The Way of the Righteous

On the walk down the hill he could hear the bell in the not-so-distant spire. The peal of it sounded in groups of three. That’s how many strikes make an out, he thought. It rang nine more times. Maybe that meant something, too.  

The bell produced not a lingering toll but a sharp one. Billy had been told the piercing tone of the bell took its quality from its composition. His grandpa said that nearly a century ago a widowed parishioner had brought to the new church a vast amount of silver to be added to the molten mix of bronze from which the bell would be cast. The silver-- ingots and bars and baubles-- had been hoarded by her late miserly husband. Neither she nor he had any further use for it. 

He turned right onto Sturdevant Street and then left onto an unnamed alley. The alley ran behind the gymnasium of the school he attended. Between the red-brick school and the gym was a narrow walkway. As he approached the dividing line, three boys jumped from the walkway into the narrow lane.

“Where do ya think you’re going?” the tallest one with the crazy eyes said. The other two formed the balance of the blockade Billy could not get around. The second one wore a smug smile, and the third had beady eyes and a pointy nose.

The tallest one grabbed the collar of Billy’s sport coat and yanked it down to the middle of his back. His arms were locked near his hips in a straitjacket of tweed.

“You know what’s worse than a tornado?” the smug one said.

The tallest one dug into Billy’s chest with the points of the second knuckles of both his ring- and middle-fingers, pinching the soft flesh near his nipples. He twisted as hard as he could, his eyes growing wider, relishing the pain in Billy’s face.

The pointy-nosed one grabbed the lunch sack from Billy’s hand. He opened it and took a sandwich from its plastic bag, peeling apart the bread and spitting between the slices.

“Who eats Swiss cheese anyway? It smells like shit,” he said before tossing the lunch bag in a yard across the way. I eat Swiss cheese. My dad loves Swiss cheese, asshole.

There was no way to fight back. There was no one around to help.

The smug one made his way around the young boy and got down on all fours behind him. The tallest one then pushed Billy slightly and he reeled before falling backward over the back of the smug one. He almost caught his balance, but he spun as he fell before hitting the pavement. He ripped one knee of his school pants that were two days old.

The three boys cackled and made their way back up through the walkway.

He had cried the first time it happened. His older brother told him not to cry if it happened again. If he let them see that the torment did not bother him, maybe they’d stop. That didn’t work but at least he developed a reputation for not being a crybaby, for whatever that was worth.

When he got home from school he ditched his dress pants in his closet. He walked downstairs as his mom walked upstairs. He sat on the couch and waited for the big blast.

“What the hell happened here, mister?” she yelled from the second floor.

“What?”

“These pants are ripped. How in the hell did it happen again? Do you know how hard your father has to work to make enough money to buy one pair of these pants?”

He did know how hard his dad worked. But his dad never got upset when something went wrong. Maybe his dad did get upset with his mom at times. Billy never heard them argue. But maybe they did. When no one was looking.

She’ll get over it. I know she will, he thought. He never questioned his parents’ love. That got him through just about anything. He knew a lot of kids who couldn’t see it that way. They didn’t have to say it. The look on their faces did.

He lay in bed that night on a hot, humid September evening. His window opened wide to the evening air because there were only so many window screens to go around. Mom didn’t want him to keep the window open without a screen since it let the bugs in. But he couldn’t keep it closed. He needed some kind of breeze, even if it had only been full of hot air. It was simply the idea of the breeze that cooled him down, in mind and not so much in body.

His older brother had moved out a few months back. Billy was sad when his brother left. But he knew older brothers didn’t stick around forever. Some of his friends’ brothers had gotten married or moved away to bigger cities in search of bigger things. In search of a lifestyle the older generation did not approve of.

George gave Billy his turntable. Yet he felt it wouldn’t do enough to ease the pain of separation. He needed to  get out of the house and do his own thing, but he regretted leaving Billy to fend for himself. With the rest of the family. With the school bullies. With the world itself.

Before he moved away, George gave Billy some records. One was Days of Future Passed. The other was Beethoven’s Fifth performed by the Chicago Symphony with Sir Georg Solti conducting. The record label looked familiar. It was the same as the one on The Who’s Tommy. He gave them to Billy and said, “Make sure you listen to these. They’re magic.”

Day had tumbled into night. Billy cradled the Moody Blues record and eased its center hole through the turntable’s spindle where the album teetered and hesitated for a second before floating to the rubbery spinning mat with a barely perceptible thwap. Now he had records of his own. And these things comforted him.

Two songs into twilight, Billy’s eyes grew heavy. His breathing slowed. A mosquito had taken from his ankle, but it didn’t rouse him from the silvery-green and leafy path in his mind that led to the dusky meadow of slumber. Take a look out there, planets everywhere.

In the still air of a room half-lit by the moon, the sheer whitish curtains began to billow and twist, gently, like heavenward smoke from a tall altar candle having just been extinguished.

Billy looked sleepily through the space of the open window. There was the scent of a sweet flower rounding beneath his nose, past the curl of his upper lip. He felt the hair on his arms and neck bristle. He felt the sensation creep to his chest and scalp. He heard a voice from outside the peeling wooden window frame. Not so much a voice as another song. It seemed to sing his name.

He was drawn to the open window. Outside it hovered a thick square of silk, mutedly glowing with kaleidoscope patterns of saffron and ruby-red and deep purples. At each end waved thick tassels of silver, pulsing metallically in the glare of the streetlamp. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet was a woman of not more than twenty— her hair shimmering in lush black, her eyes like polished onyx. She extended her hand, revealing slender fingers with delicate nails glimmering like sapphires.

Billy had no fear. He was enraptured.

“Please join me, young master. Is there anything you’d like to take on this journey? I know you’re not afraid,” she said.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Amrita. I am the daughter of the devas.”

“Where are we going?”

“To settle a score.”

“What does that mean?”

“You will learn soon enough. But we must go now. Take with us something to make you braver.”

Before he slipped onto the magic carpet, he grabbed his slingshot from his nightstand.

“I have something for you,” she said. It was a heavy bell cast in a metal he could not describe, with an ornate handle of fragrant rosewood. “It is the ghanta. This will at one point announce our arrival. And it will keep us from harm.”

They soared quickly above the tree line, making their way toward the steeple near the school. They circled it once and headed for a neighborhood familiar to Billy. On its quiet streets rested rows of large Victorian homes, painted in pastels and drenched in self-regard. They drifted to a second-story room where a needle-nosed boy sat mesmerized by the blue glow of a television set.

The daughter of the devas twirled her finger from which appeared the spectre of a giant cobra, fangs the size of stiletto blades. It rapped three times with its fangs on the beady-eyed boy’s window.

“Can I smash the glass?” Billy said excitedly.

“Oh, but you must,” his companion answered. She produced a handful of tiny balls: petrified pellets reaped from the lair of giant beetles. “Take aim.”

He placed the pellets in the pouch and drew back the bands with all his might. The boy inside heard the tapping and approached the window. As he got to the opening the glass exploded. The cobra reared back and spat repeatedly in the urchin’s face. The dried pellets rained about his body as Billy gleefully shot one after another. The shots did not injure the boy severely. They left itchy welts all over his skinny little body. The last thing the scrawny needle-nosed kid remembered was a vision of Billy Gilbert flanked by a hissing snake the size of a maple’s trunk. He would awaken in a cold sweat.  

They sailed around the corner to a house of similar style and stature.

In a den off the living room, the smug one struggled with his schoolwork by the hue of a lamp shaded by jade-green glass. He could not multiply fractions and could not read but a page of Melville before his lima-bean-brain drifted to less taxing thoughts. He walked outside to sneak a cigarette behind a yew, below where Amrita and Billy floated noiselessly.

The young woman twirled her finger again and the moon ducked behind a cloud while every light in the neighborhood went out. The smug one dropped his pack of matches on the ground and fumbled for it in the dark. She coasted to the ground and Billy hopped off the mystical carpet. All but Billy’s crystal-blue eyes were cloaked in invisibility.  Billy gave him a shove that sent him head over heels down the steep incline of a hill. He came to rest by smacking his thick skull off the skirting of a shed that was raised a foot off the ground by some cinder blocks. The quiet, white-striped creature beneath the shed did not appreciate the disruption of her late-night snack routine. She dropped her crabapple on the ground and investigated. The smug one lay in the mud. His chest heaved. His body ached and his eyes began to well up. The little lady lifted her tail and with her own spellbinding mist showered him point-blank—in the eyes, in the nostrils and most directly in the mouth. He ran toward the house recalling only the eyes of a boy he knew for certain.

In the walkout-basement bedroom of a more modern house, the tall crazy-eyed one lay on a couch. He was clad only in his white briefs listening to Foreigner. Amrita looked at Billy and shrugged. She said, “Pasand ka koi maapdand nahin hota.” He did not understand the words, but he somehow knew they meant that there can be no accounting for musical taste. The air conditioner blared in the window of the basement bedroom. She tapped on it three times. It went silent.

“The ghanta,” she said. “Ring it three times. And three times again. And yet again. And ready your shot.”

Inside the crazy-eyed boy pounded on the air conditioner when a bell began to ring. The first triad sent him staggering backward. He clasped his ears amid the deafening peal. He headed for the sliding glass door. Amrita handed Billy a grape-sized ball of white stone and nine smaller orbs of blood-red marble.

“I trust you’ll know where to aim,” she said. 

At once the air conditioner sprung to life. It spewed a cloud of grey dust that filled the room with a violent swirling funnel. It spun off tiny grains of sharp pumice that sprayed his semi-naked body from head to toe. The bell continued to ring. He staggered toward the door before the glass disintegrated. The crazy look in the eyes quickly transitioned to terror. Billy wore no disguise or cloak of darkness. He stood ten feet away from his nemesis in the newfound glory of his confident eight-year-old body. He loaded up the slingshot and fired in three series of threes. This night, he found uncanny accuracy nine times in a particularly sensitive part of the bully’s body.

When they arrived back at Billy’s window, Amrita ushered him gently inside. She sat him down on a chair upholstered with pinwheels of star jasmine flowers. He was tired. Not in the way one tires from being picked on. More in the way one finds peaceful exhaustion after swimming daylong in the warm waters of a deep blue quarry.

“Let me ask you something. Have you observed anything tonight?” she said.

“I’m not sure. But I feel better than I did this morning.”

“There is the need to seek revenge only to keep the world in balance. To offset wrong with right. There are also the lessons you’ve already learned. To love your enemies and pray for those who would bring you harm. There will be times when you struggle with this. Revenge or forgiveness. Which path will you choose?”

“I don’t know. I’m really sleepy.”

She led him to his bed. He fell wearily on it.

“I think I dreamed you,” he said.

“This too is fine,” she answered softly. “Lie down now. I’ll go on being your dream.”

She placed his head on the pillow and set his right hand beneath his cheek.

That night he did not dream. He woke the next morning to find the strange bell on the worn rug beside his bed. He bathed, dressed and bounced down the stairs. He grabbed his lunch sack and hugged his mom.

“See you later, mom. I love you.”

His mom was taken aback, in a good way. She was certain this was the first time he ever uttered those words. He’s just a little boy, she thought. How has he learned so fast?

When Billy reached the alley behind the school, a group of boys had gathered tossing a football. Two of them stood in a far corner of the empty lot off the alleyway. He knew them well. To his surprise, they did not start after him at first sight. They turned their backs. The football eluded a tall third one who looked as if he’d been out in the sun far too long the day before. He hobbled after the football, which skittered across the pavement in random jiggles and hops. The ball found the feet of Billy. He scooped it up and tossed it underhand to the tall one. And he made his way to class.