Before our girlfriends dumped us, we swayed gentle-drunk on the eve of our tenth high-school reunion, dogging shots around the dusty pool table at the town’s better bar. As we dipped about to Dua Lipa songs vibing from the jukebox, we blew our vape clouds into the swinging, green-frosted light, though the place was posted as smoke-free.
Our girlfriends said, “We can’t believe you grew up in this town.”
“Why?” we said.
“You’re all so business-y now. Have they even heard of the NASDAQ around here?”
“Maybe, maybe not, but big-city bitchyness they have heard of,” we said.
“Fine, fine,” they said. “Then tell us what it was like growing up here.”
“For one, it’s like we’ve always had each other,” we said, play-punching each other’s shoulders. “Yeah, we’ve always had each other’s backs.”
“But what did you do?” they said. “It seems pretty quiet so far.”
“First, having fun in a small town doesn’t just take care of itself. It takes planning.”
“Planning?” the women said.
“Yeah,” we said. “Like——.”
Our eyes popped wide, and we snapped our fingers and said, “Like the way Jimny showed us.”
“Who?” they said.
Turning to ourselves, we said, “Shit: Jimny. Haven’t thought of that guy in years. What ever happened to him?”
“Wait: Who?” they said as we kept talking to ourselves.
“God, remember how he smashed that window of the autoshop when it was closed, and he told us to say some group of Puerto Ricans had driven into town and gotten so pissed off at the American Flag decal, they kicked it in?”
“You went along with all that?” our girlfriends said.
“Jimny made up that story?” we said. “It was just so real since that’s how they all are. See? If it weren’t for us, who else would have defended this town?”
“You mean you were the town troublemakers?” they said, their word choice bringing our faces back to them.
We set our pool sticks down and said, no, we were just like kids in any American town anywhere else doing what we had to do.
Our girlfriends’ eyes checked in with each other, and they said, “Had to do?”
“Yeah, like, like——,” we said reaching for a memory. “Like Jimny’s job that one year. Who else would have helped him get his job back? He mowed the park. No one else was going to do that.”
“OK, then,” they said. “How’d you get his job back?”
“Let’s see,” we said. “Haven’t thought about it in years, but it was on a cookout day, right? It was ninth grade. No: end of eighth.”
We agreed it was on that Memorial Day when our fathers sent us around to the neighbors because it was time to be grilling out. We told our girlfriends that we’d pounded doors, so our dads could roll their grills into a circle in the empty lot at the end of our row of shotgun houses.
“You skipped the Reynolds, right?” our dads said as they slapped metal and poured out charcoal.
“They weren’t home,” we said.
“The other day, that Reynolds woman said they never even plan to have children,” our moms said.
“Not only that,” our dads said, “but just yesterday Reynolds himself gave that park bum a tent. A tent. Maybe some kids could’ve used that tent. Or maybe we could’ve used it at the shop for the dogs, keep them out from under the cars.”
“And cops don’t do anything about it all,” our moms said. “No offense, Karl.”
“You all know that I’m the one who reported it,” Karl said. “But closest I get to duty today is dropping doodie in your kiddie pool.”
Parents laughing sounded like work, so we squirted condiments on buns and snatched burgers from the scuffed melamine platter and slunk away.
When Jimny, seventeen, wandered over, we set him up in a clean plastic chair in the shade of the only nearby tree and got him a triple burger on a doubled-up plate, the coldest can of Pepsi, and a dish for chips.
To the sounds of Journey blaring from our dad’s radio, he said he hated the chips and aimed them at us till he dumped the rest of them on the moth-eaten yard and added a flood of soda.
“Look: Dumb ants eating that shit,” he said and squashed as many as he could.
In the last days of that school year, Mr. Reynolds had us arguing if it mattered if you stepped on bugs purposely versus accidentally.
“Something for you to think about over the summer,” he’d said. “Should we qualify suffering? Some religions do.”
So we wondered aloud to Jimny, “Does it matter if you kill them accidentally or like that?”
Jimny froze and tilted his head and said, “You sound like Mr. Reynolds. You’ve been paying attention in school again, haven’t you?”
To get back on his side, we said, “Did you hear Mr. Reynolds gave Sleeping Man a tent?”
Jimny looked like someone’d made him eat up his butt and go out his mouth.
“First, Reynolds gets in your heads with shit about ants and now he’s helping that guy?” Jimny said. “Oh, some bait really can’t wait.”
Role models like Jimny spoke in purifying proverbs, and ours was no exception. We leaned forward to catch the moment.
“Yeah, this means it’s time for all batters up,” he said and took a moment to nod at each of our faces.
We nodded back, agreeing to his confidence, still unsure of what his words meant.
“Batter, batter, batter, swing,” he said.
We chimed, “Batter, batter, batter, swing.”
Our moms wandered near and said, “Look at that: Jimny’s so good with the younger ones. Like a coach.”
We followed Jimny to his house and lingered outside while he went in. When his screen door’s thwack-thwack announced his return, we followed his strut and baseball bat through town. He toed rocks into the air. When a piece arced to the sweet-spot height, he smacked it as hard as he could. When glass tinkled, he threw the bat to us and backed away, pointing at whoever was set for the blame.
“You’d better run,” he said. “Loyalty means paying dues.”
We scattered and regrouped back at his porch twenty minutes later, and he said, “You all ready?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s pretty weak,” he said.
“Yeah,” we cheered.
“So one word: Sleeping Man,” he said. “And that’s taken care of tonight. If we don’t, imagine who else’ll think they can follow him here. Mr. Reynolds will take all your tents and hand them out too.”
No one corrected Jimny’s counting ability, but we did say, “Can’t argue with that.”
“Now that we have the right worm for this kind of fish,” he said, “we meet back here at ten tonight.”
We wandered off and tried to kick our own rocks up.
We said, “Do you think he’ll really take care of Sleeping Man?
“How could he when our dads can’t?
“Maybe he’s just all talk.
“You can’t say that about him.”
We scuffled and ripped our jeans, sniffed away the blows that landed. At truce, we agreed that Jimny would guide us to do whatever we had to. The night, outside Jimny’s, Jimny scratching The BOYZ into a porch board with a pocket knife, we said, “Remember the cookout leftovers? We looked for some, and our moms said Mrs. Reynolds took them and gave it all to Sleeping Man.”
“If we even needed another reason,” Jimny said.
“Yeah,” we said, though we were all full from eating dinner at our homes since we saw him earlier.
“It just adds to the plan,” Jimny said. “If he likes what we have so much, let’s bring him some more.”
We laid bats over our shoulders and gripped a paper sack of raw hamburger from Jimny’s fridge. When we arrived at the park, we asked who needed a footbridge to cross a pond that wasn’t all that big anyway. The only real thing the bridge did was create a place to sleep underneath itself.
“Thinks our town’s a campground,” Jimny said.
“A campground,” we said.
“City said it’s not safe for me to work till he’s taken care of,” he said. “So let’s make it safe again.”
Jimny stepped up to Sleeping Man’s orange tent and called, “We have something for you. I can’t seem to knock, though.”
The tent unzipped. Sleeping Man crawled out. Bearded, blurry-eyed, he wore a long t-shirt that read ARGENTINA.
“That where you’re from?” Jimny said.
The man frowned.
“You eat hamburgers, huh? Our ham-bur-gers?” we said.
Jimny slammed the sack into the man’s hands.
Sleeping Man eyed the bag. We brought our bats forward. He eyed those too.
“Eat,” Jimny said.
“What?” he said.
“You like taking our stuff,” we said. “So have it.”
We grabbed one of Sleeping Man’s arms and Jimny the other. We ripped out wads of red meat and stuffed it into his mouth. He spit and screamed. We punched him in the stomach, and he fell to his knees.
A car screeched maybe a block up, followed by shattering glass. We froze, but no headlights beamed our way.
“Batter, batter, swing,” Jimny said.
Jimny hefted his bat and tipped Sleeping Man’s chin up with his foot. We ran our hands along our own bats. And after that, who knows?
“Next day, he was just gone,” we said.
“Just——gone?” our girlfriends said.
“Yeah, he left or whatever after that night. And it was right around then that the Reynolds moved away too. Feel bad for whatever new town they moved to.”
“And Jimny?” they said, scanning the row of barstools.
“It’s not like he’d just be sitting over there,” we said, but we also looked, because anything was possible. “The city let him start working again after Sleeping Man was gone, and he kept at it all while we were in high school. He’s probably still working in that park.”
Our girlfriends pursed their lips and said, “Wow: That’s some story.”
We shrugged and landed our arms around our their shoulders. We called for another round of beers.
“You know what?” our girlfriends said. “We’re going to take one of the cars back to the rental. Time for some cat naps.”
“But it’s early,” we said. “Sun’s still up.”
“Maybe we’ll get a second wind.”
“Don’t be strangers,” we said.
They didn’t answer as they walked away.
“Hey, we said ,‘Don’t be strangers’.”
Never looking back, our girlfriends stepped into the tall rectangle of light for the parking lot.
That night at the rental, we argued if the girls actually did bother to take a nap before packing their stuff and ditching us.
“For sure they always could’ve used more beauty sleep,” we said.
The next day, as we scanned the bars and meals for women who cared as much as us about the safety of our country, we reminded ourselves that we’d dodged a bullet with our former girlfriends. Hell, we were thankful that they showed us they were trash not worth our time——because who else would ever have blocked our numbers and left before the real partying of a trip even began?
Florida writer Todd Wellman, with Wisconsin & UP connections, has been selected for a Lambda Literary Fellowship and the Key West Literary Seminar Writers’ Workshop. Writing has appeared in Merion West, Cozy Ink Press, Neptune, James Franco Review, Lunch Ticket, Indie Next Lists, Lambda Literary Review, Emerge Anthology, Beyond Queer Words, & more. He is represented by Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. and a favorite recent work that explores revenge is The Adversary by Michael Crummey. Read more at toddwe.com.
