Brother's Keeper

I was feeling the ennui of a late summer afternoon that can be particularly poignant in a fourteen year old boy living on the edge of a small town.  Friends were unavailable and shooting hoops by myself in the driveway had run its course.  

My Dad had recently bought a dirt bike for some inexplicable reason and it was sitting unused in our small barn.  Knowing him, it was something that likely had come onto his radar at a good price that he could not resist wrangling down even a bit further to justify an impulse buy.  It was a pure off-roader with knobby tires, no lights, and no license plate.  It was not mine, per se, but other than my older sister's boyfriend, there was really no one else to ride it.

At that particular moment the motorcycle seemed to be the answer to my boredom.  I wrestled it out from among the bikes and a riding lawnmower onto the concrete pad in front of our barn.  The road in front of our house ran to the end of our neighborhood where it transitioned to gravel  and snaked out into the country which was mostly comprised of fields and farms with scattered forests.  My plan was to explore that country road and find some field to tear around in and jump some small mounds if I could find them.

Knowing me, I did not likely check the gas or the oil and I definitely did not put on a helmet.  The kick starter was stiff and I did not weigh much which made getting it started difficult.  After several failed attempts I pushed it up our side hill and then jumped on as it rolled down and popped the clutch.  The engine rumbled to life and I headed back up the hill and down the road.

The gravel road undulated over hilly terrain as my dirt bike spit out rocks left and right from the knobby tires.  I would accelerate up each hill as if trying to ramp each and every one and coast down the back side.  After about a mile of this I came upon a break in the fence which opened to a large expanse of wild grass and what looked to be some bumpy patches like ski moguls.  It was just what I'd imagined I was looking for.  I pulled into the grass and in the distance I noticed a house less than a mile away.  

I wondered who might live there, but then remembered I knew whose house that was.  It was a poor family who had moved to our town in the past year or two and they had two girls near my age.  One was in my grade and one was a few years back.  They were the butt of a lot of jokes due to their extreme poverty.  Things like the clothes they wore, the odor that followed them, and their unkempt appearance were ridiculed.  The youngest had it worse of the two.  She had a droop to one of her eyelids and was made fun of mercilessly for it.  She was also the first to be found with lice at our school and sent home.  The older one was pretty in a kind of feral way but still a pariah.  I remember hearing a boy (who was actually man-sized due to failing a few grades) in the locker room say, "man, if I stuck my dick in her it would probably fall off."  A few years later, after we'd moved to a different town, I heard he'd been arrested after robbing a gas station on the town's main drag.  He had taken the cash, jumped back on his motorcycle, and rode south on a spending spree.  He was quickly caught by the police and became the butt of jokes himself.

I knew where they lived because we had once driven to their house to invite them to church.  I remember my Dad stopping the car a little ways from the house and walking up to their door while I stayed in the car.  From the looks of it I imagined the inside of that house was something just short of being uninhabitable.  I'd heard stories of what little they ate or the oddness of their diet.  To my immature mind they might as well have been a family of aliens newly landed in an empty field trying unsuccessfully to integrate into the local town.

***

At this point in writing this recollection I called my Mom and mentioned I was writing about the particular incident that is yet to be described.  She said that my grandpa (whom we called "Poppy") loved to visit with this family and couldn't have cared less what other people thought about it.  She told me that he'd asked the father if there was anything they needed and he'd told Poppy that they needed something to take a bath in, so he bought a large metal washtub for them at the hardware store.  He also would bake pies to take to them (he owned a bakery when my Mom was a child).  Mom said they thought Poppy hung the moon.

***

With these thoughts running through my mind I noticed a cloud of dust rising up off the road in the distance coming from the direction of that house.  Someone was coming!  I thought it was an angry farmer coming after me for trespassing on his property.  I could  just make out a pickup truck making it's way towards me and I hightailed it back to the road and flew back the direction I'd come.  It felt like the truck was bearing down on me and I had the motorcycle at full throttle.  

I crested a hill and came flying down the other side, but at the bottom I ran into a cluster of potholes which ripped the handlebars away from my hands as the front wheel whipped back and forth violently.  I suddenly found myself flying through the air superman-style .  I landed on the gravel flat out and face down with my arms extended above my head.  I slid for a bit and then got up dazed but with the wherewithal to walk to the side of the road so the pickup truck would not run over me coming over the hill.

When they arrived it was the mother and father of those poor girls and they looked terrified.  The woman got me into the cab and the man pulled the motorcycle off the side of the road.  She wrapped my head in a dirty bandana and asked me where I lived.  They drove me to my house and walked me up the back steps.  My Mom said I was pale as a ghost and my face was covered in blood.  The woman kept saying "We thought he's keeled!  We thought he's keeled!"  My sister's boyfriend later told me that as they were cleaning me up in the bathroom he had to pry a sizable rock out of a huge gash in my forearm which made him feel like he was going to throw up.  In the ER they removed some small pieces of gravel from my forehead and got me stitched back up.  My t-shirt was relatively intact with a few holes, but when they removed it my chest and stomach were completely covered with abrasions.

Well, my boredom was at an end and it took me quite some time to be able to ride a motorcycle again.  It must have been several months later that my sister's boyfriend offered to give me a ride back home from my Dad's carpet store on his motorcycle.  I was hesitant, but then climbed on and clung to him keeping my eyes closed most of the way while my heart raced down the highway.

And those precious people in their beat up pickup truck with their worn out clothes and missing teeth became something more than an abstraction to me.  I'm sure they had no idea that Poppy was my grandpa.  In a simple and straight forward way they became their brother's keeper.

Here's a picture of me 

sometime after the accident when 

 the swelling had gone down
and many, but not all, of the cuts 

and abrasions had disappeared: