There was a group of people just beyond the smoking area, twenty or thirty of them in a tight little circle. That pattern usually means a fight or what Arnie likes to call a “pushy-pushy”—two guys who aren’t really mad enough to fight sort of shoving each other around and whacking each other on the shoulders and trying to protect their macho reputations.
I glanced that way, but with no real interest. I didn’t want to watch a fight; I wanted to eat my lunch and find out if anything was going on between Arnie and Leigh Cabot. If there was a little something happening there, it might take his mind off his obsession with Christine. One thing was for sure: Leigh Cabot didn’t have “any rust on her rocker panels.
Then some girl screamed and someone else yelled,” Hey, no! Put that away, man!” That sounded very much ungood. I changed direction to see what was going on.
I pushed my way through the crowd and saw Arnie in the circle, standing with his hands held out a little in front of him at chest level. He looked pale and scared, but not quite panicked. A little distance to his left was his lunch-sack, squashed flat. There was a large sneaker-print in the middle of it. Standing opposite him, in jeans and a white Hanes T-shirt that clung to every ripple and bulge of his chest, was Buddy Repperton. He had a switchblade knife in his right hand and he was moving it slowly back and forth in front of his face like a magician making mystic passes.
He was tall and broad-shouldered. His hair was long and black. He wore it tied back in a ponytail with a hank of rawhide. His face was heavy and stupid and mean-looking. He was smiling just a little. What I felt was an unmanning mixture of dismay and cold fear. He didn’t look just stupid and mean; he looked crazy.
“Told you I was gonna getcha, man,” he said softly to Arnie. He tilted the knife and jabbed softly at the air with it in Arnie’s direction. Arnie flinched back a little. The switchblade had an ivory handle with a little chrome button to flick out the blade set into it. The blade itself looked to be about eight inches long—it wasn’t a knife at all, it was a fucking bayonet.
“Hey, Buddy, brand im!” Don Vandenberg yelled happily, and I felt my mouth go dry.
I looked around at the kid next to me, some nerdy freshman I didn’t know. He looked absolutely hypnotised, all eyes. “Hey,” I said, and when he didn’t look around I slammed my elbow into his side. “Hey!”
He jumped and looked around at me in terror
“Go get Mr Casey. He eats his lunch in the wood-shop office. Go get him right now.”
Repperton glanced at me, then glanced at Arnie. “Come on, Cunningham,” he said. “What do you say, you want to go for it?”
“Put down the knife and I will, you shitter,” Arnie said. His voice was perfectly calm. Shitter, where had I heard that word before? From George LeBay, hadn’t it been? Sure. It had been his brother’s word.
It apparently wasn’t a word Repperton cared for. He flushed and stepped closer to Arnie. Arnie circled away. I thought something was going to happen pretty quick maybe one of those things the call for stitches and leave a scar.
“You go get Casey now,” I told the nerdy-looking freshman, and he went. But I thought everything would probably go down before Mr Casey got back… unless I could maybe slow things down a little.
“Put down the knife, Repperton,” I said.
His glance came over my way again. “Whit you know,” he said. “It’s Cuntface’s friend, You want to make me put it down?”
“You’ve got a knife and he doesn’t, I said. “In my book that makes you a fucking chicken-shit.”
The flush deepened. Now his concentration was broken. He looked at Arnie, then over at me. Arnie flashed me a glance of pure gratitude—and moved a little closer to Repperton. I didn’t like that.
“Put it down,” someone yelled at Repperton. And then someone else: “Put it down!” They started to chant: “Put it down, put it down, put it down!”
Repperton didn’t like it. He didn’t mind being the centre of attention, but this was the wrong sort of attention. His glance began to flicker around nervously, first at Arnie, then at me, then at the others. A hank of hair fell across his forehead, and he tossed it back.
When he looked my way again, I made a move as if to go for him. The knife swivelled in my direction, and Arnie moved—he moved faster than I would have believed. He brought the side of his right hand down in a half-assed but effective karate chop. He hit Repperton’s wrist hard and knocked the knife out of his hand. It clattered onto the butt-littered hottop. Repperton bent and grabbed for it. Arnie timed it with a deadly accuracy and when Repperton’s hand came all the wav to the asphalt, Arnie stamped on it. Hard. Repperton screamed.
Don Vandenberg moved in then, quickly, hauled Arnie off, and threw him to the ground. Hardly aware that I was going to do it, I stepped into the ring and kicked Vandenberg in the ass just as hard as I could—I brought my foot up rather than pistoning it out; I kicked him as if I were punting a football.
Vandenberg, a tall, thin guy who was either nineteen or twenty at that time, began to scream and dance around holding his butt. He forgot all about helping his Buddy; he ceased to be a factor in things. To me it’s amazing that I didn’t paralyse him. I never kicked anyone or anything harder, and my friend, it sho” did feel fine.
Just then an arm locked itself around my windpipe and there was a hand between my legs. I realised what was going to happen just a second too late to wholly prevent it. My balls were given a good, firm squeeze that sent sick pain bellowing and raving up from my crotch and into my stomach and down into my legs, unmanning them so that when the arm around my windpipe let go. I simply collapsed in a puddle on the smoking-area tarmac.
“How did you like that, dickface?” a squarish guy with bad teeth asked me. He was wearing small and rather delicate wire-frame glasses that looked absurd on his wide, blocky face. This was Moochie Welch, another of Buddy’s friends.
Suddenly the circle of watchers began to melt away and I heard a man’s voice yelling, “Break it up! Break it up right now! You kids take a walk! Take a walk, dammit!”
It was Mr Casey. Finally, Mr Casey.
Buddy Repperton snatched his switchblade off the pavement. He retracted the blade and shoved the knife into the hip pocket of his jeans in one quick motion. His hand was scraped and bleeding, and it looked as if it was going to swell. The miserable sonofabitch, I hoped it would swell,until it looked like one of those gloves Donald Duck wears in the funnypages.
Moochie Welch backed away from me, glanced toward the sound of Mr Casey’s voice, and touched the corner of his mouth delicately with his thumb. “Later, dickface,” he said.
Don Vandenberg was dancing more slowly now, but he was still rubbing the affected part. Tears of pain were spilling down his face
Then Arnie was beside me, getting an arm around me, helping me up. There was a lot of dirt smeared across his shirt from where Vandenberg had thrown him down. There were cigarette butts squashed into the knees of his jeans.
“You okay, Dennis? What’d he do to you?”
“Gave my balls a little squeeze. I’ll be all right.”
At least I hoped I would be. If you’re a man and you’ve slammed your nuts a good one at some point (and what man has not), you know. If you’re a woman, you don’t—can’t. The initial agony is only the start; it fades, to be replaced by a dull, throbbing feeling of pressure that coils in the pit of the stomach. And what that feeling says is Hi, there! Good to be here, just sitting around in the pit of your stomach and making you feel like you’re going to simultaneously blow lunch and shit your pants! I guess I’ll just hang around for a while, okay? How does half an hour or so sound? Great! Getting your nuts squeezed is not one of life’s great thrills.