Chapter 4

“The guys who won World War II and that whole generation have disappeared, and now we have a bunch of teenage twits.” - Clint Eastwood

For some reason, when you’re driving endlessly for hours alone and in silence, there is a form of highway hypnosis where you do nothing but reflect upon the past and hash (or rehash) every fork in the road you’ve taken and the mistakes made that you ought to have learned from.

“You’re old enough to know better,” my brother had told me at various times in my life, from the time that I was a teenager (barely), even up to recently. Now, I was reflecting on the fact that I was nearing thirty ... and just when was ‘old enough to know better’ ever going to kick in for me?

For some reason, for me anyway, my private thoughts have never strayed much into the future. I certainly didn’t ever consider whatever was going on ‘now’ to be of much interest either. I mused upon this a bit and decided at length that since I had never expected to have a future after high school ... that this was all quite alien territory, every single day of it since.

The first Monday back at school after the tragedy of Patty’s suicide and the Thanksgiving recess, the bell for the start of 1^st period hadn’t even rung yet when I heard my A#1 bully since elementary school, Frank Larson, loudly call out my name in the hallway, gathering the attention of at least a couple of dozen fellow students nearby, all milling about by their lockers.

“Your fattie fuck-friend at least had the guts to kill herself, why couldn’t you have done the same? Because you never had the balls to anything, especially something useful like ridding the rest of us of your useless ass by topping yourself.” Yeah, he really said that, word for word ... it was burned with a branding iron into my skull. I couldn’t forget it, then or now, even if I tried.

Everyone around us was laughing, pretty hard too as if this was the funniest joke anyone had ever heard. This included a gal from my junior class that I had shared an occasional class with and that I had a major, but silent, crush for. We’d barely talked except to occasionally say ‘hi’, and I’d vaguely thought that she might have had a vague interest in me too, but when I saw her laughing just as hard as everyone else, that put a hard ‘nope’ on that optimistic thought.

I saw red. I utterly lost my last hold on keeping my shit together and I just went primal on Frank. In a straight-up ‘fair’ fight he could take me down in seconds ... but I didn’t care. I got in on him close, fast and hard, staying inside of his reach where his superior size and bull strength would be much less of an advantage. He was our football team’s star linebacker and he had over a foot of height and probably one hundred pounds of extra weight (all muscle) on me. It was going to end badly, like it always had about a hundred times before, when Frank got in the first punch to initiate hostilities, but I just didn’t care.

As usual, Frank had a couple of his buddies about with him, as they mostly all had the same class schedule together, and in well-less than a minute they’d pried me off him and had me held tight and totally pinned up against the lockers so Frank and his other buds could take turns plastering me with their fists while I was defenseless for at least the better of five minutes before a teacher eventually showed up to put an end to their fun. I was lugged boneless off to the nurse’s office, treated and fed an aspirin before the vice principal formally notified me of my week’s suspension for fighting.

It was the first time at any school when I had been rightfully suspended for really being the person who had started various brawls, dustups and donnybrooks. It was different ... it was the first suspension that I’d actually honestly earned!

As for the results of the fight itself, I’d clearly won round one due to my initial surprise attack, which had been completely unexpected. The worm had indeed shown some backbone for the first time ever when dealing with the bully ... and particularly my most ancient enemy of old. My right fist hurt for a week afterwards, after squarely clobbering his nose with all of the might that adrenaline could give me. Then as Frank’s hand moved up (a bit too late) to stop his nose from fracturing, I went low and nasty, ramming my right knee as hard up into his balls as I could crush it. From the way he collapsed onto the polished stone floor of the hallway, I’d nailed it solid. He wasn’t going to be fucking any cheerleaders or younger spirit bunnies this week! By the time his buddies could react and grab me, I was kicking the every-loving fuck out of our football hero’s right knee. I nailed three good solid kicks there for sure ... frankly two more than I’d expected to be able to get away with.

There was never any remote chance of my winning the battle ... but in the end I think I won the war. I happily served my suspension and returned to school the next Monday morning to find my classmates all actively avoiding me like the plague. Frank was still walking on crutches for two more weeks and limping a fair bit even after the Christmas break. He couldn’t play any of the three remaining games of the football season, two of which our team narrowly loss. One and all put the blame squarely on me – and I basked in the glory of it!

Frank was obviously livid with me and wanted every inch of my guts ripped out of me, but he’d lost some of his nerve to take ‘smaller and weaker’ me on again. I’d become an uncertain threat now and he remained somewhat wary of me now. So, he and his buddies tried for various ambush attempts off of school grounds, but I was wary too and tried to stay as elusive as possible the moment I was off school grounds, leaving school at different times and by different doors, and never taking the most direct path towards home.

None of this stopped Frank’s dad from wanting to settle his son’s private affairs for him. Did I mention that Frank’s dad was the county sheriff? He first tried to get me for criminal assault, and that might have worked except a disturbing minority of the eye-witnesses to our fight weren’t entirely sure that I had started it. Everyone knew that I was Frank’s favorite punching bag ... but I’d never, ever, struck him first before. Probably, the witnesses tended to agree, they’d missed the very start of the fight, where Frank had made first physical provocation. The beat down I’d received afterwards didn’t much help the merits of the case and the county DA’s office buried the charges without action until long after they were rendered moot by other events.

None of that stopped two of constables from conducting a very long and very illegal ‘unofficial’ interview with me that following Saturday, the week after the fight, which involved having my face smashed down into walls and the interview table over a half dozen times. I didn’t look too bad leaving the station, but I made quite sure that that the few other folk who were there could see me leaving the station with wet blood on my face. This would come in handy very shortly thereafter. I then went home to deal with my father ... who proceeded to put down a colossal beat down on me that rivaled anything Frank and his minions had ever before accomplished.

Oh, I absolutely deserved that clobbering, every bone-cracking blow of it. This was also the first time ever that I’d had the balls to tell my father exactly what I thought of him! That he was ‘a ball-less cuck who’d let every workman, milkman, mailman and deliveryman empty their balls inside of his wife, my mother ... all probably while he wanked his poor tiny limp noodle while waiting anxiously for his opportunity to be a good cuckie and lap down all of the more virile juices of his betters. That even breathing the air around him would make me less and less of a real man each day and that he’d do the entire world a favor by drinking Drain-O someday instead of cheap whiskey.”

Yep ... that set him of alright sky-higher than some fourth of July fireworks!

With my face swollen like a purple melon on Monday morning, one eye swollen shut and the other bloodshot and nearly hidden by facial swelling, even the teachers had to take minimal notice of my condition. These sort of beat downs from parents wasn’t exactly an uncommon occurrence in our mostly rural county with relatively high unemployment and levels of adult alcoholism. There were Authority Procedures for this, written ones that that even the school staff couldn’t dick about with too much. Everyone, my homeroom teacher, the school nurse, the vice principal, and the county social worker that was officially called in, all thought sure that my dad, a known mean drunk, had done this (as he indeed had).

But no ... just to make life in our town much more interesting, I stated that two of the country constables (on the instigation of Sheriff Larson, Frank’s father) had done it while I was handcuffed and being held without charges at the station last Friday. The Authorities were practically pleading with me to not make a formal written statement of this ... but it was already a done deal, all pre-typed and printed out on my PC at home. When I signed it and handed it directly into the hands of the country social worker, their hands were tied, and they all knew it.

Everyone knew that rural county ‘justice’ could be a bit on the rough side sometimes, but with the photos of my face looking like an overripe squashed plum tomato, not to mention (slightly reluctant) witness statements from dispatch and front desk staff present at the time of the alleged incident who all agreed that I was bleeding at the time I left the station ... along with video camera footage clearly showing my face was unmarked and uninjured when I was brought in while wearing handcuffs.

The constables didn’t help their case in the slightest by first denying any assault had ever taken place, and then later instead claimed my wounds were all self-inflicted while I was in custody. Anyone with two brain cells rubbing together could easily make the mental connections between me and the Sheriff’s son. The Country DA’s office made an investigation which agreed more or less with my statement and decided that from a civil and criminal liability aspect, that the county was vulnerable – therefore the results were promptly buried somewhere even deeper than the earlier assault charges filed against me.

I needed a better plan. I had decided for certain now that I was going to get revenge for Patty’s death ... and not settle for inflicting a slight knee injury that would be forgotten past history long before Frank’s graduation in six months.

For a moment, I suppose, I ought to relate at least a few words about my father and our relationship, or the complete lack of one.

For starters, he was neither my biological father nor Joe’s. We never knew this for 100% certain until just a few years ago, but it always seemed intuitively obvious to me. We looked, sounded, and acted completely different. It took modern DNA testing right after my father’s death for Joe to determine, positive and scientifically, that our ‘father’ had no actual biological relationship to either of us. Those would have been fighting words before (and for many years, they nearly were), every time I mentioned or even hinted to him that our mother couldn’t keep her knees together and that his (Joe’s) biological dad was either someone she found in a bar or the milkman. Joe accepts the science now ... but for many years he was in severe denial about it.

He was, up to his death, a road crewman for civil contracting firm, usually found out on some public street with a crew digging up old roadbed and laying new concrete. You’ve seen that guy, the middle-aged fellow with a paunch holding the reversible Stop/Go sign to slow traffic and keep the dump and cement trucks managed in and out of traffic, while six other guys stand around looking bored while leaning on shovels. That was my father. No education worth speaking of and practically untrainable for any task involving project planning or requiring any actual managerial execution. It also helps that that his company had a union, giving him too much seniority to ever get fired. That’s how you end up still holding a traffic sign for 8-12 hours a day (if there’s overtime on the project) while still in your 50’s. That job is usually reserved for the idiot nephews of some foreman with serious seniority, or is related closely to management.