Twerp (12 page)

“It’s just a number,” I said. But I have to admit, listening to Lonnie tell the story like that made me feel real good.

“But that’s just a warm-up,” Lonnie said. “The guy runs another four-point-nine in the semis and then five-zero in the finals … only because he slowed up even more at the end. Willie came in second. It was a sad day for the sixth graders. I know that for a fact because I was one of them. Except I was real proud of Julian, so who cares?”

I don’t think Lonnie even realized he’d just told Jillian and Eduardo that he’d been left back, that it was his second time through the sixth grade. I sure wasn’t going to point it out to him.

“That is very fast,
Julian
,” Eduardo said. “
Very
fast.”

Yeah, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I could have listened to them talk like that for hours. Except just when I began to think that maybe I
was
as fast as Lonnie was saying, that maybe I
wasn’t
a fake, that maybe the entire school
wasn’t
going to find out that I was now the
second
-fastest kid in P.S. 23 on Track and Field Day, Eduardo winked at me. It was that same wink from the playground. It cut right through me. It was as if he was saying,
You and I both know what’s going on. We both know the truth. We both know talk is cheap, and that sooner or later we’re going to race … and we both know how that’s going to turn out, don’t
we?
It was as if he was using Lonnie’s bragging on me to get in another dig. That’s what it felt like.

Lonnie got real quiet and thoughtful on the bus ride home after the barbecue. The bus was a rattler, even louder than usual, so that made the lack of conversation less noticeable. I felt awful for him. But what could I say? He shouldn’t have said what he said about his mom. Even if he didn’t mean it in a bad way, which I’m sure he didn’t, that’s how it came off.

The bus rolled to a stop at a traffic light, and Lonnie looked up at me. He looked tragic. That’s the only way to describe the expression on his face. Like his entire life got blown to smithereens. “I should have let well enough alone.”

“No, you did all right,” I said. “I think she likes you.”

“She thinks I’m a bad guy. But I’m
not
a bad guy.”

“If she thinks that, then she’s off her rocker,” I said.

“Do you think it’s hopeless?”

“How could it be hopeless? Nothing’s hopeless.”

“So you think I can fix it?” he said.

“Sure, just be natural the next time you see her.”

“Why don’t you sit next to her at lunch? Then I’ll come over—”

“No way. I’m out of this, Lonnie—”

“C’mon, just sit down next to her in the cafeteria. What’s the big deal?”

“She sits with her friends,” I said.

“Well,
you’re
one of her friends now.”

“You’re as much her friend as I am. Why don’t
you
sit down next to her?”

“I need another chance, Jules. I can’t do this alone.”

I didn’t answer him. That was how we left it.

April 7, 1969

I know I’m supposed to keep going, or else
the deal to get out of English assignments is off. But the barbecue on Saturday got me real emotional, and then writing about it killed Sunday. Just killed it, the entire day.
Sunday
. It was a gorgeous sunny day, warm but not sticky or hot like Saturday, with just the right kind of breeze blowing through the window, and I was holed up inside, scribbling away before I forgot a thing. There’s no way I would’ve spent that much time on a regular paper, not even if I was writing about
Julius Caesar
.

What I’m saying, Mr. Selkirk, is that I deserve a break. There, I said it. I deserve a break. I don’t want to write anymore for a while. I don’t know how long, exactly. But I need to stop doing this. I’ll come back to it sooner or later, but right now I need to give the thing a rest.

April 14, 1969

It’s amazing how taking a break, or
just
thinking
about taking a break, gets your juices flowing. I mean, I wasn’t going to write another word for the rest of April. But the truth is, I was itching to get going again after only three days. So then I decided I wouldn’t write for two weeks. Then that became one week, and now here I am, one week later, sitting down at the desk, Bic in hand, raring to go.

It was a perfect week to take off, as it turned out. Nothing much happened, unless you count what happened to Eric the Red. I don’t know if I should even write about it since it’s squirmy. But it seemed to get Lonnie’s mind off Jillian. He let the entire week pass without nagging me to sit next to her at lunch. Whatever the reason, I needed a break from that too.

The thing with Eric the Red happened Thursday afternoon. I guess I should mention right off that he’s all right. He rode in an ambulance to the hospital, sirens blaring, but came home that night. His mom and dad brought him back around nine o’clock. Quentin and I were hanging around in front of the Hampshire House, so we saw them drive up. Eric’s dad dropped off him and his mom, then went looking for a parking space, so we got to talk for a couple of minutes. Eric was worn out, but even he was cracking up about it.

I mean, it
was
kind of hilarious. Not at the time, of course, but afterward, once we knew for sure that Eric didn’t get killed. The six of us were out back in Ponzini—Howie Wartnose, Shlomo Shlomo, Quentin, Eric, Lonnie, and me. It felt good to be there with the entire gang. It seemed like weeks since all six of us showed up at once. Also, I knew Lonnie would be his regular self. He never talks about Jillian to the rest of them.

He
was
his regular self too. It was as though he’d been saving up the real Lonnie, keeping him under wraps, but now, back in Ponzini, surrounded by the entire gang, he let loose. He was on us from the second we got there. It was brutal how he was ranking us out, but it was beautiful. It was art, almost. He had us cracking up at one another and at ourselves. It wasn’t
what
he said. If I quoted him word for word, you’d just shrug it off. But the thing
about Lonnie is, when he’s his regular self,
what
he says doesn’t mean as much as
how
he says it.

So the six of us, like I said, were out back in Ponzini, and Lonnie was ranking on us, and just when it felt as though he was going to run out of insults, out of nowhere Eric decided he wanted to walk Ponzini’s Fence. Why he picked that moment, I have no idea. But he asked Lonnie to bring him the circus axle, and right off Lonnie went and got it for him.

Now I guess I should explain about the circus axle. It’s actually a car axle that fell out of the bottom of one of the rusted-out wrecks in Ponzini a couple of years ago. Lonnie was the one who first noticed it and dragged it out from underneath the car. It’s maybe four feet long, solid metal, and heavier than you’d think. We call it the circus axle because we use it to balance ourselves when we walk the fence that separates Ponzini from the private backyards on the other side. It’s like a circus act. The fence is about sixty feet long and six feet high, and it takes nerve to walk the entire length because there’s nothing but concrete on the Ponzini side and cobblestone patios on the other.

The idea to use the circus axle to walk the fence was Lonnie’s, but the first guy to climb up and do it was Quick Quentin. Lonnie dared him, and Quentin did it like it was nothing. Once I saw Quentin do it, then I had to do it, and then Lonnie did it himself. Howie Wartnose
was going to go next, but then Victor Ponzini showed up—he must have been watching us from his bedroom window—and begged us to let him try it, so we did.

He got about two steps, dropped the axle, then keeled to the left and fell off. He landed flat on his stomach, then rolled onto his back, gasping for air. He kept mouthing a word that we couldn’t make out. There was no sound, just his mouth widening and tightening. You know that thing a fish does when it gets yanked out of water? That’s what his mouth looked like. But then Ponzini managed to suck in enough air to form the word: “Wind …” We leaned in closer. “Wind … wind … wind …” That was when we figured out what he meant. He’d gotten the wind knocked out of him. That cracked us up for some reason. Of course, it was mean to laugh while he was still lying on the ground. But the way he was gasping the word “wind” just seemed real comical. Maybe you had to be there.

After that, Lonnie began to call the fence Ponzini’s Fence, which is how the lot came to be called Ponzini. It doesn’t quite make sense, if you stop and think about it, but for whatever reason, the name stuck.

Victor Ponzini was the first person to fall off the fence but not the last. It took Howie Wartnose three times to make it across, and he got scraped up pretty good the first two tries. Shlomo Shlomo lost his balance, dropped
the axle, and tried to jump down—except the axle hit the fence, seesawed back up, and hit Shlomo in the chin as he was jumping down. The poor guy wound up with three stitches and a tetanus shot. He never tried again after that. Beverly Segal fell off, but then she tried again a couple of weeks later and became the first and only girl to walk the entire fence.

I think it was watching Beverly Segal walk the fence that made Eric feel as if he had to do it too. He was the only one of us who’d never tried. But the thing was, he had a real phobia about it. He didn’t even like to
hop
the fence, which we had to do from time to time to get back a ball during stickball. Even Lonnie laid off him about it. I mean, you don’t want to force a guy to do what he can’t do.

But for whatever reason, Eric stepped up last Thursday and asked Lonnie for the circus axle. Maybe we should’ve tried to talk him out of it. But how can you talk the guy out of it without making him feel worse? Put yourself in Eric’s place. I mean,
Beverly Segal did it
. If you’re Eric, even if you fall flat on your face, I think you have to give it a shot.

So Lonnie went and got the axle while the rest of us helped Eric climb the fence. You could feel how scared he was going up. I had hold of his left leg, right below the knee, and I could feel the tremble running down his
calf. I didn’t think he was going to be able to stand, but when Lonnie held out the circus axle, he grabbed the end of it and used the leverage to hoist himself upright. I still had hold of his left sneaker, which was as high as I could reach, and Quentin still had hold of his right sneaker, but at that point there was nothing we could have done if he lost his balance.

Eric nodded at Lonnie to let go of the circus axle, and then he pulled it up to his hips, into balanced position, and then Quentin and I let go of his sneakers … and Eric was on his own. It took him a couple of seconds to gather himself, but he got the hang of it pretty fast, letting the axle drift up and down instead of adjusting with his hips. That’s the trick. If you feel yourself tilting to one side, you lift the axle on that side until you come upright again.

The worst thing you can do, of course, is panic. To be honest, that’s what I thought was going to happen to Eric. I was afraid that he’d built the thing up so much in his mind that he wouldn’t trust his feet. The fence doesn’t move. When you stop and think about it, walking the fence is just like walking a straight line—except you’re six feet up in the air. If you put one foot in front of the other, and you do it again and again, there’s nothing to it.

So how do you
not
panic? You don’t look down. That seems like common sense, but it’s the difference between guys who make it across and guys who don’t. If you keep
your eyes straight ahead and let the circus axle do the work for you, you’ve got it made. But if you look down, and you start smiling at your friends, and you start thinking about how their eyes are on you, thinking about how spastic you’re going to look if you fall, thinking about which side to jump down if you feel yourself falling—then you’re dead meat.

That’s what got Eric the Red. Looking down, I mean. He was doing fine for the first ten steps, working the axle like a pro, but then Quentin and Howie started yelling at him, telling him he was halfway across, which wasn’t true, and he knew it wasn’t true, which made him glance down to give them a sarcastic look. Then Lonnie shushed all of us and told Eric to focus on what he was doing, which was good advice, but
that
made him nod down at Lonnie, then look forward, then shake his head, then look forward … and that was the beginning of the end. His knees began to wobble, first the right and then the left. He recovered for a split second, but then his hips started to go. By then, his eyes were bulging out of their sockets. Full panic. He let go of the circus axle, which clanged down on the fence and then clattered to the ground. His arms were flailing in circles.

“Jump down!” Lonnie yelled.

It was more good advice. The trouble was that Eric was keeling to the right at that moment. The natural thing
for him to do would have been to jump in that direction, but that would have landed him in one of the private backyards. The rest of us were standing in Ponzini, to his left, so Eric took it in his mind to jump back toward us.

He split the difference.

He came straight down on the bar at the top of the fence, with one leg on either side. Right on his crotch. You could hear the air go out of him, a long, loud
“Oooooomph.”
For a second, no one moved. Not even Eric. His eyes were shut, his hands gripping the top of the fence. Then he opened his eyes, turned his head to the right, and puked. It was disgusting to watch, but he puked his guts into one of the private backyards.

Afterward, his head sank down onto his chest. His eyes were still open, and he was still holding on to the bar at the top of the fence, but he was out. You could see the glaze over his eyes. There was no one home. He started to roll to the right, away from us, but Lonnie lunged forward and grabbed his left leg. Quentin and I jumped up onto the fence and caught him by the waist. The three of us managed to ease him down from the fence on the Ponzini side.