Don't Rely on Gemini (22 page)

“What do you mean, you put him down?”

“I don’t like anyone calling me Kraut,” Flip elaborated.

“I’m talking about power, my good man. Your
pow-er
over him.”

“Power?” Flip shrugged his shoulders, embarrassed. “Who says?”

“Why
are
you so evasive?”

Flip chuckled and cracked his knuckles in a frustrated, awkward gesture. “Man, oh, man,” he said, for no reason. Raleigh said, “Where did you pick up that jargon?” “Heard it around.” “He doesn’t like it,” Bardo said. “Who doesn’t?”

“Bardo Raleigh doesn’t,” Bardo Raleigh answered. “He finds it infinitely tiresome.”

• • •

Emanuel Pollack pulled his olive-colored tie to a neat knot and studied his face in the locker-room mirror. He wondered if his father had been right this morning when he had suggested that the reason Manny had flunked two of his subjects this term was that the curriculum was too difficult for a young boy.

“They drive you kids too hard,” he had said in his soft, serious tone. “They expect too much of you. Why, I saw you studying every night with my own eyes, Emanuel. Latin and French and all those subjects are
hard!
And you with an I.Q. of a hundred and eighteen. Nobody can say you haven’t got the brains, Emanuel.”

Manny would have liked to accept his” father’s idea that the school was to blame, and not himself, but Flip and Wylie both had passed their subjects, and he remembered the principal’s report. His mother had read it aloud.

“… convinced that his inability to concentrate and his dreamy attitude during class sessions are rooted in a

basic personality problem. The faculty recommends that Emanuel apply for consultation with a psychologist at the Jewish Children’s Clinic …”

“You don’t have to go, son,” his father had declared. “You just forget all about it.”

But his mother had said he certainly
was
going to go.

“Not if he doesn’t want to, Ruth!”

“Well, he
should
want to!” and then turning to Manny she had said, “Don’t you
want
help? Do you want to be backward and stay behind another year? You want help, don’t you, Emanuel?”

“What about it, Emanuel? Do you?”

Emanuel said, “I don’t know. I—What do
you
think?”

“I think,” his father said, “that you should do as you please. You should do whatever
you
think is best, Emanuel.”

As he remembered these things, Manny’s reflection frowned back at him. His face was gaunt and somewhat sullen; his gray eyes were always rather timid-looking. A teacher once described Manny by saying that he had the face of a melancholy seventeenth-century poet and the build of a professional football tackle. His hair was chestnut-colored and curly, and now still wet from the shower. As he took his comb from his trouser pocket, he heard Flip’s familiar whistle outside. Without bothering to part his hair, he grabbed the coat of his tan summer suit from the wire hook on the wall and began to run up the basement steps. Midway, he suddenly remembered the humiliating episode of less than an hour ago. It was funny that he had forgotten all about it, and funny too that as he recalled it, he was unable to recall his anger at Flip. The incident, he realized, was a dead issue, buried now in a graveyard of past and similar incidents.

• • •

Coming up Lexington Avenue, approaching the club entrance, Johnny Wylie wondered who the third boy was with Heine and Pollack. He saw Manny shaking hands with him while Flip stood by, grinning inanely and pushing the yellow strings of hair back off his forehead.

Johnny was the baby of the crowd; he had five months to go before he would be sixteen. He was five feet seven and clearly handsome, with thick black hair he wore close-cropped to his head, sparkling dark eyes, and a smooth, creamy complexion. Above his full wide lips he was cultivating a thin line of mustache.

“Where’d you get the ‘tash, Johnny, hmm?” Lynn Leonard, the girl across the hall, had said shyly to him that morning as they met at the mailboxes in the apartment-house entranceway. “It’s nice.”

He had tried to keep his eyes off the tight white halter she filled too well for a girl of fifteen.

He said, “That’s a funny name for it—’tash.” He stared down at his shoes, afraid to raise his head for fear his eyes would never reach her face, but stay fixed there below her neck. He could smell the faint lilac fragrance she wore, and he was keenly aware of bare flesh at her shoulders and back, though he had not seen her fully.

“It’s nice,” she repeated. “It’s a nice ‘tash.”

“ ‘Tash!” He feigned a gruff tone. “I never heard one called
that
before. Never!”

She laughed, tossing her head back so that her long, soft dark hair fell to the small of her back, and Johnny stole a glance at the halter. He looked squarely at her there, and then away quickly, his face flaming. He turned so she could not see.

“See you around,” he mumbled.

“So long, Johnny.”

• • •

“Do you stay in bed very long in the morning after you have once awakened?” Father Farrell had questioned Johnny after he had blurted out his confession twenty minutes ago, when he had stopped off at church on his way uptown.

“I won’t any more, Father.”

Johnny felt better now, after having talked about it with someone.

As if to dismiss these scraps of thought from his mind, he squared his broad shoulders, drew a deep breath, and held his head up high. He wore a brown cord suit and a natty yellow bow tie, which was clipped to the collar of his white shirt. The taps on the heels of his heavy ox-blood shoes clicked more insistently as he stepped up his pace, waving now at the boys who were waiting for him. Johnny took the club steps by twos. He slapped Flip across the back and gave Manny a mock punch in the stomach. Then he shook hands with Bardo Raleigh.

“Let’s all cut out for the store,” Heine said, and as the sun slipped back behind the skyscrapers to the west, casting their jagged shadows in the path, the quartet ambled lazily along Lexington Avenue.

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Copyright © 1969 by Vin Packer

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

eISBN 10: 1-4405-3704-6

eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3704-2