“What.”
“I’m gonna do it all over again!”
“You’re going to break this goddam bench if you don’t quit flopping on it. You ever been there before, Guppy?”
“Shit yes. Lotsa times.” Guppy grinned his secret thoughts to the ceiling. “Ain’t you?”
“No.”
Guppy sat up again. “You ain’t?”
“I said no,” Jolly said.
Guppy watched Jolly’s face closely. “You ain’t?” he repeated quietly. “I bet you never even had a piece.”
Jolly walked to the far end of the room before he answered. “Sure I have, dope. All the time.” He dropped the cigarette into a toilet and with his foot on the handle watched it swirl away.
“Well, I got to go, Guppy,” he said, gathering up his things.
“Say, Osment. Why the hell don’t you go with us?”
Jolly smiled but said, “No thanks. Not this time. I—”
“We’re gonna have a real blast.”
“—I have a date.”
“Stick around while I clean out my goddam locker.”
“I can’t, Guppy. I have to see the principal or somebody.” He opened the door that led onto the basketball courts. “See you later, Hero.”
“So long,” said Guppy as he stretched out on the bench.
Jolly stopped by Mrs. Perley’s room to see if she was in the mood to divulge final geometry grades. She wasn’t, so he went on to his hall locker and faced the job of separating a nine months’ collection of ill-related items into a keep pile, a sell-back-to-the-book-store pile, and a throw-away pile.
At twelve he crossed the small campus to the phones in the hall opposite the office. “4112, please,” he responded to the nasal voice. He listened as the phone rang twice.
“Hello?”
“Is Dogie there?”
“Who? Oh, Dorothy. Yes.”
He heard the voice call Dogie to the phone.
“Yes?”
“Hi, Dogie.”
“Hello, Jolly.”
“What’s the matter with your voice?”
“I caught cold last night, I’m afraid. It’s not bad, though. Mother’s not too happy about my going out tonight.”
Jolly laughed. “You’re getting pretty cocky, aren’t you?” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve got around to
asking
you yet.”
“Asking me?” she said after a moment.
“Yeh. We could go to a movie or somewhere. I really ought to study for that test tomorrow, but in this case—”
“Jolly,” she interrupted.
“What?”
“Jolly, I already have a date for tonight.” Her voice came quietly over the phone. “Jolly?”
“You
already
have a date? But, Dogie, I thought—well, I thought—” He traced over the number 4112 with his pencil on the plywood panel that was nailed anew each fall on the wall by the students’ telephone. “Never mind,” he said. Then he said, “Who?”
“Who do I have a date with?”
“Yes.”
He heard her cough dimly, as if her head were turned away from the phone. She said, “With Luke.”
“Luke!” Jolly nearly shouted. “With
Luke?”
“Yes.”
“But why—but when—when did he—”
“He called me this morning. Jolly, you’re not
mad,
are you? You sound mad.”
The point of his pencil broke on the number 2. He stuffed the stub into his shirt pocket. Then he answered, “No, crazy. Why should
I
be mad?”
“Well,” she laughed, “you just
sounded—”
“Look, Dogie,” he said, “I have to go. I got some things to do. I’ll call you tomorrow maybe. OK?”
“Well, OK. Jolly, listen, I didn’t—”
“Bye, Dogie,” he said and hung up the receiver. He leaned against the small counter that held the telephone and stared blankly at his tennis shoes lying crazily atop his notebook. “Son of a
bitch!”
“Osment!”
Jolly turned. There stood Mr. Hanfield, coach-turned-counselor. Jolly flushed before the indignant stare.
“Whatya mean using that kinda language on the school grounds? Look, just because school is about out don’t mean you can—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hanfield.” Jolly picked up his tennis shoes and gym clothes and books. “I didn’t know—I mean, I didn’t mean—”
“Look,” the man said, coming closer, “something the matter?” He peered at Jolly’s face, then reached out a hand to Jolly’s shoulder. “Look, if there’s something—”
“Nothing’s the matter,” Jolly said and moved out from under the hand.
“You look kinda—well, you look like you been—”
“Please, Mr. Hanfield.” Jolly turned to the glass door that led onto the parking lot. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing the matter.” He shoved hard with his hip on the metal bar that opened the door.
Mr. Hanfield rubbed one hand over his gray head and readjusted his glasses. “That boy’s gonna be a real case about next year,” he said. He watched Jolly’s back as he walked across the lot. “That big and he don’t like football or basketball or nothing.” He wagged his head. “A real case.”
Jolly climbed the steep path that ran over the hill behind the school to the low stone wall that embraced the Historical Museum, a series of dark, squat buildings in which were mercilessly guarded such things as stuffed owls from the homes of early persons of note in the territory, or rusted and rotted wagon wheels that had dropped off along the way as white men routed the Indians back to the sage brush and claimed the pine forests in the name of the Union. Jolly sat on the wall from where he could look down on the pink-topped school buildings, and beyond to the town itself—the plaza, Whiskey Row, the drugstore, the dimestore, Penney’s—all settled down like an alley full of motley cats for a nap in the heat of the day. Jolly wondered in passing which of the old widows that guarded the museum’s priceless junk would recognize him sitting there and report the fact of his smoking to his mother. He followed the progress of a white-shirted figure across the school parking lot far below and tried to guess who it was. He saw the man enter a blue car and watched it back up, then move forward over the nearly empty lot and onto the street. Mr. Smithson; typing. He heard the horn of a diesel engine howl through the heat waves over the town from the railroad yards. He remembered the time when he was very small when he and Jamie got in trouble for putting pennies on the rails so that the coal-burning engines would flatten them into oval copper disks. He looked for recognizable animal shapes in the white thick clouds that had begun to rise trembling over the mountains to the east. The cigarette was bitter and stale from being carried around or cached in his locker too long. He dropped it among the small stones at the bottom of the wall and thought about it until the blue smoke ceased rising. He picked up the dirty white tennis shoes and the towel-wrapped clothes and the books. With the other hand he shoved himself off the wall and stood looking across town toward where the aspens lined the streets, gray-green and still. “Goddam son of a bitch.”
Jolly ran his hand along the impersonal dark gray stones of the church as he rounded the corner and approached the front door. Once there, he took his penknife from his pocket, and balancing the tennis shoes atop his books, he opened the short blade. With his shoulder against one of the double doors he inserted the knife blade between them and pushed in on a small metal peg until it sprang back and its mate popped forward. He folded in the knife blade against his leg and replaced it in his pocket. Taking hold of the door handle he pulled once, hard, and the two doors swung open with a loud crack as the inside chain catch was forced from its niche. He closed but did not lock the doors from the inside and climbed the stairs to the sanctuary. The sun filtered through the yellow-glassed windows and created a false sunshine over the pulpit and pews, homely and quiet.
He walked resolutely to the front of the church. He set his school items on the front pew. He lifted the lid of the piano bench and took out his three books of piano music, which he stacked on the music holder of the black, square grand piano that squatted there in its ebony glory, a gift from someone long forgotten, someone, like the piano, from the nineteenth century. Its rheumatic legs bowed down into lion’s claws, each of which held a glass ball as tenaciously as if they were jungle delicacies newly captured.
Usually when he played the church piano he played quietly so that no passing pillar would hear him and enter to investigate. This day it did not matter. He started at the beginning of his books of Chopin nocturnes and played them in succession with little attempt at accuracy. They were too difficult for him at best, and he played too loudly and, he knew, badly. His left hand was cramped from carrying the school books, and the accompaniments that Chopin had doubtless intended to be winsome only thumped, disjointed and irregular, against the right hand melodies.
He had played for perhaps a half hour, taking greater pleasure from crashing the chords as they came, seeing nothing either in his mind or out of it—except the heavily blacked filigree of the pages—when he felt the hand placed lightly on his shoulder. Even before his eyes focused on the hand directly—a strong hand with long blunt fingers, pale-skinned against which the hair lay thick and black—he knew whose it was.
Jolly lifted his foot from the pedal and the discordant notes died, except for their faint echo on the stone walls of the church. “Hello, Jamie.”
The hand tightened on his shoulder, then relaxed. “Sounds like Chopin and that man-woman—what’s her name—had another fight.”
Jolly turned sideways on the bench. “George Sand,” he said. “I know. I never could play his stuff. Or anything else for that matter.”
“What are you doing here beating that piano to death?”
“I just don’t feel so hot, I guess.” Jolly struck a chord with his left hand. “How’d you find me here?”
“I saw you come in and followed you.” That was not the exact truth, but it was truthful enough. Actually, he had been sitting astride the chair facing the back, his chin on his folded arms, staring out the window into the bright bleakness of the street when he saw Jolly pass beside the church and around the corner to the front. A few minutes later he had heard faintly the sound of the piano. He was alone in the apartment, except for the child, who slept deeply and sprawled in his crib, because Mandy had already gone to work. What his thoughts were when Jolly intercepted his line of vision probably not even he knew. Possibly he wondered why he stayed here in this loud and dottering town with its four-square streets bordered by mongrel façades of glass brick and neon and yellow tile standing in haphazard discipline before the buildings that had once shaded the red carriage of the Territorial Governor on his way from his afternoon game at The Tree Frog to his split-log mansion.
“Oh,” said Jolly. He faced the piano again. His fingers dawdled.
Jamie paced the width of the church and back to the center. His glance scanned the single circular window above the baptistry whose magenta and blue and gold glass cast foreshortened fragments of color across the carpeted floor and purled the edge of the single step down from the pulpit.
“This where you and Mom go?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Jamie sat on the first bench behind Jolly, his hands jammed into his front pockets, his legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles.
“What do you come here for? I mean, now—like this.”
“No reason. The piano, I guess.”
He watched the back of Jolly’s head for a moment, then let his own back against the edge of the bench. He stared at the high raftered ceiling from which hung the church lights on long brass chains.
“What’s eatin’ you, anyway.”
“Nothing.”
“You sure are friendly. What happened to all the talk?”
Jolly flipped a page of the book. He leaned his left elbow on the top edge of the piano and began to pick out the melody. He did not answer.
“Well, Jesus Christ!” Jamie flung himself up from the bench. He sat down again, abruptly. He propped his chin in his hands and eyed the round window as if it might explode daggers of glass for his insurrection.
“You moping about the same girl? Or another one,” he said.
Jolly laughed, once, in spite of himself. “Another one, I guess.”
Jamie waited. “Well? Go ahead.”
“No.” Jolly turned. “Only—one thing—you’re right.”
“What does that mean?” Jamie shifted his position on the bench. “I don’t suppose I can smoke in here, can I?”
“No.”
“No. Well, what do you mean?”
“You were right. Take any one of them whenever you can and get it before somebody else does.”
“You still talking about girls?”
“Yes.”
“I never said anything like that.” Jamie’s voice lost its flippant hem. Then he smiled. “You’re out of your mind. I always thought so.”
Jolly babbled the topmost keys of the piano. “Maybe,” he said.
“ Joll, you know I’m kidding.”
“I know.”
“You’re wrong. I didn’t say anything like that.”
“No, you didn’t say it. But you—you lived it. You know damn well you did. You always have. Traipsing all over the damn country years on end. And I know. Getting it wherever you could from anybody you could, and did you ever think that—”
“Knock it off, Jolly.”
“—that maybe I—maybe somebody around here might want—Forget it. You’re right. I said you were right.”
Jamie was standing beside him. “Listen, you moron, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” He clenched Jolly’s shoulder with one hand. “Do you hear? You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Ouch!”
Jamie jerked back his hand and jammed it into his pocket again. He paced across the front of the room to where the stained glass laced a gilt edge on the floor.
“Well, don’t preach at me. If you can do that—if you can sleep with them all and get up and hitch up your pants and walk out, well so can I. And I will. Goddamit, I will—”
“Shut up!” Jamie’s shout reverberated against the gray stone. He came closer to Jolly. “I’m not preaching. God knows I’m not the one.” His hands went to either side of Jolly’s face and then his shoulders. “Listen, you know where I’ve been since the last time? Do you know where I’ve been? I’m going to tell you, and it’s not going to do you any good, but it’s going to maybe do me some good, and you’re going to listen and then you’re not going to say anything about it. Not to me or anybody.