Edenville Owls (11 page)

WE
played a bunch of preppies from the Phillips Country Day School. They were pretty slick. At the end of the first half they were beating us by ten points. They had a center as tall as Russell, and Russell wasn’t so good against people his size. Both their guards were better than I was. But they were all sucking air when the first half ended.

“Okay,” I said before the second half. “They’re probably better than us. But they’re in lousy shape. And we’re not.”

“So we run them,” Nick said.

“Every time we get the ball,” I said. “Run like hell. We throw the ball away some, we can live with that.”

“Defense?” Manny asked.

“Press,” I said. “All over the court. We’re in shape. They’re not. We give up a couple layups, we can live with that.”

“Besides,” Billy added, “it’s the only chance we got.”

“My man can’t keep up with me now,” Russell said. “By the time the game’s over, he’ll be puking on the floor.”

They won the tip to start the second half, and we surprised them with our press. So much so that one of their guards lost the ball out of bounds. We brought it in from the side and surprised them again. The whole first half we’d brought the ball up at a normal pace, looking to set up our weave, trying to set up some screens, trying to get Russell free of his man on a roll to the basket. This time Manny threw the ball in to me and I went full tilt up the court, running as hard as I could, in only about half control of my dribble. But it worked. I blew by everyone and laid the ball in. Then they took it in from the end line, and we stayed right up there with them. Face-to-face. Fighting them on every pass. Bothering them on every dribble. When we got the ball, all of us ran for their basket like a Chinese fire drill.

Occasionally we did lose the ball. I lost my dribble a couple of times. Nick threw it away once, trying to hit Russell. Manny got a rebound and threw it the length of the court to Billy but overthrew it. On defense sometimes, one of their guys would break past one of us and go in to score.

But as the half moved on, we also began to get layups, and they began to lose the ball more and more. Hurried passes. Double dribbles. Bad shots. Russell was getting to the basket ahead of his man and getting layups. Phillips took all their time-outs, and when they came back, we were right up against them again. We’d played with only five guys the whole season. All of us were tired. But none of us were exhausted. The Phillips guys looked like all they wanted to do was go sit down.

With two minutes left in the game, we were tied and they ran out of gas. We scored the last eight points while they sort of walked up the floor after us. When the buzzer sounded, they all did go right to the bench and sat on it, heads hanging, gasping for breath, too tired even to shake hands or tell us we were just lucky.

We weren’t lucky. We were in shape.

I
was with Joanie in the bowling alley, sitting in the back row of benches, having a Coke, watching them bowl.

“I went to see Miss Delaney,” she said.

“You did?”

“After school,” Joanie said. “The day after we found out about that guy Richard Krauss.”

“You didn’t say anything did you?”

“Nothing bad,” she said. “I told her I was starting to think about college.”

“College?” I said. “We’re in the eighth grade.”

Joanie ignored me.

“And she said that was wise, it was never too early.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So I told her I was wondering where she went,” Joanie said.

“Miss Delaney?”

“Yes, and she told me Colby College.”

“Where’s that?” I said.

“In Maine someplace,” Joanie said.

“Who wants to go to college in Maine?” I said.

“And I said did she have a yearbook or something I could look at, and she gave me hers. She brought it in the next day.”

“Her college yearbook?” I said.

Joanie reached into her book bag and pulled the yearbook out. It was white. On the cover in blue letters it said “ORACLE,” and down lower the year, 1942. We sat together on the leatherette bench in the bowling alley and read it. The student photographs were alphabetical, and there she was, Claudia Delaney. There was a list of things she’d been in, and some phrases that were probably funny if you knew, but didn’t mean anything to us.

“She looks the same,” I said.

“Yes,” Joanie said. “Except her hair’s different.”

“She would have been what, twenty-one, I guess.”

“Now look at this,” Joanie said, and turned to the
K
listings. There, between Kantor and Kroll, was Richard Krauss.

“It’s Tupper,” I said.

“Yes.”

“He’s from Lynn.”

“Yes.”

“Where’s Miss Delaney from?” I asked.

Joanie flipped back to Miss Delaney’s page and said without looking, “Marblehead.”

“They must have met in college,” I said.

Joanie flipped back to Krauss.

“He played football,” she said.

I nodded.

“If they graduated in June 1942,” Joanie said, “the war started during their senior year.”

“He probably went in the army after he graduated,” I said.

“And they probably got married before he went,” Joanie said.

“So the kid could be like three years old,” I said.

The alley bowled duck pins. Sometimes when I was broke I used to set pins in the alley. Sit on a little shelf behind the pins. Jump down, step on the pedal to raise the spikes. Set the pins on the spikes. Take your foot off the pedal, and jump back up on the shelf. Sometimes some jerk would bowl while you were still setting the pins, but if you kept your foot on the pedal, the ball just ran into the pins and stopped. Sometimes the pins would get bent and they’d have to close the alley, but that wasn’t my fault, and it was better than getting a bowling ball in the face.

There were mostly men in the bowling alley. Some grown-up women. Some guys our age. Not many girls. But Joanie didn’t seem to mind. She always seemed comfortable wherever she was.

“So why did he take somebody else’s name?” Joanie asked.

“Maybe he did something wrong,” I offered. “Maybe he knew the guy who died and he had done something bad, so he pretended to be him instead of who he was.”

“How would you do that?” Joanie said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was probably pretty confusing during the war.”

“What do you think he did?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It would have to be pretty bad.”

“How are we going to know?”

“We’ll figure it out,” I said.

EVERY
Friday night during the school year, we went to dancing class in the Grange Hall. It was a big old building with some sort of churchlike tower on it. I wasn’t really sure what a grange was, but I knew it had something to do with farmers.

The class was taught by a single lady named Miss Miller who played music on a piano in the corner, and would count for us as we glomped around the floor.

None of us exactly liked dancing class. But they insisted we go, and it was a chance to hang with your friends and dance close with girls. Miss Miller insisted we dress up for class, so the girls mostly wore big skirts and white socks and loafers. On top they usually had sweaters, sometimes with a little dickey under the sweater, and sometimes they’d wear a blouse, usually white, instead of a sweater. When you danced with them, you could feel the sharp push of their bra against your chest. The bras were very hard.

I usually had on gabardine slacks and a brown plaid jacket, and either a maroon or a green rayon shirt, with the collar open and spread out over the neck and lapels of the jacket. Most of the guys wore the same kind of stuff. Some kids wore sweaters instead of suit coats.

We were also supposed to learn manners from Miss Miller. She was always saying “Young gentlemen” this, and “Young ladies” that, and acted as if we would want to be young gentlemen and ladies. Most of the guys, I knew, were not much interested in being young gentlemen. Most of us were interested in sex. We didn’t think that girls were; we thought they were interested in being young ladies. But we might have been wrong.

The problem with being so interested in sex was that we didn’t really know how to express the interest, or what to do about it. Most of us knew the facts of life in a technical sense. We just lacked what you might call hands-on experience. So we made jokes, and talked sort of dirty, and danced as close as we could. And then retreated to our side of the room and huddled among our gender mates.

The Grange Hall had a bad heating system, so it was always too hot or too cold in there. And the real issues of sex and uncertainty that made the air in the Grange Hall thick with intensity was far beneath Miss Miller’s plane of vision. She played her piano and counted for us and talked about “young gentlemen” and “young ladies.” If Miss Miller had ever thought about sex, she seemed to have stopped a long time ago.

Dancing with Joanie was, of course, the most pressure. Neither of us could dance, and as we bumped around the barnlike room, we giggled a lot. But I also smelled her shampoo, and felt the hard pointy bra against my chest, and felt her thighs move. I almost closed my eyes in the effort not to think impure things about her. I didn’t want to have to tell Father Al I’d had impure thoughts about Joanie Gibson…I didn’t want to have them, she was too important to think about like that…I forced any bad feelings back down into the bottom of my soul…Sometimes I said several silent Hail Marys to distract me. They worked. Or it worked. Or something worked. I didn’t have impure thoughts about Joanie, but the effort of not having them was so powerful that sometimes it was difficult for me to talk.

IT
was about half past three in the afternoon. School was over for the day. Joanie and I were squeezed into the phone booth outside Romeo’s Package Store next to the Village Shop.

“All my uncle John could think of,” Joanie said, “was the Veteran’s Administration.”

The copy of the Medal of Honor list that Old Lady Coughlin got for Joanie said that Oswald Tupper was in the 1st Infantry Division, 26th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Battalion, Company L. Joanie had it written on a piece of paper along with the number for the VA. She dialed the number.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m trying to locate my brother.”

She held the phone away from her ear a little and I pressed my head against hers to listen.

“He is a veteran of what service?” the VA woman said.

“Excuse me?”

“Army? Navy? What service?” the VA woman said.

There was the kind of impatience in her voice that kids always hear from grown-ups.

“Army,” Joanie said.

“And he’s missing?”

“Yes, ma’am. He went to war and now it’s over and we haven’t heard from him and my mom’s awful sick…” Joanie said.

“I’ll transfer you,” the VA lady said.

We waited. Another lady picked up. Joanie told her story again. We got transferred again. Finally we got a guy. He sounded like a young guy.

“…and I don’t know how much time my mom has left,” Joanie said.

She sounded ready to cry.

“I understand,” the young man said. “What is your name?”

“Janie Krauss.”

“And your brother’s name?”

“Richard. Richard Krauss.”

“Do you have any kind of address for him?” the young man asked.

“I don’t know. I have an address, but I’m not sure it’s his,” Joanie said.

“Let’s try it,” the young man said.

Joanie gave him Oswald Tupper’s military address.

“The Big Red One,” the young man said. “That would be European Theater.”

“Can you look and see?” Joanie said.

“Hang on,” the young man said.

It was cold outside, with a lot of wind. But in the small telephone booth, with the door closed, the two of us were perfectly warm. We stayed with our heads together, listening. We didn’t want to talk in case the young man came back on the line. So we were silent. It took forever. But finally he was back.

“Janie?” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“That was the correct address for your brother,” he said.

“Do you know where he is?” Joanie said.

The young man paused.

“No,” he said after a moment. “I don’t.”

“Can you tell me anything?” Joanie said.

Again the young man paused.

“Please,” Joanie said. Her voice was desperate. “Please. I don’t have a father. My mom’s dying. I don’t know where my brother is. Please tell me something. Anything. Please.”

“I was with the Forty-fifth Division,” the young man said. “At Anzio.”

Joanie and I waited.

“I’ll lose my job if you tell anyone I told you,” he said.

“I’ll never tell,” Joanie said. “I promise.”

“And,” the young man said, “there’s other jobs, anyway.”

“I won’t tell,” Joanie said.

“I’m sorry,” the young man said, “but your brother is listed as a deserter.”

“A deserter? Like, you mean AWOL?” Joanie said.

“Sort of like that,” the young man said.

“Oh my God,” Joanie said.

“If you find him,” the young man said, “he needs a lawyer.”

“Yes, sir,” Joanie said.