Winning the City Redux

by Theodore Weesner

  Out in cool air, still warm from showering, Dale acknowledges that he has to go home, if only to see if his father is still alive. It’s a walk of a mile and he takes his time, trying not to think of anything, looking to gutters in search of lost treasure. He could be back in first grade . . . looking for dimes or quarters where cars parked and keys had been pulled from pockets.

  In time, crossing Chevrolet Avenue and going along, there is the house wherein they rent the third floor. Patsy Cline is not singing from the windows and the third floor—their compressed apartment with slanted ceilings—is not smoking or in flames. Things haven’t gone that far. Not yet.

  Dale looks for his father’s car. The presence of the green Chevy would be a giveaway. There at the wrong time, it means his father has missed work and is juiced. In an early stage of intoxication, he might be in thrall to something by Hank Williams or Jimmy Rodgers circling the phonograph turntable. Or, of course, he might be lying there dead, as some one day he would have to be.

  Or, as it happened—if not recently—his father might be fun to be with, would have Dale snickering on enticing a fly to land on a fingertip to feed on sugar, or shedding tears of laughter at some story of growing up in Kansas . . . as they made a run for fish and chips or, in summer, drove to the lake for a swim in cool green water. Years ago, when the world was young, when bottles, drinking, and music were closer to hilarity and happiness than to defeat and despair.

  No car. Dale looks carefully. Experiences relief. The Chevy isn’t there. Still, it’s only as Dale is eating Franco-American from a saucepan, cross-cutting the orange mess, that he wonders if the woman might have urged his father to get it together and to get to work on time. It may have been the first time Dale considered that a certain woman in his father’s sad life might be more answer than problem. For his father—the thought raises a film over his eyes—wasn’t a bad guy at heart. He hadn’t always been a mess.

  # # #

  CITY LEAGUE. As he puts away the last spoonful, he’s thinking that tomorrow, as early as tomorrow, he’ll get together with Sonny Joe and confirm the team they’ll enter this year in City League. Ten players, Dale thinks. No more than ten. It’s been next to impossible keeping the name to himself, but tomorrow, at last, he’ll pass it on to Sonny Joe. The Blue Arrows. Dale continues to like it. But with disclosure to his teammates pending, so do his doubts resurface. In his spiral notebook, opening to a clean page, he prints across the top:

  THE BLUE ARROWS

  Cool. What a name. It’s better than the Tigers or the Northern High School Vikings or the Central High School Indians. It’s so much better, too, than begging some car dealer or siding company to act as a sponsor. And this is the time to spring it. Two weeks ahead of time. It will show yet again that leadership is an arrow that Dale Wheeler has in his quiver. Initiative. Foresight. He has those things . . . because he knows he does! He’s not some kid who waits to be told what to do. He’s a kid who does the thinking, and the telling. It’s why he’s co-captain already of his school team and why he’ll be co-captain of his City League team, too! The Blue Arrows.

  What goes on in the heads of others? Dale wonders. TV shows? To grow a DA or not? To get a Mohawk or a buzz cut?

  His mind keeps anticipating the finale at season’s end. City Auditorium at last, where the big high schools and the Harlem Globetrotters play . . . where he had yet to drain a single shot. Two, three, four thousand show up for City League finals, not least of all high school coaches with their clipboards and, as always, it’ll be ten times as exciting as anything that ever happens in Scholastic Conference. Yet again, Dale can hardly wait. They only have to guard against overconfidence, he reminds himself. Over-confidence and under-confidence. Thinking hard, he adds other dreams to the name he’s invented for City League:

  Win the City.

  Be co-captain.

  Drive a car.

  Do it with a Girl.

  Do it with Zona Kaplan as the Girl.

  Turn everything around.

  Be a star in high school.

  He sings out “Hey! Mister Tambourine Man . . . play a song for me!” knowing he will never list his longing for his father’s sobriety, or his dream of saving his father’s life, in fear of his impossible dream being dashed on the wings of asking too much. (Which isn’t to say it isn’t his deepest dream.)

  To divert his thoughts he takes up the Official Rule Book Coach Burke gave him as co-captain and begins reading. Twenty-six pages of small print. He’ll be ready, he tells himself. No ref will ever catch him off guard. No way. Not as a co-captain who thinks of things. Not as a leader who can show the speed and do the deed! “I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to!” he hums on, absorbing one rule after another.

  CHAPTER 13

  “MAN, WE GOT A TEAM,” SONNY JOE SAYS TO HIM.

  Dale just called Sonny Joe an asshole in the hallway, is expecting a reply in kind, and doesn’t understand what the lanky boy means to say. Light is poor near metal Shop, the afternoon hour is darkening, and they’re walking hard. Running into Joe, Dale let out that it was time to set up their meeting, time to firm up their roster and confirm a name for their team. (As if he doesn’t know what the name of their team will be!)

  “Who has a team . . . what do you mean?” Dale replies, thinking at the same time that he has to recover from Metal Shop a copper bracelet dipped in chrome he’s hoping to find a way to give to Zona Kaplan without declaring his feelings for her.

  “What I said, bird brain. We got a team . . . and a sponsor. Burkebutt’s letting us use the gym nights after dinner.”

  “Who’s doing what?” Dale asks, even as awareness—a shape in the leaves thought to be a branch being seen to have eyes and diamond markings, to be thick and alive—is coming home to him. He hears himself say, as Joe strides on, “No one told me anything. Since when? What do you mean?”

  “You’re not on it,” Joe tells him.

  “Not on what?” Dale asks, his words ringing off-key and awful, even to himself. “What are you saying? I don’t get it.”

  “Just what I said.”

  “I don’t get it. What do you mean I’m not on it?”

  “Mr. Bothner put together a team for City League. We met at their house last night. Have a sponsor . . . everything’s all set.”

  “Last night—? At their house? Nobody told me anything about any of that.”

  “Hey, Wheels, don’t blame me,” Joe says. “We met at their horse farm with our fathers, to firm it all up.”

  “But nobody told me anything about it.”

  “That’s because you’re not on the team, bird brain.”

  “How can I not be on the team?”

  “Search me,” Joe says.

  “What sponsor?” Dale manages to say as his heart is all but literally breaking.

  “Look, don’t take it out on me,” Joe says, raising a palm.

  “Who’s taking anything out on you? What sponsor? I don’t get it.”

  “Flintstone Truckers. Some company Mr. Bothner owns, is on the board of, something . . . I don’t know. Listen, man, gotta go, gotta go.”

  “Who’s on it?” Dale hears himself call in someone else’s voice. He means to sound reasonable, but his voice is no longer his own. The message from Joe is a knife in the heart, a knife he cannot believe is there all the while he knows that it is, and knows that it cannot not be removed.

  Dale stands looking down the hallway through a scattering of students. He hardly knows what he’s doing, or where he’s going. He has class to attend, he knows that, but which class, in which direction? He isn’t going to cry, he knows that much. Joe’s message keeps knifing into him and is so unbelievable it doesn’t make sense. He is not on what he regarded as his team? A nightmare he has walked into is what it is, for otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. Mr. Bothner has formed a City League team that does not include him? They got together with their fathers? How could he get together with his father when his father works sec
ond shift and was half in the bag besides?

  Has class started? Given the emptiness of the hallway, Dale knows that it has, though he cannot recall having heard the second bell. Walking on, he sees he’s walking toward metal Shop. No one is peeking around a corner, waiting to spring and hoot at how easily he was just had by Sonny Joe.

  He walks on . . . has a class. Has to get to class as in a nightmare, even as he knows yet again that a knife is moving into his chest on its way into his heart.

  Flintstone Truckers. The name impresses him. Yeah, it’s cooler than the Blue Arrows, may be the coolest name he’s ever heard. That and other things Joe said keep jumping up too rapidly to fall into place or to be denied. They have a team and he isn’t on it? How can they think of something like that when it isn’t their team at all, but his team? Isn’t it? Hasn’t it been his team since seventh Grade? Isn’t he co-captain? Well, practically co-captain with Sonny Joe?

  CHAPTER 14

  GLANCING THROUGH THE GLASS HALF OF A CLASSROOM door, information keeps jumping up in Dale’s mind and he cannot escape the knife in his chest, the disbelief, the crazed heartsick terror that has him in its grip. None of this can be, he tells himself, struggling yet again not to cry. They wouldn’t do this to him. Would they? What sense does it make? Everyone knows he’s good. Has he been too proud? Too cocky? Is that what it is, him thinking he’s hot shit? Is it because his father drinks and can’t go to someone’s horse farm in Fenton Meadows to put a team together and plan a season? Is that what it is?

  Inside the classroom, Dale grows aware of himself staring through a window. A ribbon of sky and pencil lines of telephone wires cross where he has never noticed them before. The knife keeps moving and hurting—his throat and stomach are helpless against filling as if with blood and tears—letting him know he’s being closed out of the dream he’s been dreaming every day of his life through seventh, eighth, and ninth grades.

  Sky and wires. Telephone poles. Tree branches. He sees them through glossy eyes and knows as his throat is filling that he is helpless against disintegrating, has to either run or explode. A gasp and a cry escape his throat. He nearly bawls, trying to hold in a fullness that has him recalling wetting his pants at age five, piss running down his leg while his heart went to pieces and he slipped beyond control, knowing everyone would see the wet stain, even the girls.

  Rising, he circles the rear of the room to the door, having little idea what he’s doing. “Dale—?” Mrs. Wright is asking behind him.

  In the empty hallway, he walks on and away. Miss Furbish’s room is ahead and his thought is to cry out to her for help. If he does, he knows he might fall to begging her to remove the knife from his chest, to please undo what is being done to him, to spare his dreams and life. Maybe Miss Furbish would speak to Coach Burke, to Mr. Bothner, would tell them they cannot do what they’re doing to this young man because he does his work and can think on his feet, that they better get busy and undo what they’re doing right now or, grown men or not, she will have them staying after school and cleaning blackboards and erasers for the rest of their lives.

  CHAPTER 15

  DALE DOES NOT GO TO HER ROOM, AS MUCH HE WANTS TO BE in the presence of anyone who will be on his side. Eyes filling, he presses toward the main door, face down.

  In outside air he begins to lope as if to escape what he knows cannot be left behind. Slowing, gasping tears, he crosses the street, proceeds on a side street, straining not to break as his heart and body are threatening to do. If only he might collapse like a child in the long-ago heartbreak of having his dog hit by a car and dying in his lap on the curb, gazing at him with dark eyes and blood seeping from his nose. If only he could hold in his arms and contain like his dog Blackie that which is destroying him now.

  The hurt remains alive and Dale knows it will not be going away. Nor does he know where to go, with school underway and practice after school scheduled as usual. The knife is painful in his heart, he knows that. He’s been stabbed and will bleed no matter where he tries to hide. Is it because his father is a factory worker and an alcoholic and a hillbilly and everyone else has mothers and houses and goes to church and has Sunday dinners? Is it because he dared to presume winning the City and turning everything around for him and his father? Is it because they don’t have any money like people in his school are said to have money? Is the dream he worked for being taken from him so it can be given to others? Is that what it is? That he hit on something valuable and someone with money has decided to take it away?

  Dale continues gasping not to break into tears, trying to stifle one sob after another. In his confusion, he presses into shrubs beside a house and wonders if there is any way he can ask someone to get a message to his father at Plant Ten, to say it’s Dale and that he needs his help?

  Were they losers, him and his father? Tearing and pinching leaves, fearing they are losers, Dale tries to entertain a thought nonetheless of his father beating them up, making them sorry, making them let him be on the team he deserved to be on even as he keeps knowing his dream has been smashed like a glass bowl. Inhaling in the shrubs, he recalls the time Mr. Boatwright picked on him and he went home to get his father, and for a moment he seems to believe there is something his father can do and how sorry they’re going to be. He was fighting smelly Jimmy Boatwright in the dirt, beating him up, letting him have it in the face when Mr. Boatwright lifted him up from behind and held his arms while his son slugged him, until he jerked free, said it had been a fair fight! it wasn’t fair to hold somebody! that he better watch it because he was going home to get his father!

  His muscular father. When he asked Dale how big the guy was (Mr. Boatwright, a string bean, was inches taller) Dale said he wasn’t that big, and his father tossed off a double shot. “Let’s go show the sonofabitch what we’re made of,” he said, and Dale had never felt so proud as on their walk down Lyon Street and onto Boatwright’s porch, where the man’s tub of a wife crowded ahead of the string bean behind their locked screen door and started sobbing, “George, you are not going out there!” as if in a million years George would be going anywhere, whereupon his father leveled a finger at the man behind his fat wife and told him if he ever put a hand on his son again he’d need a hell of a lot more than a screen door to keep him from meeting his maker.

  CHAPTER 16

  DALE KEEPS ENTERING AND DEPARTING THE TORTURE OF what is being done to him. Maybe an hour has passed, and he has an idea at last of something he can do. Coach Burke. It isn’t fair, he imagines telling the man. It isn’t, because City League is always made up of kids from their own schools. How can he be a returning starter and co-captain of his school team and not be on the City League team at all? How can that be? It doesn’t make sense.

  Coach Burke won’t stand for it, Dale is telling himself. Everyone knows that Dale Wheeler is one of the best players his age in the entire city! that he has a shot! that he’s a playmaker guard, a ball handler in a league of his own! Why else is he co-captain of his scholastic team? Where do City League teams come from if not from scholastic teams?

  Inside the building, however, Dale begins feeling terror and confusion with what he’s doing. What line of appeal should he use? He fears all at once that in putting himself up as co-captain—as he has done so often in his confident dreams—the scales may already have tipped against him. Who does he think he is?

  Please let it not be, he begs of the air as he passes through the locker room on his way to Burkebutt’s office. Let it be a big joke by Joe Dillard. He won’t even be mad anymore, if it’s only a joke. Well, he might be mad, but not really mad.

  Uncertain what he will say, Dale taps on the door in the tunnel. Yes, he knows he shouldn’t be there, he knows that. He should be in class like everyone else and this is something he should be bringing up at the right time through the right channels. He knows that. Still it’s unfair of Mr. Bothner to come in and do what he’s doing! he imagines pleading to Coach Burke. It doesn’t make any sense!

 
His first tap unanswered, Dale taps again. Against his better judgment, he tries the knob in his desperation, but as the heavy wooden door opens and he sees inside, the office stands unlighted, empty, devastating all over again. What is happening? Is it all some kind of nightmare?

  Peeking into the boy’s gym, seeing Coach Burke at one end, whistle swaying from his neck while directing rows of seventh grade boys in an exercise, Dale knows again he should not be interrupting a class. Still this is an emergency, and he’s a leader and a co-captain (isn’t he?) and he walks across the floor in his street shoes to where the man has his arms raised like an official signaling a touchdown. “What is this—what are you doing!?” the short man snaps in instant anger as Dale catches his eye.

  “They left me off the team or something,” Dale tries to explain.

  “What are you doing here? You should be in class!”

  Knowing he’s losing it, Dale’s eyes blur and it doesn’t matter that he’s in front of seventh grade boys. “They left me off the team and it isn’t fair, like I did something!”

  Hearing the man call “Free time!” Dale feels a push-grip of his elbow as he finds himself steered in the direction of the tunnel and Coach Burke’s office, hears, “Get a hold of yourself right now—do you hear me? I do not appreciate being interrupted in the middle of class—not one iota!”

  As Coach Burke opens his office door and guides Dale in, retaining his grip, Dale jerks his elbow from being held. He does not like being held, is within a heartbeat, he knows, of turning on the man in some out-of-control way, maybe in an attempt to hurt him.