“Maybe he’s retarded,” he whispered. “Maybe he’s slow.”
I nodded my head a bit, but didn’t say anything.
There are four boys in our family. I am the oldest and there’s a set of twins in the middle — Matt and Christopher — and the youngest is James. During that time we spent with Reggie, we were all clustered in there between the ages of 8 and 12. This was right at the peak of our infatuation with hockey, when we cared about it in that total and absolute way that only kids can care about anything. None of us could skate, and we had never actually played in a real league on real ice, but we dumped everything we had into our games in the street. We built our own nets out of old two-by-fours nailed into posts and crossbars and instead of string netting, we used this heavy-duty industrial plastic sheeting that we had found behind a meat-packing plant. We cut the plastic and staple-gunned it right into the wood so that every time someone fired a ball into the net, it made a satisfying pop, like a burst balloon or a gun being fired. Our sticks were Koho and Sherwood shafts with plastic blades that had been wickedly curved over the front burner of the stove and we usually played with tennis balls that were too small and kept falling down through the grates of the sewer. We had the other kind of ball, too, a couple of those hard, orange, no-bouncers that are designed especially for the street and we believed that if one of those ever got fired straight into a guy’s nuts, then that person would die. It became one of our most reliable standby threats — “I swear, I’ll fire this fucking thing right into your fucking nuts if you don’t fucking shut up.” We had a pair of real goalie pads and a baseball glove trapper. For the blocker we used to spend five minutes taping an old phone book onto the outstretched arm of whoever was unlucky enough to play in the net.
“Can I join you,” Reggie said. “Can I be a joiner?”
Right after his name, this was the first thing to come out of his mouth. I didn’t think it was a big deal, and I was going to say no problem, but James was defiant from the start.
“It’s two-on-two,” he said, pointing at each of us and trying to make it clear. “Adding another guy will throw everything off.”
James waved his hand at some of the other houses on our street where there were all kinds of kids who would have played.
“You find a friend and we’ll go three on three,” he said. “Three on three works.”
Reggie never even considered it.
“No, no, no,” he said. “That’s fine. Forget it. Maybe I’ll just watch. Is that okay with you if I just watch?”
He looked around and found a clean spot on the curb. Then he sat down and leaned forward with his elbows resting on his knees like this was Joe Louis Arena. When the ball went up on his lawn, he’d run and toss it back to us in the street and whenever somebody scored he’d say, “All right,” but other than that he did nothing. You could tell that he’d never really played much of anything in his life. All his lines had been picked up from watching TV.
“Nice pass,” he might say, or “Good execution.”
The words he could use didn’t match up with his body. It was like we had our own little Danny Gallivan there on the sidewalk, watching over us and rolling along all the time, keeping up a steady stream of compliments.
We showed off our drop passes for Reggie and our between-the-legs passes and the passes where we’d bank the tennis ball off a parked car. Sometimes we’d have break away contests or we’d use pop cans for targets and try to see who had the most accurate shot. Chris and Matt even used to practice their fighting. In the middle of a game they’d nudge each other and stare for that one dramatic second before they threw down their sticks.
“You wanna go? You wanna go me?” They’d scream at each other, trying not to laugh.
“I think those two are on the same team, aren’t they?” Reggie asked, the first time he saw them shimmying around, trying to grab onto each other.
It didn’t matter. One guy would try to trip the other or pull the shirt over his head and then, once he had the upper hand, he’d start pummelling away with these crazy exaggerated swings, piling on the furious, fake punches.
“Take that and that and that.”
It was like those fights you see on pro-wrestling. The big, hollow blows kept coming down but there was never any real force behind them. Even if one of us caught the other in a crippling figure-four leg lock or if we slapped on the sleeper hold or a killer iron claw — a grip so dangerous it was guaranteed to cause permanent brain damage — it still meant nothing. All that rage washed over and left us completely untouched and unharmed and ready to go another round.
You hardly ever see big families like we had anymore. Especially not with boys. Today, if a couple has two or three boys in a row, they quit. I guess you could probably still make it through with four girls living in the same house, but I wouldn’t know anything about that. Even back then we were different. From the outside we looked like good kids, like a bunch of those super-skinny, old-fashioned boys who might be headed down to the swimming hole in a Norman Rockwell painting. One of us was always in line to skip a grade — though none of us ever did — and we each had a paper route winding through the neighbourhood. One of us would probably mow your grass or shovel your sidewalk even though you didn’t ask and if our school ever needed somebody to read something in public — at an assembly or a concert or a church service — we’d get that call. At Christmas, our parents made us collect cans for the needy and we grudgingly stuffed our quarters into the share-Lent pyramid that sat on our kitchen table during the weeks before Easter. When the nasty Greek couple who lived three doors down needed someone to look after their matching Pomeranians, Hector and Achilles, while they went back to Thessalonica for vacation, we said no problem. And when they came back and paid us only three dollars for the whole summer — three dollars for us to split four ways — we smiled and asked them to tell us all about the trip and to show us their pictures. It took a lot of consistent performing to pull this off, but it was like we couldn’t help ourselves. We seemed exactly like good kids on the outside, but we weren’t soft. There was more than enough hard waiting below the surface.
ONCE, WHEN I WAS ABOUT ELEVEN, I punched Chris in the face as hard as I could and there was no joke behind it. The whole side of his head swelled out with fluid and started to turn colour, a kind of reddish purple. We were home for lunch and it was some stupid confrontation about nothing in the backyard. I have no idea what it was about. He fell over and rolled around on the ground.
“I can’t see. I can’t see,” he was crying. There was a little bit of blood in the corner of his eye.
My mother came out and shouted something about how this wasn’t funny any more. She said that if we weren’t careful somebody was really going to get hurt one of these times and then we’d be sorry. She put some ice on Chris’s eye and she thought about keeping him home for the afternoon. But then the swelling was going down and she didn’t want him to miss class, so she sent him back to school.
That was a mistake. Fifteen minutes after we returned to school, the principal called us both down to his office. We had never been in this situation before.
“How did this happen?” the principal asked me and he kind of waved at my brother’s messed-up face. “Who hurt you, Christopher?”
“I did it,” I said.
I did not cry, but it was almost there. It almost came through. All the possible consequences of the truth ran through my head. I thought about my permanent record and about what would happen if I was suspended or expelled.