Punk Smith

By Andy Decker

Punk don’t care and you can’t make him. No one can. His mother Sara quit trying and his teachers don’t know how. The school counselors have the paperwork to prove it. Against a backdrop of public education we know to be true but seldom confront, even the lost and unreachable are not beyond the purposes of grace.

So what happens when Peter Dwayne Smith, this second-time seventh-grader, kills a man and no one believes him when he tells? Even Kip, his one and only friend, doesn’t buy the story. Awakened, Punk’s soul begins a journey to find a confessor. Through the labyrinth of his small world, the boy is guided through what he knows only by television clichés, a history of dismissive contempt, and the memory of the last time his mom tried to help. What he discovers is something far more powerful and redemptive than he ever imagined.

This is the story of a young salvation, of one who seeks and finds; of one who asks and receives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Decker
• Release date: Jul 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476422596

Andy Decker

Andy Decker is a Pastor of a small church in central Illinois. Additionally, he teaches different levels of English Composition and introductory literature courses at Illinois Central College. When he is not busy at these two endeavours and when his teenage daughters are at either green or yellow levels of threat potential, he likes to write, eat, and stare off at nothing in particular. Please visit his blog for more information.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Right after school on Friday afternoon Punk slung his backpack to the top of his dresser. The contents of the bag included the following: one green spiral notebook (70-sheets, one subject, left lower-bottom of cover tearing away from wire coil), two pencils (one broken tipped, the other crowned by chewed erasure), roughly folded returned assignments (possible review pending, prior to trashing), one white cigarette lighter (small size, disposable), and the 19th edition of the Murray-Mann Seventh Grade Physical Science text-book. All therein would rest until Monday morning.

The text, entitled Exploring Science, Exploring Ourselves showed a stretched and ladder-like DNA strand in red, blue and green nodules watermarked beneath a smiling anonymous boy looking into a microscope. All this collaged with soft toned tie-dye of pink, orange, and blue. The cover of the book still shined. It had been new the previous year and by neglecting to use the book the current owner, not a very careful young man at all, still managed to keep it shining.

The first time he saw the cover Punk thought microscopes would be fun. Fresh from sixth grade summer he held in his mind an ideal about it all, about how seventh grade would be different and better and more worthwhile. The class must include advanced scientific equipment, laboratories and watching through lenses magnifications of the invisible. It had to because the smiling boy said it would. He waited and then waited some more for the real experimentation to begin.

Punk had homework for the weekend. He needed at least a C average or Sara, his mother, would take the PlayStation from his room. She would also stop buying minutes for his phone. She did that last year for two weeks hoping deprivation might motivate him. It had not worked. Yet she clung to the threat of doing so, some hope of hers that it might wield some leverage. Regardless of the incessant, I will’s, and the, Just try me’s, Punk managed his Cs because he was in the middle of his second seventh-grade. It had nothing to do with what Sara threatened.

In Physical Science they were studying basic physics. One element, offered in the overview chapter, involved the concept of measuring trajectory via math problems. This skill, ordained as recognizable and required by the state of Illinois, had been mandated as something all seventh graders should know. Accommodating that, Murray-Mann provided a formula: velocity equals distance divided by time. They carefully avoided mass, vector quantities, and magnitudes. They portrayed only the basic principle and law; nothing too sophisticated for their text book readers. The salable point, simplicity, arched each chapter. This one here, the salesman said while tapping the cover of the latest edition, will help your learners achieve state-mandated minimum test scores." The book purchasing committee for the school district bought the promise and then recommended it to the school board.

None of that mattered to Punk. He took Physical Science for his last hour of the day. A lot of class time he spent sitting on the lab stool playing in the sink, tapping unnoticeably as possible the water handle. He kept gentle time with his finger, tap tap tapping the silver knob until the water began to drip. Then he smiled and expectantly caught the eyes of the three others in his lab group who shared the sink. They never used microscopes in Physical Science.

He supposed, when he thought of it, velocities were kind of interesting. The formula wasn’t hard, but so what? Almost fifteen, curiosity did not factor into much of his current game. Early in the school year, for example, Mrs. Shirley, the pear, once asked the students in her English class to write a list of five topics they might find interesting when writing and researching. She gave them thirty minutes to create their lists. Punk forced out three topics. He wanted to know, Why do I have to do this? Who really cares?, and Something about computer games. He turned it in because three were plenty and besides, why didn’t she just tell them? Punk had finished wanting to know things for some time.

His real name was Peter Dwayne Smith. He rarely used his real name because his peers did terrible things with it. There existed too many degenerate associations and Punk had heard them all, early and often. Though never admitting it, and though the full articulation of the thought never occurred to him, Punk felt shame towards his given name, and who thinks in terms of shame? And who wants to be called Dwayne? Certainly not Punk Smith.

Early in the name-calling and the perverse accusations of those school boys more in the know than he, his grandpa gave him an out. It happened while sitting cross-legged in front of the television, immersed in Saturday cartoons. He was nine at the time, waiting for his mom to pick him up. The old man, he could still remember, had a belly that looked like a pumpkin wrapped in a shirt. From the kitchen grandpa asked, Hey Punk, it’s time for lunch. What do you want? Something resonated and soon, at his own request, his mom also started calling him Punk. Quickly and thankfully the new name seeped into school, most of the time. Only at the start of each new year, in late August as summer died, when teachers called that first roll did he cringe and imagine the snickers and leers of the others. By Halloween only the deans of the school seemed to remembered who he really was.

One time someone questioned his request to be called Punk. Then eleven, on a Friday afternoon, weeks after grandpa died, mom’s friend Kelly happened upon a question. The two women were getting ready to go out for the night. It would do Sara good. He remembered Kelly peppering their adult woman talk with the phrases, go out, do you some good. In the clacking of lipstick tubes and pocketbooks, the chemical smell of applied makeup, his mom half-asked, Punk, get to bed by ten, ok?

Again on the floor in front of the television he nodded but didn’t look up. Kelly looked down at him from where she sat on the couch, You like that? She scrunched up her face.

It was long and tanning bed brown. She managed her pigmentation like the last owner of a discontinued crayon color. He didn’t know the word sepia. Her bluish painted eyelids and her black eyebrows arched like the crescent gulls a child might draw for a refrigerator picture of the sun over a flat-line field. She held a compact, doing her rouge in the small mirror.

Why do you want to be called punk? Kelly asked. She said it fast. They always talked fast.

He shrugged his shoulders and mom came to the rescue. That’s what he says he wants to be called. It kinda fits.

Kelly clicked the compact shut. She shrugged and the talk swerved in a different direction. Punk stood and walked to his room. That was that.

In the three years to follow, along with his name, Punk withdrew support from almost everything. He decided he hated school and then sports. First time through he had a quick bout with seventh grade band, a tour of the percussion section. But he hated practice because he could not sound the way he thought he should sound and because he messed up the beats. Reading music was stupid.

Girls, at best, became a paralyzing entity pre-imagined by the internet. By then, most of the boys in his class were visually aware of each anatomical variation and distortion of the sex act. They knew it all and they knew it was only a matter of time. Lies about the girls and who had done what grew like the sumac in the gully behind his house. The other boys in his class were mean; Punk’s polite word, the one used when mom asked about friends.

By the end of the sixth grade he graduated to thinking his mom boring and a person whose greatest talent resided in the ability to state only the obvious. Television and movies the same. He did not listen to the radio or buy music. Reading, boring and it took too much time. Once mom got on a church kick and he hated it. He knew her heart not to be in it because they went only three times. He did not piece together the church trips as a failed stratagem on his own behalf. But he did hear his mom tell Kelly that someone had said something the wrong way. Why should I go there? she asked. Hypocrites, she said, and Punk doesn’t like it anyway. Sara wove these phrases like bright threads into the often repeated tapestry-narrative between the two women. That’s all they do, Punk thought. They talk about the same things, over and over.

On it went until he found himself, towards the end of the first seventh grade, at a place where anything offering the slightest challenge or apt to bring the slightest attention could be sidestepped. Criticism, like a light-switch, turned it all off.

Teachers, counselors, and once in a while Sara asked, What do you want to do? or, What do you want to be when you get big?

He’d say, I don’t know.

Well what are you interested in?

He’d shrug, I don’t know.

One counselor, last year, followed up with, Well then, how about this. Do you know what you don’t want to do?

Punk shrugged as default. The man got points for being original, for looking at it differently, but nothing more. His question certainly wasn’t worth thinking through.

The seventh grade ended the first time and Sara, tired of the nothing that seemed to comprise her son, concluded, He’ll just have to find his own way.

CHAPTER 2

On this particular Saturday Punk woke mid morning to a quiet house. He ate a bowl of cookie cereal and slipped a game into the player. He bent on his bed like an old man for a few hours, nearly doubled over, playing.

Outside, sealed behind the window, a warm October day, sunny and windless, grew to maturity. It still looked like summer. Only around the edges of the pin-oak and sugar maple leaves were any colors but green and only a few of the bushes had lost foliage. Most everything still wore the thick verdant. It was easy to not see things beginning to change.

The sky was gaudy blue. Japanese beetles, revived in the late heat, zapped through the air like tiny orange candies. Punk hated them because when they landed on him they pinched, and when he crushed them they stank.

Just before noon Punk bored and paused the game, time for something new. He stood and put on his camouflage pants. He grabbed his bb gun out of his closet. It had a black plastic stock and a silver barrel, a present someone gave him for Christmas three or four years ago. Behind his house ran a wooded gulley. Punk called it the ditch and he left the game on pause and walked outside through the garage. Had a bird or a squirrel or any other animal showed itself Punk could take a shot. Yet none did and besides, Punk had better things to shoot.

He walked to the back of the house and then down to the ditch. He followed the dry water course uphill and then veered to the left near to the road about a quarter mile back. There he climbed a tree and sat in a crook in the limbs. Hidden, he told himself. The game he made a few weeks back allowed him to shoot at the first three vehicles coming down the road. He limited it to the first three vehicles because that was how many he shot at the first time. He wanted to do more but then the third car put on its brakes. When he saw that he jumped from the tree and ran full-bore all the way home.

He figured any more would push his luck too far; three’s enough. He had no way of knowing if he ever hit any of the cars and trucks he shot towards. Besides, it was only a bb gun. Nobody could get hurt, not really. He planned it out the smart way. Three shots then home. If anyone stopped he could jump out of that tree and escape before they could spot him or find him or know anything about him. No one could catch him in these woods.

So there he sat, uncatchable. The tree set back almost eight feet from the shoulder and Punk had a good view of the two-mile straight stretch of blacktop. Everybody flew down it. He just finished pumping the gun when he heard the whine of a motorcycle. He took an aim and waited, slumped over with one elbow resting on a thigh. He saw a blue and white Japanese crotch rocket with the rider leaning forward, no helmet. The rider had a red jacket and the wind pulled his hair back exposing forehead. The curve of the rider’s back smooth like that of a turtle shell.

Punk aimed at where he guessed the form would be in a second or two and pulled the trigger. The gun gave a little pop. He’d done this enough that he’d formed the habit of getting immediately ready for his next shot. Punk drew the gun to himself and pulled the chamber thing back to let in another bb so he could cock it.

That’s why he missed seeing the rider’s head snap back and the initial wobble of the bike. He missed seeing how the front wheel jerked left right left right, and then sharp left again. But with the chamber closed on a second bb, he looked up and did manage to see the bike slap flat on its side into the blacktop and the rider hit, face first. Rider and bike parted and both flipped several times. The bike stayed on its own side of the road while the rider went into the other lane.

On his second somersault the rider flopped almost upright and on his feet. His back faced Punk. The head rested with the left ear pressed impossibly against the left shoulder blade. Punk could not see the man’s expression. The rider’s face, hidden by the angle had no expression. Most of the man’s nose, cheeks, and lips were crushed away on the initial hit, leaving only jagged red smears. The rider’s forward somersault continued and the bike scooted to the right and came to rest about eighty yards down the road on the shoulder. The body flipped twice more, ending in the weedy ditch with a sound like an empty bread wrapper shoved into a trash can.

Then it was silent. The wind pushed against the leaves. Punk stared at the blacktop where he had seen the rider and the bike part ways.

By Exploring Science, Exploring Ourselves’ standards, the velocity of the bb, gun cocked eleven times, ten the recommended maximum, was thirty two and a half feet divided by three and five ninths of a second. The velocity of the rider’s right eye was one-hundred and forty-six yards, divided by six point three seconds. These two physical properties collided like a terrible self-fulfilling prophecy from every grandmother who had ever issued the standard warning against bb guns. The motorcycle rider, Peter Giddens sans helmet, first lost his right eye, then control of his Kawasaki.

Punk squeezed his eyes closed and then opened them. He unfolded his legs and swung them out. He scooted off the tree limb and started walking home, not looking back. He held the bb gun vertically and with elbows bent like he would if he were to cross a river with it. His palms were wet; wetter in-between his fingers. Something fluttered in his chest. A strong moth living in a deeper place beat its wings against a hot summer light bulb at night, behind his heart. He kept walking, angling and stumbling down into the ditch. The silent sky, still terribly blue housed the bitter-candy Japanese beetles yet zipping along. A spider’s web or something hanging from a red-tinged sumac bush got in his face and Punk wiped it away. His first conscious thought emerged. I don’t want to get caught, he told himself. He wiped his sweating upper lip and became for a moment a purist, doubting such a thing happened, demanding that such a coincidence could never, really, happen.

The intersection of time and chance he now walked away from stood like a sheer cliff in his mind and distance meant, somehow, survival. Each step meant safety, that he would not fall, and that he could not have just done that because what just happened was impossible. The odds too steep; he guessed like a thousand or ten thousand to one. He didn’t know but it had to be impossible. He reached the bottom of the ditch and walked the gully-rock half-stumbling on the big gravel and he had a hard time lifting his feet.

He usually ignored the root chambers along the edges of the course, but today because his world had constricted the dark places where the soil emptied itself from under the trees helped hurry him. In them or near them or somehow because of them a new fear, something he could not recognize but yet terrified him, existed. He walked to a place almost directly behind his house.

Punk reached a type of bottom where the gully leveled out to empty itself