The day the crazy kid brought a knife into our yard

Sometimes people have the luck to be in just the right frame of mind when a crisis arises.  OK, bad luck brings the crisis, but the right frame of mind can keep a disaster from happening, from becoming more than a momentary disturbance on a soft summer day.

Our Atlanta neighborhood was a quiet one most of the time, and in those days, the early sixties, parents could send kids outside to play without much of a second thought.  I was in about the sixth or seventh grade, the only boy in a family of four, and the oldest.  On this day, my sisters and I were out under the oaks in front of the house, just passing the time with who-knows-what kind of aimless activity.  Down the street, we could see one of the neighbor boys coming our way with more purpose in his bearing than he usually showed.

We actually didn’t see this boy out all that much.  He had some sort of mental illness that made him behave oddly, setting fires in the storm sewers and acting erratically from time to time.  Mostly his parents kept him at home, but I guess they felt sorry for him sometimes, or just needed a rest from him.  Either way, they let him out to roam the neighborhood once in a while, and it was usually a noteworthy occurrence.

I remember one time, during a neighborhood rock fight, he ran across 75 feet of open ground carrying a huge rock in his hands.  He didn’t dodge the rocks we threw at him; if they hit him, they hit him; he didn’t even flinch.  As he got closer, I hunkered down in the ditch, hoping he wouldn’t see me.  Hunkering down turned out to be a big mistake.  He found me in the ditch and dropped the rock on my head.  That’s the kind of thing this kid would do.

That might explain why I was not that glad to see that kid headed toward us, and we could see he was focused on us from all the way down the street.  What we didn’t see until too late was that he was carrying a big hunting knife.

I didn’t like the situation very much.  My sisters didn’t seem to know what was happening, and it was too late for me to herd them inside.  Running away would just bring out his predatory instincts, I thought.  I found myself meeting him in the yard, telling him not to come any closer.

If only that had worked.  As it turned out, he kept on coming, but I was lucky enough to get a strong grip on the arm with the knife.  That started what I recall as a kind of slow-motion, extremely careful combat.  He wasn’t going to drop the knife and leave, and I couldn’t very well release my grasp on his arm, but neither of us did anything rash.  I didn’t want to provoke him, and on some level, he didn’t really want to hurt me.

By this time my mother had come out, and she and my sisters were all sort of galvanized, watching what was going on.  It would have seemed like some kind of tableau to anyone passing by.  For all the stasis involved, I still remember it as a singularly charged episode–an odd contrast between potential disaster and nothing much going on, really.

I finally got the knife away from him, and oddly, started getting scared after the danger had passed.  The fear came out as anger, though, and I yelled at him for quite a while and made him go home.  I always thought about how differently things could have turned out if anything different had happened around us as we struggled.  The knife had one of those fake antler handles common on that type of thing.  I remember picturing how blood would have looked running down that gnarled, white-and-brown handle.

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