Prose Discourse: Fiction
Short Story
Darrin Doyle
The Boys Who Danced
Robbie, Ronnie, Reggie: bosom pals. Reggie with his straw-colored hair, Ronnie with his golden hair, Robbie with his hair-colored hair, what the heck we didn’t know the difference, we never kept them straight, always called one the other and other the one.
Reggie, Ronnie, Robbie: no relation and yet nearly identical. Who could tell them apart? The parents, sure. Siblings, likely. Everyone else, no chance.
Robbie, Reggie, Ronnie: healthy boys on the cusp of manhood. Tall, short, whatever, that’s a relative assessment, not the point, nor did they seem eager to be described, never asked for it, likely only wanted to be celebrated as respectable torchbearers of non-noticeability, young men with dreams of getting more than they gave in the long haul, although not greedy except in the ways we all succumb to now and again. Nonetheless to provide a picturable image in their memory, they were: pale-bodied, thick-armed, denim-clad, freckled, on the short side of tall, always together, rarely apart, red in the cheeks and heavy perspirers when the sun shone. Reggie a mirror of Robbie a mirror of Ronnie or whatever, you couldn’t even tell which was the mirror and which the source, they formed a general haze of strong, proud farmboy-adjacents occupying outdoor tables at the Dairy Crème or perched in a row on the stone retaining wall behind the tire shop, sneaking Skoal and saying god-knows-what to each other and laughing sometimes, sometimes not.
When it happened that one of these boys perpetrated a crime, they all had to go on trial because who could tell the difference. I hear you shouting that this crime was committed by only one individual! Their lawyer shouted this, too, and he had damn good reason to shout it. But which boy was it? Nobody could say. Not even the lawyer, so he shut up about it, and maybe there’s a lesson in there.
Robbie, Reggie, Ronnie, we loved our highschoolers, loved all our high school boys, the skilled athletes, the delicate nerds, the social climbers, the tree climbers, the vaguely artistic, the vague, those with limps and without. It cannot go without saying that we loved our high school girls, too, their impressive range of statures and foreign language skills and inquisitive noisy minds and spontaneous outbreaks of song. These young people were our future, ask anyone, the future of this little town, totally worth loving and making happy so long as it didn’t cost too much because none of us were rich.
They were good kids, too, mostly, sure probably a few bad ones, selfish ones, possibly even a few criminal types who kept their crimes hidden, operating under the cloak of darkness or some other cloak, but in this case, the case of Robbie, Ronnie, and Reggie, their crime (or the crime of one of them) had been uncloaked, which was the problem. We don’t remember what the crime was, not anymore, but it was absolutely something bad, something felonious, maybe violent, leaving scars on someone either physically or otherwise, someone innocent, although not perfectly so because who is unless you’re talking about a baby, and no, the crime wasn’t committed on a baby, that much is known so you can rest easy on that count, but in any case it was a crime that caused ripples of pain through this town and who knows, far beyond if we’re being honest about how ripples work.
We told them, we said hey, Reggie, Robbie, Ronnie, you’re all gonna go down if one of you doesn’t admit the guilt, take the fall, we know that two of you are innocent (not perfectly, because who is), at least innocent of this crime, though maybe all three were secret dirtbags who fouled up the world behind closed doors or under cloaks, you can never truly be sure, that’s human nature and one of the mysteries we just deal with, right? Anyway, we didn’t know which boy was guilty of this particular crime, didn’t frankly care, either, though why put away three when you only need to put away one, that was the practical question.
We thought why don’t we just herd them into some room somewhere, the three boys, lock them in there for a few hours with a table and modest refreshments, let them figure out which one did the crime, which one needs to be guilty. The boys never did, though, never did come up with the one guilty name maybe because they never got put into that room, not sure about that part of things. Everything happened pretty fast.
Regardless, regarding the guilty party the boys Reggie Ronnie Robbie as a collective didn’t seem to care. They weren’t even sure themselves who did or didn’t do whatever got done, and if they didn’t care we didn’t really care, they were interchangeable basically, not that they weren’t individual souls with fingerprints, memories, desires, unwritten sonnets in their hearts – all that jazz. The point was everyone knew that plenty of people had played the scapegoat throughout history, plenty of minorities and women and disco musicians, and this was an opportunity for one of the white fellows to become a scapegoat. Kind of a badge of honor showing that we were finally in the game, playing the game. We had to accept it and might as well embrace it, that’s what we all said, just be the scapegoat, do the thing, take your lumps, now you’re in the game for real and it’s a level playing field, which is awesome to no longer be on a field that isn’t level, which we all know can cause some pretty nasty injuries.
We tried to tell them, hey, Reggie Robbie Ronnie, this isn’t you, it’s us, it’s the system, it’s broken, or it’s fixed. Either way, one of you has got to go away and serve the time, face the music or at least give it a listen, because that’s what folks have done across the ages, doesn’t even matter whether you’re innocent, why not be the hero, there are no losers only quitters and that sort of thing.
All of this philosophizing was pretty enjoyable except we had no guilty party. They were all possibly guilty and all possibly innocent, and the town became what is known as “at loggerheads.” Forward movement itself, the possibility of it, came into question, which made everyone antsy and the Blue Bean Bar full at all hours with cantankerous souls.
Then suddenly in the courtroom one day appeared two more boys: Randy and Rodney. What was happening, what was happening, what were Randy and Rodney saying to the judge up there, were they saying what we thought they were saying? Whispers abounded.
Once the judge figured out who Randy and Rodney were in relation to Reggie, Robbie, and the other guy, Rodney and Randy asserted that it was quite possible that they were also the guilty parties, considering they looked pretty much like the other three and also had similar names, so they couldn’t rule themselves out. With their corn-kernel hair and their hairless faces, boy – that is to say, gosh – their parents couldn’t even be sure it wasn’t them either, their parents wailing from the courtroom seats, tearfully asking God what they’d done wrong, what happened to their babies.
As you might expect, pretty soon Richie, Roger, Rex, and Ricky joined as well on the defendants’ side of the court room. It seemed our humble town was suddenly a cesspool of criminal types and also innocent babes wrongly accused. A handful more Robbies soon followed, and then a Barney and Barry who said close enough.
The judge asked, “Have any of you an assertion or proclamation as to your blame or non-blame in this case, can any of you with hand to Bible swear to not be the one who perpetrated this egregious offense against society?” The public defender, speaking on the behalf of every accused (and non-accused) boy, entered a plea of not guilty not not guilty. The judge took this plea as a collective shrug of the shoulders by the Robbies/Reggies/et. al, a shrug that obviously didn’t sit well with the old man, as his severe white brows knitted and his lower lip puffed like a blood-filled leech, and before long he gaveled a humorless verdict of guilty with the sentence to face the firing squad.
A confused or angry or satisfied hush fell over the court room and lasted for the next two years until broken one early September morning by a symphony of rifle shots echoing across bean fields and down the empty corridor of Main Street, as everyone had gathered to watch the mass execution before heading to the fish fry. Prior to these gunshots, however, it should be mentioned that most of the boys requested blindfolds so they wouldn’t see the bullets coming at them. We didn’t bother explaining velocity, just gave the thumbs-up and allowed them this courtesy. The only three without blindfolds were the original Ronnie, Reggie, and Robbie, though I couldn’t swear to that nor ascertain any particular significance even if it was true. Collectively, the boys said their goodbyes while we listened the best we could with the earplugs in, and then a horizontal rain of lead made them dance for a few seconds, a few beautiful seconds in which the boys, our boys, looked like they were wildly alive, celebrating, boogieing like beef-fed angels in the dappled autumn sunshine of Farmer Olsen’s field.
This is the end of the tale for those 38 boys, who lived and dreamed and died so near to one another, and not much has happened in the town since. There’s a new party supply rental store with reasonably priced inflatables, helium tanks, and the like. They’ll also rent you a backhoe if yours happens to break.
About the writer:
Darrin Doyle is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently the novel The Beast in Aisle 34 (Tortoise Books) and the novella, Let Gravity Seize the Dead (Regal House Publishing). His short stories have appeared in many literary journals. He teaches at Central Michigan University and lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan.
Image: Dans Macabre, an AI-assisted digital image by O:JA&L staff creative. Proprietary image. 2025.
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