Winning the City Redux

by Theodore Weesner

  “All the same,” she warns. “If they are true or not, I cannot accept these emotions you’ve been identifying! As enjoyable as it may be for me to laugh, too, I cannot allow you to exploit the sympathy I feel, or misread a physical gesture I may have made as your teacher. As traumatized as you were, and are . . . I will not allow you to turn this in this way. I appreciate that you’re confused. But we cannot continue this conversation, not for one moment! We have to leave this behind, now!’”

  Confused by her words, Dale says through his glistening eyes, “I know what we can do . . . to make it even . . . to leave it behind.”

  “To make it even . . . what does that mean?”

  “Let me squeeze your shoulder,” he says. “That’ll make us even.”

  CHAPTER 18

  AN INSTANT PASSES BEFORE MISS FURBISH SNAPS AT HIM, “There is no way you will be squeezing my shoulder! Good lord! Dale, listen . . . all I’m trying to do is help you put behind you something you’ve already carried too far and altogether misconstrued! This is not a junior high school game, not to me, I assure you!”

  “I just meant it would be a way . . . because I don’t want you not to like me . . . to make us even. So we can leave it behind.”

  “Even?”

  “You . . . did that to me. What’s wrong with me doing it to you . . . to make us even?”

  She smirks, snorts, shakes her head but also laughs—flabbergasted with his zany juvenile logic—and says, “Dale, you’re young, and maybe too smart for your own good. If you’re serious . . . I’m not sure you understand the implications of what you’re saying.”

  “I would never tell anyone. I just want you to let me like you.”

  “Well, everyone tells . . . but that’s another matter.”

  “I wouldn’t . . . not ever.”

  “It’s not going to happen, so it doesn’t matter. This is going to end, in one more minute and according to my wishes. On my terms . . . not yours! You will not be squeezing my shoulder, now or ever!”

  “When you did it to me it made me feel better. We’d be even, and I could go.”

  “This is childish, so please just stop it. All you’re doing in your little game is making me angry.”

  “Why does it make you angry? You did it to me. And I found out you’re a human person. Let me do it to you . . . to make us even.”

  Her smirk is real. “This isn’t the playground,” she tells him. “This is your teacher! I’m sorry if squeezing your shoulder gave the wrong impression. But it doesn’t mean that any of this is going any further!”

  “Please.”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “It would make everything as it was before.”

  “Before what?”

  “I don’t know . . . in the past . . . when I hadn’t had my shoulder squeezed, by you or by anyone else. When I didn’t feel like I do now.”

  “Stop it! I don’t like any of this.”

  “I kissed Zona Kaplan once, but she didn’t kiss me back.”

  “That’s what you should be doing, at your age, not conniving to squeeze your teacher’s shoulder!”

  “It was a stolen kiss. Like your squeeze. I just did it.”

  “Please! I did not ‘just do’ anything!”

  “We were skating under the lights . . . when they flooded the tennis courts at Ballenger Park. Music was playing . . . and Zona wanted me to skate. I stole a kiss on her cheek. It blew me away, because I knew all along she wanted me to do it.”

  Unable not to smirk, shaking her head in admiration of his rhetoric, Miss Furbish says, “Dale, you do have a way . . . maddening as it is. At the same time, I’m telling you this is nonsense, so please just let it go. It’s time for you to be leaving.”

  “It isn’t nonsense to me.”

  “To me it is! Kindly put it all out of your mind.”

  “Okay . . . but it still isn’t nonsense, not to me.”

  “It’s bordering on something that is ludicrous. Dale, I want you to go now. Or there isn’t going to be any friendship between us at all. I hope you understand how disappointed I am with your behavior.”

  “Fine. But it isn’t childish to me.”

  “Whatever it is, I really don’t like being manipulated.”

  “You make it sound awful . . . when it isn’t that.”

  “Please stop trying to finagle everything!”

  “I’m not trying to do finagle anything!”

  “It’s time to go. That’s what I want you to do. This has gone far enough.”

  Pausing, silver package yet in hand, seeing an artery on her neck resembling a string of yarn, what Dale wants consciously to do is extend his face and kiss the artery.

  “Please,” she says.

  In defeat, Dale’s virgin heart wrenches with the rejection she’s imposing, and his vision blurs once more with the heartbreak he’s been suffering for days.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” she says. “I’m sorry you were hurt . . . but I shouldn’t have brought you here like I did in the first place. Nor should you have come here tonight, as you well know.”

  Something within Dale’s affection is disintegrating. Near the door, disintegration continuing, he cries in the breaking voice of the fourteen-year-old he happens to me, “Fine! I won’t like you, either, if you don’t like me. I don’t see why you have to be mean when all I’ve done is tell you I like you.”

  Reaching for the door knob, holding the silver package in his hand, he tosses it to the kitchen counter and cries out, “Here, who cares!”

  Crying, he slams into the cool dark air. Fighting his disintegration and anger, he grabs up his gym bag on heading down the stairway, presses past the house along the dark driveway, turning headlong down the old tree-lined intercity sidewalk, where occasional cars and headlights are going by.

  Why couldn’t she let him like her a little? he finds himself crying to her and to himself. What’s so wrong with that!? Doesn’t she know how it feels to have her say they can’t be friends!? Is it fair to turn your back on someone because they say they like you? He won’t like her at all if that’s how she feels! If she thinks he’ll ask to squeeze her shoulder again, ever, begging is what she’ll have to do because he won’t be her friend either, or care for her anymore at all, if that’s how she feels.

  CHAPTER 19

  THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT DALE GROWS STRICKEN WITH guilt, regret, second-guessing how he allowed himself to act. Leaving early for school on a city bus, he sits again at a picnic table and watches for Miss Furbish to drive into the parking lot as before. When she arrives—as she does, to his surprise, ten minutes after he begins his confused vigil—and walks toward the building, he runs after her and inquires, as evenly as possible, in case someone is listening, “Miss Furbish, can I ask you something?”

  To his surprise she turns to hear him out, standing apart as he draws near. “I’m sorry for how I acted,” he blurts out. “I got carried away. I acted like a dumb kid and now I feel stupid because you’re one person I really like and the only one who’s ever been nice to me. Will you accept my apology?” he asks in the single line he rehearsed.

  Eyes on the skyline, speaking as much to car-tops it seems as to him, she says, “Dale, listen . . . a kid is what you are and you did get carried away. That’s okay. I accept your apology,” she adds, looking at him. “Apologizing is a mature thing to do. As your teacher, I want to encourage you to be mature.”

  “It hurt . . . when you said we wouldn’t be friends,” Dale tells the pavement.

  “I decided, last night . . . if you were man enough, to apologize, I would forgive you.”

  “Thank you. Thank you.” Beside himself with relief, with new hope and joy, Dale hardly knows what else to say.

  “To be entirely fair,” Miss Furbish confides in a softer voice, “maybe a squeeze of the shoulder would’ve evened things out. I know you’ve had a difficult time . . . I could’ve been more sensitive to your confused state of mind.”

  “I acted
weird . . . but it isn’t how I’ve wanted to act.”

  “Dale . . . I believe you’ve been traumatized by what’s happened to you. That’s what I believe, and I can understand your grasping after human contact. You’ve been deprived in certain ways and could use some help. I’m still going to see if there isn’t someone you can speak to.”

  “Could I speak to you again, sometime?” Dale inquires of the pavement.

  “Only according to my ground rules.”

  “I just want to be friends.”

  “I understand.”

  Dale glances to where her eyes meet his. Unable to help it, there comes rushing into him a fresh wave of adoration for Miss Furbish that has his eyes blurring as before. “I’m messed up,” he admits. “You got me there. I don’t wanna be, but I guess I am.”

  “I’ll speak to you . . . not in homeroom. Certainly not in my apartment. Maybe in the nurse’s room, if I can find out when it’s free.”

  “I could walk you home,” Dale tries.

  “Well, I drive . . . and we won’t be going there again.”

  “Thank you for forgiving me.”

  “You’re a bright young boy . . . I decided not to give up on you. But don’t you ever test me again with any of your nonsense.”

  “I was afraid you’d turn away from me . . . which I knew I deserved.”

  “No more inappropriate behavior,” she says with a near smile.

  “Don’t drive . . . tomorrow. Take the bus and let me walk you home,” Dale dares to say as she starts away. “After practice.”

  She looks back, pauses, says, “Okay. That may not be unreasonable. For friends. Let me think about it.”

  “I knew I was being a jerk,” Dale admits. “I don’t know why I didn’t stop myself.”

  On a glimpse from her eyes that Dale will relish, her head turns as she enters the building, the metal door closing behind her. Seeing the assistant principal, Mrs. Marr, approaching, Dale moves toward the end of the building, where he can use the student’s entrance between metal shop and wood working.

  Miss Furbish’s eyes: Intentionally or not, they had pierced his own and conveyed one thing or another. She has to know what he feels for her. Teacher, mother, sister . . . girlfriend. Her eyes, her throat and neck, her person, her breasts and shoulders. He adores everything about her, and closing his eyes at the end of the building—in the face the morning’s rising sun—he swoons within with unfettered love stirring in his chest. God, he loves her. Who cares about age or anything like that? He would do anything to be with her, if only for one minute! He loves her.

  CHAPTER 20

  DETOURING TO THE LOCKER ROOM AS IF TO CATCH HIS breath in the midst of ventilated tin doors, moldy towels, melted bars of soap in the gang shower, Dale experiences for the first time in days a whiff of the old call to compete, to go onto the floor and fight to win, to engage his ability to prevail. It’s a call by which he has lived. Always show up, always fight back.

  How strange, how delicious . . . to be out not only to win games but the favor, the presence, the anything of an adult woman who happens to be his homeroom teacher! Does he stand any chance at all in feeding his heart what it hungers for? Is he wounded, as she implied? Deprived because his mother abandoned ship and his father works second shift? Doomed? A loner made crazy by her innocent touching of his virgin neck beneath their mutually tear-filled eyes? Unattainable love, impossible hunger for her no less strong than had been his hunger to win the goddamned city?

  Oh love. Love trumps all, doesn’t it, and if he wasn’t crazed before he’s crazed now with his unattainable love for a woman maybe three times his age?

  In the hallway—moving within a swooning afterglow—competition keeps coming to mind and stirring his heart. He has yet to mention to anyone that he’s on a new City League team, a good team at that, a power team from Emerson Junior High over in Little Missouri. Shame remains within (always will) for having been excluded from, ostracized by the power team from his own district, and he vows to guard his news, to not call any more attention to himself than necessary, or to the excruciating rejection that walks with him yet like a knife in the heart. Was he more traumatized than he’s been able to know?

  Calling attention to themselves is exactly the mode of the Flintstone Truckers, which team name is riding the air of classrooms and hallways, locker room and sidewalks, playing like the latest hit tune with students. Nor is Dale surprised, thinking it is about the coolest name he’s ever heard for a City League team, or a big league team for that matter. The Flintstone Truckers. It’s a name—he must admit—that would have suited perfectly his dream of being a leader and turning things around for him and his father. That’s the sad part. ‘Blue Arrows’ may be cool, but ‘Flintstone Truckers’ is on another level. Not only jerseys but white shorts and jackets with red letters. All silky white. To think he could have, should have been one of them, like a birthright. For what the exclusion has done is relegate him to the blue-collar hillbilly world that really is his birthright. A person is what a person is. He has never believed he is what he is—has preferred movie versions of fate and reality—and now he has no choice but to accept the reality of his heritage. A working-class hillbilly. A redneck fucked over and diminished, no doubt, by people with money, people with power and education. People ready to take whatever they want.

  # # #

  “THURSDAY,” MISS FURBISH tells Dale in the morning when he arrives early and has a chance to ask if she’s thought about letting him walk her home after school?

  “Part way, to the corner of Garland and Third Avenue,” she tells him. “My ground rules. And you keep this to yourself or our friendship really will have to end once and for all,” she adds. “It’ll be an occasion when we can talk, and not have to worry about being interrupted. An innocent walk.”

  Dale is cool. He gets it. As some students are entering the classroom, he nods and moves to his seat, begins running through the most proper preview of a day’s classes he will ever conduct, all while a balloon of untold excitement is inflating, deflating, and inflating again. Miss Furbish is open to friendship! An innocent walk all the way to the corner of Garland and Third Avenue! Has he ever felt more happy?

  He’ll be cool . . . and not a fool, he reminds himself. He’ll do the right thing all the way, and give her no cause at all to regret befriending him. He’ll prove her right, smart, proud for accepting his apology and giving him a second chance. He’ll show her just how grown up he can be.

  CHAPTER 21

  FROM REMARKS OVERHEARD IN THE LOCKER ROOM DALE knows the Truckers will be going again—following City League’s opening game on Saturday—to eat tubs of fried chicken and see more home movies of those certain Soap Box Derbies at Akron. The phrase Nationals at Akron keeps playing like a chorus in concert with the latest hit: Flintstone Truckers.

  Dale avoids responding to what he overhears. He enters classrooms, departs, ties his sneakers, unties his sneakers, steps under a nozzle to rinse his hair, passes the ball in Scholastic practice, follows the pass, moves without the ball. All the same, he hears what he hears, his jealousy and resentment accumulate, and there are times when he slams a locker door or returns a loose ball with ferocity enough to have it ricochet from a player’s fingers, to have someone saying, “What’s your problem?”

  To which he responds: “What’s yours!? Grow up!”

  The Bothner brothers could have been his friends, Dale is compelled to allow. He could have been proud to tell his father of their Soap Box Derby wins, their Fenton Meadows horse farm, their tubs of fried chicken, the uniforms they’ll be wearing and the drills they’ll be using on taking the floor like half-sized professionals . . . the coolest team ever in the metro area, on which he would have been the most natural of team leaders! How can it be that he isn’t one of them? wearing a silky white uniform? leading the way?

  Eyes ever stricken by exclusion, Dale knows only resentment for the brothers, sees them as cheaters, their father as the biggest cheate
r of all, fantasizes punching out all three in a fist fight to end all fist fights. Close one eye with a right cross, another with a left hook, then another and another, until every Bothner eye looks like a stomped tomato. Bloodied noses, fat lips, loosened teeth. For he knows how to flash his fists, how to duck and deliver punches that can make an adversary go to a knee and raise a hand that says he’s had enough. How did Mr. Bothner think he became a returning starter, and a co-captain of the scholastic team, all while his candy-ass sons went rolling downhill in toy cars?

  # # #

  DALE’S FEELINGS ABOUT Sonny Joe and his former teammates have also faded as days have gone by. They look the other way, betraying friendship from previous teams in previous years when he led them with guts and brains and won all kinds of letters and prizes.

  For their part, they may be clueless when it comes to fairness and loyalty. At the same time they went over to the Bothners without a peep and it appears to mean nothing to them that a friend, a returning starter and team leader, has been dealt from a team he should have been on. How can they talk in front of him of the Nationals at Akron, of their white uniforms and tubs of fried chicken as if he no longer exists?

  Are they, maybe, the ones who are deprived and in need of help?

  # # #

  DALE WONDERS—IF SOMEONE else was left off a team for being poor, for his father being an alcoholic and playing Cold, Cold Heart over and over—if he would have gone to a horse farm himself and stuffed drumsticks into his dumb mouth without saying anything? Would he have looked elsewhere on passing in the hall and been proud to have new friends who had won the Nationals at Akron? Would he have assumed himself to be on the inside and there having been no way he would have ever been the one to be excluded?

  It isn’t an easy question and, truth be told, it picks at him. He can see how it could happen, how he could feel privileged and busy being hot shit. Hey, too bad about so-and-so being chucked, but his old man’s a drunk and that’s how it goes. These things happen, as Burkebutt had wanted him to know. Sure, he’s as sorry as he can be, but that’s life, and what could he do about it?