Stay Pony Goldboy - Toni Kochensparger

Marcus cut into the flesh of a peach with his pocketknife.

“Mom’s gonna be mad if she sees you took that thing out,” Cal said. Marcus watched the blade of the knife dip into and out of the peach again, like something swimming in the distance.

“So? I already got my pocketknife card.”

“Yeah, but just with one corner—”

“That means that I get to use it—”

“Not until you have all four!”

“Would you shut your fucking mouth?” Marcus hissed at his little brother. “First of all,you’re only a Tiger.”

“So what?”

“So you don’t even know about being a Bear—”

“Yes, I do,” Cal whined.

It went on like that until the sunshine let its shoulders relax all over a too-blue Ohio. Everywhere it was warm instead of snowing.

#

Marcus returned the pocketknife to his mother’s sock drawer while Cal was getting in trouble for leaving his lunch box at school again. He didn’t really say much during dinner. As soon as he was through, he went upstairs to his room and stared at an unhatched block of wood, trying to think about it—to imagine its future possibility—in subtractive terms.

The Pinewood Derby took place in what used to be a stable, what now housed a gymnasium at the elementary school, which was attached to the church. The stable doors were imperfect. The building had been tacked on a hundred years earlier, around the time everyone in Ohio got their own cars, their own identities on the highway, their first firsthand understanding of inexplicable speed.

At school, God was squeezed in between mathematics and science like an afterthought, but at least it was something. When the kids got to be seven or eight, they were old enough to sit on the stage with the priest during mass, the person who, as long as they’d been alive, had been a medium for God. They sat at his right side like it was nothing. They were so fine and cool.

After school one day, at their Boy Scout meeting, Marcus and the other scouts had each been handed a small block of wood. The pine measured seven inches by one and three-quarter inches by one and one-quarter inches. It was warped and psychedelic—soft, the kind of wood they made the boxes, but not the faces, of drawers from. The kind that could be pushed back into the frame if it got a dent.

#

“I heard he flipped off Father Klaus, and now he’s in a whole other scout troop.”

“I heard he told him to go fuck Jesus.”

The boys hadn’t seen Tevin in well over a week, not since he’d been sent to detention very publicly during an assembly meeting—an event that had too many witnesses, and so its details were overburdened with elasticity and seemed to shapeshift by the minute.

When Tevin did come back to school, he wouldn’t say where he’d been, or actually say really much of anything. Marcus and his friends had tried all of the old tricks but couldn’t convince him to resume his role, whispering jokes with the rest of them in the back of the room.

When the behavior continued, the boy became the object of speculation (“I heard they gave him a lobotomy”) as well as wild, upsetting rumor (“Nah, I heard from Kenny Fass they shipped him to a special camp for gay kids, and they electrocuted his balls.”)

But now, Tevin was back in class and back at church and back at scout meetings and was the last to get his little pine block.

“Shit. He’s gotta get to work fast if he’s gonna get his car done in time.”

“I can’t believe he lost a whole week!”

The seven-day delay in Tevin’s production had been spent by Marcus and the remaining scouts, and their parents or uncles or aunts (or whoever was helping them with power tools), in preparation for the big day. Typically, the child came up with the concept and drew where to cut on the car and then sanded it after the adult did the work. The children painted the cars, and wheels were attached. The more detail-oriented (and possibly sociopathic) parents researched and acquired special wheels, grease, and weights.

Marcus heard that Tevin had asked his uncle Bobby for help making his car look like a PlayStation controller and that it had taken them half a Saturday to complete. They did not use special wheels or grease. They probably didn’t know any better. Marcus had seen them that afternoon when he was out riding his bike—Tevin’s uncle lived around the corner from Marcus’s house, and his garage door was up. Tevin and his uncle were working and listening to records in the garage, and then, Marcus assumed, his uncle drove Tevin home.

#

“Mom knows about the pocketknife,” Cal whispered to Marcus in the dark.

“No, she doesn’t,” Marcus sneered from his bunk. “What are you even talking about?”

“I heard her on the phone in the kitchen.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I heard her say, ‘He’s doing little things.’ Like that you were acting out.”

“No, I’m not.”

“That’s what she said.”

“That doesn’t mean she knows about the pocketknife.”

“Yes, it does!”

“Besides, I put it back exactly where she had it in the drawer.”

“She said it on the phone!”

“She said I had the pocketknife?”

“That’s what I said.”

“No, you said she said I acted out.”

“And about the knife—”

“Which I don’t. I’m too old for that.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Uh-huh! You always act out, you’re like the super king of acting out.”

“Well, you’re the super king of acting stupid.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Mom!”

#

Father Klaus always seemed excited about the Derby. He said the day felt Olympic or something, as if they were taking part in a truly human threshold crossing, like they were participating in something ancient or important. “Except in Athens,” he was telling Dave, Troop 138’s scoutmaster, “the boys would have ridden on horses.”

“Funny, then, that we do all this in an old stable,” Dave said with a wry smile. The event was absolutely packed. This was the Superbowl for this small-scale boys’ organization—the pièce de résistance of the calendar year.

“The one night even Jesus can’t ruin,” Marcus’s best friend, Adam, said. The boys bowed their heads for Klaus’s blessing of the event.

“And we’re off!” Father Klaus announced.

The preliminary rounds of the evening took the entire first half of the event to complete, not only because the first rounds involved the bulk of the cars but because they were quite literally slower. These were not the racers. This was the part of the evening where pageantry came into play, where decoration and the superficial got their moment to shine before it was time to open up the floodgates of the bloodbath, after the snack break at halftime.

The track ran the length of the church’s gymnasium and had cameras positioned at the end of its woodwork to verify results within a fraction of a second, to make certain no undeserving little bastard went home with a trophy. To protect the natural order.

Inside the gym, adults with whistles, stopwatches, clipboards, and pens. Not only the families but more distant relatives in the stands. The car shaped like a real car shaped like a spaceship shaped like a Twinkie. The car that looked like a little kitchen sink. A Power Rangers- Superman- Ninja Turtles car. A pirate ship, fighter jet, and Batmobile. See the lone, top-heavy, obtuse Oxford shoe. And their breath in the air in the parking lot.

The parking lot led right into the gym, where all the action was. Adam was the first one to ditch the event, and a few friends followed him.

Cal told Marcus not to go.

“Just chill, dude.”

“We have to stay. You have to—”

“Cal, you sound like fucking Mom. You know that, right?”

“But Marcus—”

“Shut up. Shut the fuck up, okay?”

“Marcus, are you coming?” Adam asked.

Marcus turned back to his brother. “Just shut up, you’re being a fucking idiot,” he said before leaving with the other boys.

“Come on, Tev,” Marcus said to Tevin. They joined the rest of the scouts making their way outside.

Cal watched from the bleachers as the boys exited. “But my car’s next,” he said to no one.

#

Marcus heard the sound before he saw them.

“Adam! What the fuck!” he yelled.

Adam and this kid, Thomas, were trying to hit the parapet of the building with rocks.

“Specifically,” Adam said, flinging another rock toward the top, “we said the winner is the first one who can bop the nose on Mother Mary.”

“Oh, this is bad,” Tevin said under his breath.

Marcus let out a nervous laugh. “Come on, guys. What the fuck?”

“I wanna see if I can crack it in half.” Thomas said, whipping a stone at the statue.

“Stupid fucking night, anyway,” Adam said., “Plus now we’re in the bullshit zone where everybody has to wait for all the baby cars—”

“The ones with the wheels shaped like squares.”

The boys laughed. Marcus winced.

“Yeah, well. They’re probably about to break soon, so like—”

“What are you, a pussy?” Adam turned to face Marcus.

“What?”

“Since when did you get all soft, Marcus? I know Tevin here’s had his brain scrambled or whatever. I know he’s useless, but when did you become a fucking baby?”

“I’m not a baby.”

“You wanna see about it?” Adam asked, taking out his pocketknife.

“Where did you get that?” Marcus asked.

“It’s mine.”

“You don’t have all the corners on your card.”

“So?”

“So you can’t have your pocketknife—”

“Says who? Says...what, the police?” Adam gestured wildly, waving the knife. “I looked it up, dipshit. It’s not against the law.”

“Put. Down. The knife.”

“Pick. Up. A rock.”

Marcus and Adam stared hard into each other’s eyes. The quiet roar of another round came from inside the gym.

Marcus leaned down, slowly, eyes on Adam’s pocketknife.

He picked up a rock.

“There he is,” Adam said.

“Shut up,” Marcus said.

“I told you he wasn’t a pussy,” Adam continued.

“Shut the fuck up, what’s the game?”

“Right in between her eyes. Like you’re an assassin.”

“Right. Not the nose?”

“Fuck the nose. Get her right between. Right at the bridge.”

Marcus let the stone rip.

It was Andy Carlyle’s dad, headed to the parking lot to smoke at the tail end of the first act, who heard the building’s window shatter, and the glass rain down on the pavement, and then the little bubble of whispers and patter of feet.

“You missed my car,” Cal said when Marcus joined him in the stands. Marcus didn’t answer his brother. He stared straight ahead, eyes unfocused, into the great, big eternity of light illuminating the gymnasium’s glossy floor.

“Folks, I’m afraid I’m going to need your attention,” began the scoutmaster. Dave pressed STOP on the CD that was providing a soundtrack to the race. “If everyone could take their seats.” The scoutmaster looked around the room at the polyphony of familiar faces, taking his time. “I regret to inform you. It’s just been brought to my attention that something rather unfortunate has transpired just now, outside, in the parking lot.”

Cal turned from the scoutmaster to his brother.

“Shut the fuck up, Cal,” Marcus whispered, bobbing his knee.

“And we are going to need to sort of...well, to put a pause on this evening’s festivities while we work all this out.”

Father Klaus walked up to join Dave in front of the assembly.

“It seems that someone—or someones—were throwing rocks at the...the building outside,” Dave continued. “Uh. And I believe. I think what. Seems to make sense. Is to take a moment. Together. To. Pray. With Father Klaus. Here. With the thinking that maybe. The individual. Or individuals. Zzz. Zzz. W-would come forward. And ask for forgiveness. And we could all work this whole thing out, together.” Dave handed the microphone to the priest.

The racetrack stretched behind the two adult men like a microscopic world. All the house lights were up.

No one said a word.

Everyone bowed their heads. Father Klaus prayed.

Outside, Marcus could hear the traffic pass by the church grounds, which only reminded anyone who was listening of the parking lot, which only made the room and the situation feel more claustrophobic.

No one said a word.

No one said anything following Klaus’s prayer, for so long that Dave chose to speak again. “We can wait for the rest of the evening, folks. We don’t have to have a Pinewood Derby.”

This received audible groans—especially from the younger scouts. Marcus could feel Cal’s eyes like hot daggers.

“You have nothing to fear,” the scoutmaster said.

Marcus looked over at Tevin, then at Adam and Thomas, who were sitting in the upper corner of the risers.

Thomas looked down at his knees.

Tevin looked straight ahead.

Adam looked at the scoutmaster.

Marcus could feel his brother’s eyes on him.

“I’m gonna tell Mom about the pocketknife.”

“Cal, shut the fuck up or I’ll cut you with the pocketknife—”

“I’m gonna tell Mom about—”

“Dude, seriously. I need you not to fucking suck for just even, like, five minutes. For once. Shut the fuck up, shut the fucking fuck up, okay?”

Marcus watched Cal’s energy sink like a stone. His brow furrowed. The emotion swelling his face confounded his features so they didn’t make sense anymore. Cal drew back in his chair and got quiet.

“I have to tell you, folks. It’s this part right here—this silence—that brings me the most shame of all,” Dave said.

Marcus looked at Tevin. Tevin was shaking.

“Perhaps the culprits are all gone home.”

Cal turned back to face his brother, slowly.

“But then again, in a minute, if no one comes forward, we’re going to have to take attendance.”

In Marcus’s peripheral vision, Cal’s body was like a storm overtaking the horizon.

“Thirty seconds, folks.”

Marcus watched a bead of sweat roll down Tevin’s cheek in the gym light.

“Fifteen seconds.”

And Adam, just staring at the Scout Master. Like it was nothing.

“Ten seconds.”

And Tevin shaking.

“Five seconds.”

“You’ve turned into a real dick since they got a divorce,” Cal said to Marcus.

Tevin stood up.

Everyone turned.

There was a bright light like infinity.

Editor: Leanne Phillips

Originally published by Scribble

Toni Kochensparger was born in Kettering, Ohio, and now lives in Queens. Their short stories can be found in Kelp Journal, Alien Buddha, Free Spirit, Two Two One, and Scribble.