In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [45]
“Come on, kid, get out of the way, will ya?” He grabs the ball and whistles it off to one of his Toadies. He had yellow eyes. So help me God, yellow eyes!
I got up with my knees bleeding and my hands stunned and tingling from the concrete, and without any conception at all of what I was doing I screamed and rushed. My mind a total red, raging, flaming blank. I know I screamed.
“YAAAAAAHHHH!”
The next thing I knew we are rolling over and over on the concrete, screaming and clawing. I’m out of my skull! I am pounding Dill against the concrete and we’re rolling over and over, battering at each other’s faces. I was screaming continually. I couldn’t stop. I hit him over and over in the eyes. He rolled over me, but I was kicking and clawing, gouging, biting, tearing. I was vaguely conscious of people coming out of houses and down over lawns. I was on top. I grabbed at his head. I caught both of Grover Dill’s ears in either hand and I began to pound him on the concrete, over and over again.
I have since heard of people under extreme duress speaking in strange tongues. I became conscious that a steady torrent of obscenities and swearing was pouring out of me as I screamed. I could hear my brother running home, hysterically yelling for my mother, but only dimly. All I knew is that I was tearing and ripping and smashing at Grover Dill, who fought back like a fiend! But I guess it was the first time he had ever met face to face with an unleashed Tasmanian Devil.
I continued to swear fantastically, as though I had no control over it. I was conscious of it and yet it was as though it was coming from something or someone outside of me. I swore as I have never sworn since as we rolled screaming on the ground. And suddenly we just break apart. Dill, the back of his head all battered, his eyes puffed and streaming, slashed by my claws and fangs, was hysterical. There was hardly a scratch on me, except for my scraped knees and cut lip.
I learned then that Bravery does not exist. Just a kind of latent Nuttiness. If I had thought about attacking Dill for ten seconds before I had done it, I’d have been four blocks away in a minute flat. But something had happened. A wire broke. A fuse blew. And I had gone out of my skull.
But I had sworn! Terribly! Obscenely! In our house kids didn’t swear. The things I called Dill I’m sure my mother had not even heard. And I had only heard once or twice, coming out of an alley. I had woven a tapestry of obscenity that as far as I know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan. And my mother had heard!
Dill by this time is wailing hysterically. This had never happened to him before. They’re dragging the two of us apart amid a great ring of surging grownups and exultant, scared kids who knew more about what was happening than the mothers and fathers ever would. My mother is looking at me. She said:
“What did you say?”
That’s all. There was a funny look on her face. At that instant all thought of Grover Dill disappeared from what was left of my mind and all I could think of was the incredible shame of that unbelievable tornado of obscenity I had sprayed over the neighborhood.
I go into the house in a daze, and my mother’s putting water on me in the bathroom, pouring it over my head and dabbing at my eyes which are puffed and red from hysteria. My kid brother is cowering under the dining-room table, scared. Kissel, next door, has been hiding in the basement, under the steps, scared. The whole neighborhood is scared, and so am I. The water trickles down over my hair and around my ears as I stare into the swirling drainage hole in the sink.
“You better go in and lie down on the daybed. Take it easy. Just go in and lie down.”
She takes me by the shoulder and pushes me down on the daybed. I lie there scared, really scared of what I have done. I felt no sense of victory, no sense of beating Dill. All I felt was this terrible thing I had said and done.
The light was getting purple and soft outside, almost time for my father to come home