As we walked, Everson leaned in toward me and whispered, with dread, "We're fighting Woodbridge. And some of his friends." But I could only imagine killing Pete.
"Here's what we do," Pete said as we entered the rail yard above the river. "We pin 'em down in a gunfight, and while you guys keep 'em down, I'm gonna circle around and ambush the motherfuckers from behind. Got it?" He began pumping his rifle, bringing his arms together in a scissor motion until he strained against all the air pressure he'd built up in his gun. "You mother-fuckin' got it?"
We nodded and kept walking. We heard them before we saw them. We had come down a hill onto the flats overlooking the river. They were in a stand of trees just on the other side of an old gravel pit at a bend in the river. Pete lowered his welding shield over his face. Then Everson lowered his. I tightened the strap on my forehead and lowered my shield. We ducked down. It was quiet: the only noises were the babbling river and my own breathing behind the dark-tinted welding mask.
We crept up on the stand of trees, Pete in the lead, Everson and I behind him. My hands were shaking and sweaty, the stand of trees suddenly empty.
"Crap," Pete said, and almost as soon as he said it I felt a shot, like a bee sting on my hip. The air was filled with the popping of air guns. They had outflanked our plan to outflank them.
"Get down!" Pete yelled, and we did, diving for cover in the stand of trees that Woodbridge and his army had just evacuated. I remember seeing Pete dive forward, roll, and shoot back over his shoulder, the pneumatic thuck of his pellet gun. I fired too, a higher, popping sound, blindly aiming into the brush just above the river, where the shot had come from.
Pete yelled and Everson and I looked over, frightened, but he wasn't hurt, just excited, pumping his gun and firing into the brush. "Come on, motherfuckers! Come on, Vietcong pussies!" Even through two shirts and a heavy coat my side hurt where I'd been shot, and I could feel a welt forming.
Everson and I pressed ourselves to the ground and fired over our heads as quickly as our single-shot BB pistols would allow us, pulling the trigger, then releasing the hammer and pushing it into place, firing again. Throwing the BBs would have been as effective. After a few minutes Pete slapped me on the shoulder, pointed with two fingers, ran his hand along his neck, gestured with his eyes, and ran away. Apparently our counterattack was beginning. I watched as he ran serpentine, bent at the waist until he disappeared into the brush along the river. We kept firing until we realized no one was shooting back. For a moment it was quiet.
Everson lay next to me, breathing as heavily as I must have been.
"Do we keep shooting, or what?" I asked.
He just shrugged. "It hurts," he said, and he lifted his sleeves to show me a purplish bruise on the inside of his forearm.
"Yeah," I said. We lay there on our stomachs, listening to the river.
Next to me, Everson fumbled in his coat pocket. I figured he was going to produce a joint; Pete got mad at him now if he was ever without dope. Instead he pulled out my George Hendrick baseball card, which had been folded in half.
I just stared at him.
"Pete sold 'em to me."
"All of 'em?" I asked. I took the ruined card from him.
Everson nodded. "This morning. He came to my house and said I had to give him twenty bucks for all of 'em."
"Were they all like this?"
"Burned or crinkled up or folded like that. I'm sorry, man. He's an asshole."
From the brush along the river we heard a few pops and we tensed, then a voice from far off: "Where are you guys?" Everson and I both started. It sounded like Pete.
"Were we supposed to follow him?" I asked.
"I don't know," Everson said.
There were a few more pops from down near the river. "Come on, you pussies!"
My side ached where I'd been shot. I looked over my shoulder, wondering if we could just run home.
But Everson pulled his shield back down over his face, and I did the same. I swallowed and stood, and Everson and I began running toward the river, our footfalls sounding like air rifle shots. I spun my head from side to side trying to find Woodbridge and the seventh-grade goons he stood with at the bus stop, but there was no one.
"Come on, you pussies!" Pete yelled again. His voice was coming from a draw along the riverbank that Everson and I were approaching. I tried to picture Woodbridge and his guys down there in the draw, with Pete pinned down between them. I imagined Everson and me bursting into their camp – which looked in my mind like a machine gun nest from one of those black-and-white war movies my dad watched – and spraying Woodbridge's army with BB's. But in my mind it was Pete I would be shooting, firing over and over into his sinewy body, my baseball cards falling from his pockets.
When we reached the top of the draw, we could see what had happened. Pete was at the bottom of a short depression, pinned down by Woodbridge and his friends on the far end of the draw. From the lip of the draw, I could see Pete's back, as he pressed himself into the ground, and I could see Woodbridge's guys at the other end, their air guns now trained on Everson and me. There were three quick pops, like the first popcorn in an air popper, and on my left Everson yelled "Ow!" and fell. I watched him go down as something zipped past my head, but I kept running, my breath heavy behind the welding mask. Somehow none of the shots hit me, and I just kept running toward Pete, my air gun now trained on his back, my teeth clenched.
Woodbridge and his guys fired another volley, and I heard one of the shots ping off the welding shield. Finally I dipped into the depression where Pete was hiding, and they couldn't hit me anymore. I lifted the mask away from my face and stared down on Pete, who cowered there before me. I was amazed at how small he looked from this angle, realized for the first time, maybe, that Pete was just a kid like us, same skin and bones and lean muscle. I was five feet from him when he spun around suddenly, deep fear in his eyes, his pellet rifle pointed at my face.
It felt like someone hit me with a bottle or a baseball bat. My head snapped back and I dropped to the sand. I reached up to cover my face. Something warm and gooey mashed between my fingers. I wondered what could have been in the bottle that I'd been hit with. I tried to open my eyes, but there was a rush of pain and everything went a dark purple and that color was my pain for just a minute, so that I could see how badly this hurt and it was a pain that I could hear, too, a scream that came from deeper than my voice box, deeper than my lungs, and I was surprised to hear it sounded like my voice. I screamed until my air was all gone.
I could hear Pete's voice, too: "Oh fuck!"
I was rolling around on the ground, both hands covering my left eye. The world seemed to expand into this purple and then contract, all of the pain and blood and everything pulling back into the socket of my left eye.
I pried my right eye open and blearily looked up to see Pete running away, climbing the bank of the draw. He was pulling Everson with him.
"Wait," I said quietly, but they were gone.
There was no noise except the trickling river at my side. I began to cry. That brought more of the purplish pain, and I felt like throwing up. My hands were covered with blood now, and I pulled them away and the blood ran down my face and pooled in the sand. I put my hands back on my face, thinking maybe I could hold my eye in its socket. I lay there a few minutes, moaning and trying to figure out the sinewy things I felt against my fingers.
I stood and fell back into the sand, the pain seeking out new levels. I got back up and began walking. I made it a few steps and sat down in the sand again. I got to my knees and threw up. That's when I fell back in the sand, beaten. I couldn't do it. My first thought that wasn't pain was that they would name an award for me, as they had done with Woodbridge's dead brother. I hoped Ben would fare better without me than Woodbridge had without his older brother.