We found out later that these kids were from Abington, a neighborhood just outside of the city, five minutes away. These were suburban kids, not the glass-eating monsters of Fishtown, or the barbed-wire thugs of Kensington. Their parents were doctors and schoolteachers. Audis, in-ground pools, ski trips. According to dumb neighborhood logic, we should be tougher than them, crash their playground. But at the time, racing across that field in the dark, they seemed like Romans with torches. Like demons. I have always played defense, scored only once or twice, and then, by accident. In soccer, defense meant chasing people, a ball, a thing. No one chases the sweeper. There’s no point. Now, I was on the defensive that night, to be sure, but lost with no object to run down or goal to protect. The girl had to pull on my arm to keep me on track, while I veered all over the field. So this is what it’s like, I thought. I was the breakaway winger hearing something like me but worse breathing down his neck. The girl knew what she was doing. The back end of the playground emptied out through the trees onto Ridgeway Avenue. When we hit the street, the girl grabbed me and pulled me down between two parked cars. “I live right over there. Where do you?” I explained it was a good 15-minute walk. “Don’t go straight home,” she told me. “Stay on big streets as much as you can and hide if a car rides by.” It was good advice and I wondered how many times she had done this. A car rumbled past and we froze. “OK, Four Eyes. Get home. Be careful.” She kissed my cheek and disappeared down the street.
This happened all over the neighborhood that night. Grown men slamming doors in kids’ faces, some of those faces streaked with blood.
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I was 10 blocks from home with the fight in between. I had lost Clip and was wearing a jacket that identified me as a target. My neighborhood had become evil in a matter of minutes, and I was drunk for the first time and lost in it. I knew Ridgeway hit Rhawn Street at an angle, about a block away from the church, very close to the playground. Or I could walk out of my way toward the train tracks and follow them home, but risk a run-in with a different type of thug—the drug kids and the skateboarders, the 10th-grade Satan worshippers. I didn’t want that either. Or I could just wait there behind the lines and hope the fight didn’t come to me. This was cowardly, but like most things cowardly, safe. In the end, I didn’t have a choice. After five minutes of waiting, a car came up from behind and slowed down as it approached me. I started walking, Clip’s ball under my arm, and tried to pretend I had just come from practice. The beer in my stomach began to churn. They started yelling from the car, “Hey! Hey, kid, where are you going? Hey, Fox Chase!” I looked up the street. There were no other cars coming that might save me. But I couldn’t be alone. Ridgeway was lined with row homes on the other side of the street. I ran to the first door and banged on it. The Abington kids, about 20 feet further down the street, put on their flashers, and popped the trunk. A kid got out, his eye on me the whole time, and pretended to be looking for something in the back. Finally, the door opened. A man in a white undershirt with yellowed armpits stood glaring at me. A small, angry dog yapped from behind him. “Shut up!” he said and turned to me. “What?” “Please,” I said, “I’m in trouble. I need to use the phone. Can I please come in?” “More of you hoodlums? Always pissing on my grass or keying my car! Get out of here before I call the cops.” “Please call them. There’s bad—” but by then, he had shut the door. Inside, the dog kept barking and I could hear a woman say, “Who was that?”
♦◊♦
I found out later, this happened all over the neighborhood that night. Grown men slamming doors in kids’ faces, some of those faces streaked with blood. I wasn’t the only one who thought I could retreat back to the world of adults for safety. And I wasn’t the only one denied access, having come this far, just wanting blowjobs and beer. It wasn’t until two or three of us kids banged on the same door, or words like “kill” or “murder” were used that the parents finally called the cops. And they did it reluctantly, embarrassed, maybe even a little ashamed, saying things like, I know this sounds crazy and I hate to bother you but … I know because they played the tapes on TV weeks later. On the other end, the cops must have taken it the same way. Probably nothing, a spooked housewife, drunk kids causing trouble. It’s a good neighborhood. Like I said before, I was fast. My pursuers were obviously drunker than me and did not know the neighborhood. But none of this information seemed available to me as I launched myself back toward the playground. The beer mixed with adrenaline and their shouts (“You’re fucking dead!”) got louder and more ferocious. I cut through the trees back up onto the soccer fields, thinking I could lose them in the open stretches. By now, the timer on the playground’s lights rendered the field completely dark. Two hundred yards off, the basketball court was lit up only by a few headlights, but I had no idea whether they were friendly or not. So I ran to the opposite side of the field, also lined with trees, and hid in the pitch dark. I watched my pursuers slow to a stop. I could tell from their silhouettes that they were carrying weapons—more bats, it looked like. Finally, they turned around and went back the way we came, presumably to get back in the car. I panted in the dark, unsure of whether I could make another run like that if I had to. Then I threw up.
♦◊♦
I wasn’t the first person to find Roger. When all the cars finally left the basketball court, I walked across the field towards Rhawn Street. The neighborhood was quiet. The church was still lit up, and the floodlights shining up on the statue of Saint Cecilia were throwing giant shadows across the building’s front. People were milling around out front—two girls, it looked like—and as I crossed the street, they screamed at me, “Get away! Get the fuck outta here!” Between the two girls, a figure lay crumpled on the asphalt. This was Roger. Recognizable now only by his clothes, his head—beaten with baseball bats—made a strange, unnatural silhouette against the concrete. The girls circled him like wild animals, and I kept my distance. “The cops are coming! You’re in deep shit!” they were yelling. I recognized one of the girls from the basketball court earlier that night, but obviously they didn’t know me. The girls finally quieted down, pacing around and stooping over Roger. I hung around the edges of the scene, and wondered if the church was open this late at night. No, it wouldn’t be. They stopped doing that years ago, I remembered. Two cop cars pulled up and the girls started screaming again. “An ambulance! We need an ambulance!” A few nuns came out of the convent, and quickly blessed themselves when they saw the scene. Sister Thomas, in a green sweat suit and with a head of short brown hair exposed, tried to usher the girls away, and the girls’ piety resurfaced out of habit. Their ferocious cursing stopped. “Sister, no, he’s dying! Please help!” Sister Thomas, stripped of her uniform now, seemed like a real person to me for the first time. She hugged the girls and began to sob, recognizing Roger as one of hers. But not hers. Could it be the whole celibate life crashing down on her, the love for children she had no authority over? Who hated her, though she stayed awake at night worrying about them? My thoughts about these people were confused. The ambulance pulled up and then two priests came out of the rectory. One opened the church with an elaborate set of keys and turned on all its lights. A crowd was starting to gather—more nuns and priests, panting kids like me, some parents looking for their kids. The paramedics looked at Roger quickly and scooped him up on a stretcher. They said nothing to the crowd before they sped off. I got closer now, emboldened by the crowd, and heard every conversation: the small nun asking the cops if she could clean up Roger’s blood, a mother and father grabbing someone else’s kid demanding to know where their son was, two priests saying to each other, Yes, a prayer, but which one? Probably, around that time, someone had the awful job of calling Roger’s parents. Father Fitz stopped me and asked what happened. “A fight,” I told him. “This was no fight.” He toed the concrete with a pair of running shoes; he wasn’t wearing his collar either. “Help me get everyone inside the church.” I nodded, but he did all the talking. I wandered among the crowd, numb and confident, since I knew what happened and finally felt somewhat safe. Eventually, everyone filed into the foyer, eyes stinging with tears and desperately trying to adjust to the harsh lights of the church. “We should say a prayer now. For Roger. For all of us. Heavenly Father,” he started, “Have mercy on us all. St. Cecilia, give your parish strength …” Everyone bowed their heads, but it seemed mainly out of exhaustion and shame.
♦◊♦
I walked to Clip’s house. I wasn’t scared anymore. I felt for some naïve reason that nothing worse could happen that night, like some sort of quota had been filled. I imagined I could hear the engines of Abington cars speeding home, expelled from the parish by our priests and nuns like an exorcism. When I got to Clip’s, he was outside on his stoop with a big grin. I threw him his soccer ball. “You won’t believe what happened!” he said. “They killed Roger.” “What are you talking about?” “Those kids. With cars and baseball bats.” “He’s dead? What kids?” I shrugged. Clip stood up and bounced the ball once. “Where were you?” I asked finally. “I went to that girl’s car. Then she drove me back. Her name’s Michelle.” “Did something happen?” He nodded, the grin creeping back. What was this? That night, Clip had been saved by horniness, and driven home by a beautiful girl while the rest of us ran for our lives. And Roger had been killed playing host and protector of our neighborhood. I thought of Saint Cecilia, though I wouldn’t be the only one to do that over the next few months. I wasn’t mad at Clip, but I couldn’t talk to him then. Later, he could tell me what a blowjob was like and I’d tell him what a dead body looked like. When I got home, my mom was on the phone and quickly hung up when she saw me. “Are you OK? Something’s happened to Roger.” “I know,” I said. “What? How?” “I saw him.”
♦◊♦
By Saturday afternoon, Fox Chase was aflame with rumors and accusations. A neighbor, Mr. Kramer, told my dad and me he just knew it was the blacks who did this, and when I began to tell him, no, it was just rich white kids like me and his own two sons–I saw them–my dad shushed me. Then Kramer told us he was moving to the suburbs as soon as he could, “where it’s safe.” The cops were blamed for not responding fast enough. Even the poor priests and nuns got their share of abuse, since Roger was killed on their property, practically on the church steps. When someone was brave enough to suggest that maybe kids shouldn’t be out late on Fridays drinking and getting into fights, they were shouted down quickly by the neighborhood fathers. “I did the same thing when I was a kid, and I turned out fine. Boys will be …” Parents were interviewed on the news; they pushed their way on camera. Everyone suddenly knew Roger. Claimed to know what their kids did, and to know that their kids were completely different from Roger’s attackers. There was no mention of Roger’s glove. Or the other weapons our own guys had, but were too startled to reach.
♦◊♦
The next weekend, while Roger was being proclaimed the martyr of the neighborhood, Dad finally talked to me about Roger’s death. The wooden fence in our backyard had collapsed and I held the posts while he nailed them back together. “What happened that night?” he asked, fishing through his tool belt for a nail. I told him everything. I told him about the beer and the girls and the running across the field. The bats and the blood and the prayers. It was a confession. And I was ashamed again, as if describing a bad soccer game but worse. So many times before, Dad had told me how I had let our goalie—Roger—down. And here it was, the big failure I had been training for. Dad stopped hammering. “You know what the problem is?” He stepped away from the fence and ran his hands over his face, pulling his skin tight over the bone, erasing the years and bullshit that had harrowed him. He looked young for a second, and the fence sagged as he let it go. On the other side was just a mirror image of our own small backyard. I didn’t answer the question and neither did he. Instead, he grabbed me by the shoulders. “Look. Run from idiots, you hear me? Run from thugs. Run from liars. You’re fast. You can.” He went inside and I heard the sink start to gush. I thought for a second that I might fix the fence myself, but Dad had taken the tools inside.
♦◊♦
The details of Roger’s death came out eventually. Stories were patched together. Probably 20 other kids had stories like mine, kids who saw Roger and then lost him, everyone running for their lives without knowing it, making choices in the heat of the moment that decided everything. But the best report was from Warren, the unapologetic cause of it all. He had run across the busy traffic of Rhawn Street with Roger towards the church and school to get away from the kids with bats. But in the parking lot, Roger finally stopped to fight. It was what a good goalie does. Turning on his pursuers, he must have realized his mistake as four kids, two with baseball bats, charged even harder. Warren watched from 50 feet off, not stopping when Roger did, and no doubt confused why his friend had made that decision or what to do next. According to Warren, he saw Roger get hit in the side with a bat and then run stupidly, confused by pain, back towards the playground. Warren ran home at this point, told his parents nothing, probably swore into his pillow over and over that, of course, he never raped anyone. But we know that this was when Roger was killed. On a busy street, under our saint, traffic whizzing past the frenzy, headlights aiming straight ahead. Some of the other kids limped around after that night, eyes shone black around their edges, they had fought a little and run, but their injuries were not trophies anymore.
♦◊♦
Mass was crowded in those weeks after Roger’s death. The congregation always comes back in tragedy, the same way that the neighborhood bars were probably also filled. But Father Fitz seemed speechless when he started his homilies; the readings for those weeks always seemed irrelevant. On the Church calendar, we were in that period of “Ordinary Time” between Christmas and Lent, just the boring stuff between birth and death. Still, sermons inevitably turned to Roger. Lessons were dissected from his corpse in the way a biology class might pillage a dead cat all semester. Roger, we were told, was enjoying eternal life, both with God and through our stories of him. And on the Last Day, he would return. Many patted me on the back and told me, “You’ll see Roger again.” Roger’s family vanished from St. Cecilia’s quickly, and the effect was freeing to the other churchgoers. Stories began to be told. Roger’s service as an altar boy. His willingness to help his fellow students in math, a subject he had apparently been gifted at. His skill on the soccer field. You could almost hear the congregation wishing that Roger had been a musician as well. Maybe in the years to come the neighborhood would say he was, and hand his ghost a guitar, once the real story gets blurry and the details are more important. What else can happen when adults become children, and some children become saints?
♦◊♦
Clip and I had only one more conversation about Roger. It was the last weekend before high school started, and he had stolen a few beers from his parents’ fridge after they went to bed. We drank a lot of beer that summer. He brought it up as we sat in his small backyard. “Did Warren really rape that girl?” Clip said. I was relieved because I thought I was the only person who didn’t know. “I don’t know,” I said. “He says he didn’t. Would it matter if he did?” “It feels like it should,” Clip said. “But both versions of the story are bad.” “I never liked Warren,” I admitted, but it was a useless thing to say. “How does a person become a saint?” “I know this one,” Clip said. “Miracles after they are dead.” He finished his beer, and tossed the bottle over the fence. “Are you going to pray for him? My folks say I should pray.” “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t yet.” Then it occurred to me that I didn’t know if Clip was talking about Warren or Roger. I didn’t ask him to clear it up because our ability to save either of them seemed the same. —photo by TonytheMisfit/flickr
Great story Sean. Wonderfully written!
It read like a story from my own childhood in the 40-50s in Fox Chase. Excellent!
Awesome story, Sean E! I remember this one.
Excellent story, brilliantly told. This was a great way to kick off the fiction series. Fiction was once traditionally the heart of every magazine produced and edited for me, and the fact that the Good Men Project magazine has embraced this idea is deserving of praise.