Dillon
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
Dillon Ruskin’s most glorious academic achievement was lifting Steve Swift by the neck and bashing his head against the Choir Room lockers. Steve had been harassing Dillon all day, flat-tiring on the backs of Dillon’s sneakers and trying to make him trip. This kind of mean-spirited focus was something Steve was well-known and generally reviled for, but choosing Dillon as his target was unusual because Dillon was enormous: six-foot-two, three hundred and something pounds, fists like microwave ovens. Dillon was known as a gentle soul and a benevolent spirit—and Lucy, who saw firsthand, told me that Dillon asked Steve many times to stop before he snapped. Why Steve would choose to pester someone like Dillon can only be explained by an unconscious longing, hiding deep within the folds of Steve’s malignant personality, for oblivion. But Steve lived, his face healed. He and Dillon both got suspended.
Lucy, and others, said Dillon lifted Steve one-handed. I believe it—Dillon was that strong. I used to ride on Dillon’s shoulders in gym class as a joke, like Freak the Mighty. On track days, we walked while others ran, talking about Lord of the Rings and other nerd shit that would get your ass kicked if you weren’t as big as Dillon. Being thought of as Dillon’s friend gave me a lot of protection, and I’m sorry to say I was not a good friend in return.
He was just never around on the weekends. Maybe it was that simple. His dad lived in some place like Monroe, or Jackson, and Dillon was at his dad’s for weekends and summers. There was never any time to get to know him. He invited me to his mother’s place after school a few times and I always demurred. We have a book, he said, enticingly, all about old aircraft, because he knew I could name every fighter-plane from the ’40s. I never went. I was happy to accept his protection in the locker rooms and hallways of Drager Middle, and I was willing to talk about Tolkien at lunch, but I didn’t want to be close to him. I think I imagined that he’d have one of those houses like Kurt’s that you never wanted to go to, and that being close to Dillon would make me feel lonely.
High school was where the great separation took place—the kids like me and Robby, with good grades and high test scores, got shunted into advanced classes, and the kids like Dillon, whose home lives didn’t give them the time or energy for schoolwork, were cordoned off from the people Adrian High School wanted to be made proud by. So I was in the college-bound bubble and Dillon was in the classes with the kids who still liked to fight. After Steve, Dillon walked in a kind of bubble too: everyone took Dillon’s side, and I’m sure everyone was really careful about stepping on his shoes. I wonder if Dillon has any sense of how much his story was retold at sleepovers, and on nostalgic drunken nights; how his battle with Steve was etched upon Achilles’ shield.
Dillon strung some nonconsecutive community college classes together, which he managed to pay for by collecting and selling scrap metal. He was arrested for stealing metal from a county recycling center. He got probation, and was blacklisted at all the places that buy scrap. This was the Great Recession—there were not many jobs for somebody like Dillon. Fewer for a Dillon with a record.
One moonless night in the summer of 2011, Dillon got high in the backyard of his aunt’s place in Palmyra. Palmyra is six or seven miles southeast of Adrian, a few dozen buildings and a few dozen people. The only landmark of prominence is the Palmyra Masonic Lodge, a white rectangular church with a steeple somewhat less tall than a grain elevator. Dillon burst down the backdoor like it was made of balsa.
Within, dark and musty, metal folding chairs were arrayed before a dais on the East side of the room. On the dais sat an antique Bible, hide-bound, embossed and gilded. Dillon stuffed it into his backpack, filled his pockets with plumb-bobs and ceremonial levels. The Masonic effluvia he flung into culvert, but the Bible he kept for a while—maybe a few days, maybe a week. Ann Arbor and Toledo papers ran stories about the robbery. Op-eds and letters to the editor mused wildly about a dark, Satanic influence. The dozen or so Masons remaining in the greater Adrian area cleaned their rifles giddily and took to locking their doors at night, tizzied up on their own ghost stories. Dillon took the Bible out to a soybean field to burn it. In a humid summer, the old mildewed pages wouldn’t catch, and Dillon had to use a bottle of charcoal fluid before it went up. When the blaze went out, when the act was irreversible, Dillon turned himself in.
He didn’t speak during his trial or his sentencing. He was sent to the county jail on a sentence that Masonic Secretary Eldon Clingaman decried as far too light. The Bible, priceless to the Palmyra Masons, was valued at $500 by the court, and records show that Dillon paid his restitution before he disappeared. I don’t mean disappeared in the thin-air sense, I’m sure someone knows where Dillon is—but his social media is gone, his phone number is dead. Kat said she saw him at Kohl’s, but she can’t be sure—which means she didn’t see him. You don’t mistake Dillon for anybody else.
I hope he’s gone, far away from Adrian, someplace where they don’t think to google his name. I hope he’s somewhere like Alaska, maybe—hauling nets of king crab out of the brine, cracking a beer as the setting sun paints the Aleutian range. Wherever he is, I hope the people in his life are better to him than Steve and I were.
Nathaniel Berry is a writer and editor from Adrian, Michigan. He has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and is the 2020 Swan Quill & Lantern Lit Society Writer in Residence. He has a 2006 Pontiac Vibe with 250,000 miles on it, and there’s a highway curling just like smoke above his shoulder.
