I Revelation
I don’t know if you’ve figured it out for yourself, yet, but you can’t trust grownups. Even the ones you think you can trust. Like your parents. It’s not like they actually lie to you, mostly, but they try to make you think about stuff the way they want you to think about it. I think it’s really just to make things easier for them. At the same time, you have to kind of admire the way they’re always playing the angle on you. Getting you to do things you really don’t want to do, and you never even know it. Smart.
Like last year, when I started missing my old catcher’s mitt. My old man gave it to me when I was about eight. It was really just a kid’s mitt. It was pretty flat and didn’t have a very good pocket. But Mr. Porter, my gym teacher, said he was going to start up a Junior Knothole baseball team. I thought I might be able to try out as a catcher. I’m actually not a bad player for my size, it’s just that my size is so damn small. Every single kid in my class is taller than me. In group pictures I always have to sit in the front row with the girls. That irritates the shit out of me, because Leon and his buddies always call me girlie names and give me a hard time.
Anyway, none of the other kids ever wants to catch in pickup games. I thought maybe I could make the team as a catcher. Besides, catchers get to wear a mask and all those pads and stuff. Which is kind of cool. They might make me look bigger. Plus, Yogi Berra is a catcher, and he’s my favorite player. I just read his biography. Believe it or not, his first name is really Lawrence.
About my mitt. I guess I must have left it laying around a lot. Anyway, Mom told me about a hundred times, “If I have to pick up that damn mitt blah blah blah blah throw it out!” And then one day she did! It was just a kid’s mitt, and I didn’t miss it much. But then I needed it again. I started grousing about how unfair it was to just toss something like that when it’s your kid’s favorite thing. A gift from my father. If I didn’t have it I’d never get to play. I’d never have any friends. I’d be a failure in life. Angling for a new one, of course.
Then out of left field, my old man said, “You know, sometimes if you pray hard enough, God will give you what you want. Why don’t you try praying for your old mitt?” That sure as hell stopped me in my tracks. Yeah, he was always going on about God and trying to make me go to church. Even though he always slept in Sunday mornings. But whenever I asked him to name anything God had done since a bazillion years ago to prove he was still around, he’d get pissed. I’d get the true believer speech.
“A true believer blah blah blah didn’t need deeds blah blah just has faith.”
Ha. To me, true believer was spelled s-u-c-k-e-r. I went to church, but only because he’d ground me if I didn’t. But now, here he was, actually daring me to try it for myself!
Naturally, I had to take him up on it. It was a dare. I didn’t know how he expected to pull this off, but I didn’t see as I had anything to lose. When the mitt didn’t show, maybe he’d back off on the God thing for a while. For more than a week, I prayed every night for that mitt. I tried hard to stay serious. But if there really was a God, I knew he was getting a good laugh out of it.
But one day, as I was pawing around at the bottom of my old toybox, hoping to come up with a piece of red crayon – THERE IT WAS! My old catcher’s mitt! I wigged out. Holy shit! Did this mean there really was a God? And worse – was I going to go to hell for all the grief I’d given my old man about it?
I knew the mitt hadn’t just been buried there all this time. I’d been through that toybox top to bottom a hundred times since my mom pitched it out. It was PUT there by someone. But by who? That was suddenly a huge question.
I went flying downstairs, mitt in hand. “LOOK WHAT I FOUND!” I shouted.
“Wow!” said my old man. “Your prayers must have been answered. I told you that happens sometimes. I hope you’ll be properly thankful.”
“You put this there, didn’t you?” I demanded.
“No, I did not,” he said. “You told me yourself that your mom threw it out a long time ago.”
True. That was a stopper.
“Are you telling me that God put it there?”
“I’m not telling you anything. I didn’t put it there. You’re the one who did the praying – you tell me.”
And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get anything else out of him. When I tried Mom, all she said was “You’ll just have to listen to your father on this one. I don’t know anything about what God does or doesn’t do.”
I didn’t know what to believe. If my mom said she threw it out, she threw it out. But here it was. And my old man said he didn’t do it, and he probably wouldn’t tell me an outright lie. At least not one he could get caught in. And if I didn’t believe in God and there really was one, I was up a shit creek without a paddle.
I spent the rest of the day worrying about going to hell and trying to put a pocket in that pancake of a mitt. I soaked it with water and put an apple where the pocket should have been. I folded the mitt around the apple, then tied it up tight with twine and put it in the sun to dry. I pulled the Bible off the bookcase and tried to read a couple of pages. It was boring and I couldn’t make any sense out of it at all.
My agony ended the next day. The squid and I were eating lunch at the kitchen table. Mom was in the basement doing laundry.
“Hey, Davy?”
“What, squid?”
“I know about your catcher’s mitt.”
“Yeah, I just found it again – isn’t that really weird?”
“No, I mean I saw Mama find it.”
I froze, with half a baloney sandwich in my mouth. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like this. I swallowed the whole thing without chewing.
“OK, what?”
“I was up in the attic, looking in the old boxes, and I heard Mama coming. I hid in the blanket pile where she couldn’t see me. She went to the big black trunk and took out the mitt.”
I was stunned. I didn’t know what to think. I must have sat there for a while.
“Davy?”
“Huh?”
“You OK?”
“Of course I’m OK. Whaddaya think? Anyway, you’re not supposed to be in the attic. How the hell did you get up there?”
“I sneaked up. You showed me how to do the thing with the broomstick.”
Crap. I’d showed him how to lift a hook off the little screw eye with a broom. Maybe that wasn’t so smart after all.
“Don’t tell, I’ll get in trouble.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“You’re not gonna tell, are you?’
“No, but you better not go up there any more – you were just lucky this time. Don’t forget about the belt!”
He turned pale. “I won’t, I won’t!”
I walked back into the living room and picked up the Bible I’d left out. I put it back in the bookshelf.
So, I’d been played for a sucker by my own loving parents. That seemed a little low, even for grownups. On the other hand, I had a catcher’s mitt I didn’t have yesterday. And I still might play Junior Knothole. And any interest I had in church and any fear of roasting my ass on a spit in hell were gone like a fart in a windstorm.
I decided to call it even.
_____________________________
II Lesson Nine
I was good at art. Really good. I made colored pencil drawings of the neighborhood kids from their class photographs and sold them to their parents for a quarter apiece. You could always tell who it was right away. That kept me in ready cash most of the time. Other than that, being good at art didn’t carry a lot of weight in this neighborhood. It’s not like I could hit the ball over Metzger’s fence or drive a car or anything important. In fact, it could be a real pain, especially since I was also one of the smart kids in my class and the littlest. Sort of like three strikes for a kid, if you know what I mean. Bullies could smell me from way over in Polish town.
Actually, Alton Greenwood was littler, but that didn’t count, because he wasn’t a regular kid. He had little tiny flippers for arms and wore real thick glasses. Everybody said he was going to die soon, but they’d been saying that since he moved here in the first grade, and he didn’t look too dead yet. My old man tried to convince me once that God made him like that because he played with himself. But I didn’t buy it. On the other hand, my mom always said that making pictures is a heck of a lot better than smoking and hanging out and getting into trouble, which is what most of the kids around here seemed to do all the time. That was probably the truth.
Every once in a while, when my old man was nursing a hangover and wanted to go somewhere my mother couldn’t yell at him, I’d talk him into taking me to the art museum. It was always quiet there, and he liked it. He’d find a chair and move it into the coat room and go to sleep. When he was asleep, I’d sneak a dime out of his pocket and buy a candy bar and wander around. There really were a lot of neat pictures there. My favorites were paintings of landscapes and Indians from something called the Hudson River School. It seemed kind of funny that all those artists went to the same school, but maybe it was a special school for landscape painters. Anyway, I guess I wouldn’t mind going there myself, someday.
I think my old man was secretly a little proud I was a good artist. Once he got me a book from the museum for my birthday that had all kinds of drawing exercises. Like perspective and how to draw hands and faces and how to do shading so it looked like the light was all coming from the same direction. It was the first art book I ever had, and I was pretty excited. It was by Robert Fawcett. He wasn’t as good as Norman Rockwell, but sometimes he had illustrations in The Saturday Evening Post.
The Post always had lots of cool illustrations by famous artists. When my parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas last year, I told them a subscription to The Saturday Evening Post. Their eyebrows went up and their mouths dropped open. Just like in a Three Stooges skit. I never knew people really did that. They looked at me, and then at each other, then back at me. You’d think I’d just told them President Eisenhower was coming over for lunch. But it wasn’t too expensive, so I got it. After that, I sat on the front porch every Tuesday after school and waited for the mailman, hoping Norman Rockwell had a cover illustration. It always came on Tuesday. I wondered why it wasn’t called The Tuesday Evening Post. I finally figured out that it was coming all the way from Indiana. The mail was probably just slow.
I decided to start the book with lesson one and work straight through to the back. I took it with me everywhere, even to school. If I worked real fast I could get my assignment done and have 10 or 15 minutes left in each class to draw. Most of the teachers liked me OK because I was a good student and didn’t give them any trouble. And because they knew I was a serious artist, they pretty much let me alone. Not Wighead. And, naturally, it happened in her class.
* * *
Wighead was Old Lady Ledbetter, the math teacher. She didn’t like anybody finishing her assignments early. It was like a personal insult or something, like she wasn’t smart enough to keep a kid busy for a whole hour. Mostly, she thought we were on her time, and nobody was going to do anything she didn’t tell us to do. Especially not art. My mom said Old Lady Ledbetter had a “Victorian attitude.” I said she had a “hair up her ass.”
Wighead was tiny and thin and wrinkled like she’d been in the shower for about a month. She got her name because she had a little white wig that was all powdered like a sugar doughnut. We all knew it was a wig because it was always slipping down about an inch on her forehead and sticking out in the back. Then she’d get up and go out in the hall and when she came back it would be straight again. Like just because we were kids we all didn’t know what was going on. But cripes, she had eyes like a hawk! I swear she could look at you across the playground and tell what color underpants you were wearing. So that day I waited until she made a wig-straightening trip before I pulled out Lesson Nine: Figure Study and slipped it behind my math book.
I thought I was pretty safe. I mean, wouldn’t you think from 30 feet a kid copying pictures from an art book would look pretty much like a kid doing math problems from a text? So did I. Right. When she came back in, she took about four and a half steps into the room and stopped. Her head jerked up and she whipped around and looked right at me.
“David Abbott, what are you doing?” she snapped. “That doesn’t look like math to me!”
Shit! I was dead.
“Well, I finished all my problems, Miss Ledbetter,” I mumbled. She had me. Still, to be picky about it, she sure as hell knew what I was doing - she’d caught me at it before, and every single time I was doing the same thing. She stomped over to my desk and glared down at my drawing. But instead of the usual lecture, “blah blah my class blah blah math is really important blah blah,” she got real quiet. Her eyes started getting bigger and bigger, and they actually bulged out until I was afraid they were going to stick to the inside of her glasses and I’d have to call the school nurse. She started making this funny noise in her throat and her face got about the same color as Jimmy Powder’s candyapple Chevy. It looked like she was having the Big One, as my old man said.
“What... what is this?” she croaked. By now I figured my goose was really cooked. When I finally squeaked out “Art?” I didn’t know if she could hear me. But I guess she did.
“This isn’t art!” She shouted. Shaking with fury, she snatched the drawing off my desk and waved it around in the air like it was on fire and she had to put it out before it traveled up her arm and got to her wig.
“This is A NAKED WOMAN!”
She marched over to the wastebasket - the big one by the paper cutter right in front of the class, of course, not the little one behind her desk - and crammed both the drawing and the book into it like she was dunking the devil himself into a vat of holy water. Then she grabbed me by just the shirt collar and a handful of hair and dragged me down to Principal Stein’s office so fast I swear my feet only touched the floor about twice on the whole trip. Boy, I tell you, sometimes people who you always thought were little can suddenly seem a hell of a lot bigger when they get pissed off.
Well, after Mr. Stein poked Wighead down off the ceiling with a stick, they called my mom and Mrs. Bass, the art teacher. One of the secretaries went down to retrieve the evidence from the vat of holy water. And Mrs. Bass testified that it was really genuine imitation art. Eventually Judge Stein decided that it wasn’t all that big of a deal and let me off easy.
“Inappropriate but not felonious,” he said. Lucky for me he wasn’t too bad of a guy for a principal, even if he did like to hear himself say big words. But I had to go home for the day anyway. At least I got my book back.
My mom wasn’t happy about having to go get me at school. But I knew it really would hit the fan when my old man got home. She broke the news at supper and I got the dumb shit lecture.
“You dumb shit, what were you thinking? Don’t you have a brain in your blah blah blah embarrassing me and your blah blah what are people going to blah blah.”
I almost made it through. But I guess I must have reached the end of my string for getting yelled at that day. I just couldn’t help it. I felt it swelling up inside my chest and it kind of slipped up my throat and popped out my mouth before I could clamp it shut.
“Well you gamme the damn book in the first place! Whydja gimme the damn book if you didn’t want me to use it? And if art’s such hot shit why’d I get busted for copying a picture by a famous dead French guy that’s probably in a museum someplace, for cripe’s sake? You shouldn’t be on Wighead’s side, you should be on mine!”
Silence. Not good. Not good at all.
* * *
By the time the dust settled, I got a good belting and was grounded for three weeks. One week for getting in trouble at school, one week for sassing and one week for swearing. But I knew better. He really didn’t mind the sassing or the cussing so much. Although he was kind of honked off about school. He’d never admit it in a zillion years, but what really got his tit in a wringer was that, down inside, he knew I was right.
_____________________________
III The Triple
Believe it or not, I made the team. Mr. Porter had finally managed to get his Junior Knothole baseball team started, and now I was the starting center fielder! I tried out for catcher, but it turned out I had a good eye for fly balls. I could tell right away when the ball was hit where it was going to land. And I’d just run to that spot and wait for it. A fly ball isn’t very hard to catch once you’ve outsmarted it. I wasn’t much of a hitter, but I caught just about every fly ball hit to me, so Mr. Porter figured I was worth keeping for defense.
Our team was the Go-Devils. That’s the stupidest name for a team I ever heard, but Mr. Klapfish, who owned the Veri-Best, was willing to pay for the uniforms if he could name the team. Maybe a Go-Devil was a Jewish thing, like a golem. But the uniforms were great! The shirts were bright red with a white pitchfork stenciled on with a little “Veri-Best” and a big “Go-Devils.” The hats were red, too, but they didn’t have any printing on them. That was OK. It was the only uniform I ever had, if you didn’t count Cub Scouts. The only day that was better than the first day of the season was the day the uniforms came.
Today we were playing the St. Matthew Tigers at Jermaine Park. My old man had driven me and Little Bill and Gerald Funk over to the park. He came to most of the games, but he wasn’t a coach or anything. He just liked to watch.
While we were all playing catch and getting warmed up for the game, Mr. Porter came over to the bench and called us all together.
“There’s been a little mixup with the league…” he began. We all started groaning and hollering.
“No, no, the game’s still on. It’s just that they didn’t assign us an umpire. So the Tigers’ coach and I decided we’ll split the umpiring between the two teams. That means for the first three and a half innings, one of our coaches will umpire, and for the rest of the game, one of their coaches will umpire. Since we’re a little short on coaches today, I’m having Mr. Abbott ate umpire for us.” That was my old man.
Actually, I thought that was a pretty good choice, as long as he was sober. He’d played baseball in high school, so he must know the game pretty well. And it wasn’t like you needed a real expert to ump a Junior Knothole game. We wouldn’t even notice the difference.
I was looking forward to playing the Tigers because Bobby Wilcox was one of their pitchers. Bobby and I went to the same church and hung around all the time at Sunday school. We were pretty good friends. I thought he was probably a lot better player than me. He was bigger and just had that good-athlete look, if you know what I mean. But he told me he wouldn’t be pitching today.
The first inning, nobody got any hits. Their pitcher was pretty wild, so we got a couple of walks, but we couldn’t squeeze a run out of it. I got my first at-bat in the second inning. The pitcher had just walked the last two batters so we had runners on first and second, with two outs.
I walked up to the plate and took a couple of practice cuts, trying to look like a slugger, but I know I didn’t fool anybody. I pulled my cap down hard and stepped in and looked at the pitcher. He was a big fat kid. He could really wing the ball, but today he couldn’t find the plate with a compass and a map. He was sweating a lot. His coach kept yelling at him to slow it down.
I thought there was a fifty-fifty chance if I just stood there, I’d get a walk. I also thought there was a fifty-fifty chance that I’d get beaned, so I didn’t dig in any too deep, if you know what I mean.
The pitcher took his windup. He had a long, slow reach and kicked his left leg way up in the air. He kind of stood there that way for a minute, and I wasn’t sure if he was planning to let it go or not. Finally he started leaning a little more in my direction, and brought his arm down. The pitch was way outside, and the catcher had to jump out to get it.
“Strike one!”
What? I turned around to look at the umpire. I was startled to see the face in the mask was my old man’s. I had forgotten he was calling the pitches.
I turned back to the pitcher, wiggling my bat like I knew how to use it. The pitcher was smiling. He went into another big, slow windup, then brought his arm down again. I was planning to wait him out, to see if he could get one over. The ball came zipping by at about eye level.
“Strike two!”
Well, I thought it was a little high, but maybe it was good. I guess now I’d have to start thinking about swinging. I tugged on my hat again and pounded the bat on the plate until it kicked up dust.
The pitcher had a big grin, now. He thought he was on a roll. I wiggled my bat at him as a warning. Here came the big windup again, the ball coming out fast and low, hitting the ground about a foot in front of the plate. The catcher caught it on the bounce.
“Strike three!”
What? I turned and looked at my old man again. He was looking off into right field. Was I wrong? Had he had a couple? Even the catcher turned around and looked at him. The pitcher started giggling, a high, girly giggle, then covered his face with his glove. After a few seconds, I turned and walked back to the bench, dragging my bat. Inning over.
We scored two runs the next inning, on three walks and a single. They scored three runs in the bottom of the inning to go ahead 3-2.
I came up again in the top of the fourth, with a runner on second and two outs. The same pitcher was still pitching, as wild as ever. His pitches were a lot slower now, though. Maybe he was getting tired. Or he was finally listening to his coach.
I strode up to the plate and pounded the bat on the plate a few times. I thought I might actually take a swing at something this time. He kicked his leg way up in the air and teetered around on the other one again for a little while, then let it go. It was a lot slower and came right down the middle. I took a tentative chop at it and fouled it off back to the screen.
“Strike one!”
Well, that felt better. Maybe I was going to show him after all. I stepped back in the box and glared at him. Come on, fat boy, is that the best you’ve got?
Big windup again. This time I thought he might actually fall over backwards. But, no, he leaned forward just in time and brought his arm down. The ball came in low, down around my ankles.
“Strike two!”
What? What was going on? I turned and looked at my old man. He was staring off into space again. I turned back to the pitcher. Well, the only thing to do was take a swing. I obviously wasn’t going to get a call. I pounded the plate again, starting to get mad.
He whirled around and kicked his leg up and threw it again. It came in hard and inside – way inside. I ducked so fast my hat came off and the bat went flying somewhere behind the backstop. I landed flat on my back in a big cloud of dust. I heard the ball plop into the catcher’s mitt.
“Strike three!”
I couldn’t believe it. The pitcher stood there with his fat little mouth hanging wide open. The kids on my team and the fans were screaming bloody murder. Even Coach Porter was yelling. Inning over. Again. The catcher, looking embarrassed, reached down and helped me up.
“I don’t know who that ump is, kid, but you really got screwed.”
* * *
That finished up three and a half innings, so my old man handed the umpire’s job over to one of the Tigers’ coaches, and Mr. Porter moved him to the third base coaching box. He was safely out of the way, now. Maybe I’d have half a chance to hit something.
I came up again in the sixth, with one out and runners on first and second. The fat kid had just walked two batters on eight pitches, and the coach finally yanked him. Then guess who he brought in? You got it! Bobby Wilcox! OK, this was going to be fun, now. On the other hand, it was more serious, too, because it wasn’t just baseball any more – it was personal.
I walked up to the plate and we grinned at each other, but then we got down to business. I pounded the plate and waited. He didn’t have any big fancy windup. He just stepped forward and threw. The pitch came in hard and straight down the pipe. I could hear the whizzing of the seams and the big “POP” when it hit the catcher’s mitt. That was a very nasty looking pitch.
“Strike one!”
No argument there, for a change. I wiggled my bat and dug in my cleats and tried to growl.
Step. Throw. Whiz. “POP.”
“Strike two!”
Cripes. Right down the pipe again. Right in the same spot. I had one more pitch to do something, because I figured it was coming right down the pipe again. Well, if it was coming in at the same spot, maybe I could swing for that spot. Maybe I could get lucky. Maybe pigs could fly. Maybe Melinda Dawson would say hi to me.
I dug in again. This time, I leaned way back on my right foot, holding my bat all the way down at the bottom and way back around me. I was planning a roundhouse, all-or-nothing swing, right from the heels. As he stepped forward, I started my swing. As I swung, I closed my eyes, visualizing his first pitch as it crossed the sweet part of the plate. I clenched every muscle I could summon, extending my arms and turning my body like the coach told me.
It felt like I hit a telephone pole. The shock ran up my arms and down to my toes. But I kept pulling the bat around. When I opened my eyes, everybody was jumping up and down and yelling “Run! Run! Run!”
I dropped the bat and started tearing toward first base. I figured it must be a fair ball, wherever it went. When I got near first, Mr. Porter was windmilling his arm around, yelling “Keep going! Keep going!” Wow! It must be a hit! On the way to second, I looked up and saw the left fielder running like mad in the other direction. Then I saw the ball bouncing high beyond him. It was going to be a homer! I’d hit a home run! I couldn’t believe it!
I flew past second, heading for third base, keeping my head down and digging as hard as I could. As I rounded third base, looking at home, I heard a voice yell “Get back! Get back!”
Oh no! The left fielder got to the ball quicker than I thought. I hit the brakes, skidding and sliding, my cleats catching in a spray of dirt. I went down on my knees, then scrambled up and dove head first back into third, trying to beat the throw. As I lay on my stomach with both hands on third base, I could see the left fielder just throwing the ball back in. I turned and looked toward the catcher, wondering if I could still get up and make it home. No. Bewildered, I turned my head to find the voice which had snatched my home run away. It was the third base coach. My old man.
* * *
I don’t remember much of the game after that. I’m not sure if I batted again. We lost the game. I didn’t remember the score. Nobody wanted to sit by me or talk to me on the bench. Everybody was too embarrassed by what had happened. Nobody knew what to say, even Mr. Porter. I drove home with my old man in silence
He’d gone to bed right after supper. He worked a 6 am-3 pm shift, and always went to bed right after supper, even on weekends. I was slouched across the couch in the living room with my feet over the back, watching the television. I had forgotten to turn it on.
“Are you going to tell me about the game today, David?” My mom was sitting at the dining room table, doing something with the dinnerware.
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“Yes, but I thought you might like to tell me, too.”
I thought about it for a while. Mom didn’t say anything else.
“Why’d he do it? What does he have against me?”
“What do you think he did?”
“He stole my home run! Striking me out was bad enough, but why did he have to steal my home run?“
She came in the living room and sat down beside me on the couch, drying her hands on a dishcloth. She waited.
“I know the score. I’m not a jock. That hit was pure luck and I know it. I’ll never get a hit like that off a pitcher like Bobby again. Or anybody else. I know I’m not good enough to make a high school team. I know I’ll never get a sports letter. But I could’ve looked back and said ‘I hit a home run once.’ Even if it was just Junior Knothole. I’d have that for the rest of my life.” I was trying to choke back the sobs, but I wasn’t doing a very good job.
She moved closer and tried to put an arm around my shoulders. It was kind of awkward, since I was approximately upside down on the couch, now. She settled for putting a hand on my chest.
“Why’d he do it?” I sobbed.
She waited a few minutes until I calmed down again.
“I know you think this was about you and your home run. But it’s not. It’s not about you at all.”
“What the hell’s it about, then? What the hell’s it about?”
“Shush.” She punched me hard in the chest. “Just listen.”
I was lost. If it wasn’t about my home run, what was it about?
“Your father didn’t do this to spite you. He did it for himself.”
“Himself! What did he get out of it? What did he get out of it that was worth my home run?”
“You know your father loves you, don’t you.”
I had to think about that for a minute. Sometimes that was really hard to believe. This was one of those times.
“I guess.”
“You don’t just guess. You know.”
She paused again and we sat there for several minutes.
“You know your father drinks. You’ve seen him drunk. And when he’s drunk, sometimes he’s not very nice to you. And I know that’s hard to understand. But that’s what his own father did with him, and so that’s the only kind of father he knows how to be.
“His mother died just after he was born. He was raised by his father for years. His father drank a lot and when he was drunk, he beat your dad. He told him he was worthless and would never amount to anything. Finally, the court took him away and he went to live with Aunt Ruth. She was scarcely any better. She never liked children and resented that she was saddled with that responsibility.”
“But she was a teacher!”
“Yes. Isn’t that a strange thing?”
Mom had started crying a little, too, and wiped her eyes with the dishcloth.
“Your father finally came to believe that Ruth and his father were right, that he wasn’t worth anything. He never had a chance to develop any confidence, any self respect.”
“But he’s always acting tough. Yelling and stuff.”
“That’s the way people act when they have no self confidence. They puff up to conceal what they think is their weakness. You’re just a kid. When you look at him, you see a man – big and powerful. But under that puffed up shell is a little boy who never had a chance to grow up into a real man. And he’s afraid someone might peek behind that shell and expose that little boy. He’d do anything to avoid criticism, because when he’s criticized, he hears his father and Aunt Ruth again, telling him how worthless he is.”
“But I wasn’t criticizing him!”
“No. But it was a terrible problem for him to be umpire in his own son’s game. He was afraid people would think he was giving you a break – cheating to help you out. He had to bend over backward to prove to them he was being fair. And that’s why he made those bad calls and kept you from scoring.”
“And he screwed me just so he wouldn’t get a little criticism? What kind of a father is that when he won’t stand up for his own son?”
She was quiet for a pretty long time. Another tear made its way down her cheek and dropped off onto her lap. She got up off the couch.
“Well, I guess in the end, you’ll have to be the judge of that, won’t you?”
* * *
I lay awake for a long time that night. Life somehow didn’t seem so simple any more. My old man got drunk and beat me. His old man got drunk and beat him. Did his old man’s father get drunk, too, and his father’s grandfather? How long did something like this go on? Did that give him the right to betray me like he did? Was I supposed to let him off the hook? Why should I end up getting screwed? Was I going to be like that, too? The older I got, the more questions, the less answers.
I finally cried myself to sleep. I’d never done that before. I wasn’t sure if it was for my lost home run or for my Dad.
_____________________________
IV The Day Off
“Let’s skip school tomorrow!”
“What?” I said.
“Let’s skip school. We can stay at my house.”
Talk about total surprise. I had to stop for a minute to let it sink in. “Why?”
“Hey, c’mon - My mom works all day. We can do whatever we want.”
It still hadn’t sunk in. I guess I must have looked pretty stunned.
“C’mon, it’ll be fun! More fun than another whole day at school, anyway. I hate school, don’t you?”
I guess he thought that question only had one answer, because he turned and made a couple of dribbles and threw up a shot from the foul line. Swish. We were hanging around the gym after basketball practice, waiting for Mr. Washington, the janitor, to kick us out. We both played on the basketball team. I should say, Mark played and I sat on the bench. I was pretty small and never got into any actual games. The only reason I was on the team was that Mr. Porter, the gym teacher, needed ten players to have a practice scrimmage. And there were only eleven boys in the class, although Alton Greenwood didn’t count because he just had little flippers for arms and I guess that could be a problem if you wanted to play basketball.
Wow. This was truly gigantic. I’d never even thought about skipping school before. I’d never tell anybody, but I actually did like school. Well, maybe I didn’t like math all that much, but the other classes were pretty fun. Probably because I did pretty well. I was one of the nerdy smart kids. I guess everybody must like to do what they’re good at. But if I got caught skipping, my old man would beat the living shit out of me.
On the other hand, Mark Sobecki was the best basketball player on the team. More important, he was cool and really popular with the girls. He had blonde, curly hair and really bright blue eyes. Even some of the older girls like Melinda Dawson would hang around after practice and walk him home. This was clearly a chance to improve my social standing. Which wouldn’t be too hard, because right now I didn’t have one.
“Don’t you have a math test tomorrow?” I asked.
“Shit! Who cares about a math test, anyway? I just feel like a little vacation for a day, that’s all. It’s like a day off. Everybody takes a day off now and then. What’s the matter – you chicken?”
Uh-oh. I’d been thinking about how to get out of this without looking lame. Now I was screwed. Now he’d cranked it up to a chicken challenge. I wasn’t sure why he picked me for this gig – it wasn’t like we were great buddies or anything. But I guess now I didn’t have much choice, if you know what I mean. Well, what difference was one beating more or less, anyway? Maybe Melinda Dawson would remember my name.
Mark shot baskets for a few minutes. I sat on the steps and tried to imagine what it would be like to spend a whole day away from school. I guessed it would be pretty much like Saturday in the middle of the week. We could do pretty much anything we wanted. It was sounding better and better. He had a hoop on his garage, so we could shoot around, and we could watch television. I was pretty sure he must have a TV. We didn’t.
“You have a TV?”
“What? Of course we have a TV! What do you think?”
“So I just show up at your house at 8:15 instead of going to school?”
“Yeah.”
“You better not sleep late and leave me standing on the porch all morning.” He was notorious for being late to school.
“Jeez. Don’t worry, I’ll be up. But don’t come up to the porch – Mrs. Chitwood might see you and tell my mom something screwy was going on. Go around to the side door.”
“Who’s Mrs. Chitwood?”
“Oh, the old bat next door. She doesn’t have anything else to do, so she’s always got her nose glued to the window, trying to find something she can bitch about.”
“You’re telling me we haven’t even done this yet and already there’s a witness?”
“Jeez, Abbott, don’t make such a big deal. Don’t worry, she’s not gonna see you if you come up the alley from Wilson Street – she can’t see the side door from her house.”
“What about the people on the other side?”
“Shit, that’s just the Thompsons. They’re really old. I haven’t even seen them for about a year. They might be dead for all I know. Even if they noticed anything, they wouldn’t care. They never talk to my mom. It’s easy. Are you in, or not?”
“You just better not get me burned, is all.”
A light of recognition went on in his eyes. “You never played hooky before, did you?”
“Sure, I did! Lots of times! It’s just that I always did it at home, where I knew what was what and I didn’t have any little old ladies peeking in the window.”
“Jeez! What a chicken. OK, if you don’t want to, just say so!”
I swallowed hard and thought about Melinda Dawson. “I’ll be there at 8:15. You just be up.”
* * *
Mark’s house was only two blocks away, but it was in the opposite direction from school. It was grey and cloudy and it looked pretty dark over past the old Babcock Dairy. It sure felt like rain, so I grabbed my jacket. I had to walk toward school like nothing was up until I was out of sight of my house, in case my mom was watching, then cut back through the alley and over to Wilson Street. I was out the door at 8:14. I thought that was late enough that just about all the other kids would be in class by then. I couldn’t let anybody see me, especially not Leon and his buddies. They’d know right away what was up, since they cut class all the time. They’d be in the principal’s office in 30 seconds ratting on me. They’d just love to get me in trouble.
A few minutes later, I was knocking on Mark’s side door. Actually, I never really got the chance to knock – he opened the door as soon as he saw me through the window.
“You’re late!”
“What, maybe two minutes? You got another appointment or something?”
“Well, come on in. You had breakfast yet?” He was still in his pajamas.
“Yeah, my mom makes me eat before I go to school.”
Mark’s house was like every other house on the block. In fact, it was like any other house I’d ever seen, except for my grandmother’s, which used to be a farmhouse. It was square with wood siding and an upside down V shaped roof and a brick porch across most of the front. Inside, there was a closet right next to the front door and a stairway up to the second floor. When you came in you could go straight through to the kitchen or go left through the living room, right through the dining room and right again to the kitchen. Upstairs there would be three bedrooms and a bathroom and a door that went up to the attic. The only difference there might be was the front door on the left instead of the right, and the rooms switched around. Boring with a capital B. When I got old enough to have a house of my own I wanted it to be really different. I was really sick of seeing the same house everywhere I went. Maybe I’d design my own house. Maybe I could be an architect – that was kind of like an artist, which is what I mostly wanted to be. We took path A - straight through to the kitchen.
“I’m having some pop tarts and a Coke. Sure you don’t want some?”
Wow! Coke for breakfast! Another mind-blowing idea. Coke was a pretty rare treat at my house and never, ever for breakfast. “Yeah, I guess I could use a Coke.” Things were really starting off right! Why hadn’t I ever thought of this before?
We popped the tops off our Cokes and we went into the living room to watch TV. There was a commercial on for Rice Crispies.
“I don’t like Rice Crispies, much, do you?”
“Naw. I like Raisin Bran better. Although the snap, crackle and pop is kind of fun.”
“I really don’t care if my cereal makes noise or not – just so it’s sweet enough.”
“Yeah, cereal needs to be sweet. Sometimes I put extra sugar on mine.”
“Me too, sometimes.”
“See, isn’t this cool?”
The commercial ended and a cartoon came on. Not a real cartoon, like Superman or Peter Pan, but a kids’ cartoon with a couple of blackbirds and some mice. Nothing seemed to be happening except the birds hit each other over the head with a mallet every five or ten seconds and the mice would run around. And lots of bird screeching and loud piano music.
“Is this all that’s on? Can’t you get other channels?”
He got up and changed the channel. Believe it or not, the new channel was a preacher! Preaching like in church. And it wasn’t even Sunday.
“Holy crap! Is this all you’ve got on TV?”
“Hey, don’t blame me. This is all that’s on in the morning.”
“Don’t you get any Detroit channels?”
“Naw, you’ve got to have a rooftop antenna for that. All we’ve got is rabbit ears. We can just get the two local ones”
So much for TV. I finished my Coke. I thought about asking for another one, but I didn’t want to be greedy. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was only 8:45. Mark went to get dressed and I switched the TV back to the blackbirds and watched them hammer on each other’s heads until he came back.
“Let’s go shoot some baskets!” I said.
Mark was quiet for a minute. “We can’t.”
“What? Why not?”
“Old lady Chitwood. She’ll see us and tell my mom.”
“The garage is on the other side of the house.”
“She’ll hear us and come out to look. I know she would.”
We sat there for another 15 minutes and watched the blackbirds hammer each other’s heads.
“Want to see my baseball card collection?”
“All right. Cool.”
We climbed the stairs up to his room and spent the next half hour combing through his collection. He had a Bill Skowron and a Whitey Ford, two Yankees I didn’t have, and a Hoyt Wilhelm I’d never even seen before – nobody I knew had a Wilhelm. Other than that, his collection was pretty much like mine, but not as good. He even had about ten Walt Dropos, just like me.
“Hey,” he said, “Why don’t we go down to the Veri-Best and get some more cards? Got any money?”
“Yeah, I brought about fifty cents. Sounds OK.”
We tromped down the stairs and out the side door. “We better take our coats,” I said, “It looks like it might rain. It’s getting kind of cold, too.”
“Naw, it’s only a block and a half. We can outrun any rain.”
“Actually, we better not run – we don’t want to attract any attention. Let’s just walk, like we’re supposed to be here, like going to the store for your mom, or something.”
“Why? Who cares?”
“Don’t they have truant officers? School cops who drive around looking for kids on the street instead of in school?”
“Do they really do that?”
“Well, what else would they be doing? Sitting in their office talking on the phone or typing reports? They have secretaries who do that, I think.” That sounded pretty reasonable. We walked the block and a half trying to look like two responsible boys on an important errand from their mothers.
“What if Mr. Klapfish asks us why we’re out of school?” Crap. I’d forgotten about that.
“We just tell him it’s parent teacher day, and all the kids are out.”
We turned the corner at Stanley Court, passed Carol Slater’s house and the dry cleaning shop and turned in at the Veri-Best. The Veri-Best was the local market – they had a little of everything, but not very much of anything, if you know what I mean. If you had a lot of shopping, you’d go on to the Kroger store at Sylvania and Kingston. The prices were a lot better there and they had gobs of everything. But it was another six blocks. And Kroger didn’t carry baseball cards, believe it or not.
The overhead door bell jingled and we marched inside. Mr. Klapfish was talking to a customer and we headed straight to the cash register, where all the baseball cards were stacked in a wire holder. For five cents you got a big stick of pink gum and five baseball cards. For twenty-five cents you could get 30 cards, but no gum. It was a good deal, but I didn’t like to part with that much cash all at once, so I always got the five cent packages. The gum was pretty decent, too.
“Hi, boys!”
“Hi, Mr. Klapfish.” we said together.
“What are you guys doing out of school, Mark?” What was this? He knew Mark by name? That must mean he talks to his mom, too. Good thing we’d rehearsed. At least he didn’t know me.
“Hi, David, you’re out too, huh?” Crap. How’d he know my name? Who was this guy, the neighborhood social secretary?
“It’s parent teacher day” said Mark, with a big, confidant grin. ”All the kids are out.”
“Oh. Funny I haven’t seen any other kids this morning, then. Usually they’re in here like a cloud of locusts. Have to watch ‘em like a hawk. Especially that Leon and his friends. They’d have the whole candy section cleaned out in two minutes if I didn’t stand right over ‘em.”
Uh-oh. I sneaked a sideways look at Mark. His grin was gone and he looked like he had something stuck in his throat.
“It’s just our class, today,” I said. “They’re doing it one class at a time. There are four classes and each class gets off one day this week. That’s four days. That’s why there aren’t a lot of other kids around. And this is our day. So we get the day off.” I was nervous and running off at the mouth. And he didn’t look any too sold, either. I grabbed three packs of cards and threw them down on the counter, fishing in my pocket with my other hand for change.
“Here, Mr. Klapfish, gimme these cards, please.” Anything to distract him.
He looked blank for a second, then picked up my quarter, rang up the sale and gave me back a dime. He turned to Mark, like he was going to ask another question. Just then the door bell jingled again and two ladies came in pushing strollers. He hesitated, then turned to the new customers.
“Morning, Mrs. Schultz, Mrs. Montoni. And how are the kiddies today?”
I grabbed Mark’s arm and shoved him toward the door. “But I didn’t get any cards…”
“You can have half of mine,” I whispered, “just go!”
* * *
This time we ran the whole block and a half back to the alley. If the truant officers saw us, they’d just have to catch us. When we got to the Hansons’ garage on Wilson, we slowed down to cut up the alley. Mark turned the corner, then stopped and jumped back around the garage.
“Wait! Don’t go down there!”
“What? What the hell is it? A school cop?”
“No, it’s Mrs. Chitwood’s dog. We can’t let him see us.”
A dog? Oh, great. I edged up to the corner of the garage and peeked one eye around. “I don’t see any dog.”
“It’s by the tree.”
“That’s not a dog, that’s a squirrel!”
“No, it’s not, that’s Cleo, Old Lady Chitwood’s dog.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me! That thing’s only a foot long. That’s what you’re afraid of? Does it have rabies or something?”
“She doesn’t like me, and she’s got a bark you can hear for a mile. If she sees me she’ll start barking her ass off and Old Lady Chitwood will come out.”
“We can just run in the house.”
“No, she’ll just follow me to the door and keep barking. The old bat will know somebody’s in the house and call the cops. She’d just love to do that!”
“Well, how the hell are we going to get back in, then?”
“We’ll just have to wait her out. She’s not usually out more than half an hour. When Chitwood takes her in, we can go back.”
We sat down with our backs against the garage.
“Boy, this is sure more fun than school! I bet those guys in math are sweating bullets about now. I wouldn’t mind taking a day off like this once a week!”
It started to rain.
* * *
“Shit.”
“Double shit!”
Mark tried the door to Hansons’ garage, but it was locked. We sidled around to the other side to look for some shelter. There was a line of pretty thick bushes on that side up close to the Hansons’ house, right under a set of picture windows. We crawled under the bushes and waited some more. I hoped the Hansons weren’t home - I didn’t want to have to explain this if we got caught. Eventually, the rain seeped down through the shrubs, and we started to get wet anyway.
“Hey, let’s see those baseball cards. Remember, you said I could have half.”
I took the three packages out and gave one to Mark. I opened the second one. I popped the gum in my mouth and fanned out the cards.
“Who’d you get?”
“Nobody good.”
“Open the last pack. There’s five cards – how are we going to split them?”
“How about if we cut the last card in two and we each take half?” I said.
Mark looked at me like I’d started to speak Hungarian. “What? Are you crazy?” So much for the wisdom of Solomon.
“OK, one of us gets the last card and the other takes the gum. How’s that? But the one that gets the card has to pick blind.”
“OK, you can have the gum.” He picked three cards without looking.
“I didn’t get anybody good. Who’d you get?”
“Two Walt Dropos,” I said.
* * *
The rain started to slack off. We were still pretty wet, though. All of a sudden three kids ran past, and we could hear a bunch more kids down the street yelling.
“Oh, shit, man! Morning class is out. It must be 11:30. All the kids are going home for lunch.”
“Don’t worry, Abbott. My mom left me lunch money. We can go down to Mel’s Diner and get hamburgs and Cokes!”
My heart did a few jumping jacks in my chest. I never got to go to Mel’s. The morning was saved! Then I remembered.
“Aw, shit, Mark! I can’t go. I have to go home for lunch. If I don’t, my mom will be over at school looking for me!”
“Aw, tough, man. But don’t worry, I’ll drink an extra Coke just for you!”
* * *
At 1:05 I was heading back up the alley from Wilson Street, filled with fried baloney and cherry Kool-Ade. No burger. No Coke. I turned up the driveway at Mark’s house toward the side door.
“He’s not home.”
My head jerked up and I spun around toward the voice. A little old man in a full apron and a broad straw hat was rolling a tiny wheelbarrow filled with what looked like garbage out the drive toward the alley. He had a trowel in one hand.
“What?”
“You’re looking for Mark, aren’t you?”
“Uhhh…yeah.”
“He’s not home. He’ll be at school. School started at one o’clock.”
“Uhhh…OK, thanks. Uh, yeah, I should have remembered that.”
The man smiled. “Have to work on my compost pile. It’s the best time, right after a little rain. Softens it up a bit.”
“Yeah, I agree… nothing like a little rain to soften it up.” What the hell was a compost pile? And what was this guy doing out here? Mark said the people on this side were dead. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just go pound on the door and have Mark let me in. This old guy would know something was up. But it was the only way in past the canine patrol. I was stumped.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mark’s side door open a crack and a hand sneak out and wave. I waited until Farmer John was stooped down in the other direction, then raced up to the door. It opened a little wider and I slipped in.
“Holy Crap, Sobecki, you said the people on this side never came out of their house. Between Old Lady Shitwood and her trained squirrel on one side and the two dead corpses on the other, they’ve got us prisoners in here!”
“Man, I swear I never see them outside! I don’t know what the hell he’s up to today. But don’t worry about it, Abbott, we’re going to have even more fun this afternoon. We don’t need to go out anywhere. I saved the best for last.”
I sure as hell hoped so. At this point, anything short of Melinda Dawson and one of her girlfriends would be a major disappointment.
He led the way upstairs, but this time we went into a different room – it looked like his mom’s bedroom. There was a lot of frilly stuff and nothing that looked like a man’s clothes. I never heard him talk about his dad – I thought his old man must be dead or divorced. That must be tough. Although I thought there were a few dads in the neighborhood that the kids would be better off without. Like Tommy Connor, for example.
Mark dragged a little stool over to the closet, climbed up and started digging around on the top shelf. He pulled out a little metal box and took it into his room and laid it down on the bed. He opened it up and pulled out a gun. A real gun. It was a .38 police special. I knew that because my old man had one just like it and I played with it lots of times when I wasn’t supposed to. He started waving it around, aiming at things, going “Blam, blam, blam,” and blowing pretend smoke off the barrel.
“Know what this is?” he asked, pointing it at my stomach.
“’Course I know, what do you think? But watch where you’re pointing that, will you?” I reached over and nudged the barrel down toward the floor.
“Don’t be such a pansy, Abbott! My mom never keeps it loa…” BANG
I jumped a foot. The gun fell out of Mark’s hand and spun around on the floor a couple of times. We both stood there for a long time, staring at the small, perfectly round hole right between his feet.
Finally, I said “It’s a good thing you’ve got such a little pecker. Otherwise you’d have blown it right off!”
He started to giggle. I started to giggle. He started to laugh out loud. I started laughing. In a minute, we were rolling around on the bed laughing hysterically, laughing our guts out, tears streaming down our cheeks, pounding the pillows with our fists. Finally my stomach hurt so much I just couldn’t laugh any more. We rolled onto the floor and lay there for a while, still staring at the hole.
I could hear a dog barking faintly. “So, who all heard it?”
Mark’s eyes got real big.
“Shit!”
We raced out the bedroom door and tumbled down the stairs. Mark ran to the window on Old Lady Chitwood’s side and peeked through the closed curtains.
“Cleo’s barking, all right, and the old bag’s stuck to the window, but she’s not looking over here! She’s looking out to the street. Maybe she thinks it was a car backfiring. Maybe she didn’t even hear it and doesn’t know what the dog’s barking at.”
We ran down to the side door and peeked out the window on the other side. “Nobody in sight. Mr. Thompson must’ve gone back inside and didn’t hear anything. I don’t think his hearing’s too good anyway.”
“Or he went back inside to call the cops.”
“Shit!”
We sat on the basement steps and thought for a while. My hands were still shaking. “Well, anyway, we’ve got to do something about that hole. No way my mom would miss that.”
“Are you sure it’s just one hole? How far did the bullet go?”
“Shit!”
We got up and raced into the dining room, scouring the ceiling for holes. “I think we lucked out. I don’t see anything. Are you sure this is where it would have come through?” Just in case, we checked the living room and kitchen. No holes. I was starting to breathe normally again.
“Well, how are we going to fix that hole?”
We? “Can you just put a rug over it?”
“My mom would just move it to clean. Or worse yet, wonder why I put a rug there.”
“Yeah, I guess that would be asking for it. Could you put your bed over it?”
“It’s in the middle of the room. That wouldn’t make any sense.”
“Yeah. I guess we’re gonna have to fill it with something. Got any wood filler, like Plastic Wood?”
“I’m pretty sure we don’t. We don’t have any stuff like that.”
“Any paint? Wood stain? Water colors? Sandpaper? Any tools?”
“We’ve got maybe a hammer and screwdriver and pliers, but that’s about all.”
“Cripes, how do you fix anything?”
“Oh, Mr. Thompson does all that stuff for us. He’s got a shitload of tools and stuff.”
“Mr. Thompson? You mean Farmer John? You mean that old dead guy next door who never goes outside or talks to your mom? SOBECKI!!”
“…well…you know…um…” Crap. If I ever decide to go into a life of crime, remind me never to take on a partner. At least he had the decency to look guilty. I think he was starting to realize his ass was really, really close to the burner. I was more than a little bit honked off.
“Well, I’ve got a swell idea – let’s just call up nice old Mr. Thompson and have him bring his shitload of tools over and fix it for us!” That shut him up. He was starting to look kind of grey. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
OK, what did we have to work with? I remembered seeing a bunch of stuff on his mom’s dresser – jars, bottles, tiny utensils. I walked back into his mom’s room and sat down at the table. Mark followed me like a dog that wanted company but was afraid if he got too close he’d get kicked. Nail polish. Eyeliner. Emery boards.
“Have any clothespins?”
“Clothespins?”
“Yeah, the little wood thingeys you pin clothes with. Not the kind with the springs, the kind with the two little wings. Got any?”
“Yeah. Sure. What do you think?”
“I’m trying not to. Got a good sharp knife?”
That brightened him up a bit. “Sure! I’ve got a great folding camping knife!”
“OK, bring me the knife and a clothespin. And the hammer”
I assembled my makeshift toolkit and took it back into Mark’s room.
* * *
Mark was waiting with the knife, clothespin and hammer. He picked up the gun and sniffed it. “Man, this stinks, now. The whole room does.”
“That’s probably the gunpowder. We can open the windows. But be careful nobody sees you. Maybe you could put a fan on in here.”
“What should I do about the gun?”
“Maybe you better clean it up a little. Don’t forget to take out the shell and put another bullet in.”
“Oh, yeah.” He took the gun and left.
I snapped the two little wings off the clothespin, leaving the top part with the head. The bottom end was now pretty ragged. Crap. More work. I put the clothespin down to the hole. It was maybe a quarter inch bigger than the hole. I started whittling down the sides with the knife, making it slightly cone-shaped and thinner toward the head. Surprisingly, the knife actually was a pretty good one, and the whittling went pretty fast, but it wasn’t going to be a work of art. In a minute Mark was back.
“Here, take what’s left of this clothespin and sand it down until the fat end is just a hair bigger than the hole. Then sand the fat end off completely flat. It has to be perfect.”
“Sand it off with what?”
I held up the emery board.
“With that? You’ve gotta be kidding! That’ll take forever.”
He saw the stuff I had brought in from his mom’s dresser. “Cripes, Abbott, my mom’s gonna be pissed at me if she thinks I was playing with her personal stuff.”
“Well, would you rather have her pissed at you for playing with her makeup, or pissed at you for shooting a hole in the floor with her gun?”
“Um.”
He started sanding with commendable industry.
I went downstairs. I turned on the TV and flopped down in the biggest chair while Mark sanded. A program called “All My Children” was on. It was a bunch of fancy-dressed grownups standing around saying lots of boring things to each other. I got up and changed the channel. This channel had “Days of Our Lives.” A lot of different grownups were standing around saying different boring things to each other. Oy veh!
I went to the kitchen to look for a Coke. No luck in the refrigerator, but there were a couple of bottles on the floor. Well, warm Coke was better than no Coke. Not by much, though.
Finally it was 2:30 and new programs came on. “As The World Turns.” I couldn’t believe it. It was just more of the same adults talking. I changed the channel again. “The Young And The Restless.” Cripes, did people really watch this stuff all day long? This must be how grownups learn to be so boring!
I heard Mark clomp down the stairs. He said “Here,” and tossed the wood piece at me. He disappeared around the corner and I heard him clomping down to the basement. “Jesus Christ!” he yelled.
I jumped out of the chair, spitting warm Coke, and ran to the stairway. “What the hell is it? Is your mom home?” No answer.
I ran the rest of the way down the stairs. Mark was standing in the doorway looking at the washing machine. A colossal mass of bubbles poured out of it, flowing down the side and piling up about two feet deep all the way across the floor. We stood and stared, speechless.
“What…”
“I was cleaning the gun.”
“What? You put it in the washing machine? You’re joking, right? Did you at least take the bullets out?”
“Of course I did, I’m not stupid.”
I thought of Melinda Dawson and bit my tongue as hard as I could.
Mark waded over and turned off the washer. He opened the top and fished around for a while until he found the gun. He pulled it out, wiped it clean on a dry spot on his shirt and laid it on the countertop. We looked at it for a minute, knee deep in bubbles.
“It looks different.”
“I know. It’s not as dark.”
“And blue. Didn’t it used to be bluer?”
“Yeah.”
“And it smells like… lavender? What did you do?”
“Well, we were out of the regular soap so I used some of my mom’s bubble bath. I guess it must be lavender flavored.”
We looked at the gun for a while.
“What did it used to smell like?”
Mark thought about it for a minute. “Kind of like oil, I think.”
“Do you have any oil around? Maybe you could rub a little on – just enough to cover the soap smell.” Maybe we should call Mr. Thompson and ask if he had any oil. I tromped up the stairs again to his bedroom, leaving Mark to deal with the bubbles. I had a headache.
* * *
I had to admit he did a good job with the sanding. I slid the wood piece into the hole. It was pretty snug with just a little sticking out at the top. I took the hammer and gently tapped it until it was flush with the floor. It fit pretty close.
Mark walked in. “Shit, Abbott, it looks worse than just the hole! It’s white – it stands out like a tit on a watermelon.”
Calm down, willya? You got any coffee?”
“Coffee? Hell, let’s just get the hole fixed - we don’t have all that much time, in case you haven’t noticed. What, you drink coffee?”
“No. Just go put about a spoonful of coffee in a cup with about a spoonful of water and bring it back here.”
“What the hell for?”
“Trust me. Just do it, willya?”
He was back in a minute, looking puzzled. I stuck my finger in the coffee and started dabbing it on the wood peg. The peg started turning a pale brown. After a couple of minutes of dabbing and rubbing, the color was about as dark as the floor.
“Jeez, Abbott, that’s amazing! You can hardly see it. How did you think of that?” He started getting a little giddy, grinning and squirming and jumping around.
“In the old days, artists had to mix their own paint colors from whatever they could find. You just have to think a little bit. No big deal.”
“It still doesn’t have those little lines in it like the rest of the floor, though.”
“The wood grain, yeah.” I held up the eye liner in front of his face. I popped the top and took the little brush out. I started to paint little black lines to match the wood of the floor. Mark was grinning and wiggling like a puppy. “Too bad it isn’t shiny like the rest of the floor, though.”
“You’re pretty picky for somebody who’s as desperate as you are.” I held the bottle of clear nail polish up to his face.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later I had my coat on at the door. It was 3:20, and school had been out for five minutes.
“Did you get the basement cleaned up OK?”
“I washed most of the bubbles down the floor drain, but there’s still a mess. It’s not gonna be dry by the time my mom gets home.”
“What are you going to tell her?”
“Well, I threw a bunch of my dirty clothes in the washer. I’ll just tell her I had an accident trying to wash them. She’ll be pissed, but I thought if she was pissed at me for messing up the basement, she might get a little distracted and not notice some other things as much.”
I looked at him with a newfound respect. “All right! Good thinking.” Now he looked as happy as a dog with a fresh bone.
“Hey, Abbott, this was a really fun day! I haven’t had this much fun in a long time! I can’t wait to tell the other kids how much fun we had while they were grinding away in school. We gotta do this again!”
“Yeah, this was really a kick! Thanks a lot for inviting me.”
“I really mean it. This was great! And my mom will never see that hole.”
Knowing what I knew about moms, I doubted that very much. But I could at least get a little time and space between me and the explosion, when it came. “No, you’re totally in the clear now. If she ever does find it, you can tell her it was always like that. Like somebody filled in a knothole in the wood.”
“Yeah, cool. See you tomorrow at practice.”
“Yeah, bye, Mark.”
“Bye, David”
* * *
Five minutes later, I banged through the screen door at home. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, hon, how was school?”
Without thinking, I said “Man, this was the boringest day of the year!”
_____________________________
V The Good One
Leon and I weren’t exactly best friends. Leon was tall, skinny and mean. He was in my class, but he’d been held back a couple years because he was so dumb. He was at least two years older and a lot bigger than I was and gave me shit any chance he could.
I had to admit, sometimes it was my own fault. I had a bit of a smart mouth, if you know what I mean. It got me in trouble once in a while. But Leon was so dumb, and it was really so easy, sometimes I just couldn’t help myself.
Like the time we had an in-class snap quiz on our civics homework. Mrs. Tatro had passed out a list of questions about the federal government and she was reading them out loud. She was an OK teacher, I guess. She had black horn-rimmed glasses with a long, beaded cord connecting the ends. The cord went over her head and kept her glasses from falling on the floor if they should ever come off her nose. They never did. She liked to wear big flouncy skirts that came almost down to her ankles. She had a bit of a mean streak, though. Whenever she spotted some kid sweating or trying not to make eye contact, she’d swoop down and ask that kid for the answer. Of course, he never had it. It was like shooting ducks in a barrel. The trick was to look her in the eye all the time and look like you wanted to get called on. It worked every time.
Anyway, one of the secretaries knocked on the door, and Mrs. Tatro went out in the hallway to talk for a minute. I felt a sharp rap on the back of my head.
“Ow! Shit! What was that for?” I turned around and saw Leon glaring at me over my shoulder. He had bad teeth and thick glasses and his breath smelled like dog vomit.
“You’ll get a lot more than that if you don’t gimme the answer to question seven, Abbott!” he growled.
“You better not let Mrs. Tatro find you out of your seat, Leon.”
“Fuck Tatro. What’s the answer?” He’d screwed up on the answer to question four, already. I guess he wanted to show that it was only a momentary lapse and he was actually one of the class brains. As if.
“I’m not gonna help you cheat, Leon. Leave me alone.”
A stab of pain ripped through my head as he grabbed a hunk of my hair and gave it a ferocious yank. “OW! Shit! All right! Cut it out!”
He let go and I grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled the answer. Leon smirked and disappeared back to his seat. The kids around me tittered. I felt around my head to see if he had pulled any hair out. I checked my hands for blood, but I didn’t see any.
Mrs. Tatro came back and we got through questions five and six. At question seven, Mrs. Tatro gave an odd look back in Leon’s direction. I turned. Leon had his hand up. It was the first time I’d ever seen him hold his hand up in class that he wasn’t giving somebody the finger. Mrs. Tatro bit. “Leon? Do you have the answer?” Like she really didn’t believe it.
“Alfred E. Neumann!”
The class exploded in laughter. Pencils, erasers and paper went flying. Books dropped. Tim Walton rolled off his chair onto the floor. Harry Clark was laughing so hard snot was running down his face. Millie Hancock told me later she actually pissed her pants. Leon was absolutely flummoxed. He looked wildly around, not believing what he was seeing. Then he got it. He turned real slow and looked straight at me.
Mrs. Tatro blinked a couple of times, like somebody had hit her in the nose with a paper wad. Then she started to steam. She steamed until the class settled, which took a pretty long time. Very slowly and very clearly, she said, “No, Leon, I don’t think that Alfred E. Neumann is the President of the United States. What I do think is that you should meet with me and Principal Stein right after school tonight.”
It was a good one – nobody was going to forget this any time soon. Especially Leon. Now all I had to do was make it home alive.
During math, Betty Kusak slipped me a note. It said that she heard Leon had arranged for his buddies to be watching the exit doors after school tonight. All three doors. They planned to beat me until there was nothing but a bloody stain, then piss on the stain. I needed a plan B.
* * *
The school janitor was Charles Washington. Everybody, including the other kids, called him Charles. I called him Mr. Washington. He was the only negro I had ever seen up close. He was a black version of Wighead, the math teacher – tiny and wrinkled with white hair. But he had a huge ring of keys that must have weighed like five pounds hanging from his belt. Keys to every room in the school. Keys to the supply closet. Where the art supplies were stored. Supplies like paint, pastels and paper. Lots and lots of paper. That’s why I called him Mr. Washington.
Once, when it was raining like a sonovabitch, Mr. Maddox had sent me down to tell Mr. Washington the window in his classroom was leaking. His “office” was in the basement next to the huge boiler. It was a tiny room, like a little grungy parlor with a little desk and a cot in the corner. He had lots of photos cut out from magazines stuck up on the walls. I surprised him – he was smoking, which I was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to do, because he started to look around for a place to dump the butt. But when he saw it was just me, he laughed and took another drag. We kind of hit it off, what with me calling him Mr. Washington and all. He was really pretty cool. He had lots of funny stories about the teachers and seemed to know every kid by name. If anybody knew what made that school tick, it was Mr. Washington.
Later, I’d find excuses to make trips down to his room. I’d just happen to leave a couple of cigarettes each time. I didn’t smoke, myself. I tried once, but it tasted like paint thinner and my tongue burned for days. Why the hell does anybody smoke? But I’d cadge cigarettes out of my old man’s packs when he was at work. Just in case I needed something to grease the wheels, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, I was going to have to call in a favor. I was hoping to save any favors for the supply closet, but I figured dead people don’t have much use for art supplies.
After the last bell rang, I laid back until most of the kids had gone. It was just me and the girls at volleyball practice. I spent the time watching Melinda Dawson in her volleyball shorts through the little window to the gym. She had short, curly blonde hair and big blue eyes and bigger tits than most of the teachers. She was a year older than me and the wet dream of every boy in school who could choke his chicken, even if she sucked at volleyball.
When I thought it might be safe, I sneaked up to the front door and peeked out. The school was shaped like a U, with the main doors at the bottom of the U and doors on each side near the top ends. The teachers’ parking lot was between the uprights of the U. Two of Leon’s buddies, Charlie Starks and Lannie Prochaska, were sitting on the step with their backs to the door. I ran down the hall to the Stanley Street side. Mick and Jughead. Back up to the front and down the other side hall to the Taylor Street door. Wesley and his older brother Doug. It was no use. I wasn’t getting out the doors. Even if I went blasting past them when they had their backs turned, they could run me down before I got home. I ran back down to the janitor’s door and bounced down the old metal staircase to Mr. Washington’s room. He was sitting in his little parlor, feet up on his tiny desk.
“Hi, Mr. Washington.”
“David – whuchu be doin’ down here? School’s closin’.”
“I know Mr. Washington, but I need a favor really bad.”
“A favor? Whassat be? A bottle a hootch? Hee, hee, hee.”
“No, I need to get out of here without anybody seeing me.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah, Leon, yassah! Yassah, I heard all ‘bout that! Hee, hee, hee. That was a good one, awright! Hee, hee, hee! That was a good one!”
Damn! How did he find this stuff out so fast? He started laughing harder and slapping his knee, and then he started coughing and I had to grab him and pound him on the back. Maybe the cigarettes weren’t such a good idea after all.
“Are you OK, Mr. Washington?”
“Yassah, yassah, ah be OK donchu worry none ‘bout me. Hee, hee, hee. Now how you spose you gon’ get outta here? You want I should stuff you in the boiler ‘an shoot you up the smokestack to the roof where a hellycopter be plucken you off ‘n flyin you home? Hee, hee, hee!”
“No, listen. You know the metal barn doors by the teachers’ parking lot? Where they deliver the coal? Can you open those for me?”
“The coal doors? Why they be dirty as sin! You have to climb up that chute an’ get yore clothes all black. You don’t wanna be doin’ that!”
It was either dirty clothes or be a piss-smelling blood spot on the sidewalk. Dirty clothes were looking pretty good right now.
“Please? Leon and his buddies are gonna beat the crap outta me if you don’t!”
“Well, I dunno…”
It was going to work. But the coal doors were just around the corner from the Stanley Street door. If Mick or Jughead peeked around at the wrong time, I could still be dead meat. He unlocked the barn doors, then went outside. The doors were almost flat to the ground, and the handles were on the outside so the coal man could lift them up. Mick and Jughead ignored him. They were after juicier game. Inside, I had to crawl on my hands and knees up about 15 feet of sloped chute. It was thick with coal dust and slippery as a pig in mud. By the time I had my hands on the top rim, I was blacker than Mr. Washington and coughing just as hard.
In a minute, one of the doors opened just a crack – barely enough to let me squirm through and sneak behind the two cars left in the teachers’ parking lot. I heard Mr. Washington walk around the corner and past Mick and Jughead back into the school.
“Now, whachu boys be doin’ hangin’ roun’ here this late? Donchu know school’s closed? Hee, hee, hee! You gon’ miss yo dinner!”
From the cover of the cars, I could make it to the chain link fence around the playground. The fence was all grown up with weeds about two feet high – if I stayed on my hands and knees, I could make it down to Mr. Jepson’s house, cut across to the old Plymouth he parked out front, use that for cover to get up through his side yard, then over the fence, down the alley to Elder Drive and home. I was going to live, after all.
I cleared the cars and started crawling.
“Gotcha, you little piss ant!” I felt a hand grab me by the collar of my shirt. Shit! It was Leon. Where did he come from? From behind, he jerked me up to a standing position. I kicked backward with my heel.
“Ow!” It couldn’t have hurt much, but it surprised him just enough to loosen his grip. I tore free and raced straight across the playground toward Stanley Street. I got a good start - Leon was just noticing I was gone. Crap! Mick and Jughead had heard the ruckus from around the corner and were heading for me from the right, cutting off my escape to Stanley. I veered left and made it to Mr. Jepson’s yard after all, hopping the fence and squeezing through Mrs. Beeler’s iron gate onto Elder Drive. Leon was making up ground fast. As I came out on Elder, I saw Charlie Starks running up the street, cutting me off from home. Double crap! I made a U turn back around the other side of Mrs. Beeler’s, barely avoiding Leon’s grasping hand as he flew past me in the other direction.
I was back out on the playground again, running like my feet were on fire, but now Doug and Lannie had me headed off from the other side. They were forcing me back to the school. I could see they were going to try to trap me in the middle of the U. It was a good plan – I didn’t see any way out.
At the school, the volleyball team was finished with practice and filing out the door. I could see Mr. Washington waiting to lock up, talking to one of the girls. He seemed to be gesturing in my direction, but it wasn’t going to help – they had me fenced in and I couldn’t make it back inside before I was run down.
Wesley, who was really fast, finally grabbed me by the shirt. It slowed me down. Jughead, running at me from the side, grabbed an arm. I ground to a halt, twisting and pulling. Leon finally caught up, grabbing a handful of my hair. I was lost. I started thinking about how much it was going to hurt.
“OK…you… shithead…” he gasped, sucking air, “It’s… all… over.”
“Leon!” His head jerked up, like a dog hearing its master’s voice. It was Melinda Dawson, still in her volleyball shorts.
“Leon, let that little kid go and come over here! Now!”
His eyes bugged. To ignore Melinda was a hormonal impossibility. I could see him agonizing, his head snapping back and forth between me and Melinda, measuring the chance of a feel against the satisfaction of seeing my blood run. Finally he turned back to me.
“Leon! I need you to walk me home!” It was too much. With a groan, either of lust or disappointment, Leon turned and started walking back to the school, muttering curses over his shoulder. “Break every bone in that little prick’s body,” he growled. “I’ll see ya later.” All six started poking and shoving me with delight. One less pair of knuckles wouldn’t mean very much.
“No, I mean all of you!” Melinda shouted. “Let that kid go! Leon, walk me home.”
“Melinda…” he whined.
“No! Let him go. All of you.”
His last shred of resistance dissolved. With an impressive final burst of cussing, he waved at his posse and they reluctantly turned me loose.
“We’re not through with you, dipshit,” said Jughead. “You know that, dontcha?” He gave me one last hard punch in the arm. “Your day’s comin’ and there ain’t gonna be nobody there to save your ass. Nobody at all.” They turned and headed toward Leon and Melinda.
As I took off for home, I waved at Mr. Washington. He waved back. I couldn’t really tell for sure at that distance, but I could swear he gave me a big wink. Melinda was busy loading Leon and his crew with books and gym bags like pack mules while they giggled and joked and tried to rub up against her
Now all I had to do was get these dirty school clothes past my mom. Which would make my escape from death at the hands of the Wild Bunch seem like a walk in the park.
* * *
For the next couple of weeks I stayed pretty close to home. A few mothers still walked their little kids past my house to school and back, so I tucked in with one of them every day, just one more little duckling trailing along behind mama duck. For the first time in my life, I was thankful for being small. There was no sign of dickhead or his buddies, but I knew it was just a matter of time. Still, for days afterward, my parents commented on my good mood, and gave me puzzled looks when I’d burst out laughing for no reason at all. It was really a good one.
_____________________________
VI Magnum Opus
All morning I’d been on the front porch working on a painting of two indians paddling down a river. My old man told me that the great masters learned by copying pictures that other great masters had painted. I didn’t happen to have any old masterpieces laying around, so I was making do with a photograph from a book. I’d already wasted a good hour trying to mix a brown for the skin of the Indians that looked like the photo. Mrs. Bass, my art teacher, told us the way to make brown was to mix red, yellow and blue. I tried it that way with tempera colors about twenty times and it always turned out really muddy and kind of greenish. It looked like dog shit. All the other classes she taught were social studies, so she probably wasn’t even a real art teacher. But if she didn’t know, why couldn’t she just say so?
Around noon I made THE GREAT DISCOVERY. The secret is mixing orange with a little bit of black. Then you can add some red or yellow or white, depending on what kind of brown you want. But definitely no blue. Especially blues with fancy names like cerulean or peacock - they’re already kind of greenish and they make it look really muddy.
I was grounded again. This time for drawing pictures of naked women from an art book my old man got me. So I’m grounded for doing what he was encouraging me to do in the first place. What is it with grownups? That’s why I was sitting on the front porch painting indians on the most perfect Saturday of the year, while all the other kids played baseball in Grohnke’s field across from the school. I could see flashes of Sal Pinciotti’s red shirt through Mr. Bond’s chain link fence. Either every shirt Sal had was red, or he didn’t wash that one very often. Actually, it wasn’t so bad. My parents had gone shopping downtown and wouldn’t be back until the 3:10 bus, and I had most of the day to myself to paint. It was my job to watch the squid, but I had him safely locked inside.
Our house sat at the end of Elder Drive where it came to a “T” at Woodrow Street, and I could see down the street in three directions. So the porch was a pretty good spot if you were watching for somebody. On the other hand, you couldn’t very well hide from anybody, either.
I caught a motion down the street to my left, and saw Dale Novatny turn the corner and head up Woodrow toward my house. Dale was a couple years older and about twice as big as me. He played tackle on the high school freshman football team. Crap. This meant trouble. Wink Pollard lived a couple of doors down, and he was one of Dale’s buddies. Maybe he’d stop there. Please, please… no. Damn. I stopped painting and held perfectly still, hoping he wouldn’t be able to see me. It didn’t work. I saw him look up. Just go on past, please, please. Shit.
He turned in and lumbered up the steps to the porch.
“Hey, dickhead.”
“Hey, asshole.”
“Dicked any dogs, lately?”
“Just your old lady.”
Greeting ritual over, he sat down with a huge thump in the other chair. Sat down like he meant to stay awhile. I really, really hate to have anybody watch me while I paint. Now it looked like I was screwed for the day. Who would have guessed that a redneck like this would like art? Sometimes he’d stay, like an hour, just watching. Or maybe it just seemed that long. He told me he drew stuff, too, but he’d never show me anything. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Wait. There was hope! A bright pink ball of fluff on a black stick had appeared at the other end of Elder. It was headed this way. If I could just stall for another three minutes, I was in the clear. I used the time to carefully add water to each of the colors in my paint tray and clean my brush. Dale was getting impatient. He wanted action.
“Hiiiii, Daaaaale!” Finally.
Melinda Dawson rolled and swiveled and wiggled around the corner, waving and smiling at Dale like he was Pat Boone. She wore a huge fuzzy bright pink angora sweater and matching neck scarf with a tight charcoal poodle skirt. Charcoal was pretty much like black except it cost four bucks more. Charcoal and pink were the cool colors that year, but for Melinda it was always an angora sweater and matching scarf. Melinda had jugs as big as any other three girls in her class put together, and she didn’t mind letting you know it. She was really pretty, too, with short curly blonde hair. Everybody knew Melinda, if you know what I mean. And anybody that didn’t, wanted to.
She didn’t say hi to me.
Dale was off the chair and across the street quicker than I’d ever seen him move on the football field. Melinda Dawson 1, art 0. They sauntered off toward Mel’s Drive-In. Dale had one arm around her waist and seemed to be trying to stick his head down her sweater.
I worked on the indians until about 2 o’clock, when I heard Big Bill hollering from across the street. There were two kids named Bill in the neighborhood. And they lived next door to each other. To call a kid out to play, we’d sit on the front step and holler out his name. But they kept getting mixed up, and the wrong Bill would come out. So we called one “Big Bill” because he was a year older, and the other “Little Bill.” Little Bill didn’t like it much, but I guess you don’t get to choose your nickname. Somebody just lays it on you and it sticks.
“Hey, David! Leon’s got your brother and says come on down and get him.”
My heart stopped beating for a few very long seconds. “Whataya mean? The squid’s here in the house. I’ve got him locked up tight.”
“Naw, I saw him. Leon’s got him tied to a chair in the garage. You better go get him.”
“No way – he’s in the house!” I yelled. But I knew as I went tearing inside that he wasn’t going to be there. I didn’t bother looking for him – I went right to the back door. Which was standing open. With the broom laying on the floor where he’d used it to lift the hook off the screw eye. Shit! Shit! Shit!
This was a double disaster. One was my parents, who were coming home on the 3:10 bus. I looked at my watch. It was 2:08. I had one hour to get the squid back in his box without my old man finding out. I was already in plenty hot water, and if he found out I let the squid get away and had to leave the house when I was grounded to catch him, he’d find another use for that broom handle.
The second problem was Leon. Leon had a particular hard on for me since that trick in Mrs. Tatro’s class. Not that he needed any special excuse – he was always out to get me. But it looked like my tit was really in the wringer this time.
First, I had to see for myself what I was up against. Leon lived in the last house on the other end of Elder Drive, which is kind of a long block. There’s a driveway next to the house, which leads up to a garage in back. Behind the garages on the block, there’s an alley where everybody puts out their trash, and some of the garages open up to the alley instead of the street. Then, on the other side of the alley, there’s a bunch more houses and garages which face out on Manhattan Boulevard.
Behind Leon’s garage there’s an old rusty chain link fence, the kind with rusty pointy ends of the wire sticking up over the top bar. It was about a foot and a half from the back of the garage, and that area was all weedy, with hollyhocks taller than me. But there was a small, dirty window at the back of the garage. I had to get to that window without them seeing me.
Lucky for me, Leon and his goon squad weren’t geniuses. They probably expected me to march down the middle of the street and right up into the garage. So I didn’t think they’d have a lookout. They didn’t.
In two minutes I was in back of the garage. I could hear Leon and somebody else laughing. I crawled up to the fence and tiptoed to try to see in the window. Damn. It was too dirty to see in from this far out, and too high up for me to reach. I tried the gate. I could lift the latch and open it, but it was rusty as hell. It probably screamed like a banshee when you moved it. I edged it open, inch by inch. I was starting to sweat. It opened enough to let me squeeze through. I looked at my watch. It was 2:21. The weeds were really thick and I had to force my way through to get near the window. I still wasn’t tall enough to see in, but there was a pile of junk thrown behind the garage. Old crates and stuff. I pulled one over knelt on it. Then, slowly, I pushed my way up through the Hollyhocks and looked inside.
Did I mention there were Hollyhocks? Have you ever been scrunched into a mass of Hollyhocks? In case you don’t know, Hollyhocks are totally full of pollen. On the flowers, on the stems, on the leaves. Itchy pollen that sticks to your sweat and gets up your nose if you breathe and makes you sneeze. And I felt a sneeze coming on. I tried thinking about baseball, but it didn’t work. I tried holding my breath. I held it until tears ran down my cheeks. I held it until I could see spots in front of my eyes. I held it until I couldn’t hold it any more. I clamped my mouth shut with one hand and pinched my nose with the other and tried to choke it off. It came out anyway.
But it wasn’t a regular sneeze. It came out in a loud, blubbery squeak. I think most of it came out my ears.
“Ssskkgrbbbruggghffttt!”
The talking stopped in the garage.
“Safeties!” yelled one of the kids inside.
“No, man, that wasn’t me!”
“A fox smells his own hole first!”
“That was Jughead! That’s what his sound like!”
Then a bunch of laughing, and they all ran out into the driveway.
I stood up and looked in the window while I had the chance. There was the squid, tied to a chair. He didn’t look all that unhappy. He probably liked the attention. The bad news was that Leon, Jughead, Mick and Wesley were there. The worse news was that they were smoking. That meant Leon’s folks weren’t home. That screwed my plan of sneaking around the other side of the house, walking up to the porch, ringing the doorbell and asking Leon’s mom if she would make Leon let the squid go. It was going to be a massacre.
“Hey, the kid’s gonna get gassed to death!”
“You wanna go in and get him?”
“No, man, he’s like the canary in the mine shaft – if he dies, we know we can’t go back in!”
More laughter and crazy giggles. I eased off the crate and backed out through the gate. I turned and raced for home. It was 2: 28.
* * *
I guess about this point I ought to tell you a little about what you might call the power structure of the neighborhood. It was pretty complicated.
To start with, just about all the guys belonged to gangs. These weren’t official gangs, they didn’t give out shirts or anything. They were just bunches of guys who kind of hung out together because most of the time there’s safety in numbers. And sometimes the guys would change gangs, so you might not know just who was with what gang at any given time. And it wasn’t like they were tough gangs having fights all the time. As a matter of fact, I never saw a real, serious fight. Mostly it was to keep from being hassled and picked on by older kids. Or, in some cases, to hassle and pick on younger kids.
Leon had a gang. His guys were mostly mean and liked to pick on younger kids. I had my own gang, but we were littler and younger. We were the ones Leon liked to pick on. We mostly just liked to hang out and sometimes play sports together. Leon’s gang wouldn’t be caught dead playing sports.
We never had gang fights. If two gangs ran into each other and both wanted to hang out with Melinda Dawson, for example, they’d all swagger around and call each other names. They’d cuss and push each other around a little. But it all came down to the toughest kid in each gang. Eventually, these two would end up facing each other off. And the toughest of the two would win the face-off and the other gang would back down. They’d grumble and cuss some more. Then they’d move off and look for something else to get into.
The funny thing was, the two toughest kids would never really fight. We all knew that Larry Funk was tougher than Big Bill, so if those two faced off, Big Bill would eventually back down. It was like chess. When you had other king cornered and he couldn’t get away, you didn’t actually take the king. Your opponent just sort of said, “Well, I guess you could take me if you wanted to,” and agreed that you won. And he picked up his pieces and went home.
I always wondered how everybody knew that Larry Funk was really tougher than Big Bill if nobody ever actually fought. It seemed to me like it was based mostly on reputation. Meaning who got in worse trouble more often. It didn’t seem like the most foolproof system of judging toughness, if you know what I mean. It left a lot of room for playing the angles.
I wondered if it was like this in other neighborhoods, or if it was just us. It was the only neighborhood I’d ever lived in, so I didn’t have much to compare it with. I wondered if there was a secret rulebook for the universe that you had to, like, decode, to understand how things worked? I did a lot of wondering.
Anyway, the bottom line was, you didn’t need a big gang. You only needed one really tough guy in your gang to come out on top.
Most of the tough guys in my neighborhood would rather clean out the cat box with their tongue than hang out with me and my friends. We were too little and nerdy for them and they were mostly too dumb for us. Plus, they were a lot older. So we weren’t going to be buddies. But we needed them. Or at least one of them.
Did you ever watch Have Gun, Will Travel? With Richard Boone? It was my second favorite western show behind Maverick. Maverick was really funny. Where Richard Boone, whose name is Paladin in the show, hires his gun out to anybody with a couple of bucks? That idea made some sense. Hiring somebody, that is. So I had buddied up to a couple of the tougher guys, like Larry Funk, Jimmy Powder and Harley Benton, greasing the wheels with smokes, cokes and occasionally cold hard cash. With the idea that they’d show for a couple of minutes when we were in deep shit. Like now.
But this was going to be a little tricky. Leon, Jughead, Mick and Wesley were all way up on the list, and there were four of them. I had to come up with a real animal. Somebody like Larry Funk or even Jimmy Powder. And I had, now, 42 minutes to do it.
Harley was in the hospital, but Larry Funk was reliable. We got along pretty well. He was the oldest of nine kids, and he kept in practice by beating up all the others as often as he could. This was actually a feat, because a couple of them, like Gerald and Bud, were pretty high up that list themselves. I started off at a run for his house.
I figured I didn’t have to be too careful on the street, now. Leon and all the buddies he could round up were at his house waiting for me. I cut straight across Elder, not caring if the goon squad saw me, through Little Bill’s yard, over his fence into Mr. Jepson’s yard onto Stanley. I made a beeline across the school playground to Taylor and down to the second house from Madden, where all the Funks lived.
I banged on the front door. In about 30 seconds Dot opened the door and pressed her nose against the screen. She was the littlest Funk. She was three.
“Dot, is Larry home?” I asked.
She stared at me, unblinking.
“Dot! Is! Larry! Home?”
She stuck her finger up her nose and pulled something out, which she looked at closely for a long time.
“DOT!” I screamed. “GO GET YOUR MOTHER!”
She backed away and closed the door. Shit on a pancake!
I kept banging on the door. In another 30 seconds, the door opened again. It was Terrance. He was five.
“Terrance, is Larry home?”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter. Is he home?”
“Is he in trouble?”
“NO! HE”S NOT IN TROUBLE! IS HE HOME?”
“Gerald’s home. But he can’t come out.”
“I don’t want Gerald. I want LARRY! Is he home?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“Is your mother home?”
“Yes.”
“Terrance, do you want a nickel?”
“OK.”
“I’ll give you a nickel if you’ll go get your mother.”
“OK. Gimme the nickel.”
“I’ll give it to you when your mother comes out.”
“I want it now.”
“No. Your mother.”
“I want it now.”
“ALRIGHT, dammit, here’s your nickel! See?” I held a nickel out.
He opened the screen a crack and snatched the nickel. He jumped back and slammed the door. Jesus H. Christ, what now? I looked at my watch. 3:35.
“David?” I jumped a foot. Mrs. Funk was standing behind me with a laundry basket of clothes. She had come around the side of the house from the back yard.
“Hi, Mrs. Funk. Is Larry home?”
“Yeah, he is. He’s in his room. He skipped mass this morning. Father Don called to tell me he missed him. The little shit got dressed up and went out like he was going to church, and he came back right on time, but the little turd didn’t go to church at all, he was out screwing around doing God knows what. You know, you try to bring a kid up right in the church, send him off every Saturday and Sunday morning, and what does it get you?”
“Mrs. Funk?”
“It gets you squat, that’s what it gets you. Now Father Don and everybody at church think I’m a bad Catholic just because I can’t get my damn kids to go to church. I tell you, if his dad was still around, he’d kick his ass so hard his shoe would pop out his mouth. What can I do? I’m just a mom, and I guess that’s not good enough for Mr. Fancypants to bother about…"
“MRS. FUNK!”
“What? What? Whaddaya want, David?”
“Can I talk to Larry, please?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No!”
“Why not?”
Because he’s in his room and that’s where he’s goddam good and well gonna stay until maybe the police come and drag him off to…
“Bye, Mrs. Funk. Thanks!”
I flew off the porch and headed back home. Larry and Gerald were out. It was 3:42. 28 minutes to doomsday. There was no time to try Jimmy Powder. He lived on the other side of Crossway Park. Way too far. I tried to think while I ran. I cut through Mrs. Hostetler’s side yard and into the alley, still going at full blast.
Wait.
I came to a screeching , sliding, gravelly stop. I turned around and ran back up the alley a couple of houses. To Connor’s house. Mr. Connor’s son, Tommy was sitting in the backyard. He had his back to me. Maybe he had passed out. Nope, he just took a drag on a butt.
Could this work? Tommy was 19 or 20. A grownup, just about. He’d already been busted a whole bunch of times and even went to jail. He would be so far off the chart nobody could even read his name without a stepladder. He and his old man were both drunks. I watched his old man walk home every night from the Jeep plant. He was huge, with a big gut. He always carried a six pack of beer, but the bottles were always empty. I was pretty sure he drank them all on his way home. Sometimes they had terrible, noisy fights. A couple of times the cops showed up.
I looked at my watch again. Jesus. 3:48. I had no choice. It was all or nothing. I turned and sprinted back toward home. If I could pull this off, I knew this would cost me. But did I have anything he’d want?
I burst in the front door and raced upstairs to my stash. Twenty-three Camel cigarettes. Four dollars and seventy-six cents. A half pouch of pipe tobacco and one of my old man’s pipes I had rescued from the trash. Some good baseball cards. Nah! That was stupid. That seemed like a lot to me, but would it be anything to him? Geez, this was like trying to guess what a man from Mars wanted. I needed a secret weapon. I could only think of one more thing. Man, I hated to give that up! But it was the closest thing to a secret weapon I had.
I went into my mom’s room to the back of her closet. I pulled out an old roll of yellowed wallpaper, curled up and frayed around the edges. It was so grungy she’d never use it for anything. But this was the kind of thing she never threw out, either. From the cardboard core I carefully slipped out my prize. I unrolled it, took a look, sighed, and rolled it back up again. Here’s a little advice in case you ever want to hide something from your parents. DO NOT put it anywhere in your own room. Put it right under their own noses. I learned that from a story by Edgar Allen Poe. You probably never heard of him. He wrote mysteries and some pretty weird stories that actually made a strange sort of sense. He was one guy who really knew how to run an angle on people.
OK. It was do or die.
I threw all my stuff in a paper bag and ran down the street to the Connors.’ It was the shabbiest house on the block. It needed a coat of paint really bad, but I don’t know how they’d ever tell what the original color was. There was an old swing on the porch where Mr. Connor sat and drank beer every night. The front yard was tiny, but there was hardly any grass. It was mostly all dirt. I slowed down and walked up the side of the house to the back yard. How was I going to do this? I don’t think he even knew my name. Maybe he wouldn’t know me at all.
At the corner of the house in the back was a gate. I leaned over the gate and peeked around the corner. He was still sitting there smoking. He had his eyes closed. He wasn’t nearly as big as his old man, but he was stocky. Kind of square looking. I don’t mean nerdy square, I mean rugged square. He was wearing jeans and an old t-shirt with a big rip across the front. You could see the hair on his stomach. He had a sock on one foot and an old sneaker on the other. His hair looked like a bird lived in it. He even needed a shave. He looked like just the kind of person you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.
“Tommy?” I squeaked.
He opened his eyes.
“I’m David Abbott. I live down the street. Maybe you’ve seen me around.”
No answer. He just looked at me. I opened the gate and edged across the back yard to his chair. He was sitting by an old card table with three legs. The yard was overgrown with weeds. There was an old cracked hose curling around the yard and a couple of old broken crates. There was a massive pile of beer bottles piled against the side of the house, spreading out over the grass. Over the weeds, I should say. If I lived through this, maybe I’d come back and help Mr. Connor clean up his yard. At two cents a bottle, that was a tidy sum.
“I’ve got a little problem I think you can help me with.”
He smiled. He took a drag. He closed his eyes.
“OK, so Leon, down the street. You know Leon, don’t you? The tough kid.” At that he snorted. And smiled again. It was a really weird smile, like that cat in the Alice in Wonderland movie.
“Anyway, he’s got the squid. My brother. Tied to a chair. And he won’t let him go, you know? I need you to help me get him loose.” At that he actually laughed.
I opened the bag and started laying things out on the table. I’ve got cigarettes…
For the first time he seemed to focus his eyes. He looked at the smokes.
“You gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’, right?” He held up his butt to me and took a long drag.
HOLY SHIT! What was he smoking? That didn’t look like a regular cigarette! It couldn’t be. No, really, it can’t be. It’s gotta be! It’s DOPE! HOLY FUCKING JESUS CHRIST! IT”S DOPE! IT’S A JOINT!”
Was this cool, or what! I still couldn’t believe it. Dope, right here in my own back yard, almost. We always had a movie in gym every year about smoking dope. They tried to scare you into thinking it like ate your brain and sucked out your guts and turned you into a mindless, drooling zombie. From here, that looked about right.
I had to calm down and stick with the program. I had to get him moving. OK, cigarettes are out.
“I’ve got almost five bucks…”
At that he started giggling. Like he couldn’t stop. He rocked way back in his chair. I thought he might tip over backward, but he stayed balanced way back on two legs. After a minute he stopped giggling and took another drag.
OK, right to the secret weapon. I reached in the bag and pulled out my last hope. Real careful, I unrolled it and held it up. It took a few seconds for him to focus again. But when he did, his chair came slamming back on all four legs. He leaned over and stuck his head up close. His eyes bugged out. He made a funny kind of grunting sound.
“Jzzuz Chrris.”
He dropped his joint.
It was 3:56
* * *
I walked down the middle of the street, turned in at Leon’s house and marched back to the garage. The way I thought they expected me to come. The doors were open and the squid was still tied to the chair. He was looking a bit more nervous. He probably had to pee.
“Well, well, look what we got here”
“Wow! Big brother to the rescue!”
“C’mon in, cocksucker, you’re just in time for the party!”
Leon took a step up to me and punched me in the chest, not really hard, but hard enough to show he meant business.
“You know I been looking forward to this, doncha?”
“I’m not here to fight, Leon, I’m just here to get my brother.”
“Just here to get your brother, huh? Well, we can’t let him go just yet. We want him to watch the fun.”
“I’m serious, Leon, he’s not supposed to be out and I have to get him back home before my parents get back.”
All four of them started wailing and moaning.
“Ooooh, noooo! Mommy and Daddy are gonna come home! And poor little Davee’s not gonna beeeee there! Him OR his little brother.”
“I’m just going to take him, now, Leon. Just leave me alone.”
“Just take him, huh? Just take him? Are you jackin’ me off? You and what fuckin’ army, Abbott?”
What a setup line.
He took another step and pushed his face in mine.
“Close the doors, boys. It’s party time!”
“Hey, army.” I called.
Tommy stepped around the corner. He had walked down the alley and up along the side of the garage. He leaned against the door. His joint still hung out of the corner of his mouth. He had found his other sneaker. I hoped he wouldn’t fall over and spoil the effect.
The effect wasn’t spoiled. Leon stood there with his mouth open. The other three sort of melted back into the wall. I walked over to the squid and untied him. They did a pretty good job. His arms were really red where the rope had been. I’d have to think of a good cover story for that.
“Man, you are gonna get such a beating when you get home.”
He looked up at me. It was the first time today I’d seen real worry on his face. I grabbed the squid by his shirt collar and marched him down to the sidewalk and up Elder toward home. I took one last look back. Leon and the goon squad hadn’t moved a muscle between them. Tommy was still leaning on the door. Maybe he was asleep.
The best part of this was that Leon didn’t know how tight Tommy and I were. And if he was part of my gang now, Leon couldn’t take the chance of whacking me.
“Man, you are gonna get the worst whipping you ever had when the old man gets home! You sneaked out when you weren’t supposed to and on top of that, you made me go looking for you. That’s TWO whippings you’re gonna get!”
“No, no, I don’t wanna whipping! Don’t tell, don’t tell!”
I probably can’t do anything about it. You’re just gonna have to face the music. Or face the belt, I should say!”
“NO NO NOT THE BELT PLEASE PLEASE!.”
“Well, maybe I can talk him out of it. Just maybe.
“Please, please, talk him out of it. Please, Davy, I don wanna whipping!”
“Well, it’ll cost you. Give me a quarter and I won’t tell. But you can’t tell, either, ‘cause if you do, it’ll be the belt!”
“I won’t tell, I won’t tell. Please, please!”
“OK. It’s a deal. OK? You won’t tell?”
“No no I won’t tell. Please, please!”
“OK. Then shut up.”
I breathed a little easier. It looked like I had my ass covered on that side. I looked at my watch. 3:08. Shit.
“Run! Run! If the old man sees you out, it’ll be the belt, no matter what I say!”
He took off like a scalded cat and didn’t stop until he was in his room.
I hit the porch and plopped into my painting chair. Through Mr. Bond’s chain link fence I could see the 3:10 bus slowing to a stop in front of the school. My paint had gotten dry. I added a little water to each dried up blob of paint and started mixing black and orange.
* * *
I never saw Tommy again.
About two months later, his old man stepped in front of a semi on the way home. I guess that’d be the way to go. He was probably so plowed he never knew what hit him. Right after that, Tommy sort of disappeared. The house stayed empty for a long time.
Last week at dinner my mom said a new family moved into the Connors’ old house. She wondered what had happened to Tommy. My old man said he heard he was in prison.
“Yeah, I think he’s doing a life sentence. You should pay attention blah blah blah never get out blah blah blah could happen to you blah blah blah go to church blah blah.”
It was just more grownup horse shit. Tommy was living in Findlay. After his old man got planted he sobered up and got a decent job at the Whirlpool plant making washing machines. He still likes his weed, though. How did I know? Every couple months or so I get a letter from him. Each time he sends a new order, along with all the photos I need. Two bucks a pop. Anyway, it’s not a bad way to make a few bucks on the side. And it’s really good practice.
I’ve gotten a lot better. Now I’m using pastel pencils, which are kind of like dried paint in sticks. The color is smooth and rich and you can blend in shadows real easy. It’s not grainy, like the regular colored pencils. It’s really cool. Still, my favorite of all time is that first one. I guess it was what you’d call a labor of love.
On that one, I started out with a copy of a really sexy naked woman, Olympia, by a French artist called Manet. It was in an art history book I found in the school library. I read that it caused a real rumpus at the salon of 1863 in Paris. Although, to tell the truth, I’d think it would’ve made more sense to hang it in a museum instead of a salon.
The crowning glory, of course, was the portrait of Melinda Dawson that I copied from her class photo for the head.
It was a masterpiece. Really.
Copyright Bob Beach 2012