What they cannot know, of course, is that while they will be out to destroy his, he is gathering within an equal need to obliterate theirs. So it is that moments in school pass strangely each day for Dale. Only when he is away from the long building in the evening, yearning for Miss Furbish, wanting to hold her and knowing she will not be letting him into her arms again, does the world appear ordinary, and maddening. Play it cool, if you’re out to rule, Dale reminds himself again.
CHAPTER 4
WEDNESDAY, SITTING ON A LOCKER ROOM BENCH AFTER class and checking his locker for clean socks for the following day’s big game, any doubt Dale may have had of the Mother Truckers evaporates. There is Sonny Joe at the head of the aisle. “Hey, man, how’s it going?” Joe says. “You guys have a game this week?”
“I think so. How about you guys?”
Joe smirks, says, “Okay . . . I want you to know I’m sorry we’re playing our last game here against each other. After all the games we played as co-captains.”
“So it goes,” Dale concedes. “What’s to say?”
“My dad asked how come you aren’t on our team and when I told him, he said he didn’t think it sounded right.”
“Kinda late now,” Dale says, stricken by his old friend’s sudden confession.
“Yeah.”
“You guys went along. How could it sound right to betray a teammate, or let one team use a school gym to practice in at night? Where was your dad then?”
“He was working.”
“You’re the one told me I wasn’t on the team.”
“Like I said . . . I’m sorry.”
“Forget it.”
Preparing to turn away, Sonny Joe says, “Of course we’re gonna stomp your hillbilly asses anyway.”
“We’ll see.”
“It’ll be your last game and our next-to-last. Come down-town Saturday night, see the Flintstone Truckers win the city.”
“Thought you went to Sunday School,” Dale says after Joe as he starts away. “Thought they taught you not to profane your neighbors.”
Joe looks back. “What do you hillbillies know about profaning neighbors?”
“You just did it again, only you’re too dumb to know it.”
“Man, you’re not my neighbor.”
“I was. But you’re right, I’m not anymore. And I don’t wanna be.”
Dale sits on in the locker room. No one ever said a word, he thinks, and here when it’s too late, Sonny Joe is saying he’s sorry. The apology is heartbreaking while Dale knows of nothing else to do but to sit there, looking between his shoes.
CHAPTER 5
WALKING HOME IN NEW MARCH DAYLIGHT, DALE WONDERS if Miss Furbish might be proud of him for calling Joe Dillard on profaning his neighbor . . . only to be startled, turning into the alley, by the sight of his father’s car. On a weekday evening, the green Chevy should be in the big parking lot near Plant Ten.
A bender in the works? Sentimental music throughout the night before the biggest game of his life? Not now, Dale thinks, recalling that seeing his father and that sodden lady through a hard-drinking night was how this strangest of hoop seasons began.
He approaches with ears perked. Nothing from Patsy Cline or Merle Haggard. The cinderblock structure emits only silence. Sidestepping the dusty green sedan, he enters quietly. Nothing. A light on in the kitchen but no music playing. There were times in the long ago when his father worked first shift and Dale came home to the enjoyable presence of his company, a past that came to mind as he tried, “Pop?”
“In here,” his father says, appearing in his bedroom doorway, left arm hanging in a white sling from his neck.
“What happened!?” Dale asks at once, relieved that his father is alive and smiling.
“Lost part of a finger,” his father says. “Doped me up and sent me home.”
“Part of a finger!?”
“About half. One knuckle. Sheet metal machine took it off just like that.”
His father’s left forefinger and much of his hand, hanging in the sling, is heavily bandaged. No matter the wrapping, the forefinger isn’t as long as its pink brothers. “Took off a knuckle-and-a-half like a Coney Island dog hit by a butcher knife.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes and no. Gave me a shock when it happened. Right now they got me so fulla morphine it’s like I’m swimming at the lake on a summer day. What hurts,” he adds, a sparkle in his eye, “is the piece that got away. Landed in metal shavings and ran off where nobody could find it.”
“Ran off . . . in metal shavings?”
“A sizeable chunk of finger. Guess it didn’t wanna get stepped on.”
“I see.”
“Ran like a head with its chicken cut off.”
Dale can’t help snickering, then snickering some more. “Pretty funny,” he says. “A head with its chicken cut off. You were waiting to say that, weren’t you?”
His father’s eyes are glossy. “I’m feeling silly,” he admits. “Problem is I’m under orders against any hard stuff and this morphine has got me in a fix.”
“You don’t feel anything where the finger was?”
“I do, only it’s not there. Swimming across the lake is what I’m feeling. It’s like your nose tickling and you can’t scratch it. The part that’s tickling ain’t there to scratch.”
Dale giggles as his father adds, “Truth is, it’s one of those times, you go along, head in the clouds, something happens to let you know how close you are to the other side. Anyhow—you hungry, son? It’s about dinnertime and we could work together and fix us a bite to eat. Finger has me thinking how much time we ain’t been spending together.”
# # #
SHOULD HE INVITE his father to his game? Dale has rarely heard him talk like this and is on the verge of doing so even as something within keeps warning against it. If his father has tomorrow off, he could make it, and Dale is about to say something, thinking it might gain him some luck on the floor. At the same time an image of Miss Furbish standing under the bleachers comes to mind, followed by the old image of his father’s foot slipping through bleacher boards and losing his grip on a pint from which he had turned aside for a sip . . . the old image of his father being escorted from the gym and heads craning in his direction.
As they sit to eat, Dale declines to raise the subject of his big game, despite looking for a good moment. To his surprise—it must be the morphine—his father says he’s going to bed, can use a good night’s sleep, and Dale says goodnight without mentioning what keeps traveling the center of his life like a runaway car.
“It’s back to the grind tomorrow,” his father says.
He won’t be inviting him, Dale tells himself on cleaning the kitchen. Not now, when he can’t come anyway. The pull of loyalty moves Dale, however, and has him approaching his father’s bedroom door. “Pop . . . you awake? Pop . . . I got a big game tomorrow you might like to see . . . if you can take some time off.”
Stepping through shadows to his bedside, Dale looks down on a man breathing deeply, swimming at a great distance. Gazing on him, Dale is stricken with the fate of the man he loves. If he wins the city or not, might it save his father? The answer coming to mind isn’t one he wants to hear. He’s seen guys give in to dumb wishful thinking, and being dumb isn’t another failure to which he’s ready to submit. Not now.
CHAPTER 6
IN HOMEROOM, ZONA KAPLAN SCREWS HER NECK AROUND and says, “I can’t believe you’re playing against your own school!”
Dale, stabbed in the heart with surprise, says nothing.
After a moment, keeping his voice even, he leans forward and says to the smooth skin of her neck, “I told you . . . they wouldn’t let me be on the team. Mr. Bothner didn’t want me because I’m better than his dumb son. Even Burkebutt told me that.”
“Which dumb son?”
“Both dumb sons.”
“You don’t even know them.”
“Better than they know me.”
“They’r
e nice. They’re not hillbillies, I can tell you that.”
Just like that, Dale’s liking of Zona takes a mortal hit. Pained, he says, “You lied about inviting me to your party . . . you knew you didn’t do it.”
She makes no move to look his way. Leaning her way again, he adds, “I used to like you, but I don’t anymore. I used to really love you, like a girlfriend.”
Nor does she respond to this, as Dale checks himself against added emotion and defeat. She doesn’t move, and he looks to the side of the room, at the windows. As Miss Furbish calls the room to order, saying, “Good morning, boys and girls,” Dale keeps staring through crazed perceptions. Neither Miss Furbish, nor Zona, nor the Flintstone Mother Truckers will be turning him from what he means to do, and it doesn’t matter, at last, what any of them ever think or say, as stupid as it may be. Being his own man is what his father urged him to be, and he is seeing that his father knew the answer all along.
CHAPTER 7
HIS SHOELACES, FRESHLY LACED INTO HIS SNEAKERS, REMAIN damp from having been washed the previous night as part of his big game ritual. Laces and jock, shorts and shirt washed in the bathroom sink and dried on the wooden rack they keep there. He places the sneakers on the bench, to give the laces added air in which to dry. He means to fight, to flash and fly as the Flying Wheel! Preparation. Being ready in his mind. Are games ever won by players who aren’t ready in their minds?
The first to arrive, having the empty locker room to himself, Dale attends to the details of undressing and dressing. Hefting his handful of jock-packed genitals like a Granny Smith, he gives added thought to Miss Furbish and the unbelievable bond they experienced early on in being together. Dressed, he places one foot at a time on the bench and pulls the laces tight. A final detail. But for shaking out and going into the gym to warm up, he’s ready. As he rotates his shoulders the quiet of the big room is hit by an explosion of brash voices letting him know the Flintstone Mother Truckers have begun to arrive.
Dale’s private reply: Orange and black, take no flak! Always show up, always fight back! Glancing down over his number 4, he stands, thinking of nothing and of everything. Envisions everything, the school building, the planet—the globe in the reference room—all tumbling through space and carrying him and his father, even his father’s severed finger. Loyalty and disloyalty. Fairness and cheating. The sheen of Zona Kaplan’s hair. Miss Furbish invisible in the dark, letting him pull aside her nightshirt and have her nipple in his mouth, if not as long as he would have liked. Love and friendship. Promising a hundred times never to tell.
Girls have never much liked him, Dale acknowledges, because he isn’t very good looking. Miss Furbish liked him for what had happened to him, and also for the things he said to her in class and then out. Maybe he is homely, but his looks haven’t mattered to her. The bridge of his nose is flattened, broken by the cleats of a big tub from St. Michael’s he brought down in a tackle at age eleven, and his teeth, no getting around it, are crooked enough to have him flashing a hand every time he smiles. But when the time comes to do the job, as he knows in his heart, he’s the one who has done the work and can carry the day. It’s what he knows. If it’s something Zona failed to see, Miss Furbish reaffirmed his belief in more ways than one.
It’s why he will do anything for Miss Furbish, including winning this game today . . . if he can only make it happen. If only he can find the muscle.
CHAPTER 8
MORE BRASH VOICES. MORE ENEMY PLAYERS, IN ANOTHER wave. Sonny Joe’s voice, Hal Doyle’s. They squawk several aisles away, slam locker doors open, issue yelps, clucks, grunts. It’s happening, Dale tells himself. Excluded from the team meant to be his, his mission all year of winning the city remains on the line. In half an hour he will go onto the floor in orange and black and play against his former teammates. Sitting there, sensing a presence at the end of his aisle, he looks up to see Hal Doyle standing sock-footed, unbuttoning his shirt, transmitting his persistent smirk.
“Wheels, where’s your team?”
“They figured I could beat you on my own. Where’s yours?”
“You sitting here hiding or praying?” Hal Doyle wants to know, backing off.
Dale gazes between his feet to the floor. He stands once more to shake out his arms and legs, when, suddenly—on another storm entering the locker room—a voice bellows, “HULLO, ASSHOLES! GIVE A CHEER . . . THE LITTLE MS IS HERE!”
Lucky Bartell!
“HEY MOTHER TRUCKERS . . . PERCH ON THIS LOLLYPOP!”
Chub Coburn!
Dale is so thrilled all at once his breath catches in a gasp. His teammates, his friends, his fellow hillbillies! Take that! he imagines their presence saying to the Mother Truckers. Take that, you cheating, backstabbing dinks!
Entering the aisle, Dale is filled with joy at the sight of his teammates. Lucky, Grady, Chub, Emmett, Lloyd, each in a dark blue, double-breasted gangster overcoat, hair swept into DAs, neck-length pompadours, spit curls on foreheads. They look older, smarter, tougher, look like the gang of thugs they mean to be, and Dale experiences a rush of love for them as friends, as fellow warriors ready to fight. Always show up, always fight back. Individuals of imagination and independence, courage and defiance, as—Dale is thinking—Miss Furbish would readily agree.
“WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE, HILLBILLY!” Hal Doyle shouts, trying, Dale realizes, to make his voice play deeper and stronger than it is.
The Little Ms, flooding about Dale in his aisle, laugh, hoot, toss bags, bang locker doors. “WHAT LANGUAGE YOU TALKING ABOUT, YOU SHITHEAD, FUCKFACE, ASSHOLE MOTHER TRUCKER?” It’s Chub, shouting as the mob of Little Ms howl and hoot.
The Mother Truckers have no reply until one of them calls, “WE’LL SHOW YOU HILLBILLIES SOME LANGUAGE ON THE COURT.”
“We’ll show you hillbillies some language on the court,” Chub mocks, making every Little M squeal with laughter.
“Goodness me, I do believe we interrupted Youth Fellow-ship,” Grady says, white teeth flashing, grinning as always.
Lucky shouts, “WE GOT US A SECRET WEAPON: FLYING WHEEL . . . GONNA SAIL RIGHT OVER YOUR CHICKEN-SHIT SNOB ASSES!”
The Little Ms laugh and hoot as Lucky, opening a locker door, gives Dale a wink and has him thrilled all over again to be on such a team.
“HE’S A HILLBILLY, TOO, WHICH IS WHY HE’S NOT ON OUR TEAM!” Hal Doyle shouts back.
“YOU GO FUCK YOURSELF, PAL!” Grady calls in anger that is unlike himself. “Don’t worry,” he adds to Dale. “They wanna fight, it’s one game we ain’t ever lost.”
“How come this school is so clean?” Lloyd wants to know, drawing a laugh.
“Dale, you’re captain today,” Lucky says. “Everybody, Flying Wheel’s captain, here in his own fancy gym.”
“What about the Bothner assholes, they any good?” Grady inquires of Dale more confidentially.
“They’re not bad,” Dale says. “The older one, plays forward, is nearly as big as Sonny Joe. I hear he’s not bad. A little slow. The younger one, their point guard. What I hear is he’s a little prick with ears.”
“Can he play?” Chub asks.
“I guess so. The old man was a big star for the Pistons, knows lotsa stuff.”
“Got our work cut out for us . . . that what you’re saying?” comes from Chub.
“Sonny Joe always scores most of their points, so he’s the one we need to stop.”
“I’ll stop Sonny Joe,” Chub says. “Don’t worry.”
“Chub’ll kill him if he has to,” Lucky says.
“He’s good,” Dale says, though his words draw no further response and, looking around, he thinks again that the charge, in fact, is on him to do the winning.
THERE COMES A moment when all are dressed and standing, shaking out, slamming doors, fixing locks, going silent. “Let’s huddle,” Lucky says.
“Don’t think we can’t beat these guys, because I know we can,” Dale tells them within their arms-over circle.
“Nobody run scared!” L
ucky says. “Make these assholes run scared! Make ’em play our game! Get a chance, throw an elbow, stomp a toe! They’re good, and we’re gonna have to throw a scare into their snob asses quick as we can. This is it, Little Ms. Take no flak! Always show up, always fight back! Let’s be tougher than these assholes have ever seen anyone be!”
CHAPTER 9
INSIDE THE TUNNEL, THEY PAUSE AT THE DOUBLE DOOR opening. Before them is the sweep of the Walt Whitman double gym—playing lengthwise—with its Plexiglas backboards locked into place, bleachers high on both sides, a cavern twice the size of the Little Ms home arena. Between naked shoulders Dale can see the gathering of a full house. On a final word from Lucky—“Let’s do it!”—they lope into the lion’s den, boxing ring, court room, cathedral, all things to Dale who keeps telling himself to play it cool if he wants to rule!
Approaching the far basket, they stretch and circle as boos and hisses have them raising index fingers in reply. The enemy has arrived, in orange and black. “You could eat fried eggs on this floor!” Lloyd says as they congregate about the foul circle.
“I’ll get some balls,” Dale says, heading to the scorer’s table where two zebras in black and white stand talking. Two other men—score keeper and time keeper—sit at a long folding table, and there is Coach Burke near the end of the home team bench conversing with a man who is a league official or a Trucker’s parent, Dale isn’t sure. To the zebras, Dale says, “We need some warm-up balls.”
The men look about, to locate some warm-up balls. One of the zebras—a new pebbly ball under his arm—jokes, “This is a game ball, can’t have this.”
Coach Burke, looking their way, says, “You didn’t bring warm-up balls?”
“You kidding?” Dale says. “Nobody ever brings warmup balls.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
Winning the City Redux Page 19
