The Speed of Life

by James Victor Jordan

  “Tomorrow we play the Panthers,” I said. “Got to go, sir.” And I too walked away.

  He called out, “Georges Bohem. You. Come. Back. Here.”

  But it wasn’t his voice I heard, it was my father’s, telling me my clothes were mismatched, my attitude bad, I’d screwed up again. But inspired by Aurora’s aplomb, I didn’t look back.

  When I stepped outside, Bruce was leaning against the building, waiting for me. I expected him to chide me for embarrassing myself before Hailey and her friends. But he didn’t. Instead, good naturedly, he slapped me on the back of the shoulder.

  “She likes you,” he said.

  “Who? Aurora?”

  “You been decked by another girl lately?” We walked toward the gym. He said, “She’s no good.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She’s bad news. Forget her. Are you still psyched by your hitting slump?” I looked away, feeling queasy. “It’s all mental,” he said. When we reached the locker room, he said, “Have you been getting enough sleep?”

  “I’m not losing sleep over my hitting.”

  “Something’s bothering you,” he said.

  “I was thinking about the game. It’s the playoffs—”

  “Just stay loose.”

  “All right. So what’s wrong with Aurora?”

  Other boys crowded into the locker room, so Bruce pulled me aside to speak privately.

  “She has a bad rep.”

  I’d known him all my life. When he said something, he meant it. But I didn’t want to believe him.

  “Who says?”

  “She runs with a crowd of older guys I know. She— you know. She does it.”

  “What about you and Abbi?” I said. “You do it.”

  “We only go to third base.”

  “Wait a sec,” I said. But before I could say another word, several of our teammates surrounded us, congratulating me for my victory over Roger.

  The next morning we knew there would be college scouts in the capacity crowd. During the pre-game throw-around Bruce threw a grounder to me between second and third base. It should have been routine, an easy play, but I was startled by jeers from Roger and his pot-smoking buddies. The ball ricocheted off my glove.

  Sitting above them in the bleachers, Aurora and her friends were chanting, “Go, Georges!”

  I kicked at the dirt, pretending something on the field caused the ball to take a bad hop.

  Roger shouted, “Hey, Bohem, try out for the girls’ team!”

  My father, our first base coach, gestured for me to come over and talk to him.

  “That was a fluke,” I said, “a sudden wind gust.”

  “Your fielding’s first-rate. Your Hitting?” he said. “You’re swinging the bat like a grandmother.”

  “A little slump,” I said.

  “Son,” he said, “slumps are for sissies.”

  In the stands, Aurora waved.

  Orange monarchs fluttered, circling each other, kissing.

  “I’ll get a damn hit,” I said.

  He squeezed my arm. “Watch your mouth, son. There’s no call for that kind of talk.”

  I pulled away and walked to the pitcher’s mound to join Bruce and Eric, our second baseman, who were talking to Manny, our pitcher. I was surrounded by guys who’d gone all the way with their steady girlfriends, and I’d never even had the nerve to ask a girl out. The verve I’d felt standing up to my father was as fleeting as the moment of the monarchs mating.

  The Panthers’ shortstop lined the first pitch over the left-field fence for a home run. Manny walked the second batter and struck out the third. The next batter swung early at a curveball but connected solidly, driving it hard to my left. I caught it off a bounce and flipped it to Eric at second. Eric tagged the base, then riffled it to Bruce at first for a double play. It was virtuosity, every note played in perfect three-part harmony: Tinkers to Evers to Chance, Georges to Eric to Bruce. But Roger and his cohort were on their feet screaming, “Lucky play, loser.” Aurora and her friends cheered.

  Bruce and Manny headed for the bleachers, but my dad and Coach Levine stopped them.

  In the first inning, I went down swinging for the third out. The razzing from our side of the bleachers drowned out the cheers from the Panthers’ side. My dad went into the stands. The next time I looked, Roger and his stoner friends were gone.

  In the bottom of the fourth I popped up; it was an easy catch for the shortstop. I was hit by a pitch in the seventh.

  It felt great to be on base until my father said, “You still haven’t gotten a hit.” I took a large lead but he motioned me back. His hand on my shoulder, he said, “Outstanding field play: baseball-scholarship potential. Extra batting practice and you’ll be fine.”

  Bruce hit a line drive deep into right field. The third-base coach tried to hold me up, but I came around the base thinking that our season was on the line.

  The Panthers’ catcher caught a relay, then, seeing me coming, crouched, blocking the plate. I barreled into him, knocking him over and the ball out of his glove. Through a haze of dust and the knot of our tangled legs, I reached out, tagged home, and the ump yelled, “Safe!” My shoulder was on fire.

  Three to one in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, I was on-deck when Eric hit a line-drive single, bringing home the runner on second. My teammates were standing at the chain-link fence in front of the bench. Coach Levine looked at me and waved me back.

  “Georges, I’m putting in Buster to pinch hit,” he said.

  “Coach, I’ll get on base.”

  Bruce joined us. “What’s going on?” he said. His dad looked at Buster, swinging his bat in the on-deck circle. He looked at the kids jeering and cheering in the bleachers, and then looked at Buster again. Bruce said, “Georges can do it, Dad. Don’t take him out.”

  Coach Levine wiped his face with a sleeve, looked at the scoreboard, the Panthers’ pitcher, my father. He said, “Georges, can you pull it down the third-base line?”

  When I stepped up to the plate I was expecting a knuckleball, but the pitcher threw a fast one, high and inside; I swung and missed. His second pitch was an outside curveball that I punched down the first base line out of play. The pitcher threw three more outside curveballs; I checked my swing each time.

  The pitcher shook off two calls before winding for his pitch. Eric took off for second as the pitcher let the ball go. I started my swing late, expecting an outside curveball, but I guessed wrong. The pitch was a fastball, high and inside. I brought my bat around for a full swing; the ball hit the bat a good six inches below the sweet spot, and I hit a blooper that the first baseman would have caught easily had he not been holding Eric in check at first. The second baseman dove for the ball, just missing it, and it fell into shallow right field for a hit. The second baseman got tangled up with the right fielder as they fought for the ball. The third-base coach waved Eric home. The score was tied.

  Two pitches later Bruce punished a fastball, smacking it deep into center field for a double. My father pumped the air with his fist as I scored the winning run.

  Bruce and I had post-game plans, but his dad called him into his office as we were leaving the locker room. Hailey was in his office, and Coach Levine didn’t look happy. But when he saw me he smiled and said, “How’s the shoulder, Georges?”

  I told Bruce I’d wait for him in the quad.

  I haven’t been back to Gables High since graduation, but I used to tell Bea that I could picture the quad as vividly as if I’d seen it yesterday. It was a garden of native palms, lush lawns, statues of Conquistadors, and a four-tier fountain rising from a base in the shape of a Mediterranean cross.

  I’d been working on an essay due the following week. The assignment was to argue whether The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was racist. When Aurora sat down next to me in the quad, I was reading the novel and thinking that the way people treated each other hadn’t really changed much since Huck Finn was a boy. My father had told me that to
the great shame of our state and our city, almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education there were still only a handful black students among the 3,000 students at Gables High. School buses bringing white and Cuban-American kids to Gables passed George Washington Carver High, an all-black high school on Dixie Highway in Coconut Grove.

  “Congratulations,” Aurora said. “I didn’t know baseball was a contact sport.”

  She sat next to me drawing up her legs, hunching over them, showing her white panties. She wore a low-cut blouse.

  “Did you get hurt when you scored?”

  I rubbed my shoulder. “It’ll be okay.”

  She played with the grass, twisting blades around her fingers. Blue jays bathed in the fountain and squirrels chased each other around and up the trunk of a coconut palm. Pink skin below the tan line on her cleavage was exposed. From a thin silver chain, a Star of David hung around her neck. I wanted to ask her about the costume she’d worn the day before. I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was. But I said, “Thanks for coming to the game.”

  “I did it for Hailey,” she said.

  “I didn’t see her.”

  “She was sitting next to me.” I squinted as I tried to remember if I’d seen her. “Want to talk about a contact sport?” Aurora said. She pulled up her skirt, splaying her legs. My embarrassment, if not my erection, must have been evident because she gave me a funny look. “The bruises,” she said, pointing to black-and-blue marks on her inner thighs. “I run the hurdles.”

  “Oh, I get it,” I said, looking away. “A contact sport.”

  “Hailey runs the mile.”

  “She can’t be very good,” I said. “She’s too heavy.”

  “She won this week, made varsity,” Aurora said.

  I couldn’t imagine Hailey winning a race. I couldn’t imagine her running a mile. I didn’t know what else to say. So I tried to read Huck Finn, but I couldn’t concentrate. I put the book down and rolled onto my back. A flock of ducks flew across the cloudless sky in a V-shape formation. As the birds passed overhead, I was wishing that I knew how to talk to a girl, how to talk to Aurora, and I felt myself falling into a well of sadness so deep I didn’t have the courage to plumb its depths.

  The spell was broken when Aurora picked up the novel and said, “That’s a pretty lame assignment.”

  “My thesis is that Huck Finn is so racist it’s not even assigned in the colored schools,” I said.

  “How can a novel be racist when the hero is a black man?” she said.

  “Huck Finn wasn’t Negro.”

  “Huck’s not the hero. He’s just the narrator. Jim is the hero,” she said.

  “Huck’s the hero,” I said. “He helps Jim escape.”

  “Jim protects Huck,” she said. “He’s the only one who does.”

  “So does Judge Thatcher,” I said.

  “He just protected Huck’s money,” she said. “He didn’t protect Huck from his father.”

  I saw her point. But I wasn’t going to concede. “The intro-duction by T. S. Eliot doesn’t even mention Jim, and Eliot won the Nobel Prize.”

  “Eliot was dead from the neck down, etherized upon his own table,” she said.

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “It’s a line from Eliot’s poem, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ No one understands it, but they pretend to,” she said. “It’s nonsense, like his introduction to Huckleberry Finn.”

  “But the introduction is part of the assignment,” I said.

  Her hands shook. “Here,” she said, handing me her copy of Huckleberry Finn opened to the title page. Someone had written: "The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs."

  “Who would write that?” I said.

  “T. S. Eliot. I copied it,” she said, “from one of his poems that my mother showed me.”

  I said, “He wrote a poem comparing Jews to rats?”

  “Yes,” she said, “before the holocaust. After the war he gets the Nobel Prize.”

  I tried to imagine what she was thinking, what she was feeling.

  “When she teaches advanced English lit, my mother uses Eliot’s poems to question the social value of literary prizes.”

  “What does your father do?” I said.

  “He’s a naval aviator.”

  “Bruce wants to go to the Naval Academy. Would your dad talk to us?”

  “My dad—his plane was shot down over Hanoi.” Her eyes were moist. “He’ll come home when the war’s over.”

  I felt even worse.

  She brushed a lock of hair off my forehead. “How come you’ve never spoken to me?” She traced her index finger across my cheek. “I’d kiss you,” she said, “but you need a shave.”

  “Why do you hang out with Roger?” I said. “Those kids smoke pot.”

  I knew if I asked that question I might put her off, but as much as I wanted her to kiss me, I didn’t want to get mixed up with the wrong kind of girl.

  “You know,” she said, “when I said that, about kissing you, I meant it platonically.” She took my hand, her fingers entwining mine.

  “It felt romantic,” I said.

  “Your lips aren’t scratchy. I meant a kiss on the cheek.”

  She laughed, scrambled to her feet. I jumped up, laughing, ready for a chase. But Bruce, an eclipse of gloom, dragging his letterman’s jacket on the ground behind him as if he were bringing us the head of John the Baptist, was walking toward us.

  He headed directly toward Aurora and, getting in her face, said with spittle flying from his mouth, “Dad’s taking Hailey home. She’s grounded. You better not see her again.”

  Aurora stepped away, lifted her purse from the lawn.

  “Go ahead, run. Your cowered, Peacenik!” He raised a fist, his face a display of menace.

  A mechanical susurrus, a flash of sunlight on metal. Aurora almost crouching, held a switchblade.

  “Jesus!” Bruce said, audibly exhaling, brows furrowing in a frown, his Adam’s apple rising and falling.

  I stepped between them. “Aurora! Bruce?” I said, pushing him back. “Aurora, put that away.”

  “You saw him attack me, Georges. It’s self-defense,” she said.

  “Bruce wouldn’t hit a girl,” I said. Aurora folded the knife but still held it. “Bruce, what’s going on?”

  “That tramp was going to take Hailey to an anti-war rally. Dad found out.”

  “No one is taking anyone. We’re going together,” she said. “Free speech is a constitutional liberty our soldiers are fighting and dying for.” Turning to Bruce she added, “But I doubt you or your father have heard of the First Amendment.”

  Bruce said, “Hailey’s not going anywhere with you.”

  “In that case,” Aurora said, her tone softening, her knife now nowhere to be seen, “we won’t need these.” She took an envelope out of her purse and handed it to me before walking away.

  I opened the envelope.

  “What is it?” Bruce said.

  “Two tickets to the Battle of the Bands tonight at Dinner Key Auditorium.”

  Driving to the concert, Bruce had a tight grip on the steering wheel. “Hailey called Dad a fascist and left the house against orders. She’s AWOL.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” I said.

  “What’s not wrong with her?” he said.

  “Aurora’s father was a navy pilot. Now he’s a POW,” I said.

  “That cunt pulled a knife on me.”

  I blanched. It was the first time I’d heard that word.

  He made a wry face. “And she dishonors her father’s sacrifice. The hippies want freedom, but they won’t defend it.”

  The day before, I would have agreed emphatically. Now I said nothing.

  At our seats, in the second row, we were greeted with a bear hug by Ray Bindle, tall, bearded, wearing a denim jacket with a yellow peace symbol. He’d been our best pitcher. He’d been a mentor, a role model. Now he played college bal
l.

  The auditorium lights dimmed, strobe lights flashed, over a PA a voice boomed, “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN . . .”

  Ray lit a joint, offered it to Bruce, who pushed it away.

  “. . . WFUN PRESENTS THE MIAMI ROCKFEST.”

  Suddenly – and this was another shock – Aurora, wearing the red top with silver comets, waving drumsticks, bounded onto the stage followed by Melody and Phoebe – two of the hottest girls at our school – wearing similar costumes.

  Melody picked up an electric guitar. Phoebe stood behind a keyboard, Aurora hit the bass drum and rolled her sticks on the snare, then Phoebe and Melody joined in a rock ’n’ roll riff.

  A spotlight illuminated a burst of smoke, and a girl with a perky figure and a glittering silver comet streaking across her tight-fitting spandex top stepped sprightly through the vapors, dancing suggestively, provocatively, singing with conviction, “For civil rights/we set our sights/with rock ’n’ roll/we lift our souls.”

  Cabernet hair fell in ringlets over her bare shoulders. “A new dawn’s come/To bring the day/The war will end/What do you say?”

  Her band mates chanted, “Make love—”

  The audience roared, “Not war!”

  “Who’s that girl?” I said.

  “That’s not a girl,” Bruce said, “that’s my sister.”

  A banner unfurled from the rafters. It said: the comets.

  “C’mon,” Bruce said, “let’s go.”

  I didn’t move.

  Leaving, he said, “Be sure you get a ride home with someone who isn’t stoned.”

  Hailey waved to the crowd, blew kisses to Ray and his friends.

  “This next song,” she said, “written by our celestial goddess, Aurora, is dedicated to the man with the secret plan to end the war.” She struck a Richard Nixon pose, waving peace signs above her head, then she picked up an electric guitar.

  Aurora sang the words, the title to her song, “The Napalm Rag.”

  Melody and Hailey turned toward each other like hockey players in a face-off. Their guitars twanged in a discordant clash that gave way to a melodic groove with a classic backbeat. The Comets sang about jungles vaporized, villages pillaged, children mutilated, and American sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers slaughtered prolifically, needlessly, regrettably in combat.