Favorite Sons (3 page)

How many fourteen-year-olds could explain the intricacies of compound interest? Adrian and Pepper's dad was the president of the Glass Works Bank and Trust Company. Obviously, Pepper had been paying attention to his father's lessons and was way beyond the
rest of us in the area of fiscal management. None of us doubted that he would someday be ridiculously rich.

After three hours of exploration in Marty Postalakis's feed-corn fields, we ended our search on the east bank of the Little Seneca Creek, the sun high overhead, our shirts clinging to moist skin, the tang of testosterone in the air. We washed our treasures in the clear stream, compared our finds, bragged a little, then followed a furrow that snaked along the tree line back toward Chestnut Ridge. As we neared the end of the path that cut through a coppice of chestnut trees at the edge of the Postalakis property, Pepper was ragging on Deak, who had found only two points, although one was by far the best point of the day, a gray and maroon flint spear tip in near perfect condition. “I think the spear point should count for more than one, since it's in such good shape,” Deak said.

“I agree,” Pepper said. “I'll give you one and a half for it.”

Deak thought for a minute. “That still makes me the low man.” Pepper grinned. “I know.”

I had six arrowheads for the day, Pepper five, and Adrian three, though he also had the prize find, a maul made of red quartzite. The maul was used by Indians as a hammer head. It was about the size of a tennis ball and had a groove worked into the middle so the user could get a solid grip when using it for pounding. It was in pristine condition, without nicks or chips. The fact that it was made of red quartzite, which is not found in eastern Ohio, meant a Mingo Indian had once traded for the maul, probably with a tribe in the northern United States. It was a valuable piece.

As we walked, Adrian was rolling the maul around in his left hand, admiring his find, and said, “Maybe I'll just keep this.”

“If you do, you have to pay me half its worth,” Pepper quickly chimed in. “We have a deal, remember? We sell everything we find and split the money.”

“That's just on arrowheads,” Adrian countered.

“Really? Then how about the axe head I found last fall? How come we didn't have an arrowheads-only rule when I sold that?”

You were not going to beat Pepper Nash in an argument about money. Adrian muttered something unintelligible, and I was laughing at the end of our single file line, enjoying the brotherly squabble.
I was still grinning when the column emptied into a clearing atop Chestnut Ridge and Adrian abruptly halted, causing a chain-reaction collision of teenage boys. Standing at the side of the clearing under the shade of an oak tree, blocking the path leading back down to the school, was Petey Sanchez.

He spotted us immediately and was yammering before we began walking again. “What are you guys doing up here, huh? Queers. Faggots. You up there jerkin' each other off, huh? Havin' a circle jerk, I bet. Circle jerk. Circle jerk. You're a bunch of fuckin' queers, aren't you? Queers. Queers. Queers.” Drool fell from his lips as he spoke, and he spread his legs, bent his knees, and made a masturbating motion with his right hand. “Bunch of faggots, faggots, that's what you are. Faggots.”

My stomach knotted up. “Get the hell away, Petey,” said Pepper, who among the four of us had the shortest fuse.

“Queers. Cornholers. Cocksuckers. Queers. Bunch of queers.”

Petey was nearly eighteen with sparse, prickly hairs sprouting on his upper lip and chin, and growing into a strong, physically mature man. The same mental limitations that made him annoying and scary also made Petey fearless, or perhaps just incapable of understanding danger. We made our way toward the hunting path, a tight, shoulder-to-shoulder phalanx around Adrian, who was a full head taller than the rest of us and offered a modicum of protection. I walked at his right shoulder, not wanting to seem afraid, though I had goose bumps covering both arms. I kept my eyes on the path and avoided looking at Petey, who met us in the middle of the clearing and hovered around our group, cursing and yakking and making bird calls, twice leaning his face close to mine and gagging me with his putrid breath. He was dressed in a sleeveless maroon T-shirt with dark sweat and salt stains under the armpits. His grimy underwear was pulled above his cut-off blue jeans, which drooped low on his hips. A pair of black socks sagged around his ankles, lying in ridges on the tops of his battered tennis shoes. Petey reeked of dirt and sweat and excrement, and as we neared our escape path he screeched and leaned in close to Pepper, who said, “Jesus H. Christ, Petey, when's the last time you took a bath? You smell like horse shit.”

“Fuck you, queer. Queer. Faggot,” he said, waving his arms in a bird-like motion. When Petey attempted to again lean into Pepper's face, Adrian stepped forward to block the charge, and the bony ridge of Petey's forehead hit him on the chin. It was a glancing blow, but Adrian's jaw muscles tightened, his neck flushed and pulsed. Adrian brought his fisted right hand and the hand holding the maul together in front of his chest, and striking a pose like an offensive lineman, he stepped forward and drove his forearms into Petey's sternum. It was a powerful blow, and Petey looked like a marionette jerked off his feet by a puppeteer, flying backward into the scrub near the path. Pepper and I laughed. Deak said, “Hey, come on, let's not do this.”

Petey got on all fours. He was starting to cry, spit flying from his mouth, and then, in a motion quicker than I imagined him capable of, he came up with a dried oak limb with a few brown leaves still clinging to it, and swung at Adrian's face. The dried leaves rattled as the limb arced toward Adrian, who ducked and threw his right arm up to block the attack. He tried to grab the limb, but Petey pulled it back and swung again, this time hitting Adrian first in the upper shoulder and snapping the limb in two off the back of his head. The broken end of the stick helicoptered into the clearing; the business end remained clutched in Petey's hands.

We stopped laughing, and I can tell you for a fact that I knew what was going to happen next. As clear as the noontime sky, I could see it unfolding in my mind's eye. I knew it was going to be tragic, but I could not, or did not, stop it. Years afterward, I would ponder that moment and wonder if my hatred and fear of Petey Sanchez trumped common sense and prevented me from stopping Adrian. I was only three feet away when I saw the muscles twitch in Adrian's forearm and the maul drop from his palm into his fingers, easily sliding into the grip he used for a two-seam fastball. I made no move to stop him. Instead, I looked at Petey. He was enraged, his face crimson, squealing and slobbering. When Petey raised his arm for another attack, Adrian's right foot came off the ground.

As the foot came forward, his left shoulder dropped. Petey's right hand started forward with the stick at the same time Adrian's left hand arced past his ear. The maul came out of
his hand and covered the two feet to Petey's forehead in a blur. I never saw it leave his hand and I never saw it hit Petey, but I heard it. Pepper always said the impact sounded sharp, like a walnut cracking or a tree limb snapping in a high wind. That's not the way I remember it. What I heard was a sickening crunch, like the sound of someone stepping on an ice cube.

We sometimes make decisions in a span of time so infinitesimal that it cannot be comprehended by our own minds. Yet the impact of the decision is life-altering. There may be times when people lash out purely on instinct, reacting to fear or pain without regard for the consequences, but I think those instances are few. A decision might be made as the result of fear and rage, but it is still a decision. I have had years now to think about the events that occurred that day on Chestnut Ridge, and I believe that Adrian Nash meant to kill Petey Sanchez.

I had known Adrian a long time. He was the star pitcher on the baseball team and I was his catcher. I had seen Adrian Nash in his zone. I had witnessed firsthand the times his eyes narrowed and he honed in on my catcher's mitt and delivered the ball with such accuracy that I caught it without ever moving my hand. Those were the eyes I saw just before Adrian delivered the maul into the forehead of Petey Sanchez. After the limb broke across the back of his head, the pain seared, the adrenaline surged, and a neuron fired somewhere deep in Adrian's brain. It was during that millisecond that the primal instincts of survival took over and I saw the look flash in Adrian's eyes. They narrowed, the teeth clenched, and the maul slipped into his fingers. The desire to kill Petey only lasted an instant, but it struck while Adrian had a three-pound granite projectile in his throwing hand. When Adrian's right foot strode forward, Petey Sanchez was as good as dead. The maul struck Petey an inch to the right of the bony ridge, directly between his eyebrow and hairline, exactly where Adrian wanted to put it.

The stick dropped from his hand, but Petey didn't go right down. Death had yet to register in his feeble mind. The impact of the maul spun his head toward me, like the head of a boxer that has just taken a vicious left hook. It was an instant after granite had compacted bone and his eyes carried a perplexed look, as though trying to process the electric charge that had ignited in his brain
and sent a shower of sparks shooting from the cerebellum to the bottom of his spine. But it was only momentary. The brain that had served Petey so poorly in life was shutting down, his eyes turning blank, mouth agape, jaw slack, blood flowing from the crater of pulp in his forehead. The dim lights inside his head began shutting off in quick succession. Like that same staggered boxer, he stood for a moment, wobbled, then began a slow descent to his back. As he started to topple, Petey looked like a wooden soldier in the throes of death, his arms and legs stiff, hinged only at the shoulders and hips. One leg extended awkwardly to the side and his arms windmilled as he fell backward into the weeds, scaring an animal that moved in the thicket and scattering a flock of starlings from a nearby mulberry tree.

We froze for a long moment, just looking at one another. I fought back the salty bile that flooded my mouth and the urge to run as far and fast as my legs would carry me. The clearing and woods had gone suddenly silent. The only sound I recall was Adrian sucking for air through his mouth, his saliva whistling with each heaving breath. The silence was broken when Deak Coultas, the church acolyte, said, “Holy fucking Christ.”

The blood drained from Adrian's face. I watched it. The color dropped like the line of a cooling thermometer, and his face took on the pale, waxy hue of the hot candle drippings that clung like stalactites from the church candelabras. Adrian began walking in circles, his splayed fingers on his hips, sucking for air and fighting back tears. Pepper put a hand on his brother's back and offered consolation in a hushed tone. Deak dropped to one knee and held his face in his hands. I twisted a dark blue felt bag in my hands. It had once contained a bottle of fine Canadian sipping whiskey, but now held my arrowheads, which clacked together as I approached the prone figure of Petey Sanchez.

He had fallen into a patch of high grass, thistles, and milkweed under the low branches of the oak tree that had shed the limb he had used as a weapon. After he fell, the parted grass and weeds drooped back over Petey, creating a tomb of green into which his torso and head had disappeared. I set the velvet bag near his legs, which jerked every few seconds, took the stick that had fallen from Petey's hand,
and slowly parted the vegetation. His left arm lay limp at his side, the right extended over his head as though he were swimming the backstroke. Blood pooled in the crater; the right side of his face was awash in red. A few stems of grass clung to his cheeks, held in place by the sticky blood; a blowfly had already alighted at the rim of the hole. His fingers twitched and his mouth opened and closed in a manner that reminded me of a fish that had been dragged up on shore and struggled for breath. I thought Petey, too, was gasping for air, but later in life learned that it was simply the spasmodic reaction of his muscles after his wiring had been short-circuited. I watched for several minutes, maybe as few as two, or as many as five, I'm really not sure, until his body relaxed and settled hard into the brush. When all movement stopped and two more blowflies lit on the moist side of Petey's face, I moved the stick and allowed the grass to fall back over him. I snatched up my velvet bag and moved away. “He's dead,” I said.

“Are you sure?” Pepper asked.

“Positive.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Adrian said.

“Did you check for a pulse?” Deak asked.

“I don't need to check for a pulse, Deak. There's a hole in his forehead that I could stick my fist in.”

“Maybe we should call for an ambulance.”

“Fuck no, we're not calling for an ambulance,” Pepper said. “For what? He's dead.”

“Why in hell didn't he just leave us alone?” Adrian asked, his eyes glassy with tears. “Why'd he always have to get up in your face like that? Goddamn him.”

“It was self-defense, Adrian. You had no choice,” I offered. “He was going to club you again with that tree limb. He could have killed you.”

I expected Adrian to protect his infallibility and shift the blame to us for not helping, but it didn't come. He just stood there, chewing on his lower lip, shaking his head and fighting back tears. With each breath his chest and stomach rolled in unison.

“I'm just saying, if we ran down the hill and called right now, maybe the paramedics could do something,” Deak offered.

“Yeah, they'll do something, all right. They'll declare his retarded ass dead and then call the cops to arrest us,” Pepper said.

“But, if we don't do . . .”

“No, Deak,” Pepper said, his nostrils flaring as he took a step toward him.

I stepped between them and put a hand on Pepper's chest. “Stop it. Enough. Let's give it a minute.” I looked at Adrian, who was our unspoken leader. He was beginning to regain his composure, but offered no help. It was on me. “Look, there's nothing anyone can do for Petey. Deak, if you want to check for a pulse, be my guest, but I'm telling you he's stone dead. If we're standing around here and someone wanders by, we're screwed. I say let's get out of here and go somewhere where we can talk and sort things out.”