Sipping his lemonade, Clive raised the issue of Randy's rifle and the FPS. A metal BB out of one of the pistols, at the range we were going to be shooting at one another, hurt a little bit but not that much, according to hearsay. Pump the rifle enough times, however, and a copperhead BB was going to break the skin.
“But if I can't pump, I'll be at a disadvantage,” Randy moaned.
“We have to figure out how many rifle pumps is equal to the standard pistol shot,” I offered.
“How do we figure that out?” Clive asked.
“We can test it out on Marcus,” Randy said.
Marcus said, “Okay,” and we headed out into the yard. Midweek, midafternoon, we didn't have to worry about passersby Marcus took off his shirt.
Randy loaded his rifle. “Let's start at one,” he said.
I said, “Marcus, why don't you turn around so it doesn't go in your face or something.”
Marcus turned around and gritted his teeth. There was a routine he used to do when one of us got mad at him, where he pulled up his shirt and clowned, “Please, Massa, Massa, Massa, please,” anticipating the whip,
Roots-like
. He had the same expression on his face. Randy stood four yards away, aimed, and fired. The BB hit Marcus in the spine and bounced off.
“Shit, that didn't hurt,” Marcus said. “Do I have a mark?”
We told him no. Randy said, “Then let's try three times,” and stepped closer.
“Ow,” Marcus cried. But it still didn't break the skin.
Clack clack clack clack clack. I noticed that Randy kept creeping closer between shots, but I didn't say anything. Neither did Clive.
Five times and Marcus screamed and a crescent of blood smiled on his skin. “So don't pump it more than four times,” Clive said.
“Yo, that hurt,” Marcus said.
“Let's make it no more than two, just to be safe,” I said.
I couldn't sleep that night. The mosquitoes didn't help. Then it was Thursday and its tally through the years. When NP broke his ankle sneaking into his bedroom window after hanging out late at the Rec Room with those townie girls. When I didn't properly hose off the lounge chairs on the deck was a Thursday, and the next day I got confined to inside the property line for a week and obediently stuck around like a fool even when they were out of town and would never know. Fight after fight, too many to count. When the chain fell off Marcus's bike and he smeared his bare feet all the way across the gravel of the Hill trying to stop—that was Thursday all over. Our weekly full moon.
I woke up wrong. I heard noises in the living room. It should have been quiet. “Why aren't you at work?” I asked my brother.
“I switched my shift so I can be in the war,” he said. I later learned Nick had done the same thing, making it four on four.
I told him he couldn't go. He'd get hurt. “When they're away, I'm in charge,” I reminded him.
“You're not in charge of me.”
Odd. It always worked when our sister used that line, like every five minutes. “Yes, I am.”
“What are you going to do—tell on me?” he said, and he had me there. I couldn't rat him out or else I'd get it, too, just like the good old days except now I was actually guilty. He went off to get in some last-minute practice.
At fight time, I headed up Walker. I passed the stop sign at Meredith and noticed it was freckled with silver, the red paint chipped away—target practice for one of our friends, probably Marcus, who lived two houses down. Nice cluster on the T and O. He had good aim, depending on how far away he was standing.
I stood in front of the Edwardses'. They'd been some of the earliest victims of the Other Family bug. Yvonne Edwards was my sister's age, and had a rep for throwing heavy objects when she got angry, usually at her little brother. Ralph, who happened to be my final
opponent in the days of summer smackdowns. Ralph was an in-betweener like Randy, too young for us to accept into our plans, and too old for the younger crop of kids. He was harmless, and occasionally we'd let him hang around us, but that had been years ago. I don't know what he did with his days, but with a crazy sister like Yvonne, he probably spent a lot of time ducking.
Like all of our fights, it started over something little. A pebble, actually. He was two years younger than me, and I was a head taller. Which probably enabled me to croon, “You're lost little girlllll,” from the Doors record our sister played over and over, when I saw him sitting on the curb that day. Forlorn, with his ashy elbows on his ashy knees and messed up 'Fro. The words just popped out. That's what occurred to me to say as I biked past him.
He gave me the evil eye and threw a pebble at me. It skipped on the ground and jangled about my spokes. No biggie but then I saw Marcus coming down the street, slapping a basketball, so there was a witness. I jumped off the bike and—pausing to knock the kick-stand down—said, “What the fuck are you doing?” Like I said, he was smaller than me. I'd wrap this up pretty quickly.
The fight was long and drawn out and went on for miles, if you untangled our paces and laid them out lengthwise. I'd never seen such fury before. In a little person, anyway. I punched him in the face and he took it and retreated, walking backward, and I advanced on him for a while up the road. Then he reached some internal border and started advancing on me, hitting me in the face, and I retreated for a while, walking backward until I was up against my own personal wall and advanced on him again. That's why pro fights have a ring—otherwise people would just walk all over the goddamned place, up the aisle through the seats, out the lobby, and into the avenues. We prowled after each other up and down Walker, back and forth, the moronic pendulum, as my friends came out one by one, sniffing this on the wind from all points and following alongside like a news crew, providing blow-by-blow for the folks at home. His evil eyes on me the whole time. I'd get him in a headlock but he wouldn't
go down to the ground like he was supposed to. He was tough! I tried to do an Indiana Jones move, from when he's grappling with the Nazi bruiser on the airplane and slams the guy's head into the wing a bunch of times. I thought this was a spectacular gimmick and tried to re-create it with Ralph's head instead of the Nazi head, and the Andersons' red Volvo instead of the airplane wing. But I couldn't get his head to the metal. His neck was superstrong, probably from dodging his sister's bricks.
Eventually we got tired and put down our fists. He didn't beat me and I didn't beat him, but since I was the older one, the judges called it his way. If anybody asked, I would have said, Look, the other guy wanted it more. He was descended from a construction material–throwing peoples and was in serious training between that and the whole Other Family thing, which he probably wasn't aware of consciously but you know he had to bend before such fierce invisible gravity. Especially if his family was the Other Family in question, with the cheaper presents and fainter hugs. But no one asked. Reggie wasn't there, and he didn't mention it but I know he heard, so in the end I did lose, in the eyes of my inner ref I cut through the Edwardses' driveway. The summer of that last fight was the last summer they came out.
WHEN I GOT TO CLIVE'S HOUSE
, we were all there except for Nick. He'd called, whispering about how his mom was home and he couldn't get out of the house with his BB gun. Marcus suggested we start without him.
“But then we'd have uneven teams,” Bobby said.
“One of us can sit out,” I said. “Youngest first?”
“Four is better than three,” Clive announced, and we caved.
It was going to be dark soon, so we got busy making teams. Everybody wanted to be on Clive's team because Clive's team always won, but Randy was a factor with his rifle expertise. Plus, if you appeared to value his Randy-ness in all its wondrous forms—driver,
hunter … well that's all I can think of right now—he might rule in your favor during an upcoming shotgun dispute. He threw off years of sturdy mathematics.
Reggie said, “Me and Bobby are a mini-team because we've been practicing together,” and I was appalled. We'd never not been a mini-team, what with the whole “Benji 'n' Reggie, Benji 'n' Reggie” singsong thing through the years. The only thought that had calmed me that afternoon was that I could protect him better if he was on my team. Send him on a crazy mission out of the way until it was all over. He didn't look at me.
This historic severing of the Benji-'n'-Reggie alliance went un-remarked upon. But who was I kidding? Nobody thought of us as the old unit anymore except for me. Some brothers threw bricks, others simply walked away from each other. The final teams were me, Clive, Marcus, and Nick on the Vice (for
Miami Vice)
and Randy, Bobby, Reggie, and NP on the Cool Chief Rockers. When Nick finally got his ass over there, I pulled out the paint goggles I'd rescued from the cobwebs under the deck and NP said, “Goggles?” I'd brought them for Reggie.
“No one said anything about goggles.”
“I don't got goggles.”
“I'm not wearing any pussy-ass goggles,” Marcus said. And neither was Reggie, I didn't even bother to fight with him about it. I didn't wear them, either.
The sky was getting dark. We went over the rules again and counted to two hundred per the guidelines. Then it was on.
We ran away, scattering according to haywire teenage logic toward the highway, toward the beach. I jogged around the corner, checking to see if I was in anyone's sights, and jumped into the undeveloped lot next to the Nichols House. I waded in deep enough that I couldn't be seen from the road, but shallow enough that I could see anyone coming down Clive's street or the street Mrs. Jenkins's house was on. Fifty-two, fifty-three. Getting there. It was almost too dark to play at this point, but the poor visibility would help me. I was going to wait for one of the Cool Chief Rockers to
recon my way and then ambush them, a favorite tactic of mine to this day. Wait for the right moment in an argument with a loved one, then ambush them with some hurt I've held on to for years, the list of indictments nurtured in the darkness of my hideout, and say, “Gotcha!” See how you ruined me. If I was lucky, Bobby and Reggie would stop right in front of where I was hiding, to regroup or break into song, and I'd take them both out.
A firefly blinked into existence, drew half a word in the air. Then gone. A black bug secret in the night. Such a strange little guy. It materialized, visible to human eyes for brief moments, and then it disappeared. But it got its name from its fake time, people time, when in fact most of its business went on when people couldn't see it. Its true life was invisible to us but we called it firefly after its fractions. Knowable and fixed for a few seconds, sharing a short segment of its message before it continued on its real mission, unknowable in its true self and course, outside of reach. It was a bad name because it was incomplete—both parts were true, the bright and the dark, the one we could see and the other one we couldn't. It was both.
I moved closer to the street so I could get a better view and someone hit me in the face with a rock.
Hot oil! Hot oil!
A rock. That's what it felt like. My head snapped back and the top half of my face throbbed like I'd been slapped. I cursed and stumbled out into the street. Who throws rocks at a BB gunfight? I yelled for a time-out.
Randy popped out of the woods on the other side of the street. “I hit you,” he said, in surprise and pride.
“Why are you throwing rocks?”
“No, it was a BB.”
I poked gingerly around my left eye. He'd hit me in the socket, in the hollow between the tear duct and the eyebrow. There may be a proper anatomical name for that part of the eye socket, but I don't know it. It felt like a rock. I couldn't see out of it. There was stuff in it. Randy reached forward and I batted his hand away. I heard NP say, “What's up?” I traced my fingertip along the lumpy hole in my
face, the stinging flesh. It broke the skin. He'd pumped it more than two times.
“What happened?” Clive asked.
“Benji's out. I hit him,” Randy declared.
“I'm not out,” I said. “He pumped it more than twice! I'm bleeding! He's disqualified!”
Randy took my face in his hands and lifted my chin for a better look. He did this queasy thing. He bent his face down and stuck his tongue in the wound.
I pushed him away. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I was checking the taste to see if it was blood or sweat,” he said. “It's sweat. You have sweat all running down your forehead.”
I told him to keep the fuck off me, freakazoid. I touched the hole in my face and staggered into the cone of the streetlight. Fat june bugs crawled over one another on the ground in their wretched streetlight ritual. I held up my finger. It was blood.
Bobby and Reggie appeared, and then all the Cool Chief Rockers and Vicers, guns dangling. Reggie grabbed my arm and wanted to know if I was all right. I hadn't heard his voice like that in a long time. I shook my head drunkenly “What the hell did you do, Randy?” Reggie said.
“He pumped it more than twice,” I said. Everybody murmured dag, in their disparate dag registers. When they got a look at the wound, they re-dagged at how close it came to my eye.
Randy denied it, but to break the skin from across the street, he had to pump it a lot more than twice. We all knew it.
I realized the Horrible Thing. I said, “It's still in there.” I probed around the wound. The skin was tough and swole up, but beneath that was something harder, like a pearl. I shared the Horrible Thing.
Randy didn't believe it. “Let me see,” he said, his hands out.
“Get away from him,” Reggie shouted. He stepped between us. “Benji,” he started, squinting at the bloody hole in the poor light, “you have to go to the hospital.”
“We can't do that,” Marcus said. “We'll get in trouble.”
“We'll all be in some serious trouble when our parents come out tomorrow.”
I looked around. They had decided. Even Clive, who in his alpha dogness could have grabbed Randy's keys and taken me if he wanted, fuck everybody. He was looking down the street, as if he heard his parents pulling up, avoiding my gaze. Half gaze.