“I’m not supposed to do that. But I wanted to show you.”
I don’t know what to say, except “That was cool.”
“I’m a trampolinist. It’s a bit like being a gymnast, except you do it on a trampoline.”
“I didn’t know that was something you could be.”
“Well, it is. I just didn’t want you to think that only boys get stupid about practicing stuff. I practice all the time.”
“Okay,” I say. “Can I come on now? It looks like fun.”
“Haven’t you ever been on a trampoline before?”
“I used to live in New York. Nobody has a backyard. At least I didn’t know anybody with a backyard . . . or a trampoline.”
She waves her hand and I climb on. The surface trembles under my hands and knees; it’s hard to stand up. Mabley keeps jumping and shaking the whole thing. The first time I jump, I have to hold out my arms to stay balanced. Mabley makes it look easy. Also, she can bounce in a way that knocks me over, which makes her laugh. But it’s easy to talk on the trampoline, because we’re both just busy going up and down. I don’t feel shy at all.
Mabley seems different, too. Most of the time she thinks about everything she says before she says it. But not now.
“Your mom is really pretty,” she tells me. “You know that, right?”
“Everybody thinks their mom is pretty.”
“Well, yours is.” And then, for no reason: “Mr. Tomski is one of my favorite teachers. My dad says he’s the best teacher in the school.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask her.
“I just feel, like, kids say stuff all the time, just because they think it’s funny. They don’t even care what they say.” She stops jumping. “I guess I’m not making any sense.”
“I don’t know.” I stop, too. “Are people talking about my mom?”
“Everybody talks about their teachers.”
“What are they saying?” I can still feel the surface of the trampoline under my feet. It makes a weird sound, and you have to keep shifting your weight.
“Like, your mom is Mr. Tomski’s girlfriend.”
She looks at me. I don’t know what kind of reaction she wants. Maybe she doesn’t want any reaction, because she keeps talking. “I said, Who cares anyway? This is none of our business. And anyway, if they are going out, great, because I really like both of them.”
“Well, they’re not.”
“Okay.”
“They’re not going out.”
“Okay,” she says again. “It’s none of my business anyway. I just wanted to say something . . . because I hate it when people talk about you behind your back. So if people are saying something, I wanted to let you know. But now I feel bad.”
“You don’t have to feel bad; it’s just not true.” But to be honest, I don’t know if it’s true or not.
“Kids really like your mom,” she says after a minute. She’s starting to jump again, her short hair is flopping up and down. “They just say this stuff because they think it’s funny.”
“I don’t care what they say. But it isn’t true.”
“Fine, then. That’s fine. Then you don’t have to worry about it. Forget I . . . said anything.” And she does this funny thing with her hand, like she’s wiping something with a cloth, making a squeaky noise, like it’s a whiteboard or something, which kids have started to do, which means, like, wiping it clean. “I have to go. I’ll see you at school.”
I crawl back through the hedge again. Mom calls me in for supper. I guess she really is pretty—I watch her moving around the kitchen. Her hair has gone yellow, her skin tanned. All that Texas sun, Granma says. Mom has started swimming again and you can see the muscles in her arms. She looks happier than she used to look in New York.
Mom finishes eating early, because she wants to go out. She’s going to see a movie with a friend of hers and just spends a minute in the bathroom to brush her teeth and put on a little lipstick. I wonder if she’s going with Mr. Tomski. After she leaves, Granma and I clear up together.
Granma’s very quick at everything. She rinses the plates and stacks them, she rinses out the glasses and lays them in the drying rack. She puts the pots in the sink to soak. I watch her swollen hand in the dishwater and feel sorry for her.
“Do you mind having us stay with you?” I ask. I don’t know why—nobody has said anything in about five minutes.
“Do I mind? Who says mind? Of course, I don’t mind. What put that idea into your head?”
“I don’t know. It’s something Dad used to say. Do you mind. Mom doesn’t like it either. She says it sounds stuffy.”
“It’s a little stuffy,” Granma says. “But people can’t always help what they sound like.”
She’s drying one of the pots with a cloth and afterward gives me the pot so I can put it away. It lives in a cupboard under the kitchen counter. “Bending down,” as Granma says, “isn’t something I’m good at anymore.”
“Do I sound like Dad?” I ask her.
“Hard to say, since you never talk.”
“Okay, if you want me to talk, I’ve got a question.” I give her the salad bowl and she reaches up to put it on a shelf. “Is Mom going out with Mr. Tomski?”
“Boy, you don’t mess around,” she says, but not really in a kidding voice. “Did she mention something to you?”
“No.”
“Then you should ask her.”
“Does Dad know?”
“I said, young man, that you should talk to your mother.” But she’s only pretending to be annoyed. Her dishcloth is wet, so she hangs it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs to dry. “Okay,” she says, “if you’ve finished your homework, you can watch a little TV.”
But I don’t want to watch TV, at least not yet. There’s something bugging me. “Granma,” I say, and she says, “What?”
“Am I creepy?”
She turns to look at me, with her hands on her hips. “What are you talking about? Who said that?”
“Some boy in my class.”
“What boy?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I said, what boy?”
“It doesn’t matter! Just forget about it.” For some reason I’m shouting.
“Now you listen to me,” Granma says, and she still sounds angry. It’s the voice she uses if she wants you to do something, and there’s no point contradicting her. But there are tears in her eyes as well. “You are my beautiful boy. And anybody says anything different will have to deal with me.”
“But they don’t have to.”
“What?”
“They don’t have to deal with you. You’re not even around when they say it. Anyway, I know you love me, that’s not what I mean. I mean like, if you didn’t know me, if you met me, would you think, He never says anything, he just kind of hangs around all the time, carrying those bags?”
She’s just staring at me now. Her wispy gray hair has slipped out of the bun. It’s the end of the day and she looks old and tired.
“Is that what you’d think?” I ask again.
“That is not what I would think,” she says.
“But how do you know?”
“Because I do know you, and I know that you’re the gentlest, most honest—”
“But that’s not what I’m asking. Forget about it. It doesn’t matter.”
“Who called you creepy?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me. That is not a thing you’re allowed to call another kid.”
“Kids call each other stuff like that all the time,” I say. “Anyway, I don’t want to discuss this anymore. I just want to watch TV.”
She kisses me on the head. “You are my beautiful boy,” she says again. “It wouldn’t kill you to get a locker, though. And stop carrying around those bags.”
Mom still isn’t back by the time I go to bed. Granma lets me write in my diary for a few minutes, but then she comes in to turn the lights off. She si
ts on my bed afterward, and I shift a little to give her some room.
“Are you okay?” she says.
“I’m fine. Dad says there’s a school in London just for Americans.”
“I’m sure there is. Is that what you want to do? Do you want to move to London?”
“I don’t know, Granma. It’s like—I’ve told a couple people about it, like, This isn’t my life, I have this other life. So they don’t feel sorry for me.”
“And you miss your dad,” Granma says.
“Mom sometimes tells me, You’re just like your father. Not even when she’s mad at me—sometimes I think she likes it. But then if she likes him, why are we even here? And if she doesn’t like him, what about me? Why does she like me? I don’t understand.”
After a moment, she asks, “Don’t you like it here?”
“Of course I like it.”
“You say that like you have to say it,” Granma says.
“If I were staying with Dad in London, I’d probably talk about Austin. It’s like, everywhere I go there’s somebody missing.”
She puts her hands on my cheeks and kisses me on the forehead. “There’s a joke people make about marriage. They say the first twenty years are the hardest. Well, you could say the same about childhood. What they mean is, it gets better.”
“Great. That’s very reassuring.”
When she gets up to leave, I ask, “Is Mom going out with Mr. Tomski?”
“Not that I know of,” she says. “But you really should talk to her.”
After she closes the door, I just lie there, watching the ceiling fan turn slowly in the dark. Every time a car goes past I wonder if it’s going to park, then wait to hear if the front door opens. But I guess I fall asleep before Mom gets in.
Twenty
AS THE WEATHER GETS WARMER, Sam comes out to join me more often. He puts on high-top sneakers and jumps around in his green gardening shorts to get loose. “Old knees,” he says.
The branch over the basketball court has started to sprout new leaves and twigs—it keeps getting in the way.
“How come you don’t cut it down?” I ask Sam. “You’re the groundskeeper; you’ve got all the stuff. Ladders, saws.”
“It’s a living thing. Plus, it’s nice to have a little shade. You just have to shoot higher.”
“I’m not strong enough.”
“Yes, you are. I used to play basketball on the deck of a nine-thousand-ton cruiser in the South Pacific. I’m talking about twenty-foot seas—big gusts of wind. Don’t let a tree branch block your shot.”
For a few minutes, I don’t say anything—we just shoot and pass and track down the ball. Then I say, “Is that why you have that anchor tattoo?” For some reason, it seems like a personal question, even though he never seems to hide it.
“Twenty-five years in the navy.”
“My grandfather was in the merchant marine.”
“Where did he serve?”
Sam misses, and I follow the ball into the grass. “I don’t really know,” I tell him as I pass it back.
“Why don’t you ask him?” He holds the ball in his hands for a second.
“He’s dead,” I say. “I never met him.”
“That’s a good reason,” Sam says, and turns to shoot again. Later he says, “Twenty-five years was enough for me. I missed green things.”
He talks about Austin, too. This is where he went to college, but he barely recognizes it now. “You got all this tech money, people moving in from Brooklyn and places like that, California, people with no connection to Austin—they don’t even know what Austin is, or used to be. I mean, look at this neighborhood,” he says. “It used to be, people like me could afford to live here. But not anymore. My son lives in one of these housing developments off two ninety—it takes him an hour to drive in. Look at this school. The building they tore down was a beautiful building; it had some kind of history. But this looks like a supermarket.” He waves vaguely across the football field toward the school. “The only thing left is this basketball court.”
This is the kind of stuff he talks about. I don’t really know what to say, I just listen. And catch the ball and shoot and track it down again; pass and shoot and move and shoot again.
In social studies, we’re learning about the siege of the Alamo, one of the battles of the Texas Revolution. “It all happened a long time ago,” Mr. Tomski says. “And after it happened, everybody started telling stories about it, so it got to be pretty hard to tell what happened and what didn’t.”
Mr. Tomski has brought an old musket to school, a brown Bess, he calls it, which is what many of the soldiers used. He passes it around the room—I get a good look at it.
“This is a flintlock gun,” Mr. Tomski says when the gun comes back to him. He walks around the room, pointing out the different parts. “You got your hammer. You got the jaws of the hammer. And what they’re holding is a piece of flint, which comes down against something they call the frizzen—a piece of steel. The idea is, the flint hits the frizzen and makes a spark, and the hammer pushes the frizzen out of the way. Because underneath the frizzen, you got the pan. That’s where the gunpowder is. One spark and bang! You can see the pan right here.” He holds up the gun and points it at the blackboard and presses the trigger. There’s a click but nothing else.
“Now this may look like an old stick,” Mr. Tomski says. “The flint is dull and there isn’t any powder in the pan or bullet in the muzzle. But this is still a very dangerous instrument in the wrong hands—accurate to about seventy yards. Does anybody know how far seventy yards is?”
“A little shorter than a football field,” somebody says.
“That’s right. And that’s where we’re going right now.”
It’s the middle of March, nice and sunny, and the whole class troops through the hallways and out the double doors into the picnic area. Then we straggle over to the football field, about thirty kids walking and talking in little groups of friends. I’m on my own, but I don’t mind. It feels good to be outside.
Mr. Tomski gathers us all together in one of the end zones, and then he marches by himself seventy yards down the field and turns around. I can see him looking at us, shading his eyes with his hand. “All right, class,” he calls out, sounding small and far away. “I want you to run to me. All of you. As fast as you can. Starting . . . now!” And he claps his hands; they make a noise like a gunshot.
Some of the kids run hard, but most of them just kind of giggle and jog at the same time. I try to end up in the middle of the pack—I don’t want to come last, but I don’t want to be first either. And it’s warm enough to make me sweat. The field is muddy, with patchy grass left over from the winter. Lots of little green seeds have been scattered over the dirt. It’s easy to slip.
Mr. Tomski holds his hand up and checks the time on his wristwatch. When the last kid comes puffing up, he says, “All right, folks. That was just about twenty-two seconds, from start to finish. Now if I were standing guard at the north wall of the Alamo, you would have been in the range of my brown Bess for about twenty-two seconds.”
He counts out the seconds again on his wristwatch—using his fingers: one, two, three, four, five; one, two, three, four, five, again and again. Everybody’s gone quiet. “You think maybe next time you’d like to run a little faster?” he asks.
Nobody answers. Mr. Tomski waits. “Except you wouldn’t have had to,” he says at last. “Because on that night, on the fifth of March 1836, almost exactly a hundred and eighty years ago today, the three men guarding the walls had fallen asleep.”
“Excuse me!” A loud angry voice suddenly breaks in. Sam is striding across the field toward us, in big brown boots and green shorts. His heavy key chain clatters against his belt. “You can’t be here,” he says. “This is the football field.”
“I’m teaching a class,” Mr. Tomski says.
“I don’t care what you’re teaching—this is my football field. You are not authorized to be messing around
on my football field.”
Mr. Tomski raises his voice. “I am a teacher at this school. I am teaching a class. You will not talk to me in this way in front of my students.”
“I’ll talk to you any way I want to talk to you,” Sam says. He looks at the kids. “Now get off my field. All of you.”
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know whose side to take. Mr. Tomski is shaking his head. “What is it about football in this school that makes everybody crazy?” he mutters under his breath.
But Sam hears him. “You know how long it takes me to get this field ready for the season? A field of grass, in Texas?”
“The season doesn’t start until August.”
“Yeah, but the grass grows now. Don’t make me say it again. Get off my field.”
“I’m teaching a class,” Mr. Tomski says as calmly as he can, which only makes him sound angrier. “I am a teacher at this school.” He has started to repeat himself. “I’ll get off your field when the class is over.”
Sam stares at Mr. Tomski. Then he sees me. I’m standing at the edge of a big group of kids, hoping he doesn’t notice me. But he does, and we look at each other, until I suddenly look down at my feet.
When I look up again, Sam is walking away from us across the field. His keys swing back and forth at every step. I watch him go, and count out the seconds in my head, the way Mr. Tomski counted them before. One, two, three, four, five; one, two, three, four, five. I get to thirty-seven before Sam disappears inside his hut.
Mr. Tomski has watched him go, too. Eventually he turns to our class and says, “Let’s go back in.”
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