Waiting for Robert Nix by Héctor Hernández

The discovery of skeletal remains in the woods near the Quitipea River has brought back memories of Robert Nix. I knew him as a kid and thought he was just weird at first—we all did, even the teachers. It was only later that I—and I alone—discovered he was actually insane; I just didn’t know the depth of that insanity, not back then, anyway. I know now.

There were several incidents that led you to believe Robert was different. This was 30 years ago, so I’ve forgotten most of those incidents, but there is one that stands out. It happened in fifth grade during math class. I was working on my study sheet, struggling to figure out if 3/8 was bigger than 3/4 or the other way around, when I heard Mr. Casey say, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Mr. Casey started teaching straight out of college, and he was in his forties when he arrived at Parnell Elementary. He had a handsome, chiseled face and perfect posture, and he always wore a blue blazer with button-down shirt and necktie. A few other teachers also wore the same attire, but Mr. Casey was the only one to keep his blazer on throughout the whole day.

I think he did it because he wanted to set himself apart from the other teachers. He was hoping to be principal and what better way to show that you were the best qualified candidate than to dress the part. It didn’t work. Ms. Thompson became our principal.

Anyway, to hear Mr. Casey use a four letter word—even one as mild as “hell”—was a shock. It got the attention of the whole class. We all turned to see him standing with his hands on his hips, looking down at Robert Nix.

Robert was small for his age. He sat swallowed up by his desk. He held a pencil in his right hand, and the underside of his left arm was face up. I could see angry red scratches on it. While the rest of us had been diligently working on our study sheets, Robert had been diligently working on the underside of his delicate, slender arm. He had scratched the letters “F,” “U,” “K,” “U” on its pasty flesh.

Mr. Casey had had enough. “Get out of your seat. You’re going to see Ms. Thompson.”

Robert didn’t budge.

You could feel the whole class hold its breath.

“I said, ‘Get out of your seat.’”

Robert doubled down. He sat rock solid.

Mr. Casey shook his head and let out an exasperated little sigh. “I don’t have time for this nonsense.” He bent down and grabbed Robert by the upper arm, and just as he was about to yank him out of his seat, Robert swung his hand and caught Mr. Casey across the face. He may have intended only to slap Mr. Casey, so it was possible that what happened was just an accident—it was hard to say. What Robert did was to jam his pencil into Mr. Casey’s cheek.

I don’t think Mr. Casey realized what had happened because he didn’t try to pull it out, not right away he didn’t. He just shot up with a surprised look, the pencil bobbing like a misplaced cigarette. This was a whole new world for him, one in which students struck their teachers and not the other way around. Corporal punishment was still in practice back then.

While Mr. Casey stood shocked, Robert Nix took the opportunity to bolt from his desk and race out of the classroom. I don’t know where Robert spent the rest of the school year or the year after that, but it wasn’t at Parnell Elementary.

It wouldn’t be until seventh grade that I would see Robert Nix again. It was then that Brian Larson played a stupid trick on Robert—and I helped. I wish I hadn’t. It was that schoolyard prank that revealed Robert Nix’s insanity.

If Robert Nix was known as “that crazy son of a bitch,” then Brian Larson was known as “that mean son of a bitch.” Brian was a bully. And he was a bully because his dad was the P. E. coach, which was funny because Brian was fat and had zero athletic abilities.

Coach Larson would make your life hell if you ratted out his son to any of the teachers. Coach Larson was a bear who protected his cub. And he did so for the very simple reason that Brian had only one good eye. He still had the other one, but it just wasn’t any good for seeing. It was great for being seen, though. It was in a glass jar of formaldehyde, which Brian would show you for a quarter.

Brian had lost that eye for being stupid, basically for being a kid. A couple of years back, he had found a live cartridge—a .38 Special—and he and Larry Young came up with a pretty clever way for shooting it off without the need for Larry to steal his dad’s revolver to do it. It was actually Larry’s idea. Brian just executed the plan.

Brian taped a BB to the back of the brass shell casing, where the gun hammer would strike. He then twisted paper in the shape of a cone and taped it around the other end of the casing, where the bullet was. The two wannabe munitions experts then climbed onto the roof of Larry’s house, and it was Brian who won rock-paper-scissors to drop the modified cartridge onto the concrete driveway below. The paper cone would ensure the cartridge dropped vertically, so that the BB would hit the concrete and fire the primer. Brilliant—or so they thought.

The problem was that without the steel chamber of a gun cylinder to provide support for the brass casing, that casing, when fired, would act less like a harmless container and more like a dangerous bomb. It was Tweedle Dum who caught a face full of casing shrapnel when he peered over as the BB made contact with the concrete below. Even though Tweedle Dee had also peered over—and by all rights, should have suffered the same fate—he escaped without a scratch.

The trick that one-eyed Brian wanted to play on Robert Nix wasn’t really a trick. It was just another one of Brian’s attempts to give meaning to his miserable, little life and entertain his toadies while doing it. It came after his usual stunt had grown stale. That involved staggering down the hall and shoulder-smashing you as if by accident and then exclaiming that you should watch where he was going since he couldn’t see for himself. It always got a laugh from that clique of toadies that circled Brian like flies buzzing trash. Having grown bored with that shtick, Brian came up with a new one. I was his first victim.

It was recess, and the boys were out on the grassy field while the girls, grouped by social cliques, stayed on the blacktop gossiping. The jocks were holding impromptu football scrimmages, while us non-jocks stood idly by and watched. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone walking fast toward me.

“Hey! I wanna talk to you!” Brian shouted. Riding his slipstream were his toadies.

Brian looked determined. He was like a general leading his troops into battle. But what cause did he have to do battle with me? I hadn’t done anything to him or to any of his “troops.” As my mind raced to make sense of what was happening, they kept coming, and it didn’t look like they were going to stop. They were going to steamroll right over me. I back pedaled a couple of steps and found myself looking at the sky for a brief second before I was flat on my back.

General Brian and his troops broke out in raucous laughter. He had sent Larry Young to sneak up behind me and crouch down on all fours. When Brian marched toward me, he knew I’d backpedal and tumble over Larry or—better yet—that I’d turn and run and fall flat on my face, which no doubt would have been funnier. As it was, my landing on my ass proved satisfying enough for him.

“Oh, man! You should’ve seen your face!” Brian was doubled-over laughing. “I got you good!”

I wiped the grass from my hands but said nothing.

“Hey, come on. It was funny,” Brian said. When I didn’t respond, he said, “You wanna help me do it to Nix?”

I don’t know why I said “yes.” Thinking about it 30 years later, I can only imagine I was flattered Brian wanted me to be part of his merry little gang of pranksters even though I loathed them. It just felt good to be wanted. Perverse, I know, but I was twelve.

We found Robert Nix on the blacktop, leaning against one of the classrooms.

Brian called out, “Hey, Robert. C’mere. I wanna talk to you.”

Robert Nix, with a wary eye, sauntered over. He was no longer a runt. He was still pasty-skinned, but during the nearly two years since I’d last seen him, he’d shot up like a bamboo stalk. And that one year he’d been held back in first grade now worked to his advantage. He was a good six inches taller than Brian Larson. He was still skinny, though. Jumbo Brian probably outweighed him two to one.

As Robert approached, Brian signaled with his head for me to get behind Robert. I casually walked away from the group and circled back. While Brian made small talk with Robert, I crouched down on all fours.

When I was set, Brian shocked me by saying, “You homo,” and then he pushed Robert—hard. I panicked. What the hell did I get myself into? It suddenly dawned on me that this wasn’t a simple prank. Brian meant to hurt and humiliate Robert Nix.

By the time I stood up, Brian and his gang were walking away. I looked down, and Robert was lying flat on his back. He glared at me with spooky eyes. He sat up and looked at the palms of his hands. They were scraped and bleeding. He brushed away gritty pieces of asphalt, smearing the blood. He wiped his hands on his corduroys, which were three inches too short, and then he touched the back of his head. He was bleeding there too.

I wanted to run, but I was frozen. I wanted to say I was sorry, but I couldn’t get the words out. It had been such a mean thing to do to Robert. And I wasn’t a mean person. Brian was the mean one. He knew what he was doing. I was just a dupe and an idiot for having let him sucker me into helping him bully Robert. I stood there burning with shame as Robert got up and walked away.

The next time I saw Robert Nix, he was pointing a gun at me.

Most weekends during that following summer I’d head to the river with George, Steve, or Joe—or all three of them—to shoot our BB guns and pellet guns. We’d shoot mostly birds and frogs. Steve was the one who pointed out that you didn’t want to pump your gun too many times because then the BB or pellet would just pass cleanly through the game. If you pumped just once or twice, the impact would be more impressive, guts and innards scattering everywhere.

On this particular weekend I was planning to go to the park. I’d just opened the garage door to pull out my bike when I heard someone say, “Wanna go to the river and shoot my dad’s gun?”

Startled by the suddenness, I nearly jumped as I turned to see Robert Nix standing in our driveway and pointing a revolver right at me. “Geez, Robert! Don’t sneak up like that!”

“I could shoot you,” he said. It was such a bizarre thing to say. And he said it like it was no big deal, a matter-of-fact statement, as if he was commenting on the weather: “It’s a warm day today.” He had a dead stare. Again, those spooky eyes. He smiled—which was creepier than his stare—and said, “Let’s go.”

I didn’t want to go to the river with Robert Nix, but here was an opportunity to shoot a real gun, and in my twelve-year-old mind, such an opportunity would never come again. But there were practical considerations.

“I don’t know. It’s a long ways, and you don’t have a bike.”

“I could borrow your brother’s.” He pointed his gun at my older brother’s chrome Diamondback Viper, which my brother had bought with his own money.

“Uh-uh. Frank would kill me.”

“How about your sister’s bike?”

It was a ten-year-old hand-me-down. My sister rarely used it.

“Yeah, sure,” I found myself saying.

Forty-five minutes later we were at the river. Vegetation was sparse in some areas and heavily wooded in others. When my buddies and I would come down here, we’d stick to the sparse areas, but Robert Nix wasn’t satisfied until we’d gone deep into the bowels of the heavy vegetation. He said it would muffle the noise of the gun. We walked our bikes but had to abandon them when the vegetation got really thick.

Finally we came to a small clearing. Robert had set up a target of sorts. It was a large burlap sack, like you would use for a potato sack race. He’d filled it with dirt, he said. It was resting against some fallen tree trunks. A paper target was pinned to the side. A face was drawn on it, a crude rendering of a one-eyed Brian Larson.

Robert took out his dad’s gun and showed me how to use the front and rear sights to aim. I was to put the front sight post inside the rear sight notch, making sure it was evenly centered and the tops of both sights were level. He handed me the gun.

The weight of the thing surprised me. I didn’t expect it to be so heavy, but it was a big hunk of metal; of course it would be heavy. I held it with both hands. The rush of adrenaline had me shaking. I took a deep breath, held it, sighted the gun, and—like Robert instructed me to do—slowly squeezed the trigger.

I expected to miss the target completely, but I hit it dead center, which surprised me. But what really surprised me—besides how loud the explosion was, which set my ears ringing—was that there was movement in the sack.

I turned to Robert, and he had his fingers plugging his ears—he had known what to expect—but he also had that creepy smile again. I turned back to the sack. Maybe I had imagined the movement, but no. There was something struggling inside. My heart began to race. What had I done?

“You just shot Brian Larson’s dog,” said Robert Nix.

I didn’t believe him. “You’re lying.”

“Open the sack and find out,” he said. His dead eyes told me he wasn’t lying.

I found myself saying the same thing Mr. Casey had said to him back in fifth grade, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

He held out his hand. “Give me the gun.” He saw the fear in my eyes. “Unless you want to put Brian’s dog out of its misery yourself?”

I had no doubt that if I had given Robert Nix the gun he would have shot me. I thought of shooting him instead, but I didn’t have it in me, not like Robert. I could run, but in this thick vegetation, Robert would easily catch me, and in a struggle, I knew he would fight like a madman—which he was—and take the gun from me and shoot me like I had shot Brian’s dog.

Robert stepped forward. I reacted without thinking and fired at his feet. He stopped.

“Oh. You’re gonna shoot me? Is that it? First you shoot Brian’s dog, then you shoot me. How’s that gonna look?”

He was crazy. Robert Nix was crazy. I had one chance to escape. It would either work or it wouldn’t. “Explain to your dad how you lost his gun,” I shouted, and then I threw the gun as far as I could and ran in the opposite direction.

That was the last I saw of Robert Nix. He moved away shortly after Brian Larson went missing. There were plenty of witnesses who saw the two of them together the same day Brian disappeared. People remembered because it struck them as odd that Brian would hang out with Robert, especially since Brian considered Robert a “homo.”

Robert’s dad was a police officer, and he moved the family to take a job in another city. Rumor had it he moved to get away from the accusations that his son had anything to do with Brian Larson’s disappearance. Brian Larson had simply run away from home. Officer Nix had seen it hundreds of times. Brian would come back when he was good and ready. I forced myself to believe that lie for years, but I can’t believe it any longer.

The news story of hikers discovering the skeletal remains of a large dog bound with duct tape inside the remnants of a burlap sack deep in the woods along the Quitipea River leaves no doubt in my mind that another story will soon follow: the discovery of human remains—that of a twelve-year-old boy—near the site of that first discovery.

I have my own gun now, in case Robert Nix decides to pay me a visit.

Hector Hernandez

Image: A BB gun with a wooden stock and black barrel – from Pixabay.com