By the time Matthew and Chris and I ripped them off each other they were both a mess. It had poured rain the night before and it was still early in the morning so the ground was all sloppy and greasy. James was covered. His pants were wrecked, all green and brown around the knees from when he had been kneeling over him and his shirt was stretched out of shape, and ripped a little bit around the neck. There was this thick wet mud all over his face and his hands.
Reggie was worse. Because he was lying on his back, all the blood from his nose was smeared out across his face. It ran back towards his ears and up into his hair and down into his mouth in these long, long spidery thin lines. It was like his face was a window and someone had thrown a rock right through the middle of it. When Matthew first looked at him, he said, “Holy Fuck, we have to take him to the hospital right away.”
Then he turned on James.
“Look what you did to this little kid,’” he said. “We have to go to the hospital now. We’re going to get killed for this. All of us, you know, not just you. We’re all dead for this one.”
He was wrong. In the end, it turned out that we weren’t all dead because of this. We weren’t ever even going to hear about it again. We didn’t have to call an ambulance and we didn’t have to go to the hospital and we didn’t have to fill out a report because, in the end, it turned out that Reggie was fine or he at least seemed fine or he pretended to be fine. When we got James off him, he jumped right up and he said, again, “No, no, no. We’re all right, don’t worry.”
He didn’t cry once and even though, as I was watching it happen, it looked like he was really getting the snot beat out of him, now, I thought that maybe Reggie had been telling the truth all along and that it really didn’t hurt, didn’t hurt. It was like all that pounding hadn’t got anywhere near the centre of him.
He got up, walked out into the street and crouched down near a big murky brown puddle that had formed the night before when one of the sewer grates backed up. Then he cupped his two hands and he dipped them deep into that solid brown, grit-filled water as if it was a completely normal thing to do, as if this was a pure white sink in a pure white bathroom. He pushed his face into it, rubbed his palms up and down and then used his fingertips to work the dirt out from around his eyes and the blood from under his nostrils and down by his mouth. He splashed some into his hair and tried to smooth it down back to normal.
James was the one who turned scared now. He sat there, on the soaking wet ground, dazed and crying these soft little really sad cries, almost whimpering. Reggie called him to come over to the puddle and James got up and went straight over.
“I’m sorry, Reggie, I’m so sorry,” he said, all runny-nosed and crying and dirty. “Please don’t tell anyone, okay. I’m so sorry, please don’t tell anybody.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Reggie said. He was flat and calm now. Every second he was coming back closer and closer to his normal self. His face was almost okay, a little puffy maybe but getting there.
“I won’t tell anybody,” he said. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean it. But we have to get cleaned up right now. You and I have to get cleaned up or everyone will ask what happened.”
A second later James was doing the same thing. He was in there, in the puddle, scrubbing his face and his arms, trying to get the dirt out from under his fingernails.
Reggie said, “Face and hands. You just got to get your face and hands looking all right. For the rest you can just say you wiped out somewhere. No big deal. Come on now. Let’s see what you look like now. Let me get a good look at you.”
James stopped washing and he turned toward Reggie. And Reggie put his two hands on either side of James’ face. And then he untucked his own collared shirt and started to dry off James’ face with it, wiping around in soft circles.
“There you go,” he said, “All better. Good as new. You look fine to me.”
The two of them walked over to a car and looked at their reflections in one of the side mirrors. Then he turned to us.
“You guys go on,” he said. “Then we’ll come in a second. No need to make a big show.”
That’s what I remember most clearly about it, that last part, with Reggie bossing us around, solving it and telling us what to do next. The rest of us, even me, way older than he was, we did exactly what he said and went to school. I turned my back and I left him there with my little brother. I let him work it out all on his own.
AFTER THAT, things were different between us, between the four of us and Reggie. He played road hockey with us all the time now with our uneven teams, our three on twos, and it really didn’t matter. We lent him a pair of old sneakers and it turned out that he wasn’t that bad at all once he got the hang of it. He still went on with the cabbage rolls and the rest of it, but everything was different.
Through the remainder of the fall and into the winter and on past Christmas it went pretty much the same. Then in January and February it started to get too cold outside so we had to move everything in. Down in the basement of our house we started this intricately-organized league of tabletop gear hockey. We kept stats and we followed a schedule, and we posted our rankings on a piece of Bristol board taped to the wall. For about a month that was all there was, thinking up clever passing plays, sawing back and forth with those metal rods and working on our one-timers from the back defenseman. Reggie was great at this kind of hockey. When it came to pushing those little plastic guys around, and shoving the goalie back and forth in his limited little one-line crease, nobody was better. We also watched a lot of games on TV. It was that period of New York Islander and Edmonton Oiler dominance, a terrible time to live where we lived. It might have been great on the Prairies, but around here the Red Wings and Maple Leafs were both terrible. It was the John Ogrodnick, Rick Vaive era, a time when halfway decent guys like that could score fifty goals on a team that didn’t have a chance of making the playoffs. They were so terrible we didn’t expect anything from them and we could just sit there and watch our nothing teams doing nothing in a game that meant nothing. Reggie was absorbed right into that. He still never slept over and he only ate with us on Tuesdays, but when I think about that time, I remember him always being there, sitting on the couch with us or getting ready to drop the puck out of his left hand while the fingers of his right swivelled the centre man and set him up for the face off. The coldest weeks passed quickly and it wasn’t long before we were back outside in the spring and starting to think about baseball.
Then one day after school, in April or May, I think, I answered the door. I opened up our front door and that ended it. I barely recognized her because I had never really seen her close up before. She was wearing white sweatpants and white running shoes and one of those blue nylon windbreakers that folds neatly into a pouch. She seemed very skinny to me and her hair, which was pulled back into a ponytail with one of those pink bobble elastics, was that colour that goes right in between blonde and brown. I remember that she was wearing a lot of makeup so her face looked more dressed-up than the rest of her, and I couldn’t decide if she was a young person who looked old or an old person who looked young.