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Jack Steele                                                                                                   3802 wds.

240 Regency Drive

Marstons Mills, MA 02648

508-280-8645

jacksteele1@comcast.net

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By

Jack Steele

     He was old enough at seven to be upset when they moved.  He hardly noticed the other moves, but he liked their street in Fort Worth and didn’t want to leave it.  He liked playing ball in the street until dark.  He liked playing in the sand box next door.  It was superior to any other sandbox he’d ever seen because his friend’s father worked for the railroad and brought different colors and textures of sand home from work.  He liked playing hide and seek on the trails of the tall marshy reeds at the bottom of the street, and sitting on the rock wall at the top of the street, speculating with his friends about who lived in the big house in the middle of the field.  He liked his best friend, Billy, and Billy’s mother Jo, who his mother later said was a little “rough.”  And he liked Skip and T.J., his parents’ friends who lived on the corner, and the pretty woman from Mississippi with the strange but pleasant accent who played Canasta and made hush puppies.  He learned a lot that year in Fort Worth.  How to play ball, cowboys and Indians, hide and seek, Canasta, jacks, hopscotch.  How stepping on a crack will break your mother’s back, that there was no Santa Claus, no tooth fairy, and that he didn’t care much for Easter. 

     The problem with Easter was that it came on a Sunday, ham wasn’t as good as turkey, it was cold and windy outside, and he had to dress up to go to church and spend the afternoon in a park with relatives he didn’t know.  He also learned that he liked frozen strawberries.  His mother insisted that he try one bite, and after that he couldn’t get enough of them.  He already knew how to ride a bike, a blue one with pedals on the front wheel, but he didn’t know until then how much it hurt to crash and get a long cut on your knee cap.  It was also the first time his parents disappointed him at Christmas.  He wanted holsters and pistols, but he wanted them to be tan, not white like Hopalong Cassidy.  He acted as if he liked them, and he wore them outside to play with his friends, but he was embarrassed.  No one seemed to notice.  No one made fun of him.  But he was ashamed of them.  And it was the first time he was sick, or the first time he remembered it, with infetigo, which nearly drove him crazy.  He itched so bad he couldn’t sleep.  And he learned eeny, meeny, miny mo, and that LSMFT meant Lord Save Me From Truman, which his parents couldn’t really explain, or didn’t want to, saying only that some people didn’t like President Truman.  And war games, in which killing Japs was always the point.

*****

     In the new town Beasley lived on the next street over, but he always got there through the hedge in the backyard.  It was a big yard with a pile of dirt for playing war and a good enough but not perfect backboard.  It leaned a little and was probably not exactly the right height.  And two pear trees.  The Beasley’s didn’t have air conditioning.  Instead, they had an attic fan and sometimes they had ice cream in the refrigerator.  Neither of his parents ever seemed to be there and the house was always a mess.  They would turn on the fan, eat the ice cream out of the carton, and listen to Beasley’s older sister’s records.  They listened to the Elvis Presley album with Blue Moon Over Kentucky on it.  They listened to Sam Cooke, over and over again.  They collected baseball cards—he convinced Beasley that the smaller Bowman cards, which weren’t made after ‘55, were better than the Topps, because they “looked neater”--and played All-Star Baseball.

     Beasley didn’t like to lose, at anything, and usually didn’t.  They didn’t choose their teams in the same way.  Hitting was all that mattered in the game, and they both knew it, but only Beasley chose only the best hitters.  He chose players he liked, often for reasons that were obscure even to himself.  He might like the name.  Solly Hemus.  A mediocre hitter.  Preacher Roe.  A terrible hitter, even for a pitcher.  Or he might like the way the card looked.  They often doctored the cards to make them more in line with the latest batting averages of the players, so many were touched up with black and white ink, which gave them a distinctive look.  And of course all the cards looked different anyway, since the names never fit in exactly the same way, and the spaces for singles, 13 and 7, and doubles, 11, and home runs, 1, were different sizes for different players. 

     But Beasley had no such esthetic handicap.  He picked the best hitters, and he usually won.  One day, though, he got lucky, and he was ahead of Beasley by ten runs by the seventh inning.  He knew Beasley was mad, but he underestimated how mad.  He gleefully kept spinning and celebrated when, already ahead by a wide margin, some mediocre second baseman hit a bases loaded home run.  Beasley blew up.  He picked up the game board and broke it across his knee and threw it against the wall.  The spinner broke off.

     They made it up eventually, and his father fixed the spinner, but the older he got the more Beasley faded out of the picture.  Pretty soon his best friend was Watkins, a boy he hadn’t liked much when they were younger because he didn’t know much.  Nor was he interested in knowing much.  They’d had a shouting match once about Watkins not knowing who Yogi Berra was, which should have taught him a lesson.  Watkins didn’t seem to think it was important, and most of the people around him, girls and boys, seemed to agree with him, maybe because they didn’t know who Berra was either.  But the ignorance outraged him.  He couldn’t see how people could live in the world and not know, or, assuming that somehow they didn’t, how they could fail to be appalled by their own ignorance.  Or, at the very least, care and be curious.  But no one around them that day supported him, and that wasn’t the worst of it.  Watkins actually won the argument.  He wanted to know what knowing the Yankee lineup had to do with wanting to be a doctor or a lawyer.  His older sister was a nurse, saved people’s lives, and he was sure she didn’t know who Yogi Berra was.  Did that mean she was stupid?

     It should have taught him a lesson, and it did to the extent that he tried to keep his opinion about people’s ignorance to himself.  That made it possible for him to be friends with Watkins, although he couldn’t say that he liked him.  It wasn’t possible to like someone who was so stubbornly incurious and unwaveringly practical.  Watkins didn’t mind learning, and wasn’t half bad at it, as long as he could see that it was something that would pay off, or someone he trusted who’d told him it would.  He was fun to be with.  That’s the most he could say for Watkins, and he even had to qualify that.  He was fun to do things with, or maybe fun because of what he would do, since for a brief time, what they wanted to do was the same.  Ride bikes all over town.  Both had new ten speed bikes, so they could get from one end of the town to the other in a reasonable amount of time.  He got so absorbed in riding his bike that never thought of the outdoors as outdoors when he was on it, hardly even noticed that it was hot or raining.

     They could ride downtown anytime.  Ride the streets, the alleys, and drop their bikes anywhere, almost without thinking about it.  Just so they, the bikes, wouldn’t get run over.  He liked it because in most places nobody paid the least bit of attention to them.  They were almost invisible.  And he liked it because downtown provided the most opportunities for flirting with trouble.  Shoplifting at the dime stores.  Reading the magazines without buying anything at the drug stores.  Examining the exit doors of the movie theaters for ways to pry it open.  Stealing coke bottles from behind the grocery store and selling them back.  Nothing really serious.  They knew that.  They knew they weren’t bad.  Just pests, and that only when anyone bothered to notice or care.  They knew they didn’t have the nerve to be bad, or, truth be told, even the inclination.  They weren’t mad at anybody and they didn’t need anything.

*****

     Musically speaking, the record was all that mattered, and all that mattered about the record was hearing it.  He wasn’t sure how to answer when someone asked him if he liked Elvis Presley or Little Richard or Chuck Berry or Gene Vincent, or for that matter, the Platters or the Dell-Vikings.  Of course no one asked him if he liked the Dell-Vikings, but he could and did say often that he liked “Come Go With Me.”  He especially liked the scream and how they got to it and out of it, whatever all that was called.  He didn’t know and didn’t care.  All that mattered was the record and how it made you feel when you listened to it.

     He did most of his listening in his room in the afternoon to KLIF in Dallas, and some at night to 45’s on his red cloth covered record player.  45’s cost 99 cents, and he spent most of his allowance at the movies, so he didn’t have a lot of records.

*****

      Tim Flanagan knocked on his door almost every morning at eight o’clock in the summer and wanted him to “come down” and play.  That meant Stewart’s lot; baseball.  His mother always answered the door because he was always asleep at eight a.m. in the summer.  Very asleep.  Being a child, he slept like one.  Even when he resisted Tim’s persistence and stayed in bed until ten-thirty or eleven, he had to force himself up, and only got up then, often, because he had to pee.  He staggered into the bathroom, painfully concentrated on hitting the water in the toilet bowl so that he wouldn’t get yelled at, and washed his face not for hygiene’s sake and not with soap, but with cold water, to get the sleep out of his eyes and his body.  And even then he sometimes plopped back into bed, not really wanting to sleep more but unable to get his body to feel like doing anything else. 

     His mother usually coaxed him out of bed, asking repeatedly if he was going to sleep all day.  She put the cereal out for him, which, if he was going down to Stewart’s lot, he would hurry through, and which, if he wasn’t, he would eat two bowls of, heavy on the sugar, lots of milk, and read the sports page, mostly for the numbers, taking great pleasure in memorizing the standings of both major leagues and the Texas League, right down to Shreveport, in the cellar, 12 games behind, and the lineups of his favorite teams, Giants, Yankees, Dodgers, in that order, the Dodgers not because he liked them, he didn’t, but they were too important not to know about.  He didn’t like the Dodgers because everybody else did.  He liked the Giants because no one else did, and Willie Mays.  His father had to tell him the details about Willie Mays.  He didn’t read it anywhere.  The “say hey” kid and the basket catch, which was part of making it look easy, a quality his father admired.  In fact, he seemed to think it was the highest quality a major league baseball player could have.  Joe DiMaggio had it, he said.  He usually didn’t have to move more than a few steps to catch a fly ball.  He made playing center field in Yankee Stadium look easy, but behind that was knowing the hitters, which took a lot of work.

     It was hot in the summer even at eight in the morning, and he was always tempted to forget about Tim, even when he got up early, and instead grab a book and lie down near the air-conditioner.  On the other hand, he knew that once he got down there, he would have a good time.  They played flies and skinners, which he liked better than little league.  A good hitter could often hit the ball on the fly over the chain link fence in the Stewart’s back yard.  It was rare the first summer they played, and then got more and more frequent, until in the end the gate to the fence was left open and the best fielders played in the Stewart’s front yard, at the edge of it just in front of the border of scrawny rose bushes, so that they could run between the rose bushes for a short fly, or through the gate if necessary and into the backyard for a long one.  Anything hit over the fence or beyond the rose bushes was a home run unless it was caught, so when it became common to hit it that far, home runs, the only way to score, became rare.  The fielders had to drop or misjudge it, which was also rare.  They’d outgrown the lot, but no one wanted to change the rule and say it was a home run whether it was caught or not.  Catching the flies when it didn’t mean anything would not be near as much fun.

     It was always Tim who wanted to play.  Flies and skinners in the summer and touch football in the winter.  That’s all they did down there, his friends, but every kid in the neighborhood used Stewart’s lot.  Joanne Daviss’s older brother was electrocuted and died there, flying a model airplane.  One Christmas Day a kid came out with a real bow and arrow set.  He shot one of the arrows straight up, a good distance, and it came down and stuck right in the center of another kid’s football helmet.  He didn’t see Jerry Daviss die, but he saw the arrow stick in the helmet.  It looked like a gag in a Bob Hope or Three Stooges movie.  It was crowded that day.  Everyone had come to the lot with their Christmas presents.  Kids were everywhere and quite a few of them saw the arrow come down.  The kid who shot it was just old enough to be a little scared and embarrassed.  He didn’t stop shooting arrows, but he was more careful after that.  No grownup ever told him about Jerry Daviss.  One of his friends casually mentioned it one day, when they saw someone else flying a model airplane.

     Tim had walked with a crutch until the fourth or fifth grade, but even before he didn’t have to use the crutch anymore, he wanted to play every day.  He would even run foot races, with the crutch.  It wasn’t polio, according to his mother.  She might have told him what it was, but he’d never heard of it, and so soon forgot.  It didn’t matter.  Tim was never a friend like Beasley and Watkins.  He never talked to Tim about anything.  He never did anything with Tim except play ball.  He never even saw his mother or his father or the inside of his house.  Tim was the boy on crutches, who was now completely healthy and a pretty good athlete, and who wanted to play ball every day.  That was Tim.  Front and back.  Beginning to end.

     Beasley didn’t play ball very much.  Less the older they got.  He didn’t know what Beasley did all day.  He didn’t think about it.  Watkins played all the time, and he was better than anybody, which was another reason not to like him.  He could hit the ball further than anyone, and further a lot more often, and although he wasn’t a great fielder, he was just as good as anyone else without really trying.  He was good at cutting to the chase, at making things simple.  He didn’t care if he looked like anyone in the major leagues.  He didn’t care if the rules made sense.  He stood, crouched, and ran naturally, and looked good doing it, and he wanted the rules to be whatever was most fun, regardless of logic.  He never thought about form and was impatient with anyone who did, and just as he’d been right about Yogi Berra, he was right about that.  It couldn’t be denied.  He had the best argument.  Stewart’s lot was not the major leagues.

     Watkins’ father was a barber.  A good one.  His own father was happy to find him, saying that he was the only barber in town good enough to give you a haircut that didn’t make you look like you’d just had one.  That was a lesson in how to be manly without being a hick, valuing that, subtlety, and Mr. Watkins and his haircuts were lessons in themselves.  Part of making it look easy.  He was the only barber who wouldn’t jerk a boy’s head around to make him hold it right and be still.  He was the only barber who paid any attention to what people said they wanted and the only one who was good at doing it.  He was the only one who was naturally soft-spoken and friendly.  He didn’t try to be.  He just was, all the time. 

     Watkins had a number of interesting facts to tell about his father.  He slept in the nude, he never wore a hat because it made you bald, he died his hair, he walked to work and back every day, he watched Gunsmoke every Saturday night and then went to bed.  He also fell out of a car once that was going fifty miles an hour and wasn’t hurt except for a few scratches.  Watkins knew that for a fact because he’d been driving.  He’d started driving at twelve and often took over on out of town trips when his father got sleepy, which was often.  He said they were driving to Waco one night and he noticed that he didn’t hear his father snoring anymore, and when he looked over, his father wasn’t there.  He stopped, backed up, and found his father sitting on the side of the road.  They decided he hadn’t been hurt because he’d been asleep.  Relaxed as if a baby, or drunk.  His mother said it was God.

     Watkins’ mother was just as easy going as his father, in spite of the fact that she went to every church service given by the North Side Baptist Church, which was more fundamentalist than First Baptist, almost like holy-rollers, and didn’t believe in dancing, drinking, card playing, pool, dominos, boys and girls swimming together, going to movies on Sunday, and a host of other things.  She said one day that cutting down two oak trees for a hamburger stand was a sin, and Watkins laughed at her, and as usual, he had the best argument.  Despite knowing the Bible backwards and forwards and every sin in the book, she couldn’t say why cutting down the trees was a sin.  It didn’t seem right.  They were pretty.  They were over a hundred years old.  Not an argument and they all knew it.  Mrs. Watkins was driving.  They were stopped at a light, and to their right were the uprooted trees being moved around by machinery.  Dust and noise everywhere.  He agreed with Mrs. Watkins and knew why.  He liked the trees.  He didn’t like the dust or the noise.  The town already had two or three good hamburger stands.  What was the point?  But he knew better than to say as much.  There are plenty more trees, Watkins said, and he was right.

     Mrs. Watkins talked too much.  She never shut up.  He liked her but could only take her for a certain amount of time, and he was glad he didn’t live in the same house.  He much preferred his own mother, who was younger, prettier and listened as much or more than she talked.  He wasn’t sure, though, that he preferred his own father.  His father was not as easy going as Mr. Watkins.  In fact, he wasn’t easy going at all.  Rare was the second question that didn’t irritate him.  First questions were usually okay.  Second questions were best avoided.  Also to be avoided was any talk about girl friends, which he’d tried only once and found out immediately that it embarrassed his father, and therefore it embarrassed him.  The one exception to the second question rule was math.  His father sat at the dinner table with him one night for half an hour patiently explaining why the 1900’s were the 20^th Century, using a peeling an orange analogy.  He’d have been good also at showing him how to peel an orange, did show him more than once, but it was something he could never remember.  More often, actually, it was an apple, and he was fascinated by the elegance of his father’s peeling with his pocket knife, the apple almost seeming to peel itself, the skin coming off so effortlessly and in such a perfect spiral.  The effortless way he used his thumb against the blade to make it almost seem like the apple was spinning under it.  But he could never even get holding the knife right, and at first his father was easy going about it, laughing gently, showing only mock impatience, but after a while, after a certain amount of failure, he sensed the real irritation creep in.  He was not good with his hands.  That quickly became a family fact.

*****

     He hated the country.  Camping.  Visiting relatives who still lived on farms.  Even lake cabins.  All of it was full of biting insects, of kids, especially girls, who teased him mercilessly for not knowing anything, of grownups who either laughed or got impatient when he was clumsy, which was just about always, of strange strong tasting food, of uncomfortable sleeping and embarrassing bathroom arrangements, and tedium.  Not to mention the long rides in the back seat of the car, his father in a bad mood, the cigarette smoke burning his eyes.  If he had a good book and people left him alone most of the day, it could be marginally tolerable.  Otherwise, it was hell.