The Boy's Club My Father Was Shot to Death One Night in November on The

Nick Norwood 765 Davis Abilene, TX 79605 (915) 677-7862 The Boy’s Club My father was shot to death one night in November on the gravel parking lot of a bar outside Nocona, Texas. This was in 1970, when I was ten. The man who shot him was the husband of the woman my father had been seeing. The man went to prison, I guess, but to be honest it was not something we ever talked about. My mother was working as a ticket agent for Braniff at the little airport there in Wichita Falls and she had already written my father off several years before that, had resigned herself to the fact that she would have to raise my brother and me by herself. She rented us a tiny frame house on Hollandale Street, on what she considered to be the right side of Windthorst Road. It was just barely on the right side, the first street in that better neighborhood, and even then ours was the sorriest house on the block, its pale yellow paint peeling away from the wood siding, the front porch a four-by-four concrete pad mounted by two steps. That summer she left us home to take care of ourselves while she was at work. I was in charge since my brother, Timmy, was only seven. It didn’t take long to figure out this was going to be a boring arrangement. Eating pop tarts in front of the television, staring at the walls. One day Jackie and Troy, two friends of mine from down the block, asked me to go with them to the Boy’s Club. They’d been going since school let out. I’d heard them talking about it. Shooting pool, playing ping pong and basketball, lifting weights, boxing. Norwood 2 “How are we going to get there—walk?” “It’s only a couple miles,” Jackie said. He was twelve, two years older than me, wavy- haired, dark-eyed, with slightly prominent incisors that showed when he laughed. “Shit,” I said. “That’s too far.” “No, it’s not,” Troy said. He was nine, a husky kid with a burr haircut. “It’s not that far.” “What are you going to do,” Jackie said, “sit around here with Timmy all day?” I had to admit he had a point. In short, I went. Left Timmy there with the television, explaining that if he went out of the house or answered the door before I came home I’d give him the Chinese torture—an excruciating ordeal that involved my pinning his shoulders to the floor with my knees and rapping on his breastbone with the knuckle of my middle finger until he had a deep bruise that lasted a week. I had done this to him once when he was five and the threat of it kept him my slave from then until about the time he hit puberty. We cut through my backyard, across the parking lot of a bowling alley, then stood waiting for the traffic to clear so we could cross Windthorst Road. Then it was some three miles through rundown neighborhoods on the other side, neighborhoods I had driven through with my mother when she took Timmy and me to the house of our babysitter, an old woman named Gertrude whose husband, Willard, was senile and drooled. Weedy yards and paint- peeling houses smaller and in worse shape even then ours, ugly dogs barking at us from behind cyclone fences. We stole pears from a tree in the side yard of a house about a mile from the Boy’s Club, and, spotted by the old man whose tree it was, got fired on with a pump-action BB gun. Troy took a round square in the back, right between the shoulder blades. We continued Norwood 3 running until we were safely out of the old man’s range. Then, lifting Troy’s shirt, we saw the mark it left, a bright pink whelp the size of a dinner plate. It was still visible when we got to the Boy’s Club. The club was housed in a squat, cream-colored building made of cinder blocks, flat- roofed in front, with a higher roof in back over the gym. An American flag hung limp on its pole out front. A gray asphalt parking lot lay beside it, behind it a mangy playing field of red dirt and splotches of dry yellow grass already burning up in June. Above the door hung the crest of The Boy’s Clubs of America, blue letters on a white field. Inside some fifteen to twenty boys crowded the main room, shooting pool, playing ping pong, racing model race cars, or sitting in the mismatched armchairs near the front windows waiting their turn. Jackie, who was known for his mouth, started telling our story, the daring tale of our exploits as pear thieves. The boys in the club gathered around us. This was a good introduction for me, a kid brave enough to steal pears from a gardener known to be armed and willing, somebody who had actually come under fire. Troy’s fading whelp was presented as evidence. The other boys looked at us like we were exotics, “rich kids,” from the other side of Windthorst Road. They at least seemed to be a lot poorer than we were, though in my case it was only because my mother had learned how to create a middle-class appearance, clean clothes from Sears that actually matched, canvas sneakers washed once a week. The boys I saw there reminded me of the mongrel dogs that had barked at us on our way through the neighborhood. Most of them wore dirty clothes and needed haircuts. They cursed in new and dangerous ways I’d never heard before. Cocksucker. This was a word I learned that first day. Pee-shooter. That was another one. Norwood 4 While Jackie was still talking, one of the guys in the crowd introduced himself to me, a sort of muscle-bound kid named Mike Smith who had short reddish hair and freckles across his face. Mike asked me right then if I wanted to box. I had never really considered it—whether I was cut out for boxing—and, still high on my newly won fame, I agreed. We went into the gym, where, at one end, stood a small ring, its canvas mat raised about six inches off the gym floor, surrounded by sagging cotton ropes. While we were putting on the gloves, word got around we were going to box and the crowd of boys moved into the gym and surrounded the boxing ring. Mike asked somebody to help me on with my gloves and while the kid was tying them I looked around at the faces staring back at me. Jackie’s was among them, grinning. When he wasn’t talking he was grinning. Troy, who stood beside him, looked scared, which I thought odd at the time. Our gloves tied, somebody rang the little bell they used to start and stop the rounds. Mike and I approached center ring. I should say right here that I had never had on a pair of boxing gloves in my life, not even those blow-up balloon-toy gloves some kids had when we were five. I had never had any interest in boxing, until that moment, in the charged atmosphere of a new environment. Mike Smith had asked me, and it seemed like a day for starting new things, a day to say “yes,” whatever the question. What happened next has been reduced in my memory to the smell of Mike’s boxing glove. An old, musty, rank, gym-sweat smell that had worn its way into the leather of those gloves over many years and was not coming out any time soon, not ever. Mike kept the smell of it in my nose by repeatedly landing it there. I vaguely recall watching as he stood before me, like an idling race car, can still see his face, his stance. Then there’s just the blur of brown leather as his glove connected with my face, the blur and the smell. And that Norwood 5 smell is still the first thing that comes to mind, some thirty years later, if I happen to recall my experiences at the Boy’s Club. Mike, it turned out, was that year’s Wichita Falls Golden Gloves champ for his age group—which was age eleven, a year above mine. We later became friends, but at that moment he was merciless. I asked him once why he’d had it in for me. He explained that he hadn’t but that he couldn’t get anybody else to box with him once they knew his record. He was just striking while the iron was hot, as they say. It was only after he had bloodied my nose, cut my lower lip, caused great swelling to my left eye, that the Boy’s Club manager, John David Seale, arrived to stop the slaughter. Mr. Seale was in his early thirties, average height, slim build, with light brown hair combed straight back from his forehead, his face bony, angular. I remember being vaguely aware of his presence as he came into the gym, moving deliberately through the crowd of boys and stepping into the ring. Without saying a word, he placed his hand on Mike’s forehead, pushed him—with one smooth motion—away from me, then turned and took my face in his hands.

Load more