Miss Clay looked up at us over her reading glasses. “Thank you, Mr. Belcher,” she said. “Take a seat, girls.” She passed us a box of Kleenex. I started to explain about
the friendship application, since that was what the fight was about, but Miss Clay cut me off. “That’s neither here nor there.” She launched into a lecture, saying how
disappointed she was in us for engaging in such inappropriate behavior and going on about what was and wasn’t proper conduct at Byler High. “Girls hitting each other,” she said.
“It’s so unladylike.”
“Unladylike?” I asked. “Do you think I care what’s ladylike and what’s not?”
I was still completely worked up. I had gotten even hotter when I realized that Miss Clay wasn’t going to let me tell her about the repulsive friendship application. I went on to say that
if the teachers had been doing their jobs and looking after their students instead of turning a blind eye when one of them got picked on, these girls wouldn’t be going after my sister, and I
wouldn’t have to be defending her.
Miss Clay jerked off her reading glasses. “Don’t use that tone of voice with me, young lady. You need to respect your elders.”
“I respect people who do their jobs,” I said. “Respecting people just because they’re older is a bunch of malarkey. Jerry Maddox is older. Am I supposed to respect
him?”
“Don’t try to change the subject,” she said. “Jerry Maddox has nothing to do with this.”
“He sure as heck does,” I said. “You know it, too, and if you pretend you don’t, you’ve got your head up your butt just like all the rest of them.”
“Jean Holladay, you have one ugly mouth on you. You’re suspended.”
“What?”
“You can spend the next three days at home, thinking about your behavior.”
“What about her?” I pointed over at Lisa Saunders, who hadn’t said a word and instead had been sitting there with her ankles crossed, daubing at her runny mascara with the
Kleenex and doing her best to look innocent. “She was fighting, too. And she wrote that thing about Liz that I’ve been trying to explain to you.”
“I’m not interested in whatever the two of you were squabbling about,” Miss Clay said. “School officials never get to the bottom of these quarrels, and in my mind, we
shouldn’t try. You’re not being suspended for fighting. You’re being suspended for using unseemly language with the vice principal.”
Uncle Tinsley was
pretty upset when I told him I’d been suspended. “This is mortifying,” he said. “Another
first for the Holladay family.” Once I explained that I’d been standing up for Liz, he said, “Well, I guess you did what you felt you had to do, but it won’t exactly boost
our standing in the community.”
The funny thing was, it sort of did. When I got back to school at the end of November, the other kids treated me differently. Now I wasn’t Day-Glo Girl, I was the Girl Who Beat Up Lisa
Saunders. I guessed that it was, if nothing else, a step up. The teasing mostly stopped, and a few kids actually went out of their way to be friendly. It was as if they thought going to the cops
and filing charges against Maddox was being a tattletale—like running to the teacher when someone picked on you—but throwing punches, now, that got their respect.
Kids continued to give Liz a hard time, but then the judge set a date in March for the trial, and it became clear to everyone in town that the case wasn’t going to go away. That was when
we realized we had a lot more to worry about than bony-nosed Lisa Saunders and her girlfriends.
Piles of garbage started appearing on the lawn and driveway at Mayfield. We’d get up in the morning, and it would be strewn all over the place—used Pampers, empty bottles of RC and
cans of SpaghettiOs, plastic bags, shredded paper, and those cylindrical Pringles containers. All that stuff practically had Maddox’s name on it.
One day, on our way to the bus stop, Maddox’s black Le Mans appeared out of nowhere. Maddox was behind the wheel, hunched forward like a racecar driver. He gunned the car toward Liz and
me, swerving so close that we had to jump into the ditch to keep from getting hit. We felt the whoosh of air as the car passed. I picked up a rock and hurled it after him, but the Le Mans sped off
and the rock missed.
After that, it seemed like Maddox cruised around looking for us almost every day, trying to run us off the road when he saw us walking home or riding our bikes into town. It got to the point
where, whenever I went outside, I listened for the roar of the Le Mans. I started carrying around a pocketful of rocks, and I did give the car at least one good dent, but most of the time Maddox
got away too quickly for me to score a hit.
We didn’t tell Uncle Tinsley. We never seriously considered going to the police, either, since we wouldn’t be able to prove anything, and so far, filing complaints against Maddox had
only caused trouble. But Maddox’s campaign was having an effect on Liz. She was terrified and didn’t want to leave the house. She also started talking more and more about the voices and
how they were warning her that Maddox was hiding behind every bush and tree.
I kept telling Liz—and myself—that the voices were temporary and would go away once Maddox got convicted and sent to prison. It was now December, with the trial three months away,
and I was worried sick that Liz might fall apart by then. That made me wonder if we should drop the case. But if we pulled out now, Maddox would know he had terrorized us into giving up. We’d
have to leave town, since I couldn’t imagine riding my bike around Byler knowing I might run into the man and he’d give me that smile bullies give the people they push around. And
leaving town wouldn’t solve anything. Maddox would haunt Liz, and that might make the voices get worse.
I decided there was only one thing to do. I couldn’t wait for the trial. I had to kill Jerry Maddox.
I didn’t have
a car to mow Maddox down, so I had to strategize. There was a ridge behind the Maddox house with a lot of
boulders and big rocks. I’d noticed one in particular when I was working for the Maddoxes, and I’d thought at the time that if it ever rolled down, it might do some serious damage. It
might even kill someone. So I decided to roll it down myself.
I would hide on the ridge until Maddox came out to the back porch, which he did every day to check the thermometer and put the stuff from his paper shredder into the trash cans, and then
I’d send that rock barreling down the hill and crush him like a bug.
After school the next day, I rode the red Schwinn into Byler, left it at the library bike stand, and cut through the yard of one of Maddox’s neighbors to the ridge behind his house. I
scrambled up through the scrub pines to the rock, which was about as big as an armchair and had one side covered with lichen. I pushed on the rock to see how loose it was, and that was when I
discovered I couldn’t budge the thing. It must have weighed a ton.
I needed a partner.
Liz wasn’t cut out for this type of assignment, and asking Uncle Tinsley was out of the question. The only person I could turn to was Joe Wyatt. I’d already told
him all about Maddox’s harassment campaign, of course, and so at school the next day, I explained my plan and asked if he’d be willing to help out.
“When do we do it, cuz?” he asked.
I told him how big and heavy the rock was. Joe didn’t make such good grades in school, but he was really smart when it came to doing things, and he told me what we needed to do was lever
the rock into motion. His dad, he said, had a tamping bar that would do the job.
The next day, Joe met me at the library, carrying the heavy iron bar. We circled up into the woods behind Maddox’s house, and I showed Joe the rock. He worked the tamping bar under it, but
it wouldn’t budge, so he got a smaller rock that he used as a fulcrum, and with both of us pulling down on the long end of the bar, we worked the big rock forward.
“This’ll do it,” Joe said.
“Maddox is a goner,” I said.
We sat down on the pine needles and waited.
After about an hour, we heard the whistle of the train and the wheels rumbling and screeching across the tracks that ran through the middle of Byler. After the noise died away, the back door
opened. We jumped up and grabbed the handle of the tamping bar. But instead of Maddox coming out the door, it was Doris. She had just given birth and was carrying her pink-faced newborn in one arm
and a bag of trash in the other.
I felt my whole body sag. All the energy that I had worked up to kill Maddox just drained out of me. As much as I hated Doris for siding with her husband, I wasn’t about to kill
her—and certainly not the new baby. That was when I realized I really didn’t want to kill anyone, not even Maddox. Bad as he was, that just wasn’t in me.
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all,” I said.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Joe said.
As we watched, Doris took the lid off the can, dropped the bag in, and replaced the lid without putting down the baby. Then she went back into the house, never once looking our way. Joe pulled
the tamping bar out from underneath the rock. “That was a right nice fulcrum, though,” he said. “Could have done it if we’d wanted to.”
We headed across the hill, away from the house.
“Does this mean we’re wimps?” I asked.
“Nah,” Joe said. He kicked at a pinecone in his path. “You know, we could get Maddox where it really hurts.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Le Mans.”
Joe and I
talked about smashing the windshield, but we worried that the noise might bring Maddox running out of the house. Then he
suggested keying the car, but we also nixed that idea because it would only do cosmetic damage, and Maddox could still cruise around, trying to mow us down. In the end, we decided that the best
course of action would be to immobilize the Le Mans by slashing the tires. Maddox could buy new ones of course, but we’d have made a real statement—and we could always slash the new
tires, too.
We waited until the weekend, when Maddox would probably be home. We needed the cover of darkness, so Joe told me to meet him at the library at dusk. He always carried his jackknife on him, he
said, so I didn’t need to worry about anything in the weapons department. He said he’d go over the day before and case Maddox’s street and work out a plan of attack. We needed to
wear dark clothes, he added. “Camouflage,” he explained. Joe was putting a lot of thought into what he called “the operation.”
When I rode up at the appointed time on Saturday, Joe was waiting at the library bike stand. He got on the Schwinn, and with me sitting on the rack behind, we pedaled over to Maddox’s
neighborhood as the sun was going down. It was a colorless December sunset, the sky all silvers and whites and grays.
When we got to Maddox’s street, we could see the Le Mans parked in the breezeway down the block. Joe had me hide with the Schwinn behind a holly bush at the street corner. My job was to be
the lookout and if anyone approached, either in a car or on foot, I was supposed to hoot like an owl. By then the sun had gone down, the streetlights had come on, and they cast pools of purplish
light. While I waited at the holly bush, Joe casually walked down the street and looked around. When he saw that the coast was clear, he ducked behind a big rhododendron a few houses up from the
Maddoxes’.
As I watched from over the holly, Joe scurried from bush to bush, stopping at each one to suss out the situation. When he reached the bush closest to Maddox’s house, he dropped down on his
stomach and shimmied over to the Le Mans.
Joe was out of my sight when a porch light flicked on at the house across the street from Maddox’s. The front door opened and an older lady let out a little dog. I started hooting like
crazy. At the sound of it, the little dog began to bark. Suddenly, Joe came running as fast as he could toward me. I had the bike ready to roll, kickstand up, when he reached me.
“Got two tires,” he said breathlessly as he jumped on. I clambered aboard and pushed off with both feet while Joe stood up on the pedals, working them as fast as he could.
We circled around town instead of going through it, and fifteen minutes later, we got to the bottom of the mill hill. Joe was about to get off and walk the rest of the way home, and I was going
to head back to Mayfield, when the squad car pulled up alongside us. The cop pointed to the side of the road. Joe stopped the bike, and the cop parked behind us and got out, leaving the engine
running and the headlights on. As he walked toward us, he put on his broadbrimmed hat and adjusted the chin strap.
“What seems to be the hurry here?” he asked.
“Got to get home for dinner,” Joe said.
“We had a report of some slashed tires over on Willow Lane,” the cop said. “Know anything about it?”
“No, sir,” Joe said.
“You’re saying you didn’t do it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re denying it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re just bike riding,” I said.
“I’m not talking to you,” the cop said. He turned back to Joe. “Son, empty your pockets onto the hood of the car.”
Joe sighed. He climbed off the bike and started taking stuff out of his pockets: keys, change, string, a few screws, a chestnut, and the jackknife.
The cop picked up the knife and opened it. “This is a concealed weapon,” he said.
“It’s my whittling knife,” Joe said.
“It’s a concealed lethal weapon,” the cop said. “Follow me.” He opened the back door of the squad car. “Get in.”
People driving by slowed down and craned their necks to stare as Joe climbed into the backseat. I stood there straddling the Schwinn as the cop car pulled away. I wanted to wave to Joe, but he
didn’t look back.
I pedaled through
the darkness toward Mayfield. While Joe and I were planning and then carrying out the operation, slashing
Maddox’s tires seemed not only justifiable but something I obviously had to do to defend myself and Liz and to strike back against someone trying to kill us. But it occurred to me that if I
tried to explain the tire-slashing operation to anyone, it was going to sound incredibly stupid, the kind of boneheaded crime that landed kids in juvie. Looking back, I almost couldn’t
believe it myself. On top of it all, I had gotten Joe into trouble. I kept thinking of him staring straight ahead as the squad car drove off.