Yard War (16 page)

I looked back at Dee and yelled,
“Dee! Run!”

Then I turned around and landed my fist on Tom Bethune's nose and knocked him howling to the curb.

He had both hands on his nose and there was blood coming out between his fingers. “It's broke, it's broke….”

Tim slammed his fist into my cheek. He was wearing a ring and blood came away on my hand when I felt where he hit me. Next thing I knew, I was on my back getting kicked by three of them. Through all the legs, I saw Stokes and Andy trying to push them away. And Dee was running right into the fight. I managed to turn over and crawl away from the kicks and get back up again. Johnny Adcock was leaning over trying to help Tom, still moaning. Andy slugged one of the older guys, and they got all tangled up on the ground. Everybody was screamin' and hollerin'. Calvin and Kenny were standing in the rose bed, yelling, “Hit 'em! Hit 'em!”

“Get out of the roses!” I yelled.

Tim slugged me again. Stokes tackled him and before Tim could get up, I got down behind him, pinned his arms back, wrapped my legs around his stomach, and got him in a scissors hold. He was screaming his head off and trying to jab his elbows in me. Stokes picked up the baseball bat and swung it in a half circle
to keep the rest of them away while I worked my scissors on Tim. He said if I didn't let him go, he was gonna kill me, which only made me squeeze harder because I figured he was gonna kill me no matter what I did.

Finally, he said, “I give! I give!”

“You give?”

“I give!”

“And y'all will get out of here and leave us alone?” I said.

“Yes, yes! Let go of me!”

“Promise?”

“Promise!”

“No crosses count?”

“No crosses count!”

I let him go.

“That's it, boys!” Tim yelled.

They let go of Andy and everybody got real still.

“Put the bat down, Stokes,” I said. “It's over.”

Everybody stopped fighting and walked over to us to shake hands and have a truce. I pushed myself off the ground, and as soon as I was standing all the way up, Tim clipped me so hard in the face, everything went brown for a second, and I was down again. When I knew what was going on, he was standing over me with the bat in the air, about to let me have it.

I saw a blur of somebody charging into Tim from the
side and knocking the bat out of his hands, somebody in boxer shorts for some reason. It was…Daddy.

“What the hell are you trying to do, son?”
He roared it out of his whole body and shoved Tim against the tree by the driveway and pinned him there with the bat across his chest. I had never heard Daddy's voice like that.

“What the hell are you trying to do?”

Tim musta thought he was about to be killed.

“We're sorry, we're sorry….” He looked around for help and his eyes landed on Stokes.

“I told you not to wake him up,” Stokes said, and shook his head.

“Yes, you
are
sorry!” yelled Daddy. “You are the sorriest bunch of redneck punks I ever laid eyes on!”

“Don't hurt him, Sam!” Mama yelled from the porch, where she and Willie Jane were standing.

“Dee!” Willie Jane waved for Dee to run up on the porch, but he stayed where he was.

Daddy's eyes were red and squinty. The rain had started coming harder, and his hair was plastered down. He was breathing real hard.

We heard tires screeching, and Mr. Bethune jumped out of his truck so fast he almost fell down.

“What's going on here?” he yelled.

“Your son was about to bring that bat down on my boy's head.”

“He broke my nose!” yelled Tom, still holding it with both hands.

“They attacked us!” Tim said. “We were just walking down the street and they attacked us!”

“That's a lie,” I said. “We were trying to play football and they walked up and started calling Dee names.”

“You see what happens? People get hurt!” yelled Mr. Bethune. “Is that what you want?”

Daddy backed away from Tim and let the bat drop.

“No, Pete, it's what
you
want. You and every redneck in this godforsaken state!”

Mr. Bethune squinted at Daddy and slugged him in the stomach.

Daddy bent over and walked back a few steps with both hands on his gut.

“Whoahhh!” somebody yelled, like when something good happens in a football game.

Mama ran down from the porch but Daddy held out his arm for her to stop.

“It's okay,” Daddy said, still bent over. “Go back, go back.” His voice was almost not there.

She backed up a few steps, folded her arms, and looked at Mr. Bethune like she wanted to scratch his eyes out.

Mr. Bethune was holding up his fists at Daddy and saying, “Come on! Come on!”

Daddy straightened up again and took a big breath.

“This is not the way, Pete.”

“Come on, coward!”

Daddy looked like he was deciding what to do. Then he popped Mr. Bethune hard in the jaw. Mr. Bethune staggered back, rubbed his face. Then he charged at Daddy and took another swing. Daddy dodged it. Then they were all the way fighting.

Mr. Nelson ran across the yard to see better. Mr. Cook stood on the other side of the driveway, smoking a cigarette so hard I thought he might eat it. Stokes's mom drove into her carport, got out, and watched with her mouth open.

“Stokes! Get over here!” she yelled.

Mr. Webb and his boys and the Reeves kids from over on Hartfield were running across the street. They must have heard the shouting. Dr. Reeves was hustling behind them, yelling, “Sock him a good one, Sam!”

I was about to jump on Mr. Bethune's back when Tim went for the bat. I snatched it up before he got there and hurled it into the street. It clanked and rolled, thunder boomed, and the rain came in buckets, like a bat in the street was the signal it had been waiting for. When I turned around, Tim hit me in the stomach the way his dad had hit my dad. Stokes pushed Tim down, and when I looked up again, people were running every which way, and everybody was swinging at everybody. The whole yard was a tangle of arms and legs flying.

Tim and a couple of his buddies were ganging up
on Stokes. Andy was swinging at Johnny Adcock. Mr. Cook tried to stop it and got knocked down. Mr. Nelson tried to help Mr. Cook and got punched, and he started swinging at whoever he could reach. I don't know who Calvin was swinging at. At least he had come out of the rose bed.

I ran over to help Stokes, and Tim spun me around and bloodied the other side of my face. I stood there a second, not feeling anything at all. Then, I felt the monster take over.

“Aaaaahhh!”
I landed a sledgehammer fist on Tim's face.

His mouth fell open and he backed away with his hands up. I took a couple of steps toward him. I could have punched out a telephone pole.

That was when the police came.

They hadn't turned on their siren, so everybody was surprised. Those who could scattered. Stokes plopped down on the grass and said he was too tired to run. I plopped by him, panting like a dog. My mouth tasted like blood and dirt and somebody had come along when I wasn't looking and vacuumed every bit of spit out of it. I didn't know what was rain and what was blood, I just knew my face hurt. And my hands hurt. And my legs hurt. And I had never felt so good in my life.

Two policemen got out, one fat, one medium fat, shouting, “Hold it! Freeze right there!”

Let 'em try to take me to jail,
I thought. But it wasn't me they were interested in.

It looked like Daddy and Mr. Bethune had gone from fighting each other to hugging. Then I figured out that Mr. Bethune was hanging on to Daddy the way boxers do when they're tired. The policemen told them to freeze again. Anybody could see Daddy and Mr. Bethune were too tired to go anywhere.

Willie Jane was running to the far corner of the yard. “Dee!” she screamed.

I ran over to Dee. He was lying facedown.

“What happened? What happened?” she asked me. I didn't know. I had lost track of him in all the fighting. We turned him over and he had cuts on his face and blood coming from a bad gash. His eyes were open, but I wasn't sure he knew what he was looking at.

“Who got ya? Who did this?”

“Don't know,” he mumbled, and grabbed his arm and groaned. “My arm.”

I yelled to the policemen to let my daddy come see about Dee, but they were putting handcuffs on him. We got Dee up and helped him inside and laid him down on my bed. Willie Jane held his head and talked to him, and he mumbled something back.

I ran back to see about Daddy, and Mama shoved a shirt and a pair of pants and some loafers at me. “Take these to your father.” She didn't want to give them to him herself. It was a good thing those policemen were
there, or Daddy would have had another fight on his hands.

“Officer, at least let him get dressed!” Mama yelled from the porch.

Daddy's face was bloody and marked up, and he was breathing hard. I told the policeman I could explain what happened, but he said Daddy and Mr. Bethune could explain it all downtown. I was hoping they'd let Daddy explain why he was in his underwear.

Mr. Bethune started talking real fast, and then he started cussin', and when they tried to calm him down, he swung his arms around, so they took him on to the car.

The medium-fat policeman took the handcuffs off Daddy, just for a minute, he said. “It's against regulations, but under the circumstances…”

“I'll be okay, pal,” Daddy said to me, stepping into the pants. “Everything will be okay, Virginia!” he yelled to the porch. “Don't you worry! I delivered this man's baby boy, isn't that right, Officer?”

The policeman smiled and nodded.

The other one came back and said to me, “Get on out of the rain, son.”

Then they re-handcuffed him and pulled him toward their car.

“It's my fault, Daddy.” I had to go ahead and cry, seeing my daddy like that. “All this is because of me.”

“Don't you feel bad about a thing, pal,” Daddy said over his shoulder. “The good guys won here today.”

I didn't know what he meant at first. I had won against Tim, but Daddy and Mr. Bethune had just worn each other down. The bad guys probably threw as many punches as the good guys. I think he meant that the good guys won because we had fought at all. That winning was in not giving in, in trying, no matter how many times you had to try.

Willie Jane put mercurochrome and Band-Aids on Dee's face, and Mama fixed ice packs and a sling made of old sheets for his arm. She told Willie Jane they needed to stay with us, and maybe spend the night, depending on when Daddy got let out of jail. He could say whether the arm was broken or not. Mama thought it was just a sprain.

She looked at my cuts and bruises and declared that I would live. “But you are the wettest little boy I ever saw in my life. Go get cleaned up and I'll put some Band-Aids on you and make you a grilled cheese. Chop-chop!”

I looked in the bathroom mirror at the blood and sweat and dirt all over my face and shirt. I had it all in my mouth, too, and let the shower rinse it out.

Mama fed and doctored me. Willie Jane stayed back in my room with Dee and said she didn't want a grilled cheese, she just wanted her baby boy to be
okay. I went into Mama and Daddy's room and lay down on their big bed to rest up a little. My daddy was in jail, and I felt lucky and proud.

—

When I woke up it was dark. The clock on the nightstand said 8:11. How could that be true? I felt all blurry and sore, and my face had these things on it and it took me a second to remember they were Band-Aids. Willie Jane and Dee were asleep on my bed.

Meemaw and Mama were standing in the middle of the den, hugging. They said hi when I walked through, and kept hugging. I said hi and walked to the kitchen because I was starving.

I fixed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and stood in the doorway eating it. At first I wanted to hear what they were saying, but after they started talking louder, I wanted them to see me. They wouldn't look over to where I was, only at each other.

“When did he say you could come get him?” Meemaw asked.

“Tonight sometime. One of the officers is being real helpful because Sam delivered his baby last month. Sam will call me.” Mama was trying to make her voice sound like Daddy was off on a hunting trip or something. “And Sam is in the right. They came into our yard. Pete Bethune attacked him. Sam said Pete was
being so obnoxious they might never let him out.” She tried to laugh but it turned into crying.

“Oh, Ginny.”

Meemaw hugged her again and took a step back and put her hands on her hips and said, “You know your daddy and I always had our doubts about him.”

“Mama, don't.”

“Dr. Nobody from Nowhere.”

“Please.”

“But you were hell-bent for leather to marry him and—”

“Yes, Sam grew up poor, but he worked hard and got scholarships all the way through medical school, and instead of being proud of him for that, you blame him for his childhood.”

“After what he said last time y'all had Sunday dinner with us, which was
weeks
ago, I thought, When did my son-in-law become this inte
gra
tionist? How can he be so wrong in his thinking? But then I said, ‘You know, I'm really not at all surprised.' ”

“Why is he ‘wrong in his thinking' just because he thinks differently from you? Do we all have to be in lockstep about everything?”

“About some things, yes, we do. Unless you want the entire state to go to hell in a handbasket!”

Mama moved away from her. I backed into the kitchen, but not so far I couldn't see.

“And now he's brawling in the yard in front of the whole neighborhood!” She almost shouted it.

“He was de
fend
ing himself against the neighborhood. Against people who threatened your grandchildren.”