Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories

by Jean Shepherd

  I slogged across the street and began to cut through the vacant lot, thinking of the basketball game on Thursday, only four days away. Basketball is Indiana’s true religion. Nobody thinks of anything else from the opening game of the season through the state finals, and then they argue about it all summer long. This was the big game with our hated rivals, the Whiting Oilers, a well-named team. They came from a school buried amid a jumble of refinery tanks and fumes. Understandably, they played a hard, vindictive game. I already had my ticket in my wallet. It was the big game of the year.

  I was about halfway across the vacant lot, crunching contentedly and clumping along the well-worn path, when I saw something ahead of me in the darkness. I hardly ever met anybody on the path, so I stopped for a second. It looked like some kind of bear, a low dark blob in the gloom. I’d always felt that one day I’d meet a bear someplace, but I never thought it would be here in this vacant lot. I couldn’t make out what the hell it was. It seemed to be sort of lunging around, making sounds. I was about 20 or 30 yards away from it, maybe a little less. Deep in my sheepskin pocket, I felt for my Scout knife and edged forward.

  For a couple of seconds I had a powerful urge to turn and run like hell, and then I saw what it was. It was somebody picking things up off the ground. I walked forward warily, because Grover Dill used this path, too, and he was dangerous in the winter because the cold made his teeth hurt.

  It was a girl. It was Josie! It had to be. No girl in our neighborhood looked like that She was bent over picking up cans and packages from the path and trying to stuff them into a torn paper bag. She looked up. The light from the neon sign at the Bluebird Tavern illuminated her face in a flickering radiance. I almost fainted. These moments are known to all men: the electric instant of manifest destiny: Ahab sighting Moby Dick, Tristan meeting Isolde, John meeting Yoko! She stuck a can into the tattered bag, and it rolled out into a snowdrift.

  “Hi.” It was all I could think of to say. She said nothing, just continued to scrabble among the weeds.

  “I guess your bag broke,” I said observantly. Still nothing. She struggled on in the snow.

  “Here. I’ll help you.” It was the first coherent thought I’d had.

  And then she spoke, her rich, sensual, vibrant voice coming from deep within her well-filled corduroy coat, from amid the mufflers and the red stocking cap; a voice which to this day I have never forgotten: “T’anks.”

  Together we packed the torn bag. Her groceries ran heavily to sausages and what smelled like sauerkraut. I could feel a surge of erotic tension warming my longjohns. Together we marched on through the darkness, occasionally dropping a can or a bottle.

  “Uh … what’s your name?” I didn’t want to tip my hand and let her know I had been stalking her relentlessly for days.

  “Josephine.” She didn’t ask mine—a bad sign.

  “Where do you live?” She didn’t answer, being busy at the moment retrieving a turnip that had rolled among a collection of beer cans.

  “You want a piece of candy?” I asked, hoping to soften her up for the kill.

  “What kind?”

  “Mr. Goodbar. It’s got peanuts.”

  “They stick in my teeth,” she said, her breath making a misty, fragrant cloud.

  I kept looking at her sideways, and every time the streetlight hit her I couldn’t believe that such a girl had moved into our neighborhood. Her high, chiseled cheekbones, the dark hair trickling from under the stocking cap, the rounded slopes and valleys of her corduroy coat, the faint scent of cabbage—all were beginning to tell on my addled senses. But my mind was alert and sharp, guarding against a false move. I could sense that this voluptuous creature must be carefully handled. She could fly into the wilderness forever if I so much as struck a wrong note. With Esther Jane Alberry, it was a hit here, a kick there, a hurled snowball and nothing more. But I sensed something in Josephine that opened up pores in my soul I never knew I had.

  “Boy, it sure is cold,” I said finally. I figured I was on safe ground. Somehow I knew I had to keep her talking.

  “Yeah. I’m sure glad we don’t have to go far,” she answered, sniffing in the cold air. I saw my opening.

  “Where do you live?” I tried to sound totally uninterested.

  “Right down the street. Third house from the corner.”

  “Oh.…” I struck, hurling the harpoon with all my might. “Well, well. That sure is funny. I live in the second house from the corner. How come I never saw you before?” I lied adroitly.

  “We just moved in from East Chicago.”

  “That’s a nice town. What school do you go to?”

  “All Saints.”

  “I go to Harding.”

  She didn’t comment. We were nearing her house. I knew I had to make my move or all would be lost. I couldn’t ask her to the basketball game, since I only had one ticket and they had been sold out for over 12 years for the Whiting game. How about the Orpheum? No, I was almost totally broke because of Christmas. I had bought a catcher’s mitt for my kid brother.

  I started to drag my feet and suddenly I became aware that she was giving me a long, intense stare, her magnificent crystal blue eyes catching the gleam of a passing headlight. I felt silly.

  “Would you like to go to a party?” she said suddenly.

  Good God! No girl ever asked me to a party before, except Helen Weathers once, and that didn’t count because she was fat.

  “A party? A party? Why, why, yes, sure, uh … Josie.”

  “I don’t know anybody around here,” she said. “I hope you don’t get the wrong idea because I asked you.

  “Heh-heh-heh. Why, of course not!”

  I couldn’t believe it. Polish girls really were everything I’d heard! Here I didn’t even know her five minutes and she was asking me to a party. At last life had begun. This was it!

  We trudged up the front steps of the Bumpus house to the sagging porch where the Bumpus hounds had howled and raged on many an afternoon of summers past and old Emil had fallen through the railing one night when he had a snootful. But I wasn’t thinking about that now. She opened the front door and a great wave of warm air redolent with strange aromas—along with the rumble of recorded polkas—came flooding out onto the wintry porch.

  “Don’t forget the party,” she said, holding the door partly closed with her free hand.

  “Oh, I won’t! I go to a lot of parties. When is it?”

  “Thursday. Pick me up about eight.”

  “Why, I just happen to have Thursday open. Yessir, and….”

  She was gone. The door closed. It wasn’t until I got back home with the groceries that I realized that she had said Thursday. THURSDAY! There were at least 12,000 people who would have given anything to have a ticket for the Whiting game, but suddenly basketball and the Oilers didn’t seem as important as they had before. Sex will do that to you.

  The next day I told Schwartz what had happened.

  “Y’mean she asked you to a party? You?” He practically reeled.

  “Yup.”

  “Boy, them Polish parties are really wild. Casimir told me about one once that went on for four days.”

  All day in school I drifted on a plane of ecstasy, floating high above the humdrum dronings of history teachers. All through geometry I wrote Josie, Josie, Josie in parabolic curves on the back of my notebook.

  That night I began to plan my wardrobe. I laid the stuff out on my bed, checking it carefully. Let’s see, I’ll use the Old Man’s Aqua Velva, and….

  The next essential was getting my father to let me use the car. A car was absolutely necessary for the operation that was beginning to evolve in my mind. In Indiana, male kids usually start driving at about ten, so I was an accomplished gravel-thrower and was well known at all the local drive-ins hamburger joints from Big Blimpie to the Route 41 Diner.

  “Uh … Dad. Is there any chance of getting the Olds Thursday?” He was deep in the sports page, which I figured was as good a time as an
y to hit him for the car.

  “Thursday?” He squinted at me, blowing smoke through his nose and letting it curl up in front of his eyes like a shifting curtain. If I hadn’t known that he hated movies, I’d have sworn that he studied under Humphrey Bogart. For all I know, Humphrey Bogart studied under him. The old man got around.

  “Thursday … let’s see. Thursday. What am I doin’ Thursday?” He talked aloud to himself, toying with me. I knew Wednesday was his league bowling night and on Fridays he went to the wrestling matches with Gertz and Zudock. Saturday was usually up for grabs, with my mother usually winning when they drove over to visit her friend Bernice and her dumb husband, Elmer, who worked for the phone company.

  “What do you have in mind for Thursday?” he asked, folding the paper over so that he could read the scores of the various bowling leagues. His life revolved around three things—the Chicago White Sox, bowling and the Oldsmobile, the order depending on the season.

  “Well? What d’ya want the car for?”

  Naturally I couldn’t tell him what I really wanted it for. “Me and Schwartz are going to the Whiting game at the civic center, and Schwartz’s old man’s Ford is up on blocks.”

  “Whiting’ll kill ya. That Zodnycki’s got a jump shot from the keyhole that you can’t block, and he hits from the outside, too. They’ll murder you guys.”

  “Yeah?” was all I could say, knowing that the old man was probably right and also that I wouldn’t be anywhere near the game, if things went right.

  “OK. But be sure to fill the tank. Not like the last time, so you run out of gas in Blue Island and me and Heinie hafta chase all over the place before we find ya. If that wasn’t stupid, tryin’ to make it to Chicago and back on a gallon of Shell regular. Leave it to you and Schwartz.”

  He had opened an old wound: the memory of that miserable night when Schwartz had supplied a gallon of gas and I had supplied the car on a disastrous double date that ended with the four of us sitting in the car on a railroad siding at 15 below zero for two and a half hours. The two girls hadn’t spoken to us then or since, and I didn’t blame them.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll fill it up. I learned my lesson.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” was all he said as he went back to the scores.

  Well, that took care of that. It was humiliating, but I had the car; that was the big thing. I went to my room and sat down at the desk that I used for my homework. My Aunt Glenn gave it to me for my eighth birthday. It was robin’s-egg bue and had yellow bunnies painted on the side. I figured one day I’d paint it red or green, since the bunnies were beginning to be embarrassing. My aunt had a thing about bunnies. For every Christmas as long as I could remember, she’d given me bunny slippers and no doubt I’d get another pair this year, even though my shoe was a half-size bigger than my old man’s.

  I made out a list of what I had to do:

  Get haircut.

  Polish car.

  Buy gas.

  Gargle.

  Squeeze blackheads.

  The next day, which was Wednesday, was dark and windy with a lot of snow drifting down all afternoon. We had an auditorium session in which Jack Morton and Glen Atkinson and some other guy dressed up like Wise Men while our crummy glee club sang We Three Kings of Orient Are.

  “Boy, you sure are gonna miss one hell of a ball game,” said Flick as we hitchhiked home from school that night. “That better be some babe.”

  I said nothing, since it was obvious that Flick was jealous that I had a date with the greatest-looking girl for miles around. For a couple of days now there had been churning inside of me a molten excitement that was getting so hot I could hardly stand it. Every time I thought of her, it started again. I can’t explain why, since I hardly knew her, but maybe that’s the reason. You never feel that way over somebody you really know.

  “Didja hear Zodnycki said the Wildcats are a bunch of overrated punks, and that he and four girls could beat ’em goin’ away? I read it in the Times,” Schwartz chipped in, blowing his breath in a big cloud as the cars rumbled past us. We were part of a tiny contingent of diehards who always hitchhiked the three miles back and forth to school, not only to save our bus money but also out of principle.

  “That bum’ll be lucky if he cans five points against Sobec,” I answered, trying to sound like I cared about the game.

  “Ah, I dunno. That bastard must be eight feet tall. And he looks like he’s about 40 years old,” Flick yelled over the roar of a passing diesel. He spoke the truth. Northern Indiana high school teams often resemble the best the Big Ten can field; 300-pound tackles, blue-jowled and squinty-eyed, are common. Their actual ages are as hard to tell as the sex of a clam. There are rumors that many promising players are not even enrolled in first grade till their 17th year, and by the time they’re high school sophomores are grizzled veterans with large families and pro contracts from four leagues.

  “Watch this baby.” Schwartz waggled his thumb seductively as a knock-kneed Buick rattled toward us. It slowed to a stop. “GOT ‘IM!” Schwartz hollered.

  We piled into the amiable wreck, which was driven by a mammoth steelworker who was fragrant with beer and chewing tobacco. He spit a long amber skein out the window into the frigid air.

  “If yer gonna get in, get in. I ain’t got all day!”

  The uproar inside the Buick was deafening. No muffler, bad shocks and a transmission that sounded as if it were made of a million cracked iron marbles. The floor of the car was ankle-deep in beer cans, cigar butts and rags—a real working car.

  “Hey, Schwartz!” Flick yelled over the din.

  “Yeah?”

  “D’ ya think Ace here is gonna score tonight?”

  “I hear them Polish girls invented sex!” shouted Flick.

  “You guys are just jealous!” I yelled as I struggled to keep from falling off the seat.

  At that moment, I became aware that the driver was peering intently into his cracked rearview mirror right at me. At the time, it had no meaning.

  Just as we climbed out at the end of the roaring ride, the steel puddler spit another stream of tobacco juice and hollered over the clatter of his valves:

  “You guys go to high school?”

  “Yeah,” Schwartz answered for all of us.

  “You don’t know when you’re well off.”

  He spat again and drove off. It was a point we weren’t prepared to accept. It was just before the dawn of the age of youth culture, and being a kid was just something you went through before joining the real world.

  “Y’ comin’ over to the Red Rooster tomorrow night after your date?” Flick asked me. The Red Rooster was where everyone who was with it went after a big night.

  “Are you kiddin’, Flick?” said Schwartz, jabbing him in the ribs with a mitten. “He’s gonna have a lot more to do besides sit around and eat cheeseburgers, right?”

  “Now look, you guys, I don’t know what you’re thinkin’ I’m gonna do, but.…” I tried to inject a note of dignity into the discussion.

  “Don’t worry. We know what you’re gonna try to do. Oh boy! If I had a date with that doll, lemme tell you….” Flick winked a large, lascivious wink.

  “Don’t worry. I can handle whatever comes up.” More elbows in the ribs. I played the game.

  I plodded home. There was time before supper to back the car out of the garage in the frigid air and to give her a coat of Duco Seven if I worked fast. I had polished that car so many times that I could do it in my sleep. I was already deep in the middle of a torrid embrace in my mind when I became aware, as my right arm buffed the hood, that a hulking shadow had darkened the gloom around me. It blotted out the distant glow of the open-hearth furnaces against the lowering clouds. As I glanced up, a rasping voice set my teeth on edge. “Hey!”

  A thrill of fear zipped through me. “Uh … yeah?” I managed to squeak, dropping my polishing rag into the slush.

  “You the kid takin’ Josie t’ tha pardy t’morra?”

  “
Yeah.”

  “I t’ought so.” He was wearing a checkered wool jacket about the size of a circus tent. He had on red earmuffs and no hat. He had a crewcut that looked like steel wool.

  “Who’re you?” I asked. It was a dangerous question, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Whatsit to ya?” He leaned with one hand the size of a 12-pound ham on the fender of the Olds. I didn’t like the way the conversation was going, and I wondered if I should make a break for the back door.

  “I’m ‘er brudder. I jus’ t’ought I oughta see who was goin out wit’ Josie.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I heard of you. She’s a nice girl. She sure is a nice girl. Yeah.”

  Words kept squirting out of me. He reminded me of Alice the Goon from the Popeye comic strip. I could smell the faint aroma of a locker room.

  “You play football,” I said, trying to make contact.

  “Dat’s right, she’s a nice girl.” He ignored my latest remark as being too obvious to answer.

  “Yep. She sure is. A real nice girl. Yep.”

  “You show her a nice time, y’ hear? An if anybuddy gives ya any trouble, tell em ya know Stosh.” He made a sound that I guess was a laugh. It sounded like two angle irons clanking together.

  “I sure will … Stosh.”

  He clanked again and shambled off into the darkness. I noticed that he had left a dent the size of an elephant’s footprint in the fender of the Olds. I should have taken the hint.

  Later that night at Pulaski’s, I waited my turn amid a crowd of ladies who milled around the meat counter, watching Pulaski as he weighed pork chops. He was famous for his two-pound thumb.

  “I said didn’t want ’em so fatty!” bellowed a hulking lady in a stocking cap.

  “Whaddaya want from me, lady? I don’t grow the pigs!”

  An angry murmur arose among the throng as Pulaski held them at bay with his cleaver. Howie struggled past me, carrying a sack of potatoes on his shoulder.

  “I hear you’re goin’ to the party,” he said out of the side of his mouth as he hurried past

  “How’d you know?” I threw after him.