climb into the truck he grabbed one of the cut logs from the pile and swung it at me. A numbness spread down the side of my face. At that moment there was no pain. I just said to myself, OK, turn back and stop him from doing it again. Only the blow had been harder than I thought. I found myself rocking back on my heels. When he raised the log again I didn’t defend myself.
… Christ, I couldn’t defend myself. I just remember seeing Crowther’s face blaze with fury. The eyes blazed pure fury, too. Maybe this was the same expression I wore on my face when I killed.
Four
OUTSIDER. At school that was me. That’s what I felt, anyway. Somehow I never seemed part of a group. No gang invited me to join. Don’t get me wrong, I had friends. But there was always this sense of being apart from the rest of the kids in school. Sometimes I’d catch them looking at me in a certain way, as if they were thinking, Hey, that Greg Valdiva, he’s different somehow.
Somehow?
How?
Search me.
I don’t know what it was then. Or what it is now. I had no weird hobbies like collecting a million candy bar wrappers or had a thing about learning comic strips by heart. I didn’t form romantic attachments to farmyard animals. Nothing like that. No one would even describe me as nerdy. Although I’d never get into fights. When other kids fought I’d never get excited like the rest who’d gather ’round chanting “Fight, fight, fight!” And who’d cheer when the first lick of blood appeared on a guy’s nose. Instead I’d get a sick feeling in my stomach. So some other guys did take to calling me yellow. For a while I got a reputation for being a coward. Some would push me around. Nothing heavy. It was just a bit of swagger to show off in front of their friends. Go give Valdiva a push when he’s carrying his lunch tray. Trip him up in the hallway. In class take his book and scribble “Valdiva faggot ass” on the front.
I didn’t react to this. I just let them do it. I just kind of blanked it out. It seemed to be happening to someone else, not me. They never hurt me physically much. If at all.
Then it all changed.
I remember heading home from school one day. I’d have been fourteen. I cut through the park, carrying files and books under my arm. As I passed by the swings Chunk and his posse were there. Chunk earned his name by the quantity of muscle that enfolded his arms and thighs. Muscles even seemed to bulge out of his shaved head. He was a big cheese on the school football team. He boxed, too. And his reputation as a nose-breaker spread far and wide. Once he thumped a bunch of kids who’d turned up at his door trick-or-treating on Halloween. School legend had it he busted their noses while shouting, “Is Halloween scary enough for you now? Is it?” Yeah, lovable guy, isn’t he? Now it was my turn.
“If it isn’t Miss Valdiva,” he called.
There were a few girls with him, as well as his old roughhouse buddies. They laughed this giddy laugh, egging him on.
“What ya got there, faggot boy?”
I carried on walking. The thing is, keep your head down when kids toss out a few experimental insults. If your local neighborhood bully realizes he’s getting under your skin and sees you reacting to his torments, then it only gives him that taste in his mouth for hurting you a little more. Be impassive as a block of wood. Don’t react. Don’t show pain.
It works sometimes.
Maybe not that day in December, though. Seeing the girls giggle and sort of get turned on by his insults, Chunk turned up the menace. “Don’t ignore me, Valdiva. Come here.”
This time I stopped. He slipped easily into bad boy mode. He came up behind me and pulled my head back by my hair. “In a hurry to scrub your mommy’s back in the bathtub, queer boy?”
“I’m going out tonight, Chunk.”
“Ooohh…” Smirking, he looked back at his posse, who laughed and hooted, encouraging him to crank up the bad boy persona. “Oooh. You’re coming out, are you? It’s about time, faggot boy.”
“I’m going out.”
“No, you’re not. You’re coming out of the closet, aren’t you, Valdiva? Admit it. Say: ‘I’m a pervert and I’m coming prancing out of the closet tonight.’ Say it!”
I didn’t let my impassive expression slip. “I’m going out. It’s my sister’s birthday. I’ve got-”
“Did you hear that?” Chunk laughed. “Mr. Queer of the year loves his sister, too. Man, you’re a bigger fucking pervert than I thought.”
He pulled my hair harder. I could hear a crackling sound as hair started to snap from my scalp.
“Valdiva’s got to get home in time to share the tub with his sister.”
I saw the girls giggling more. Their eyes glittered. Man, those juices were really starting to flow. They were getting high on Chunk roughing me up. Chunk swung me ’round to face a wall that came up to my chest, pushing me toward it so I’d be pinned face for-ward. He was hyperventilating. Psyching himself up to wade into my face with his fists. This was better than sex for him. A real gutsy one-on-one beating. All the time he was panting insults at me. Really getting him-self steamed up. “Little freak; little worm…”
He pushed his face right against the side of mine, telling me how he was going to hurt me so badly my own mother would have to donate DNA so they could identify me. He was so close I could smell fried onions on his breath. From the corner of my eye I could see the black, clogged pores in his nose. A sheen of sweat glistened on his eyelids. He grunted like he was getting turned on. Then he really shoved me against the brick, pushing harder and harder, all the time grunting insults with that stinking onion breath of his that damn near choked me.
It’s happened enough times since. But there was no sense of me having done anything. One second Chunk was crushing my belly against the wall so hard I couldn’t breathe.
The next I heard the girls screaming, “Leave him, he’s had enough! Leave him, you bastard, you’re killing him!”
I swear I don’t remember what I did. But the next thing I know, I’ve got Chunk’s shaved head in my hands and I’m bouncing it down against the wall. There’s blood everywhere. Chunk’s eyes were open, but they were dead-looking. And the strange thing is I felt no anger, no rage, no emotion, no nothing. And there was no physical effort on my part. None that I could sense. It was like bouncing a big beach ball onto the bricks.
The guys in Chunk’s posse just stared in horror. It was the girls who were trying to do something. Screaming at me to stop. Trying to pull me back. And the strangest thing: I still had the books and files tucked neatly under one armpit. Like I was doing nothing more than bouncing a ball on a cold afternoon in December.
Only this beach ball pumped living blood all over me and all over the wall in thick, juicy red squirts.
Chunk had a head of solid bone. He was back at school after Christmas. The upside was he didn’t touch me, or even make eye contact again. The down side? There has to be one, doesn’t there? His mother and father were big shits in a lawyer’s practice. They might as well have nailed that assault charge to my head. They couldn’t have made it stick there any more tightly.
I got probation as well as newspaper headlines with my photograph hollering loud and clear IS THIS THE MOST EVIL TEENAGER IN TOWN? Well , words to that effect. In a formal way, all nicely legal, I was thrown out of school. Neighbors and co-workers crucified my mother in that nice, civilized way responsible adults employ on former friends. They stopped talking to her. She was no longer invited for coffee. Some kids beat up my sister. She was seven years old. Other stuff, too. Dog turd smeared in the mailbox. The kid across the road fired his air gun at the kitchen window. Someone ran a screwdriver down the side of our car to achieve that nice customized scratched-to-hell look.
You know the sort of thing, don’t you? Really neighborly stuff. Christ.
And then there was the Halloween that followed the ruckus with Chunk. It wound up trick-or-treat night for us, all right, with OUT, OUT OUT! aerosoled across the garage door. Mom wept. I mean really wept: Her tears left big damp splotches on her sweater and her eyes were puffy and sore for days afterward.
You think I’m angry? You bet I’m angry. She didn’t deserve that. Or the fact that the guy she was seeing
