Forgive me, Leonard Peacock

TWENTY-EIGHT

My target suddenly makes an appearance in Mrs. Beal Makes Her Perverted Son His Last Meal—there he is on the kitchen’s bay-window drive-in movie screen.

I start to sweat.

Enemy collateral target known as “Asher’s mother” gives the primary target a kiss on the cheek.

Primary target says something before disappearing.

Primary target looks like the all-American next-door boy in the movie—like the kid you’d pick to take your daughter to the prom. The dutiful-son lie plastered all over that drive-in movie screen gets my heart pumping machine-gun blood drops that race through my veins as I turn the P-38 safety off with my thumb and finger the trigger.[61]

Every inch of my skin is slick with sweat, even though it’s probably less than forty degrees out. A minute ago I was shivering, but now I fight an urge to take off my shirt—that’s how hot I feel. It’s like I swallowed the sun.

Primary target’s bedroom light comes on a second later, which is supposed to be my cue to move and put the plan into action, but my feet remain rooted to the ground.

Primary target flicks on his computer and his face glows like an alien.

Kill the alien, I think.

Remember what he did to you.

You have every right.

He’s not human.

He’s a thing.

A target.

Remember to use your military training—what you gleaned from the Internet.

I leave my body and my essence floats up maybe fifteen feet above my head so that I am looking down on the flesh and bones and blood—the matter—I used to inhabit.

I can’t see my expression because of the Bogart hat, but my right arm is outstretched and the P-38 is pointed at the primary target.

My legs don’t walk, but I start to glide across the backyard, through the darkness, light as a ghost.

I look like a rigid lowercase r being pulled across ice.

What’s pulling me? I think as I hover through the stiff winter air looking down, which is when I realize my essence is being pulled too—I’m sort of following my flesh like a helium birthday balloon tied to a little kid’s wrist.[62]

I’m standing in the target’s window now, remembering what he did to me in that very bedroom so many times.

How confused I felt.

How I wanted it to stop.

How he intimidated me.

How he psychologically tricked me.

How he said if I stopped doing what we were doing he’d tell people in great detail all about what we had done together and then everyone would call me a faggot and maybe even beat the shit out of me.

People would believe him and not me, when he said I made him do it.

And how if I stopped doing what he wanted me to do he’d post the video he secretly made of us with his computer camera that I didn’t know was on.

The first time, he said his uncle had shown him how to feel good in a way I wouldn’t believe.

I wanted to feel good.

Who doesn’t?

We were almost twelve.

We were wrestling WWE-style.

Just messing around.

I had this ski mask I’d wear and pretend I was Rey Mysterio.

He was always John Cena.

And then we weren’t wrestling.

We were doing something I didn’t understand—something exciting, dangerous.

Something I wasn’t ready for—something I didn’t really want.

We were pretending—or were we?

Then Asher wanted to wrestle all the time.

I started asking questions—trying to figure out what was happening.

Asher told me not to ask questions—to keep what happened between us, not to think about it too much—and he looked mean when he said it, like someone I didn’t know, not like a friend at all.

The more it happened, the less friendly he got.

It went on for two years.

I didn’t want to lose my friend.

Haven’t you ever done things you didn’t want to do just to keep a friend?

I tried to avoid Asher’s bedroom—being alone with Asher period—but he was persistent, always asking me to wrestle, which became the code word.

Then I just started making up excuses—telling Asher I couldn’t hang out because I had homework, or my mom had grounded me, or whatever. He got the hint quick, which is when he started to threaten me.

It ended with a fistfight—Asher beating the shit out of me because I refused to “keep wrestling.”

He was always stronger, bigger.

I didn’t care about the beating.

And my not caring freed me.

When I made it clear that he’d have to give me regular black eyes—wounds that would get people asking a lot of questions—to keep it going, that’s when it stopped.

Maybe that’s when I became a man.

When my parents asked about the bruises, I told them Asher and I had another fight.

They didn’t ask any follow-up questions.

Maybe because they suspected I was gay.

I think I tried to tell Linda once, but she refused to believe it and changed the subject. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I was probably indirect, because how can you be direct about shit like that when you’re just going through puberty? Sometimes I remember her laughing, like I had told a joke. Sometimes I remember laughing too, just because it felt safer to laugh, although maybe I made that part up. The memory of that attempt to communicate is all fucking blurry, so I don’t really know.

No one ever found out the truth and that seems wrong—dangerous even.

I became a freak, while Asher somehow went on to become popular and well-adjusted and what most people would call normal, at least on the outside.

The bullies are always popular.

Why?

People love power.

Will I become temporarily powerful if I shoot Asher?[63] I’ve been wondering.

But—standing there outside his window—I become that scared little kid again whose parents are oblivious and gone; whose mother doesn’t even say a word when she walks in on her son and his best friend naked one day, but simply shuts the door and pretends it never happened.[64]

But for some reason—regardless of all that—I start thinking about this one summer day, before all of the weirdness started, back when we were just two kids.

It’s the last good memory I have of my old friend.

For no reason at all, Asher and I decided to ride our bikes as far as we could before we were due home for dinner.

We left at nine AM and had to return by five PM.

That gave us eight hours, so we decided to ride in one direction for three and a half hours, and then simply turn around and ride home for four and a half, figuring we’d be tired on the return trip, so it would take longer.

It was a pointless thing to do—the type of plan kids come up with when they are bored to death in the summer. But we had never really left our town before without our parents, we knew we definitely weren’t allowed to do this, and so our hearts pounded as we began pedaling defiantly. It felt like we were embarking on an amazing, forbidden adventure.

I remember Asher leading the way through all of these towns we’d never been to before even though they were close by and I remember experiencing a sense of freedom that was new and alive and intoxicating.

I remember being forced to stop when a red-and-white gate came down, and as we watched a train pass, I noticed Asher’s T-shirt was soaked in sweat. He had us pedaling hard and my thighs were on fire for most of the trip, but they burned hottest then, when we were forced to wait idle.

When the train passed and the gate went up, we were off again.

He kept looking back over his shoulder and smiling at me—and I loved him in the sort of way you love a brother or a trusted friend—even as the bugs kept hitting my face and the summer wind blew back my hair.

I remember sitting by a pond in a formerly unknown-to-us park located in a town where we knew no one—eating the slices of leftover pizza we had wrapped in tinfoil and stuffed into our backpacks.

We didn’t even really say anything to each other, but smiled because we were rebelling—out in the great big world on our own—and we couldn’t believe how easy it was, how you could hop on your bike, pedal, and disappear from under your parents’ thumbs, from everything you knew, and how there was so much out there for us to explore.

That day buzzed with possibility.

We both felt it, and so there was no need to put it into words.

Everything was understood.

What happened to us?

What happened to those two kids who simply loved to ride bikes for hours and hours?

The mouth of my P-38 is almost touching the glass now.

Primary target doesn’t sense I’m just outside his window.

Primary target is approximately five feet away.

If your grandfather could execute an evil man, so can you, I think.

The computer screen casts an eerie glow over the target’s bedroom.

As I hover above my body, I try to move my index finger so that it will trip the trigger and the and the P-38 will dischar ge and the glass will shatter and the target’s head will explod e like a pumpk in.

But that doesn’t happen for some reason.

The target clicks off his computer and the room goes dark.

It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust, but when they do I see that Asher has his dick in his hand and he’s jerking off in his chair, only he’s turned sideways so that his pumping fist won’t bang the underbelly of his desk. He’s even thrown back his head.

But, amazingly, even with Asher jerking off five feet away, I just can’t stop thinking about that day we went for that long-ass bike ride and wishing we could erase everything that happened since and live in the space of that one single day.

I remember turning around at the designated time so we wouldn’t be late for dinner, so we wouldn’t arouse our parents’ suspicions.

We were in front of a car dealership and there were all of these red, white, and blue balloons left over from the Fourth of July. We put our feet on the concrete, straddled our bikes, and surveyed the new land we’d discovered.

It was like we were little Christopher Columbuses or Ponce de Leóns.

Like we had left safe land and survived unknown waters.

BMX bikes were our ships.

Asher said, “We made it pretty far.”

I nodded and smiled.

“We can do this every day this summer. Go in so many different directions! Like the spokes of our bike wheels!”

I remember the look on his face was genuine pure excitement—like we had just discovered we had wings and could fly.

His eyes radiated like the summer sun above us.

But we never did go on another bike ride like that ever again, and I’ll never understand why.

Our parents didn’t catch us.

We didn’t get into any trouble at all.

The trip was a complete success.

We just never got around to taking another daylong ride, maybe because of what Asher’s uncle started, and that seems so so fucking sad right now, such a missed opportunity, that my eyes get all watery and my vision blurs.

My grandfather would probably call me a faggot and slap the shit out of me, like he used to do to my father, or so my mother told me at my grandfather’s funeral, when I was in the third grade.

My heart’s just not in it, but I’m not really sure why.

Probably because I’m a fuckup who can’t do anything right.

My essence gets sucked back into my body and then I’m clicking the P-38 safety back on.

I stuff the gun into my front pocket, pull out my cell phone, and hit the power button.

As soon as it loads up I tap the camera icon, make sure the flash is on, point it at Asher’s bedroom window, discharge an explosion of white light so he will know someone has taken a picture of him jerking off, and then run like hell through the woods.