Radical Kills [Chapter two: 'One Down']

I can’t think of a single day where being on that dusty road wasn’t a time-honored occurrence. Every time, I’d always think to myself, I’ve never thanked Pete for getting me all riled up about the prospect of crossing a streak of red ribbon called a finish line.

The tenseness of the moment would be so taut it wouldn’t seem able of being snipped, he had said. But by the lightning speed of your body you’d go tearing through it and the ribbon would lash you, with a sting just long enough for you to know you’d won.

It couldn’t have been better said by anyone but Pete. He was gifted in the rare art of knowing things so good and well and I could never keep up. But I so desperately wanted that lashing, winning feeling of a scarlet-trimmed finish line; so much that I could almost imagine it hugging my body in happy returns when the dusty road was all said and done beneath my feet. I even started having good dreams. Ones where I was the hero of the day.

In those cases Fear didn’t have to do anything but look on with the satisfaction that at last I learned how not to be afraid. I got to thinking it was waiting all along, leaning against me like it was in a casual old speakeasy on the Western front. A speakeasy about how long I would take to be older and not have to be rescued every single dad-gum night.

In my dreams I lived and breathed the orange clay track before me. I never stopped staring at the horizon of ribbon. When the blanks fired I shot off the starting block fast as an impala and never stopped, never stopped, never stopped until my body sliced through the horizon and I was a heap on the track and people started running up to pat my cheeks and kiss them.

I thought to myself, where be my competition? I looked all around me and there was only the white sky bearing down on the clay and grey steam rising up from my leaden feet. But I didn’t feel leaden, I felt all royal and queen-like, looking backwards at the ribbon now hugging the ground with caboodles of friction. There were no other runners on the track. I turned back around and saw Pete looming over me, smiling with closed lips.

Everybody else had run off to carry on with whatever lives they had shortly set aside, I supposed. I asked Pete, where be my competition? He said, it’s you, Bronwyn. Don’t you get it? You’re the only one competing.

And then I wake up, cursing myself to high heaven, wishing I could have had the dream where I didn’t get all confused and I won and that was the end of it. Besides, I didn’t like the Pete in my dreams. The Pete Upchurch I knew would give it to me straight, not puzzle me with senseless allegories.

Once the spoken-about mosey down south was decidedly put into instigation, my running dreams ended quicker than they had begun, and Fear returned, with a good amount of exasperation involved, I’m sure. What we had to do was simple, but I simply didn’t want to do it. When I would say that to Mama she’d tan me, sure, but I didn’t let so much as a tear dribble out of my eyelids. I wouldn’t allow it. And I never did.

Even if I was to steal a dollar or two out of Pop’s wallet to go to Coin Laundry and buy a Coke, I’d take the objectionable stings as they came. I approximate that it was about this time that Pete and me launched into mischief. Stealing a dollar wasn’t impressive, Pete said. Anyone could steal a dollar. It took a real Charlie Chaplin to prioritize in risks.

And so we planned and convoluted in the confines of Pete’s ten-by-twelve bedroom, brewing up a storm of what I called tomfoolery, a word which unbeknownst to Pete I had found in the dictionary Mama kept on the top shelf of her hutch desk but what he thought I knew from brains alone.

Pete and me ended up with the most confounding idea we had ever outdone ourselves with. I was ten, and he was twelve. One-and-a-half-years’ difference of sheer inventive power. It would have some number on Pop and Mama, busy scrabbling about painting walls and giving the shed a once-over with the sand block, but we didn’t care none.

“We’ll need a meter-long plank from Harvey’s, a packet of nails, possibly screws, and those little see-saw undersides,” Pete had said. Half of this stuff was alien-like to me. A see-saw underside? For that bit I figured he just couldn’t name the flat timber spikes that went under the boards. Not that they were called flat timber spikes.

Whatever they were, they’d be mighty hard for a skinny ten-year-old to acquire without bumps and bruises involved. And I doubted I’d be discreet enough to not get caught. For a minute I just wanted to burst out of the house and speed away like I liked doing. But I couldn’t leave my brother just when we’d come up with the biggest thing of our lives. Not Pete. Mayhap Charlie, but not Pete. Pete had shown me the goods of running, which I’d not soon forget.

“I reckon you’ll be coming with me?” I said, not wanting to hear a no. If I heard a no, my love for Pete would most definitely be muted for a long, long while.

“Well…since you’re still little, I reckon so,” he said. I let my breath go, until he said, “I’d rather be there to tell you when to leave well enough alone, since you obviously can’t do it your darned self, than get caught and be hauled in for a good Mama’s-hidin’.” Then that little goblin grinned and took off before I could catch him and give him a what-for with my fists.