This next one is a little like that.
It's called Bleeder.
A bleeder's a hemophiliac.
It's sort of about--
Well I was once a counselor for a couple of years
at a crippled children's camp in Pennsylvania.
I was about 15.
The camp was I worked about 15.
And there was a kid there with hemophilia.
And this sort of distorts that.
Bleeder.
By now I bet he's dead which suits me fine.
But 25 years ago when we were both 15
and he was camper and I counselor
in a straightlaced Pennsylvania summer
camp for crippled and retarded kids,
I'd watch him sit all day by himself on a hill.
No trees or sharp stones, he wasn't safe to be around.
The slightest bruise and all his blood would simply drain away.
It drove us crazy, first, to protect him,
then to see it happen.
I would hang around him, picturing a knife
or pointed stick wondering how small a cut you'd have to make,
then see the expectant face of another boy watching me.
And we each knew how much the other
would like to see him bleed.
He made us want to hurt him so much we hurt ourselves instead,
sliced fingers in craft class, busted noses in baseball,
then joined at last into mass wrestling
matches beneath his hill, a tangle of crutches and braces,
hammering at each other to keep from harming him.
I'd look up from slamming a kid in the gut
and see him watching with the empty blue eyes of children
in sentimental paintings, and hope to see him frown or grin,
but there was nothing, as if he had already died.
Then, after a week, they sent him home.
Too much responsibility, the director said.
Hell, I bet the kid had skin like leather.
Even so, I'd lie in bed at night and think
of busting into his room with a sharp stick,
lash and break the space around his rose-petal flesh,
while campers in bunks around me tossed
and dreamt of poking and bashing the bleeder
until he was left as flat as a punctured water balloon, which
is why the director sent him home.
For what is virtue but the lack of strong temptation.
Better to leave us with our lie of being good.
Did he know this?
Sitting on his private hill, watching us smash each other
with crutches and canes.
Was this his pleasure, to make us cringe beneath our wish
to do him damage?
But then who cared?
We were the living children he the ghost
and what he gave us was a sense of being bad together.
He took us from our private spite
and offered our bullying a common cause,
which is why we missed him, even though we wished him harm.
When he left, we lost our shared meanness and each of us
was left to snarl his way into a separate future,
eager to discover some new loser to link us and frailty again.