Stop-Time

by Frank Conroy

  “Okay.” He tapped my shoulder. “Good.”

  I wiped my hands on my blue jeans and watched him move down the line. “Out ... out ... out.” He had a large mole on the back of his neck.

  Seven boys qualified. Coming back, Ramos called out, “Next trick Backward Round the World! Okay? Go!”

  The first two boys missed, but the third was the kid in the sailor hat. Glancing quickly to see that no one was behind him, he hunched up his shoulder, threw, and just barely made the catch. There was some loose string in his hand, but not enough to disqualify him.

  Number four missed, as did number five, and it was my turn. I stepped forward, threw the yo-yo almost straight up over my head, and as it began to fall pulled very gently to add some speed. It zipped neatly behind my legs and there was nothing more to do. My head turned to one side, I stood absolutely still and watched the yo-yo come in over my shoulder and slap into my hand. I added a Loop-the-Loop just to show the tightness of the string.

  “Did you see that?” I heard someone say.

  Number seven missed, so it was between myself and the boy in the sailor hat. His hair was bleached by the sun and combed up over his forehead in a pompadour, held from behind by the white hat. He was a year or two older than me. Blinking his blue eyes nervously, he adjusted the tension of his string.

  “Next trick Cannonball! Cannonball! You go first this time,” Ramos said to me.

  Kids had gathered in a circle around us, those in front quiet and attentive, those in back jumping up and down to get a view. “Move back for room,” Ricardo said, pushing them back. “More room, please.”

  I stepped into the center and paused, looking down at the ground. It was a difficult trick. The yo-yo had to land exactly on the string and there was a chance I’d miss the first time. I knew I wouldn’t miss twice. “Can I have one practice?”

  Ramos and Ricardo consulted in their mother tongue, and then Ramos held up his hands. “Attention all kids! Each boy have one practice before trick.”

  The crowed was silent, watching me. I took a deep breath and threw, following the fall of the yo-yo with my eyes, turning slightly, matador-fashion, as it passed me. My finger caught the string, the yo-yo came up and over, and missed. Without pausing I threw again. “Second time,” I yelled, so there would be no misunderstanding. The circle had been too big. This time I made it small, sacrificing beauty for security. The yo-yo fell where it belonged and spun for a moment. (A moment I don’t rush, my arms widespread, my eyes locked on the spinning toy. The Trick! There it is, brief and magic, right before your eyes! My hands are frozen in the middle of a deaf-and-dumb sentence, holding the whole airy, tenuous statement aloft for everyone to see.) With a quick snap I broke up the trick and made my catch.

  Ramos nodded. “Okay. Very good. Now next boy.”

  Sailor-hat stepped forward, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. He threw once to clear the string.

  “One practice,” said Ramos.

  He nodded.

  “C’mon Bobby,” someone said. “You can do it.”

  Bobby threw the yo-yo out to the side, made his move, and missed. “Damn,” he whispered. (He said “dahyum.”) The second time he got halfway through the trick before his yo-yo ran out of gas and fell impotently off the string. He picked it up and walked away, winding slowly.

  Ramos came over and held my hand in the air. “The winner!” he yelled. “Grand prize Black Beauty Diamond Yo-Yo will now be awarded.”

  Ricardo stood in front of me. “Take off old yo-yo.” I loosened the knot and slipped it off. “Put out hand.” I held out my hand and he looped the new string on my finger, just behind the nail, where the mark was. “You like Black Beauty,” he said, smiling as he stepped back. “Diamond make pretty colors in the sun.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Very good with yo-yo. Later we have contest for whole town. Winner go to Miami for State Championship. Maybe you win. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I nodded. “Thank you.”

  A few kids came up to look at Black Beauty. I threw it once or twice to get the feel. It seemed a bit heavier than my old one. Ramos and Ricardo were surrounded as the kids called out their favorite tricks.

  “Do Pickpocket! Pickpocket!”

  “Do the Double Cannonball!”

  “Ramos! Ramos! Do the Turkish Army!”

  Smiling, waving their hands to ward off the barrage of requests, the twins worked their way through the crowd toward the mouth of the alley. I watched them moving away and was immediately struck by a wave of fierce and irrational panic. “Wait,” I yelled, pushing through after them. “Wait!”

  I caught them on the street.

  “No more today,” Ricardo said, and then paused when he saw it was me. “Okay. The champ. What’s wrong? Yo-yo no good?”

  “No. It’s fine.”

  “Good. You take care of it.”

  “I wanted to ask when the contest is. The one where you get to go to Miami.”

  “Later. After school begins.” They began to move away. “We have to go home now.”

  “Just one more thing,” I said, walking after them. “What is the hardest trick you know?”

  Ricardo laughed. “Hardest trick killing flies in air.”

  “No, no. I mean a real trick.”

  They stopped and looked at me. “There is a very hard trick,” Ricardo said. “I don’t do it, but Ramos does. Because you won the contest he will show you. But only once, so watch carefully.”

  We stepped into the lobby of the Sunset Theater. Ramos cleared his string. “Watch,” he said, and threw. The trick started out like a Cannonball, and then unexpectedly folded up, opened again, and as I watched breathlessly the entire complex web spun around in the air, propelled by Ramos’ two hands making slow circles like a swimmer. The end was like the end of a Cannonball.

  “That’s beautiful,” I said, genuinely awed. “What’s it called?”

  “The Universe.”

  “The Universe,” I repeated.

  “Because it goes around and around,” said Ramos, “like the planets.”

  I pedaled out Los Olas Boulevard toward the beach, gliding along the empty sidewalk under the towering royal palms. At the drawbridge I disregarded a “No Bicycles” sign and zipped over at full speed. Even if the bridge-keeper had seen me I’d be gone before he got out the door. I took a right at Lotus Drive and coasted down to my cousin Lucky’s house.

  “Hey, Lucky!”

  No answer. I pulled open the screen door and walked through the kitchen, dining room, and living room on my way to the front porch. From there I could see him out on the sea wall, spearfishing, a long gig held above his head as he walked along, his lean brown body bending slightly over the water.

  “Hey, Lucky,” I shouted, trotting out to him.

  He didn’t look up, but froze suddenly, staring down into the water. Just before I reached him he threw the gig. I knew perfectly well he hadn’t seen a fish. There was a studied calmness, unlikely if he’d had a real target, and his throw was subtly overdramatized, like the movements of Olympic athletes. He was playing, which seemed perfectly natural to me, but he covered it up because he thought he was too old. Without actually thinking about it I understood, and never called him on his white lies. Lucky was always in rehearsal for great, unspecified trials ahead. I liked him.

  “Shit,” he said. “A mullet big as Shadow.” (His dog.) Pulling the string hand over hand to retrieve the gig he peered into the water, feigning frustration. “Almost got him.”

  “Maybe he’ll come back in.”

  We ambled along the sea wall.

  “Two girls moved into one of Schmidt’s cottages yesterday. Secretaries from up North on vacation.”

  “I got a yo-yo since I saw you,” I said.

  “Judy and Cissie. Judy’s tits are so big she has to watch it going around corners. The other one has red hair down to her waist. I saw her take it down last night.”

  “What do you mean you sa
w her?”

  “Just what I said.” He gazed down into the water.

  I waited a moment, but he would say no more. “How?” I felt a slight stiffening in my neck and my ears grew warm. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted him to answer.

  “You’ll find out.” He hefted the long gig in the air, tossing it lightly to change his grip. “Maybe.”

  “Look at the crab!” A small white crab was pulling at a pop bottle on the sandy bottom. “You going to hit him?”

  He shook his head. “I hate those ugly shit-eaters. The only thing worse is a land crab.”

  “Or a snake.”

  “I don’t mind snakes,” he said.

  “I won a yo-yo contest at the dime store today.”

  Once again he stopped, crouching, and motioned me back with his free hand. “Hold it, hold it.”

  “The mullet?”

  After a moment he straightened up. “No. Just some seaweed. The hell with it.”

  We cut back across the neighbor’s lawn, feeling the short tough grass between our toes. Lucky walked quickly. “The girls went up to the beach.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Twenty or twenty-one.”

  “What do you call them girls for, then?” I said. “They’re not girls.”

  “Well, whatever they are they went to the beach and that’s where I’m going.”

  “Can you lend me a dime? I’ll have enough for a banana split at Ray’s.”

  “I guess so. Daddy gave me two bucks yesterday for cleaning his reels.”

  We dropped off the gig in Lucky’s room, drank a glass of milk in the kitchen, and started for the beach. It was only a few blocks so I left my bike. I did a few tricks as we walked along.

  “Hey. That’s pretty good. Let me try.” He threw a few times, trying for a Loop-the Loop.

  “I won a contest at the dime store,” I said, pulling out Black Beauty. “They gave me this. You can’t buy them.”

  We walked for a while, yo-yoing together, until I felt his hand on my arm. “There they are,” he said under his breath, “coming right at us.” He undid the yo-yo and gave it back to me. The two girls strolled toward us unhurriedly, white towels draped over their shoulders. “My God,” Lucky said distantly, like a man talking in his sleep, “will you look at the boobs on her.” I could feel him gathering himself. Nervous energy radiated like an electrical aureole around his body.

  “Hi there!” he said in a totally false voice. “How’s the water?”

  “Hi,” said Boobs. “Well, it’s just great.” They paused without committing themselves, as if just for a moment to catch their breaths.

  “We’re just going up for a swim ourselves,” Lucky improvised. It occurred to me that he had the proper fatuous grown-up tone, but that he was saying everything too fast. The words leaped out of his mouth like machine-gun bullets.

  “Who’s your little friend?” asked Redhair.

  “Oh, that’s my cousin Frank,” Lucky said quickly, like a tourist guide pointing out some dull local landmark. Staring at my toes I felt a mild anger whipping around in my heart. I might have been skinny, but I certainly wasn’t little. I was five feet eight. “He’s from up North too, and I sort of look after him.”

  Lucky was only two or three years older than me, but the process of physical maturation, only just begun in my case, had wreaked most of its changes in him. He was six feet tall, well muscled, and his voice was a smooth baritone. Had I been a little more aware of such things I would have realized that like almost all the Fouchet men he was exceptionally attractive to women.

  “Well,” said Boobs, moving away. “See you later. C’mon Cissie. I want to get this sand off me.”

  “Bye,” said Lucky, with a little fluttering wave. “See you later, girls.”

  I tapped him on the arm. “So you look after me, do you?”

  “Oh, what the hell,” he said weakly.

  “Hi there!” I mimicked the weird voice he’d used. “How’s the water?”

  “Do you realize,” said Lucky, moving closer as if afraid of being overheard although we had the sidewalk to ourselves. “Do you realize that in a very few minutes little Miss Titties will be ever so gracefully slipping out of her teeny little bathing suit? Do you realize that her immense, glistening knockers will pop out like a pair of well-oiled basketballs? Do you realize that probably at this very moment she’s dancing along to the shower with every last bit of razzamatazz flapping around in the open air?”

  I threw my yo-yo nervously. That kind of talk had a strong effect on me. “I wouldn’t mind dancing right along with her,” I said, aware that I’d struck a good balance between the sort of wisecrack one was supposed to make, and my true feelings—that to be there with her, to hold her and have her like it because I was a man, to learn the mystery from her, to die inside her would be, in no uncertain terms, the best possible thing that could happen. Literally heaven on earth. Even the thought made my hands tremble. My dry throat swallowed nothing.

  “You know why girls shouldn’t drink beer on the beach?” he asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “They’ll get sand in their Schlitz.”

  Laughing, we went into Ray’s and ordered banana splits.

  While Lucky took a workout, swimming parallel to the shore in a steady blind crawl down to the last hotel and back, I lolled in the warm sea, my legs dangling weightless in the sunny green water. I didn’t believe in exercise, conscious exercise to build one’s muscles. As a skinny kid, a kid so skinny total strangers would come up to me on the street and offer to buy me milkshakes, I had long ago learned to put up with my freak’s body. The situation was embarrassing, ridiculous, sometimes unbearable, but I knew it couldn’t be changed. Set very deeply in my mind was the idea that any program of self-betterment would be doomed from the start. To change from weakling to strongman, from C student to A student, from bad boy to good boy! I not only believed it couldn’t be done, but even that it wasn’t worth doing. Success would have made me another person, or an actor hiding the past. And I wouldn’t succeed, I would fail. Failure was dangerous, threatening my only reliable source of strength, my pride. I was proud, and God knows why. I had no reason to be. I’d picked it up somewhere and it held me together. Better simply to live in my absurd body and not think about it.

  One could always drift in the warm cloudy water, hearing the cries from the beach skipping out like stones over the soft roar of the breakers, watching the immense clouds, feeling the sun on wet hair. There was always the knowledge of one’s shadow, an extension of oneself slanting down in a long dark bar, a black column sliding into the depths and into the darkness.

  I spent the last few days before school in the woods, attempting to re-create the trick Ramos had shown me in the lobby of the Sunset Theater. I’d broken it down into three steps, the world, the solar system, and the galaxies, the sum of which was The Universe. The world and the solar system were within my abilities, but in the galaxies stage the yo-yo would run out of gas or the string would tangle. My strategy was to go back and practice the simple Cannonball for duration, snapping my throws out more and more evenly, trying for perfect balance so the string wouldn’t touch the inner walls of the yo-yo. At the same time I speeded up the first two stages, attempting to feel The Universe not so much as three separate maneuvers but as one continuous rhythmic statement. Progress was slow but steady, and had I not been interrupted by the opening of school, I might have learned it in a week.

  A sad fact about school was the prolonged separation from Tobey. I was a year ahead and had to attend the Central School in town while he finished his last term at the branch grammar school. We accepted it in numb silence, unable to rebel against the official powers we mistakenly believed to be so much stronger than ourselves. We couldn’t even ride the same school bus. We started our days together though, meeting in the early morning for a few games of mumblety-peg or property before riding up to the bus stop a half-mile away.

  A surprising number of
kids gathered at the stop each morning, all of them younger than us. Some of the smallest we’d never even seen before, standing with their only slightly older brothers or sisters, clutching their lunch bags and watching us with big eyes. They were a pretty sad-looking lot, even by our standards—dirty, dressed in rags, hair stringy and uncombed, ankles black with caked dust. They came on foot, in twos and threes. We’d zip by them on the road, or if we were late (as they never were), we’d skid rakishly to a halt where they waited at the mailboxes, feeling like big shots as we hid our bikes in the woods. Luckily they all went to the branch school. At Central School they’d have been treated badly.

  Later in the year those scruffy kids became a symbol of our separation, not because they forced us apart, but because they came to represent all the things in which each of us was involved without the other’s knowledge. I began to notice after a couple of weeks, when the kids, at first so quiet, would smile when Tobey showed up, and even gather around his bike to push the button on his electric horn. Before long we were picking them up on the road, stacking them on the handlebars, the crossbars, and the fenders for the ride out to the highway, sometimes even carrying the smallest on our backs. They were too shy to open up with me (my Northern accent frightened them) but from overhearing bits here and there I learned that Tobey had become the champion of the whole Chula Vista contingent, and on more than one occasion had used his fists in the schoolyard protecting them. I was proud of him, but a bit sad, too, since he never mentioned what was going on, and even changed the subject when I brought it up. There was a trace of envy in my heart, probably because my own position at school was anonymous. But I was more proud of him than anything else.

  My bus came first. I hoped for an accident or a flat tire, but it always appeared at the dip in the road down by the dump, yellow and inexorable, engine wheezing as it approached. My secondary fantasy, once the bus came into view, was that it would drive right past without stopping. But that never happened either.