Cowardice

By J.M. Jones

You’re not having a good time with things, are you? No, you’re not doing well at all. And it’s going to get worse before the day’s out. You’re nine, maybe ten, and this has been happening all the days you remember. At least, all the days counting the years from when you started at this school until now. What’s that: three? four? That’s the time we’re looking at here, and that seems right. Three, going on four. It seems nothing of consequence should be happening now, these being your elementary years, but we both know that’s not the case. It certainly doesn’t feel that way to you, right? Not with the dark ribbon of blue-black bruise wrapped around your leg. Or maybe it’s on your arm. You’ve had them there, too, so you know the life of a bruise. The way it starts red, inflamed, a welt, before it fades to this, a Rorschach blot you stare at in the privacy of your bathroom at home, after which it transmutes to a dull yellow-brown like the skin of a fruit, a banana, and you’ve been called that, too—a fruit, though you’re not sure you understand what a fruit is. You just know you’re different, quiet, introspective. You’d like to be left alone, but your introspection marks you out, makes you a target.

You’ve taken to watching the clock, which is what you’re doing now, isn’t it? Tracking the second hand as it races in circles. Before the minute hand moves forward, it clicks back, just a moment, to make you almost imagine that time can move backward, that you could go back and eliminate the mark, fit in, blend, become part of the crowd. As it stands, you’re nearing recess, and you know if you can’t get out ahead of the pack, if you can’t beat Nathan Sudell to the yard and disappear before he sees you, your ass is grass, or you’re dead meat or toast, which are all parlance of the time meaning a beating is in store, though you wouldn’t know the word parlance yet, would you? You’re a reader, advanced for your age, but parlance is above your level. Still, you know ass is grass and dead meat. It’s what—’89? ’90? The year before, or maybe a few years before that, Dukakis was defeated by Bush, the space shuttle Challenger exploded—adult events swirling around that you’re vaguely attuned to but don’t understand. Your understanding is that life can be cruel, unpredictable. The candidates your parents support lose. The first teacher NASA sends into space isn’t protected by providence. So, why should things be different for you? Why should the adults around you, for all their good intentions, be trusted to keep the other kids from taking you to pieces once the clock hits quarter of and the bell rings?

Nathan Sudell isn’t the only one, only the boldest, the most brazen, a composite, really, of all the bullies in all the years you’ve been bullied. The difference varies by degrees, elements of brutality, whether it’s solely name-calling or something more, something violent, a physical assault. Though violence isn’t something adults usually associate with children, that’s what this is, and you apply it to Nathan, if not then, then in retrospect, as memories return, as you trace back impulses, emotional reflexes, humiliations of a bygone time. He gave you names, the names other children used to jeer at you. At least you think it was him, but it might have been another. It might have been an evolution, a whisper down the lane of your faults and insecurities, spreading across the schoolyard, refining itself into modes of terror. You’re not even sure from this distance if he’s the one who gave you the bruise, composite that he is. Yet you remember massaging the bruise beneath your desk, hoping no one would see and charge you with fondling yourself. Though you don’t fondle yourself, you don’t even know what it means, but if someone saw you, regardless of whether or not they knew, they’d accuse. And this would be one more mark against you. Though the rubbing feels good. There was pain, but after the rubbing, the pain recedes, gives you a moment’s respite, which isn’t something you often get, is it? You’ve lived your life in fear. Three years, going on four. And the person who gave you this bruise is someone you fear, isn’t he? So it might as well have been Nathan Sudell.

Fear’s a constant companion during this time, a musk you give off. Everywhere you move this trace element follows you, a trace element Nathan’s ilk can scent and track. And he’d done this a few days before. Hence, the bruises. But it’s not the bruises that cause the most pain. It’s the fact that you can’t fight back, isn’t it? Because, you think, if circumstances were different, you would. You’re a hothead when provoked, though you rein this in if it might cause trouble, which is why you don’t let fly at Nathan. When he’d found you, you’d been hiding, because hiding was better than fighting. You were concealed by a ring of bushes, reading a book. When you look back, you see the dark green nettles around you, filtering sunlight, the plump red berries you’ve been told are poisonous, the earthen floor. There’s the book, too. A book whose title you can’t recall. But Nathan had snatched it from your hands, called you a pussy, not because hiding was feminine but because reading was. He was more brazen than you could have anticipated, for he’d torn the book, and he’d done it, as far as you can remember, by ripping it straight down the spine, which implied not only strength but also an utter disregard for the rules. It had a flap in the back, a manila cardboard pocket for the white checkout card from the library. Anyone could have seen that, and you think Nathan did, but he didn’t care. You’d reached for the book—a mistake in retrospect, since this exposed your stomach—and he hit you, and you fell, and once he’d knocked you down, he kicked you, aiming for your groin but gaining only your thigh. You were humiliated. You lay in the dirt, fighting back tears, because crying was beyond humiliation. And you could have struck back. You weren’t injured enough that you couldn’t have stood and taken a shot at him from behind as he turned away, but you didn’t, not because you feared him, but because you feared the fallout if someone saw. It was common knowledge among your peers that you were an outcast, but this knowledge hadn’t migrated to adults. The recess aides didn’t know, which meant your teachers didn’t, which meant your parents didn’t, and you would have gone to any length, including clamping down on this humiliation and refusing to fight back, to avoid having this relayed to them. You were their child. They loved you. They thought you had friends and made a good showing at school, but they were wrong, and you didn’t want them to see you differently. So you squashed down your rage, increased the pressure on that nugget of hate until it grew so tight in your chest that it pulled in all the other emotions and squashed those, too. And you moved that day—the day Nathan attacked you—in a rage, off the bus home, into your backyard. You took a stick and thrashed your mother’s wilting hydrangea plants. You figured they were dying anyway, and your mother wouldn’t notice the yellowing brown leaves and desiccated blue flower petals lying in the drive, wouldn’t suspect her son had done this, and you were right. You thrashed the plant, imagining it was him, imagining his eyes, his face, his body, tearing it apart. You imagined hurting him, defeating him.

Now you’re sitting, watching the clock as I’m watching you, thinking about you, all this time knowing where you’re headed, knowing what you’re about to do, though you don’t, do you? Not yet. You’re wondering where you’re going to hide. Because hiding is what you do, and the spot in the bushes is compromised, so you’re thinking about the schoolyard’s alcoves. You know he’s coming. He won’t rest until the year is over or you fight back, and summer’s a long way off. Even then, he could find you in the parks and playgrounds, the fields. Time accelerates as you age, but you don’t know this either. At nine or ten, it’s interminable. It stretches. It seems Nathan Sudell will always be a presence in your life, and to some extent, he will, but not in the way you think. All you want that afternoon is to rid yourself of him—for good if possible—but how?

It doesn’t come easily—machination, a word you wouldn’t know either—but once you reach the schoolyard, that’s what you’re doing: scheming, plotting. You’d like to think you’re smarter than him, just not as ruthless. And this makes vengeance difficult. Vengeance requires rescinding your conscience, and you don’t know how to achieve this, but it’s what you’ll learn today. You’re not sure how far you’ll go, what will hurt him most, but if he’s anything like you—and you hope he isn’t, but it’s all you have to go on—humiliation will work better than physical pain. So you slink along, watching. You’ve found a spot in the alcove by the bike racks. There’s a wall behind which you can hide, and a door, into which you can retreat if you sense his approach.

He’s showing off now. He’s got a few minions or flunkies or whatever you call them, at his side, and he’s climbing the monkey bars, back and forth, dangling by an arm to demonstrate his strength. And what he’s doing, you’ll concede, requires strength. You’ve tried climbing those bars yourself. They’re high with a patch of packed brown earth underneath that stings your feet whenever you fall, and you always do. Most kids can’t hang on. Which is what Nathan finds so invigorating: that he can, that this makes him unique.

The boys around him cheer. And when he challenges them, they climb out a bar or two and then back and wave him off, acknowledging he’s their leader, their king, which is what he wants: to be the best, to rule, to dominate. This type of behavior will appear in others in your life, but you don’t know this yet. These types of people are also cowards, which you don’t know either, because his domination involves instilling fear in people like you, people who don’t know. And watching this, you get mad. Madder than you’ve ever been, this anger being the culmination of three or four years’ humiliation, and as you think this, the seed of inspiration strikes, and when it comes, it feels so right, you can’t ignore it. You see it all unfolding: him dangling there, loose gray sweatpants, the way he’s exposed, so convinced of his own invincibility that he doesn’t recognize how vulnerable he’s made himself. And you know, though you don’t know how, that everyone’s vulnerable, that anyone can be hurt, that the candidates your parents support can lose, that the teachers they send into space can blow up, that even the strongest can fail.

Now I’ll admit I’ve tried to write this in other ways, but it never comes off. Perhaps it’s because you’re a child, and the moment, when not weighed with what’s happening inside you, when seen from the outside, seems inconsequential. And it’s hard to get at what’s inside you if I’m not directly talking to you. But I remember that moment, everything you felt, and I’d like to tell you that you’ll be all right, that the moment will fade as bruises fade, though it has a resonance that won’t disappear completely, if only because this day, as inconsequential as the actions of a nine- or ten-year-old seem, you learned what’s inside you, the cruelties you’re capable of. And you’ve been struggling against such cruelties ever since. I’d like to say you followed through, as I watch you walking across the yard, to say you took action against Nathan, humiliated him, fought injustices, righted wrongs. But you didn’t. For as you approached, you got scared, considered calling it off. You feared the possibility of backlash. You felt the fist in your stomach, the embarrassment of him calling you a pussy. You felt the book being ripped from your hand. And you saw, as you approached, another boy coming on, responding to Nathan’s call: Can you climb the bars, can you swing out and make it across? And this boy was thinking, I can. I can climb. I can do what he says and make it and get cheered on. That boy was like you—looking for a way out, a way through, trying to get by day-to-day, to avoid the jeers and ridicule that others seemed so adept at providing. His name was Aaron, not a composite like Nathan, but a singular boy. And he was dirty and poor and quiet. And his approach made Nathan stop hanging, interrupted your plan. And though the boy was like you—a pariah—you couldn’t forgive that he’d forestalled your potential victory. Though maybe you wouldn’t have done it. Maybe it was all in your head, and you only did what you did because Aaron was weak. And the weak have cruelties thrust upon them, especially if—as Aaron was doing—they try to rise above their station.

It was Nathan’s job to do what you did when Aaron took the rung and swung out over the patch. It was Nathan’s job, if order held, if things kept working the way they should. But no, it was you. You doled out punishment, punishment for transgressing, for Aaron wanting into the pack when you wanted in but couldn’t figure out how, because you were you and blending in wasn’t easy. Just as it wasn’t easy for Aaron, who was trying, too, right then and there. Trying to cross that divide as he crossed those bars. And so you approached and ignored your better judgment, the judgment that cried, don’t do this, he’s you and you’re him and you should align and stand together and against. But here’s the thing, that secret, terrible thing: You knew the kids would laugh, that it didn’t matter whether it was Nathan or Aaron up there dangling. They’d laugh, and you’d get that laugh and it would be yours, because it wouldn’t be aimed at you but for you, and you would feel good for once. So you went and never considered the all-too-human willingness of the injured to mete out injury to whoever crosses their path. And who can say what Aaron felt? But looking down at him that afternoon, watching him writhe and weep in the dirt, his pants around his ankles, you understood that he too knew the life of a bruise; the way it started red and throbbing, transformed to a deep blue, then resolved itself into a yellow-brown tinge; and I can assure you, from the vantage point of years later, we’ve never felt worse in our life. Because it’s moments like these that show what you’re capable of. It’s moments like these that can prove who you are.




About the author:

Jason M. Jones works as a writer and editor in Philadelphia. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Jabberwock Review, Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, and Potomac Review. For more, please see jasonmjones.net.