Like so many men who resent the authority of others, Big Jim hated for his own to be questioned. Sully and Patrick certainly knew better. The same, however, could not be said of the local boys who ignored the KEEP OUT signs posted at regular intervals along the perimeter fence, signs that ironically provided an additional foothold when they climbed over. Though they were the least of his problems, their father managed to convince himself otherwise, telling anyone who’d listen that if these little assholes were allowed to run rampant, playing football and tearing up the pristine lawns, he’d lose his job. He seemed not to understand that the sport they enjoyed even more than football was goofing on Big Jim Sullivan. Quick and nimble where he was slow, lumbering and — depending on the time of day — inebriated, they taunted him relentlessly into giving chase. When he did, they scattered like roaches to every point on the compass, forcing him to decide which of the bastards to pursue, not that it mattered. There wasn’t a sick wildebeest in this particular herd, nor was Big Jim the lion of his imagination. The boys particularly enjoyed letting him get close. One would pretend to fall or twist an ankle, only to leap away like a gazelle at the last second, scamper over the fence, drop down just out of arm’s reach on the other side and blow Big Jim a rich wet strawberry for his efforts. For them, their pursuer was nothing short of a marvel. How effortlessly their antics brought him to a full boiling rage. What was wrong with the guy? How could he fall for the same tricks every day, seemingly incapable of learning from experience, no matter how recent or vivid? They loved, as only thirteen-year-old boys could, his inept malignancy, perhaps glimpsing in this the greater adult world they were about to enter, where rules were made and enforced by fools of every stripe. Seen in this light, wasn’t mocking Big Jim Sullivan a moral imperative? With the wrought-iron fence between them and him, it must’ve seemed to be.
Still, how could such fine sport not end badly? How entirely predictable was it that eventually a boy would lose his grip while scaling the fence? And so, one day, it did. An iron spike atop the fence entered a boy’s throat just below his chin and exited his stunned, open mouth. Two of his pals claimed it wasn’t really an accident, that he never would’ve slipped if this large, powerful man hadn’t given the fence a great shake. Big Jim denied this, claiming the wrought-iron fence was too sturdy and heavy to budge at all. Whatever the truth, the boy hung there like a hooked fish, his arms flailing frantically at first, then dangling, useless and limp, at his sides. The fire department was summoned, and the boy, deep in shock, was finally lifted free of the spike, after several horrible failed attempts. Astonishingly, he survived.
But the incident was the last straw, and it cost Big Jim his job, making his prediction of what would get him fired seem prescient. To hear him tell it, he lost his job for doing it, and what the hell kind of justice was that? As if in all other respects he’d been a model employee. Nor in the weeks and months that followed was he ever able to understand why the incident occasioned such an outpouring of moral outrage from the community. Given how viciously people turned on him, you’d have thought he’d done something wrong. Now that he was unable to treat them to a room at the Sans Souci, his former friends, ingrates all, behaved as if he were some sort of monster. Clearly, they’d been jealous of his status all along and loved reveling in his misfortune. It was enough to give a man grave doubts about the entire human race.
Losing his employment at the Sans Souci sparked Big Jim’s final long descent into the bottle. A social drunk before, he became a deeply solitary one afterward — silent, morose, self-pitying, aggrieved. His wife bore the brunt of his moods, as she always had, though Sully absorbed his own share of verbal and physical abuse. “Don’t talk back,” his mother pleaded on the few occasions he stood up for her. “It just makes him worse.” Sully couldn’t see where this was true at all. Cowering and weakness were as likely to provoke and intensify his father’s rages as confrontation. Patrick was a case in point. For reasons Sully could never fathom, he often took their father’s side, despite faring no better than his brother. He was two years older, though, which meant he got to escape the house on Bowdon Street that much sooner. At the time Sully thought his brother a coward for abandoning their mother, but he did the same thing himself when his turn came.
In a sense he’d left home even earlier. As a high-school junior he tried out for football, and Clive Peoples, Miss Beryl’s husband and North Bath’s coach, impressed by his recklessness, took him under his wing. He and his wife, who’d been his eighth-grade English teacher, opened their home to him, and by senior year he was spending more time in their Upper Main Street home than he did on Bowdon Street. Sully tried his best to earn his keep and repay their many kindnesses, shoveling their sidewalks and driveway in the winter, mowing their lawn in the summer and, in autumn, raking the mountain of leaves that fell from the ancient elms that lined their street, duties that otherwise might have fallen to their son, Clive Jr., a soft boy four years younger than Sully who seemed happy enough for him to assume the role of older sibling. Less work for him, in effect. Sully was not only clever with tools but also unafraid of starting jobs he wasn’t sure he knew how to finish, and the elder Clive was delighted by how handy he was becoming. It was Miss Beryl who understood his motivation. Any task that kept Sully away from Bowdon Street was worth undertaking. He’d enlisted right after graduation, telling neither of his parents until it was time for him to report. Though his mother might’ve seen it coming, she didn’t have a clue.
“You’re leaving?” she repeated, stunned by his announcement, as he stood there in the kitchen, his duffel bag slung over his shoulder. The look on her face was the same one she always wore in the instant before one of his father’s ringing head slaps.
“You’re staying?” he replied heartlessly.
She glanced nervously into the front room, where his father sat with the drapes drawn, as usual, the television on but the sound turned down. Sully couldn’t remember the last time they’d spoken but was certain the old man, despite his typically feigned disinterest, was listening. “Why would I leave?”
What she was really asking, of course, was: Where would I go? How would I live? Who would pay? Having no answers to these questions, he told her what she already knew. “He treats you like a dog. Worse.”
Again, she glanced fearfully into the front room. “He just has a bad temper, is all.”
“No, he’s mean and stupid and a coward. And that’s before he starts drinking.” Thinking, Come out here, old man. Come out here and take your medicine if you don’t like what I’m saying. Ready to set down the duffel bag and go at it right there in the kitchen, if necessary.
“Deep down,” she said, “he loves us.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
She lowered her voice. Pleading. “If I leave, he won’t have anybody.”
“He doesn’t deserve anybody.”
She took his hand, then. “You don’t have to be hard,” she said, “just because the world is.”
No? he thought. Because he’d come to the exact opposite conclusion. America would soon be at war, and he would be in it. Hard would be what was called for, he knew that much. Which was why he’d kissed her goodbye that morning but left without so much as glancing into the front room, already the kind of hard his mother hoped he wouldn’t become.