Lysistrata (14 page)

Outside, Bugs said, “You oughtn’t to needle Gravy that way. Gravy’s a pretty damn big shot, if you want to know it. Jackie Bramble’s big brother works for Gravy, dealing and taking bets and things like that, and he says Gravy’s got connections in the city with all the big gamblers and everyone,” and I said, “He’s just a lousy small-town punk, and if he had so much on the ball he’d be a big shot gambler up in the city himself instead of being down here in this jerk town running a crummy game in the back of a cigar store. Besides, it wouldn’t make any difference if he had connections with Frank Costello himself, I don’t take any lip from any lousy grease-ball.”

We went on through town, and the lights were on because it was getting late and it got dark pretty early that time of year, and I thought about hanging around for a while before I went home, but I didn’t do it because all the damn running up and down had made me hungry as hell, and I didn’t have any money to buy a hamburger or anything with. The farther we walked, the crummier it got, and when it got just about as crummy as it was going to get, that’s where I lived. Bugs turned off to cross over a few blocks to the street he lived on, and he said he’d see me tomorrow at school, and I said sure, I’d see him around, and I kept on going down the street I was on to the house I lived in, and it was dark as hell down there and pretty cold.

I went up across the porch and back through the house to the kitchen, and the old man and the old lady were still bellied up to the table, and the old man said, “Where the hell you been?”

I said, “I been playing basketball, if you want to know, that’s where I’ve been,” and he said, “Basketball? What the hell you mean, basketball?” and I said, “I mean basketball, that’s what I mean. Didn’t you ever hear of basketball?”

He laid his knife down on the table and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at me like he was stupid, which he was. “By God, I can’t believe I heard right,” he said, and I said, “You dig the muck out of your ears, maybe you could hear better.”

He glared at me across the table and said, “Don’t mouth off at me, you smart little bastard, and I’ll tell you something else too. No kid of mine is going to play any God-damn silly games, and you get home for your supper on time after this or I’ll damn well go up the side of your head.”

“I’ll play any games I like, and I won’t ask you a damn thing about it before I do,” I said, but I said it too close, and the old man jumped up and clobbered me on the side of the head before I could duck. He was pretty strong in spite of being a beer-soaked slob, and he slammed me up against the wall and damn near knocked my brains out. That set the old lady to bawling, and she went into the old routine about how I was a bad boy, and it was all because I’d lost the big brother I needed to look after me and teach me what I needed to know, but that was a lot of bull because my big brother, whose name was Eddie, hadn’t ever loked after me any at all, and the only things he ever taught me were some dirty stories and limericks and how to shoot pool. He’d been in the war and off in some stinking place like New Guinea or somewhere, and he’d written me this letter once that said pretty plain between the lines that he was damn sick of it and was going to pull out and desert the first chance he got, but damned if he didn’t get killed before he could go. That made the old lady a gold star war mother or something corny like that, and she sure as hell got her kicks out of it, especially when she was drunk.

After my head quit ringing, I eased into my chair at the table and began to eat, and the chow was pretty damn lousy, besides being cold, and the only reason I bothered to eat at all was because I’d worked up this big appetite. Pretty soon the old man got up and said he was going up the street to the tavern to watch the fights, and I said if he’d quit blowing all his money for beer in the lousy tavern he’d have enough to buy a television set, and we could all watch the God-damn fights. He looked like he was figuring to clobber me again, but he hardly ever bothered to clobber me more than once a day, and so he just belched and rubbed his fat gut and went on out. I finished eating and went in the living room and sat down and tried to think of something to do with the damn night. There wasn’t any use going back uptown, because I didn’t have any money, and I’d had plenty of Bugs for one day, a little of Bugs going a hell of a long way, and finally I decided I might as well go over and see if I could stir up something with Mopsy, so I went.

The whole damn sky was lousy with stars, and the moon was floating around big and yellow up there among them, and when you walked under a tree and looked up you could see the moon and a big mess of the stars through the bare branches of the tree, and it was like seeing it all through a God-damn black filigree or something, and it was a pretty good eyeful if you cared for that kind of crap. The wind was blowing pretty strong in the street, stirring up the dead leaves in the yards and along the gutter, and it was damn cold, and I got to thinking that it was too cold to sit outside with Mopsy, and what the hell could you do with Mopsy inside with her old man and her old lady hanging around, and I was about to turn around and go home and to hell with it when it occurred to me that there was an outside chance that the old man and the old lady had gone out to a movie or somewhere, and so I took the chance and went on, and that’s just the way it turned out, as luck would have it.

Mopsy opened the door when I knocked, and I said, “Hi, Mopsy,” and I could tell by the way she looked half glad and half scared, like she knew damn well she was going to do something she wasn’t supposed to do, that no one was home but her.

“Hi, Skimmer,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

I said, “I just came over to do a little diddling,” and she said, “Don’t you talk like that, Skimmer. Besides, you can’t come in. Mom and Pop are gone to the movies, and I can’t have boys in the house when they’re gone.”

“Nuts,” I said. ‘Who’s going to know besides us? I’ll get the hell out before they come back.”

“Well,” she said, “they’ll be back around nine, so you’ll have to leave by eight-thirty.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be gone like Callahan,” and I went in.

She had her goggles off and her hair pushed up on top of her head and pinned there, and the fact was, she looked pretty good, sort of sophisticated, if you know what I mean, except she was too heavy, not really fat but damn plump, and she was wearing these crummy saddleshoes and white sox instead of high heels and nylons like any smart doll wears when she wants to send a guy. She was stacked up good, though, even if she did pack a little too much altogether, and her tail had a nice little wobble to it when she walked. I sat down on the sofa and watched her wobble it over to the radio-phonograph, and she said, “You want to hear some music?” and I said, “Sure. Put on a stack.”

She started the first platter spinning and came back and sat down beside me on the sofa, and I began to think that she was just the soft-headed kind that would be impressed all to hell by something like a guy playing on the school basketball team, so I said, “I’ll bet you can’t guess what I’ve been doing,” and she said, “No, what?”

“Playing basketball,” I said.

“Basketball?” she said.

“Hell, yes, basketball,” I said. “Can’t you understand anything?”

“Where you been playing basketball?” she said, and I said, “I been playing at school. Where the hell else is there to play basketball?”

“On the team?” she said.

“God Almighty, yes, on the team,” I said. “You think you play basketball all by yourself or something?”

By that time her eyes were sort of shining, and her mouth was hanging open a little like she was in heat, and she said, “Oh, Skimmer, that’s wonderful,” and I could see that she was already thinking about me being a school big shot, maybe, and dragging her around to dances and places with me, and I thought, Fat chance, sister, if everything old Bugs said about the classy dolls turns out to be true. Meantime, though, I was making a hell of a lot of points, and old Mopsy wasn’t too damn bad while I was waiting for something better, and as a matter of fact, we wound up doing a lot of kissing and having a pretty hot tussle there on the sofa, and if I hadn’t had to clear out at eight-thirty — except it was almost nine before I left — I got an idea I might even have got past that holy and precious stuff she always came up with at the last minute. Anyhow, on the way home I decided that if it worked like that on Mopsy there wasn’t any reason why it shouldn’t work on a lot of others, and I made up my mind right then and there to give this basketball crap the big try, and I didn’t worry any about the old man’s guff about no kid of his playing, either, because he didn’t really give a damn what the hell I did, or if I ever came home for supper on time or any other time, and he’d only stirred up a brawl over it tonight because he was handy and felt like raising hell.

I did it too. I went for it whole hog. I got me a jock strap and went out for practice every God-damn afternoon after school and sometimes on Saturday, and I guess I ran up and down that court damn near a million miles, and as a matter of fact, old Bugs was right, and I had to ease up on the gaspers some, but I didn’t quit entirely as a matter of principle. Old Mulloy would make me stand back on the outside of the keyhole, which means the black lines painted on the floor in front of the basket that look like a big keyhole, and he’d stand in the keyhole under the basket and fire the God-damn ball out to me and yell, “Jump and push,” and I’d jump and push the ball at the basket, and he’d grab it and fire it back like the son of a bitch was hot and yell, “Jump and push,” and I’d jump and push again, and after a while he’d have old Tizzy Davis stand in there under the basket and fire the ball out, because Tizzy was center, and it was really his job, and before long I got free and fancy and loose as ashes and could flip the ball through the net almost every time with a little swish, and it was just like shooting a lot of God-damn fish in a rain barrel.

Like I said, old Tizzy played center, being so tall and skinny and sort of limber, and the idea was to slam the ball to him under the basket, and if he had a chance he was supposed to jump up and away from whoever was guarding him and hook the ball over into the basket — only the other guys called it a bucket instead of a basket, and I got to calling it that too — and if he didn’t have the chance to hook the ball in, he was supposed to fire it back to me outside the keyhole, and I was supposed to throw it through from there, and I don’t mind saying it worked damned good. As a matter of fact, you’ve got to give the devil his due, and there weren’t any flies on old Tizzy when it came to playing that pivot position, which is what we called it, and the only thing wrong with him was that every once in a while he’d lose one of those God-damn contact lenses off his eyeball, and then we’d all have to stop and go crawling all over the lousy floor until someone found it.

We always wound up every practice with the first team playing the second team, and I was on the first team right off, and old Bugs was on the second team. As a matter of fact, he played guard and was supposed to keep me from making any points, and I really gave the poor bastard a hard time, and before we finished playing his tail was always rubbing out his tracks. Old Mulloy would stand along the side, sometimes running up and down a little, and he’d keep yelling, “Run, run, run! Move, move move! Pass that ball, pass that ball!” Once in a while he’d run out on the court waving his arms around to stop the action and chew somebody out for not doing something the way he should’ve done it, but he never called it chewing out because he didn’t go for cussing, and once when I did a little in a natural sort of way, damned if he didn’t give me a five-minute lecture on sportsmanship and clean speech, the son of a bitch, when all the time he wasn’t interested in anything, really, but running the hell out of you, and he didn’t give a damn if you dropped dead just as long as he won his God-damn games.

We came up pretty close to the time for our first game, and along about then I had some trouble with a God-damn old grandma named Cupper. He taught geometry in the school, and if you’ve ever tried the stuff you’ll understand what God-awful tripe it is, and I’d taken it once before and hadn’t done any good with it, and now I was taking it again, because I had to, and I wasn’t doing any better this time, and as a matter of fact, I wasn’t doing a damn thing. Anyhow, old Cupper got wind of my playing basketball, and he served notice on the coach that there wasn’t any way on God’s earth I could make a passing mark in geometry, and that I couldn’t play, and old Mulloy just hit the God-damn ceiling and went screaming down to the principal. I got called down to the office later, and the principal and the coach and old Cupper were all there, and you could tell they’d been raising hell because the principal was red in the face, and he kept taking off and putting on these fancy goggles with a black ribbon on them, and the coach was red in the face too, but old Cupper was white as a sheet, so I figured the principal and the coach had been dishing it out, and old Cupper had been taking it. He looked like he was about a hundred years old, and he had a little gray curl that hung down over his forehead, and these God-damn plates kept clacking around in his mouth. Take it from me, he was so damn dry it made you thirsty to look at him, but maybe it was what you’d expect in a guy who’d spent most of his lousy life teaching something as dry as geometry.

Well, the principal had me sit in a chair just like the rest of them, which surprised the hell out of me, and he started in telling me what great things he’d heard about me from old Mulloy, and what a fine thing he thought it was for a young man to serve his school so well, and I knew he was just breaking it off in old Cupper, but he lost control of himself and overdid it, and I kept remembering some of the other things he’d told me at different times, and it was confusing as hell, and I had a feeling generally that he was talking about someone else. He wound up saying there had been a little misunderstanding, but he was sure everything could be worked out all right and that Mr. Cupper wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt the team, and old Cupper broke in with his voice trembling and said that nothing could ever be worked out unless Scaggs, meaning me, did a little work himself, and then the principal got mean as hell and said right out that Scaggs, meaning me again, would receive a passing mark in geometry or else someone, meaning old Cupper, would suffer the God-damn consequences, only he didn’t say God-damn. Old Cupper got so excited that his teeth began to rattle like a hot crap game. The truth is, I felt kind of sorry for the damn old fool, but I wasn’t going to louse anything up by saying so. What’s more, I had a sneaky feeling he was right, and if I’d been him and he’d been me, I wouldn’t have given him nothing, but nothing. Not that God-damn Mulloy, though. That righteous bastard didn’t feel sorry for anyone ever, and all the way back to the locker room he kept crowing like a banty rooster about how it was time certain people were learning that there was more went into the making of a man than what came out of a crummy book.