Jerry’s turn came later, after they had unloaded the cattle. They were having a beer or two in a honky-tonk on North Main and Jerry talked them into putting up five dollars apiece toward a fifteen-dollar whore he knew about. They could all three have easily found five-dollar whores, but Jerry insisted on flipping to see who got the more expensive one, and he won the flips. The whore was in a dinky little North Main hotel. Sonny and Duane walked around outside, freezing their tails, while Jerry went up to have fun. They stepped inside a cheap dance hall a few minutes to warm up and watched a lot of sideburned stockyard hands dance their skinny girl friends around the room.
As soon as Jerry was done and they were back in the truck the boys went to sleep. Jerry was somewhat weakened himself and on the home side of Jacksboro he pulled the truck off the road and went to sleep himself. About four in the morning Sonny woke up, practically frozen to death. Jerry and Duane were both mashed on top of him, trying to keep warm, and the door handle was about to bore a hole in his back. The windshield was completely sleeted over. Sonny pushed around until he woke the others up and he and Jerry got out and scraped the sleet off the windshield with an old Levi jacket. While they were doing that Duane crawled over and vomited in the bar ditch. Coming back from Fort Worth was never as much fun as going.
While they had rolled around trying to sleep they had kicked the heater wires loose, so the rest of the trip home was miserably cold. The café looked like the most comfortable place in the world when they finally pulled in. Genevieve was sitting at the counter reading an old paperback of Forever Amber that everyone who worked at the café had read several times. When she saw what bad shape Sonny and Duane were in she put it away and fixed them some toast and coffee; as soon as they ate a little they dozed off and slept with their heads on the counter while she filled the coffee maker and got things ready for the morning business. Asleep they both had the tousled, helpless look of young children and she kept wanting to cover their shoulders with a tablecloth or something. When Marston came in she woke them up. She put on her heavy blue coat and the boys stumbled outside behind her, trying to keep their eyes open. The cold air snapped them out of it a little. Genevieve had an old gray Dodge that was hard to start and by the time she got it to kick off the boys were wide awake.
“What do you think about a woman that would make her daughter go with Lester Marlow?” Duane asked, remembering that he had a grievance.
“I don’t know much about Lester, but if I had a daughter I don’t know that I’d want her going with either one of you boys, the way you all cut up,” she said, treating the whole matter lightly. She pulled up in front of their rooming house and raced her motor, so the old car wouldn’t die.
The boys got out, thanked her, waved as the car pulled away, its exhaust white in the cold air. “Well, at least we got to go somewhere,” Sonny said, picking up a beer can somebody had thrown out on the lawn. Fort Worth, after all, was a city, part of the big world, and he always came back from a trip there with the satisfying sense that he had traveled. They flipped to see who got the bathtub first and he won.
CHAPTER VIII
THE FIRST BASKETBALL game of the season was with Paducah, a town well over a hundred miles from Thalia. It was the longest trip of the year and usually the wildest: in Paducah they played basketball as if it were indoor football, and they had everything in their favor, including a gym so small that the out-of-bounds lines were painted on the walls. The Paducah boys were used to the gym and could run up the walls like lizards, but visiting teams, accustomed to normal-sized courts, had a hard time. Every year two or three Thalia players smashed into the walls and knocked themselves out.
This time it happened to Sonny, and in the very first minutes of play. Leroy Malone managed to trip the gangly Paducah center and while the center was sprawled on the floor Sonny ran right along his back, in pursuit of the ball. Just as he was about to grab it somebody tripped him and he hit the wall head first. The next thing he knew he was stretched out beside the bench and one of the freshmen players was squeezing a wet washrag on his forehead. Sonny tried to keep his eyes closed as long as he could—he knew Coach Popper would send him back into the game as soon as he regained consciousness. He feigned deep coma for about five minutes, but unfortunately the coach was experienced in such matters. He came over and lifted one of Sonny’s eyelids and saw that he was awake.
“Possuming,” he said. “I thought so. Get up and get your butt back in there. We’re forty points behind and it ain’t but the second quarter.”
“I think I got a concussion,” Sonny said, trying to look dangerously ill. “Maybe I ought to stay out a little while.”
“Get up,” the coach insisted. “We just quit football practice ten days ago, you ain’t had time to get that out of shape. If you want to rest, by God go in there and foul out first. Knock the shit out of that forward two or three times—he’s the one doin’ all the scorin’. Hell, we come all this way, let’s make a showing.”
Sonny reluctantly got up and went back in. He managed three fouls before the half, but he was too weak to hit anybody very hard and none of the fouls was really satisfactory. The half-time score was Paducah 62 and Thalia 9. During the half the coach called them over for one of his little pep talks, this one very brief.
“You ten boys have got the shortest little peckers of any bunch of kids I’ve ever coached,” he said sincerely. “By God, if you don’t stomp some asses this next half I’ll stomp a few tomorrow afternoon when we start practicing.”
He scowled fiercely and strolled off to the concession stand to have some coffee.
In the second half things began to look really ominous. Sonny felt strangely lightheaded and went out on the floor not much caring what he did. Paducah defense had become virtually impenetrable: for one thing, they had started openly tackling whichever Thalia player had the ball. It seemed to Sonny that at last the time had come to shoot peg shots—there was not much chance of moving the ball down the court any other way. Whenever they tried, Paducah tackled them, tripped them, threw body blocks into them, or had the referee call fouls on them.
Actually, the refereeing was another very bad aspect of basketball in Paducah. Unusual as it was, Paducah had a male home economics teacher, a frail little man named Mr. Wean. The school board felt that teaching home ec was really too light a job for a man so they made Mr. Wean basketball referee. He had never managed to learn much about the game, but he was quite docile and called whatever the Paducah team told him to call. Also, he was in bad shape and couldn’t possibly run up and down the court for forty-eight minutes. Instead of following the ball, he just stood on the center line and made all his calls from there.
After considering the matter for half a quarter or so Sonny concluded that peg shots were the only feasible tactic. He was simply too weak to dodge the blocks the Paducah boys were throwing. From then on, every time he got the ball he threw it at the backboard he was attacking. At the very worst it slowed down Paducah’s scoring. The other Thalia players were quick to see the wisdom of such an offense and in five minutes they were all doing it. Whoever caught the throw-in after a Paducah score would immediately whirl and throw a full-court peg shot. The only one it didn’t work for was Leroy Malone: the big Paducah center anticipated him, caught the ball, and threw a ten-yard peg shot right at Leroy’s groin. It hurt so bad he later told Sonny he was unable to jack off for two weeks.
The groin shot drew such sustained applause from the Paducah bleachers that Sonny was angered. Mr. Wean had failed to see that it was a deliberate foul: indeed, Mr. Wean was seeing less and less all the time. Thalia’s pegshot offense confused him—he had to keep turning around and around to keep up with the ball. After a while this made him so dizzy that he simply stopped and stood facing the Thalia goal—most of the Paducah team was down there anyway, catching the peg shots and throwing them back. Mr. Wean felt that he had somehow got involved in a game of ante over, and he didn’t like it. He had a fat wife and all he really
wanted to do was stay in the home ec classroom and teach young, small-breasted girls how to make pies. Instead he was standing on the center line, sweating and wishing the quarter would end. Suddenly, Sonny had an irresistible urge to chunk somebody. He unleashed a flat, low peg shot that caught Mr. Wean squarely in the back of the head and sent him sprawling.
The Thalia bench, boys and girls alike, arose with shrieks and cheers, their jubilation all the more noticeable because of the moment of total silence in the Paducah bleachers. The shot instantly made Sonny a celebrity, but it also scared hell out of him and his teammates who were on the floor at the time. They rushed over and tried to help Mr. Wean up, but his legs were like rubber. He had to be dragged off the floor. Paducah’s assistant football coach was called in to referee the rest of the game—by the time he got his tennis shoes on, the hometown bleachers had recovered from their shock and were clamoring for Sonny’s blood. He knew his only hope was to foul out immediately and get to the bench. While he was trying to decide on the safest way to foul, Coach Popper came to his rescue and took him out.
“Good lick,” the coach said. “Nobody but a queer would teach home ec anyway.”
From there on things were dismal for the Thalia five. Duane fouled out before the quarter ended, leaving no one but Joe Bob and the freshmen to play the fourth quarter. Paducah was ahead 88 to 14. Coach Popper got so mad at the freshmen that he couldn’t see; he almost strangled himself tugging at the towel around his neck. He sent Sonny in again but Sonny quickly threw a couple of light body blocks and fouled out. That left Joe Bob and the freshmen to do the best they could. For the remainder of the game they never once managed to get the ball into their end of the court. As soon as they threw it in, the Paducah players took it away from them and made another goal. In five minutes the score was 110 to 14 and Coach Popper called time out. A huddle was in order.
“I tell you,” the coach said philosophically, “let’s just forget about winning and try to hold the score down. We’re gonna get beat over a hundred points if we ain’t careful. Oaks, you throw the ball into Joe Bob and Joe Bob, as soon as you get it lay down with it. That way they’ll have to tie it up and jump for it every time. That’ll slow ’em down a little.”
The tactic worked fine the first time it was tried. Joe Bob swallowed the ball and Paducah had to tie it up to get possession. It took them about forty seconds to score. Thalia tried it again and three Paducah players gang-piled Joe Bob as he went down. He had to be carried off. The freshman who shot his free throw for him was so scared he barely got the ball halfway to the basket.
Joe Bob’s injury left the four freshmen alone on the field for the last few minutes of the game. None of them wanted to swallow the ball and get pang-piled so they did what they could to cooperate with Paducah. The final score was 121 to 14.
“Well, hell, at least my B team got some experience,” Coach Popper said. “Might as well look on the bright side. Let’s go to the bus.”
Basketball defeats weighed very lightly on the coach: football was the only sport that really counted. Ten minutes later he was flopped down in his bus seat, sound asleep.
The boys sat in a stupor for the first twenty miles or so, trying to get used to feeling safe again. Besides, Old Lady Fowler, the girls’ coach, was still awake and they could not start to work on the girls until she dropped off. She went to sleep as they were pulling out of Vernon, and from there on it was dog-eat-dog.
The four little freshmen had no chance with the girls and had to get what amusement they could out of tormenting Joe Bob. They crowded him in a seat, took his underpants off, and threw them out the window. Joe Bob was too weak from the gang-piling to fight back, and he might not have bothered anyway. He lost so many pair of underwear that his mother bought them wholesale. He was the only boy on the team who wore his regulars, rather than a jockey strap: Brother Blanton wouldn’t hear of him wearing anything so immodest.
“What if you got hurt and were taken to a hospital wearing a thing like that?” Brother Blanton said. “Our good name would be ruined.”
Most of the kids had seen Joe Bob’s underwear often enough to be thoroughly bored with it. The freshmen attracted no notice at all, and soon went to sleep.
Sonny started the return trip sitting by Leroy Malone, whose balls were so sore that the mere thought of girls made him writhe. After a little bargaining Sonny managed to switch with the kid in front of him, which put him next to the pretty but prudish sophomore he had had his eye on. Knocking Mr. Wean down gave him so much status that he was able to hold the girl’s hand almost immediately. Martha Lou was her name. By the time they reached Electra she was willing to let him kiss her, but the results were pretty discouraging. Her teeth were clenched as tightly as if she had lockjaw, and even Sonny’s status couldn’t unlock them. His only reward was a taste of lipstick, in a flavor he didn’t much care for.
The only real excitement on the bus ride home involved Jacy and Duane, the star couple. That was usually the case. None of the other kids excited one another much. There was a fat blonde named Vida May who would feel penises, but the teachers knew about her and made her sit so close to the front that it was dangerous to fool with her even when the teachers were asleep.
Jacy and Duane, as a matter of course, were sitting in the very back seat. Duane didn’t like the back seat much because there was a little overhead light above it that the bus driver refused to turn off. The bus driver’s name was Wilbur Tim and he wasn’t about to trust any kids in a totally dark bus. One time years earlier his wife Jessie had found two prophylactics when she was sweeping out the bus, and it just about sent her into hysterics. She was the apprehensive type and went around for months worried sick that some nice little girl had got pregnant on her husband’s bus. After that Wilbur installed the light.
It was a small bulb that didn’t really give any light, just a nice orange glow. Jacy loved it and wouldn’t sit anywhere else, despite Duane’s protests. She thought the light was very romantic and suggestive: everyone in the bus could tell when the couple in the back seat were kissing or doing something sexy, but the light wasn’t strong enough for them to see too clearly. Courting with Duane when all the kids on the school bus could watch gave Jacy a real thrill, and made her feel a little like a movie star: she could bring beauty and passion into the poor kids’ lives.
Because Jacy enjoyed them so much, the kissing sessions in the back seat had become a sort of regular feature on basketball road trips. All the kids watched, even though it made them itchy and envious. Jacy, after all, was the prettiest girl in school and watching her get kissed and played with was something to do on the long drives home. The element that made it really exciting to everyone was the question of how far Jacy would go. Once Duane got started kissing he was completely indifferent to whether he had an audience or not: all he wanted was more. The dim light made it impossible to tell precisely how much more Jacy allowed: everyone caught shadowy glimpses, and occasionally a gasp or a little moan from Jacy indicated that Duane was making some headway at least, but no one ever knew how much or what kind.
Only Jacy and Duane knew that he was making a great deal of headway indeed. Jacy would kiss and play around any time, but she seldom got excited past the point of control unless she was on the school bus, where people were watching. Being in the public eye seemed to heighten the quality of every touch. On the bus seat she never had to feign passion—she was burning with it. It was easy for Duane to get his hands inside her loose uniform and touch her breasts, and she loved it. Also, since she was in shorts, it was easy for him to do even more abandoned things to her. She loved to have him slide his hands up the underside of her legs, and sometimes she would even get to the point where she wanted him to touch her crotch. It was a matter that took very delicate managing, but if Duane’s hand were cupped against her at the right time so she could squeeze it with her legs, something nice would happen. That was not for the audience, however: she didn’t want the kids to see that. When the mom
ent came near she would try to get Duane to crowd her back in the corner, so they couldn’t be seen so well. Sometimes it worked beautifully. The younger and more naïve kids were sure Duane went all the way; the juniors and seniors knew better, but felt he must be going a pretty significant distance, anyhow. Every trip added to Jacy’s legend. The following day at school she would be on every tongue. Some of the girls said bitter things about her, but the boys took notice when she walked by. The only one seriously discommoded by bus-seat sessions was Duane, who frequently ached painfully by the time the bus reached home. He didn’t like it, but he supposed such frustration was something he would simply have to bear until they were married.
Just before the bus got back to Thalia Coach Popper woke up and looked around. Most of the kids were asleep by that time, Jacy and Duane among them, but Jacy had gone to sleep with her legs across Duane’s and when the coach saw that he was infuriated. It would put him in an awful spot if Lois Farrow somehow found out he had let her daughter go to sleep with her legs across Duane’s. Gene Farrow was on the school board, and an incident like that could cost a coach his job. He stormed back and shook Jacy until she was awake enough to stumble down the aisle to the front seat, where she stayed the rest of the way home.
When all the kids had been delivered to their houses the coach got to thinking about it and began to cuss. There was no end to the trouble a couple of silly-ass kids might cause, particularly if one of them was Lois Farrow’s daughter. Lois Farrow was the one person in Thalia who didn’t give a damn for the fact that he was football coach.
Wilbur Tim dropped him off at his home, and he stomped inside, still angry. When he turned on the light in his bedroom closet it woke Ruth up. She had just had her breast operation a few days before and was still taking pain medicine. As he was taking off his shoes she sat up in bed.
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