The Gnat

I think it was a dime. It could also have been a snide remark or maybe an inadvertent nudge. The initial trigger wasn’t important. The carnage that ensued was.

My older brother, John, and I shared a bedroom. Twin beds, a large bureau, a night table and my small desk didn’t leave a lot of room for personal stuff, let alone privacy.

 John was going to be a senior and had earned serious attention from college coaches and attractive young women as a diver. Fat was not permitted on his sculpted figure and other than breaking his nose a couple of times from striking the end of the diving board and hitting the bottom of a pool from too clean an entry, he was in fine fettle. He was on our high school baseball team and had his driver’s license.

He was not about, that particular summer day, to tolerate nonsense from his twerp brother when I spotted a dime on the floor between our beds.

“That’s mine,” he said, with the cocksure assurance of a guy who had marched down Broad Street playing the trumpet in the band in the Philly Thanksgiving Day Parade.

“I think not,” I said, tired of his ability to speak some German and get good grades from hardly studying.

One of us reached for it.

Craziness began.

He outweighed me by 50 plus pounds and could bench press me all afternoon. He had reach and speed. I had years of playing tackle football with him and my younger brother in the backyard, where I was used to getting clobbered and holding on until somebody toppled.

We tumbled our way from the floor to his bed. The dime switched hands.  Sweat flew, softening elbow strikes.

 The slates in his bed let go after a bit, and we found ourselves wedged between the two beds.

I felt something brush my head. I thought it might be a gnat. Bugs were always slipping into the bedroom to drive me crazy with their buzzing at three in the morning.

John body slammed me onto my bed, which also collapsed. Pieces of plasterboard rained down on us from somewhere, and the gnat kept brushing my head.

Fatigue and luck smiled on me. I managed to slip a leg lock around his head and squeezed his neck. I couldn’t see his face, but the fight was rapidly going out of him.

 The gnat became insistent, banging now against my shoulders. It began to hurt.

I looked up and saw my mother hitting me with a broom.

“Let him go,” she shouted.

“You’re hitting me with a broom,” I said, astounded.

“I’ve been hitting both of you for five minutes,” she said. “Let him go.”

John didn’t act like he was going to body slam me any more so I released my legs

She pointed the broom around the room.

“Look at what you’ve done.”

We both eased ourselves up some and looked.

 There were two holes in the wall. One was over my desk, which was a tad strange since I didn’t remember being near there. The other was on the wall next to us. John had plaster board fragments in his hair. Books and the lamp on the nightstand were toppled.

“You’ve made me hurt my wrist,” my mother said, easing down the broom to the floor.

Guilt, the chief weapon in my mother’s vast arsenal. Right up there with “close to the poorhouse and nobody appreciates anything I’ve done.”

“You’ve hurt my head,” I said, lobbing her guilt back at her, but she came right back with her stinger.

“I’m going to tell your father.”

Given the circumstances, that was an unnecessary threat, but we knew its implications.

Not three steps into the house that night, my mother would pounce on my father. She would dramatically describe our fight, tearfully pointing out the grievous damage to her wrist, as well as the assault on the bedroom.

 She would then turn the heat of her ire toward him. Within minutes, our pointless brawl would amazingly become tied to something he had done years before.

A shouting match would erupt that would take hours to play out.

I wasn’t too worried.

When the thunder and lightning inside the house would finally fade away, till next time, my father would take John to the hardware store. There they would talk with enthusiasm about tools and spackling paste and home repairs.

 With the same attention to detail he used to sculpt balsa wood into airplanes with tissue-paper skin, John, curse his patient hands, would heal the walls, then, just for chuckles, teach himself to play the guitar. 

Copyright (c) 2019 by James Hugh Comey