Chapter 3 • Wiccisaw High

Wiccisaw High School lay like a squashed gray slug on a patch of land halfway between the Sangre de Cristo foothills and the reservoir valley. Altitude was the prime social indicator in Chivalry. Wherever folks could look down on anyone else there was a well paved road. The streets joined columned red brick houses with driveways so steep the owners probably needed the glossy new trucks that sat in their garages just to get up to them. Below the high school it was different. The downward slope led to dirty, soulless duplexes. They had shingles missing from their rooftops like mouths missing teeth. The yards in the valley were dry and brown, except for the ragwort that thrived between the ruts where rusted cars sat disintegrating on blocks of crumbling masonry.

On one side of the high school was the grocery store. At lunchtime, the kids who didn’t have cars walked across the street to buy ham and cheese sandwiches or corn dogs from the deli. Every couple of weeks some idiot got caught stealing a candy bar or a slice of pizza and was told they could never come back. They’d brown bag it for a few days and then head right back in like nothing ever happened. On the other side of the school was a car dealership. No one ever went there until they graduated. Then they went in droves to look for jobs.

On the first day of school, Randy Fitch backed his 1948 Packard into the furthest row of parking spaces in the school lot. That afternoon, the engine revved beautifully and the transmission refused to move the car in any direction except reverse. He’d spent every lunch hour since standing next to the car, trying to figure out how to get it home so he could beat the crap out of it. By Friday, he’d decided he was going to have to wait until dark, drive it over the curb, back across the school’s front lawn, and then sprint home looking out the rear window, using his reverse lights to tell where he was going. None of that bothered him much. What did bother him was that until he could move it the Packard was parked under a street lamp, and a lot of birds shit on it every day.

The Packard was painted yellow. It looked like a Checker cab without the TAXI sign on top. Randy Fitch had the hood up, and he’d just finished using orange primer to spray paint a giant hand, middle finger extended, on the underside. Randy Fitch didn’t have a middle finger on his right hand. During his sophomore year he’d worked at a gas station. While he was checking the radiator on a Japanese import, he’d dropped the cap into the bowels of the engine. When he poked a hand down to search for it, the thermostat in the guts of the car turned on the cooling fan, neatly severing his crooked middle finger just above the first knuckle. At the emergency room, they told him that they could save the finger if someone could locate it and put it on ice. His boss at the station couldn’t find it, and the doctor stitched the wound closed. The finger turned up later in a bucket of windshield cleaner. They never saw the radiator cap again.

Randy shook out his last two Camel cigarettes. He dropped the pack onto the pavement and tucked one between his ear, breaking it in half on the yellow mesh baseball cap he wore backwards to cover the fact that he hadn’t washed his hair in days. Randy swore and looked around for a light. Class was close to starting, and only two other boys were standing near him. They were wasting their last few moments of freedom arguing about whether it was possible to stuff a five liter Ford Mustang engine into a Mazda Miata.

“Anybody got a light?” Randy said.

“I’m telling you, it kicks ass,” one of the boys said. “I read it in one of those motor magazines.”

“What would you want to drive one of them for, anyway? They look like jellybeans,” the other answered.

“I need a fucking light,” Randy repeated.

“What’s Fitch yelling about?” the second boy said. Although Randy Fitch’s deformed hand had earned him a certain amount of respect at Wiccisaw High, they had no fear of him. In two years they’d all be working at Big T Tires together and they knew it.

“Dunno.”

The warning bell rang for class. A purple martin perched on Randy’s air filter. It lifted each leg once and then settled. Randy knocked the hood support away with one arm. The bird moved in plenty of time, excreting calmly across his windshield as it circled up to the lamppost. The hood, which weighed about fifty pounds, broke something in the engine compartment as it landed. Randy heard the busted part rolling around on the pavement below the car.

Randy Fitch walked quickly towards the school’s main entrance with his unlit cigarette trapped between his chapped lips. He wanted to get to his locker at a certain time. He wanted to get there right when Danny did.

Danny Chevalrae and Randy Fitch had attended the same school since kindergarten. Danny was the kid who wore thick glasses and corduroy pants until someone in high school introduced him to Levis and contact lenses. He made grades easily and quietly in class. Randy figured teachers encouraged Danny to excel because they knew he’d never survive if he had to get by on his nonexistent personality. He was skinny, lousy at sports, and as far as Randy knew, most girls had never even consciously seen him.

On this particular morning Randy overheard a conversation between two girls in science class. One of the girls had lived in Chivalry until high school, moved to California, and then moved back again for the semester. The other girl was Jennifer Kinder.

Jennifer Kinder was not Randy’s type of girl at all. At least, she wasn’t the type of girl who would have anything to do with him. She hung out with the people other people talked about. She wore dresses. She never swore. She was tall and pretty. She wore her hair long and it was always perfectly combed over her forehead. She didn’t smoke and she probably didn’t even own a leather jacket. He scoffed when his friends joked about her.

Randy Fitch wanted her in the worst way. He sat behind her in science class every day the seat wasn’t taken.

Jennifer’s voice was soft enough to keep the teacher from stopping class. “Don’t you miss California?” she asked.

“I missed Chivalry when we moved away,” Kara Lynn answered. “Yeah. I miss my friends. I don’t know anyone here anymore. I miss the ocean.”

“The desert’s not quite the same.”

“It’s beautiful,” Kara Lynn agreed, “but it’s not the same. I miss having a house.”

“How is it, living on Main Street?” Jennifer asked. This was her polite way of inquiring about Kara Lynn and her mother, and how they’d been forced to rely on the charity of others in moving back to Chivalry.

“It’s okay, I guess,” Kara Lynn responded. “I can’t believe Danny’s mother invited us to stay. It’s different. I think we should get an apartment somewhere, but Mom says it’s too expensive. She wants to be near Grandma. I feel so sorry for her. Grandma I mean. I called there yesterday. When she answered the phone, she sounded like a little girl. Not just because she can’t remember what she’s saying. When she talks, she talks in a little girl’s voice. It’s eerie.”

“What about Danny?” Jennifer asked. “You used to make fun of him.”

“He’s changed a lot,” Kara Lynn replied.

“I don’t see it. Maybe because I never left.”

“Maybe,” Kara Lynn said. “Maybe it’s me who’s changed.”

As soon as the school year started Randy forgot the combination to his locker. The lockers were full sized, four feet tall, and the door to his wouldn’t shut right at the top. The first day he wedged his fingers into the gap and yanked on it twice with all the violence he could manage. The second pull bent the latch on the lock and it popped open. Now he could open the locker just by smacking his hand against it.

Danny was trying to open his locker when Randy got there. Danny always had to dial the combination three times before the tumblers set right.

Randy waited to pull the door open until he heard the latch on Danny’s door come up. Then he swung his door wide, hard, slamming it across the space that held Danny’s books. It stuck there, humming and shivering, completely blocking Danny’s way. Randy didn’t even bother to reach into his own locker. He knew Danny would shut down and back off.

Most everyone at Wiccisaw High School was standing in the hall or walking to class. Somehow, over all of the lunchtime noises, people sensed something about to happen. They turned to stare, to listen, and to watch.

Carefully, ignoring the warning signals coursing through his body, Danny moved the metal door in front of him so that it stuck straight out between his locker and Randy’s. It formed a partition, a boundary line. Danny knew that if either of them crossed or even bumped it, there would be a fight.

Randy slammed the door back again, even harder. It bounced off the frame of Danny’s locker. Danny looked at Randy Fitch for the first time. He saw the anger there. He knew Randy was going to attack him. He didn’t understand why. He knew he couldn’t stop it. He knew running would only drive the blood lust into a frenzy. Adrenaline came as he realized he couldn’t defuse what was happening.

He punched the door back onto Randy’s side. The door would have shut and locked, but Randy wasn’t expecting it to come. He didn’t move the hand holding onto the frame in time. The door caught him across the knuckles and pierced his skin. He let out a howl, thick with pain and fury.

Randy’s speed was stunning. Danny felt fingers dig into his arms, and heard the hollow bang the bank of lockers made when his body slammed into them. The back of his skull hit hard at the same time, and he felt his teeth in his tongue. For a moment it was so quiet in the hall that he could hear the ringing in his ears. He felt people looked up across the length of the school, sensing blood even from the opposite side of the building. Randy let go, spitting and red. Danny reeled away, gasping. He tried to ask Randy where the anger came from, but there was too much happening for the words to come out.

“You little pussy,” Randy snarled.

Danny took in the hallway with a breathless look. He recognized Aaron Keller standing further down the row of lockers. Aaron was tall and wide, popular, with soft short hair that always seemed to stick out the wrong way and an easy smile he was willing to give to anyone. Aaron watched Danny steadily. He saw Danny glance towards him. He saw Danny’s eyes. They were the eyes of a calf sensing a wolf, looking to its mother for protection, watching her plod away. They were the rolling eyes of a rabbit about to be eaten.

Aaron Keller nodded at Danny. “Go on,” Aaron encouraged him. “Go after him.” The words were loud enough for Danny to hear.

He’d wrestled with Randy Fitch once, in gym class, the teacher looking on to make sure that no one used a full nelson or put someone in the hospital. After that match, Danny’s chest and arms had been covered with long red welts that swelled up into angry ridges, like cat scratches.

Lunging at Randy Fitch was easier than Danny thought it would be. He grabbed one arm and swung Randy into the lockers. After that, things became more difficult. He found himself caught in a whirlwind of tumbling muscle. His body couldn’t do anything he wanted it to do. All he could do was hang on.

He felt them hit the wall and the floor at the same time, and felt the burn as skin peeled from his knees and his elbows. He felt his head slam into something that didn’t give way. The two belligerents fell apart and got up. They circled one another. Then Danny saw Kara Lynn in his peripheral vision and all the fight went out of him.

Even though there were people standing all around them, the only sound Danny could hear was Randy Fitch panting like a dog. Randy’s hands flexed into claws and relaxed again. Randy’d lost his hat, and his long hair hung in limp strands over his face. He had a long gash running down one cheek.

“This is stupid,” Danny mumbled. He put his right hand out, shaking, placing it in the space between them.

Randy’s fist shot out straight, no curve to it at all, faster than Danny could follow. He felt the cartilage in his nose pop like a brown paper bag blown full of air and hit open handed. His eyes swam with tears and he felt a warm gush of snot that tasted like blood roll down his face. Watching Randy back away, he wondered if maybe the other boy thought he was done. Danny didn’t realize his lips had peeled back from his teeth in a feral smile and red was running in the cracks between the white enamel. Rage flared in him. It felt good, like flying. The blood dripped down his chin and splattered on the tile floor.

Danny wouldn’t remember bridging the hot space between himself and the other boy. He wouldn’t remember locking his fingers around Randy’s ears. As he sent his thumbs to gouge in the boy’s eyes, he didn’t feel himself throwing the head sideways into the locker and then knocking the body to the floor to get astride it. All he knew were the spots he hadn’t hit already, and when he ran out of those he started over and kept going until they pulled him off.

Kara Lynn was staring into her locker when Jennifer walked up after school. The trend this year was to take a single large poster and cut it to fit the inside of the door, covering it completely like wallpaper. The guys hung pictures of women wearing shaving cream. On the first day of school, she heard one complaining that girls could always cut and fit things perfectly, without using so much as a ruler. Bolstered by this fact, she went out and bought a door sized poster of Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback Troy Aikman. After an hour of work, Troy had been knee-capped by the bottom edge of the locker door, lost the football to the left side, and been gutted by the locking mechanism. The next morning she opened the door and Troy rolled out onto the floor. She crumpled him unceremoniously into the nearest trash can and rubber cemented a picture of her with her arms around her grandmother on Danny’s front porch in his place. The first time they took the old woman to Danny’s for dinner, they had to drag her out of the trailer. Somehow, the front porch stuck in the slippery fabric of Grandma’s memory. Now she asked to go every time Kara Lynn saw her.

“My psychology teacher talked about it today after lunch,” Jennifer said. Kara Lynn knew she was talking about Danny. “It’s called a blind rage. He said that it hasn’t been adequately studied, but that the adrenaline and stimulation which occurs in a fight might cause the brain to begin operating on a different, more primal level. He said that in that instance, a person might be overcome with blood lust, or the desire to fight to the death. He called it a survival instinct.”

“Mr. Werner?” Kara Lynn asked.

“He’s a darling,” her friend hummed.

“Jennifer, he’s married.”

“He doesn’t wear his wedding ring. He says it gives him a rash.”

“How do you know that?” Kara Lynn queried.

“I asked him.”

“Jennifer,” Kara Lynn scolded.

“Hush,” her friend said. “My mother told me about a girl in college who went into a blind rage once. This girl was on the basketball team with her best friend. One day after practice they were alone in the showers and her friend told her she loved her, really loved her. Like she wanted to go to bed with her. The girl flipped.”

Kara Lynn said, “Maybe she felt betrayed.”

“I don’t know.” Jennifer continued the story. “She said everything went gray, like when you stand up from a chair too fast. Later they told her she almost killed her friend with a towel hamper.”

Kara Lynn asked, “Is that what you think happened to Danny?”

“He sure looked out of it there at the end, when they pulled him off Randy. Can you imagine? Waking up somewhere and being told that you almost killed someone? I’ve had dreams like that. They scare me to death. What if you woke up and it was true?”

“Danny didn’t almost kill Randy,” Kara Lynn responded. “He just needs some stitches over his eye.”

“I’m talking about my mother’s friend,” Jennifer said. “You and I both know Randy deserved what he got. He’s a creep. He sits behind us every day in science class and just stares. You’ve seen him. I don’t think Danny should even be suspended. Randy started it. We all saw him sucker punch Danny.”

“I have to go back there now,” Kara Lynn said, digging a folder out of the bottom of her locker. “He’s going to be there. What do I say? Nice left jab? What if you’re right? What if he still doesn’t know what he did? Maybe I’ll be the first one to tell him he’s going to be out of school for at least two weeks and they might expel him.”

“Well, he’s not going to beat you up,” Jennifer giggled. “I think he likes you.”

“Really.”

“I’ve seen the way he watches you,” Jennifer explained. “You let a boy with a look that hungry walk you home, he’s going to fall in love.”

“Well, I don’t know how I feel about him.” Kara Lynn finished dragging books out of her locker and zipped her bag. “Especially now. When I saw the thing with Randy start, I got so excited. Randy’s such an asshole. It seemed like quiet, shy Danny was going to be the one to take care of him. But then it changed so fast. My stomach hurt. I don’t know how to explain it. It was frightening. Do you know what I mean?”

“I guess so,” Jennifer mused. “There was so much blood.”

“It’s not even that,” Kara Lynn said. “I can’t believe that two people would do that to each other. It’s so stupid.”

There’d been blood everywhere, gushing out of the long cut over Randy’s eye socket, tracking rusty smears across the white tiles where the two boys’ sneakers slid in it. The janitors mopped it up, but some of the cracks between the tiles were still shaded with a reddish black that hadn’t been there before.

Kara Lynn shut her locker. The halls were empty except for her and Jennifer. Everyone else was in the parking lot or standing waiting for the buses. Kara Lynn had to walk home. Softball would start soon, and she’d be able to catch rides after practice with the other girls. Until then it wasn’t far.

“Are you walking with me, Jen?” she asked.

“Bobby and I are going to his house. He’s got a pool table. He’s going to show me how to jump balls.” She gave Kara Lynn a worried look. “Unless you really want me to. If you don’t want to go back alone.”

“I’ll be okay.” Kara Lynn smiled. Bobby was Jennifer’s man of the week. “Have fun. The black ball’s the bad one.”

“I know. Hey, see you later.” Jennifer walked a few steps and then turned back to her friend.

“Good luck,” she said.

Sometimes when Danny slept he dreamt of his father’s skin. It was cool and smooth, and he thought that his father’s chest had been without hair, like his own. The skin was soft and giving, but underneath there lay a strength. It was a hard, fibrous power that reminded him of tree roots under rich soil. He couldn’t remember how his father had looked, or the timbre of his voice, but he could always feel his skin. The dream never left him happy or sad, only empty and anxious, as if there was something he had to do he couldn’t recall.

Danny woke disoriented. He sat in his chair on the front porch. He had a kink in his neck from leaning his head back against the wall of the house. At first, he thought it was the slanting rays of afternoon sun which disturbed him. Then he felt the tickle of the gauze on his face, and the throb of pain that came with each heartbeat. It was funny how the body could take over. He’d come outside to sit and think about what had happened, and what it meant. Now the sun was even with the eaves of the house from where he sat. Time had passed since they’d sent him home, time he couldn’t account for.

He thought of the nurse’s voice. “Don’t worry about all this blood. It’s not as bad as it seems. Just think of it as a bloody nose. It’s not broken.”

He’d wanted to tell her about the sound Randy’s fist had made when it crashed into his face, but he hadn’t felt like talking through the pain.

“This is styptic powder. It’s a clotting agent,” she’d said. “It’ll keep the bleeding from starting again. I need to stuff some patches up inside your nostrils. They’re going to make you uncomfortable, but there’s no help for it. I want you to leave them in for the rest of the day.”

A tinkling noise came from the kitchen. Danny heard the rapid cracking that comes when warmer liquid is poured over ice cubes. He hoped it wasn’t his mother in the kitchen, that they hadn’t called her. That she hadn’t come home early for him.

The door opened and Kara Lynn walked onto the porch. Danny realized he wanted to see her even less. He sat up straight and put his hand over his nose. He wondered how he could pull out the gauze without her seeing what he was doing. The cotton felt crumbly as he rolled it in his fingers, and it pulled at the hairs inside his nose. He tasted dried blood for a moment, the taste of iron. The first two breaths through his nose after he pulled out the patches were impossibly cool.

“I brought you this,” Kara Lynn said brightly. She handed him a glass and sat down on the swing. “How do you feel?” He cupped the crusted gauze in his hand and dropped it beside the chair.

He drank and tasted water. It stung the back of his teeth as if nothing had passed his lips for days. It was delicious. She held out her hand to him. There were two white tablets sitting on her palm. He reached out for the pills. Her hand was cool on his as she turned it to drop them.

“Aspirin,” she said. “I thought your head might hurt.” It did. No one had given him anything to kill the pain.

“Thank you.” His voice cracked.

They sat still for a moment.

“Do you know,” Danny said, “I’ve never been in a fight in my life. Not even playing in the sandbox when I was a kid. I just beat the crap out of someone, and I don’t even know why.”

“So you feel pretty darned good, then,” she said.

“Yeah, pretty darned good. I’ll probably get expelled.”

“No you won’t,” she assured him.

He looked at her for the first time. She had her hands trapped in her lap and her knees tight together. He couldn’t tell if she was worried about him or afraid of what he might do.

“Actually, I feel pretty bad,” he said. He popped the aspirin into his mouth. Even with a swig of water, they went down hard. “I remember almost everything now,” he said. “It just seems unreal. Like I woke up thinking it’s six in the morning, and it’s really dinnertime. I don’t know how it happened. It wasn’t me. But it was.”

“You sure lit into him,” Kara Lynn said.

“I’ve never even thought I could compete with other guys. There’s always been someone stronger to pick on me. I think I’m doing good if I can just avoid them.”

“I don’t think that’ll happen anymore,” said Kara Lynn. “Them picking on you.”

“And I should feel good about that,” Danny reflected. “I stood up for myself. I’m a man. I took out the bad guy. That’s pride material.”

“Yeah. It is,” Kara Lynn agreed.

“I just feel sick to my stomach. And my nose hurts. Is Randy hurt bad?”

“He’ll heal,” she said. “Danny, it’s nothing he didn’t deserve.”

He didn’t answer her. They sat together in silence, and after a while the sun dropped down to eye level and lit orange fires that ran across the sky.

Danny liked to wait for his mother to come home from the hospital in Santa Fe before he went to sleep. After the fight, he couldn’t do differently, no matter how much he wanted to.

Friday nights were bad in the emergency room. There were glass lacerations from bar fights. There were broken bones from domestic squabbles. Bullet wounds were becoming more common. His mother’s nursing shift ran from two to midnight. That night she came home late, and her exhausted eyes weren’t just the result of trying to ease the pain of others. She came through the door with a bag of groceries from the Safeway. “Danny. Danny–boy,” she said, and he knew the principal had called her at work.

“I didn’t start it, Mom.”

“You know that doesn’t matter. Danny. You can’t go solving quarrels with your fists. People grow out of that in grade school. What would the world be, otherwise?”

He didn’t say the obvious things. His mother knew the brutality in people’s hearts better than he did. She saw the evidence every night. It didn’t mean she would sleep well, thinking he’d become a part of it. “I tried to stop it,” he explained. “I was holding out my hand and he punched me.”

“They said he needed stitches, Danny. Stitches. My God, what did you do?”

“Was I just supposed to take it?” he asked. “It’s hard enough as it is.”

“What’s so hard?” she wanted to know. “You go to school. You get good grades. You live in a town where no one’s ever been mugged. People have barbecues on weekends. You have a mother who loves you. I don’t understand what’s so hard.”

His thoughts poured out too fast for his mind to count. Somehow he was able to keep them away from his lips. He didn’t tell her it was hard enough to make it through every day when he couldn’t find someone to eat lunch with. He didn’t tell her about the sinking feeling he got in his gut anytime a teacher told the class to break into groups, because he was afraid no one would want to work with him. He saw the same people day after day. He’d gone to school with them all his life, but he wasn’t part of the community they shared. He didn’t know why.

He couldn’t tell her that he loved her, but that he needed a father. He needed someone to show him how to be a man. He needed someone to tell him when he finally was.

“Randy’s a bully,” he said. “He’s been a bully ever since grade school. He didn’t grow out of it. If I hadn’t stood up to him, he would’ve kept on me all year.”

She shook her head. He knew it wasn’t because she didn’t understand. It was because she understood too well.

“The first few days after you were born,” she said in a quiet voice, “I noticed all sorts of things about you no one else will probably ever see. What I noticed most was how straight your spine was. I saw the strength in your back. Even when you were small enough to fit in the crook of my arm or in the hollow of my belly, your back was the strongest back I’d ever seen.”

His mother turned away from him. She asked him if he would mind putting the groceries away, and then she went upstairs to her room. As she climbed the steps, he could see her fatigue in the way she held herself. It made him hurt even more than he already did.