Roland

Goity

 

At the Foot of Golden Hill

An issue has arisen that needs taking care of. An employee of mine has crossed the line, and punishment is expected. Not just internally, within our civil engineering firm, where for appearances—we being an American corporation doing business overseas—he will almost certainly be fired, but via criminal proceedings here on the island. In a strange way, sipping coffee now, and staring out the window of my 44th floor office, it triggers a similar predicament on a lesser scale when I was a boy. An incident I’ll never forget with Lars Larson.

Our school was perched on top of Golden Hill. The priory school was at its bottom. During lunch recess we ate from brown bags on splintery benches while priory students ate in a sun-roofed cafeteria. When they assembled outside to play in the distance below, we watched from above in awe. Like us, they played handball and tetherball and four-square. Like us, they swung from swings and jumped rope. But they were well groomed and dressed in fancy blue sweaters and saddle shoes, wore white-collar shirts and pleated skirts. We gawked at them as if they were from an exotic country, or some far-off planet.

One day curiosity spurred a few of us boys to go on safari down the hill to check out the priory kids in their natural habitat, up close and personal. Problem was Lars, the big redheaded school bully, invited himself along. Big problem—but there was nothing we could do.

Once on the priory campus, we routed the rim of the school’s rotund multipurpose building, our pathway shadowed ominously. When we reached the bleached sunlight around the corner, we met face-to-face for the first time with those whose different lives fascinated us. Their games and activities ended immediately upon our arrival. Bodies stopped moving, jaws started dropping, and only the sound of balls bounce bounce bouncing on the blacktop pierced the air’s quiet.

Then a pretty brunette, about our age, fifth grade, asked what we’d all like to play. Maybe a game of capture-the-flag, she suggested.

How about a game of peek-a-boo? Lars said. And then he ran up to the girl, lifted her skirt and pulled down her panties all the way to her ankles. Peek-a-boo! I see you! he shouted. The poor girl just stood there, teetering. Lars was bent at the knees beside her, enjoying the view beneath her skirt and laughing. My friends didn’t move a muscle. Worse, the priory kids forgot how to breathe.

As the raven-haired girl hiked up her underwear and Lars kept laughing, I became feverish. The hands at my sides had gone all slick and clammy with the realization that I was about to do something. Just what I wasn’t sure, but I was tired of seeing people like Lars Larson enjoy themselves by ruining the lives of others.

Lars’s weight easily doubled my own, and his fighting experience was infinitely greater than mine. But I bucked the odds and common sense and summoned every ounce of my strength. I bolted towards Lars and waved my pasty little fists at his big stupid face. Then I hocked a loogie. Time seemed to stop as the loogie propelled itself end-over-end in mid-air. It landed on Lars’s left cheek before it slid to his chin and dangled like a thin bubbly beard. His face turned a shade of red to match his hair, and he narrowed his eyes and gave me a look that told me hell awaited.

It could have been a minute, it could have been five, but I was pummeled mercilessly after that. No one came to my aid. My buddies had split back up the hill once trouble started, and the formally attired priory students just observed my beating like paying spectators. A yard-duty monitor finally appeared. By then Lars had sat on my chest and pinned my shoulders, and kept pushing my head down to the pavement as if it were a walnut shell that needed cracking. The woman kept shouting at Lars and tried to wrestle him away, but it wasn’t until I finally grabbed him by the balls and squeezed hard that he got off me for good.

Just out of B-school, the young manager at our firm stationed here has presumably done something on a far grander scale than Lars; he’s accused of sexually assaulting and then beating the daughter of a prominent local politician.

Back then, our principal was notified and decisions were made. Students from our campus were banned from the priory during school hours. No exceptions! Lars didn’t get expelled, but he was suspended for a week. My suspension was but a single day, one during which I did a lot of thinking.

The kind of thinking that I’m doing now. Especially as I consider the pressure I’m under to influence officials to keep this as under-wraps as possible, to see if they’ll bargain financially for the fellow’s release with the promise he’ll leave Singapore on the next plane out and touch down in New York with an unenviable fate awaiting. 

I’ll go through the motions at least, and will certainly do my best to distance the firm from the black eye we’ve received. They say any PR is good PR, but that’s not the case in this instance. I’ll need to mitigate as much as possible any negative press that comes our way because of this.

But I won’t be despondent if it’s judged a good cane lashing is in order. I never was able to deliver any real physical punishment upon Lars that day, and sometimes physical punishment is the only kind a bully understands.

[12/09]

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Roland Goity lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and edits fiction for the online journal LITnIMAGE. His stories appear in dozens of literary publications, including Fiction International, Underground Voices, Bryant Literary Review, Talking River, decomP, Eclectica,, and Scrivener Creative Review.