As time passed, the quarrels over Victor’s bouts grew bigger. Ralph moved out, out of Yazoo City entirely, into an apartment in Hattiesburg. After that the house stayed messier. Alone with his mother, Victor learned to steady himself through fussy tidying. For an hour each evening he wiped down surfaces, straightened things just so. Out in the world, he and Mary would take the old highway past pawn shops, auto garages, the ball fields where several strata of asphalt merged in a chaotic pimple of broken tarmac. Victor suspected that none of the Little Leaguers hyperventilated, as he did, at the sight of Queen Anne’s lace sprouting through those pavement cracks. He alone hung a wrecking ball from space to demolish every derelict building as they passed. By shutting his left eye, he crushed whatever needed it on that side, likewise with his other eye on the right. He was uncompromising. Whole cities he flattened while imagining them from a bird’s-eye view, like the hideously named Hattiesburg, and then he seeded the scars with tulip bulbs, and that was how it was for years, until the day in ninth grade when he spotted Sievert Alfsson mowing the Alfssons’ lawn, a breeze rippling his open shirt and blond curls.
Transfixed, Victor knelt at the window. He’d never seen such a compelling boy before, or a richer contrast between someone’s ruddy skin and the green grass. For half an hour Sievert mowed. When he was done, he leaned on the lawnmower handle and gazed toward Victor’s house until Victor raised a hand.
Sievert did the same, in a gesture that could only mean he was beckoning Victor to come say hello.
Heart fluttering, Victor ventured outside on his left foot. He crossed into the Alfssons’ yard and ended in front of his neighbor on his right foot.
“Hey, Victor,” said Sievert in a voice whose deep pitch stirred Victor and rendered him briefly mute.
“I’m Micah,” he finally managed to reply.
“I thought you’re Victor.”
“That’s my middle name.”
“My dad says you’re disturbed.”
“My mom says you’re a Seventh-Day Adventist.”
“Sievert’s one, but I worship the devil.”
Victor’s impulse was to correct this boy: “Sievert’s you,” he nearly said, but in fact he was speaking to ugly old Albert.
He looked the alleged Albert up and down, judging whether this newly slim kid could own such a hideous name. “You’re skinny,” he said, his lungs seizing a little.
“So?” said Albert, as if it had been ever thus.
“How do you worship the devil?”
“You drink,” Albert said, pulling out a flask.
Albert sipped, then passed the flask to Victor, who took it, stealing a glance across the road. He’d done nothing like this before. Albert was home-schooled, ignorant of Victor’s reputation as a good kid.
I’m Micah, he thought, tilting the flask to his lips to pour what tasted like medicine into his mouth. Immediately he could feel stamina spreading through him, coating his insides as he choked on the burn.
“Too hot for a shirt,” said Albert, pulling his own off to toss it at his feet.
It was only about sixty degrees out, with cool gusts of wind. “Yeah,” Victor said.
“Been in the woods?”
“Those?” said Victor, gesturing behind the Alfssons’.
“Know some others?” retorted Albert, so that Victor heard how moronic he’d just sounded. Did he always sound that way? He fell out of the moment and stood thinking of Albert’s name, his grandpa Albert, wizened old men, until a tingling moved up his arms. Once again he would faint unless he did something. Albert was now squeezing under a barbed-wire fence toward a stand of pines. In alarm Victor drank. Right away, something flowed through him again and halted his decline. A layer of dry needles softened the pine-cone crunch under his feet as Victor hurried into the dark of the woods.
“My dad works for the radio,” Albert said when Victor had caught up, “so there’s free trips to Gulf Shores. What’s yours do?”
“He moved out of town.”
“Where’d he move?”
“East of here.” Victor didn’t want to say Hattiesburg.
“My mom’s on disability. She’s possessed.”
“Mine’s a nurse.”
“She wrote to Rome to ask for an exorcist, but they wouldn’t send one, so she switched to Adventist.”
“Mine’s nothing,” said Victor, giggling, because the alcohol was in his blood now, and his body felt like an unclenching fist.
“Here’s the swamp.”
They emerged into a meadow where willows grew by the shore of a cow pond. It wasn’t a swamp. From now on, thought Victor as he drank again, if he felt like saying something dumb like “It’s not a swamp,” he would drink instead.
“Dad will whip me later,” said Albert with a cramped smile.
“He won’t find out,” said Victor.
“Maybe I want it,” said Albert, and suddenly it didn’t matter if the blond fuzz on Albert’s arm belonged to someone with an unattractive name; Victor couldn’t go any longer without touching it. He reached a hand tentatively toward the boy. It felt like he was pushing through a thick morass. Then, as his finger hovered near Albert’s skin, a heron’s wings flapped, rippling the water.
Scared out of his reverie, Victor pulled back. “I wanted it to keep going,” said Albert, as if he meant the approach of Victor’s hand.
“Getting whipped?”
“Sievert and I punch each other.”
Following his new protocol Victor sipped from the flask until he had a better reply than “I like Sievert’s name.” The better one was, “Why?”
“To see who can take more hits.”
“Should I do it to you?”
“Are you gay?”
“You just said you like it.”
“No, assmunch.”
“Want to do it to me?”
“In the face like a girl?”
“However you like,” said Victor, immediately gulping down an impulse to take it back, to run away from this strange thrall. He folded his hands across his lap. Beyond Albert the sky was ripe with white clouds that floated above the pines while Albert’s cupped palm whooshed in to slap him. Right away Albert gasped as if he’d been the one hit.
“Happy now?” he asked.
“I guess,” said Victor, his cheek stinging.
“Again, assmunch?” said Albert, as Victor kept unclenching. Hard not to conflate that with the stinging, so he presented his cheek. He breathed with ease. He hadn’t liked the slap, but being drunk felt sublime. His lungs weren’t tight anymore. His head didn’t hurt. He had binocular vision, not just in the merging of his two eyes’ fields but in the two halves of the earth. In this new state as he awaited Albert’s palm, beauty wasn’t repelling ugliness. He desired no stick for raking scum off the pond water. He didn’t care about the trash strewn on the far shore.
From then on, Albert let Victor drink with him once a week when his family was at service. They did it in Albert’s basement and in the woods, in an abandoned school bus there, or by the pond where it had first happened. A summer evening in the school bus could calm Victor for a week. They smoked Marlboros Albert purchased from the cousin who sold him gin. They arrived home reeking of gin and cigarettes, so Victor started stowing a toothbrush and toothpaste behind a loose house brick, brushing his teeth to mask the scent. Not that Mary noticed stuff like that. As for Albert, he didn’t care what his parents smelled; he hated them for messing up his brother’s head.
“What did they do to it?” asked Victor more than once, to which Albert would say only, “Fucked it up.”