An Incidental Reckoning Read Free Page A

bean at its heart. That part of him, though buried deep under the years, a job and marriage, still lived in its own special purity. He had worked hard to smother it, but talking to Will proved how deep old pain could still run, and how good it felt to have someone who shared it. He knew now why combat veterans sought each other out after so many years; only those that had felt the bullets fly a hairs-breadth away from punching their ticket to the afterlife, and had witnessed their brothers falling all around them, could understand. Their tears needed no explanation except to the wives and children and grandchildren at the center of their lives suddenly thrust to the periphery. Maybe his and Will’s experience didn’t have the same intensity as surviving a firefight, but he thought it an apt enough comparison.
     
    Re-living those days, the pain stirred up into a sudden whirlwind by Will’s voice, nearly caused him to drop the phone. But in the end, they both realized a need to reconnect and allow the restless boys within expression; to look into the eyes of one who knew.
     
    The annual camping trip was born.
     
    They didn’t get sappy, didn’t hug and cry, but simply basked in the affirmation of that connection. They didn’t even talk about Stape much, because in a way he came too, sat by the campfire roasting hot dogs with them, and threw a third line into the cold mountain waters hoping for a sixteen-inch brook trout.
     
    Jon had discovered that Will had never told his wife about those years: with a laugh shrugging off her suggestion that he attend his twenty-year reunion, explaining he had no desire to see those people again, but inside cringing at stepping through the double doors and seeing his memories reflected on every face that turned to look at him. This didn’t surprise Jon. He had never told anyone either that didn't already know. And even if no one at the reunion said anything - the reunion that he had avoided as well - he too would have suspected their humiliation behind every bray of laughter that carried across the room.
     
    They had - after a discussion in a pizza shop after school following their second run-in with Stape and the certainty that he would not leave them be - come to a mutual agreement not to fight back. They decided to ride it out. Stape would graduate in two years, and between the classes he cut and the time spent in detention, they could often avoid him. But primarily, both boys were terrified of their aggressor. He had never struck either of them. That was the most galling thing. He simply enjoyed watching them fight so much that he arranged for it to happen again, off school grounds. And they did, while Brody carefully controlled who was invited and then charged admission. In future bouts, he even fixed the fights, telling them beforehand who would take a dive and when. He made sure they didn’t hurt each other too badly, and kept events spaced out so that blood and bruises wouldn’t attract the undue attention of Mr. Giles or any other authority figure. And other kids, even if inclined to do so, never told. The terror of Brody Stape taking a personal interest in them acted as a powerful deterrent.
     
    They should have taken a beating for their freedom, he now knew from a man's perspective and far removed from any threat. But they hadn’t. They had become Brody’s property, forced to hurt the only true friend either possessed. Jon did not have the strength or the resources, or the support from his father (his mother gone since his infancy), but he did have Will. Perhaps if he’d been alone, he might have lashed out from sheer desperation and an irrepressible accumulation of rage. But he bore no grudge or placed any blame on Will. They had been kids, and done the best they could, or at least the best they knew how. And it had drawn them together in a way that nothing else could have, even as it after had torn them apart, only recently gravitating back together after so