But every man dies the death of his own making.
Me? I took a step toward being an adult that day. I told myself that if I didn't beat Eli up, Pete Decker would pound us both. I told myself that I would go easy on Eli, that I'd pull my punches. I told myself that we would make eye contact and he would see that I didn't really mean this, that I could do this and not actually do it, that I wasn't beating him up, not like Pete Decker and Matt Woodbridge did, that I was different from them. That I was different. That is the biggest lie – that we are different than they are.
The brakes squealed on the bus and Pete was up behind me, rubbing my shoulders, extolling me, whispering random combinations of guttural words in my ear.
"Fuck up that fat dickbreath cockbite fuckball!"
"Kick that smelly fag dipshit's ass!"
We moved along the aisle. Below our feet, the floor of the bus was lined with a grooved rubber strip and my tennis shoes squeaked as I moved to the front of the bus. Pete hovered behind, inches from my ear: "Break his fuckin' four-eyed, pig-nosed face!"
Such trouble has a way of congealing the passengers of a school bus, and I felt their oozy, collective eyes on me as I moved down the aisle. I was about to beat up the most pitiful kid in twelve grades. I, the kid who offered cigarettes in fealty to Pete Decker, was about to join his ranks. In their eyes, how could I be any different?
Eli was the first off, of course, and he'd begun moving in his quick crooked shuffle, bent at the waist, trying to hide in his own clothes.
"Boyle!" Pete yelled from behind me. "Hey, Boyle!" I felt Pete gently take my book bag and set it on the ground. Eli just kept moving, and Pete dispatched his two goons to run after him and drag him back. I stood under the willow tree, my mouth dry. The bus pulled away and I watched it go, the faces pressed up against the back window, kids having flooded to Pete Decker's seat, hoping to see the first moments of our fight before the bus pulled away.
The goons dragged Eli back and pushed him toward me. Still he didn't look up.
"Are you gonna fight, or are you a fag?" Pete asked Eli.
He didn't answer. He stood in front of me, staring at his shoes. He shifted his weight and his leg braces clacked together.
Pete pushed Eli in the shoulder. "Come on, queer."
I raised my fists slowly and moved forward. He looked up then, and I realized I'd never seen Eli full-on like this, from the front. He was usually looking sideways or averting his gaze or covering his mouth or looking away before you could get a fix on his face. It was egg shaped – too much forehead and chin, all the features and pimples packed in between, the black glasses, the braces on his teeth, like some perfect rendering of the collective nightmares of adolescents.
Pete Decker stepped away and it was just Eli and I squared off in the gravel between the street and Will the Hippie's front yard. Our eyes met and I tried to let him see that I was sorry for what I had to do. He sighed.
And then he hit me. Twice. The first punch connected with my nose, the second clipped my ear. I kicked at him and caught him in the leg and he hit me again in the face, a hammer that buckled my knees and sent me sprawling, crying, onto the ground. From my side I looked up through teary eyes to see Eli running away, crying, his knee braces rattling, Pete Decker a few steps behind. Pete caught him and dragged him to the ground and by the time I got to my feet, he was pounding on Eli. I felt my nose. It was bleeding. Twenty yards up the road, so was Eli's. Pete just kept cocking his fist and letting Eli have it. Eli was crying for help, honking like a goose, trying to squirm away. Pete's goons were cheering the beating their boss was delivering. Finally Pete climbed off him, opened Eli's book bag and scattered everything, set his lunch pail on the ground and stomped it into scrap metal. Then he kicked Eli once in the side and came back toward me.
"That was a good fight," he said, slapping me on the back. "That fucker jumped you, man. He didn't fight fair at all." Pete was panting. There was sweat on his upper lip, making the hair below his nose look almost like a mustache. I looked at one of the goons, who seemed ready enough to accept Pete's description of the good fight and the idea that I had somehow been jumped, and I wondered if Pete's goons even processed their own thoughts. "You'd have killed him if he fought fair," Pete said. And he began walking toward his house, a goon on either side.
I looked up the street, to where Eli had already gathered his things. He was no longer crying, and he seemed oblivious to the damage he'd done to my face. He walked home, bent at the waist, as if nothing had happened.
At home my sisters were playing Barbies on the porch, and they stared at me wide eyed as I came up the sidewalk. Being all of five, Meg saw her job as explaining the world to Shawna, and so she bent over and whispered, "Clark got all beat up."
"By bad guys?" Shawna asked, and Meg nodded.
Ben had stayed home sick that day and he was on the couch, reading a Flash comic book. He looked at me as if I were covered in blood – which, of course, I was. "Hot Christ buns," he said, "what happened to you?"
That brought my mother from the kitchen, where she usually spent the afternoons sorting through the Avon cosmetics and sundries that she stockpiled in the house. She was supposed to sell these Avon products door-to-door in the neighborhood and at swanky Avon parties that she shamed friends and relatives into attending, but my mother didn't like to bother people, and so the Avon products had taken over our house and our basement was filled with boxes of foundation eyeliner and birdhouses and perfume (I got regular nighttime erections just thinking about the case of "Nights of Romance" perfume underneath my bed.) "Who did this to you? Was it that boy, Pete Decker?" She waved a pair of Avon candlesticks at me. "I'm going to march down there and talk to his mother."
"No," I said. "I just fell down."
But she wouldn't buy it, and finally I had to admit that it was in fact Eli Boyle who had done this to me.
Ben slapped his forehead. "Jesus meet the neighbors!"
Even Mom was changed by this bit of news. "Huh," she said. "The boy with the…" She gestured around her face as if we were talking about the Elephant Man.
"Yeah," I said, staring at the ground.
"Oh," she said, and looked down at the candlesticks in her hands. The idea of waving candlesticks at the mother of such a boy was less interesting and my mother just sort of shrugged and half turned back toward the kitchen, suddenly faced with a problem potentially worse than her son being beaten up by a bully: her son being beaten up by an Eli Boyle. "You… um… you should talk to your father about defending yourself, Clark," she said. "And you shouldn't get into fights."
Staring at my bloodied face, Ben shook his head. "I'll say."