crow hop.

Jason Frank had come over to my family’s house for a sleepover and when we were walking to the corner store he said we should throw rocks at house across the fence. It was the first of many incidents in which I was led to believe not to trust people with two first names.
Bret Robert John. Patrick Henry. Tom Henry. Charles Christopher.
I kept my head down and dug in the dirt with the toe of an untied shoe. Jason Frank picked up rocks and threw them, hardly made it over the fence, building a small pile on the other side.
‘Don’t be such a pussy.’ He said.
‘I’m just hungry.’ I told him.
‘Of course you are, you are also a pussy.” Jason Frank had heard his dad call another dad a pussy during a game in Essex last weekend and had begun saying it to everyone. His eye still had a little purple teardrop at the corner from his mother’s spaghetti spoon when he called her a pussy for not making meatballs.
To appease him, I started throwing rocks at a wooden shack that was property of the Burlington Parks and Recreation. Every rock chipped off a chunk of green paint, leaving behind a patch mark of a grey tin. Audibly it was much more satisfying, each resounding shot echoing through the park.
There we were, back to back, with child’s arms throwing stones. Jason Frank’s pile of rocks was building in height still.
“Pretty soon you will have made them a nice little stone terrace, eh Jason?”
“Fuck you pussy.” Jason was an emotional thunder ball. Stemming from his small stature and the hugeness of his head. His own father called him Jupiter. My dad called him Frankenhead, my mom called him a spaz. The spaz part was true, and carried over into his adult life, when he became the first police officer in the country to kill someone with a taser. ‘Liberally Applied’ was what they called it in the newspaper. He blasted someone for fifteen minutes outside of the theater after Terminator 2.
‘I’m not a pussy.’ I said back, firing another stone off of the hut.
‘Yes you are, my dad said so.’ Jason said.
‘Fuck that, your dad is an drunk.’ I told him
Jason smashed one knobby fist into the space under my nostrils, pushing the tip of my nose straight up and knocking me to the ground. I looked to him with a pure and astonished ‘What the fuck was that’ type face. My nose wasn’t bleeding, but I held my hand there anyway. I had stumbled back a good fifteen feet from him, about seventy feet from the house. In my hand was another stone.
It was round, a bit bigger than a golf ball. Smooth, with a lip on top that my pointer finger fit into perfectly. I rose from the ground and crow hopped, bouncing up with my right foot and stepping forward slightly with my left and bringing my arm around over the top of my head, the rock in a perfectly straight line with my right leg and my left arm crossed across my chest with my elbow cocked and palm facing outward and I let the rock fly while snapping my left arm down and landing with both feet under me and it was a fucking laser beam that flew past Jason Frank and about a foot over the fence and as it increased in velocity the sun shined down on us bright for a second and Jason watched it pass over his head, turning at his very strong neck that held his very big head he watched it sail past while shielding the sun from his eyes.
I knew what was going to happen before he did and turned on my heels while bending my legs for those crucial first few step and it felt like I was running in slow motion as I heard the shatter come. I looked over my shoulder and a patio door was blown to pieces and a man stood looking out through the glass.
Jason said, ‘holy shit.’
The man in the window didn’t say anything but he took one step through that window with the look of chase all over him.
Then we were running, all of us, with me in the lead and Window man at the back with Jason slowly dragging his head in between us, I knew the neighborhood but Jason didn’t and I thought that if I could slow down to him I could pull him in the direction in which we would lose our pursuer and disappear into the neighborhood somewhere.
I put the brakes on and Jason impressed me by being only about twenty feet behind me. But he looked fucking horrible. His eyes were all puffy like he was crying, his mouth was wet and pink and snot was coming out of his nose.
He spoke in bursts. ‘As… As…’ we were wasting time and the Window man was running at full speed.
‘Come on Jason, we are fucked.’
‘I… can… I… can’t…’ he fumbled around in his pockets. ‘Asthma… asthma…’
‘Shit.’ This was before asthma had started killing children who got pushed to hard at football practice. Then he did the unthinkable. He took a knee. Then I took off.
The Window man had gained a lot of ground and I was running my hardest, the ground switched from loose pebbles and concrete to the long wet grass and I pulled each knee up and made sure not to kick too hard and slip. If I could make it a little bit farther I could lose him and he knew that.
He didn’t say a word out loud, just silently and quickly trailed me. Then, I made the move.
I side hopped never breaking stride through a place were the branches were not very thick and when I hit the ground I jammed my heels into the dirt, I was surrounded on all sides by tall privacy trees that lines our neighborhood, two rows of thick pines in which the light didn’t shine through. I dug in and took off in the other direction and watched the man pass me in the other direction.
He was walking, Jason stood at his side laughing.
I stopped and watched them. Following them from the other side of the trees. Jason took big pulls from the inhaler and never looked back. He was leading him right to my house.
I kept following them while I cut through a neighbor’s yard. I watched as they walked up onto my parent’s porch and rang the doorbell.
I felt the first betrayal of a boy with two first names. I looked around on the ground for two more rocks.