Not a slap but a real, grown up punch, like a boxer whacking another boxer. KC and me were so shocked that we started laughing. Johnny Seven dropped like a brick. Then Johnny’s dad picked him up and hit him again. Hit him three times, holding him steady so he could get a real good aim. Now it wasn’t funny anymore.
“Jesus, I don’t believe this,” said KC. “Do you believe it?”
“No way.”
That kid must have got punched and thrown and kicked around that room a hundred times. KC got upset. I knew he would.
“Hey! Fuckin’ cut that out!” he shouted. He picked up a stone and threw it at Johnny’s window. I threw another. We both missed.
We kept on tossing those damn stones but missed every time. Johnny’s dad didn’t hear us yelling. He was enjoying himself too much. He just carried on beating up his boy. KC and me had to go home, we couldn’t watch it anymore.
We started walking. “That’s bad,” said KC. His voice sounded strange. “That fuckin’ sucks.”
“Shit, you see the way his dad laid into him?” I said.
“I saw,” said KC. “That is so wrong, man. My dad may have smacked me round once or twice, he never hurt me. That bastard was using his fists. Goddamn.”
There was a train coming. Me and KC slid down the slope to get out of its way. The train whooshed past. It was a cold lonely feeling, seeing all the passengers through the windows and knowing not one of those motherfuckers knew about me or KC or Johnny Seven or would have given a shit if they had. To them, we were just a bunch of kids.
We watched the train until its tail lights snaked out of sight.
As we headed for the bridge I said: “So what’re we gonna do?”
“About what?“
“Someone getting half-killed, that’s what! Do we call the fuckin’ cops or not?”
“Are you joking?” said KC. “What good would that do?”
“We witnessed a violent assault.”
“We witnessed shit. We were spying, for fuck’s sake. Things you see when you spy don’t count.”
“Hey, I’m shaking,” I said. “Look at me. I’m shaking all over.”
KC sniffed. Might have been snot, might have been tears. I didn’t ask. “I hope that kid’s all right,” he said. “Because, God help me, if he dies, it’s your fucking fault.”
But Johnny Seven lived. A week later, he was back at school. His mouth was all swollen and his left eye was so bruised he could hardly see out of it. No one asked him how it had happened, not even the teachers. By now, both me and KC felt we owed Johnny something so in recess we went over to be nice to the kid. At first, he ignored us but we wouldn’t let up. It became like a fucking mission with us.
We asked him to play catch. But he was so sore he couldn’t raise the mitt properly. So instead we sat on the wall and talked. We didn’t say anything about the terrible way Johnny looked and you could tell Johnny was real relieved that we didn’t mention it. And we certainly had no intention of telling him it was our fucking fault he looked that way.
“I was thinking of going shooting after school,” said Johnny Seven. “Wanna come?”
“Shooting who?” I said. “Griff?” The idea kind of appealed to me.
“M-h.” Johnny shook his head. “Just trees and stuff. My old man collects handguns. He wouldn’t miss one.”
We were impressed but trying not to show it.
“What happened to your mom?” said KC. “She die?”
“No sir. She just walked out, man. My dad never wanted to go anywhere or have friends over so she kept getting depressed and finally she just left.”
“Where’d she go?” said KC.
Johnny shrugged.
“What’s it feel like, not knowing if you’re ever gonna see her again?” I asked him.
KC acted all shocked. “Fuck, Garrett, what kind of asshole question is that?”
“S’okay,” said Johnny. “Way it is, when you got a mom, you sometimes think you’d be better off without her. But when you don’t even know where she is, it feels like you wanna hurl all day long.”
KC nodded respectfully. “I bet it does. I bet it really does feel that way.”
We met in the woods near the lake. There was a fucked-up old ruined house near the lake. It was called the Retreat, because that was its name when people lived there. The walls were half down and it didn’t have any windows because so many kids had thrown rocks at them. KC told Johnny “The Retreat” was an unlucky name to give a house, because retreating was what cowards did in a battle. Johnny looked at me and smiled. He could see that KC was pretty dumb but would never have said it out loud. That wasn’t Johnny’s style.
So Johnny took this gun, this police special with six chambers and he let me and KC hold it and said we could have two shots each. We got a rock and scratched the shape of a naked lady on the side of the wall, then we each took a couple of shots at her. When the gun went off, it was real loud, like thunder, so loud that we were sure someone would come running, but no one did. Johnny walked half a mile away. He fired twice and got the woman smack in the nipples. It was like he was Clint Eastwood or somebody.
“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”
“We had a ranch in Oklahoma,” said Johnny. “That’s where my folks come from. We used to shoot at things all the time. I can drive a car, too.”
“No fucking way,” said KC.
Then it was my turn to shoot. The gun went off before I was ready and I didn’t hit a fucking thing. KC laughed but he didn’t do any better. I had one more shot and I fired it straight into the ground because I felt like it. Johnny said what I’d done was a waste of ammunition. “What?” I said. “But it ain’t a waste to shoot at a picture of some tits?”
Later we went back to Johnny’s house and he let us in, said his dad was out and wouldn’t be back until late.
“Like how late?” I said.
“Who knows?” said Johnny.
“Wow,” I said. “You could stay out until midnight if you wanted.”
I could see KC looking pretty surprised. Me and him usually had to be home by ten, on the fucking dot, or we got grounded. And there’s Johnny coming home to an empty house. The place was a fucking mess, though. There was this thick layer of dust on the TV and the kitchen looked like someone had been throwing soup at the walls.
Johnny took the gun back to his dad’s room then got us some cold beer from the icebox. We couldn’t believe it. It was real German beer. He got out a CD, someone called Martha somebody. “Listen to this, she swears her head off in it.” It was a boring song, except at the end when this woman calls someone a mother fucking asshole. She sang it about six or seven times. Man, we rolled about laughing. When the song was over, we played it again just to see if we’d heard it right the first time. After one can of beer each we were all pretty drunk.
Johnny got us another beer, even though he’d said we could only have one each. Then he put on another song we hadn’t heard. It was some really old party record called The Monster Mash. On account of the song being about monsters, KC had the bright idea that we should listen to it in the dark. I knew what he was planning. I fucking knew. Sure enough, next thing he was asking Johnny if he had a flashlight. Johnny said sure. So KC asked Johnny to aim the flashlight at him while he did a dance to the record. In no time at all, Johnny was pointing the spotlight at KC while he flashed his big white ass in the dark. Jesus, it was funny. Johnny was laughing so much he was crying. KC wasn’t laughing, though. His face was all serious, like he was concentrating on giving an artistic performance.
Then the light turned on and Johnny’s dad was standing there. From a distance, he’d looked like the main villain in a gangster movie. Close up, he was just a normal looking guy, average size, ordinary hair and clothes and his belly starting to bulge, like any dad from anywhere in the world. He just looked at us. No expression on his face or nothing.