Fifth Place

Moments in the History of Danny and Dewitt

by Margaret Thompson

illustration by Jason Stout

I loved that car, that silver-green-blue Ghia, the color of a spring where a nixie lives...

I never wanted to be his friend. Not to please my mother, or his mother. I had my sisters, those wild girls. Sometimes I almost screamed from the excitement of being near them. Dewitt? No no, no thank you, not even if he lived two miles down the dirt road, not even if his father was my father's second farmer. His wiry hair, his turnip head. The way he sneered. And then my sisters driving the garden tractor in their bikinis, riding Miss Peaches four in a row like circus acrobats. "Boy-o, boy-o, slave child," they'd call across the lawn to the porch, the front pasture dimming behind them, the fireflies just starting to light. "Come lead our mount to water. Bed her for the night, and we will reward you from our purses."

"Dewitt never stood a chance with you," his father said. The hospital, the second time.

And I tried to say, "Well, look, if you wanted to give him a leg up in life maybe you shouldn't have whipped him with the spare end of a garden hose on a regular basis," but I couldn't form the words from anesthesia, could only open my mouth and strain with my tongue and then bring my lips together once more.

I drove that beautiful car back to Plomer, Michigan on early summer roads lined with towering goldenrod and as I sped past the farms of my childhood I thought I might become a Canadian citizen, to celebrate my home for the past seven years, my deal with the Toronto Ballet...

What do I remember, specifically, about the two of us? The ninth grade choir concert, oh yes, Dewitt took a razor blade to my new corduroy knickers during "Lady," Kenny Rogers' "Lady." But before, nothing really, maybe we picked strawberries together one high July, but nothing really until his mother started driving us to ballet.

Mommy must have come up with that plan to earn Miz Junction some extra money. Mommy loved Lansing, she always said she didn't mind the long ride to class, she dropped us off in front of Robaire's School de Dance and wandered around town, ate at the Korean restaurant and admired the orchids in the university greenhouses. But after she saw Miz Junction gathering twigs in the woods, after she found out that Miz Junction burned their trash in a barrel outside the kitchen door because Old Mister wouldn't spare the gas to the county dump, she said Miz Junction just needed some pocket money, just in case.

None the difference to us. "Mommy, we your children do hereby present this proclamation of why we do not want to ride with Miz Junction," I read off the sheet my two oldest sisters had prepared. "One, she smells bad, like old cooking and grease. Two, her clothes--"

Mommy shook her head with such finality that I stopped, lowered the proclamation, and crumpled it into the palm of my hand. She stared at that wallpaper Daddy bought out of Michigan Ag Monthly, with the little boys in overalls and boots asking, "Been farmin' long?" and said, "Children disgust me, they really do."

Miz Junction didn't say practically a word until the girls — first Laura and Susan, then Jane and Mary — dropped out of ballet for basketball, queen rodeo, candy striping, 4-H. She patted the front seat next to her until I moved up and started talking, about the farm and Dewitt and also my potential. She kept trying to bring me and Dewitt together, a matchmaker for her son.

"Dewitt likes that show real good," she'd say. "You should come watch it at our house." Or, "Dewitt has a dog, too. You boys should put on a dog parade."

I get confused when I think of that road...

The week before ninth grade he came over for the afternoon. Miz Junction took my sisters to K-Mart to give us boys-only time. Oh I almost cried — the girls hurrying to each blue light special, fingering clothes and examining makeup, and me with Dewitt, who wanted to know if Daddy had any Playboys and could we look at them.

"Does he?" Dewitt pressed. "With tits and poontang?"

Now be fair, Danny, be fair to figure this out. He didn't burn insects or smother kittens, nothing like that. He wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons, since we didn't have any dirty magazines in the house.

"Oh puh-leeze," I said, and clicked my tongue. "We wouldn't play that if it was the last game on earth!" I made Dewitt sit on the front porch while I went into the barn to halter Miss Peaches, and I reclined in the hayloft and read an old issue of People before I led her into the yard and into the pond. We dove off her broad solid haunches into the water and it was almost nice, I didn't say anything about Dewitt's yellow-white briefs hanging sodden around his bottom but showed him how to swim underwater and come up on Miss Peach's belly like a leech, kiss her wet legs-width while she sighed into the water.

So the day was fine? and Miz Junction invited him to ride along to ballet. Well, big mistake. He came out of there just shocked — me in tights, the only boy, dancing on my toes like a fairy. Yes, fairy. Miz Junction bent his pinkie finger back for that and said that I would probably end up dancing for kings (two) and princes (five) and other famous types (lots), that some people like me had special God-given gifts and them that didn't had to be good to them that did.

Lincoln Township Road. It was a fishhook with a tail, it didn't have signs but it did have rules and those are what confuse me now — the person coming up the fishhook stopped? or the person driving down? Stop, nod your head, raise your finger. I knew the rules and I followed them...

I did not make things better at the Labor Day Picnic. First ignoring him for my sisters and the ag agent's daughters, then whispering about the bug in his hair, then leading the screams when Miss Peaches pooped in the water near his head. And he got back at me when school started. Telling people about ballet, when I'd been saying that I went to Lansing for special karate lessons, wrecking my clothes in the lunchroom. Calling the house and whispering, "I don't like the kind of person you are."

He saw me. Dewitt saw me. And he did not nod his head and raise his finger. Or stop...

Why did I even help with that stupid Homecoming float? The ninth grade passed over my "Goddesses of the Silent Screen" for "Oscar: The Statue," that should have been enough. Still, my sisters wanted me out at the Fairgrounds with them, in the Sheep Barn to their Swine Barn, Goat Barn, etc. To help them make fermented cider out of PTA apple juice. Did we know anything, anything at all?

For maybe a minute? The goldenrods they were through my window, my breath stirred their powder. And his moaning, a pain beyond the body. He would have hated knowing I heard that sound...

We kept the cider jug buried in the sawdust dump outside Swine, and each of us checked it on a given night, sipping a capful and waiting to see if drunkenness hit. Thursday was my night, and I thought I left paper napkin flower duty very slyly, thought I slipped out of Sheep completely unnoticed. The first tackle sent me front-down into the sawdust. Dewitt. Of course. He flipped me over and straddled my stomach, his breath smoke in the chill air. I noticed the weak moon behind his head, the dark metallic glint of Goat next door.

I said the usual things. "Will you get off me, you big fatso?" and "I'm going to scream if you don't let me up!" and "Look, I'm sorry for whatever you think I've done to you."

It was the last one that made him mad. "Oh, come on," he hissed. "You expect me to believe that?" He scooped up a pawful of sawdust. "Little liar. Too bad I don't have soap."

And then he started to pack it into my mouth, his fingers searching back to my tonsils. The flakes massed together above my throat. Every breath was water from a stagnant hollow on top of a tree stump. I could die from this, I thought. I could I could. Very quick, in almost one movement, I turned my head to the side and gagged up the sawdust and revealed the secret I thought would save me: "Your mother pretends I'm her son. Always. She tells everyone, the waitresses and the gas pumpers and — "

Dewitt shattered my jaw with one punch.

My babiest sister told me later, when I was strong enough — the rescue people cut through the Ghia with giant mechanical scissors, cut through it like cloth and left the pieces in the goldenrod on Lincoln Township Road...

Mommy met me in the emergency room. "Dewitt?" she kept asking. "Dewitt Junction?"

My mouth was wired shut, and so I wrote my reply: I don't know. I guess he just hates me.

The days after Swine were not unhappy ones — milkshakes from the McDonald's in Bucephalus, soap operas, talk shows, the news that my oldest sister rode Miss Peaches past the Junction' back shed and saw Old Mister whipping Dewitt as he bent naked across the rider mower.

Miz Junction came to visit and brought me a book, How to Survive the Loss of a Love, which kind of puzzled me. What love had I lost? Not Dewitt? I figured she must have bought it at the P-Back Book X-Change in town, because all the blank pages were covered with a girl's round handwriting, with a lament to her boy love gone away to find his fame. I didn't know anyone from Plomer who was famous.

In December, when Mommy agreed to let me go to the ballet school in Winnipeg, I forgave Dewitt, even thanked him, though only in my own mind.

A few days after I got home from the hospital Mommy set me on the back of Missy Peach Peach, the daughter of Miss Peaches, and I lasted four or five steps before I threw up in a long pure arc and fell off as though my body was a large bag of water, no structure inside and hard to control. Damage to the inner ear, the sense of balance. I will not write what this means for my life.