can live to be a hundred years old, maybe older. It just don’t seem right to me to eat something that lives so long. Kind of takes em out of the food category for me, you know?”
“That is a very interesting way of thinking,” Mary said, nodding her head. “Would you show me which of these on my plate is turtle for eating?”
“That’s a piece right there,” Tommy said, pointing with his fork. “But like I said, you may find it a little strong.”
Mary picked up the chunk Tommy indicated, dropped it and her fingers in the sauce, and stuck the whole piece in her mouth. She chewed twice, swallowed, licked her fingers, then took a swig of blackjack. She smiled, then reached for another piece.
“Then again, you might not,” Tommy said.
I watched the two of them discussing food and drinking whiskey, Tommy enjoying Mary’s appetite and throwing out country witticisms that Mary laughed at even though she didn’t understand half of them.
Except for less hair and about forty more pounds, Tommy looked about the same as he had when I’d met him twenty years earlier in high school. His fat kept his face smooth and shiny, and his eyes twinkled like blue neon bulbs.
In school, he’d been one of the few remaining country boys in a community that was changing rapidly from farms to suburbs. Jokes about his height and his accent seemed not to faze him. He was friendly and outgoing and talked to everybody from the principal to the janitors and from the homecoming queen to guys like me who didn’t hardly talk to anybody. He was nicknamed Tiny Tommy, or TT for short, and I never heard him object to it. But he had introduced himself to me as Tommy, so that’s what I called him.
No one ever knew for sure about the darker side of Tommy, but I saw the first hint of it my sophomore year. He and I were in the same gym class, and a bunch of us were changing clothes when two senior football players grabbed Tommy and threw him into one of the big wire cage lockers. One of them stuck a ballpoint pen through the latch, trapping him. Then they pulled out their dicks and began to piss on him through the wire. Tommy put his hands over his face and tried to turn away from them, but the locker was too tight. “There’s some tee tee for you, TT,” one of them said, and they both laughed so hard their urine came out in spurts.
I hardly ever acted without thinking, even then, but this was so outrageous that I yelled to them to stop. One of them yelled back over his shoulder, “Shut up, you little fucker, or we’ll shit on you.”
They were finished by then, anyway, and they zipped up and walked out, still laughing. The rest of the boys in the locker room walked out quickly, laughing nervously or frowning with shame and disgust.
Tommy was stuck tight in the locker, urine dripping off his chin and nose and puddling at his feet. I got the pen out of the latch, and pulled the locker open, wetting my hand in the process.
Tommy squeezed out of the locker and immediately began taking off his clothes. He wouldn’t look at me. “Well, hey, they got me good, didn’t they,” he said with a sound that could have been a laugh or a sob. “Yeah, yeah, that was a good joke all right,” he said in a steadier voice.
“Tommy, that wasn’t any kind of a joke,” I said. I was so mad and so embarrassed for him that I could hardly talk. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. Let’s go to the principal right now and tell him what happened.”
Tommy was stripped off by now, but he looked at me and said, “John, I appreciate you at least trying. Now I’m going to take another shower and find some sweats that I can wear to class.”
“Do you want me to go ahead and tell the principal?” I asked.
“There ain’t no need to tell the principal. Them boys was just having some fun,” Tommy said.
“Come on, Tommy. That’s not right. They ought to be punished.”
He stared up at me intently, and said, “It happened to me, John, not you. I don’t want the principal to know, you got it?”
It was one of those three or four things that happen to every kid, when he learns the world is made up of the strong and the weak, and that fairness is not a universally held ideal. It took weeks for it to fade in my mind, but in the meantime Tommy was his usual self, talking and laughing with everyone, showing up at all the games, pep rallies and dances as if he was the biggest man on campus.
About a month after the locker room incident, on a warm fall day, a police car pulled up in front of the school while most of the senior class was sitting outside eating lunch. The students watched curiously as the two cops, acting on an anonymous tip, went in the building and met the principal, who was coming out of his office with a bolt cutter. The principal guided them to the locker of one of the boys who had peed on Tommy, and snipped the combination lock off. In a brown paper grocery sack, the policemen found eight one ounce sandwich bags of marijuana. Subsequent tests would show that one of the bags was covered with the boy’s fingerprints. That bag, in addition to the marijuana, contained some bread crumbs and mayonnaise residue.
They walked back outside, and the principal pointed to the owner of the locker. The two cops walked over to him and announced that he was under arrest for possession of illegal drugs with intent to sell. They made him lie flat on the sidewalk while they roughly searched him and handcuffed him. Then they yanked him up, read him his rights, and threw him in the back of the patrol car.
Some of those present said he worked his mouth open and closed like a fish, but no words came out. Everyone else sat in stunned silence. As the police car drove off, the principal said loudly, “That is what happens to drug pushers. Let it be a lesson to you.”
The football player’s father had held him back a year so he would have a better shot at playing college ball for a big program. The strategy had worked and his son had already accepted a full scholarship at the University of Alabama starting the next fall. His father couldn’t have known that the same strategy would result in his son being tried as an adult and sentenced to five years. We never saw him again.
The other boy who had degraded Tommy was one of the wealthiest kids in school. His family lived on a twenty-acre estate outside of town, complete with horses that no one ever rode. It was next door to the small working farm where Tommy’s parents continued to try to eke out a living.
About a month after the other player was arrested, the rich kid was on his way home from a dance about two in the morning. He turned off the main road onto the long tree-lined drive that led to his house, and punched the accelerator on the Trans Am he had gotten for his sixteenth birthday. Halfway down the drive, going eighty miles an hour, the low-slung car hit a six-inch thick dead limb that had fallen from an overhanging tree and lay diagonally across the road. The car went airborne and veered to the left, twisting on its axis in mid-air and impacting a foot thick oak while it was upside down and ten feet off the ground. Every one agreed that it was a miracle the driver survived. He came back to school three months later, walking with a cane, dragging his left foot and carrying a towel to mop up the drool he couldn’t stop.
I was fifteen years old, and there were some things I couldn’t even imagine yet, so it was years before I suspected a link between Tommy and his tormentors’ misfortunes. We had never been close friends, and that didn’t change. He went his way, and I went mine. After graduation, I went off to college, and Tommy took a job at a local manufacturing plant. I didn’t see him for years, until one night Kathleen and I were pulled over by a sheriff’s car as we came back from a client’s Christmas party out in the county. I knew I had been speeding, and I was nervously trying to remember how many drinks I had had and figure out whether I should
