Guardian Angel
18 Retribution
A BLACK CAR with the orange flames peeled around a corner and screeched to a stop in front of me just as I turned off of Quincy Lane on Friday morning. I’d only delivered the first couple blocks of my route. School had been going so well and I had such a swell girlfriend and friends that I’d ignored any contact with Kirby and his gang. But here they were, piling out of his car.
I tried to turn my bike around and run, but the load of papers slowed me down and before I got turned, one of them had grabbed me. They were prepared for what was happening—I wasn’t. They were all wearing ski masks, so I don’t know who threw the first punch. Or the second or third. By the time they started kicking me, my papers were in the ditch and I was curled in a ball beside the road. They all jumped in the car again and backed up over my bike before they tore out.
I woke up in the hospital. Some guy who had to go to work early in the morning saw my bike in the middle of the road and jumped out to move it. He saw me lying off to the side. I guess he ran to a neighbor’s house and they called an ambulance and the sheriff and then my parents. Everything hurt and when I opened my eyes I was crying. Mom and Dad and Rev. Gordon were there. Everything went dark again and I slept, I guess.
The next time I woke up, my right arm was in a cast. My hip and side hurt and my mouth felt all swollen. The sheriff was there with Mom and Dad. He asked me if I knew who beat me up. I told him it was Kirby and his gang, but they were all wearing ski masks. He asked how I knew it was them and I described the car. He nodded.
I was in the hospital all weekend. That night, Hannah and her family came to visit me. No one at school knew what happened—just that I was absent. My sweet girlfriend had been crying and Sarah held her. I was in pretty bad shape and could hardly say anything. Mom held a straw to the right side of my mouth so I could sip water. The left side hurt too much. Hannah came to the bedside when she saw I was awake. She took hold of my left hand. That didn’t hurt too much.
“I’ll deliver your papers for you while you’re… sick, Brian,” she said. “I want you to get better soon.”
“Is it safe?” Rev. Gordon asked my dad.
“They were arrested this afternoon,” Dad said. “But maybe we should follow along in the morning.”
“Hannah is very concerned,” her dad said, “so I won’t ask her not to help. It’s not our way. But I’d feel better about it if we kept an eye on her.” They went out into the hall and Mrs. Gordon joined them.
“You’re the best girlfriend,” I whispered to Hannah. “You’re the only person I could ever turn to for help like that. I mean except my parents,” I added as Mom snuffed a little. She smiled at us and went out to join the adults. Sarah came to that side of the bed.
“You really look bad,” she said.
“Gee, thanks.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I just meant that they really beat you up. Hannah has been crying ever since she got home from school and found out. Well, I guess I have too. I hope you’re not mad, but when I found out, I had to call Jessica. I was so upset. She’s my best friend and I know she’s your friend, too.”
“It’s okay. Thanks.” I was finding it hard to concentrate on anything Sarah was saying because Hannah was still holding my hand and kind of petting it. It was the only thing in my world that didn’t hurt. She didn’t say much else except to hurry and get well. Then visiting hours were over and everybody left. I kept flexing the fingers on my left hand trying to keep the feeling of her holding it.
A nurse came in about eight o’clock and found me crying. Not loud. I felt like a baby. I’d never felt really lonely before. And I hurt.
“Oh, Brian!” the nurse said when she saw me. “Didn’t anyone show you the button to call for help? You don’t have to wait for us to come around if the pain is too bad. Call me. I’m just a few steps down the hall and if you push this button, I’ll come running. Let’s get you something to make you more comfortable.”
I had to go to the bathroom and that wasn’t comfortable at all. I had to roll onto my left side and she had a kind of pitcher I had to pee into. Of course, just knowing she was holding that urinal over my cock made it start to get hard and then it got caught on the edge and flopped back when she pulled the pitcher away. My face was so hot, I knew I must be fire-engine red with embarrassment.
“Oh good!” she said. “It looks like all your plumbing works. I’m always worried when I see a young man in your condition that something might not work right. I’d say you’ll do fine.” I wondered how often she saw young men in my condition. But the pain medicine she gave me was having an effect, too, and boner or not, I was going to sleep.
“Jessica, please don’t tell anybody,” I pled. She’d come over as soon as I got home on Sunday afternoon and was sitting on my bed beside me. She was pissed.
“Why didn’t you tell me they were still pestering you?”
“They hadn’t done anything since that time on the school bus when the sheriff chased them. I thought it was all over,” I complained. “Jessica, if you tell a bunch of people, they’ll get in trouble. They could all get hurt, too. I don’t want my friends getting hurt because they think they need to protect me. What kind of a friend would that make me?”
“But Brian, you can’t carry ammonia around with you anymore. These guys are delinquents.”
“Yeah. And they’re in jail, right where they’re supposed to be.”
“Um… not exactly.”
“What?” She sat next to me on the bed and held my left hand between both of hers. It was kind of up against her tummy and I was getting distracted.
“That’s why I want you protected. They got out of jail yesterday and their parents took them home,” she said.
“How could they do that?”
“They must have planned it all out. Kirby called the sheriff’s office Friday morning at seven and told him he had just gone out to get in his car to go to school and discovered it had been stolen.”
“Stolen? He was in it when he attacked me,” I complained.
“But you told the sheriff that you couldn’t really identify them because they wore ski masks. All you could identify was the car that had already been reported stolen.”
“Oh crap!”
“Exactly.”
“Now it’s even more important that no one does anything, Jessica. Except maybe help watch out for Hannah when she delivers my papers if anyone can get up that early. Let me figure something out.”
“Brian, promise me you won’t try to do anything by yourself.”
“Jessica…”
“Put your hand on my heart and promise me.” Before I could respond, Jessica pulled my hand up under her shirt and put it right on her bare left breast.
“Um… I don’t think that’s exactly where your heart is, Jessica.”
“Can’t you feel it beating? Promise me, Brian. I know you’d never break a promise. Promise you won’t go after them by yourself.”
“I promise,” I said. I made no move to take my hand away from her wonderful soft breast and she didn’t try to move it. She stared into my eyes. “I want you to promise something, too, Jessica,” I whispered. I pulled at her hand with my right hand. It hurt a little, but Jessica got the message and slid her hand lightly up under my pajama shirt and placed it over my heart. As near to over as I was. “With our hands on each other’s hearts, promise me you’ll keep my friends from trying to get revenge. Promise you’ll make them wait for me.”
“I promise, I’ll try. They are already pretty upset. When they start hearing things on Monday they are all going to want to do something. I don’t know what you think you can do, but I’ll try to convince them to wait before they do something.” She leaned forward, pressing my hand more firmly against her breast. I squeezed it gently and felt her hard little nipple in my palm. She kissed me lightly on the right side of my mouth and all I could think of was how I wished I didn’t hurt and we were up in the hayloft.
By Tuesday when I got back to school, everybody knew. The first five and the front five confronted Kirby, but he played poor wronged innocent whose car had been used without his knowledge. “It wasn’t us,” he announced. Everyone knew otherwise, but there was no proof.
“How are deliveries going?” I asked Hannah at lunch.
“It’s a breeze. I can do them in forty-five minutes. I go early, though, so I can take a hot bath when I get home.” I was having trouble eating with my left hand and a bite of hotdog scooted halfway across the table when I tried to cut it with my fork. Hannah laughed. Whitney reached over from the other side and cut up the rest of my hotdog so I could get it and some beans on my spoon.
“Do you want us to feed you?” Brenda laughed just as beans dribbled down my chin. It was hard enough to eat left-handed, but the left side of my mouth was still cut and a little swollen. Getting food into the right side of my mouth with my left hand was a real challenge. My teeth were a little loose on that side, too, so I’d been eating mostly soft things at home yesterday. Fortunately, everything the lunch ladies cooked came out soft.
“See?” Hannah asked. “You’ve got a whole tableful of nurses. Now, who is going to help with notes in his classes?” That brought up another issue. I really couldn’t write left handed. Fortunately, there was at least one person at the table in each of my classes except chemistry.
“I want good notes,” I said. “The kind I let you copy, Lionel.” He grinned at me.
“I’m taking better notes now since you let me see how you did it. I won’t let you down.”
The bell rang and I headed for chemistry. The entire front five met me at the hall intersection and we walked to class together. I didn’t see any sign of Kirby or his gang.
“We’re going to take care of him,” Reggie growled as we sat down. We had lab, so we were allowed to talk to our partners and the other pairs at our table which meant the six of us were hunched over the table. I took a deep breath.
“I can’t measure anything,” I said. “I’ll read the instructions.” I pulled the text for the experiment to me and made like I was going to read. “Step one: Do nothing.” The five guys turned to look at me. They’d done okay in chemistry because in addition to being Reggie’s lab partner, I’d shared my lecture notes with all five of them.
“Little brother, we don’t let our own get bullied and you are one of us,” Reggie said. The others nodded but let Reggie spell it out.
“Listen to me, Reggie. You got that scholarship to Notre Dame. Rod, you’re going, too, aren’t you?” They’d recruited both our tackles and it was pretty well known who was going to what school. The other guys didn’t all have full scholarships, but they were going to good schools. “What happens if you get caught getting even with Kirby and his gang? They play the innocents who got beat up by the football team. What happens to your scholarships? Worse, what happens if you get convicted of a felony? You won’t get to play ball at all. They might not even let you go to the school. Step one in this experiment is to do absolutely nothing.” They were quiet as they considered what I’d said.
“Makes no difference,” Reggie said. “Can’t do nothing.”
“Of course not. I’ve got something for you to do.”
“What?”
“Step two: Give me your lecture notes from Friday and Monday.” George started coughing so much that Al had to whack him on the back a couple times. “That goes for you, too, Mr. Center. I’m gonna need all your notes in order to make one complete set.”
“Seriously, Brian. We can’t let them get away with this. They’ve got another year here and they’ll just prey on everybody who doesn’t stand up to them.”
“That’s exactly why you can’t do anything,” I said. “If you do something and then leave, next year they’ll just go after me twice as hard. I’ve got to be the one who stands up to them.”
“You’re little and you’re injured,” Al said.
“Yeah. Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?” It took me all of class to get them convinced to at least wait until I could come up with a solution. We had to come back after school to finish the experiment. Reggie drove me home.
The saying goes that revenge is a dish best served cold. I wasn’t interested in revenge, but I wasn’t going to let the bastards get away. Still, it was going to be a while before I could do anything. Being young, my bones healed quickly and in four weeks I had a lightweight partial cast on my arm instead of the fully immobilizing one. The doctor told me I needed to exercise it and suggested shooting baskets. I started throwing the ball at the rim for an hour each night. Gradually it got so I could actually hit the rim hanging above our garage door.
I couldn’t go back to delivering papers. I couldn’t ride a bike. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t have one. I walked the route with Hannah on Saturday morning to do collections and got to thinking that maybe I should quit carrying papers and give her the route. I’d have to find a different job, but Hannah really loved getting up early and delivering those papers.
I had to sign up for my freshman classes and they wouldn’t let me sign up for Home Economics. I liked cooking and wanted to learn more about it. The school insisted that Home Ec was a girls-only class and boys had to take drafting. My arguments were to avail. I was mostly in advanced placement classes, but I still had to take drafting and Phys Ed. Freshman requirements.
I got a phone call a few days after registration from my good old sixth grade English teacher, Miss Sullivan. She said that she’d heard I wanted to take Home Ec and asked me why. I told her about my cookbook and how much it was like chemistry and I wanted to learn more. I thought maybe she could pull some strings. What she did instead was ask me to take 4-H Foods. She was the leader for that section and if it didn’t work out for me to be in the same group with girls—too distracting, she said—then she’d make sure I had the full foods curriculum and exhibited at the fair. Well, it wasn’t the same, but it was pretty good.
“Take my gym bag after class,” I told Reggie. “Sorry about the stinky clothes. There are four canning jars in it. Don’t empty any of the containers in the storeroom. Fill a jar from each one so Mr. J doesn’t know it’s missing. Got it?”
“You know there’s enough?”
“He has four almost full cans in there,” I said. “Remember, only a quart from each one. And be careful not to spill it. It stinks. Put the lids on tight.” He nodded and took my bag.
I was in the back seat of his car when he and Rod and George met me after school. I had them drive out to the barn and took the jars into the tack room.
“So you’re sure this works?”
“It’s just science. Which means we should experiment. But carefully; some of this stuff is supposed to do the same thing to your skin that it does to a tire.” I took one jar and a couple rags out behind the barn. When you live in the country, sometimes things don’t get dragged to the dump. Like tires. We had half a dozen old tires out back because sometimes local farmers set them on fire to smoke out insects. It stunk, but a big wasp nest wasn’t likely to survive it. I set a tire on edge and poured some of the solvent, methyl ethyl ketone, over one edge of the tire. We waited.
“Nothing’s happening,” Rod said after about five minutes of shooting the bull.
“Yeah,” I said. “Might as well wipe it off.” I grabbed one of the rags and wiped the tire where I’d poured the solvent. A big glop of worn-out tread came off in my hand.
“Holy shit!” Rod yelled. “You couldn’t tell a thing.”
“The longer you leave it on, the softer the rubber gets,” I explained. “I read in Popular Science that they’re trying to figure out ways to recycle used tires and were experimenting with melting them with chemicals. They haven’t figured it all out yet, but this is one of the solvents they’re trying.”
“Okay, Brain Trust. You got me. What’s the plan?”
We set it up for Friday morning. I wanted no question about who was responsible for it in their mind. And I wanted them to know that it would get worse if they pursued me. I wasn’t counting on how well their own stupidity would work against them.
I was getting off the bus at school when Kirby did his usual peeling around the corner of the parking lot and sliding into ‘his’ parking space. I noticed there were only five in his gang now. Apparently, it got too violent for one of the girls and she transferred to a different school.
“Hey look! It’s Brain Freeze. I hear the little faggot wants to take Home Ec next year. Hey faggot! As soon as you can grow a beard and pull your teeth I’ll marry you!” His gang laughed.
“Did he just offer to marry your brother if he’d give him a blowjob?” Jessica asked Betts loudly as she got off the bus. “Doesn’t that make him the faggot?” There was a lot of laughter. Betts was clueless and looked like she was ready to panic. Jessica knew we had a plan. Kirby was speechless. No one ever goaded him back.
“What’s your car doing here, Moron?” I yelled. “I thought Fridays were the days it got stolen so you could beat little kids to a pulp.”
“Keep it up, twerp. Apparently once wasn’t enough.” There was a little gasp and people started pointing at Kirby. He realized he probably said too much and headed around to the back of the school, probably to smoke. Just before they got around the corner, he pulled his little gun trigger gesture at me. I no longer had any doubts.
“I’ve got to see my chemistry teacher at lunch today,” I told everybody as I grabbed a sandwich. “My lab team promised we’d have the analysis of our extra credit experiment done before class today.” We’d planned that one out, too. It was an extra credit project that our table took on. It would boost the guys’ grades by half a letter and that could spell a better financial package at college. I had ten minutes to get to his classroom. I was dragging my bag and it was heavy. It was a good thing I still had most of my muscles from delivering newspapers. Shooting baskets had helped, too. I was getting pretty good at it.
I slipped along the front of the parking lot and between the cars. I uncapped and poured an entire quart of solvent on each of his rear tires. I loved this part of the parking lot because there were potholes all over. He was sitting right down in one where the solvent pooled around the tires. I poured the other two quarts of solvent all over the custom paint job on his car. For good measure, I opened the gas tank and poured two pounds of sugar into it. I scrambled for the back of the kitchen where the cooks always tossed out the jars from the peaches they served on Fridays. I wiped down my jars with a rag and put them in a case with the others that would be taken back to the cannery. I wiped down the lids and put them in the dumpster with the rag. I was tearing down the empty high school hall when Reggie stepped around the corner and practically scared me to death.
“Mr. J sent me down to meet you,” he said. “Everybody’s talking about the way you taunted Kirby this morning. That was wicked.”
“It’s gonna get worse,” I grinned.
Our meeting with Mr. J went well. He looked at the results of our experiment and gave all six of us full marks. It was easy for me. I’d done soil testing two years ago at science camp. We’d done the experiment in my bedroom laboratory so everyone knew that the front five had been to my house to work together on this. Our alibis were all ironclad. I stayed in the classroom for the rest of the period while the five seniors went back to their usual classes. Apparently, seniors have to leave one class for another in the middle a lot during the last month of school. It was going to be nice to have a long weekend for Memorial Day when school finally got out this afternoon.
“Brian, rumor has it that you were taunting Kirby and his gang this morning,” Mr. J said. “That’s not healthy. You need to be careful. We haven’t been able to catch him at any of the things we all know he’s been up to and we have no doubt it was him that beat you up a couple of months ago.”
“Yeah. It was him. Mr. J, I’m not going to let him run my life out of fear. He’s got to know I won’t back down.” I turned and walked over to the classroom windows. “I see his car is back.”
“Back?”
“Yeah. Reggie warned me to watch out because his car was gone at lunch. It’s back now, so I guess no one stole it so they could beat me up.”
Mr. J came over to look out the window beside me. You could just see things clicking in his mind. He shook his head and chuckled. “I sure hope you pull this off,” he said.
“Me, sir? I’m not pulling anything off.” I was innocent as I could make believe.
Everybody stopped loading busses and heading for the parking lot when Kirby and his four buddies came out of the school and I yelled at him.
“Hey, Kirby! Who got beat up at lunch? I hear your car got stolen!” He ran down the stairs and looked over to his precious car.
“My car’s right where I left it this morning, twerp.”
“It was gone at lunch,” Reggie called. “I was delivering a package to Ms. Fergusson and saw it pulling out. Not supposed to leave school grounds in the middle of the day, Kirby.”
“I didn’t go anyplace.”
“See? Stolen then.” Kirby was looking worried now and they ran to his car. They got in and he started the engine. Everybody scattered. They knew how Kirby entered and exited the parking lot. You didn’t want to be in the way of the gravel. His engine roared to life and he spun his tires as the car came out of the parking spot and cut to the left. There were two big pops like gunshots and the back of the car went down as the rims hit the gravel. A second later, smoke came from under the hood as the engine froze. The five piled out of the car and Kirby came around the front running his hand across the hood. He froze and stared at the paint on his fingers. His cronies pushed off the side of the car and left four butt prints on the doors.
“My car! My paintjob. What did you do?”
“Must have been the guys who stole it,” I said stepping forward.
“Brian!” Betts yelled. She was actually ready to come to my rescue. Jessica pulled her back away from me. The entire school was circling around us, but it was just me facing off against the five of them. A couple teachers had appeared on the steps and the bus drivers were standing in their doors, but no one was moving to stop what would happen. I could hear a siren in the distance so I figured someone had called the sheriff.
“You sorry ass!” Kirby yelled. “I thought we taught you your lesson, but it looks like we’ll have to break the other arm, too.”
“You sure you want to face me without running me off the road first?” I asked. I pulled a plastic bottle out of my bag and tossed it in the air and caught it. “You know what happened to the Kowalskis?”
“They banned ammonia after that. If you’re carrying it you’ll go to jail.”
“I’m a chemist. There’s a lot of things the school hasn’t thought of banning yet.”
“Well, we can take care of that,” Kirby laughed. “Pull them and let’s take this bastard out once and for all.” As one, they reached up and pulled on the fold of their knit caps and rolled them down into black ski masks. The stupid bastards.
“Look!” I screamed. “It’s the five fuckers in ski masks who attacked me. That’s them!”
That was all the signal it took. The entire football team surrounded Kirby. Sirens and lights came rushing in to the school yard. The sheriff pushed his way through the crowd and I heard Jessica’s voice yell out, “We all heard it. They admitted they beat up Brian a couple months ago and threatened to break his other arm.”
In a couple of minutes, I felt Mr. J’s hand on my shoulder.
“The principal has asked me to examine the contents of your squirt bottle,” he said. “May I have it please.”
“Of course, sir,” I said. I tipped the bottle up and squirted a stream into my mouth. “I’ve been getting awful thirsty with my mouth still healing. The doctor suggested I carry a water bottle.” I handed it to him. He laughed.
“You went to a lot of work to get your revenge, Brian.”
“Revenge is petty, Mr. J. But my parents taught me that you can never let a dog bite twice.”
“Ah. Justice?”
“That’s up to the court. This is retribution.”
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