Clare

"He gave his teachers homicidal thoughts." Four-minutes of fiction with voice over.

He was as crazy as an outhouse rat.  At least that was the general consensus.

Clarence was the kid who put a garter snake in the teacher’s desk and was proud to admit it. He brought a gopher in a shoe box for “show and tell” one time, and then he chased the squealing girls with it out on the playground at recess. I gave him my hankie more than once to wipe his disgusting runny nose. Clare was the ragged, unwashed boy who smelled of burned tires and fear; he lived with his step-father at the junk yard. Most all the other kids rejected him, and he was sometimes bullied, but then, so was I.

For some reason Clare liked me. He’d stop by my house and bring me wrinkled apples from his tree. He’d cut the wormy bits out for me with his pocket knife — the one with the genuine artificial mother-of-pearl handle. One time he built a birdhouse for me. He painted the word BRID above the little door, so that an errant squirrel wouldn’t get any ideas about moving in.

Vladimira Slyusarenko on Unsplash.com ( edited )

One time he helped me when I had slipped backwards down into a muddy ditch and hurt my ankle. He sat me on the cross bar of his bicycle and pedaled me home, my lunchbox dangling from the handlebars. His hair and his hands were filthy, but I didn’t care. I invited him in and made for him a baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread. He said “This is the best sammich I ever ate.” So I made him two more.

Clare was always mayhem in living color. He balanced his poor academic record with foolish pranks that gave his teachers homicidal thoughts. He spent a lot of his school career squirming on a bench outside the Principal’s office for various creative infractions. Then, in the middle of the eighth grade, he dropped out, saying his head was already “plum full up”. His step-father didn’t seem to worry about it. He just threw in the towel, as they say.

Giovanni Randisi on Unsplash.com ( edited )

I rarely come back home to Middleton, and I haven’t thought of Clare for a long time. I’m almost 40 now, which means he must be, too. Today I drove back up to Middleton for a long-overdue visit with cousins, and I saw him. He was sitting in front of the Dairy Queen, eating a Peanut Buster sundae and thumbing through a comic book. A rusty bicycle was leaning against the chain-link fence — could have been the same old bike he had in grade school.

I pulled over and lowered the window and when he saw me, his face just lit up. He had a smile like a jack o’ lantern with several important front teeth missing, but he was beautiful to me. In that instant, my past came pouring over me, a sudden flood tide of memory washing over the small, smooth stones of my childhood.

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Sharron Bassano 2024