The Falls of the Wyona

by David Brendan Hopes

  I don’t know that discussions of the Iliad of Homer marked the first time Vince raised his hand and offered an observation in English class, but it certainly hadn’t been a daily occurrence. He hit the mark, too, in what he said, and kids in the room turned to look at him, to make sure they’d recognized the voice correctly. The general level of enthusiasm in class was, for a while, so high that anyone with a working familiarity with the local school system could have guessed that Miss McWhirter’s chances of being retained were slim. Any pedagogy that loudly successful was bound to be a threat to the tenured “experts,” every minute of whose classes were a lead weight around the necks of their students. At one point when we were hanging out at Tilden’s, his mom suggested that we put down our homework and go outdoors and play. The three of us stared at one another for a moment after the utterance, realizing that something had been said which had never been said before, and which was very unlikely ever to be said again.

  Long experience as the Coach’s son had taught Vince to keep his uncertain enthusiasms cloaked, not to call attention to himself off the field when it could be avoided. What if he liked something creepy or girly? He could not afford to be caught unawares in matters like that. But the Iliad set him off in ways not to be controlled. Miss McWhirter refused to pronounce any of the jaw-cracking names until we’d at least given it a try, and Vince saved us hours of embarrassed silence by blazing out with “Agamemnon” and “Philoctetes” like they were his next door neighbors. I could see his body shift and change as he read, taking on the posture of the heroes, the aggressive forward lunge of Hector with his outstretched sword, the hesitating glamour of Helen on the ramparts, the upright, massy weightlessness of the gods on Olympus. It was a gigantic adventure movie and he got to play all the parts.

  Tilden was in love with the teacher and Vince with the text. It was a home run for elementary education.

  The boys came over to my house in the evening so we could read the story together. Vince had to arrange the light in the room just so, the sun sinking on the wine-dark sea, or some such. Tilden made fun of his high seriousness, but never refused any of the stage directions Vince constantly supplied. Sometimes Vince would be blind Homer, intoning in a voice he pitched as low as he could, which was considerable, as his voice had always been amazingly, not to say freakishly, low. Mom came upstairs just to check who all crowded in my bedroom, with the bardic voice booming and rustling. Tilden took his turn reading, but he was a little halting, and you could tell Vince was squirming with impatience the whole time, so Tilden’s passages got progressively shorter and Vince’s longer, as if anybody cared. Tilden was great at sound effects, the whistle of arrows through the shining air, the thud of spear heads against bone.

  Vince’s transformation was the most remarkable when he got to the parts about the gods. I went to Sunday school, and had a little trouble with the concept of gods who were not Jesus, but Vince took to them like a pagan born. When Zeus the Thunderer had his entrance, Vince marched around making thunder noises and lightning noises, a tempest there in my room. When it was Athena, he made himself straight and bright-eyed, his arm bent in front of him in a way I eventually recognized as her holding a giant shield. It was Apollo, though, who really got to him. It was funny to see Vince become Apollo, with his little belly sticking out and his skinny arms held out like rays of light were dripping from them. Vince let us laugh, but I don’t think it was all that funny to him. He had found a role model. It would be difficult to imagine a tougher one than the god of light. General Patton or Captain America were well within reach by comparison.

  Winter came, and the snow forts with it—on those rare occasions when the snow was sufficient for them at all—were no longer Alamos or Fort Apaches, but the walls of Troy. The branches of the playground trees became the watchtowers of Ilium, from which could be descried the hosts of the Achaeans arising from the sea. Vince would have to remind us that we were no longer shooting the long rifles of the pioneers or launching the grenades of Audie Murphy, but hurling javelins and shooting arrows. This change of image improved our aim and accuracy considerably. I thought of this in later years when my passing arm whipped out like a pistol shot. When the reporters asked me “What’s your secret, Summers?” I planned to say, “Throwing spears from the walls of Troy.” It would be worth going pro just to have that opportunity.

  Not only was I actually into a Greek poem from three thousand years ago, but that Christmas, instead of toys, I received things a young man not too far from middle school could use: a matched brush and comb set, an expensive chess set which was not red and black plastic like the one Vince and I took up into the tree house, but onyx and ivory, so weighty and substantial I thought it might really be onyx and ivory, and the bottoms of the pieces were covered in green felt to keep them from scratching the board.

  Something clearly was in the water, a Homeric strain which turned boys into demigods. Maybe it was just puberty’s first shots across our bows, but whatever it was inspired us to actions which astonished even ourselves. I fought Chuck Leggett in the locker room—Chuck who had been tormenting me since we were in kindergarten—and chipped two of his front teeth. Vince beat all the middle school boys at the high hurdles, and because nobody believed it, beat them again half an hour later with everybody from two schools watching. Tilden did three hundred sit-ups without stopping and got his name affixed in bronze to the gymnasium wall.

  But beyond any of this ranked Vince’s second deed of daring. Given a hundred tries we wouldn’t have guessed what was coming.

  He decided to try out for the school talent show.

  Glen bears responsibility for this. Glen was in a different English class (“Advanced”) and didn’t have McWhirter and they read The Scarlet Letter. You could see Glen pulling Hawthorne out of his Boy Scout knapsack and reading at the lunch table, which was not done by anybody else, ever. You could throw a potato at him and he would not put down that book. Tilden and I didn’t always know what went on between Glen and Vince—they took time to themselves in a way no other combination of us did—so whatever conversation or double-dare led to Vince’s decision to veer toward the arts we never knew.

  We were able to counsel him against choir or pep band. It’s not that anyone would think that Coach’s son was a homo if he joined the pep band, but it would have just been too baffling for the masses. People like Vince Silvano simply were not in bands or glee clubs, and when they were, it would be the time to rethink too much too fast. Tilden and I were still working on the problem when announcements were made for the annual talent show. Vince tried out—I didn’t know then with what: free throws? weightlifting?—and made it.

  News of Silvano in the talent show encouraged everyone to assume a goof. Surely he was having one over on the school. He had to be. Everyone with an older brother or sister remembered the year they elected horrific Jane Osterman as freshman attendant to the homecoming court. She was not just the ugliest girl in that class, but maybe the ugliest girl anyone had ever heard of. She was sweet, though, and chosen by the gods to possess a sense of humor strong enough to survive her appearance. The thing was that Jane wanted it. She wanted to be on the homecoming court. What girl didn’t? The teachers got together and explained to her, as gently as they could, that it was meant as a joke. Jane already knew that—she had a mirror, for godssake—but she wanted it anyhow. She wanted to stand up there with Mark Crimaldi, the one-freshman-on-varsity stud, with her bouquet and little coronet, beaming into the cameras. Eventually the teachers nixed it, and let I-forget-who—some pretty girl who had come in, in fact, third—stand on the podium with Mark. That was a shame in so many ways. Like I just said, I forget who the substitute beauty was; nobody would have forgotten that year or that dance if Jane Osterman had been the freshman attendant.

  Anyway, I was not immune to the camp buzz, and on the night of the talent show Tilden and I went to see our buddy perform, and we went prepared to laugh. I sat with the JV team in our white sweaters with sky b
lue letters—most of whom were present in support of their interpretive-dancing or guitar-strumming girlfriends—and waited for Vince to cause a stir. An odd thing about Vince was that everyone expected him to be the class clown; everyone expected him to goof on the serious matters the teachers laid before us, but he wasn’t and he almost never did. It must have been that look on his face, that archaic smile which looked insolent to people looking for insolence. His beauty was so great that people assumed he was as involved in thoughts of himself as they were. He was good-humored, but I don’t think you’d call him humorous. Vince could mouth off but he couldn’t tell a decent joke. His deadpan was lethal, but not always intentional.

  The theme of the talent show was “Around the World in Eighty Days,” and the opening extravaganza involved the whole cast sashaying on stage singing that song, from an old movie or something, and there Vince was, not at the front, but not at the back either, warbling his heart out. You’d be disappointed trying to catch him in a smile of collusion. He was serious as cancer. And, God, he was handsome. Maybe his talent would be just standing there.

  I figured the teachers had final pick of the numbers, as most of them were old. The Dawes sisters sang “Volare,” which was supposed to be Italy, and this big girl from ninth grade sang “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” which was pretty good, and meant to invoke London, where Berkeley Square is. You saw her in the hall but you never knew she could sing. Ann Dadlez, the police chief’s granddaughter, had been a Junior Miss runner-up, and she was supposed to sing “Spanish Eyes,” the song that had wowed the Junior Miss judges, but Mrs. Hunt stood up from the piano bench and announced that Ann had the flu and could not appear tonight. A bunch of hoods did an Apache dance to “The Hawaiian War Chant,” and it was actually amazing, those dark souls dancing like that. Their brothers and sisters had been to the gay clubs in Knoxville and taught them some snaky moves. They left everybody way behind, in terms of cool.

  Vince came on first after intermission. We scurried back from the bathrooms and pink punch of the refreshment table primed for it. You could hear the hush in the room; you could hear how the need to bust out laughing had built up and built up, reaching its peak when Vincent Silvano Jr. walked on stage. We needed Vince to be a goof. He could have cemented his rep clear through high school.

  Glen was there, by himself. I waved to him across the room. I was sad that we couldn’t sit together, but the JVs were all around us, and Glen could not be added to that mix. He wore a blue shirt and a blue tie. He was smiling so hard his face must have hurt.

  The indefatigable Mrs. Hunt was all day accompanist, and she looked at Vince, and Vince nodded, and she launched into the opening riff. Vince sang “The Rose of Tralee.” He’d told me all about the song, and how he had wanted to do a Dorsey piece but they couldn’t fit it into the theme, so Mrs. Hunt had dragged this number out, thinking because it was Irish and so were most of us, everyone would like it. It’s funny the things you focus on. Mrs. Hunt’s red dress had this big furry hem at the bottom, which I guess she thought gave the dress intriguing movement when she walked, but which bunched up there under the level of the piano bench like a great red python, and if you lost focus for a moment you almost thought, or hoped, it was a python, and that the music would be drowned out by Mrs. Hunt screaming and fighting for her life in the coils of the red constrictor. I was tangenting on Mrs. Hunt’s dress because I was so afraid for Vince. It was clear it wasn’t a goof, but maybe the guys would laugh anyway, and maybe I’d laugh with them. Maybe Vince would hear my voice laughing out of all the others.

  Vince was wearing a white shirt and gray pants and a green tie with shamrocks on it, and behind him loomed a giant shamrock covered in shiny green wrapping paper, which stood for Ireland. I noticed everything because I was afraid to notice anything in particular. I feared not even being a god out of Olympus would get him through this. In the center section Glen was leaning forward in his seat, his palms turned up on the tops of his knees. He was as afraid as I.

  When Vince began to sing, though, a strange thing happened. He wasn’t funny. He wasn’t funny or pathetic or sarcastic, or pleading-for-love, or any of the embarrassing things he might have been. Nor was he the sudden Caruso that would have been the other end of the continuum, campy in its own way, if a little more surprising. He was this earnest kid singing a pretty song, straight-backed and bright-eyed, as if he’d never had so much fun. We’d been giving all this thought to him, and he absolutely none to us, just out there singing his song. People didn’t know what to do. I looked at the guys around me while one kind of smile faded from their lips, and another took its place. Someone did guffaw, but the guffaw was thin and uninspired, and didn’t start the avalanche its maker hoped for. Vince warbled the last “The Rose of Tralee,” bowed, and turned to walk off, then stopped for the applause, as though surprised that it happened for him the way it happened for everybody else. That was it. Samuella Lowe came on in a black geisha wig to do some Japanese cherry blossom number, and the show went on.

  They gave out prizes at the end of the show for the best acts. Everybody was flabbergasted when the hoods doing the Apache dance to “Hawaiian War Chant” won first prize, because they really were the best, and we didn’t expect our teachers to acknowledge it. They gave out prizes for courage, usually to kids who couldn’t sing who tried to sing anyway, or who couldn’t act and tried to act anyway. Vince didn’t get any of the prizes, for being good or for being bad, and that was exactly right. No sentiment, no excuses, just the damn song, take it or leave it. I don’t know about anybody else, but Glen and I were proud of him.

  “The Rose of Tralee,” by the way, is about a girl, and not about a flower at all.

  A big crowd milled around in the lobby. Vince was surrounded by boys congratulating him with the uncertain tone of those who didn’t know if they’d had one pulled over on them or not. The big lights over the school entranceway, which had been turned off so long because of air raid drills, were on now that the war was all but accomplished and because the talent show was a big deal in that remote age. Out of the wash of light, like a god from Olympus, strode Coach Vincent Silvano Sr., looking like a movie star, gigantic and out of place.

  It would be hard to guess why Coach Silvano and his posse showed up at the middle school talent show. The high school and the middle school were on the same campus, and shared music and art teachers and the occasional assembly speaker, but the high school coaches were notoriously indifferent to anything from the middle school unless its voice had changed and it had hair on its balls. The possibility that he’d come because his son was in the show was so remote that no one we knew even considered it. Anyway, in that case he came two hours late. Coach was surrounded, as he always was, by bruisers from the varsity football team. You could see why they loved him. If not burlier than some of them, he was a big, strong man, one of those men who can appear stylish and put together while never tending visibly to wardrobe or to person. His black hair gleamed in the light of the school lobby. You felt his slouching and casually hoodlum air were deliberate foils to his movie star looks. The girls went on about his blue eyes, which he narrowed to look like a cowboy squinting into the sunset, or Bogart taking a drag on a cigarette. He was an impressive man. His beauty customarily wore a jacket of aggression. Coach needed to look good, but not too good. Pretty is not taken seriously, and if there was one thing the Coach was, it was taken seriously. He was an American man’s man. I know that because my mother said so, with more enthusiasm than I wanted to detect. That most of his boys had crushes on him was assumed and never mentioned. It was something they’d grow out of, and, for a time, that emotion provided the fire behind his victorious teams. They were forever winning one for the Coach.

  Coach and his boys lounged on one side of the lobby, balancing on one foot with the other braced flat against the wall, identical in every detail, indifferent to the exodus of the talent show audience with their chit-chat and their cooing of praise, and sometimes t
ittering of mockery. They managed to appear indifferent and watchful at once. Put uniforms on them and you might imagine yourself in a prison camp movie. Coach knew who I was, of course, but I gave up the idea of going over and saying hello. He was best looked at from afar.

  Vince wanted to backtrack into the auditorium and disappear, but he had been spotted. One of the bruisers was pointing right at him, and whispering in Coach’s ear. So on Vince came toward his father, his steps hesitating in a way clear to everyone but himself. When he was near enough, Coach reached out and flipped the end of Vince’s shamrock tie.

  “Nice,” Coach said, the way a crocodile would say it.

  The bruisers all laughed, a deep tittering, like girls dropping an octave in some unfamiliar atmosphere. Coach stared at his son in a way calculated to make him as comfortable as possible for as long as possible. Coach jerked his head toward the auditorium and said, “What the hell is this?”

  Vince responded hopefully, “Did you hear me?”

  “No I didn’t hear. It’s not about that. Do you mean to play for me next year?”