Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

She rolled away and my fists were flying. The projectionist’s howls became little mewling sounds, then petered out altogether. His face had gone pasty white, and I stopped punching.

Anelle pulled me off him. I realized that I was crying, and I knew that she saw my tears, saw the confusion in my eyes, but I didn’t even care because there was confusion in her eyes, too. Her arms went around me. Again I felt her breasts pressing against my chest.

There was nothing between us but my thin cotton T-shirt.

Anelle Carney kissed me then.

Not a lover’s kiss. Not the kiss I’d dreamed of. But it was Anelle’s kiss. And it was for me.

I closed my eyes. We didn’t do anything but hold each other. When Anelle pulled away, I was ready to tell her everything.

I opened my eyes. Saw a little smear of blood on her chin and wondered if it was hers or the projectionist’s. It rattled me for a second, but it wasn’t going to stop me.

I swallowed. Opened my mouth.

Then the cashier stepped into the room, one finger jammed in her paperback so she wouldn’t lose her place. “I already called the cops.” She gasped, staring down at the projectionist. “Oh, Jesus. I’d better call an ambulance… ”

The district attorney went hard. The projectionist had quite a record, including a rape conviction, so there wasn’t much trouble about it, especially after he lost his head and threatened Anelle right in front of the judge. Anyway, the guy went off to prison. Fairly quickly, fairly quietly.

Anelle and I were minors, so our names were kept out of the papers. The little word that did leak out enhanced my reputation. Some girls saw me as a knight in shining armor. Pete and the other guys I hung out with thought I was a numero uno badass.

Personally, I think the projectionist would have had that heart attack even if I hadn’t touched him. After Anelle bit him the second time, it was pretty obvious that he was going to have to fight the both of us.

I think that scared the shit out of him.

After it was over, I figured things would work out just fine with Anelle. Sure, I hadn’t had a chance to tell her how I felt in the heat of the moment, and I wasn’t seeing much of her now because she’d quit her job at the theatre, but I figured that I’d have plenty of opportunities to set things right once school started.

My folks dragged me off on a two week vacation. Then it was September. The Jerry Lewis telethon came and went. I bought some new jeans and hit the books once again.

Anelle wasn’t in any of my classes. Pretty soon I discovered that she wasn’t in school at all. I didn’t ask anyone what had become of her, because I was afraid of the answer I might get.

I didn’t want to hear that Anelle’s mind had caved in.

I wanted to call her. I sat down and made a big list of things I wanted to ask her, and things she might reply, and things I could say after that. But none of it seemed real. Like I said, writing things down doesn’t work.

So I tried to pick up her trail. I spent a solid week of afternoons working on an old Chevy at the gas station. Anelle didn’t show, and Pete felt so guilty about me single-handedly rebuilding the Chevy’s engine that he actually paid me forty bucks. I spent my evenings at the library, practically sitting on top of the romance paperback rack.

No Anelle.

One night her mother showed up at the library. She was picking out nonfiction, mostly school assignment stuff. I worked up the courage to reintroduce myself — we’d met briefly at the projectionist’s trial. Trying not to seem overly anxious, I asked how Anelle was doing.

“As well as can be expected,” she said. “There’s been a lot of strain, both for Anelle and for the family.”

I asked when Anelle was coming back to school.

“She is in school. She transferred to the Catholic Academy. We thought a girls’ school would be better for Anelle, at least for the time being.”

I could tell that Mrs. Carney didn’t want to say more, so I left it at that.

The next day I cut class and waited for Anelle outside the Catholic Academy.

Funny. It was a Tuesday. Another big one.

The Tuesday I walked Anelle Carney home from school.

She came down the stairs and I started out like I always did, talking about music and movies and books, but that wasn’t what Anelle wanted to talk about.

She opened up to me that day, but looking back on it I think that she would have opened up to any familiar face. She said that she felt like she was the one who’d done something wrong. Her parents, especially her father, had turned into overprotective watchdogs. He’d insisted that she transfer to a girls’ school, and he’d taken her Pontiac away, too.

“Look at me,” she said, pointing at her plaid dress and knee socks. “He’s trying to turn me into a little girl. I’m not a little girl. It’s time for me to start cutting ties, and he’s just tying them tighter.”

In my head, I tried to twist that into some kind of opening, but everything I came up with seemed cliched. We were cutting through the cemetery, and I knew I had to say something soon if I was going to say anything at all.

I slowed my step as we approached her door. My mind slipped into neutral.

“Thanks for walking me home,” she said. “I really needed to talk to someone, and you’re such a good listener.”

I looked up, trying to smile, ready to tell her that she could talk to me any old time, but then I saw the thing rooted on the freshly mown lawn.

A “FOR SALE” sign.

That night I followed the red Pontiac, but this time I was following Anelle’s father.

Even though I’d never met Mr. Carney, I’d always figured that he was a pretty steady guy. He had a good family, a nice house, and a job that allowed him to buy a new car for his daughter on her sixteenth birthday. So it surprised me, how many bars Anelle’s dad hit that night. Not olive and onion bars, either — these were nasty joints out on the highway.

I didn’t know what to make of that. Maybe Mr. Carney had always been a drinker. Or maybe what had happened to Anelle was breaking him up inside.

Either way, the chances of me talking him out of moving seemed ridiculously long. After all, I was a sixteen-year-old kid. I couldn’t just belly up to the bar and buy the old boy a brew, now could I?

So I sat there in the Dodge, and I wrote Mr. Carney a letter. I told him how I felt about his daughter. It was eloquent stuff. I practically asked him for her hand, his blessing. Yep, I got it all down in writing.

It wasn’t hard to get into the Pontiac. Mr. Carney hadn’t locked the door. I figured I’d leave my letter on the dash, where he’d see it real easy.

There was only one problem with that.

Another letter lay on the dashboard.

It was from Mr. Carney’s boss, and it said that his transfer to the east coast was “a rock solid, incontrovertible, done deal.”

All my carefully considered words were nothing compared to that one-paragraph bombshell. I balled up my useless letter and shoved it into the pocket of my new jeans.

An hour later I was safe at home, cleaning brake fluid from under my fingernails.

I guess Anelle could handle her mom pretty well, because things got back to normal after her dad’s funeral. The red Pontiac had been wrapped around a telephone pole along with Mr. Carney, of course, but the insurance money bought Anelle a nice, sensible Volkswagen. The “FOR SALE” sign came down a week after Mr. Carney was laid to rest in the cemetery across the street — another good Tuesday for me — and I remember feeling that destiny was finally on my side.