In third grade Kelly stabbed a classmate in the forearm for trying to kiss him. In eighth grade he yelled and pointed whenever one of his classmates wet themselves. Because Juan drooled sometimes, Kelly renamed him Faucet Face. Rose spontaneously shouted absurdities and Cynthia banged her head on her desk most days after lunch. Kelly encouraged her. "No blood yet, Hammerhead." The twins he referred to as Tweedledick and Tweedledyke. They were not much kinder than Kelly. They giggled insanely anytime someone cried or fell. Kelly hated them most. They may have been weak competition, but they were competition.
Mrs. Katrel, Kelly's teacher, believed his only challenge was anger, which she explained to Kelly's mother, Mrs. Wyatt, who to her credit had postponed her trip to the bar for this meeting. "Severe anger," Mrs. Katrel said. "Aside from that, he's very intelligent. Very clever."
By sixteen Kelly was not clever enough to stay out of a juvenile detention center for stealing a car and swinging at a cop. Had he been, his mouth would not have been accessible to the cocks of two hairy-knuckled, marble-chested hayseeds. Kelly was also not intelligent enough to keep these incidents to himself. He reported them to the older guard, who replied, "I understand what you mean. Turn around." The guard handcuffed him, then escorted him to a small isolation cell where he turned Kelly around, pushed him against the wall, held his nightstick against his throat and forced him down on his knees. "Go ahead. Nobody'll know," the guard said. In his voice was guilt and excitement, no audible malice, and Kelly almost vomited.
The detention center endowed Kelly with vision, determination and autonomy. He imagined himself armed and brawny, unlikely to be approached by faggots but capable of beating the tongue out of any faggot's head or, if necessary, shooting a fucking faggot in the eye. Although he had disowned his mother, she was the only person to arrive for him after his release from the detention center. He had no choice but to accept the ride. She cried when she saw him. She hugged him and kissed his cheeks, her cigarette hands and breath all over his face. He pushed her away. "We're going to be okay," she said. On the way home she apologized for how they'd ended up. She was so pathetic he couldn't even tell her to shut up. As a mother she was a stranger. As a person he knew her better than he wanted. He couldn't look at her. His father he didn't remember, but he did respect him for leaving this woman.
One night when Kelly was about ten his mother took him to her bar. She'd already been drinking. She announced, "I thought it was bout time ya'll met the one gentleman in my life." People laughed in the dark. They sat at a small table on the other side of the bar where Kelly spent the night playing hangman with someone his mother knew, a man who wore a baseball hat and had a red face, chuckled a lot and told Kelly one day he'd be a heartbreaker. The man came home with them and stayed the night, his mother howling until after sunlight. When his mother and the man finally came out of the bedroom Kelly was watching television, eating breakfast. The man ignored him. Kelly, afraid to say anything, was waiting for him to explain how to be a heartbreaker.
When the man left, Kelly's mother wouldn't tell him who he was. "I can't tell you everything. I have to have my life, too." She lit a cigarette and went back to the bedroom. Kelly sat on the couch trying not to jinx himself by smiling. He hoped she wouldn't remember he was supposed to be at school. In an hour she was asleep and he had the entire neighborhood to himself.
Such freedom Kelly often enjoyed as a child. One day after school, when he was in third grade, his mother forgot to pick him up. For a while he walked nearby streets looking for classmates to bully. He looked in people's windows until a woman watching the news caught him and screamed. He ran back to the school and hid in the bushes until dark. He found some rocks and threw them at a classroom window, but it wouldn't break. Eventually he fell asleep at the school's main entrance. He was discovered by a janitor the next morning, this just about an hour before his mother, still drunk, arrived at the school to claim him. After being told that a counselor from child services was coming for Kelly, Mrs. Wyatt attacked the principle. She was taken to jail. He spent nearly a month in the state's care while his mother, indignant as a victim of grand theft, fought to regain custody.
We could, of course, attribute Kelly's "severe anger" to neglect, just as his mother's alcoholism and robust libido could be attributed to her snatchy step-father and emotionally mismanaged mother. In fact each strange angle in Kelly's family tree, each gap and break, results from some abuse, perversity, condition or disease, everything from gout and schizophrenia to incest and general oppression, and the origins of these might be traced down into the roots, beyond the Civil War, one member's sufferings infecting another directly or indirectly, immediately or ultimately, but who has time, really?
Kelly didn't. He was dead by twenty-two. Although his early end may be no surprise, its cause might be. He was not shot by the police and he did not overdose. He electrocuted himself connecting a generator during a hurricane. His mother adjusted the story. Her sister listened but was suspicious. "I guess," Mrs. Wyatt explained, weeping long distance, "he was worried for his roommates. It got so hot here when we lost power. I know he was no saint, Vicky, but deep down he was a good boy."
The generator was a lucky find while Kelly and one of his roommates looted a local pawnshop after their neighborhood lost power during the early gusts of the storm. Kelly had busted up the pawnshop to show the asshole owner just who he had screwed with when, a couple weeks before, the man threatened to call the cops if Kelly ever came into his place again "with other people's crap."
Both Kelly's roommates, Justin and Vince, were his partners in drug dealing, mostly marijuana and cocaine. Justin's eyes were set in dark pits. He appeared to have been smoking since elementary school. Vince laughed a lot, looked forward to the release of the latest video games and had been a mediocre pizza deliverer. At the time of the looting Kelly was on probation for possession. The officer might not have discovered the cocaine in Kelly's pocket if he had not thrown a beer bottle at a young man in a night club for a reason Kelly, waking up in jail the next morning, could not recall.
A lot of money was to be made during the hurricane. Because of parties and cabin fever people would be willing to drive in the storm for dope, Kelly believed. Once he got power to a few lamps from the generator his place would be a beacon in the dark neighborhood. And in case the junkies tried to rob them when they arrived—although no one who knew Kelly, or of him, likely would have—he, Justin and Vince each carried a gun in their waistbands. Vince believed his was loaded.
The lights stayed on for only a second when a surge from the generator jolted Kelly's heart. Barefooted he lay on the patio in the rain, his arm twisted under his body. In the living room the bong gurgled. Justin headed for the sliding glass door in the dark: "Dumb ass broke it."
The sight of Kelly's body inspired Justin with options: bury it in the backyard or bury it in a field somewhere. A field out of state. Or call the cops, be honest. Say they'd stolen the generator. No. Be half-honest. They could say they didn't know where Kelly had gotten it. But all the pot and coke. Would they have to flush it? They at least had to return it to Roy, hide it now and return it later, after calling the cops, or hide it and explain the situation to Roy, who'd be grateful they didn't sell him out. Maybe, Justin thought, he should just send Vince to Roy's now. Someone had to call the cops. Cops would be able to figure out how long Kelly had been dead and the longer Justin and Vince waited the more likely the cops would suspect something. How to tell Vince, who'd definitely panic and make Justin's decisions that much harder? The rain had soaked Kelly, his face on the patio. Strong winds blew his hair this way and that. Justin banged on the sliding glass door, calling for Vince.
A handful of people would, long after Kelly's death, summon his memory to energize conversations with friends and family. I knew this guy, total prick, who got shocked to death by a generator. One he'd stolen. Kelly's story had a moral. He became a minor myth. The fact of the matter is the longer Kelly would have lived, the more harm he would have caused. He was too weak or too angry, or both, to be saved by sympathy or love. His compass had locked into position before he turned twelve. Had he lived he would have, for example, easily invented good reasons to leave his child and the mother. For Kelly the choice of taking a little more liberty for himself or taking someone else's life would have been no choice at all. He would have developed a hatred of cats and, whenever they ran in front of his car, he would have sped up to hit them. Had his mother's dying wish been to see him at her side he wouldn't have walked three feet to fulfill it. The women attracted to him would have been those bored by men with conspicuous virtues. After Kelly finished with them these women would no longer believe that in all people is something good. Kelly's legacy would have been herpes, the child whose name he didn't know and the victims of his crimes: car theft, car jacking, armed robbery, battery, vandalism, extortion, attempted murder. In prison he would have initiated rumors that he had raped young boys, then he would await his executioner—theoretically a dangerous man with ties to even more dangerous men. Kelly would have killed this man with a short, sharpened handle of a toothbrush, and he would have done the same to the next man and the next, until no more would come. He would have died of stomach cancer or a heart attack, alone, smug, impenitent.
Before his actual death Kelly had a few times held open doors for strangers. The last time he told his mother he loved her he hadn't meant it, so you might say the expression was selfless. Also, not even a few months before Kelly's death, Justin was stranded downtown late on a weeknight and Kelly got out of bed, dressed and went to pick him up. Neither of them could have explained why he did this. Justin had been surprised that Kelly had even answered his cell. These are the gestures that Kelly's mom and his few friends tried to recall after his death. When the recalling become too difficult, or impossible, they pushed his memory aside. Relatively soon he, the infant his mother had named Kelly because she'd expected a girl, was, and always would have been, dissolved in the wash of the great majority.
Ryan Meany's work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Confrontation, River City and Saw Palm. He is currently shopping Bama, his short story collection.