Finding the Worm

by Mark Goldblatt

  “Lonnie said that? I’m real sorry, Howie.”

  “It’s just that … sometimes things don’t go how you want them to go. They go how they’re going to go, and you wind up looking like the bad guy. But you’re not the bad guy, even if you did a bad thing. Do you know what I mean?”

  “No,” I said. Which was the truth.

  “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, what you did with Beverly. It could happen to anyone. That’s all I’m saying.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. But when a guy gets killed the way he got killed, you can’t expect him to make sense right away.

  I patted his shoulder and said, “Don’t worry about it, Howie.”

  He turned and headed back to his house. As he was walking away, I got a low-down feeling that was hard to describe. But then, suddenly, I knew the exact word to describe it: I felt sluppy.

  March 6, 1970

  The Big Race

  Right up until the last minute, I was hoping Beverly would change her mind about the race. Not that I thought she would. I knew she was dead set on it, but I was still kind of thinking, in an unthinking way, she might come to her senses.

  It’s like when you’re watching a baseball game on TV and your guy strikes out, and then the replay comes up and you kind of hope he’ll foul off the pitch—even though you just saw him strike out. Your brain tells you that it’s stupid to think like that, that it’s not going to happen, that it can’t happen. But your heart still holds out hope.

  Beverly wouldn’t talk to me during morning or afternoon homeroom. She waved me off the couple of times I tried to make conversation. Then she walked home alone while the rest of us took the bus with Quentin, who was having one of his bad-breathing days. (Lonnie called them BBDs.) It was a strange thing. He had a much easier time on miserable, overcast days when the air was thick and wet. The days when the air was crisp and cold were harder.

  He wouldn’t gripe about it, but you could tell he had to focus on inhaling. He’d be standing next to you, and then, without warning, he’d get this panicky look in his eyes, like he was choking, and he’d take like ten breaths in five seconds. But afterward he’d be all right.

  Quentin was sitting in the back row of the bus, next to Howie, who was keeping an eye on him. We rotated doing that, keeping an eye on Quentin—even though he didn’t know that was what we were doing. It wasn’t something we sat down and worked out. It was more like a habit we fell into. Eric and Shlomo were in the next-to-last row, right behind Lonnie and me. As the bus turned the corner at Twenty-Sixth Avenue and Parsons, Lonnie jabbed me with his elbow and said, “You’re going to teach her a lesson, right?”

  “I’m just going to beat her. That’s it.”

  “I think you should teach her a lesson.”

  “Why would I do that?” I asked.

  “Because if you don’t, she’ll want to race again. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but down the line. Then where does it end? You’ve got to nip this thing in the bud.”

  “Yeah, but it’s Beverly.”

  He shook his head. “I know you like her—”

  “I don’t like her.”

  “What I mean is, we all like her,” he said. “I didn’t mean, you know, you like her. Which would be fine if you did. I’m not saying it’s good or bad. That’s not what I meant. What I meant was, this whole girls-racing-guys thing, you’ve got to put a stop to it. You’ve got to teach her a lesson, or else you’re just going to make things worse.”

  “How about this?” I said. “I’ll beat her bad for the first half of the race, and then I’ll let her catch up a little. That way she’ll know I could’ve beaten her by more, but I won’t embarrass her.”

  “Just one problem,” he said. “How will she know you’re letting her catch up? To her, it’s going to feel like she’s catching up on her own. She’s going to come away from it thinking, ‘Maybe, if the race was longer, I could’ve caught him.’ Then you’re back to square one. I’m telling you, Jules, you have to wipe her out. There’s no other way to end it once and for all.”

  That was as much strategizing as we could squeeze in before the bus pulled up at the corner of Thirty-Fourth Avenue. The six of us walked back to Ponzini and waited. It was maybe three minutes until Beverly showed up with her cheerleader friends from the Dorado House. But that was it, just the two cheerleaders. She didn’t even bring out her brother, Bernard.

  She nodded at me from across Ponzini. Then she hung her coat over the fence and began to walk toward the starting line. I handed my coat to Lonnie and followed her, still unsure what I was going to do.

  Once we were out of earshot of the rest of them, I came up behind her and said, “We really and truly don’t have to do this. We can call it off. You can even say I chickened out if you want.”

  “You said you’d race me, Julian. I want to race.”

  So that was that.

  We took our places at the starting line and leaned forward. Beverly had her hair tied back, her head up, her eyes straight ahead. The way she was balanced, it was just so earnest. I don’t know if I’ve ever used that word before, or ever thought that word before. But you should have seen her. There was a steady breeze behind us, but nothing on her was ruffling. She was just dead still and determined. Meanwhile, I was in a half stance, more like the way you’d lead off first base than the way you’d start a sprint. I felt ashamed, even before the race started, about winning.

  “On your mark …,” Lonnie yelled.

  I took a deep breath and held it.

  “Get set …”

  I shook my head.

  “Go!”

  Between the time Lonnie yelled “get set” and the time he yelled “go,” here’s what I decided: I wasn’t going to teach Beverly a lesson. There was no logical reason I decided that. I didn’t get smarter in that one second. But sometimes, even when you’re not sure what you should do, you get a gut feeling what you shouldn’t do. Slaughtering her in front of her cheerleader friends wasn’t the way to go, even if it meant I had to race her over and over for the next ten years. That much, I knew in my gut. As weird as it sounds, Howie was right and Lonnie was wrong.

  Beverly took off, and I took off a step behind. You know the poem “Casey at the Bat,” where the guy gets overconfident and then strikes out? This was nothing like that.

  After the first half dozen steps, Beverly was running full speed, and I was running next to her—and I was coasting. It really wasn’t a close race. Well, it was a close race, but only because I was hanging back and running next to her, thinking about how earnest she looked. The way she kept her head down, the way she kept her eyes forward! She was putting everything she had into the race, every ounce of strength, every drop of concentration. If you had stuck a brick wall in front of her, she’d have crashed into it like Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon. Except not in a funny way. In an earnest way. What I mean is it was just a total effort.

  But then the weirdest thing happened, the weirdest thing in an entire week of weird things. The sun started to come through the clouds, and about halfway into the race, a glint of it flashed across Beverly’s face. It came from behind her and caught her cheek. I was running right beside her, watching her, watching her face, how earnest she looked, and then the sunlight hit her left cheek, and it was just the most perfect pink cheek, the most perfect pink thing, I’d ever seen. She was straining to run as fast as she could, with her legs churning, and with her arms cutting the air, but her left cheek was pink and peaceful.

  As I stared at her cheek, I got that feeling again in the pit of my stomach, that warm gust of wind that came up inside me and whirled into my throat. You know that feeling you get when you shove pieces of Bazooka gum into your mouth? How the first piece tastes good and the third piece tastes good, but around the sixth piece, even though it tastes the same, it’s kind of bad? What I mean is it’s still sweet, and you still want it, but you gag on it. It felt like that, running next to Beverly, staring at her left
cheek.

  I’m not quite sure what happened next. I’ve thought about it over and over, and there are only two possible explanations. Either I slowed down, which is highly likely, given the sick feeling I had in my guts, or else Beverly sped up, which is highly unlikely, given how hard she was running the entire race. But who knows? Really, it could’ve been either one. For whatever reason, I blinked hard, and when I opened my eyes, she’d crossed the finish line a step ahead of me … which I guess means it was like “Casey at the Bat,” if you stop and think about it.

  There was dead silence in Ponzini.

  It was the first race I’d ever lost. Ever. Not that I was upset—I mean, it wasn’t like I was running hard. I figured that had to be pretty obvious. You couldn’t watch that race and think I was running hard. Not even Beverly’s cheerleaders were cheering, which meant even they knew what had happened. Or at least what hadn’t happened, which was that Beverly had beaten me fair and square.

  I looked at her, and her eyes were like grapes.

  “I won,” she said. Her voice was shaking.

  That was when it hit me: she didn’t know.

  “Well, yeah …”

  “I didn’t think I had a chance. But I won.”

  She rushed over and hugged me, but only for a second. Then she let go of me and stepped back. “I’m sorry. I mean, I actually won. I’m so sorry, Julian. I swear I didn’t think … I mean, I wouldn’t have made such a big deal out of it. We could’ve raced when no one was around—”

  “Beverly …”

  “I actually beat you!”

  “Well, you did win.”

  She started to speak again but stuttered and gave up. She turned around and ran over to her cheerleader friends. She was running as fast as she did during the race. I noticed, as she got close, that the cheerleaders were looking past her. They were looking straight at me, and they were ticked off.

  Meanwhile, the guys were walking slowly in my direction.

  “Why’d you do that?” Lonnie said. “That was just stupid.”

  “I don’t know. It just happened.”

  Howie was shaking his head. “I said you shouldn’t slaughter her. You didn’t have to let her win.”

  “I didn’t let her win, exactly.…”

  “That’s what it looked like,” Quentin said.

  “I was going to beat her by a couple of steps. I don’t know what happened. I think maybe I got distracted.”

  “You think too much,” Lonnie said. “You need to turn it off.”

  “What distracted you?” Eric said.

  “I just had a bad feeling,” I said. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Are you going to race her again?” Shlomo said.

  “Of course he’s going to race her again!” Lonnie said. “He has to race her again!”

  “What’s the point?” I said.

  “What’s the point? The point is—”

  He didn’t get to finish the sentence. Beverly came running back. I heard her footsteps and turned. There were tears streaming down her face as she pushed through the other guys and came right up to me. “How could you do that?”

  “I didn’t plan it. I got distracted—”

  “I hope you got a good laugh out of it!”

  “No!”

  She brushed away the tears with both of her palms and stared at me. It was the hardest, iciest stare I’ve ever gotten. Then, suddenly, she tried to kick me in the shin with her left foot. If I’d had even a second to think about it, I would’ve stood there and taken it. But instead I jumped backward, and she missed. She stumbled to the side and almost fell, but then she caught herself.

  Beverly stared me down again. Her eyes were freezing cold, but also scalding hot. As I looked at her, that stupid wind gusted up inside me again. It felt like when your mom opens the door to the oven and you get caught by a rush of hot air. That’s what it felt like inside my chest.

  “I hate you,” she said.

  She didn’t scream it. She said it under her breath so that only the two of us could hear. That made it a hundred times worse.

  “C’mon, Beverly! We can race again.…”

  But she turned and ran out of Ponzini.

  March 11, 1970

  The Stomach Versus the Heart

  Quentin called after dinner to ask if he could come over. He wouldn’t tell me over the phone what it was about, but I said sure. Looking back, I should’ve gone to his house, because it took him a half hour to walk the half block from the Hampshire House and then another five minutes to get up the two flights of stairs. That’s the bad thing about living upstairs in a two-family house: no elevator. But it’s only a bad thing if you’re toting a couple of bags of groceries for your mom … or if you’re waiting for Quentin on one of his bad-breathing days.

  He was still breathing hard when he got to the front door. My mom handed him a glass of iced tea, but his grip was so shaky that you could hear the ice cubes clinking, so I carried it back to my room for him. He sat down on the edge of my bed, and I handed him the glass of tea. Then I closed the door and sat down across from him, on my desk chair.

  He didn’t talk at first. He gulped down the tea, which seemed to make him steadier. I didn’t want to stare at him, but there wasn’t much else to do while he caught his breath. The way he was gripping the glass with both hands made his hands look real small. He was always the smallest of us. He was shorter than I was by a couple of inches—and I was pretty short—and even before he got sick, he was the skinniest of us.

  He finished the tea and handed me the glass, and I put it down on a coaster on the windowsill.

  “Did you figure out a new word?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “It’s nothing like that.”

  “Then what’s on your mind?”

  “I got kind of a weird question,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “The thing is …”

  “Whatever you want to ask, just ask it.”

  “Lonnie said you let Beverly win because you’re in love with her.”

  I started to laugh. “I’m not in love with Beverly, Quentin.”

  “Then why’d you let her win?”

  “I told you. I got distracted.”

  “Lonnie said you got distracted because you’re in love with her.”

  “I got distracted because … I don’t know why I got distracted. But—”

  “Then how do you know you’re not in love with her?” he asked.

  “Let’s look at it logically,” I said. “Howie’s been in love with Beverly since third grade, right? Think about how Howie acts when he’s around her. Now think about how I act when I’m around her. Do I act like Howie?”

  “Maybe different guys act different when they’re in love.”

  “C’mon, Quent …”

  I didn’t know what else to say to him. But he kept looking at me, leaning forward, expecting me to say something.

  “Look,” I said, “I guess I did feel something weird during the race.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s it,” I said. “I was looking at her, and I felt something weird.”

  “You think it was love?”

  “You can call it that, but I don’t think that’s the right word.”

  “Lonnie was pretty sure—”

  “If you want to believe Lonnie, believe Lonnie. Who knows? Maybe he’s right. Maybe I’m in love with Beverly and just too stupid to know it. All I’m saying is that’s not what it feels like.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Quentin!”

  “C’mon, I just want to know what it feels like.”

  “Why?”

  “I just … I just want to know.”

  I shook my head. “Here’s why I don’t think it’s love. You’re supposed to feel love in your heart, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The thing with Beverly, it’s more stomach-y.”

  “How do you mean?”

  I had to think f
or a few seconds to find the right words. “Do you remember when you were a little kid, and you’d spin yourself around and around on a swing until you felt sick to your stomach? That’s the closest thing I can compare to it. I mean, it was kind of what you were trying to do, but you still felt queasy afterward.”

  As soon as I said that, his face got real pink. He let out a weak laugh, but he looked straight down at the floor.

  “What is it, Quent?”

  “When I was in the hospital,” he said, “there was this nurse with red hair. She was younger than the rest of them, like maybe twenty years old …”

  “Yeah?”

  He started to laugh. “No, I can’t talk about it.”

  “C’mon, you can’t leave me hanging like that.”

  “The thing is, I was stuck in the bed, so she used to come in and wash me. You know? She would wash my arms and legs, and then she’d roll me over and wash my back. But while she was doing it …” His voice broke off, and he stared down at the floor again.

  “You’re not going to tell me you’re in love with her, are you?”

  “No, nothing like that,” he said. “But after the first few times, whenever she walked into the room, I got a feeling in my stomach, like what you said. That kind of feeling.”

  “So what do you make of it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think it’s a wrong feeling?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “You think it’s a right feeling?”

  “Maybe it’s both.”

  “Did you ask Lonnie?” I said.

  “Please don’t ask Lonnie about it, Jules.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s not going to understand.”

  “All right,” I said. “It stays between us.”

  March 15, 1970

  Eric’s Bar Mitzvah

  The talk with Quentin got me thinking even more about what’s going on with Beverly, about the wind that gusts up when I’m around her. It bugs me that Lonnie thinks I let her win the race because I’m in love with her. It’s like saying I can’t control myself. Except, if you think about it, I didn’t intend to let her win, but I did let her win. Doesn’t that prove I can’t control myself? Maybe looking at it from the outside, Lonnie can see stuff that I can’t see because I’m the one going through it.