Ultimate Sports (27 page)

Mr. Krenzwinkle struck the triangle every twenty seconds or so. It was getting very close to ten o’clock. The breeze around the mountain stiffened into a wind that bent the spring grass and whistled through the branches of nearby trees. Far in the distance, I heard a rumbling that could have been thunder. The little hairs stood up all down the back of my neck. My knees got a little weak, and I think I might have fallen down if I hadn’t been holding on to Jennifer’s warm hand.

And then it was ten o’clock on the nose, and Mr. Krenzwinkle struck the triangle, and, of course, nothing happened. The wind died back down into a breeze, and the distant thunder or whatever it was never rumbled again, and the oceans didn’t rise and the world didn’t end. We all just stood there, waiting. Every few minutes Mr. Krenzwinkle struck the triangle. Perhaps it was my imagination, but as the minutes crawled by he seemed to strike it less and less frequently and with less and less enthusiasm.

Finally, at about ten-thirty, a little girl—she couldn’t have been more than six or seven—looked up at her mother and said, “Mommy, I’m cold.”

The little girl’s voice was clearly audible all around the circle of bodies. Mr. Krenzwinkle slowly lowered his triangle. I was grateful that I couldn’t see his face as he said, “Let’s go home, everybody.” He took the pointed hat off his head and held it so that the tassel pointed straight down, and began to unbutton his scarlet robe.

I had thought that the ride out was on the quiet and grim side, but the ride back home was much worse. What do you say to three people who have just found out that
they’ve devoted years to a religion that’s really just a bunch of hooey? I kept my big mouth shut and listened to the tires eat up the miles of highway.

When we got back to Jennifer’s house I said goodbye to her parents and headed home. Jennifer walked with me as far as the corner of her block. She didn’t say a thing—but I could tell how confused she was by the way she kept biting her lip. It was like she was relieved and disappointed at the same time, and didn’t know what to say or how to act. “Well, bye,” she said when we reached the corner.

“Bye,” I said. “Maybe we can start practicing for the state tournament soon.”

She nodded very slightly. “Maybe.”

“Come on,” I said, “cheer up a bit. I know you’re confused, but it’s not the end of the world….” I choked as I realized what I’d said. “What I mean is, try to look on the bright side….”

“Goodbye,” she said, and hurried off back to her house.

My mom was still awake when I got home. “How was the astronomy?” she asked. “See any planets?”

“Outer space is a pretty bizarre place,” I told her.

“Bizarre in what way?”

I thought for a second of Mr. Krenzwinkle standing on the mountaintop in the funny pointed hat, waiting for Shaftsbury’s prediction to come true. I wondered what had passed through his mind when nothing happened— embarrassment, anger, joy? “Unpredictable,” I mumbled.

“That’s what makes it interesting, I guess,” she said. “I’m going up to bed. Turn the lights off when you go up. Night.”

“Night,” I told her. I made myself a cup of tea and sat
there for a little while, listening to the small sounds that filled up the quiet April midnight. I could hear my father snoring regularly from the second floor. An owl hooted several yards away, its low hunting call a deep, rich sound. Our house was nearly forty years old, and every few seconds a floorboard squeaked or a screen window vibrated. And underlying all these sounds was the endless feint chirping and buzzing of the night insects as they marched back and forth, waging their endless wars through our lawn and garden. I usually take those sounds for granted, but that night I sipped tea and listened to them, and it was nice to hear the raspy snoring and the old house shifting and the endless buzz of the insects. Then I rinsed out my cup, turned off the light, and went up to bed.

Jennifer and I practiced twice in the week before the state tournament, but she just wasn’t the same player. She was distracted and uneven, and I could tell just from watching her miss forehands that she was going through a hard time at home. I didn’t know exactly what to do for her so I just tried to be friendly and supportive and didn’t complain too much when she botched shots.

We got crushed in the second round of the states by a team from Franklin Lakes that we would have beaten handily on a good day. I played pretty well, but Jennifer was off and she knew it. After the match she tried to apologize to me, but I told her not to be silly. “We had a great year. And I can see you’re going through a hard time. We’ll win the states next year.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know….”

“Want to talk about it?”

“My parents are thinking of moving back to California.”

“When?”

“Real soon, if we go. It’s not decided yet.”

“If you do, I’ll be sorry.”

“Me too, a little bit,” she admitted. “I told you it wasn’t a good idea for us to get to be friends.”

“Are we?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know much these days. Everything’s very confusing. Even my father’s confused.” She lowered her voice, as if telling me a secret. “Even Shaftsbury’s a little confused.”

“I’m sure it will work itself out,” I told her.

“I’m sure it will,” she agreed, but she didn’t sound very confident.

I didn’t hear from Jennifer for about a week after that, and I took the silence to mean that her family had departed suddenly for their valley in southern California. I tried not to think about the whole thing too much. I got a job at the Burger Barn, and I watched a lot of videos on cable, and a couple of times when I felt like calling her I got my racket and some balls and hit them against a wall for a few hours till the ache went away.

She called me on a Saturday, at about eleven. “Hey, Andy, are you mad at me?” she asked.

“Why would I be?”

“For not calling. Are you?”

“No.” I hesitated. “Yes.”

“Well, everything’s finally settled. We’re staying. Are you free this morning?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Want to hit some tennis balls? C’mon, please? I have a new can….”

“What kind?”

“Wilson,” she said. “Please?”

“I’ll meet you at the park in half an hour.”

“Great,” she said. “Be prepared for a battle.”

She was great that day. Her serve was blistering and her backhands were accurate, and she stepped up and ripped forehands back at me with gleeful savagery. It was all I could do to split two sets with her. After the second set, which she won, she jumped over the net to shake my hand. “Anytime you want a lesson, let me know,” she said.

“You’re in great spirits today. Did you hit the lottery?”

“No,” she said, “Shaftsbury found his mistake.”

“His mistake?”

“Yes, in his calculations. You won’t believe this, but he left out a variable. No wonder the world didn’t come to an end two weeks ago.”

“So he’s gonna come out with a new date?”

“I think so. He’s working on it now. It’s amazing to think that even Shaftsbury could make a simple mistake like that.”

“It could happen to anyone,” I told her. “But I guess that gives us some time.”

“Sure,” she said. “My dad’s been talking to Shaftsbury, and he says it looks like we have at least five years.” She smiled, and it was a joy to watch. It was like the sparkle in her blue eyes ignited her entire face. “Maybe even ten.”

“I’ll settle for an hour,” I told her, “if you’ll split an icecream soda with me. Since you’ve been the holdout, I get to choose the flavors.”

“Okay,” she said, putting her racket away. “But no strawberry. I hate strawberry ice cream.”

“So do I. What do you know, we have something in common besides tennis.”

“You never really believed Shaftsbury, did you?” she
asked. “Tell me the truth. You think my whole family’s crazy?”

As we walked to the ice-cream parlor, I gave her a careful, but true, answer. “Actually, I don’t really have any philosophical differences with Shaftsbury,” I told her. “He built the valley and the schools that produced you, and you turned out all right. And we
are
polluting the water and the air and the atmosphere, and Pm perfectly willing to believe that eventually the gift that was given to us may be taken back.”

“And given to the dolphins?” she pressed.

“I have trouble with the dolphins,” I admitted. “But aside from that, Shaftsbury and I pretty much agree. The only place we differ is in the matter of timing.” I took her hand in mine, and I guess my answer was okay, because she didn’t pull away.

That was a great hour. We sat in that ice-cream parlor side by side, laughing and talking and making pigs of ourselves, eating every variety of ice cream except for strawberry. And as Jennifer finished off a banana split, I realized that Shaftsbury and I disagreed on one other minor point.

Maybe he did have telepathic visions, and maybe he did go on a UFO ride through the galaxy, and I guess it’s possible that his calculations about the future and the end of the world may someday come true. Who knows? By all accounts he’s brilliant. For me, speaking as a seventeen-year-old who hates physics and likes tennis, I believe that most of the things worth knowing in the universe are contained within the bounds of the pretty blue eyes of a girl you like very much. And as Jennifer scooped up the last of the banana split, licked the spoon, and grinned at me, the future that I glimpsed in her eyes looked very encouraging, to say the least.

David Klass is known for novels whose main characters are involved in sports.” He is the author of
Breakaway Run, A Different Season, The Atami Dragons
, and
Wrestling with Honor
, which the American Library Association has included among its 100 Best of the Best Books for Young Adults published between 1967 and 1992. In
California Blue
, Mr. Klass combines the world of high-school track with ecological concerns and parental conflicts in a story about seventeen-year-old John Rogers, who discovers a new species of butterfly on land owned by the lumber mill at which his dying father works. Mr. Klass’s most recent novel for young adults is
Danger Zone
, in which a worldwide junior basketball tournament becomes very dangerous for the American team.

As a teenager David Klass played baseball and soccer at Leonia Public High School in New Jersey and went on to do the same at Yale University, from which he graduated. In Los Angeles, where he now lives and writes, he swims and “occasionally limps up and down the basketball court.”

Mr. Klass says the relationship between Andrew and Jennifer in “The Gospel According to Krenzwinkle” was inspired by his moving to Los Angeles and meeting some smart people who had unusual views of reality.

Vicik
never came to my house and I never went to his house, but he was my friend, and it was like God was my friend. He was strong as a truck. He could run faster and hit a ball farther than anybody. He’d dare anything. Nothing could ever touch him.

What I remember best about him is stickball, the way he held the bat, waving it in a little circle over his head, just daring you to get the ball past him. He could hit a ball three sewers, from one end of Britain Street to the other.

Britain Street was the best place to play stickball because there was hardly any traffic. All you needed was a taped-up broomstick and a rubber ball. Every game had a season. There was a squirt gun season, a yo-yo season, and a season when we played street hockey on roller skates that we clamped to our shoes and tightened with special keys we kept on cords around our necks. We played stick-ball all year round.

Vicik and Dov were the leaders. Vicik tossed the bat to
Dov, who tossed it back. They went fist over fist up the stick. Last hold got the first pick.

Dov was tall and skinny. He talked fast and stuttered, spattering spit in all directions. He always picked his pal, Jack, first. Vicik picked Leo. I would have picked him, too.

The strongest were chosen first, the fastest, the best hitters. The scare in my belly was big. “Choose me,” I prayed. I didn’t care if I was the last, as long as I played. It was shameful not to be picked. Vicik finally saw me and gave me the nod. “Okay, Lenny, you play out.”

I ran out almost to the end of the street. I counted two manhole covers. “Hit the ball,” I yelled. I slapped my hands together. I was small, but everyone said I had a man’s voice. “All the way,” I yelled, “hit it all the way to me!”

Vicik smiled at everything I did. If I missed the ball, he winked at me. And when I caught it, he said, “Thataway, Lenny.”

My father never smiled at anything I did. All he said was, “I don’t want you to play in the street.” Where he came from, you either went to school or you went to work. He called my games “foolishness.” Everything I did was “foolishness.” He wanted me to stay in the house, do my homework, study, and listen to the opera like him. He always wanted me to do something I didn’t want to do.

He didn’t get it. We had to play in the street or we didn’t play. Growing up in New York City, there were just the streets, the cement sidewalks, the stoops, the brick walls. No Little League, no grown-ups supervising games. Hardly any playgrounds.

We got chased by everyone: storekeepers afraid for their windows, and people who couldn’t stand us playing
stoopball against their steps. “Chickey!” Chickey was the call when a cop was coming. We ran, the cop after us. He got the bat, broke it in a sewer grate, and dropped the pieces down the hole. It was bad. A heavy-duty stick with a good taped handle was hard to find.

It was all part of the game. The only place that belonged to us was the middle of the street. Us and the cars. “Heads up. Car coming!” Play stopped. We jeered at the drivers, dared them to brush against us. “Go on, move, get outta here!” we yelled.

You had to have nerve. And never show fear. Once, on my bike, I grabbed the back of a moving truck. I was on one side and Vicik was on the other side. The truck went so fast my heart was down between my legs. I had to let go. But Vicik never let go.

We hopped rides on the trolley cars that ran up and down White Plains Road. If the motorman didn’t see us, we could ride all the way to Burke Avenue or even Gun Hill Road. Every time the trolley stopped, we jumped off. When it started, we jumped on again. Hook a hand through the window, but keep ducked down. If the motorman spotted you, he’d whack your hand off. A kid in my class got bounced off the hood of a car that way and broke both his arms.

We flew kites on the roof and chased each other over the top. Being on the roof was like being on top of the world. We looked out over the rooftops. At night you could see the stars.

“Chicken! Let’s see you walk the edge.” Vicik walked the edge like it was nothing. On a dare, he hung over the edge, seven stories in the air, and let go. The fire escape was right under him, but it scared me just to think about it. Once I’d seen a dead man on the sidewalk, covered
with a canvas. He’d been working on the building and slipped off a scaffold. His paint-stained boots stuck out from under the canvas.

My father didn’t like me to go out. “Where are you going? Put something on.” Like I was going out naked. I wasn’t cold; he was. He never went out without getting all dressed up—suit, tie, hat, his shoes shined. He was like a soldier in uniform.

The first thing my father did in the morning was comb his hair. He combed it straight back, smooth and flat behind his ears. Then he exercised. He opened the window. My mother told him not to stand by the window in his underwear, in front of all the neighbors. “What neighbors?” he said. “Who’s looking?”

He stretched, he took deep breaths, everything deliberate and slow. He bent his knees, straightened up, then touched his toes. Then he combed his hair again.

He rubbed his hand over the bristle on his cheeks, then took out the shaving cream and the razor. That was the part I liked best. When he was done, he’d hand me the razor, but without the blade. I foamed up and ran the razor up and down and all around my face like a sled in the snow.

One time I decided I was going to teach my father how to play. We were on the street together, and I was bouncing my ball. “Catch,” I said. “What?” he said. I showed him the ball. I put the ball in his hand. “Now you give it to me, Pop.” He handed me the ball, then wiped his hands on his white handkerchief.

I bounced the ball on the sidewalk, then threw it to him, nice and easy. He caught it. “That’s the way, Pop, good.”

My dream was that my father would learn about games
and play catch with me. He could pitch to me and I could practice my batting, which was not too great. I threw the ball again, and it got away from him. He was wearing a coat and a hat, and he couldn’t bend. The ball slipped like water through his fingers and rolled out in the street. “Grab it!” I yelled. But he didn’t move. He stood there like a dope.

I dove for the ball. It was my pink Spaldeen, the best ball in the world. I saw the car coming, I had plenty of time, but my father went nuts. “Stop!” His voice was like an explosion. “Are you crazy?”

Top, my ball…” The car rolled over it and split it in half. “My Spaldeen…” I picked up the pieces. The in-sides were pink like bubble gum and it smelled like new rubber.

“How many times do I have to tell you: Stay out of the street,” my father said. “All you do is play. Play is not important. School is important.”

I didn’t say anything. Underneath everything, I knew I didn’t have to listen to him, because he wasn’t a real American. When I thought that, it made me feel sorry for him. I was born here and he wasn’t. I knew I was going to leave him behind.

There was never a moment when I felt he understood. He was from another world. He had nothing to teach me. I learned from my friends, from Vicik. There was nothing I needed from my father, except maybe to teach me how to shave or make a tie.

•   •   •

On Saturday I was out of the house early. Out of the dark rooms, the corridors, the tension. “Stop! Stand still a minute.” They were both on me. Mother and Father.
One of them says, “Where are you going?” The other one says, “You didn’t eat anything yet.”

I hardly heard them. I was out, up the stairs and over the roof. It had rained overnight and there were puddles in all the dips. The air was clear and clean and taut as a wire. I couldn’t breathe enough of it. One last breath and I dove down another dark, spooky staircase. I pounded on a door. “Let’s go, Mutt.” He was my real friend.

He wanted me to come inside. I looked past him down the dark corridor of his apartment. His mother was in the kitchen, and he had to finish eating before she’d let him out.

I waited in front of the building. Mutt and I were handball partners. I was left-handed and that was an advantage, because our strong arms were on the outside. I liked to watch the older guys play. They played the same game we did, only they played with gloves and a small hard black ball. Those were things I really wanted, a pair of leather gloves and a regulation handball.

I had a ball in my pocket. I bounced it, threw it up, caught it. Besides the ball, I carried marbles in my pockets, trading cards, a pocketknife, coins. We played marbles in the dirt. I used my biggest, smoothest marble as a shooter. The little ones were emmies, and there were steelies and dearies you held up to the light. We matched pennies, playing odds and evens, or pitched them against a wall. Or you could put a coin on the crack in the sidewalk, then try to hit it with a ball to the next crack.

Sometimes, if no boys were around I’d play potsie with the girls. You chalked the game on the sidewalk, eight numbered squares. You dropped a bottle cap or a stone into square one, hopped on one foot through all the squares, picked up the marker, and hopped out.

Mutt and I played handball all morning. When I got home my hands were swollen, my fingers fat like sausages. Nobody was home, but my mother had left me a sandwich, a glass of milk, and a big piece of yellow sponge cake. I ate and then fell down on the bed, sank down into pillows and quilts. I heard cars honking through the open window, sirens, kids calling. The window curtains blew in and out.

When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. I staggered out to the other room. My mother was cutting a pattern for a dress on the table. My father was telling her she was going to ruin everything. I ate noodle pudding and washed it down with a glass of milk.

“I’m going out.” I had the door open.

“Where are you going? Shut the door and come back inside.”

“My friends are waiting.”

“You’ve been out enough. Sit. Read something.”

My father read the paper. I went to the refrigerator and got the white bread and butter.

“Are you eating again?” he said. “If you’re eating, sit down. Only animals eat standing up.”

I sat down. My father turned a page, wet a finger, and turned another page. I could hear the kids outside through the open windows. It was getting dark. I leaned on my elbow. In the distance, along the horizon, along the edge of the sky and the rooftops, I saw a train creeping along the elevated track.

The paper rustled, then slipped from my father’s hand. I waited till his eyes closed. I had my sneakers off. I held them up for my mother to see as I tiptoed out of the room.

In the bedroom, I looked out the window. The sky was
still bright above, but below in the courtyard it was dark. I hung out the window and saw Vicik’s blond head shining. I bird-whistled. “Vicik, up here.”

I dangled my sneakers out the window, let one go, and then the other. They fell five floors, straight down. Vicik caught them. He motioned for me to come down. I went out the fire escape window, down the narrow metal stairs. On the last landing, I was still too high. Vicik reached up. “Leggo.” He had his arms out. “Leggo, Lenny.”

I let go, fell into his arms, and we both went down. I laced on my sneakers, and we ran off to find the others.

There were a million moths around the streetlights. The best game at night was Johnny on the Pony. We divided into two big teams. I was on Vicik’s team. Dov’s team made itself into a horse first.

The fattest boy, the pillow boy, stood with his back to the wall. The other boys on his team bent over and locked together, head to tail, making the horse. The last boy tucked his head between the legs of the boy in front of him. “Anyone who farts gets killed.”

Our team was across the street. I was the first one to run, because I was the smallest. “Go, Lenny!” Vicki yelled. I sprinted, picked up speed. I got my knees high, let my arms swing. “Go, Lenny!” I vaulted over the bent back of the last boy and threw myself as far forward on the horse as I could. I came down hard on somebody’s bony back. The next boy landed on top of me, and the next, and the next, one on top of the other, digging in, hanging on.

I looked back. There came Vicik. His arms were pumping. His feet were shooting out like a duck’s. His eyes were popping out of his head. He went up higher then anyone and came down on top of us like a ton of bricks.
It was like an earthquake. The horse trembled. It started to shake and crack and fall apart.

“Johnny on the Pony,” the other team chanted. They had to say it three times. “Johnny on the Pony.…Johnny…” But they couldn’t. The horse swayed one way and then the other. And then it fell. We won.

After the game broke up, a bunch of us hung around the candy store. Vicik sat on a fire hydrant and poked at his teeth with a straw. He was telling us a joke and laughing in the middle of it. “What did the moron say when he jumped off the Empire State Building?” Vicik was laughing so hard he could hardly get out the punch line. “He’s falling, and someone says, How’s it going? And the moron says, So far so good.”

Gradually, everyone went home, but I was still there with Vicik. I knew I should go home, but it was Vicik, and I couldn’t. He bought a candy bar and we shared it. We walked around Allerton Avenue, all the way up to Boston Post Road. It was late and there was almost nobody on the street. Vicik’s house was off Mace Avenue. I’d never been on that street. The sidewalk was all broken up, and there were no apartment houses, just a lot of trees and old wooden houses.