by Jamie Gilson
“OK, let’s EVERYBODY form a big, round CIRCLE and ROLL IT!”
The girls kept talking to each other, chewing gum, glancing around as if they couldn’t quite hear the guy on the mike, like if he’d speak up just a little, maybe. The boys poured cider down their throats and took their brownies in two bites, staring out at the empty dance floor like they heard the guy, all right, but could care less. Nobody wanted to be the first one out.
“Come on, you guys,” the announcer pleaded. “They’ll think I’m no good at this and fire me.” I wondered how much they were paying him. He looked over toward the parent-types who were talking to each other at a table in the corner and not, at least, paying him a whole lot of attention. They didn’t look ready to rise up and give him the hook.
“OK,” he sighed. “OK. Listen, I know you guys know how to do this. Just reach out and grab the hand of the kid next to you and before long, by some obscure law of physics, you’ll have a circle and we can spin.”
One girl tried to grab a guy’s loose hand, and he leaped onto a chair and then to a tabletop, hopping across to another like they were stepping-stones. When he got to a table far enough away to be un-catchable, he began to dance all by himself, shuffling around, making crazy faces. Kids started to scream. I tossed my cider cup at the garbage can and crossed my arms.
A parent-type stood up. “Cut it out! If you can’t behave, we’ll close up right now,” she said, her voice slicing through the music. “I’ve had just about enough of this nonsense. You settle down or that’s it.”
The kid ambled across the rest of the tables, jumped down, and fled to the gym. Out on the dance floor, though, a circle had started to form.
“ALL RIGHT!” the high school guy yelled. “Now all we need is one couple in the middle for us to snowball around.” I was heading toward the door, sure I’d find Quint and Tuan—Tom—shooting baskets, when somebody grabbed my wrist and twirled me around and around the way we played Statues in second grade. It was Caroline.
Everybody was looking at us. I could feel them. I mean, she was all dressed up, and I was me. My head spun even when we stopped.
“You scared to dance?” She smiled.
A kid next to me picked something off the floor and then whacked me one on my seat. “You chicken?” he asked, like the question was the answer.
“Looks like the yolks on you.” The kid with him laughed.
“Me?” I laughed back, ha-ha. And to show them how scared I wasn’t, I went with Caroline to stand in the center of the not-so-big snowball circle that was moving around and around. I picked my feet up and down while she cleaned unseen windshields with her arms. Over my shoulder I could hear girls giggling, so when the guy announced that the two kids in the middle should each choose somebody else to dance with, I escaped fast under a bridge of arms.
In the hall I stopped for a gulp of air. It felt like I hadn’t had one for an hour. I was dripping sweat. The windows on the outside door were steamed up too. So I stood a minute, watching two kids writing on the fog with their fingers.
“Hey, Zilch!” I heard Quint call. “Didn’t know you were changing your name, too. Very classy.”
Behind me, next to the heaps of coats down the hall, he and five or six guys were sitting on the floor. They were laughing at me like I was the Fourth Stooge.
“Say, S.E.,” Quint said, “we watched you in there dancing with the girls. Our foreign friend here looked pretty shocked when he saw how Caroline swept you off your feet. I don’t think that kind of thing’s done in Vietnam.”
I crossed my arms like I didn’t know what he was talking about, but there wasn’t much use denying it. “What’s this S.E. stuff?” I asked.
Except for Tom, they all laughed again, louder. Like I wasn’t just the Fourth Stooge, but the Fourth Stooge zapped with a chocolate cream pie.
“I’ve heard of egg on your face,” Quint said without a smile, “but this is ridiculous.”
“OK, what’s going on?” I asked, as calm as I could.
“We shoot marbles, Zilch,” Tom Win said, glancing at Quint to see if he’d gotten it right.
“Quint Calkins!” I yelled. I could have blasted him. He was grinning the way he’d done when he’d told the kid that a fork was a porcupine. Telling Tom to call me Zilch! “Listen, my name is …”
“Scrambled Eggs!” Suzanna came up behind me. “Harvey, why are you wearing a sign down there that says your name is Scrambled Eggs? I would have thought you’d choose something grander, like … Loverboy LaRue. I mean, what do you call somebody for short whose name is Scrambled Eggs?”
That, of course, was when I realized it. The yolks on me. First I stuck my hand into my back pocket. The name tag from breakfast wasn’t there. It must have fallen out when Caroline was twirling me around because it was just after that when the kid slapped me on the seat of my pants. I reached back, peeled it off, and crumpled it into a ball without even reading what those girls had been reading as I snowballed in the middle of the circle. I thought about crawling under the stacks of coats and letting them find me there hours later, dead of embarrassment.
“What you guys doing?” Suzanna asked the kids sitting on the floor.
“Ohhhhhh, Suzanna,” Quint sang out, “won’t you shoot marbles with me?”
“Sure.” She called over a couple of other girls, and they all knelt on the floor next to him. “What do we do?”
“You got some extras, Zilch?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir. One bag full.” I was so glad to talk about something else that I gave marbles to anybody with a hand out. I sure didn’t need them. Nobody played marbles in Pittsfield. Nobody even talked about them except fathers and uncles who said how perfect it was in the old days without television when kids sat around shooting marbles in the dirt. What a waste of time it was. We could have been at home with Felix, making some headway with the kid’s grammar.
“I’ll show you how,” Quint told them. “This is a simple shooting game called Wall that we can do inside.” Big authority on marbles. “Everybody puts one marble out here about a foot or so from the wall and then we take turns shooting big ones off the wall, trying to hit one of the little marbles in the field.” The little one Tom put out from his bag wasn’t a marble at all, just a stone, a little rounded stone.
“I don’t know how to shoot,” one of the girls said, tossing a yellow and black one of mine at the wall, underhand.
“Show them, Tuan.”
The kid opened up his palm and put the big blue marble on the tile floor. Then, resting just his thumb on the ground as a pivot, he flicked the marble with his middle finger. It ricocheted off the wall, hit one of my marbles, and flung it back into the pile of coats. Shooting with the cat’s eye again, he picked off another and then another.
“In Galang camp we play a lot.” The kid smiled proudly.
“My uncle used to play marbles,” Quint told everybody. “He says he never saw anybody shoot that way. Everybody around here who plays at all shoots by putting their knuckles down flat on the ground and flicking the marble with their thumb. Like this.” He flipped the yellow marble I’d given Tom, knocked it against a red one I’d given Suzanna, and put them both back in his pocket. “You always get the one you hit when you’re playing for keeps.”
“Let me try that,” Suzanna said. “You got another marble for me, Harvey?” I handed her a green and white one.
It didn’t seem like much fun to me, so I sat on the sofa of tossed jackets and watched. Quint kept calling the kid by his old name, Tuan, and telling everybody how bizarre his shooting style was.
I was leaning back, counting dots in the ceiling tiles, when Quint came over and sat down with me. He lowered his voice. “Listen, Scrambled Eggs, I got a little advice for you.”
“My name isn’t Scrambled Eggs, and I don’t need any advice.”
“A name’s a name.” He shrugged. “Whatever it is, you’ve got a problem.”
“Caroline’s no problem.”
“The kid? You’re kidding. He knows more words every day.”
“But he’s not having any fun. You know? What’s fun about being stuffed with verbs? I bet you even think he likes you.”
“Likes me? Sure, I’m … his …”
“‘We all live in a yellow submarine …’” Quint began to sing loud.
“‘Yellow submarine,’” the kid sang on, laughing, “‘yellow submarine….’”
“He learned that in Vietnam. Knows a lot of Beatles lyrics. I bet you didn’t know that.” I shrugged. “Listen, my advice to you is to give the kid a little fun. Let him know you’re not just a word machine.”
“I showed him my beer can collection. It’s all in black plastic bags, so it doesn’t look as great as when it’s stacked, but I opened them up and showed him.”
“I bet you told him all their names.”
“Sure.”
“What’d he say?” Quint’s lip curled up in a half-smirk.
“He smiled.”
“He smiles all the time.”
“I know. That way you can’t tell for sure what he likes.”
“He likes me.” Quint folded his arms and leaned back on the jackets.
“So?”
“So, I thought I’d help you have a little fun with him after T.G.I.F. I’d go, but my uncle’s come to pick me up.” He nodded toward the outside door. Wayne Calkins was leaning against it, flipping the ash off his cigarette. “He wants me to ride over with him to the Starlight Motel—find out why a guy who can’t speak the language got hired when he didn’t. Says he’s going to tell them if it’s Vietnamese they want, he can talk a few words of that, too.”
Reaching behind us, Quint got his jacket, and from deep under the pile of coats, pulled out a large brown grocery bag. “So, this is for you,” he said, like it was some big gift. “You’ll have a terrific time with it. I gotta go now.” He glanced over at his uncle, who was motioning for him to come. “Wayne’ll be mad if I don’t get out there soon.”
“What’s in it?”
“Toilet paper.”
“Toilet paper! You’ve got to be kidding.”
“What do you mean, kidding? Listen, two weeks ago—remember the night we won the game against Jacksonville twenty-one to twenty—well, I watched a gang of kids wrap a whole yardful of trees next door to me in toilet paper. The guy who lives there is captain of the football team. Anyway, they’d throw a roll up and it’d drape around the branches like silver icicles on a Christmas tree. I thought you could do Mr. Tandy’s house tonight … or Caroline’s.”
“Caroline’s?”
“Yeah, I’d like to come with you. She likes me. But I gotta go. The paper’s all yours.” He got up. “And take my advice. Nobody’s friends with a dictionary, even a dictionary named Scrambled Eggs.”
Across the way all the kids were laughing, looking like they were having a terrific time bouncing little glass balls around. Quint called good-bye and ran toward the door just as Suzanna yelled, “I’ve got it. I think I’ve got it. I’m going to be a hotshot.”
“Hotshot,” Tom repeated, throwing his head back to laugh.
Wrapping trees in toilet paper. What a dumb idea. I’d seen TP’d trees, of course. Sometimes they looked pretty good, like they’d been hit by some kind of weird snow storm. But I wasn’t about to TP Caroline’s house. Especially if she liked me. Which, of course, she didn’t. I picked up the sack and, wandering over to the door of the cafeteria, took aim and shot it at the trash can where the kids had been throwing their empty cups.
Swoosh. And the crowd cheered for Harvey Trumble, world-class athlete, as he shattered his career record and set a new one for the world. “Tell the vast television audience just what was going through your mind, Harv,” the announcer asked, “when you sank that historic bucket?”
“Ooooooooooouu, baby, baby.” The high school DJ must have had a very small record collection. Nobody was dancing.
The hall outside, though, was filling up with kids, who were filtering in from the gym and cafeteria. They were either playing marbles or giving free advice. The game kept going, and Suzanna, Caroline, Tom, and I were among the last to leave at the nine-thirty closing. Suzanna had won three with the two I’d given her.
“Can I get more of these at the drugstore?” she asked me.
“Want a ride?” Caroline’s mother was parked outside to take her, Suzanna, and a couple of other girls home.
We wouldn’t have fit. Not without somebody sitting on laps. “No, thanks. We’ll walk.” As they drove off, I turned to Tom and said, automatically, “Car.”
“I know.” He nodded. “A Toyota.”
I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t told him that. I wasn’t even a good dictionary. He was smiling, but I couldn’t tell what kind of smile it was. Maybe he didn’t like me. I couldn’t ask him if he thought I was just a word machine.
“Wait here,” I told him. “Don’t go away.” Dashing back just as the custodian turned the lock, I pounded on the front door. “I forgot something!” Mr. Bushel shook his head and turned away. “Please!”
Looking plenty disgusted, he frowned over his glasses and dug out a ring of keys to let me in. Then he watched as I threw open the door, hurried into the cafeteria, and produced my dazzling free-throw sack from the garbage.
“You got beer cans in there? Let me see.” I’d had my picture in the paper once for my collection, and a lot of people know me for that. Some of them even think I drink the stuff, which is disgusting. But I sure wasn’t going to let him look inside this bag, no matter what he thought. So, clutching it like a football, I hurled myself out the door. “Thanks!” I called as it clanged shut behind me.
“Let’s walk home by the square,” I said. “I want to show you the pig.” It was only a block or two out of the way.
The night was dark. Only a small moon. And our street lights are changeovers from gas lamps, so they show you where the path is but don’t make night seem like high noon, or even sunrise. The grocery bag didn’t weigh much. Every few steps I’d fling it high so it would flip before I caught it. I was feeling great. This was better, much better, than acting out the meaning of listen, or even sneeze.
“And here it is!” I told him about the statue and how there are more pigs raised near here than anywhere else in the world. We ran up onto the courthouse lawn, away from the stores, to where Pitt Pig stood, barely reflecting the stoplight as it turned from green to caution.
A couple of cars drove by, but all the stores on the square are closed by six, and so nobody was out buying dog food or bunion pads.
“Pitt Pig,” I said, rubbing the creature’s car-spring snout.
“Pitt Pig,” Tom Win repeated. “Zilch….”
“Tom, my name is not Zilch.”
“Quint call you Zilch.”
“Listen, Quint’s just …” I reached into the bag, pulled out a roll of the toilet paper and heaved it into the air, expecting an explosion of streamers. It dropped down whole with a soft thud.
“What do you do?” Tom Win asked.
“This is called TP’ing.” I loosened the paper from the roll so it would flow. “It’s fun!” The paper was pink. I let it loose into the top branches of the oak tree next to the pig, and this time it caught before bouncing at my feet. “You want to try?”
He threw one that carried to the next tree over. “Why throw?”
“Because it’s there.” I wrapped the toilet paper around the pig’s neck. It made him look like he’d just won the pink ribbon at the state fair. Rubbing the pig’s nose with my sleeve, I told Tom, “I bet friend pig is bored silly standing here all year, cold and naked. I bet he’d like some more banners and festoons and song and dance. ‘We all live …’” Nobody was going to outdo me for fun. The pink roll arched up into the air again and emptied out midway down.
The
second roll was blue.
“Duck!” A car rounded the courthouse square, so we pressed down behind the pig. It wasn’t a squad car. Pittsfield has two. The lights moved past slowly, and since we were already crouched there, we tossed the toilet paper around the statue’s little hog legs and wrapped its hams in blue.
All quiet again, we played high-flying pitch-and-catch, looping the rest around the branches. When that ran out, I grabbed the last roll, a green one. Carefully, I tore the paper loose, wound up, and tossed the stream of green toward the moon, IDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT STREAKS INTO SPACE, the headlines read, LOCAL BOY SENDS PAPER PATH TO MARS, WHERE SQUAT RED PEOPLE SHRIEK WELCOME!
Suddenly we were in the spotlight. A real spotlight. It was bright and sharp and caught us like a net. The green roll fell, draping over the side of the pig and bumping down the courthouse lawn. Sirens whined in my ears, though I knew there were none in the air. It was dead quiet. My legs wouldn’t move.
“What are you boys doing?” a voice called out. It might have been the light that spoke. That’s all I could see. A car door slammed.
“Do we do wrong?” Tom grabbed my jacket. “Who is …?”
Between us and the spotlight, a policeman stepped onto the sidewalk. We couldn’t see his face, just his shape, huge, motioning for us to come.
Tom said something to me in Vietnamese, the sounds catching in his throat.
“It’s OK,” I lied. “But we better go to him. He’s a policeman.”
“Policeman,” Tom Win said.
When the policeman stepped out of the light, it still caught all the metal on him—his badge, the eagle on his cap, his gold-rimmed glasses, and the handle of the handgun slung on his hip. We walked toward him slowly.
“All right. What’s going on over there?”
“Nothing,” I said. I held my hands out to show they were empty.
He flashed his spot up at the trees. “Doesn’t look like nothing to me.” We looked at the paper loops connecting tree to pig to tree, and he was right. It didn’t look like nothing. “What’ll your parents say when I call them?”