Sticks (13 page)

I’m pretty sure my wrist is never going to get better. Everybody keeps asking me how I hurt my hand.

I’m sick of telling.

Arlen and I are painting the poster,
THE AMAZING SECRETS OF THE POOL TABLE
. Arlen’s really worried because
Francine talked Marna into spying on Rory and the news is not good. Rory’s building a five-foot erupting volcano that’s getting delivered to Town Hall in a truck.

“How,” Arlen shrieks, “do we compete with a volcano?”

I shake my head and look at my bandage.

I come home from school and go up the back way so I won’t have to walk through the pool hall. I stick cotton balls in my ears so I can’t hear the
click, click
of the pool balls below my room. Everyone’s doing the chores I can’t do—Poppy gets more cooking and vacuuming, Mom takes out the garbage, Camille gets more laundry. Camille’s getting sick of it, too.

“I know you can’t help it,” she says, coming back from Crystal’s with the basket of folded clothes, “but I have a
life
. I have a
fashion debut
I’m trying to get ready for.”

“I’m sorry.”

Then she goes into her room, where she stays up late and sews. I’m replaying every dumb move I made with Buck—it’s like a movie running through my head.

Mrs. Cassetti is bringing me cookies from the bakery. Mr. Kopchnik asked if I wanted to help him take apart an old vacuum cleaner. Mr. Gatto said I could have any candy bar I wanted every day until I was better.

I just want my hand back.

It’s purple and swollen and I feel the hurt going up my arm to my elbow. Sometimes kids push past me in school and bang my hand without meaning
to and I have to stop where I’m at until the pain passes.

Arlen’s upset. He’s forgetting things again. He lost his Red Sox cap, left his bookbag in the park, forgot his vocabulary sheet three days running.

I’m not helping him remember like I should.

I’m not much good to anybody, that’s what Camille says. She’s been in a foul mood; she messed up on one of the costumes for the play and had to fix it
and
help with dinner because Mom’s got citizens’ patrol tonight. By the time Camille slams the pasta and meatballs on the table, anything good about eating is over. Poppy has to work late—lucky her.

“I’ve had it, Mother, I feel like a slave. Mickey just sits around here doing
nothing
while
I
—”

“I’m doing stuff!”

“Right. You eat, sleep, and talk about
Joseph Alvarez
! I’m
sick
of hearing that man’s name!”

Mom puts her fork down. “Camille, that’s enough.”

Camille shakes her head. “No. All he does is talk about Joseph Alvarez like he’s . . . like he’s . . . Dad come back or something!” Camille pushes away her dinner plate and starts crying. “I don’t know why Daddy didn’t send someone to look in on
me
!”

Mom reaches out to her. “Oh, honey.”

“I try so hard not to think about Daddy. But sometimes I just need to have him here so bad . . . .”

Mom’s staring straight ahead. “I understand.”

We’re all looking down at the table. I say I think Joseph Alvarez came for all of us.

Camille’s standing now. “No he didn’t. He doesn’t care about me. He’s helping you with pool and—”

“He’d help you with your game, Camille, if—”

“
I don’t like pool! I don’t like living in this town! I feel like I don’t belong anywhere!
”

Mom gets her car keys and the big mega-flashlight the citizens’ patrol uses. Camille starts running out of the dining room and Mom grabs her arm. “We’re all going,” she says. “Right now.”

*   *   *

I’ve only ridden on patrol a few times. It’s so cool. I’m in the front seat of the Chevy with Mom, feeling at least thirteen. Camille’s in the back not talking. Mom’s driving slowly down Flax Street, past the fix-it shop, Cassetti’s Bakery. I’m watching hard for anything suspicious—open doors, trucks parked where they shouldn’t be.

“Camille,” Mom says, “I can’t make you care for a place that I love. I wish I could. I don’t even know if I can explain to you what this town means to me. I’ve lived so many places I didn’t care about that finding one that was special was a gift. There isn’t much in Cruckston that’s pretty the way we think beauty should be. There isn’t much here that distinguishes us from other places. We don’t live above Vernon’s because I’m still hanging on to the ghost of your father. We stay because the values that I hold dear in this world—loyalty, hard work, love,
determination—are here. And there’s no better way I know to teach my children what I believe in and care about than to have us live in a place where they see these things happening around us every day.”

Mom turns left down Mariah. “I’ve never told either of you this—I could never count on my father. He’d go off places and come back weeks later than he said he would. He’d promise we’d go on vacations, promise he’d be there for us. He just couldn’t stick around or didn’t want to. It was awful for my mother. For a long time it was hard for me to trust people and feel secure.”

I look at Mom. I don’t know what to say. I hold up my bad hand because it’s beginning to ache.

Mom points to the apartments above the stores lining Mariah Boulevard. “When your father died, all these people poured out to comfort me. They didn’t give me pat promises at the funeral. They didn’t tell me that everything was going to be all right. They
stood
with me, they
cried
with me until it was all right. No one here is a fancy dresser, Camille, and the colors you love so much aren’t in grand display, but if you can focus your eyes to look inside the hearts of these people, you will see a rainbow of colors. That’s what I see. That’s why I stay.”

Camille’s crying soft in the backseat. “Mom, I’m so sorry . . . .”

Mom hands her a tissue. “I know.”

I turn to Camille and say there’s no hard feelings. Camille nods and keeps crying.

Mom lets me shine the flashlight back and forth along the row of cars behind the fence at Zeke’s
Towing. The light’s so strong it shines anything bad out of hiding. A rat runs underneath the tow truck.

Mom picks up the cellular phone the phone company donated to the patrol and punches buttons.

“This is Ruth at the south end,” she says into the receiver, turning past St. Xavier’s onto Botts Street. “It’s looking safe and sound from here.”

*   *   *

The next morning I’m in my room lying on my lower bunk bed on the quilt that Mom dyed poolroom green to go with the pool-ball pillows Camille made for me. She dyed the curtains green, too, which Arlen says just multiplies the experience. I put my autograph collection of the pool greats of the world in my closet because I didn’t want to look at it.

Joseph Alvarez just got back from Canada. I hear the Peterbilt and don’t get up. I don’t want him to see me like this.

I can hear him running up the stairs.

Hear him talking to Mom.

Hear his big boots clomping on the floor as he moves toward my room. He knocks on my door.

“It’s open.”

He walks in sad, looks at my splint. “Oh, son . . .”

“I’m sorry.” I fight hard not to cry. “I can’t play in the tournament!”

“You don’t know that for sure now.”

I start shouting that even if I can play, I can’t play good enough to win because I can’t practice for being an idiot!

Joseph Alvarez stands there holding his hat. “I’m so sorry, Mickey.”

We don’t say anything for the longest while.

Joseph Alvarez puts down his hat and starts talking about living in Mexico when he was a boy. His family was poor. His mother sold flowers on the street; his father drove a taxi. He said once some tourists were riding by his village on horses, going fast through the streets, and a girl fell off her horse, hurt bad. All the people in the village came out to help. The women brought water, the children brought cloth for bandages, the men lifted the girl gentle into an old truck and took her to the hospital, where the doctor fixed her up.

“See, we’re all connected to each other,” he says. “Some people you just know for an instant, others are for life. And when things get bad, like when we get hurt, we’ve got to let the people around us help.”

I don’t say anything.

“Have you been going in the hall?” he asks.

“No.”

“You’ve got to start doing it, son, watching people play the game you’ll be playing soon. Learn from their game, play them in your head. Everybody makes mistakes—I’m a living testimonial to that.”

I’m standing now, shoving out my bandaged hand toward him. “The tournament’s two weeks away! I’m not going to beat Buck! He’ll be too old to compete next year.
I don’t want to talk about it anymore!
”

Three days pass.

Nobody mentions my hand.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table eating Oreos when Poppy slaps her fist on the table.

“Listen up because I’m only going to say this once.”

I’m about to tell her I’ve had a pretty hard day at school.

“People would pay a lot of money for the advice I’m about to give you, Mickey Vernon. I don’t talk much about the arthritis I’ve got in my hands. I don’t think complaining about things makes them any better. But my hands hurt every day. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth getting out of bed, but then I’ve got to go to the bathroom, and suddenly the trip seems worth it.” She puts her hand on my shoulder. “You’ve just got to keep walking through it, honey. Don’t run, don’t hide, just walk. Eventually
it’s going to get better. It won’t stay like this forever.”

She takes three Oreos from the bag and leaves me there.

*   *   *

Arlen and I are walking the long way back to my house from his house past Shankiss’s Hole. We saw Buck and Pike Lorey hanging by Woolworth’s and figured a detour was better than getting beat up. Other than people sitting on the pool tables and misusing the equipment, Shankiss’s Hole gets Poppy, along with everyone else in town, the most upset about life.

I look past the
DANGER
signs around the fenced-off construction site and stare into the big hole in the ground. The bulldozers made it two years ago when Mr. Shankiss was going to build his restaurant and revitalize Flax Street until he ran out of money and just left it there as an eyesore four blocks from Vernon’s and made himself the most hated man in all of Cruckston, New Jersey.

Quitter
. That’s what people call him. He could have made a difference and he quit. Quit on his responsibilities, quit on the people who were counting on him.

Quit on his dream.

I look down deep in Shankiss’s Hole and feel my dream buried in the dirt. Arlen takes out his mechanical pencil, calculator, and a pad of paper from his bookbag. At least I helped him remember it today.

“I’ve been doing some figuring,” he says, punching calculator buttons. “According to my calculations, you shouldn’t be depressed.”

“
What
?”

“Figuring,” he says, “the average life span for an American male is about seventy-three, and given the fact that you are ten, you have lived out approximately one-eighth of your life, meaning you have about sixty-three years left to make good.”

I sniff.

“If you were ancient, like in your forties, I’d say stay depressed, more than half your life is gone, there might not be another tournament. But at ten, Mickey, you’re going to have a lot more opportunities to nail Buck and a ton of other guys.” Arlen’s punching buttons like crazy. “And,” he says, “this three-week setback only represents less than one tenth of one percent of your life, assuming you’re going to make seventy-three, but you could last longer. You could live to be one hundred, in which case, you’re looking at six one hundredths of a percent, which is basically nothing in the whole sphere of the universe.”

“My dad died young, Arlen!”

Arlen’s calculating away and writing down numbers. “Even if you don’t go as long as the averages, and you go a lot earlier, you’re still talking small percentages. If I were you, I’d definitely feel better. The numbers don’t lie.”

Arlen puts the calculator back in his pocket. “We need to go to the hall,” he says, and starts off down the street.

I stand there.

Arlen turns to me. “Are you going to argue with
math
?”

*   *   *

It’s the first time I’ve set foot in Vernon’s for ten days.

I love the echo the balls make when they jump in the pocket. I love the way the pool sticks hang on the wall like soldiers.

I love the way Buck misses easy shots when we make gasser noises at him. I stand at table twenty-one and roll the white cue ball across the empty table.

Take it slow.

Arlen is holding the mechanical bridge—that’s an extender for a pool stick—and I’m shooting one-handed. I’m going to use whatever I can to make my game better.

A siren’s blaring in the distance. Buck’s kissing his stick and dancing with it in the corner.

I look away and concentrate. I miss a lot of shots at first. It’s frustrating. But slowly I get the hang of playing one-handed.

I line up the shot and tap. Three in the side. Not perfect, but not bad.