tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-344063546191042082024-03-05T11:43:18.596-05:00READING LOG AND MORE (Whatever Fits)Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.comBlogger93125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-26148600287057736382012-04-20T09:34:00.000-04:002012-04-20T09:34:28.652-04:00Latest news in re to what appears on blogOf the links to published stories you can search my name on Blackheart and it comes up. The other two will get you to the magazines but I'm not sure how to find my stories. Will let you know when I figure it out. Just let me know if you want to read one and I'll send it to you. Same goes for longer works, which I took off because publishers are starting to include on-line pubs, even self-published, as if they were print. Magazines too, which I found out the hard way, a previously accepted story then rejected when editors saw it on this blog. Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-48925557637231993442012-03-21T09:08:00.001-04:002012-03-21T09:13:56.575-04:00MartinaAlthough not exactly a sports idol of mine, I've always admired and respected Martina Navratilova. If you have ever followed tennis closely, you know it's difficult to separate talent and personality completely. Aside from her talent, I always found her reserve and dignity appealing. That's all smashed to hell now. Not only did she get a face job, but she's appearing on Dancing With the Stars. Humiliating? Degrading? Take your pick and apply to either or both. Surely she made plenty of money playing tennis. Why would she do such a thing? It makes Joe Louis opening doors in Vegas seem almost dignified, especially since he really needed the money. My wife tells me she recently got engaged. I know we will do a lot of foolish things for love, and I like to think I'd forgive most of them, but if love is behind this it doesn't bode well. I know this isn't steroids or gambling, but should I ever meet her, I'd be tempted to say what we all say when confronted with a fallen idol: Say it ain't so Martina. Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-3833109625830799262011-09-21T12:17:00.001-04:002011-09-21T12:19:23.662-04:00Lines from The Alexandria Quartet, re-visited forty some odd years after first reading<div class="nav navtop"><a href="http://m.myspace.com/home.wap?bfd=offdeck"><img alt="" src="http://x.myspacecdn.com/images/mobile/basicfutura/240_home_nav.png" /></a> <a href="http://m.myspace.com/messaging/mymail.wap?bfd=offdeck"><img alt="" src="http://x.myspacecdn.com/images/mobile/basicfutura/240_mail_nav.png" /></a> <a href="http://m.myspace.com/friends/friendlist.wap?bfd=offdeck"><img alt="" src="http://x.myspacecdn.com/images/mobile/basicfutura/240_friends_nav.png" /></a> <a href="http://m.myspace.com/blog/blogdetail.wap?bfd=offdeck&p=17&lr=-1&fr=-1&rpn=16&blogid=489721835"><img alt=" > " src="http://x.myspacecdn.com/images/mobile/basicfutura/Basic_pagination_next.png" /></a> </div><form action="/blog/blogdetail.wap?bfd=offdeck&blogid=497186741&p=16&sb=&a=b" class="" id="addBlogCommentForm" method="post"><div class="aspNetHidden"></div><div class="listItem"><span id="WapPageBody_subjectLabel"><br />
</span><b><span id="WapPageBody_blogSubject"></span></b><span id="WapPageBody_categoryLabel"></span><span id="WapPageBody_blogCategory"></span><span id="WapPageBody_blogDate"></span><span id="WapPageBody_moodLabel"></span><span id="WapPageBody_blogMood"></span> </div><div class="content"><a class="b" href="http://m.myspace.com/blog/createblog.wap?bfd=offdeck&blogid=497186741&s=Edit" id="WapPageBody_editBlogLink" style="color: white;">Edit</a> </div><hr /><div class="content">Apart from the wrinkled old peasant who comes from the village on her mule each day to clean the house, the child and I are quite alone.<br />
<br />
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential--the imagination.<br />
<br />
. . . days became simply the spaces between dreams . . .<br />
<br />
The city unwrinkles like an old tortoise and peers about it. For a moment it relinquishes the torn rags of the flesh, while from some hidden alley by the slaughter-house, above the moans and screams of the cattle, comes the nasal chipping of a Damascus love-song; shrill quartertones, like a sinus being ground to powder.<br />
<br />
I suppose the secret of his success is his tremendous idleness, which almost approaches the supernatural.<br />
<br />
"There are only three things to be done with a woman," said Clea once. "You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature." I was experiencing a failure in all these domains of feeling.<br />
<br />
Streets that run back from the docks with their supercargo of houses, breathing into each others' mouths, keeling over.<br />
And then the street noises: shriek and clang of the water-bearing Saidi, dashing his metal cups together as an advertisement, the unheeded shrieks which pierce the hubbub from time to time, as of some small delicately-organized animal being disembowelled. <br />
<br />
Reading Log and More </div><div id="WapPageBody_addcommentpanel"><div><div id="WapPageBody_addCommentControlPanel"><div class="thirdNav"><b>ADD A COMMENT</b> </div><div class="content"><textarea cols="15" name="fb" rows="5"></textarea> </div></div><div class="secondNav"></div></div></div></form><div class="nav navbottom"><a href="http://m.myspace.com/home.wap?bfd=offdeck"><img alt="" src="http://x.myspacecdn.com/images/mobile/basicfutura/240_home_nav.png" /></a> <a href="http://m.myspace.com/messaging/mymail.wap?bfd=offdeck"><img alt="" src="http://x.myspacecdn.com/images/mobile/basicfutura/240_mail_nav.png" /></a> <a href="http://m.myspace.com/friends/friendlist.wap?bfd=offdeck"><img alt="" src="http://x.myspacecdn.com/images/mobile/basicfutura/240_friends_nav.png" /></a> <a href="http://m.myspace.com/search.wap?bfd=offdeck"><img alt="" src="http://x.myspacecdn.com/images/mobile/basicfutura/240_search_nav.png" /></a> </div><div id="footer"><a class="footerlink" href="http://m.myspace.com/signout.wap?bfd=offdeck">Sign Out</a> <a class="footerlink" href="http://m.myspace.com/settings/index.wap?bfd=offdeck">Settings</a> </div>Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-18327601699838184742011-09-14T14:36:00.000-04:002011-09-14T14:36:27.134-04:00MoldavaDecided to move some of the blog posts I had on my space (which makes no sense to me anymore) to this location. Just when I feel like it. Here's the first one. Dates don't matter. <br />
<br />
Moldava. Article in NY Rev of Books. Looked it up in Wikipedia. It's like a country that someone would invent for a novel. Maybe Nabokov did and I'm forgetting. Don't think it was him but sure I read something about a scholar in such a place. Slowly coming back to me. A prof of the very obscure and isolated language and literature. Does he get involved in some mystery? There is something in Wiki that suggests they have this thing for something called the "Moldavan (Moldavian?) language," but it's also true, apparently, that the languages spoken there are Romanian, by majority, and Russian. No one says anything about there being a Moldavan language.Wendy and Lucy. Got impatient and pissed off at Wendy as she was being taken away from store where she shoplifted. Told CG I didn't want to watch it anymore, so we turned it off. CG convinced me that the gay porno star in doc we watched was an interesting guy, specifically in the way he wanted to please everyone, which, when he could manage it, made him happy. I did like the story he told of his first serious heartbreak. 3 weeks of getting drunk and he was over it. No downward spiral of substance abuse and self-loathing. Should admit I fell asleep about halfway through. Not because of that. Would probably have fallen asleep even during substance abuse and self-loathing. Claudine at School. Charming and funny. Didn't really mind that it went on and on rather aimlessly. Noticed one glitch in transition to Claudine in Paris. She says in School she's going to Paris to stay with aunt. In C in P, she and her father move to Paris with no mention of aunt until later. Colette must have decided that staying with aunt would not work as well in re to how she wanted C to be. Plus the father is funny. Just remembered yesterday an Asian director I meant to watch more of. Film I watched was 2nd in trilogy about a chef. Conflict with his kids who don't share his interests. Japanese, Korean, Chinese? Well known director I'm sure.Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-57328648126194903272011-09-08T12:23:00.001-04:002012-03-18T16:23:06.194-04:00Don DeLillo siteI especially like the second quote. <a href="http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html">DeLillo</a>Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-2354594787559754722011-08-15T07:40:00.003-04:002011-08-15T07:57:42.687-04:00Changing and Moving Things AroundI finally changed pictures. I highly recommend both The Adversary and My Life as a Russian Novel. I also rearranged the stories yet again.Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-9740204929567272652011-08-06T12:05:00.000-04:002011-08-06T12:05:24.058-04:00Links to Online WorksI've now included links to the stories that I've published online. The others are available in print only. All are listed on the right under Published Stories. Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-21209814030177331362011-07-17T05:46:00.000-04:002011-07-17T05:46:03.235-04:00Link to PrologueHere's the link to the non-fiction piece about Mexico. <a href="http://www.solliterarymagazine.com/">SOL: English Writing in Mexico</a>Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-61432396471023463222011-07-07T11:17:00.002-04:002011-10-24T09:50:13.399-04:00Link to "Good Works"Here's a link to an online story of mine. <a href="http://www.34thparallel.net/back15.html">34th Parallel Issue 15</a>Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-29553778750613279262011-05-01T11:46:00.001-04:002011-05-01T11:54:22.036-04:00Saving Paper<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/arts/design/bill-blackbeard-comic-strip-champion-dies-at-84.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Bill%20Blackbeard%20Obituary&st=cse">Bill Blackbeard Obit</a><br />
<br />
<br />
I envy this type of obsession, but what really caught my eye was the allusion to Nicholson Baker. Baker has done a lot of excellent work towards trying to save paper from microfilm, including a book called "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper," and if Blackbeard inspired him, that's no small feat.Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-68711031852992714872011-03-25T00:22:00.001-04:002011-05-10T08:34:06.225-04:00Pictures of WritersI'm a little behind my Friday deadlines for changing pictures, and I'm also behind on getting the old pics into that one file. Will endeavor to catch up. Meanwhile, the featured photos do show up regularly and I try to strike a balance between typical and interesting. Jane Bowles was quite a challenge in that regard. Too much good stuff, so I settled on a painting. Paul may prove even more of a challenge.Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-2734097361926292822011-03-07T11:24:00.021-05:002011-12-07T10:20:45.571-05:002011December<br />
<br />
De Carvalho, Mario, A God Strolling in the Cool of the Evening<br />
Souza, Marcio, Death Squeeze (A Condolencia)<br />
Doctorow, E.L., Loon Lake <br />
<br />
November<br />
<br />
Haruki, Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase<br />
Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World<br />
Wu Ch'eng-en, Monkey, Folk Novel of China <br />
King, Stephen, 11/22/63<br />
Unsworth, Barry, Losing Nelson<br />
Leavy, Jane, The Last Boy, Mickey Mantle<br />
Sayers, Dorothy L., Six Red Herrings<br />
Hitchman, Janet, Such a Strange Lady (bio of Sayers) <br />
<br />
October<br />
<br />
Nooteboom, Cees, Lost Paradise <br />
Robinson, Marilynne, Housekeeping<br />
Josipovici, Gabriel, In a Hotel Garden <br />
Buckley, W.F., Last Call for Blackford Oakes<br />
Cercas, Javier, Soldiers of Salamis<br />
<br />
September <br />
<br />
DeLillo, Don, Point Omega, a re-read<br />
Cercas, Javier, The Anatomy of a Moment <br />
<br />
June, July and August<br />
<br />
Connelly, Michael, City of Bones <br />
Carrere, Emmanuel, The Adversary<br />
Carrere, Emmanuel, My Life as a Russian Novel<br />
Sciascia, Leonardo, The Wine-Dark Sea <br />
Connelly, Michael, The Closers<br />
Marias, Javiar, A Heart So White<br />
Nesbo, Jo, The Devil's Star<br />
Nesbo, Jo, Redbreast<br />
Sciascia, Leonardo, The Day of the Owl<br />
Sciascia, Leonardo, To Each His Own <br />
<br />
Through May 22<br />
<br />
Collins, Wilkie, The Moonstone. Read this so long ago, I hardly remembered it at all, even as I re-read. Not sure I agree with TS Eliot that it's the best crime novel in English, as well as the first, but it is definitely the best police procedural, certainly in the beginning, maybe to end. <br />
<br />
Through May 5:<br />
Auster, Paul, The Book of Illusions, I've read this before. Odd to remember it as you read. <br />
Dickens, Charles, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. <br />
Through April 25:<br />
Wilson, Robert, The Vanished Hands. If you like thrillers, Wilson is good but Perez-Reverte is better. <br />
Portis, Charles, Gringos. Yes, yes, not reading much. Will get back in the saddle soon, feel it coming on. Gringos kept me laughing. A good start, and I'm almost done with a Robert Wilson book.<br />
<br />
Through March 7:<br />
<br />
Larsson, Steig, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Not a disappointment by any means.<br />
Portis, Charles, The Dog of the South. One of my favorites.<br />
Portis, Charles, Masters of Atlantis. Found this a bit tedious, but may have been my mood.<br />
Perez-Reverte, Arturo, The Club Dumas. Now that Larsson is no longer in the running, I think P-R is a worthy successor to LeCarre in the category of best crime fiction writer. The Queen of the South is still my favorite, but then it would be.<br />
Perez-Reverte, Arturo, The Fencing Master<br />
Masako Togawa, Slow Fuse. Worth reading but not as good as The Lady Killer, her novel from the 50's or 60's.Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-64267479502328368212011-01-15T07:02:00.001-05:002011-03-07T09:05:32.077-05:00Story in blackheart magazine<a href="http://blackheartmagazine.com/">http://blackheartmagazine.com/</a> The story is called Scrap. Scroll down to fiction on left side of page and look for December 17, or thereabouts. A friendly warning: It's R rated, so no one under 18 allowed.Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-73023591609351105822010-12-18T06:43:00.013-05:002011-09-22T08:28:05.567-04:00Preface to Other SidesPreface to<br>
<br>
Other Sides: A Journey With Maps<br>
<br>
"What then is writing of quality? Well, what it has always been: knowing to stick one's head into the dark, knowing to jump into the void, knowing that literature is basically a dangerous occupation." Roberto Bolano<br>
<br>
The news from Mexico now is all about drugs, especially the wars along the border, those closest to home. In the spring of 2003, even though it was already old news, the Zapatistas were still getting most of the attention, and there was then and is now the persistent issue of the hundreds of murdered and mutilated young women in the border towns, especially Juarez, about which Roberto Bolano wrote what I consider a masterpiece of fiction, <i>2666</i>. <br>
<br>
And those are just the headlines, the major events that seep across the border because news editors think we might find them relevant to our lives up here in the promised land, where most things, relatively speaking, work pretty well and reliably, and where, although we are not by any means at the top of the class in low rates of crime or violence, at least, as far as I know, no one has ever rolled the heads of their victims across a dance floor, nor do sheriffs and police chiefs count on being murdered a few days after taking office.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://jacksteele.blogspot.com/2008/12/preface-to-other-sides.html#more">Read more »</a>Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-60377014520912811642010-12-14T16:40:00.000-05:002010-12-14T16:40:53.973-05:00Common Sense 2After reading about the REPUBLICAN federal judge who ruled that mandatory health insurance is unconstitutional, I began to wonder who would not want health insurance, given that under the current plan it will all be either free or affordable. I know that "affordable" is open to interpretation, but even so, if you get sick or have an accident and you have no insurance, in the vast majority of cases (unless you are filthy rich), your fellow citizens are the ones who pay for it. Ever read about how hospitals get paid for emergency room visits by the uninsured? The person who doesn't want health insurance, then, must be someone who wants everyone else, taxpayers, to pay for his affliction. But isn't that what Republicans are against? Aren't they always complaining about people who look for what they call "government handouts?" Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-87535287365191764722010-12-05T08:45:00.001-05:002011-12-05T08:48:50.958-05:00Scenes from a Boyhood in Central Texas<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">Jack Steele<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>18575 wds.</div><div class="MsoNormal">240 Regency Drive</div><div class="MsoNormal">Marstons Mills, MA 02648</div><div class="MsoNormal">508-280-8645</div><div class="MsoNormal">jacksteele1@comcast.net</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">Scenes from a Boyhood in Central Texas</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">A novella</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">By Jack Steele</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;"><br />
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</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">Scenes from a Boyhood in Central Texas</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was old enough at seven to be upset when they moved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He hardly noticed the other moves, but he liked their street in Fort Worth and didn’t want to leave it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked playing ball in the street until dark.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked playing in the sand box next door.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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 behind them in the middle of the field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked his best friend, Billy, and Billy’s mother Jo, who his mother later said was a little “rough.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He learned a lot that year in Fort Worth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How to play ball, cowboys and Indians, hide and seek, Canasta, jacks, hopscotch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem with Easter was that it always came on a Sunday, ham wasn’t as good as turkey, it was usually 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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also learned that he liked frozen strawberries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother insisted that he try one bite, and after that he couldn’t get enough of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He already knew how to ride a bike, a blue one with pedals on the front wheel, but he didn’t know until a few weeks later how much it hurt to crash and get a long cut on your knee cap.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was also the first time his parents disappointed him at Christmas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wanted holsters and pistols, but he wanted them to be tan, not white like Hopalong Cassidy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He acted as if he liked them, and he wore them outside to play with his friends, but he was embarrassed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one seemed to notice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one made fun of him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he was ashamed of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fort Worth was also the first time he was sick, or the first time he remembered it, with infetigo, which nearly drove him crazy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He itched so bad he couldn’t sleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And war games, in which killing Japs was always the point.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the new town, not far from Ft. Worth but much smaller, Bosley lived on the next street over, but he always got there through a break in the hedge in the backyard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a big yard with a pile of dirt for playing war and a good enough but not perfect backboard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It leaned a little and was probably not exactly the right height.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And two pear trees, the pears always, or so he remembered it, lying around rotting on the ground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Bosley’s didn’t have air conditioning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, they had an attic fan and sometimes they had ice cream in the refrigerator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither of his parents ever seemed to be there and the house was always a mess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They would turn on the fan, eat the ice cream out of the carton, and listen to Bosley’s older sister’s records.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They listened to the Elvis Presley album with Blue Moon Over Kentucky on it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They listened to Sam Cooke, over and over again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They collected baseball cards—he convinced Bosley that the smaller Bowman cards, which weren’t made after ‘55, were better than the Topps, because they “looked neater”--and they played All-Star Baseball.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bosley didn’t like to lose, at anything, and usually didn’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They didn’t choose their teams in the same way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hitting was all that mattered in the game, and they both knew it, but only Bosley chose only the best hitters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roy chose players he liked, often for reasons that were obscure even to himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He might like the name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Solly Hemus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A mediocre hitter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Preacher Roe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A terrible hitter, even for a pitcher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or he might like the way the card looked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Bosley had no such esthetic handicap.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He picked the best hitters, period, and he usually won.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One day, though, Roy got lucky, and he was ahead of Bosley by ten runs by the seventh inning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew Bosley was mad, but he underestimated how mad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He gleefully kept spinning and celebrated when, already ahead by a wide margin, some mediocre second baseman hit a bases loaded home run.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bosley blew up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He picked up the game board and broke it across his knee and threw it against the wall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The spinner broke off.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They made it up eventually, and his father fixed the spinner, but it was a good lesson about Bosley, one he never forgot, and the older he got the more Bosley faded out of the picture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pretty soon his best friend was Weaver, a boy he hadn’t liked much when they were younger because he didn’t know much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor was he interested in knowing much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’d had a shouting match once about Weaver not knowing who Yogi Berra was, which should have taught him a lesson.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weaver 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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the ignorance outraged him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He couldn’t see how people could live in the world and not know, or at least be ashamed and appalled by their own ignorance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or, at the very least, care and be curious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But no one around them that day supported him, and that wasn’t the worst of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weaver actually won the argument.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wanted to know what knowing the Yankee lineup had to do with wanting to be a doctor or a lawyer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His older sister was a nurse, saved people’s lives, and he was sure she didn’t know who Yogi Berra was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Did that mean she was stupid?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That made it possible for him to be friends with Weaver, although he couldn’t say that he liked him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It wasn’t possible to like someone who was so stubbornly incurious and unwaveringly practical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weaver 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 had told him it would.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was fun to be with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s the most he could say for Weaver, but he even had to qualify that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ride bikes all over town.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He got so absorbed in riding his bike that he never thought of the outdoors as outdoors when he was on it, hardly even noticed that it was hot or raining, and in the summer it was almost always one or the other.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They could ride downtown anytime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ride the streets, the alleys, and drop their bikes anywhere, almost without thinking about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just so they, the bikes, wouldn’t get run over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked it because in most places nobody paid the least bit of attention to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were almost invisible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And he liked it because downtown provided the most opportunities for flirting with trouble.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shoplifting at the dime stores.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reading the magazines without buying anything at the drug stores.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Examining the exit doors of the movie theaters for ways to pry it open.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stealing coke bottles from behind the grocery store and selling them back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing really serious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They knew that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They knew they weren’t bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just pests, and that only when anyone bothered to notice or care.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They knew they didn’t have the nerve to be bad, or, truth be told, even the inclination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They weren’t mad at anybody and they didn’t need anything.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McGill knocked on his door almost every morning at eight o’clock in the summer and wanted him to “come out” and play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That meant Stewart’s lot; baseball.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother always answered the door because he was always asleep at eight a.m. in the summer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very asleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Being a child, he slept like one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even when he resisted McGill’s persistence and stayed in bed until ten-thirty or eleven, he had to force himself up, and only got up then because he had to pee.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother usually coaxed him out of bed, asking repeatedly if he was going to sleep all day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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, usually 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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t like the Dodgers because everybody else liked them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked the Giants because no one else did and Willie Mays.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father had to tell him the details about Willie Mays.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t read it anywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “say hey” kid and the basket catch, which was part of making it look easy, a quality his father admired.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, he seemed to think it was the highest quality a major league baseball player could have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joe DiMaggio had it, he said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He usually didn’t have to move more than a few steps to catch a fly ball.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He made playing center field in Yankee Stadium look easy, but behind that was knowing the hitters, which took a lot of work.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was hot in the summer even at eight in the morning, baseball was not possible after ten, and he was always tempted to forget about McGill, even when he got up early, and instead grab a book and lie down under the air-conditioner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the other hand, he knew that once he got down there, he would have a good time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They played flies and skinners, which he liked better than Little League.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No grown-ups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A good hitter could often hit the ball on the fly over the chain link fence into the Stewart’s back yard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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, make home runs, the only way to score, became rare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fielders had to drop or misjudge it, which was also rare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Catching the flies when it didn’t mean anything would not be near as much fun.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Flies and skinners in the summer and touch football in the winter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s all they did down there, his friends, but every kid in the neighborhood used Stewart’s lot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joanne Davenport’s older brother was electrocuted and died there, flying a model airplane.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One Christmas Day a kid came out with a real bow and arrow set.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t see Jerry Davenport get electrocuted, but he saw the arrow stick in the helmet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It looked like a gag in a Bob Hope or Three Stooges movie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was crowded that day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone had come to the lot with their Christmas presents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kids were everywhere and quite a few of them saw the arrow come down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The kid was okay, the arrow never touched him, but the kid who shot it was just old enough to be scared and embarrassed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t stop shooting arrows, but he was more careful after that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No grownup ever told Roy about Jerry Davenport.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of his friends casually mentioned it one day, when they saw someone else flying a model airplane.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And as far as he knew, no one ever told a parent about the helmet incident.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McGill 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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He would even run foot races, carrying the crutch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It wasn’t polio, according to his mother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She might have told him what it was, but he’d never heard of it and so soon forgot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It didn’t matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McGill was never a friend like Bosley and Weaver.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never talked to McGill about anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never did anything with McGill except play ball.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never even saw his mother or his father or the inside of his house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>McGill was the boy on crutches, who was now completely healthy and a pretty good athlete, and who wanted to play ball every day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was McGill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Front and back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beginning to end.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bosley didn’t play ball very much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Less the older they got.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t know what Bosley did all day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t think about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weaver played all the time, and he was better than anybody, which was another reason not to like him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was good at cutting to the chase, at making things simple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t care if he looked like anyone in the major leagues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t care if the rules made sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It couldn’t be denied.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had the best argument, irritating though it could be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stewart’s lot was not the major leagues.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weaver’s father was a barber.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A good one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was a lesson in how to be manly without being a hick, valuing that, subtlety, and Mr. Weaver and his haircuts were lessons in themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part of making it look easy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was the only barber who wouldn’t jerk a boy’s head around to make him hold it right and be still.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was the only one who was naturally soft-spoken and friendly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t try to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He just was, all the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weaver had a number of interesting facts to tell about his father.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He slept in the nude, he never wore a hat because it made you bald, he dyed his hair, he walked to work and back every day, he watched Gunsmoke every Saturday night and then went to bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also fell out of a car once that was going fifty miles an hour and wasn’t hurt except for a few scratches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weaver knew that for a fact because he’d been driving.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d started driving at twelve years old and took over on out of town trips when his father got sleepy, which was often.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He stopped, backed up, and found him sitting on the side of the road.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They decided he hadn’t been hurt because he’d been asleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Relaxed as if a baby, as if drunk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother said it was God’s will.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weaver’s 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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She said one day that cutting down two oak trees for a hamburger stand was a sin, and Weaver laughed at her, and as usual, he had the best argument.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It didn’t seem right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were pretty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were over a hundred years old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not an argument and they all knew it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mrs. Weaver was driving.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were stopped at a light, and to their right were the uprooted trees being moved around by machinery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dust and noise everywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roy agreed with Mrs. Weaver and knew why.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked the trees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t like the dust or the noise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The town already had two or three good hamburger stands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What was the point?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he knew better than to say as much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are plenty more trees, Weaver said, and he was right.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mrs. Weaver talked too much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She never shut up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He much preferred his own mother, who was younger, prettier and listened as much or more than she talked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wasn’t sure, though, that he preferred his own father.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father was not as easy going as Mr. Weaver.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, he wasn’t easy going at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rare was the second question that didn’t irritate him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First questions were usually okay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Second questions were best avoided.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The one exception to the second question rule was math.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father sat at the dinner table with him one night for half an hour patiently explaining why the 1900’s were the 20<sup>th</sup> Century, using a peeling an orange analogy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The effortless way he used his thumb against the blade to make it almost seem like the apple was spinning under it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Roy 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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was not good with his hands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That quickly became a family fact.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Raymond’s baseball story went like this:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“When I was 16, around the time of The Great War, I got signed by the New York Giants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was playing centerfield for a semi-pro league in Indiana, and one of their scouts saw me have a pretty good day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They sent me to one of their farm clubs down in Alabama.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rest of that season, three months or so, I hit .455 with 30 home runs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During the off-season I went back to work at the factory, and then in the spring the Giants sent me to play Triple-A ball in Pennsylvania.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hit over four hundred there too and had just hit home run number fifty when they called me up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was late in the season and they were still in the pennant race.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was there to pinch hit, but I was low man on the totem pole, so it took them five or six games to get around to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was extra innings and the bases were loaded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were behind a run.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They put me up only because they’d used everybody else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I guess they figured green as I was I still had a better chance of getting on than the pitcher did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I took three balls in a row.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not even close.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I looked down at third base, got the take sign of course, and then the pitcher wound up and threw me the fattest pitch you ever saw.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew he would.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t have no other choice, and well boys, like Dizzy Dean always says, I went for the downs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I swung so hard that my feet came off the ground, and I hit that ball right out of the park.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cleared right center by twenty feet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I felt like Babe Ruth jogging around those bases, let me tell you, never felt better in my life, but it didn’t last long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew the minute I rounded second and saw the look on the third base coach’s face that I was in deep trouble.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one said a word to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one would look at me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The players too, not just the coaches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the next day they sent me back to Alabama, but I didn’t go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I went back home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Didn’t even have the heart to play semi-pro after that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Screw’em.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the first time Roy had ever heard an adult say “screw” in that way, and it shocked him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He couldn’t remember when people forgot that screw means fuck, or decided it didn’t matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe early in the sixties, or even before that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe it was more common than he thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His world was a lot smaller then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d just turned twelve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He played baseball in the morning, rode his bike in the afternoon and watched TV at night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Actually, he read a lot too, either in the library downtown or on the floor of the one room in his house that was air-conditioned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sports and war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mostly baseball.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mostly the Civil War.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And he ate whatever was put in front of him, and more if he could get it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>About that time he also started noticing the exposed legs of dancers on TV when they did twirls, and how the skirts of the women on the covers of 25 cent novels were always well above their knees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The magazines on a separate rack in a certain drug store caught his eye as well, and he was sorely tempted to look, but he was afraid that if he was seen, he wouldn’t be allowed to read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sporting News</i> for free anymore.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Adults never told you anything in those days, but he’d guess that the man who told him the grand slam story was already widely known to be of “no account.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was Mrs. Phelps’ brother-in-law, recently arrived from “somewhere up north.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They knew that because he talked funny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mrs. Phelps ran the little store they rode their bikes to for cold drinks after baseball.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’d run it forever for all he knew, but her brother-in-law appeared for the first time that summer, and he was always sitting in front of the store in a metal lawn chair, the kind that give a little when you sit down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or give a lot if you’re fat, which Raymond was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He insisted they call him Raymond, and after a while they got used to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another story he told them was about Tojo’s son, what the G.I.’s did to him when he was captured.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to Raymond, who claimed to have been there in person, they put a reed in Tojo Jr.’s mouth, buried him alive in a shallow grave and took turns peeing into the reed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That went on for several days, Raymond said, but no one knows how long it took him to die and no one bothered to dig him up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He laughed when he told that story, laughed so heartily that it made his face turn red, which made him even uglier than usual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His teeth were yellow and crooked. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His face was unhealthy, the color and consistency of chalk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It reminded Roy of an illustration in a Robin Hood book he’d come across in the library.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not Friar Tuck, but another monk, a bad one.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By ten in the morning it was too hot to play baseball even for us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We all felt drained and had cotton-mouth, but we didn’t always go to Phelps’s store.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes we wanted a place where we could also read magazines, or if we were short on cash, we stole bottles from behind the supermarket and traded them in up front for cold drinks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At times we stole from Mrs. Phelps but we never sold her back the bottles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bottle deposit was two cents, but Mrs. Phelps would only give us a penny.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A liveoak is an evergreen with relatively small leaves, but its trunk and branches are stout and gnarled like the oaks you see in children’s books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It might smile or frown at you, but it seems in any case to have its arms out wide, to shelter or smother, to welcome or frighten you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Raymond’s chair, as they quickly began to think of it, sat under such a tree, and more often than not, when they rode up to the front of the store, he was in it, doing absolutely nothing but rocking and staring into space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never greeted them, and when one of them said, “Hey Raymond,” he’d just barely lift his head, and sometimes an eyebrow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s how northeners are, someone said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t mean anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And they’d be settled down and talking among ourselves before he ever said a word, if he was going to say anything that day at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Tell us one of your stories, Raymond,” didn’t work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d either spit or not do anything, so they learned fast to leave him alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most days though he’d come up with something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d just start talking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never worried about interrupting anyone.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“They should have given that nigger the electric chair,” he said one day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They all knew who he was talking about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of their parents had similar opinions, but to know that you had to listen from the other room, and they didn’t express themselves in the same way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Colored” was the more acceptable term on the social level most of our families belonged to, and mothers especially preferred to focus on “that poor woman.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Opinions about the sentence were given more indirectly:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“He got off easy,” or “I just don’t know if life in prison is enough for someone who would do that.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’d learned from Weaver, whose older brothers tended to be less discreet than most parents, that a nineteen-year-old black man, “colored boy” or “nigger” to everyone they knew, had been convicted of raping an 84-year old-woman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>None of them knew or asked whether she was white or black.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roy didn’t even think to ask.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was too amazed at the crime itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It didn’t seem to make any sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was beginning to understand how a person might get so horny that he’d lose control of himself and do something he later regretted, but he couldn’t imagine getting that way over an old woman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Fry his balls and feed’em to the crows,” Raymond said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then he told them about seeing a lynching in East Texas when he worked in the oil fields.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only lynchings he’d ever heard of before were in cowboy movies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were bad things that almost but never actually happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The guy with a rope around his neck was usually saved at the last minute, but Raymond’s lynching did actually happen, and they all heard about it in detail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The kicking, the weird grimace on the victim’s face, the shouts of approval, even cheers, from the men in the crowd as the body was suddenly released, how quick it fell, with such violence, and bounced up and down for a minute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can’t look at a photograph of a lynching now without thinking about Raymond.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes I think that metal lawn chair started to squeak as he told us about it, but I couldn’t swear to that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just remember for sure that I’d never seen him so excited before, not even when he told about hitting the home run.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it was Tojo’s son that got him into trouble.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Someone’s little brother decided to tell it at the dinner table, and that was the end of the bike rides to Mrs. Phelps’s store.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weaver wanted to go anyway, but no one else had the nerve to go against his parents, and Roy suspected they’d have been run off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reilly’s father was a lawyer, and he took it upon himself to speak to Raymond.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one at that time had much affection for the Japanese, but as my mother put it, “the story is too gruesome for boys your age.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roy’s father had his doubts about it being true, at least the part about Raymond being there in person, which made Roy decide not to tell him about the grand slam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had his own doubts about that one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He might have believed it a year earlier, but at twelve it seemed a little too perfect to be true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And he could already see the dreaded condescending look on his father’s face, even if he told him in advance he didn’t believe it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d know he sort of had at one point and still wished it was true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He probably knew people who believed that Mr. Rosen was evil, but what he heard people actually say about Jews was not that extreme.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father said they were tight and implied their shrewdness with money by noting that they tended to start businesses with high markups, like jewelry and furniture stores.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No Jews in town were in the grocery business, for example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One was a record store owner, but you had to allow for their near monopoly of the entertainment business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A Jewish uncle by marriage was a musician, for example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And shoes?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Were shoes high markup?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the clothing business in general?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jews were everywhere in the clothing business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every department store he’d ever heard of in Texas was owned by Jews.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Were clothes high markup?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t know, but still, the theory probably had more exceptions than it could bear, but he got the idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jews were good with money, to an unseemly degree by the standards of other people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sunday school teachers also had something to say about Jews.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the First Baptist Church he was taught not to hate Jews but to pity them, as we would anyone who rejected Christ.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But extreme views were there, he was sure, and what kept him from them when he was little was propriety, an understanding among a certain class of adults that there were limits to what could be openly discussed among children.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Inevitably, though, there are those who test the limits, either from coarseness or idealism—children can’t be protected from the truth forever and isn’t it our duty to tell them the truth, to prepare them?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or just from spite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not being able to bear such innocence, one that would make no distinctions.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dr. Laban was his Sunday school teacher when he was sixteen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was a surgeon who believed that prayer could cure cancer and that Karl Marx never did an honest day’s work in his life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No socialist, i.e., communist, or anyone who lived under such a system of government, ever did an honest day’s work, and that alone proved it was evil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dr. Laban knew the truth about everything, and he gave his time to share that knowledge with young people, to make a better world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At first Roy liked him because he was singled out for being smart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The doctor flattered him by asking if he’d ever considered medicine as a profession and offered recommendations, even money if he needed it, which should have warned him right away, not the money, but reading him so badly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roy had won his respect by asking him questions in his Sunday school class, even arguing with him, but he had no interest in science.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless, Dr. Laban took him so seriously that he prepared detailed responses, which had the unintended consequence of trapping him into regular attendance.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dr. Laban thought he was answering his call for reason with reason, but it soon became clear that what really interested him were miracles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not only did God heal cancer, but people came back to life after dying in car wrecks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All nonsense, of course, Roy was old enough to see that, but he was glad to find someone who would address his concerns and not go silent or hostile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dr. Laban was a newcomer to town and perhaps a little too dark complected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lebanese, people said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had two beautiful daughters and a comfortable brick home in a fashionable part of town, but his downfall came when he invited the Sunday school class over to his house one night to watch his home movies of the Texas City oil refinery explosion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They ate cookies and drank punch and watched mangled bodies, serious blood and guts, accompanied by the doctor’s clinical narration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one threw up on his carpet, but everyone thought it was a little creepy, and word soon got out among parents that Dr. Laban’s parties for boys were to be avoided.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was around that time that he started liking Mr. Rosen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he was little he was afraid of him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not because he was Jewish, but because he was such a strange, imposing presence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was built like one of those men at cocktail parties in the New Yorker, a graceful S, only a little stooped, and his teeth were yellow and his mouth always seemed to be full of mucus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had a strange accent, patrician New York he guessed later when he knew what that was, all of which was odd enough, but he compounded his own strangeness by standing out on the sidewalk in front of his store in order to collar passersby.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s what had scared him as a kid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That stooping aggressiveness, standing on the sidewalk like some big bug about to scoop in little kids, all the while smiling between those yellow teeth and speaking in a way that sounded like whining to a Texas ear.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first clue about Mr. Rosen’s real nature came when he brought both a bottle of bourbon and a bottle of scotch to his father when he had his appendix out, saying he didn’t know which he drank.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Next came an afternoon spent in his store, the old man showing him and a friend his boxing trophies and photographs from his service days at around the turn of the century, and then demonstrating “a real Army spit shine,” spitting on shoes, cracking the rag.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was always fond of Mr. Rosen after that, and bought shoes from him whenever he could, but the real clincher came when he saw him at the airport one day with his family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mr. Rosen didn’t see him, and he kept his distance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a family affair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The occasion was that Mr. Rosen was on his way to the LBJ inaugural, and there was something about the elegant way he sat at the gate, a smile on his face, basking in his family’s admiration, that tugged at Roy’s heart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was probably Juapo, but he didn’t know that until years after, and it remained stubbornly in his brain as Wappo, a man who like Mr. Rosen talked as if his mouth was full of mush, or yellow phelgm, or mucus, his walk a slow shuffle, his profile a graceful but sickly S, an old zoot-suiter now racking balls at the Navarro Club, Members Only.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite superficial similarities, he couldn’t have been more different from Mr. Rosen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wappo never hurried, never smiled, never said anything anyone could understand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was always there.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t own the place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was Mr. Wappo, also the owner of the Army Navy store next door, who sometimes sat on a stool in his dark suit to watch the high rollers play nine ball for five dollars a game.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was where Roy learned about shape, standing on his toes to see the good players between the heads of the not so good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s what it all came down to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing else mattered if you didn’t have it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hard hitting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finesse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brains.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grace under pressure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Endurance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>None of that was enough if you didn’t have shape and didn’t know how to get it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He and his friends weren’t supposed to be there, but once inside they were tolerated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sign on the door said No One Under Eighteen Allowed, so they kept a low profile and minded their manners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They put their nickels on the edge of the table, a nickel a cue a game, and meekly waited for Wappo to notice them and come shuffling back to rack the balls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It never occurred to them that the nine ball players probably tipped him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wappo’s was long and narrow, hardly room enough at either end of a table to draw back a stick without hitting a wall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There were about eight tables, side by side in single file, and the kids played eight ball at the last two on worn felt, even ripped in places, and got used to the urine smell from the toilet at the rear of the building.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only light came from the flourescent bulbs over each table.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The heat came from little gas stoves up front, nearer the nine ball players, and in the summer there were a couple of revolving table fans, also up front.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only person their age who ever played on the front tables was Bosley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d been part of their crowd in grade school, but by high school they’d almost forgotten about him, and then one day he started showing up at Wappo’s with his own stick in a leather case, determined to play with the nine ball players.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It took nerve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More nerve than any of them had, even if they’d been good enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They had to respect that, but on the other hand, who did he think he was?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe he’d paid a fortune for his stick and his leather case, and somehow had the money to lose, and was actually good enough not to make a total fool of himself, but it still didn’t seem right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At first they thought the nine ball players would laugh at him and turn him away, refuse to take his money, but they didn’t, and then they wanted him to lose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They looked forward to seeing him walk out of there with his tail between his legs, especially since he never acknowledged them, always had his game face on, as if he had something to prove.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They laughed at him behind his back, partly in resentment, partly in embarrassment for him, he looked so ridiculous, so comically serious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never won even one game.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t completely make a fool of himself, he wasn’t that bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He made some tough shots and could have beaten any of the kids blindfolded, but he wasn’t in the same league as the nine ball players.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After two or three months of losing every Saturday morning, patiently waiting his turn and then showing everyone he was pretty good but not good enough, he stopped showing up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One Saturday he wasn’t there, and then the next, and pretty soon they stopped talking about it.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We had no business on Commerce Street.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Across from Wappo’s was a pawn shop and down the block was the Tex Theater, which none of us ever went to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It showed double features of old westerns and somebody’s older brother said it was only for Mexicans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That meant you’d probably get knifed, not to mention sick if you ate or touched anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We didn’t belong on Commerce Street, but no one paid us any attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We stared at the switch blade knives in the pawn shop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We looked at the gas masks and bayonets in the Army Navy store.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We tried to find the damage on the furniture at the damaged freight outlet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The next street over, Beaton, the main street, was respectable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very wide, metered angle parking, Penney’s, Sears, two banks, two barber shops, two drug stores, two shoe stores, two jewelry stores, three dime stores.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two restaurants, one Mexican, one home cooking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two record shops.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Penney’s still had hardwood floors and pneumatic message carriers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here and there you could find an old hitching ring in the sidewalk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Farmers in bib overwalls sometimes sat on the curbs outside the drug stores.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Traffic was bumper to bumper on Saturdays.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nearly every day the smell of cottonseed oil permeated all of downtown.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The third street over was Main.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A local department store, three stories high, a bakery, a printer, a stationer, shoe repair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Black people were never seen on Beaton or Main.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was a side door in Sears that could be reached from Commerce, which was on their side of town, and separate facilities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes you saw them crossing Beaton to go to the Ideal theater, where they were allowed in the balcony.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There were two ushers at the Palace, which had no balcony and allowed no black people anywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One usher had a big ass and the other had very bad acne.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was thought of as a sissy job, but their word was law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No talking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No knees on the backs of seats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’d warn you the first time, sometimes knocking your knees down with a flashlight, then throw you out if you did it again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The one in charge was the one with the bad acne.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rumor was that the manager of the theater had a big stash of pornography in his office, and if the usher with bad acne liked you, he’d let you see it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some also said that he liked you only if he wanted to suck your cock.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Palace was part of a chain of small town movie theaters, which meant that everything was standardized.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What movies played, how it looked, what you could buy at the concession stand, maybe even including the giant dill pickles in a jar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You couldn’t get ice in your drinks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You couldn’t get Coke.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just Pepsi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the Palace was the only game in town for first run movies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They changed after two or three days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One for the first half of the weekend, another for the second half, and usually a third (always a B movie) for the middle of the week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He went two or three times a week, often by himself, depending on how much money he had.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never worried about when the feature started.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d just ride his bike downtown in the afternoon and go.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also went to the Ideal, but not as often, certainly not as part of a routine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was always second best, more the kind of place he went to when he couldn’t think of anything else to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it had its attractions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You could always get Coke with ice at the Ideal, you never saw an usher, and although he wasn’t conscious of it being a big deal back then, perhaps the opera boxes, faded murals on the walls and ceiling and grand staircase to the balcony, made an impression.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was pretty rundown by the fifties, but it was hard not to be aware, sense in some way, that unlike the Palace, which hardly existed except as a nearly invisible vehicle for the films that played there, the Ideal had a past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More of a past than a future, which would have been clear even to him, if he’d ever thought about anything changing, since he never saw it even half full.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was it the black people in the balcony that kept people away?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its seediness?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m sure neither of those things helped, but the main thing had to be the movies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I think of the Ideal, I think of films that were already old:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lash LaRue and the Cisco Kid serials, short subjects like the Bowery Boys, The Three Stooges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tom and Jerry cartoons instead of Bugs Bunny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And many of the movies weren’t just second run, but borderline respectable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Foreign movies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Documentaris about childbirth, marijuana, prostitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rock and roll.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brigitte Bardot, Mondo Cane, High School Confidential, La Dolce Vita.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked his father’s side of the family better than his mother’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On his mother’s side they were all country people, all hicks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They knew nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They talked in a way that was comical, similar to Ma and Pa Kettle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father often became impatient and irritable when they visited his grandparents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father’s face would turn red when his grandfather urged another piece of chicken on him or more mashed potatoes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He would answer curtly that when he wanted more food, he’d ask for it, and Roy knew what his father really meant by his answer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father thought his grandfather was stupid and his manners ridiculous, and his tone made that clear to anyone with half a brain, a message apparently lost on his grandfather, who never changed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Later in the car, on the way home, he often heard his father tell his mother that if he wanted more chicken or mashed potatoes, he would ask.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t say, Why can’t the old bastard take no for an answer?, but Sonny knew that’s what he was thinking.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At dinner was about the only time his grandfather seemed completely alive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rest of the time he seemed to be more or less in hibernation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He would sit on a straight backed wooden chair in a corner of the living room, wearing dark glasses even inside, and watch television without comment or visible reaction, his arms folded across his chest, apparently indifferent to what he was watching, perhaps not even knowing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He might or might not have been listening to the conversation going on around him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never entered into conversation, not even at the dinner table, except to urge more food on people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He would answer a question politely, but as briefly as possible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not because he was taciturn or ill-tempered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was placid, at least on the surface.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father used to say that Abner was the only man he’d ever known to whom nothing had ever happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He grew up on a farm near Greenville.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He courted Roy’s grandmother in a horse and buggy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d been in the infantry in the First World War.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He went to a Baptist church service every Sunday of his life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d been a postman in Dallas for most of his working life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He learned all that from his mother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He did have one story, though, which Roy got out of him one day. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For God knows how many years, his route consisted of delivering mail in the same building in downtown Dallas, and for all that time he started at the top and walked down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One day a customer asked him why he couldn’t vary his route a little, so that at times he could get his mail earlier, and Abner replied, firmly, that he’d always done it from top to bottom, for God knows how many years, and that he wouldn’t change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he told the story, he got red in the face and laughed at the end of it indignantly. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The point of the story, it seemed, was that he’d held his own, but against what Roy was never sure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Against an unreasonable request?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Against chaos?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps he thought that if he gave in to even a reasonable request, a fair one, politely delivered, it would start a trickle of disorder that would inevitably lead to an avalanche, and pretty soon the people in the building would have him hopping back and forth from floor to floor, trying to please everyone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But his grandfather didn’t say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was his one story and all he had to say about it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His grandmother was completely different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You couldn’t find two more different people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mamaw was never off her feet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was always cooking and serving and gossiping and laughing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was the life of the party and the perfect host.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At Christmas she would even drink a little egg nog with bourbon in it, courtesy of Roy’s father.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father hated egg nog, but once he found out that Mamaw would drink it with bourbon, he brought it to the house every Christmas Eve, probably less to please Mamaw than to irritate Abner, who, being a devout Southern Baptist, never had a drink in his life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t seem irritated, though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, he even grinned a little at the jokes about “Mamaw getting drunk.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could be a good sport, even when Roy’s father turned the tables on him and tried to get him to try a little spiked egg nog.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“No, thank you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve never had a drink and never will,” he said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Not even in France?” his father teased.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You mean to say you spent six months in France, went to Paris where all those madameioselles are, and never had one drink the whole time?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Not even in France,” he answered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And no one doubted it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Christmas Eve at the King’s was raucous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All the adults except Abner drank, and there were enough young cousins running around for it to be a madhouse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The cousins, actually, were a big part of the problem with his mother’s side of the family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All girls, all younger than him and all spoiled brats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Invariably, they got better presents and more attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even his mother hardly noticed when he opened his presents, which was just as well, since they were always stupid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Clothes, usually.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shirts he wouldn’t be caught dead in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hicks didn’t know how to buy Christmas presents.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless, it was not possible to dislike Mamaw, no one didn’t like her, but he didn’t like it that she favored his cousin Sally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew he was being unreasonable and unfair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She raised Sally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sally was like a daughter to her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew that, but he still didn’t like it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story, told by his mother, was that Sally’s mother left when Sally was a baby.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sally’s father, moved back in with his parents, so it fell to Mamaw to take care of her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was plenty for a reason, but he was only a kid and still resented it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He felt more at home in the house on Marlborough Street than he did at home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was just him and Dee, his father’s mother, and she left him alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She didn’t even speak to him, except to answer questions, or tell him dinner was ready, or that it was time to pull out the bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She never hugged him or fussed over him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She rarely smiled or laughed, except with other grownups or at something on television.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She wore shapeless print dresses that all looked the same and old-fashioned glasses like Franklin Roosevelt had worn, with small round lenses and wire rims.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She worked the TV Guide crossword puzzle every week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She made sure when he visited that the refrigerator was stocked with Dr. Pepper, and not having a machine or anyone to crank it, she made her own version of homemade ice cream for him, putting it in the freezer in bread pans and stirring it now and then as it froze.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By far, she was his favorite grownup.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During and after supper he watched television with her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She preferred variety shows to dramas and knew everything about everybody.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Arthur Godfrey, Garry Moore, Dave Garroway, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, Ed Sullivan, anyone who’d ever appeared on Ed Sullivan, John Daly and all the panelists and mystery guests on What’s My Line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She could answer any question about them and had an opinion, when asked, about all of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Artie Shaw, she thought, had been married more than anyone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nine times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Arthur Godfrey showed his true colors when he fired Julius LaRosa.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked to hog the spotlight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He couldn’t allow anyone to take it away from him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jack Paar was smart, but he wasn’t as refined as John Daly or Bennett Cerf.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He squirmed too much and went too far.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jack Benny was Jack Benny, like Bob Hope or Bing Crosby.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’d always been around and always would be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That went without saying.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes he spent all day reading, from morning until night, switching now and then from the sofa bed to the floor to D’s bed as the spirit moved him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the summer, the time when he was there the most, he liked the damp straw smell of the swamp cooler, and he would often lie on the floor directly in front of it not just to be cooler but to take in more of the smell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The windows and doors were kept open, but the curtains were always drawn to keep out the light, and revolving table fans helped out in the other rooms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He read boys’ books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sports.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Biographies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Hardy Boys.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also read all of D’s movie magazines from cover to cover.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And he sometimes brought All-Star baseball with him and his baseball cards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or he might be briefly obsessed with another board game or something similar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked a little hand held device with red and white tiles that could be moved around to make different sequences of numbers. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And D showed him how to play solitaire, which took hold of him completely for several days.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>D rode the street car with him the first time or two, to show him how, and then she let him ride by himself down to what she called, for a reason he never thought to ask about, “Boundary,” the shopping area around the corner of Marlborough and Jefferson.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never quite got over the anxiety of deciding exactly when to pull the cord for stopping, how soon or how late, the dread of calling attention to himself always with him, of seeming like someone who didn’t know what he was doing, or like someone, as his father would have said later, who had his head up his ass, but he liked riding the street car so much that he accepted the anxiety as a price he was willing to pay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And being at the movies, the main reason for riding the streetcar, he liked perhaps more than anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Bison theater, named after the mascot of Sunset High School, where his mother went, was not very big.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had a “loge” instead of a real balcony, but that was okay, and the movies it showed were all drenched in color and so forgettable that he sometimes couldn’t even remember the title when he got back to D’s, but that was okay too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was cool and dark in the theater, and hardly anyone came to the matinees in the summer and sat in the loge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And he liked to eat popcorn and have a Pepsi with ice in it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He especially liked chewing up a big wad of popcorn and keeping it in his mouth until all the flavor seeped out of it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Boundary was where his aunt had her dance studio.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The football coach at Sunset sends his players over here to learn tap,” his aunt told him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It makes them more agile.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was trying to coax him into taking lessons when he visited D.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It doesn’t mean you’re a sissy,” she added, which was the point of course of mentioning the football players, and he showed up once or twice just to please her, but he had no feel for it or interest in it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was too hard to remember the steps and listen to the rhythm at the same time, and he didn’t like to look clumsy in front of people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not to mention that he saw no point in it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His aunt was a lot younger than Dee and completely different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was the life of any party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was tiny, had orange hair, smoked Old Gold’s constantly, and drove around in a not new but not too old green Oldsmobile with power windows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He called her O.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t know why and never thought to ask, even though unlike Dee, it wasn’t short for anything that he knew of.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her real name was Maedelle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She had a son named Ron, who was nine years older than him and fat and freckled, and a husband named Freddie, a man he saw only in the evenings, around suppertime, sitting in front of a little magnified mirror, doing something with his face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was a musician.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their last name was Freeman, and for a while they lived in the other part of the house on Marlborough Street, a duplex with two front doors.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also had a little house in the back, a converted garage, and until she died, Mama, his great-grandmother, lived there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She actually lived in the back of the house in back, right on the alley, in a room so small that there was just enough space for the single bed, her chair, a table and a place to stand up and talk to her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was never forced but always asked by D to go in and say hello to Mama, and she was always in her bathrobe in the chair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She told him that she read the dictionary every day, that it was a habit she recommended.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I learn something every day,” she said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Did you know, for example, that ‘noggin’ is a real word, not just slang.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I always thought it was slang.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She showed him the Webster’s paperback she kept beside her on the table.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To her he was “little Roy,” Sonny’s boy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he told her, in answer to the question that all old people ask children, that he wanted to be a writer, she told him he ought to send in something to the Readers’ Digest, to the section called “Life in These United States.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Send them a funny story,” she said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It shouldn’t be more than a couple of paragraphs.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She showed him the section, then gave him a back copy to make sure he’d have the address.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She quoted Mark Twain to him, via Readers’ Digest:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Cauliflower is cabbage with a college education.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He smiled but he didn’t like it as much as she did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He got it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He understood why it was funny and had no problem with the populist, Will Rogers-like sentiment, but he was such a serious boy, and that kind of cleverness just didn’t do much for him.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only once did he get mad at D.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was when Luther died.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Luther was on the other side of the family, one of Mamaw’s brothers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He owned a barber shop on Greenville, way on the other side of town, not Oak Cliff, and once in a while he went with his mother and father to visit Luther and his wife Nina.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were famous in the family for saying “my how you’ve grown” every time they saw him and his brother, and Nina was famous later for attending funerals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They had no children, and aside from remarking on his growth and patting him on the head, they had nothing to say to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Luther was friendly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of MaMaw’s brothers were always smiling and friendly, easy going in a mischievous country sort of way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was “Addie’s grandson” or “Mary’s boy” in their house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They always had hard candy in cellophane wrappers on the coffee table, in a heavy glass bowl, and he was welcome to help himself, but he didn’t like it much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor was he much interested in their round screen television.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was hard to see anything for all the snow in the picture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He endured the visits to see Luther and Nina, a social obligation of his parents that included him, but he didn’t really know either one of them, and there was nothing to do while he was there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even listening to the adults talk, which he usually liked, was boring at Luther and Nina’s, which probably explains why he didn’t go with his parents to visit them the day Luther died.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he talked to Luther that day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He called the house around noon to find out if his parents would be back in time for lunch, and Luther answered the phone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sounded perfectly normal, except that he didn’t know who was calling him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It’s Roy Jr.,” he said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Little Roy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mary’s son.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Luther still didn’t know who he was, and it must have been right after that, according to what his parents said, that Luther walked out to his car and dropped dead.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are you sure it was Luther?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are you sure you dialed the right number?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Did you tell him who you were?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one could explain it, but he overheard D say to his parents, “He probably didn’t insist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You know how Jack is.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course he knew already that he was shy, painfully so at times, but he didn’t know that D knew it, or thought it important.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thought less of him for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was the hard part to take, since he heard that in her voice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And to make it worse, it contradicted what he knew to be true and had told them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For once, he had insisted, both to Luther and to them about what he’d said to Luther.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d been so amazed at Luther’s inability to understand who he was, that he forgot to be shy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two or three times, louder than normal, speaking slowly and clearly, he had explained who he was, who he was related to, how he was related to Luther, all to no avail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And D didn’t believe him, or at least doubted it, “knowing him.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t think that she didn’t like him in general for being shy, or even for that specifically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it was something she knew about, and it was a flaw, and on top of that, and perhaps more important, she didn’t know how honest he was.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He believed everything he read and almost everything his teachers and parents told him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When his sixth grade teacher said that Stalin was a dictator and a dictator could do anything he wanted, he believed her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He did not think to ask, as his friend did, if she meant that Stalin could make a person eat worms, or hop around all day on one leg, and when his teacher answered his friend in the affirmative, he wasn’t so sure she was right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or even if she knew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was the best teacher he’d ever had, his favorite for life, but that day, when she answered his friend’s question, he thought she seemed uncertain, which was not like her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was a big ugly woman, perhaps the ugliest woman he’d ever known.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her face and body together made him think of an elephant, and the boys, referring to her body in motion, said she looked like a Sherman tank.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They might also have been thinking about her personality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She came on as tough, no nonsense, and she could lose her temper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was a big crack in the gray concrete block wall at the back of the room, and the other kids said it was made when she banged a boy’s head against the lockers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was true, his mother reluctantly told him, that his teacher almost lost her job for slapping and shaking a boy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She doubted, though, that she hit him hard enough to make a crack in the wall.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For an hour most afternoons the class played Scrabble, and his teacher often sat in at the table where he played.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He beat her consistently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At times she seemed irritated when she lost, at other times pleased.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was difficult to predict her moods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He and his two best friends were her favorites, and there were days when they could do no wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She would laugh when they cut up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Answer them back when they teased her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ignore the spit wads and the paper airplanes and the whispers and the notes passed back and forth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But on other days she would turn red in the face and act like they’d been put on this earth just to torment her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One day during the lunch period, the three of them were sitting around together in the almost empty class, doing nothing in particular, when the principal came in carrying a paddle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Just the three I was looking for,” he said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Follow me.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were ushered into a storage closet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was barely room enough for all of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The boys had to sit on boxes of toilet paper and floor wax.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The principal told them that their teacher had complained about them, that they were making her life miserable, that she couldn’t control them, and he’d come to see if a good paddling might not convince them to behave.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was a nice man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d shown them how to plant a pecan tree.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was friendly and outgoing when he filled in for the cashier at lunch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And when the teacher was sick and he taught the class for her, he always made the lesson interesting, the discussion lively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They had never seen him mad before, and his show of temper shocked them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The paddle was the last resort, he said, but from what their teacher had told him, they deserved it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He made a long speech, emphasizing that he didn’t really want to do it, but he didn’t think he had a choice, and the longer he talked, the madder he seemed to get.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They didn’t say a word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They knew that would only make it worse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They didn’t like it, but there didn’t seem to be any way of escape, and then came a knock on the door.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the principal’s secretary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had a phone call.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Don’t move,” he told them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I’ll be right back.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was gone for about five minutes, and when he came back he resumed his speech.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t understand how they could show their teacher so much disrespect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew they weren’t bad boys, but they had certainly been behaving badly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A good<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>teacher like theirs would come to him only as a last resort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had to stop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He meant for it to stop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They should be very ashamed of themselves for driving her to this extreme.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then came another knock on the door.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Don’t move.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll be right back.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not until he was a grown man did it occur to him that the principal never had any intention of paddling them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had the paddle in his hand and his face was red.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until he came back after the second interruption, he seemed really mad, almost like a different person, and it scared them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was also right about their behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their only defense might have been their teacher’s unpredictable moods, but that was far too complicated, and besides, they were guilty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No two ways about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Best to keep their mouths shut and take it like men.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Try not to cry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Try not to put their hands back there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those were the two most important rules of getting paddled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No crying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No cowardly putting your hand in the way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone knew them, even though he didn’t know anyone who’d ever been paddled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two very strange kids were in his class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One was a girl who ate ink.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not every day, but several times he and his friends noticed that she had blue ink on her lips and all over her hands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The other was a boy who dressed in overalls like a farmer and sat in a far corner of the cafeteria, as far away from everyone else as possible, and caught flies with his hands and ate them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He and his friends talked about those kids among themselves and joked about them, maybe a little too loudly, but they never teased them directly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was a distance between the strange kids and everyone else, a separation that seemed to suit everyone involved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He tried to imagine doing what they did, being how they were, but it was hard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t think he would like the taste of ink or flies, but the worst part would be the attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d be ruined for life, as his mother said.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also separated were the project kids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their clothes were different and they came to school barefoot until the weather changed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were “rough,” yet another term he’d learned from his mother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All the bullies in the school were project kids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The project kid who made A’s was rare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They often needed haircuts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were not always clean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They caused trouble.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had a fist fight back by the lockers with a project kid over the 1956 World Series.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you were not for the Dodgers, the kid would hit you on the arm until you changed your mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one, then, was not for the Dodgers, but he decided he couldn’t give in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was very simple, a matter of courage, and the rule was clear:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if you didn’t fight back, you were a coward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He believed that and did not want to be a coward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was afraid of fighting, but he was more afraid of being a coward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had no idea even what a fight was, since he knew that movies were probably not a reliable guide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He said Yankees, and the project kid looked at him as if he couldn’t believe it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his eyes there was doubt, hesitation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not fear, but he had not expected to hear Yankees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless, the kid hit him on the arm, one knuckle out to make it sting more, and knowing he couldn’t let himself think about it even for a second, he hit back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They traded one or two more arm blows, and then it accelerated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It became a real fight, but it didn’t last more than a few seconds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They flailed at each other, aiming for the head, but neither connected very solidly, and then the project kid backed off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not enough to lose the fight, but enough to suggest a truce, and Roy took the hint.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No more flailing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was crying, but he hadn’t said Dodgers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The project kid didn’t look happy, but he wasn’t crying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He just shrugged his shoulders and walked away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a victory of sorts, or at least a draw, a draw with a project kid, but he was ashamed of crying.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He went through a period of sitting in the front row of the movie theater and eating Tootsie-Rolls and popcorn together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He chewed the popcorn up in a ball and then added a Tootsie-Roll or two for flavor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>About that time he started thinking about making left and right even.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If he touched something with his left hand, he had to touch something else with his right, and he had to apply exactly the same amount of pressure in both cases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, he needed to touch each in as similar a way as possible, as close as he could get it, and he had to get it perfect before he could stop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mostly, though, when he went to the movies, he did something a little different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He counted with his fingers, either touching something or not, maybe just moving them, it didn’t matter, but he had to count up to the same amount on each hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For a while, he had difficulty not doing this, especially when he was alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead of getting lost in the movie, as he wanted to do, he was compelled to count and make it even.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He did not know where that came from, or why he wanted to do it, but in Little League he did something that he knew was similar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He prayed before every pitch that a ball wouldn’t be hit to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A quick prayer with an “amen” at the end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was a good first baseman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So good in fact that he never missed a throw, even when it bounced in front of him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or a grounder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or a line drive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Popups, though, were a problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could never judge them right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They always landed behind him no matter how much he told himself when the ball was in the air not to run in until it arced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He couldn’t make himself do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He played the ball the way it looked, and then it was too late.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could throw the ball up in the air and catch it almost without thinking about it, but real popups during a game were different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Luckily, there weren’t many of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew then, all things considered, that his prayer was irrational, like making things come out even, that when the ball was hit to him, unless it was a popup, he would play it well, but he couldn’t stop himself.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Robert E. Lee was a flawed hero.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A man of impeccable integrity who made the wrong decision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Civil War was about two things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The North wanted to abolish slavery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The South was defending states’ rights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both, therefore, were right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The South was wrong, however, to break up the Union, and Lee was wrong when he chose to support it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was his flaw.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was too loyal to Virginia, blinded by his love for it to the greater good of preserving the Union.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His photograph, the kindly looking, portly man with the white beard, in full uniform, not unlike Santa Claus, showed everyone what was good about the South.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was run by gentlemen, and yet the sword that hung at his side, like the pistol of a gunfighter, gave fair warning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here was a man who would defend himself, who would hurt you if given a good reason.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Robin Hood, on the other hand, had no flaws, and although he enjoyed humiliating fools and cowards, he killed no one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Robin Hood was a natural.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could shoot a bow and arrow better than anyone who ever lived, and he was good-natured and smart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Little John knocked him into the water, he came up laughing and was so impressed that he invited Little John to join his Merry Men.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was a good loser and knew how to turn defeat into victory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a way, his whole way of life was that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When faced with death for shooting the king’s deer, Robin and his men disappeared into the green woods and created a life for themselves that was better than what they’d had before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They lived hidden away in a beautiful forest, ate wholesome and succulent venison cooked on a spit over a fire, amused themselves with games that honed their physical skills and their cunning, and robbed from the rich to give to the poor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could not imagine a better life, and although he was glad for Robin when King Richard returned from the Crusades and put everything right again, he was sorry that the life in the forest had to end.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was no King Richard for Robert E. Lee and his rebels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only Lincoln and Grant and whatever scrap of dignity Lee might have preserved at Appomattox.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roy liked Grant better than Lincoln.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grant was a drinker and a fighter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wasn’t sure what to make of Lincoln.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew how to look at the face as if it were that of a saint.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sad, ascetic and, the truth be told, boring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He much preferred the handsome, robust figure of Grant, a smart man of action like Robin Hood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even Lee, with his tragic flaw, was not up to Grant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lee too was boring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Too good, like Lincoln.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Washington.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked his heroes to be bold and reckless, and a little bit mean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or at least mischievous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could tell by the way Grant sat in his camp chair, cocky and careless, legs spraddled and a drink in his hand, that he was that way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Sam Houston given to him at school was more like Lee and Lincoln, a little too good not to be boring, and everyone knew that Travis, with his line drawn in the dirt, was too strict and narrow-minded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Davy Crockett was plenty wild, but too much like someone who might work on your car.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His grammar wasn’t good enough to be a real hero.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roy’s man was Bowie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both a craftsman and a gentleman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He even knew Spanish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d been in duels, lived in New Orleans and dressed well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had a temper and was quick to fight, but he was fair and friendly to people who deserved it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Alamo was the main event of history, far more important than Gettysburg or Valley Forge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even San Jacinto was an afterthought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Victory was never as good at explaining how things were as defeat, and how things were, thanks to the Alamo, was very clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Mexicans, the brown little men in their old-fashioned soldier uniforms, hordes of them, all wearing peaked hats and carrying rifles with bayonets over their shoulders, scrambled up ladders like bees or ants, not because they were brave or believed in anything in particular, but because they were afraid of their cruel and ridiculous little leader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They might as well take their chances on the ladders, since if they turned back, Santa Ana would certainly have them shot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s why the heroes died at the Alamo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike the little brown hordes, who’d probably been turned cruel by their master, like fierce dogs, savage yet cowardly, the men at the Alamo were brave enough to resist the tyranny of Santa Ana.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They stood for freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They didn’t want Mexicans telling them what to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They wanted to decide for themselves, and they died for that cause, so that the other white people in Texas could throw off Santa Ana’s yoke and live in peace and freedom.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When they first moved to the new town, his parents joined the church and were baptized together in the aquarium-like tub that held the water, located above and behind the pulpit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They held their noses before being dunked, which washed their sins away, and for a while they all went to church every Sunday, but not for long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was too tempting to stay in bed and read the sports page and the funny papers in your pajamas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the way to church once, they saw a man in his bathrobe stooping over to get his Sunday paper, and his father said, “Now there’s a man who knows how to spend a Sunday morning.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He saw his mother jab his father in the ribs for saying that, but it was too tempting for everyone in the family, although he went more often than his parents, usually just to Sunday School.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked Sunday School.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both before and after he was saved, he was interested in what his teachers had to say, since he knew they talked about how things were, what was important and what was not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t tell his parents that he was going to walk down the aisle the day he was saved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d worked it out by himself that it was something he needed to do, and he was afraid they would try to talk him out of it if he told them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or even forbid him to do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Wait until you’re older,” he could hear his mother saying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And besides, it might not even be right to tell anyone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was his decision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone knew that and everyone was always saying it, especially the preacher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His decision alone, and what it amounted to was whether he wanted to go to heaven or hell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had until he was twelve to decide, but he didn’t want to go for three years worrying about it, not the going to hell part, but the dread of walking up the aisle, the short conference with the preacher, and then being the absolute center of attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Too bad about that, but it seemed like life was full of things that required you to make yourself the center of attention, if you were ever going to amount to anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you were going to join what everyone else joined, and be a leader, you had to prove your worthiness by embarrassing yourself in front of a lot of people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s just how it was, and it seemed to him better to get it over with than to dread it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had no trouble saying “yes” when the preacher asked him if he was ready to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Savior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He understood the question and he believed his answer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d listened carefully to what the preacher said in his sermons and what his Sunday School teacher said, and he accepted as truth their unanimous opinion that being saved was absolutely necessary if a person was going to have a good life and go to heaven.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Jesus didn’t speak to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He accepted him as his personal Savior, but he thought very little about Jesus, probably because everyone talked more about God the Father.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He worked it out in his head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>God made the law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jesus amended it a little, but he followed it, and when you accepted him, you agreed to follow it too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After that it got too complicated, the part about Jesus dying for everyone’s sins, why his dying washed away all the sins of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he didn’t think he had to understand that, not yet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What he had to do was walk down the aisle, say yes to the question, and submit himself to the undivided attention of a lot of grownups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew that if he did that, the dread of doing it would leave him, and he’d never have to do it again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And he was right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The preacher leaned down and put his arm around him, whispered softly in his ear, and every grownup he could see was looking at him and smiling.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of all the Ten Commandments the only one he thought he might have any trouble with was lying, but fortunately, lying was not something he was good at getting away with, and when he did, he felt so guilty that it was worse than if he’d told the truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not for fooling people, he didn’t feel bad about that, but for being afraid to tell the truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The temptation to lie was always cowardly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which was completely different from the first temptation he remembered ever having.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had nothing to do with lying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was real little, perhaps in the second grade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While everyone else napped on Sunday afternoon, he lay on the linoleum in the kitchen with a butcher knife.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He held it in both hands and pointed it at his chest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wondered what it would be like to push it into his body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He did this and thought about it a lot and sensed more than knew that it would be a sin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he was curious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So curious that he was tempted to try it, and he didn’t only because he lacked the courage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could feel the temptation in his hands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His hands anticipated the pleasure of forcing, the downward plunge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were alive with it, which was a pleasure in itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And a pain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The hands were impatient with him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They wanted him to finish what he started.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were not concerned with the consequences, and he had no clear idea himself what they would be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He tried to think past it, but he couldn’t, which was part of both the appeal and the restraint.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not fear exactly, but something very similar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps he didn’t lack courage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surely, it didn’t take courage to sin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wasn’t it supposed to be just the opposite?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He always ignored his hands in the end, what they wanted to do, and put the knife back where he found it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the very least, if not a sin, it would be an unacceptable act.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one would like it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would create a scene.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother said that unless he wanted to be considered “rough” like the project kids, he would use good English.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not say “ain’t,” no double negatives, and no bad words, especially in front of girls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A bad word in front of a girl can ruin your reputation for life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s best to be extremely careful at all times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any reference to things having to do with bathrooms was strictly taboo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He believed her, just as he believed everything else she said, and therefore found it puzzling when one afternoon at a girl’s house, all the girls giggled over a lampshade that showed a boy peeing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So puzzling that he made a fool of himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The girl’s mother worked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one was there but kids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Four or five girls and two or three boys.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was exciting just to be in the house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A house with no grownups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just kids, mostly girls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was a major event.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He expected it to be fun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Girls liked him, and he liked girls, unless they were mean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One girl had picked on him in the second grade, and since his mother had told him never to hit a girl, even if she hit you first, that it could ruin your reputation for life, he spent most of his recess trying to avoid her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“She has a crush on you,” his mother said, which turned out to be true, but not really useful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most girls, especially those with a crush on him, weren’t mean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They could be difficult, hard to understand, but not mean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t expect to feel ganged up on by girls, even when the boys were in the minority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor did he expect to be shocked.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The girls went as a group into the parents’ bedroom and came out screaming and giggling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d never seen that before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Girls having fun by acting as if something was naughty and yet clearly enjoying it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a new experience and he wasn’t ready for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even before he went into the bedroom, he knew it didn’t fit with the way he thought the world worked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surely, girls couldn’t like something bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It wasn’t natural, and of course, new as it was, strange as it was, it excited him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had to see for himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wasn’t invited to see, but he was allowed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one told him to go see.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That would be going too far, crossing the line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they didn’t stop him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was already embarrassed, he could feel himself blushing, either way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not to go would be cowardly, but going might be crossing the line of what was allowed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one would simply tell him what it was, but he knew it had to do with a lamp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He looked around hurriedly after entering the bedroom, knowing he was where he shouldn’t be, and then he found it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A lampshade, the lamp not lit, had a picture on it of a boy peeing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On impulse, he pulled the cord, and when the shade turned, the pee seemed to move in a stream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He ran out of the room.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He shouted, once he reached the living room, “You can see it coming out!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He said it too loud, too fast, almost shrieking, and the girls went into hysterics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They fell against each other as if about to faint.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They repeated what he said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They pointed at him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They wouldn’t stop laughing, and he wanted to disappear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He defended himself, his face hot, by saying, “Well, you can.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And they laughed even more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The television was in the room across the hall from his parents’ bedroom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His younger brother slept on the bunk bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was also a couch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the whole family watched TV, the most common arrangement was for his mother to be on the couch, his father on the bottom bunk, his brother on the top bunk, and him on the floor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The room was just the right size for the four of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even when he was little, he could almost stretch out on the floor and touch the TV with his fingers, the bunk bed with his toes, and the couch with his left hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the whole family didn’t watch TV together every night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only on Sundays for sure, and then only Ed Sullivan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sunday night was also the only time they didn’t eat supper at the table.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They had Campbell’s chicken noodle soup or grilled cheese sandwiches, usually during Maverick.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father liked Maverick.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was almost the only TV show he’d ever known his father to make it a point to watch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother was usually busy in the kitchen until right before Ed Sullivan, when she brought in dessert.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father never laughed at the comedians, not out loud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked a few of them, but he never laughed out loud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was pretty hard on most of the acts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not funny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Too oddball.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Got on his nerves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A has been or never was. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother’s favorite comment was that a performer liked himself or herself too much, or that a female singer was showing too much cleavage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wondered why they watched Ed Sullivan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He liked just about everything, even the acrobats and spinning plates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even Maurice Chevaliar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even Mary Martin in Peter Pan, although the only really good thing about that was being able to see the wires that held her up.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He learned never to recommend or praise anything, since his father never liked it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Besides Maverick, the only thing they watched together was Charlie Chan movies, and those not very often since they only came on after bedtime during the week. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in the summer, when there were no bedtime rules, he and his father sometimes watched Charlie Chan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father started calling him his number one son and his younger brother his number two son.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He understood that his father liked the detective’s amused and condescending attitude, along with the deference the Chan sons showed him.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was not a sickly child.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He rarely if ever missed school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never threw up, never even had earaches like his brother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was healthy except for one thing, maybe two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His nose was always “stuffed up,” and he apparently made a lot of noise breathing when he slept.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They took him first to Dallas and then to Oklahoma City to an allergy clinic where the doctors stuck little pins in his arms and back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It didn’t hurt too much, but it was very hard to sit still for so long a time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was allergic to a million things, they said, but especially chocolate and corn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For a while his mother gave him allergy shots twice a week, and he ate candy bars with no chocolate, Paydays and peanut butter logs, and passed up popcorn at the movies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t know if it helped.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t even know he was “stuffed up” until his mother told him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She noticed, she said, because he was always sniffing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t know he was sniffing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d sniffed his whole life, she told him, and has trouble breathing from time to time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At one point he found himself in a children’s hospital in Dallas for a couple of weeks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had bronchitis, they told him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s okay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t feel sick and he liked spending the day reading baseball magazines and playing a horse racing board game.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only thing he didn’t like about the hospital was the food, and that was almost completely made up for when his father sneaked a box of fried chicken past the nurses one night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With french fries and a coke.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was probably the best food he’d ever tasted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless, it brought him no closer to his father.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor did the times when he got Roy to tell another grownup the American and National League standings that day, and how many games separated the first three or four teams.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or how to spell something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could spell nearly any word any grownup could think of.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most days he hardly saw his father. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During the week his father was gone before breakfast and got home after he and his brother had eaten.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On Saturdays his father was running errands or mowing the lawn or doing paperwork at the dining room table.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On Sundays he read the paper and took a nap.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sunday dinner was always a roast, and although he liked roast and all the things his mother usually made to go with it, he did not think of those meals with pleasure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or any meal when his father was present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had to pay more attention when his father was there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had to be more careful to mind his manners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had to ask for someone to pass the peas rather than reach across the table for them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Use his napkin and not the back of his hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not drop his fork.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not eat too fast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had to do most of those things when it was just him and his brother and his mother at the table, but he didn’t care so much when his mother reminded him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was not quite so much like he did something wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It didn’t embarrass him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even when his father’s tone was not particularly harsh, when he did something wrong in front of him, when it was necessary to be corrected by him, he was embarrassed.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They went to the 1954 Cotton Bowl game.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just the two of them, Rice versus Alabama.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Forty yard line tickets, about halfway up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good seats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father was shooting pictures with an 8mm movie camera when an Alabama player, identified later as Tommy Lewis, jumped off the bench and tackled Dicky Maegle, the star Rice halfback.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dicky Maegle is a big part of why they were there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was still the era of college halfbacks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Broken field runners, as they were called.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doak Walker of SMU.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jim Swink of TCU.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Billy Cannon of LSU.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was late in the second half, and Dicky Maegle had already run circles around the Crimson Tide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He couldn’t get over that team nickname, mainly because it wasn’t an animal, or even really a thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not an owl or a mustang or a horned frog.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a tide, whatever that was, and why crimson?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Crimson is red, his father explained, and a tide is how the water comes in from the ocean, but he didn’t know either why a football team from Alabama would be named the Crimson Tide, or that Alabama had a crimson tide, or exactly what one would be. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In any case, the Crimson Tide was getting soundly beat by the Owls, by Dicky Maegle in particular, and as Maegle ran for yet another touchdown along the sideline, the nearest opposing player several yards behind and losing ground, a player comes out of nowhere and tackles him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The whole Alabama bench stands up and gathers around, blocking whatever is happening on the field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing like this has ever happened before, but it didn’t take long for the referees to award the touchdown to Rice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maegle was only fifteen yards from the goal line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one was near him until Tommy Lewis jumped off the bench and tackled him.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He couldn’t think of a worse thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was painful to think of being Tommy Lewis, but he couldn’t help it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He couldn’t stop himself from feeling Tommy Lewis’ embarrassment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ruined for life was one of his mother’s favorite expressions, and surely, if anyone was ever in that situation, it had to be Tommy Lewis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t know how he could live with himself, how he could ever stop thinking about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> he thinking?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He tried to understand it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He tried to put himself on the Alabama bench.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The paper the next day said that Lewis got “carried away.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He couldn’t imagine it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would be the same as jumping off a skyscraper, or from an airplane without a parachute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one got that carried away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The paper didn’t say he was crazy, but that’s what everyone thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet, it wasn’t quite crazy enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It wasn’t really jumping from an airplane, not that extreme.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It made too much sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He couldn’t imagine doing it, having the nerve, but he could imagine wanting to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could see, the more he thought about it, how Tommy Lewis could want to stop Dicky Maegle so bad that he couldn’t make himself not do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that’s what made it really painful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even scary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone knew that Tommy Lewis couldn’t control himself, that he was incapable of not doing something that was absolutely forbidden, and in newspapers all over the country there were pictures of him doing it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is the only college football game he attended as a boy, and it didn’t make him any closer to his father.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew his father wouldn’t have bought the tickets if it hadn’t been for him, if he hadn’t said at some point, not meaning it as a hint since he never imagined that it was possible, that he wished he could go to the Cotton Bowl.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew how special it was, and he and his father both enjoyed the game, but their relationship afterwards was the same as always.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He and his brother were told one night by their mother to go wake up their father.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was asleep on the couch in the living room.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was time for him to come to bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They didn’t like the assignment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Waking up their father was not something they wanted to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They even objected, but their mother told them not to be silly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s not going to bite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She shamed them into it, but they still kept their distance and called out “Daddy” in quiet voices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No response, until finally Roy worked up the nerve to tap him on the shoulder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father jumped.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roy and his brother jumped back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father opened his eyes and sat up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He said, “Go tell your mother to come here.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It made no sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s why they woke him up, so that she wouldn’t have to get out of bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The brothers looked at each other, on the verge of objecting, but not wanting to get yelled at.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, Roy screwed up his courage once again and asked his father what he’d just said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was told again, this time more firmly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Go tell your mother to come here.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They ran to the bedroom to tell their mother that something was wrong with Daddy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She shook her head like they’d gone crazy, got out of bed in a huff and went to the kitchen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father was standing at the counter, drinking a glass of milk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He remembered nothing of the incident, not even that the boys woke him up.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The closest he ever felt to his father was in a car one summer afternoon in the New Mexico desert, his mother and younger brother in the back seat, his father drinking bourbon and driving eighty miles an hour.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You’re going too fast,” his mother said, and his father slowed down a little, but not much and not for long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father was in such a good mood that he asked him what he wanted for dinner, and he said enchiladas, and his parents asked at the motel if there was a good Mexican place in town, his mother telling him that the woman said the restaurant was “just a little hole in the wall.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t know what that meant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He imagined a place that only a mouse could get into.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“A small place,” she explained.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t care for the enchiladas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sauce was dark brown and bitter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not at all like Texas enchiladas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he tried to hide his disappointment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t want to spoil his father’s mood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The trip in general, to Colorado, was a failure, the only vacation they ever took.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All he and his brother wanted to do was swim and play miniature golf.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was too cold in the mountains to swim and the motels they stayed at didn’t have heated pools.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were on a very tight budget.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father would inquire about the price at the motel office, and if it was eleven or twelve dollars a night instead of eight, they would try another one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His parents discussed it in the car, and it was mostly his mother who insisted on keeping to the budget.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother was cheap.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father wasn’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was something that was always understood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He and his brother felt that his father would have stayed at the twelve dollar places if his mother hadn’t been so stern about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A few times his parents debated the issue, not really an argument, since his father gave in so quickly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He apparently thought she was right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>About his driving, though, he wouldn’t listen to her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was afraid of the gravel road up to Pike’s Peak.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She kept saying that if he didn’t slow down they were going to run off the road and fall off the mountain, until his father finally blew up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those were the worst times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was time to be absolutely quiet, to disappear in the back seat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father got irritated about the swimming and the miniature golf.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sites, the mountains and caves and old mining towns, were why they came to Colorado.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why couldn’t his boys appreciate that?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He got very irritated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He got red in the face and he grumbled, he made sarcastic remarks, but he didn’t blow up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He blew up only when someone didn’t do what he told them to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not caring about the mountains, preferring swimming pools and miniature golf, took its toll, pushed him a little further away from his father, but in itself it was only a minor offense.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He talked often with his mother and for a long time told her everything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything he thought and almost everything he did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never thought about having secrets from her, and he began to have them only with great reluctance, when he realized that there were some things she’d rather not hear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They embarrassed her, and when she was embarrassed, he was embarrassed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Slowly but surely, then, and only to avoid such moments, he developed a sense for what was going too far, and every time he pulled himself up, it hurt a little.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wanted to tell her everything, and he wanted her to understand it all, every last confidence, every last emotion, every last thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew, even before he was old enough to actually think it, he knew his father was a lost cause in that regard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He must always say the right thing around his father.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was cut no slack.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even when his father was indifferent to or puzzled by what he said, rather than angry or impatient, he didn’t like to say the wrong thing, which made the separation from his father complete.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he did not want to be separated from his mother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a perfect world, she would be with him everywhere, and she would understand him completely, know everything about him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a way, he would be no more than an extension of her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he played ball.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he looked at the maps in the encyclopedia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he swam naked at the Y.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he went to the bathroom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he slept and dreamed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And on each occasion, when he first stepped out of her body, he would be like a ghost, transparent, spirit-like, and then he would turn into a real boy, solid, absorbed in play, but only until she called him back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He does not learn this anywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only time he ever read anything about mothers was in a biography of Lou Gehrig.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lou Gehrig and his mother were very close and fished for eels in the middle of the night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He appreciated Gehrig’s devotion to his mother, but he did not connect it with his own feelings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gehrig’s mother was not his mother, and he wasn’t Gehrig.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor did he talk about mothers with anyone, except his father, whose sole message was respect, which meant obey and no talking back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He rarely talked back—he knew how serious his father was about that—and only when he was upset enough to do it without thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He disobeyed more often, but in a similar way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or not allowing himself to think.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If he remembered, he felt his face turn red, and he stopped.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Usually, it involved not coming home when expected, a serious offense, but one he could not resist when he was having fun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And sometimes, he had to willfully not remember, almost force himself to lose track of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a giddy feeling, losing track of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was no other word for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he was giddy, he was both excited and scared.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother had a small hump on her back and her arms and the backs of her hands were always covered with scratches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was two completely separate problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When she was about fourteen, her mother noticed that one side of her back was larger, stuck out, more than the other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The doctor said she had curvature of the spine, probably from carrying her school books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She needed an operation, the doctor said, or else when she was fully grown she’d be able to touch the ground with her fingers without bending over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This frightened everyone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They agreed to the operation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A bone was taken out of her leg and put in her back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was in a cast, flat on her back, for six months when she was sixteen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She showed him the scar on her leg.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She told him she had to buy loose tops so that the hump, which was still there, wouldn’t show.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seemed to be slowly but surely getting worse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was sore most of the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her back hurt if she did “too much.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They no longer did that operation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She wasn’t sure if it was a success or not, since she had no way of knowing what would have happened if she hadn’t had it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The scars had a simpler explanation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was allergic to direct sunlight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her arms itched and she would scratch them until they bled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, she tried to keep them covered whenever she went outside, but sometimes she forgot.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didm’t feel sorry for his mother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even when she said she was always self-</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">conscious about her back, there was no reason to feel sorry for her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s just how it was, how she was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It didn’t make her any different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew more about her, but that didn’t change anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing he could ever learn about her would change his mother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would only make her more clear to him, like the story about how his father courted her when she was in the cast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They had only met once, at a party, from which he would have taken her home, but he had a flat tire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then he showed up at the house when she was in the cast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“He came to visit me,” she said, “nearly every day for six months, and me flat on my back.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She talked about how bad it was to be in the cast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She alluded only vaguely to the physical problems, something about bed sores, and emphasized the tedium.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Six months of not being able to get off of your back, but he didn’t feel sorry for her, or admire her for enduring it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was his mother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would be like feeling sorry for or admiring himself, which he never did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It just made her more clear to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was always there, almost always in the kitchen when he got home from school, and they talked while he ate his snack, and then he went out to shoot baskets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His father put up a backboard above the carport, and it wasn’t long before he had a deadly jump shot that he almost never missed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a good place for it, the perfect arrangement. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From the kitchen his mother could hear the ball bounce on the asphalt driveway, and he didn’t have to worry about losing track of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><br />
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</div>Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-62458480167479504962010-11-11T12:02:00.003-05:002011-11-11T12:21:26.435-05:00Scenes from a Boyhood in Central Texas<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">Scenes from a Boyhood in Central Texas</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> 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 behind them 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 always came on a Sunday, ham wasn’t as good as turkey, it was usually 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 a few weeks later 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. Fort Worth was also 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.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> In the new town, not far from Ft. Worth but much smaller, Bosley lived on the next street over, but he always got there through a break in 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 pears always, or so he remembered it, lying around rotting on the ground. The Bosley’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 Bosley’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 Bosley that the smaller Bowman cards, which weren’t made after ‘55, were better than the Topps, because they “looked neater”--and they played All-Star Baseball.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Bosley 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 Bosley chose only the best hitters. Roy 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. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> But Bosley had no such esthetic handicap. He picked the best hitters, period, and he usually won. One day, though, Roy got lucky, and he was ahead of Bosley by ten runs by the seventh inning. He knew Bosley 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. Bosley blew up. He picked up the game board and broke it across his knee and threw it against the wall. The spinner broke off.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> They made it up eventually, and his father fixed the spinner, but it was a good lesson about Bosley, one he never forgot, and the older he got the more Bosley faded out of the picture. Pretty soon his best friend was Weaver, 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 Weaver not knowing who Yogi Berra was, which should have taught him a lesson. Weaver 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 at least be ashamed and 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. Weaver 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?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> 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 Weaver, although he couldn’t say that he liked him. It wasn’t possible to like someone who was so stubbornly incurious and unwaveringly practical. Weaver 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 had told him it would. He was fun to be with. That’s the most he could say for Weaver, but 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 he never thought of the outdoors as outdoors when he was on it, hardly even noticed that it was hot or raining, and in the summer it was almost always one or the other.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> 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.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> McGill knocked on his door almost every morning at eight o’clock in the summer and wanted him to “come out” 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 McGill’s persistence and stayed in bed until ten-thirty or eleven, he had to force himself up, and only got up then 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. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> 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, usually 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 liked them. 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.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> It was hot in the summer even at eight in the morning, baseball was not possible after ten, and he was always tempted to forget about McGill, even when he got up early, and instead grab a book and lie down under 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. No grown-ups. A good hitter could often hit the ball on the fly over the chain link fence into 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, make 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.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> 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 Davenport’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 Davenport get electrocuted, 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 was okay, the arrow never touched him, but the kid who shot it was just old enough to be scared and embarrassed. He didn’t stop shooting arrows, but he was more careful after that. No grownup ever told Roy about Jerry Davenport. One of his friends casually mentioned it one day, when they saw someone else flying a model airplane. And as far as he knew, no one ever told a parent about the helmet incident.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> McGill 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, carrying 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. McGill was never a friend like Bosley and Weaver. He never talked to McGill about anything. He never did anything with McGill except play ball. He never even saw his mother or his father or the inside of his house. McGill 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 McGill. Front and back. Beginning to end.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Bosley didn’t play ball very much. Less the older they got. He didn’t know what Bosley did all day. He didn’t think about it. Weaver 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, irritating though it could be. Stewart’s lot was not the major leagues.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Weaver’s 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. Weaver 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. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Weaver 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 dyed 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. Weaver knew that for a fact because he’d been driving. He’d started driving at twelve years old and 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 him sitting on the side of the road. They decided he hadn’t been hurt because he’d been asleep. Relaxed as if a baby, as if drunk. His mother said it was God’s will.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Weaver’s 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 Weaver 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. Weaver 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. Roy agreed with Mrs. Weaver 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, Weaver said, and he was right.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Mrs. Weaver 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. Weaver. 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<sup>th</sup> 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 Roy 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.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Raymond’s baseball story went like this: “When I was 16, around the time of The Great War, I got signed by the New York Giants. I was playing centerfield for a semi-pro league in Indiana, and one of their scouts saw me have a pretty good day. They sent me to one of their farm clubs down in Alabama. The rest of that season, three months or so, I hit .455 with 30 home runs. During the off-season I went back to work at the factory, and then in the spring the Giants sent me to play Triple-A ball in Pennsylvania. I hit over four hundred there too and had just hit home run number fifty when they called me up. It was late in the season and they were still in the pennant race. I was there to pinch hit, but I was low man on the totem pole, so it took them five or six games to get around to me. It was extra innings and the bases were loaded. We were behind a run. Two out. They put me up only because they’d used everybody else. I guess they figured green as I was I still had a better chance of getting on than the pitcher did. I took three balls in a row. Not even close. I looked down at third base, got the take sign of course, and then the pitcher wound up and threw me the fattest pitch you ever saw. I knew he would. He didn’t have no other choice, and well boys, like Dizzy Dean always says, I went for the downs. I swung so hard that my feet came off the ground, and I hit that ball right out of the park. Cleared right center by twenty feet. I felt like Babe Ruth jogging around those bases, let me tell you, never felt better in my life, but it didn’t last long. I knew the minute I rounded second and saw the look on the third base coach’s face that I was in deep trouble. No one said a word to me. No one would look at me. The players too, not just the coaches. And the next day they sent me back to Alabama, but I didn’t go. I went back home. Didn’t even have the heart to play semi-pro after that. Screw’em.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> It was the first time Roy had ever heard an adult say “screw” in that way, and it shocked him. He couldn’t remember when people forgot that screw means fuck, or decided it didn’t matter. Maybe early in the sixties, or even before that. Maybe it was more common than he thought. His world was a lot smaller then. He’d just turned twelve. He played baseball in the morning, rode his bike in the afternoon and watched TV at night. Actually, he read a lot too, either in the library downtown or on the floor of the one room in his house that was air-conditioned. Sports and war. Mostly baseball. Mostly the Civil War. And he ate whatever was put in front of him, and more if he could get it. About that time he also started noticing the exposed legs of dancers on TV when they did twirls, and how the skirts of the women on the covers of 25 cent novels were always well above their knees. The magazines on a separate rack in a certain drug store caught his eye as well, and he was sorely tempted to look, but he was afraid that if he was seen, he wouldn’t be allowed to read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sporting News</i> for free anymore.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Adults never told you anything in those days, but he’d guess that the man who told him the grand slam story was already widely known to be of “no account.” He was Mrs. Phelps’ brother-in-law, recently arrived from “somewhere up north.” They knew that because he talked funny. Mrs. Phelps ran the little store they rode their bikes to for cold drinks after baseball. She’d run it forever for all he knew, but her brother-in-law appeared for the first time that summer, and he was always sitting in front of the store in a metal lawn chair, the kind that give a little when you sit down. Or give a lot if you’re fat, which Raymond was. He insisted they call him Raymond, and after a while they got used to it. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Another story he told them was about Tojo’s son, what the G.I.’s did to him when he was captured. According to Raymond, who claimed to have been there in person, they put a reed in Tojo Jr.’s mouth, buried him alive in a shallow grave and took turns peeing into the reed. That went on for several days, Raymond said, but no one knows how long it took him to die and no one bothered to dig him up. He laughed when he told that story, laughed so heartily that it made his face turn red, which made him even uglier than usual. His teeth were yellow and crooked. His face was unhealthy, the color and consistency of chalk. It reminded Roy of an illustration in a Robin Hood book he’d come across in the library. Not Friar Tuck, but another monk, a bad one.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> By ten in the morning it was too hot to play baseball even for us. We all felt drained and had cotton-mouth, but we didn’t always go to Phelps’s store. Sometimes we wanted a place where we could also read magazines, or if we were short on cash, we stole bottles from behind the supermarket and traded them in up front for cold drinks. At times we stole from Mrs. Phelps but we never sold her back the bottles. The bottle deposit was two cents, but Mrs. Phelps would only give us a penny.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> A liveoak is an evergreen with relatively small leaves, but its trunk and branches are stout and gnarled like the oaks you see in children’s books. It might smile or frown at you, but it seems in any case to have its arms out wide, to shelter or smother, to welcome or frighten you. Raymond’s chair, as they quickly began to think of it, sat under such a tree, and more often than not, when they rode up to the front of the store, he was in it, doing absolutely nothing but rocking and staring into space. He never greeted them, and when one of them said, “Hey Raymond,” he’d just barely lift his head, and sometimes an eyebrow. It’s how northeners are, someone said. It doesn’t mean anything. And they’d be settled down and talking among ourselves before he ever said a word, if he was going to say anything that day at all. “Tell us one of your stories, Raymond,” didn’t work. He’d either spit or not do anything, so they learned fast to leave him alone. Most days though he’d come up with something. He’d just start talking. He never worried about interrupting anyone.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> “They should have given that nigger the electric chair,” he said one day. They all knew who he was talking about. Most of their parents had similar opinions, but to know that you had to listen from the other room, and they didn’t express themselves in the same way. “Colored” was the more acceptable term on the social level most of our families belonged to, and mothers especially preferred to focus on “that poor woman.” Opinions about the sentence were given more indirectly: “He got off easy,” or “I just don’t know if life in prison is enough for someone who would do that.” They’d learned from Weaver, whose older brothers tended to be less discreet than most parents, that a nineteen-year-old black man, “colored boy” or “nigger” to everyone they knew, had been convicted of raping an 84-year old-woman. None of them knew or asked whether she was white or black. Roy didn’t even think to ask. He was too amazed at the crime itself. It didn’t seem to make any sense. He was beginning to understand how a person might get so horny that he’d lose control of himself and do something he later regretted, but he couldn’t imagine getting that way over an old woman. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> “Fry his balls and feed’em to the crows,” Raymond said. Then he told them about seeing a lynching in East Texas when he worked in the oil fields. The only lynchings he’d ever heard of before were in cowboy movies. They were bad things that almost but never actually happened. The guy with a rope around his neck was usually saved at the last minute, but Raymond’s lynching did actually happen, and they all heard about it in detail. The kicking, the weird grimace on the victim’s face, the shouts of approval, even cheers, from the men in the crowd as the body was suddenly released, how quick it fell, with such violence, and bounced up and down for a minute. I can’t look at a photograph of a lynching now without thinking about Raymond. Sometimes I think that metal lawn chair started to squeak as he told us about it, but I couldn’t swear to that. I just remember for sure that I’d never seen him so excited before, not even when he told about hitting the home run.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> But it was Tojo’s son that got him into trouble. Someone’s little brother decided to tell it at the dinner table, and that was the end of the bike rides to Mrs. Phelps’s store. Weaver wanted to go anyway, but no one else had the nerve to go against his parents, and Roy suspected they’d have been run off. Reilly’s father was a lawyer, and he took it upon himself to speak to Raymond. No one at that time had much affection for the Japanese, but as my mother put it, “the story is too gruesome for boys your age.” Roy’s father had his doubts about it being true, at least the part about Raymond being there in person, which made Roy decide not to tell him about the grand slam. He had his own doubts about that one. He might have believed it a year earlier, but at twelve it seemed a little too perfect to be true. And he could already see the dreaded condescending look on his father’s face, even if he told him in advance he didn’t believe it. He’d know he sort of had at one point and still wished it was true. </div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He probably knew people who believed that Mr. Rosen was evil, but what he heard people actually say about Jews was not that extreme. His father said they were tight and implied their shrewdness with money by noting that they tended to start businesses with high markups, like jewelry and furniture stores. No Jews in town were in the grocery business, for example. One was a record store owner, but you had to allow for their near monopoly of the entertainment business. A Jewish uncle by marriage was a musician, for example. And shoes? Were shoes high markup? And the clothing business in general? Jews were everywhere in the clothing business. Every department store he’d ever heard of in Texas was owned by Jews. Were clothes high markup? He didn’t know, but still, the theory probably had more exceptions than it could bear, but he got the idea. Jews were good with money, to an unseemly degree by the standards of other people. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Sunday school teachers also had something to say about Jews. At the First Baptist Church he was taught not to hate Jews but to pity them, as we would anyone who rejected Christ. But extreme views were there, he was sure, and what kept him from them when he was little was propriety, an understanding among a certain class of adults that there were limits to what could be openly discussed among children. Inevitably, though, there are those who test the limits, either from coarseness or idealism—children can’t be protected from the truth forever and isn’t it our duty to tell them the truth, to prepare them? Or just from spite. Not being able to bear such innocence, one that would make no distinctions.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Dr. Laban was his Sunday school teacher when he was sixteen. He was a surgeon who believed that prayer could cure cancer and that Karl Marx never did an honest day’s work in his life. No socialist, i.e., communist, or anyone who lived under such a system of government, ever did an honest day’s work, and that alone proved it was evil. Dr. Laban knew the truth about everything, and he gave his time to share that knowledge with young people, to make a better world. At first Roy liked him because he was singled out for being smart. The doctor flattered him by asking if he’d ever considered medicine as a profession and offered recommendations, even money if he needed it, which should have warned him right away, not the money, but reading him so badly. Roy had won his respect by asking him questions in his Sunday school class, even arguing with him, but he had no interest in science. Nevertheless, Dr. Laban took him so seriously that he prepared detailed responses, which had the unintended consequence of trapping him into regular attendance.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Dr. Laban thought he was answering his call for reason with reason, but it soon became clear that what really interested him were miracles. Not only did God heal cancer, but people came back to life after dying in car wrecks. All nonsense, of course, Roy was old enough to see that, but he was glad to find someone who would address his concerns and not go silent or hostile. Dr. Laban was a newcomer to town and perhaps a little too dark complected. Lebanese, people said. He had two beautiful daughters and a comfortable brick home in a fashionable part of town, but his downfall came when he invited the Sunday school class over to his house one night to watch his home movies of the Texas City oil refinery explosion. They ate cookies and drank punch and watched mangled bodies, serious blood and guts, accompanied by the doctor’s clinical narration. No one threw up on his carpet, but everyone thought it was a little creepy, and word soon got out among parents that Dr. Laban’s parties for boys were to be avoided.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> It was around that time that he started liking Mr. Rosen. When he was little he was afraid of him. Not because he was Jewish, but because he was such a strange, imposing presence. He was built like one of those men at cocktail parties in the New Yorker, a graceful S, only a little stooped, and his teeth were yellow and his mouth always seemed to be full of mucus. He had a strange accent, patrician New York he guessed later when he knew what that was, all of which was odd enough, but he compounded his own strangeness by standing out on the sidewalk in front of his store in order to collar passersby. That’s what had scared him as a kid. That stooping aggressiveness, standing on the sidewalk like some big bug about to scoop in little kids, all the while smiling between those yellow teeth and speaking in a way that sounded like whining to a Texas ear.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The first clue about Mr. Rosen’s real nature came when he brought both a bottle of bourbon and a bottle of scotch to his father when he had his appendix out, saying he didn’t know which he drank. Next came an afternoon spent in his store, the old man showing him and a friend his boxing trophies and photographs from his service days at around the turn of the century, and then demonstrating “a real Army spit shine,” spitting on shoes, cracking the rag. He was always fond of Mr. Rosen after that, and bought shoes from him whenever he could, but the real clincher came when he saw him at the airport one day with his family. Mr. Rosen didn’t see him, and he kept his distance. It was a family affair. The occasion was that Mr. Rosen was on his way to the LBJ inaugural, and there was something about the elegant way he sat at the gate, a smile on his face, basking in his family’s admiration, that tugged at Roy’s heart. </div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> It was probably Juapo, but he didn’t know that until years after, and it remained stubbornly in his brain as Wappo, a man who like Mr. Rosen talked as if his mouth was full of mush, or yellow phelgm, or mucus, his walk a slow shuffle, his profile a graceful but sickly S, an old zoot-suiter now racking balls at the Navarro Club, Members Only. Despite superficial similarities, he couldn’t have been more different from Mr. Rosen. Wappo never hurried, never smiled, never said anything anyone could understand. He was always there.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He didn’t own the place. That was Mr. Wappo, also the owner of the Army Navy store next door, who sometimes sat on a stool in his dark suit to watch the high rollers play nine ball for five dollars a game. That was where Roy learned about shape, standing on his toes to see the good players between the heads of the not so good. That’s what it all came down to. Shape. Nothing else mattered if you didn’t have it. Hard hitting. Finesse. Brains. Grace under pressure. Endurance. None of that was enough if you didn’t have shape and didn’t know how to get it. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He and his friends weren’t supposed to be there, but once inside they were tolerated. The sign on the door said No One Under Eighteen Allowed, so they kept a low profile and minded their manners. They put their nickels on the edge of the table, a nickel a cue a game, and meekly waited for Wappo to notice them and come shuffling back to rack the balls. It never occurred to them that the nine ball players probably tipped him. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Wappo’s was long and narrow, hardly room enough at either end of a table to draw back a stick without hitting a wall. There were about eight tables, side by side in single file, and the kids played eight ball at the last two on worn felt, even ripped in places, and got used to the urine smell from the toilet at the rear of the building. The only light came from the flourescent bulbs over each table. The heat came from little gas stoves up front, nearer the nine ball players, and in the summer there were a couple of revolving table fans, also up front.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The only person their age who ever played on the front tables was Bosley. He’d been part of their crowd in grade school, but by high school they’d almost forgotten about him, and then one day he started showing up at Wappo’s with his own stick in a leather case, determined to play with the nine ball players. It took nerve. More nerve than any of them had, even if they’d been good enough. They had to respect that, but on the other hand, who did he think he was? Maybe he’d paid a fortune for his stick and his leather case, and somehow had the money to lose, and was actually good enough not to make a total fool of himself, but it still didn’t seem right. At first they thought the nine ball players would laugh at him and turn him away, refuse to take his money, but they didn’t, and then they wanted him to lose. They looked forward to seeing him walk out of there with his tail between his legs, especially since he never acknowledged them, always had his game face on, as if he had something to prove. They laughed at him behind his back, partly in resentment, partly in embarrassment for him, he looked so ridiculous, so comically serious. He never won even one game. He didn’t completely make a fool of himself, he wasn’t that bad. He made some tough shots and could have beaten any of the kids blindfolded, but he wasn’t in the same league as the nine ball players. After two or three months of losing every Saturday morning, patiently waiting his turn and then showing everyone he was pretty good but not good enough, he stopped showing up. One Saturday he wasn’t there, and then the next, and pretty soon they stopped talking about it.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> We had no business on Commerce Street. Across from Wappo’s was a pawn shop and down the block was the Tex Theater, which none of us ever went to. It showed double features of old westerns and somebody’s older brother said it was only for Mexicans. That meant you’d probably get knifed, not to mention sick if you ate or touched anything. We didn’t belong on Commerce Street, but no one paid us any attention. We stared at the switch blade knives in the pawn shop. We looked at the gas masks and bayonets in the Army Navy store. We tried to find the damage on the furniture at the damaged freight outlet. The next street over, Beaton, the main street, was respectable. Very wide, metered angle parking, Penney’s, Sears, two banks, two barber shops, two drug stores, two shoe stores, two jewelry stores, three dime stores. Two restaurants, one Mexican, one home cooking. Two record shops. Penney’s still had hardwood floors and pneumatic message carriers. Here and there you could find an old hitching ring in the sidewalk. Farmers in bib overwalls sometimes sat on the curbs outside the drug stores. Traffic was bumper to bumper on Saturdays. Nearly every day the smell of cottonseed oil permeated all of downtown. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The third street over was Main. A local department store, three stories high, a bakery, a printer, a stationer, shoe repair. Black people were never seen on Beaton or Main. There was a side door in Sears that could be reached from Commerce, which was on their side of town, and separate facilities. Sometimes you saw them crossing Beaton to go to the Ideal theater, where they were allowed in the balcony. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> There were two ushers at the Palace, which had no balcony and allowed no black people anywhere. One usher had a big ass and the other had very bad acne. It was thought of as a sissy job, but their word was law. No talking. No knees on the backs of seats. They’d warn you the first time, sometimes knocking your knees down with a flashlight, then throw you out if you did it again. The one in charge was the one with the bad acne. The rumor was that the manager of the theater had a big stash of pornography in his office, and if the usher with bad acne liked you, he’d let you see it. Some also said that he liked you only if he wanted to suck your cock.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The Palace was part of a chain of small town movie theaters, which meant that everything was standardized. What movies played, how it looked, what you could buy at the concession stand, maybe even including the giant dill pickles in a jar. You couldn’t get ice in your drinks. You couldn’t get Coke. Just Pepsi. But the Palace was the only game in town for first run movies. They changed after two or three days. One for the first half of the weekend, another for the second half, and usually a third (always a B movie) for the middle of the week. He went two or three times a week, often by himself, depending on how much money he had. He never worried about when the feature started. He’d just ride his bike downtown in the afternoon and go.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He also went to the Ideal, but not as often, certainly not as part of a routine. It was always second best, more the kind of place he went to when he couldn’t think of anything else to do. But it had its attractions. You could always get Coke with ice at the Ideal, you never saw an usher, and although he wasn’t conscious of it being a big deal back then, perhaps the opera boxes, faded murals on the walls and ceiling and grand staircase to the balcony, made an impression. It was pretty rundown by the fifties, but it was hard not to be aware, sense in some way, that unlike the Palace, which hardly existed except as a nearly invisible vehicle for the films that played there, the Ideal had a past. More of a past than a future, which would have been clear even to him, if he’d ever thought about anything changing, since he never saw it even half full. Was it the black people in the balcony that kept people away? Its seediness? I’m sure neither of those things helped, but the main thing had to be the movies. When I think of the Ideal, I think of films that were already old: Lash LaRue and the Cisco Kid serials, short subjects like the Bowery Boys, The Three Stooges. Tom and Jerry cartoons instead of Bugs Bunny. And many of the movies weren’t just second run, but borderline respectable. Foreign movies. Documentaris about childbirth, marijuana, prostitution. Rock and roll. Brigitte Bardot, Mondo Cane, High School Confidential, La Dolce Vita.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He liked his father’s side of the family better than his mother’s. On his mother’s side they were all country people, all hicks. They knew nothing. They talked in a way that was comical, similar to Ma and Pa Kettle. His father often became impatient and irritable when they visited his grandparents. His father’s face would turn red when his grandfather urged another piece of chicken on him or more mashed potatoes. He would answer curtly that when he wanted more food, he’d ask for it, and Roy knew what his father really meant by his answer. His father thought his grandfather was stupid and his manners ridiculous, and his tone made that clear to anyone with half a brain, a message apparently lost on his grandfather, who never changed. Later in the car, on the way home, he often heard his father tell his mother that if he wanted more chicken or mashed potatoes, he would ask. He didn’t say, Why can’t the old bastard take no for an answer?, but Sonny knew that’s what he was thinking.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> At dinner was about the only time his grandfather seemed completely alive. The rest of the time he seemed to be more or less in hibernation. He would sit on a straight backed wooden chair in a corner of the living room, wearing dark glasses even inside, and watch television without comment or visible reaction, his arms folded across his chest, apparently indifferent to what he was watching, perhaps not even knowing. He might or might not have been listening to the conversation going on around him. He never entered into conversation, not even at the dinner table, except to urge more food on people. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He would answer a question politely, but as briefly as possible. Not because he was taciturn or ill-tempered. He was placid, at least on the surface. His father used to say that Abner was the only man he’d ever known to whom nothing had ever happened. He grew up on a farm near Greenville. He courted Roy’s grandmother in a horse and buggy. He’d been in the infantry in the First World War. He went to a Baptist church service every Sunday of his life. He’d been a postman in Dallas for most of his working life. He learned all that from his mother. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He did have one story, though, which Roy got out of him one day. For God knows how many years, his route consisted of delivering mail in the same building in downtown Dallas, and for all that time he started at the top and walked down. One day a customer asked him why he couldn’t vary his route a little, so that at times he could get his mail earlier, and Abner replied, firmly, that he’d always done it from top to bottom, for God knows how many years, and that he wouldn’t change. When he told the story, he got red in the face and laughed at the end of it indignantly. The point of the story, it seemed, was that he’d held his own, but against what Roy was never sure. Against an unreasonable request? Against chaos? Perhaps he thought that if he gave in to even a reasonable request, a fair one, politely delivered, it would start a trickle of disorder that would inevitably lead to an avalanche, and pretty soon the people in the building would have him hopping back and forth from floor to floor, trying to please everyone. But his grandfather didn’t say. That was his one story and all he had to say about it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> His grandmother was completely different. You couldn’t find two more different people. Mamaw was never off her feet. She was always cooking and serving and gossiping and laughing. She was the life of the party and the perfect host. At Christmas she would even drink a little egg nog with bourbon in it, courtesy of Roy’s father. His father hated egg nog, but once he found out that Mamaw would drink it with bourbon, he brought it to the house every Christmas Eve, probably less to please Mamaw than to irritate Abner, who, being a devout Southern Baptist, never had a drink in his life. He didn’t seem irritated, though. In fact, he even grinned a little at the jokes about “Mamaw getting drunk.” He could be a good sport, even when Roy’s father turned the tables on him and tried to get him to try a little spiked egg nog. “No, thank you. I’ve never had a drink and never will,” he said. “Not even in France?” his father teased. “You mean to say you spent six months in France, went to Paris where all those madameioselles are, and never had one drink the whole time?” “Not even in France,” he answered. And no one doubted it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Christmas Eve at the King’s was raucous. All the adults except Abner drank, and there were enough young cousins running around for it to be a madhouse. The cousins, actually, were a big part of the problem with his mother’s side of the family. All girls, all younger than him and all spoiled brats. Invariably, they got better presents and more attention. Even his mother hardly noticed when he opened his presents, which was just as well, since they were always stupid. Clothes, usually. Shirts he wouldn’t be caught dead in. Hicks didn’t know how to buy Christmas presents.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Nevertheless, it was not possible to dislike Mamaw, no one didn’t like her, but he didn’t like it that she favored his cousin Sally. He knew he was being unreasonable and unfair. She raised Sally. Sally was like a daughter to her. He knew that, but he still didn’t like it. The story, told by his mother, was that Sally’s mother left when Sally was a baby. Sally’s father, moved back in with his parents, so it fell to Mamaw to take care of her. That was plenty for a reason, but he was only a kid and still resented it. </div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He felt more at home in the house on Marlborough Street than he did at home. It was just him and Dee, his father’s mother, and she left him alone. She didn’t even speak to him, except to answer questions, or tell him dinner was ready, or that it was time to pull out the bed. She never hugged him or fussed over him. She rarely smiled or laughed, except with other grownups or at something on television. She wore shapeless print dresses that all looked the same and old-fashioned glasses like Franklin Roosevelt had worn, with small round lenses and wire rims. She worked the TV Guide crossword puzzle every week. She made sure when he visited that the refrigerator was stocked with Dr. Pepper, and not having a machine or anyone to crank it, she made her own version of homemade ice cream for him, putting it in the freezer in bread pans and stirring it now and then as it froze. By far, she was his favorite grownup.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> During and after supper he watched television with her. She preferred variety shows to dramas and knew everything about everybody. Arthur Godfrey, Garry Moore, Dave Garroway, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, Ed Sullivan, anyone who’d ever appeared on Ed Sullivan, John Daly and all the panelists and mystery guests on What’s My Line. She could answer any question about them and had an opinion, when asked, about all of them. Artie Shaw, she thought, had been married more than anyone. Nine times. Arthur Godfrey showed his true colors when he fired Julius LaRosa. He liked to hog the spotlight. He couldn’t allow anyone to take it away from him. Jack Paar was smart, but he wasn’t as refined as John Daly or Bennett Cerf. He squirmed too much and went too far. Jack Benny was Jack Benny, like Bob Hope or Bing Crosby. They’d always been around and always would be. That went without saying.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Sometimes he spent all day reading, from morning until night, switching now and then from the sofa bed to the floor to D’s bed as the spirit moved him. In the summer, the time when he was there the most, he liked the damp straw smell of the swamp cooler, and he would often lie on the floor directly in front of it not just to be cooler but to take in more of the smell. The windows and doors were kept open, but the curtains were always drawn to keep out the light, and revolving table fans helped out in the other rooms. He read boys’ books. Sports. Biographies. The Hardy Boys. He also read all of D’s movie magazines from cover to cover. And he sometimes brought All-Star baseball with him and his baseball cards. Or he might be briefly obsessed with another board game or something similar. He liked a little hand held device with red and white tiles that could be moved around to make different sequences of numbers. And D showed him how to play solitaire, which took hold of him completely for several days.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> D rode the street car with him the first time or two, to show him how, and then she let him ride by himself down to what she called, for a reason he never thought to ask about, “Boundary,” the shopping area around the corner of Marlborough and Jefferson. He never quite got over the anxiety of deciding exactly when to pull the cord for stopping, how soon or how late, the dread of calling attention to himself always with him, of seeming like someone who didn’t know what he was doing, or like someone, as his father would have said later, who had his head up his ass, but he liked riding the street car so much that he accepted the anxiety as a price he was willing to pay. And being at the movies, the main reason for riding the streetcar, he liked perhaps more than anything. The Bison theater, named after the mascot of Sunset High School, where his mother went, was not very big. It had a “loge” instead of a real balcony, but that was okay, and the movies it showed were all drenched in color and so forgettable that he sometimes couldn’t even remember the title when he got back to D’s, but that was okay too. It was cool and dark in the theater, and hardly anyone came to the matinees in the summer and sat in the loge. And he liked to eat popcorn and have a Pepsi with ice in it. He especially liked chewing up a big wad of popcorn and keeping it in his mouth until all the flavor seeped out of it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Boundary was where his aunt had her dance studio. “The football coach at Sunset sends his players over here to learn tap,” his aunt told him. “It makes them more agile.” She was trying to coax him into taking lessons when he visited D. “It doesn’t mean you’re a sissy,” she added, which was the point of course of mentioning the football players, and he showed up once or twice just to please her, but he had no feel for it or interest in it. It was too hard to remember the steps and listen to the rhythm at the same time, and he didn’t like to look clumsy in front of people. Not to mention that he saw no point in it. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> His aunt was a lot younger than Dee and completely different. She was the life of any party. She was tiny, had orange hair, smoked Old Gold’s constantly, and drove around in a not new but not too old green Oldsmobile with power windows. He called her O. He didn’t know why and never thought to ask, even though unlike Dee, it wasn’t short for anything that he knew of. Her real name was Maedelle. She had a son named Ron, who was nine years older than him and fat and freckled, and a husband named Freddie, a man he saw only in the evenings, around suppertime, sitting in front of a little magnified mirror, doing something with his face. He was a musician. Their last name was Freeman, and for a while they lived in the other part of the house on Marlborough Street, a duplex with two front doors.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> It also had a little house in the back, a converted garage, and until she died, Mama, his great-grandmother, lived there. She actually lived in the back of the house in back, right on the alley, in a room so small that there was just enough space for the single bed, her chair, a table and a place to stand up and talk to her. He was never forced but always asked by D to go in and say hello to Mama, and she was always in her bathrobe in the chair. She told him that she read the dictionary every day, that it was a habit she recommended. “I learn something every day,” she said. “Did you know, for example, that ‘noggin’ is a real word, not just slang. I always thought it was slang.” She showed him the Webster’s paperback she kept beside her on the table. To her he was “little Roy,” Sonny’s boy. When he told her, in answer to the question that all old people ask children, that he wanted to be a writer, she told him he ought to send in something to the Readers’ Digest, to the section called “Life in These United States.” “Send them a funny story,” she said. “It shouldn’t be more than a couple of paragraphs.” She showed him the section, then gave him a back copy to make sure he’d have the address. She quoted Mark Twain to him, via Readers’ Digest: “Cauliflower is cabbage with a college education.” He smiled but he didn’t like it as much as she did. He got it. He understood why it was funny and had no problem with the populist, Will Rogers-like sentiment, but he was such a serious boy, and that kind of cleverness just didn’t do much for him.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Only once did he get mad at D. It was when Luther died. Luther was on the other side of the family, one of Mamaw’s brothers. He owned a barber shop on Greenville, way on the other side of town, not Oak Cliff, and once in a while he went with his mother and father to visit Luther and his wife Nina. They were famous in the family for saying “my how you’ve grown” every time they saw him and his brother, and Nina was famous later for attending funerals. They had no children, and aside from remarking on his growth and patting him on the head, they had nothing to say to him. But Luther was friendly. All of MaMaw’s brothers were always smiling and friendly, easy going in a mischievous country sort of way. He was “Addie’s grandson” or “Mary’s boy” in their house. They always had hard candy in cellophane wrappers on the coffee table, in a heavy glass bowl, and he was welcome to help himself, but he didn’t like it much. Nor was he much interested in their round screen television. It was hard to see anything for all the snow in the picture. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He endured the visits to see Luther and Nina, a social obligation of his parents that included him, but he didn’t really know either one of them, and there was nothing to do while he was there. Even listening to the adults talk, which he usually liked, was boring at Luther and Nina’s, which probably explains why he didn’t go with his parents to visit them the day Luther died. But he talked to Luther that day. He called the house around noon to find out if his parents would be back in time for lunch, and Luther answered the phone. He sounded perfectly normal, except that he didn’t know who was calling him. “It’s Roy Jr.,” he said. “Little Roy. Mary’s son.” But Luther still didn’t know who he was, and it must have been right after that, according to what his parents said, that Luther walked out to his car and dropped dead.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Are you sure it was Luther? Yes. Are you sure you dialed the right number? Yes. Did you tell him who you were? Yes. No one could explain it, but he overheard D say to his parents, “He probably didn’t insist. You know how Jack is.” Of course he knew already that he was shy, painfully so at times, but he didn’t know that D knew it, or thought it important. Thought less of him for it. That was the hard part to take, since he heard that in her voice. And to make it worse, it contradicted what he knew to be true and had told them. For once, he had insisted, both to Luther and to them about what he’d said to Luther. He’d been so amazed at Luther’s inability to understand who he was, that he forgot to be shy. Two or three times, louder than normal, speaking slowly and clearly, he had explained who he was, who he was related to, how he was related to Luther, all to no avail. And D didn’t believe him, or at least doubted it, “knowing him.” He didn’t think that she didn’t like him in general for being shy, or even for that specifically. But it was something she knew about, and it was a flaw, and on top of that, and perhaps more important, she didn’t know how honest he was.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He believed everything he read and almost everything his teachers and parents told him. When his sixth grade teacher said that Stalin was a dictator and a dictator could do anything he wanted, he believed her. He did not think to ask, as his friend did, if she meant that Stalin could make a person eat worms, or hop around all day on one leg, and when his teacher answered his friend in the affirmative, he wasn’t so sure she was right. Or even if she knew. She was the best teacher he’d ever had, his favorite for life, but that day, when she answered his friend’s question, he thought she seemed uncertain, which was not like her. She was a big ugly woman, perhaps the ugliest woman he’d ever known. Her face and body together made him think of an elephant, and the boys, referring to her body in motion, said she looked like a Sherman tank. They might also have been thinking about her personality. She came on as tough, no nonsense, and she could lose her temper. There was a big crack in the gray concrete block wall at the back of the room, and the other kids said it was made when she banged a boy’s head against the lockers. It was true, his mother reluctantly told him, that his teacher almost lost her job for slapping and shaking a boy. She doubted, though, that she hit him hard enough to make a crack in the wall.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> For an hour most afternoons the class played Scrabble, and his teacher often sat in at the table where he played. He beat her consistently. At times she seemed irritated when she lost, at other times pleased. It was difficult to predict her moods. He and his two best friends were her favorites, and there were days when they could do no wrong. She would laugh when they cut up. Answer them back when they teased her. Ignore the spit wads and the paper airplanes and the whispers and the notes passed back and forth. But on other days she would turn red in the face and act like they’d been put on this earth just to torment her. One day during the lunch period, the three of them were sitting around together in the almost empty class, doing nothing in particular, when the principal came in carrying a paddle. “Just the three I was looking for,” he said. “Follow me.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> They were ushered into a storage closet. There was barely room enough for all of them. The boys had to sit on boxes of toilet paper and floor wax. The principal told them that their teacher had complained about them, that they were making her life miserable, that she couldn’t control them, and he’d come to see if a good paddling might not convince them to behave. He was a nice man. He’d shown them how to plant a pecan tree. He was friendly and outgoing when he filled in for the cashier at lunch. And when the teacher was sick and he taught the class for her, he always made the lesson interesting, the discussion lively. They had never seen him mad before, and his show of temper shocked them. The paddle was the last resort, he said, but from what their teacher had told him, they deserved it. He made a long speech, emphasizing that he didn’t really want to do it, but he didn’t think he had a choice, and the longer he talked, the madder he seemed to get.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> They didn’t say a word. They knew that would only make it worse. They didn’t like it, but there didn’t seem to be any way of escape, and then came a knock on the door. It was the principal’s secretary. He had a phone call. “Don’t move,” he told them. “I’ll be right back.” He was gone for about five minutes, and when he came back he resumed his speech. He didn’t understand how they could show their teacher so much disrespect. He knew they weren’t bad boys, but they had certainly been behaving badly. A good teacher like theirs would come to him only as a last resort. It had to stop. He meant for it to stop. They should be very ashamed of themselves for driving her to this extreme. And then came another knock on the door. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.” </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Not until he was a grown man did it occur to him that the principal never had any intention of paddling them. He had the paddle in his hand and his face was red. Until he came back after the second interruption, he seemed really mad, almost like a different person, and it scared them. He was also right about their behavior. Their only defense might have been their teacher’s unpredictable moods, but that was far too complicated, and besides, they were guilty. Period. No two ways about it. Best to keep their mouths shut and take it like men. Try not to cry. Try not to put their hands back there. Those were the two most important rules of getting paddled. No crying. No cowardly putting your hand in the way. Everyone knew them, even though he didn’t know anyone who’d ever been paddled. </div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Two very strange kids were in his class. One was a girl who ate ink. Not every day, but several times he and his friends noticed that she had blue ink on her lips and all over her hands. The other was a boy who dressed in overalls like a farmer and sat in a far corner of the cafeteria, as far away from everyone else as possible, and caught flies with his hands and ate them. He and his friends talked about those kids among themselves and joked about them, maybe a little too loudly, but they never teased them directly. There was a distance between the strange kids and everyone else, a separation that seemed to suit everyone involved. He tried to imagine doing what they did, being how they were, but it was hard. He didn’t think he would like the taste of ink or flies, but the worst part would be the attention. He’d be ruined for life, as his mother said.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Also separated were the project kids. Their clothes were different and they came to school barefoot until the weather changed. They were “rough,” yet another term he’d learned from his mother. All the bullies in the school were project kids. The project kid who made A’s was rare. They often needed haircuts. They were not always clean. They caused trouble. He had a fist fight back by the lockers with a project kid over the 1956 World Series. If you were not for the Dodgers, the kid would hit you on the arm until you changed your mind. No one, then, was not for the Dodgers, but he decided he couldn’t give in. It was very simple, a matter of courage, and the rule was clear: if you didn’t fight back, you were a coward. He believed that and did not want to be a coward. He was afraid of fighting, but he was more afraid of being a coward. He had no idea even what a fight was, since he knew that movies were probably not a reliable guide. He said Yankees, and the project kid looked at him as if he couldn’t believe it. In his eyes there was doubt, hesitation. Not fear, but he had not expected to hear Yankees. Nevertheless, the kid hit him on the arm, one knuckle out to make it sting more, and knowing he couldn’t let himself think about it even for a second, he hit back. They traded one or two more arm blows, and then it accelerated. It became a real fight, but it didn’t last more than a few seconds. They flailed at each other, aiming for the head, but neither connected very solidly, and then the project kid backed off. Not enough to lose the fight, but enough to suggest a truce, and Roy took the hint. No more flailing. He was crying, but he hadn’t said Dodgers. The project kid didn’t look happy, but he wasn’t crying. He just shrugged his shoulders and walked away. It was a victory of sorts, or at least a draw, a draw with a project kid, but he was ashamed of crying.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He went through a period of sitting in the front row of the movie theater and eating Tootsie-Rolls and popcorn together. He chewed the popcorn up in a ball and then added a Tootsie-Roll or two for flavor. About that time he started thinking about making left and right even. If he touched something with his left hand, he had to touch something else with his right, and he had to apply exactly the same amount of pressure in both cases. In fact, he needed to touch each in as similar a way as possible, as close as he could get it, and he had to get it perfect before he could stop. Mostly, though, when he went to the movies, he did something a little different. He counted with his fingers, either touching something or not, maybe just moving them, it didn’t matter, but he had to count up to the same amount on each hand. For a while, he had difficulty not doing this, especially when he was alone. Instead of getting lost in the movie, as he wanted to do, he was compelled to count and make it even.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He did not know where that came from, or why he wanted to do it, but in Little League he did something that he knew was similar. He prayed before every pitch that a ball wouldn’t be hit to him. A quick prayer with an “amen” at the end. He was a good first baseman. So good in fact that he never missed a throw, even when it bounced in front of him. Or a grounder. Or a line drive. Popups, though, were a problem. He could never judge them right. They always landed behind him no matter how much he told himself when the ball was in the air not to run in until it arced. He couldn’t make himself do it. He played the ball the way it looked, and then it was too late. He could throw the ball up in the air and catch it almost without thinking about it, but real popups during a game were different. Luckily, there weren’t many of them. He knew then, all things considered, that his prayer was irrational, like making things come out even, that when the ball was hit to him, unless it was a popup, he would play it well, but he couldn’t stop himself.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Robert E. Lee was a flawed hero. A man of impeccable integrity who made the wrong decision. The Civil War was about two things. The North wanted to abolish slavery. The South was defending states’ rights. Both, therefore, were right. The South was wrong, however, to break up the Union, and Lee was wrong when he chose to support it. That was his flaw. He was too loyal to Virginia, blinded by his love for it to the greater good of preserving the Union. His photograph, the kindly looking, portly man with the white beard, in full uniform, not unlike Santa Claus, showed everyone what was good about the South. It was run by gentlemen, and yet the sword that hung at his side, like the pistol of a gunfighter, gave fair warning. Here was a man who would defend himself, who would hurt you if given a good reason.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Robin Hood, on the other hand, had no flaws, and although he enjoyed humiliating fools and cowards, he killed no one. Robin Hood was a natural. He could shoot a bow and arrow better than anyone who ever lived, and he was good-natured and smart. When Little John knocked him into the water, he came up laughing and was so impressed that he invited Little John to join his Merry Men. He was a good loser and knew how to turn defeat into victory. In a way, his whole way of life was that. When faced with death for shooting the king’s deer, Robin and his men disappeared into the green woods and created a life for themselves that was better than what they’d had before. They lived hidden away in a beautiful forest, ate wholesome and succulent venison cooked on a spit over a fire, amused themselves with games that honed their physical skills and their cunning, and robbed from the rich to give to the poor. He could not imagine a better life, and although he was glad for Robin when King Richard returned from the Crusades and put everything right again, he was sorry that the life in the forest had to end.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> There was no King Richard for Robert E. Lee and his rebels. Only Lincoln and Grant and whatever scrap of dignity Lee might have preserved at Appomattox. Roy liked Grant better than Lincoln. Grant was a drinker and a fighter. He wasn’t sure what to make of Lincoln. He knew how to look at the face as if it were that of a saint. Sad, ascetic and, the truth be told, boring. He much preferred the handsome, robust figure of Grant, a smart man of action like Robin Hood. Even Lee, with his tragic flaw, was not up to Grant. Lee too was boring. Too good, like Lincoln. And Washington. He liked his heroes to be bold and reckless, and a little bit mean. Or at least mischievous. He could tell by the way Grant sat in his camp chair, cocky and careless, legs spraddled and a drink in his hand, that he was that way. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The Sam Houston given to him at school was more like Lee and Lincoln, a little too good not to be boring, and everyone knew that Travis, with his line drawn in the dirt, was too strict and narrow-minded. Davy Crockett was plenty wild, but too much like someone who might work on your car. His grammar wasn’t good enough to be a real hero. Roy’s man was Bowie. Both a craftsman and a gentleman. He even knew Spanish. He’d been in duels, lived in New Orleans and dressed well. He had a temper and was quick to fight, but he was fair and friendly to people who deserved it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The Alamo was the main event of history, far more important than Gettysburg or Valley Forge. Even San Jacinto was an afterthought. Victory was never as good at explaining how things were as defeat, and how things were, thanks to the Alamo, was very clear. The Mexicans, the brown little men in their old-fashioned soldier uniforms, hordes of them, all wearing peaked hats and carrying rifles with bayonets over their shoulders, scrambled up ladders like bees or ants, not because they were brave or believed in anything in particular, but because they were afraid of their cruel and ridiculous little leader. They might as well take their chances on the ladders, since if they turned back, Santa Ana would certainly have them shot. That’s why the heroes died at the Alamo. Unlike the little brown hordes, who’d probably been turned cruel by their master, like fierce dogs, savage yet cowardly, the men at the Alamo were brave enough to resist the tyranny of Santa Ana. They stood for freedom. They didn’t want Mexicans telling them what to do. They wanted to decide for themselves, and they died for that cause, so that the other white people in Texas could throw off Santa Ana’s yoke and live in peace and freedom.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> When they first moved to the new town, his parents joined the church and were baptized together in the aquarium-like tub that held the water, located above and behind the pulpit. They held their noses before being dunked, which washed their sins away, and for a while they all went to church every Sunday, but not for long. It was too tempting to stay in bed and read the sports page and the funny papers in your pajamas. On the way to church once, they saw a man in his bathrobe stooping over to get his Sunday paper, and his father said, “Now there’s a man who knows how to spend a Sunday morning.” He saw his mother jab his father in the ribs for saying that, but it was too tempting for everyone in the family, although he went more often than his parents, usually just to Sunday School. He liked Sunday School. Both before and after he was saved, he was interested in what his teachers had to say, since he knew they talked about how things were, what was important and what was not. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He didn’t tell his parents that he was going to walk down the aisle the day he was saved. He’d worked it out by himself that it was something he needed to do, and he was afraid they would try to talk him out of it if he told them. Or even forbid him to do it. “Wait until you’re older,” he could hear his mother saying. And besides, it might not even be right to tell anyone. It was his decision. Everyone knew that and everyone was always saying it, especially the preacher. His decision alone, and what it amounted to was whether he wanted to go to heaven or hell. He had until he was twelve to decide, but he didn’t want to go for three years worrying about it, not the going to hell part, but the dread of walking up the aisle, the short conference with the preacher, and then being the absolute center of attention. Too bad about that, but it seemed like life was full of things that required you to make yourself the center of attention, if you were ever going to amount to anything. If you were going to join what everyone else joined, and be a leader, you had to prove your worthiness by embarrassing yourself in front of a lot of people. That’s just how it was, and it seemed to him better to get it over with than to dread it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He had no trouble saying “yes” when the preacher asked him if he was ready to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. He understood the question and he believed his answer. He’d listened carefully to what the preacher said in his sermons and what his Sunday School teacher said, and he accepted as truth their unanimous opinion that being saved was absolutely necessary if a person was going to have a good life and go to heaven. But Jesus didn’t speak to him. He accepted him as his personal Savior, but he thought very little about Jesus, probably because everyone talked more about God the Father. He worked it out in his head. God made the law. Jesus amended it a little, but he followed it, and when you accepted him, you agreed to follow it too. After that it got too complicated, the part about Jesus dying for everyone’s sins, why his dying washed away all the sins of the world. But he didn’t think he had to understand that, not yet. What he had to do was walk down the aisle, say yes to the question, and submit himself to the undivided attention of a lot of grownups. He knew that if he did that, the dread of doing it would leave him, and he’d never have to do it again. And he was right. The preacher leaned down and put his arm around him, whispered softly in his ear, and every grownup he could see was looking at him and smiling.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Of all the Ten Commandments the only one he thought he might have any trouble with was lying, but fortunately, lying was not something he was good at getting away with, and when he did, he felt so guilty that it was worse than if he’d told the truth. Not for fooling people, he didn’t feel bad about that, but for being afraid to tell the truth. The temptation to lie was always cowardly. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Which was completely different from the first temptation he remembered ever having. It had nothing to do with lying. He was real little, perhaps in the second grade. While everyone else napped on Sunday afternoon, he lay on the linoleum in the kitchen with a butcher knife. He held it in both hands and pointed it at his chest. He wondered what it would be like to push it into his body. He did this and thought about it a lot and sensed more than knew that it would be a sin. But he was curious. So curious that he was tempted to try it, and he didn’t only because he lacked the courage. He could feel the temptation in his hands. His hands anticipated the pleasure of forcing, the downward plunge. They were alive with it, which was a pleasure in itself. And a pain. The hands were impatient with him. They wanted him to finish what he started. They were not concerned with the consequences, and he had no clear idea himself what they would be. He tried to think past it, but he couldn’t, which was part of both the appeal and the restraint. Not fear exactly, but something very similar. Perhaps he didn’t lack courage. Surely, it didn’t take courage to sin. Wasn’t it supposed to be just the opposite? He always ignored his hands in the end, what they wanted to do, and put the knife back where he found it. At the very least, if not a sin, it would be an unacceptable act. No one would like it. It would create a scene.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> His mother said that unless he wanted to be considered “rough” like the project kids, he would use good English. Not say “ain’t,” no double negatives, and no bad words, especially in front of girls. A bad word in front of a girl can ruin your reputation for life. It’s best to be extremely careful at all times. Any reference to things having to do with bathrooms was strictly taboo. He believed her, just as he believed everything else she said, and therefore found it puzzling when one afternoon at a girl’s house, all the girls giggled over a lampshade that showed a boy peeing. So puzzling that he made a fool of himself. The girl’s mother worked. No one was there but kids. Four or five girls and two or three boys. It was exciting just to be in the house. A house with no grownups. Just kids, mostly girls. This was a major event. He expected it to be fun. Girls liked him, and he liked girls, unless they were mean. One girl had picked on him in the second grade, and since his mother had told him never to hit a girl, even if she hit you first, that it could ruin your reputation for life, he spent most of his recess trying to avoid her. “She has a crush on you,” his mother said, which turned out to be true, but not really useful. Most girls, especially those with a crush on him, weren’t mean. They could be difficult, hard to understand, but not mean. He didn’t expect to feel ganged up on by girls, even when the boys were in the minority. Nor did he expect to be shocked.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The girls went as a group into the parents’ bedroom and came out screaming and giggling. He’d never seen that before. Girls having fun by acting as if something was naughty and yet clearly enjoying it. It was a new experience and he wasn’t ready for it. Even before he went into the bedroom, he knew it didn’t fit with the way he thought the world worked. Surely, girls couldn’t like something bad. It wasn’t natural, and of course, new as it was, strange as it was, it excited him. He had to see for himself. He wasn’t invited to see, but he was allowed. No one told him to go see. That would be going too far, crossing the line. But they didn’t stop him. He was already embarrassed, he could feel himself blushing, either way. Not to go would be cowardly, but going might be crossing the line of what was allowed. No one would simply tell him what it was, but he knew it had to do with a lamp. He looked around hurriedly after entering the bedroom, knowing he was where he shouldn’t be, and then he found it. A lampshade, the lamp not lit, had a picture on it of a boy peeing. On impulse, he pulled the cord, and when the shade turned, the pee seemed to move in a stream. He ran out of the room. He shouted, once he reached the living room, “You can see it coming out!” He said it too loud, too fast, almost shrieking, and the girls went into hysterics. They fell against each other as if about to faint. They repeated what he said. They pointed at him. They wouldn’t stop laughing, and he wanted to disappear. He defended himself, his face hot, by saying, “Well, you can.” And they laughed even more. </div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The television was in the room across the hall from his parents’ bedroom. His younger brother slept on the bunk bed. There was also a couch. When the whole family watched TV, the most common arrangement was for his mother to be on the couch, his father on the bottom bunk, his brother on the top bunk, and him on the floor. The room was just the right size for the four of them. Even when he was little, he could almost stretch out on the floor and touch the TV with his fingers, the bunk bed with his toes, and the couch with his left hand. But the whole family didn’t watch TV together every night. Only on Sundays for sure, and then only Ed Sullivan. Sunday night was also the only time they didn’t eat supper at the table. They had Campbell’s chicken noodle soup or grilled cheese sandwiches, usually during Maverick. His father liked Maverick. It was almost the only TV show he’d ever known his father to make it a point to watch. His mother was usually busy in the kitchen until right before Ed Sullivan, when she brought in dessert. His father never laughed at the comedians, not out loud. He liked a few of them, but he never laughed out loud. He was pretty hard on most of the acts. Not funny. Too oddball. Got on his nerves. A has been or never was. His mother’s favorite comment was that a performer liked himself or herself too much, or that a female singer was showing too much cleavage. He wondered why they watched Ed Sullivan. He liked just about everything, even the acrobats and spinning plates. Even Maurice Chevaliar. Even Mary Martin in Peter Pan, although the only really good thing about that was being able to see the wires that held her up.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He learned never to recommend or praise anything, since his father never liked it. Besides Maverick, the only thing they watched together was Charlie Chan movies, and those not very often since they only came on after bedtime during the week. But in the summer, when there were no bedtime rules, he and his father sometimes watched Charlie Chan. His father started calling him his number one son and his younger brother his number two son. He understood that his father liked the detective’s amused and condescending attitude, along with the deference the Chan sons showed him.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He was not a sickly child. He rarely if ever missed school. He never threw up, never even had earaches like his brother. He was healthy except for one thing, maybe two. His nose was always “stuffed up,” and he apparently made a lot of noise breathing when he slept. They took him first to Dallas and then to Oklahoma City to an allergy clinic where the doctors stuck little pins in his arms and back. It didn’t hurt too much, but it was very hard to sit still for so long a time. He was allergic to a million things, they said, but especially chocolate and corn. For a while his mother gave him allergy shots twice a week, and he ate candy bars with no chocolate, Paydays and peanut butter logs, and passed up popcorn at the movies. He didn’t know if it helped. He didn’t even know he was “stuffed up” until his mother told him. She noticed, she said, because he was always sniffing. He didn’t know he was sniffing. He’d sniffed his whole life, she told him, and has trouble breathing from time to time. At one point he found himself in a children’s hospital in Dallas for a couple of weeks. He had bronchitis, they told him. That’s okay. He didn’t feel sick and he liked spending the day reading baseball magazines and playing a horse racing board game. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The only thing he didn’t like about the hospital was the food, and that was almost completely made up for when his father sneaked a box of fried chicken past the nurses one night. With french fries and a coke. It was probably the best food he’d ever tasted. Nevertheless, it brought him no closer to his father. Nor did the times when he got Roy to tell another grownup the American and National League standings that day, and how many games separated the first three or four teams. Or how to spell something. He could spell nearly any word any grownup could think of. Most days he hardly saw his father. During the week his father was gone before breakfast and got home after he and his brother had eaten. On Saturdays his father was running errands or mowing the lawn or doing paperwork at the dining room table. On Sundays he read the paper and took a nap. Sunday dinner was always a roast, and although he liked roast and all the things his mother usually made to go with it, he did not think of those meals with pleasure. Or any meal when his father was present. He had to pay more attention when his father was there. He had to be more careful to mind his manners. He had to ask for someone to pass the peas rather than reach across the table for them. Use his napkin and not the back of his hand. Not drop his fork. Not eat too fast. He had to do most of those things when it was just him and his brother and his mother at the table, but he didn’t care so much when his mother reminded him. It was not quite so much like he did something wrong. It didn’t embarrass him. Even when his father’s tone was not particularly harsh, when he did something wrong in front of him, when it was necessary to be corrected by him, he was embarrassed.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> They went to the 1954 Cotton Bowl game. Just the two of them, Rice versus Alabama. Forty yard line tickets, about halfway up. Good seats. His father was shooting pictures with an 8mm movie camera when an Alabama player, identified later as Tommy Lewis, jumped off the bench and tackled Dicky Maegle, the star Rice halfback. Dicky Maegle is a big part of why they were there. It was still the era of college halfbacks. Broken field runners, as they were called. Doak Walker of SMU. Jim Swink of TCU. Billy Cannon of LSU. It was late in the second half, and Dicky Maegle had already run circles around the Crimson Tide. He couldn’t get over that team nickname, mainly because it wasn’t an animal, or even really a thing. Not an owl or a mustang or a horned frog. It was a tide, whatever that was, and why crimson? Crimson is red, his father explained, and a tide is how the water comes in from the ocean, but he didn’t know either why a football team from Alabama would be named the Crimson Tide, or that Alabama had a crimson tide, or exactly what one would be. In any case, the Crimson Tide was getting soundly beat by the Owls, by Dicky Maegle in particular, and as Maegle ran for yet another touchdown along the sideline, the nearest opposing player several yards behind and losing ground, a player comes out of nowhere and tackles him. The whole Alabama bench stands up and gathers around, blocking whatever is happening on the field. Nothing like this has ever happened before, but it didn’t take long for the referees to award the touchdown to Rice. Maegle was only fifteen yards from the goal line. No one was near him until Tommy Lewis jumped off the bench and tackled him.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He couldn’t think of a worse thing. It was painful to think of being Tommy Lewis, but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t stop himself from feeling Tommy Lewis’ embarrassment. Ruined for life was one of his mother’s favorite expressions, and surely, if anyone was ever in that situation, it had to be Tommy Lewis. He didn’t know how he could live with himself, how he could ever stop thinking about it. And what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> he thinking? He tried to understand it. He tried to put himself on the Alabama bench. The paper the next day said that Lewis got “carried away.” He couldn’t imagine it. It would be the same as jumping off a skyscraper, or from an airplane without a parachute. No one got that carried away. The paper didn’t say he was crazy, but that’s what everyone thought. And yet, it wasn’t quite crazy enough. It wasn’t really jumping from an airplane, not that extreme. It made too much sense. He couldn’t imagine doing it, having the nerve, but he could imagine wanting to. He could see, the more he thought about it, how Tommy Lewis could want to stop Dicky Maegle so bad that he couldn’t make himself not do it. And that’s what made it really painful. Even scary. Everyone knew that Tommy Lewis couldn’t control himself, that he was incapable of not doing something that was absolutely forbidden, and in newspapers all over the country there were pictures of him doing it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> It is the only college football game he attended as a boy, and it didn’t make him any closer to his father. He knew his father wouldn’t have bought the tickets if it hadn’t been for him, if he hadn’t said at some point, not meaning it as a hint since he never imagined that it was possible, that he wished he could go to the Cotton Bowl. He knew how special it was, and he and his father both enjoyed the game, but their relationship afterwards was the same as always. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He and his brother were told one night by their mother to go wake up their father. He was asleep on the couch in the living room. It was time for him to come to bed. They didn’t like the assignment. Waking up their father was not something they wanted to do. They even objected, but their mother told them not to be silly. He’s not going to bite. She shamed them into it, but they still kept their distance and called out “Daddy” in quiet voices. No response, until finally Roy worked up the nerve to tap him on the shoulder. His father jumped. Roy and his brother jumped back. His father opened his eyes and sat up. He said, “Go tell your mother to come here.” It made no sense. That’s why they woke him up, so that she wouldn’t have to get out of bed. The brothers looked at each other, on the verge of objecting, but not wanting to get yelled at. Finally, Roy screwed up his courage once again and asked his father what he’d just said. He was told again, this time more firmly. “Go tell your mother to come here.” They ran to the bedroom to tell their mother that something was wrong with Daddy. She shook her head like they’d gone crazy, got out of bed in a huff and went to the kitchen. His father was standing at the counter, drinking a glass of milk. He remembered nothing of the incident, not even that the boys woke him up.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The closest he ever felt to his father was in a car one summer afternoon in the New Mexico desert, his mother and younger brother in the back seat, his father drinking bourbon and driving eighty miles an hour. “You’re going too fast,” his mother said, and his father slowed down a little, but not much and not for long. His father was in such a good mood that he asked him what he wanted for dinner, and he said enchiladas, and his parents asked at the motel if there was a good Mexican place in town, his mother telling him that the woman said the restaurant was “just a little hole in the wall.” He didn’t know what that meant. He imagined a place that only a mouse could get into. “A small place,” she explained. He didn’t care for the enchiladas. The sauce was dark brown and bitter. Not at all like Texas enchiladas. But he tried to hide his disappointment. He didn’t want to spoil his father’s mood. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The trip in general, to Colorado, was a failure, the only vacation they ever took. All he and his brother wanted to do was swim and play miniature golf. It was too cold in the mountains to swim and the motels they stayed at didn’t have heated pools. They were on a very tight budget. His father would inquire about the price at the motel office, and if it was eleven or twelve dollars a night instead of eight, they would try another one. His parents discussed it in the car, and it was mostly his mother who insisted on keeping to the budget. His mother was cheap. His father wasn’t. That was something that was always understood. He and his brother felt that his father would have stayed at the twelve dollar places if his mother hadn’t been so stern about it. A few times his parents debated the issue, not really an argument, since his father gave in so quickly. He apparently thought she was right. About his driving, though, he wouldn’t listen to her. She was afraid of the gravel road up to Pike’s Peak. She kept saying that if he didn’t slow down they were going to run off the road and fall off the mountain, until his father finally blew up. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> Those were the worst times. It was time to be absolutely quiet, to disappear in the back seat. His father got irritated about the swimming and the miniature golf. The sites, the mountains and caves and old mining towns, were why they came to Colorado. Why couldn’t his boys appreciate that? He got very irritated. He got red in the face and he grumbled, he made sarcastic remarks, but he didn’t blow up. He blew up only when someone didn’t do what he told them to do. Not caring about the mountains, preferring swimming pools and miniature golf, took its toll, pushed him a little further away from his father, but in itself it was only a minor offense.</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">*****</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He talked often with his mother and for a long time told her everything. Everything he thought and almost everything he did. He never thought about having secrets from her, and he began to have them only with great reluctance, when he realized that there were some things she’d rather not hear. They embarrassed her, and when she was embarrassed, he was embarrassed. Slowly but surely, then, and only to avoid such moments, he developed a sense for what was going too far, and every time he pulled himself up, it hurt a little. He wanted to tell her everything, and he wanted her to understand it all, every last confidence, every last emotion, every last thought. Everything. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He knew, even before he was old enough to actually think it, he knew his father was a lost cause in that regard. He must always say the right thing around his father. He was cut no slack. Even when his father was indifferent to or puzzled by what he said, rather than angry or impatient, he didn’t like to say the wrong thing, which made the separation from his father complete. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> But he did not want to be separated from his mother. In a perfect world, she would be with him everywhere, and she would understand him completely, know everything about him. In a way, he would be no more than an extension of her. When he played ball. When he looked at the maps in the encyclopedia. When he swam naked at the Y. When he went to the bathroom. When he slept and dreamed. And on each occasion, when he first stepped out of her body, he would be like a ghost, transparent, spirit-like, and then he would turn into a real boy, solid, absorbed in play, but only until she called him back. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> He does not learn this anywhere. The only time he ever read anything about mothers was in a biography of Lou Gehrig. Lou Gehrig and his mother were very close and fished for eels in the middle of the night. He appreciated Gehrig’s devotion to his mother, but he did not connect it with his own feelings. Gehrig’s mother was not his mother, and he wasn’t Gehrig. Nor did he talk about mothers with anyone, except his father, whose sole message was respect, which meant obey and no talking back. He rarely talked back—he knew how serious his father was about that—and only when he was upset enough to do it without thinking. He disobeyed more often, but in a similar way. Not thinking. Or not allowing himself to think. If he remembered, he felt his face turn red, and he stopped. Usually, it involved not coming home when expected, a serious offense, but one he could not resist when he was having fun. And sometimes, he had to willfully not remember, almost force himself to lose track of time. It was a giddy feeling, losing track of time. There was no other word for it. When he was giddy, he was both excited and scared.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> His mother had a small hump on her back and her arms and the backs of her hands were always covered with scratches. It was two completely separate problems. When she was about fourteen, her mother noticed that one side of her back was larger, stuck out, more than the other. The doctor said she had curvature of the spine, probably from carrying her school books. She needed an operation, the doctor said, or else when she was fully grown she’d be able to touch the ground with her fingers without bending over. This frightened everyone. They agreed to the operation. A bone was taken out of her leg and put in her back. She was in a cast, flat on her back, for six months when she was sixteen. She showed him the scar on her leg. She told him she had to buy loose tops so that the hump, which was still there, wouldn’t show. It seemed to be slowly but surely getting worse. It was sore most of the time. Her back hurt if she did “too much.” They no longer did that operation. She wasn’t sure if it was a success or not, since she had no way of knowing what would have happened if she hadn’t had it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> The scars had a simpler explanation. She was allergic to direct sunlight. Her arms itched and she would scratch them until they bled. Yes, she tried to keep them covered whenever she went outside, but sometimes she forgot.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;"> He didm’t feel sorry for his mother. Even when she said she was always self-</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">conscious about her back, there was no reason to feel sorry for her. That’s just how it was, how she was. It didn’t make her any different. He knew more about her, but that didn’t change anything. Nothing he could ever learn about her would change his mother. It would only make her more clear to him, like the story about how his father courted her when she was in the cast. They had only met once, at a party, from which he would have taken her home, but he had a flat tire. And then he showed up at the house when she was in the cast. “He came to visit me,” she said, “nearly every day for six months, and me flat on my back.” She talked about how bad it was to be in the cast. She alluded only vaguely to the physical problems, something about bed sores, and emphasized the tedium. Six months of not being able to get off of your back, but he didn’t feel sorry for her, or admire her for enduring it. She was his mother. It would be like feeling sorry for or admiring himself, which he never did. It just made her more clear to him. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"> She was always there, almost always in the kitchen when he got home from school, and they talked while he ate his snack, and then he went out to shoot baskets. His father put up a backboard above the carport, and it wasn’t long before he had a deadly jump shot that he almost never missed. It was a good place for it, the perfect arrangement. From the kitchen his mother could hear the ball bounce on the asphalt driveway, and he didn’t have to worry about losing track of time. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><br />
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</div>Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-40338670860508199922010-10-26T09:35:00.000-04:002010-10-26T09:35:08.479-04:00Chili KeelaNo, the spelling above is not a mistake. I assume it to be Mom's version of chilaquiles. For the real deal go to <a href="http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/chilaquiles/">chilaquiles</a>. In addition to a decent recipe, they have links to two of Diana Kennedy's books, la reina gringa de la comida mexicana. As always, DK's versions are long, complicated and delicious. But if you like Frito Pie, and I do, this shouldn't offend you, unless of course you are actually in the mood for chilaquiles.<br />
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put large piece of butter in Iron Skillet add 1 small green pepper and onion cut up. Fry until soft add 3 small fresh tomatoes and cook until soft.<br />
add 1/2 (cup?) grated cheese let melt. Just before ready to serve add to this the not quite whole big pkg of Fritos.<br />
Eat at once.<br />
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Mom doesn't say this, but chilaquiles are usually eaten for brunch (almuerzo) and often with eggs and refried beans. Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-53140611840017449682010-10-24T12:12:00.001-04:002010-12-14T16:45:42.004-05:00Common Sense 1Here are some of the terrible things that health care reform brought you in September:<br />
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Your insurer can't drop you after you get sick.<br />
Your children can stay on your policy until age 26.<br />
Your insurer must totally cover preventive services and annual checkups.<br />
Your insurance will no longer have a lifetime limit.<br />
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A few good corporate citizens who opposed the above reforms:<br />
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Aetna, Blue Cross, Cigna, Humana.<br />
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The political party that opposed them: Republicans. Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-28035063183247460862010-10-07T09:50:00.000-04:002010-10-07T09:50:16.537-04:00Vargas LlosaAbout time, and he's even a tad right of center. What's the Swedish Academy coming to?<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/books/08nobel.html?_r=1"> Vargas Llosa</a>Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-49299720987243500962010-09-12T09:12:00.002-04:002010-09-12T09:26:22.525-04:00Obit Beat 4Now I know what steampunk is. Better late than never.<br />
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RIP F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre <br />
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/nyregion/12froggy.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=froggy&st=cse">Froggy</a>Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-26438467742460117852010-08-23T17:19:00.002-04:002010-08-24T09:14:47.773-04:00Obit Beat 3For all you snake lovers out there. <br />
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/nyregion/22pinney.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=obituaries&st=nyt">Roy Pinney obit</a>Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-28921896185722545922010-06-01T09:14:00.007-04:002010-06-01T09:48:48.140-04:00Not just for Yankees fansDon't worry sports fans, this isn't an obit. Sparky Lyle ain't no kid at 65 (who is?), but he's still around and this is a good article.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/nyregion/30sparky.html?scp=1&sq=sparky%20lyle&st=cse">Sparky<br /></a>Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-71642846817788144752010-05-23T17:13:00.004-04:002010-05-23T17:53:06.755-04:00Not to mention "I Eat Your Skin"Three interesting obits in Sunday NY Times, but the funniest is of David E. Durston, writer and director of "I Drink Your Blood." Also of note is a full page feature of the soon to be departed Law and Order and in Automotive (always right after Sports) is a really good piece about Bugattis. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/pages/obituaries/index.html"> NY Times Obits </a>Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34406354619104208.post-52656015620632616242010-03-26T15:43:00.005-04:002010-04-02T10:27:03.445-04:00Mom's Recipes 17Excuses, excuses, but the truth is, I've been slow on this because I've just about gone through all the meals I remember and/or sound like something I might actually make. Dare I say that some sound a trifle dated? I picked this one because it has bacon grease in it, which, as everyone knows, makes everything taste better. The world would be a sadder place without butter, lard and bacon grease.<br /><br />Black Eye Pea Dip<br /><br />2 cans blackeyed peas (1 with Peppers)<br />1 can Rotel tomatoes<br />1/4 bell pepper<br />2 celery sticks<br />1 large onion<br />3 chicken buillion cubes<br />1 teaspoon garlic<br />1 teaspoon pepper<br />1 teaspoon salt<br />1/2 cup catsup<br />3-4 drops tabasco (optional)<br /><br />Dice bell pepper, celery and onion. Add rest of ingredients and stir. Simmer for 30 min. Add 1/2 cup bacon grease, 3 teas flour. Cook 10-15 min. Serve warm with crackers or chips.Jack Steelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03161507017026345372noreply@blogger.com0