I woke up wrong. I heard noises in the living room. It should have been quiet. “Why aren't you at work?” I asked my brother.
“I switched my shift so I can be in the war,” he said. I later learned Nick had done the same thing, making it four on four.
I told him he couldn't go. He'd get hurt. “When they're away, I'm in charge,” I reminded him.
“You're not in charge of me.”
Odd. It always worked when our sister used that line, like every five minutes. “Yes, I am.”
“What are you going to do—tell on me?” he said, and he had me there. I couldn't rat him out or else I'd get it, too, just like the good old days except now I was actually guilty. He went off to get in some last-minute practice.
At fight time, I headed up Walker. I passed the stop sign at Meredith and noticed it was freckled with silver, the red paint chipped away—target practice for one of our friends, probably Marcus, who lived two houses down. Nice cluster on the T and O. He had good aim, depending on how far away he was standing.
I stood in front of the Edwardses'. They'd been some of the earliest victims of the Other Family bug. Yvonne Edwards was my sister's age, and had a rep for throwing heavy objects when she got angry, usually at her little brother. Ralph, who happened to be my final opponent in the days of summer smackdowns. Ralph was an in-betweener like Randy, too young for us to accept into our plans, and too old for the younger crop of kids. He was harmless, and occasionally we'd let him hang around us, but that had been years ago. I don't know what he did with his days, but with a crazy sister like Yvonne, he probably spent a lot of time ducking.
Like all of our fights, it started over something little. A pebble, actually. He was two years younger than me, and I was a head taller. Which probably enabled me to croon, “You're lost little girlllll,” from the Doors record our sister played over and over, when I saw him sitting on the curb that day. Forlorn, with his ashy elbows on his ashy knees and messed up 'Fro. The words just popped out. That's what occurred to me to say as I biked past him.
He gave me the evil eye and threw a pebble at me. It skipped on the ground and jangled about my spokes. No biggie but then I saw Marcus coming down the street, slapping a basketball, so there was a witness. I jumped off the bike and—pausing to knock the kick-stand down—said, “What the fuck are you doing?” Like I said, he was smaller than me. I'd wrap this up pretty quickly.
The fight was long and drawn out and went on for miles, if you untangled our paces and laid them out lengthwise. I'd never seen such fury before. In a little person, anyway. I punched him in the face and he took it and retreated, walking backward, and I advanced on him for a while up the road. Then he reached some internal border and started advancing on me, hitting me in the face, and I retreated for a while, walking backward until I was up against my own personal wall and advanced on him again. That's why pro fights have a ring—otherwise people would just walk all over the goddamned place, up the aisle through the seats, out the lobby, and into the avenues. We prowled after each other up and down Walker, back and forth, the moronic pendulum, as my friends came out one by one, sniffing this on the wind from all points and following alongside like a news crew, providing blow-by-blow for the folks at home. His evil eyes on me the whole time. I'd get him in a headlock but he wouldn't go down to the ground like he was supposed to. He was tough! I tried to do an Indiana Jones move, from when he's grappling with the Nazi bruiser on the airplane and slams the guy's head into the wing a bunch of times. I thought this was a spectacular gimmick and tried to re-create it with Ralph's head instead of the Nazi head, and the Andersons' red Volvo instead of the airplane wing. But I couldn't get his head to the metal. His neck was superstrong, probably from dodging his sister's bricks.
Eventually we got tired and put down our fists. He didn't beat me and I didn't beat him, but since I was the older one, the judges called it his way. If anybody asked, I would have said, Look, the other guy wanted it more. He was descended from a construction material–throwing peoples and was in serious training between that and the whole Other Family thing, which he probably wasn't aware of consciously but you know he had to bend before such fierce invisible gravity. Especially if his family was the Other Family in question, with the cheaper presents and fainter hugs. But no one asked. Reggie wasn't there, and he didn't mention it but I know he heard, so in the end I did lose, in the eyes of my inner ref I cut through the Edwardses' driveway. The summer of that last fight was the last summer they came out.
WHEN I GOT TO CLIVE'S HOUSE, we were all there except for Nick. He'd called, whispering about how his mom was home and he couldn't get out of the house with his BB gun. Marcus suggested we start without him.
“But then we'd have uneven teams,” Bobby said.
“One of us can sit out,” I said. “Youngest first?”
“Four is better than three,” Clive announced, and we caved.
It was going to be dark soon, so we got busy making teams. Everybody wanted to be on Clive's team because Clive's team always won, but Randy was a factor with his rifle expertise. Plus, if you appeared to value his Randy-ness in all its wondrous forms—driver, hunter … well that's all I can think of right now—he might rule in your favor during an upcoming shotgun dispute. He threw off years of sturdy mathematics.
Reggie said, “Me and Bobby are a mini-team because we've been practicing together,” and I was appalled. We'd never not been a mini-team, what with the whole “Benji 'n' Reggie, Benji 'n' Reggie” singsong thing through the years. The only thought that had calmed me that afternoon was that I could protect him better if he was on my team. Send him on a crazy mission out of the way until it was all over. He didn't look at me.
This historic severing of the Benji-'n'-Reggie alliance went un-remarked upon. But who was I kidding? Nobody thought of us as the old unit anymore except for me. Some brothers threw bricks, others simply walked away from each other. The final teams were me, Clive, Marcus, and Nick on the Vice (for Miami Vice) and Randy, Bobby, Reggie, and NP on the Cool Chief Rockers. When Nick finally got his ass over there, I pulled out the paint goggles I'd rescued from the cobwebs under the deck and NP said, “Goggles?” I'd brought them for Reggie.
“No one said anything about goggles.”
“I don't got goggles.”
“I'm not wearing any pussy-ass goggles,” Marcus said. And neither was Reggie, I didn't even bother to fight with him about it. I didn't wear them, either.
The sky was getting dark. We went over the rules again and counted to two hundred per the guidelines. Then it was on.
We ran away, scattering according to haywire teenage logic toward the highway, toward the beach. I jogged around the corner, checking to see if I was in anyone's sights, and jumped into the undeveloped lot next to the Nichols House. I waded in deep enough that I couldn't be seen from the road, but shallow enough that I could see anyone coming down Clive's street or the street Mrs. Jenkins's house was on. Fifty-two, fifty-three. Getting there. It was almost too dark to play at this point, but the poor visibility would help me. I was going to wait for one of the Cool Chief Rockers to recon my way and then ambush them, a favorite tactic of mine to this day. Wait for the right moment in an argument with a loved one, then ambush them with some hurt I've held on to for years, the list of indictments nurtured in the darkness of my hideout, and say, “Gotcha!” See how you ruined me. If I was lucky, Bobby and Reggie would stop right in front of where I was hiding, to regroup or break into song, and I'd take them both out.
A firefly blinked into existence, drew half a word in the air. Then gone. A black bug secret in the night. Such a strange little guy. It materialized, visible to human eyes for brief moments, and then it disappeared. But it got its name from its fake time, people time, when in fact most of its business went on when people couldn't see it. Its true life was invisible to us but we called it firefly after its fractions. Knowable and fixed for a few seconds, sharing a short segment of its message before it continued on its rea
l mission, unknowable in its true self and course, outside of reach. It was a bad name because it was incomplete—both parts were true, the bright and the dark, the one we could see and the other one we couldn't. It was both.
I moved closer to the street so I could get a better view and someone hit me in the face with a rock.
Hot oil! Hot oil!
A rock. That's what it felt like. My head snapped back and the top half of my face throbbed like I'd been slapped. I cursed and stumbled out into the street. Who throws rocks at a BB gunfight? I yelled for a time-out.
Randy popped out of the woods on the other side of the street. “I hit you,” he said, in surprise and pride.
“Why are you throwing rocks?”
“No, it was a BB.”
I poked gingerly around my left eye. He'd hit me in the socket, in the hollow between the tear duct and the eyebrow. There may be a proper anatomical name for that part of the eye socket, but I don't know it. It felt like a rock. I couldn't see out of it. There was stuff in it. Randy reached forward and I batted his hand away. I heard NP say, “What's up?” I traced my fingertip along the lumpy hole in my face, the stinging flesh. It broke the skin. He'd pumped it more than two times.
“What happened?” Clive asked.
“Benji's out. I hit him,” Randy declared.
“I'm not out,” I said. “He pumped it more than twice! I'm bleeding! He's disqualified!”
Randy took my face in his hands and lifted my chin for a better look. He did this queasy thing. He bent his face down and stuck his tongue in the wound.
I pushed him away. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I was checking the taste to see if it was blood or sweat,” he said. “It's sweat. You have sweat all running down your forehead.”
I told him to keep the fuck off me, freakazoid. I touched the hole in my face and staggered into the cone of the streetlight. Fat june bugs crawled over one another on the ground in their wretched streetlight ritual. I held up my finger. It was blood.
Bobby and Reggie appeared, and then all the Cool Chief Rockers and Vicers, guns dangling. Reggie grabbed my arm and wanted to know if I was all right. I hadn't heard his voice like that in a long time. I shook my head drunkenly “What the hell did you do, Randy?” Reggie said.
“He pumped it more than twice,” I said. Everybody murmured dag, in their disparate dag registers. When they got a look at the wound, they re-dagged at how close it came to my eye.
Randy denied it, but to break the skin from across the street, he had to pump it a lot more than twice. We all knew it.
I realized the Horrible Thing. I said, “It's still in there.” I probed around the wound. The skin was tough and swole up, but beneath that was something harder, like a pearl. I shared the Horrible Thing.
Randy didn't believe it. “Let me see,” he said, his hands out.
“Get away from him,” Reggie shouted. He stepped between us. “Benji,” he started, squinting at the bloody hole in the poor light, “you have to go to the hospital.”
“We can't do that,” Marcus said. “We'll get in trouble.”
“We'll all be in some serious trouble when our parents come out tomorrow.”
I looked around. They had decided. Even Clive, who in his alpha dogness could have grabbed Randy's keys and taken me if he wanted, fuck everybody. He was looking down the street, as if he heard his parents pulling up, avoiding my gaze. Half gaze.
Randy said, “How are you going to get there?”
“That's uncool,” Reggie said. He was my brother. I loved him. The way he said it, I knew. He'd found stoners. Maybe he was going to be all right after all.
“That's so uncool,” I said. Justice according to brothers and stoners: if someone needs to go to the hospital and you got the car, you have to take them.
Reggie said, “Bobby, your grandpa can drive us!”
Bobby got weaselly “He's asleep—look, it's dark.”
“I don't have to go to the hospital. I'm okay,” I said. Reggie protested, but everyone else was so thoroughly relieved that it was someone else's Thursday that the point was moot. I'd take one for the team. I didn't care that that's what they wanted of me. I'd take the hit because that's what I did. The other guys turned on Randy for putting them in this position, bitching about the pumping and whether aiming for my face was an accident or not. He didn't give an inch—“It just happened”—but did offer me “automatic shotgun for two weeks” as compensation. But the next week Bobby got his car, and the girls finally appeared, and Randy's reign was over.
My plan was to go home and try and squeeze the BB out, pimple-style. Me and my brother walked away, one palm over my eye and my other hand on his shoulder.
“We can still play three-on-three,” NP suggested.
We tried to cut through the Edwardses' house on the way back, but the lights were on. Someone was home. We took the long way around.
In the bathroom mirror, my eye looked disgusting. Like I'd gone a few rounds with a real heavyweight. The socket was all swollen up, and blood trickled over my nose and older, dried trickles of blood. I washed my face off and got a better look. I could feel the BB in there. I couldn't move it. It was lodged in the meat or something. Reggie hovered around, trying to be helpful, but he freaked me out so I asked him to give me a minute. I tried to wiggle the BB again, applying time-honored zit-popping principles of strategic leverage like a modern-day Archimedes. Nothing happened, and the inflamed flesh was so tender that I couldn't really have at it. Blood with dark little bits in it dribbled over my fingers. We'd thought it all out and decided metal BBs were okay because in theory they weren't going to break the skin, but now I had a tetanus-covered time bomb in my head. I was going to wake up with lockjaw and waste away in bone-popping misery. Should I have occasion to fly between then and my deathday, to visit an international lockjaw specialist at his mountain-top clinic, for example, metal detectors would go off and I'd have to explain the whole dumb story.
We drank some of our father's seven-ounce Miller bottles. I put ice on it and we watched the last half of The Paper Chase. I'd try again in the morning.
The next morning the swelling had gone down a little and the hole was scabbed over. I tried squeezing it again. The BB wasn't stuck in the tough flesh anymore, but now the “entry wound” was closed over. Our parents were coming out that night and they were going to murder us. Playing with BB guns. Allowing Reggie to play with BB guns when I was in charge of the house. Both of us letting the other play with BB guns when we should have known better. Three capital offenses right there.
I was going to have to get it out.
I had a scalpel from my eighth-grade science class, but it was in the city. Our father's razor blades were the disposable kind, encased in plastic to prevent exactly this kind of misuse. I sent Reggie out to Frederico's. “Get some of those old-fashioned razor blades, the ones people use to kill themselves.”
I stared at my stupid face. Some kids rebelled to get attention. I did stupid things very carefully, spending all of my time thinking of ways to engineer small stupid things without getting caught. Things so small that no one else could see them and only I knew about them. But there I was last night, being stupid in a group, and of course that broke my rules and look where it got me. Who holds a BB-gun war at twilight? The dumb and the desperate. I had that thought, What if I could go back in time? Just thirteen hours. A simple time machine was all I was asking, a leftover prop from a science-fiction movie. You had to have real powers to pull that off, George Lucas–type special effects. Take the case of my friend Greedo. In 1997 when George Lucas rereleased his Star Wars trilogy, he fixed what he didn't like using modern special-effects technology, erasing the mistakes of his youth. He had a secret compound and an entire nerd army dedicated to this purpose. In Greedo's case, that meant rewriting the alien's history. In the original movie, the green-skinned bounty hunter is going to deliver the reluctant hero Han Solo to the space-age Mafia don Jabba the Hut, so Han shoot
s him to prevent this. But all those years later, that version of Han Solo, the one who shoots first, didn't fit in with Lucas's idea of how a real hero acts. So he changed what happened. He re-digitized the scene, inserted a laser blast of Greedo shooting first so that Han didn't shoot someone in cold blood. Han was a hero, Greedo the villain. There. Fixed.
Fans were angry. People don't like it if you mess with their childhood. But not me. Greedo didn't change. There was the first Greedo, the one we knew, and the other Greedo, the new one that emerged to change the meaning of things. To me they're both real. It's a simple thing to keep the two Greedos together in your head if you know how.
Reggie returned with a pack of real razor blades, each one individually wrapped like cheese slices. I peeled the cardboard off one. God it looked terrible. It was such a slim piece of metal and yet host to so much more potentiality than the BB guns. And I was going to put it in my face. Reggie's lip was trembling. His eyes watered. He said, “I don't want anything to happen to you.”
Don't cry or you'll get some more. “I'll be okay.” I kicked him out.
I cut a thin line into the scab and I squeezed. The BB didn't move. I cut deeper into it. Nothing happened. So I cut another line, and now I had an X. I squeezed as hard as I could. The BB was too deep. The FPS had been such that it was down in there, and the skin had closed around it in an embrace. I wasn't so much of a psycho that I was really going to dig in there, shit.
We didn't know what we were going to do. Like the good old days when we broke a lamp or put a hole in the couch and ran around each other like crazy cockroaches. Two fuckups waiting for the Big Shoe. Eye patch? We prayed they'd decide at the last minute not to come out. The odds were good. (“Never tell me the odds,” was a Han Solo–ism, hero talk.) We cleaned the house extra special, even used Windex for the fingerprints on the fridge. Maybe that would distract them. We stuck the bloody mop of Bounty paper towels and a blood-soaked washcloth into a plastic King Kullen bag and shoved it way down in the garbage.