There was something about cuts, welts, and splints on a young man that warned an antagonist, You’ll get hurt, too. Josh hesitated. Todd appeared even more apprehensive. Although the events of the past twenty-four hours were not as dramatic as the buzz they generated, Daniel was aware that he now had a reputation. He’d been carted off to jail by the police in front of the whole school for single-handedly beating up two of the town troglodytes. There wasn’t a person in town under twenty-one that didn’t have a beef with one Grundy or another. This act was simply putting his juvenile delinquency to good use.
“And Elijah didn’t rape anybody,” Daniel added, for emphasis.
“Nobody got raped!” Josh shrieked.
“Fuck, man!” Todd cursed. The word rattled the jock.
“There was NO rape!” Josh repeated, more for himself than anyone else, but hearing the word again made Todd squirrelly.
“Screw this, man,” Todd said. “This dude’s nuts. Last thing I need is a busted arm or leg before the scouts see me play. I’m outta here, Josh. Sorry.”
“Fuckin’ hell, Todd! Get back here, you pussy.” Todd kept walking.
“And then there was one,” Daniel said.
“Shut up!” Josh didn’t stand quite so tall anymore. He looked deflated. He looked alone in more ways than one.
Daniel was beginning to see a ray of sunshine in this situation. The last thing he needed was another fight. If Josh was shaken enough, they might walk out of the park unscathed.
“Think you can sweet-talk Katie into thinking she wasn’t raped?” Daniel said in a mocking tone.
“Stop saying that word! I didn’t force her into the shed.”
“You can’t even convince your best friend,” Daniel said, motioning to the distant dot that was Todd.
“She wanted it. She got all funny after it happened.”
“LIAR!” Katie bolted forward from her human shield, scratching and clawing at Josh. “GODDAMN LIAR!”
Shit, Daniel thought.
3
The five-fingered gash across Josh’s face enraged him. He grabbed Katie’s wrists and threw her to the ground into a pile of beer bottles. Daniel picked up a stray bottle by his foot and hit Josh square in the forehead with a solid throw. The jock staggered back, tripped on another empty and landed hard on his back. Daniel grabbed his friend’s arm and pulled her out of the dugout. He dragged her toward his bike as she struggled to lunge at Josh. She had lost all sense about the reality of fighting a big, angry, dumb jock. Daniel shook her by the shoulders.
“Stop it, Katie! I know you’re mad, but he’s going to cream us when he gets up.”
The sound of bottles rattling signaled the jock regaining his feet. Something about the look in Josh’s eye snapped the girl from her fit; perhaps it was the same gleam of bad judgment with which he stole her virginity. Josh looked resolved to undertake new sins. It was time to go.
Daniel peddled for two toward the field exit. The dirt was terrible for traction, but he didn’t dare look back. He turned right at the exit on a course for the better side of town, riding along the first-base line. Daniel barely registered that Josh had climbed over the chain-link fence ahead of him when all of a sudden he landed on them hard and knocked them down. Katie rolled into the street. Daniel was pinned, the bike frame cutting into his leg from his assailant’s weight. His rib was on fire. A fist smashed his nose; pain swimming across a web of nerves. Another one hit him in the jaw. He saw spots before his eyes. Katie rammed Josh with her whole body and knocked him back. Daniel slid out from under the bike, trying not to pass out. His bandaged rib protested any further action. He staggered to his feet just as Josh grabbed Katie’s wrist and twisted. There was a horrifying crack. She screamed. He clipped her in the cheek with a right jab and she crumpled to the ground like a rag doll.
Daniel was furious, angrier than he’d ever been in his life. Josh blocked his punch and returned a solid jab to the gut. The jock grabbed Daniel by the top of his shirt and almost lifted him off the ground as he shoved him back onto the hood of a parked Dodge Ram. Daniel struggled, but his assailant’s arms were birch-tree thick.
“I am not going to jail for raping no one!” Josh shouted. “Especially for your little tramp girlfriend.” Then, Josh stopped punching him and looked into the cab of the pickup.
Daniel looked, too, and saw a bare leg in a white lady’s pump straddled over the steering wheel. The other leg lay over the headrest of the driver’s seat. A well-manicured woman’s hand gripped the passenger-side dashboard. And above the horizon of the dashboard were two pair of eyes looking straight at him. One of those pairs was Clyde’s.
“Oh, crap.”
4
She was the same woman Clyde had met in the hospital earlier. She struggled to put her tits back in her bra even as Clyde buckled his pants. Josh had stopped hitting Daniel, and hovered over him with a gaping mouth, confused by the distraction. Clyde looked incensed, which Daniel knew to be his default face.
“Shit,” Josh said.
“Worse than that,” Daniel responded. “That’s my stepdad… ex-Marine.”
Josh let Daniel go and backed up a few steps before turning and running off. What a pussy, Daniel thought. He rushed over to Katie, who was still out cold, and patted her face. She had a dark purple bruise where Josh hit her. Even with welts, she is beautiful, he thought.
“Katie, wake up,” he whispered in her ear.
Clyde got out of the truck. “What the hell are you doing here, boy?”
The day’s events had yet to catch up with Daniel’s stepfather, but the boy realized catching Clyde in his extracurricular activity was enough to warrant a beating. Clyde wasn’t stupid or drunk enough to do it in the middle of the street, in front of Daniel’s friend whose father had some influence in the town… at least he hoped. He realized how silly he was earlier thinking that Clyde had attacked Katie. If she would only wake up.
“Katie,” he repeated, tapping the back of her wrist lightly.
“Boy…”
“You know, Clyde,” Daniel said, trying to keep the fear from his voice, “most dads would be proud to see their kid hold their own against someone bigger and older than they are.”
“First off, runt, you wasn’t holding your own. You were getting the shit kicked out of you. Second, you ain’t my kid.”
Katie groaned. She stirred, then opened her eyes. Clyde stood his ground. The woman staggered from the truck and joined them. They were both two sheets to the wind and would be adding a third before calling it a night. Daniel turned cold as he read the hospital name tag on her blouse: Conklin. That’s why she looked familiar. He’d seen her in a photo in the principal’s office. Clyde was banging Conklin’s daughter.
The principal’s animus toward him took on new dimensions. Clyde’s actions, his lusts, greed, and poor character even polluted Daniel’s sanctuary at school, the one place he had never had to worry about his stepfather. His collection of havens was shrinking. Clyde was his bane in an almost biblical sense. A new chapter had to be written for any possible future to exist. For the first time, Daniel feared Clyde less than the prospect of extricating him from his life. He should have ratted the bastard out to the sheriff earlier. It wasn’t too late to go back and lodge that formal complaint. Rita would have to live with the consequences of her own lies. Penny would have to endure a house full of strangers. Daniel had had enough.
He helped Katie to her feet. She leaned on him for support, favoring her uninjured arm. “I’m going to take Katie home,” he told his stepfather.
He picked up his bike and wheeled it by the handlebar while supporting Katie with the other arm. Daniel held his breath as they inched away. It felt like they were backing out of a lion’s cage. Daniel hoped Clyde’s lust for Conklin’s brat was greater than the taste for his blood. After a few minutes they were around the corner and out of view. The boy sighed in relief.