Land of the Blind (4 page)

H
is pitiful presence that day was undoubtedly what kept Pete Decker from completing the remodeling project he’d begun on my face. Had I known the importance of what would happen at that bus stop that day with the appearance of Eli Boyle, I might have begun studying it myself, for it would turn out to be a near-perfect real-world expression of an experiment that microbiologists have long re-created in the lab. They know that viruses and pathogenic bacteria will adhere to damaged cells in the human body, that the real nasty bugs are attracted to those broken and bruised places that blood has trouble reaching, and that the body will sacrifice a foot, say, to save the rest, and that if you have an infection in your throat and sprain your ankle, the virus or bacteria or parasite will do its best to make the journey from your throat to your ankle.

Eli became my broken ankle. That day, still full from the meal of me, Pete Decker retreated to the back of the tree and, presumably, picked my bones from his teeth, but I have to think he also had his eye on the horrible newcomer. Because the very next day Pete was all over Eli Boyle, knocking his glasses off, snapping the buttons off the cuffs of his flannel shirt, and grabbing his underwear and yanking them out of his pants and giving him—and here I defer to each reader’s age, socioeconomic class, and basic geographic orientation—a wedgie or a melvy or a crack-back or a slip-and-slide or a jam sandwich or a thong-along or a line-in-the-sand or a famous-anus.

Eli took his punishment in stride, picked up his glasses, quietly pocketed the snapped button for his mother to sew on later, and left his dirty underwear wedged up his cakehole until Pete Decker had moved on to terrorize elsewhere. After my own beating I had resumed my place at the street, with the terrified little kids, who stood with chattering teeth, clinging to their lunch money and repeating in their minds, Don’t turn around, Don’t turn around. In those early days I never ventured to help Eli Boyle—although, honestly, what could I have done?

Every day after that, Eli tried to arrive just as the bus did, hoping to limit his exposure to Pete. Our driver, Mr. Kellhorn, was notorious for his erratic timing, though, showing up at various times between 7:22 and 7:29, which might not sound like a big deal to adults, but for kids hoping to avoid having their underwear winched into their asses, it was a horror. The other bullies allowed Pete to have first—I apologize in advance for my word choice—crack at Boyle. Some days, when Pete missed school (we whispered about juvenile detention, or theorized that maybe he’d finally gone ahead and killed his parents), some lesser bully would make sure to spit on Eli or yank on his underwear or make him lick shoes.

For his part, Eli attempted the defense that every afflicted and hunted beast attempts, the defense of a sand dollar that settles into the ocean floor or a beaten dog that cowers beneath his forepaws, the worthless twin defenses of shrinkage and anonymity. Eli stood with the little kids, his big, greasy, flaking head a foot above theirs, staring at the ground, sniffling with whatever airborne bug he was carrying that day, trying to look inconspicuous as the dandruff flaked down around his greasy head.

I stood only a few feet away, but Eli and I never spoke. In fact, none of the underclassmen at the bus stop ever spoke, staring instead at our shoes or looking down the road, praying to the God of afflicted children that we would see our bus—the color of sweet potatoes—rising over the hill behind us and making its way to our stop. My little brother Ben would whisper under his breath: “God’s noggin, would you hurry?” He had recently become an inveterate taker-of-the-Lord’s-name, and he’d taken to jotting down new ones when they popped into his head, eager to amaze and thrill us older kids with the range and poetry of this one sin. Even then, Ben planned to have this sin be his signature. “Christ on a bike, what is taking so long?”

The air went out of us when the bus arrived—two hydraulic sighs as a matter of fact, the first when the brakes set and the door opened and the second when all of the smaller kids finally exhaled and pressed for the door. These littlest got on first, sliding three to a bench seat in the second and third rows; then came Eli, spinning right around the pole into the seat behind the driver, the safest seat, obviously, but also the worst seat socially, because it marked him as a coward and a brownnose and a boy with no friends. After my failed attempt to smoke, I had become a sort of leader of the third,
fourth, and fifth graders—king of the geeks—and so I settled into the fifth or sixth row, sharing a seat with only one other kid.

After we little kids had boarded the bus, the older kids emerged from the leafy curtains of the willow tree, Pete Decker and the other delinquents grinding their cigarettes into the gravel ashtray of Will the Hippie’s front yard, blowing smoke down the rows of little kids, pushing their way to the back of the bus, Pete pulling his fist back and causing some poor kid to flinch, before he and the other seventh and eighth graders settled in the back three rows, all stretched out and reflecting a chilled boredom.

I suppose Eli had been at our bus stop two weeks before I actually made eye contact with him—the eye contact of death-row prisoners, part better-you-than-me, part but-for-the-grace-of-God, part empathy, part worry that his terrified face reflected my own. Obviously, I had noticed Eli Boyle before; he was a billboard for adolescent horror. But I had been so overwhelmed with my own self-loathing that I hadn’t really contemplated his, which I saw must be both epic and lonesome. I stood in the aisle of the bus, in the first row, staring at Eli until it crossed my mind that I could sit next to him, that in my improved role as the kid who tried to smoke at the bus stop, I might effect some social change by sitting next to the least of us all, the spazziest, dorkiest, queerest, loosest nut on the tree. We would face the beatings together after that, the two of us, and we would slowly change the world.

Then again, maybe not. Behind me, my brother Ben was pushing me in the back, hurrying to be seated before Pete Decker emerged from the willow tree and climbed onto the bus. But even with Ben pushing me, I couldn’t break eye contact with Eli. Once I’d taken hold it was like a live electrical wire, and I shook at the depths of his anguish. He seemed not only to suffer—what was life, after all, but suffering, and who knows that more than a kid—but also to understand his own position, to know that there was something more than crippling in his physical appearance, in his personal odor and his bad eyesight and his lack of coordination and the host of bugs and bends and sprains that comprised him. It was as if he knew the future offered no reprieve and yet he kept showing up anyway.

“Sweet cheese of Jesus, move it, Clark!” Ben groused behind me. “They’re coming.”

I found my seat and Ben slid in behind me, just ahead of Pete Decker, who walked with his elbows out, smacking the heads of every kid on the inside of the bench seats. A couple of those kids ducked and Pete balled up his fist or pushed out the knuckle of his middle finger, smacked the offending kids, and moved down the row.

Eli had turned to face the window again; he would stare out that window right behind the driver until we pulled up at school.

It is hard to fathom, I suppose, but the next bus stop—Eli’s old stop—was even worse than ours. While we at least had the willow and the cover of Will the Hippie’s house, this stop stood at a bare corner and so there was no cover at all; it was the difference between jungle and savanna. The dominant male at this stop was a twice-flunked eighth-grade goon named Matt Woodbridge, who had driven out all the little kids until it was just him and his crew: three slope-headed seventh graders, all of them smoking in broad daylight and daring anyone to say anything about it. The day Eli and I made eye contact, I thought about how Eli had arrived to take my beatings for me, how he’d looked down on me with such sympathy, and I was suddenly hit with the realization that Pete Decker and the button-popping, glasses-slapping, underwear-yanking routine of my bus stop was an improvement for Eli! I mean, hard as it is to believe…
he actually chose to come to our bus stop.

Even today I have trouble fathoming it, trying to imagine the tortures that Matt Woodbridge had devised, persecutions horrible enough to make Eli walk three blocks to catch the bus with an animal like Pete Decker. I did a paper on torture in college and I can never forget the worst ones: the glass tube shoved into the penis and then broken while the tortured person is forced to drink glass after glass of water, the legs encased in a vise and put in a burlap sack and then pounded with hammers until the burlap is the only thing holding them together. Right after these horrors I place whatever Woodbridge did to drive Eli down to our bus stop. And so that day, on the bus, I looked up as Woodbridge passed and at that moment I hated him, and I must have betrayed something on my face because he stopped in the aisle and turned to face me, a look of disbelief on his pockmarked, wispy-mustached face.

“What?” he asked. “What, motherfucker?”

The bus erupted in a chorus of “Ooohs,” and someone yelled from the back of the bus, “Kick his ass! Kick his fuckin’ ass, Woodbridge!”

“Nothing,” I said quickly, and dropped my eyes.

“You bet nothing,” Woodbridge said. “Nothing and a fucking ass-kicking if you ever look at me again, motherfucker.” And he continued sidling back toward the end of the bus, toward his seat in the back, the polar opposite of Boyle’s seat. “Little shit.”

I knew what we all knew about Woodbridge, that his brother Jesse had been an A student and a good athlete who had been killed in the eighth grade in some mysterious way (I’d heard, variously, that Matt shot him with their father’s gun accidentally, that he got drunk and fell out of a pickup truck, and that he slashed his own wrists) and that Matt dealt with his brother’s death and with his parents’ grief by beating the shit out of every kid he saw, by flunking his classes, by riding his motorcycle across the flower beds of all the houses in the neighborhood, by stealing our bicycles, by selling pot to little kids, by shoplifting, fighting, fingering, smoking, dealing, shooting up, vandalizing, and generally being the worst form of life on the bus. I think that while he didn’t know it, he was trying to live up to his dead brother, trying to remain a perpetual eighth grader like Jesse.

I stared straight ahead, hoping Woodbridge would ignore me, but of course he couldn’t. “Who is that motherfucker?” he asked the back of the bus.

“That kid?” Pete Decker laughed. “That’s the fuckin’ Marlboro man.” His gang erupted in laughter. Pete and Woodbridge had an interesting cold-war relationship; like nervous superpowers, both knew the only thing they couldn’t afford was to lose a fight, and since each was the only one who had a chance of beating up the other, they existed in a kind of strained equilibrium. As long as there were pathetic little shits like me to terrorize, they had few dealings with each other, except maybe to bum a cigarette or fence some stolen property.

Now that I had crossed one of the superpowers, I tensed, waiting to be nuked.

“Nah, that’s just Clark,” Pete said then. “He’s all right.”

The air seemed to leave the bus just then, and a great light and warmth rose up inside of me. I don’t recall, but the other underclassmen must have snuck glimpses at me then, glimpses of admiration and envy. To be pronounced “all right” by Pete Decker was more than just the commutation of my death sentence; it seemed almost a coronation. I had been plucked from the ranks of the pathetic and small, and given a place among the Pete
Deckers and Matt Woodbridges of the world. Clark Mason? That motherfucker? Aw, he’s all right.

The bus rumbled down Empire toward the last stop on our strip before it turned out of our neighborhood and came up for air on Trent—the busy industrial street that cut us off from the rest of the world. The whole world felt different. I remember staring at Boyle, wondering if he had heard the exchange, if he’d realized what had just happened, my sudden ascension out of his world. But he just sat with his thick glasses against the window, his index finger working his nose like a puppeteer on speed, Eli alone in the nightmarish world of his freakishness, his apartness, and, I suppose it’s safe to say now, his seething ambitions. I see him in my mind now and I realize that all of these forces of his personality were concentrated then on the humble goal of sheer survival, the cold, flat wish that he be left alone, and he was being forged in a way by the challenge of his youth. What did he see out that window while he sat there, catatonic and seemingly impervious to the beatings and taunts and stares? I think now, looking back, that his fear may have amounted to less than I ever imagined, that he had actually figured out a way to shut down, to distance himself from his broken self.

Or maybe that’s just what I want to believe, an idea that I cling to for my own peace of mind—that Eli had figured out a way to leave the awful physical world behind, to block out the bullies and assholes, to ignore the scorn, to somehow be on our bus and soar above it too, riding on the thinnest of daydreams.

I
shot someone in the face with a rubber band that I had stretched along the length of a ruler. I don’t recall the victim or my motive (I acknowledge the irony, of course, this casual parallel to the trouble before us today), but my fifth-grade crime doesn’t matter except to explain why I was alone in the school office on a late-fall day in 1975, sitting with my head in my hands, waiting for the principal to come back.

I sat in a chair across from the desk of our distracted principal, Joseph Bender, and I practiced looks of contrition and sorrow and prayed that I not slip and call him Joe Boner, the name by which we all knew him. I recall his office as a massive tomb, windowless and cold and the place I waited for my hack—a quick swat or two on the ass with a thick wooden paddle, the gold standard of school punishment circa 1975. Joe Boner was a tame hacker because he kept his emotions under control. There were other teachers—being an attorney with a working knowledge of libel, I won’t name them—who could take out years of their own frustration by blistering the asses of children like me. I only saw Joe Boner go overboard once, when Dennis Gilstrap asked the lunch lady if he could kiss her “boobies” and Mr. Bender promptly pulled Dennis out of line, bent him over, and swatted him so furiously that his gum flew across the room and—I know this part of the story must sound apocryphal, but I saw it myself—stuck to the wall of the cafeteria, where it stayed for two weeks as a kind of monument to adult boundaries.

As I sat in the principal’s office that day, I was understandably nervous, even though I didn’t really fear a hack like the one that had de-gummed Dennis Gilstrap. More likely I would get a reasoned swat and be sent back to my classroom to study our poetic spelling list, which I repeated in my mind—distance, influence, affluence, confluence—as a way to keep from dwelling on the swat I was about to receive.

That’s when I heard, outside Joe Boner’s office, the principal talking to a woman, trying to calm her down. “No, I’m very sorry. It is unfortunate.” I leaned toward the door, as if a few inches might help me hear better. “No, Mrs. Boyle,” the principal said, “I assure you, it won’t happen again.”

When he opened the door I looked back and saw Eli Boyle’s mother, wearing a kind of peasant’s dress and a scarf over her head, an almost pretty woman in her early forties who looked that day, and every other day that I saw her, like a person who has lost something very important.

“Eli is a very special boy, Mr. Bender,” she said. “He’s sensitive.”

“Yes,” the principal was saying, “I know he is and I’m sorry he’s had to go through this. We are taking care of it, Mrs. Boyle.” And that’s when Joe Boner saw me sitting at his desk. “Oh, Mr. Mason. That’s right. Why don’t you go back to your class? And no more rubber bands, okay?”

He tousled my hair and I sat there a moment longer than I needed to, amazed to be escaping my punishment. Once again, Eli had indirectly saved me. I nodded to Mrs. Boyle, hopped out of the chair, and hurried for the door, turning at the last to see Eli’s mom settle into the chair, and to see Mr. Bender close the door behind me.

I suppose that meeting was the reason that, the very next morning, Joe Boner escorted Eli Boyle into my classroom. Eli had started the school year in the other fifth-grade class, taught by Mr. Gibbons, a cross-eyed alcoholic who had been at the high school until two years earlier, when he was asked to leave after some vague complaint by the parents of a girl who had been getting “extra credit” for “correcting papers” as Mr. Gibbons’s “after-school aide.” Now Eli was standing in the class of
my
teacher, the eternally cute Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley, who had been teaching at our elementary school for fifteen years and at least three divorces and who seemed incapable of forsaking any of her ex-husbands’ last names. We gathered that there had been some problem in Mr. Gibbons’s class involving Eli, but we had trouble getting details. Actually, that’s not entirely true. We had no trouble getting details, but their context and order eluded us, and so we knew little beyond the glimpse of a meeting that I’d seen between Eli’s mom and Joe Boner and the rush of playground intelligence:

Kevin Klapp, who was in Eli’s old class, claimed that the trouble began when everyone went out for recess one day. Eli stayed glued to his chair and when Mr. Gibbons came over to see why, he found that Eli had shit his pants.
According to Kevin, Mr. Gibbons then yelled at Eli and slapped him. Heather Lindeke said that what actually happened was that after the pants-shitting episode, Eli’s mom came in and Mr. Gibbons called Eli “a retard,” and Mrs. Boyle demanded that he be put in our class. No, said Marshall Dickens, what actually happened was that Eli only farted, and when everyone went out to recess, Mr. Gibbons yelled at Eli that he’d “prefer it if you did not shit your pants in my classroom anymore” and that was why Eli’s mom pulled him out of that class. What did I believe? All of it, I suppose. I didn’t put any of it past the people involved, that Eli might shit his pants, or that Mr. Gibbons might make him feel even worse than he did or even slap him, or that Mrs. Boyle might come to Eli’s defense.

Whatever the reason, Eli limped into our classroom that day, staring at his corrective shoes, ready for new humiliations. He stood in front of the class, while behind him, Mr. Bender whispered to the teacher and gestured with his hands. Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley, her high hair spun like soft vanilla ice cream, frowned and shook her head and even covered her mouth as Joe Boner spoke quietly, relaying the actual story of Eli’s banishment from Mr. Gibbons’s class. But while she listened with obvious sympathy and perhaps even empathy, she made no move to ask Eli to sit down and he stood there like a courtroom exhibit while they whispered about him. Finally, we saw our teacher mouth the word “terrible” as the story reached its critical juncture. Just then Eli twitched, as he often did, in some leftover spasm or convulsion, the brackets on his leg braces clacking together, a late-autumn snowfall loosed from his head. Twenty-eight sets of eyes followed those dandruff flakes to the floor.

Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley thanked the principal and walked him to the door. Then she put her arm around Eli, who was a foot shorter than she.

“Welcome to our class, Eli,” she said. “Class, say hello to Eli.”

We said hello. He never looked up. For all her good intentions, Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley was torturing Eli.

“Eli? You may sit wherever you want,” said Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley. “Do you have any friends in this class?”

This seemed to me like classic adult stupidity.
Do you have any friends?
Why not just knock the boy down and let us stab him to death with compass needles? Eli looked up through his thick, black-framed glasses and one of his cockeyes went directly to me and—to my endless shame, I prayed that he not say my
name—he looked back at the teacher and shook his head no.
Do you have any friends?
What kind of question is that? While Eli stared at the ground, our teacher moved a few kids and put Eli smack in the middle of the classroom.

Jeff Fletcher, who was now sitting behind Eli, plugged his nose and stuck his tongue out to indicate that Eli stunk, and when Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley turned her back Fletch pulled his desk back away from Eli’s. The students on his right and left did the same thing, their desks screeching as they slid across the tile floor. Eli didn’t look up, just stared at the notebook open on his desk, drawing pictures of tanks.

I have yet to mention Dana Brett. I suppose I haven’t known how, in this ugly world that I am relating, to describe someone so wonderful. Cute? The girl was entirely composed of porcelain, tiny features on a round face beneath black hair that curled up at her collar so that her face was perfectly framed. She wore ribbons in her hair. Ribbons! A redundant bit of packaging perhaps, but still. Ribbons! Miniskirts and vests. And suede boots that laced up the front. There is nothing so hypnotic as the romantic daydreams of the hopelessly presexual, and back then all of my daydreams involved young Dana Brett and unlacing those boots.

She sat in front of Eli and was the only one who didn’t move her desk when Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley turned her back to address the class on Hopi Indians or adding fractions or whatever she was selling that day. She droned on as the desks moved away, until Eli was an island, or rather an isthmus, connected only by the honorable Dana Brett’s desk. And when the teacher finally turned around and saw what had happened—the desks magnetically repelled from Eli—she became intent on making it worse. “All right. Move those desks back. Jeff Fletcher, why did you move your desk away from Eli’s?”

Of all the cruelty exhibited that day, I still think that question—no matter its intent—was the pinnacle. In one question, she codified what we all knew, made it official and made a horrible mistake: she gave a lousy prick like Jeff Fletcher the opportunity to actually be funny.

“Well,” said Fletch, looking around at us, gathering strength, “he smells like a bag full of turds.”

In the laughter that followed, Eli never looked up from the tanks he was drawing.