FIC: I Read on a Hillside Gravestone: The Sweetest Thing You Ever Heard
Boyd Crowder was always kind of around, on Raylan’s periphery.
He remembered at Lee Spade’s campout birthday party in the fifth grade, Boyd and his cousin Johnny threw a garder snake in the tent and laughed when Mikey Pritchard near pissed himself. He remembered two years ago when the whole town heard Boyd spent a night in jail ‘cause he got caught playing mailbox baseball with cherry bombs-don’t ask Raylan how he managed that-out in Corbin.
Raylan saw him around school a lot last year, running through the halls, late to class every other day, and smoking in the bathroom with his brother and cousin. Boyd didn’t play sports, but Johnny was on the baseball team with Raylan, though they weren’t too friendly, and Boyd would come and watch the games.
He never looked like he was having a good time, though. For all the rule-breaking he did, his smile, toothy and almost maniacal though it was, never quite reached his eyes.
Now Boyd was looking at him from across the room on the first day of Marchese’s third period study hall for seniors and Raylan wasn’t sure why. He met Boyd’s eyes and quirked an eyebrow questioningly.
The corner’s of Boyd’s mouth turned up, like he was about to smile, but didn’t want to yet. He rolled his eyes and tilted his head slightly to the left and Raylan’s gaze followed. He saw Spider Sullivan, Quarterback prodigy, and Lefty Jones, his favorite receiver, with their heads bent over a piece of lined paper, probably some play for Friday’s game.
When Raylan looked back to Boyd, wondering what the hell the big deal was, the boy had his thumb and forefinger curled together to make an “o” under his desk and was pushing and pulling his other index finger in and out of that little hole in a decidedly rhythmic motion. Boyd raised his eyebrows, as if silently saying, “Yep, they’re fucking.”
Raylan had to cough to cover an explosion of laughter. He had tears in his eyes when he came up for air and looked back again at Boyd. That was the first time he received a real and true smile from Boyd Crowder. It was a beautiful thing.
Raylan Givens was a goddamn straight shooter, Boyd knew that, had always known it. But the year they turned senior in high school, he felt it.
Before they shared that joke about Spider and Lefty, Boyd kept finding his eye caught by Raylan. The casual way in which he seemed to approach the world was… interesting. Like the way he smiled at Cherie Miller two rows behind him, turning his shoulder and pulling his arms across the back of his chair, or the way he watched the play from the dugout during the baseball games, hunched over, elbows on his knees, laughing with the other players, but all like nothing was really touching him.
Raylan had an easy smile and it always looked the same, but if you stared real hard, like Boyd kept being unable to stop himself from doing, you could tell if he was smiling ‘cause he was happy or if he was just thinking about how he’s smarter than you.
In school, it was almost always the latter. Boyd thought the only person he hadn’t seen Raylan smile at like they were dumb as shit was himself, because Raylan hadn’t smiled at him at all. Not since they were on the same team in a schoolyard game of baseball when Raylan was on third in the ninth-inning and Boyd threw out a bunt, letting himself run to first and Raylan go home for the game winning point.
Boyd was determined to see that smile again, so he caught Raylan’s eye and made his little joke. He couldn’t have been more pleased with the result.
A few weeks later, Raylan happened to be at a party Boyd was crashing. It was one of those backwoods keggers that no one’s really sure who started but there was somehow plenty of beer and ‘shine for everyone.
Boyd first spotted Raylan standing between the spread legs of a girl who was sitting on the rickety table that held plastic cups for the beer and a bunch of empty jars of ‘shine. The girl was Becky Woods, a pretty blonde who liked to think she was better than the town she was reared in.
“When we graduate,” she said with typical fervor, “I’m gonna take me a bus straight to Hollywood, California. I’m gon’ be an actress and go to fancy places and meet interesting people. I’m gon’ make a million dollars and buy me a house on the beach.”
Boyd poured himself a beer and caught Raylan by the corner of his eye as he was making more “hmm”ing and “huh”ing noises to indicate he was listening to her prattle. Raylan turned his head and they shared a smile. Boyd knew that if he turned around as he was walking away, he’d see Raylan’s face buried in that girl’s neck and her hand winding half-way up his shirt.
A little while later, Boyd saw Raylan returning for the area most people were taking themselves to piss. He sidled himself over towards Raylan’s path and the other boy stopped when he saw him. Boyd passed Raylan the jar of ‘shine he’d been partaking of and they stood in silence for just a moment.
“You have fun with that girl, Givens?” Boyd asked.
Raylan shrugged. “As much fun as can be expected. She’s one of those who won’t put out unless she’s in a bed. I didn’t think I’d get even as far as I did tonight.”
“She seems to have a lot to say about the future. What with her dreams of stardom and all that.” Boyd wasn’t really sure where he was going with this; he just wanted to keep on talking to Raylan. He thought maybe the buzz was hitting his mouth a little harder than usual, most of the time he could hold back from talking people’s ears off when he was drinking.
Raylan raised his eyebrows, glancing over and passing the ‘shine back. “You don’t have any aspirations about getting out of Harlan, Crowder?”
Boyd just shrugged, “Harlan’s home, Raylan,” electing to use the boy’s given name to his face for the first time since they were children. If Raylan was surprised by it, his face wasn’t saying so. “I can’t imagine any place bein’ any better or worse.”
Raylan looked at him for a long moment and then smiled, but it was that other smile, the one Boyd didn’t want to see.
“I can,” was all he said. It was an amenable response, Raylan wasn’t looking to fight over the subject, but Boyd knew Raylan thought he was dumber than a pile of bricks for thinking any place wouldn’t be better than Harlan.
And maybe he was, but Boyd didn’t like Raylan thinking that. In fact, it occurred to him that he hated the idea that Raylan would have less than glowing opinions of his mental capacity. So he turned on his heel and stalked away, fighting a red flush of embarrassment.
When Johnny saw him walking towards the trucks in such a temper, Boyd just said he was hot from the fire and not feeling well. Johnny let him take the keys to his truck, saying he’d probably sleep off the ‘shine by the fire anyway, so it was fine if Boyd wanted to go home. But when Boyd left, he really just drove around until dawn wondering why the hell he was so upset.
On the day of the Bennett baseball game, Raylan nodded to Boyd from the dugout. He was sitting by himself in the first row of the bleachers, wearing a black shirt with the sleeves cut off and a pair of ripped and faded blue jeans. They had an uneasy kind of friendship now, one where they would acknowledge each other’s existence across distances and share private smiles in the classroom.
One time, after the party where Boyd had walked away from him, Raylan had come upon Boyd putting out a cigarette in the sink of the second floor boys’ bathroom. Boyd had looked up and given him one of those smiles, as if nothing had ever happened.
“Raylan,” he’d said, like his first name was an acceptable substitute for hello.
“Boyd,” Raylan had returned, though he only remembered calling him Crowder up until that very moment. He decided he liked the way the name fell off his lips as Boyd swept out of the room, winking over his shoulder.
When Dickie Bennett’s third pitch hit Raylan in the temple, hard enough to crack the hitter’s cap, there was a roaring in Raylan’s ears and then a deafening silence. Everything seemed to be tilted and spinning, but he saw Dickie’s cleat coming for his face, and he was able to stop it from taking out his eye.
He grabbed Dickie by the ankle and pulled hard. The other boy came crashing down on his back, and somehow the bat was in Raylan’s hands. He went for his third hit. He didn’t hear the aluminum shattering bone because Boyd was calling his name.
A second later the bat was on the ground, Dickie Bennett was screaming and Boyd had Raylan’s arms pinned behind his back. Boyd dragged him away and faceless people swarmed over the injured boy. Only Boyd was there to take the bloody cap off Raylan’s head and examine him with light fingers and dark, concerned eyes.
The only thing Raylan could hear was Boyd saying his name. He said some other things, fast things, worried things, but Raylan couldn’t make it out. His head felt funny and his limbs were numb. He tried to look around but the light was starting to hurt his eyes.
“Raylan,” Boyd said again, urgently.
“Boyd,” Raylan said and smiled. Boy, did he like saying Boyd’s name.
He thought it was Boyd’s hands that caught him when he fell backward and he thought he heard Boyd yelling for help. Soon there were more people, talking in a cloud of muffled chatter, saying things to him he didn’t understand.
“Boyd,” he said again, and a hand closed over his fingers. They both held on tight until the uniforms rolled away the stretcher.
Boyd didn’t come to see him in the hospital, but Raylan was only there for a day anyway. When they passed each other in the halls at school afterward, there was only a nod and that smile to suggest that there was anything at all between them.
Boyd had run a gamut of emotions in the twenty short minutes it had taken from that fucking Bennett boy throwing his third pitch to the paramedics rolling Raylan away on that stretcher. He didn’t think he had been so shaken, so terrified, or so confused in all his eighteen years.
He knew that Raylan and Dickie had exchanged some tense words before the game; the bleachers had been full of chatter about it. Boyd didn’t put any stock in back country family feuds, but he knew Raylan wasn’t the kind of person to take an insult lightly and he thought there would be some kind of fisticuffs during the seventh-inning stretch or immediately after the game. He had decided to stick around to see it.
A hard ball to the head in the middle of the first was not what Boyd had been expecting.
He also wasn’t expecting Raylan to get up so fast. Boyd was barely out of his seat when Raylan’s hand shot out and pulled Bennett down hard.
Raylan’s expression was bone-chilling, terrifyingly remote and it shook Boyd to the core. It was as though all the reason and sense had been knocked out of him when that fastball hit his head. He moved with an ease that seemed to require no thought, as if he weren’t aware at all of what he was doing.
Boyd realized only too late what the force that Raylan was pulling back was going to do to that boy’s knee and he found himself running across the field, hollering Raylan’s name.
He got there before Raylan could put the bat to Dickie’s head for another swing. He only managed to pull Raylan a few yards away, but he got him kneeling on the dirt while most of the crowd’s attention was fixed on Bennett.
It was scary seeing Raylan so out of sorts-it wasn’t surprising seeing as he’d so recently taken that blow to the head-but the smile on his face when he said Boyd’s name, his eyes dazed and unfocused, was almost as terrifying as his cold rage. Raylan said, “Boyd,” like it was the sweetest thing he could think of and Boyd knew he couldn’t leave after that.
Later, when Boyd finally went home in the wake of the paramedics and the police, his Daddy mentioned the fight at the game. He made it sound like the talk was just idle gossip, sharing the news of the town, but Boyd knew better.
“I heard you was the one to catch him when he fell,” Bo said in regards to Raylan, cutting into his second helping of pork chop at the dinner table while Boyd was picking at the half-eaten remains of his. "I didn't know you was friends with the Givens boy, Boyd. His daddy's a bad apple. He can't have fallen far, no matter how shiny he looks.”
Boyd looked up into the hard stare of his father and set down his fork before he spoke. It was the truth to anyone’s ears but his own, and maybe Raylan’s. “We ain’t friends, Daddy. I just happened to be there. It was nothin’, nothin’ at all.”
Boyd didn’t go visit Raylan in the hospital, though Johnny did with the rest of the team. Word ‘round town was that his concussion wasn’t as bad as it could have been. “Givens always have hard heads,” he’d heard Raylan’s Aunt Helen say with not as much humor as you’d think, but Boyd had to suppress a smile anyway.
And that made him wonder. He barely knew Raylan Givens, not any more than you can know someone you’ve only said a handful of words to since grade school, but somehow he was never far out of Boyd’s sight or mind. Looking at or thinking about Raylan made him think about how things were before Mama passed, but he didn’t understand the connection. It was strange.
Frightened by a confusion he so rarely found within himself, Boyd didn’t speak to Raylan again until they wound up on the same crew together at the mine. But that didn’t stop him from smiling when they passed each other in the hallways.
Chapter 2 here.
This entry was originally posted at http://norgbelulah.dreamwidth.org.
Comment at Dreamwidth.
He remembered at Lee Spade’s campout birthday party in the fifth grade, Boyd and his cousin Johnny threw a garder snake in the tent and laughed when Mikey Pritchard near pissed himself. He remembered two years ago when the whole town heard Boyd spent a night in jail ‘cause he got caught playing mailbox baseball with cherry bombs-don’t ask Raylan how he managed that-out in Corbin.
Raylan saw him around school a lot last year, running through the halls, late to class every other day, and smoking in the bathroom with his brother and cousin. Boyd didn’t play sports, but Johnny was on the baseball team with Raylan, though they weren’t too friendly, and Boyd would come and watch the games.
He never looked like he was having a good time, though. For all the rule-breaking he did, his smile, toothy and almost maniacal though it was, never quite reached his eyes.
Now Boyd was looking at him from across the room on the first day of Marchese’s third period study hall for seniors and Raylan wasn’t sure why. He met Boyd’s eyes and quirked an eyebrow questioningly.
The corner’s of Boyd’s mouth turned up, like he was about to smile, but didn’t want to yet. He rolled his eyes and tilted his head slightly to the left and Raylan’s gaze followed. He saw Spider Sullivan, Quarterback prodigy, and Lefty Jones, his favorite receiver, with their heads bent over a piece of lined paper, probably some play for Friday’s game.
When Raylan looked back to Boyd, wondering what the hell the big deal was, the boy had his thumb and forefinger curled together to make an “o” under his desk and was pushing and pulling his other index finger in and out of that little hole in a decidedly rhythmic motion. Boyd raised his eyebrows, as if silently saying, “Yep, they’re fucking.”
Raylan had to cough to cover an explosion of laughter. He had tears in his eyes when he came up for air and looked back again at Boyd. That was the first time he received a real and true smile from Boyd Crowder. It was a beautiful thing.
Raylan Givens was a goddamn straight shooter, Boyd knew that, had always known it. But the year they turned senior in high school, he felt it.
Before they shared that joke about Spider and Lefty, Boyd kept finding his eye caught by Raylan. The casual way in which he seemed to approach the world was… interesting. Like the way he smiled at Cherie Miller two rows behind him, turning his shoulder and pulling his arms across the back of his chair, or the way he watched the play from the dugout during the baseball games, hunched over, elbows on his knees, laughing with the other players, but all like nothing was really touching him.
Raylan had an easy smile and it always looked the same, but if you stared real hard, like Boyd kept being unable to stop himself from doing, you could tell if he was smiling ‘cause he was happy or if he was just thinking about how he’s smarter than you.
In school, it was almost always the latter. Boyd thought the only person he hadn’t seen Raylan smile at like they were dumb as shit was himself, because Raylan hadn’t smiled at him at all. Not since they were on the same team in a schoolyard game of baseball when Raylan was on third in the ninth-inning and Boyd threw out a bunt, letting himself run to first and Raylan go home for the game winning point.
Boyd was determined to see that smile again, so he caught Raylan’s eye and made his little joke. He couldn’t have been more pleased with the result.
A few weeks later, Raylan happened to be at a party Boyd was crashing. It was one of those backwoods keggers that no one’s really sure who started but there was somehow plenty of beer and ‘shine for everyone.
Boyd first spotted Raylan standing between the spread legs of a girl who was sitting on the rickety table that held plastic cups for the beer and a bunch of empty jars of ‘shine. The girl was Becky Woods, a pretty blonde who liked to think she was better than the town she was reared in.
“When we graduate,” she said with typical fervor, “I’m gonna take me a bus straight to Hollywood, California. I’m gon’ be an actress and go to fancy places and meet interesting people. I’m gon’ make a million dollars and buy me a house on the beach.”
Boyd poured himself a beer and caught Raylan by the corner of his eye as he was making more “hmm”ing and “huh”ing noises to indicate he was listening to her prattle. Raylan turned his head and they shared a smile. Boyd knew that if he turned around as he was walking away, he’d see Raylan’s face buried in that girl’s neck and her hand winding half-way up his shirt.
A little while later, Boyd saw Raylan returning for the area most people were taking themselves to piss. He sidled himself over towards Raylan’s path and the other boy stopped when he saw him. Boyd passed Raylan the jar of ‘shine he’d been partaking of and they stood in silence for just a moment.
“You have fun with that girl, Givens?” Boyd asked.
Raylan shrugged. “As much fun as can be expected. She’s one of those who won’t put out unless she’s in a bed. I didn’t think I’d get even as far as I did tonight.”
“She seems to have a lot to say about the future. What with her dreams of stardom and all that.” Boyd wasn’t really sure where he was going with this; he just wanted to keep on talking to Raylan. He thought maybe the buzz was hitting his mouth a little harder than usual, most of the time he could hold back from talking people’s ears off when he was drinking.
Raylan raised his eyebrows, glancing over and passing the ‘shine back. “You don’t have any aspirations about getting out of Harlan, Crowder?”
Boyd just shrugged, “Harlan’s home, Raylan,” electing to use the boy’s given name to his face for the first time since they were children. If Raylan was surprised by it, his face wasn’t saying so. “I can’t imagine any place bein’ any better or worse.”
Raylan looked at him for a long moment and then smiled, but it was that other smile, the one Boyd didn’t want to see.
“I can,” was all he said. It was an amenable response, Raylan wasn’t looking to fight over the subject, but Boyd knew Raylan thought he was dumber than a pile of bricks for thinking any place wouldn’t be better than Harlan.
And maybe he was, but Boyd didn’t like Raylan thinking that. In fact, it occurred to him that he hated the idea that Raylan would have less than glowing opinions of his mental capacity. So he turned on his heel and stalked away, fighting a red flush of embarrassment.
When Johnny saw him walking towards the trucks in such a temper, Boyd just said he was hot from the fire and not feeling well. Johnny let him take the keys to his truck, saying he’d probably sleep off the ‘shine by the fire anyway, so it was fine if Boyd wanted to go home. But when Boyd left, he really just drove around until dawn wondering why the hell he was so upset.
On the day of the Bennett baseball game, Raylan nodded to Boyd from the dugout. He was sitting by himself in the first row of the bleachers, wearing a black shirt with the sleeves cut off and a pair of ripped and faded blue jeans. They had an uneasy kind of friendship now, one where they would acknowledge each other’s existence across distances and share private smiles in the classroom.
One time, after the party where Boyd had walked away from him, Raylan had come upon Boyd putting out a cigarette in the sink of the second floor boys’ bathroom. Boyd had looked up and given him one of those smiles, as if nothing had ever happened.
“Raylan,” he’d said, like his first name was an acceptable substitute for hello.
“Boyd,” Raylan had returned, though he only remembered calling him Crowder up until that very moment. He decided he liked the way the name fell off his lips as Boyd swept out of the room, winking over his shoulder.
When Dickie Bennett’s third pitch hit Raylan in the temple, hard enough to crack the hitter’s cap, there was a roaring in Raylan’s ears and then a deafening silence. Everything seemed to be tilted and spinning, but he saw Dickie’s cleat coming for his face, and he was able to stop it from taking out his eye.
He grabbed Dickie by the ankle and pulled hard. The other boy came crashing down on his back, and somehow the bat was in Raylan’s hands. He went for his third hit. He didn’t hear the aluminum shattering bone because Boyd was calling his name.
A second later the bat was on the ground, Dickie Bennett was screaming and Boyd had Raylan’s arms pinned behind his back. Boyd dragged him away and faceless people swarmed over the injured boy. Only Boyd was there to take the bloody cap off Raylan’s head and examine him with light fingers and dark, concerned eyes.
The only thing Raylan could hear was Boyd saying his name. He said some other things, fast things, worried things, but Raylan couldn’t make it out. His head felt funny and his limbs were numb. He tried to look around but the light was starting to hurt his eyes.
“Raylan,” Boyd said again, urgently.
“Boyd,” Raylan said and smiled. Boy, did he like saying Boyd’s name.
He thought it was Boyd’s hands that caught him when he fell backward and he thought he heard Boyd yelling for help. Soon there were more people, talking in a cloud of muffled chatter, saying things to him he didn’t understand.
“Boyd,” he said again, and a hand closed over his fingers. They both held on tight until the uniforms rolled away the stretcher.
Boyd didn’t come to see him in the hospital, but Raylan was only there for a day anyway. When they passed each other in the halls at school afterward, there was only a nod and that smile to suggest that there was anything at all between them.
Boyd had run a gamut of emotions in the twenty short minutes it had taken from that fucking Bennett boy throwing his third pitch to the paramedics rolling Raylan away on that stretcher. He didn’t think he had been so shaken, so terrified, or so confused in all his eighteen years.
He knew that Raylan and Dickie had exchanged some tense words before the game; the bleachers had been full of chatter about it. Boyd didn’t put any stock in back country family feuds, but he knew Raylan wasn’t the kind of person to take an insult lightly and he thought there would be some kind of fisticuffs during the seventh-inning stretch or immediately after the game. He had decided to stick around to see it.
A hard ball to the head in the middle of the first was not what Boyd had been expecting.
He also wasn’t expecting Raylan to get up so fast. Boyd was barely out of his seat when Raylan’s hand shot out and pulled Bennett down hard.
Raylan’s expression was bone-chilling, terrifyingly remote and it shook Boyd to the core. It was as though all the reason and sense had been knocked out of him when that fastball hit his head. He moved with an ease that seemed to require no thought, as if he weren’t aware at all of what he was doing.
Boyd realized only too late what the force that Raylan was pulling back was going to do to that boy’s knee and he found himself running across the field, hollering Raylan’s name.
He got there before Raylan could put the bat to Dickie’s head for another swing. He only managed to pull Raylan a few yards away, but he got him kneeling on the dirt while most of the crowd’s attention was fixed on Bennett.
It was scary seeing Raylan so out of sorts-it wasn’t surprising seeing as he’d so recently taken that blow to the head-but the smile on his face when he said Boyd’s name, his eyes dazed and unfocused, was almost as terrifying as his cold rage. Raylan said, “Boyd,” like it was the sweetest thing he could think of and Boyd knew he couldn’t leave after that.
Later, when Boyd finally went home in the wake of the paramedics and the police, his Daddy mentioned the fight at the game. He made it sound like the talk was just idle gossip, sharing the news of the town, but Boyd knew better.
“I heard you was the one to catch him when he fell,” Bo said in regards to Raylan, cutting into his second helping of pork chop at the dinner table while Boyd was picking at the half-eaten remains of his. "I didn't know you was friends with the Givens boy, Boyd. His daddy's a bad apple. He can't have fallen far, no matter how shiny he looks.”
Boyd looked up into the hard stare of his father and set down his fork before he spoke. It was the truth to anyone’s ears but his own, and maybe Raylan’s. “We ain’t friends, Daddy. I just happened to be there. It was nothin’, nothin’ at all.”
Boyd didn’t go visit Raylan in the hospital, though Johnny did with the rest of the team. Word ‘round town was that his concussion wasn’t as bad as it could have been. “Givens always have hard heads,” he’d heard Raylan’s Aunt Helen say with not as much humor as you’d think, but Boyd had to suppress a smile anyway.
And that made him wonder. He barely knew Raylan Givens, not any more than you can know someone you’ve only said a handful of words to since grade school, but somehow he was never far out of Boyd’s sight or mind. Looking at or thinking about Raylan made him think about how things were before Mama passed, but he didn’t understand the connection. It was strange.
Frightened by a confusion he so rarely found within himself, Boyd didn’t speak to Raylan again until they wound up on the same crew together at the mine. But that didn’t stop him from smiling when they passed each other in the hallways.
Chapter 2 here.
This entry was originally posted at http://norgbelulah.dreamwidth.org.
Comment at Dreamwidth.