PLAYING HOOKY
by Dan Russell
The first time I read James Joyce’s “An Encounter” I was blown away by how much he packed into a story that, on the surface, seemed like a simple tale of two boys skipping school in Dublin. It is an examination of naiveté, childhood wonder, and the loss of innocence. It is also a masterclass in character revelation. With “Playing Hooky” I wanted to transport the characters to the swampy bottoms of the Arkansas Delta to show the universality of Joyce’s themes proving that danger and consequences lurk no matter the setting.
Dylan Jones had a shit ton of porno mags. Every evening after supper he’d grab a few, and we’d all meet down at the branch and look ‘em over. He had all kinds: from girls laying on beds all splayed out, to ones where some fella was giving it to ‘em good. His daddy was the preacher at the First Church of God. If he found out, he wouldn’t only kill Dylan, he’d make sure we were killed, too. Horner Mills took a book home with him once and his daddy beat the shit out of him for it and made him read Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy over and again for a month solid, then made him read a big old book by Billy Graham. He said his momma made him eat so much soap that he shit bubbles. I don’t know if that is true or not. Being thirteen, I figured we were old enough to look, and I admit I had a couple tucked under my bed that I prayed my momma didn’t find.
The school year was nearly over and I had a couple of days I could skip. It was the time of year when nobody learned anything. The teachers just hammered us with shit we had to know for the standardized test. We all knew it was more about them than it was our learning, so we never paid it much mind. All that mattered was what showed up on our report cards. Them tests are more for the teachers.
At lunch, I told Tommy Johnson we should skip school the next day and go fishing. Tommy had near perfect attendance, and he was in on the idea, so we decided we’d meet at the bus stop in the morning and before Mr. Samuels pulled up, we’d hide. When he pulled off, we’d hightail it into the woods and then go in to town. Nobody’d be the wiser.
Tommy agreed, and we shook on it.
I didn’t sleep that well thinking about our adventure. I tossed and turned and thought about what all we’d get up to. When morning came, I dressed and ate the bowl of cereal momma had waiting, tossed on my backpack, and ran out the door. On the way, I hid my backpack in the root wad of a live oak, so I didn’t have to haul it around all day. When I got to the bus stop, I sat on the bench and waited for Tommy to show.
Before long, I saw him running over the hill. When he got to the bus stop, he bent over and put his hands on his knees.
“I thought I wasn’t gonna make it,” he said.
“You barely did,” I said.
“How long we got?”
“A minute or two. We best get hid.”
We slid on our butts down the bank behind the bus stop and laid down behind a log. We both peeked our heads over the top and waited for Mr. Samuels to pull up.
It wasn’t long before we heard the bus over the hill. We ducked our heads and waited. The door squeaked open and then shut, and the engine rumbled back to life. When we were sure the bus was gone, I stood up and motioned for Tommy to come on. We ran down the hill and into the bottoms where we could walk the branch till we got to Hammond’s Bridge where it would be safe to climb up and walk on the road in to town. Everybody would be at school by then and we’d have little chance of getting caught.
Once we made it to town, we spent a few minutes walking around, taking it all in. Roddy Sample was fixing a flat outside the post office and Maud Childers had dropped her mail and was chasing it down the sidewalk, hoping the breeze wouldn’t blow it into the street.
We decided we would stop at Dixon’s to buy a comic book and a couple of packs of peanut butter crackers because neither of us had thought to bring any dinner for the day. Tommy picked a Batman, and I went with a Green Lantern. Old man Dixon gave us the eye when we came to the checkout.
“You boys sick?” he said.
“No, sir,” I said. “My mother is. My sister, Cathy Ann, is off at a Girl Scout thing in Tulsa and Momma had to come to town to see the doctor, so I come with her.”
Old man Dixon put his hands on his hips and sighed. “What about you, Tommy Johnson? Your momma sick, too?”
Tommy looked at me. I shrugged. He looked back at old man Dixon. “She is. Bad taken with the flu. She sent me to Lyle’s house to make sure I didn’t catch it. She said she’d call when she thought I could come home. Now that his momma’s sick, I come to town so I could meet my daddy at dinner so he could take me to my granny’s house.”
Old man Dixon rolled his eyes and sighed. He slid our comics and crackers into a paper sack and then across the counter. “3.50,” he said.
I gave him a five-dollar bill, and he gave me the change. Tommy grabbed the bag and we ran out the door.
“You reckon he’ll call and check us out?” Tommy said.
Inside myself, I felt a hot feeling in my cheeks. We were supposed to be having a day out and acting grown. My granny got married at thirteen. Tommy was acting like a kid.
“Whyn’t you just go home if you’re gonna be such a pussy,” I said.
“I ain’t neither,” Tommy said. “Why you wanna talk like that? I ain’t no pussy. I’m here, ain’t I? I skipped school just as you. It’s my ass if it’s your’n.”
“Well, quit acting like a damn skirt.”
“Quit being an asshole and I will.”
Just then, I heard something whoosh past my ear and smack Tommy in the shoulder. He grabbed his arm and hollered. I looked down and seen it was a rock. I turned around and saw Harley Rebsaman and Nate Jackson flipping us the finger from across the street. They were older than us by three years and quit school when they turned sixteen. Starting from grade school, they would pick on us every single day. Called us all manner of nasty shit and always put us in some wrestling move to try to make us say “uncle.” Now, they were crossing the street toward us and I wasn’t clear on options of how to get away.
“What’re you queers doin’? Out on a date?” Harley said.
“Y’all come to town to get you a dress for the Spring Fling? Which’n of you is the girl? Nate said.
“I ain’t no girl,” I said. “What’re you always messing with us for? Ain’t you supposed to be at work?”
“You’re talking’ like a big man, Lyle. Can you back it up? Reckon we go around behind the bank there and see how grown you are,” Harley said. He shoved me in the arm and it felt like a damn bear’s paw slapping me. I took a step backward, but steadied myself.
“What about you, Tommy? You ain’t gonna fight for your girl?” Nate said.
“He ain’t my girl,” Tommy said.
“He ain’t?” Nate said. “Well, what’re y’all doing out on a date in town on school day for? Y’all are playing hooky, ain’t ya?”
“We got the days,” I said. “We can do what we like. Besides, it ain’t none of your business what we do.”
Harley grabbed me by my shirt collar and pulled me up close to his face. I could smell wintergreen snuff on his breath and see it stuck in his teeth like black pepper. “How about I make it my business? How about I finally put that ass whipping on you I promised? How’d you like that, you little shit?”
A loud voice across the street made Harley turn me loose.
“Reb, you and Jackson get over here and back to work. I ain’t paying you to run around and play with your little friends.” It was Ron Smith. He ran the electrical company. “Come on, put your boyfriend down and get on back to work.” He put his hands on his hips and stared at us.
Harley looked at me and smiled. “You ain’t grown, boy. Next time I see you, I’m gonna whip your ass. Mark my words.”
I fixed my shirt and looked across the street at Mr. Smith and then back at Harley. “Looks like you ain’t grown neither,” I said.
Harley pushed me again and then walked away. Nate huffed and shuffled on behind him.
“You alright?” Tommy said.
“No thanks to you,” I said.
“Come on,” Tommy said, “We best get on down to the branch. We ain’t gonna catch nothing if we don’t hurry. Besides, we gotta go by Uncle Lonnie’s and grab the poles and bait. That’s why we even come to town.”
I nodded and me and Tommy ducked down an alley and walked on side streets to his Uncle Lonnie’s house. Tommy picked up a flowerpot and grabbed the key. He unlocked the door, and we grabbed two cane poles and a tackle box. He locked the door and hid the key back. Then, we run off through the yard, hoping his Aunt Nancy never saw us. Lonnie’s house backed up to Johnny Taylor’s hayfields, which backed up to the branch. We snuck across Taylor’s field and into the woods, down the bank, and collapsed on the ground, both of us laughing and breathing heavy. We laid there for a minute before Tommy stood up and started taking off his clothes.
“I’m gonna jump in and have a swim before we get to fishing. All that running has me burning up,” he said.
“Alright,” I said. I stood up and took mine off, too, down to my underwear.
Tommy had already bailed in. When I waded in, the water was like ice. Goosebumps popped up on me everywhere and I felt every bit of heat in my body run off.
“Shit, that’s cold,” I said.
Tommy dove under and then came back up. “If you just dive in, you’ll get used to it,” he said.
I held my breath and sat down hard so my whole body went under. It felt like a thousand knives stabbing me at once. I came back up gasping. “I ain’t about this shit. I’m getting out,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” Tommy said.
I jogged out of the water and dried myself off with my shirt. I pulled my underwear off and hung ‘em up on a tree limb to dry. Once I’d finished drying off, I hung my shirt up and pulled on my pants. I opened the tackle box and started looking for something to bait up with.
Tommy came out soon after and dried himself and lay on the ground naked as a jaybird. I paid him no mind and ran my hook through a chartreuse and black jig and tossed it in the water. Tommy didn’t say much. After a while, I looked over and he was asleep. Just lying naked on the ground. I kinda laughed and went back to fishing. The sun felt good on my shoulders after the sting of the water. I closed my eyes and stared up at it. I felt the warmth on my face and thought about how good it felt to not be playing by the rules. How good it felt to be out doing what you wanted without worrying about anything. All last week we studied freedom in history class. Right now, I knew what that word felt like.
Somebody whistling broke my trance. I nudged Tommy, and told him to cover up that somebody was coming. He grabbed his pants and pulled ‘em on, but his shirt was down by the bank, so he couldn’t get to it.
Some man we didn’t know was walking through the woods across the branch. When he got even with us, he stopped and looked at us for a minute. He was tall and skinny. He had on an old Army coat and some stained up blue jeans. The tongues on his boots flopped loose like the tongues of two worn out hounds. His hair was long and looked like it needed a wash. He gave us a nod and then he went on. Tommy ran down to the bank and grabbed his shirt.
“Who was that?” he said.
“I ain’t ever seen him,” I said.
“Where you reckon he’s going?”
“I dunno. Probably to town.”
Tommy pulled his shirt over his head and slung his arms through the sleeves. He got his pole and went to baiting his hook.
I got a nibble and jerked to set, but went too quick and my jig flew up in the air and come back down with a plop. Tommy was about to toss in his line when he elbowed me in the ribs and pointed off to my right. “Look,” he said. “The feller from before, he’s coming back this way.”
I looked where Tommy pointed. The man had crossed the branch and was making his way through the thicket toward us. When he got near, he coughed and hollered, “Y’all doing any good?”
I gave him a wave and hollered back. “No, sir. We ain’t. Hadn’t caught nothing.”
“I been walking a while. Think I might sit down for a bit. Y’all don’t care, do ya?” the man said.
“No, sir. I don’t,” I said.
“Your friend there? He care?”
Tommy leaned around where he could see the man better and answered. “Don’t bother me none.”
The man ducked under the limb where my shirt and underwear were hanging and sat down next to me. He smelled of outside — dank and wet.
“Pretty out today, ain’t it?” the man said.
I nodded.
“Being pretty this early in the spring’ll mean a pretty hot summer, I reckon. Hot. Damn hot. You know, when I was your age seemed it didn’t get as hot. No, we had all four seasons. Day like today, you could expect to come in late June. Now, here we are in May and it’s already that warm. You boys not in school today? Ain’t no holiday that I’m fuzzy on, is there?”
I jigged my pole up and down in the water and tried to think of a good lie. When I couldn’t and Tommy offered no help, I said, “No, sir. No holiday today.”
“Y’all’s playing hooky, ain’t ya? Ha ha, well, hell. I remember them days. Boy needs a little hooky time to play and get out when he’s your age. School can get heavy, can’t it?”
“Yessir,” Tommy said. “I don’t like it none.”
“Oh, I loved it, school. Loved it. I read every book I could get my hands on. I read that Faulkner, ol’ Hemingway. I even read that Jane Austen but I didn’t like her much. Men writers were more my thing. You read them books? Faulkner, Hemingway?”
I hadn’t read anything by either man. My momma read some Faulkner, and she told me he was from near here across the river in Mississippi, but I didn’t have a clue about what he wrote. And Hemingway, we didn’t have to read him till next year. Sam Bartlett told me Hemingway wrote a book about a fish and it was good, so I went with that one.
“I read that one by Hemingway about the fish.”
“The Old Man and the Sea. I read that one. About a man struggling with himself. Overcoming weakness, I seem to recall. A man gets weak. Boy, boy.” The man ran his fingers through his lank hair and pushed it behind his ears. He turned to look at us both. He gave a little smile and I could see his teeth were real bad. They looked grimy and small. His beard and mustache were patchy like someone had drawn ‘em on with a dulled leaded pencil. He pointed at Tommy. “Your buddy there, he ain’t no reader, is he? He looks like he likes to play games. Looks a little soft. Probably stay round home, don’t ya, boy? Don’t go out chasing the girls much, huh?”
“I chase ‘em,” Tommy said. “I got a couple.”
The man laughed until his laugh turned phlegmy. “A couple,” he said. “I doubt all that. What about you?” the man said. He gave me a little punch in the ribs. “Every boy has a sweetheart. How many you got?”
“I ain’t got one,” I said.
“Aw, now,” he said, “I ain’t believing that. You got one, or you had one. Look at you all strong. I see them muscles.”
The conversation wasn’t one I wanted to be having with him. He was acting off. He would get a shiver now and then and looked over his shoulder every minute or two like somebody might be after him. I thought he might just be lonely and told him I had had a couple of sweethearts before, but right now I was between. He laughed and told us how much he missed being young and how he had a few sweethearts back in his day. He told us he loved the way a girl’s hair smelled and how soft and warm her hands were when you held them, but he told us not all girls were that way. Some of ‘em showed you one thing, but did another. He said he loved looking at young’uns playing and having fun and that he missed being able to have fun like that. He told us all about his sweethearts. His voice would get high pitched when he got excited, then drop to almost a whisper when he talked about kissing and holding hands. He told me and Tommy all of it like it was a secret. I just nodded and watched my line. It didn’t move. It just hung there untouched and drifting further away in the breeze.
The man went on and on about his youth and asking us how many girls we’d kissed or if we’d got lucky. He said by our age he had got lucky twice. Once in Trumann, the other with his second cousin at a family reunion in Lonoke. He got real excited telling us about it and then went quiet. For a long time, he didn’t say anything. The silence got heavy, and the I glanced over at him. He seemed lost in thought. Then he stood up and said he had to go take a leak. I nodded, and he pushed himself up and I heard him breaking twigs underfoot as he went up the hill behind us. I looked at Tommy and he shrugged. Both of us sat quiet and hoped he might’ve decided to go on his way. After a minute or so, Tommy hit me in the arm.
“Look up yonder,” he said.
I didn’t answer. I just stared out at the water.
“He’s up there playing with it. He’s got it out!”
“He what?” I said.
“Up there, behind that tree, look!”
I didn’t look. My mind was scrambling trying to find us a way out.
“What’ll we do?” Tommy said.
I didn’t know. “If he asks us, you tell him your name is Jackson, and I am gonna tell him mine is Rebsamen. Got it?”
Tommy nodded.
I could hear the man whistling and starting back down the hill. He sat back down beside me and scratched at his beard. About then, a rabbit ran along the bank and Tommy jumped up and chased after it. The man and I turned to watch him. The rabbit ran up the hill. Tommy scrambled up after it and then bent down and picked up a rock. He chunked it at the rabbit before they both disappeared over the rise.
After a minute or two, the man spoke. He said Tommy had the Devil in him, he could tell. He said the problem with kids these days was that they were soft and nobody spanked ‘em anymore. He said it was good for a boy to be spanked and spanked good. He said when a boy was hellbent on doing bad, he needed a whipping every day. Belts, wooden spoons, bent over a knee and spanked real good and hard. He said rough boys deserved to be punished for acting like they did. He said boys didn’t want to be scolded or grounded. What they really wanted was somebody to give them a good hard whipping to set them straight. I was starting to wonder how I was gonna get away. I glanced over at him and saw his coke bottle green eyes staring right into mine. His shoulders quivered, and he seemed to have a twitch in his eyebrow.
The man went on with his sermon. He said if he found a boy who had a sweetheart or two, he would whip him and that would break him from flirting with girls and trying to sin. And if that boy had ever done more than kiss a girl, say tried to touch her in a certain way, he would give him a beating so bad it would make him bleed. He said there wouldn’t be no greater pleasure in the world than to do that. He said he’d love to do it and that it would do the world a favor. His voice was singing the same note now. It was low and soft, almost a whisper, telling me how much he wanted to whip a boy for doing wrong and when I looked at him again, he seemed to want me to understand.
I heard a rustling in the grass and twigs breaking and saw Tommy chasing the rabbit again. The man looked over his shoulder to see what the racket was. When he did, I jumped up and ran up the hill, hoping he wouldn’t snatch me by the leg. When I got to the top of the hill, I hollered, “Jackson!”
My voice cracked, and I sounded like a child. I hollered again. Tommy heard me and whistled. I could see him running toward me like he was coming to fend off a dog who’d got off his leash and was chasing after me. And I was thankful, because until then, I hated him more than I could tell.
Dan Russell is a writer and host of the Fair to Middlin' Podcast. His work has appeared in The Arkansas Review, Cowboy Jamboree, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Tributary, Close to the Bone, and You Might Need to Hear This. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Concordia University-St. Paul. Cowboy Jamboree Press will publish his first novel, Poor Birds, in 2025.
by Dan Russell
The first time I read James Joyce’s “An Encounter” I was blown away by how much he packed into a story that, on the surface, seemed like a simple tale of two boys skipping school in Dublin. It is an examination of naiveté, childhood wonder, and the loss of innocence. It is also a masterclass in character revelation. With “Playing Hooky” I wanted to transport the characters to the swampy bottoms of the Arkansas Delta to show the universality of Joyce’s themes proving that danger and consequences lurk no matter the setting.
Dylan Jones had a shit ton of porno mags. Every evening after supper he’d grab a few, and we’d all meet down at the branch and look ‘em over. He had all kinds: from girls laying on beds all splayed out, to ones where some fella was giving it to ‘em good. His daddy was the preacher at the First Church of God. If he found out, he wouldn’t only kill Dylan, he’d make sure we were killed, too. Horner Mills took a book home with him once and his daddy beat the shit out of him for it and made him read Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy over and again for a month solid, then made him read a big old book by Billy Graham. He said his momma made him eat so much soap that he shit bubbles. I don’t know if that is true or not. Being thirteen, I figured we were old enough to look, and I admit I had a couple tucked under my bed that I prayed my momma didn’t find.
The school year was nearly over and I had a couple of days I could skip. It was the time of year when nobody learned anything. The teachers just hammered us with shit we had to know for the standardized test. We all knew it was more about them than it was our learning, so we never paid it much mind. All that mattered was what showed up on our report cards. Them tests are more for the teachers.
At lunch, I told Tommy Johnson we should skip school the next day and go fishing. Tommy had near perfect attendance, and he was in on the idea, so we decided we’d meet at the bus stop in the morning and before Mr. Samuels pulled up, we’d hide. When he pulled off, we’d hightail it into the woods and then go in to town. Nobody’d be the wiser.
Tommy agreed, and we shook on it.
I didn’t sleep that well thinking about our adventure. I tossed and turned and thought about what all we’d get up to. When morning came, I dressed and ate the bowl of cereal momma had waiting, tossed on my backpack, and ran out the door. On the way, I hid my backpack in the root wad of a live oak, so I didn’t have to haul it around all day. When I got to the bus stop, I sat on the bench and waited for Tommy to show.
Before long, I saw him running over the hill. When he got to the bus stop, he bent over and put his hands on his knees.
“I thought I wasn’t gonna make it,” he said.
“You barely did,” I said.
“How long we got?”
“A minute or two. We best get hid.”
We slid on our butts down the bank behind the bus stop and laid down behind a log. We both peeked our heads over the top and waited for Mr. Samuels to pull up.
It wasn’t long before we heard the bus over the hill. We ducked our heads and waited. The door squeaked open and then shut, and the engine rumbled back to life. When we were sure the bus was gone, I stood up and motioned for Tommy to come on. We ran down the hill and into the bottoms where we could walk the branch till we got to Hammond’s Bridge where it would be safe to climb up and walk on the road in to town. Everybody would be at school by then and we’d have little chance of getting caught.
Once we made it to town, we spent a few minutes walking around, taking it all in. Roddy Sample was fixing a flat outside the post office and Maud Childers had dropped her mail and was chasing it down the sidewalk, hoping the breeze wouldn’t blow it into the street.
We decided we would stop at Dixon’s to buy a comic book and a couple of packs of peanut butter crackers because neither of us had thought to bring any dinner for the day. Tommy picked a Batman, and I went with a Green Lantern. Old man Dixon gave us the eye when we came to the checkout.
“You boys sick?” he said.
“No, sir,” I said. “My mother is. My sister, Cathy Ann, is off at a Girl Scout thing in Tulsa and Momma had to come to town to see the doctor, so I come with her.”
Old man Dixon put his hands on his hips and sighed. “What about you, Tommy Johnson? Your momma sick, too?”
Tommy looked at me. I shrugged. He looked back at old man Dixon. “She is. Bad taken with the flu. She sent me to Lyle’s house to make sure I didn’t catch it. She said she’d call when she thought I could come home. Now that his momma’s sick, I come to town so I could meet my daddy at dinner so he could take me to my granny’s house.”
Old man Dixon rolled his eyes and sighed. He slid our comics and crackers into a paper sack and then across the counter. “3.50,” he said.
I gave him a five-dollar bill, and he gave me the change. Tommy grabbed the bag and we ran out the door.
“You reckon he’ll call and check us out?” Tommy said.
Inside myself, I felt a hot feeling in my cheeks. We were supposed to be having a day out and acting grown. My granny got married at thirteen. Tommy was acting like a kid.
“Whyn’t you just go home if you’re gonna be such a pussy,” I said.
“I ain’t neither,” Tommy said. “Why you wanna talk like that? I ain’t no pussy. I’m here, ain’t I? I skipped school just as you. It’s my ass if it’s your’n.”
“Well, quit acting like a damn skirt.”
“Quit being an asshole and I will.”
Just then, I heard something whoosh past my ear and smack Tommy in the shoulder. He grabbed his arm and hollered. I looked down and seen it was a rock. I turned around and saw Harley Rebsaman and Nate Jackson flipping us the finger from across the street. They were older than us by three years and quit school when they turned sixteen. Starting from grade school, they would pick on us every single day. Called us all manner of nasty shit and always put us in some wrestling move to try to make us say “uncle.” Now, they were crossing the street toward us and I wasn’t clear on options of how to get away.
“What’re you queers doin’? Out on a date?” Harley said.
“Y’all come to town to get you a dress for the Spring Fling? Which’n of you is the girl? Nate said.
“I ain’t no girl,” I said. “What’re you always messing with us for? Ain’t you supposed to be at work?”
“You’re talking’ like a big man, Lyle. Can you back it up? Reckon we go around behind the bank there and see how grown you are,” Harley said. He shoved me in the arm and it felt like a damn bear’s paw slapping me. I took a step backward, but steadied myself.
“What about you, Tommy? You ain’t gonna fight for your girl?” Nate said.
“He ain’t my girl,” Tommy said.
“He ain’t?” Nate said. “Well, what’re y’all doing out on a date in town on school day for? Y’all are playing hooky, ain’t ya?”
“We got the days,” I said. “We can do what we like. Besides, it ain’t none of your business what we do.”
Harley grabbed me by my shirt collar and pulled me up close to his face. I could smell wintergreen snuff on his breath and see it stuck in his teeth like black pepper. “How about I make it my business? How about I finally put that ass whipping on you I promised? How’d you like that, you little shit?”
A loud voice across the street made Harley turn me loose.
“Reb, you and Jackson get over here and back to work. I ain’t paying you to run around and play with your little friends.” It was Ron Smith. He ran the electrical company. “Come on, put your boyfriend down and get on back to work.” He put his hands on his hips and stared at us.
Harley looked at me and smiled. “You ain’t grown, boy. Next time I see you, I’m gonna whip your ass. Mark my words.”
I fixed my shirt and looked across the street at Mr. Smith and then back at Harley. “Looks like you ain’t grown neither,” I said.
Harley pushed me again and then walked away. Nate huffed and shuffled on behind him.
“You alright?” Tommy said.
“No thanks to you,” I said.
“Come on,” Tommy said, “We best get on down to the branch. We ain’t gonna catch nothing if we don’t hurry. Besides, we gotta go by Uncle Lonnie’s and grab the poles and bait. That’s why we even come to town.”
I nodded and me and Tommy ducked down an alley and walked on side streets to his Uncle Lonnie’s house. Tommy picked up a flowerpot and grabbed the key. He unlocked the door, and we grabbed two cane poles and a tackle box. He locked the door and hid the key back. Then, we run off through the yard, hoping his Aunt Nancy never saw us. Lonnie’s house backed up to Johnny Taylor’s hayfields, which backed up to the branch. We snuck across Taylor’s field and into the woods, down the bank, and collapsed on the ground, both of us laughing and breathing heavy. We laid there for a minute before Tommy stood up and started taking off his clothes.
“I’m gonna jump in and have a swim before we get to fishing. All that running has me burning up,” he said.
“Alright,” I said. I stood up and took mine off, too, down to my underwear.
Tommy had already bailed in. When I waded in, the water was like ice. Goosebumps popped up on me everywhere and I felt every bit of heat in my body run off.
“Shit, that’s cold,” I said.
Tommy dove under and then came back up. “If you just dive in, you’ll get used to it,” he said.
I held my breath and sat down hard so my whole body went under. It felt like a thousand knives stabbing me at once. I came back up gasping. “I ain’t about this shit. I’m getting out,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” Tommy said.
I jogged out of the water and dried myself off with my shirt. I pulled my underwear off and hung ‘em up on a tree limb to dry. Once I’d finished drying off, I hung my shirt up and pulled on my pants. I opened the tackle box and started looking for something to bait up with.
Tommy came out soon after and dried himself and lay on the ground naked as a jaybird. I paid him no mind and ran my hook through a chartreuse and black jig and tossed it in the water. Tommy didn’t say much. After a while, I looked over and he was asleep. Just lying naked on the ground. I kinda laughed and went back to fishing. The sun felt good on my shoulders after the sting of the water. I closed my eyes and stared up at it. I felt the warmth on my face and thought about how good it felt to not be playing by the rules. How good it felt to be out doing what you wanted without worrying about anything. All last week we studied freedom in history class. Right now, I knew what that word felt like.
Somebody whistling broke my trance. I nudged Tommy, and told him to cover up that somebody was coming. He grabbed his pants and pulled ‘em on, but his shirt was down by the bank, so he couldn’t get to it.
Some man we didn’t know was walking through the woods across the branch. When he got even with us, he stopped and looked at us for a minute. He was tall and skinny. He had on an old Army coat and some stained up blue jeans. The tongues on his boots flopped loose like the tongues of two worn out hounds. His hair was long and looked like it needed a wash. He gave us a nod and then he went on. Tommy ran down to the bank and grabbed his shirt.
“Who was that?” he said.
“I ain’t ever seen him,” I said.
“Where you reckon he’s going?”
“I dunno. Probably to town.”
Tommy pulled his shirt over his head and slung his arms through the sleeves. He got his pole and went to baiting his hook.
I got a nibble and jerked to set, but went too quick and my jig flew up in the air and come back down with a plop. Tommy was about to toss in his line when he elbowed me in the ribs and pointed off to my right. “Look,” he said. “The feller from before, he’s coming back this way.”
I looked where Tommy pointed. The man had crossed the branch and was making his way through the thicket toward us. When he got near, he coughed and hollered, “Y’all doing any good?”
I gave him a wave and hollered back. “No, sir. We ain’t. Hadn’t caught nothing.”
“I been walking a while. Think I might sit down for a bit. Y’all don’t care, do ya?” the man said.
“No, sir. I don’t,” I said.
“Your friend there? He care?”
Tommy leaned around where he could see the man better and answered. “Don’t bother me none.”
The man ducked under the limb where my shirt and underwear were hanging and sat down next to me. He smelled of outside — dank and wet.
“Pretty out today, ain’t it?” the man said.
I nodded.
“Being pretty this early in the spring’ll mean a pretty hot summer, I reckon. Hot. Damn hot. You know, when I was your age seemed it didn’t get as hot. No, we had all four seasons. Day like today, you could expect to come in late June. Now, here we are in May and it’s already that warm. You boys not in school today? Ain’t no holiday that I’m fuzzy on, is there?”
I jigged my pole up and down in the water and tried to think of a good lie. When I couldn’t and Tommy offered no help, I said, “No, sir. No holiday today.”
“Y’all’s playing hooky, ain’t ya? Ha ha, well, hell. I remember them days. Boy needs a little hooky time to play and get out when he’s your age. School can get heavy, can’t it?”
“Yessir,” Tommy said. “I don’t like it none.”
“Oh, I loved it, school. Loved it. I read every book I could get my hands on. I read that Faulkner, ol’ Hemingway. I even read that Jane Austen but I didn’t like her much. Men writers were more my thing. You read them books? Faulkner, Hemingway?”
I hadn’t read anything by either man. My momma read some Faulkner, and she told me he was from near here across the river in Mississippi, but I didn’t have a clue about what he wrote. And Hemingway, we didn’t have to read him till next year. Sam Bartlett told me Hemingway wrote a book about a fish and it was good, so I went with that one.
“I read that one by Hemingway about the fish.”
“The Old Man and the Sea. I read that one. About a man struggling with himself. Overcoming weakness, I seem to recall. A man gets weak. Boy, boy.” The man ran his fingers through his lank hair and pushed it behind his ears. He turned to look at us both. He gave a little smile and I could see his teeth were real bad. They looked grimy and small. His beard and mustache were patchy like someone had drawn ‘em on with a dulled leaded pencil. He pointed at Tommy. “Your buddy there, he ain’t no reader, is he? He looks like he likes to play games. Looks a little soft. Probably stay round home, don’t ya, boy? Don’t go out chasing the girls much, huh?”
“I chase ‘em,” Tommy said. “I got a couple.”
The man laughed until his laugh turned phlegmy. “A couple,” he said. “I doubt all that. What about you?” the man said. He gave me a little punch in the ribs. “Every boy has a sweetheart. How many you got?”
“I ain’t got one,” I said.
“Aw, now,” he said, “I ain’t believing that. You got one, or you had one. Look at you all strong. I see them muscles.”
The conversation wasn’t one I wanted to be having with him. He was acting off. He would get a shiver now and then and looked over his shoulder every minute or two like somebody might be after him. I thought he might just be lonely and told him I had had a couple of sweethearts before, but right now I was between. He laughed and told us how much he missed being young and how he had a few sweethearts back in his day. He told us he loved the way a girl’s hair smelled and how soft and warm her hands were when you held them, but he told us not all girls were that way. Some of ‘em showed you one thing, but did another. He said he loved looking at young’uns playing and having fun and that he missed being able to have fun like that. He told us all about his sweethearts. His voice would get high pitched when he got excited, then drop to almost a whisper when he talked about kissing and holding hands. He told me and Tommy all of it like it was a secret. I just nodded and watched my line. It didn’t move. It just hung there untouched and drifting further away in the breeze.
The man went on and on about his youth and asking us how many girls we’d kissed or if we’d got lucky. He said by our age he had got lucky twice. Once in Trumann, the other with his second cousin at a family reunion in Lonoke. He got real excited telling us about it and then went quiet. For a long time, he didn’t say anything. The silence got heavy, and the I glanced over at him. He seemed lost in thought. Then he stood up and said he had to go take a leak. I nodded, and he pushed himself up and I heard him breaking twigs underfoot as he went up the hill behind us. I looked at Tommy and he shrugged. Both of us sat quiet and hoped he might’ve decided to go on his way. After a minute or so, Tommy hit me in the arm.
“Look up yonder,” he said.
I didn’t answer. I just stared out at the water.
“He’s up there playing with it. He’s got it out!”
“He what?” I said.
“Up there, behind that tree, look!”
I didn’t look. My mind was scrambling trying to find us a way out.
“What’ll we do?” Tommy said.
I didn’t know. “If he asks us, you tell him your name is Jackson, and I am gonna tell him mine is Rebsamen. Got it?”
Tommy nodded.
I could hear the man whistling and starting back down the hill. He sat back down beside me and scratched at his beard. About then, a rabbit ran along the bank and Tommy jumped up and chased after it. The man and I turned to watch him. The rabbit ran up the hill. Tommy scrambled up after it and then bent down and picked up a rock. He chunked it at the rabbit before they both disappeared over the rise.
After a minute or two, the man spoke. He said Tommy had the Devil in him, he could tell. He said the problem with kids these days was that they were soft and nobody spanked ‘em anymore. He said it was good for a boy to be spanked and spanked good. He said when a boy was hellbent on doing bad, he needed a whipping every day. Belts, wooden spoons, bent over a knee and spanked real good and hard. He said rough boys deserved to be punished for acting like they did. He said boys didn’t want to be scolded or grounded. What they really wanted was somebody to give them a good hard whipping to set them straight. I was starting to wonder how I was gonna get away. I glanced over at him and saw his coke bottle green eyes staring right into mine. His shoulders quivered, and he seemed to have a twitch in his eyebrow.
The man went on with his sermon. He said if he found a boy who had a sweetheart or two, he would whip him and that would break him from flirting with girls and trying to sin. And if that boy had ever done more than kiss a girl, say tried to touch her in a certain way, he would give him a beating so bad it would make him bleed. He said there wouldn’t be no greater pleasure in the world than to do that. He said he’d love to do it and that it would do the world a favor. His voice was singing the same note now. It was low and soft, almost a whisper, telling me how much he wanted to whip a boy for doing wrong and when I looked at him again, he seemed to want me to understand.
I heard a rustling in the grass and twigs breaking and saw Tommy chasing the rabbit again. The man looked over his shoulder to see what the racket was. When he did, I jumped up and ran up the hill, hoping he wouldn’t snatch me by the leg. When I got to the top of the hill, I hollered, “Jackson!”
My voice cracked, and I sounded like a child. I hollered again. Tommy heard me and whistled. I could see him running toward me like he was coming to fend off a dog who’d got off his leash and was chasing after me. And I was thankful, because until then, I hated him more than I could tell.
Dan Russell is a writer and host of the Fair to Middlin' Podcast. His work has appeared in The Arkansas Review, Cowboy Jamboree, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Tributary, Close to the Bone, and You Might Need to Hear This. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Concordia University-St. Paul. Cowboy Jamboree Press will publish his first novel, Poor Birds, in 2025.