Things as They Are by Guy Vanderhaeghe Page B

with a leaden clunk.
    You could have heard a pin drop. Scutter rolled over, got his hands and knees under him. Dark red drops of blood splashed onto the floor from his nose, swept back and forth in a fine spray when he shook his head, trying to clear it.
    “Count! Count, fuck face!” Norman screamed at Broward. He did. The first two numbers into a stunned silence; the next two into the kind of hysterical uproar occasioned by the death of one god and the birth of another. At five, Scutter began to creep about on all fours like some old blind dogtrying to find the scent home. He crawled over to Broward’s legs, clutched one, and shakily started to pull himself up.
    Scutter was reeling, one arm clasped around Broward’s waist, when Meinecke stepped in and chopped two hard, desperate blows into his temple, sending him crashing. It didn’t quite stop there either. The Master of Disaster, sobbing uncontrollably, kept pounding Scutter where he lay on the floor until Broward, Hiller, and me managed to drag him off.
    For months afterward Hiller told and retold the story of how he had engineered the greatest upset in boxing history since Cassius Clay whipped Sonny Liston.
    “I trained him perfect,” he’d say. “I brought him along just so. As soon as I seen him hit the heavy bag, well, there was no question but he could hit. The problem was making him
want
to hit. Fucking guy was too nice for his own good. So I took the mental approach because if he seen the damage he could do hitting somebody – he wouldn’t want to hit people any more. That’s where Hop Jump came in. Somebody to dance the night away with because no way, Jose, was Hop Jump going to let himself get hit.
    “Scutter I was worried about. For him I designed the Cool Hand Luke defence. After a couple of rounds of that, Scutter figured he didn’t have nothing to worry about. And Meinecke – the pounding he was taking – that had to get to him, that had to piss him off. And everybody laughing at him, that twisted him, and me sitting on him, not letting him hit, that twisted him more. Psychology. He had to blow. I loaded him, I cocked him, I pulled the trigger.”
    Kurt was never the same guy after the fight. Deke, Hop Jump, Murph, everybody in Hiller’s gang began to notice that he was avoiding them. He avoided me too. No more long conversations late at night after the pool room closed down, walkingthose empty streets and talking about how, just around the corner, things were going to fall into place for us. When we ran into each other, we nodded, said a few words about nothing, and then edged away from each other like people who share a secret they would sooner forget.
    There were other changes. His hair grew longer. He quit the football team, didn’t bother to go out for wrestling. He began to hang around with strange types, two or three assholes who had published poems in the yearbook about Vietnam and babies crying in Watts. Deke said he had heard that Meinecke was taking acoustic guitar lessons. Hiller said, “Fuck him. You can drag a person up to your level but if they don’t make an effort they’ll sink back to where they naturally belong.” Meinecke and his new friends cut a lot of classes and spent afternoons at the house of a girl whose mother worked, listening to records, smoking grass. Finally, with only three months of school to go before graduation, Kurt dropped out.
    The last that was seen of Kurt Meinecke he was standing at the edge of the highway at five o’clock on a Sunday morning with his thumb stuck out. When those that had spotted him passed that way again a few hours later, he was gone.

Ray

 
    IT WAS RAY’S WIFE WHO WAS responsible for planting in him the notion that something had been askew in his childhood, wrong in his upbringing. He didn’t want to believe this was true and Pam’s persistence in claiming it was led to their first fight as a married couple.
    “What about the train and the cards and all that?” she said.