Tommy Hatfield

FICTION Tommy Hatfield Lee Maynard INLEE MAYNARD'S NOVEL, Crum, a young boy is living in Crum, West Virginia, and attending high school. His only goal is to leave — the town, the school, West Virginia. The novel opens with the narrator — the young boy — ready to enter his senior year ofhigh school. But that wasn't hisfirst year in Crum. Whatfollows is "lost" materialfrom the novel, takenfrom the original manuscript, but never appearing in print. The narrator is in hisfirst year in Crum High School . . . The first time I saw Tommy Hatfield he was walking through the door into the stuffy classroom, his chest puffed up like a toad. He swaggered down the aisle, his hands bouncing at his sides as though wearing imaginary boxing gloves. He wore new blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up midway on his heavy engineer boots. His short-sleeved shirt was too tight, the buttons on the front pulling hard. It took me a minute to realize that he liked it like that, the tight shirt emphasizing his thick chest. The sides of his head were nearly bare, his black hair cut evenly all around, as though someone had put a bowl on his head and trimmed away whatever hung out beneath the rim. In spite of this, he was almost handsome. He walked past me and took a seat at the front of the class, as though he owned the room, and then turned, slowly and deliberately, and looked directly at me, as though inspecting something that he would shovel up and throw on the shit pile. His fingers brushed across the front of his tight shirt as though flicking away something insignificant. There was not a sound in the classroom. And I knew enough to know that was a very bad sign. I tried not to look at him, but I couldn't help it. Before the school year started, I had heard all about Tommy Hatfield from some of the other guys in Crum, heard how tough he was, how he liked to bull up against the new guys. And that was me, a new guy in this fucking, nowhere high school buried in the mountains of West Virginia. I was sent here from the homeplace on Black Hawk Ridge, far back in the county. I had to stay here, my relatives told me, until I graduated from Crum High School. Or until I ran away from Tommy Hatfield. 61 When the bell rang at the end of class I was up and out of my seat and into the hallway as quickly as I could, melding into other kids who were milling around. I thought I was invisible, but when I turned around Tommy was there. He didn't look at me. But as he walked past, he bumped my shoulder, hard, hard enough to make my upper body twist. He went on down the hallway, his engineer boots clumping on the floor, not bothering to look back or say anything. Other kids looked at me and then looked down, knowing that Tommy had picked out another mark. And knowing, for a while, they were relatively safe. In the weeks that followed, Tommy Hatfield turned my life to shit. Which, all in all, I thought had already happened. I was his target. I was his selected amusement for the year. Tommy bumped me in the hallways, stepped on my foot as he strutted down the classroom aisle. Once, I was talking to a redheaded girl out in front of the school. Tommy walked up, put his arm around the girl and pulled her away. The girl said nothing. They walked away, Tommy's arm around her waist. The other kids stood stock-still, waiting. I ran up behind Tommy, grabbed him by the arm and spun him around. As he turned, his arm shot out and his fist hit me in the middle of the forehead. I fell to the ground like a pole-axed calf. Tommy and the girl walked away. I was afraid to go to school. I was afraid of Tommy Hatfield. I was a big kid, but he was bigger, stronger, older, a kid who had...