Rubber Tree
oil on canvas
9" x 12"
When I was a youngin', kids would regularly drive to the spot depicted above and have fist fights after school. All sorts of other extracurriculars took place on that road less traveled, but I mostly remember the three o'clock caravans to our adolescent idea of conflict resolution. On one occasion, after a particularly lopsided matchup, every spectator in attendance ended up stuck in the mud while trying to turn their cars around. Served us right.
After that day's boxing bout, in an ironic twist, an unlikely team took shape while dislodging the last car from the swampy roadside ditch. Opponents moments before, now castaways together, the fist fighters were left marooned at the east end of "Rubber Tree Road" with a car and confrontation conundrum. As the rest of us pulled away from ringside, some type of agreement was reached between the two and a solution soon followed. A friend and I watched from the rearview as the little Buick bounced and shook its way back onto the gravel path. The silhouette of a figure followed fast behind through a cloud of exhaust smoke and tire spray. At the steering wheel of the two-toned hand-me-down sat a scrawny boy with a bloody nose. Pushing from behind the rear bumper was a formidable bully with bloody knuckles. We might've had a laugh or two at their expense. Shame on us.
It was a curious scene in the moments that followed. A mud-covered teenager walked alongside a mud-covered sedan. We never found out what was said, but after nearly 100 yards of finger pointing through an open window and what we assumed was some pretty coarse language, the car stopped abruptly and the passenger door swung ajar. Before pusher became passenger, he bent down and untied his laces.
The victor and the vanquished rode back to town together, one with a wadded t-shirt held to his busted nose the other with his muddy boots held out the window.
