Unsportsmanlike Conduct

The first time I rode a school bus, I stabbed another twelve-year-old in the forehead with my pencil. He didn’t bleed much, but when I let go, the pencil stayed in place, like a pin sticking out of a pincushion. Years later, in high school, whenever I ran into him, he’d make me touch the little dark spot on his head where the graphite was still lodged. I think he wanted me to apologize, but the best I could do was remove my pocketknife and offer to cut that old pencil lead out of him.

The day I stabbed him—this was back in the spring of 1986— we were both sixth graders at Bethlehem Middle School. Earlier that year, my mother went to prison for embezzling $50,000 from First Baptist, and I was still embarrassed and more than a little bitter over that whole situation. Because no one knew exactly who my father was—my mother waffled between it being Robert Redford, Bjorn Borg, and some public masturbator now in a Kentucky nuthouse—I ended up living out near the county line with my Aunt Kat and her chest freezer full of dead dogs.

Those ice-covered animals were part of my aunt’s livelihood. She taught pre-vet classes at the local college, which didn’t have the resources to store her cadavers, so on Wednesday afternoons, her boyfriend Duke would drive a rattling Animal Control truck up our hill to deliver a fresh batch of euthanized creatures. He once carried a beagle puppy by the scruff of its neck to show me; its long ears still looked soft enough to pet. “Only trouble this guy caused was being born,” Duke said. “People around here think strays carry the plague, I guess. Worse than rats.” He tossed the puppy into the freezer as if it were a bundle of rags, and then slammed the lid shut.

Aunt Kat had a gentler touch with those corpses. She packed them carefully into the bed of her truck before going to teach a class, and sometimes on Saturday afternoons she’d relax with a Coors while sitting on that freezer tucked against the carport’s back wall, as if it contained only steaks or a Thanksgiving Butterball. Duke would stare at her with folded arms while she drank, and when he couldn’t take it anymore, he’d stomp out of the carport, angrily kicking pieces of gravel into the yard. I think all those dead animals were starting to get to him. He’d worked at Animal Control since leaving the marines, and sometimes after a day of feeding creatures into the incinerator, Duke would sit on Aunt Kat’s porch with his mandolin and sing a melancholy tune that crescendoed with the line, All day long, I throw puppies in the fire.

But in the mornings, when he took me to school, we got along like two kids the same age. I’ve never been accused of being mature, so I suppose there was something inherently childish about Duke. We grinned together like fools because we enjoyed so many of the same things, from the Atlanta Braves and Dale Murphy to newspaper ads of women in their undergarments. In November, he started taking me to Mass on Sundays, prepping me to become a devout Catholic like him, and sometimes on those long car rides, it felt like we were two versions of the same man, as if time had glitched, and I was looking into my future while he gazed stony-eyed at his past. I don’t know what he thought when he saw me, an angry, overweight kid with a jailbird mother, but even with his graying beard and receding brown hair, I hoped I’d grow to be just like him.

That hope ended in April when he and Aunt Kat called it quits. There was some mention of wanting a baby, but all I knew was that he abandoned us on that hilltop, forcing me to ride a school bus for the first time in my life. That’s how I ended...