He tousled my hair and I sat there a moment longer than I needed to, amazed to be escaping my punishment. Once again, Eli had indirectly saved me. I nodded to Mrs. Boyle, hopped out of the chair, and hurried for the door, turning at the last to see Eli's mom settle into the chair, and to see Mr. Bender close the door behind me.
I suppose that meeting was the reason that, the very next morning, Joe Boner escorted Eli Boyle into my classroom. Eli had started the school year in the other fifth-grade class, taught by Mr. Gibbons, a cross-eyed alcoholic who had been at the high school until two years earlier, when he was asked to leave after some vague complaint by the parents of a girl who had been getting "extra credit" for "correcting papers" as Mr. Gibbons's "after-school aide." Now Eli was standing in the class of my teacher, the eternally cute Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley, who had been teaching at our elementary school for fifteen years and at least three divorces and who seemed incapable of forsaking any of her ex-husbands' last names. We gathered that there had been some problem in Mr. Gibbons's class involving Eli, but we had trouble getting details. Actually, that's not entirely true. We had no trouble getting details, but their context and order eluded us, and so we knew little beyond the glimpse of a meeting that I'd seen between Eli's mom and Joe Boner and the rush of playground intelligence:
Kevin Klapp, who was in Eli's old class, claimed that the trouble began when everyone went out for recess one day. Eli stayed glued to his chair and when Mr. Gibbons came over to see why, he found that Eli had shit his pants. According to Kevin, Mr. Gibbons then yelled at Eli and slapped him. Heather Lindeke said that what actually happened was that after the pants-shitting episode, Eli's mom came in and Mr. Gibbons called Eli "a retard," and Mrs. Boyle demanded that he be put in our class. No, said Marshall Dickens, what actually happened was that Eli only farted, and when everyone went out to recess, Mr. Gibbons yelled at Eli that he'd "prefer it if you did not shit your pants in my classroom anymore" and that was why Eli's mom pulled him out of that class. What did I believe? All of it, I suppose. I didn't put any of it past the people involved, that Eli might shit his pants, or that Mr. Gibbons might make him feel even worse than he did or even slap him, or that Mrs. Boyle might come to Eli's defense.
Whatever the reason, Eli limped into our classroom that day, staring at his corrective shoes, ready for new humiliations. He stood in front of the class, while behind him, Mr. Bender whispered to the teacher and gestured with his hands. Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley, her high hair spun like soft vanilla ice cream, frowned and shook her head and even covered her mouth as Joe Boner spoke quietly, relaying the actual story of Eli's banishment from Mr. Gibbons's class. But while she listened with obvious sympathy and perhaps even empathy, she made no move to ask Eli to sit down and he stood there like a courtroom exhibit while they whispered about him. Finally, we saw our teacher mouth the word "terrible" as the story reached its critical juncture. Just then Eli twitched, as he often did, in some leftover spasm or convulsion, the brackets on his leg braces clacking together, a late-autumn snowfall loosed from his head. Twenty-eight sets of eyes followed those dandruff flakes to the floor.
Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley thanked the principal and walked him to the door. Then she put her arm around Eli, who was a foot shorter than she.
"Welcome to our class, Eli," she said. "Class, say hello to Eli."
We said hello. He never looked up. For all her good intentions, Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley was torturing Eli.
"Eli? You may sit wherever you want," said Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley. "Do you have any friends in this class?"
This seemed to me like classic adult stupidity. Do you have any friends? Why not just knock the boy down and let us stab him to death with compass needles? Eli looked up through his thick, black-framed glasses and one of his cockeyes went directly to me and – to my endless shame, I prayed that he not say my name – he looked back at the teacher and shook his head no. Do you have any friends? What kind of question is that? While Eli stared at the ground, our teacher moved a few kids and put Eli smack in the middle of the classroom.
Jeff Fletcher, who was now sitting behind Eli, plugged his nose and stuck his tongue out to indicate that Eli stunk, and when Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley turned her back Fletch pulled his desk back away from Eli's. The students on his right and left did the same thing, their desks screeching as they slid across the tile floor. Eli didn't look up, just stared at the notebook open on his desk, drawing pictures of tanks.
I have yet to mention Dana Brett. I suppose I haven't known how, in this ugly world that I am relating, to describe someone so wonderful. Cute? The girl was entirely composed of porcelain, tiny features on a round face beneath black hair that curled up at her collar so that her face was perfectly framed. She wore ribbons in her hair. Ribbons! A redundant bit of packaging perhaps, but still. Ribbons! Miniskirts and vests. And suede boots that laced up the front. There is nothing so hypnotic as the romantic daydreams of the hopelessly presexual, and back then all of my daydreams involved young Dana Brett and unlacing those boots.
She sat in front of Eli and was the only one who didn't move her desk when Mrs. Chalmers-Wright-McKinley turned her back to address the class on Hopi Indians or adding fractions or whatever she was selling that day. She droned on as the desks moved away, until Eli was an island, or rather an isthmus, connected only by the honorable Dana Brett's desk. And when the teacher finally turned around and saw what had happened – the desks magnetically repelled from Eli – she became intent on making it worse. "All right. Move those desks back. Jeff Fletcher, why did you move your desk away from Eli's?"
Of all the cruelty exhibited that day, I still think that question – no matter its intent – was the pinnacle. In one question, she codified what we all knew, made it official and made a horrible mistake: she gave a lousy prick like Jeff Fletcher the opportunity to actually be funny.
"Well," said Retch, looking around at us, gathering strength, "he smells like a bag full of turds."
In the laughter that followed, Eli never looked up from the tanks he was drawing.
5
I smoked weed every day as a kid. Not so much during the time I'm relaying now – the fifth-grade hell that Eli and I shared like some awful creation myth – but from that summer on, pretty much nonstop until the tenth grade. Looking back, those fifth-grade days were the night before battle, the last days spent in complete sobriety. I'm not sure why I offer that bit of information now except to interrupt this harsh story with the reminder that these were different and difficult times – the mid-1970s, after all – when a preteen might be expected to smoke dope every day. It is probably the least endearing and most enduring habit of a whole generation of politicians, this desire to confess, and I can't help wondering if – in admitting fumbling around with a few joints, a smart Arkansas redneck could win two terms – I might not secure a white-trash landslide by acknowledging that I toked regularly at twelve and never had trouble inhaling, that, in fact, I carried the respectful nickname Old Iron Lung.
Still, as I said, I feel the need – perhaps the political necessity – to halt the narrative momentarily and take refuge in the time and place of all of this: the desperateness, the poverty, the harsh world in which I was raised. I would kill (once again, I acknowledge irony) to be able to report that I simply went to school and got good grades; that I sat next to Eli Boyle on the bus and demanded that he be treated with respect; that I insisted that he, in fact, did not smell like turds (sadly, though, he did); that I did not crave more than anything the respect of my classmates, this societal juice, this cultural cachet, this… approval, this immeasurable measure of popularity, not only from the suede-booted Dana Brett – love would be more defensible – but also and more importantly from the school toughs, the pubescent dictators, the dope-selling jefes, the Pee-Chee-carrying warlords of the Empire bus stops.