by Rich Wallace
MIKE I dint mention the carrots. Put them in when you add the beer and water. Don’t peel them. And don’t use those little babie carrots. Use whole carrots, washed BUT NOT PEELED. Cut off the ends.
—Gus
“Important stuff,” I say, smiling slightly.
Joey shrugs. “He’s a good cook.”
“Yeah, I know. He ought to get a job as a chef.”
“Your girlfriend called me last night and told me I was a total scumbag for letting you hang,” Joey says.
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“She said if I had any guts at all, I would have fessed up and got you off the hook…. She’s probably right.”
“Probably. But it’s too late now. I’m screwed.”
He shrugs again. “They would have killed me.”
“They didn’t.”
We sit there quietly for several minutes until a commercial for an online dating service comes on the screen.
“So what are you going to do?” Joey asks.
“I don’t know. Get a job in a kitchen or something. My dad says I can get a GED by the end of the summer and go to Lackawanna for a semester or two, then try to transfer out. But I’ll be stuck in Scranton for at least another year.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
I look at him, but I don’t say anything. He’ll be stuck here for longer than that. Probably he’ll inherit the Onager estate and continue its gradual decline.
He leaves a few minutes later. Who knows where he’s headed?
The freezing rain has stopped, and the sun is already out. I watch TV for a couple more hours, then walk downtown and get a sandwich. I kill time with a cup of hot chocolate at Northern Lights, one of the few hip places in the city. It’s a coffee shop across from the courthouse that has things like poetry readings and folk music on the weekends. Students from the U hang out there and eat biscotti and drink espresso.
I ask the guy behind the counter if there are any job openings. He says he doesn’t think so.
So I walk past the Coney Island Lunch, and I see Joey’s father in there, scarfing down a hot dog.
I’ve got nothing to do. So I go in.
He looks up from the booth and waves at me with the stub of the hot dog. I take a seat across from him.
“So that trouble you were talking about bit you on the ass,” he says.
“Yeah. It sucks.”
He wipes some mustard off the corner of his mouth with his wrist. “You want one?”
“Nah,” I say. “I ate.”
“I’m gonna get another.”
He steps up to the counter to order, then walks back over and sits down. “Your mom and dad pissed off?”
I shrug. I hold my thumb and next finger a quarter inch apart. “The house could burn down or they could win the lottery, and their expressions would change this much. So who knows what they think about this. They hardly said anything.”
“Tell you what,” he says. “If Joey got booted out of school, he’d hear about it big-time.” Then he laughs. “His mom would tear him a new one.”
“Would she?”
He rolls his eyes and shakes his head slowly. “I don’t know. She finally stopped beating him up a few years ago…. She whacked me pretty good a few times, too.”
“You never hit him?”
“Never.”
“That’s about what he said.”
“It’s true.”
A waitress brings over his hot dog and asks me if I want anything. I’m taking up space, so I figure I ought to get something. So I order a soda.
“Let me ask you something,” he says. “Your dad ever have a real job?”
“What do you mean? He’s a professor.”
“Yeah. I mean, did he ever do anything else? Just wondering. Seems like if you’re gonna teach, you’d be better at it if you did something else first, you know? Got real-world experiences. Played sports, at least.”
I shake my head. “No. He didn’t.”
“Just was wondering. No big deal. Real-world experience means a lot.”
I’m not allowed on the high school campus at all, but I walk over that way around four o’clock. From a block above, I can look down into the stadium and watch my former teammates working out, running 200-meter intervals, throwing the shot and discus on the infield, working on starts and hurdles. I can hear the coaches’ whistles and the high-jump bar clanging to the ground after a miss, and I can feel the pain and the effort as guys struggle toward the finish line or try to propel themselves through the air.
I’d be the best athlete in the stadium if I was out there.
Maybe I’ll run that marathon this fall after all; something to point toward, keep me focused until this is all behind me and I can start competing again for real. When I finally get to college.
But I already feel disconnected. I’ve spent years aiming toward this spring, my final high school track season. It’s like all that preparation has been erased.
“I thought I might find you here.”
I turn and see Shelly walking up the hill toward me with a tight smile. I fold my arms and nod slowly.
“Free at last,” she says.
“Out on my ass is more like it.”
She stands next to me and looks down at the track. “You should be out there,” she says, barely above a whisper.
I nod. She sounds really sad for me, which makes me feel sad for her.
Watching practice from up here feels like one of those near-death experiences you read about, where a guy says his spirit was hovering above a crash scene, watching the paramedics pull his body out of the wreckage.
She looks down at the wobbly sidewalk, old slates pushed up at uneven angles.
I stare at the hurdlers, whacking the barriers with their feet as they strain toward the finish line. “Why’d you stop running?” I ask her. “Competing, I mean.”
“Just didn’t like it,” she says. “I liked it when I was fourteen, but I just don’t have that need to kick anyone’s ass anymore…. The way you do.”
“Yeah. Like I do.”
She starts to speak, then stops. She waits another minute, then asks slowly, “How could you do that, Mike?”
“Do what?”
“Let yourself get so screwed over.”
“What would you have done?”
“Fought it.” She looks at me in disgust. “Tell them what happened.”
“I did.”
“You did what?”
“I told them what happened. I bought some joints. They got delivered to my locker. The cops found them. End of story.”
She shakes her head. Her voice is subdued again. “That’s not the whole story.”
“It’s the only part that matters.”
She lets out a sigh and kicks at one of the bumps in the sidewalk. “Mr. Integrity, huh?”
“I gotta live with myself.”
“Stupid.” She spits the word out. Then she starts crying.
I put my hand on her shoulder, and she leans into me. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m stupid. But I’ll get over it. So will you.”
“I can’t believe you let yourself get kicked out of school.”
“School sucks anyway. I’ll survive.”
“That’s great, Mike. Good luck living the rest of your life in Scranton.”
She’s got to be kidding me. This is a onetime screwup, not some pattern. “I’m not that stupid,” I say.
“I hope not.”
“Would that be so bad if I did?”
“Did what?”
“Stayed in Scranton.”
She slowly starts shaking her head again. “You’re better than that, Mike, and you know it.”
And with that, she starts walking away. I let her go. Maybe I’ll catch up to her someday.
I stand there for a long time, staring at the athletes in the stadium, unable to move from this spot. And I start thinking about what my obit might be like, hopefully a long time in the future.
Born and raised
in Scranton, Michael attended Lackawanna Junior College for a year before transferring to Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, where he excelled in cross-country and track and field. In later years, he was a three-time winner of the Steamtown Marathon.
Down on the track, Jay and Rico are leading a pack of runners racing around the far turn. They’re running steady but hard, probably a 400-meter trial. Both of them are faster than I am but not as strong.
He is survived by four successful children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
If I was out there, I’d be right on Rico’s shoulder, pushing him along the backstretch and ready to make my move, feeling the strain but working right through it.
He was the author of several beloved novels and movie scripts.
If I was out there, they’d be sweating it big-time, not just because of the work but because they’d know I was stalking them, ready to pounce.
He traveled widely and had many friends.
And now, just before the final turn, I’d be bursting past them, kicking it into a higher gear and moving to the inside lane. They’d be straining to stick with me, but I’d be tougher; there’d be no quit in me anymore.
He took some hard shots, but he never, ever gave up.
If I was out there, I’d roar onto the finishing straightaway, opening up the lead, driving hard, capitalizing on all that work I put in this winter.
That’s what I’d be doing.
If I was out there.
Rich Wallace is the acclaimed author of Wrestling Sturbridge, an ALA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults; Shots on Goal, a Booklist Top 10 Youth Sports Book; Playing Without the Ball, an ALA Quick Pick; and Losing Is Not an Option. He grew up in a small town in northern New Jersey where competitive sports were a way of life. Since then he’s worked as a sportswriter, a news editor, and a magazine editor. Rich Wallace lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two sons.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Rich Wallace
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wallace, Rich.
One good punch / Rich Wallace.—1st ed.
p. cm.
SUMMARY: Eighteen-year-old Michael Kerrigan, writer of obituaries for the Scranton Observer and captain of the track team, is ready for the most important season of his life—until the police find four joints in his school locker, and he is faced with a choice that could change everything.
[1. Conduct of life—Fiction. 2. Integrity—Fiction. 3. Track and field—Fiction. 4. Journalism—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction. 7. Scranton (Pa.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.W15877One 2007
[Fic]—dc22 2006033270
eISBN: 978-0-375-89073-4
v3.0
