Time to be cool, and not a fool. Time to be rough and tough . . . especially with your heart in a vice and being left more helpless than before. She’s cut him off and he’s out in the cold. She kept saying she was going to, and now she has. It’s over. Hurt keeps flooding through him, filming his eyes, and he keeps looking down to avoid eye contact with his father.
CHAPTER 15
IN HOMEROOM IN THE MORNING, DALE LETS HIS PERIPHERAL vision take in Miss Furbish while acting, as before, as if he is not looking her way. For her part, he knows she’s distracted when she says to the class, “We won’t be doing Word Power Challenge this morning.” To think he has known the woman before the room in the way that he has is hard to believe. Who is she? Who is he? Where are they? What matters in the universe about anything?
Dale sits in realization that he loves Miss Furbish even more than before, that he would run away with her to anywhere, stay with her for all time, would never even think of calling anyone like Zona Kaplan again. If only she would smile as before, meet him as before, let him have at her as before . . . in any dark space they might locate. Love, alas, has come to be more exciting than basket-ball . . . love withheld more painful than any loss or missed shot.
At the same time, his only recourse is to be manly, to prove to her that he is strong. Winning the city, in spite of all, might bring her back. To win the city not only for his father, as he has dreamed so long of doing, but for her, in the face of greater odds.
Fight for love . . . win for love. It’s a new secret charge by which to live. To return to her after going on to high school in the fall. To slip into her apartment, into her heart and rooms as a high school star . . . to be allowed (when she sees again the leader he can be) to lie with her in the dark as before.
Within days, however, Dale is seeing how risky it is to place his hopes in one basket, to think he can win as if for love alone. As every athlete knows, it isn’t smart to set up unrealistic expectations that can leave you hanging, that can turn on a whim. Smarter to suppress your dreams and allow competitive zeal to grow into creativity and ferocity on its own. Hang loose, he advises himself . . . be cool in the way that any good athlete knows how to nurture a winning edge. Love is cool, and he loves his teacher, cannot help it, while it isn’t cool to invest every hope in love alone.
# # #
MISS FURBISH. As days slip by and she moves before them, smiles at the class, writes on the board and leaves Dale suffering helplessness on reading the parabolic upward curve of a breast he wants yet again to nuzzle, the line of a thigh (as she reaches overhead with a stub of chalk) he wants yet to caress. When their eyes meet—at midweek, passing in the hall—she seems to convey in the shadow of her smile that while she will not be taking him back, she misses him, too, and wishes him well despite his hanging up on her.
No, I haven’t told anyone! he thinks to joke, though of course she hasn’t asked, is rather departing his view in the hallway as if they are merely teacher and student.
ON SATURDAY, AS they dress for their game, Lucky appears at the head of the aisle to call out, “Little Ms, listen up, goddammit. Thursday—y’all hear me? Thursday, here, at three-thirty. We play the winner of Lowell: Stebbins Pharmacy.”
“Thought we had to win today to get home court?” Emmett says.
“We’re gonna win,” Chub says.
“We’re gonna kill Stebbins Pharmacy on Thursday,” Lucky adds. “And Thursday a week . . . it’s on to the Flintstone Mother Truckers in the game of the year!”
“Whatta ya say, Dale . . . can we beat those jerks?” Grady wants to know.
“If we fight, we can,” Dale says. “We’re tough, can surprise them, because they think they’re hot shit! We go in to kill, we can leave them like blood on the floor!”
Seeing their eyes on him, Dale realizes how crazed he has sounded. “You got the mo,” Emmett says. “Gives me the mo.”
“Fuckinay,” Lucky adds. “Orange and black, take no flak. Gonna leave them like blood on the floor.”
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 1
THE LITTLE MS WIN THEIR FINAL GAME WITH EASE, FINISHING the regular season undefeated. On Thursday, when the bell rings to end the day, Dale—watching the clock as if awaiting the start of a race, gym bag in hand—is immediately on the run. Not even Miss Furbish passing in the hall would stop him. Well maybe Miss Furbish would rein him in with an offer to slake his famished heart with words and affection . . . but Dale knows that no such words are forthcoming.
Following are two mad dashes of a hundred yards each and two stop-and-start bus-rides as first shift is letting out and second shift is going in at all the factories within and about the Vehicle City. In the best of times Dale’s trip to Emerson is a thirty-minute, two-bus ride. Challenged by shift changes at the factories, his strategy is to connect sprints and rides and zip into the Emerson locker room with time enough to undress, suit up, and race into the gym to join his teammates for the tip-off.
No such luck is with him on this most important of days. Shifts coming and going pack the streets, and each bus Dale boards seems driven by a driver out to frustrate him, who enjoys waiting for yet another overweight mamma to lift her massive thighs aboard, to sit through a red light as some old hillbilly remembers to yank the cord and deboard no matter the doors having closed and the bus having begun to roll! Don’t pull over again! Please . . . I’ve got a game! If I am ever going to make my way back . . . if Miss Furbish is ever going to take me into her arms again . . . I have to win the city!
# # #
GROWING ANXIOUS, DALE makes himself look at the floor, orders himself—feels almost successful—to think not of the game at all but of re-entering Miss Furbish’s heart as well as her apartment. At last, Emerson is opposite the bus. Sidestepping to race across the street before the big vehicle can move, Dale invades the school like a broken-field runner, bypassing students loitering along the hall. Visiting players are almost always transported by parents and coaches, and the three-thirty p.m. starting time isn’t unreasonable if a person isn’t limited to traversing the city by bus. Racing into the locker room, however, Dale finds it silent and empty, the caged clock above the doors to the gym showing: 3:36.
Pulling off his clothes, jamming them into a locker, he pulls on jock, shorts, socks and drag-walks his unlaced sneakers as he stuffs his number 4 jersey into his shorts. Entering a suddenly noisy, crowded world, he kneels to pull at his laces while loping one-footed to where the Little Ms are huddled at their bench . . . just as a horn blares to signal the start of the game.
His teammates slap hands in the midst of the confusion before the outsized crowd. If not coached, they are not without self-coaching, leadership, decisions by consensus, offering, “Hey, you made it!” and “We tried to slow things down,” to which Lucky adds, “Lloyd’s starting, but you come in at the first time-out. Lloyd, Flying Wheel’s in at the first time-out. This is a real game, you shitheads, so let’s be rough and tough and hard to bluff! Get some more of that wonderful stuff!”
SITTING ON THE bench, Dale sucks in air. The jump takes place and the game is under way. Loosening his shoe laces, he re-pulls and re-ties, scuffs his soles on the floor, shakes his limbs. At once, it seems, a whistle blows and Lloyd is coming off. On his feet, signaling entrance to the game by raising four fingers to the scorer’s table, Dale takes to the glossy surface only to hear someone shout, “Lucky, who’s number four?” There, as at any Scholastic Conference or City League game, players are always one and the same—a detail lost on the first full house before which the Little Ms have played—and the shouted question is left hanging.
Dale receives an in-bounds pass from Emmett and, as he has done so many times, moves the ball down-court, where Lucky, Grady, Chub are weaving, looking to receive passes and initiate drives or shots. Stebbins Pharmacy is organized and it’s a serious game, as Dale knew from the moment he entered the gym. Spectators and noise, thrill and excitement are in place and alive. Adrenalin has kicked in, ra
ising an aggressive edge, and as Dale reads Chub’s weaving direction and fires a baseball throw, it meets the big center’s angle to the hoop on a line that has Chub continuing high, taking it from the air, laying it in off the board, igniting an explosion from the crowd. Backing off on defense, bypassed by the Little Ms front three, Dale hears Lucky return an answer at last to the stands, “Flying Wheel’s who number four is!” From Grady, Chub, Emmett comes: “Great pass!” “Let’s kick butt!” “Good pass, man!”
WITHOUT A WORD they assume their zone defense. Thus their strategy. On other teams in Dale’s experience there would have been a practice and a team meeting the day before a big game, maybe several practices and chalk talks when even Coach Burke would lay out line-ups, defense strategies, offensive moves. Only in Summer League outdoors under the lights was strategy spontaneous, creative, sometimes brilliant, which creative engagement is gripping Dale as Stebbins Pharmacy comes down-court with the ball. Brilliant charges click in and work when coaches aren’t trying to pull every string and sputtering frustration at every small thing not done their way. Playing their best ball to date, the Little Ms are finding themselves unified, as a composition of athletic control and victory is occurring for Dale. His big dream retains a chance. You know what you know.
CHAPTER 2
PLAY-OFFS. ONE GAME ELIMINATION. DALE RECALLS HOW gripping it is to fight for a win in order to advance one game at a time. Hearing from the stands—“Hey number four, let’s see some more!”—he keeps experiencing the old urge to win, to execute, to control the combat that make it what it is: a real game, an intercity battle for a district, a league, a school. It’s the meat of sports coming alive, allowing him to compose and rally within.
The Little M’s establish a lead over Lowell but lose it once before moving ahead by five, six, seven points. Still, it’s a dog fight and when the horn blares and the Stebbins Pharmacy players stand in shock on having been eliminated, the Little Ms carry their excitement into the locker room, the gang shower, into their aisle as they dress. A win. They knew they would win and only when it is over is it apparent that, but for clicking in with creativity, they could have lost.
Outside, where moderate March air awaits them—refreshing on the heels of indoor steam heat—they carry their excitement to Chub’s father’s gas station. Hanging out, they rag each other with newborn myths and taunts of testicles and talent (“Nobody messes with Chub under the basket . . . ” “Nobody has eyes in the back of his head like Flying Wheel . . . ”) while waiting for Lucky to arrive with official word of their next opponent.
As if they don’t know. As if Dale doesn’t know. In the string of days since Miss Furbish has forsaken his hungry heart once and for all, Dale hasn’t felt so charged, and he joins his teammates feeding coins into the candy machine and sipping root beer as if it’s champagne.
“Wheeler, you ain’t bad,” Chub—as always, calling it as he sees it—remarks in the midst of their high jinks. “Tell you the truth . . . didn’t think Lucky shoulda signed you like he did. Man, you can play the game. Not sure we’d be gunnin’ for the city without you, have to admit.” Dale glosses with pleasure as Chub adds, “‘Sides, you’re just a hillbilly redneck like the rest of us . . . have to admit that, too.”
Whereupon Lucky, entering with a card held high, has them quieting down to hear what they know is coming. “Thursday, three-thirty! Some team called the Flintstone Mother Truckers! Dale . . . ever heard of these guys? Game’s at your school in your big gym! Time, I would say, for the Little Ms to kick some Mother Trucking ass!”
There is Grady with his white smile, asking Dale: “Whatta ya think, can we do it?”
“We got a shot,” Dale says. “They’re good, but we got a shot.”
“Cain’t beat ’em in the gym, we’ll do it in the parking lot,” Chub says.
Chub isn’t entirely joking, nor is Grady as he notes, “We could do both, if only because people would talk about it forever.”
# # #
DALE’S HEART IS gripped. As is his urge to fight. Here it is, as he hardly dared dream it might ever be. Anticipation is alive within, filling him with anger, creative energy, muscle. To play at his school, in his gym—twice as big as the gym they had just used—to play against the Bothners, Sonny Joe, the Mother Truckers, and Burkebutt, too. To dress in his locker room with these new teammates from Little Missouri. To go onto a gym floor he swept every morning for three years, and not in home colors but visitors’ orange and black.
To possibly play, alas, within the see-all eyes of Miss Furbish herself. To turn her uncertain heart with his resilience and win it all over again. A feeling enters his throat of wanting a physical fight, wanting to get it on, wanting to go for the jugular. Orange and black, take no flak! Always show up, always fight back! Of all things, to believe in the Little Ms as he has come to believe in himself again.
Three years earlier, in sixth-grade math, Mrs. Kessler rewarded them—for being quiet—by reading chapters from Huckleberry Finn. The reading event of Dale’s primary grades so affected him, so enamored him of his brothers-of-the-heart along the Mississippi that he became a believer in underdog brilliance . . . which belief is stirring in him again in Coburn’s Parts and Service. Love for his teammates as brothers is surfacing while also being kept secret. So is love for Miss Furbish gripping his heart while also being kept secret.
Departing from Chub’s and returning across the street to catch the first of two buses through downtown and home, Dale finds himself too excited and tense, too filled with a desire to fight to wait at a bus stop. Walking on with his gym bag, he’s soon at the next stop, and the next, desire and imagination on fire within as he walks, as he looks around for the big brow of a city bus to come into view.
The beating of Joe Dillard. Dale has never thought before of beating the superstar who is a legend, who has been scouted and offered a schoolboy contract by the Detroit Tigers. Dale seems never before now to have considered that Sonny Joe could be beaten by anyone. But beating him is what he is thinking, an idea, as he walks, that is taking over his mind. Beating Sonny Joe Dillard. Meeting Miss Furbish after the game to be with her as before. (They were together once, weren’t they? She did allow him to be with her, didn’t she?)
Stricken with visions, losses, disbelief, Dale continues walking hard. He walks until he has gone so far it is no longer necessary to board a bus for the first leg of his trip home. He keeps brainstorming . . . sees that there is but one person in the world who can beat Sonny Joe Dillard and that it is the person who knows that he can . . . the person whose heart has heard the call, knows the desire, understands what it is to play for love and life.
Rough and tough and hard to bluff.
Can’t get enough of that wonderful stuff.
Gotta be cool if you wanna rule.
Oh, he knows who the person is, just as his father knew the score when a female teacher telephoned a pupil at home on a Sunday night. It’s the person the Bothners chose to ostracize, the person they sought to cast aside in the blatant theft of his team, the person the Walt Whitman girls excluded from their parties while extending invitations to cheaters working to steal away a classmate’s dream. Nor is it Chub Coburn or Grady Devlin or Lucky Bartell knowing the score. It’s the person striding into the lowering night, streetlight to streetlight, the person going out of his mind with all that he knows.
CHAPTER 3
MONDAY IN SCHOOL A BOY BARELY FAMILIAR TO DALE remarks on turning from a drinking fountain, “Hey, good luck in the big game this week.”
“Thanks,” Dale says, moving to the fountain himself.
He’s pleased, if only for a moment. March Madness has been spreading like poison ivy, and it comes to him that the boy, of course, was assuming he played for the Flintstone Truckers. Did anyone but Zona Kaplan and the Truckers themselves know he was on another City League team in another school district?
“What’s the M stand for?” Dale is asked by Sonny Joe and Hal Doyle further along the
hallway. “Little Mouses of Little Missouri? Rednecks living in double-wides? Hillbillies up north, working on the line at Chevy?”
IMPLICATE AND INDICATE. Miss Furbish is looking like herself, looking as if not much has happened to her, or to one of her homeroom students who plays ball and will be going to high school in the fall. Dressed in another tweed suit, another pastel blouse, short high-heels, glasses on a lanyard, a shank of hair falls aside as she reaches overhead to write with chalk. The ballplayer’s heart sighs with love and need. Considering implicate and indicate, what Dale knows is that he wants to have his teacher within his heart again like a phrase from a love song that keeps coming close while refusing to admit its shape in his mind.
# # #
ON TUESDAY IN the hallway Dale notices, coming from Hal Doyle, the faintest grin of derision. Total confidence, Dale thinks. Total arrogance. Hal Doyle’s grin lets him know how certain the Mother Truckers are of themselves, says as well that it’s Dale they have in their sights. The thirst for blood, Dale thinks, a thirst he knows, too. To have an adversary. To have a desire, as Dale is experiencing. To see an adversary buckle in a shock of loss . . . as the dirty cheaters made him buckle on the loss of the first big dream of his life.
No surprise, Dale thinks. They need to defeat him now to justify their crime. For he is the one who calls up their disloyalty, their selling out, their banning of a teammate in exchange for fancy uniforms, fried chicken and home movies of the Nationals at Akron. He is the one on whom they will focus, not the Little Ms . . . which is but another team on their way to playing for the city. Maybe they don’t know their own focus, for when you’re privileged you know less of such things. Mr. Bothner and Burkebutt have to know, though, and will be out to destroy any evidence that can bring to mind their stealing and cheating. Thus the message in Hal Doyle’s smug grin: Destroy Dale Wheeler’s ass.
Winning the City Redux Page 18