“What is that?” I said.
“Take it easy,” he said, and stuck it back in his shirt.
The position I was in—half-sitting/half-lying, leaning back on an elbow—was suddenly embarrassing. I pulled in my legs, raised myself higher.
“So look,” said Triple-J. “Listen, alright? All that stuff that just happened? Completely regrettable. Bums me out hard. I want to say it’s not me. I want to say it’s all them. But it’s a little bit me cause those guys are my friends and I let them be my friends. They think we’re a gang and I don’t stop them thinking that. They think we’re called the Yachts and they think I’m their leader. They read some stupid novel. New kid at school bands the losers together. Starts an uprising. I don’t want an uprising. Maybe—I don’t know—a revolution, but only if it’s fun. And I’ve told them that, but still, they keep on following me. They really look up to me. They try to impress me. They’re just so nice to me. And life is so easy. Mine is, I’m saying. I mean, I’m really lucky. I’m seriously privileged. I can’t disappoint them. I have no right to let anyone down. So I wear the silly hat and cut the arms off my turtlenecks. I try when I’m around them to talk how they imagined I would talk before they met me. Like a polo-playing dicksneeze who listens to hip-hop and goes on safari. I talk about the sky above the Kenyan savannah, thoroughbreds for birthday gifts, backgammon strategy, girls named Cebrin with sisters named Colombe. I reminisce about Manhattan, which I don’t even miss, not even a little—there’s so much space here, so many ballfields and places to park—and I throw some Slick Rick on when they come to my houses. Why am I telling you this? There’s something about you. Something familiar and maybe not bad.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Yeah, well, still. You shouldn’t have hit them. That’s what I should tell you. They’re a bunch of fucking idiots, but they’re smaller than you and they’re serious pussies and they’re good in their hearts. Or maybe they’re not that good in their hearts. It remains to be seen. But the main thing is this: main thing’s they’re with me. You shouldn’t have hit them and that’s where I stand. Don’t do it again. And I’ll tell them not to narc you. I’ll say we’re evo-stevo, and they’ll listen, believe me. But mum’s gotta be the word on your end, too. Not that you’d want people to know a kid laid you out, even this kid. Or I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe you would. Maybe you’re the kind who’d think the big headline would mean real fame. I’ll tell you, though, it won’t. Before word one about me made it into print, your life would be ruined. You know who my father is. You know he’s no pussy. So you no say, I no say, entiendes, amigo?”
“Entiendo,” I said. “We say nada nunca a nadie.” To my surprise, I felt extremely amiable. Partly, I think, because my attacker seemed to be revealing himself as an overall decent human being who’d thought he was righting a wrong when he’d hurt me, which meant that he didn’t have anything against me—against who I truly was. Partly because some really vigorous endorphins were bathing my nerve ends, overcompensating me with warmth and calm for the pain induced by the blow to my kidneys. Partly because, although I hardly knew Spanish (I’d had just a couple years of it in high school), Triple-J’s punning had not been lost on me. Also partly because I’m basically a coward; I’d rather be finished taking a beating than have to continue to be in a fight. Mostly, however, my amiability owed to the fact that I did know who Triple-J’s father was. His father’s, I’d realized—when Triple-J’d said “dicksneeze”—was the voice of which his croaky own reminded me.
“Nunca a nadie, for sure-o,” Triple-J said. “You’re funny, jefe.”
“And you’re Jonboat’s son, right? You’re Jonny Pellmore-Jason, Jr. Your father beat me up once, too, you know?”
“Oh?”
“It’s true. When we were kids. And after that we were friends. At least kind of, I mean.”
“My father,” said Triple-J, “is friendless. He’s never had friends. And listen: you’re smiling. You’re smiling in the way that some people call beaming, and it’s making me uncomfortable. Don’t beam at strangers. Jesus you’re weird. I better get going. You’re really creeping me out.”
He straightened his cap, chucked his smoke at the fence, and walked off in the direction of his father’s houses, taking with him, it seemed, the last of my endorphins.
I drew a deep breath, which hurt, and lay down.
* * *
I was, somewhat literarily, yards from where I’d lain when my father first taught me all he knew about suffering. We’d been playing tetherball. Game upon game. Despite our height differential—I was five years old—I was holding my own. My father was impressed. I’d score and he’d shake his head in admiration, call me “killer” and whistle, promise all kinds of ice cream. The sun, that afternoon, was murder, the air like sap, and, more and more frequently, he’d bend to catch his breath—hands on knees, shoulder involvement—but he didn’t want to quit. Best-of-three had become best-of-five, then of-seven, -eleven…-twenty-one.
I didn’t want to quit either. Not only was I getting better at tetherball, and pleasing my dad, but, during the breaks we took between games, I kept seeing this chipmunk dart across the blacktop (this was two or three years before the pebbles were installed), back and forth between the rocket and the gunboat. It may have been the first chipmunk I’d ever encountered, it was certainly the first one I’d ever been drawn to, and I found myself wondering what it was doing there. The nearest tree in which it could have viably nested would have been in the copse by the man-made pond. (Our housing development was younger than me; the trees along the playground’s perimeter were saplings, staked to the sod with hazard-orange-streamered tethers, same as those planted on the trapezoids of grass between the bottoms of the driveways of all the local homes.) The copse by the pond was three blocks away—an epic journey, I’d thought, in chipmunk terms, especially considering the bulldozer-flattened Wheelatine landscape’s general paucity of protective cover. The chipmunk probably had a burrow in a neighboring lawn—potentially our lawn—but that prospect didn’t occur to me at the time; I thought burrows were for rabbits, and trees for squirrels (I didn’t think of the chipmunk as a chipmunk but a squirrel).
I supposed that in the course of chasing a female it had fallen in love with, or fleeing a predator that had murdered its family, the chipmunk had left the copse and gotten lost. But that didn’t explain why it remained on the playground. Why wasn’t it trying to find its way home?
To me it seemed the chipmunk might have wanted to play. I thought it might have sensed that I wasn’t any danger; I thought it might have felt that, this far from its nest, it needed a friend, and I could be that friend. Plus it appeared, in a way, to already be playing with us, or maybe rather attempting to play with us; it showed itself only when one of us was readying to serve, whereas during the volleys it stayed beneath the rocket. True, when it hid, it may have chosen to do so for fear of those volleys’ startling sounds—I did accept that possibility—but because it repeatedly darted back and forth across the same small stretch when the sounds let up (seven separate times over someteen minutes before I quit counting) rather than running away from the playground (a nestless, foodless, and mate-free area), I came to see the rationale behind its timing (darting only during the breaks in the match) may just as well have been to invite me to chase it when I was least distracted (and thus most likely to receive the invitation), and I even registered the possibility (though, even at the time, this did seem far-fetched) that the chipmunk kept itself out of my sight while the ball was in play so as not to distract me from scoring on my father.