Ostrander at the Door

Photo by Clinton Steeds

He stood six foot two in socked feet, six three in boots, and his hair was the color of rotting straw. His father was a former Green Beret who referred to his combat tours as “paid vacation.” His older brother, James, was an off-the-shelf psycho. James got shot in the leg one night at Dandy Donuts, drove himself to the hospital, had a doctor remove the bullet from his thigh and inject him with penicillin, drove back to Dandy’s, beat the man who’d shot him into a coma, then started in on the night-shift workers who’d watched it happen. So now the father was in prison for trafficking meth and the brother on his way for aggravated battery. Connolly Ostrander was fourteen at the time. He dropped out of high school and became a man.

I wasn’t there that night at Dandy’s. I was the same age as Connolly, and I was probably home asleep. But three years later I was at a country-western club called the Circle W, four miles north of Seminole, Oklahoma, outside the city limits in the middle of a field. The Circle W was a big aluminum-sided structure with a gravel lot out front. My friends and I would go there every weekend and sit on the tailgate of someone’s truck. It was my junior year of high school, and none of us were old enough to get in. But there was always an older sibling who’d buy the beer, and that night we were drinking courtesy of Jody’s brother—me and Parks and Bailey—when Connolly pulled up in his ’68 Nova. He’d restored an old Super Sport package: a big-block V-8 with the “rock crusher” tranny, six point forty-nine liters of Detroit muscle. He’d spent the past three years working at Dennison’s Body Shop, paying off the car and buffing out its dints and dings. It was a classic, thoroughly cherried, and Connolly parked it there beside us. Something about its fire-engine gloss, the glint of all that chrome—the car looked like a model of itself, a toy.

Connolly walked up, reached into the cooler and helped himself to one of our beers. I scooted over and made a place for him on the tailgate. It was partly courtesy and partly fear and partly something else. He sat down, cracked the tab on the beer and took a sip.

“Fellas,” he said.

It was about the only word he ever said, and he’d just gotten it out when we heard this sickening, metallic crunch. We looked and saw that some guy had backed his pickup into Connolly’s front fender.

We were all a little green then. We knew who we were with, but we didn’t really know. Not like we would in ten minutes. Bailey started in on Connolly right away.

“Get this man some Bondo,” he said.

I don’t think Connolly’s expression ever changed. He didn’t look angry or even concerned. He tilted his beer to his lips, drained it and then started walking toward the guy. It was just some cowboy leaving the club, but he wasn’t so drunk he didn’t know trouble when he saw it. His window was down, and his first reaction was to start cranking it up. He’d just gotten it about two-thirds of the way when Connolly made it to the pickup and threw the only punch of the fight. He punched through the window, splintering the glass and knocking the cowboy unconscious, then reached in after the man, grabbed him by the throat and pulled him out of the cab through the opening he’d made. He dragged him across the gravel lot, back to his Nova, then to the front tire, which was pushed up against a rectangular length of concrete. Connolly wedged the cowboy’s head between the concrete and the tire so he couldn...