“MOSQUITO RUN”
Roger Hollicka sticks his big flat face about two inches from mine. I can smell Juicy Fruit on his breath. He had swooped down on his Schwinn as we straddled our bicycles over on Tesson Court to gather for the Mosquito Run. Me, Daab, Bokern and Kreft.
“Somebody smeared a lemon in my little brother Sammy’s face,” Hollicka sneers. “I think it was you.” He stuffs a fight-scarred fist into that two-inch gap between our faces. I slap it away.
“First of all,” I say, calmly, “I don’t know your little brother. And second, I’d never waste a good lemon on somebody as ugly as he must be since he’s related to you.”
Power mowers faintly growled in the distance. Harry Carray on the radio broadcast of the Cardinal’s game on KMOX; his call echoed from transistor to transistor on a dozen backyard decks. C.Y.C. baseball season was over. Next year meant high school ball if I made the team, which I didn’t because I couldn’t conquer my fear of the curve. The smell of burnt pork steaks and charcoal lighter fluid hung like a spinning knuckleball in the humidity. Daab’s skin glistened damp and clammy; salty dew dripped from the shorthairs onto Bokern‘s neck; crystallized perspiration stained the underside of the brim of Kreft‘s Cardinal’s cap; I’m was as soaked in hot flop sweat as if I’d been hosed down in a street riot. There never has been a breeze in August on the Southside. No gentle wind. Not a waft. Not a puff. Not a draft. The mosquito spray cloud hovered until gravity pulled it earthward. An American Flag sagged stone still. Smoke from barbeque pits rose in the void, as straight and still as a white ribbon weighted by a plumb bob. Even the top leaves of the giant Pin Oaks drooped submissively. August evenings in south St. Louis.
Hollicka’s right fist shoots out and catches me solid on the cheek bone under my left eye. My head twists slightly. Daab, Kreft and Bokern, stunned, back up slowly and distance themselves from the fight. I dismount, walk my bike to the curb and flip the kickstand down with my right foot. I keep my focus on what I’m doing, my back turned to Hollicka. I steel a quick glance at my buddies, who are looking at me wide-eyed, wordlessly begging me to get the hell out of there. I grin slyly and give them a wink.
Roger fucking Hollicka, 14, a year older and about twenty pounds heavier than me; overgrown blond hair, a pimply forehead and a chipped front tooth; I’ve seen him around, usually at the Greens, always alone. He sits on his bike smoking a cigarette in the shade of the twin cottonwoods while we play baseball. A young mom watching her tots play in the sandbox behind the backstop strays too far from the picnic table. Hollicka steals her purse.
Once a week in August we congregated at the subdivision entrance for the Mosquito Run. That was when the city truck rolled slowly through the subdivision at dusk and sprayed a cloud of mosquito poison skyward from a cannon-like nozzle mounted on the back. It floated through the Pin Oaks that lined the streets and evaporated onto us parading through it on our bikes. Mosquitoes need water. It never rained in August on the Southside, but the mosquitoes mated in humid mid-air; they dropped their spawn on the green-scum atop the tiny ponds in bird baths; they reared their larvae in stagnant, shady puddles created by lawn sprinklers; they were schooled in clogged gutters, and in forgotten folds of abandoned, deflated kiddy pools; they matured by the millions and drove the humans indoors; they tormented the elderly who sat in aluminum lawn chairs on the front porch and fanned themselves with the Fashion section of the Globe-Democrat; they swarmed on the soft sweet flesh of the baby’s chubby legs and raised pink itchy welts. She cried, and I picked her up and wrapped her bare skin in her fuzzy cotton blankie. She smiled at me and grabbed my nose. A familiar Southside summer sound was the flat smack of a hand against a neck. That was one method of killing them: Individually. Another was to build a purple martin hotel on a twenty foot pole and wait for the food chain to go to work. Or, you could simply send a truck through the neighborhoods to unleash an apocalyptic miasma and hit ‘em where they lived.
It is a lie that I don’t know Hollicka’s little brother, Sammy. I know him. Sammy Lane they call him, a fat kid with a dirty face and a Mohawk haircut. It is true that I didn’t smear a lemon in his face, but it is also true that I have wanted a piece of Roger Hollicka for a long time.
That past winter this older kid, Roger Hollicka, had terrorized a couple of fifth graders in their own snow fort built on the one kid’s front lawn. Hollicka basically had held them hostage for a half hour; he had plundered their stockpile of snowballs, toppled the parapets, and buried Donnie Urbanek beneath the avalanche. I had come upon the carnage a couple of minutes later and had walked the sobbing Donnie home.
I walk up to Hollicka. He cocks his head like a puzzled dog. He is truly surprised that I don’t run. Apparently this is not going to be the one-sucker-punch affair he is used to.
“Is that all you got, Rog?” I say. “Is that your best shot?” I poke him hard in the chest with my index finger. “Is that the shit that scares the sixth graders so much?”
He throws the same punch again, but I duck it and slam a short right into his rib cage. Kill the body and the head will die.
I back pedal and circle to my left. I flick a quick left jab and catch him square in the teeth. His lip splits. A thin stream of blood and spit dribbles down his chin. He swings again, another wild right that I see coming from three blocks away. I block it with my left fore arm and pop him in the jaw with a straight right. His head snaps back violently. I step in and pound his face with lefts and rights, and then I dance away. No profit to get in a wrestling match with this ugly bear.
August evenings on the Southside we played fuzz ball games on the concrete diamond at the intersection of Crosby and Wilmar. I was Bob Gibson, impatient and fierce; firing fast balls high and tight, daring the hitters to dig in against me. Hitting right handed I was Willie Mays—my massive hands held waist high and right down on the knob—bashing tape-measure drives to dead center that clanged off Mr. Voight’s metal awning. Next time up I’d switch to lefty and become Lou Brock, slap a line drive to the opposite field, then take the extra base with my blinding speed and daring base running. After the games we’d sit on the curb in front of Penny Vuichard’s house on Decatur Street and chat up the eighth grade girls. I labored to make my voice as deep as I could; I inflated my height and expanded my chest and held my skinny biceps flexed until they quivered. And they--the girls--pretended not to notice; but she was wearing a trace of eye liner and tiny diamond earrings and perfume so sweet I just wanted to walk right up and nuzzle her soft throat.
Tender August evenings before the streetlights came on.
We draw a crowd, Hollicka and me, and they contain us in an elastic ring that ebbs and flows in immediacy to the action. Outside the margin kids sprint across lawns and scale chain link fences to bear witness. A couple of parents take notice. They stand on tiptoes and strain and stretch from the safety of their patios. The voice of the crowd is electric. I’m the sentimental favorite, but I’m definitely the underdog.
Pieces of dialogue filtered through.
“Fight! Fight!”
“Who’s winning?”
“Who’s fighting?”
“Craig Hawksley and Roger Hollicka.”
“Aw, man, Hawksley’s gonna get killed!”
“That’s Roger Hollicka! He stole my baseball glove!”
“What’d you do about it?”
“Are you nuts? Nothin’!”
“Is that Craig Hawksley? He’s a pansy!”
“Hey, Debby, you’re boyfriend’s gonna get messed up!”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Move over! I can’t see!”
“Hollicka is gonna kill him!”
“Somebody go get Hawksley’s brother!”
“Better make it his dad!”
“You get him!”
“No way! I’m not gonna miss this!”
He roars and charges. I fake left, and when he goes for the deke, I step right and stick out my foot. He trips, scrapes across the jagged concrete, shreds his elbows and grates his chin—like cabbage into slaw. He gets up slow, and then rushes me, head down, arms spread like a D-Back in a safety blitz. If he gets me in his grasp, it is all over. I hold my ground and time a perfect uppercut that stops him in his tracks and stands him up. I decide to toy with him for a bit; give him a boxing lesson. I have taught myself to box by spending countless hours sparring with my reflection in the bathroom mirror waiting for the shower to get hot.
The summer between eighth grade and freshman in high school was special. So many firsts. Slow dancing with girls. A beer and whiskey buzz followed by a hangover I’ve never forgotten. Taking the entrance exam at St. Mary’s High School, sitting among strangers who, over the next four years, would become the best friends I’ll ever have. Cruising through Ted Drewes and Steak ‘n Shake one Friday night in Weber’s dad’s Plymouth with Goedde and Schmelze and my older brother Mike.
Hollicka is hurt and I attack. A left hook to the temple and he drops his hands; two lightening jabs to the nose waters his eyes and blinds him. I hammer his arms, then right to the gut, right to the gut, right to the gut. The breath whooshes out of him like a punctured dirigible. He doubles over sucking wind and I move in for the kill. I pull his head down by his ears and in one continuous motion I slam my knee into his nose. It cracks sickeningly, and the crowds’ reaction is simultaneous and unanimous. Blood and snot sprays from the middle of Hollicka’s face. It creates a crimson and cream Jackson Pollack on the pavement. The collision lifts him literally off his feet. He lands spine first, then his head clobbers the pavement. It doesn’t even bounce. I tower above him, fists clenched at my sides, defiant, like Clay over Liston in the Life Magazine photo. He is done. Daab, Kreft and Bokern run forward laughing and congratulating and pounding me on the back. I relax my dukes and walk away. Boys jostle, punch each other in the shoulder, and chatter excitedly about the ass-whipping they just witnessed. Hawksley over Hollicka, TKO! No way, man! The eighth grade girls glance at me in bashful admiration; weaken me with shy eyes and gentle smiles.
The crowd noisily dispersed in small groups and all of them headed for the mouth of Crosby Drive in preparation for the Mosquito Run.
I get on my stripped-down J.C. Higgins bicycle with the coaster brakes and the tires without fenders and the chain-drive with no guard and ride a slow circle around Roger the Prone. “I hope you find the guy that smeared that lemon in your little brother’s face,” I say. “It’s wrong for bigger guys to pick on little guys.” I say it low and cool, but loud enough so that Donnie Urbanek, lingering on the fringe of the battleground, hears it too. I imagine what he’ll do with it. The word will spread and the legend will grow.
I stood alone. Everyone had gone.
Abruptly, from my left, comes a series of thumps and shouts. I pivot like a tiger. My ears pin back. I snap back to fight mode. What? Does Hollicka want some more?
The pounding was coming from the other side of the bathroom door. The fog on my side of it was as dense as a Turkish bath house; it was as thick as a cloud of mosquito poison. The mirror was opaque except for the arc shaped areas that had been wiped dry with a towel to provide a clear reflection for the boxing lessons. I looked out the bathroom window. The western sky was fading in layers from orange, to plum, to ocher, to amethyst. Venus had reached her peak of brilliance above the horizon.
More pounding.
It was my brother. “Hey! Craig! Hey! You’ve been in there for an hour,” he yells. “You’re using up all the hot water!” I turned back to the fogged mirror and gingerly held an ice pack to my swollen left eye. Outside, a white puff hovered above the crowd at the entrance to Crosby Drive. In ten minutes the street lights would come on.
.
