Bad boy

Some kids have supportive parents. Parents, who help them learn, make sure they grow up to be good people and care for others. Parents like that were all over the television in the fifties and sixties. Ward and June Cleaver raised Wally and the Beaver to be great kids. Ozzie and Harriet Nelson were wonderful parents. Shows like “My Three Sons” and “Father Knows Best” showed how you were supposed to raise your children. Big Earl never had any idea what that was like. Not to say his mother was a bad person, she wasn’t. However, his father was the one who got credit for Earl.

 

One of Big Earl’s defining memories of his childhood was watching his Mom run from the house with her three other boys after yelling at Pop, “You may have him, but you are not getting these three!” Earl’s attention was on the beating he was getting at the time, but he did remember. Pain will focus your attention marvelously. This particular beating was in the section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known to the local whites as “Turley”. It was the only area where mixed blood families were allowed to live at that time. Pop and Earl were in the current family home. The inside walls were a dingy white. The furniture was old way before Pop was born. A broken down brown couch sat in front of a dirty, streaked window. That couch wasn’t helped by four overactive boys. A couple of torn, stained chairs and two mismatched lamps sitting on milk crates finished the furniture. In Oklahoma it was just about average for poor Indians. In any other state Mom, Pop and the four boys would have been white trash rednecks. Trailer trash, as folks like that were called all across the Deep South.

 

It had to have been summer. The windows and front door were open. The screen door was closed and the screen was torn on it. Maybe Earl tore it; maybe one of the other boys tore it. But Earl was the one getting the beating for it. Mom had just taken off after yelling at Pop. Pop stepped to the door and screamed at her to keep running. Earl remembered thinking that he might just get off easy. Then he realized that Pop wasn’t going to go after them.

 

That is when Earl got really stupid. As Pop turned back towards him, Earl ran and head butted Pop right in the nuts. Bad idea. Pop’s first punch caught Earl on the forehead and made him see stars. He should have gone down then. Pop’s second punch was a stomach punch that felt like, and probably did, hit backbone. Earl went down then, by God. Pop stood over him for a couple of seconds catching his breath. Pop looked at Earl like the boy was already dead and said, “You think you are a bad boy. You worthless piece of shit, I will show you what bad is.” All in all, Earl didn’t want to find out what bad was.

 

Then Pop left the room. And Earl heard a very bad sound. The sound was a closet door opening. The hall closet door. That one door was where Pop kept all kinds of interesting stuff. Guns were on the top shelf, where the kids couldn’t reach them. Tools were in an old tool box on the floor of the closet. Hammers, pliers, shovels, trowels and saws were all in there, resting. All of them were waiting for their call to duty. A machete Pop had brought back from World War Two. All kinds of tools were resting in there that could potentially be made into implements of destruction. Lots of potential badness waiting to happen if this was the time. Earl kind of hoped Pop was getting his coat to leave. No such luck ensued.

 

It is odd what a person might notice at times like this. Lying on the floor crying, trying to breathe, Earl saw a bug on the floor, just in front of his face. It was a ladybug. It did not care about what was happening with Pop. It was just walking across the floor about to go under a wrinkle in the rug. An Indian rug from when the family had lived in Phoenix, where his first brother was born. Before everything started going to Hell. Earl was lying on the floor watching this bug trundle along toward the rug and all he could think was. “Run for your life bug. He’s coming back.”

 

Outside the sky was blue, the day wasn’t all that hot and life was pretty good. Pop and Mom’s place was away from other houses. It was one of those houses that didn’t get burned in the Tulsa Race Riot before the war. But everything around it was gone and grown over. Outside nobody could hear a boy crying and hollering for help, because they were too far away. Earl always liked to think that, because the other option was that people heard and did nothing. Inside with our hero, Pop and that little bug, things are about to get real interesting again.

 

Earl wanted to run. He just didn’t have the air to get up yet. He probably should have tried anyway. Hindsight, as they say, is twenty-twenty. He just wasn’t smart enough yet. Earl was about to get smarter quick. Pop came back carrying a bat. That was one of the things in the hall closet Earl hadn’t thought of. A Louisville Slugger Pop used when he played ball with a bunch of other young war vets. “You want to find out about bad boy; you are going to find out about bad.” That was when Pop hit him with the bat for the first time. The first time. Then Pop drew back like he was going for the fences. Batter up. The bug didn’t make it to the rug. Pop stepped on it as he was coming into his swing. And then he hit Earl a few more times. And then Earl just didn’t remember anything else.

 

Big Earl woke up in a hospital. It wasn’t the first time that ever happened. It wasn’t the last. A doctor in a white coat asked him what happened. Earl tried to answer but couldn’t say anything yet. That is when he heard his father’s voice. “The boy is clumsy. He fell down the stairs into the basement.” It was just like if the voice of God commanded.

 

So it was said, so it was done.

 

You see, people had come to try and take the kids away from Pop before. Earl already knew how that worked. Social workers that didn’t care about their clients would ask questions nobody followed up on. The kids would spend a few days in the care of some overworked foster parents that never even learned their names. And the family would come together and swear the charges were unsubstantiated. Eventually everyone would be brought back to Pop. Things would end up just like they were before.

 

Earl got a drink of water from a nurse and told the doctor, “I tripped going into the basement.” There was nothing the doctor could do after that. It was the fifties in Oklahoma. Nobody much cared if a half breed Indian beat up one of his kids. Social care in the fifties was for lower middle to low class white kids. If there was time and money enough, they might help a few Negro kids. There was never enough time, money or doctors to care about Indians.

 

If Pop had killed Earl the police might have investigated. But then, it might not have mattered to them at all. It wasn’t like Oklahoma was going to run out of Indians any time soon. And a mean assed, half breed Indian that beat his kids was just not a high priority to the local police

 

You see, it didn’t matter that there wasn’t a basement. It didn’t matter that the doctor wanted to help. It didn’t even matter that Mom had run and left Earl with Pop. She had to save what she could. Earl was just the price she paid to save the others. Even Earl knew that she was doing the only thing she could do to save the other three boys. Nobody blamed her but herself. Sometimes the choices a person makes in life extract a price far beyond what they think they can pay. You make your choices and then you spend the rest of your life trying to decide whether or not you made the right one.

 

That may be why, later in life, Mom protected Big Earl. Even years later, after she grew to be afraid of him. Afraid of what she had allowed him to become. She really, really hoped she was wrong about what she thought he was. But she never stopped loving him. And sometimes, loving the Bad Boy is all you can ask of a Mother.

 

Just ask Mom.