I wish I had a scar.

I mean, I do have a scar, but it's a really wimpy one and hardly worth showing to attractive young women in bars. I got it when I was six and pestering my older sister as she played Stratego with our cousin.

"Hey, Kilgore," she said. "Look at that." She pointed to the top of one of the Stratego pieces, which were shaped like the top of a rook in chess.

I peered down at the board. "What? I don't see anything."

"Don't you see it? You have to look closer," my sister said. My cousin giggled and looked away.

"Where is it? I don't see anything."

"You have to look really close. You have to get your face right down there."

So I got my face right down there, trying to find the wonderful invisible something that the older kids could see and I couldn't, and my beautiful, sweet, loving older sister smashed her hand down on the back of my head, slamming my forehead into one of the pieces.

There was squalling. There was bleeding on my aunt's clean kitchen floor. There was motherly panic. Stitches occurred. Tears were dried with the help of sugary treats. Stiff punishments were meted out to guilty parties. And all I have to show for it today is a near-invisible line on my forehead, just below the hairline. Sometimes I try to show it to people. "See it?" I say, pulling my hair back and pointing. "Do you see it?"

"No," people say, glancing at their watches.

So I wish I had a better scar. I wish I had a scar like Jack, a man who went to the same church as I did as a child. Jack was a kind man, a family man, a handsome man, and he had a deep scar carved into his left side of his face. It was a vertical slash starting less than an inch below his eye and cutting straight down across the cheekbone, ending above the corner of his mouth. It looked too awesome to be real, as though Jack got up early every morning and spent hours putting on pirate-movie makeup.

That scar gave Jack's face character and mystery. Maybe Jack had been a prisoner of war and had taken a bayonet across the face rather than tell the filthy Cong where his unit was camped. Maybe Jack had been mugged by some guy waving a knife, and Jack had given up his wallet, no big deal, but then the mugger had demanded Jack's watch, and that's when Jack just went berserk, because his father had given him that watch on his deathbed. Or maybe Jack took his family camping once, and a grizzly bear attacked, and Jack grabbed his hunting knife and sent that grizzly bear packing back into the woods, but not before the grizzly tore his face open with a swipe of its claws. I always considered asking Jack the real story behind the scar, and I imagined him getting a flinty look in his eyes and saying, That's not something a boy your age should have to hear about.

A scar like Jack's demands respect. Consider if you were in a bar, causing trouble as usual, and I came up with my dinky Stratego scar and asked you to knock it off. You gonna make me? you would say, grinning and posturing and looking for a fight. But what if Jack came up with his POW/mugger/grizzly bear scar and said, Hey, cool it, okay, fellas? You would shut up and sit down, quiet like a bunch of kindergarteners at naptime. Oh yes, you would. You just don't mess with a guy who's gotten his face hacked up like that and lived.

+posted by Lawrence @ 11/13/2003 10:33:00 PM