All-American

by John R. Tunis

  “Ok.”

  Gordon’s face brightened. He shifted the pile of books he was carrying from one arm to the other. He always took more books home than any six boys in school.

  At this moment Stacey went past. Seeing them in conversation, his glance fell contemptuously on the books under Gordon’s arm. Making a quick step toward them, he reached out and with a swift jab sent the whole pile toppling to the floor. The books rolled beneath the feet of the passing crowd.

  This was enough. He was tired of it all. Tired of the eternal “Oh, Ronny...” up and down the corridors, tired of having Gordon Brewster tag along whenever he went into the library, the cafeteria, or the boys’ room. And he was tired of Stacey. Most of all he was tired of Stacey and his annoying tricks. So he moved in. The freckled face came closer.

  “What’s the idea, Stacey?”

  “Idea of what?”

  Several boys going past stopped. There was a sudden quietness over the noisy corridor as if the crowd felt the approach of trouble. All around, the movement of boys and girls, the calling and shouting and whang-banging of lockers, died away.

  “Idea of rushing this kid all the time.”

  “Yeah... an’ who’s to stop me?”

  “Me. Right now. Cut it out, see?”

  The group, now larger, moved in closer. Gordon somewhere behind tugged anxiously at his sleeve.

  Stacey’s face became red. “You! You stop me? I’d like to see you try it, you big jerk.”

  Relief. He had to have relief. Relief could only come in action, quick, expressive. He forgot the boys and girls and other boys on the outside peering over shoulders, forgot where he was and what he was doing in the satisfaction of his fist on Stacey’s jaw. The red face reeled back, then came in, the eyes clouded with moisture, yet cold and savage. All at once he felt the pain of Stacey’s knuckles on his nose, a sharp, violent pain. He staggered.

  Then the lights went out. There was no more pain.

  III

  “Just don’t move. Stay perfectly still, don’t move.” The voice was up there, way up there, up, up, above, up there.

  Who said anything about moving? He didn’t have the slightest desire to move. Wanted to stay like that, there, motionless, forever. And ever. Up there were more voices, older voices, vaguely familiar voices floating through a film. Let’s see, where is this? The Academy? Nope, not the Academy. It’s home. Yes. No, not home either. It’s Abraham Lincoln. That’s stone, it’s cold, it’s the floor, the tiled stone floor. That’s it, Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson...

  This was like waking from a dream. Someone, several hands on each side, grasped him. He was thrown through the air, thrown, that’s what it felt like. Pains shot through his head, violent pains. Hey, lemme alone, you fellas. Lemme be. Just let me stay there, motionless on the stone floor. Why didn’t they let him stay where he was, forever and ever? And ever.

  Instead he was pulled, hauled, jostled, thrown. All the while those terrible pains in his head, so bad he didn’t want to talk. He wanted only to be let alone. Please let me alone, that’s all. A man in a white coat leaned over and asked him something but he didn’t want to talk. Go away. Let me alone, please; just let me alone, that’s all.

  Now where was he? He woke up, looked around. It was a room. It wasn’t the floor, the stone floor, the cold floor; it was a room, a strange room, and he was in a bed. Not certainly his own room in the Academy. No, nor his room at home either. Sunshine was sweeping into this room and a woman in white had his wrist. A nurse. Doggone, this is the hospital. Yep, sure as sure, it’s the hospital. She leaned over.

  “Just don’t try to talk.”

  Now why did everyone say that? He had no desire to talk, the fact was that he never felt less like talking. The pains were still there, but not so close, far away, sort of. He felt them only as in a dream, not pounding and terrible inside his head. He was in a dream. A dream, that’s it. He was going back to sleep.

  When he woke it was all different; night, and his mother was there, and then Dad. More sleep, and finally the light once more. Drip, drip, the rain spattered against the window. He felt better. The pain had almost gone. So had that strange faraway feeling, as if he was here and his body over there, someplace far away. There was a nurse there, not the same nurse; another nurse in white, who kept doing useless things such as giving him orange juice and medicine to drink. Then doctors entered.

  At last the whole thing came back clearly; the fight, the ring of boys standing around, the pain of Stacey’s fist just before the lights went out. He looked about the room curiously. It was full of flowers and the nurse was arranging them. From the class. From the principal. These were, she read the tag, from Gordon Brewster.

  That afternoon he saw his mother who didn’t say much. As he was tired he said little, too. The next day, however, he really felt better, able to eat and sit up a little. His mother came and was cheerful.

  “It’s wonderful; the X-rays don’t show a thing, Ronald.”

  “X-rays! When did they take those?”

  “That first afternoon you were brought in. You didn’t know much what was going on then. The doctors were all afraid of a fracture of the skull; but there wasn’t any, thank heavens.”

  Fracture of the skull. It sounded bad. Something that was always happening to someone else, in football or hockey. The nurse entered. “There’s a Mister Stazy or Stacy, or something, says he wants to see you as soon as he can.”

  His mother went out to meet him, and a minute later Stacey came in alone. His red hair was stiffer and straighter than ever, but over his usually grinning freckled face was a solemn and worried look. He didn’t seem the same Stacey.

  “Gee, Ronald...” His face sobered even more at the sight of the bed.

  “Hi there, Stacey...” Funny, the mere exertion of talking tired him. Just talking was hard work. Stacey stood there, awkwardly, saying nothing, staring at him with open eyes. Now he, Ronald, was on the receiving end. Or was it Stacey? That was it, Stacey was on the receiving end. You had to go through things of this sort really to understand.

  The redhead came closer to the bed. “Gee, Ronald, I feel bad about this. You dunno how bad I feel...”

  Same thing, only with Stacey on the receiving end this time. Same thing, same words. Wasn’t that about all he could stammer out one morning last fall in front of Meyer Goldman and his father? Gee, Goldman... yes, he knew how Stacey felt.

  “Forget it, Jim. It’s ok. I hit you first, anyway; I had it coming to me.” First, last, what difference did it make? When you knocked a man out, it was all the same. He knew, he understood how that stammering Irish boy felt. Why, only a few months ago he had felt exactly the same in the same kind of a room on the same floor of this same building. Didn’t some teacher somewhere say that history repeated itself?

  “Aw, say, Ronald, look here... look, you’re coming ok, aren’t you? You’re gonna come through all right....”

  “Sure. Sure I’m ok. It just knocked me out, that’s all. Seems like those tiled floors are harder than my head.” He tried to laugh, he did laugh, and a twinge of pain shot up the back of his neck. He moved uneasily. Stacey noticed it immediately.

  “No fooling! Honest to goodness, are you better? Are you? Look, Ronald, I didn’t mean to lay you out on purpose, honest I didn’t. I just got mad and hit back, that’s all.”

  Same words, same situation, same feeling. He knew, he understood. You had to go through things like this, to hit a man and almost cripple him, you had to be on the receiving end before you understood.

  “I getcha, Jim. Don’t worry; it’s nothing, and I’m all right.” Then a thought struck him. “Hey, Jim! Sorta looks like we’re all square now, doesn’t it?”

  Stacey was puzzled at first. Then he got it. “Oh. You mean for Meyer Goldman?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Uhuh. Guess so. Say, you understand, don’t you, Ronald? You understand how it was?”

  “I understand, b
etter’n you could think, Jim. Just forget it all.”

  “An’ about Brewster. Gee, I’m sorry I pestered that kid. I never realized, exactly. Only sometimes he just sort of, well, I dunno, he sort of...”

  “Yeah. I understand. He’s irritating often, that kid is. He doesn’t mean to be.”

  “I know. I’ve cut that all out; it’s over, see, Ronald?”

  “That’s fine, Jim. I’m glad.”

  “So hurry up and get well, will you? We’re gonna have some ball team this spring; we could sure use you out there in the field. Practice begins next week, so try and make it.”

  It was the first time anyone at Abraham Lincoln had needed him or said they needed him. Also the first time anyone had spoken of the school as “we” to him. He wanted to say something, but just then the nurse poked her face in the room and began making signs to Stacey. Then he noticed there were pains in his head once more.

  “Yeah, an’ one more thing.” Stacey edged toward the door. “She never called you up at all, Ronny; she never did it.”

  Ronny sat up. The sudden movement sent a burst of pain up the back of his head; but he didn’t care. “What d’you mean? She didn’t...”

  Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to mention her name. “She didn’t? What d’you mean; how d’you mean, Jim?”

  “Nope. She never knew a thing about the whole affair. It was all my gag. All of it. I planned it, see, ’cause I saw she liked you from the first day you came to Abraham Lincoln. So I got Helen Kempner, that’s the big girl with glasses, the one she’s always going round with; you know the one, don’t you?”

  Ronald knew. From his earliest days at the Academy he had noticed that good-looking girls always went around with homely ones. That’s how girls were.

  “Yeah. Uhuh, I remember her.”

  “Well, she’s the one who called you up that night, ’cause she can talk like Sandra, see. Then she went and got Sandra to come riding with us, and I showed up there at the corner just when I knew you’d come along. She never knew a thing about it. Honest.”

  “Oh!” A weight fell off. Then he hadn’t been framed. It wasn’t at all what he had supposed.

  “Say! That’s good. I’m mighty glad you told me, Jim. Honest, I feel better about it.”

  “Yep. I thought I oughta tell you all this. ’Nother thing. Here’s the latest number of the school paper, you’d be sure to see it sometime anyway. It was all made up and ready to print before... before the accident. So don’t pay attention to what it says there about you, will you? Remember that evening was all my idea, every bit of it. Well, I gotta shove along. Get outa here quick, Ronny; we sure need you in that-there team.”

  “You bet, Jim. I’ll be back soon, won’t I, nurse?” The nurse didn’t hear. She was urging Stacey toward the door.

  He leaned back, his head aching now. Well, it was almost worth it, all of it, the pain, the discomfort, the absence from school with all that Latin for Mrs. Taylor to make up; why, that alone would mean lots of evenings working at home. Yet it was worth it to know what had really happened. To know she had never called him up, that she hadn’t fixed it with Stacey, hadn’t pulled a fast one. What did it matter if they laughed, if the school paper wrote it up? He looked at the copy of the Mercury left on the bed.

  “Speaking as we were above of wolves, what a wolf our new junior acquisition from the Academy, Ronald Perry, turned out to be! At present he is wolfing in the direction of Sandra Fuller. We hear she loves to date him. (But definitely.)”

  5

  I

  HE WALKED DOWN the corridor with its gray and black square tiles on the floor and the murals of baseball, football, and basketball on the side walls. How fresh and new and clean it was; how strange and different all this had seemed that first morning back in January. Now it was familiar. Those figures hitting home runs and throwing passes had once seemed amazing; now he hardly noticed them in his daily movements about the building. Except when, as today, he’d been away from the place a while. He passed the drinking fountain set back at one side. On the second floor there was another fountain just like it, and above that on the third floor another, near his locker where the fight had occurred. The strangeness of the place was gone. He was coming back to a school he knew.

  And to people he knew. They surged toward him down the hall, girls in sweaters with their arms intertwined, boys in windbreakers and checked shirts. They all spoke, some of them half-eagerly, and many stopped him. He was a stranger no more.

  “Hullo, there, Ronny...”

  “How you feel, Ronald?”

  “Hey, Ronny, you ok again?”

  “Can you play ball, Ronny? Will they leave you play ball now?”

  “Will they let you play, will they?”

  “Hullo, Ronald. Everything all right?”

  “Hi there, Ronny, how you feel?”

  “Hullo, Mac. Hullo, George, glad to see you. Yeah, I’m ok. How are you, Chester?... Hullo, Mike.... Hullo, Ruth.... Hullo, Dave. Sure I’m ok. Yep, I’m gonna play baseball if I’m good enough to make the team. Why, sure I mean it.

  Hullo, Gene. Hullo, Susie. Hullo, Ned, why, Ned, how are you?”

  The Negro shuffled up with his hand held out in a friendly gesture. Golly, he’s actually smiling, thought Ronald. That’s something, isn’t it? Takes a man being knocked out to make that kid grin.

  And look, there’s Meyer! Meyer without that horrible leather neckpiece. “Why, Meyer, how are you, boy? Gee, it’s good to see you again! How long you been back? You have? That’s super. Me? Sure I’m ok; don’t I look ok? Well, I am. Sure I’ll play ball; I will if I’m good enough....” It was great to have Meyer in school. Ronald had seen so much of him in a bedroom with that leather neckguard that he hardly looked natural without it.

  Then from a distance he saw a familiar freckled face topped by a bristle of straight red hair approaching. Some of the crowd standing around saw him coming also and moved aside as he drew near.

  “Hey! Hey there, Ronny!” He waved.

  “Hullo, Jim.” Then he felt himself grabbed by the arm.

  “Here we are, all three of us together.” Now he had Meyer by one arm, too.

  “That’s right, Ronny...”

  “Yessir, that’s right. Here we are, all three of us together.” Arm in arm, that was the way they moved down the corridor. Stacey in the middle, Ronald on one side, and Goldman on the other.

  “There’s a musical assembly in the auditorium. The band’ll play and the Glee Club’ll sing. It’s for the Scholarship Fund. You got ten cents, you guys? C’mon.” They were moving toward the crowd at the door, a crowd that had for some time been pushing in.

  “C’mon.” He grabbed their arms again and together the three went down the aisle.

  Someone called to Ronald. He heard his name, his first name. “Hey, Ronny, hey there, Ronny...” He felt Stacey’s arm, tight in his own. It made him warm and comfortable inside, it almost gave him a kind of glow. At last he was one of them, he was a part of the school, he was a stranger no more. They moved into their seats, Stacey in the middle, Ronald on one side and Goldman on the other. That was the way they sat all the rest of their time at Abraham Lincoln High.

  In between classes later on it was the same thing. Boys he hardly knew, girls he had hardly seen, came up to welcome him back, to say they were glad he was well and with them again. They greeted him on the narrow stairs, in the long corridors, in the library, in the cafeteria. At lunch Jim slouched over with his tray and sat down next to Ronny.

  “Now look here, Ronald, what are we going to do about this-here kid, Brewster?”

  “I know. I was thinking about that. I’ve been thinking about him a whole lot. He sticks closer than a Scotch uncle; in fact he got so on my nerves last month...”

  “Same here. After you... after, I mean while you were in the hospital he changed over to me, and I had him all day—morning, noon, and night.”

  “You telling me! Well, I have an idea, or sort of an idea, ab
out that kid. What do you say to this, Jim? It would take up some time and do him lots of good, too, if, now, we went to work and made him...”

  “Hullo, Ronny. Hullo, Jim. Mind if I sit opposite you guys?”

  “Why, hullo, Gordon. No, of course not. Sit down.”

  “Sure, sure, sit right down, Gordon. About that thing, Jim, I’ll talk to you and tell you my ideas after the next period.”

  When school was over, Ronald walked upstairs to his locker. This time Gordon was not waiting; on the contrary, he had to go to Gordon’s locker down the hall to find him. As usual that energetic student was piling up a Mount Everest of books to carry home.

  “Hi there, Ronny! You don’t have to wait. I don’t need to ride home with you anymore; me and Jim are friends now.”

  “I know all that; but justa same, Gordon...”

  “Jim’s swell to me now; we get on all right. You don’t need to wait, Ronny, honest you don’t.”

  “Yes, I know that, Gordon. But Jim and I want to ride a ways home with you. If you don’t mind, that is, Gordon.”

  “No. Of course not.” At the bottom of the stairs Jim was waiting. They left the building, got their bikes, and started down Harrison. Into West Avenue. They were nearing Gordon’s usual turn.

  “Well, s’long, you fellas. I’ll see you tomorrow.

  “Hold on, wait a minute, Gordon; we’d like you to come along with us a piece.”

  “Where? Which way? What for?”

  “To the Y,” said Jim and Ronny together.

  “To the Y!” Gordon nearly fell off his bike.

  There was a trace of alarm in his voice. “To the Y! What for?” He looked at them with concern. “What do you want me to go to the Y for?”

  “You’ll see.” They rode on in silence. Down West Avenue into South Main to the traffic light and then up North Main. The brick Y loomed ahead. They yanked their bikes into the basement entrance.

  “This is where we want to go, down here,” said Jim. “Come on, Gordon.” They passed through a small office, down a passageway, and opening a door entered a gymnasium. A man in white trousers and a white undershirt was pounding a bag.