Social Blunders by Tim Sandlin

fragrance of unresolved college karma wafting on the breeze, waiting for a chance to haunt.
    As I drove home through the deepening dusk, the only thing I knew for certain was this had been the longest day in history. Between Gilia, Atalanta Williams, and Ryan’s fists, my body and brain were pulp on a stick. I swore never to look up my ancestors again. Shannon could deal with them from now on. She was young.
    I parked the Dodge in front of the garage and, remembering threats, locked the doors. Shannon’s Mustang was nowhere in sight, which meant she was probably out being loose with the psych major. One more nail in my already hammered back. On the edge of the lawn, I bent forward with my hands on my knees, trying to ease the kidney pain, when a figure in black charged.
    Moonlight glinted off the blade of a knife—just like in a book—and I yelled.
    “Clark. Stop!”
    He stopped. Consider it a miracle.
    “What the hell are you doing?”
    Clark’s face was dead pale and wrinkled.
    “Never hold a knife up high like that. Didn’t your father teach you anything.” I raised my left forearm to his right wrist. “Look how easily you can be stopped.” The boy seemed to be in a trance.
    “Give me the knife.” Gently, I pried it from his frozen fingers. It was a serrated kitchen deal, the kind used to cut tomatoes. “Hold the knife at elbow level with the blade up. See, the victim can’t block without getting cut.”
    “I’m going to kill you.”
    “Not until you learn how to handle a knife. Here, you try.” I stuck the knife back into Clark’s hand, where it dangled uselessly.
    “You have dishonored my father.”
    “Actually, your father dishonored my mother.”
    “My father has never committed an un-Christian act in his life. That’s what I hate about him.”
    The kid had an incomprehensible viewpoint toward parents. I could relate to that.
    “Billy can’t help who he is,” I said.
    Clark passed the back of his hand over his face, then his eyes seemed to focus and he saw my condition. “Did I cut you?”
    “The blood’s from another father’s son. Listen, you want to come inside? We could talk about this love-’em, hate-’em problem people get with moms and dads.”
    I started limping toward the door, but Clark stayed put. He said, “She must have been a total sleaze.”
    I stopped. “Lydia is not a sleaze. Not total, anyway.”
    “Only a sleazy woman would seduce five boys at once.”
    “She was fourteen and they raped her.”
    At the word rape Clark began to shake. “Saint Billy would never.”
    “You were hiding behind the door, did you hear him deny it?”
    “I’ll kill myself.” He held the knife across his wrist.
    “You’ve been looking for an excuse all day.”
    His eyes jerked toward me. “I’m not kidding. I am going to kill myself.”
    “At least do it right. Don’t you read books?”
    “I know more about suicide than anyone in my class.”
    “Cut yourself that way and you’ll be two days bleeding to death.” I grabbed his wrist and twisted the knife ninety degrees. “Slice up the vein from the bottom to top. Lay it open and you’ll squirt like a stuck pig.”
    I felt Clark’s wrist tighten, then he touched blade to blue vein. Nothing happened. I didn’t stop him and he didn’t go on.
    His breath smelled of horehound drops. “You’re not taking me seriously, Mr. Callahan.”
    “No, I’m not.” I released his wrist. “I’m sorry, Clark. I know I should but I’m too beat to humor a sad teenager. Come by in the morning and I’ll sincerely tell you why life is better than death. It is, you know. Took years, but I finally figured the thing out. Right now, I need sleep.”
    “For my father’s honor, one of us has to die.”
    “Can’t we forget the whole thing?”
    He pointed the knife at me. “One of us has to die.”
    ***
    My body was fast running out of gas. Even riding the bike a hundred miles had never worn me out this thoroughly. Bike fatigue was merely