The Battle at Katy's Hill

Back to the frontier. The Mason’s lived on Whitier Place, the same street as Johnny Kotlarczyk, but across the street, further north, and nearer the golf course. There were a bunch of Mason kids, Charlie, a younger brother Johnny, another younger brother Jason (who would one day burn down their garage), and a little girl we seldom saw. I never saw any Mr. Mason. Don’t know if there was one. I remember Mrs. Mason as a woman with a permanent frown (think "Margaret Hamilton") who seemed to always be either shrieking at her kids or any parent who dared to challenge their behavior. Johnny Mason was a likable and funny kid, but everyone suspected that scratching him too deep would reveal his psycho mode. As will be revealed later, he was a key figure in our yearly Devil’s Night escapades.

But Charley was way twisted. Like a hyena, he’d linger at a distance from the rest of us kids, waiting for a stray. When he found one he’d act so quickly that no adult could stop him. He’d have a knife, a piece of barbed wire, or sometimes just his fists. Then we’d hear the screaming cry of a victim trying to make his way back home, with Charley nowhere to be seen. This didn’t happen every day or every week, but probably at least once or twice a year. The strange thing was that once you learned to stand up to Charley, he’d back off with a crazed grin. I remember Johnny Kotlarczyk shouting lots of times, “Get out of here, Mason!” He’d heard his mom and dad say it enough times.

The day eventually came when Charley Mason was murdered in Jackson State Prison. Johnny Kotlarczyk told me this a few years back when I spoke to him after the death of his father. I was not surprised, but somewhat satisfied to learn of this. I told Johnny that the last time I had seen Charley was one cold day at the bus stop at Outer Drive and Michigan Avenue. I was coming home late from high school. He was standing at the corner. I wasn’t afraid, maybe I should have been. We exchanged looks of brief recognition, a few words maybe. A moment later, a late model car pulled up driven by a really creepy dangerous looking fellow. Charley took off with him.

Roll the tape back eight or nine years. It’s winter time after a big snowfall. Kotlarczyk (by then we were all calling each other by our last names), one of the March kids, and I headed with our saucers to Katy’s Hill. Katy lived at the edge of our subdivision, nearly as far as you could go before passing over to the next. We called it Katy’s Hill because it was her hill, descending from her back door down to the golf course. Next to the smoothly flowing Katy’s Hill was a drop off, sort of a cliff, about 20 feet high.

We spotted Charley on the way to Katy’s Hill. He didn’t seem particularly threatening that day, but it was hard to tell with Charley. As he came closer, someone packed a snowball and beaned him with it. Then there was another. We all either hated him, feared him, or both. More snowballs. He started running away from us toward Katy’s. We ran too, and as we got nearer to the hill snowballs changed to rocks. Closer to the hill, closer to the cliff, I was swept by a feeling that this was our day of great revenge.

He had nowhere to run. He was screaming at us, “Cut it out, you fuckers!” As if duty-bound, we maintained our attack. Our dads had told us all stories about “The Bulge” and “Pork Chop Hill.” Each rock had meaning. Charley fell over the cliff. He managed to pick himself up and run toward the river. I never saw him again until that time at the bus stop.

I guess it sounds cruel. But if you asked me, even now, to describe what happened that day at Katy’s Hill, my answer would be “justice.”