Wise Men and Other Stories (8 page)

“Twenty seconds!”

I realized this was probably just as the Champ had planned. He was playing it cool, and I had played right into his hands. But I refused to give up. Focus, I said to myself. Concentrate. That’s when I heard the little voice in my head.

“See the word.”

It started as a whisper, but it kept repeating and it grew louder and more drawn out with each repeat: “Seeeee the worrrrrd.”

It kept running through my head over and over again—and then I realized the voice wasn’t coming from inside my head… it was coming from somewhere behind me. I turned around and watched as Billy Dee Williams did a stage whisper: “Seeeeee the worrrrrrd.”

It was meant to be supportive, and I realized then that he and most of the rest of the people in the room were all pulling for me to knock off this Scrabble gunslinger of a champion who had blown into town intent on showing off his erudite ways and wooing all of our intelligent women, only to blow out of town the next day, leaving in his wake a trail of scattered Scrabble tiles, disillusioned lady literati, and humiliated but fragrant men. So I should have been flattered. But instead, I found the whispering very distracting—and the clock was counting down.

“Ten seconds,” said the organizer.

“Seeeeeee the worrrrrrrd,” said Billy Dee.

“Everything all right over there?” asked the Champ.

“Could we have quiet, please?” I yelled.

The room fell dead silent. My powers of concentration came back in a rush, and I could see not only the word, but the theme of my entire life. The structure, the design, the grand pattern… it was all perfectly clear now.

“Time,” said the organizer. “Put down your words.”

“After you,” said the Champ.

I smiled, calmly selected my tiles one-by-one, and laid down my word: MOTIF.

Billy Dee Williams and his date and the ninety-eight other onlookers broke into a round of applause.

“Nicely done,” said the Champ.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Now for your word,” said the organizer to the Champ.

The Champ didn’t bother with putting down his tiles one-by-one. He picked them all up in one hand and laid them before us in an omnipotent motion, as if to say, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was… FOMITE.”

FOMITE?

“What the hell is FOMITE?” I said, before I could stop myself.

There was a quiet gasp from the audience at my crude inquiry. The organizers and volunteers instinctively moved in, lest I pull a blade and try to cut the Champ.

“It’s an inanimate object that serves to transmit infectious organisms,” said the Champ.

“It’s in the dictionary,” said somebody in the audience, holding up a pocket electronic Scrabble Dictionary.

“FOMITE?” I said. But the world was already moving on.

“Good game,” said the Champ. He stood and held out his hand to me. I stood up and shook his hand, then one of the organizers yelled, “Next!” and I was ushered away.

I won’t bore you with details of the rest of the Scrabble tournament. Most of the details of the remainder of that evening are kind of fuzzy in my memory anyway. I know that we lost our third round game by a wide margin, and I recall that my coworkers observed a somber and respectful silence on the drive home later that night. But the thing that sticks with me most was my walk through the crowd after my loss to the Champ. The Tribune Company representatives gave me a pat on the back as I went by. The young copywriters from Leo Burnett shook my hand and said, “Better than we could have done.” The editors of Playboy magazine were genuinely bummed: “We thought you had him with ‘MOTIF,’ man!” And one of my coworkers came over and put an arm around me and asked, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just need a minute.” So they all went off a left me alone by the fireplace with my thoughts. I wasn’t alone for long though. I soon sensed a presence behind me. I turned around and saw Billy Dee Williams and his girlfriend.

“FOMITE,” said Billy Dee. He was shaking his head in a motion that conveyed both disbelief and sympathy.

“Yeah, FOMITE,” I said.

Billy Dee shook his head again. “That’s rough,” he said.

“Yeah,” said his girlfriend.

“What are you going to do now?” asked Billy Dee.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll just keep playing.”

Billy Dee nodded. “That’s right, man. Just keep playing.” He gave me a fist bump.

“You, too,” I said. “See the word.”

Billy Dee nodded again. “That’s right,” he said. Then he turned to his girlfriend. “C’mon, Baby. We got a game to play.”

They turned to walk away, but his girlfriend looked back over her shoulder and smiled at me. “Bye, honey,” she said. Then she turned to Billy Dee Williams and whispered, “You should get you some of that Clubman stuff.”

Billy Dee turned to his girlfriend. “How many letters in ‘Clubman,’ Baby?” he asked.

“Seven,” she said.

“That’s right, Baby,” said Billy Dee. “Seven.” He smiled at her and she smiled back, and as they walked back in to the Scrabble tournament, I saw the grand pattern of my life clearly again and knew that it was time to break out of that pattern and make a change for the better.

We are in the dog days of winter. I can tell by watching my dog.

Normally when I let my dog in the house, she stops just inside the door so I can wipe her feet. Last week, when it was bitterly cold outside, I opened the door and Kallie darted in, ran straight to the kitchen, grabbed my cheeseburger off my plate, and took off running.

In the past, Kallie has chewed up pillows, eyeglasses, computer diskettes, and numerous other items—but it usually happens when she has been home alone all day. She doesn’t normally act like that when I’m around.

I told a coworker about my stupid dog, and my coworker told me that her dog had been acting weird, too. One night, while she was watching the news, her dog started growling at Dan Rather. Then, when she tried to pull the dog away from the TV, the dog snapped at her.

My guess is that our dogs are suffering from cabin fever. And if our dogs are suffering, we probably are, too. Tempers are short, we are irritable, and we do irrational things. Maybe we snap at people when we are normally patient and polite. Or we gnash our teeth and gnaw on our pillows when we hear politicians talk about the budget. And at some point every winter, we inevitably cross the line: we march into the living room while everybody else is watching TV, pick up the remote control, and start flipping through channels like madmen.

Yes, things are getting bad. But don’t worry. Spring is just around the corner—just another severe winter storm or two away. So until then, hang in there. And in the meantime, if you feel like grabbing somebody’s cheeseburger, make sure you can outrun them.

The university in my hometown has a large pond on its grounds. Locally, it’s referred to as “The Lagoon.” As soon as the weather gets warm in the spring, hundreds of ducks fly in to make the pond their temporary home, and people from all over town bring their children to see the baby ducklings.

The ducks know a good thing when they see one, and they cruise the pond, accepting a slice of bread here, leftover French fries there. The only thing that spoils this otherwise serene setting is that some of the ducks fight with each other over food or chase kids around looking for a handout. Meanwhile, the smaller, more timid ducks hang back and go hungry. Some people throw breadcrumbs into the midst of the ducks and let nature take its course. Others seem to resent the aggressive ducks. They ignore them and throw crumbs to the timid ducks instead.

The best time at the lagoon comes earlier in the year, before the warm weather and ducks arrive. In winter, people go to the lagoon to ice skate. Even on a busy evening you can find a remote spot and skate in solitude. If you stop skating for a moment, you can hear the fragile sound of ice creaking beneath your feet. And if the night is clear, you can look up and see a sky full of stars creaking their way across the universe.

Best of all, there are no pesky ducks around.

I go to the lagoon in the winter when I want to be alone. On a clear winter night in a peaceful Midwestern town, it’s a nice place to be.

* * *

I went to the lagoon on the night I heard about Joey Russo. The lagoon is a long way from Germantown, the blue-collar neighborhood of shotgun houses in Louisville where Joey and I grew up. In winter, kids were more likely to be dribbling a cold, gritty basketball in the alley behind Louie Eberhardt’s house than they were to be ice-skating.

Joey Russo lived on the fringes of Germantown, in a little apartment above a bar at the corner of Burnett and Shelby Streets. Joey was the tough guy in our neighborhood. The local bully.

I first encountered Joey Russo at St. Elizabeth Elementary School. He was a year older than the rest of our class, having been held back to repeat the second grade. I got halfway through the school year without any trouble from him, but then one day, a strange thing happened.

Our class was outside for recess after lunch. I was leaning against the short fence that separated the boy’s side of the playground from the girl’s side, and the next thing I knew, Kathy Johnson was standing a foot or so away from me on the other side of the fence. It was a pretty unusual for a boy and a girl to be standing so close to each other at recess, but nobody seemed to notice. Then, suddenly, it happened: Kathy Johnson, very quietly, very calmly, very gently, leaned over and kissed me.

I had no idea how to act in that situation, so I did the only thing that made sense: I turned and ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction. Not that I minded being kissed by Kathy Johnson. On the contrary. She was one of the prettiest and smartest girls in school, and she was to be my girlfriend for the next two years. But I
did
mind being kissed in public. It felt to me that everybody was staring at me after the kiss, but in actuality, it was a nonevent. No one had noticed—no one except Joey Russo.

Joey cornered me a few days later while I was waiting to walk Kathy Johnson home after school.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

Joey smiled. “You’re waiting for Kathy Johnson, ain’t ya?”

I hesitated for a moment, then answered, “Yes.”

“You like her, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“She likes you, too, don’t she?” he asked.

“I guess,” I said.

Joey walked around me, sizing me up.

“I like her, too,” he said, “but I saw her kiss you the other day.”

Upon hearing those words, I prepared myself for the worst: Joey Russo was going to kick my little seven-year-old butt.

“Don’t worry. I ain’t going to do nothing to you,” he said. “If she likes you, that’s all right.” Then Joey started to walk away. Before he got very far, he turned and added, “Be nice to her.”

His final words struck me as very odd. They came not so much as a threat or a warning (as in, “Be nice to her or I’ll kick your butt”), but more as a piece of friendly advice—and more than that, as a piece of friendly advice that he knew he didn’t really need to give.

I didn’t have any more run-ins with Joey Russo for several years after that. During that time, he was in and out of trouble—if not for fighting, then for stealing, talking back to the teachers, or skipping school.

Then, when I was eleven years old, I once again found myself face-to-face with Joey Russo. It was a hot, humid summer night. I was playing in the front yard when all of a sudden, there was a huge commotion from around the corner at the Gerard family’s house. Somebody was yelling, and I heard a fence gate clang open and shut several times. I ran toward the noise and as I turned the corner, I ran right into Joey Russo.

There was a black kid with him, but the kid kept on running. Joey stopped though and looked right at me. He didn’t say anything, but he walked slowly past—staring at me the whole time—then continued on down the middle of the street at a jog.

I watched him run off, and then I went to the Gerards’ house. It turned out that some bikes had been stolen. The Gerard kids were distraught, and Mr. Gerard was ready to kill someone. I walked up to him and said, “I know who did it.”

It occurred to me later that I did not really know who did it. When I saw Joey Russo, he was on foot, which meant someone else must have stolen the bikes. But when the police arrived, I told them that I had seen Joey Russo running away.

The police knew who Joey was, and they took me with them to look for him. At one point, we turned the corner into Eberhardt’s alley and spotted a kid on a bike. But before the police could close in, the kid cut through a backyard and disappeared. After that, the police gave up and took me home.

The whole thing left me with an uneasy feeling. Had I done the right thing in telling on Joey? Was it him we saw racing down the alley? I didn’t hear any more about the stolen bikes until that fall.

* * *

Each Friday during the football season, one of the big high school games is played at Manual Stadium in Germantown. One particular night, I was hanging out with my friend, Mark Schmid, at his house across the street from the stadium. Mark’s older brother, Matt, was also there with some of his friends.