It turned out she was from Glen Burnie, and her family had some kind of hot-dog stand up there, but her brother had taken over this place beyond Eastport, not because it was much of a place, but because it had a big icebox, and they could use it for storage. And today, with the brother away and a lot of dogs, butter, ground meat, pop and stuff on hand, there was plenty to spoil if we didn’t get the ice there quick. So when we pulled up outside I piled that ice in the box, and she made sure everything was all right. Then she began to clown and ask if we’d have something cold. So while she and Fats were getting bottles Denny and I had a look around. It was just a soft-drink joint, with a front room that had a counter in it, and two back rooms, one a bedroom, the other a combination kitchen and pantry. Pretty soon Lina came out with soft drinks and sandwiches, and Fats passed them out. Denny suddenly seemed awful hot. After he got down some ham and ginger ale, he said: “You know what I’d like to do?”
“What’s that, Mr. Coolidge?”
“Go swimming.”
“And ruin all those clothes?”
“Oh, we got suits.”
“You have?”
“In the car. Right in the dashboard.”
“But we girls, we’re to swim in our birthday clothes?”
“Well, we could take turns on the suits—”
“How you know
we
haven’t got suits?”
So they dug in a closet and came up with Lina’s brother’s suit, which was blue flannel shorts and a white woolen shirt, and her sister-in-law’s suit, which was a one-piece job with the little short skirt they wore at that time. Then Denny and I got our suits from the car. Then an argument started as to where we’d put them on. Denny said one locker room for the four of us, and Fats acted like she had no objection. But Lina took her in the bedroom, and he and I put on our suits by the counter. Pretty soon both girls ran by outside, on the catwalk that ran around the place, and skipped on down to the water, giggling.
Lina had a hard, trashy face, but in the brother’s outfit, with the blue pants flapping and the white shirt hugging her, she had something. In the water she didn’t squeal and splash like Fats did, but really liked to swim, and could. When I got out there she was in deep water, headed for a float, so I went out there too. Pretty soon we had it to ourselves, letting the swells rock us, with Denny and Fats and their whoopdedo where we could hardly hear them. She watched me, then: “You do a nice crawl, Jack, all except your arms. You’re forcing them out, and it’s all right for a pool, maybe. But on long stretches it sure will wear you down.
“How do
you
get them out?”
“Roll ’em out.”
She swam for me, and showed me. “Roll out your elbow first and leave it lift your hand out. And relax your hand, so it goes limp. And sling it forward, don’t push it. Sling it easy. Let your middle finger riffle the water as it goes along. And don’t reach. Don’t stretch for distance and grab. And don’t dig your hand in. Roll it in. Roll it in, blade your hand, and let your weight push you ahead. It’s all in rolling your hips to get foot action and your shoulders for arm drive. Do it right you can keep it up all day. Do it wrong you poop out in fifty feet.”
It was play the way I liked to play, quiet, friendly, close.
But there was no getting around it, the air might be hot but the water was cold, and pretty soon we had to come in. So of course Denny and Fats came too. She was all out of breath from laughing and he from making her laugh. In the shack it was so hot you could smell oilcloth, suits, ham, mustard, pop, and girls. Lina opened Cokes and we drank them. I took mine to a table by the window, where there was air coming in. Lina turned on a fan and let it blow her hair around. Denny moved to get some of it, but just shifted from one counter stool to the other. Fats was at the end of the counter, and all of a sudden there was a spitting sound and something popped Denny in the eye and she began chasing a cat. Denny wiped off his face, and went back in the kitchen to look, and Fats kept on talking about how that darned cat kept spitting at people. Lina looked at me and winked. Denny came back and took another swig at his pop. Then here came the spitting sound again and Fats chased the cat again and Denny went out to look again and Lina winked at me again. Then I saw what had happened. Lina had opened two or three spares, and Fats had one, out of sight from Denny under the counter, and she’d shake it up, keep her thumb over it, and then when the pressure was good, she’d ease her thumb and a little pip of foam would spit out and hit Denny in the eye. Then right away she’d kick at the cat, chase it, and hide the bottle. If you ask me Denny was fooled, but maybe he wanted to be. Then he caught her at it, and that was all it needed. In just about ten seconds the whole afternoon we’d been piling up for ourselves exploded.
He grabbed her, shook his own Coke, held his thumb over it, and began popping it in her face as fast as he could get the pressure up. She squealed and pulled away and Lina whooped and held her. Then he tore her suit open and slopped Coke all over her and she did the same for him. Then her suit slipped off and she had nothing on but fat, that shook all over her. Still he kept throwing Coke. Then she got loose and dodged all around. Then she ran in the bedroom and he ran in after her and slammed the door. Lina beckoned me, tiptoed over, opened the door on a crack, and peeped. You could hear them in there, but what made me sick was the look on Lina’s face as she watched them, her mouth wet, her eyes shining, and her breath coming in little short gasps.
“What’s the matter, don’t he like me?”
“Listen, Lina, take it easy. He’s not a horse, see? In the first place you kept him swimming around out there, right on top of all that stuff he put in his stomach, and—”
“What stuff?”
“Sandwiches. Pickles. Ginger ale.”
“What was wrong with that?”
“It was swell. But in the second place, it’s hot—”
“It is, Coolidge, but he’s not. What ails him?”
“Hell, he’s just a kid—”
“Oh, I am, am I?”
When the other two showed, it was our turn in the bedroom, Lina’s and mine, that seemed to be the idea, and Denny’s and Fats’s turn at the keyhole, no doubt. But my imagination didn’t run on that track. Nice made as Lina was, much as I’d liked the swimming, I could no more have gone through with it the way it was being done that afternoon than I could have flown. And the sorer she got the greener I turned, as I could see by the mirror back of the counter, but I couldn’t want her, to save my neck. When Denny made his crack about my being a kid I meant to take a poke at him, but I never got that far. Two steps from my table and I had to dive out the door. There by the car everything came up, ham, bread, pop, and girl. When I got back I knew she’d been told, my real age, I mean, because she stared at me with tears shaking in her eyes, partly from rage at me, partly from pity for herself, that she’d been kidded and didn’t know it. In a minute she picked up my clothes and threw them out. “Get that sick pup out of here!”
Now, as I tell it, it all seems simple enough, and if I couldn’t take it, the wild afternoon the other three had got started on, I guess I don’t mind, looking back at it. I wouldn’t like it, if I
had
chased her around, torn off her suit, and dragged her in the bedroom, with Denny and Fats at the door. But at that time nothing was simple. Here all summer we’d done nothing but chase girls, not knowing how very well, but hoping. And here at last we’d bumped into exactly what we were looking for: a pair of trollops pretty enough for what we wanted, and trampy enough that they wouldn’t get big ideas in their heads of what they had coming to them afterwards. And they had the time and the place, which were slightly more important than we had any idea of. And then I whiffed out like a wet match. Doing it in front of Denny was bad enough. But that crack of hers, about the sick pup, was the worst of all.
Something
seemed wrong with me, and not knowing what it was, feeling like some part of a man was left out of me, bothered me, and bothered me plenty. After that I didn’t go out much. Fact of the matter I didn’t go out at all. I found the Old Man’s library, that had been there all the time, and started reading. I read Thackeray and Dickens and Bennett and Wells and Conrad and Hergesheimer and Lewis. There was a lot in their books about what was worrying me, and for a while I wasn’t too proud to get educated second-hand.
T
HE FOOTBALL WAS AN
accident, and as you might expect, came from some ideas Denny got. The day after the big afternoon on the bay he was due to leave for Frederick, but didn’t. Baltimore Polytechnic, where I had entered the year before, opened, and you’d think Frederick High School would have opened too, but he didn’t start for it, and every time I’d see him there’d be a lot of mysterious talk about something he was cooking up. Then one Sunday his parents were in town, and they came over to the house. Then I was called in to answer questions about my teachers. Denny’s mother was a tiny little woman, that smiled and listened to what everybody said, but his father was a big, two-fisted customer, that wanted attention whenever he talked, and what he wanted to know about was physics. So it turned out that Denny was so serious about engineering, and the course so limited at Frederick, that it was practically a necessity that he check in at good old Poly, where I was, and where everything of that kind was wonderful. Now this holy consecration that had come over him was news to me. I think I’ve mentioned I’ve a mechanical gift myself, and I was hep, even if they weren’t, that his lech for cam shafts and turbines and belts was about as hot as last night’s potato, and what he didn’t know about them would fill a public library, and what he did would go on one side of a rubber washer, with plenty of room for his autograph. So when it was all fixed up about Poly, I took him out into the garage, and threw on the squeeze. “What is it, smart guy?”
“Weren’t you listening? As
prerequisite,
for all
engineering,
every one of these
technical
schools put physics
first
on the list, because—”
“I’m asking you, what is it?”
“... Well look, I could show you about this mechanical stuff, but—”
“All right, show me.”
I threw open the tool chest of my car, which at that time I carried under the seat, and he looked at it. I pointed at a Stillson wrench and said: “What is it?” He looked uncomfortable and said: “So all right. What difference does it make?”
“Listen, this is not
them.
It’s me. Talk.”
“It could be football.”
“Football?”
“It’s a game. Or feetball, maybe you call it.”
“And?”
“Maybe I’m going out for it.”
“Why here?”
“Why not?”
“Why not Frederick?”
“Does anybody pay attention to Frederick?”
“Who pays attention to Poly?”
“Everybody... Listen, dope, you think I’m passing up all that moola? It’s amateur, sure it’s amateur. Just the same, they slip you. Don’t tell me they don’t.”
He was awful sure that he was on the trail of something big. “To cut in, you’ve got to have a rep, and the only one place to get that rep is in some high school that gets in the papers. For Frederick you could play till you dropped and not one scout from anywhere would come to see you. Poly, though, that’s different. So—engineering, physics, what’s the dif? You got to tell ’em something.”
Of course that made sense. That you could tell your father the truth and not fool him wouldn’t occur to you at that age. Well, can you? If Denny had come out with that stuff about football, what would his father have said? That he was crazy, as of course he was. Just the same a crazy guy came for a good time too, and now and then, not too often but sometimes, a crazy horse wins.
Denny didn’t have his growth yet, but he wasn’t far from it, and at least he looked like something that ought to be playing football. He was about medium height, five feet eight or nine, but stocky, specially in the chest and upper legs. His waist was small, but his torso bulged out above it, and from his hips to his knees he was thick, specially in back, so his hindside stuck out like a girl’s. But you had to see it to believe how fast he could pump his legs along, and after he went out for practice and I stood around watching him, I suddenly got it through my head that maybe he was right, he could be going places. The coach must have thought so too, because pretty soon he had Denny standing by the first team to learn formations. And then sure enough, on Friday, when we played our first game, with an outfit I’ll call Calvert, there was Denny in the opening line-up, at right halfback. But on running, blocking, passing, and kicking, everything except tackling, he was as bad as he could get and still have on a suit. Toward the end of the second quarter he got yanked, and Gus Schoenfeld, who had had the job in the first place, was put in, and Denny wasn’t put back. That ended his career, for the time being anyway, in spite of his big talk, his limp, and his alibi, which was that he had turned his ankle on the kick-off. He kept going out for practice, but was shoved over to the third team, or the ninth maybe, some outfit that the coach never even saw.
But I kept wondering why. In the first place, I’d tangled with him a lot, and he could take it, I knew that. Maybe he folded after round one, but for that long he was a tornado. And in the second place, there were those tackles he made. Football’s rough, every part of it, but the tackle can’t be faked. A guy that’ll come up fast, slip past the interference, line out his runner, then cut him down and really cut him down, so he’s on the grass and the ball is dead, that guy has something. Mind, I don’t say he’s much good to his team yet. Tackling’s defensive, and you can’t win games with a o-o score. For that you need touchdowns, but if they take more than the guts that tackling takes, they don’t take any less either, and that’s what crossed me up. Because that much Denny had. And yet, even in Scrubville where he was now, he couldn’t make two yards before he was thrown. Then after a while I saw what the trouble was, and as usual it came from a slight case of looky-looky-looky. On defense that was all right, because on busting up plays he could show off fine and nobody did it better. But on offense, advertising how fast he could run, shooting past his interference until he was away out front, that may have been a fine way to lead a parade but it was a poor way to hit a line. Because then the line hit
him
and it was the same old story: second down, ten to go. I argued with him about it, and he got hot and said he knew what he was doing and what counted was speed and he had it and he meant to use it and soon he’d get the recognition that was coming to him. I said he should follow his interference, and I even put on a suit and went out there, got myself put in the squad that he was in, and because I could run a little too, made the backfield. When I was part of his interference I’d try to keep him near me, but it was no soap. And then one time when he was out in the open, with no protection, some kid piled into him head-on, and it was an hour before they could get him quiet, from the hysteria the shock brought on, and he was so ashamed of the way he had blubbered that he came over that night and at last asked me to lay it out for him, what he had to do.