I didn’t want the girls to see us get beat down, but I thought about afterward, about Nancy holding my hands at my chest and wiping the blood from my face with disinfected cottonballs, how I could accidentally confess my love and not be held responsible since I’d have a serious concussion.
Byron said, “Let go.”
“You got a thin voice,” I told him.
I pulled his wrist back a couple degrees. His fingers danced around.
Every guy in that yard was creeping toward us, saying “Hey” and “Hey now.” There were too many of them, broken bottle or no. All we had left was wiseass tough-guy shit. “Hey,” they said. And Joe said, “Hay’s for horses,” and I forced a laugh through my teeth like I was supposed to. They kept creeping. Little baby steps. Tina whispered to Nancy, “Can we go? Let’s just go.”
“Just let go of me!” Byron said. “Let go of me!”
I said, “What!”
He shut his mouth and the crowd stopped moving. They stopped right behind where the patio met the grass. That’s when it occurred to me the reason they weren’t pummeling us was Byron. They didn’t want me to damage him. And that meant that I controlled them. I thought: We got a hostage. I thought: All we have to do is take him out the gate on the side of the house, get him to the car, then drop him in the street and drive off. I was gonna tell Joe, but then Nancy started talking.
“Do you guys know Sensei Mike?” she said.
This chubby drunk guy was wobbling at the front of the crowd. He said, “What?” But it sounded like “Whud?” That’s how I knew he was a lisper, even before he started lisping. Because he had adenoid problems. The first lisper I ever knew in grade school had adenoid problems. Brett Novak. He said his own name, “Bred Novag.” Mine he said, “Jag Gragow.” When people called him a lisper, I didn’t know what a lisper was, so I decided he was a lisper not just because of what he did to s sounds, but because of what he did to t sounds and k sounds, too. So I thought this chubby drunk guy was a lisper, because I used to be wrong about what a lisper was and so “lisper” is the first thing I think when I hear adenoid problems. But since the chubby guy turned out to be a lisper after all, my old wrongness made it so I was right. It was like if Nancy wore hot pink. The color would look sexy on her, and because it would look sexy on her, I’d say it was hot pink, and I’d be right, even though I didn’t know what I was saying. I’d be right because of an old misunderstanding.
“Sensei Mike?” said Nancy. “We came for Sensei Mike.” Her voice was trembling. I could’ve killed everybody.
The guy said, “Thenthaimigue? Ith that thome thort of thibboleth?”
This got laughs. The crowd thought it was very clever for the lisper to say a word like shibboleth to us.
But fuck them for thinking I don’t know shibboleth. Some people don’t, but I do. It’s from the Old Testament. In CCD they told us we shouldn’t read the Old Testament till we were older because it was violent and confusing and totally Christless, so I read some of it (I skipped Leviticus and quit at Kings). The part with shibboleth is in Judges: There were the Ephrathites who were these people who couldn’t make the sound sh. They were at war with the Gileadites. The Gileadites controlled all the crossings of the Jordan River, and the main thing they didn’t want was for the Ephrathites to get across the river. The problem was the Ephrathites looked exactly like the Gileadites and spoke the same language, too, so if an Ephrathite came to one of the crossings, the Gileadites had almost no way of telling that he was an Ephrathite. Not until Jephthah, who was the leader of the Gileadites, remembered how Ephrathites couldn’t make the sh sound — that’s when he came up with the idea to make everyone who wanted to cross the river say the word shibboleth. If they could say “Shibboleth,” they could pass, but if they couldn’t say it, it meant they were an enemy and they got slain. So shibboleth was this code word, but it didn’t work like a normal code word. A normal code word is a secret — you have to prove you know what it is. Shibboleth, though — it wasn’t any secret. Jephthah would tell you what it was. What mattered was how you said it. How you said it is what saved your life, or ended it.
I said to the lisper, “I know what’s a shibboleth, and Sensei Mike’s no shibboleth. And you’re no Jephthah, either.” It came out wormy and know-it-all sounding. I sounded like I cared what they thought of me. Maybe I did. I don’t think so, though.
“Are you jogueing?” he said. “Whud gind of brude are you? Do you offden find yourthelf engaging in meda-converthathions?” He pronounced the t in often, the prick, and on top of it, he turned it into a fucken d.
All those guys laughed anyway. It was funnier to them than the shibboleth joke. It was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
And I was sick of getting laughed at. And I was sick of people asking me questions that weren’t questions.
I pulled on Byron’s arm and he moaned. Cojo slapped him on the chops and the lisper stepped back into the crowd to hide.
The crowd started shifting. But not forward. Not in any direction really, not for too long. It swelled in one place and thinned in another, like a water balloon in a fist. It was in my fist.
I saw the lisper’s head craned up over the shoulder of a guy who’d snuck to the front, and that’s when I knew.
They didn’t stop creeping up at the patio because they were scared of what I’d do to their friend and his arm. They stopped at the patio to give us space. They stopped at the patio so I could do whatever I’d do to Byron and they could watch.
I said to Nancy, “You and Tina go get the car, okay?”
Nancy reached in my pocket for the keys and whispered, “Be careful.” Then Tina kissed Joe. The girls ran off. It could’ve been a war movie. It could’ve been Joe and I going to the front in some high-drama war movie. It was a little hammy, but that didn’t bother me.
As soon as I was sure the girls were clear, I asked Joe, with my eyes and eyebrows, if he thought we should run for it.
He told me with his shoulders and his chin that he thought it was a good idea.
Then I got an inspiration. I started yelling at the top of my lungs: “AHHHHHH!”
The whole crowd went pop-eyed and stepped back and stepped back and kept stepping back. I got a huge lung capacity. I think I yelled for about a minute. I yelled till my throat bled and I couldn’t yell anymore. Then I dropped Byron, and we took off.
Nancy was just pulling out of the parking spot when we got to the car. Some of the sickos from the barbecue ran out onto the street, and one of them was shouting, “We’ll call the police!”
We still didn’t know Sensei Mike’s right address and the girls decided it was probably better to get out of Glen Ellyn, so we headed back to Chicago. When we got to the Christamesta house, Tina and Joe went inside and I followed Nancy around the neighborhood on foot, not saying anything. I don’t know how long that lasted. It was dark, though. We ended up at the park at Iowa and Rockwell, under the tornado slide, sitting in pebbles, our backs against the ladder. Nancy opened her purse and pulled out a Belgian beer. I popped it with my lighter and gave it to her. She sipped and gave it back. I sipped and gave it back.
I’ve told a lot of girls I was in love with them. There’s some crack-ass wisdom about it being easier to say when you don’t mean it, but that’s not why I didn’t say it to Nancy. I didn’t say it because every time I’ve said it, I meant it. If I said it again, it would be like all those other times, and all those other times — it went away. And silence wasn’t any holier than saying it. Just more drama for its own sake. All of it’s been done before. It’s been in TV shows and comic books and it’s how your parents met. And there’s nothing wrong with drama, I don’t think. And there’s nothing wrong with drama for its own sake, either. What’s wrong is drama that doesn’t know it’s drama. And what’s wrong is doing the same thing everyone else does and thinking you’re original, thinking you’re unpredictable.