As an Old Memory Read online

  Both blows landed solid. The fist to the jaw did little but make Josh’s hand hurt, but the foot to groin did the job. Bill’s knees buckled, and he toppled down on top of Marcus, who was trying to get back on his feet. The chant of fight rose in the air and bolstered Josh as Jamie recovered and came at him. His right hand still stung, so he threw his left, which was a weaker blow. The impact stunned Jamie for a moment, but he flung a haymaker square against Josh’s jaw. Josh stumbled to the side. Bill grabbed his leg and pulled on his jeans. Josh jerked away, but couldn’t free himself. Jamie came at him with another wound-up punch like Popeye.

  Josh didn’t fight often, but he could. That came from growing up with a younger, larger brother. He slammed his palm into Jamie’s nose at the tip and shoved up with as much force he could muster. Blood exploded, and the nose bone crunched, which meant he’d made that move right. Jamie covered his spewing nose and backed out of the fight.

  Bill tugged harder on Josh’s leg. He almost toppled to the floor, but now that the rush of adrenaline welled up in him, Josh felt like some sort of Spartan. His free foot rammed Bill under the chin with enough force to send the big headbanger’s skull cracking into the underside of the table. His leg came free.

  Marcus made a move as if he were trying to get to his feet. Josh readied himself to stomp down on the other boy. Someone grabbed him from the crowd. A battle fog had settled over his mind, and without looking, he shoved against the grasp, sending the person backward. The chant of fight stopped, and everyone gasped.

  The pressure changed in the room. Josh came out of his rage and looked around. Through the gap formed in the circle of classmates, he saw Jessica sprawled on the floor. Corey Aaron knelt beside her. She didn’t appear hurt, only stunned. Josh stepped through the gap and offered his hand to help her up. Corey knocked it away.

  “I don’t think she needs any more help from you,” he said with his fake California accent.

  “I didn’t mean to do that. I was caught up in the fight. Someone grabbed me.” He held his hand out again. “It happens.”

  Corey stood and put himself between Jessica and Josh. He helped her up. “You’re the one who knocked her down in the first place.”

  “You act like you’ve never been in a fight before,” Josh became aware that his jaw hurt pretty bad and that he tasted blood in his mouth.

  Corey looked him up and down and tossed his bleached hair out of his eyes. “Clean yourself up, dude.”

  He took Jessica by the arm and pushed past Josh. They walked toward the door. Bill and Marcus had gotten into chairs. Jamie stood with his head bent back, and his nose pinched, trying to stop the bleeding. Josh had never unleashed anything like that before. It shocked him. His hands trembled from the thought of it.

  “I’m sorry, Jessica. I didn’t mean to knock you over,” he yelled at her as Corey pulled her closer to the door.

  “Whatever,” Corey said back in his fake singsong accent.

  “You’re from Buck’s Landing,” Josh yelled at him. “Not L.A., poser.”

  Corey walked out. Josh would have loved to knock him down a peg or two as well, but he’d never had the opportunity. Looking at the havoc he’d wreaked on the headbangers, he swore to himself that he’d never fight again.

  Thomas rushed into the library. He looked around as he stopped by his brother. “I got here as soon as I could. Looks like you handled it.”

  Josh rubbed his jaw. “How did you know about this?”

  “I was in shop class, and news of an epic fight like this travels fast. They said it was you against three dudes, so I hauled it down here to help you out.”

  “Why?”

  “Brothers do that for each other, and Harvey was in trig. You had no backup. It looks like you didn’t need it.”

  Josh blushed. “I think I lost control a little bit.” He looked at Jamie, who couldn’t stop his pouring nose. “Sorry, man.”

  “Don’t apologize to that dick,” Thomas said. “Never apologize for kicking ass.”

  “Language, young man,” Principal Chapman said, walking into the library. With the cool of Harry Callahan, he scanned the scene. “Where’s the librarian?”

  “Smoking,” one of the students said.

  “That’s interesting,” Chapman looked at the boys sprawled around. “Christ, Josh, what did you do?”

  “He kicked their asses,” Eric Dill said.

  “Language,” Chapman yelled. “You four boys come with me and leave the fight here.”

  Bill rubbed the back of his head. Josh could see a lump growing from under his shaved head. “Don’t worry about that,” the big headbanger said. “I’ve got a splitting headache.”

  Josh, the headbangers, and Principal Chapman left the library. When they passed the nurse’s office on the way to the main office, the principal dropped Bill, Jamie, and Marcus off with her. He told Josh that he could wait to be checked out. They headed into the principal’s office. When they walked in, Alan sat in one of the visitor chairs. He grimaced when he saw them. Josh ran his hand across his mouth to wipe blood from his swelling lip.

  “Trust me,” Chapman said. “The other boys look worse.”

  “Where are they?” Josh’s dad asked as Josh sat in the chair beside him and the principal closed the door.

  “In the nurse’s office,” Josh said.

  “The nurse’s office?” Alan said in a surprised tone.

  “Apparently, Josh here beat up three guys singlehandedly. One of which was Wild Bill.”

  “Bill Foreman?” Alan asked.

  “Yep,” Chapman answered.

  “I taught my boys not to fight,” Alan protested before the principal could say anything. “I taught them how to win if they had to.”

  Principal Chapman smiled as well. It seemed the administrator didn’t mind the carnage left in the library. Josh started to feel like he might get off pretty light.

  “Those guys probably deserved what they got,” Chapman said, “and if you hadn’t completely wiped the floor with them, and probably broke that one kid’s nose, I could get away with a week’s detention and a good old-fashioned paddling, but not in this case.”

  Josh rubbed his aching jaw and ran his tongue across his split lip. “Great, just my luck.”

  “Three-day suspension effective as of now.”

  Alan nodded his head. “Seems fair.” He gave Josh a look that said something far worse was coming. “Part of your time will be spent with your grandfather.”

  “What?” Josh said. “The punishment is not worth the crime. He calls me a faggot to my face.”

  “Maybe not after this dustup, but he needs to go to a funeral tomorrow. Since you’re free, you’ll take him, and I can save my personal days for when your Aunt Charlotte’s commitment hearing comes up.”

  “He can drive,” Josh said.

  “He’ll probably be drunk,” Alan said. “It was an old friend that died.”

  Josh looked back at the principal. “Can’t you let Marcus, Bill, and Jamie paddle me as many times as they want? It’s got to be better than that.”

  “Sorry,” Chapman said. “I guess you’ll think a little harder before you get in another fight like that.”

  Josh sighed and settled into what his punishment would be. He hoped that his Aunt Charlotte would at least appreciate what he’d done.

  Alan walked through the empty school building. Coach Turnbuckle had gotten him back for blowing off yesterday’s practice. It seemed silly that he should have to do some kind of makeup work for a position he was more or less forced into because it was part of his job. He didn’t like coaching football. Basketball was Alan’s first love, and he accepted the assistant football coaching position to secure the ability to be the head coach for basketball. Usually head coaches of different sports gave each other a little more respect than he got from Coach Turnbuckle, but at Pinehurst High School, football was not the king of sports, it was the messiah. Alan found himself scrubbing down the disgusting equipment in the weight
room because the football players, including his lazy son Thomas, refused to clean up after themselves. It took him hours, but he had an ace in the hole to help him through it. He forced Thomas to pitch in.

  The halls were dark, lit only by an occasional fluorescent light. Alan never liked being in the school after hours. Something about it gave him the creeps. It shouldn’t, but some places did that. The school had been around a very long time. FDR had it built by the WPA back during the Great Depression. The wooden floors creaked underfoot and echoed down the hall. At night, the place smelled like years of education, ghosts of lectures past.

  He’d left his car keys in the drawer of his classroom desk. As he turned down the offshoot hallway to his room, he hoped the janitor hadn’t locked it. If that were the case, Alan and Thomas would be walking home in the dark. His son would be none too pleased about that. He already fumed from having to help.

  Alan stopped at his classroom. The door stood half-open and a single fluorescent light glowed within. He didn’t know how Thomas had gotten past him without being noticed, nor how he made only one fluorescent in the whole room work. His payback was coming, but Alan was smarter than his younger son gave him credit for. It took an early morning wake-up to pull one over on Alan McAdams.

  He pushed the door open quickly and jumped into the room. “Ah ha!” he yelled, taking a quick survey of the place.

  No one was in the classroom. There was no reason to look under desks, because they were almost too small for Thomas to sit in, much less hide under. Alan nodded and pursed his lips as he reached into the middle drawer of his desk to get his keys. Josh beating the snot out of those three boys and this elaborate payback trick Thomas was in the midst of proved to him that he’d done a pretty good job raising his boys. He was definitely a better father than Sim.

  He flipped the light switch as he walked out the door. The single light went out. He closed the door and locked it. The floorboards at the opening of his hallway creaked. Alan jerked his head in the direction of the sound to see only a fleeting shadow passing by. Something cold ran through him. He shivered with the kind of shake people blamed on possums running over their graves. Despite knowing all this was a very good trick put together by his son, it still creeped him out.

  “You’re not going to pull one over on me, Tommy Boy,” he yelled down the hall.

  As he turned onto the main trunk hall to head to the exit, a boy chuckled, the sound of a teenager feeling very full of himself for getting away with something deemed “awesome.” Alan would ruin his boy’s plan, for the fun of proving he was still the master. He started to run down the hall, not at full speed but at a good trot. His slight paunch of a belly bounced more than he’d like. He needed to join the boys in running bleachers instead of watching them. Every time he passed a cross hall where the lights were on, he tried to catch a glimpse of his son, coming up short each time.

  As Alan approached the final cross hall before the exit door, a stitch started to form in his side. He slowed to a quick walk. The chuckling came from behind him. Alan turned quickly to catch his son; instead there was nothing.

  “Tommy Boy,” he chanted in a singsong tone trying to sound as creepy as possible. “Tommy Boy, I want my tail.”

  The line came from an old scary story he used to tell the boys when they were younger. Every time he did, Josh and Thomas would jump out of their skins. Occasionally when they were very young, one of them might even cry. Sim had told him the same story, making sure to make him cry every single time. Alan didn’t know why he’d ever told his boys that story. Maybe to try to make them tough and realize that stories couldn’t hurt them.

  The exit door opened. Alan turned to see Thomas sticking half his body in the door. The streetlamp outside the door made his hair looked green instead of auburn. His skin looked pallid, too. It took Alan a moment to realize that he was staring at his son because of the strange effect the light had, but also because he had convinced himself that Thomas was somewhere in the building.

  “What do you want?” Thomas asked. “And why are you doing that old creepy voice?”

  “How did you do that?” Alan turned completely around.

  His son looked at him with the you’re crazy look. “How did I do what?”

  “Get outside so quickly. You were behind me laughing.”

  “I’ve been out here like forever, waiting on you. I was about to start walking home. I’m hungry.”

  The chuckling echoed down the hall again. Alan perked up his ears. Thomas did the same.

  “Who is that?” Alan asked.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen anyone around since the guys left,” Thomas said. “Maybe they’re playing a trick on us.”

  “All right, you can stop it now,” Alan called. “If Principal Chapman hears about this, y’all are going to be in trouble. If you come out now, I won’t have to tell him. Who’s there?”

  “Tommy Jones,” the voice said and chuckled again. “Don’t tell the principal.”

  “I don’t know a Tommy Jones,” Thomas said.

  Anger rose in Alan. All of this hadn’t bothered him much as long as he’d thought it was Thomas playing a trick. Even if it was another one of the football players, he wouldn’t have turned them in to the principal, but this was a whole lot different. Alan knew who Tommy Jones was. One of those stupid kids who were planning the massacre anniversary party had sneaked into the school to play a very unfunny prank. Of all the teachers to pull it on, he had chosen the wrong one.

  “That’s not funny,” Alan said. “Show yourself, this minute.”

  Thomas stepped inside and stood beside him. Together they took up most of the space in the hallway between the lockers. No one would get past them. It made Alan feel better to know that he’d instilled a sense of family and moral fortitude in his boys besides brute toughness.

  “Make it easy on yourself,” Thomas said. “You’re not going to get past us.”

  “Please don’t tell the principal, mister. It was all in good fun. I’m sorry I scared you, but if I get any more detention my folks aren’t going to let me go to the Homecoming dance,” the voice said.

  “Too bad. You shouldn’t have said you were Tommy Jones,” Alan said.

  “But I am Tommy Jones, and you’re a McAdams, aren’t you?”

  “I’m Alan McAdams, one of the teachers here.”

  The air in the hallway started to move like wind blew down it. The posters on the wall rustled, and a few pulled free and flew against the back door. Thomas grabbed his arm, which had burst out into gooseflesh as soon as the voice identified itself. Whatever was going on, whether a good trick or not, he didn’t want to find out what was next, and if his son actually touched him for support, it meant Thomas was scared, too.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Thomas said.

  “I’m not going to argue.”

  Both of them took two steps backward and turned. Thomas rushed for the door ahead of Alan. He disappeared outside before Alan got a good trot going. As Alan exited the building, he turned back to look down the hallway. In the dim light, a shadow walked up the hall. The wind appeared to have died down. Alan didn’t watch for too long. He beat feet as quickly as he could, leaving the school unlocked and not caring if they fired him for it or not.

  Josh sat on his bed with his back against the headboard, far enough within the edge of the bedside lamp’s circle of illumination to let him read. He didn’t have to worry about studying for the next few days. When his mother found out about the fight—which he had tried to dodge talking about, but his lip was swollen to the point that it couldn’t be ignored—she had made sure the next few days wouldn’t be filled with television, watching tapes, or playing video games. That left him with nothing better to do than sit in his room and read for fun.

  He didn’t mind reading. A good book could actually be better than anything on TV, but the idea of that being all he had to do made him angry toward the book and the author. He looked at the back cover of the book jack
et. Stephen King stared back at him in black and white, sitting atop an old car. The author had a dopey grin on his face, and the caption at the bottom read Stephen King and friend. Because of all of that and nothing else, Christine blew hard.

  Thomas knocked at the same time he poked his head into the room. He looked both scared and excited.

  “Try knocking and waiting for me to say ‘come in,’” Josh said.

  “What was I going to see that’s more shocking than you reading one of Mom’s prized Stephen King books?” Thomas asked.

  “I could have been doing other things.”

  “Doubtful. You’ve got all day for the next three days to do that. Come down to the kitchen. I’ve got to tell you what happened to me and dad.” Thomas’ voice was tinged with overexcitement that comes from either having something completely awesome happen or something completely bogus.

  “Tell me up here. I don’t want to go down there, because Dad might pile some more punishment on top of me.”

  “He’s taken his supper plate into the living room to watch that stupid program he can’t miss, and I’m hungry. I can tell you while I eat. Plus, Momma already told him what judgment she levied on you. He said that sounded like enough. I told him while we cleaned the weight room why you got into that fight. Dad told Momma that you had to drive the old man to a funeral tomorrow. She agreed that your current punishment was enough,” Thomas almost spat the words out. His manic speech told that he had something wondrous to tell. “Come on; I’m not getting any less hungry.”

  Josh carefully laid Christine facedown on the table, opened to where he was reading. The book tented upward. Being one of his mother’s prize possessions, he would not dog-ear it or break the spine for fear of her wrath. Thomas didn’t wait for him to follow. Josh walked down the stairs. The blaring of the television with his dad’s program made him a little homesick for the warm glow of TV. He walked into the living room on his way to the kitchen. His mother looked up from a magazine she read while the television blared.