Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy-2.pdf - Microelectronics ...

Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy
Richard B. Wells
inches when Steve counterpunched with his left. His move knocked my right completely to the side and
his big left fist went whistling past my left ear. His follow through pinned my left arm at the same time,
opening me up completely, and then his right fist went whistling by my right ear. He’d thrown both
punches in less time than it takes to blink. I’ve never seen anyone else – including pros – whose hands
were that fast. If we’d really been boxing, my head would have gone bouncing across the room like a
basketball. That was all it took for me to know I wasn’t even in the same universe with Steve when it
came to boxing. I wouldn’t fight him for real armed with anything less than a machine gun.
Anyway, Steve took it upon himself to see to it that nobody tried to push drugs to the younger kids. He
had a little brother named Larry – a very cool kid in Melody’s grade – who hung around with us a lot at
the Hotel. All the older members of the Clan thought Larry was the brightest kid in the whole family, and
they were expecting great things from him, including his being the first in the family to go to college.
Although I think the Clan’s vigilante movement was probably prompted by Steve’s concern to keep Larry
safe from any and all pushers, the movement rather quickly spread beyond just this. What happened was:
Steve gathered up the Clan and they paid a visit to every guy in high school who they even suspected of
being involved with drugs. Steve was the spokesman and his promise was the same to every guy they
talked to: If he even heard you were giving drugs to Larry, you were going to be beaten until there was
nothing left of you but bloody pulp. Somehow nobody wanted to take the chance this was really confined
to just Larry and it was generally presumed Steve really meant any of the younger kids. He even gave me
this warning – probably because he knew I hung out with Gary sometimes – although in my case it took
the form of a chillingly casual evening front porch conversation down in the south end. The basic gist of it
was along the lines of ‘You’re smart enough to know this already, but if you ever . . .’ He didn’t leave any
doubt at all in my mind that he’d already voted Gary ‘the kid most likely to be reduced to pulp product.’
If anybody had even suggested to Steve – even if it was a flat out lie – that Gary had slipped any drugs to
anybody, they’d have gone after Gary and there would have been no trial. All loose talk of drugs dried up
almost overnight at the high school.
But getting back to the other Steve, the one from Maquoketa: One morning I picked up Steve and then
we went out to get Gary and set off to try and find some rabbits. All three of us sat in the front seat of the
Falcon; across the back seat we laid two rifles and a shotgun. Gary insisted on taking the center seat,
claiming it was the safest place to ride ‘because you had padding’ – meaning Steve and me – ‘on both
sides.’ We took a gravel road way back into the countryside, parked, and started hiking along the railroad
tracks looking for rabbits. Our hunting expedition lasted about two hours, during which time we saw a
sum total of exactly one rabbit. That one moved so fast, and with so many hairpin changes in direction,
that none of us got off even a single shot. What we’d have done with it if we had managed to shoot it I
don’t know. None of us was exactly a Great White Hunter. Still, we had a good time.
After we finally gave up on the rabbits, we unloaded our weapons and put them back across the back
seat again. We piled back into the car – same seating order as before – and decided to head back to Spruce
Creek to shoot some pool. We were flying down the gravel road at about sixty miles an hour. What most
people did on those kinds of roads was drive right down the center unless another car was coming head
on. Then both cars would move over to their respective sides and they passed each other.
We were approaching the turn that led to the road to Spruce Creek when another car came around the
bend ahead of us. Like us, he was going right down the middle and, also like us, he was going fifty or
sixty miles an hour. I moved us to our right and expected him to do the same.
He didn’t.
Two cars could pass on that gravel road if they were both on their proper sides, but not if one of them
was in the middle of the road. When he didn’t move, I jerked the wheel and took us further over onto the
shoulder. The shoulder wasn’t graveled; it was soft sand and just like that we started skidding. The other
car flashed by us and vanished down the road without even slowing down.
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