Because the clothing he'd brought with him, despite being two suitcases full, proved to be inadequate to Alistair's needs once he'd joined the fourth-grade crowd's afterschool activities, my mother loaned him mine. When I found them going through my closet and drawers and began to complain, my mother quickly said, "Don't be so selfish. These are just old things anyway." The "old things" included my favorite, perfectly worn dungarees, which naturally fit Alistair to perfection; my green felt and white-leather-sleeved stadium jacket, in which he looked like a young honor student; even my extra-comfortable pullover cable-knit sweater.
It was just that outfit that Alistair was wearing one evening, a few minutes before dinner, when he sped up to the front of our house and skidded to a stop on my bicycle—which he hadn't even bothered to ask to borrow. I'd gone outside to wait for him by the garage, so we could have it out, over his taking the bike, without disturbing the others. But my dad had decided that was exactly the right time to spray his over-pampered and underachieving roses. And my mother had come out to tell my father he had a phone call. And my sister had that second stepped out, to tell my mother that the water for the noodles was boiling on the stove.
I watched from a slightly hidden spot not four yards away as Alistair wheeled up, got off the bike and smiled at the massed and admiring group. I couldn't help but see them all stop as though frozen as he approached. Couldn't help but see him—on my bike, dressed in my clothing, resembling me—completely fulfill for each member of my family what I had never been able even to approach. It was a profoundly disturbing few moments, as he pulled the bike up the steps and parked it, then kissed my mother's cheek, and my father dropped his spray can and put an arm around Alistair's shoulder, and they all went inside, talking together, a unity.
It was only as my sister reopened the front door to let out her pet cat that I was noticed. From the surprised, slightly puzzled look on her face, I could tell that for the briefest of moments she hadn't recognized me.
Then she said, "When you're done skulking about, we're having dinner in five minutes."
As it turned out, Alistair didn't have dinner with us that night, but cleaned up, changed into some of his own clothing, and allowed my father to drive him the few blocks up to Kerry White's house on Hill Crest Lane. This was supposedly a big deal, as Mr. White was a stockbroker with a large old firm on Wall Street, the Whites' house and three-acre property were the largest and best kept in the area, and the Whites themselves were considered the social cream of the neighborhood, until now completely out of reach of us mere Sansarcs. So I was hardly surprised but I was thoroughly disgusted when my mother didn't a bit mind this delay of our meal so Alistair could hobnob with the Whites. Instead she hummed merrily all the while she served us, and once we were all eating, she said to my dad, "Dinner at the Whites' house. Maybe..."
Maybe what? Probably that she, they, possibly all of us, might be invited to the Whites' for dinner someday, simply because we were Alistair's cousins.
If that turned out to be the case, I'd never go.
Saturday afternoon, Augie and I were practicing up in the Vanderveer lots, away from the junior high school boys who were having a real game, when Guy Blauveldt and Carmine DeRosa biked up.
I'd been batting better that day than ever before. And Augie was trying out his new curveball, both of us attempting to gain confidence for the game the following afternoon, when Guy shouted, "Not bad. But you're wasting your time."
"I know I'll never be as good as you, Guy, but how about shutting up and letting me practice?"
"I didn't mean you, Rog. I meant Augie was wasting his time," Guy said. "He's been knocked down the roster for tomorrow's game."
"By who?" both of us demanded to know.
"I don't know."
"When?"
"This morning. We just passed Tony Duyckman coming out of the Superette with his mom, and he told us."
"Who else was there?" Augie wanted to know.
"Why weren't we told about this meeting?" I persisted.
"Hey! I don't know. I wasn't there!"
Augie and I surrounded him. I shoved my bat handle into Guy's front spokes so he couldn't move.
"Don't give me that crap!" I said. "Tell us!"
"Ask Tony. Or better still, ask your cousin. He's the one who called a meeting."
"Let him go!" Augie said.
"Who else was there?" I demanded.
"Tony. Ronny. Coupla other guys."
"The shrimp?" I asked, meaning Kerry White.
"I guess so. The meeting was at his house."
"He'll die like a dog!" I pulled the bat out of the spokes, and Guy was smart enough to leap onto his bike before I could smash it to smithereens. "They'll all die like dogs." I kept swinging the bat, but by now Guy and Carmine had biked out of range and were looking back. I noted that they were headed toward Ronny's house.
Despite Augie's protests to "forget about it, will ya," I got him on his bike and we also headed for Ronny Taskin's house.
"You're on the top of that pitching roster, or someone dies!" I shouted at Augie enough times to get him annoyed and angry too.
As I'd suspected, we found Guy and Carmine's bikes thrown down on the lawn by Ronny's back porch. We dropped ours on top of them, then fought our way through the brambles surrounding the supposedly padlocked and unused side door of the Taskins' big, old freestanding garage.
They were all there waiting for us: Ronny, Tony, Kerry, Bob, and my second cousin, with the messengers announcing our arrival still breathless from their ride.
I had my bat in my hand and was swinging it. "Okay, Alistair, outside."
"Wait a sec, Cuz. What's all the commotion about?"
"You know damned well. The pitching roster."
Kerry had the nerve to speak up. "We voted on it. Fair and square."
"Who voted for it? You, yourself, and you? This is a team, remember?"
"Doesn't make any difference," Alistair said. "You two would have been outvoted anyway."
"Who suddenly made you manager of this team?" I asked. "You don't even live here!" I spat out the words.
"I'm manager of the team," Ronny said.
"Since when? Another phony vote this morning? We don't have a manager. And there's no reason to move Augie down because one guy hit a home run off him last week."
"There's a perfectly good reason," Alistair said. "He can't follow the catcher's suggestions." The catcher, of course, being himself. "Whereas everyone on the roster now can."
"There's no rule I ever read that says the pitcher's got to do what the catcher says!" Augie finally spoke up on his own behalf.
"Al's the best pitcher we ever had," Ronny said. "He tagged two guys coming home last night."
Thus revealing that they'd played a game and hadn't even told us.
"Look, Cuz." Alistair had pulled out the roster they'd schemed on all morning. "Augie's on it."
I looked. "Fifth. After Ronny and Tony and Bob Cuffy—and Kerry?" I looked at the little squirt with disdain. "This one couldn't pitch horse-shit into a barn with a shovel."
"That's the roster we agreed on," Ronny said.
"You're shortstop," Alistair said, attempting a final placation.
"Forget it! I'm not playing shortstop or any other position with cheaters. Not tomorrow and not ever again!"
"Me either," Augie said.
"Me either," Bob Cuffy unexpectedly piped up, followed by Carmine.
"We'll put together our own team," I said.
Now, this was clearly an unexpected move, and compelling in its potential for disaster to their plans.
"I've got an idea," Alistair said, suddenly conciliatory. "Since you won't accept the democratic way, how about we flip a coin for it?"
"Whose leaded coin?" I asked. We all had one.
It was Guy who came up with the brilliant idea that we shoot marbles for the winning roster: it required skill as well as chance and would take time, not a few seconds, thus allowing us all to feel
that something competitive—and thus real—was taking place.
We agreed to meet back at the spot in an hour to shoot for the roster. Whoever won would then gracefully concede defeat and accept the winners' roster. At least for tomorrow's game.
Augie was the best marble player among the four of us, so we all rode over to his house and spent a half hour picking through his collection of marbles to find five other ones to complement his winner, a big, almost pure ebony, completely unfaceted onyx. On the way over I stopped at my house, dashed into my bedroom, and grabbed my own bag of playing marbles.
We arrived back at Ronny's garage. He'd cleared a space in the dirt in back of it and drawn a circle with a stick. The rules were agreed upon: six marbles each until all the marbles were gone but the winning one.
I shouldn't have been surprised that Alistair had gotten himself selected as their side's champion. But there he was, already hunkered down, six carefully selected marbles from the others' collection at his side. I recognized Guy's tortoiseshell and Tony's blue-and-white sailboat, so named because that's what the facet looked like when you held it up to the light.
Ronny and Bob Cuffy did fingers for choosing, three out of four, and Ronny won. Augie placed his least valuable agate into the circle, and Alistair shot it far out past the lines with a big, badly colored cat's-eye. That became Alistair's and went into the center. Augie sliced it right to the other side of the circle line. Alistair chose a pinkstone agate as man, and Augie shot that out too. But he could only side-slice the tortoise-shell, and he lost two stones to Alistair before he had another go at it. By then the tortoiseshell had been retired (to Guy's relief) and replaced by the sailboat. Augie took that easily with his big onyx blaster. But Alistair won it back. On and on they went, until Augie hit lucky and the onyx almost cracked the sailboat in half knocking it out of the ring. Alistair now had one stone left.
He stood up and began to powwow with the others.
"Don't worry," I said to Augie. "You'll take him out and you'll pitch first tomorrow."
They returned to the ring, and Alistair said, "It's obvious that I can't win unless I have a stone as good as Augie's onyx."
"Does that mean you're giving up?" I asked.
"No. It means that I need a stone as good as the onyx. I'm told there's only one other stone in this neighborhood that good. Your tourmaline."
"My tourmaline?" I gasped.
Now this was indeed a true fact. For the past two years, my tourmaline had terrorized the marble rings of our suburb, so dominating the game it effectively ended all play. However, my tourmaline wasn't merely a big, dense, beautiful multicolored stone. It was a gift from my uncle Ted, a Navy captain, who'd bought the large, expensive stone in Ceylon when he was on duty, and had it turned into special gifts for us—earrings for my mom, a charm for my sister's bracelet, and a playing marble for me. The thought of letting another person, never mind Alistair, use it was so unthinkable to me it literally nauseated me.
"You've got it," Ronny said. "That means you guys intended to use it."
"Did not!"
"Then why'd you bring it?"
"No one's using my tourmaline but me," I declared.
"In that case you'll have to shoot against Augie," Alistair said, effectively trapping me.
"Use the tortoiseshell," I said. "That's still left."
"Everyone knows it's not as good," Kerry said.
"Then use your head," I told him. "It's about the right size."
We were gridlocked.
Alistair stood up and said, "Well, guys, I've done everything I know to make this a fair match."
The logical next assumption was that I was the one being unfair.
"I'm not playing against Augie. Period,"
"Then give me the tourmaline," Alistair said.
I didn't know what to do. Looking at Augie was no help. Despite his terrific shooting, he now wore that hangdog look that showed that he was already defeated—not by a marble shooter, but by the complications my second cousin had introduced into the game, into our friendship, into poor Augie's until-then Edenically innocent life.
"We're waiting!" Kerry sang out.
I promised myself that the minute Alistair had gone back to Michigan, I'd waylay the little creep and beat him to the consistency of tapioca.
I snuck a look at Alistair. He was enjoying this, really and truly enjoying the predicament he'd gotten me into, watching and waiting what I'd do to get out of it. That infuriated and decided me.
"Fine! I'll shoot against Augie!" I declared.
Before any of them could respond, I went to the circle, dropped to one knee, pulled out the tourmaline, and shot it hard, directly into the blank, glazed surface of the onyx lying in the middle of the ring.
It gave the onyx a good smash and sent it whirling and gyrating out of the circle, then sent it whirling and gyrating back in again, where the onyx stopped, inert.
"No fair!" Alistair shouted behind me.
"It was a good shot!" the others shouted.
It had been a good shot, an honest shot with a freak result. Any marble player worth his oats could see I'd really given it everything.
The next shot was Augie's, and he took my tourmaline easily. A few days later, he actually tried to let me win it back. I said no, he should keep it.
As for Alistair, he was livid. Truly livid, in that I'd done the honorable thing the honorable way and had honorably lost a valuable—even a legendary—marble, even if to my friend, and not one among them could say I'd in any way balked or complained about it.
He waited until we got home before shoving me into the wall behind my bedroom door. Holding my own bat horizontally against my neck until I began to feel faint from lack of blood and oxygen, he spoke in the quietest and nastiest voice I'd ever heard out of a human.
"I really thought I'd taught you a lesson back there, Cuz. But you just won't learn, will you?"
His face was mine, but distorted dreadfully.
I got a grip on the bat and tried to push it away.
"You think just because you stuck up for that poor, stupid, fat boy that you're some sort of hero, don't you?"
I'd gotten a grip on each of his hands, but he had the angle and leverage on me.
"Well, just remember this, Cuz. Schmucks like that will come and go in your life. They don't mean a thing. I'm the one who counts. I'm the one you're going to have to face and deal with. Because I'm the one who's going to be around for a long, long time.
"You got that?" he emphasized with another burst of pressure, as I began to see spots in front of my face and black out.
"Good!" he said. "Don't ever forget it!"
"Missing him already?"
I snapped to attention. Alistair was leaning into the little cul-de-sac behind the enormous fake columns he'd had installed and painted faux marble a year ago by a former trick, now part of some rehab program funded by Afghan or Moroccan millionaires to "Aid the Arts" and help some of their best former customers recover from decades of drug abuse.
"Him who?" I asked.
"Who else? Wallace the Red. I saw him vanish into the crowd and out the door like a sword through hot butter."
"He was hungry for Szechuan food." "Bless his metabolism," Alistair said, with less irony than usual. "Indeed. Bless anyone for still having a metabolism! I was thinking of installing paramecia or something prevertebrate like that into my intestine so I might once again recognize what used to be called an appetite."
"You don't look that bad," I lied.
"You mean I don't look like 'Gee, guys, I've been in Auschwitz and I managed to get out' yet?" Alistair asked. "The Duchess of Windsor was wrong: You can be too thin. Give me a hand," he added, literally dropping a nearly fleshless and thus lightweight and fragile arm onto my shoulder.
"Where we going?"
"The loo."
"What happened to what's-his-name?" I asked as I steered Alistair into the hallway. "The star?"
"He left."
"How was he?"
"Flawless. He didn't once mention It" Alistair said.
"Is that good or bad?" I asked; these days one could never be certain whether one should or shouldn't The epidemic seems to have developed an ever-metamorphosing construct of etiquette. I sometimes think there should be an Illness Manners Crisis Hotline you can phone to get the latest subtle twist.
"Good for him," Alistair explained. "He'd only say the wrong thing."
We'd gotten to the john, and I knocked hard enough to awaken anyone catnapping within.
"It's all yours," I declared, opening the door.
"Come in with me."
"It hasn't come to that, has it?"
"No, silly. I want you to fix my face."
Alistair's bathroom was large, but when he'd redone the apartment a year ago during a burst of unexpected energy, he'd enlarged it further by absorbing two closets, then he'd followed through the postmodern architectural theme of the building to what I considered illegal lengths. If the large living-dining area was post-Pompeii, the bathroom was late Dark Ages. The stall shower—big enough to hold a medium-sized dyers' guild—was in the color of, and with that puddinglike texture of, alabaster you see only at the Cloisters. The floorboards had come from a twelfth-century Norman mill. The sliding doors were artfully mosaicked chunks of stained glass of the same period, but from a Silesian monastery. The rest of the large room followed the motif: the fixtures looked like baptismal fonts, the walls were scattered with sour-faced Madonnas holding goggle-eyed infants against fields of ancient gold leaf, each set within its own little house—a frame resembling nothing more than a cowshed, behind which lurked a cabinet for toiletries. Next to the Madonnas floated several antique mirrors of varying sizes, the bluish glass much impinged upon by thick frames filled with hordes of pouting, rather bony cherubim. It was into one of these that Alistair thrust his face.
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