“I have your word?”
I nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “I trust you to keep your word.”
I nodded again. Nodding didn’t count. If you didn’t actually say the promise, I always figured you didn’t have to keep it. Miss Delaney put her hand on my shoulder for a moment as she looked at me. Then she stood and smoothed her skirt, and walked back toward her desk.
“That’s all, Bobby,” she said. “Thank you.”
I stood and walked out of the classroom. I felt a little funny, like my head was disconnected. The corridor was empty. At the end of the school day people didn’t hang around. It was worse than she said. I could still hear the sound of broken glass in that man’s voice. There was something going on here that I didn’t get. But I would. I was smart.
I could too figure it out.
CHAPTER 9
“I thought you’d be here,” Joanie said.
“What made you think so?” I asked.
Joanie stepped up onto the bandstand and sat on the bench beside me.
“Because the weather is terrible and everybody else is inside,” she said.
“I like bad weather,” I said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s kind of exciting, I guess.”
“Do you come here to think?” Joanie said.
“Sometimes.”
“What are you thinking about now?” she asked.
“You,” I said.
“I mean before I came,” Joanie said. “Were you thinking about a problem?”
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“Can’t tell you now,” I said.
“Oh.”
We were quiet.
“It’s not you,” I said to Joanie. “I gave my word I wouldn’t tell.”
“You’re making me die to know what it is,” she said.
“I can’t,” I said. “I gave my word.”
She nodded.
“Stuff like that matters to you,” she said. “Keeping your word and stuff.”
“Yes.”
There was no wind this time. Just a hard rain coming straight down on the calm water of the harbor.
“It’s hard being a kid,” Joanie said. “Grown-ups tell you how easy it is. But it’s not.”
“Kids problems don’t seem serious to grown-ups,” I said.
“But they are serious to kids,” Joanie said. “Getting grades. Being popular. Having friends.”
“Making a team,” I said. “Being brave.”
“Being brave?” Joanie asked.
“Yeah. Boys are supposed to be brave.”
“You think about that?”
“Sure,” I said. “I want to be brave and, uh, you know…” I rolled my hands, trying to find the right word. “Like a knight…honorable.”
“Honorable?” Joanie said.
I nodded. The rain sound was steady on the roof of the bandstand. It made a sort of hushed sound around us as it fell. And the wet smell mixed with the salt smell and everything seemed very exciting.
“You know,” I said, “like Philip Marlowe.”
“Who?”
“Guy in a book,” I said.
Joanie nodded.
“You read a lot of books, Bobby.”
“I like to read,” I said.
“What about your problem that you promised not to tell?”
“I promised not to,” I said.
“Is one of your friends mad at you?”
“No.”
“I hate when one of my friends gets mad at me,” Joanie said.
“I know,” I said. “I always say it doesn’t matter. But it does.”
“It makes me feel scared,” Joanie said.
I nodded.
“Are you ever scared, Bobby?” she said.
I wanted to say no in the worst way, but I opened my mouth and heard myself say, “Yes.”
“What of?”
“People being mad at me, I guess. Not being, you know, nobody liking me.”
I couldn’t believe it. I never even talked to myself about stuff like this.
“Let’s make a promise,” Joanie said.
“What?”
“Let’s promise we’ll never be mad at each other.”
“No matter what?” I said.
“No matter what,” Joanie said. “We will always be each other’s friend.”
“I never had a friend, except you, who was a girl,” I said.
“And I never had a friend, except you, who was a boy,” Joanie said. “Promise?”
Sitting in the bandstand with the weather all around us, I looked at her for a long time.
Then I said, “Promise.”
CHAPTER 10
BILLY sat beside me in the back row in homeroom.
“Was it him?” Billy whispered to me.
“Yeah.”
“He recognize you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I said I liked his car.”
“What are you going to do now?” Billy whispered.
“Billy,” Miss Delaney said. “Will you swap seats with Manny, please, for the rest of class?”
Miss Delaney knew that Manny rarely said anything, and putting him between me and Billy would quiet us all down. But she didn’t break the Owls up, just shuffled us around a little.
“Thank you,” Miss Delaney said when the swap was completed.
When school was out, we went to the basketball court in the yard.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do that weave again to warm up.”
“Okay, Coach,” Russell said.
“You been over to the high school again this week?” Nick asked.
“I got some new stuff,” I said. “After we warm up.”
“They warm up at the high school?” Manny said.
I was always a little startled when he spoke, he was so silent so much of the time.
“Course,” I said.
Manny smiled and loped into the corner with the basketball and started the weave.
“Inside,” I said to Russell. “Inside the guy you’re handing off to.”
“Screw you,” Russell said. “I started this team. I’ll go where I want.”
“You want to go to the tourney or not?” I said.
“We got to get better, Russell,” Nick said. “We stunk up the gym when we played the JVs that time.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Russell said.
And the weave continued.
“Now,” I said when we were done weaving, “we’re going to work on screens.”
“We don’t need screens,” Russell said. “Until spring.”
“Very funny,” I said. “Manny, say you got the ball over there. Now you pass it to me and run over here and stop. You got to be set to screen for me. A moving screen is a foul. Okay, come on…pass me the ball…and run over…stop…. Now I got the ball, I can either dribble past the screen and lose the guy guarding me…or if I can’t lose him, or they switch, I can pull up behind Manny and hit the set shot.”
I put up a one-hand shot, which hit the front of the rim and bounced away.
“Work even better,” Russell said, “if you hit the shot.”
“You’ll get your chance,” I told him.
We practiced screens for the rest of the afternoon. I noticed that a lot of the plays the JVs ran had people moving without the ball and getting the ball passed to them when they were behind the screen. And I’d heard Coach talk about a double screen, but I didn’t quite see what that was. Today we’d just keep it simple. Pass the ball and set the screen.
After practice when I was walking home with Manny, I saw the car again, parked on Church Street this time, in front of the school. I kept my head down and didn’t look at it as we went by.
CHAPTER 11
JOANIE invited Nick to go to a party with her at the Boat Club. I was glad I didn’t have to go. I couldn’t dance.
We’d all gon
e to dancing class except Manny, and we all liked pressing against the girls. What we weren’t interested in was all the crap about who led who, and how you asked a young lady to dance and la di da. But if Joanie had asked me to the party and I’d had to dance, I would have been embarrassed.
Joanie had asked me what I thought about her inviting Nick. I had said he was a good guy. She said she thought he was really cute. I kind of didn’t like that. But she wasn’t my girlfriend. We were pals.
“You think he’ll go?” Joanie had asked me.
“Sure,” I said.
Nick was the first one of us to have a regular date, and the first one of us to ever be invited to the Boat Club. The rest of us sort of followed Nick and Joanie at a distance, and hung around outside. I don’t know quite why. Wanted to see what was up, I guess.
The thing was, I felt funny about it. I felt funny about her asking Nick and funny about feeling funny about it. I didn’t exactly wish she hadn’t asked him. And I didn’t exactly wish she had asked me. I guess I wished she hadn’t asked anyone and had, instead, come down and sat on the deserted bandstand with me.
“You think they might do something?” Russell said to the group of us.
“Joanie and Nick?” Billy said.
“Yeah. You think he might get a good-night kiss?”
“She seems pretty hot,” Billy said.
“Maybe more than a good-night kiss,” Russell said.
I didn’t like the conversation. But I couldn’t think of any way to complain about it. We talked all the time about what you could get a girl to do. As far as I knew, none of us had actually gotten a girl to do much of anything. But it didn’t slow the conversation any. If we couldn’t speak of what we had done, we could talk a lot about what we would do. Or would like to do.
That’s all Russell and Billy were doing. So why did it bother me? We hung around across the street from the Boat Club. We could hear music and see lights. But we couldn’t really keep track of what was going on. Beyond the Boat Club was a private beach where the waves washed softly up.
There was a roadhouse up on Route 6 where things we couldn’t imagine were supposed to go on, and now and then we would sneak up there and try to peek in the windows. But the windows were all tightly covered and we could never see anything. And we were always almost breathless with what we imagined could be going on beyond our ability to see.
I felt sort of like that now. And the more I couldn’t see, the more my stomach tightened up, and the more I felt feverish, and the harder it was to swallow.
“You’re the brains,” Russell said to me. “You think she’s hot?”
“Not for me,” I said.
“Who is?” Billy said. “Except maybe Miss Delaney.”
I walked away toward the beach.
“Miss Delaney’s hot for us all,” Russell said.
I kept walking.
“Hey,” Russell called. “Where you going?”
I didn’t answer.
“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Russell said.
“Let him be,” Manny said. “He wants to look at the water, let him look at the water.”
“Don’t you wanna see what’s going to happen?” Russell said.
“Maybe he’ll kiss her good night,” Billy said. “You don’t want to see that?”
I kept walking.
Behind me I heard Billy say, “What the hell’s wrong with him?”
“He’s pretty weird sometimes,” Russell said.
There was enough moon, so I could see okay. At the edge of the sand where the waves broke, there was a little white foam drifting. I watched it as it slid back out with the receding wave, and re-formed when the wave came gently up the sand again.
CHAPTER 12
WE had our first game against a JV team from Hartfield in the gym at Hartfield High School. There weren’t many people watching. But it was a real game, with a referee. There was no one on their team as tall as Russell. He got the tip. We went right away into our weave and the Hartfield guys looked a little confused. We kept at it until Russell’s man began to anticipate the weave and then Russell faked coming toward the man with the ball (who was me), and broke suddenly behind his man toward the basket. I got him the ball and Russell hit the layup. It was pretty clear that if we could get Russell the ball near the basket, he could shoot a layup over anyone that they had guarding him.
In the second half we had a big lead and we started experimenting with Nick driving for the basket off the weave, and Billy shooting set shots behind a screen. Manny wasn’t as tall as Russell, but he worked harder and got a lot of rebounds. He always looked to pass out, but at halftime I had told him to start putting some of them up. And in the second half he did.
We won by a lot, and hitchhiking home afterward, we were really up, throwing the ball around, telling each other how good we were.
“What kind of trophy they give when you win the tourney?” Russell said.
“They’re going to give you the ball hog trophy,” Nick said. “You shoot every time you get the ball.”
“You mean I score every time,” Russell said.
“I didn’t see the ball so long,” Billy said, “I almost forgot how to play.”
“I could see that,” Manny said.
“Hey,” Billy said. “How many points you get?”
A pickup truck stopped and the driver said we could ride in the back if we wanted. We jumped in.
As we rattled around in the back of the truck, I said, “You know why we won?”
“Because we’re the class of the freakin’ league,” Russell said.
“Because they didn’t play any defense at all,” I said. “They didn’t know how to defend the weave. So they just gave up on it. They didn’t fight for rebounds. They didn’t have anybody to guard Russell. And all any of them wanted to do was heave the ball at the basket.”
“So you’re saying we won because they were crappy,” Nick said.
“I’m saying that we won because we were better than they were,” I said. “But it doesn’t mean we’re good yet.”
“We could use a couple more guys,” Manny said. “I was sucking air by the end.”
“Not me,” Russell said.
“That’s because all you did was shoot layups,” Billy told him. “Manny was working his ass off getting rebounds.”
“Don’t want to tire out your big scorer,” Russell said.
The truck let us off on Route 6 at the corner of Main Street.
“You know anybody else who can play?” I asked. “That we can stand to play with?”
“Some of the older guys can play,” Billy said.
“They don’t want to play with us,” I said.
“And anybody else,” Nick said, “we can’t stand.”
“So it’s just us, I guess. We gotta be sure and get in good condition.”
“Hell, we practice every day,” Russell said.
“Maybe we’ll need to do some sprints too,” I said. “You know, up and down the court?”
“Sprints?” Russell asked.
“Need to be strong at the end of the game,” I said.
“What if somebody gets hurt?” Billy said. “And we don’t have any other guys?”
“We’re screwed,” I said.
I read the newspaper every day. I didn’t pay too much attention to the news. In the summer I went straight to the sports page and read the box scores…. Tommy Holmes had a great year for the Braves in 1945. Hit .352 and led the league in home runs with twenty-eight. The Braves finished in fourth place that year. The Red Sox with everyone still in the service finished seventh in the American League and an outfielder named Johnny Lazor was their leading hitter at .310. But the next year, with Williams and the others back, they won the pennant and Ted hit .342…We had a pro football team those years. The Boston Yanks had Boley Dancewicz and Paul Governelli at quarterback. Babe Dimancheff was the main runner. Rocco Canale played guard and there was a kick returner named Sonny Karnofsky. The te
am was owned by Ted Collins, who everybody knew was Kate Smith’s manager. The Boston Yanks played in Fenway Park sometimes, and were never very good…I felt that studying the sports page was more or less a responsibility; the funnies were pure entertainment. There was Alley Oop and his girlfriend Oola, with their pet dinosaur Dinny…There was L’il Abner, and Blondie, and Ella Cinders and Terry & The Pirates, and Red Ryder…Comic books were a longer form, more complex. I especially liked Batman and Robin, and Captain America and Bucky, and of course the print ads for Chesterfield cigarettes and Seagram’s whiskey and the delicious meals you could make with canned ham and peaches…Another step up the intellectual ladder was LIFE Magazine, which came out once a week. It had wonderful pictures of everything that Americans cared about, and some great text and photo features on things like “Married Vets Return to College,” and “LIFE Goes to a Sorority Party.” There were always a few pictures of nice-looking girls changing clothes…There were whole series of writing and pictures on things like the renaissance…And “Life Goes to the Movies,” which was a sort of capsule presentation of current movies with still photos from the movies, a magazine version of the Lux Hollywood Theater. LIFE always made me proud to be American.
CHAPTER 13
IT was a bright Saturday afternoon and no one was around. I walked down to the harbor and looked at the bandstand. It was empty. I went on down the hill past it and out to the end of the longest wharf, and sat on the stone surface and looked at the water.
Nick and I were a little ill at ease these days. Neither one of us said anything, but I figured it must have something to do with Joanie. I know it did for me. And I knew Russell was kind of PO’d because he thought the Owls were his team, and he didn’t like me doing all the coaching. I didn’t like it either, but there wasn’t anyone else to do it, and we had to do something if we were going to get anywhere in the state tournament. Part of me doubted that we would. It was the part that was sort of separate from the rest of me, that knew the stuff that I didn’t want to know.
That part knew why I had come down here past the bandstand.
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