Flagged Victor (2 page)

It was all very impressive.

What a cool fucking way to die, I said to Chris.

I meant it. I would be proud to die like that, heroically meeting my fate side by side with a best friend, rather than huddling like a coward hoping to evade the inevitable.

But Chris had a different take.

What do you mean die? he asked. Who says they’re dead?

I scoffed at his lame humour, but then I saw he wasn’t joking at all. Naturally, I rose to the bait.

Of course they’re dead, you moron. They’re surrounded by thousands of pissed-off, gun-toting badasses.

Chris disagreed. In fact, he utterly denied what he called my interpretation. To settle matters, we reversed and played the ending over and over, the Betamax whirring and clunking with each repeat performance.

Calmly, Chris asked: Did you see anyone die?

Frustrated, I answered: No. But they’re dead.

Reasonably, Chris suggested: Prove it.

Increasingly emotional, I declared it obvious: There’s no way
they can make it. They might have survived tight spots before but this time they’re dead.

Socratically, he continued my education: How do you know?

Desperately, I went literary: That’s why the camera freezes, you asshole. To show the end of their journey together, to stop the constant movement, to prove to anyone with half a fucking brain that they’re finally totally dead.

I’m not sure I believed my own argument, as convincingly as I tried to lay it on. It was the kind of premise a master debater (and God knows I did my share of that) throws out with utter conviction in order to baffle an opponent and score a cheap point. At the same time, I suddenly wondered what
had
been the reason behind the mysterious freeze-frame shot? There was a deeper mystery in that aesthetic choice, and I was not sure I understood it.

Not to be out-scholared, Chris turned my film-school argument upside down.

You’ve got it wrong, fuck nuts. They only froze the camera so they can duck down, drop out of the frame, and sneak off.

This was so provocatively ridiculous I lost my shit.

Chris, they’re fucking dead.

I bet they’re back in the US before the credits even finish rolling. Robbing another train. Getting ready for the sequel.

They’re hanging by their ankles from some tree limb with their throats cut.

Enjoying a whiskey. Watching the sunset somewhere. Shooting cans off a fence.

Executed.

Escaped.

This went on for several more rounds until I screamed: Dead dead fucking dead!

I could have wept in frustration. It did not help that I knew he did this sort of thing to me all the time.

Of course, I recognized what was happening. The intensity of our argument had begun to echo the kind of childish fights Butch and Sundance had in the movie. This was no comfort to me, however, just as it clearly annoyed the shit out of Sundance when Butch insisted on something impossible. I also knew that Chris’s ability to twist circumstances to serve his needs, the very persistence of his self-delusion, reflected an actual and potentially combustible difference between us. Chris refused to believe anything but victory was inevitable. I anticipated defeat around every corner.

Later, when I thought about that frozen frame in the light of Kundera’s novel, in my beach hut, still typing, each key exploding like a gunshot, I understood the scene and my emotional response to Chris more clearly.

Butch and Sundance weren’t just frozen for aesthetic purposes, they were nailed to the eternal cross of consequence. Drip drip rip.

The
black Fiero. The warm August evening. The gym bag within reach on the passenger seat.

Chris was driving to see Susan. He never arrived. I felt self-servingly bitter whenever he spent time with her. It cut me both ways. He was my friend first, so there was some jealousy of her. And, of course, as is only to be expected with a friendship
like ours, I had complicated feelings for Susan, too. The situation was impossible, and I’m sure I preferred it that way. I was made to be the jaded extra—the amusing, cynical, but secretly pining sidekick. These are the limiting but potent terms you see friendship in when you are young. If Chris knew any of this, he didn’t acknowledge it. He was good about overlooking my complicated handicaps of conscience and soul, my many personal weaknesses. He had few jagged edges himself, and it seemed rare and noble for someone of such ease to be so large-hearted and accommodating about the limitations of others.

He took the highway because that was the fastest way to get to Susan’s house on a Saturday night. He was eager, even anxious, to spend time with her. He was coming down from the high of what we’d done, and he wanted comfort and compassion as much as sexual release. He was also feeling very tenderly toward her, and that was not always the case. He could be dismissive, cruel, and deceitful at times, and Susan put up with it, saw it, I think, as part of what made him compelling. His present emotional state might have been a passing mood, a letdown from the earlier excitement, or it might have been a tilt toward maturity. I view it as tragic, however, because I think it indicated the beginning of a new him and a different level in their relationship, the place you get to when you learn to actually care about others and their feelings.

He was driving too fast, so it was no logical surprise, though still a little heart-knocking, when the blue and red lights came on behind him. He hadn’t seen the speed trap. Fuck me, he thought, and gave a laugh. Only Chris could have laughed in such a situation, with so much at stake. Only Chris wouldn’t
immediately assume the worst, because he did not experience the universe as oppressive, as out to get him, as lying in wait. He eased his speed down and pulled to the side of the highway carefully, put the gear in neutral, and pulled up the handbrake. He threw his track jacket over the gym bag. The highway was dark all of a sudden. The sun had gone down during a few unnoticed moments and dusk had settled in with the permanence of night. The side of the road did not have a wide shoulder, and he wondered if the cop would be pissed off at him for not pulling over farther. Fuck it, he thought. There was a ditch and then a dense pine forest. The evening was airless and calm. No traffic passed by. He rolled down his window and waited.

Do you know why I stopped you? the officer asked.

The question echoed a similar question Chris often asked, but he didn’t think of that at the time. Talking to the man’s belt buckle, Chris admitted that his speed might have been a tad too fast. He apologized like the pleasant and polite middle-class young man he appeared to be.

But something about the ongoing moment and the police officer’s demeanour sharpened his attention, a nervousness, a touch of formality and strain. Chris knew many cops personally—his own father, his father’s friends, the cops who frequented the Billy Club, the bar he bounced at on Tuesdays and Thursdays—but not this one. His mind worked, in delayed fashion, to interpret this condition of wrongness and understand what, if anything larger, was going on. At the same time, he prepared himself to hand over his documents. Driver’s licence in the wallet in his hip pocket. Registration and insurance in the glove compartment. The police officer did not ask to see those things.

What’s in the bag? came the question instead.

And that’s when Chris understood exactly what was happening.

He thought about the bag and wondered what to do. The obvious answer was to jam the car into gear and gun it. Maybe he could put some distance between himself and the cop, then toss the bag away unseen. He hesitated, however, and those three or four seconds of indecision were sufficient, in the micro-battle between will and circumstance, to allow the moment of action (uncharacteristically) to slip by.

With a foreign sense of defeat weighing him down, he answered that the bag was filled with workout clothes and added optimistically that he had just come from the gym. The police officer, however, asked to see inside. So Chris dragged the bag toward him slowly, while fumbling as casually as possible to pull the gym clothes closer to the surface and hide the rest of the contents.

As he started to look back around to the police officer, he felt the muzzle of a handgun against the little hairs of his temple. This forced his gaze forward, his skin sparking under the electric touch of metal. He could not see the man’s face, but the burst of blue and red lights behind him, the number of police cars such brilliance indicated, was a gauge of how heavy everything had become.

Heavy
wins out over light, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But for every someone who insists on living lightly, there’s always another someone who tags along, living lightly too for a
time, not out of natural inclination but because they have been momentarily convinced by the sheer certainty of a person who refuses to see the world any other way.

I suppose it’s telling that when I think about me and Chris, I think about Butch and Sundance. And I also think about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

You’re probably starting to see a pattern.

Actually, it’s not the force of certainty or the lure of adventure that convinces a Sundance to share the delusions of a Butch Cassidy, or a Sancho Panza to follow a Don Quixote.

It’s love.

Like many memorable duos, our friendship started with
a fight.

When I was twelve, I broke my arm. It happened my last year in elementary school, right before summer. I was new to the school, new to the neighbourhood. My family had moved from somewhere else. My parents wanted me to attend the new school, even though there was only a month left and I would be going to a different school in the fall, because they felt it would give me an opportunity to make some new friends. Nobody at the school thought that was a good idea—not the principal, not my teacher—but my parents forced the issue, knowing what was best. Then, a week in, I broke the arm, and it was a bad fracture, and it took another week for the swelling to go down, and by that time it seemed pointless and possibly hazardous to send me back for ten measly days. (I’d have to struggle with the cast and avoid falling or jostling my arm in the playground, impossible for a boy.) So they let me stay home instead. The weather was unseasonably hot that week. I suffered in my jean shorts and tank top, lying awkwardly on the couch in front of the TV,
never comfortable. The cast was solid plaster and dry to the touch but so heavy it seemed soaked with bad luck and humiliation. It hooked around my right thumb like a belt loop and came to a crusted and crumbly end at my shoulder. I felt like a fallen gladiator permanently braced with a shield.

I was happy to skip school. It was a source of great relief. But I was also bored to be at home with nothing to do and no one to play with. My father didn’t like my lying around. Whenever he walked past, his stern eyes were averted and he moved faster than usual, as though making up for my self-indulgent immobilization with his own vigour. But, at some level, he must have felt guilty about my plight because he bought a few comic books to keep me company. Batman, Superman, Justice League. They were ordinary classics, brilliantly coloured with fantastic storylines, but they lacked the intensity and intrigue of the weirder stuff I preferred. Nevertheless, since comic books had been forbidden in our house until then, the gesture conceded the seriousness of my condition, a nearly lethal combination of injury, loneliness, and boredom.

Sometimes, when I was sick of being inside, I went out into the backyard and lay on the newly sodded lawn and read. Midday with everyone at work or at school, the neighbourhood was so quiet and still that once a little blue bird hopped up close to my propped-up comic, as though curious about the world behind the cover. I was in awe of its lightness, the way it flicked with each hop and flutter. For a brief second, that bird was my closest friend, and I was filled with hope for a new beginning, one in which the universe and I would be finally in sync. Then the bird got bored and flew off, as birds do.

I
got used to the cast by the time the school year ended, and I started running into some other kids from the neighbourhood on the street. Since I was new and had a broken arm, I was the object of some curiosity. They asked me where I was from and what had happened to the arm. It turned out one of the boys had been in my class and knew some of the details. He filled everyone in.

He and Lewis had a fight lined up—

Lewis Garner?

And practically the whole school followed them out to the field under the overpass—

I heard about that.

And they started fighting, and it was more or less even until all of a sudden Dusty jumped in and booted him right in the face. Twice.

Booted him?

In the fucking face. Boom. Splat. He flopped over like a sack of shit.

At first, I didn’t quite know what had happened, not just because I didn’t see the kick but because I didn’t understand where that kind of anger could come from. Lewis and I were only going at it half-assed. He wasn’t nearly as strong or mean as I’d feared and I became comfortable, or at least complacent, realizing I could hold my own. The entire fight seemed staged, a storyline we were forced to follow to satisfy the audience’s whooped-up depravity. Maybe Dusty sensed something bogus. Maybe he just hated me too much to hold back when I appeared to be winning. All his rage came out when he kicked me. And afterwards, I lay passively on my back with my hands on my
face, incapable of doing anything else, not because of the pain, which was surprisingly mild, but because of the shame. The kick to the face was so humiliating and unjust, so morally wrong, that it gave me the excuse I needed—an excuse I didn’t know until then had been available to me—to do the unthinkable and just give up. All the weight I felt, the reign of terror I’d been experiencing as the new kid, the anxiety of being battle ready while also staying open to any gesture of kindness, all of that heaviness vanished when Dusty gave me the boot. The worst thing had happened. And so the dread lifted.