Earskell peered across the room with dim, cloudy eyes as if he was searching for the answer in the flowered wallpaper, though he knew the reason well enough. Alice Louise Berry had died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, along with 3 million or so other poor souls, just a few weeks after starting her classes at the Gilmore Sanderson Secretarial School. If only they had stayed in the hills, Earskell often thought, she might still be alive. But Alice always had big dreams, which was one of the things he had loved about her, and he was glad that he hadn’t tried to talk her out of it. He was certain those days they spent in Cincinnati among the tall buildings and crowded streets before she took the fever were the happiest ones of her life. His, too, for that matter. After a minute or so, he blinked away the memories and said, “That sure looks like a dandy cake.”
Emma took up her knife and cut it into four pieces, one for each of them.
20
ONE DAY ARVIN WENT LOOKING FOR LENORA after school let out and found her backed up against the trash incinerator next to the bus garage, surrounded by three boys. As he walked up behind them, he heard Gene Dinwoodie tell her, “Hell, you’re so damn ugly I’d have to put a sack over your head before I could get a hard-on.” The other two, Orville Buckman and Tommy Matson, laughed and squeezed in closer to her. They were seniors who had been held back a year or two, and all of them were bigger than Arvin. They spent most of their time at school sitting in the shop building trading dirty jokes with the worthless industrial arts teacher and smoking Bugler. Lenora had shut her eyes tight and begun praying. Tears were running down her pink face. Arvin got only a couple of licks in on Dinwoodie before the others tackled him to the ground and took turns punching him. While he was lying in the gravel, he thought, as he often did when in the middle of a fight, of the hunter that his father had beaten so badly that day in the outhouse mud. But unlike that man, Arvin never gave up. They might have killed him if the janitor hadn’t come along with a cart of cardboard boxes to burn. His head ached for a week, and he had trouble reading the blackboard for several more.
Though it took him almost two months, Arvin managed to catch each of them alone. One evening right before dark, he followed Orville Buckman to Banner’s store. He stood behind a tree a hundred yards down the road and watched the boy come back out swigging a pop and eating the last of a Little Debbie. Just as Orville started past him with the bottle tipped up to take another drink, Arvin stepped out into the road. He smacked the bottom of the Pepsi bottle with the palm of his hand and sent the glass neck halfway down the big boy’s throat, breaking two of his rotten front teeth off. By the time Orville realized what had hit him, the fight was pretty much finished except for the blow that put his lights out. An hour later, he woke up lying in the ditch along the road choking on blood and a paper sack over his head.
A couple of weeks later, Arvin drove Earskell’s old Ford over to the Coal Creek High School basketball game. They were playing the team from Millersburg, which always brought a big turnout. He sat in the car smoking Camel cigarettes and watching the front door for Tommy Matson to show his face. It was drizzling rain, a chilly, dark Friday night in early November. Matson liked to think of himself as the school cock-hound, was always bragging about the pussy he picked up at the games while their stupid boyfriends scrambled up and down the gym floor chasing a rubber ball. Right before halftime, just as Arvin flipped another butt out the window, he saw his next target walk outside with his arm around a freshman girl named Susie Cox and head to the row of school buses parked in the back of the lot. Arvin got out of the Ford carrying a tire iron and followed them. He watched Matson open the rear door of one of the yellow buses and help Susie up inside. After waiting a few minutes, Arvin twisted the handle on the door and let it swing open with a raspy squeak. “What was that?” he heard the girl say.
“Nothing,” Matson told her. “I must not got it shut all the way. Now come on, girl, let’s get them bloomers off.”
“Not until you close that door,” she said.
“Goddamn it,” Matson grumbled, raising up off her. “You better be worth it.” He walked down the narrow aisle holding his pants up with one hand.
When he leaned out to grab the latch and pull the door back, Arvin swung the tire iron and hit Matson across the kneecaps, toppling him out of the bus. “Jesus!” he yelled when he hit the gravel, landing hard on his right shoulder. Swinging the tire iron again, Arvin cracked two of his ribs, then kicked him until he stopped trying to get up. He took a paper bag out of his jacket and knelt down beside the moaning boy. Grabbing hold of Matson’s curly hair, he pulled his head up. The girl inside the bus didn’t make a peep.
The next Monday at school, Gene Dinwoodie walked up to Arvin in the cafeteria and said, “I’d like to see you try and put a sack over my head, you sonofabitch.”
Arvin was sitting at a table with Mary Jane Turner, a new girl at the school. Her father had grown up in Coal Creek, then spent fifteen years in the merchant marine before returning home to claim his inheritance, a run-down farm on the side of a hill that his grandfather had left him. The redheaded girl could curse like a sailor when the opportunity presented itself, and though Arvin wasn’t sure why, he liked that a lot, especially when they were making out. “Leave us alone, you dumb prick,” she said, glaring scornfully at the tall boy standing over them. Arvin smiled.
Ignoring her, Gene said, “Russell, after I get done with you, I might just take your little girlfriend out for a nice long ride. She ain’t no beauty queen, but I gotta say, she’s not nearly as bad as that rat-faced sister of yours.” He stood over the table with his fists clenched, waiting for Arvin to leap up and start swinging, then watched dumbfounded as the boy closed his eyes and put his hands together. “You got to be shittin’ me.” Gene looked around the crowded lunchroom. The gym teacher, a burly man with a red beard who wrestled for extra money in Huntington and Charleston on the weekends, was scowling at him. The rumor around the school was that he’d never been pinned, and that he won all his matches because he hated everybody and everything in West Virginia. Even Gene was afraid of him. Leaning over, he said to Arvin in a low voice, “Don’t think praying’s gonna get you out of this, motherfucker.”
After Gene walked away, Arvin opened his eyes and took a drink from a carton of chocolate milk. “Are you all right?” Mary said.
“Sure,” he said. “Why you ask that?”
“Were you really praying?”
“I was,” he said, nodding his head. “Praying for the right time.”
He finally caught Dinwoodie a week later in his old man’s garage changing a spark plug in his ’56 Chevy. By then, Arvin had collected a dozen paper bags. Gene’s head was tightly encased in them when his younger brother found him several hours later. The doctor said he was lucky that he hadn’t suffocated. “Arvin Russell,” Gene told the sheriff after he came to his senses. He’d spent the last twelve hours in the hospital believing that he was running dead last in a race at the Indy 500. It had been the longest night of his life; every time he stomped the accelerator, the car slowed down to a crawl. The roar of the engines passing him by was still ringing in his ears.
“Arvin Russell?” the sheriff, a hint of doubt in his voice. “I know that boy likes to scrap, but hell, son, you twice as big as he is.”
“He caught me off guard.”
“So you seen him before he put that knot on your head?” the sheriff asked.
“No,” Gene said, “but he’s the one.”