Confess it

Three nights ago I woke up in a cold sweat, yanking myself out of a bad dream. About what I don't even remember, but when I came back from the bathroom, I saw that I'd sweat right through the sheets, right underneath where my head and shoulders lay. I eased back onto the cold damp sheets, too exhausted to care, and gazed vacantly at the ceiling.

If unexpurgated sins be one cause of nightmares, then perhaps I had one burdening me.

I thought back to my trip to my parents' house in Texas. On the first day of that stay, while my parents were still at work, I'd decided to go out for a coffee. They had only one extra house key, for the garage side door. Stepping out from the garage and into the backyard, I remember thinking about all that had happened in that backyard. The times I played baseball with my older brother and how much strength it took to smack a tennis ball over the fence. The time we buried my first pet, a blue-grey parakeet, in front of the tall bushes. And the time that I got into my only fight.

It was with a neighbor kid. I was maybe seven. He was younger, maybe five or six. No malice, no disagreement. As best as I can remember, we'd just decided to reenact some wrestling we'd seen on TV. Hell, we even had a referee, an older neighbor kid -- I'll peg him at twelve or thirteen.

Anyway, we -- the older kid and I -- had gotten some rope, wrapped it around the two locks on the gates leading out of the backyard, pulled on the free ends to tighten the knots. We were making a cage.

It was summertime. My parents weren't around. The air was humid, the sun hazy, yellow, indifferent.

And at some point, the younger kid and I just started going at it. Pummeling each other with pre-adolescent fists. There were no rules, and the only objective was to land hits with force, secondarily to make them look good.

Fair? No, it wasn't. Being older and bigger, I easily overpowered him.

But what I remember most was the feeling of whaling on this younger kid, blow after blow. And the feel of the grass in summertime -- when you were in it and hot, the way it pricked against your skin, stuck to you and made you itch. I remember being on top of this kid and hitting him senseless.

Was there blood? It's funny. I don't remember that part.

The kid somehow wriggled free and ran to one of the gates that we'd done up in rope. He was crying, I mean wailing like an animal, and grabbing furiously at every piece of rope that wasn't knotted. I remember watching him.

Eventually the older kid and I helped out, pulled the rope free. The kid got out and he was gone. The names have been lost to me. Maybe I never knew their names.

And that was it, the last time I ever fought in anything but jest. You could argue that we were, in fact, fighting in jest. But the memory doesn't feel that way. And sin, like life itself, seems nine-tenths what you make of it. So said Hamlet: "For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."