Empire.
Life on Empire Road began at the bus stop. I have heard that our first conscious memories occur at four or maybe three, but my first sense of myself was in the socialization of later elementary school, fourth and fifth grade, and it was as a fifth grader, a short, insecure eleven-year-old, that I first remember seeing Eli Boyle.
He had decided to walk down the long row of dreary houses to our bus stop because the torture at his own stop had become unbearable. Once again, I ask you to imagine a neighborhood stretched like a rubber band until it is too long and too thin and strained in the center. Picture six bus stops along this strip of despair, mine second in line. My family was typical of the Empire neighborhood: poor and white, father a night custodian, mother what was called then a housewife. There were four of us kids. My sister Meg was five and in kindergarten, so Mom drove her to and from school. Shawna was four and didn't go to school yet.
So that left little brother Ben (two years younger than I) to trudge with me the long block to our bus stop. There, twenty-five kids gathered beneath a willow tree that wasn't so much weeping as oozing. Beneath this tree, a nest of kids aged six to sixteen quickly found places: the older you were, the deeper you went into the tree and the more adult your behavior. The willow tree sat in the front yard – although I hesitate to call that tangle of bunchgrass and clover a yard – of Will the Hippie, who wasn't a hippie and wasn't really named Will, but such was the intelligence that flowed around the bus stop because he used an American flag as a curtain on his broken living room window. Add the fact that he'd painted the word WILL on his garage and certain assumptions were made, assumptions which were deflated two years later when the man whose name was not Will sat on his roof with a Korean-made, assault rifle and shot out the windows of about a dozen cars and houses in the neighborhood and murdered two dogs and six mailboxes before walking up to the county sheriff's car and surrendering to the two frightened deputies huddling on its floor.
Like me, Eli was a fifth grader the first time he made his way to our stop. I was in the process of leaving my brother and venturing deeper into the willow, not quite to where the oldest girls and boys were making out and doing research on the tensile strength of bra straps, but to the midpoint, where the sixth and seventh graders stood smoking cigarettes and the occasional joint. I had pilfered four of my dad's Pall Mall cigarettes, running my finger along the luxurious, cellophane-encased package and the lion crest. "Pall Mall." I said it over and over. It was so elegant. I wanted it to be my name. "Hello. My name is Paul. Paul Mall."
"Good God Friday, where are you going, Clark?" my brother Ben whispered, but I ignored him and kept moving, past the smaller kids and deeper into the branches. The bigger kids did not look up when I arrived at their denim circle in the midway point of the willow, shuffling in my bell-bottom corduroys, the one pair of "cool pants" I owned and the only pair I ever wore to school. They didn't acknowledge me when I reached in the pocket of my yellow polyester BMX polo shirt and they didn't flinch when I removed a single white cigarette, squinted my eyes, placed it between my lips, and pretended to pat my pockets like a man who's lost his wallet.
"Anyone got a light?" I asked. And then, finally, horribly, they noticed. Bushy heads turned and from that clutch of lanky, narrow-eyed trouble stepped Pete Decker of all people, who looks in my memory like a seventh-grade Clint Eastwood and who, it was rumored, had been kicked out of Golden Gloves boxing for cheating or biting or paralyzing a kid, depending on which version of the story you heard. Flame leapt from Pete's lighter and he narrowed his eyes and took me in, the cigarette dangling from my mouth. Below that, my Adam's apple bobbed with a nervous swallow.
"Good, huh?" he asked.
I nodded, inhaled, and coughed twice, my eyes smoking red. By now the sixth and seventh graders were watching, because they'd never seen Pete go out of his way to do anything to a smaller kid but take his money and knock him into the street. But Pete just stood there, watching me hack away on my first cigarette, eyes watering, nose burning.
"Smooth," he said.
I nodded, unable to speak, and had the sense that the crowd was moving in on us, surrounding us. Even Tanya Bentitz and Eric Mullay looked up. Usually they were entwined, bobbing for tonsils during the entire wait for the bus, rolling around in the furthest reaches of the tree, beyond our imaginations. I remember wishing (or perhaps I have constructed it now; you need only run your own elementary school memories to test the accuracy of mine) that I could step away too, that I could go back to being part of the circle instead of the meat inside it.
"What's your name?" Pete asked.
"Clark," I said.
"Been smoking long, Clark?" Pete asked.
"Couple years," I said. Which means I would have started at nine.
I once imagined tracking Pete Decker down. I thought about starting a smoking clinic in which Pete got smokers to quit by giving the same treatment he gave me that day. Quickly, without dwelling on my pain, because it's not my pain that matters, here's what happened:
Pete stepped up toward my face, his eyes slits. He formed his index finger and thumb into an OK sign, lifted them to my face, and performed a perfect example of what we used to call flick-the-cherry, knocking the burning ember from the end of the cigarette so that it was no longer lit. Before I knew it Pete had me in a headlock, had pulled me to the ground, yanked my arm up into my back, let go of the headlock, and with his other hand grabbed a handful of my hair. He beat my face into the gravel at the spot where the road blended into Will the Hippie's yard. I remember the sound of my nose hitting the ground. I remember opening my bleary eyes and seeing the tiny pieces of blood-spattered rock scatter before my face. And I remember that Pete dragged me – eyes clouded, nose clogged with blood – a few feet to where the burning cherry sat smoldering in the grass.
"Eat it," he said. I did, reached out with my tongue and enveloped the burning ash, pulled it into my mouth and swallowed.
"Cool," Pete said, and he let go of me. Of course it's easy to criticize Pete Decker's behavior at the bus stop that day. Easy to imagine him a bully or a criminal and assume that he has made nothing but trouble of his life since. But as someone who has done wrong, I have to tell you: I never smoked another cigarette after that day. Which just proves my point. There are a hundred ways to save someone's life. And, I suppose, just as many ways to take one.
But Pete Decker's impromptu smoking intervention is not the story I set out to tell and, in a way, it is simply prologue to the real story, which began that day as well. As I crawled, whimpered, and bled out of the long arms of the willow tree, the crowd turned away from me, rather than earn a beating for sympathizing. From the ground, I watched as even my brother Ben turned away, hiding the family resemblance. Every pair of shoes faced away from me except one, a pair of smudged black shoes with metal braces hooked to the soles and connected to straps at the calves. And when I looked up at the bent legs and scoliatic back, at the pinched, dandruffed shoulders that owned those shoes, I saw the only person in the crowd who measured me with anything but disdain. There, standing at my bus stop, a line of snot on his upper lip, grease in his hair, a look of sheer empathy and… fucking beatitude on his miserable face, was Eli Boyle.
3
His pitiful presence that day was undoubtedly what kept Pete Decker from completing the remodeling project he'd begun on my face. Had I known the importance of what would happen at that bus stop that day with the appearance of Eli Boyle, I might have begun studying it myself, for it would turn out to be a near-perfect real-world expression of an experiment that microbiologists have long re-created in the lab. They know that viruses and pathogenic bacteria will adhere to damaged cells in the human body, that the real nasty bugs are attracted to those broken and bruised places that blood has trouble reaching, and that the body will sacrifice a foot, say, to save the rest, and that if you have an infection in your throat and sprain your ankle, the virus or bacteria or parasite will do its best to make the journey from your throat to your ankle.