There are summer mornings that are cool and damp, and in the backyard of Clay’s house the birds chirped noises through his bedroom window to wake him on Saturdays when he could have slept in. The chirping wasn’t necessarily pleasant, to Clay it was almost aggressive, and purposeful like something martial. He couldn’t ignore the sound and he usually got up just half an hour later on weekends than the time his sister woke him for school on weekdays, when he groaned for fifteen more minutes and was usually late. On weekend mornings, he showered and readied himself to drag the old punching bag his father had used from the shed in the backyard and hung it from the clothesline; he had rigged it with parts from an old bicycle and some wire, and the bag held securely even when he gave it his all.
The backyard in the dark morning, just before the sun broke the night sky open with light, was usually still and the grasses that Clay did not cut often enough looked wild and slick with dew. There were woods behind his house that would have looked ominous if he wasn’t so familiar with it all; the trees were tall and some had trunks thinner than the pine trees, and they made pecans, others pears. The neighbor had a dog tied to a tree in the backyard and she woke like Clay in the mornings to the sound of the birds. She barked at Clay and he sometimes threw her strips of bacon; he pitied that dog that had ran away the grass in a circumference twice as wide as the length of her chain and was hardly ever allowed to run free.
Sometimes Clay would run into spider’s webs in the dark that hadn’t been there the night before, but an industrious little fellow would take note of the bugs swirling around the light next to the back door that Clay would forget to turn off, and the spider would spin a web for Clay that could teach him the lesson to turn the light off if he had put two and two together; in fact, he started intentionally leaving the light on in hopes of spotting the webs before walking into them. He developed a strong aversion to spiders that made it hard for him to even watch them on tv or in movies, and if it happened that he saw a spider in real life, he would pull away in a child like horror.
Other than spiders, there weren’t many things that scared or intimidated Clay, not even the drug dealer that lived a couple of houses over who threatened to shoot him if he continued to ruin his business. Clay didn’t so much mind that the man was a drug dealer, it was the fact the man seemed to go out of his way to get teenaged boys addicted to crack. He had loud, drug fueled parties that were well attended by high schoolers and Clay called the police with a noise complaint that got the drug dealer arrested. He was unaware that it was Clay who had made the call. Clay got on the drug dealer’s bad side again when he saw the drug dealer making a transaction on the sidewalk next to his mailbox. Clay approached the man as his customer drove away and he asked him, “why shouldn’t I call the police?” The drug dealer looked at Clay and laughed. The man was a few inches shorter and he appeared to be in the same physical shape as Clay who spent much of his free time sharpening his reflexes and his instincts practicing various martial arts, but mostly boxing. The drug dealer dismissed Clay like he would a child; “I’mma tell you once, don’t fuck with my business you ain’t gotta worry about me. You do what you feel you gotta do, but know that actions got consequences, homie.” Clay would have agreed but he thought about the boy, Mike, who used to live in the neighborhood, how he was shot dead trying to rob a store for drug money. Clay pulled out his cell phone and started to call the police, but the drug dealer threw a punch that Clay easily deflected and countered with jabs to the nose. The dealer stumbled away gathering his blood in his hands and vowed that Clay had not seen the last of him.
That drama was far from Clay’s mind on Saturday mornings. After he fed the neighbor’s dog a steak that his sister had thrown out the night before, and hung up the punching bag, Clay’s mind was clear as his body enacted the punches his father had taught him so long ago, before he was in prison for killing Clay’s mother.
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