Four Days of Rain

I WAS FOURTEEN YEARS OLD WHEN I KILLED NASH CAMPBELL.

Killed him like the coward I was.

Bushwhacked him.

Hid amid the pines, sparkleberries, and scrub oak growing along the dry creek bed that cut through the woods behind my house and, as Nash ambled home from a hard day at school, sneaked out behind him and lay his head open with a brick.

Nash didn't know what hit him.

Not until, I suppose, his soul departed his body and saw me standing over it, staring at his corpse, scared to death, my stupid mouth hanging open in disbelief.

I have imagined Nash’s fiery little spirit leaping from that cadaver, bony fist balled, ready to battle whatever craven asshole had blindsided him with a goddamned brick.

An image conjured by popular film.

The ethereal Nash, light as wind but wound, as in life, tight as a clock.

Wiry.

Compact.

Angular.

Oddly athletic -- like a rheumatic old man who runs marathons.

Emulating...who? His grandfather? Some other cantankerous old patriarch of the Columbia, South Carolina Campbells?

The "Rudy" Campbells. Descendents of old man Rudy who was, if Nash's demeanor was a genetic phenomenon, aptly named.

All of them lawyers, it seems.

“Shysters,” my father would say.

And, if Nash was an example, racists.

Homophobes.

Chauvinists.

Nash: Young curmudgeon, chronically irritable, railing like a standup comic about niggers and queers and pansies and poontang.

An old southern salt full of pepper in the body of a fourteen year old boy.

Old fart adolescent smoking fat, wet stogies instead of cigarettes like the rest of us and making a show of it, marveling at the absurd picture he imagined he made.

Smaller than I by both by inches and pounds, yet somehow bigger.

More powerful.

Like a 1000 watt floodlight to the flickering candle flame I was turning out to be.

Smart.

Precocious.

Comical.

Confident.

Charismatic.

Nash could pick his friends.

Unlike me, who had already learned to hang back.

To remain anonymous and go, hopefully, unnoticed.

To skulk and yearn.

A lonely boy.

The anonymous giver of unrequited love, pining secretly from afar after this one or that -- a chronic, incessant mental masturbator, dreaming of the likes of Rose Karen Clay or Eloise King or Debbie Yates.

I was only an acquaintance to a friend of Nash’s.

Already, as I would often be, a sideliner.

A bench player.

Not that I wasn’t attracted to him.

Not that I didn’t want to be his friend.

I would have tagged happily along behind, laughing with the rest of
them, had he simply ignored me.

But Nash saw in me the opportunity for a joke.

Or a series of jokes.

Or a relentless barrage of them.

I inevitably became a challenge for the boy.

Not regarding how far he could push me because, God knows, despite myself I seemed to have no limits.

Rather, Nash seemed to see in me an opportunity to compete with himself -- to see how outlandishly cruel and abusive he could be.

I was, unhappily, simply sport.

* * *

Why I stood for any of it, I’m not sure.

Why I continually sought Nash out, or even if I did seek him out, or if I just happened to always end up in his line of fire, I don’t know.

I know that as time progressed he became relentless, hunting me down even when I tried to avoid him.

And that his taunts became louder.

And bolder.

So there was never any peace.

And I could never seem to save face -- to outrun the spectacle I’d become -- even in my own neighborhood, where classmates Jimmy and Elvin Hoff lived across the street and one house up, or at church, where I attended with several members of the student body who'd seen me standing like a fucking moron, mortified by something Nash had said or done.

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