Long Islanders

2 - The Painting

Jimmy was bored.

There was no one at home. His parents were at work; Ron and his sisters Jane and Lizzy were at their friends' houses. He was alone, and he was bored.

It was too hot to be outside, so Jimmy wandered throughout the house, looking for something to do. A book lay on the coffee table and he half-heartedly picked it up, attempted to read the first couple paragraphs in the opening chapter but then gave up when the words started to blur together as they always did. He tossed the book back onto the table, grimacing at the large scrape across the table's surface, and stomped over to the double glass doors leading out to the low deck.

The old fort he and Tim had built back in elementary school still stood, although it looked very shoddy, leaning haphazardly in the corner of the yard. That was probably due to Jimmy taking a break from fort building, going inside, getting a snack, and turning on the television.

Tim had been furious when he had realized that Jimmy's "break" wasn't simply getting water. He had stormed out of the backyard and the fort had never been completed.

Well, I'm definitely not finishing that now, Jimmy thought, turning away from the doors. It's too hot.

He saw the coffee table again, with the scrape across the wood grain. Even several years later, he could still hear the lecture from his father pounding in his ears.

While sitting by the coffee table, pulling out their assignments from their backpacks, Ron glanced up at Jimmy as the younger brother took out his new pocket knife, admiring the blade as a break from his math homework, giving his eyes a break from the numbers that switched their order before his eyes. Both boys were still in cub scouts. "I don't understand why you like that old knife so much," Ron commented. "It's just a toy."

Irritated, Jimmy looked up. "It's not a toy," he snapped. Ordinarily, he wouldn't have been annoyed but his math homework was getting hard for him to do. "It's a tool, a knife. And it's cool."

Skeptical, Ron glanced down at his notebook. "It's a toy, Jimmy."

The argument escalated as the two brothers argued over whether or not pocketknives were cool. And then it came to blows.

Ron and Jimmy wrestled, both knowing punches were off limits. But they were able to struggle, and struggle they did.

As their father entered the room, looking to separate the two boys, Ron grabbed Jimmy by the collar from across the table and pulled him down onto the coffee table face first. Before Jimmy could react, Ron was dragging him across the table.

Jimmy's belt buckle scraped against the coffee table, the sound grating on his ears as he fell to the ground, breaking out of Ron's grip. Their father rushed over, grabbing Ron's shoulder with one hand and hauling Jimmy up with the other.

"Look what you did!" he exclaimed, looking down at the scratch cutting across the grain of the table. "What were you two fighting about, anyway?"

He didn't seem impressed by their explanation, and the lecture he gave them was lengthy.

Passing by the coffee table, Jimmy continued to walk around, eventually finding himself in the basement. A moment of wandering around the basement brought him to the vice where he had made Q-tip darts the week before.

Wait a minute....

Jimmy looked back at the vice. He still had some darts left over from when he had made some, inserting needles into the Q-tip base and wrapped thread around it. Then he had told Nathaniel about it and he had come down into the basement to make some himself.