Some decisions, though not flawed, nor even wrong, can haunt us.
They can plague our days and disturb our nights. They can drive us
completely mad, or partially demented. Their aftermath can affect us
from without. Can deviate how we are perceived.
April, 1975
Eleven-year
old Thomas ‘Stitches’ Sinclair was walking home from school. He used
the paths and gullies that ran along a creek on the fringe of what to
him seemed to be a large forest. A forest into which one could travel
forever, living off wild onions, blackberries, and panfish. He liked to
walk that creek on warm summer days and catch crawdads to sell to the
bait shop. They paid a nickel apiece, and a nickel bought two giant
jawbreakers. And a giant jawbreaker could generate enough spit to
launch a stream clear across the road. He didn’t even mind teasing off
the leeches that attached themselves to his leg after a day of wading.
Oh, that first time he looked down and saw the black, slimy worms stuck
to his ankles; he came as near to crying as he could remember. Stitches
didn’t cry though, he was tough, like the Chicago Mafia guys he'd seen
on the news.
He lived sixty miles southwest of Chicago, a
mysterious place full of tall buildings and endless lines of people
walking. He’d gone there, to the Field Museum on a school field trip.
He was both astounded and fearful of that place. Compared to his home,
essentially fifty miles of corn fields in any direction, Chicago was
chaos. Another planet, like those in the comics he enjoyed reading.
For
some reason that afternoon, Stitches deviated from his usual path home.
He left the familiar banks of the creek, breached the forest edge, and
emerged at the top of a steep set of stone stairs leading way, way down
into a valley that bordered a small park.
These stairs must be a
thousand years old, he thought, conjuring up images of warriors with
swords rushing down both slopes to meet at the bottom with a terrible
noise. He went down carefully. He was a careful young man, having
experienced the reality of physical pain and death already.
Cutting
through the park, instead of the clank of sword against shield, he
heard a pitiful wailing. Worse than a crying girl, he thought. And then
he heard laughter. Laughter from several boys. Voices he recognized.
Stitches
was the school bully. He was big for his age, exceptionally big, and
quick to fight. Stairs he approached carefully, but fighting aroused in
him not a moment’s hesitation. He veered over to investigate the racket.
One
of those voices belonged to an older boy, a boy who had beaten Stitches
to the ground barely a month earlier. He had not seen him since,
Stitches was still in elementary school, and this boy was in the junior
high building.
He walked around a row of large hedges and, some might say, faced his destiny.
There,
in the middle of a small clearing, five boys were taunting one very
pale skinned, oddly constructed boy by tossing a notepad in the air
above his head. As soon as the pale boy turned and started toward
whoever held the notebook, they tossed it to someone else.
On
closer inspection of the boy, Stitches saw that not only was he the
palest, clumsiest moving person he’d ever seen, but he also had only
one eye. He wore a patch over the other—a lightly colored patch that
blended in quite well with his unusually pale skin.
Eleven-year
old Stitches didn’t realize it, but at that moment he stood at a
crossroad. Fate had confronted him with a choice, a decision. He would
face many decisions in his near future, some more painful and riddled
with death than those already experienced in his short life. But it
would be from this one decision that he drew strength in the coming
turbulence.
Stitches was indeed a bully. Five years earlier, his
father was killed in that faraway place called Vietnam, fighting a war
that apparently no one felt anyone should be fighting. His mother did
not take it well. Not well at all. After losing their home, she moved
them back into a little field worker's house on her parents' farm. She
was the youngest of eight brothers and sisters, and though they tried
to help her stabilize, she still made a poor decision.
She
remarried to a man who was as wild as a weed seed in a strong wind. A
garrulous, bullying, hard-drinking roustabout more at home in jail than
in his own bed. He made good money working pipeline construction at
nuclear plants; it kept him away for a month at a time, and those were
Stitches' favorite months. When the stepfather was at home, it was a
nightmare. His idea of fatherly instruction was a frequent and quite
solid beating.
At age ten, Stitches, after having one or more of
his teeth loosened one time too many, started fighting back. Apparently
that was the lesson his stepfather wanted him to learn, because he
finally showed him a little respect. He started calling him Stitches,
instead of ‘Kid’. They still fought, not roughhoused—fought. With
fists, and feet, and wild, launching attacks that sent both to the
ground in a mass of struggling bone and muscle.
This interaction
sparked a profound difference in the way Stitches behaved when faced
with something he did not like. He'd become extremely confrontational.
Not the kind of bully who demands others' lunch money, or steals the
pineapple upside down cake from their school lunch tray, which by the
way was delicious, and one of the few things churned out of the school
cafeteria that would ever merit such a compliment. No, just very
sensitive to the errant comment, the nasty glare, the threatening
posture. To mention his dead father in any way not absolutely
respectful guaranteed an immediate punch to the head no matter where
you stood or who was watching.
After several sessions where
Stitches calmly walked into his office with a note, then bent over the
desk for his punishment, the principal of the school was out of
options. He had tried paddling the boy, which had no noticeable effect.
He had tried stern discussions, to which the boy responded logically
and forthrightly; and finally, contacting his mother, which proved
fruitless. He was concerned, but in light of what happened to the boy’s
father, he remained patient, and lenient.
So it was with an
innate sense of the conditioned scrapper, that Stitches quickly
analyzed the scene before him. Five boys, one he did not like at all,
against one weird looking, deformed, probably retarded kid. This
decision was never in question, nor was it the important one.
He waded into the center of the boys and initiated a devastating attack
against the older one he’d lost to previously. Three solid punches, one
well aimed kick to the shin, and a two-handed push to the chest sent
the older boy to the hard ground. One of the punches had landed at that
sensitive spot on the bridge of the nose that seems direct-wired to
your tear ducts, and before the boy realized fully what had just
happened, the water was flowing down his cheeks.
Stitches didn’t
see this as he had already turned to the next boy, the one currently in
possession of the notebook—the one who dropped the notebook and ran,
followed closely by the rest of the pack.
Stitches was
disappointed. His young body fully-charged with adrenaline, and now he
had no one to drain it on. After looking around, reassuring himself
that none of them were creeping up to ambush him like in the westerns
he watched, Stitches stared openly at the strange boy.
The boy
had for the most part stopped his wailing, only occasionally making a
pitiful noise that caused his entire body to spasm. He was thick in the
torso, but his legs and arms were incredibly skinny in comparison. His
skin was as pale as a peeled onion. Stitches had never seen anyone like
him at all.
The weird looking kid stared fearfully at Stitches.
His single eye switched back and forth from Stitches to what was
presumably his notebook still on the ground; bent and battered, but
still intact.
Stitches felt strangely uncomfortable beneath the
frightened gaze of this odd kid. Not threatened uncomfortable, more of
a generalized discomfort, like when he knew he should be studying and
instead chose to walk the woods.
“Go ahead, get your book,” he said.
The boy made a sound that could have been a word, but if it were, Stitches did not recognize it.
The boy continued to stare.
“What are you, deaf? I ain’t going to hurt you. Get your book. Go home, before those fairies surround you again.”
That
said, Stitches turned and left, warily following the path the boys had
taken when retreating. Maybe they were waiting to spring a bushwhack,
and that was all right with him.
He never looked back to see
whether the weird kid had gathered his book and skedaddled. He wanted
to, but the kid made him nervous.
Stitches kept walking,
crossing the road and cutting through a patch of field already planted
with the corn that would rise to ten feet and cover everything around
anywhere he went. Now it was too early and only scattered plants had
poked through the soil. He loved it when the corn got tall and he could
run the rows pretending he was a famous explorer searching for lost
tombs full of treasure.
To his credit, Stitches didn’t jump when
the strange boy with the pale skin appeared from behind a mailbox.
Stitches had just crossed the last street before he made the final hike
to his grandparents' farm.
“Hey, what are you doing here?”
The
boy held forth the tablet. Stitches didn’t take it, but looked instead
at the open page. On it was a drawing of the boy clutching his notebook
to his chest and smiling so wide, it appeared that his face was all
teeth. It was an excellent caricature, There were oddly formed letters
underneath the drawing, but they spelled nothing Stitches could read.
Nevertheless, Stitches knew what that picture said. It was a ‘Thank you
for getting my notebook’ picture.
“You are welcome,” Stitch
said, exaggerating each syllable as if talking to his grandma who
couldn’t hear nothing. “Now go home.”
The boy flipped another
page and it showed the two of them walking together, surrounded by
trees. Again, there were crude attempts at letters, but they were
indecipherable.
Stitches stared at this drawing a little longer,
then realized it was the kid wanting to hang out with him. Be friends.
Stitches started to laugh, but he was not a mean boy, so he remained
silent, thinking. He’s got one eye, can’t hear, can’t talk, can’t even
walk too good. He cries like a girl, has white skin, and looks funny.
Thus catalogued, Stitches did something he rarely did, he lied.
“Yeah,
we’re friends,” he told the boy, whose single eye lit up with unalloyed
glee and formed a smile wide enough to swallow a hot dog whole. “We’ll
hang out. Now go home.”
Stitches didn’t wait to see if the kid
left, he turned and continued walking to his house. He had no intention
of ever seeing the kid again. That realization made his stomach tumble
around as he walked home. By the time he got there, he had no appetite
for his favorite food, fried chicken. He had trouble looking his
grandpa in the eye when he asked him how things went at the school, and
he skipped desert, apple pie, excusing himself from the table to go
study.
Passing the television, he went straight to his room and
tried to reread a Doc Savage book, but he couldn’t concentrate and kept
seeing the look on that goofy kid’s face when he told him they were
friends.