Benders 3

They played basketball in the afternoons under the viaduct down the street. We would see them walking the alley on their way there and it was like watching a movie. They moved as a crew. A long line across the alley, Joshua in front in the center, bouncing the ball and walking. As I sit here thirty one years later, I can still see the sight now. It fills me with pride. They were my gang. They were the badasses of my neighborhood. Our own police force. Our only criminal element. They were beautiful the way a thorny rose is beautiful. Beautiful the way a child’s memory can be.

Under the viaduct at the hoops, Joshua would dunk on anyone who came to play. Billy could get a ball past anyone you could name. Demon Duck had a seat he would sit in and smoke cigarettes. The butts he would stick through the chain links over his head. They piled up behind him like an ever-growing mound of disrespect.

Beauty, Carny, Jad, and Cringle, the boys played and talked trash, the girls flirted and jeered. The Benders were the lifeblood of our blocks. They were the one thing that was constant.

After Kerry left, his stepdad started beating his mom. Kerry had kept her safe from him, never letting her husband get out of control. The man knew Kerry was dangerous and a bit unhinged and he did not dare lift a hand to her when Kerry lived there, but after he disappeared, that house saw a vacuum of power and rage built up there.

One night Kerry’s stepbrother ran from the house and went to Joshua’s. Joshua and Demon went to the house and the father slipped out the back.

Order was restored.

When the man came back a few days later, Joshua and Demon went into his house and sat down with him. They talked while the rest of the neighborhood held its breath. Joshua and Demon left peacefully, and in their wake, the house was still. The family lived in quiet and respect, everything put right.

When a few months later the man beat her again, he disappeared. We never saw him again.

Carny dated Demon after Kerry vanished. She was never far from his side. He would have his arm crooked across her shoulders, his tongue in her ear as she giggled and laughed.

After that, many said it was a game, that Carny had used Kerry to get to Demon Duck. That her relationship with Kerry had been a calculated play for Demon’s arm.

I am not one of those people.

I saw Carny a few days after Kerry vanished. Saw her in the back of a used car dealership a few blocks away. The dealership had closed a few years earlier but the cars that could not sell still littered the small parking lot. I went behind an old beat up Ford and saw her back there bent over a tailgate getting used by a few older men.

It hurt to watch. I could feel it in my chest. Like a weight, dragging down my heart. I saw her getting worked on and crying. They laughed, dropped a few bucks, and she scrambled to pick them up. I watched as she climbed into the bed of the rusted-out truck and lit a cigarette. I waited until a bit of time had gone by before I stepped around the corner and she saw me.

She had wiped the makeup tears from her eyes and sat bold and beautiful, her legs crossed, staring at me as I walked closer.

“Get up here, Jesse,” she said, patting the tail gate. Even after what I had seen, she was still one of the most beautiful women I had ever known, so I obeyed. I climbed up by her and she wrapped an arm around me. “I don’t hate you, you know.” She ran her fingers through my hair and gripped it tight in her fist with a little jerk. “I should, but I don’t.”

“Why should you hate me?” I said. “I never did nothing to you.”

“Your house. Kerry went into your house because of something Less said. Demon Duck had to go in after him.” She kissed my cheek and sighed. “Demon had to do it. Kerry would have killed her.”

“He would have had to kill me, too,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. That is kind of sad. You know, one day she is going to get you killed. That girl doesn’t give a shit. She is hard. She is cold. She is broken. One day you are going to have to get along without her, or be consumed by her,” Carny said.

I didn’t know what to say. Usually I would be feral about defending my sister, but Less was dating Malice by then. Malice was a psychopath. He had already stabbed me and was promising to kill me. Less knew and had done nothing about it.

Even as Carny said it, I knew the day might come. When she looked into my eyes, she made me believe. I would go for decades trying to serve Less. In the end, Carny was right.

When I asked her why she had dated Kerry, she hugged me and sobbed. I didn’t know what to do, so I just held her. My coat was a puffy blue monstrosity. I could not get a good hold of her, so I unzipped it and she wrapped her arms around my eleven-year-old body.

She wept and she said nothing more. I never mentioned Kerry’s name to her again. For the most part, no one in the neighborhood did. He was a topic off-limits. A curse so foul as to be punishable to utter.

I walked her home. She kissed my cheek when we got there and zipped my coat up on me. The way she did it made me feel like a child. When I got away from her house, I unzipped it again even though it was below ten degrees.

I still wear my jackets open.

We left Milwaukee for good a year later. My family packed up and we lived for a while in Normal, Illinois, lived for a while in Allenton.

I went back to that neighborhood when I was older. It looked a lot smaller. The Bender family still lived there. I didn’t get a look at anyone. Cringle’s dad still ran a bike shop out of his garage. Cringle still lived there. I saw him sitting in a lawn chair in his dad’s shop smoking a joint. He scowled at me, but I knew he didn’t recognize me. For my part, I didn’t stomp into the garage and beat his ass either.

I’ll call that a victory for self control.

Less went back years after that. She came back with stories. Said Joshua was emaciated now. He had gotten stuck on coke for a while before hitting meth. She said he looked like an old man and reeked. He tried to borrow money from my sister but she was broke.

Demon Duck still runs the neighborhood according to her. She “seduced” him, and when she was done, she went and bought him some cigarettes and some burgers from George Webbs. In her defiance, she kept the change.

The Benders gave me my first notions of cool. They cemented the hard part of me that will always defend what is mine. Without the Benders, I would never have met Billy Badass. I would never have become his boy. In that one fact, I would never have become who I am.