Racing the Rain Page 2

  Little Cassidy, though he was truly entranced by the Latin gobbledygook and the profusion of robes, miters, crucifixes, and other fabulous pagan paraphernalia, soon returned to the fold, however, pronouncing that his knees just couldn’t take it.

  It wasn’t until years later, in his freshman comparative religion class, that he read a chapter from a book called Religion from Tolstoy to Camus titled “The Dark Side of Religion.” One paragraph read, “The Protestant Calvin burned [at the stake] the scholarly Servetus for holding that Jesus was ‘the eternal son of God,’ rather than ‘the son of the eternal God.’ ”

  It seemed to Cassidy fairly harsh punishment for the misplacement of an adjective, even if the point were granted. Perhaps Servetus had made a typo.

  But that, as far as Cassidy was concerned, was just the icing on a frightening cake of apostate immolations, witch torturings, and child sacrifices that Christianity had proudly authored in its early days.

  His mother, however, made no exceptions for budding heretics, so he attended church and Sunday school regularly, messed around with Stiggs in the Fellowship Hall, and never missed the potluck suppers. No one ever made baked beans as well as the ladies at Reeves Memorial.

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  REGGIE HARRIS

  Cassidy lolled in the grass in Carl Wagner’s front yard, waiting to fight Reggie Harris.

  Now in the sixth grade, he was used to being picked on because of his small size and big mouth, but this animosity from Reggie was a surprise. They had been friends in the second and third grades, trading comic books and playing at each other’s houses. They drifted apart but were still more or less friendly. Now all of a sudden it was, “Hey, let’s fight.”

  “How come?” Cassidy said.

  Reggie just shrugged. “See you at Carl Wagner’s after school,” he said, going back to his disheveled desk as the bell rang.

  So Cassidy sat with Stiggs and Randleman and Stiggs’s freckle-faced little brother, Timmy, who was, pound for pound, tougher than all of them, and who was now all but vibrating in anticipation. He would have gladly taken on Reggie Harris by himself.

  “You stay out of this or I’ll kill you,” Cassidy told him. And to Stiggs: “Watch him, okay?”

  “Here they come,” said Stiggs. “I’ll go get Carl Wagner.”

  “He’s in his bedroom working on his P-51. He’s putting the decals on today but he said to come get him.”

  “Did he get the Revell or the Aurora one?”

  “I don’t know. The cool British one.”

  Carl Wagner had been working on it all week, showing up in Miss Leydon’s class every morning with dried Testors cement on his fingertips. The dark-complected Carl Wagner, whose parents were Lebanese immigrants, was an important personage at Fern Creek Elementary because his house was right across the street from the school. Also, both his parents worked, so many important after-school events were staged at his house. No one knew why he was always referred to by both names, never just “Carl” or “Wagner.”

  “Tell him Reggie’s coming and he’s bringing his brothers,” Cassidy said.

  Randleman did a rolling back flip to his hands and knees and hopped up as the shirtless Reggie and the two older boys sauntered up. Timmy glowered at the three of them but sat still.

  “You ready?” Reggie said.

  “I guess,” said Cassidy, climbing to his feet and starting to take his shirt off.

  Reggie tackled him around the waist and drove him back to the ground, his buzz-cut brown head buried under Cassidy’s sternum. When they hit the ground, it felt like Reggie’s thick forehead proceeded on down to tap the inside of Cassidy’s spine, forcing every molecule of air out of his body.

  Tears of shock welled in his eyes and he tried to push Reggie’s head away so he could get his breath back, but Reggie kept flailing at him, keeping him pinned and helpless. He began to panic when he couldn’t loosen his diaphragm enough to take a breath. He was vaguely aware of Dickie Harris urging Reggie on, but he also heard Carl Wagner’s voice saying, “Let him up, this isn’t fair.” Stiggs was already holding his squirming little brother around the waist.

  Fairness was a big thing in their world.

  They were both undersized, wiry as lynxes, skinned-knee tough and a little on the grimy side even before the fight began. But with Reggie it looked more worked-in, with several layers of kid soil not often disturbed by enforced bathing. He was already showing traces of the deep-seated resentment and sullenness that would almost certainly one day blossom into full-blown sociopathy.

  He came by it honestly, however, growing up in a low-income housing area called Sunrise Estates, where he shared a run-down cottage with his cigarette-sneaking brothers and a permanently hair-rollered, TV-obsessed mother. Their father had gone back to upstate New York to paint barns, and their mother’s life now centered around The Guiding Light, S&H Green Stamps, and the very same comic books her children read.

  Some algorithm deep in Reggie Harris’s frontal lobes had apparently worked out that he was doomed.

  For the time being he was merely nursing a mean streak that Quenton Cassidy suddenly found himself on the business end of. Down the road waiting for Reggie would be a succession of defeated teachers, outmanned social workers, and bored cops who would form the conduit through which Reggie and his mean streak would be processed through the elaborate drainage system of the Republic. Much of this even an innocent like Quenton Cassidy somehow understood on a primal level, but it availed him not a whit at the moment.

  In desperation, he began rocking Reggie from side to side until he got him off balance enough to dump him over. Then he got to his hands and knees and tried to draw that impossible first breath. Reggie was instantly on his knees beside him, holding him in a headlock and swinging uppercuts at his rib cage.

  The deep, noisy first breath came at long last, ragged and painful but quelling his panic. He might live after all, but he was still so shaky and desperate for air that he was having to will himself not to start bawling out of frustration and self-pity. It would have been, really, the worst thing he could do. His friends would be humiliated and everybody in school would know about it the next day. In their little society there was precious little sympathy for a crybaby.

  He began to feel real anger toward Reggie Harris for the first time. This was something new. Most fights were semi-lighthearted scuffles more like his losing wrestling matches with Stiggs and Randleman. This felt different.

  “Work the body! Work the body!” cried Donnie Harris. Cassidy wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but it was obvious Reggie was getting more than encouragement from the peanut gallery, and it finally dawned on Cassidy what this was all about: his siblings had been trying to toughen Reggie up for the coming Rat Wars, and the undersized Cassidy must have seemed a good early palooka.

  Cassidy looked over at Reggie and saw him winding up to deliver the coup de grâce. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion now, and Cassidy easily ducked under the roundhouse, feeling the air whiffing above him as the blow sailed over.

  He realized something else as he scrambled to his feet and turned to face his tormentor: Reggie wasn’t that good at this. Cassidy knew that he was not only quicker than Reggie, but he wasn’t breathing as hard. Maybe Reggie had already picked up some of his brothers’ bad habits.

  Now Reggie was huffing and puffing just as Cassidy was getting back to breathing normally again. Yes, he remembered, this is how it goes.

  Reggie let go another roundhouse right so far off the mark Cassidy didn’t even bother to duck. No wonder Reggie needed his brothers to egg him on. Cassidy felt something almost like pity for him and his squalid little life, but anger still gripped him.

  When Reggie got ready to try the right again, Cassidy saw an opening and stepped in and hit him hard in the midsection with his left hand, sinking his little knot of a fist into the declivity under Reggie’s sternum that Cassidy’s cousin Henry called “the solar plexu
s, your opponent’s secret off switch.”

  Reggie’s face lost its sneer and turned into a comic aggregation of circles, round eyes, and round mouth inside a round face. His hands dropped as he grabbed his knees and began struggling for breath, just as Cassidy had. Red faced now, he looked up at Cassidy almost in disbelief, and for a very brief moment Cassidy saw in his eyes something he was not expecting: a look of the old rapport they had had in their comic-book-trading days.

  Cassidy lost a lot of his anger then, but not his will to finish this. As he stepped toward Reggie, thinking to get him in a headlock and wring the rest of the fight out of him, Reggie’s middle brother, Dickie, stepped between them.

  “All right, round one. Time-out,” he said. He had an unfiltered cigarette behind his left ear, and he was barefoot. He had a ballpoint “tattoo” on his biceps of a cross overlaid with a dagger dripping a single drop of blood.

  “Huh?” Cassidy said.

  “It’s round one. Now we go to our corners and rest.”

  “What corners?”

  “It’s just what they call it. You seen the Friday Night Fights, ain’t you? Brought to you by Gillette blue blades in the handy dispenser? What’ll ya have, Pabst Blue Ribbon?” He was helping Reggie over to where the oldest brother, Donnie, sat in the grass, smoking a cigarette and looking disgusted. He was in high school and had a work-study job at a gas station.

  “My dad drinks the beer that made Milwaukee famous,” Cassidy muttered to no one in particular. But maybe Dickie had a point. None of the fights at Fern Creek Elementary ever had “rounds,” but Cassidy had to admit he had seen them on TV.

  Fingering several sore places on his face, he trudged over to where Randleman and Carl Wagner were lying in the grass poking at some kind of woolly caterpillar with a twig.

  “Pretty neat!” said Carl Wagner. “You really pasted him good!”

  “Why didn’t ya clean his clock when ya had the chance?” said Randleman.

  “I don’t know. I guess we’re doing rounds,” Cassidy said.

  “Rounds?” said Carl Wagner.

  “Like boxing, on TV.”

  “Aw, those old guys. Some of them are even bald! They don’t look tough to me,” said Randleman, hard to impress as usual.

  “They don’t hit each other all that much,” Cassidy admitted. “They just kind of stand there and hug each other for a while and then the referee comes in and makes them stop. My dad likes it though.”

  “Mine, too,” said Randleman. He had finally coaxed the caterpillar onto the twig and was holding it up for Cassidy to see. Carl Wagner reached over to run his finger down the bug’s furry back and everyone shivered in disgust.

  Cassidy flopped on his back, watching the low clouds sliding across the blue summer sky. He was still breathing hard.

  “I have to go finish my decals,” said Carl Wagner, chewing dried cement from his forefinger. “Are you guys going to fight any more?”

  Cassidy shrugged.

  Stiggs helped him up, and he and Cassidy walked over to where the Harris brothers were sitting. Randleman stayed to hold Timmy back, and Carl Wagner was given custody of the caterpillar.

  “Okay, Reggie,” said Cassidy. “Ding goes the bell.”

  Reggie looked up at him, glanced at his brothers, then looked away. Cassidy couldn’t believe it. He looked to Dickie, the apparent ringleader, for an explanation. Dickie looked away, too. The disgusted Donnie was already getting up to leave, rolling his pack of Luckies into the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  “I’ll be ready in a minute,” said Reggie, trying to salvage something.

  “I’m ready now,” said Cassidy.

  Reggie didn’t say anything. Dickie was sitting cross-legged, looking down at the grass between his knees.

  “I’m going to count to ten, then screw you guys, I’m going home,” said Cassidy. “One, two, three . . .”

  Reggie wasn’t going to get up, any fool could see that. But Cassidy felt he had to do something to give this nonevent some kind of arguable conclusion, so no one could ever say he chickened out.

  When he finished counting and Reggie hadn’t moved—hadn’t even looked at him—Cassidy returned to the others. Carl Wagner was showing the caterpillar to his little sister, Suzie, who had wandered over with her so-called babysitter, Maria DaRosa, who wasn’t much older than she was.

  “What are you going to do with him?” Suzie asked.

  “Well, we thought about eating him for dinner,” said Randleman.

  Her eyes widened and she studied the others, ever on the alert for teasing. “You wouldn’t!”

  “They might,” said Maria DaRosa. “Boys are pretty stupid, you know.”

  “Why not?” said Randleman. “Course, you have to skin them first.” More wide eyes.

  “Cut it out, Randleman,” said Cassidy. “They’re not going to eat him, Suzie.” Randleman was just trying to impress Maria, who was almost as good an athlete as most of the boys. But Cassidy knew she didn’t impress easily.

  “We could,” said Carl Wagner defensively. “My uncle Cliff said they eat bugs in survival school. He’s a Ranger. And they had to drink water out of a stream that had green stuff growing in it!”

  They all made noises of disgust. Citrus City had lots of lakes, but they were mostly clean. It was hard indeed to imagine how gross it would be to drink green slime, though they would have gladly watched someone else do it.

  “Besides eating caterpillars, what are you all doing?” asked Maria DaRosa.

  “Having a fight,” said Cassidy.

  “With who?”

  “Reggie Harris.”

  “Where is he?”

  Cassidy gestured behind him, but when he looked, Reggie and his brothers were gone.

  “Come on, Suzie,” said Maria DaRosa. “Boys are stupid and boring.”

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  WILD MAN

  Cassidy stopped paddling with a nicety of judgment that allowed the canoe to glide the rest of the way, finally scrunching up onto the small beach on the intracoastal near the mouth of the Loxahatchee River.

  His first love was now basketball, but he was small and skinny and regularly got trounced by the likes of Stiggs and Randleman, both of whom won much admiration on their junior high team. Cassidy, on the other hand, had had to skulk shamefacedly away from the list pinned to the bulletin board in the gym. He had not even made the first cut.

  What he was good at was holding his breath underwater, at first a worthless skill until he found useful tasks to do while submerged, such as procuring various forms of dinner. He learned that grown-ups would shower him with high praise and rewards when he returned from water sports with one or more interesting entrées. He had become expert in the use of different kinds of pole spears and spear guns, but his favorite weapon was the Hawaiian sling, a sort of underwater slingshot.

  Cassidy stowed the paddle in the back and took in the silence, resting in effort-induced contentment. The only sounds came from lapping wavelets and the light metallic scraping of a half dozen orange spiny lobsters in the front of the boat. Shirtless and barefoot, he got out carefully and—tides being second nature to him—pulled the boat up until it mostly lay on dry white sand, wrapping the painter round and round a cypress root. Fetching his net equipment bag from the boat, he dragged it over to a hurricane-felled palm tree and sat.

  This was a good spot for mangrove snappers, but because they would be small, he decided against the Hawaiian sling he had been using all morning and instead began putting his pole spear together.

  He didn’t hear the slightest sound, but when he looked up from his task, he was staring straight into the eyes of the largest and scariest-looking creature he had ever seen, either in real life or in the movies. And he had seen an angry hammerhead shark in real life.

  Cassidy’s mouth dropped open, and though every molecule of his being was poised to flee, he didn’t move. He stared wordlessly at the apparition.

  It was obviously
a man of some kind but unlike any he had ever seen. Cassidy’s father was over six feet tall, but this man would have dwarfed him. And he was so muscular he looked like a caricature from the weight-gain comic book ads. The man was shiny from sweat and river water and was deeply tanned. Swamp muck coated his bare legs up to his knees. Cassidy was horrified to see a huge red leech attached to his thigh. He wore only cutoff army fatigues, dilapidated combat boots, no socks, and greasy burlap bags tied around his ankles. A sweaty reddish bandana circled his forehead. When he moved, Cassidy could see every strand of muscle gliding beneath taut skin.

  Over one shoulder he carried a pair of wire animal traps, and over the other a live alligator that looked to be about four feet long, mouth neatly taped shut with electrical tape and feet bound together by pieces of clothesline. Tucked into his waist was a burlap bag full of something wiggling.

  “Mind if I have a drink?”

  The apparition dropped the traps where he stood, gesturing at Cassidy’s canteen, which he handed over wordlessly. In one long gulp the swamp man all but drained it before handing it back without comment. Cassidy noticed the man’s eyes held no malice, just intelligence and mild amusement, and he slowly let out some of the air he’d been holding.

  The man placed the alligator gently under the shade of a palmetto bush, pulled the burlap bag from his belt, and tossed it down next to Cassidy before sitting matter-of-factly on the log beside him.