Grouper's Laws

by D. Philip Miller

  “Sometimes,” Blondie answered, hedging his bets.

  Blondie turned his attention back to Buford. Peering around the post, he saw that Buford’s sidekick Purdy had joined him. Now there were two of them.

  “Is Buford giving you a hard time?” Bobby asked.

  Blondie started to lie, then thought better of it.

  “He doesn’t like me.”

  “He’s a jerk.”

  Blondie admired the casual way Bobby said it, as if he didn’t care whether Buford heard him or not.

  “Guess I better check things out,” Bobby said, strolling away.

  Alone, Blondie grew fearful. He edged his way toward Brick and Dispatch, who were standing in a corner, casting disdainful glances at a group of girls.

  “What do you think of that one?” he heard Dispatch ask Brick.

  Blondie followed Dispatch’s glance and saw a plain, but nice-looking girl in a pink dress. Not bad, he thought.

  “A dog,” Brick said. “a real hound.”

  “How about her?”

  This one was tall, with a hint of mustache.

  “Another barker,” Brick responded.

  His expression suddenly changed. His eyes glazed over and his mouth fell open. Blondie followed his look. Coming through the entrance was a girl in a short black skirt so tight it seemed painted on. Her large breasts challenged the tensile strength of her bright red blouse. Her face bespoke sexual understanding.

  Blondie looked to Dispatch for an explanation, but he was transfixed as well, apparently suffering a brain boner.

  “Who’s that?” Blondie asked.

  “Linda Lapidus,” he murmured, as if waking from a dream. “She’s just a tenth-grader, but …. ” His voice trailed off.

  “Does she go down?” Blondie whispered, hoping his question would make him sound knowledgeable about such things.

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Why are you two so crazy then?”

  “Just wait,” Brick replied.

  Feller walk over to the nerdy kid behind the turntable and said something to him. A few seconds later, the bouncy beat of “The Twist” filled the room.

  “Ask her to dance,” Brick said to Blondie.

  “Me?”

  “Go on, ask her.”

  Blondie wasn’t about to do any such thing. She was too formidable. Without warning, he found himself tumbling forward until he was almost on top of her, propelled by a hard shove in his back. The girl brought her eyes up to his and raised her brows.

  “Wanna dance?” Blondie asked huskily. His face felt like the inside of a boiler.

  She shrugged.

  Blondie led her toward two other couples who were dancing. As soon as he turned toward her, she began to dance. She didn’t do the Twist. What she did had no name. With her legs rooted, she rocked her pelvis back and forth at him, at first slowly, then faster and faster. There was no mistaking the motion. She was fucking the space in front of her. Blondie was glad he hadn’t stood too close. Her mons would be pounding his thigh like a jackhammer.

  Everyone had to be watching. He bet his face was as red as baboon’s backside. He felt like someone who’d taken a bitch in heat to a high-class dog show. He cast an angry glance Brick’s way, but Brick was paying him no attention. His eyes were epoxied to Linda’s hips. His head bobbed with every thrust. It was the same with all the guys. Even the girls were watching her, although with far less enthusiasm. He was foolish to feel self-conscious. Nobody was watching him at all.

  Except Buford. Blondie picked him out of the crowd, staring at him with his cold cat’s eyes and clenching and unclenching his fists. Purdy was watching him, too, a vengeful smile on his flabby face.

  How would he ever get out of this, Blondie wondered. First, he was going to be embarrassed to near death, then pummeled the rest of the way. DEAD MEAT.

  Still gyrating, Blondie scanned the room for a way out where he didn’t have to pass by Buford. His eyes caught on a face in the crowd. Witnessing Linda’s wild dance of love was his Venus — Tammy. She was wearing a white angora sweater over a blue skirt. She suddenly shifted her gaze to him. He tried to read the look she gave him. She probably thought he was some kind of Satyr, joined as he was in a frenetic mating dance with an out-of-control pelvis. How would he ever explain? He had to get off the floor.

  The record ended just before he reached the point of despair. Buford began walking his way. His gait was both casual and purposeful, the swagger of the executioner.

  “Thanks,” Blondie mumbled at his exhausted partner. He ducked his head and edged away from the couples milling onto the dance floor at the first strains of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” The lights began to dim.

  Blondie circled away from Buford and Purdy. He came to a door marked “restrooms” and shoved his way through it. He darted into the men’s room, surprising a youngster squeezing a zit. He bolted from the room.

  Blondie opened a stall door and sat down on the john to catch his breath. He heard the door open again, so he loosened his belt and dropped his pants to the floor to avoid suspicion. It was the wrong move.

  “Well, well, look who’s taking a shit,” he heard Purdy say.

  “No dummy. He isn’t taking a shit. He is a shit.” That was Buford. Blondie was in for it now. How would he ever get out alive? In desperation, Blondie began making farting sounds by blowing on his arm with his mouth.

  “Kee-rist!” Buford exclaimed. “I’m going to have to waste him while he’s on the can.”

  Fingernails scraped against the metal.

  “You’re going to have to crawl under there and get him,” Purdy said.

  “Bullshit. I’m not crawling under a stall door even to kill this worthless turd.”

  Good, Blondie thought. Maybe they’ll leave.

  “You go under,” Buford told Purdy.

  “Me. I don’t want to do that.”

  “Get your fat ass down on the floor and grab his fucking feet,” Buford ordered.

  Blondie heard some grunting, then a fleshy hand began reaching for his ankles. He brought his heel down on the back of Purdy’s hand.

  “Jesus!” Purdy shouted.

  “You dumb fuck. Let me look under there.”

  Buford peered under the stall door, his face contorted with rage.

  The door to the restroom opened again.

  “What are you two doing?” a man inquired.

  Grasping at a potential reprieve, Blondie shouted, “What’s wrong with you guys? Why don’t you go after girls?”

  “You bastard,” Buford yelled back. “I’m going to pull your nuts right out of their sack.”

  “Who are you talking to like that?” The man’s voice rose. “I don’t like your attitude. In fact, if you don’t leave the premises right now, I’m calling the police.”

  A long silence followed the man’s threat. Blondie could sense Buford’s fury. It crackled the air like an approaching thunderstorm. Finally, he heard the door open and crash shut. They were gone.

  “You in there. Come on out.”

  Blondie pulled his pants back up and fastened them. He opened the door.

  Standing before him was the mild-mannered man who’d taken his money at the door.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded.

  “Sir, I don’t know. Those two boys came in while I was going to the bathroom and they began making remarks of a perverted nature, so I hid in the stall.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed in skepticism.

  “Sounds fishy to me. You better get back to the dance.”

  “Yes sir.” Blondie detested the unctuous tone in his voice.

  When he reentered the main room, it was dark except for a rotating mirrored ball on the ceiling, which cast shards of light onto the shadowy dancers below. When Blondie’s eyes adjusted, he saw Brick and Dispatch with Feller and the Grouper. Tammy was standing nearby, talking to the homely girl who rode his bus.

 
“Let’s blow this joint,” Dispatch said as Blondie arrived. “It’s scag’s night out.”

  “Where’s Shakes?” Feller asked.

  “He’s been following a dumpy little Jewish girl around all night,” Brick answered.

  “Janine Raznosky?”

  “She looks like a woodpecker with that nose,” Dispatch said.

  “Yeah, and that’s all I’d put in her too,” Brick commented.

  Feller sent Dispatch to collect Shakes. He reappeared shortly, dragging Shakes by the arm.

  “I c-could’ve n-nailed her, I t-tell you …. ”

  “No. You could’ve needled her,” Brick said.

  “It’s time for some processed barley,” Grouper announced to general acclaim.

  They began trooping toward the exit, but Blondie didn’t move.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Feller asked.

  “I’m not ready yet.”

  Feller gave him an inquisitive look.

  Sweat broke out on his forehead. How could he explain his paralysis to Feller? How could he make him understand that the evening would be a bust if he didn’t dance with her? The idea scared him to death, but he had to do it — and it had to be a slow dance, so he could hold her tight.

  “Blondie isn’t ready to go yet,” Feller called after the others. They turned and looked at him.

  Blondie heard the strains of a new song, a slow song. It was now or never. Blondie told his wooden legs to move and, to his surprise, they did. He peg-legged himself across the dance floor, feeling condemned, knowing she’d turn him down … knowing also that he was a slave to his fate.

  The pigtailed girl’s gaze followed him as he strode across the room, a question in her eyes. Tammy was looking away when he reached her. She turned and looked at him in surprise.

  “Would you like to dance?” he asked — too forcefully, he thought. Nerves.

  “Okay.”

  Blondie was flustered by her acceptance. He’d been preparing himself for rejection. Still, he retained enough presence of mind to lead her into the swaying crowd.

  When he took her in his arms, she rested her head on his chest as if he and she were steadies. Her hair was soft against his cheek and her smell was fresh like … like what? Like clean hair? He was flipping out.

  The Lettermen were crooning “The Way You Look Tonight,” an old standard about someone reminiscing about a past love and feeling a warm glow at the memory of her. Sparkles of light from the rotating ball above showered them.

  Time slowed and the rest of the world disappeared behind the lacy curtain of his infatuation. He was suspended in sweet nectar, slowly revolving in perfect harmony with his angel. On and on the Lettermen sang as he floated with her above the world somewhere, lost in the place where the very idea of love begins.

  Blondie didn’t even notice when the song ended. He was startled when her arms fell away from him. She gave him a warm smile — what did it mean? — and walked off.

  For a moment, he stood alone in the middle of the dance floor, disoriented. Had she been with him in that faraway place? Or had he been hallucinating?

  The whole club was watching him, Grouper most intently. Dispatch signaled for Blondie to come along. While the others filed out, Grouper lagged behind. A melancholy expression gripped his face.

  When the rest were too far away to hear, Grouper leaned toward Blondie and whispered: “Only assholes fall in love.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  His dad had planted an ash tree in the front yard in mid-September. “Best time to plant a tree,” he’d said. A few dozen leaves had decked its limbs then. Now, a month later, only one remained. Blondie identified with the solitary leaf. He felt like he was just hanging on and any day a stiff breeze would blow him away.

  Sunday. His parents already had left for church. Sunday. Two weeks and a day since he’d made an ass of himself in front of Tammy’s dad at the CYO dance. Feller had given him that unwanted piece of news as soon as he’d arrived at school the following Monday.

  Since then, he’d been semi-depressed, passing through the halls of school as unobtrusively as a monk. Not only was he afraid of encountering Tammy — her dad had surely told her about his bizarre behavior in the restroom — but he could tell from Buford’s glares that the animosity he’d aroused by puking on his sneakers had been compounded enormously by his more-or-less calling him a homosexual.

  “Billies are big-time into being he-men,” Grouper’d told him. “You can call a billy a drunk, a wife-beater, even a child molester, and probably get away with it. But never call one a pansy. That’s a challenge to his manhood.”

  Grouper had said it in a scornful way, but Blondie recognized the truth behind his words. There would be no forgiving. The only thing that was saving him from Buford’s harsh knuckles so far, he was sure, was carefully planning his routes to and from class so he always was in as big a crowd as possible.

  Blondie continued to stare out the window. The sky had clouded over in long gray ridges, like the underbelly of a whale. Perhaps it would snow. It could make him no more a prisoner.

  Blondie heard the Pontiac whoosh up the driveway and soon the report of a door being shut. He heard his mother’s heels smack across the front porch and shortly the sounds of her sobs inside the house. He heard his dad call his mom’s name just before their bedroom door slammed shut. What was it this time? After a while, he heard a knock at his bedroom door and his mother slipped into the room.

  She’d quit crying, though crimson blotched her face. Her expression was a mix of anger and hurt. Blondie immediately felt the weight of her need.

  “Your father … ” she began in a tone of outrage. She began to cry again. She plopped down on the bed, her body heaving. Blondie went to her and awkwardly placed put his arm around her.

  After a while, she told him his dad had refused to skip the next meeting of his military group to attend an open house at her school.

  “He’s more concerned with those washed-up old sots than he is about me,” she accused.

  Was this the kind of thing other husbands and wives got upset about? If so, what was the point of being married?

  “Don’t you think you’re overreacting, mom?”

  “Sure, take his side,” she said. “Men always stick together.”

  Blondie was flattered that she’d called him a man but stupefied that she thought he and his dad shared some commonality of outlook. He was beginning to get a headache. But he could tell his mom was beginning to calm down. Her wracking sobs had given way to sporadic tremors.

  “Your dad makes me so damn mad!” Her anger flared again.

  “I know, mom.”

  “You don’t know everything about Francis and me,” she said in a much softer voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never you mind. When you’re eighteen,” she answered. She sighed deeply and trudged off.

  Blondie knew her upset would be over by the time she finished cooking dinner, but now he was curious. What had she been talking about? A secret? He bet he knew what it was: he was adopted. That would explain his light coloring, why he felt so little in common with his dad. He was probably impotent. Blondie’d read about it in a booklet in the doctor’s office.

  Later, after dark, tiny snowflakes began to fall — nothing much, a halfhearted effort by the weather gods, but a harbinger of winter’s approach.

  When he awoke the next morning, Blondie felt a modicum of enthusiasm about going to school. Feller had offered to chauffeur him in his dad’s aging black-and-white two-tone Fairlane. So it wasn’t a Corvette or even a souped-up Chevy — how many kids got to go to school in any car at all? Besides, this would give him a chance to know Feller better. He was the only one of their group with any status at school.

  Blondie waited a minute or two after Feller arrived so he wouldn’t think he was too eager, then sauntered out.

  “I don’t get dad’s car very often,” Feller said afte
r he got in. “Not much, is it?”

  “One day away from the bus is not to be sneered at.”

  Feller laughed.

  “You don’t think much of the kids here in Fenton, do you?”

  “Do you?” Blondie shot back.

  “Ah, they’re not so bad. A little rough around the edges maybe.”

  “They’re all edges.”

  Feller laughed again. He didn’t seem to mind what Blondie was saying.

  “You don’t identify with them, do you?”

  Feller shrugged.

  “I’m not planning to spend my whole life here anyway.”

  “What do you think you’ll do?”

  “I don’t know. Take pictures maybe.”

  “You mean be a photographer?”

  “Yeah, I like to do that. I’m in Photography Club, you know.”

  Blondie didn’t know. He’d passed on joining any clubs first semester because he didn’t know anyone.

  “It could be great to travel the world, just taking pictures of new places and people and getting paid for it …. ” Feller stopped.

  “Yeah, that could be great,” Blondie agreed. He was impressed. Feller had dreams too.

  “You?” Feller asked.

  “Sometimes I write things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Stories, poems.”

  “Yeah? Can I see some?”

  Blondie felt threatened. What he wrote was personal. Feller might think he was a jerk if he read them.

  “I guess.”

  “No big deal,” Feller said. “If you want to, I’d be interested. If you don’t, that’s all right.”

  Blondie liked the way Feller never seemed to push. He was smooth in a way Blondie didn’t think he ever would be. Everything was so important to him.

  That was probably why he liked Miss Darlington so much. She was the same way. She was passionate this morning about what was going on in the South, where Martin Luther King and his followers were registering blacks to vote.

  “No one’s keeping them from voting now,” one boy said.

  “Actually, they are,” Miss Darlington replied. “In most Southern states, Negroes have to pass tests to prove they’re qualified to vote.”