That's Not What
You Saw
by Shane Borrowman
Hollis takes a long last drag on his cigarette, the tip glowing so
bright in the dark that it casts red highlights onto his cheeks. He flicks the butt with his middle
finger, arcing it over the lawn and into the street. It explodes in a shower of sparks,
a tiny carcinogenic artillery shell.
We’re sitting side-by-side on the porch, feet buried in the weeds
that used to be a flowerbed when this house wasn’t a college-town
rental.
So drunk he can barely sit without falling over,
Hollis still managed to flick his smoke more than thirty feet. I can’t help but be
impressed.
I take a drink from the bottle of spiced rum and set
it on the warped boards between the two of us. Hollis shakes another Marlboro out
of his battered pack, spilling three or four into his lap. He snaps his Zippo open, the flame
big and bright and unwavering in the cold November air. In the Zippo’s light, I can see
the blood on his hands, on his shirt, on the pack of cigarettes, on the
bottle.
Blood everywhere, almost none of it his.
He closes the lighter with a metallic snick and takes
a pull of rum into his mouth, swishing it around before swallowing. I don’t bother to ask him if his
mouth is bleeding or if he’s got some newly loose teeth. I saw what happened. I know the damage he took and the
damage he gave out.
Normally Hollis doesn’t drink my rum, but the
whiskey’s gone, broken in the fight.
We’re waiting for the police. Have been waiting for nearly
twenty minutes. We didn’t
call them, of course, but someone must have. The neighbors realized months ago
that our alcohol abuse is a full-contact sort of sport, so they’ve turned
a blind eye to the broken barbecue on the lawn and a deaf ear to the
blaring music from nightfall to daybreak.
Even deaf and blind, they couldn’t possibly have
ignored the sight of Hollis, over six feet tall and carrying 240 pounds,
beating Dane to the ground and then stomping him in the middle of the
street until I intervened.
Their porch lights came on during this. I know they saw. One of them must have picked up a
phone this time.
“What’d you see?” Hollis asks me, taking a long drink
from the bottle and passing it over.
My fingers stick in the blood on the label. We’ve been talking about the fight
for half of an hour. He knows
what I saw. But there’s a
question beneath his question, and we both know it.
Hollis wants to know what I’m going to tell the
cops.
Sitting on the porch in the dark, smoking and
finishing my spiced rum, I give him the abridged version of what I’m
planning to tell the police:
I was in the living room, sitting on the couch watching Reservoir Dogs, when I heard some
noise in the kitchen.
Dane was yelling.
There was a crash.
When I looked into the kitchen, I saw the bar overturned and
Dane on the floor surrounded by broken glass and spilled whiskey. He jumped up, and he and Hollis
began to wrestle, pushing and shoving, calling each other variations on
“fucker.” The fight moved out
into the yard, then to the street.
I pushed them apart, shoving Hollis back toward the house. Dane, drunk and yelling at the top
of his lungs, stumbled off down the street towards
campus.
We could hear him for blocks.
Hollis thinks for a few moments, the only sound the
shush-whoosh of our constant smoking. “No,” he says, “That’s not what
you saw.”
***
It’s been fourteen years since Dane took his beating, and I don’t
remember it like it was yesterday.
When Hollis and I talk about that night, and it comes up often in
our conversations, we’re still surprised by what happened. We’re surprised by the suddenness
of the fight and, simultaneously, the way we expected the fight to happen
for months.
Something always got broken when
we were drinking.
This time it was Dane.
It’s been fourteen years since
Dane took his beating and Hollis and I sat drinking rum and waiting for
the cops. I’m standing in my
garage, sorting loose screws into size-specific piles and talking to
Hollis on the phone. My wife
and kids are asleep, and I’m finding quiet tasks to keep me busy as Hollis
and I rehash our stories.
Over the line, I can hear Hollis’s wife occasionally talking to him
in the background. His
daughter, like my twins and spouse, has been asleep for
hours.
He’s smoking. I can hear the pause in his talk
whenever he inhales, the heavy indrawn breath carrying smoke into his
lungs, the slow and lazy exhale.
I find myself inhaling with him, sharing a cigarette across three
states.
It’s been more than a year since
my last cigarette. Six years
since my last fight.
“You remember Dane’s mug
shot?” Hollis’s question
catches me entirely off guard.
We’d been talking about the day Paul hit the corner of the house
with his Jeep, so hung over that his depth perception was skewed. Prior to that we’d talked about
the day we all spent sitting on the roof of the garage, using a sad and
sagging outdoor couch, tipped on one end, as a ladder to climb up and
down. Before he asked me, I
had no conscious memory of the mug shot—black and white, Dane’s battered
and bloody face above a clipboard filled with numbers. When he asked, the image returned
in its grim entirety.
I stop sorting screws and laugh
darkly, feeling the same mix of anger and adrenaline and relief I felt
fourteen years ago when Dane ended up in jail and Hollis
didn’t.
The picture wasn’t
flattering. Dried blood
covered Dane’s left cheek, and his right eye was swollen entirely
shut. The left eye was
unmarked, its pupil dilated to the size of a beer bottle screw top. This could have been a concussion
showing itself, but—more likely—it was only alcohol. I don’t think the cops even took
him to the hospital to be checked out.
In the mug shot, the waffle print
of Hollis’s shoe was clearly visible on Dane’s right cheek, a size sixteen
indent that wouldn’t fade for a week.
“I remember.” Hollis takes another drag on his
cigarette, and I take an involuntarily sympathetic drag with
him.
“Good thing you stopped me. I’d have killed him.”
I agree.
***
Hollis repeats himself: “That’s not what you
saw.”
Smoking in the dark, he tells my
story back to me, keeping the particulars and narrative structure. I was in the living room, sitting on
the couch watching Reservoir Dogs, when I heard some noise in the
kitchen. Dane was yelling. There was a crash. When I looked into the kitchen, I saw
the bar overturned and Dane on the floor surrounded by broken glass and
spilled whiskey. No one was
near him, so he probably fell when he tipped the bar over. He jumped up and attacked Hollis,
who had no choice but to defend himself. The fight moved out into the yard,
then to the street. I pushed
them apart, shoving Hollis back toward the house. Dane, drunk and yelling at the top
of his lungs, stumbled off down the street towards campus. We could hear him yelling for
blocks. Hollis tells me
to mention that Dane was a great wrestler in high school and still works
out with weights occasionally.
Even though they’re separated by eight inches of height and a
hundred pounds of weight, Dane was a real threat.
Hollis tells a good story, and I take mental
notes.
I also make notes of what not to
mention, especially the part where I ran into the street screaming at
Hollis—“Stop kicking him for Christ’s sake! The neighbors are calling the
cops!” I could see lights
coming on up and down the street.
I could hear the thumping sound of Hollis’s sneaker slamming into
Dane’s chest and face—an ugly sound, like beating a big dog with a bag of
oranges.
***
Hollis’s cell phone drops the
call, so I finish sorting screws while I wait for him to call back. I know that he’ll make himself
another drink, possibly even run to the store for cigarettes, before
calling again, so there’s no hurry.
I sort and wait and think about
Dane. About Hollis hitting
him again and again then kicking him when he went down. About the two of us sitting on the
porch and waiting for the cops, drinking rum as quickly as possible so
Hollis wouldn’t have to spend his night in jail
sober.
When he finally calls, the topic
of conversation has changed.
“You still writing?” Hollis asks in place of a
greeting.
“Not much,” I tell him, which is
deliberately vague. I’m tired
all the time from caring for my infant twins, so I never speak of my
writing in any detail no matter who asks—in case I’m not truly doing any
at the time. “It’s no big
deal, though. My past isn’t
going anywhere.”
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