Sticks

by Joan Bauer

  I don’t say anything.

  “Have you been going in the hall?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “You’ve got to start doing it, son, watching people play the game you’ll be playing soon. Learn from their game, play them in your head. Everybody makes mistakes—I’m a living testimonial to that.”

  I’m standing now, shoving out my bandaged hand toward him. “The tournament’s two weeks away! I’m not going to beat Buck! He’ll be too old to compete next year. I don’t want to talk about it anymore!”

  CHAPTER

  Three days pass.

  Nobody mentions my hand.

  I’m sitting at the kitchen table eating Oreos when Poppy slaps her fist on the table.

  “Listen up because I’m only going to say this once.”

  I’m about to tell her I’ve had a pretty hard day at school.

  “People would pay a lot of money for the advice I’m about to give you, Mickey Vernon. I don’t talk much about the arthritis I’ve got in my hands. I don’t think complaining about things makes them any better. But my hands hurt every day. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth getting out of bed, but then I’ve got to go to the bathroom, and suddenly the trip seems worth it.” She puts her hand on my shoulder. “You’ve just got to keep walking through it, honey. Don’t run, don’t hide, just walk. Eventually it’s going to get better. It won’t stay like this forever.”

  She takes three Oreos from the bag and leaves me there.

  * * *

  Arlen and I are walking the long way back to my house from his house past Shankiss’s Hole. We saw Buck and Pike Lorey hanging by Woolworth’s and figured a detour was better than getting beat up. Other than people sitting on the pool tables and misusing the equipment, Shankiss’s Hole gets Poppy, along with everyone else in town, the most upset about life.

  I look past the DANGER signs around the fenced-off construction site and stare into the big hole in the ground. The bulldozers made it two years ago when Mr. Shankiss was going to build his restaurant and revitalize Flax Street until he ran out of money and just left it there as an eyesore four blocks from Vernon’s and made himself the most hated man in all of Cruckston, New Jersey.

  Quitter. That’s what people call him. He could have made a difference and he quit. Quit on his responsibilities, quit on the people who were counting on him.

  Quit on his dream.

  I look down deep in Shankiss’s Hole and feel my dream buried in the dirt. Arlen takes out his mechanical pencil, calculator, and a pad of paper from his bookbag. At least I helped him remember it today.

  “I’ve been doing some figuring,” he says, punching calculator buttons. “According to my calculations, you shouldn’t be depressed.”

  “What?”

  “Figuring,” he says, “the average life span for an American male is about seventy-three, and given the fact that you are ten, you have lived out approximately one-eighth of your life, meaning you have about sixty-three years left to make good.”

  I sniff.

  “If you were ancient, like in your forties, I’d say stay depressed, more than half your life is gone, there might not be another tournament. But at ten, Mickey, you’re going to have a lot more opportunities to nail Buck and a ton of other guys.” Arlen’s punching buttons like crazy. “And,” he says, “this three-week setback only represents less than one tenth of one percent of your life, assuming you’re going to make seventy-three, but you could last longer. You could live to be one hundred, in which case, you’re looking at six one hundredths of a percent, which is basically nothing in the whole sphere of the universe.”

  “My dad died young, Arlen!”

  Arlen’s calculating away and writing down numbers. “Even if you don’t go as long as the averages, and you go a lot earlier, you’re still talking small percentages. If I were you, I’d definitely feel better. The numbers don’t lie.”

  Arlen puts the calculator back in his pocket. “We need to go to the hall,” he says, and starts off down the street.

  I stand there.

  Arlen turns to me. “Are you going to argue with math?”

  * * *

  It’s the first time I’ve set foot in Vernon’s for ten days.

  I love the echo the balls make when they jump in the pocket. I love the way the pool sticks hang on the wall like soldiers.

  I love the way Buck misses easy shots when we make gasser noises at him. I stand at table twenty-one and roll the white cue ball across the empty table.

  Take it slow.

  Arlen is holding the mechanical bridge—that’s an extender for a pool stick—and I’m shooting one-handed. I’m going to use whatever I can to make my game better.

  A siren’s blaring in the distance. Buck’s kissing his stick and dancing with it in the corner.

  I look away and concentrate. I miss a lot of shots at first. It’s frustrating. But slowly I get the hang of playing one-handed.

  I line up the shot and tap. Three in the side. Not perfect, but not bad.

  * * *

  Arlen stays for dinner so we can work on our science fair project. Mom is at night school, Camille is at the dress rehearsal for her play. Poppy makes us macaroni and cheese, which her mother used to make for her when she was pushing on a homework assignment. Poppy says her mother’s macaroni and cheese has special brain-enlarging calories that have never failed her yet, which is why she’s such an intelligent fireball to this day.

  We’re leaning over the dining room table; Arlen just finished drawing the sheet that shows about angles—the angles the ball makes off the rail, and the angles where the cue ball hits the object ball.

  I say pool is cooler than volcanoes.

  “If we just had something that explodes,” Arlen says.

  We walk down the long hall to the living room and find the creakiest place in our floor. If you step just right it makes a creepy wailing sound: Weeeeeeeaaaaaaaaccccchhhhh. When Camille has her friend Olivia over, Arlen and I rock back and forth on the place and creep Olivia out bad. Poppy put a little hooked rug over the spot, but that just makes it easier to find.

  Weeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaccccccccchhhhhhh.

  We go into the living room. Mom’s palm tree by the window is dying. Poppy says we don’t get enough sunlight in the living room. All the sun hits the back of the house, which is why Poppy’s geraniums bloom three seasons in the kitchen. Sunlight isn’t a big deal for me. Pool halls stay pretty much the same, day or night.

  Arlen and I are waiting for his mother to pick him up and I put on the video of my dad playing pool. Arlen never minds watching it. I put it on once when Petie Pencastle was here and he wanted to watch cartoons.

  Poppy sits down to watch with us, even though it’s hard for her. The tape’s choppy, but I don’t care. Dad’s wearing a blue shirt. He shoots some awesome shots and the video cuts to me as a baby, sitting in a high chair picking my nose. “Eight ball in the side,” Dad says to me, and I stop picking and watch. Dad makes the shot and I clap my pudgy little hands. I’m just watching the memories I don’t remember spill out. Poppy wipes away a tear. Dad’s bending over the table, shooting ball after ball.

  Bam.

  Pow.

  In they go.

  “He said he could sometimes see a line going from the cue ball through the object ball right into the pocket,” Poppy says softly.

  Arlen and I sit up. “What kind of line?” we say together.

  “I don’t know. He said it was like a line showing him the way.”

  Arlen looks up to heaven and closes his eyes. He does this when he’s getting math ideas. He gets out graph paper and starts drawing a pool table and a ball with lines shooting through it. His mother comes to the front door, which doesn’t interest him much.

  “He had an idea,” I tell Mrs. Pepper.

  She plops down. “We could be here all night.”

  Arlen’s drawing like mad, measuring lines, drawing angles. “This,” he declares, “is unbelievable!”

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nbsp; CHAPTER

  “Arlen,” pleads his mother, “math will wait. Your father will not. We have to go!”

  Arlen turns toward his mother. “Mom, do you know what Galileo said?”

  Arlen’s bringing out the big guns. Galileo is a dead scientist who used math a lot. He’s one of Arlen’s heroes. Arlen puts his hand over his heart.

  “Galileo said, ‘The universe stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.’”

  A labyrinth is like a maze. Arlen has this quotation on the Galileo poster in his room.

  “Fifteen minutes,” says Mrs. Pepper, and takes out her knitting. She’s making a pink sweater.

  Arlen draws a ball on a piece of paper and another ball with a line through it heading for a pocket.

  “A vector,” he says, “is a line that takes you from one place to the next. That means your father was using vectors to make his shots. He could see the lines going from the balls to the pockets like they were drawn on the table. He didn’t have math as a language so he couldn’t tell it to anyone else. His language was his stick. He could only show it.”

  My heart’s pounding.

  Arlen turns to Poppy. “Can you remember anything more that Mr. Vernon said about seeing the line?”

  Poppy’s thinking. “He just said it kind of shot through his eye, went through the cue ball, and he could see the table and what he was supposed to do.”

  “See the table,” Arlen repeated.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “See the table!” Arlen shouts. “Have you ever seen those lines when you shoot, Mickey?”

  “No, I can do the angles, but—”

  “I need string!” Arlen yells.

  Mrs. Pepper holds up her pink yarn.

  “Yes, yarn is perfect!” Arlen shouts. “We have to go downstairs! We have to see the table!”

  * * *

  Arlen’s just scattered nine balls on table eight and is cutting the pink yarn in pieces. He lays a piece of yarn from each ball to its closest pocket until table eight looks like a diagram.

  “I think that’s how your father saw it, except the lines weren’t pink.” He makes a face.

  I look at the table. It’s one of those simple answers you don’t think about.

  “But each time a ball moves the lines will be different,” I say.

  “You’ve got to train your mind to see them,” says Arlen. “Your dad did it naturally.”

  “And then there’s English,” I say. “You’ve got to be able to hit the balls just right to line up your next shot.”

  “Geometry doesn’t explain the way you have to hit the ball,” Arlen explains. “That’s calculus.”

  “As I live and breathe,” says Poppy, “I think this will work.”

  * * *

  I think if Poppy hadn’t seen it for herself she wouldn’t have talked Mom into letting me stay up late and try the experiment. Mrs. Pepper drags Arlen halfway home and then they come back to get his jacket.

  “This shouldn’t count!” Arlen pleads to his mother as he retrieves his coat. “I was helping a friend in need! Be merciful!”

  He throws me another drawing.

  The pink yarn is junking up the table, so I have to take it off, brush the matt, and use string instead. I cut different lengths, placing them on the table. Then I memorize the line that goes from the ball into the pocket and try the shot using the bridge.

  I make most of the shots.

  Poppy tries some, too. “Well, I’ll be!” she shouts.

  I want to tear the bandage off my hand and start playing for real.

  My left hand’s doing good.

  Mom makes me go to bed. I curl up in my green quilt and listen to the click, click of pool balls in the hall below. I study Arlen’s drawing and put it under my pillow. I close my eyes and try to imagine table eight in a big geometric pattern—the balls lying there, breaking apart, moving, and those lines going right through the balls, into the pockets, and slamming through Buck Pender’s dirty rotten heart.

  * * *

  In school I keep seeing the table. Long shots. Short shots. Bank shots. Vectors.

  I’m seeing geometry everywhere—diamond-shaped ball fields, birds flying in V formation. I have grapes for lunch and think about circles. Then I ram the grapes across my tray with my straw.

  Wham.

  Two grapes in the corner.

  It’s all connected.

  Mrs. Riggles gives us extra time to work on our soldier letters, which are due tomorrow. Arlen and I are in our favorite corner in the school library, sitting in the soft brown chairs, tucked behind the science fiction section. I just finished my letter.

  Dear Mother and Father,

  I am writing to let you know how I am. Things are not as good as I would like them to be. I was shot in the arm and my arm is in a sling, but the good news is that it is feeling okay now, although I will be awhile getting back to battle. It was frightening to be shot. I did something stupid near the battle line and a Redcoat got me, but my friends pulled me away and saved my life.

  I guess you know by now that we lost the Battle of Germantown and the British took Philadelphia. We feel so bad that we couldn’t hold on. Retreating from that battle was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I felt like we were letting everyone down.

  When I think of my comfortable home and warm bed and all the good food you supply, it’s hard for me to believe what has happened to us at Valley Forge. The conditions are so hard. We’ve had to cut down trees to make huts and burn wood for fires. There’s nothing left here now to break the wind. We are cold and hungry. We are tired and sick. I’m told we came here last month with 12,000 men, but there won’t be that many when we leave.

  There is no medicine, so my arm must get better on its own. There is not much hope, either. The most hope we see comes from General George Washington. He is the finest man I have ever known. He reminds us every day that our cause is good. I trust him to do the right thing. I think he would make a great president someday (hint, hint).

  Other than that, I am doing all right. I have a torn blanket to keep me warm. I’m real lucky to have it, too. Not everyone has this much. If I get back home, I will never take anything for granted again.

  Your son,

  John

  Lieutenant John Q. Milner

  Valley Forge, Pennsylvania

  January 11, 1778

  Arlen finished his letter too. He had to use his calculator. He figured how many potatoes, barrels of sauerkraut, and pounds of meat each man needed to survive for three months plus how many wagons it would take to deliver the supplies. The sauerkraut had loads of vitamin C to help fight diseases like scurvy. Arlen decided that his soldier came from a rich, brave farming family who could bring the food to Valley Forge and change the course of history. Arlen said his letter would probably get his soldier promoted from private first class to at least master sergeant.

  My doctor’s appointment is tomorrow.

  It’s the last period of the day at school. Mrs. Riggles is standing in front of the blackboard. “What,” she asks the class, “is the bravest thing you’ve ever done?”

  We all look at each other.

  Sally Stoletto says calling 911 when her grandmother had a stroke and helping her breathe until the ambulance came.

  Arlen says taking Mangler to the animal hospital without any money in a cab after he’d been hit by that motorcycle.

  “Were either of you frightened?”

  “Yeah!” Arlen and Sally say together.

  “Courage,” Mrs. Riggles says, “rarely comes without fear. Courage rises above fear and makes people more than they think they can be.”
r />   She holds up a picture of Paul Revere riding his horse. “Let’s talk about the acts of courage during the Revolutionary War.”

  I take out my history book and feel something shoot through me, like I’m connected to all the acts of courage in the whole world.

  Whether I get to the finals or choke in the early rounds, I know what I have to do.

  CHAPTER

  “Does that hurt?”

  Dr. Oglethorpe is pushing around my left wrist.

  “No.”

  “How about that?” She’s watching me hard. It hurts.

  “No.”

  She bends it up.

  “Ouch!”

  Dr. Oglethorpe takes a deep breath and steps back.

  “It’s been three weeks,” I tell her. “The swelling’s gone. You said I’d be okay in three weeks.”

  “I said we’d see. When is this tournament?” she asks.

  “A week. And I’ve got to play!”

  “Mickey!” says Mom.

  “And I’ve got to practice, too! Every day!”

  “Make a fist,” Dr. Oglethorpe says. I make a strong one. She folds her arms and looks at me. “Well, I suppose if Mickey Mantle could play baseball for nineteen seasons of unceasing pain, Mickey Vernon can play this week. You can’t do any permanent damage.”

  Yes!

  Mom’s looking worried.

  “But,” the doctor says, “you use ice regularly, you take Tylenol every six hours, you listen to what your body is telling you, Mickey. If it hurts too much, you stop and rest and put your splint back on. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “One more thing,” says the doctor. “Just how good are you on a pool table?”

  “I’m okay,” I say.

  “He’s awesome,” says Mom.

  * * *

  I get my rack of balls and walk to table twelve, cool, like Joseph Alvarez does. I’ve got catching up to do. I walk by Buck, who’s nailing shots on table six.