Hot Shot (9 page)

I said, “How’s that?” and he said, “I was authorized by Barker Umplett, head basketball coach at Pipskill, to offer you an athletic scholarship if you looked good enough, and I don’t mind telling you that you looked plenty good enough to me,” and I said thanks, he didn’t know how much it meant to me to hear him say it, which was true enough, but not in the way he thought, and then he explained to me how I’d get all expenses paid and a job that wouldn’t take any of my time to speak of and a hundred dollars a month for doing the job. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t dreamed I’d get that much, and I was damn sure ready to grab it, but just the same I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to push my luck a little, so I said, “Well, that’s fine, but my folks are pretty poor, and I don’t have any money to buy clothes to go to college in and things like that,” and he laughed and said, “Think nothing of it. Soon as I get back to Pipskill I’ll send you something to take care of these incidentals. We have a little fund for that purpose,” and that sewed it up, and we shook hands on it, and he drove me back to the hotel in the Caddy.

The next morning we went home in the bus, and there was a big celebration there that I’m not going to tell about, because it was just more of the same old crap, and I hung on at school till it was over, since it was only a couple of months, anyhow, and I kept going around with Marsha, and it was really something with the weather warmer, and I looked forward to it for the whole summer, but damned if she didn’t go away on a vacation and not get back until damn near September, and by that time I was about ready to leave for Pipskill and had other things on my mind.

That’s about all there is to it, how it started and how it grew, but I guess before I quit telling about the high school part and start telling about the Pipskill part I’d better tell how it came out between Gravy Dummke and me. As a matter of fact, nothing happened at all for a long time, not until after school was out, and you can bet I kept out of his God-damn cigar store, and I’d just about come to the conclusion that he’d decided to cut his losses and nothing was
ever
going to happen when all of a sudden it did. I went to town one night and shot rotation at Beegie’s, and I was leaving to go home when this guy I’d never seen before said, “You going home, Scaggs? I happen to be going your way, and I’ll give you a lift.” He was a short guy, but pretty heavy, with one smeary eye that looked like a stinking broken egg and red hair and so God-damn many freckles it looked like the old cow had blown bran in his face, and he kept picking his nose, which is why I didn’t suspect him of anything, I think, because who the hell suspects anything of a guy who picks his nose? I’d heard some of the guys in Beegie’s call him Pinky, so I said, “Sure, Pinky, thanks,” and we went out together and up the street to his car, which was a Chevvie. There was another guy sitting in the back seat, but I didn’t even see him until this Pinky guy and I had got in the front seat and started off, and then I saw him, and I don’t see how the hell I missed him in the first place, because he was as big as a God-damn barn.

We drove fast as hell down the street and around the corner, not toward the side of town where I lived, and I said, “Where the bell you going?” and Pinky said, “You’ll find out,” and I said, “Well, I don’t know where the hell
you’re
going, but I know where
I’m
going, and that’s home, so you can just stop this God-damn can and let me out,” and he said, “You’re a smart little bastard, aren’t you? We don’t like smart bastards. It’s our job to teach smart bastards it doesn’t pay to be so damn smart.”

By that time I knew what was happening, that it was Gravy Dummke behind it, and I said, “So you two goons are doing the dirty for that fat slop Gravy Dummke,” and Pinky said, “Who’s Gravy Dummke? Never heard of him,” and I said, “The hell you haven’t, and you can tell him from me that someday I’ll get his God-damn greasy hide for this,” and then the big guy in back reached up and clobbered me behind the ear, and I couldn’t say anything more or hear a damn thing but bells for at least five minutes, and when I’d got over it we were out of town on a gravel road and kept going down the road for about half a mile and stopped. I didn’t figure there was any point in being a lousy hero with no one around to see it, so I jumped out and started to run, but I tripped in the Goddamn ditch and fell on my face, and they were on top of me before I could get up, and the big guy had fists as hard as rock that must have weighed about twenty pounds apiece. They beat the hell out of me, I’ll have to admit it, and as a matter of fact they damn near killed me. They’d drag me up on my feet and then take turns knocking me down again, and once I hauled off and kicked one of them in the crotch, and he fell down and held himself and rolled around yelling, but as luck would have it, it was the little one, and still left me with the big one. After a long time it just seemed to stop all of a sudden, and this was because I passed out, and when I came to, they were gone, and I was still in the ditch.

Well, it took a hell of a long time and was pretty tough going, but I finally got home to bed, and the next morning I was a mess and lied to the old man about being in a gang fight with a bunch of high school guys from another town, and it tickled the hell out of him, and he said it damn well served me right for being a bum. I never told anyone the truth about it all, but I made up my mind I’d get Gravy Dummke for having it done to me, the son of a bitch, and I finally did, too, and I’ll tell about it later in the place it comes.

W
ELL, LIKE
Marsha would have said, the summer got pretty God-damn deadly before it was over, and I was glad to get away from the old jerk town when September finally came. I went up to Pipskill University, which was just outside the city on a big hill beside the valley that a river went through, and at first I felt sort of funny being away from everyone I knew, and I wished someone had come up to school with me, someone like old Bugs, or even Tizzy Davis, but Tizzy’s old man had sent him back east to some crummy college that went in mainly for books instead of things like basketball, and old Bugs was too God-damn dumb to go to any kind of college whatever. That was the difference between Bugs and me. I was pretty ignorant myself, I mean, never having taken the trouble to crack any books except once in a great while, but old Bugs was just plain dumb, and the difference between us was the difference between being ignorant and just plain dumb, which is quite a difference. A guy who’s ignorant is a guy who could learn if he wanted to take the trouble, but a guy who’s dumb is just S.O.L. when it comes to anything in the brains department. I don’t want to overdo this ignorance stuff, though, as far as I was concerned. What I mean is, I was ignorant about most of the crap you were supposed to know from books when you got into a college, but I knew quite a bit about a lot of other things.

Old Pipskill was a kind of pretty place, I’ll have to admit that, and you could sit up there on the hill where all the buildings were and look down into the valley where the river was, and it wasn’t half bad. Most of the buildings were made out of this gray stone that you see around, and they all had this God-damn green ivy crawling all over them, and there were all these big trees around that spread out over the walks you walked on, and here and there in various places there were these cast iron statues of guys who had given something or other to Pipskill, or had gone to school there and had later got to be big shots in some way, but I went around and looked at the names under all these statues, and I hadn’t even heard of a one of them before, and I couldn’t help wondering what the hell was the use of being a big shot in a way that hardly anyone ever heard of, and I made up my mind that if I ever got to be a big shot it would be in a way that got noised around.

The first thing I did when I got there was go around to the gym to see the basketball coach, whose name was Barker Umplett, like I told earlier, but the guy I saw was this guy Dilky who had scouted me out at the tournament, and it turned out that he was the freshman basketball coach as well as a scout. He’d gone to Pipskill himself once and had been a big basketball star who’d got his picture in
Collier’s
and stuff, and in fact I learned that one magazine had printed a whole article about no one but him, and the reason I learned this was because he showed it to me just so I wouldn’t have any doubts about what a wonderful bastard he was.

He was sitting in a stinking little office just off the locker room when I got there the first day, and he stood up and shook my hand in this God-damn manly way that damn near cracks your bones and said, “Well, well, Skimmer, I see you made it,” and I said I had, and he said, “Well, how do you like old Pipskill U?” and I said what I’d seen of it looked okay, and he said, “The more you see of it, the better you’ll like it,” and I thought, Well, I’ll make up my own God-damn mind about that, and then he took me out through the locker room and showed me the gym.

To tell the truth, I didn’t think much of it, and it was pretty old and dark when the lights weren’t on, and there wasn’t much room for anyone to sit and watch, and as a matter of fact it didn’t seem as good as the one in the high school. I was just about to say something about it looking like a God-damn crackerbox to me, but before I had a chance he said sort of off-hand, “This is just the old gym where the freshman team practices, of course,” and I felt a little better and asked him where the hell the first team played, and he said, “Oh, they use the field house. Haven’t you been down there yet?” I said I hadn’t, and he said, “I’ll take you down and show it to you right now. Man, it’s a honey,” and he did, and it was.

It was made out of gray stone, like the other buildings, only it was a lot newer and didn’t have any ivy on it, and from the outside it looked like a great big God-damn cow barn, but on the inside it was fancy as hell and looked like it covered about a thousand square miles and had enough room for about a million people to sit and watch, and as a matter of fact old Dilky said there was room for fifteen thousand. I got to thinking that fifteen thousand people could make a hell of a lot of racket if they were even half as crazy as the God-damn spooks who went to the games at the high school, because there were usually only a couple thousand at the high school at the most, and I found out later that the people who watched the games at Pipskill were even crazier, and when you played in the field house it was just like being in all the God-damn nut houses in the world wrapped into one. As a matter of fact, Pipskill was what’s called a basketball school, and no one cared if the stinking football team wound up in the cellar every year, which it always did, but if the basketball team didn’t win the league championship and everything else that was around to be won, somebody better look out for his God-damn head.

I might as well say right now, though, that I didn’t get to play much in the field house the first year because they had this lousy rule that you could only play three years on the first team — the varsity team, it’s called — and the first year you had to play on the crummy freshman team, and you went around and played the freshman teams at the other schools in the league, and no one paid much attention to it. I was against the rule and thought it was pretty God-damn crummy, and I tried to think of a way to get around it, and I asked Dilky if I couldn’t play the first three years and just skip the last one, but he said I couldn’t and it was just something I’d have to put up with, though he thought himself that it was pretty stinking not to let a guy play four years.

After we’d looked at the field house, old Dilky took me around to the frat house where I was going to stay and introduced me to a guy named Mellon who was a senior in the school. This guy turned out to be the big cheese around the frat house, and I didn’t like him from the start because he had this snotty attitude, and you could tell just by looking at him that his old man was loaded, a God-damn millionaire or something, and the truth is, he was nothing less than the vice-president of a railroad, as it turned out. Anyhow, this Mellon spook had a way of tipping up his chin and looking at you down the sides of his stinking nose, and his nose would sort of quiver like whoever he was looking at needed a God-damn bath, and he looked at me this way and held out a hand with the fingers kind of dangling from it. “How are you, Scaggs?” he said, and I said I was all right and took his hand, and it was just like picking up a handful of fishing worms, and he said, “I understand you’re a damn fine basketball player,” and I said I sure as hell was.

Old Dilky said, “Well, Skimmer, I’ll leave you to get settled now. We don’t start serious practice for another month, but you’d better drop in afternoons and start getting your eye back,” and I said I would, and he went away, and Mellon said, “You’ll be bunking with Spicer. Come along now, I’ll show you your room.” I didn’t know who the hell Spicer was, but I followed Mellon upstairs to the room, and Spicer wasn’t there, but it was a damn swell room, and I don’t mind saying it was a hell of a lot better than any room I’d ever had or thought about having. Mellon hung around a few minutes telling me some of the God-damn house rules I was supposed to mind, but I didn’t pay much attention, just wishing he’d go the hell away and leave me alone, and after a while he did, and I went over to the window and looked down at the yard.

It was a big yard with the grass as green and smooth as one of Beegie’s pool tables and a box hedge all around it that was clipped slick and level on top by someone who knew just how to do it, and the house itself was a lot like the house Marsha lived in, only bigger, with white pillars at the front and green shutters at the windows and everything, and as a matter of fact I was damn lucky to get a fancy place like that to flop in, because usually you had to be pledged and voted in and all that crap, but they had it set up to let star basketball players in without it, and I’m not kidding myself a God-damn bit that I’d have never got in otherwise, but otherwise, as far as that goes, I wouldn’t have been at the God-damn school at all.

I flopped on the bed and lay there thinking that this was sure as hell the life and wishing that the old man and the old lady could get a look at me now, and I was still lying there when the door opened and this guy about six feet tall came in, and he had sort of sandy hair that stuck up every which way on his God-damn head and a nose that looked like it had got caught in a knuckle shower, and he saw me flopped on the bed and said, “You’re Scaggs, and I’m Spicer,” just like that, just like he’d settled the God-damn issue once and for all, and it annoyed the hell out of me, to tell the truth, and I said, “The hell we are!” and he stopped and laughed and ran his hand through his crazy hair and said, “Well, aren’t we?” and I was bound to say then that I was Scaggs, at any rate, and he could damn well be Spicer if he wanted too.

He sat down in a chair and swung his legs up over one arm and said, “I suppose old Bunny brought you up,” and I said some creepy bastard named Mellon had done it, and he said, “That’s Bunny,” and I said, “Why the hell you call him Bunny?” and he said, “Didn’t you notice the way his nose quivered? Like a damn rabbit’s?” and I said I had, as a matter of fact, and he said, “Well, that’s why we call him Bunny.”

“He acted pretty snotty, if you ask me,” I said, “and just between us I felt like poking him in the mouth,” and he said, “Everyone feels like that about Bunny, but no one ever does it because he’s got all the God-damn money in the world, or anyhow his old man has, which is the same thing in the long run. Personally, I think he’s a fairy.”

“What makes you think he’s a fairy?” I said, and he said, “Well, he’s got this damn dainty way about him, you just watch the way he flips around and goes on about things, and you never see him with any girls or anything, in spite of having a car of his own and all that money, and besides, he was kicked out of some school back east, and everyone thinks that was the reason, so don’t let him get you in any dark corners.”

I said it would be a sad day for fairies when the son of a bitch got
me
in a corner, and I asked him how long he’d been there, and he said a couple of days, and I said it seemed to me he knew a hell of a lot for a guy who’d only been around two days, and he said, “Oh, I pick up things fast,” and then he looked at me for a long time like I was a stinking freak in a sideshow or something, and finally he said, “So you’re another one of old Umplett’s whores.”

It made me a little hot, to tell the truth, and I said, “What the hell you mean, whores?”

“Basketball player,” he said. “Like me.”

“Where’d you get that whore stuff?” I said, and he said, “Oh, don’t get your bowels in an uproar about it. I just call us that because of the way we get paid and kept and all, and I guess if I include myself you got no call to bitch, and besides, I’m all for it, and it looks like a hell of a good life.”

Well, I had to admit that he had the right to call himself anything he damn well pleased, and if it just happened to include me, that was just tough, and what was more, when I got right down to it, I sort of liked the God-damn goofy bastard, and that’s the truth of it. I asked him where he’d played basketball, and he said over in the next state, and he’d had a pretty good deal at the state university over there, but at the last minute old Dilky had shown up with a better one, so he’d changed his mind and come to Pipskill. I told him about how I’d been top scorer in the whole damn state and most valuable man in all the tournaments and everything like that, and he asked me what my points total had been, and I told him, and he whistled and said I must be pretty damn good at that and he’d bet we’d make what he called a damn good one-two punch on the Pipskill team, and all in all I had a feeling we were going to get along good together, and he started calling me Skimmer, and I started calling him Micky, which is what he said he wanted to be called.

The very next morning I got enrolled in some classes, and later I took a test that was supposed to show if you were bright, and I guess I was bright enough at least, because I never heard any more of it, and I got the general idea that they didn’t much care how God-damn ignorant you were just as long as there was some chance they could teach you a little something later, and I’ll have to admit there was another test I took that turned me up ignorant.

This was a test in spelling and grammar and how to say things the right way and all, and I guess I didn’t do much on it, and as a matter of fact, from what they told me, hardly a damn thing. They gave you this test so they’d know which rhetoric class to put you in. Rhetoric is what they called it, but it was the same damn thing they called English in high school, only they made it a little tougher for you, and it had always given me a pain in the you know what, and it still did. Everyone had to take it, there wasn’t any getting out of it, and they had it divided into three classes that they called Rhetoric I and Rhetoric II and Rhetoric Zero. Rhetoric II was for the God-damn geniuses or something, and Rhetoric I was watered down a little for the ones who were no better than they were supposed to be, and Rhetoric Zero was for the ones who loused up the test, and I was in Rhetoric Zero.

This class in Rhetoric Zero only had about ten guys and one girl in it, and the guy who taught it was about the spookiest guy you could hope to meet outside a freak show. He was tall and thin with bones that stuck out at all his God-damn corners, and he had this long face with sad eyes that made him look like a mule, and when he walked his arms and legs just flew off in any damn direction they pleased without any relation at all to the direction he was supposed to be going, and honest to God, it looked like he was about to fly all apart any damn second.