The Trigger Effect
© 2005 By Ken Glassmeyer
© 2005 By Ken Glassmeyer
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was getting dark as Armen emerged from Greendale Park and headed down his street. He was finally calmed down. He had taken a jog through the par course at the park and tried to deal with his anger while doing the various exercises. He wasn't sure why he had gone off like that. Maybe is was the whole alien idea of his favorite coach and teacher being so ready to just forgive an idiot and bully like Kellen Winslow. Somehow, his sense of justice just could not let it be. As he rounded the corner hear his home, he saw Kellen out on his Mongoose talking to some of the other kids in the neighborhood. They were under the street lamp as it flickered on for the evening, and like little cockroaches scuttled out of the light moving further down the street to a corner that wasn't lit. Armen's thumb and for finger had gone to his ear lobe and he was rolling the nerve bundle gently and whispering "Wooosab. . .wooosaaaabii," just like his counselor had taught him. It was of no use to confront Kellen now, especially while he was around his cronies. Armen tugged at his ear a bit, more surprised at how well this anger management technique worked.
A silver and blue Eagle Talon cornered hard as Kellen walked up his front walk, the squealing tires breaking his train of thought. The slick car slid to a quick stop and there was a rowdy, but freindly exchange between the Kellen and the boys on the corner and whoever was inside the vehicle. Between the red brake lights and the blue and green ground effects of the sporty, low slung car, the whole corner had an eerie tone. It made the faces of the Kellen, and the kids around him seem sharp and violent. Their eyes were beedy in the wash of colored light and it cast long shadows over there impassive faces that didn't seem to change even though their voices were loud and friendly, but you could almost smell the tension that lingered underneath the noise of a few guys out clowning around. It hung there in the air as if they wanted the a reason to fill the corner with the fog of blue gun smoke--any reason would do.
The scene a few blocks away seemed sureeal and it made Armen think that trouble was brewing in the neighborhood tonight. He could almost taste that copper bitterness of blood in his mouth from the last time he tangled with bad dudes like the ones on the corner. He had caught two of them ganging up on a sixth grader in the gym locker room shaking the poor little kid down for some lunch money. Armen usually avoided fighting at school, but one of the punks landed a lucky sucker punch to the side of his face when he tried to confront them. It was just the glancing blow of a coward, but it still bloddied his lip. A quick jab with plenty of torque to the solar plexis of the nearest one sent both them packing for easier prey somewhere else in the school. One thing Armen's father did teach him was that if you are backed into a corner and have to fight, hit just like a mule kicks by snapping your hips. Most people that get hit by someone that knows what they are doing, as well as any punks in the vicinity, are usually disheartened by the thick sound of a hard well-placed punch. The whoosh of all of the air suddenly leaving the lungs is a pretty dramatic sound. Even so, it was that afternoon that Armen came to realize what it meant to say "there are no winners" in a school fight. That thirty second taste of his own blood in his mouth would be with him for the rest of his life.
"It is what it is," Armen whispered to no one in particular as he climbed the steps of his porch and started to enter his house for dinner. When he opened the door the smell of his aunt's cooking caused a huge grin to break out on his face. It had been a while since he had made it home in time for dinner. With football and tutoring at the public library afterwards, he usually ate the leftover plate alone at the kitchen table around 8:00 PM on most weeknights. He had enjoyed family dinner time ever since moving in with aunt and uncle last year, but football season made his schedule more hectic, and sitting alone at the table the last few weeknights, eating micrcowaved leftovers reminded him too much of his old life living with his dad.
It wasn't always that way at the old Hammer household. There was a time when Armen enjoyed his homelife. When he was younger, his mom and dad had seemed happy and they always took time to sit down together as a family to eat dinner. Then his dad started working later and later when he took on a second job after his mom became ill. She had miscarried a baby. He didn't learn until he was older that those words had meant that he would have had a little brother or sister, but his mother had, for a reason that had never been made clear to him, fought what seemed to be a sudden bout of depression.
Eventually she had such a problem with drinking and taking prescription pills that it first resulted in the miscarried baby and then, one afternoon, took her from this world too. She drove her car off the road and hit a telephone pole on the way to pick him up from elementary school. to this day, Armen takes a long detour around the street that his mother died on. He could barely bring himself to look at the old pictures of her they had hanging on the walls in the various rooms of his old house, much less actually visit the place she died and actually touch the pole that had cut her car virtually in two. He never understood those people that left flowers and stuffed animals around small crosses on the sides of roads where their loved ones had perished in a wreck. Armen didn't even want to walk on the opposite side of the street from that place, much less leave momentos. That didn't mean that he didn't want to talk about what had happened. He did. He just didn't have anyone that would talk to him. His dad seemed to just stare at the floor whenever he brought it up. His friends and other relatives would express sadness, but then quickly try to change the subject whenever he tried to talk about it. This left Armen hurt, lonely, and confused.
His father, John Quincy Hammer, never talked about Armen's mother after she died. In some ways it was as if she had never lived in that house. He had scattered memories of those years, but he had always remembered his mother as a beautiful, pleasant woman with plenty of friends that always seemed to come around the house. Then as he grew older fewer and fewer of them came and soon his mother became a gray shell of the vibrant woman she had once been. His father seem to act the same way for the two years after his mother's death. Often they would sit in the house silent for hours, never talking. Never doing anything. If Armen hadn't taken up football in fifth grade, he might have gone on sitting in those shadows. quietly with his dad until they both became ghosts. They didn't even turn on the television most nights. His father would come home late from work, usually with takeout from some fastfood place, and they would sit in stoney silence across the table chewing their food slowly without ever talking or even glancing up.
It was his friend Brewster that saved him from that life of despair when he invited him to join the community football team one year. They played two years of Pop Warner together and then made the jump to the scholastic team at Sally Ride Middle School. Not once in all of those years had his father ever come to even one game or practice. He would just sit in the dark house with a sullen look on his face, smiling faintly when Armen described the plays and exploits, but never really listening to the report that his son might actually be pretty good at the sport. He just numbly signed the paperwork or handed over the money for fees. Beyond work and that chair in the shadows of the living room, the man did not seem to have a life. Armen was old enough to know something was seriously wrong with his father, but too young to have a clue what to do about it. Instead he gave himself completely to football, and found comfort in his teamates and coaches.
Then one day his father came home and without ever really looking into his eyes very long, informed Armen that he would be moving in with his aunt and uncle. He said that he had to take a job, "down south." That had been nine months ago. John Hammer did send his son a birthday card and a parcel showed up the day after his birthday with an official leather NFL football autographed by Michael Vick, Armen's favorite player. The card had no special message and the football had come in a plain brown parcel box. Not once had his father called or written him. It was as if he had fallen off the face of the earth. Had Armen been a bit more observant, he would have noticed that both the card and the box the football had come in were postmarked from a zip code across town, near the post office that was across the street from the small insurance agency that his uncle owned.
As Armen entered the door and and kicked off his shoes on the landing before heading down the hall to the kitchen he paused for a moment and took a deep, slow breath to drink in the wonderful smells coming from the kitchen. While he was still adjusting to the gloomy departure of his father and sudenly being grafted into the household of his dad's brother and sister-in-law, he loved the meals at his new home. Both his aunt and uncle were fantastic cooks. By the blended smells wafting from the kitchen, painted in the bold colors Florida blue and orange, they were both cooking up a storm in there.
"Armen, baby, you are home--wonderful!" His aunt smiled a grin almost as large as her big, warm hug."
"Young man, we have got a treat for you!"
"It smells wonderful--what is it?"
"Fried gator tail, and your aunt's amazing gumbo!"
Let me guess? Forida must be playing FSU tonight," Armen said with a grin.
"Go Gators!" His aunt and uncle cheered and sealed with a kiss. They had met at the University of Florida. It was going to be a fun night. Soon all of Armen's troubles melted away in the glow of this home.
