Bumpkins

I was in an alternative education program.

I got held back a grade somewhere in elementary school too.

Now I was about to graduate high school but first my friend Robby and I had to come in on a Saturday to take our English final. Robby picked me up and we hotboxed his car on the drive in. Whether or not we’d graduate depended on how we did on the exam. We missed too much class throughout the school year. But our teacher was a softy so we had a good feeling about it. When we got to school, we reeked of pot.

We took our final exam in this room that was like a holding cell for the school. Kids waited there while the cops were on their way to get them.

For part of our English final, we had to write our full names in Calligraphy. We were supposed to be practicing. Our teacher gave us special lined paper and these special pens.

I was so stoned and so focused on the calligraphy lettering that by the time I was done I realized I spelled my name wrong.

Fuck it.

Robby was waiting for me so we could leave. His name is shorter than mine. I turned in what I had and still graduated. They just wanted to get rid of me. To send me away to be someone else’s problem.

My state appointed case worker already took me down to the community college to sign me up for classes in the fall. I was their problem now.

***

I was at a bonfire a few weeks later.

Critter always had the best parties. His family owned a patch of woods with a small pond in the middle of it. It was off a dirt road that didn’t have a name.

Cars parked in the patch of long grass.

The party was bigger than usual.

The gangsters showed up. They weren’t really a gang anymore. A bunch of OG members got put away last year. It was on the news. Now they were just some guys who grew up together. They were some of the funniest people I’ve ever met. They didn’t care about anything. Like they discovered the meaning of life but weren’t able to articulate it. It was one of those things you could only figure out for yourself. The ones who already know can’t help you.

I was sitting on the tailgate of a truck. I smoked a joint with my friend Kyle. He bought it from the gangsters. I think it was laced.

As I sat there, I kept thinking I was hearing movement in the woods. And I was seeing motions I couldn’t make out. It sounded like kids playing. Laughing on the playground or in a backyard on a Sunday afternoon. High giggles. When I thought nobody was looking, I peered into the woods and swore I saw little kids running around. Little flashes of them going between trees. Chasing each other, playing tag.

I sat back, rubbed my face and took a deep breath. I looked at the dark trees again and they seemed to be waving at me. The tall grass was waving at me. Everything seemed brighter. The pond was waving at me. The stars reflecting off the pond waved at me. The imaginary kids playing waved at me in quick flashes. Their giggles waved at me. The fire flies waved at me.

Robby tossed a pallet on the fire. It blazed. Orange dots rising in the night sky. The heat woke me up.

I didn’t know what time it was. Maybe 10 O’clock. Two crotch rockets pulled in. That high pitched sputtering noise. Nobody knew who they were.

The two guys that got off the crotch rockets and came walking up to the party. They were around our age. Maybe a little older. Wearing tight muscle shirts, walking aggressively.

Kyle walked up to me. His pupils were huge so I figured mine were too.

“Hey man, you know who those guys are?” he asked me.

“Nah, go find out.” I said pointing into the crowd.

“That’s what I’ve been doing. Nobody knows who they are.”

“Well, what the fuck they doing here then?”

Kyle shrugged and lit a Newport.

I told him I was tripping balls and asked him what was in the joint. He said he didn’t know but was glad I said something because he was tripping too.

I could smell a fight about to happen. I scanned the party. The noise deadened. People were watching. The two guys didn’t notice.

Eventually I lost interest. I was sipping on a beer. I started talking to other people. My legs felt wavy so I wanted to stay sitting on the tailgate.

Then I heard shouting and shoving. People yelling “Fuck you motherfucker.” Shit like that.

I heard a loud crack and the crowd go: “OHHHH!”

A body was laying in the grass. Not moving except his arm was extended in the air, his wrist curled in like a T-Rex arm. Fast moving feet scattered around the stillness of the body.

The other guy was throwing himself into the fight. They grabbed the other guy and I heard screaming. Everyone looked like shadows against the fire.

The other guy fell to his knees holding his stomach. Everyone scattered away from him.

I hopped up off the tailgate and found my balance.

Critter was freaking out, holding his hands to the sides of his head. He looked like he was squeezing his head like you’d squeeze orange juice. He was yelling at everyone. Everyone was standing around like children pretending they did nothing wrong.

The one kid was sitting on the ground holding his stomach. Blood seeping between his fingers and soaking his shirt. I could see the blood glistening in the firelight. He was starting to panic. The other guy still had his arm curled in the air and I think he was having a seizure. His whole body was stiff.

Tim was standing there rubbing his fist. He was sweating. Tim was a big ass farm boy. He was wearing a flannel with cutoff sleeves.

“Dude, I didn’t hit him that hard. I didn’t hit him that hard. What the fuck.” He kept saying some variation of this over and over again.

“What happened?” I asked.

“He called me a bumpkin.”

“What the fuck is a bumpkin?”

“I don’t know.” Tim shrugged like he’d just killed one of his beef cattle with a sledge hammer.

I’m pretty sure Robby stabbed the other kid. Robby came back from the pond, lurking in the darkness, his hands wet. I eyed him but didn’t say anything. He made eye contact with me but quickly looked away. He had a butterfly knife he liked to use. He stabbed a college kid in a McDonalds parking lot a few months back. They were drunk talking shit to us. Robby already signed on with the Army. He told them he wanted to kill people. They were thrilled.

Critter was making his way around the party telling everyone to leave.

I could still hear those kids in the woods. Laughing. It felt like they were laughing at me. At all of us. I felt like they were pointing at me with their tongues sticking out, mocking me.

Critter yelled at two girls trying to wake up the knocked-out kid.

They told Critter he was a dick and left.

I turned around to watch everyone leave. The gangsters were laughing about us being crazy hillbillies. Some of them left but others stayed.

Tim was pacing back and forth, “What should we do? This is fucked up.”

The knocked-out kid started to make some weird gurgling noises and moaned.

His stabbed friend was squirming on the ground bleeding. He started sobbing, “Is he dead? Is he dead?” His crying face was perfectly symmetrical with straight white teeth. Like he was from a higher gene pool.

Nobody knew what to do.

“Tim, come here.” I waved him over, quietly. Tim leaned his ear into me, placing his hand on my shoulder. “Just get the fuck out of here, man.” I told him this like it was a playground secret.

Tim’s face was red with beads of sweat running down. “What are you guys gonna do?”

“I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. But I think you should get some distance between this.”

He nodded and said thank you. He ran to his truck and spun the tires in the dirt as he left.

“Where the fuck are you going?!” yelled Critter, throwing his hands in the air.

“I told him to leave, Critter.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. He’s panicking. He shouldn’t be here.” I spoke I felt like I was talking through a echoing tunnel. It helped me gage how far gone I was.

Critter rolled his eyes.

I knelt down in the wet grass. Crickets chirped. I could see the shadow of a bat flapping in the air, a clear night sky of stars behind it. The temp was starting to cool and I could feel my sweat drying. I wished I was a cowboy, alone out west. Living a hundred years ago. But I’m not. I started to think about how everything already happened. I thought about how we’re all stars that burnt out deep in space a long time ago and our current life is actually the light from our past lives, still traveling through space and hitting this planet we call earth and what we’re experiencing is the reverberation of something which ended a long, long time ago. I felt like I knew everything that was going to happen and I didn’t worry.

The stabbed kid started wailing about wanting to go home. Robby ran up, stood over him yelling down at him to shut the fuck up.

Everyone started talking about what to do.

Robby said we should kill them.

Everyone thought it was just another fucked up Robby joke.

I knew it wasn’t.

This guy Trevario spoke up. “Ya’ll need to get them to a fucking hospital.”

“How?” said Critter. “We’d get in trouble.”

“Yeah, maybe, but if you don’t and they die then you definitely will get in trouble. A lot more trouble. There’re so many fucking witnesses someone’s gonna say something. If you go to a hospital then at least it looks like you tried to help them.” I couldn’t see his face because of the shadows. “Do you know these motherfuckers?” He asked us.

We all said we didn’t know them.

He asked the stabbed kid if he knew any of us. He shook his head no.

“There you go. Drop them off at the hospital on Michigan Avenue in Old town.”

“Wait, if you don’t know any of us then why are you here?” Critter asked the stabbed kid.

The kid shifted. He said he heard there was drugs here and they wanted to buy cocaine. Said he was from the private Catholic school in the city. We all shook our heads.

We talked and agreed. Some guys were going to take the crotch rockets and Critter was going to follow them in his car. They were going to dump them in a ditch.

The knocked-out kid was starting to wake up. He was confused and didn’t know who he was. He didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t talk right. He pissed his pants. We got some water in him. He would bust out crying at random times. I could tell he didn’t know why.

I was still hearing the little imaginary kids rustling in the deep in the woods but was able to ignore them now.

Nobody wanted to take the catholic kids to the hospital. Trevario finally shook his head. “Alright, fuck it. I’ll take them.” He pointed at me. “But you’re coming with me.”

“Why me?” I asked. I’d been trying to not get too involved. Only helping when I needed to.

“Because you’re calm.”

“I don’t know, man. I’m kinda fucked up right now.”

“All I need you to do is get them out of the car when we get to the hospital.”

“Fine, whatever.” I packed some grizzly mint into my bottom lip, felt the fiberglass cut in.

I helped the stabbed kid get in the back seat of Trevario’s car. We wrapped a big beach towel around his torso to help stop the bleeding and hold him together.

The concussed kid’s legs were too wobbly so we picked him up. Trevario got his legs and I got his shoulders and we loaded him in. He was laying down, his head in the lap of his stabbed friend.

We slammed the doors shut and left for the hospital.

It was about a 40-minute drive and I wasn’t sure how to get there. Trevario was driving a haggard Gran Prix with sagging suspension and a rusted-out bottom. He lit a Black & Mild. The smoke filled the inside. Rap music softly bumping from the speakers, the red dash lights blurry from the smoke.

I brought a few beers with me. We went down the bumpy road that led to the city. I sat back and watched telephone poles sway back and forth across the empty county road.

We didn’t talk whole car ride to the hospital because we didn’t want to accidently say anything that could identify us.

When we got to the city the city was quiet.

When we got near the hospital Trevario didn’t go up the emergency entrance right away. He drove around the block first. He told us all to look out for cops. Even the stabbed kid was looking. We didn’t see any.

Trevario pulled into the entrance that read “Emergency” in big red neon letters. It was like a giant fast food drive-thru.

The stabbed kid started to say thank you for driving him and his friend to the hospital. Trevario and I turned around at the same time and told him to shut the fuck up. He gulped.

“Alright, man. I’m gonna pull up by the emergency entrance and you’re gonna jump out and pull the fucked-up guy out the back and jump back in. I ain’t even stopping the car. You got it?”

I nodded. As we got closer to the big glass double-doors I could see the lit up waiting room inside. A security guard sitting at a desk, arms folded, half asleep.

I turned to Trevario. “You aren’t leaving without me, right?”

“I’m not leaving you bro, but be ready.”

I had my seat belt off. My fingers curled around the door handle. I felt calm, clear headed even. I knew exactly what I needed to do. I knew what I could control. Trevario pulled up and I jumped out the car. The interior lights dinged on. I opened the back door and yanked the concussed kid out by his ankles, he flopped on the cement and groaned. I ran and hopped back in the front passenger seat. The car never stopped moving. At the same time the stabbed kid stepped out of the car on the other side.

Once I was back in the car Trevario gunned it and we sped out. The car doors slammed shut from acceleration.

The adrenaline felt good, like I’d just accomplished something for first time in forever. We slapped hands. There was a Taco Bell near the hospital. We got a big order, anything we wanted with large Baja Blasts. Taco bell wrappers covered Travario’s car floor as we ate.

I got home at around 4 am.

***

It was late August. The first day of classes at community college. I was sitting in the back of my Tech Math 3 class. The lowest math class the college offered. The one I tested into. My book looked like it’d gone through a wood chipper. It was $120. My case worker wrote a check for it. I tested into regular English and she said that was great.

I was super nervous. I didn’t feel like I belonged here. I was the only one of my friends going to college. I was scared of being asked to do math problems in front of the class. Some of the other kids seemed to know each other. They had new bookbags and new shoes.

Trevario walked in. He scanned the room and saw me in the back and nodded. “What up, baby,” he shouted. Everyone turned and looked at him. We both laughed. He walked over and sat down next to me. “You ready for this dumbass math bullshit, man?”

I was leaning back in my chair, arms folded.  I shrugged. “Fuck no. I hate this shit.”

We talked about our summers. He asked me if I ever heard anything on the Catholic kids we dropped off at the hospital. I hadn’t. Neither did he. We guessed they weren’t able to show the cops where they’d been attacked. Critter stopped having parties afterwards, scared the cops might show up asking questions.

Trevario didn’t have a book. We’d go to the library and make copies of assignments out of my book after class. We smoked weed in the big parking lot out back. Trevario dropped the class after three weeks. I dropped the class halfway through the semester but passed my other classes and got an A in English. I signed up for winter semester, retaking the same math class. I didn’t see Trevario again after that.

I recently found out he got shot and killed. There’s a spray-painted mural of him on a brick wall downtown. I don’t know what happened. I never ask any questions. Sometimes I feel like I’m not far behind. Sometimes I’ll still get the feeling everything already happened.