Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

Ollie was noticeably the smallest on the team. The punter, compact and lithe as a featherweight boxer. He stared straight ahead as they ran past. I wondered if he remembered me and our days under Roger. If he remembered throwing stones and pissing in a bottle. After elementary school, he tried to get people to call him Oliver, but Ollie was ingrained in his face. When you looked at him, that’s all you saw.

My father stood on the step and watched with me. It was the fall of my senior year. He held a mug of coffee, looking as slick as he did in the mornings — the comb marks in his gelled hair like rows in a cornfield, shirt and jacket freshly pressed. His very presence was an accusation, but a mild one; we’d both accepted certain limitations of mine by that point. I was not going to join the football team, and it was enough that I should admire them.

The Jeep vanished down Brock Road, toward the high school named after the street, for the team’s final laps around the parking lot. My father left his mug on the step for Mother to pick up. We walked to his car.

Father drove me the short distance to school. He saw me looking back at the house, where Mother would be waking Bonnie by ripping the blanket from the bed. She wouldn’t comment on Bonnie still being dressed from the night before or on the imprint of makeup and sparkles on her pillow. She wouldn’t respond to Bonnie screaming to be left alone. She would throw open the windows and draw in the sound of the neighbor’s weed whacker, start up the vacuum and the rickety washing machine. Bonnie would slam the front door when she left, cursing and still pulling on her jacket.

“That’s how women are together,” Father said. Compared to the peace of these drives: down our road, past the houses’ end, the empty pits, the failed condo development. A faded billboard showed the space-age skyline it was meant to have, uneven blocks of steel and glass, swooping neon. I noticed something had changed. There was a new sidewalk in front of the dead section, freshly poured and smoothed.

We stopped at the edge of the school parking lot. Father put out his hand to keep me from getting out of the car and gestured forward with his chin.

The football players were finishing their run, trickling into formation around the Jeep. One of the first boys to arrive veered sharply to vomit in the bushes. The next boy fell where he stood, down on his back between cars. Father nodded thoughtfully, as though the whole thing were a show for his consideration.

The coach jumped down from the Jeep, his stream of insults dissolving into nonsense: You goddamn motherfucking weakling slaggerwit pansyfucker pantser twats! Ollie jogged up last. He’d taken the final lap — without the Jeep after them — at an easy pace and didn’t even look winded. He was the only one standing up straight.

“You used to be friends with that one,” Father said. I shrugged and reached for the door handle. He stuck his hand out again, level with the seat belt. Something bad was going to happen. I wanted to run from it; he wanted to stay and watch.

The coach pointed at Ollie and started to imitate him, taking high, mincing steps on his toes, like a baby deer startled out of the bushes. He flapped his wrists limply and hissed into Ollie’s face. Ollie drew back and punched the coach in the stomach. He didn’t even need to look to hit the wide target.

The coach doubled over. When he straightened up, his face was even pinker than before, his eyes tiny dots of fury.

Ollie’s teammates said they’d throw him a goodbye party on the field that night. “We’ll get the beer,” they said. “We’ll get the girls.” When he arrived, they were standing around the goalpost, directly in the beam of the security light that hung off the gutter of the school. He recognized the way they stood in a half circle, heads close together. Ollie and I used to form part of that same half circle, back when we ganged up on smaller kids. He saw that there was no beer, no girls. Still he didn’t run.

The quarterback — also smaller than the other boys, speedy, though not as small as Ollie — demanded Ollie’s team jacket. Ollie handed it over without complaint. They asked for his shirt, and he gave them that too, feeling like there was something karmic about this turn of events, some kind of justice. “Now your pants,” the QB said. His larger teammates loomed like mountains.

Ollie shook his head. Someone grabbed his arms and held them behind his back. Another boy lunged at his ankles, underestimating Ollie because of his size and earning a swift kick to the jaw. It took four of them to get Ollie’s shoes, pants, and boxers off while he fought savagely. His elbow broke someone’s nose. He sank his teeth into a linebacker’s arm and had to be dragged off him, leaving scraped skin rolling up like cigarette paper.

Two boys dropped him hard onto the ground, naked. Stars behind his eyelids blurred into actual stars as he opened his eyes. He could hear his pulse sloshing in his skull. He weighed his options. There weren’t many. The moment to charge after them and try to get his clothes back was rapidly passing. He flattened his hands and tried to push himself up, and various scrapes and bruises made themselves known. He let himself lie in the wet grass a little longer. His teammates weren’t laughing — they were running silently through the weeds, like predators. He heard car doors slamming and then the sound of an engine turning over.

The smell of manure, of cut grass. All the fat on his body was freezing to the touch, his cock shrunken to an acorn. He sensed he would be colder when he stood. He accepted the only thing there was to do. He rose to his feet and began the walk home.

He followed the road from school, careful of his bare feet. After a few blocks, a cop car pulled up behind him, flashing its blue and red lights. Someone must have called in to report a teenage boy wandering naked through town. It would have been too much of a coincidence for the cop car to just show up there at this time of night.

He refused to press charges or name names. His teammates would do him the same favor when he cornered the quarterback in the locker room after hours, made him raise his foot onto the bench, and then slashed the tendon at the back of his ankle with a switchblade.

On the new sidewalk, I lined up with all of the unemployed youth of Fort Michel. White tents shielded the line from the spitting rain. Ollie’s story was being passed around, abridged to nudity and blood. In spite of the weather, the air was festive.

We stood in the shadow of the new restaurant. It was alone on the dead strip, surrounded by abandoned construction sites and untended grass fields, as out of place as a crashed UFO. It was a promise, an act of faith: people started to believe the condo development would be resurrected, the sidewalk would widen into a boulevard, a modern city would grow from chainlink fences and dust. It was the kind of restaurant that had never existed in Fort Michel, and, after it failed, never would again. We would forever return to to-the-point diners with names like Billy’s.

We were divided into Floor and Kitchen applicants, pretty girls in Sunday dresses splitting off from gruff-looking older men in sturdy shoes. I nervously turned over years of PBS cooking shows in my head. I was the youngest and the least white.

At the front of the line, I was ushered into a tent with a flap that closed. A man in an unbuttoned chef’s jacket sat at a table, puffing on a cigarette. The smoke filled the small tent and clouded around him. I sat across from him. He wore a black undershirt beneath the chef’s jacket, and an elaborate tattoo filled his chest above its neckline. I found myself staring at it. Two mangled birds carrying an empty circle between their beaks. The birds’ tails were on fire, and they were twisted as though in great pain.