greasy guy with the head like a planet populated by pimples and the chubby guy was gone in an instant. The lean Manson guy tried to hang on to his smirk, but even that twitched and missed a beat.
“That’s pretty brave for a kid with a big ass dog with him,” said Mr. Smirk. His thumbs were still in his hip pockets as he tried to remain cool and distant from it all.
“That would almost be funny if it wasn’t so fucking retarded,” I said. “Talking about being brave, and you there, three against one, and him smaller than you.”
I hooked a thumb in the fat kid’s direction.
He’d sat up in the stream, blood still trickling from his forehead, watching the whole thing unfolding with an expression short of amazement on his face. He was looking at me and Bandit, and then looking at the three older guys on the shore, back and forth, like he was watching some alien spectacle. I had the urge to check to see if I had tentacles coming out my backside or something.
“He’s hardly smaller than us,” the chubby guy said, and I almost laughed. It was as if in his tight jeans and black shirt he didn’t realize he wasn’t exactly Mr. Universe either. Or maybe he did, I thought with something akin to revelation, and that’s why he said it.
“The lard-ass pot calling the kettle black,” I said, and the fat boy (Bobby) barked a quick laugh before stifling it with a hand to his mouth. The three high school guys gave him a brief hateful look before turning back to me.
“Look,” Mr. Smirk said. One hand finally unhooked from his jeans pocket and went palm up in front of him, in a friendly where-is-this-getting-us gesture. “I don’t think you realize what you’re getting yourself into. Just take your dog and walk away and I’ll forget I ever saw you here.”
He’d forget me as soon as he forgot how to breathe, and that wasn’t anything I was going to hold my breath for. So I decided to roll with it and keep on going.
“Look,” I said, giving him the same friendly, conversational palm-up gesture. “I don’t think you realize you’re a dickweed.”
“You fucking asshole,” Mr. Pudge said, and took a step forward. Perhaps emboldened by his friend’s initiative, Mr. Planet Pimple Head stepped forward too.
Bandit’s growl, having continued to rumble through this exchange, rose a notch, from bestial to demonic. Mr. Smirk stopped his friends with either arm outstretched to block them.
“Look,” Mr. Smirk started again, “let’s make a deal. This is a small town. You’re obviously new here. You’re not going to have your dog with you every minute of every day. You leave now, instead of killing you, I just kick your ass one time, someday, and then we call it even.”
“Look,” I said, mocking his nonchalant tone, “I have a deal for you. A counteroffer, if you dumbshits know what that means. My dog rips one of your guys’ nutsacks off, and I find the largest rock I can and beat the living shit out of one of you other two. That’s two-thirds chance of any of the three of you getting messed up real bad. Either nutsack chewed off,” I held one hand up, “or head bashed in,” and then the other. Lifting them up and down, my hands weighed something invisible like they were scales.
“Personally,” Bobby said, and we all turned to him, equally surprised that he’d found the guts to talk, “I’d like to keep my nuts.”
I smiled at him.
He smiled back.
And there, at that moment, I saw through the pathetic overweight kid who’d been crying moments ago, and knew him for the kid he could be. The friend he could be.
Silence hung in the air like a thick curtain. There were decisions being made in that utter quiet. Gears were moving. For me there was a sense of inevitability, as if these were things that were to always be, like I’d walked into something and somewhere that I belonged. There was no turning back.
“Okay,” Mr. Smirk said, tugging on the front of his suede jacket, brushing at lint or specks that weren’t there. “You’ve made your choice.” He pointed across the way at me, his forefinger out, his thumb up like a gun hammer. “I’ve made mine too. I think we’ll be seeing each other again someday.”
With that he turned away, hands in his pockets, as if nothing at all unusual had gone down. His friends, Mr. Pudge and Mr. Pimple Planet, turned likewise, trying to imitate their leader’s nonchalance.
I looked at Bobby Templeton, sitting there fat and pathetic and almost naked in the stream, and he looked back at me and nodded. I smiled and nodded at Bandit.
“Go for the nuts, boy!” I yelled, and Bandit, poised in the stream, that growl still in his throat, darted forward. The high school guys looked back, even cool Mr. Smirk, and they saw him coming.
All one hundred pounds of him, teeth long and sharp and white.
Breaking into a run, all coolness forgotten, the three older boys tripped and stumbled over each other and the fallen branches in their path. Crashing through the undergrowth they ran out of sight, leaving me in the stream with a nearly naked fat boy.
4.
Bandit came prancing back with an as-happy-as-can-be dog smile splitting his face, though to my mild disappointment without greaseball scrotums and testes dangling from his jaws, just as Bobby Templeton was pulling his shirt and pants back on. Tossed away among some nearby bushes by the high school guys, thorns caught in the fabric poked him in awkward places and he winced and yelped as he dressed. Bandit walked up to him, and though a bit apprehensive, maybe wondering if the dog still had balls on the brain, Bobby knelt to give my dog a good rubdown. Bandit obliged, rolling on his back to offer his furry tummy.
“Cool dog,” Bobby said, looking my way.
“Yeah. He’s the best.”
“I’m Bobby.”
The fat kid held out a hand.
“I’m Joey,” I said, and pumped his hand up and down like a lever. “Who were those guys?” I gestured with a thumb over my shoulder in the direction the three older boys had run.
“The guy in the jacket is Dillon,” Bobby said. “The other two are Stu and Max.”
His gaze followed the direction my thumb indicated and, though they were long gone, the worry in the fat kid’s eyes was clear.
“Don’t worry,” I offered. “They won’t be coming back anytime soon. Not with Bandit here.” I punctuated this with a playful tug on my dog’s ear, and he nipped at my hand good-naturedly in return. “Why were they after you anyway?”
Bobby gave a weak little shrug and looked down at the same time.
“That’s just what they do,” he said, but his slumped, defeated posture seemed to also say this was just what he was: the kind of kid others beat on and humiliated. I couldn’t exactly argue with that, and so said nothing. “I was just walking into town,” he added. “You can cut through the woods and get there faster instead of going down the highway.”
I started back around the bend in the river to retrieve my shoes. Sitting on a rock, I pulled
