A Boy Called Horse  by Barbara Jean Tannert                                       

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           His friends called him Horse because he had the longest face in the neighborhood. A solid, angular face with a prominent chin and a hint of jaundice. A face too mature for an eleven-year-old boy and very much at odds with his limp red hair and tall, reedy frame. His real name was Gordon Butler, and he walked around with his head perpetually bent as if it were just too heavy for his neck to support.

            
            Gordon had lived in the same small Massachusetts town all his life. He had exactly six friends:  Father Cervone, Chinless Joe Tobin, Pin-Head Dickson, Dwarf Junkins, Pig Doncaster, and Blind Bobby Harriman. For a year now, they'd been calling themselves The Organization. Father, the oldest and strongest boy in the sixth grade, and the Capo, had come up with the nicknames. "It's the custom," he'd explained. No one had thought of protesting. Father was half Irish and half Italian and claimed to have an uncle in the Cosa Nostra.

            
            On a pale-yellow evening in August, Gordon got dressed for his farewell party. He put on his suit and tie, wet-combed the hair off his long yellow forehead, and flipped on the dark glasses he'd "lifted" during the last Hallet's job. Plodding over to Chinless Joe's house, he felt a dull aching in his bones. The next day, he and his parents would drive across six states to their new home in the city on the lake. Gordon's father had been transferred by the pest control company. "No one's going to make a fuss about this," he'd informed Gordon. "Not you, not me, not your mother. This is a promotion is what this is, and no one's going to be arguing or crying or making me feel like a criminal for doing what I have to do."  His father said this quickly, anxiously, all the while staring right into his son's eyes. Gordon didn't want to say a thing. It was almost a relief to give up without a struggle.

            
            Tonight, he was happy just to get out of the house and away from the chaos of gaping boxes and spilt drawers and rows of naked, staring windows. The look of all the emptiness made him tired and impatient, like a parent watching the tag-end of a child's temper tantrum. For weeks he'd been packed and jittery and ready to leave. He couldn't stand the sight of anything familiar these days. Not the postman with his buck-toothed smile and stalking gait or the Shoats' dog skittering back and forth across their ratty lawn or Hallett's drugstore where he stole gum and the occasional pack of cigarettes. And his parents, with their intolerable hemming and hawing about how best to wrap a lamp, irritated him beyond belief.

            
            The members clapped as he groped his way in the dark down the stairs into the skanky basement. They all wore suits and ties and dark glasses. Forming a receiving line, they took turns bussing his cheeks, thumping him heartily on the back, and murmuring "Te Amo" in his ear. He sat in one of the folding chairs that ringed the broken ping pong table, tonight the seat of honor.

            
            Father raised his Pepsi and vodka-filled wineglass. "To our brother Horse. A loyal and faithful member of our family!"  They all cheered and toasted future capers. Gordon drained his glass, feeling the pleasant warmth in the pit of his stomach, and tapped his foot to the thumping, sloshing rhythm of the Tobin's washing machine.

            
            In celebratory mode, they made a hit later that night on Earl Wickman, a dull, meaty kid who'd asked Dwarf if his parents were midgets too. The Organization's code of retribution specified the immediate avenging of any insulted member. They sent rolls of toilet paper spiraling up into the trees. No one laughed. They smeared dough all over the Wickman's Camry. (Dough was one of their trademarks. They mixed batches of it weekly and stored it in old coffee cans). Then, because Gordon's last hurrah was supposed to be spectacular, they carted the Wickman's doghouse out into the middle of Elm Street, quiet and solemn as pallbearers, and lit it on fire with the ritual torches.

            
            Running in the thick of the pack, laughter echoing around him now, Gordon felt his heart swell like a small balloon. Blinking hard, he was part of the blur of scampering feet now, the boys bathed in spidery shadows by the shafts of cold white light from the small suburban houses.

            
            The Butlers moved to an apartment complex. Their new apartment wasn't, truth be told, any more cramped than their old house had been, but it seemed to Gordon that they were living in someone's vestibule. He missed the staircase that lifted him up and away to his attic bedroom with its low-hanging eaves and sweet smell of wood shavings. Here, all the rooms flowed into one another on a blank tide of beige carpet and reeked of paint and disinfectant.

            
            His new bedroom was a small white-walled square that seemed to willfully reject his bed and bureau. It made him sad to see how dilapidated they appeared in the bright light, how they jutted from the walls at uncomfortable angles. The only thing in harmony with the room was a full-length mirror that a prior tenant had screwed into the far wall and then painted around. Gordon stared at it that first day, looking deeply into a face seemingly stretched and yellowed by the narrow glass.

            
            The Butlers had been a week in their new apartment when a letter came for Gordon. It was a squat inky envelope addressed to Horse Butler. Gordon took it into his room and closed the door.

            
            It was the first time Gordon had ever seen Father's handwriting, and it made him a little sad. Father was a big boy with thick, rough hands. It was surprising and, oh, kind of pitiful to see how small and faint he wrote, how his words got all bunched up and his sentences slanted downwards as if they were trying to escape off the page. Father informed him that The Organization had initiated someone named Baldy Howells, but it still considered Horse an honorary member. It couldn't be Freddy Howells, Gordon was thinking. Freddy was only in fifth grade!  He was allergic to his own hair, or some such thing, and had a crew cut so short you could see the pink of his scalp. Really though, what had he expected?  The Organization was sort of a losers' gang when you came right down to it. Most of the members had become friends simply because they'd found themselves at the same distant cafeteria table or in the same scrapy, leftover team in gym class. But once they formed The Organization, once they had a name, once they began sporting sunglasses and making up hit-lists and setting things on fire, well, then they got famous. They were still unpopular, but at least they were known, and this had always made Gordon feel important, even powerful. But now he was far away from his former friends and their fierce, odd ways, their sad ugliness. He decided that when he started his new school he would only make friends with normal, regular-looking boys and would never mention the old gang.

            
            The next day, already bored with exploring the identical floors of the building, the rows of red doors through which no one but housewives and old people seemed to come and go, Gordon took a soccer ball out behind his building. A bare, narrow strip of lawn bordered the parking lot. Three neighboring towers stood in the distance, and Gordon thought they looked like very tall policemen, keeping watch over the estates. He played a solitary game, trapping the ball between his big, awkward feet, then sending it scudding off the wall.

            
            Interrupted by a vague thudding noise, Gordon looked up to see a grinning boy in gleaming white sneakers hiking over the parked cars, jumping from fender to bumper, arms akimbo like a circus wire-walker.

            
            The kid's name was Curtis Howells and with his low brow and bright-yet-dark eyes, he was somewhat reminiscent of a handsome little monkey. In the loud, easy voice of an experienced salesman, Curtis explained that they were neighbors. "I'm in 3-D," he said, chewing ferociously on his gum. "I seen you move in."  He was short and muscular and, though he couldn't have been any older than Gordon, already had a dark shadow above his lip.

            
            "Glad to know you," Gordon said. It was true. It was thrilling to meet someone his own age.

            
            "You going to G.W., or what?" Curtis asked.

            
            He meant George Washington Middle School.

           "Yeah, I start seventh," Gordon said.

            
            "Same here," Curtis said. He put his hands on his hips and smiled at Gordon as if the two of them had made a wonderful discovery.

            
            They had a game, chasing the ball down in the mucky grass, trying to steal it away from each other. Curtis seemed powered by his sneakers, big puffy high tops that gave him a crazy, bouncing gait. He was all over Gordon with wild arms and close control. Gordon played hard, amazed at how easily he'd made a friend. He shouted at the sun, skidded in the grass, felt the day move through him as he ran.

            
            Well into the afternoon they played. Sometimes they'd have a break and lean against the clothes-poles, smoking Curtis's Marlboros.

           Curtis stayed to dinner that night. He had a peculiar habit of letting his mouth drop open when he chewed and holding his fork in his fist, but Gordon didn't mind. He was happy to have a friend, and he could see that his parents were happy for him too. They asked Curtis about his family, and he told them that his parents were divorced and that he had an older brother in the service. He said that his mom had the grip and that there were germs all over his apartment and that she wouldn't mind in the least that he was eating somewhere else tonight. "Well," Gordon's mother said. "We're really glad to have you. Gordon's just been so mopey this past week, so worried that he'd never meet. . . "

            
            "Mom, please!" Gordon yelled.

            
            "Excuse me for living!" she said. "More ham, Curtis?"

            
            "Surely, Mrs. B."  Curtis lifted his empty plate and heaped it with pink slices. He ate hungrily. The Butlers looked on, well satisfied.

            
            Curtis came over every day that week. By ten in the morning he'd be knocking at the door. "Hey there," he'd say, rocking back and forth on his sneakers. "I ain't bugging you, am I?"  Then he'd laugh until the rims of his ears turned red, all the time glancing rapidly in all directions down the hallway, like a nervy bird, until Gordon said, "'Course not. Come on in."

            
            Gordon wasn't sure what had happened, but he understood that Curtis admired him, was eager for his friendship. A little too eager maybe. But it wasn't as though Curtis was a creep or a weirdo or a jerkoid or anything. He was just really interested in everything Gordon said and did. Gordon felt strong and sleek and good-looking when they were together. A couple of times, Curtis had led him through the noise and unfamiliar movement of the project, through the maze of grubby little streets, and Gordon imagined himself as a white hunter following his faithful native guide through the deepest Amazon jungle. They'd gone to dark, cavernous arcades, exotic sandwich shops, and to the public pool, which had fascinated Gordon with its crowds, its dirtiness, the different color of people's skins.

            
            In the late afternoon, the boys would take Frescas and bags of chips and cookies into Gordon's bedroom and close the door. They'd lie on the floor, and Gordon would talk about The Organization. Every day the stories grew more detailed and wilder. The gang multiplied from six to twenty to fifty. The members were all of Italian descent, including Gordon who, for no good reason, claimed to have an Uncle Mario. They were handsome and tough, and they'd blown up a Masonic temple with plastic explosives and robbed a White Hen Pantry. If a kid deserved it, they'd beat him silly, make him sorry. Gordon had connections. He had protection long as he lived. He was a made man.

            
            By the end of that first week, Curtis was calling him Horse.