Two Lives

We floated lazily along the water in a canoe. The river was calm, and it was August. I smoked a cigar, and nursed a warm beer and looked out at the vast openness of it all.

My skin burning, but I didn’t care.

Maple trees, and oak trees, rose up on either side of the riverbanks like a crowd of colossus onlookers. This town, a prison in so many ways, yet at this time of the year folks would flock from all edges of the world to come and tell us how lucky we were. How we had it all. How we lived in paradise.

One beer after another and soon the prison sentence was over. College awaited, and at that moment I didn’t know how to feel. Comfort and change at odds with each other. Fighting a bloody fight at the center of my gut. This feeling, I thought, this feeling right now, was one that had consumed so many. The ones that almost got out. The ones who were destined to be great, or at least better, stayed behind because it was comfortable. And comfort could easily be disguised as truth, and happiness. I could feel it now. Christ, could I ever feel it.

Greg was next to me, Yankees hat on backwards looking out and looking in. He wasn’t leaving. He was staying, and the openness to him had a different meaning than it did to me. To me it was showing a path out. A sparkling diamond path. A thank you for the years. A bidding farewell. But for Brent, it was something different. His hand brushed the water lazily, and conversation had come and gone. I didn’t know what to say, because part of me believed that he was angry at me. As though he was feeling like a baby left at a stranger’s door. Abandonment. A breaking of the bond. A motherless child.

And so I let him internalize what he needed to internalize and drank beer, and let the sunshine burn my skin.

Once we reached the beach, we paddled to the shoreline, then dragged the canoe to his car, and strapped it to the top. Still quiet. Still distant. Inside, we drove through town, window down and music blasting. Drove down the old roads, we’d driven so many times.

Finally, he said, “You wanna go to The Crop Circle?”

And I said, “What for?”

“I’m feeling like I want to fight. You?”

And as he looked at me, there was something dark in his eyes. Like this was a test. He was telling me to do this, or I was already gone. A liberal pussy college kid, who forgot where he came from. Here, in this town. We fought and we bled. And in other towns, other cities, people read books, talked about their feelings, and expected the world not to hurt them, because they had never hurt it. But they had hurt it, hadn’t they?

And so I said, “Sure man, let’s do it.” And I tried to smile like something wasn’t broken. Like I wasn’t being torn in two. This was a nexus. I was in the middle of two lives. And I was hoping my eyes were camouflaging me from how I actually felt. But eyes couldn’t be camouflaged, there were just those who looked hard enough and those who didn’t.

We crossed the bridge and turned left onto the reserve. We drove for about five minutes before reaching a church of immense stature. A steeple high in the air, casting judgements. Casting aspersions. There we turned right. In the back of a small rundown house, there was a circle of dead grass where two boys hit each other with all they had.

What was going on in their heads? The girl that got away? The absent father? The drug-addled mother? Lack of money? Lack of friends? Lack of hope for a future? This was a prison to them. A prison partially of their own making, but a generational one too. A prison handed down by the father’s of their father’s, like a blood ritual.

Brent walked up to Jerry, who ran the backyard club, and said, “Hey brother, I’d like to get in.”

Jerry nodded, taking a bite out of a hotdog, and said, “Right on, right on, brother. We’ll get you in next.”

“Against who?”

“Uh, how about Jessie?”

Jessie weighed about 90 lbs soaking wet, and he was shadow boxing under the shade of an oak tree about fifty yards away. Greg laughed, and said sure. Greg was bigger. But I’d seen Jesse at school put his fists up against anyone, no matter their size, or their ability to beat him senseless. And a kid who had nothing to lose, was unpredictable. And unpredictability, could win fights. And I could already see Greg palling it up with the guys, and drinking a beer, and eating a hot dog. I thought that was a bad idea, but at the same time, kinda thought that seeing Greg get his nose busted up by Jesse, had potential to be quite a funny scene. And hell, I was leaving in a week. I wanted a show.

Greg won the match, but certainly not by a landslide. Jesse connected two or three times, one of those times busting just above Greg’s left eyebrow, blood leaking down his face. But Greg got the best of him, and Jesse eventually, grasping his stomach, put his hand up to say, “enough,” and went back to shadow boxing under the oak, preparing for his next match.

Greg sat on the deck afterwards, feeling a sense of pride at the display of blood on his face. Like the blood was his cross to bear. The feeling of it leaking down the side of his face, the understanding that the college kids that I’d soon surround myself with would be taken aback, and disgusted at the sight of it. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t, but it provided a sense of relief, thinking that they’d be queasy at the sight of him.

“Good fight, man.” I said, and he laughed,

“Squirrely little fucker is tough. Shouldn’t have drank all those beers.” Then it was my turn to laugh.

Jerry was at the center of the crop circle now, bouncing around with his small mixed martial arts gloves, asking someone, anyone to come and square off against him. Waving to the crowd of a dozen or so guys, who were pretending to be too locked into deep conversation to hear him, or notice him.

Then I thought about Greg, and this town. The mountains in the distance, the water, the bridge, the fights, and all of it. The good, and the bad. And realized that for better or worse, this town had molded me. And maybe I’d leave and never fit in. Maybe the intellectuals would see a fucking hillbilly mongoloid, and send me packing back home, to the wilderness, where I belonged. Or maybe I’d fit in just fine, and forget about this place. But he’d never forget. He knew that.

“I’ll go.” I said, and Jer gave me a look that was a split between feeling impressed, and thinking that I had some kind of death wish.

“Dude, Jerry’s never lost.” Greg said to me, and I told him I didn’t give a shit. I wasn’t here to win. I was just here because this was my home, and I spoke the same language as the rest, because I’d lived the same life.

I wrapped my hands and put on the gloves, and I went toe to toe with a certified killer in a small patch of dead grass known as the crop circle. I looked over at Greg and winked, and he looked pale as a ghost. But what he didn’t know was that I was expecting, I was expecting a scar, and when I left, I didn’t want to hide who I was, I wanted them to know exactly who I was.

The first round started and Jerry landed a brutal jab right between my eyes. The world was distorted, then he landed another. Under my right eyebrow, bursting, blood ran down my face. I laughed, Christ, I hadn’t laughed that hard in years, if ever.

“You’re fucking crazy man,” Jerry said, and I wiped the blood away from face with the dirty glove, and urged him to continue.

With each blow was a reminder of who I was. There was my mom packing up her suitcase and leaving us. My brother or old man not able to stay in the house, so there was me, begging mom not to go, as she cried and said she had no choice. The next blow was me holding her so tight, and squeezing my eyes closed hard enough that they watered, and praying that I was again a child, and my mom was coming into my room to tell me she loved me and tucking me in tightly.

Then I felt anger flush in my face, the laughter gone. The memories so close they were like a shadow over the present, like an eclipse, and I didn’t know where I was, or when I was, or what the hell was going on. There was just blood and memories, and I landed a hook right under Jerry’s jaw that had him stumbling back, outside the ring into the green grass, the living.

And there was a memory in his eyes too, and they flashed between anger and sadness, contempt and denial. The fight wasn’t me against him, it was my pain against his pain, my hurt against his hurt.

Then he hit me again, and I was standing at the edge of a great field, a hundred acres or more. Playing a game of burning the dry grass and stomping it out before it took off like a flash of lightning. I had a brand new shirt bought for my birthday and a bottle of gatorade. I’m too slow and like an inferno the field is set on fire, flames higher than my head, smoke as dark as midnight. The older guys, who I thought were friends are bailing, running down the street leaving me. I’m taking my shirt off, brand new and helpless smashing it against the flames, my gatorade bottle doing nothing, but I’m trying. I’m helpless, friendless, and in fear of lighting the whole town of fire, I’m crying.

And each hit brings pain and stinging, and memories. But it’s nice, it’s freeing because they’ve been locked up for so long. The wind and the summer, and the people, they’re all real but mirages as well because soon they’ll be in the rearview, and soon I’ll see once and for all, if the grass is truly greener or if every town, every city, is just different shades of same damn colour, and if it isn’t actually location that changes a person, because in reality we’re running from ourselves. I’ll find out soon, if the problem is the town or the person.

I make it two rounds, and Jerry ends it with a shot to my midsection, which instantly swells my ribs and I hit the burned patch hard, on my knees, and tell him to stop. “I’m done,” I say out of breath, “I’m finished.”

Jerry reaches out a hand, and pulls me up. “You’re crazy you know that?”

“I do now,” I say and we laugh, and he pats me on the back. Then Greg hands me a beer, and looks at me with a new found respect, like he never could have guessed that I’d have it in me.

I sit back down on the deck, putting a paper towel up against the cut.

“You might need stitches,” Greg says,

“Worse things than scars.”

He goes quiet for a minute, and I lay back on the deck staring up at a sky of unbelievable blue. Clear. No clouds. Just endless blue.

In a few days, I’ll be rolling along highway 11, looking back, and wondering at which road side sign it’ll be before this town leaves me like a possessed spirit, and I’m reborn.

“You better come back and visit.”

I tell him I will.

“Don’t forget about this place. Don’t forget about who you are.”

And I think about the deep gash above my eye, and I think about stitches, and scars, and realize that this place will be on my skin for the rest of my life.

“I couldn’t even if I tried.”