Dogfight by Michael Knight

Author:Michael Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 1998-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

A Bad Man, So Pretty

Winston got kicked out of military school for smoking dope. He was a big guy, my brother, roped with muscle through his neck and shoulders, but after two months of home cooking in place of barracks’ chow, he started to develop a gut, not really flab, more like a knot of tension, like someone had surgically implanted a volleyball beneath the surface of his skin. He stopped wearing his glasses and refused to try contacts, said it would drive him crazy to have something touching his eyeballs all the time. I think he just wanted an excuse to go around with a Clint Eastwood squint. My brother had always been a little left of normal. Instead of just the regular crew cut, he shaved his head bald for military school—Win never did anything halfway—and his hair grew back in tight crow-black ringlets, like an Afro, when before it had been straight and rawhide brown. He looked only vaguely like the person he had been before.

Marshall Military Institute was a two-hour drive from Mobile, stashed away in the scrub pinewoods of lower Alabama, left over from a time when military school was a more fashionable form of education. It was his third high school in four years, enough moving around that, at twenty years old, he still hadn’t graduated. Win never moaned about getting shipped away, and he never tried to explain himself when they sent him back. There was a boarding school in New England, where he wrote a paper entitled “Banging My English Teacher or What I Think About When I Should Be Thinking About Samuel Clemens.” I don’t think his teacher got past the first line, before Win was booked on the next flight home. Then came this New Age place in Colorado—my mother’s idea—where student problems were discussed in what they called “powwows.” You had to be holding the magic talking stick or something before the group would let you say your piece. Win hated it. It took him almost six months to get rolled. He said they talked you to death out there; they wouldn’t get angry, no matter what you did. That is, until the incident with the laboratory cats. Mom still won’t let us mention it. Win’s biology class had been dissecting stray cats. He broke into the lab and swiped the cats, along with mannequins from the art room, and decorated the campus with them, arranging them in trees, on benches, in the teachers’ lounge. It gave me the creeps to think about, dozens of skinned cats, gray and shriveled, perched in the laps of mannequins, like they were back from the dead. In my imagination, their eyes look the same, the dummies’ and the cats’, flat and vacant as clay.

Dad wasn’t talking about another school anymore. He was riding Win about finding a job. Marshall was a last resort. Win had lasted eight months, his longest stretch of school since he was sixteen, my age. The cadet core

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