Boys Life

went in and started plucking the wads of cotton open. “Hey, man!” he said to Gordo. “Look what squawboy’s got! Arrowheads!”
    “Why don’t you leave us alone?” Davy Ray asked. “We’re not botherin’-”
    “Shut your hole, dickhead!” Gotha shouted at him, and Gordo got up grinning, their brotherly hate forgotten for the moment. Both of them started going through the collection of arrowheads, their fingers grasping and gripping; I would’ve hated to see what dinnertime at the Branlin household was like.
    “Those are mine,” Johnny said.
    Words had never stopped the Branlins before, and they didn’t now. “They belong to me,” Johnny said, sweat glistening on his cheeks.
    This time, something in Johnny’s voice made Gotha look up. “What’d you say, niggernuts?”
    “They’re my arrowheads. I… I want ’em back.”
    “He wants ’em back!” Gordo crowed.
    “You little pussies tried to get us in trouble, didn’t you?” Gotha’s right hand was full of arrowheads. “Went cryin’ to the sheriff and tried to get our dad mad at us, too. Didn’t you?”
    This tactic did not sway Johnny’s attention. “Give ’em to me,” he said.
    “Hey, Gotha! I think squawboy wants his fuckin’ arrowheads!”
    “Why don’t you guys-” I began, but just that quick Gordo was in my face and he grabbed a handful of my shirtfront and pressed me up against the fence.
    “Little pussy.” Gordo made smacking noises. “Little pussy queer.”
    I saw Rocket’s golden eye in the headlamp, there for just an instant, taking in the situation, then gone.
    “Here’re your arrowheads, squawboy,” Gotha said, and he threw the ones he held across the dusty playground. Johnny trembled, as if he’d been hit by a crosscurrent of winds. He watched Gotha’s hand winnow into the box, come up again, and throw arrowheads away as if they were worthless chips of stone.
    “Pussy, pussy, pussy!” Gordo chanted, and he laid his wiry forearm across my neck. His nose was running, and he smelled like engine oil and burnt barbecue.
    “Quit it,” I gasped. His breath was no perfume from France, either.
    “Woo-woo, woo-woo!” Gotha started giving Indian whoops as he tossed Johnny’s collection away. “Woo-woo, woo-woo!”
    “Cut it out!” Davy Ray shouted.
    And then Gotha’s fingers came up gripping an arrowhead that was smooth and black and almost perfectly formed. Even Gotha could tell that this one was special, because he paused in his pride of meanness and looked closely at it.
    “Don’t,” Johnny said with a note of pleading.
    Whatever Gotha might be seeing in the black arrowhead of Chief Five Thunders, it was a passing vision. He reared his arm back, his fingers opened, and the arrowhead took flight. It spun up and up and fell into the grass and weeds near the trash dumpster, and I heard Johnny grunt as if he’d been punched.
    “What do you think about that, squaw-” Gotha began; he didn’t finish it, because in the next second Johnny had made one limp and a leap between them and Johnny’s fist came up in a blur and smacked dead solid into Gotha Branlin’s chin.
    Gotha staggered, blinked, and a wave of pain passed over his face. Then his tongue flicked out, and there was blood on it. He threw aside the tackle box and said, “You’re dead, niggernuts!”
    “Get him, Gotha!” Gordo shouted.
    Johnny shouldn’t be fighting. I knew this, and I knew he did, too. The Branlin fists had put him in the hospital once. He still suffered an occasional dizzy spell, and he wasn’t nearly equal to Gotha Branlin’s size. “Run, Johnny!” I shouted.
    Johnny was through running.
    Gotha came at him swinging. A fist caught Johnny’s shoulder and knocked him back, and Johnny dodged a fist to his face and slammed his own punch into Gotha’s ribs.
    “Fight! Fight!” somebody among the few kids who were left on the field started hollering.
    I shoved Gordo back with all my strength. Gordo put out a hand to steady himself, and his fingers gripped Rocket’s handlebars. “Shit!” he screamed suddenly, and he wrung his hand and stared at his fingers. Blood was showing on the pad of flesh between his thumb and index digit. “ Bastard bit me!” I imagine he had been cut by a screw, or an edge of metal, though I would later search Rocket and find no protruding screw or metal edge. Gordo twisted around and kicked Rocket, and that’s when Five Thunders spoke to me.
    He said, as he’d said to Johnny: Enough.
    I