Chinaberry Sidewalks (12 page)

My rejoining the Norvic Street Freedom Fighters was destiny fulfilling itself. I’m glad to say it was more for the love of my friends than my hatred of Ricky’s father that my long-overdue decision to fight back arrived with such clarity. From my eye-level position on the right flank, fifteen yards from where Mr. Schmidt crouched, I saw I had only one option. Imitating Rocky Colavito—the best throwing arm in baseball—I pegged a perfect hard-rock strike to the side of his neck, a wallop that sent his black-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses flying and the sadistic bastard crawling on all fours.

Ricky threw himself into an all-out temper tantrum right there on the banks of the most toxic waste site in the state of Texas. “No fair! Y’all cheated, he’s supposed to be on our side!” he hollered, kicking dirt and waving his arms like a stranded motorist trying to flag down passing cars. With Ricky making a sitting duck of himself, Ronnie fired a single BB that bit into his left thigh, the sting of which tripled the intensity of his hissy fit. The momentum suddenly swung back in favor of the Freedom Fighters.

On the battlefield, while Ricky bounced around on one leg protesting my defection, his father groped in the dirt for his glasses, which were now resting peacefully at the bottom of the die-if-you-dare-enter-these-waters reservoir. Who would’ve thought he couldn’t see four feet in front of his face without glasses?

Dabbo chose that moment to call a cease-fire. Having scored the battle’s decisive blow, I took the place of honor on Ronnie Thomas’s handlebars and was delivered home a war hero and patriot.

Heavy-handed punishment was doled out unsparingly. My mother whipped me with a chinaberry switch until my legs bled, and when the switch became too frayed to inflict pain she grabbed a hairbrush and continued to beat the hell out of me. But I didn’t mind that dull pain; it was the sting of the switch I’d never get used to.

Though she exhausted herself trying to beat an admission of guilt out of me, I remained unrepentant. When I flatly refused to apologize to Mr. Schmidt, she made a valiant attempt with a third whipping, this time with a coat hanger. Still unable to produce the desired result, she then sent my father into my bedroom to pry a confession out of me. Wincing at the sight of my legs, he declared, “Damn, son, your momma’s done wore your ass slap out.” And for the first time I can remember, he sat down on the edge of my bed. Lowering his voice so my mother couldn’t hear from the other side of the door, he said, “You go on and dry up that cryin.’ Your momma don’t need to know nothin’ about what we fixin’ to talk about in here.” He lit up a Pall Mall, pausing for his trademark blue-smoke exhale and thus giving me a moment to adjust to the notion that he had no plans of picking up where my mother had left off. He patted the bed for me to sit down beside him. “If y’all was shootin’ BBs and throwin’ rocks at that outfit next door, I reckon y’all knew what you was doin.’ I cain’t say if what y’all did was right or wrong, but I’ll tell ya one damn thing: I flat out wouldn’t trust that boy’s daddy as far as I can sling him. If what went on down yonder at the levee is somethin’ I need to be knowin’ about, you go on and tell me.”

Twice in one day my father had stepped outside himself with careful regard for the complexities behind my propped-up façade, and each was an act of kindness strong enough to keep me going for another ten years. Thinking my chest might explode with the pride of being the son of this good and decent man, I looked him directly in the eyes and said, “The son of a bitch had it comin’, Dad.”

In time, an unspoken truce settled over Norvic Street. The beginning of the new school year imposed a non-negotiated peace on both factions. Though still in a bad mood over her failure to beat contrition out of me, my mother showed signs of warming to my theory that the reservoir skirmish had turned a negative into a positive. After the heart-to-heart with my father, I felt vindicated enough to declare that reuniting an estranged father and son in the preservation of their bloodline, lost cause or not, merited celebration instead of switch whippings. My mother, I could tell, wasn’t so sure.

Within a week of the ambush, the Schmidt family moved a half block east and a short block north to a house on the corner of Flint and Wiggins streets. To hear Dabbo tell the story, the Freedom Fighters had driven the entire German army out of Jacinto City. My pointing out that the Schmidts were alive and well and still living less than a hundred yards away did little to diminish his sense of triumph, and his gloating couldn’t have been more pronounced if they’d all moved back to Berlin. But Dabbo’s prediction that Mr. Schmidt’s “grenade chuckin’ ” would soon be over proved prescient. That day’s dirt clods were the last he ever threw at me, or, so far as I know, at his son.

Ricky bemoaned the Freedom Fighters’ coup until the day he turned up flaunting a shining black fiberglass bow and a quiver of razor-tipped hunting arrows. Not one to pout when he could be rubbing our noses in the wimpiness of our wooden bows and practice arrows, he announced his sleek new equipment made him the undisputed King of the Universe. His newfound superiority might have been bearable were it not for the custom-made hand grip and the three-fingered deerskin shooting glove he wore on his right hand. Undone by these flashy accoutrements, we sank deep into an envious funk.

By the end of a second day’s belittling, Dabbo had had enough. “I ain’t gonna put up with this dookey anymore,” he drawled. “Me and you fixin’ to go on over to Market Street and collect us some Coke bottles. We gonna have to get us a razor-tip arrow if we’re ever gonna shut that shit heel up.”

Thanks to the steady stream of motorists flinging empty soda bottles in the slag and creosote weeds half-surviving along the railroad tracks, Market Street Road was an Eden of quick-fix cash for those willing to harvest that sordid fruit. We spent an unseasonably cool September Saturday scrounging the tracks for empty bottles, pausing now and then to congratulate ourselves on the growing size of our haul. Unfortunately, our spirits took a nasty plunge when the return deposit on a grocery sack full of soda bottles and the milk jug stolen from Mrs. Boyd’s porch tallied less than half the price of a single razor-tipped hunting arrow. Following Mr. Buck’s advice on how to make up the shortfall, we spent two weeks, after school and on weekends, searching vacant lots and back alleys for generators, tire rims, lead pipes, drive shafts—anything metal, large or small, that could be hauled back to Dabbo’s garage in a rust-corroded red Radio Flyer wagon. When Mr. Buck figured we’d accumulated enough scrap iron to bring five dollars on the salvage-yard scales, we loaded the twisted heap into the bed of his pickup. True to his word, he hauled it—Dabbo and I riding high atop our good fortune like World Series heroes—to Green’s Bayou Salvage Yard, where a cashier’s check was made out for $4.34. With this added to the $2.20 we’d cleared on the soda-bottle venture, Dabbo and I went in partners on a $5.89 hunting arrow and used the leftover change on celebratory packs of Twinkies and nickel Cokes. Thrilled by the success of the arms deal, Dabbo reckoned our purchase was key to restoring the balance of power on Norvic Street, putting me back on top as boss of the neighborhood, with him as my right-hand man. In this perfect world, he considered himself a modern-day “Sir Lan Sir Lot” and me a version of “Old King Alfred.”

“Now that we can keep Ricky from messin’ everything up,” he exclaimed, “we might start back havin’ some fun around here.”

On his best day, Ricky Schmidt greeted the world oblivious to his lack of natural leadership. The fact that he possessed neither the charm nor the poetic sensibility to draw the likes of Ronnie Thomas and David Warren under his control flew over his head like one of his father’s dirt clods; and likewise, that on a playground where razor-tipped arrows had taken the place of cap pistols, it might not be a good idea to go around barking orders like some B-movie gangster. If I hadn’t glimpsed the dark soul of this puppet’s master, there’s little doubt I would’ve pronounced Ricky’s reputation as neighborhood pariah and ill-will magnet entirely justified. Had I not seen the motivation behind Mr. Schmidt gifting his son with professional-caliber archery equipment as anything but a subliminal message to go out and nail the sneaky bastards who’d ambushed him, I’d be hard-pressed not to label Ricky an incurable bore and a mammoth bully. But knowing as I did the depth of his need to please his father, compassion counseled that I cut the boy some slack.

For me, the hallmark of Ricky’s obliviousness was how, when merrily turning the playground into a battlefield, he so blissfully ignored the fact that Dabbo and Ronnie would rather bury a dull practice arrow in his chest than tie their shoes. Because seeing him dead didn’t mean enough that I wanted my pals to be sent off to reform school, I made it my business to keep an eye out for retaliatory signs among the Freedom Fighters.

One late-October Saturday, we gathered to play bows and arrows. Having gotten word that Ricky would be away on a father-son outing, we’d gone about organizing the game with crossed fingers. Communicating with handwritten notes passed in the hallway between classes—Dabbo alone had been filled in verbally, and this I’d done in a whisper—we were optimistic that our game of pretend might safely come to pass without Ricky being there to screw it up. But before we could get our bows strung and sort out who was pretending to be who, guess who came galloping up the sidewalk.

“Ya’ll playin’?” Ricky called ahead.

“Was,” Dabbo grunted.

“Dibs on fastest horse, quickest draw, and prettiest girl!” he shouted back.

The look of astonishment among the Freedom Fighters couldn’t have been more pronounced had the Devil himself popped out of Mrs. Boyer’s bushes and taken ownership of our souls. Ricky had broken the unspoken code of conduct governing fair play. Everyone knew that honoring first dibs was a universal law, even Ricky, and we’d sooner eat broccoli than contest a legitimate claim. However, playground rules clearly stated that the person calling dibs could reap only one special attribute. Ricky’s claiming three of Roy Rogers’s best qualities left only Zorro’s swordsmanship, Lash Larue’s expertise with a whip, Tonto’s speech patterns, and Gabby Hayes’s struggles with a headstrong Jeep named Nellybelle as the raw material from which to construct a character.

It’s to Ricky’s credit that he threw himself into games of pretend with wholehearted conviction. He alone rode a golden palomino with a hand-tooled saddle trimmed in Mexican silver, pearl-handled pistols adorning his hips. His hats were white, his boots polished. The minions playing supporting roles in his high-noon dramas were, at best, donkey-riding prospectors with virtually no prospects. But there was, as was often the case with my ex–new best friend, a glaring disconnect between the dreamer and the dream. As played by Ricky, archetypal heroes like Wyatt Earp, Roy Rogers, and the Lone Ranger came across as Snidely Whiplash wannabes. In spite of his exalted imaginings on the playground, the only role naturally suited to his boorish sensibility was archvillain.

So it was peeved desperadoes who spilled out into the grassy alley behind our house, Ricky harboring old grievances and the Freedom Fighters spoiling for another fight. I, too, would’ve been, but for practice arrows flying so close to human bodies. Ricky scarcely noticed that most of the close calls were his. For his safety, I kept the newly acquired razor-tip in my quiver.

But he was the one who initiated the re-enactment of his favorite scene from the cowboy movies: the bad guy emptying his revolver at the feet of some poor old sodbuster, who, lacking the will to defend his honor, dances like a fool. In contrast to the dandy who was Ricky’s imaginary hero, Dabbo had in mind the infamous gunslinger turned into a simple farmer who was no longer looking for trouble but would, if provoked, rather die than let some tinhorn city slicker belittle him. By choosing Dabbo as his sap, Ricky had set the stage for a final showdown.

Ricky made the first move, growing right before my eyes to the height of six two. Decked out in a tailor-made city suit, a string tie, and a flat-brimmed beaver hat, his pencil-thin moustache neatly trimmed, he called Dabbo out into the streets of Dodge City. “Let’s settle this thing man-to-man,” he drawled. With a slight flare of his nostrils, Dabbo—in the humble wardrobe of a reformed outlaw trying to make a go of it with a pretty girl, a mule, and a plot of land—accepted the invitation. Ricky rested a razor-tipped arrow on the top of his bow’s grip, pulled the string half taut, and pointed at Dabbo’s feet, then snarled, “Dance, pardner.” But this wasn’t some gussied-up character actor pretending to call him out; it was Ricky Schmidt, intent on drawing real blood. So, too, was it Dabbo Buck, whose eyes flashed crimson as he hissed, “You can kiss my rosy red ass. I don’t dance for nobody—’specially some Jerry son of a bitch like you.”

Ricky let the arrow fly.

Following the arrow’s slow-motion, downward trajectory, I noticed the three feather strips, white with brown flecks, that stabilized its rear end, and the arrowhead itself reminded me of one of Mr. Buck’s triangle lead sinkers. Cutting these observations off, the arrow then sliced through Dabbo’s jeans, flesh, and even a main artery before coming to rest in the muscle and bone of his lower left leg, sticking out of his britches like a clock hand pointing to two.

Dabbo screamed loud enough to alert his mother—two hundred feet away and inside her house—that he’d been mortally wounded. Trailing blood across the broken white shingles outside the garage, he hopped on one foot down the alley into Norvic Street, where the arrow worked its way out of his leg and fell onto the asphalt.

Neighborhood adults took little notice of our Tarzan yells as we jumped off the garage, and yawned at the panic-stricken screams of “Get off!” from the bottom of a ten-kid dog pile. Men walking home from the graveyard shift were immune to Margie Buck’s hog calling, and late risers slept like logs through her husband’s coaxing of his old pickup back to life at five-thirty. Breaking glass, busting shingles, bicycle collisions, and even my parents’ knockdown-drag-outs were auditory non-events. Dabbo’s wail, however, was recognized as a legitimate distress signal. Within seconds, screen doors were slamming shut behind a half dozen grown-ups racing alarmed into the street.