Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! (15 page)

“Aunt Helen’s going to get an award,” Natalia said.

“I heard all about it,” Tucker said. “The Heights Samaritan Award. My family’s been invited to the banquet.”

“I’m glad,” Natalia said. “She’s been upset ever since Marcus slipped.”

“He didn’t slip, he recidivated,” Tucker said.

“She put in a lot of work on Marcus.”

“She always puts in a lot of work on other people,” Tucker said. “Meanwhile, how’s Susan?”

“I’ve never seen her so interested in anything as her aquarium,” Natalia said. “I just wish she wouldn’t keep her microworms in the refrigerator.”

When a new store called Aquarium Plus opened on the corner of Clinton and Joralemon, Dinky began spending all her time in there. First she bought a one-gallon aquarium and filled it with guppies; then she bought a five-gallon aquarium and filled it with swordtails, platys, and dwarf cichlids.

For her birthday in March, her father bought her a twenty-gallon aquarium. She filled it with everything from zebra danios to angelfish.

Her bedroom looked like a dark nightclub for fish.

Dinky spent most of her time in there watching them, listening to her vast collection of records, and devouring Sara Lee cakes.

Tucker had peered in at her one Friday night, when he had gone to the Hockers’ to pick up Natalia. They were going down to the Heights Cinema I to see a new movie and Tucker had asked Dinky to join them.

“I can’t,” she told him. “My cichlids are spawning.”

She was sitting in the dark on a large leather hassock before a tank with green lights, the tank was swimming with fish and corkscrew tape grass.

“Let them spawn,” Tucker said. “You’ll only be gone a few hours, for Pete’s sake.”

“You don’t know anything about cichlid spawning behavior,” Dinky said. “They’re fin nippers.”

“You can’t do anything about that,” Tucker said.

“I can
watch
it,” Dinky said. “You should see all the torn fins. Torn fins all over the place.”

On the way to the movie, Tucker told Natalia he thought Dinky was developing a cruel streak.

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” Natalia said. “The other afternoon this rummy-nose ate a hatchetfish, and Susan cried like a baby.”

“There’s still something freaky about the whole thing,” Tucker said.

There were a lot of freaky things about that spring.

One was all the dope addicts pouring into DRI. Many of them were veterans the Army wasn’t helping. Sometimes DRI couldn’t even help them. The freaky thing about it was that they’d reenlist, because it was easier to get dope in the Army than out.

Even freakier was the fact they’d all sit around complaining how dope had wrecked them, and then they’d go back to it. They were the saddest losers Tucker had ever encountered.

It made Tucker think a lot about losing.

He spent so much time around Mrs. Hocker that he also began to think about this business of being a credit to the community.

To Tucker’s mind, things had somehow gotten reversed. The community ought to be a credit to the person, and not the other way around.

It was the community that soldiers represented. If the community was all that right about war, the soldiers might feel less like losers.

Most of the members of DRI were blacks and Puerto Ricans, all from poor families. They were all losing in the community.

The community was a little like Mrs. Hocker: She meant well and everything, but she always seemed to be there
after
the damage was done. The best way to get Mrs. Hocker’s attention was to get into some kind of trouble.

Tucker did a lot of thinking on a lot of subjects that spring.

There was this freaky thing about his relationship with Natalia, for instance.

His mother kept asking him if he and Natalia were going steady.

One conversation went like this:

“Have you asked her to go steady?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s very sensible. You’re both too young to go steady.”

“I’m not trying to be sensible, Mom.”

“Then you don’t want to go steady, is that it?”

“I don’t see why we have to have an understanding about it.”

“She might want to see other boys.”

“I doubt it. She might.”

“Would you mind that?”

“Maybe.”

“You’re all confused, aren’t you?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not confused at all.”

He kept thinking, while he was talking with his mother, about this Beatle classic, “Something.”

The words went, “‘You ask me if my love will grow. I don’t know. I don’t know.’”

That said it for him. It was the only possible answer, unless you could foretell the future.

But his mother said, “You shouldn’t monopolize her time if you’re not serious about her.”

“I am serious about her.”

“Have you told her that?”

“I guess she knows.”

“I hope you’re not too serious about her.”

Sometimes he was so serious about her that he couldn’t imagine his life without Natalia in it; other times he figured that someday in the far future, Natalia and he wouldn’t even remember each other’s names.

The physical part of their relationship was confusing, too.

Sometimes Tucker would daydream about her during his classes at Richter and miss an entire lecture. His body would actually feel her presence and remember the way she could affect him when they kissed or danced together, or stood on the Hockers’ stoop saying good night. Other times he would be thinking of other things when they were together, even when their lips were pressed together; he would find himself thinking:
I ought to write P. John when I get home,
or
What am I going to write for that essay assignment, for Pete’s sake?

He didn’t know if Natalia was going through the same thing or not.

What happened to Jingle that spring was also freaky.

Jingle got married again. His wife was this wiry little gray-haired Certified Public Accountant. She came to the town house one night in early April to help Tucker’s father with his taxes. She brought along her own little adding machine, and she was able to sit there adding up long columns of numbers on it, at the same time carrying on a conversation and cracking jokes. Jingle kept making martinis for them, and talking about a vacation trip to Spain which they were going to take right after April 15th.

She called Jingle “Dollyface,” and every time she laughed hard, she slapped her knee with her palm.

“Dollyface,” she said, “tell them about the time that firm in Buffalo asked me to try and figure out why the workers were stealing sawdust.”

“They were carrying sawdust out of the place every night by the wheelbarrowful,” Jingle said. “Wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of sawdust. The manager asked Evonne to figure out if they were selling the sawdust, or what the hell they were doing with it.”

“That’s right,” Evonne said. “And you know what I found out? They were just dumping the sawdust. What they were stealing was wheelbarrows.”

A freaky spring, all right.

Then suddenly it was May.

The first Friday in May, Tucker came home late from DRI one afternoon and found his father in the living room, talking with a stranger. He was a very tall, thin young man with rust-colored hair in a long, shaggy cut, and a pair of large steel-framed eyeglasses with blue-tinted lenses. He was in a faded blue workman’s shirt, worn corduroy pants, and boots that laced. He was having a beer with Tucker’s father.

“How’ve you been?” he said to Tucker.

Tucker put down his book bag, paused a moment, waiting for his father to introduce him, and then recognized him.

“P. John!”

P. John stayed for dinner, and right after dinner, he called the Hockers. He asked to speak with Mrs. Hocker.

“I’d like to say hello to Susan,” he said, “and I’d like to apologize for the way I behaved and thought last winter.”

He was changed, all right, but in many ways he was the same old smooth, wiser-than-all-the-world P. John Knight.

Mrs. Hocker invited him over, and Tucker went along because he had a date that night with Natalia anyway.

Mrs. Hocker answered the door with her finger to her lips. “This is going to be a nice surprise for Dinky,” she whispered. “Oh my my my my
my
—you have changed.”

The thing was, Dinky had changed, too.

There are two ways of changing. One is to become more of what you once were, and one is to become less of what you once were.

P. John was less. He was less dictatorial and less unforgiving and unprejudiced, and his girth was less than it had ever been.

With Dinky, it was the other way around.

“There’s a surprise out here for you, Dinky,” Mrs. Hocker called out in her finest soprano.

“I’m
incapable
of being surprised,” Dinky answered, while P. John grinned, as though to say,
That’s herself, all right,
“and I’m
trying
to get this tank back to a pH of 7!”

Natalia came down the hall and gave P. John a puzzled look, while Mrs. Hocker pressed her finger to her lips again. “It’s P. John Knight,” she whispered to Natalia. “Don’t say anything.”

Then Mrs. Hocker said, “Dinky, come out here this minute.”

It took Dinky quite a bit longer than a minute. It would take anyone Dinky’s size quite a bit longer than a minute to walk across her bedroom, down the hall, and into the foyer.

Since Tucker had only seen her in the half-light of the fish tanks every time he was at the Hockers’, her size was a shock to him, too.

She was wearing a red kimono and a pair of old felt slippers which had once belonged to her father. Her face was bloated up like one of the blowfish Tucker had seen in her tank.

She blinked in the light, like a mole who lived in darkness. She said flatly, “Well, what’s the big surprise,” and then she turned the corner and saw P. John.

“Hello, Susan,” P. John said.

She blinked some more, but she didn’t twitch a muscle or let out a gasp or widen her eyes an inch.

“Hello, P. John,” she said.

“How are you?”

“How do I look?”

“F-f-fine,” he said. “Very good.”

“I’m busy,” she said, in that same flat tone.

Mrs. Hocker said, “
Dinky
!”

“I’ve got a pH below 7 in my tank,” she said to P. John. “That’s too acid, so you’ll have to excuse me.”

“I’d like to see your tank,” he said.

She said, “In a pig’s eye!” Then she turned around and started back down the hall.

“
Dinky
!” Mrs. Hocker said. “You come back here and apologize.”

“It’s not necessary,” P. John said. “Please don’t ask her to do that.”

“I’m
very
ashamed of her,” Mrs. Hocker said.

“Let her go,” P. John said. “I don’t think she needed a surprise like this.”

The Heights Samaritan Banquet was held that Saturday night. P. John was invited, but he had to be back at Leeds to settle another labor dispute there. He didn’t have much to say about Dinky after they left the Hockers’ the night before the banquet; he didn’t have much to say about anything, which surprised Tucker, because during dinner he had done practically all the talking.

The only comment he did make was an obscure one, about Dinky’s new hobby. He said, “Fish die belly-upward, too.”

The whole community showed up for the banquet; at least, it was Mrs. Hocker’s version of “the community.” Everyone to whom the name Helen Hocker was synonymous with Good Shepherd, Sydney Carton, or Mrs. Greatheart. Ministers, ladies’ club presidents, local politicians, social counselors, psychologists, everyone from DRI, and all previous recipients of the Good Samaritan Award.

There were elaborate displays dealing with the problem of addiction: graphic illustrations of the jargon; actual needles, pills, and samples of heroin and cocaine encased in plastic; testimonies of former junkies, and charts depicting the relationship between addiction and the rise in crime.

Tucker sat with his mother and father, and held two seats for Natalia and Dinky.

Just before the program began, Natalia arrived alone.

“Susan’s stuck back at the house,” she whispered to Tucker as the Master of Ceremonies rapped for silence. “Something’s wrong with the piston pump in the aquarium. She’s going to come as soon as she can get it fixed.”

There were many long speeches before the final one, which was the presentation of the award and the Samaritan statue.

It was one of those times Tucker was very turned on to Natalia, and she to him. They sat in the darkness of the crowded auditorium holding hands tightly.

The final speech was mainly about all the good work Mrs. Hocker had done rehabilitating dope addicts. During it, Mrs. Hocker had to wipe tears from her eyes a few times.

Then she made her speech, which was mercifully short:

“What pleases me most is that you’re pleased with me. So long as I can serve my community well, I can hold my head high and give thanks to God that I found a way to be useful and responsible. Thank you.”

Then, slowly, the community began filing out of the banquet hall into the streets.

No matter what street you turned down, you saw it.

No matter how badly-lighted the street, it was large and visible and everywhere, in bright Day-Glo paint.

It was written on sidewalks, on curbstones, on walls, on the sides of buildings, and on the doors of automobiles.

It was every size and color.

DINKY HOCKER SHOOTS SMACK!

DINKY HOCKER SHOOTS SMACK!

DINKY HOCKER SHOOTS SMACK!