It was an accident, he says. “He” being Francis.
It’s the truth, but he doesn’t mean it how it sounds.
He came to school on Tuesday with a big patch of hair missing from his scalp. It wasn’t in a clean or deliberate way like you’d imagine a brave might do when scalping an enemy in post-colonial propaganda, and it wasn’t in the scraggly way of drunken self-grooming. It was just an irregular spot of mostly missing mane.
It didn’t really look all that bad, and most people would have brushed their hair different ways to cover it up. He brushed his straight back the way he always did, making it stand up like tan lines on cleavage. It reminded me in some ways of the bloodstain birthmark Mikhail Gorbachev had in the few pictures of him I’ve seen, but inverted; all the red was in his hair and all the fleshy white was in the spot. Gorbachev didn’t have much hair on his head that I can recall.
What he – he being Francis again – meant by “it was an accident” wasn’t that it was an accident. The actual event was quite avoidable, Francis simply chose to not. What he meant was that the fight leading up to the loss of his hair wasn’t on purpose. He meant that he hadn’t been drinking and so anything he had done was done deliberately and thus by chance, not through incitement. He hadn’t been antagonistic or insulting, but he got into a fight over a misunderstanding, something easily solved by a simple explanation he felt wasn’t worth giving.
“Explanations are sometimes too heavy to bear and then too heavy to lift to your lips,” he sometimes said. Sometimes he was deep.
Sometimes.
What he really meant was that he had gotten into a fight with a drunken Indian, or he could have been dark-skinned Italian, and that he hadn’t meant to. He meant that after being properly beaten and dragged into a parking lot and thrown through a line of still running motorcycles, when the guy asked Francis if he had had enough and Francis had responded with “you haven’t done your worst yet,” he was really just giving an honest assessment.
He hadn’t meant to fight, so when he almost asked for the guy to keep going, forcing Francis to rip a big chunk out of his hair because the alternative was to be pushed, back of his head first, into a spinning motorcycle wheel, the whole exchange wasn’t what he had planned. He believed that since the first link in the chain towards his partial baldness was accidental, anything afterwards was part of the same first incident and thus also accidental. He’d washed his hands of the whole deal while it was still going on.
Francis believed all that. He didn’t believe it that much, though.
Francis was weird like that.
I think the bike was an Indian too.
Alexander Clark is a cross-genre writer of fiction and creative non-fiction living in Central Pennsylvania. He is a student at Penn State studying English, philosophy and art. When he isn’t writing he practices Pai Lum Kung Fu, herds cats, organically urban farms, and blacksmiths.