Boys Life

out, making Gotha strike air again and again. When Gotha roared with rage and rushed in, the smaller boy dodged aside and Gotha tripped over his own feet and fell headlong, scraping his bruised chin raw over the pebbly ground. He got up again, his arms heavy. Again he attacked, and once more Johnny eluded him, using his clubfoot as Pan might twist and turn on a hoof. “Stand still!” Gotha gasped. “Stand still, you niggerblood!” His chest was heaving, his face as red as a beef chunk.
    “All right,” Johnny said, his nose bleeding and a gash across his cheekbone. “Come on, then.”
    Gotha charged him. Johnny feinted to the left. Davy Ray would say later that it was like watching Cassius Clay in action. When Gotha shifted to meet the feint, Johnny put everything he had into a haymaker that caught Gotha’s jaw and snapped his head around. Ben said that was when he’d seen Gotha’s eyes roll up and go white. But Johnny had one more thunder in him; he stepped forward and hit Gotha in the mouth so hard everybody heard two of Johnny’s knuckles pop like gunshots.
    Gotha made no noise. Not even a whimper.
    He just fell like a big dumb tree.
    He lay there, drooling blood. A front tooth slid from his lips, and then Gotha started shaking and he began to cry in hard, angry silence.
    Nobody offered to help him. Somebody laughed. Somebody else sneered, “Gonna go cryin’ home to his momma!”
    Ben clapped Johnny on the back. Davy Ray grabbed his shoulder and said, “You showed him who’s tough, didn’t you?”
    Johnny pulled loose. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, which Dr. Parrish would be splinting soon for the two broken knuckles. Johnny’s parents would give him hell. They would finally understand why he’d spent so much time in his room alone, over the long hot summer, reading a book that had cost three dollars and fifty cents from a mail-order publisher and had the title Fundamentals of the Fight by Sugar Ray Robinson.
    “I’m not so tough,” Johnny replied, and he leaned down beside Gotha and said, “You want some help?”
    I, however, did not have the benefit of Sugar Ray’s experience. I only had Rocket beneath me and Gordo a relentless pursuer, and when Rocket suddenly turned with a whip of the handlebars and started onto a trail into the woods, I feared I was fast approaching the last roundup.
    Rocket refused the brake, refused my frantic tugging on the handgrips. If my bike had gone crazy, I had to get off. I tensed to jump for the underbrush.
    But then Rocket burst out through the trees and there was a big ditch right in front of us full of weeds and garbage and with a burst of speed that made the hair stand up on my scalp Rocket took flight.
    I think I screamed. I know I wet my pants, and that I hung on so tightly my hands ached for days afterward.
    Rocket leaped the ditch and came down on the other side with an impact that cracked my teeth together and made my spine feel like a bowstring that had just been snapped. The jump was too much for even Rocket; the frame thrummed, the tires skidded on a mass of leaves and pine needles, and we went down all tangled up together. I saw Gordo tear along the path toward me, and his face contorted with terror when he saw the ditch yawning for him. He hit the brake, but he was going too fast to stop in time. His black bike slid on its side, and carried Gordo with it as it toppled over into the weeds and trash.
    The ditch wasn’t all that deep. It wasn’t full of thorns, or sharp rocks. Gordo really had a soft landing amid thick green three-leafed vines and a hodgepodge of things: pillows with the stuffing spilling out, garbage can lids, empty tin cans, a few aluminum pie pans, socks and torn-up shirts, rags, and the like. Gordo thrashed around in the green vines for a minute, getting himself loose from the black bike. He was none the worse for wear. He said, “You wait right there, you little shithole. You just wait right-”
    He screamed suddenly.
    Because something was in the ditch with him.
    He had landed right on top of it, as it had been eating the last of a coconut cream pie stolen from the sill of an open kitchen window less than ten minutes before.
    And now Lucifer, who did not care to share his den of trash-can treasures, was very, very angry.
    The monkey squirted up out of the vines and jumped Gordo, its teeth bared and its rear end spraying forth a nasty business.
    Gordo fought for his life. The vicious monkey took plugs of flesh