Hermie kept coming. A few more quick lefts from Oscy and his face was beet red. Soon it would be warm vegetable soup, but he felt no pain even as he thought he heard the seams on his face splitting into midget fissures. He had no thought in his mind other than to kill Oscy. He kept wading in, aware of the fact that the circles they were making were growing smaller and smaller.
Oscy looked at Hermie’s squishy face and decided that it wasn’t necessary for his adversary to verbalize his defeat. With respect for Hermie’s pride and admiration for his staying power, Oscy magnanimously announced, “Okay, Hermie. That’s enough.” He also dropped his hands. A mistake.
Hermie came into the sky like a Grumman Wildcat launched by a carrier’s catapult. His whole body was balled up into his right fist. It buzzed through the air faster than sound and struck solidly on Oscy’s unsuspecting nose, sending Oscy staggering backward in a dandy series of drunken steps. His equilibrium thus shattered, Oscy’s knees sagged, and he sat down on his ass unceremoniously, looking up at Hermie in smiling incredulousness. In two seconds the blood came gushing from his nose as if the dam had burst. Oscy tried to put it back in, first by inhaling, then by covering his nose with his hands. But the blood came seeping through his fingers, and he looked at Hermie with painful disbelief. “Jesus, Hermie. I mean—you’re something.”
Hermie was not interested in any pleasant chitchat. His body came at Oscy, knees first. And each knee struck a shoulder so that Oscy plunked flat down on his back. Hermie was astride him like Tom Mix on Tony, pounding away with flailing fists and spiky spurs, lefts and rights and knees and thighs.
His advantage was short-lived. Oscy reared up, spun, and sent Hermie flying over him in a somersault so huge that Hermie landed flat on his back. For one split second in time, they lay head to head on the sand like the hands of Benjie’s Ingersoll at six o’clock. They didn’t stay that way too long. Hermie’s head was ringing, and as he was considering answering the phone, Oscy took that time to spring on top of him. And so it was Oscy on top, holding Hermie down, where just a moment before it had been the other way around. Oscy had him pinned good. His hands held Hermie’s wrists so hard that the pulse would be cut completely in another few seconds. Hermie tried shooting his body up at Oscy, hoping to unhorse him; but Oscy was too experienced for that, and every time Hermie tried it, Oscy gave him an emphatic knee in the groin, a strategy that would discourage even a Brahma bull. Hermie could do nothing but lie still and wait for his hands to fall off. Hovering directly above Hermie as he was, Oscy, perversely, allowed the blood from his dripping nose to splat down onto Hermie’s face. Hermie kept turning his head from side to side in order to avoid the droplets because he had enough of his own blood on his face, thank you. But Oscy managed to keep his blood plopping right on target so that, in a very short time, Hermie’s face looked as though it had been swabbed with red paint. He no longer had even the smallest initiative. He was at Oscy’s mercy, but he’d shit in Macy’s window before he’d say uncle.
Oscy could read Hermie, but just the same, he was mad enough to entertain Hermie’s lack of enthusiasm for quitting by simply pummeling him into a poetic pulp. The smile on his red face had definitely hooked to the right. It was condition red, and Hermie knew it. But like the hostage in the Nazi movies, he manufactured the spit in his mouth and blew it straight up at Oscy. Call it bad luck. Call it a change in wind direction, but it never reached Oscy. It returned to Hermie like a boomerang, right between his eyes. Oscy had to laugh, and the tension eased. “Okay, Hermie. I’m gonna let you up because enough is enough. But don’t try anything funny, okay?”
Hermie said nothing. He just looked up at Oscy through the blood and the spit and the sand and the hurt and the whole fucking misery of it all. Slowly, guardedly, Oscy climbed off of him.
The punch hit Oscy so squarely on the chin that it raised him half a foot before shooting him ass over heels onto his back again, a more and more familiar position to him. Quickly he scrambled to one knee only to find Hermie already on one of his own. The roundhouse right came hissing like a scythe, and had he not put up his forearm in the path of it, Oscy would have surely been beheaded. On their knees the two sandy gladiators continued their combat, the blood and sand flying in droplets as far back as Benjie.
Ultimately, having found the opening, Oscy put all his considerable strength into a cruelly well-timed uppercut. Hermie’s head snapped back like a Coke bottle just opened, and as he went over and down, he could see the blue sky and his own hair flapping. He saw nothing more for what easily could have been three days.
Oscy got to his feet and looked down at Hermie, who was spread against the sand as though he’d fallen there from the top of the Empire State Building. He was flattened into a two-dimensional form like a fresco in the Egyptian exhibition at the Museum of Natural History. He looked like a cave painting, a poster decrying drunken driving. He looked dead, and he stayed that way for approximately ten seconds.
Benjie came up alongside Oscy, very shaken at the sight of Hermie lying all out of shape like a rag doll. Together they looked down at Hermie, knowing that he was very much out to lunch. But at the eleven-second mark, Hermie’s whiplike arm came cracklingly to life, and at the end of it was a hand filled with sand. The sand was meant for Oscy, but instead it caught Benjie in both eyes, and he screamed blindly, “Dirty Jap! Dirty goddamned Jap!”
Oscy, of course, fell down laughing as blind Benjie groped for Hermie’s throat, his skinny fists clenched so hard that the fingernails were cutting into the palms. Oscy grabbed Benjie and restrained him. Hermie was lying very still on the sand. He was conscious, but he’d had it. The sand had been his last shot. It was meant for Oscy, but it had misfired. And so he lay there doing and thinking nothing. Bataan had fallen. The Death March would be next. He’d rather have a rifle bullet pumped through his brain. Put a gold star in the window, Mother; Hermie’s bought it.
Oscy led Benjie farther and farther away, never letting go of him, until the pair of them were all but out of sight. But Hermie could still hear Benjie, cursing as he rubbed the coarse grains of sand deeper and deeper into his eyes. Oscy turned and called back to Hermie. “We’ll see you later, Hermie! Okay?”
Hermie neither answered nor moved. He just turned his head enough so that he could see Oscy, with a firm grip on Benjie, who was screaming curse words that didn’t even exist. The pair of them disappeared over the horizon, looking like Abbott and Costello, only a lot funnier.
When they were out of sight, Hermie rolled over and pulled himself to his feet. It must have taken an hour. He was a mess. His shirt was unsalvageable, but he figured he’d keep it as a souvenir until his mother found it and turned it into an inglorious cleaning rag. On a pair of wobblies, he crazily zigzagged into the ocean, the tin taste of his own blood souring his mouth. And when he was in the water up to his knees, he plopped the rest of the way like a felled redwood. His head went under the water, and the lights went out all over the world.
The coldness was refreshing and recuperative, but the salt burned like hell in his gaping wounds. The combination was just enough to keep him from drowning out of sheer exhaustion. He knew that if he had been getting laid regularly, he couldn’t have lived through a fight like that. Score ten points for celibacy. If priests ever had a mind to become prizefighters, they’d take every crown, no doubt about it. Anyway, up he popped like a porpoise, filling his lungs with air and paddling back to the shore. Tired legs dragged him the last few steps, and he dropped to his stomach on the wet sand, causing the sandpipers to go bibble-bibble and move farther up the beach than they had intended. Resting his head on his forearm, the salt still wincing his cuts, Hermie scanned the horizon. Hitler and Mussolini were gone, but so was the woman. Could she know the battle he fought on her behalf? Had she any idea that he’d just taken on Basil Rathbone and Bela Lugosi in mortal combat? Well, he’d tell her about it later. He got to his feet and headed home, and for some reason he’d never understand, he felt better than
he’d ever felt in his whole entire life.
7
Hermie spent the remainder of the day in his room in highest meditation. He didn’t hate Oscy; he understood him. Oscy was just a big kid, a frisky colt, that’s all. Oscy was just more interested in hitting a Spalding three sewers than he was in the finer things in life. Oscy was simply more concerned about safeguarding the fucking football against the concrete of the street they played Two-Hand Touch on, which was why the football had two pounds of crisscrossed adhesive tape stuck onto each end so that, when you threw it, it was like throwing a broken leg. Oscy just wasn’t interested in sex yet. Still, hadn’t Hermie come upon Oscy in the basement of 81 Ocean Parkway only to find his dearest friend masturbating over a photograph of Claire Trevor even though Edward G. Robinson was in the picture beside her? And even though Oscy denied the whole incident as being only an accident, wasn’t it fairly obvious, from the size of things, that Oscy was no stranger to sex? As for Benjie, he was a stranger to the entire human race and a blot on the lineup card of the OPACS (Ocean Parkway Athletic Club & Social). Benjie played right field because the OPACS had only nine members, which made Benjie varsity and right fielder because how many lefty pull hitters were there? When a left-handed pull hitter did come up, Benjie was roused from his coma and moved to left field, where he could continue reading his comic book without interruption. But mostly, Benjie played right field with all the enthusiasm of a mortician. He even played right field in the football season when the OPACS merged with the Kermit Place Eagles so that they could field a fuller team of lousy players. Benjie was destined to play right field his entire life. He was born to it, a natural fuck-up. He had two left feet and had both of them perpetually in his mouth. One ounce less of intelligence and he’d be under a bell jar at NYU.
Once you try it, you’ll say buy it;
Tom Mix says it’s swell to eat.
Jane and Jimmy, too, say it’s best for you—
Ralston Cereal can’t be beat.
So ended another episode of Tom Mix and good riddance. Hermie wondered why he listened to that crap. Probably just out of nostalgia because he’d been listening since he was a kid. He always kept the radio on when he was doing deep thinking because he liked to guess at what the next line of dialogue would be. If he was right, it helped him do his deep thinking with greater confidence. If he was wrong, he’d be right on most of the following programs. After Tom Mix came Don Winslow, who was still trying to outwit Ivan Shark, as well as the Jap Navy. Then there was Little Orphan Annie, who had no eyeballs in the comic strip but who could talk all right on the radio in spite of the fact that she used to have long conversations with her idiot dog, who could only go “Arf.” And then there was dinner during which he pretended to be a deaf mute, though it was hardly noticed since his sister was doing a whole speech complaining that there were no men on the island. At the tail end of her speech she left the table crying and ran to her room, where her breasts continued to rot on the vine. After dinner his mother sat around and read Liberty magazine, while his father, on the island for a couple of weeks’ vacation, went over the bills and grumbled over the ration coupons his mother was screwing up on. Like the chicken they had for dinner: 23 points and stringy. They ate so much chicken in his family that Hermie was fully convinced he’d one morning look into the toilet bowl and discover that he’d laid an egg. It was excruciating and it was also raining, so Hermie spent the rest of the evening cutting out Kay Francis and Jinx Falkenburg and trying to find a place for them on his wall even if it meant shooting down a couple of his own planes. He found Kay and Jinx in his sister’s latest Photoplay and hoped she wouldn’t mind because—who was she kidding?—she had already cut out Joel McCrea and Don Ameche, not to mention Smiley Burnette. It was difficult finding new photographs of Penny Singleton because she was simply not in demand. His radio was offering the world Fibber McGee and Molly and then Bob Hope, who was up in Alaska freezing his nuts off for the soldiers. Maybe his cousin in combat, Ronald, was part of the audience. It was a thrilling thought. When he switched the radio off, Hermie lay in his bed thinking about the woman and the love that was building in his heart for her. He fell asleep with her fantastic face on the pillow beside him. Then the pillow became the woman, and he gave it to the pillow pretty good. It was a miracle there were no feathers flying around. It wouldn’t have mattered if there were because he had reached the point of no return, choosing to finish off his dream in the bathroom, where it was easier to deal with. And all the while, his sister was rapping at the door, unaware of her brother’s self-induced ecstasies. It wasn’t the first time. Nor would it be the last. The important thing was, he was developing concentration.
8
The alarm clock screamed at him, and he ignored it, letting it run down by itself, maybe teaching it some kind of lesson. He carefully examined the face in the mirror and concluded that there were no bruises to speak of. He brushed his teeth but didn’t bother to comb his hair, knowing that to get into any kind of presentable shape would take hours, and he didn’t have that much time to squander in spite of the fact that he had no plans for the rest of the day. He tiptoed into the kitchen and had a bowl of shit because it went snap-crackle-pop and he had no one else to talk to. He was essentially so goddamned bored with life that, unthinkingly, he let the screen door slam behind him. He waited for what he knew would follow. A button had been pressed in his mother’s mouth, and her voice came out like an air raid warning. “Herman, where are you going?”
He paused on the top step. “To the Planet Mongo.”
“It’s not even eight o’clock.”
“I can’t do anything about that.”
“Did you take something to eat?”
“An elephant.”
“Bring back a newspaper.”
“Certainly.”
“And a Time magazine for your father.”
“Jesus.” Hermie walked along the narrow sidewalk that had been split and repaired maybe a million times since the Spanish-American War. He felt nothing but emptiness. He passed a few houses and a few kids on rusty tricycles and a few dogs that looked better than the chicken he ate last night. And he looked up to see if his sea gull was around, but it wasn’t. Probably filling up on dead fish for a late-afternoon bombing run on his head.
Not many of the summer people were up as yet. But the freight boat was in, and that was good for a half hour of watching before you fell asleep.
Along the main drag he was once again stopped by the polka-dot bathing suit, which all of a sudden was laughing at him. A laughing bathing suit would stop any man, but soon the source of the laughter came through the store’s door in the form of two fat ladies laughing so hard that they were coughing. And the fat on their arms went jiggly-wiggly, and Hermie knew that never again would he feel the same way about that particular bathing suit.
He came out of Killerman’s Bakery with a bag of sugar-covered jelly doughnuts, freshly made and smelling of tastiness. And when he bit into the first of them, the jelly broke across his face making him look as though he’d been shot in the mouth with a dumdum bullet, which would have been illegal. The sugar, undoubtedly ersatz, cut a swath of white from ear to ear, and he continued his walk putting doughnut after doughnut deliciously away.
He paused to look into the barbershop, where a kid his age, but unknown to him, was getting a crew cut. It made him look like a hairy handball. Worse than that, the kid knew it. Hermie stood there, staring at the kid, because the whole thing looked like a freak show. That was the really worst thing about a barbershop; they always stuck you in the seat nearest the front window as if you were their advertisement. Then they covered you with a crummy sheet full of somebody else’s hair which made it look as if you were inside an anthill. And then they charged you a half a buck, and if you had the gall to not tip, they’d curse at you in a foreign language, probably Italian, and the next time you came in you could figure on a few little slices behind your ears because a barber never forgets, especi
ally if he’s one of the two barbers on the island and the other barber is his fucking brother. The kid in the chair lowered his eyes and made believe he wasn’t there. That’s how much he couldn’t stand Hermie staring at him. Then, when the barber spun the guy around and flashed a razor which he stropped about an eighth of an inch from the kid’s nose, Hermie left the scene. It was all too medieval.
He bought a Time magazine that had a picture of Jimmy Doolittle on the cover because it seemed Jimmy Doolittle had just bombed Tokyo. Hermie knew that that was pretty significant because, up till that time, the Yanks didn’t really know whether they were coming or going. It was like a home run that tied the score in the fifth inning. When you could come from behind like that, you were in good shape. Good man, Jimmy Doolittle. America is proud of you. Hermie bought a newspaper, too, and proceeded along the street trying to juggle the doughnuts, the newspaper and the Time magazine. Then he saw her, and his stomach dropped from behind his belt and filled up both his sneakers.
She was radiant. It was the only word. Radiant. With her long legs and flowing hair and green eyes, soft and limpid green eyes, how in my dreams you haunt me—but look. She was in distress. She had more bundles than she could handle. The damsel was sure as shit going to drop them. It was a job for Super Hermie. For extra strength he bit into the last jelly doughnut and immediately felt all 129 pounds of him harden, really harden.
One of her bundles tottered and began to slip, but she somehow managed to ease it to the ground before it could break open. But then, when she bent down to get a proper grip on it, another bundle began to teeter. It was a losing fight, and finally, all the bundles slipped out of her arms, and she stood there all forlorn indeed. Sadness in a pleated skirt. Helplessness in a gray cardigan.
Summer of '42 Page 5
