by Kent Meyers
He stood in the rhomboid of light, the race hanging from his fingers. The mechanic turned from his engine.
You need something?
Eddie stared at a grease spot in the cement. It looked like a horse trying to run.
The mechanic, holding his ratchet, rubbed the side of his nose with the back of his wrist. His hand put a dark stain in the blond fuzz on his face. He nodded at the bearing race.
You want that there piece a junk, go ahead. Ain’t worth nothing to me.
The marbles, Eddie said. He held the grass-laced thing up, cupped in his hand, a mechanical nest with hard, perfect eggs.
Marbles?
I can’t get em out. The steelies. I tried, but—
The white man dropped his ratchet onto the bench and grinned.
Shit! he said. Bring that sonofabitch over here.
He took the race from Eddie and gazed down at it reverently.
Those’d make a helluva shooter, huh? he said.
Eddie nodded.
Well, let’s get them sonsabitches out.
He banged the race down on a metal table. Eddie watched the marvel of a cutting torch—the flint spark, the snap of the flame, the lazy, orange sheet of the acetylene turning hard and blue as steel itself when the oxygen pushed into it, the grass shriveling and blackening before the flame even reached it, and then the metal brightening, glowing—and finally the extra blast of oxygen that turned the flame into a claw that pried the race apart, spraying sparks. A steelie, freed, clunked onto the cement floor. Eddie bent for it.
No! Kid!
The white man’s voice paralyzed him. He stared at the floor, grinning.
Sorry, kid. I ain’t mad at you. It’s, that bastard’s hot as hell. Wait till I’m done.
The mechanic cut the rest of the bearings out, then picked them off the floor with pliers, held them in a tank of dirty water, then dried them with a terry cloth as carefully as if they were china. One-by-one he laid them in Eddie’s palm—steelies tinged blue as tiny skies, one-inch round and deliciously heavy.
Jesus, the mechanic said. You got yourself a gold mine there. Wisht I’d a thought a that when I was a kid.
The next day Eddie brought two of the steelies to school in his pocket. They pressed against his leg when he walked. At recess he stood over the hunched players, rolling the steelies between his fingers.
I’m in, he finally managed.
Faces swiveled, squinting. Bill Lipking sneered.
You gotta have marbles to challenge, Little Brain.
Eddie withdrew his hand from his pocket, held it out, opened his fingers.
Trade one’ve these for five cat’s-eyes.
Wow. Look’t em. Where’d you get em? A chorus of voices.
Eddie closed his fist. Anybody? he asked.
It turned into an auction. He ended up with eight cat’s-eyes, from Bill Lipking himself, who recognized in the steelies a threat and knew enough to buy it out. Eddie lost his eight new marbles, but the next day came to school with another steelie. As the mechanic had said, a gold mine. By the time he’d traded his fourth steelie, he owned the game. His thumb wrapped itself backwards around a marble so naturally it seemed an extension of his eyes.
The girls came to the games, jump ropes coiled, to coo over the kneeling boys. Eddie’s pockets began to bulge. One day his grandmother’s eyes widened when he walked out the door.
Takoja, she said. Are you all right?
Sure, Grandma, I’m fine.
You’re not hurting—down there? She jutted her lips at his crotch.
He shook his head.
What do you have in your pockets, then?
He hesitated, then brought up a gleaming fistful of cat’s-eyes.
His grandmother stared.
You didn’t steal those?
He was dismayed.
No. I won em.
I’m sorry, takoja. Why are you carrying them in your pockets?
Got nothing else.
She looked out the window. He realized he’d hurt her.
I like em in my pockets, he said.
You could get a hole.
She disappeared into the lean-to at the back of the kitchen and returned with a canning jar. Eddie could read the word Ball on it. The word seemed made of light, all those reflecting edges and angles. She tilted the jar for him, and he rolled the marbles into it. They filled it half-up—a silent new world, brooding on its own splendor, the marbles’ gleamings magnified by the etched and curving glass.
He kept the jar on the flat shelf at the top of his wooden desk, next to the groove where his pencil stubs lay, and where some ancient student named Rodney Valen had immortalized, with a jackknifed heart and arrow, his love for Cassie Janisch. Eddie’s prowess at the game had affected even the teacher. She never asked him to remove the jar. It was like a trophy in the drab room. No one, boy or girl, would pick it up to look at it without asking his permission. One day when the teacher was out of the room, Bill Lipking, from his seat two rows over, said: Hey, Little Brain, what’s with the jar? You canning those marbles? You and your granny eat em?
Bill looked around triumphantly but was met with silence. Then Sophie Lawrence, who sat at the front of the room and never said anything, not even when she was called on, spoke. She stared down, her nose inches from the top of her desk, but her voice filled the whole room:
If you don’t like them in that jar, Bill, win them away from him.
The class tittered. Bill slunk down in his desk, red rising up his neck. Sophie met Eddie’s eyes, then bowed her head to her desk again.
The jar changed time. If Eddie gazed into it and followed the helixes, the way the curved lines, extended in his mind, connected to other lines and curves, until the blues and reds and yellows and greens blurred into a glowing pudding of light—then the clock hands suddenly jumped, and the bell would be ringing for recess.
But he didn’t understand the change on the playground when he ran a streak of three games against Bill Lipking. He’d beaten Bill before, but never three times in a row, and never so convincingly. As the second game progressed, excitement grew within the circle of boys, and wows and Jesuses, and Holy shits erupted when Eddie knocked Bill’s final marble from the ring, while a half-dozen of his own remained, placid as posts, within. The third time the girls formed a standing circle behind the kneeling boys, but the atmosphere had changed. Bill hardly got to play. After his first miss a groan went up, and then silence as Eddie leaned into the asphalt, his nose touching, the steelie a perfect, miniature egg in the nest of his knuckles. Then it flashed, and cracked so hard against one of Bill’s marbles a tiny shard of glass glittered over the heads of the girls, and Bill’s marble wobbled from the ring, lines of sunlight crazed within it. Eddie was so intent he didn’t notice the collective sigh or the slumping shoulders or even, as the game progressed and the outcome became apparent, the girls wandering off in pairs.
He looked up, as if waking, from the ring emptied of all marbles but his own, at a ragged circle of somber faces. He held out his hand, but Bill glared at it, refusing the ritual of picking his marbles up and placing them in the victor’s palm. Sophie was the only girl still watching. She stood to the side, a clear space between herself and the boys. Her hair hung straight down around her ears and forehead, and she looked at the ground when she spoke:
You’ve got to, Bill. It’s only fair.
But power had shifted in Bill’s favor. This is bullshit, he said, and walked away. The remaining boys grunted to their feet and followed. Eddie felt the weightlessness of his hand. He’d wanted to feel Bill’s fingers placing the marbles there. He crawled to where his winnings lay scattered, but it was like picking up dull stones. Sophie squatted down and helped him, but he felt no comfort in her companionship, and when she held out the marbles she’d gathered he nodded at the Ball jar instead of taking them. When he picked the jar up he had to balance it carefully to keep the heaped marbles from rolling out. The fractured one he put on top. It was li
ke a world of stilled and stilted lightning. Just touching it made him shiver.
The two of them stared at it. Then Sophie turned her head to the ground again and said very quietly: You shouldn’t have won.
At school he never got angry. Some kids could get away with it, but he’d learned that for him it only, ever, made things worse. But he was suddenly very angry.
Who wants to lose? he sneered.
Sophie shrank away from him but recovered. She wrapped her arms around herself.
No one, she said.
Well?
He thought maybe she would go away. But she said: You should miss on purpose. But make it look like you’re trying not to.
That’d be stupid, he said. You’re just a girl.
She flinched. He felt bad, even though what he’d said seemed justified. He walked away, then turned back. She was a forlorn heap. He started toward her, and she lifted her head, but the shrill bell suddenly insisted, and they were at the far end of the playground, and he couldn’t run with the jar so full; he had to go right now.
That evening he asked his grandmother for another jar. He put half the marbles in it and placed it under the lamp in the living room next to her chair. While she beaded she looked up at the jar, and once her hand went out to touch it. The jar made a silence. Words wanted to go into it. She began to talk to him in a way she never had before. She spoke of her childhood, and her father. She spoke of a place called Wounded Knee and of Hotchkiss cannon. Eddie loved the word, it sounded like butterscotch and chocolate. But she said the Hotchkiss made a killing hail that fell and fell and fell. It poured down from the hill above the people. They couldn’t run. They were trapped, and it poured down. She was a baby, but her mother told her. Sometimes at night she hears a sound of thunder when there are no clouds. It is like memory coming from a place before memory. Her mother and father had been at another place, dancing with ghosts. Coming back, they heard the Hotchkiss. Her father rode ahead to help, but this was a new thing. He couldn’t comprehend it. He lost the four directions. When he finally remembered where he’d left his wife and daughter, he knew one thing only, to flee. They started north and met another family. On the second day her father and the other man were scouting. The women heard shots. They stopped and waited. A whole day. Finally, afraid, they turned back toward Pine Ridge. They knew.
When his grandmother finished talking, she picked the jar up and held it. She looked into all the colors there. Eddie held the story.
The next day when he went to the chalk circle, no group coalesced around him. Rather than clustering where the playground was paved, the boys were scattered on the gravel and weedy grass. Eddie called. He shook his jar. No one turned his way. He walked to boy after boy, asking if they wanted to play, but they continued with their games of tag as if Eddie had no voice. Finally, he intercepted Bill.
Wanna play marbles?
Bill barreled toward Eddie, chased by It, then dodged the tag. It clumped past him.
Nice try, Bigfoot, Bill sneered. Take off those skis, you could run faster.
He stopped before Eddie.
Time, he called. He put his hands on his knees, then skewed his eyes up at Eddie.
Do I look like I wanna play marbles?
I’ll spot you five.
Bill took a long, ragged breath. He spit.
Spot your pants, he said. That game’s boring.
Bill watched It jerk and reach, other boys shrinking into themselves, twitching away from It’s outstretched arm.
Everyone’s sick of it, he said. Play by yourself if you think it’s so fun.
Eddie looked into Bill’s freckled, lovely face.
He held the canning jar up.
You can have em, he said. All of em.
It wasn’t begging or benevolence. He saw the jar held up to Bill, his own hands holding it, and it seemed a thing of beauty, and he went soft inside with giving. He wanted Bill to smile and take the marbles, and then he wanted to win them back, so that Bill would one-by-one return them, his fingers lightly pressing Eddie’s palm as Eddie knelt on the warm asphalt. He understood what Sophie Lawrence had said: he could cheat backwards, which wouldn’t be cheating at all, and he could maintain the game forever, touching Bill’s palm, letting Bill touch his, the exchange of marbles going both ways while he got better and better, no longer knocking marbles from the ring but nicking them, spinning them, missing them by tolerances he determined, bringing them to rest on the chalk line itself, in or out as need be, the game completely his, even its rules and the reasons for playing. Eddie wanted Bill, right now, to reach out and take the jar and lift its satisfying weight and put his arm around Eddie’s shoulders and draw him close. He wanted the sound and feel of Bill’s panting in his ear.
Greed brightened Bill’s eyes. He raised his hand. But a cunning look came to his face.
I don’t want your stupid marbles, he said. Figure it out. No one’s playing anymore.
Suddenly Eddie was tagged so hard he stumbled, and the marbles rattled up the sides of the jar. He took several steps, crouching low, to keep from falling.
Real graceful, Bill Lipking sneered. Guess you’re It. Who you gonna catch holding that dumb jar?
All around Eddie kids whirled away from him. But he refused to be It, though they howled with betrayal. He walked away. Standing by herself near the school building, Sophie Lawrence watched him, but he didn’t go to her.
That afternoon he took the jar of marbles off his desk when he went home. Where the road crossed the marshland along Red Medicine Creek, he spun like a discus thrower, holding the jar far from his body. A crescent of colors sprayed outward, as if he were the center of a rainbow failing even as it formed. He looked at the marsh: grass and water and cattails. All the marbles had disappeared. The earth had swallowed them as easily as it had his grandmother’s father. They would never come out again. Eddie cocked his arm to throw the jar, then remembered it was his grandmother’s. He returned it to the shelves in the lean-to. The jar of marbles under the lamp he also threw away, and for the first time in his life lied to his grandmother, saying he’d lost a big game. He felt a tiny contempt for her when she believed him. He threw his remaining steelies at crows, missing every one.
Lowell was never able to tell Lorena how the wheels stopped fighting him, and the trailer slid in behind the cab like a skier inside a wake. Terror and ecstasy: the best driving he’d ever done, the culmination of all those miles that stood between him and Lorena, the way she wouldn’t kiss him goodbye when he left but always had something to do, vacuuming or dishes, or Abbie in her arms, wouldn’t even watch him go, as if she wouldn’t give him a place in her eyes anymore that he could empty. Goddamn! What was he supposed to do? Truck stops, Jesus! He’d resisted, but there’d been that evening when he got into the cab to drive all night, buzzing on alcohol and caffeine, cheating on his logs to make the extra buck, for Lorena, goddammit, and that little lot lizard had appeared out of nowhere beneath his window, her tits about bursting from her halter-top, her perky face looking up at him and seeing where his eyes were going, and then that little-girl voice, You wanta feel, you may’s well, honey. Won’t cost you nothing, and he laughing, saying, Since it’s a free country, thinking, What kinda man wouldn’t cop a feel? and he didn’t know what Lorena was doing when he was gone anyway, he’d asked her to come with him on the hauls, but she insisted that house they bought in Colorado Springs needed someone in it, but she liked partying and hadn’t given up her old friends when she married him, and if he’d never found any real evidence, still, every time he came home he could imagine other men in the house. So he reached down and shoved his hand right into that halter-top, and the next thing she’s climbing into the cab and the rest wasn’t free, so he had to drive even longer, until it was just years and truck-stop whores and miles.
But somehow Lorena’d known. The worst evening of his life. She’d accused him, and he’d tried to deny it, thinking she couldn’t really know, he’d always waited at least five
hundred miles, like the song said. But she’d been like a jackhammer: Just admit it, Lowell! Admit it, you coward! Until he’d shouted, Goddammit, then, yes!
He’d wanted to hurt her—for making him say it, for not pretending it was secret.
Yeah, I’ve been screwing around! he yelled. Every time I go on the road! I’m like railroad tracks, Lorena! I been laid all over this great, fucking nation. I probably screwed someone in every fucking state a the Union except Alaska and Hawaii, and I’d a screwed there if my rig could fly. But you don’t gotta drive to screw, Lorena! You telling me you sit in this house and crochet when I’m gone? Why ain’t the walls covered in afghans?
Then they’d been so ashamed, for each other and for themselves, that for a while they’d prowled around the living room like two cats silent and bristling, arched, and somehow they’d circled right into each other, all body, Lorena’s nails scratching his back and neck, drawing blood, and her voice whispering in his ear: Goddamn you, goddamn you, and there they were, fucking like he couldn’t believe right on top of that new Stainmaster carpet he’d installed.
And then Abbie. Jesus, he really had been sorry then. He really had. Abbie. The cord wrapped around her neck and a breech, so they had to do a cesarean, and they brought her to him while Lorena was still in recovery, and he had a half-hour holding the newborn in his arms, alone in a quiet room in the obstetrics ward. He’d had no idea how much a baby’s sleeping could still a person, set a person down in a single place. He hated the nurse who finally entered the room, yet when she held out her arms, he placed Abbie in them. Why hadn’t he curled around Abbie and made a cave of his arms, and growled and spat, snapped at the nurse? Abbie was his. But he couldn’t resist that smooth, assured, professional, female face. He rose from the chair and shambled obediently after her and watched as Lorena held up her arms, still a bit groggy, and claimed the child. Cradled to herself what had for a half-hour been his entire life. To get Abbie back, he would have to ask, Can I hold her again? Like a little boy.
