I realize Mom doesn’t want to be rude to the Creek Freak, whom she gamely addresses as Mr. Dunleavy, less out of respect, I’m certain, than an inability to recall his first name, but she is even less inclined to be rude to her dear friends, the Leons, her houseguests on the screened porch. While she’s standing in the doorway, evidently wondering what to do, Dad comes into the house with some lowball glasses that need replenishing, calling after her.
Coming into the kitchen, Dad must see the Creek Freak filling our front doorframe. The Freak’s a big guy, six feet five and well muscled from his morning constitutionals along Nine Mile Creek and his forays into the woods to do God knows what. “Ever eat a pine tree?” an old geezer named Euell Gibbons asks in a Grape-Nuts cereal commercial that Johnny Carson always makes fun of. “Many parts are edible.” Dad has long suspected that the Creek Freak eats pine trees.
Tom and I have cracked open the bedroom door to hear what’s going on. The Creek Freak’s voice is loud, insistent that the Rushin boys were throwing explosives at his sons. Dad vows to get to the bottom of this and punish us accordingly, if the charges prove true, but something in his voice is skeptical. We hear the front door close. We peer through a gap in the blinds. Dad and the Creek Freak have moved into the front yard. The window is open. We can hear their voices. Dad is again reassuring the Freak that he’ll make a full investigation and punish us appropriately, provided that the allegations—given a full hearing—prove true. Tom and I are both excreting house bricks, but we can’t look away.
The Creek Freak wants more. Dad is explaining that he has company in the backyard—it is the Fourth of July, after all—and that he will discipline his own children on his own time.
Then it happens. The Creek Freak throws a roundhouse punch with his right fist. It catches Dad flush on the mouth.
Something—a crown, it turns out—flies out of Dad’s mouth and into the newly mown grass. In our bedroom, behind the blinds, Tom and I turn to stone on the spot. In the yard, after the punch, there is the smallest pause, during which the world can be heard, on its rusty rails, slowly stopping its rotations.
Donald Edward Rushin, who was raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana, by his grandparents, by the priests and nuns of Saint Patrick’s Catholic grade school, and by his single mother (if there is a Father Rushin, we have never known him); who fist-fought and joyrode and boxed his way through high school, and returned every night to the trailer he shared with his mother, employed at Walgreens; whose football coach arranged for him a summer job at a steel mill in Gary to keep him out of growing trouble with the police, telling him, “You’re the first person ever sent to a steel mill to cool down”; who starred on the Fort Wayne Central Catholic High School football team, which went undefeated and were named the Indiana state champions; who left a note for his mother in his senior year at Central Catholic to say he was off to spring football practice with Purdue, where the Boilermakers had offered him a scholarship, beating Notre Dame to the punch; who was kicked out of the Purdue residence halls and had to eat all his meals off campus after beating up a guy who threw a snowball at him from a dorm window; who once told me, “I was never a bully, but I could take care of myself with those who were bullies”; who walked out of Purdue football practice one day and never returned; whose idea of something to do on a Saturday night after transferring to Tennessee’s football program was “to get in fights in bars”; who on the final play of his career incited a benches-clearing brawl in the Vols game at Vanderbilt after pile-driving a Commodore kick returner who had just signaled for a fair catch; who then hitchhiked to Cincinnati from Knoxville to be with his girlfriend, Jane Boyle, from a family so Sunday-paper perfect that they were photographed, gathered around the Thanksgiving table, for a Sunday spread in the Cincinnati Enquirer; who married Jane Boyle, vowed to provide for her and any future children and to drive a Cadillac one day; who never—to my knowledge—threw another punch again, and instead channeled his furious energies into the selling of magnetic tape for Mickey Mining and the raising of five rambunctious children, none of whom would ever have to sleep on a couch in a trailer or relieve himself in a communal outbuilding as he had done…
…this was the man who had just been sucker punched in his own front yard on the Fourth of July by a pinecone-eating pansy who had questioned his skills as a father. And it seemed to awaken in Dad a series of memories, none of them good. Some of these, it is now clear, are muscle memories.
The ensuing whirlwind reaped by the Creek Freak has the quality of an actual tornado. Dad’s flying fists knock him to the ground and seem to sweep up a funnel cloud of debris and picket fences and Holstein cows. When the cloud passes, there is only silence and human wreckage. Dad walks into our house. The Creek Freak crawls toward his glasses, places them cockeyed across his nose, and endeavors to stand. When this proves impossible, he crawls to the curb and sits there. After a very long time, from somewhere across Nine Mile Creek, his wife comes looking for him. She helps him to his feet and then walks his bike out of South Brook, over the horizon, home.
Upstairs, buttocks defensively clenched against the spanking of our lives, we wait for Dad’s footfalls on the stairs. There is a faint clacking sound, which I assume are from my own teeth, chattering like those novelty windup chattering teeth they sell at Spencer’s Gifts at the Southdale mall. But the footfalls never come, and the clacking turns out to be a clinking of ice cubes in lowball glasses. Dad has returned to the kitchen to twist more cubes from the ice tray, to finish making libations for the Leons.
When Tom and I are summoned to eat the burgers and dogs Dad has grilled, he doesn’t say anything to us. Nor does he say anything that night, after the Leons have left, and the fireworks have exploded in the distance above Southdale.
Later, lying in bed, I hear the reassuring theme to The Tonight Show. Ed McMahon says, “Heeeere’s Johnny!” And Johnny himself opens the monologue with “Good evening. I’m gonna bring you a safe and sane Fourth tonight.” There is tentative laughter from the studio audience. “Because the monologue,” Johnny says, “is a dud.”
Dad laughs. Carson introduces a joke about the New York sanitation department promising to collect the garbage next year, on the bicentennial, and every two hundred years thereafter. “This is the one day out of the year,” Johnny says, “that people set aside their differences and join in a calm celebration.”
I fall asleep to Dad’s laughter and Johnny’s familiar voice making ironic references to a calm Independence Day, both men reassuring me that I’m safe beneath my Sears blanket. I sleep soundly and peacefully, even while rising in the night to tinkle, like a fountain cherub, into the laundry hamper in the hall.
Two weeks later, after two weeks of lurid testimony and a national debate about the propriety of charging athletes as criminals for violence perpetrated in the course of a professional hockey game, The State of Minnesota v. David S. Forbes ends with a hung jury. It will not be retried.