Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of Bliss Review of Atheist Manifesto Review of The Stones Cry Out Film review of "Karov La Bayit" Creative Nonfiction A Reverence for Words By Virginia Hendry For the Wife of Bath and the Wife of Yeats, I Give Thanks By Sara J. Ford Birth By Clint Pearson Poetry Gong Fu By Tim J. Brennan Phases By Tolu Ogunlesi They Are Driving Their Cars Again, They Are Driving... By Anne Cammon Death of the Travelers By Abigail Grant Leaves By Matt Gee Fiction The Wood Splitter By Michael Phillips Boogie & Sarah Leigh By Sandra L. West What Happened to Matt Dillon By Chris Drangle Red, Manhattan, 523 By Beth Hogan Titanic Hat By D.K. McGill About the Contributors © 2007, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Vacant Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Senior Editor - Neeldhara Misra Senior Editor - Mike Munsil Assistant Editor - Steve MacNeil Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch. |
What Happened to Matt Dillon By Chris Drangle In the summer after our first year of college, my best friend Grant called to tell me that Chelsea, his fourteen-year-old sister, had been raped. A little background is important. This had been our worst fear for a while. Chelsea had grown up faster than I have ever seen anyone grow up. She dressed like a grown woman, and not a modest one, her first day of ninth grade. She hung out a lot of places I wouldn’t, and she called friends a lot of people I wouldn’t. Grant and I had talked several times about how she would end up if she kept going like this. This may be insensitive, but if you hang out in bad places with bad people, you can bet bad things are going to happen. The details of that night are important, too, so I’ll tell you. She snuck out of the house on Saturday night, and met up with one of her girlfriends and two guys they knew. Loosely knew, I guess. They were the same age as Grant and me, but they weren’t in college. One worked in a grocery store, the other worked construction. He was the one who drove the four of them to a house he had been working on—a wooden skeleton backed by the woods out on the edge of Crystal Ridge. They all started drinking, and pretty soon the boys wanted things that the girls didn’t. So this guy took Chelsea back to the car. “She said he got all pissed off because she was saying no,” Grant said, “and she just kept drinking her coke, and can’t remember after that.” “The coke?” I asked. “She thinks there was something in it.” “So how does she know what happened?” “She remembers waking up once, and he was on top of her.” “What about her friend? Why didn’t she do anything?” “She said she was scared. She said after they’d been alone in the truck together, and she saw Chelsea passed out, the two guys fought a little bit, like they were gonna hit each other. But then they just piled back in the car. They dropped Chelsea off at our house just when she was waking up.” I was afraid to ask the next question. Grant’s father wasn’t a peaceful man, and he was overprotective of his only daughter. “What did your dad say?” “She didn’t tell him. I mean, she will, she just needs a few days. She’s gotta go to the doctor. She’s scared. She asked me not to tell him before she did.” He wouldn’t have anyway. Grant was like his father, the bad and the good. Of course, where his dad had experience, Grant had seen movies. “Do you know the guy’s name?” I asked. “Darrel Hansen.” I actually knew him. I mean, I didn’t know him, I’d just seen him a few times. He was dirt. He was exactly what you would expect of an eighteen-year-old guy who hangs out with fourteen-year-old girls. “Whatever you want to do, you know I’m with you,” I said. So now we’re sitting under the interstate bridge at the west end of town. There’s usually a creek here, but it’s hot enough this summer that it’s been dry for weeks. It’s the middle of the night, and there are only a few stars in the sky visible through the yellow haze of the streetlights on the bridge above. The car is parked twenty yards back, up on the bank where we first pulled off the road. I’m standing next to one of the bridge supports, and we’ve been waiting for about forty minutes. “That asshole actually told me he didn’t do it. Like she would lie,” Grant said. It’s a funny thing to say, because I think she would lie. About something like this, I don’t know, but she’s lied before. Grant is sitting on a small boulder in the middle of the creek bed. He’s smoking a cigarette, which seems kind of cliché to me, because he doesn’t smoke very much. He’s bouncing his leg, like a kid at a desk in school. We’re expecting Darrel Hansen in the next fifteen minutes. The truth is, I hope to God that they never show. Because there’s a huge difference between really loathing someone and knowing you want to see them hurt bad, and actually waiting under a bridge at 12:42 a.m., where you can smell the animals in the woods, waiting to do it yourself. And the stupid thing is, I know that Grant doesn’t know that difference. I’m looking at him in the lamplight, smoking his cigarette and squinting his eyes, and I can tell he thinks he’s Matt Dillon or something. Like in The Outsiders? He doesn’t have the leather jacket, or the greasy hair, or the black shirt, but he thinks he has the attitude. I thought I did too, when we were just talking about doing this. Grant was going to call Darrel, tell him to meet us to answer for what he did, and I knew for a fact that I was going to beat this lowlife down with righteous fury. We would stand over him, as he moaned in pain and made the most profound apology of his life. And then we’d leave him lying there, get back in the car, and sleep better for giving the world back some of its dignity, some of its justice. I know Grant thought the same thing, but, looking at him sitting on his stone, I can see that the difference between us is that I can recognize the fantasy for what it is: a movie. One where Matt Dillon beats the guy down, and it satisfies me, sitting in the theater. And that satisfaction at the end of a movie is what Grant wants, what he thinks he will get. Headlights slow down on the other side of the bridge, and a creaking truck pulls off the road and crawls down the bank. When it stops, two guys get out. It’s Darrel and the friend who was there that night, whose name I never learned. They leave the headlights on, and when they walk into the beams, long shadows are cast across the creek bed. In one of those shadows, Grant stands up and takes a final draw on the cigarette, which flares, orange at the end. He flicks it to the ground and looks back at me. “I’ve never been in a real fight,” he says. His eyes aren’t scared, they’re just sad. For that single instant, we’re on the same page, and he knows what I know: that this will not end well, no matter what. But then he’s Matt Dillon again, and he’s stalking toward Darrel Hansen like he’s done it before, and he calls out, “Still deny it?” and I can hear real rage in his voice. Darrel stops walking, and just stands there. In his beady, ignorant eyes, he denies nothing, but I can’t tell if that’s because he really did it, or because he doesn’t take shit from college boys who think their slutty sisters are still innocent. I catch the friend’s eyes and am not surprised to find that they are mirrors of mine. They say he knows exactly what’s going to happen, and can’t figure out how it will make any of our lives better. He knows his friend is probably wrong, but he doesn’t know how to do anything but stick by him. I’m walking closer when I notice that Darrel has brought something from the car with him—a tire iron—and he’s holding it in his left hand. Either Grant doesn’t see it, or he doesn’t care, because he screams “You son of a bitch!” and falls on Darrel with his fists. I’m running at them and I see the tire iron go back in the air, and swing back forward. When Grant’s head spins back toward me, his face is bloody like it would be in any movie I’ve even seen, but there’s something different and urgent. He spins so fast and I’m so close, I feel warm, wet drops flick my face. It scares me so much that I scream and hurl myself at Darrel, and we collide and tumble into the dirt. The friend pulls me off of him, but I’m wild. I tackle the friend and we go down into the dirt again. I hit him hard in the chin and he goes slack, but Darrel grabs my throat from behind—and when I feel his grip, harder than anything I’ve ever felt, for the first time in my life I think I might die. I let go of the friend and try to stand up. But Darrel doesn’t let go—he squeezes harder and pushes me back down. I choke and cough, and grab at his hands, but they’re calloused and strong. I’m getting dizzy and can’t think clearly. My vision starts to blur, and a profound exhaustion sweeps through me like a wave. I hear two dull thuds and Darrel’s grip is gone. I collapse onto my stomach and see Darrel fall next to me. His eyes are open but swimming, his mouth moving without sound. Grant is standing above him with the tire iron in hand, just looking down at him. It’s not the righteous Dillon stare, though. He looks sad again. The friend has gotten to his feet, but he just stands still a moment, doesn’t say anything. Then he walks over, bends down and grabs Darrel under the arms, and drags him over to the truck. Grant and I watch as he struggles to put Darrel’s lolling body into the cab, and then they drive off, the pickup rattling over rocks as it climbs back up the hill and onto the highway. My throat feels like there’s a brick in it, and my head is throbbing. Grant sits down in the grass next to me, looking off into nothing. His face is covered in blood, dripping from his cheek onto his shirt. “Hey, Matt,” I say. “Matt?” he asks, confused. “Matt. Dally. Ponyboy.” “What are you talking about?” “Movies,” I tell him. Lying on my back, I’ve been trying to remember what happened at the end of The Outsiders, or at least what happened to Matt Dillon. Looking at Grant’s cut-open face, I wonder if Dillon has scars from any of his movies. Without moving, I say to him, “Guess we showed ‘em, huh?” But he’s silent. He’s thinking about what I’m thinking about. He’s wondering exactly why Darrel wouldn’t admit it—and why he isn’t as sure now as he was before. He’s thinking about hospitals, and don’t they have rape kits? And can’t they prove it one way or the other? He’s thinking about police that will have different questions for us now. He’s thinking about stitches, doubt and hate, his parents, college, life in a small town, and mistakes. “Yea, we showed ‘em,” I say again. So we sit here on the ground, doing something I guess movies never have time to show, or just don’t bother with. We sit here in the dark, bruised and quiet, thinking. |