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Head lice meant you’d have to have all your hair shaved off, and it meant you were the lowest of the low, because decent people didn’t get lice.
    Besides, Roanie always looked dirty, and his jeans were too long one week and too short the next. He was big for his age but wiry-thin, with huge gray eyes looking out of a tight face. His brown-black hair was shaved down to nubs except for a greasy patch at the top of his forehead. His crooked tooth gave him a sinister expression when he opened his mouth. I wanted him to talk right and have his tooth fixed, so he’d be respectable.
    Evan, who was in the same class with him, told us Roanie stories at supper.
    “He smells like that old garbage hole in the Hollow,” Evan would say, “and Miss Clark makes him sit off by himselfsometimes. He chews his fingernails right down to the pink parts. Man, his lunch bag is so greasy, Mama could fry chicken on it.”
    Somebody was always messing with Roanie; he was like a scab the other boys couldn’t stop picking.
White trash. Pig shit. Smells like a toilet
. He’d fight anything, anybody—older, taller, or heavier, all comers—and about half the time he got the living daylights beat out of him. It wasn’t unusual to see Principal Rafferty dragging Roanie down the hall to have the nurse stitch up or ice down some part of his face.
    His fury and isolation and status as a worthless outcast fascinated me because I was his opposite—the pampered darling of a prosperous clan. I had a vast number of kinfolk who really were kin, not just names but a daily part of my life. At school I couldn’t spit gum without hitting someone related to me.
    But Roanie and I had one thing in common: my foibles, too, were no secret. If I got into trouble for talking in class, or traded my lunch money for another kid’s forbidden pack of Twinkies, or was caught scribbling knock-knock jokes on the wall of the girls’ bathroom, the trespass traveled the family grapevine faster than a monkey on pep pills.
    I couldn’t imagine someone who broadcast his notoriety without benefit of three dozen cousins to transmit for him.
That
was power. At the same time, I felt sorrier for Roanie Sullivan than I’d ever felt for another human being in my life.
    I knew I could count on Grandpa Joseph to have respect for an underdog.
    Grandpa never bragged about how much money he’d made or how many Japanese soldiers he’d killed during World War II; he wouldn’t talk about the war at all. He wouldn’t even watch John Wayne war movies on TV.
    One time he took me with him to eat Saturday breakfast at the Dunderry Diner, and I sat in the center of arump-sprung vinyl booth, surrounded by him and his cronies, and somebody brought up the war in Vietnam, and the other old men started talking big—wipe out the Commie gooks, drop the bomb on ’em and fry their little godless, slanty-eyed behinds, that kind of stuff. Josh had just come home from Vietnam, so I guess they expected Grandpa to agree with them.
    “Shut up,” Grandpa said suddenly. “Those Vietcong are damn sure mean, but they fight for what they believe in and they die for it, and I’ve got more respect for ’em than I have for any of you old loud-mouthed bastards.” And he got up furiously and took me by one hand, and we went home.
    “Distance makes killin’ sound too clean and easy,” Grandpa said. I guess he’d never forgotten about killing Japanese soldiers during the war. “You need to look a man in the eye,” he told me, “and see his fear, and watch him bleed, and watch him die. There’s a balance to that. Accepting responsibility. You’ll know what it means to take another person’s life.”
    So I knew you had to respect the people you fought, and be grateful you’d come out on top, and just hope you were as lucky the next time.
    I figured that was how Roanie thought of us.
    He didn’t let people catch him standing beside the road at the Hollow. I guess he knew how he looked, waiting for the