indirectly saved me. I nodded to Mrs. Boyle, hopped out of the chair, and hurried for the door, turning at the last to see Eli's mom settle into the chair, and to see Mr. Bender close the door behind me.
I suppose that meeting was the reason that, the very next morning, Joe Boner escorted Eli Boyle into my classroom. Eli had started the school year in the other fifth-grade class, taught by Mr. Gibbons, a cross-eyed alcoholic who had been at the high school until two years earlier, when he was asked to leave after some vague complaint by the parents of a girl who had been getting 'extra credit' for 'correcting papers' as Mr. Gibbons's 'after-school aide.' Now Eli was standing in the class of
