Pick up anything that fits the hand and I’ll bet you’ll toss it in the air or want to throw it as if you mean to strike a target. Twirl your arm in a circle like a propeller, your body the joint, as if your shoulder were the ball bearing it swings upon. Hold a ball and look for a tree or a post. Wind up, turn and let your legs drive you forward, your arm following to the point of release. We are built to deliver something hard at great speed at whatever we decide should wear the bull’s eye.
Now imagine it with a pie sized slice removed and then thrown.
At 10 or 11, sick of a bully’s taunts, finally chasing him behind the elementary school, between the swing sets and the fence, I found a cast iron drain cover big as a discus, fractured so it was missing a piece and those two points jagged and sharp. I picked it up on the run, discovered intuitively how it would best be held and in one motion stopped, reared back and came forward as if I were something more infernal than a pitcher on a mound.
This begins with intent.
I did not think this but felt it in my anger and thoughtless heave. I meant to hurt him. I meant him to suffer. I can see its line even now, its perfect spin, its undropping, adrenaline stoked line, and I knew in an instant (what is shorter than one second) that I was about to kill him.
Inner Diagram Of Neck Inner Diagram Of Neck Anatomy Human Body – Human Body Diagram
He might have dipped his head to the left. His foot might have planted itself in a slight drop in the uneven ground. Surely the aerodynamics of the damaged iron cover mandated its subtle gradations of rotation and descent … but it skimmed his right ear, disturbed his hair, the slice of its blade slipping past the base of his throat, glissading right next to the anterior jugular vein. That final moment is as alive in me as the cries of birds are outside this open window as I write.
I stopped chasing him as soon as I threw it. When it missed him, I exhaled, air bursting from my lungs, my anger gone, my relief so physically manifest I think I hopped up and down two or three times. Then I walked away. He went home, I think. He didn’t come back. I found my friends who did not know what had almost happened. We had been playing wiffle ball home run derby, smashing line drives against the brick wall of the old elementary school. We went back to it. I might have been pitching.
I think of this moment when I am driving, always wary of a child running from between parked cars. I sometimes thought of it when I was teaching after I had broken up a fight. I think of it now whenever these scary times bring me back to a decision about buying a handgun — what would I do if I killed someone innocent? If it were a young person? If panic overcame patience?
I think of it when my temper is rising with some unknown fool, very rare anymore but still, when I can feel the smile begin to come onto my face, that berserker smile, the one that says I wants to hurt something. You see, I know I have a savage inside me.
I pause when it once again flashes into the present — how breakable we are I think, how tenuous our hold, how soon it is over so therefore let us not find more ways to shorten it, how much each person gleams in his or her life, each one luminous, dense with history and with promise.
Muscle memory is strange. I swear I can sense the weight of that iron cover, its deadly weaponish heft. It felt right in the hand, a singular presence, unmistakable, perfect for an overhand throw where it could spin along its vertical axis, even now, spinning, moving closer to that running boy, spinning, a ghost moment, one moment, that time when I almost killed someone whose face and name I cannot recall.
