“I just wanted . . . you know.”
“I’m afraid I’ve got more on my mind right now than I can handle. We’ll have to see, later, if there is anything we can do about Mr. Bothner and what he did.”
Dale carries a box to the doorway. Nothing could be done, now or ever, is what he sees as he lowers the box. His dream of turning things around, of leading him and his father into the future . . . what future? What a joke it is when people who are rich put their eye on something even if they show up late and don’t work half as hard. No one can fight your battles, not even your father. Maybe when you’re ten and picked on by some string bean with a tub of a wife . . . but what did he think his father could do in the face of a big shot from the plant, a giant man entrenched in sports? All he’s managed to do is make his father feel lousy. What is his father going to say to his plant supervisor, a man who has money and everything and is as big as a horse besides?
Wanting to make up to his father, Dale enters the kitchen—as if for another box—to say anything that might balance his selfishness. Booze. A smell of alcohol is in the air and Dale’s heart sinks, no matter having known it would come to this as it always has. His father gives no sign. A nip? A glug? The old line that a little snort was all he had needed?
Carrying boxes, Dale tries to see nothing, know nothing, feel nothing. Anguish fills him all the same, attaching his hurt to Burkebutt and Mr. Bothner. His inner voice cries out: What did I ever do to you anyway? All I ever did was try to be a good player! Work to win the City! Turn things around for me and my old man! For that I can’t even be on my own team?!
CHAPTER 7
THE NEW PLACE, OFF ATWOOD STREET, IS WHAT IS KNOWN AS a garage house, given that it was once home to a couple of cars. A structure at the rear of a lot on which the owner’s two-and-a-half-story house faces the street, it’s the only residence along an alley of garages and cinderblock outbuildings. Parking and privacy are its attractions, as his father said. The alley is their driveway, allowing his father to park his Chevy but a step or two from the building’s only door.
Their address—like others they’ve had in the past—is the owner’s street number with 1/2 added. Two-fourteen-and-a-half Atwood Street. Half of this, half of that. Still, the garage house has things about it that Dale likes, its privacy and touch of independence.
Nor is it so different within from other furnished apartments they’ve rented. Two bedroom spaces, a bathroom with a shower stall, a living room-kitchenette with space for his father’s phonograph, room for a TV. Moving on Sunday was easy enough, hefting clothes on hangers, cardboard boxes, a wooden crate holding Dale’s gloves and cleats, another holding his books and keepsakes, the dictionary his father bought him two years earlier when he entered Walt Whitman Junior High.
Does he like it? Does it fit the bill? The privacy is special, and how about being able to park right by the door? “Whatta ya say, partner?” his father wants to know as Dale, suffering still, knows that his basketball nightmare has to be suppressed now and forever.
# # #
AN UPSIDE OF new locations: A tiny adventure in checking out a neighborhood as if it’s become theirs. Sunday afternoon, their move completed, his father cleaned up and going off to haunt (as Dale knows without being told) the bars he haunts in his never-ending fantasy search for the woman (Dale’s mother) who abandoned them both a dozen years earlier. Off the wagon already? Feeling responsible and helpless, Dale knows enough, in any case, not to ask.
He wanders out, too, to explore the streets closer to Lower Downtown. His discoveries: Third Avenue Fish & Chip, where people stream in and out carrying deep-fried food wrapped in newspapers, a boarded up movie theater, a tiny grocery with barred windows—open on Sundays—that, as Dale knows, is owned and operated by the immigrant family, living overhead, of a chubby girl from school named Vera Itzkoff. Vera, who is quick to smile and whom he likes for her friendly glances, her jokes and warm personality.
Tracing the grocery’s narrow, packed aisles, looking for Vera—realizing she is, like him, a social outcast at school, part of a poor Jewish family—Dale buys a candy bar and leaves when Vera isn’t there. At least they have their store, and isn’t it better to work on Sundays than struggle to survive hangovers?
# # #
THEIR LOCATION ALSO offers a different bus stop, one further removed from school. No matter that Dale usually walks and will continue to do so, the new bus stop gives him cause that first morning—by way of reverse logic—to decide to give up his morning perk of sweeping the gym floors. Despite losing the practice time, it doesn’t mesh for him to be sweeping up residue left on the floor the night before by the Flintstone Truckers, who ousted him from what he believed to be his own team. The prospect sickens him. He thinks again of Miss Furbish and how, when he lost it, she wept with him. How, crying, she almost held him, pressed her face to his shoulder and nearly to his famished neck.
What he realizes he is doing is liking Miss Furbish more than ever. Longing to be in homeroom, to be able to look at her . . . though if he’s seeing her as a mother, or a sister, or whatever, he doesn’t know and doesn’t try to untangle. All he knows is that he likes her. She likes him in turn, believes in him, he’s certain of that. Her aroma and warmth of existence when she cried was close enough to inhale. Did she have any idea—did he?—how powerful would be the nearness she presented like a gift he had never received before?
CHAPTER 8
RIDING A CITY BUS TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY, NOT TO SAVE TIME but because the bus passes near Garland Street where Miss Furbish lives, Dale imagines her boarding the bus, smiling, sitting with him, giving him a chance to speak to her and be with her again. She doesn’t board the bus, of course, and he rides along striving once more to suppress his feeling of having been made into a loser in her eyes, despite how hard he had worked to be the opposite, to be a top student and a team leader. It was what every star jock had in place on going on to high school, and was another loss Dale was being forced to endure.
Staring through a window, he recalls Mr. Bothner looking them over and apparently deciding against him because he was a team leader as well as a playmaker guard who could beat out his own son. Then what Mr. Bothner did was tell Coach Burke which players he wanted—mainly Sonny Joe, of course—and that he would like to rent or use the school gym for night practices no matter that it wasn’t available to any other teams. Fine, Burkebutt had let him know. Take whatever you want, Mr. Piston, Mr. Plant Supervisor. Don’t worry that the team belongs to Dale Wheeler as much as it does to you, because he’s just a kid, his father is just a hillbilly alcoholic factory worker, while you, Mr. Bothner, are a big shot at GM, the biggest of big shots, an engineer and a horse farmer whose sons won the Soap Box Derby at Akron, a member of a board of directors whose companies will provide uniforms and rent the school gym so you can have a place to practice every night. Anything else you’d like, Mr. Big Shot? How about some school girls as cheerleaders?
# # #
IF YOU HAVE position and money, Dale is seeing from his seat on high, nearing his school and running early, you can take whatever you like and nothing will happen. If some kid he knew stole something, or broke something belonging to someone, he would be sent to the Juvenile Detention Home and made to serve time or probation even if what he broke could be replaced and no one was wounded in their pride and heart.
For an instant, recalling how he sat on a new ball like hot shit that first day, recalling how cocky he was, Dale fears again that what is happening to him is his own fault in a larger way. Assuming he could win the City and turn things around. Could take himself and his father on to bigger better things. Reaching for the American Dream that everyone always talked about. At the same time, what right did any of them have to smash his dream just because he and his father did not go to church or have Sunday dinners and crap like that?
If only they had stolen his gym bag instead of wounding his pride. He would have been mad, and it would have cost money to replace it, b
ut that would have been it. He would have gotten the money from his father, and they’d have gone to a store and replaced whatever had been taken. But how could he replace his wounded pride? His confidence? Was there a bin at AllSports from which he could replace the dream they had taken away?
Leaving the bus and walking into the empty building, Dale sees that his only choice is to take a shot at joining another team elsewhere in the city. Not here—where it would be easy and horrible being on a lesser team—but in another district. He knows players from other districts, from parochial and county schools, from Y League, Church League, Summer League at the park . . . teams he could be on all over the place that he could help lead to league championships. Being poor like Vera Itzkoff, whose father can hardly speak English, is one thing. Being a loser who cannot stop hurting is something else. It isn’t what he wants, as impossible as it is to be otherwise. He might be a loner—how could he not be a loner, living with his father?—but he’s never been a loser. Not before now, on being cheated out of what was his.
# # #
HIGH WITH NERVOUS conviction, Dale goes through the locker room looking for Clem, to let him know he’s giving up his sweeping job. Afraid his voice will break with emotion—finding the elderly man in his cage near the gang shower—Dale hears himself, uttering his words, coming off like a wise-ass teenager he knows himself not really to be.
“Know someone who’d like the job?” Clem wants to know.
“Try the Bothner kids,” Dale tells him. “They could use the practice.”
Jerk, Dale says to himself on walking away. Clem gave you the job when it was the biggest thing in the world, has been good to you all along, and you come up like a wise ass. Like a Flintstone Trucker who doesn’t believe his shit stinks.
CHAPTER 9
OUTSIDE THE SPRAWLING BUILDING, WITH TIME TO KILL, Dale walks to an area of picnic tables embedded in asphalt near the girls softball diamond. Students eat bag lunches there in good weather, in view of the diamond and the faculty/staff parking lot. It’s the lot—just then all but empty—where Dale went to pavement between cars in a loss of control, where Miss Furbish, hearing him wail, had not been entirely wrong in thinking it was a wounded animal.
Gazing between his feet, Dale feels again what he felt when she touched his shoulder in her apartment. What he wouldn’t give to be touched by her again. Looking within, he sees how much he is liking Miss Furbish. He has always liked her as a teacher and now he’s liking her as a person. As a female person. Miss Furbish, a lady with a little gray in her hair who has dedicated her life to teaching. Does she have a boyfriend or something like that? What does she do on holidays, and during the summer?
An insight coming to Dale is that Miss Furbish might be possessed of dreams and desires, too, no matter her age or shoes or tweed suits. Possessed of needs and wishes, demons and denials. She might be a teacher devoted to her students, but she’s human, isn’t she, and why wouldn’t she be as subject to needs as anyone else? Need and Want? Hadn’t they undertaken that Word Power Challenge, no matter defining it in terms of nutrition on one hand, and dessert on the other?
Would his own mother have ever been like Miss Furbish? Was it mother love or sister love that was speaking to him? Girl love? Being alone with Miss Furbish and being touched on the shoulder by her. It isn’t a desire he’ll be confessing to her or to anyone, while the desire to be touched again remains alive in him like a ray of sunlight.
# # #
OVER HIS SHOULDER cars keep following one another into the parking lot, and as happens when one is possessed of another the object of one’s affection can suddenly appear, as if by psychic power. Yes, the maroon Buick sedan turning into the lot, taken in by Dale as he looks over his shoulder, is being driven by Miss Furbish. There she is, upper body raised, steering wheel in both hands. His favorite teacher, arriving to start her day. A human being with needs, just like anyone else.
From Dale’s distance of fifty or sixty yards, under an overcast sky, he watches her turn her car and park. Seeing him out there, most anyone would identify him as a loner, a lost soul, a confused teenager. In his view, though, he’s a lonely ninth grader experiencing newfound hope on seeing his favorite teacher disengage with bags and books and make her way toward the utility door that students are forbidden to use.
He watches her all the way, only to experience a loss when she opens the door and departs his view. A female human being, an identifiable woman who is educated, intelligent, considerate, one who smells wonderful and always smiles on making eye contact, whether across homeroom or passing in the hall. To think and know that in a way she likes him. More than his own mother ever liked him. How comforting to be in the homeroom of such a woman . . . one, yes, who wept and touched his shoulder when he was going to pieces.
After a moment, brushing the seat of his pants and taking up his school bag, Dale moves toward the building’s side entrance open to students. He won’t be embarrassing his favorite teacher, or himself—as one aware, after all, of being cool and not a fool—all the while he desires to be in her presence, to clean her erasers or sharpen her pencils, to let his lonely self be enveloped, stimulated, nurtured by her in any way possible, as mother or sister or—as it rises yet again in his astonished heart—a friend who happens to be female, a creature who might convey to him some comfort, strength, confidence.
Oh love, please make me whole again, is the sentiment in Dale’s heart. Make me real . . . let me have back what was taken away.
CHAPTER 10
ENTERING THE LOCKER ROOM, DALE OPENS HIS GYM LOCKER and recovers from its shelf a mimeographed Summer League program. Back in August, he led his park team to the City Championship for Juniors. Miss Furbish advised him to move on, and so he will try to do. Should she ask, after homeroom, he’ll show her the program with its Summer League rosters—junior high through college—and have her know he’s going to call some acquaintances to see if a good team has a place on a City League squad for a playmaker guard.
Emerson appeals to him. The school district in Little Missouri—so called for its concentration of hillbillies who, like Dale’s father, came north to work in the factories—is as interwoven with factory yards and plants on their side of the river as is Dale’s neighborhood on his side. Chevy Plants Two, Four, and Ten infiltrate both sides with gates, guards and fences, rail and storage yards, while Buick Parts & Service, Buick Manufacturing, AC Spark Plug, Dupont, Chevrolet Stamping and Assembly, and the the Tank Plant lie more removed from downtown. Eighty percent of those who work in the city work for GM, and the local paper runs ads every day from persons looking to share rides to Southeast Missouri, Arkansas, the Ozarks. Carrying a wad of dollars home over a weekend, tooling north on Sunday to earn some more . . . until every family member has made the move to Flint, Saginaw, and Bay City and identified them as home rather than Missouri or Tennessee or Arkansas. Seen from without, they were hillbillies; seen from within, they were Southerners.
Chevy Corners offers a dozen bars, Lower Downtown half-a-dozen Coney Islands open twenty-four hours a day and another dozen bars. From behind endless rows of translucent factory windows, orange sparks fly while smoke plumes and hisses from vents and chimneys. Rail spurs depress and squeak under rolling freight cars that sigh and slam twenty-four hours a day in musical accompaniment to money being made and an American Dream being seized by migrants and immigrants (a dream just then coming under threat to competition from Germany and Japan), which dream Dale took to himself long ago in his private mission to save himself and his alcoholic father.
Don’t be a jerk, do the work. If you work really hard, Miss Furbish had advised in class . . . not just hard but really hard, she liked to add . . . the world could be your oyster. If you were out to rule, doing the work was the only tool, Dale determined from her advice. What made more sense, he wondered, than putting in the hours and buying into the only dream most of them would ever know?
# # #
LITTLE MISSOURI AND Emerson were blue
collar–hillbilly in reverse proportion to Walt Whitman being management-professional. Emerson included a border of affluence, Walt Whitman a vein of factory workers along the river where the city stadium and Chevy Plants Two, Four, and Ten extended into Lower Downtown. Speaking with Andy Griffith drawls, playing country music and grinning friendly grins, Little Missouri hillbillies retained a code of independence and pride that had many keeping neat yards around one-story houses with one-car garages, wives working first shift at AC Spark Plug, husbands second shift at Chevy or Buick, children striving to graduate high school. Bars, pool halls, barber shops, gas stations (called ‘filling stations’) lined Little Missouri thoroughfares, diesel buses delivered them and their dollars to downtown banks and department stores, movie theaters, and high-rise office buildings, the wind-swept downtown alleys offering upscale cocktail lounges and still more bars, pool halls, and sleazy cafes tracing neon sidewalks upon which to strut and flirt and experience excited and broken hearts.
A Little Missouri player Dale identifies at once as a possible savior is Lucky Bartell. Known to Dale from countless games in Scholastic League as well as City League, Y League, Church League (schoolboys Dale’s age, recruited to Men’s League, were urged though not required to attend Sunday School) Lucky Bartell has a reputation as a reigning prince of Little Missouri, a tough, irreverent teenager known for a quick wit and comic nature, an ever-glistening black-haired DA, bold words, and fearless fists. Not a Sonny Joe Dillard straight-shooter on his way to the Major Leagues but a thug, pound for pound, who was one of the coolest guys in town.
He’ll give Lucky Bartell a call, Dale is telling himself while making his way to homeroom and Miss Furbish’s presence. The chance of joining a top team from another district is slim, but at home that evening, in the privacy of a phone call, he’ll give it a try. One step at a time, sweet Jesus, he tells himself. Have to back up and try again if you’re going to fly again. The rejection he suffered was unfair . . . but what choice does he have, short of quitting altogether, than to start as if from the beginning? Don’t be a fool, play it cool . . . he tells himself all over again.
Winning the City Redux Page 7
