Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

This historic severing of the Benji-'n'-Reggie alliance went un-remarked upon. But who was I kidding? Nobody thought of us as the old unit anymore except for me. Some brothers threw bricks, others simply walked away from each other. The final teams were me, Clive, Marcus, and Nick on the Vice (for Miami Vice) and Randy, Bobby, Reggie, and NP on the Cool Chief Rockers. When Nick finally got his ass over there, I pulled out the paint goggles I'd rescued from the cobwebs under the deck and NP said, “Goggles?” I'd brought them for Reggie.

“No one said anything about goggles.”

“I don't got goggles.”

“I'm not wearing any pussy-ass goggles,” Marcus said. And neither was Reggie, I didn't even bother to fight with him about it. I didn't wear them, either.

The sky was getting dark. We went over the rules again and counted to two hundred per the guidelines. Then it was on.

We ran away, scattering according to haywire teenage logic toward the highway, toward the beach. I jogged around the corner, checking to see if I was in anyone's sights, and jumped into the undeveloped lot next to the Nichols House. I waded in deep enough that I couldn't be seen from the road, but shallow enough that I could see anyone coming down Clive's street or the street Mrs. Jenkins's house was on. Fifty-two, fifty-three. Getting there. It was almost too dark to play at this point, but the poor visibility would help me. I was going to wait for one of the Cool Chief Rockers to recon my way and then ambush them, a favorite tactic of mine to this day. Wait for the right moment in an argument with a loved one, then ambush them with some hurt I've held on to for years, the list of indictments nurtured in the darkness of my hideout, and say, “Gotcha!” See how you ruined me. If I was lucky, Bobby and Reggie would stop right in front of where I was hiding, to regroup or break into song, and I'd take them both out.

A firefly blinked into existence, drew half a word in the air. Then gone. A black bug secret in the night. Such a strange little guy. It materialized, visible to human eyes for brief moments, and then it disappeared. But it got its name from its fake time, people time, when in fact most of its business went on when people couldn't see it. Its true life was invisible to us but we called it firefly after its fractions. Knowable and fixed for a few seconds, sharing a short segment of its message before it continued on its real mission, unknowable in its true self and course, outside of reach. It was a bad name because it was incomplete — both parts were true, the bright and the dark, the one we could see and the other one we couldn't. It was both.

I moved closer to the street so I could get a better view and someone hit me in the face with a rock.

Hot oil! Hot oil!

A rock. That's what it felt like. My head snapped back and the top half of my face throbbed like I'd been slapped. I cursed and stumbled out into the street. Who throws rocks at a BB gunfight? I yelled for a time-out.

Randy popped out of the woods on the other side of the street. “I hit you,” he said, in surprise and pride.

“Why are you throwing rocks?”

“No, it was a BB.”

I poked gingerly around my left eye. He'd hit me in the socket, in the hollow between the tear duct and the eyebrow. There may be a proper anatomical name for that part of the eye socket, but I don't know it. It felt like a rock. I couldn't see out of it. There was stuff in it. Randy reached forward and I batted his hand away. I heard NP say, “What's up?” I traced my fingertip along the lumpy hole in my face, the stinging flesh. It broke the skin. He'd pumped it more than two times.

“What happened?” Clive asked.

“Benji's out. I hit him,” Randy declared.

“I'm not out,” I said. “He pumped it more than twice! I'm bleeding! He's disqualified!”

Randy took my face in his hands and lifted my chin for a better look. He did this queasy thing. He bent his face down and stuck his tongue in the wound.

I pushed him away. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I was checking the taste to see if it was blood or sweat,” he said. “It's sweat. You have sweat all running down your forehead.”

I told him to keep the fuck off me, freakazoid. I touched the hole in my face and staggered into the cone of the streetlight. Fat june bugs crawled over one another on the ground in their wretched streetlight ritual. I held up my finger. It was blood.

Bobby and Reggie appeared, and then all the Cool Chief Rockers and Vicers, guns dangling. Reggie grabbed my arm and wanted to know if I was all right. I hadn't heard his voice like that in a long time. I shook my head drunkenly “What the hell did you do, Randy?” Reggie said.

“He pumped it more than twice,” I said. Everybody murmured dag, in their disparate dag registers. When they got a look at the wound, they re-dagged at how close it came to my eye.

Randy denied it, but to break the skin from across the street, he had to pump it a lot more than twice. We all knew it.

I realized the Horrible Thing. I said, “It's still in there.” I probed around the wound. The skin was tough and swole up, but beneath that was something harder, like a pearl. I shared the Horrible Thing.

Randy didn't believe it. “Let me see,” he said, his hands out.

“Get away from him,” Reggie shouted. He stepped between us. “Benji,” he started, squinting at the bloody hole in the poor light, “you have to go to the hospital.”

“We can't do that,” Marcus said. “We'll get in trouble.”

“We'll all be in some serious trouble when our parents come out tomorrow.”

I looked around. They had decided. Even Clive, who in his alpha dogness could have grabbed Randy's keys and taken me if he wanted, fuck everybody. He was looking down the street, as if he heard his parents pulling up, avoiding my gaze. Half gaze.

Randy said, “How are you going to get there?”

“That's uncool,” Reggie said. He was my brother. I loved him. The way he said it, I knew. He'd found stoners. Maybe he was going to be all right after all.

“That's so uncool,” I said. Justice according to brothers and stoners: if someone needs to go to the hospital and you got the car, you have to take them.

Reggie said, “Bobby, your grandpa can drive us!”

Bobby got weaselly “He's asleep — look, it's dark.”

“I don't have to go to the hospital. I'm okay,” I said. Reggie protested, but everyone else was so thoroughly relieved that it was someone else's Thursday that the point was moot. I'd take one for the team. I didn't care that that's what they wanted of me. I'd take the hit because that's what I did. The other guys turned on Randy for putting them in this position, bitching about the pumping and whether aiming for my face was an accident or not. He didn't give an inch—“It just happened”—but did offer me “automatic shotgun for two weeks” as compensation. But the next week Bobby got his car, and the girls finally appeared, and Randy's reign was over.

My plan was to go home and try and squeeze the BB out, pimple-style. Me and my brother walked away, one palm over my eye and my other hand on his shoulder.

“We can still play three-on-three,” NP suggested.

We tried to cut through the Edwardses' house on the way back, but the lights were on. Someone was home. We took the long way around.

In the bathroom mirror, my eye looked disgusting. Like I'd gone a few rounds with a real heavyweight. The socket was all swollen up, and blood trickled over my nose and older, dried trickles of blood. I washed my face off and got a better look. I could feel the BB in there. I couldn't move it. It was lodged in the meat or something. Reggie hovered around, trying to be helpful, but he freaked me out so I asked him to give me a minute. I tried to wiggle the BB again, applying time-honored zit-popping principles of strategic leverage like a modern-day Archimedes. Nothing happened, and the inflamed flesh was so tender that I couldn't really have at it. Blood with dark little bits in it dribbled over my fingers. We'd thought it all out and decided metal BBs were okay because in theory they weren't going to break the skin, but now I had a tetanus-covered time bomb in my head. I was going to wake up with lockjaw and waste away in bone-popping misery. Should I have occasion to fly between then and my deathday, to visit an international lockjaw specialist at his mountain-top clinic, for example, metal detectors would go off and I'd have to explain the whole dumb story.