Bill

Into the funnel of your death, I was able to pour more hurt than I even knew I felt. The thought of going to your funeral scared me right into a cold that kept me home for two weeks.

Let’s face it, I was fifteen years old and I didn’t know squat. You were killed, and I knew right then that we all skated on thin ice. I was right, too. Kennedy was killed that same year, Suzie got pregnant, Bobbi’s mom died of cancer, and that boy from Jefferson hung himself. And Dennis’ eye…Dennis’ left eye kept tearing like that was the only part of him that grieved. They said he’d scratched his cornea as he ran for help, leaving you lying alone in the bright yellow leaves. All the rest of that year, half of him wept.

When they told me that Dennis had shot you, my mom had just dropped me off for the weekly Luther League meeting, and all the kids were waiting outside in the weak light of an early fall evening. I wasn’t Lutheran, but I would have converted to any –ism in the book just to get out of the house. We had our usual snarling match on the way to the church, except I was finally learning not to say a word, no matter how she tried to peel back the bark and screw the knife in. Every time I slammed the car door behind me, I felt like I had just started breathing again after diving too deep in the murky waters of the lake that bordered our back yard. I had done that too many times, going deep, blind fingers feeling along the bottom laden with soft muck and countless small clam shells, waiting until I just had to breathe, then kicking upwards, sure I wouldn’t make it, swallowing to make the air last, then choking on the water that streamed off my hair in the bright sunlight.

When they told me you were dead, I just took off running. I didn’t even know you, really, except I’d see you warming the bench at football games, and I’d wanted a different debate partner than you, somebody not so nice, a real sarcastic cut-throat like me. Good old pudgy Bill. How could you get shot, when the thought of you hunting was just plain ridiculous? It seemed like a long time until somebody caught up to me, and I can’t even remember who it was that caught my sleeve and wrapped me up against their scratchy, wool coat.

Dennis stopped football, he just about stopped altogether, and he never talked about what happened out there in the woods. Then, my best friend Bobbi tucked him up under whatever she had left after her own mother died, leaving her with her six-pack-a-night father and her slut sister, and Bobbi and Dennis went steady. Later on, they married, but all I remember is they went someplace I couldn’t go even though I hurt too, and they just stayed there, Bill. They never came back and neither did you.