“Personally,” Bobby said, and we all turned to him, equally surprised that he’d found the guts to talk, “I’d like to keep my nuts.”
I smiled at him.
He smiled back.
And there, at that moment, I saw through the pathetic overweight kid who’d been crying moments ago, and knew him for the kid he could be. The friend he could be.
Silence hung in the air like a thick curtain. There were decisions being made in that utter quiet. Gears were moving. For me there was a sense of inevitability, as if these were things that were to always be, like I’d walked into something and somewhere that I belonged. There was no turning back.
“Okay,” Mr. Smirk said, tugging on the front of his suede jacket, brushing at lint or specks that weren’t there. “You’ve made your choice.” He pointed across the way at me, his forefinger out, his thumb up like a gun hammer. “I’ve made mine too. I think we’ll be seeing each other again someday.”
With that he turned away, hands in his pockets, as if nothing at all unusual had gone down. His friends, Mr. Pudge and Mr. Pimple Planet, turned likewise, trying to imitate their leader’s nonchalance.
I looked at Bobby Templeton, sitting there fat and pathetic and almost naked in the stream, and he looked back at me and nodded. I smiled and nodded at Bandit.
“Go for the nuts, boy!” I yelled, and Bandit, poised in the stream, that growl still in his throat, darted forward. The high school guys looked back, even cool Mr. Smirk, and they saw him coming.
All one hundred pounds of him, teeth long and sharp and white.
Breaking into a run, all coolness forgotten, the three older boys tripped and stumbled over each other and the fallen branches in their path. Crashing through the undergrowth they ran out of sight, leaving me in the stream with a nearly naked fat boy.
4.
Bandit came prancing back with an as-happy-as-can-be dog smile splitting his face, though to my mild disappointment without greaseball scrotums and testes dangling from his jaws, just as Bobby Templeton was pulling his shirt and pants back on. Tossed away among some nearby bushes by the high school guys, thorns caught in the fabric poked him in awkward places and he winced and yelped as he dressed. Bandit walked up to him, and though a bit apprehensive, maybe wondering if the dog still had balls on the brain, Bobby knelt to give my dog a good rubdown. Bandit obliged, rolling on his back to offer his furry tummy.
“Cool dog,” Bobby said, looking my way.
“Yeah. He’s the best.”
“I’m Bobby.”
The fat kid held out a hand.
“I’m Joey,” I said, and pumped his hand up and down like a lever. “Who were those guys?” I gestured with a thumb over my shoulder in the direction the three older boys had run.
“The guy in the jacket is Dillon,” Bobby said. “The other two are Stu and Max.”
His gaze followed the direction my thumb indicated and, though they were long gone, the worry in the fat kid’s eyes was clear.
“Don’t worry,” I offered. “They won’t be coming back anytime soon. Not with Bandit here.” I punctuated this with a playful tug on my dog’s ear, and he nipped at my hand good-naturedly in return. “Why were they after you anyway?”
Bobby gave a weak little shrug and looked down at the same time.
“That’s just what they do,” he said, but his slumped, defeated posture seemed to also say this was just what he was: the kind of kid others beat on and humiliated. I couldn’t exactly argue with that, and so said nothing. “I was just walking into town,” he added. “You can cut through the woods and get there faster instead of going down the highway.”
I started back around the bend in the river to retrieve my shoes. Sitting on a rock, I pulled them on and laced them up. Bobby hurried to keep up, as if even a few yards of distance between us would put him in danger again.
“Aren’t you scared they’re going to come after you now?”
“Sure,” I said, shrugging, “a little. But I got Bandit and I know how to take care of myself.”
“I wish I was that brave,” Bobby said, hanging his head so pathetically that I wanted to slap him.
“It’s not so much about being brave.” Trying to explain, I realized as I was talking I was using pretty much the same words Dad had with me sometime back. “It’s about knowing that there’s some people, if you give them an inch they’ll take a mile. And so you learn to know these people when you see them, and not to take any shit.”
“Your dad teach you how to fight?”
Bobby raised his head, looked at me, genuinely interested.
“Some,” I nodded. “But someone else can teach you only so much. Then it’s when something actually happens, you find out if you’ve got it or not.”
“Aren’t you afraid of getting hit?”
Still sitting, I tried to think of how best to answer. Again, finding myself thinking back to the answers Dad gave me when I asked nearly the same questions.
“Sure.”
Standing, we started walking again. The sun was still high, its light shining through the trees in patches. I thought to myself how the standoff with the three older kids had seemed so long. It seemed to me as if hours should have passed. Tension will do that to you, Dad had said. Make you think time was standing still or moving too fast for you to handle or both at the same time. I thought this was important to get across to Fat Bobby, but I wasn’t quite sure how.
“You never completely get over the threat of being hit, being hurt,” I said. “If someone says they aren’t scared when it seems like there’s something bad going to happen, they’re either lying or crazy.”
I kicked a rock and sent it sailing into some bushes as I tried to gather my thoughts. A startled squirrel darted out of the brush and up a tree, chattering angrily at me when it found a safe branch. Bandit darted towards the base of the tree, looked up questioningly at the rodent. Soon, seeing his potential toy wasn’t coming down, he turned and strode away.
“You get to the point where you just try to give as much as you get,” I said, picking up where I’d left off. “It doesn’t matter if they’re bigger or older. Someone pushes you, you push back. Someone hits you, you hit back.”
“And what if you get more than you give?” Bobby said, and his constant uncertainty, his insistence on the negative, the downbeat, the altogether pussy-ness of his whole demeanor, solidified for me. Though I tried to keep my thoughts and words kind, his name for me as Fat Bobby, which also meant Weak Bobby, Sissy Bobby, Yes-I’m-A-Big-Fat-Wuss-Come-Kick-My-Ass Bobby, became fixed in my mind.
“That happens sometimes.”
I put my hands in my pockets, clenching them into fists there, then relaxing them. Trying mightily not to get mad at this fat kid who had somehow learned in life that it was okay to get stepped on, to get kicked in the ass. That maybe that’s how things were for some people, and there was nothing to be done about it.
“But you go down swinging, and really connecting with at least a few good ones, that person who knocked you down is going to have a fat lip, or a busted nose, and they’re going to wonder if it was worth it. That maybe there’s easier targets to focus on. Either way, whether