“Riding the Fences” (Excerpt)
When Farris Kaiser was twelve years old, Tim Newton, his best friend, called him a “fairy.” He smashed Tim in the mouth. Tim touched his mouth and gazed at the blood in his hand. He charged his tormentor. Farris stepped aside and slugged his friend in the back of the head. Tim went down like a sack of cement. He didn’t get up. A teacher came by.
“What happened?” she asked.
“He called me a fairy,” explained Farris.
When he reached home, his father asked him to cut a switch from one of the willow trees by the driveway.
“Lean against the house with your back to me,” he said after Farris gave him the switch.
It was summer and he was in shorts, so he didn’t have to roll up his pants like he did in the winter when he got switched. He’d been a terror since he was young, so the switching came often, but this time he wasn’t going to take it. After a few stinging lashes on his calves, he whipped around, grabbed the switch, and started using it on his dad.
“You want to be a big boy, huh,” said his dad, throwing a punch at his son. Farris ducked, but the second one caught him on the chin and sent him sprawling to the ground. His mother ran out to the back porch.
“Stop that, Edgar,” she said.
“This boy beat up his best friend. Now it’s my turn to teach him a lesson,” said the old man as he reached down to grab Farris. But the boy knocked his father’s hands aside, jumped up, and ran for his bike.
He pedaled his bike down the dirt driveway, past the willow trees on either side of the front gate, until he came to the dirt road. He pedaled down the road to where it ended at the base of Elk Mountain. He hid the bike behind a tree and followed a trail for a mile, then into the underbrush until he came to the creek. About a quarter mile down the creek, he came to the cascades. He removed his shoes and most of his clothes except for his underpants, tiptoed carefully across the cascade because it was slippery with moss, sat down, and slid to a pool that was five feet deep, up to his neck. Cold and refreshing. He splashed around the pool for a while and thought that he wanted to be dead. All he had to do was stick his head under the water until he could no longer breathe. Not many people came here, so he supposed it would take them a couple of days to find him floating on his stomach in his underwear.
He climbed out of the pool and lay on his back. Looking high up on the ridge of Elk Mountain, he spied a hawk gliding this way and that in the thermals. He turned his head when he heard a knocking noise. It was a redheaded woodpecker hammering on a dead tree. A bunny crept out from behind a rock and stared at him. He decided that he didn’t want to die, that what he actually wanted was to be as free as all the creatures in the woods.
Later that night after his dad had gone to bed, he told his mom what he thought about up in the woods.
“Son, you may think you want to be free,” she said, mussing his hair. He jumped away. He didn’t like to be touched. “But you’re riding the fences.”
She had this funny way of talking because she grew up on a ranch in Kansas.
“Your daddy’s the same way. Maybe all men are that way. That’s why you need women,” she said, smiling at him and mussing his hair again. “We’re going to tame that wild streak out of you. That’s what I did with your dad, and that’s what I’ll do with you.”
Twenty years later he has only one friend in the world, Tim Newton. They both own shiny black Indian Motorcycles and tool as far down as Dollywood, where they ride the roller coaster and camp out in the Smoky Mountains.
One day Farris wanders in a Walmart without a mask on, and a burly man with a blue vest and ponytail accosts him. Farris pushes Mr. Blue into the shopping carts and steers straight for the auto services section, where he’s accosted by another bluecoat, this one much smaller in stature and wearing glasses. He knocks Four Eyes over onto a display case and notices six other bluecoats converging on him. He decides to hightail it. Before the sliding doors close behind him, he turns to offer his pursuers a digital salute. He speeds out of the parking lot in his shiny Indian and up the highway about ten miles toward home.
His dad died five years ago, and he lives at home with his mom; his sister; her husband, Hank; and their kid. Hank and Sarah work the farm, and Farris helps out when it comes time to pick the apples, but mostly he works as a surveyor at a local engineering firm.
Farris lives in a converted storage shed near the main house. When he pulls up on his cycle all pissed off at Walmart—all he wanted was engine oil for his bike—Tim is sitting at his desk hunched over the computer.
“Look at this.” He points at a comment on Facebook underneath the photo of a fat-faced goateed shock jock:
MASKS ARE A PSYCHOLOGICAL WEAPON TO LIMIT OUR FREEDOM.
WHEN YOU WEAR A MASK YOU ARE DECLARING THAT ALL HUMANS
ARE DANGEROUS, INFECTIOUS, AND THREATS.
YOU ARE NO LONGER IN CHARGE OF YOUR LIFE.
“Isn’t that the truth,” says Farris, looking more carefully at the screen. He doesn’t know about the rest of it, but he agrees with the last sentence of the comment. He wasn’t going to let anyone mess with his life. He tells Tim what happened at Walmart.
Tim pokes him in the shoulder. “Way to go, man,” he says.
Ever since that long-ago fight, Tim’s been totally under his spell. When Farris purchased his Indian bike, Tim zoomed up the driveway a week later with a precise clone. It’s enough to give Farris the jitters. But what choice does he have? Both he and Tim have been antsy the last couple of weeks. Since the pandemic moved into the valley, business has slackened at the engineering firm, and he has little to do other than putter around the farm.
“Hey, man, you know what?” declares Farris. “I’m bored to death. It’s time for a road trip, and I know exactly where.” He points at a post beneath the shock jock’s comment, a photograph of the demonstrations at Lafayette Square.
——
To read the story’s conclusion, which goes in an unexpected direction, as well as the other stories in the collection, pick up a copy of Everyone Worth Knowing.
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