Abandoned

By the time he’d fallen asleep, he had a plan.

The Boy had just started fifth grade. School was something mandated by his father as a necessity.

“You need knowledge to feed the meat, Son, and school’s free. Only an idiot would turn that deal down.”

He sat in his class and waited for the closing bell to ring. He had no friends and wanted none. Other people were opponents. Best to keep to yourself, so he always did.

The Boy watched Martin O’Brian, the school bully, gauging him with a critical eye. Martin was big and brutal. He had flat brown eyes and thin brown hair that always looked like it had been cut at home, and badly. He wore sneakers a few years too old, and some of his blue jeans had holes in the knees. Sometimes, Martin would come to school with a black eye, or maybe wincing as he walked, and those were terrible days for the weak. On those days, Martin was a thunderstorm.

He was feared by everyone, even the sixth graders. Martin dispensed his bullying and misery with a wild light in his eyes, as though he were somewhere else entirely. You could never be sure just how far he’d go, and this, in many ways, was the secret to his power. Anyone can be huge. Not everyone can be terrifying.

Martin would pull your arm behind your back and tell you to call your mother a whore. If you refused, his eyebrows would come together and some part of him would go away. Once that happened, it was anything goes. He’d even cracked a kid’s arm once.

It was the kind of brutality that parents couldn’t believe in a ten-year-old (or chose to ignore, suspecting its origins), so Martin was scolded and grounded or suspended but not much else. He was left free to rampage, an elephant set loose among the pygmies. Adults watched as the village burned but refused to smell the smoke.

The Boy smelled it. Surely. He’d seen the gleam rise in Martin’s eyes once, when the bully was deep in his work with another kid. They’d been madman’s eyes, set above a feverish smile that seemed more about tears than laughter.

Martin was what he was, and because of this, Martin was the solution to the Boy’s problem.

The bell rang and the Boy went to his locker. He put all of his books inside and left them there; he’d done his homework in class so he could keep his hands free. He grabbed the other item he’d put in the locker that morning and walked out of the school door without a second look back.

He walked off the school grounds and sat down on the curb of the residential street, waiting. It was a nice day. The sun warmed his shoulders. An impatient breeze hurried by, ruffling the leaves in nearby trees and giving his cheeks a distracted kiss before moving on to whatever would come to stop it.

Nearly ten minutes passed before the bully walked by. Martin was whistling to himself, smiling at some private thought, his fists clenching and unclenching in unconscious, continuous rage. The Boy watched him go, then stood up and followed from a distance.

Martin stayed on the road for about five minutes, then turned onto a side street. Just two more turns before Martin was home.

Now or never, and never was not an option.

The Boy ran forward, gripping the thing from the locker in his hands. His heartbeat was slow and steady. He reached Martin in ten steps and swung on him.

The Boy had cut the broom handle in half before school. It hit Martin in the left kidney with a hard thump. The bully froze for a moment and then he screamed in pain. He reached back a hand, and the Boy hit that too.

The bully turned to face his attacker and was rewarded with a jab in his solar plexus that sent him to his knees, gasping for breath. Another whack broke his nose. The Boy hit Martin with method and patience, taking no joy from the act. He wasn’t a sadist. This was a means to an end, no more, no less. He needed Martin to break, and he’d stop when that point had been reached.

Martin fell and curled into himself on the sidewalk, covering his face and head with his hands, trying to present the smallest body area possible to his attacker. The broomstick kept falling. Again and again and again. Arms, legs, back, butt. Not hard enough to break any bones or rupture anything inside, but more than hard enough to bring agony and waves of red mixed with spots of bright and black.

The Boy stopped when Martin began to mewl like a kitten.

“Martin. Look at me.”

The bully didn’t reply, still curled into a fetal ball, wailing, shaking, farting in little bleats of sheer terror.

“Martin. If you don’t look at me and listen to what I’m telling you, I’ll start hitting you again.”

That got through. The bully uncurled in jerky motions, fits and starts of fear. His eyes were wide and roaming. Snot ran from his nose in a gooey river, mixed with blood and tears. A knot was already rising high on one cheek. His lips would need stitches. His breath hitched as he fought to get a grip on his runaway hysteria.

“Martin.” The Boy’s voice was as patient as his eyes were empty. He wasn’t breathing hard. “You’re going to start doing something for me. If you do what I say, you’re safe. If you don’t, there will be penalties. Do you understand?”

Martin stared up at his attacker, not saying anything. The Boy raised the broomstick.

“Yes! Yes!” Martin screamed. “I understand!”

The Boy lowered the stick. “Good. You’re going to get me three dollars a week. I don’t think that’ll be a problem, right? I’ve been watching you. I know you rob other kids. Lunch money, allowance, things like that?”

“Y-yeah …” Martin whispered. He’d begun to tremble uncontrollably.

“So you just have to keep doing what you’re already doing. The only difference is that you have to give me three dollars every week. Understand?”

Martin nodded. He couldn’t speak anymore. His teeth were chattering too hard.

“Now, this next part is really important, Martin, so I need you to pay attention. If you ever—ever—tell anyone about what I did to you here, or about the three dollars, or if you don’t get me the money, I’m going to show up in your house one night. I’ll kill your mom and your dad and then I’ll kill you too. And it’ll take a long, long time.”

Martin heard these words, and time stopped. Everything became both unreal and more distinct. He saw the present and the future and was filled with a vibration that rushed the fear from him.

The sun is out in a cloudless sky. The concrete on the sidewalk is warm but not hot, and he is only five minutes from his house. He’d get home and grab a Coke and one of Mom’s brownies and head to his room. He’d kick off his tennis shoes and read the latest Batman comic. Mom would call him to dinner (meat loaf, probably) and they’d enjoy it together because Dad was off on the road, doing his salesman thing. No Dad meant neither he nor Mom would feel THE FISTS (that’s how Martin thought of his father’s clenched hands—THE FISTS). Maybe later they’d watch Happy Days together. His mother might even laugh.

Martin thought these things, and—just for a moment—his attacker’s words seemed silly. Murder? Naw. They were ten! The sun was out!

The eyes looked at him, and he looked at the eyes, and Martin understood something in that moment with a clarity he almost never had. Something important.

Martin wasn’t smart, but he was smart enough to know that he was a bad kid. He hurt other kids and stole from them and terrorized them. He made them beg and sob and, a few times, had even made them wet their pants. It didn’t much matter that he did these things because they provided relief. THE FISTS weren’t enough of an explanation for why he sometimes grinned when others were weeping. He was bad. He accepted this as he accepted his inability to change it.

The eyes looking down at him belonged to a whole different level of bad. They were devoid. There was no grief or joy inside them, no unspent tears, no laughs waiting to happen. This wasn’t a kid who went home to read Batman, and Martin would bet sure as shit he’d never watched a single God damn episode of Happy Days.

The eyes watched Martin, the whole of him, they waited with implacable promise, and he knew in that moment that it didn’t matter about the sun and the sidewalk or that they were ten years old; the only thing that mattered was understanding this: Every word had been a promise, and every promise would be kept.

“I understand,” he whispered.

The eyes watched him, searching for the truth, and Martin wept as he waited, hoping to be believed. After too long a time, the Boy nodded, straightened, and tossed the half broom handle away.

“First payment is this Friday,” the Boy said.