I
first met Boy Luttrell as we were cartwheeling to our deaths down the
limestone bluffs that stand guard over the Osage River outside of Ambrosia,
Missouri. I caught ragged glances on the way down of Boy's torn grey
sweatshirt. It kaleidoscoped with sycamore leaves and redbud saplings and
the delicate yellow flowers of wood sorrel that squeezed its tenuous life
from the wisps of dirt and moisture trapped among the rocks. Now and then I
glimpsed the berry brown water of the river as it rushed up to meet us. I
got too dizzy to be certain which image fit exactly where, so I just grabbed
at everything, hoping for a purchase without thorns or knife edges. My left
hand tangled in the frayed rips of Boy's jeans while my right closed around
the slippery bole of a young sycamore that grabbed back at me for the merest
fraction of a second before casting me off. It stemmed gravity's tide only
long enough to separate my right side from my left by perhaps a millimeter
more than nature intended. Tears stung my eyes as I fought and failed to
hold on to both the sapling and the bluejeans. Grainy limestone chewed on my
forearms and back, welling up streaks of crimson that blended with greens
and beige and blonde and the murky berry brown of the river to make me
wonder if death would be beautiful or just painful.
The
plunge ended short of death and the river on Boy's ravaged arm and a stunted
red cedar that left its calling card on my crotch and its needles in my
underwear. Boy had snagged a bloody knee around the lichen crusted root of
an oak stubble, its aspirations for treehood stored in leaves broader than
its trunk, and dug five mangled toes into a mushy pocket of decaying leaves
and moss that passed for soil on the rock face. I released the arm for
better purchase on a limestone outcropping and looked through sweat soaked,
bleary eyes at the dirty face of my benefactor to discover that the river
was not getting closer, that life would not, after all, end at eleven and
that Boy was, in fact, a girl.
She
was twelve then, her grime streaked face framed by stiff, short blonde hair
and highlighted by penetrating, sky blue eyes that reached out and gripped a
witness with such power as to make the rest of her face seem like an
afterthought. It was her eyes that gave her away. She was tough and strong
and athletic, as mean as a cornered copperhead, could swear with guys who'd
never seen the inside of a church or a bathroom, who'd never used bathroom
tissue or nail clippers or a napkin, but those eyes, as fierce and cutting
as they could sometimes be, fit only in the face of a girl. They were almond
shaped, brooding over a nest of freckles that straddled an upturned nose and
ran away toward high cheekbones, leaving stragglers to wander into the
corners of those captivating eyes.
"You
little pissant," she hissed at me through clenched teeth as she
struggled to secure her hold on the near vertical face of the bluff,
dispelling any notion I might have entertained for just a heartbeat of
treating her like a girl. "You coulda got us both killed."
"It
weren't my fault. String dropped a rock on my head. It durn near knocked me
out. I got too dizzy to hold on. I didn't know you was below me. I didn't
know you was even here. Who the hell are you anyway?"
Directness,
undiluted by tact or compassion, is a common trait of the young, and their
most enduring curse and virtue. I and every one of my peers, at that age at
which I found myself clinging like a tick to flypaper halfway down a rocky
hill that had been carved in two by a river that waited below to do the same
for me, could address ourselves to anyone in any manner without fear of
cutting up their feelings. Not that we didn't frequently do so, or that our
victims, including each other, did not suffer for it, but awareness is the
precursor of conscience, and little of the former and none of the latter had
yet intruded upon our lives after eleven summers.
String
Pendleton, whose ambitious choice of a stone with which to announce his
presence above me had introduced me to Boy, was my best friend, which will
give you some idea of how everybody else treated me. He was nearly six feet
tall, with a Roman nose and prominent Adam's apple being his most
distinguishing features, and a regrettable tendency, of which I was victim
on that and many other days, to speak or act long before thinking. I knew
the rock he dropped on my head could not have been meant to kill me, else he
would have had to begin planning the deed some days in advance and someone
would have had to cue him at the right moment, for he would have let it pass
by as he did most of life. That someone could have been Pivot, String's
fraternal twin, who was a head shorter and half a head smarter than his
brother, who also climbed somewhere among the goat paths above me on the
rock face that day, who was known far and wide and nicknamed for his
penchant for turning brusquely on his right heel whenever he wanted to
change direction, any direction, and who was already, at eleven, displaying
the pimply face and cracking voice of adolescence that the rest of us
yearned for and dreaded. String was not named for his build, as appropriate
as that would have been, but for his love of stringbeans, a vegetable whose
shape and complexion he just happened to resemble. I spent a good deal of
time defending String from the cruel ministrations of his stronger, meaner
brother, only to be rewarded late on a late summer's day with a thoughtless
rock that sent me and a hard eyed girl I hadn't known existed tumbling
toward a berry brown oblivion.
"I
seen you guys comin' out this way on your bikes," she explained to me
as we minced our way with much pain and hard breathing back to the goat
paths we'd fallen from. No one I knew of ever claimed to have seen goats on
those bluffs; wild ones certainly had disappeared from the Ozark foothills
(though they are not properly "foot" hills since there are no true
mountains for them to be the "feet" of, only sedimentary mounds
pushed up by tectonics and time to form the diminutive Ozark
"Mountains" of which these scrub cedar, sycamore and tick infested
hills could be considered feet) long before we came to trade our blood for
cedar needles, but goat paths they were called then and now, a propos,
perhaps, of nothing at all. "I just moved here from Springfield,"
she spat out at me between gasps and rocks
and hillside debris, but none of her perfect, white teeth. "They kicked
me outta school down there ‘cause I put a old, dried up cow pattie in a
teacher's file cabinet. Don't know how they knew it was me. Don't much
matter anyway, I guess. I weren't passing none of my classes. They woulda
held me back again. I sure didn't want to go to school this fall with that
bunch of geeks comin' up behind
me. I expect I'll start over here and not be in trouble so much. What's your
name, Wienie? That little cedar tree 'bout made a girl outta you, didn't
it?"
"Lucas,"
I told her. "Lucas Voss." But from that day forward until one
strange and stormy night three years later, she called me Wienie. At that
age I had neither the physique nor the bearing to evoke either admiration or
derision, or even notice, from the community into which I blended with
anonymity that was only occasionally lonely. My hair was the mousy brown
that children's hair so often settles for as it struggles for its real
identity, while my eyes were the steel grey color that reflected nature's
indecision as to which and how many of my parents' genes would get involved.
Boy and I were the same height, though I would have sworn she was taller. I
was a typical pre-adolescent in search of a personality.
Two
seconds after we pulled ourselves over the lip of the bluff to safety, she
was slapping String's face and kicking his rear end for dropping that rock
that propelled us down the rock face. I went to his defense as I always did,
and then Pivot came to mine as she pummeled and nearly pushed me over the
cliff again. Hindered, if only slightly, by the natural aversion to striking
a girl shared by even the most barbarous of pubescent boys, a standard to
which we only occasionally aspired, we were no match for her ferocity. We
discovered that day, in one of those personal, private, losing bouts with
cold reality, why she was called Boy. She whipped us all into a groaning
heap and then stepped on what was left of us. We couldn't help but admire
her.
We
became that day the closest thing rural Missouri was likely to have to a
juvenile gang, though no one called us that in those days. Kids were
inclined to travel in clusters then as now, most content to revolve like
dark planets around a star whose personality overpowered their own, content
to reflect light while yet they had none of their own. We were one of the
few clusters that sought out or created trouble, and in that sense were the
herald of a new social order whose growth rate, thankfully, was slower than
ours. We were known as "that Luttrell bunch," Luttrell being Boy's
last name and we being somewhat just more than her shadows. Had we known the
word minions, we would not have liked it applied to us, though we could not
have escaped from her orbit to avoid the label. She laid on us late in an
August afternoon a grip of durable metal that did not so much break three
years later as it just melted away in the heat of four innocent hearts grown
too warm with the friction of real life ever to touch each other in the same
old ways again.
In
the days of my life before the era of Boy Luttrell, Pivot, String and I
comprised one of many clusters of friends so nondescript as to make little
enough impression on one another and none at all on the vast, uncaring world
we used each other to struggle through. We were not the caliber of friends
that asked each other difficult questions and gave each other honest answers
we didn't want to hear, though perhaps that would have been a lot to ask of
friends of any caliber at that age. The one and only mutual service we
rendered was to support each other against a hostile environment, to
contrive or connive or just lie for one another in pursuit of an existence
we could understand without the stress and pain of deep thought, and which,
upon occasion, and in defiance of a seemingly organized and planetwide
effort to prevent it, we might enjoy. To that end, and to the dismay of our
parents, all of whom saw their own children as blameless if endlessly trying
victims of the pernicious influence of others, we spent a great deal of time
together. Before the days of Boy Luttrell, we were flotsam on a tepid sea,
struggling to keep from slipping below the surface in the estimation of our
peers and, I regret to report, our parents.
I
have never blamed my parents for my failures, so numerous and predictable as
to become routine, one of the few constituents of my early years that I
could count on to lend stability to my life, but I do believe they blamed
themselves. My mother was inclined to wring her hands frequently in my
presence and to sigh deeply, somewhat asthmatically, in response to almost
everything I said or did. I do not believe now, as I did then, that it was a
manifestation of disappointment so much as it was of expectations fulfilled.
She often told me, more wistfully than hopefully, that I had so much more
ability than I ever used, a mantra often repeated by my teachers, more
wishfully than objectively, with no justification that they ever showed me
or that I ever saw. Every visit by Pivot and String to my house, and there
were many, was confirmation to my mother that I could not climb above my
station with two albatrosses around my neck. She fretted about it
continuously and, on occasion, complained to my father in my presence, but
never took any direct action, for fear, I suspect, of depriving me of the
only friends I was likely ever to have and who did, after all, make me look
good by comparison.
In
any case my mother was not an effective decision-maker. It is a
characteristic common to those who fear the consequences of life less than
being blamed for them. She tolerated better the effects of other people's
decisions than she did their opinions of hers, so she became a sort of
avocational critic, pointing out the inadequacies of other people's lives
without actually living one herself. Poised perpetually to leap on others'
mistakes, she was nevertheless careful never to point them out to the people
who made them. That spared her the onerous, and sometimes dangerous task of
defending her judgments and herself from their reactions. No matter whom her
vitriol was aimed at, it was likely to splash on me if I were present to
catch it, so I endeavored not to be whenever I could help it. That left my
father to bear the brunt of it, which he did stoically for the most part,
until such time as the dam burst and spilled the reservoir on me, usually in
the form of a leather belt or peach tree switch lashed across the backs of
my legs for some offense I probably committed but could not associate with
any particular whipping.
My
father saw the need for punishment of misbehavior but not the need to
connect the two. If I were to devote enough time to catalog all of the
errors I committed and the punishments I received prior to that epiphany, or
series thereof in my case, that heralds the age of responsibility, I suspect
the books would have balanced nicely, though I doubt that I could associate
with any degree of certainty any one punishment with any one error. My
father's accounting skills were not that precise, nor did he see any need
for them to be. The result was that I was punished often enough to give vent
to my father's frustration but not predictably enough to change my behavior.
My father and I were trapped in a cycle of fear and frustration, of crime
and punishment, from which there seemed no escape until Boy entered my life.
She involved me in so many misdeeds, each so closely on the heels of the
last, that any time my father chose to whip me for whatever reason, the
punishment was certain to appear justified. I saw reason and order in my
father's behavior even when there wasn't any, a delusion every parent needs
from his children. It saved our relationship.
I
enjoyed having String and Pivot over, though we spent little time near the
house, because my parents both belonged to a tradition that demanded
solicitous treatment of guests whether they were welcome or not. We ate
better and fought less in the presence of company, and Dad was less likely
to rip into me in front of witnesses. I invited Pivot and String to my home
as a defense against my father, and they came in hopes of seeing it fail.
Being
twins of the fraternal variety, Pivot and String were no more closely
related than any other siblings, yet people invariably expected them to act
alike as well as look alike while they steadfastly did neither. If nature
sets a limit on the intelligence, judgment and assertiveness allocated per
birth, and if multiple births are not expected to share those equally, then
Pivot and String must have been confused with triplets, the third member
having acquired the bulk of those qualities and, having assessed in some way
his siblings before birth, chose to forego the procedure and consign himself
instead to some version of oblivion that he found preferable to life with
Pivot and String. I was ordained by circumstance to take his place.
Pivot
was the more likely of the two to express an opinion, and therefore the most
likely to be wrong. He had a quicker temper and a stronger tendency to
express it violently. He discovered early in life that String was a natural
and proximate target, and that other targets were more likely to hit back,
so String became his frequent punching bag and I String's frequent protector
-- until the day Boy appeared on the goatpaths overlooking the Osage to
change the pecking order and make it all immaterial.
We
spent the next three years following Boy into trouble, albeit not the sort
that left visible scars on anyone or endangered the public health and
welfare of the otherwise tranquil community of Ambrosia. Like the denizens
of most river towns of that day, people in my hometown were slow to get
exercised over anything that didn't affect them directly. Summers were long,
drawn out, sticky and too lazy to allow any but the very young to draw more
breath than living absolutely required. Heat crawled into the Missouri River
valley like the stench off bad ideas and lay there, unsympathetic and
unmoving, from June to September. Its vapors wrapped around our lungs. Its
tendrils crept into our brains and pushed into some inaccessible corner the
thought of any activity that wasn't life sustaining or, if you were a kid, a
bit of fun stained with meanness. Boy proved to be an expert at sticking a
needle just far enough under people's skins to draw out exasperation. They'd
swear at us and make threats and close their eyes against the heat, the
swimming air above asphalt and concrete carrying away their anger before
they got the law involved, leaving behind an itching irritation that usually
brought on a headache they'd have until the September evenings cooled it
off.
Winters
in Ambrosia bit hard with cold and the snow it squeezed out of the air above
the river. We who were young and lived for spring confined our restless
spirits under heavy coats and sock caps until the rising river and exploding
leaves signaled a return to adventure, though on occasion the pressure of
our throttled, impish natures leaked into the hallowed halls of Ambrosia
Middle School, whereupon our misdeeds brought us to the attention of Mr.
Burrows, our middle school principal, affectionately known as Zombie for his
buoyant nature or, less often, Chromedome for the polished gleam of his bald
head. As a disciplinarian he made slower progress than the small, black ants
that endeavored to scratch away the stone and brick school building to
replace it completely with the sandy mound of their expanding home. They
would build an anthill of mythic proportions, one to take its rightful place
among the other Ozark Hills, years before Zombie would succeed in turning
the Luttrell bunch into the models of comportment he innocently believed
dwelt latent in the depths of all of us. Like all inveterate optimists he
suffered from a peculiar astigmatism in which the brain confuses what it
sees with what it wants and is perpetually confounded by sincerity
masquerading as honesty.
It
was in early September, three years after we pooled our blood and resources
on the bluffs above the river, that Boy decided that our freshman year of
high school should augur in a new era of
mischief and mayhem, and that we should open the year with some prank
destined for legend, a harbinger of greatness to come, a challenge to all
who valued their reputations as miscreants and malcontents to find the
courage to top this. She chose as her target, for reasons she would not
share with us, Miss MaryEllen Trentshaw, our American history teacher.
Miss
Trentshaw had been molded from the stuff of adolescent dreams of prurient
gratification. She was tall, statuesque and prone to wear skirts shorter
than the puritanical climate of a public school of that era was likely to
approve of, though still too long to satisfy the demanding fashion sense of
the boys in her classes. Our pencils hit the floor with tedious regularity
whenever she sat down, as picking them up gave us treasured opportunities to
peek up her skirt. The hot, oppressive days of waning September coaxed Miss
Trentshaw into her seat so often that the clatter of pencils sounded like a
hailstorm. Lucky and roundly congratulated was the boy who could identify on
any given day the correct color of her underwear. Girls in our class became
so annoyed with the ritual that they took to stepping on the hapless fingers
of anyone who dropped a pencil on the floor while the teacher was in her
seat. Boys who'd never been in a fight in their lives sported bruised
knuckles.
Boy,
who never wore skirts or in any other way advertised her gender, had just
that summer begun wearing baggy sweatshirts or loose denim shirts with
overalls regardless of the weather. She patted the chest of the overalls she
wore that day as she explained our small parts in the operation. She carried
something there she didn't want anyone to see, but she wouldn't reveal it or
explain its part in the plan. It wasn't that she didn't trust us -- we who
would have followed her unquestioningly into a burning building had she but
ordered it -- but she knew our limitations. On the day of our attack on the
unsuspecting Miss Trentshaw, Boy reached across the aisle and knocked my
pencil to the floor. When I leaned over to pick it up, sneaking the
obligatory peek at the teacher as I did, Boy hit me across the back of the
neck hard enough to upend me out of my desk. It hurt no more than a hundred
other like blows she had delivered to or about my head in the three years of
our somewhat brutal acquaintance; on occasion I had fought back only to take
a thorough thrashing reminiscent of that first meeting on the bluffs, but
Boy never held my ill-considered revolts against me, and so I reasoned that
it was only right that I not hold it against her for suppressing them in the
manner she did.
The
only part of Boy's plan she had shared with String, Pivot and me came later,
so the blow to my medulla and my ego was entirely unexpected.
The class laughed hysterically as I got to my feet, still reeling,
and stumbled across several sets of feet on my way back to the floor. Miss
Trentshaw helped me to my feet and back to the stability of my seat. I
cursed myself for not feigning a more serious injury, which would have
allowed me to stay longer on the floor enjoying the sight of Miss Trentshaw
standing over me. It was only one of a long list of oversights with which my
early adolescence was plagued. Hardly a day of that part of my life passed
without the nagging certainty that I had missed some opportunity that would
never present itself again. Miss Trentshaw tossed her long, auburn hair as
she stood and flashed her green, angry eyes at the rest of the class. They
fell silent immediately -- there is nothing so captivating as sexuality in
turmoil -- and she turned her attention to Boy.
"Miss
Luttrell, that was completely uncalled for. Lucas did nothing to bother you,
and you had no right to hit him like that. Go take your seat on the dunce
stool. I'll deal with you after class." Miss Trentshaw's indignation
did nothing to mitigate the prim propriety of her manner.
She never tired of reminding us that part of her job was to civilize
our behavior as she educated our minds. Though we could not have testified
to the success of either effort, she never allowed our boorishness, our
determined ignorance, to shake her resolve or detract from the model of cool
professionalism she always presented. Boy lowered her head not quite enough
to hide the contemptuous smile that was an habitual accessory to her school
wardrobe. I knew enough of her plan to know that the dunce stool was
precisely where she wanted to be.
It
is, and has always been, an almost universal failing among the teaching
species that they believe the model of civilized behavior they display for
their classes will insinuate its way into their malleable psyches in such
manner and to such degree as to undermine or supplant, whichever is
appropriate, the parental model which has proved so inadequate over a period
of years, and for which their children have developed one degree or another
of contempt. As the disciples of cold, hard reality that children inevitably
are, they understand and respect pure force, naked and irresistible, and
virtually none other of the complex
machinations directed at them by adults. Force is the argument kids use on
each other, and the only one which routinely works, until such time as it is
partially supplanted, at least among the male gender, by sex. Miss Trentshaw
was better qualified to capitalize on the latter than the former, had she
been so inclined and had she found some way to fire the weapon without being
destroyed by it. I never saw any evidence that she was consciously tempted
to exercise that option, or even that she was aware of it, though I have no
doubt she could have had our testicles in a china cup had she only passed
one around. She could not have influenced Boy that way, of course, though
she could certainly have deprived her most determined antagonist of any
support personnel with the merest sway of her hips, a feather touch of
fingertips or a hint of a wink. No threat of force Boy could have mustered
would have kept us from jumping ship. But Trentshaw was either ignorant of
the extent of her arsenal or loath to use it, and so she relied on the same
weapon Boy used so effectively: force. Unlike her sexuality, however, she
didn’t have nearly enough of it.
Outside
the window of our room, a construction crew was doing repair work on the
roof of the building. The clangs and clatters of their efforts to hold the
old mausoleum together were the constant companions of our cerebrations,
such as they were, for a period of some years. However, to say that the
racket detracted from the quality of our education was to assume facts not
in evidence. A long platform was attached by ropes to a huge pulley bolted
to the roof. The permanence of that arrangement testified to the character
of our building and to the tempered resignation with which all public
institutions of learning view their future. Every few minutes the platform
would ascend slowly out of sight ferrying lumber, tar paper and other
supplies to the workmen above. In some classes along that hall, the slow
motion yo-yo of the platform provided welcome respite from the tedium of a
monotonous lecture, though that was not an issue in Miss Trentshaw's class,
at least not for the boys. We heard neither the lecture nor the platform,
though the noise of its creaking, jangling climb helped mask what Boy was
doing from those in class of the feminine persuasion who were likely to be
less interested in Miss Trentshaw's anatomy than in her history, as she sat
hunched over on the stool next to the open window. I saw her pull a brass
hook about three inches long from inside her overalls. That was followed by
what appeared to be a length of clothesline or other fine rope, but I
couldn't be sure. Boy's only instructions to us had been, "When the fur
starts to fly, get the door closed and the shades drawn as fast as you
can."
After
what seemed an inordinately long time, Boy straightened up from covert
operations in the vicinity of her lap and looked at me with the kind of
fierce glee I had come to associate with trouble. As Miss Trentshaw paced
near her, Boy glanced quickly back and forth from the teacher to the
platform that hovered outside the window. She seemed to be trying to time
something or to make up her mind. Eventually she just settled back on the
stool and waited. Boy could exercise infinite patience at times like this,
probably because she hoarded all that she refused to spend on me and any and
all others who were slow to divine her intentions or bend to her will. Five
minutes later Miss Trentshaw again walked between Boy and the rest of the
class. This time when Boy looked out the window, she saw the platform on its
way up. She quickly pulled out from her overalls a loop she had tied in the
end of the rope. Casually, as if from much practice, she tossed the loop out
the window to lasso the end of a two-by-four on its way to the workers
above. The other end of the rope was tied to the hook which, with a smooth
and silent bow, she deftly pierced the hem of Miss Trentshaw's dress as she
passed by. It took only seconds for the ascending rope to pull the teacher's
dress up to midthigh. The uncertain feel of the gliding garment was the
first hint she had that something was dreadfully wrong.
The
class began to react just as Miss Trentshaw did. They pointed and gaped;
some laughed, but no one got up to help. Boy's intimidating glare soured any
milk of human kindness that might have leaked unbidden from any of the girls
in class, adolescent boys being known to lack the required gland entirely.
As Pivot, String and I jumped up to close the door and pull the shades, the
tension on the rope increased enough to pop half a dozen buttons off the
back of Miss Trentshaw's dress. She fought it valiantly, trying at once to
hold the hem down so as not to reveal herself to the panting, hopeful mob in
the room with her, and to disengage the stubborn hook. But as so often
happens to soldiers who fight battles on two fronts, she lost them both. The
rapidly steepening angle of the rope's ascent pulled the hem of the dress
above her waist. The expanse of golden skin, exposed as it was on that part
of the female form most cherished by us who, on a good day, could only dream
of such a cornucopia, and revealing as it did the figure of this object of
our most durable and erotic fantasies, held us, rigid and sweating, its
willing captives. The class fell silent as a tomb as they watched
open-mouthed while the dress crawled up to the struggling teacher's neck and
yanked completely free. She
stood there petrified, a study in sensual terror, in underwear whose total
surface area would not have exceeded that of my hand, a comparison I was
eager to substantiate directly. That same plan hatched in the libidinous
minds of ten other boys simultaneously, along with a clear intent to execute
it, an intent that couldn't have been more obvious to the desperate Miss
Trentshaw. The girls who finally rushed to her aid got there in time to
catch her as she fainted. Boy solemnly shook hands with her gang, sat back
down on the stool, and calmly waited for the eye of the hurricane.
Though
Boy was the consummate tactician, it may have been that she overlooked the
fact that the pliable Mr. Burrows was no longer our principal. The high
school principal was almost as new to the system as we were, so we'd had no
experience with him, no rumors even upon which to base our expectations.
Boy's wealth of experience with others of his species may have tempted her
into an unwarranted complacency. When we were called to his office, we
sauntered in, as we had Mr. Burrow's office fifty times before, with the air
of self-satisfaction that school principals are so fond of in students. The
secretary introduced us to Mr. Bile, a man who personified irony much better
than he recognized it. Boy stiffened, her hands on hips in her most defiant
posture, her lip curled into her best condescending sneer. As Mr. Bile began
to speak, her bored gaze drifted around the room, touching upon everything
there except the principal. Whether she was listening to him or not, I
couldn't say, but I was. The more I heard, the more I felt the earth tilting
downhill. All of its really hard, heavy and sharp-edged components were
rushing down from behind and above me to impale me at the bottom of a very
deep well.
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