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river rat: Stay at Home Dads
Brock Ellis wasn’t anyone I’d ever had much to do with growing up. Once when we were kids, him fourteen and me eight, he came at me bare chested, whipping a giant black snake over his head like some martial artist swinging a chain six feet long. It turned out he wasn’t headed for me but for one of my brothers who’d just called him a pussy and ran past me into the river to hide. That was the day my brother learned all those rumors about Brock being afraid to swim were not true.
We ran into each other last week, Brock and me. His wife was transferred near me for work and he followed along, looking for work, out of Perry County, Pennsylvania for the first time. He walks around with his head up – a tourist – never having seen anything above four stories, unable to comprehend how everything happened that all of a sudden his big fish life turned him minnow.
“I remember comin’ at you with a snake once.”
“I do, too.” It felt like he was reading my mind, sitting there drinking his first real coffee with all four of our kids playing hopscotch together outside the cafe.
“Your eyes were like pancakes.” He laughed, and for the first time since I’d seen him again, wild teenage Brock Ellis eyes glinted like he’d just as soon pick up a chair and throw it through the plate glass store front as coo to his little girl the way he did right after he said it.
“If I hadn’t been soaked standin’ in the shallows catchin’ crabs you would have seen I pissed myself.” I admitted. “You looked like you were gonna’ kill me.”
“I wanted to kill your brother.” He wiped a stringer of snot from his youngest’s nose. “I pounded him good, though.”
“Some days I wish you had.” Sipping my civilized Americano I added “killed him, that is.”
