James Seidler: ARE YOU FEELING BRAVE? • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by James Seidler
ARE YOU FEELING BRAVE?

The summer before his freshman year of high school, Adam Lake and his pal Denny spent a good week building a tree fort in the woods near their houses. It was just a ratty little platform to swear from and shoot bottle rockets, but they were proud of it.

Still, it wasn’t done until they got the roof on top. So a nice June day saw them using a length of old clothesline to lift an irregular sheet of plywood to their worksite.

They had “salvaged” the wood from the Peterson’s new addition, but they were having some trouble getting it up. The clothesline had worked fine for the other lumber, but the plywood weighed twice as much. It stretched the line audibly, twisting the rope to some strange, new tuning as they tested the load.

Finally, with Denny struggling up in the tree and Adam lifting the wood from below, they managed to get their ceiling moving skyward. But the plywood stayed aloft for just a few seconds before the line snapped. Adam’s still-raised hands absorbed the bulk of its gravity, but enough of it rained down on his chin that he was driven into the dirt. For a long while, he lay in the dust and weeds, shaken in everything but the ko’ed certainty of which way was down. By the time he rose again, his T-shirt was already sticky.

Denny’s wide eyes on their parapet gave all the confirmation he needed, and Adam ran for home, holding his blood in with a slippery hand.

His mom was working, so the only adult present was her boyfriend, Terry. A wiry man with amused eyes, Terry spent his weekends traveling to weddings and trade shows, where he shaped blocks of ice into frosted roses and company logos. His hands were covered with divots, places where the skin had puckered around chisel blows that missed their mark. He worked cash construction, too, but mostly lived off his spinal disability, which he referred to as “the invisible ache.”

Terry was a drinker. He could crack a tallboy to wash down breakfast. Adam never saw him sloppy, but the man could maintain, building up his buzz and topping off until nightfall. If he wasn’t working, most afternoons fell into a long, lazy reverie where he sprawled out on the couch and listened to public radio jazz.

That’s exactly what he was doing when Adam ran in. Hearing the door burst open, Terry leaned back and raised a quizzical eyebrow. It was only when he caught sight of the blood that he shifted, reluctantly, to a sitting position.

Terry reached for his cigarette, rescuing a long ash from the lip of one of his empties. He took a drag, then spoke through the smoke. “Looks like a good one,” he said, not without sympathy.

“I fell on a branch,” Adam lied. No need to get Denny in trouble, especially when Adam wasn’t sure how Terry would react. Would he think Adam was lying? Or would they have to go out looking for payback?

Since Adam’s dad had died, his mom had dated a few guys, and some had believed their role in this scenario was to toughen Adam up, to get him less in touch with his feelings and more comfortable swinging a fist. They were hard on him like it was their job, and he was always grateful when his mom came around to giving them the pink slip.

Terry had mostly ignored him, but even after six months in the same home, Adam wasn’t sure how he would react to this. They were twin moons in different orbits, approaching conjunction only when his mom clunked their plates onto the dining room table.

“Let’s go to the bathroom and check her out,” Terry said.

Adam tried to sniffle his tears in as they clomped up wooden stairs to a renter’s bathroom that hadn’t seen an update since it was built around their clawfoot tub. Pulling the string on their beauty light, Terry leaned in to give the wound a closer look. The only reaction he offered was to wash his hands. Then he went to the cabinet to get a washcloth. Soaking it in the sink, he rubbed it with some bar soap and got down to cleaning.

Terry’s hands were callused, and Adam winced as the older man pulled at his flesh. He didn’t cry out, though, even as his eyes steadily brimmed with tears.

Terry rinsed the washcloth periodically as he worked. To Adam’s growing concern, the amount of blood running down the sink never seemed to lessen.

“Some branch,” Terry said. He held Adam’s eye for just a second, nudging for a confession, but Adam wasn’t having it.

“Oughta watch where I’m going,” he mumbled.

Terry nodded. He rubbed away one last load of blood, then squeezed the cloth and set it on the basin. Using his finger, he gently probed the outlines of Adam’s wound, which was starting to quiver with that fresh ache that comes when the adrenaline fades.

“I’ll be honest,” Terry told him. “I don’t think that’s going to close up.”

Adam nodded. He knew this was a problem. Their household budget was barely clearing the treeline as it was. A set of stitches was sure to send the whole thing spiraling into the dirt. He could hear the “thud” of their crash landing—it sounded like a car door slamming shut, with their few possessions packed inside as they got ready to move once more.

Terry’s focus shifted from Adam’s wound up to his eyes. They brought with them a firm hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Tell me,” the older man said. “Just how brave are you feeling?”

“What do you mean?” Adam asked. His voice was timid. He wished his mom were there.

“Your mom sees this, she’s going to take you to the hospital,” Terry elaborated. “That’s gonna cost some dough.” He raised his eyebrows to emphasize just how much. “But this here is a three-stitch job, max. I’ve done that on myself, plenty of times.”

Adam’s gut sank. He felt the reasonable fear that comes with your mom’s boyfriend proposing to pierce your skin with a needle. But on top of that he added the queasy dismay that if he said no, Terry might do it anyway.

That wasn’t the only factor in what followed. Adolescence had flooded Adam with just enough testosterone to make him believe there was something noble in suffering. And he knew for a fact they didn’t have enough money for the clinic, not when every cent in the change jar was already promised to his mom’s brakes, which had progressed from a squeak to the kind of rust-fused howl that had them opting to coast through stop signs whenever possible.

“You think you can?” Adam asked. He desperately, naively, hoped for a no.

“I know I can,” Terry said. “Just let me get my stuff.”

Terry left. In the minute he was gone, Adam knew he ought to look in the mirror, decide for himself. But he couldn’t face the sight of his own blood. He was still hesitating when the boyfriend returned with something that looked like an old shaving kit.

Terry’s hair was pulled back in a ponytail; his glasses had been secured with a strap, making him look like an aging power forward. He placed the kit next to Adam’s bloody rag on the basin. Then he washed his hands once more, soaping the length of each finger as he’d probably seen a surgeon do on television. Digging into the bag, he pulled out a curved needle and a spool of fishing line. He cut a length of the latter and dropped it in one of the Dixie cups they used to swish and spit after brushing their teeth. He poured a good two fingers of hydrogen peroxide atop that. Then, taking the lighter from his pocket, he flicked it and ran its glow along the length of the sewing needle.

“You’re going to want to close your eyes,” Terry told him.

Adam closed his eyes.

“It’ll be over in a second.”

Adam was holding that long count in his head when he felt the needle dig into his flesh. He tried to jerk back, but Terry already had a steadying hand behind him, one too strong to resist. Adam still wanted to squirm, though, so Terry was forced to hold the teen’s head against the wall with his forearm, freeing his fingers to pull needle through flesh.

As promised, it was quick, and clean, and utterly awful. That last part hadn’t been vocalized, but they’d both known it was part of the bargain, the extra kick that made the work free.

When Terry was done, he knotted off the fishing line and dumped the leftover peroxide on Adam’s chin. Then he sealed the wound in with a band-aid.

They went their separate ways after that, Adam to his room, still unable to peek beneath the bandage, and Terry to drink by the radio. And so it stayed until Adam’s mom came home. He heard her key in the lock, her bags on the table. Her voice was light at first, then spiked with worry as she rushed upstairs. When she entered his room, he could still make out the imprint of her deli net below her hairline.

He didn’t want to let her see under the bandage, but she moved his hands away and peeled, applying a bit of her own spit at one point when the band-aid clung too stubbornly. Then she was away and shouting—screaming, really—down the stairs.

Terry rose to defend himself. He yelled back as if this were normal, something they’d settle with a contest of volume. Maybe he even thought Adam would defend him, volunteering that it was both their idea, a compromise decision, like picking Tornado’s subs for dinner.

But Adam’s mom wasn’t having it. She howled from the landing, half-sobbing, finally screaming that the cops knew how to deal with people like him. That was too much. Yelling that she was crazy, Terry picked up his shoes and stomped out the door.

After it slammed, Adam’s mom ran over to him, running her hands desperately over his hair as she begged him outside to the car. She cried most of the way to the clinic. She parked there in a hurry, her brakes protesting loudly enough to be heard half a block away. But she didn’t leave the car right away. Instead, she turned to him and asked, her lips quivering, “Did he touch you?”

The obvious answer was, “Yeah, Mom, he stitched my fucking chin up.” But Adam knew what she meant, and he said no, which was true. But she couldn’t believe him, and so she asked again and again. It was too much. He wanted to scream at her, to make her stop. Instead, he teared up a little and insisted on the truth, doing his best to comfort her as she wept in the parking lot.

When that was finally done, they went into the clinic together. He lied to the doctor, saying he’d done the work himself. It couldn’t have been believable, but the doctor excavated Terry’s stitches and laid down new ones. Nothing came of it. Somehow Adam’s mom found the money to pay it off. He never saw Terry again, but the scar stayed with him forever.

James Seidler lives in Indiana. He likes native plants and writing fiction about working-class people with outsized dreams. This story is an excerpt from his unpublished novel, “Classmates.” You can learn more about him at jamesseidler.com.