Hot Shot (11 page)

“Well, Skimmer,” she said, “shall we get started?” and I said that was what I’d come for, which might have been all of the truth in the beginning but wasn’t any more by a damn sight, and we got on a sofa in one corner of the room and went at it, the rhetoric, that is, but to tell the truth I had something else on my mind and couldn’t show much progress, and after about an hour I said, “I just can’t seem to put my mind to it with all the noise and the people around and everything,” and she said, “Perhaps you’re right. I think we’d better use the library after this.”

We arranged it between us to meet at the library three nights a week, and we did it for a couple of weeks, and studied, and I picked up a little on the rhetoric, but not much. It came around Thanksgiving then, and school closed up for a week, the classes, that is, and nearly everyone went home, but I didn’t, and neither did Sylvia. We went on meeting at the library just like we’d been, only now it was every night instead of only three, and we had the room we studied in pretty much to ourselves, and to tell the truth, we started doing less studying and more other stuff, and I guess now’s the time to tell it and get through with it.

She was nuts, this Sylvia Pruet was. All slobs who go for literature and stuff like that are nuts, of course, but she was even more nuts than most. She asked me if I liked poetry, and I said I didn’t, except the kind of dirty limericks my brother Eddie used to teach me before he got himself killed, and she said it didn’t do any good to talk to her that way, because she’d made up her mind that all my toughness and everything was just a kind of protective armor to keep me from being hurt and that I’d been hurt terribly sometime or other and had been embittered by it. This was strictly bull, but I could see it made me look romantic or something to her, so I didn’t deny it, and she said she’d like to teach me to love poetry the way she did, because she knew I was the type would really go for it once I got into it, and it looked like an angle to me, so I told her she might be right and I’d try to learn if she thought there was anything in it for me.

After that we only spent about half the time on the rhetoric, and the other half she’d read this poetry to me, and it was enough to make you puke, honest to God. The poems she liked best and read most were all full of Aprils and lost loves and broken hearts and all sorts of crap like that, and they were written by someone I’d never heard of, name of Sara Teasdale, and one night after we’d left the library we sat on a stone bench in the dark out behind the museum, and I was just about to make a pitch and see if she’d do a little business when she said, “Oh, the fall, Skimmer, the beautiful fall. I think fall is just the most perfect time, don’t you?” and then before I could say yes or no she started reciting this poem by Sara Teasdale that was all about how someone named Robin had kissed her in the spring, and someone else named Strephon had kissed her in the fall, but how a third guy named Colin had only looked at her and hadn’t kissed her at all, and personally I thought Robin and Strephon had showed some pretty good sense for guys in a poem but that Colin was altogether a simple bastard, and I said so.

She reached up and patted me on the cheek and said I was just hiding my tender emotions behind a false front and that the point was that the most powerful feelings were often mute and undemonstrated. To show how this was, she went on and finished the poem, which told how Robin’s kiss was lost in jest and Strephon’s in play but that Colin’s, which had only been in his crummy eyes, kept right on haunting her and everything, and it was just more than I could stand, and I said I guessed it was pretty enough but awful dull. That tore it for the time, and she got up and walked off back to Drayton Hall and wouldn’t say another word to me, and I got to thinking that maybe she wouldn’t meet me at the library the next night, either, but I went there and waited when the time came, and she did.

She said hello, and I said hello, and she sat down and asked me if I wasn’t sorry for the way I’d talked last night, and I wasn’t in particular but said I was, anyhow, just to get things going again, and she said, “I don’t feel like rhetoric tonight, Skimmer. Let’s go for a walk,” and this was fine with me because I didn’t feel like rhetoric myself at the time, or any other time, either, for that matter, and so we went outside and walked along to the same bench behind the museum and sat down. We were sitting there not saying anything, but just looking off down the slope in the darkness, and all of a sudden I began to recite this poem, and I’ll admit I’d gone to the library and looked it up and memorized it just that afternoon, because I thought I might need it to get me in good again, and it was just a short one about how I’d once been as fresh as rainwater but was now as bitter as the God-damn sea.

When I got through it, she said, “Oh, Skimmer, I knew it, I knew it. I knew you were just all hurt and twisted up inside like a little boy,” and she said it in this chokey voice, and I looked at her close, and damned if she wasn’t really bawling. She was so damn intense and nutty about it altogether that I began to get a little uncomfortable, to tell the truth, and I was just thinking maybe I’d better get the hell out of it when she turned and threw her arms around me and kissed me about sixteen times. Well, that wasn’t any time to be leaving, as you can see, so I started to give her as good as I got, and she kept saying things about how I was good and noble underneath and she’d known it all the time, and she was shaking and running her hands over me and things like that, and what she was, she was one of these dolls who ordinarily keep themselves all corked up tight, and then a guy comes along at the right time and just touches them and they blow the cork and fizz all over the place. We sort of got out of control and kept going from one thing to another, and the short of it is, I got to her there on the bench, and afterward she started to cry again and say over and over, “Say you love me, Skimmer, say you love me,” and finally I had to say it to get her to shut up about it.

Well, I might as well tell all of it while I’m at it, and that wasn’t the last time, one place or another, and mostly she acted pretty sensible about it, and I didn’t think too much about it when it wasn’t happening, but then one night when I was with her she said, “Skimmer, I’m worried,” and I said, “What about,” and she said, “I’m three days late,” and I said, “Late for what,” and she said, “Late, Skimmer. You know,” and then I did all of a sudden, and it scared the hell out of me. I don’t mind admitting I was in a sweat about it, and I got to thinking about a movie I’d seen about a guy who got a girl that way and took her out in a boat to drown her but lost his nerve and wasn’t going to do it but then did it accidentally, anyhow. I wasn’t really so damn dumb as to think of trying anything like that myself, but I was trying hard enough to think of some other way out of it that wouldn’t ruin everything, all that the basketball was bringing and everything, and then after I’d sweated myself into a God-damn blue funk, damned if she didn’t show up one night a little later and say, “It’s all right after all, Skimmer,” and I’d had plenty by then and said, “The hell it is. It may be all right with you, but it’s not all right with me, and I wouldn’t touch you with a ten foot pole if I flunked a dozen God-damn rhetoric classes.”

I didn’t go for any more rhetoric lessons, and I worried about it some because I knew sure as hell that old Boxer would give me the ax, but then something happened that just shows you how these things work out, and there just isn’t any damn use worrying about them at all. I was telling old Micky Spicer about Sylvia one night in the room at the frat house, about how nutty she was and everything, and he said, “What the hell were you studying rhetoric with her for,” and I said, “Why the hell
would
I be doing it? Because I was flunking the damn course, naturally,” and he said, “You mean you’re having trouble with that stuff? Man, it’s duck soup,” and I said, “It may be duck soup to you, but it’s not duck soup to me, and if you’re so God-damn good at it, maybe you can give me a lift,” and he said, “Sure. Why not?” and damned if he wasn’t as good as he claimed, and after that he always did my work for me in no time.

I didn’t see old Sylvia any more, except now and then at a distance on the campus, having quit the rhetoric lessons, and just to show you how nutty she really was, she started letting herself go to hell like one of these dames carrying a torch in a corny movie, and there just wasn’t any damn sense in it whatever that I could see. Mainly it was just the way she looked, the way she drooped around and had shadows under her eyes and acted like there wasn’t anyone else in the lousy world, and about a month after I broke off the lessons she went away from Pipskill and didn’t come back, and I learned later that she’d had a nervous breakdown and been sent to a rest home, which is just another way of saying she’d flipped her lid and been packed off to a fancy booby hatch. Another thing I learned, I learned that she’d had these nervous breakdowns before and was the kind of doll who’d go along all right for a while until some damn little thing triggered her off, and then she’d go through one of these nutty periods until she finally came out of it again, and I thought it was about the dirtiest damn trick I’d ever heard of for old Boxer to shove someone like that off on me, and it’s just another score I’ve got to settle with the son of a bitch if I ever get the chance.

All this time I kept on practicing basketball under Dilky in the old gym, and old Micky and I got to be just what he’d said we’d be, a real one-two punch, and as a matter of fact we got so sharp and good that Dilky got together with Barker Umplett and decided to change the kind of offense they’d been planning for the team. The way they’d planned it, they’d planned to use old Carboy under the bucket as the big scoring gun, but he was such a lousy shot, like I told, that they decided to use him there to get the ball and feed out to Micky and me for jump shots instead, and as a matter of fact it was something like Tizzy Davis and I had done it under old buller Mulloy, only a damn sight better. In December we started playing freshman teams from other schools, and we cleaned up everything around and looked plenty sharp, and it was a damn good thing old Umplett had something coming, if you want to know it, because as a matter of fact the varsity team wasn’t so hot, and it was the first time in years old Umplett had had a lousy team. First of December, they made a tour through the East and played five games and lost three of them, and old Umplett could feel his throat bleeding and was sour and mean and hard to get along with.

Well, in spite of old Sylvia and a few other things I won’t mention, the first year at Pipskill was pretty dull, as you can see, and after the freshman team got through beating all the other freshman teams around, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of use hanging on, except that the living was pretty good, a hell of a lot better than anywhere else as a matter of fact, and besides, I had to finish out the term if I wanted to come back and play basketball in the fall, so I did.

The varsity team wasn’t so hot, like I said, but old Umplett really worked the hell out of them when they got back from the eastern swing, and it looked for a while like he was going to bring them out of it, and the truth is, he damn near did, and after Christmas, when conference play started, they went into a winning streak and went right on winning all their games up to the last three, and damned if they didn’t drop all of those in a row. That knocked them right out of the conference championship and the right to play in the national tournaments that came afterward, and old Umplett just blew his God-damn stack, because a coach at Pipskill that didn’t win the conference and get in the national tournaments afterward was damn well liable not to be around long. It made it tough on us guys on the freshman team, because next season we’d be on the varsity, and old Umplett had blood in his eye and would be expecting us to save his God-damn hide for him, and just before we knocked off practice in the old gym, Dilky got us all together and told us that was the way it was and that we damn well better produce if we knew what was good for us.

That was in March, and I hung on a couple of months or so, a little longer, until school quit in June, and then I went home for the summer. The old man was at work when I got there, and the old lady said, “Well, I see you’ve come back to sponge off your old man some more. What’s the matter? They quit feeding you up there at the college?” and I said, “That’s a hell of a God-damn welcome to get when you’ve been gone damn near a whole year,” and she said, “Welcome! Look who the hell’s yakking about welcome. You never wrote to us or sent us a dime all that time you were up there and the minute your belly gets empty you come running home yelling welcome. You expect me to fall on your neck or something?” and I said, “The only place I expect you to fall is on your God-damn face from always swilling that lousy beer,” and she said, “You wouldn’t talk to me like that if only Eddy was here,” and right away we were off on that crummy routine, and she started to bawl, and I wished to hell I hadn’t come home at all, and to tell the truth, I wouldn’t have if the hundred clams a month had kept on during the summer, but they didn’t.

When the old man got home from work, he looked at me and said, “Where the hell you been?” and I said, “Been? You know God-damn well where I’ve been. I’ve been up to Pipskill going to school and playing basketball, that’s where I’ve been,” and he said, “Don’t hand me that. The God-damn school closes up for Christmas, at least. Why the hell didn’t you come home for Christmas? You afraid you’d have to buy someone a present or something?” and I said, “Now isn’t that a crying shame! Since when did anyone in this crummy family ever buy anyone else a Christmas present? What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway? You know damn well you don’t give a damn if I come home for Christmas or any other time, and the way it looks to me, it looks like you’d rather I wouldn’t, as a matter of fact.”

He looked at me for a minute without saying anything, and then he said, “Well, now, maybe that’s just the Goddamn way it is, now that you mention it, and I’ll tell you something else, too. Your old lady and I know you been getting paid a hundred dollars a month to play basketball up there at Pipskill, so there’s no use trying to tell us any of your Goddamn lies about it, and if you’re planning to louse around here all summer, you’ll damn well pay board, and that’s all of it.”