Around the bend a twisted tree stretched out a gnarly limb as if in greeting. The stream widened here, almost becoming a proper river. The shoreline was rocky and strewn with pebbles and sticks. Three boys, taller and bigger than me, maybe sixteen or seventeen, high school kids definitely, stood among the pebbles and sticks, bending to pick some up from time to time and chucking them into the water. Their target was a fat kid in the water, stripped to his underwear, trying to fend off the incoming missiles with his forearms.
A rock hit him on the breast, a tit larger than most girls’, and he staggered. A stick sailed through the air and struck him on the shoulder. Another rock struck him squarely in his massive belly, making the flesh there ripple like a shockwave. This last impact made him stagger again, then topple, and he fell in what seemed like slow motion, hitting the water and sending a splash and wake like a tanker sinking offshore of the Pacific.
“What’s wrong, Bobby Templeton!” one of the older kids called out, a guy with greased-back hair that made me instantly think of Sarah’s boyfriend back in California. The guy wore tight jeans and a white T-shirt that showed his fairly muscled arms. The guy obviously thought he was some sort of biker or something, maybe thinking greased hair and a muscle shirt balanced out the explosion of acne that pocked his face. “Have a nice trip?”
The other two guys hooted and hollered at this, as if they’d never heard anything funnier. High fives were exchanged all around. The fat boy tried getting up, his legs and arms like dough, and he slipped again and sent up another large splash. I thought to myself that this might be kind of funny if it wasn’t so fucking sad.
“Bobby Templeton!” one of the other guys called out, slimmer than the first, wearing jeans and a suede jacket. He was also shaking with laughter, but more in control of himself as he did so, hands casually at hip pockets. He watched the whole thing with a crooked smirk that made me think of serial killers in movies. “Maybe we ought to call you Chubby Twinkie-by-the-ton!”
The third guy, ironically, not so thin himself but not nearly as fat as the kid in the stream (Bobby Templeton, I told myself), laughed and threw another rock. This one struck the fat boy on the forehead, and I watched him sort of totter there for a moment or two, a hand going to his forehead, finding blood, and then he toppled over into the water again.
As not numbering among the largest kids ever birthed, I’d been in my fair share of fistfights in school and, like then at the stream in the woods, out of school. I wish I could say I gave more than I got, but I don’t honestly know if I’d kept a win and loss scorecard of all my scraps as a kid which side would have the most marks. But Dad had taught me how to throw a punch, much to Mom’s chagrin, and also a few sneaky maneuvers with my legs that used my center of gravity and my opponent’s momentum against them and in my favor. I’d taken punches before, hard ones, and though I didn’t much like them I wasn’t scared of getting hit either.
I looked at the older, bigger kids, and knew my chances with all three of them weren’t that great: as in no chance in hell. I’d fought bigger guys before, and older guys, so I wasn’t really scared about that. It was just a practical matter. I knew I wasn’t some superhero, and held no delusions that if I took them all on I wouldn’t be leaving there with bruises or worse.
But I had Bandit, and figured that evened things out pretty squarely.
Apparently so did he, because he let out a growl so low and deep and vicious that for a moment I was again afraid of being so near him. He sounded like a wolf then, something primal and ferocious, something wild, and I thought that maybe there wasn’t any German shepherd in him at all.
The three high school kids hadn’t seen me yet. They’d squatted to choose again among the smorgasbord of missiles about their feet. Targeting the fat kid in the water once more, taking aim.
Then they heard the growl, and froze. Even the guy in the suede jacket with the Charles Manson face. It was as if a monster had just passed by, a thing from nightmares and dark places, and the primitive man in them all took note.
The three of them turned in my direction, saw me, saw my dog. Their gazes seemed more directed at Bandit than me, but eventually the Manson kid turned his eyes my way.
“Hey, kid,” he said, nodding in my direction like we were acquaintances. He tried to keep that not-so-concerned smirk on his face, like nothing really bothered him. Like he was somehow separate from the rest of the world. But I noted the bead of sweat on his forehead, watched it start to roll down his face. “Call off your dog.”
I’d known his kind before. However this ended up, he wouldn’t let it be. I’d interrupted his fun, his amusement, and he didn’t like it. It was all there in his smirk and eyes. He’d remember me. He’d marked me.
This pretty much meant I had nothing to lose.
“I have an idea,” I said, my voice far sturdier than I felt inside. “How about I take a shit and you eat it?”
What remained of the smiles and good humor of the greasy guy with the head like a planet populated by pimples and the chubby guy was gone in an instant. The lean Manson guy tried to hang on to his smirk, but even that twitched and missed a beat.
“That’s pretty brave for a kid with a big ass dog with him,” said Mr. Smirk. His thumbs were still in his hip pockets as he tried to remain cool and distant from it all.
“That would almost be funny if it wasn’t so fucking retarded,” I said. “Talking about being brave, and you there, three against one, and him smaller than you.”
I hooked a thumb in the fat kid’s direction.
He’d sat up in the stream, blood still trickling from his forehead, watching the whole thing unfolding with an expression short of amazement on his face. He was looking at me and Bandit, and then looking at the three older guys on the shore, back and forth, like he was watching some alien spectacle. I had the urge to check to see if I had tentacles coming out my backside or something.
“He’s hardly smaller than us,” the chubby guy said, and I almost laughed. It was as if in his tight jeans and black shirt he didn’t realize he wasn’t exactly Mr. Universe either. Or maybe he did, I thought with something akin to revelation, and that’s why he said it.
“The lard-ass pot calling the kettle black,” I said, and the fat boy (Bobby) barked a quick laugh before stifling it with a hand to his mouth. The three high school guys gave him a brief hateful look before turning back to me.
“Look,” Mr. Smirk said. One hand finally unhooked from his jeans pocket and went palm up in front of him, in a friendly where-is-this-getting-us gesture. “I don’t think you realize what you’re getting yourself into. Just take your dog and walk away and I’ll forget I ever saw you here.”
He’d forget me as soon as he forgot how to breathe, and that wasn’t anything I was going to hold my breath for. So I decided to roll with it and keep on going.
“Look,” I said, giving him the same friendly, conversational palm-up gesture. “I don’t think you realize you’re a dickweed.”
“You fucking asshole,” Mr. Pudge said, and took a step forward. Perhaps emboldened by his friend’s initiative, Mr. Planet Pimple Head stepped forward too.
Bandit’s growl, having continued to rumble through this exchange, rose a notch, from bestial to demonic. Mr. Smirk stopped his friends with either arm outstretched to block them.
“Look,” Mr. Smirk started again, “let’s make a deal. This is a small town. You’re obviously new here. You’re not going to have your dog with you every minute of every day. You leave now, instead of killing you, I just kick your ass one time, someday, and then we call it