Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories (10 page)

This was the nature of my enemy as I practiced day after day in the basement next to the furnace, perfecting, honing, polishing my burgeoning technique. Why I did it, I cannot tell. Some men are driven to climb Everest, others to go over Niagara Falls in barrels or beach balls. Some are driven to wrestle crocodiles barehanded. I only knew that in the end there would be just Farkas and me, and our tops.

One thing was sure: To get hold of a top that could even stay in the same ring with Mariah, I would have to do better than the measly assortment that Old Man Pulaski kept in the candy case among the jawbreakers, the JuJu Babies and the wax teeth. Pulaski's tops were not fighting tops. They were little-kid playing-around tops; weak, defenseless, wobbly, minnowlike, they were even used by girls.

“Do you have any other tops but them little ones?”

“D'ya wanna top or don'tcha?” Old Man Pulaski glared down at me from behind his bloody butcher's apron while the jostling knot of Lithuanian and Polish housewives clamored for soup bones.

“Yeah, but I got that kind.”

“Here, how ‘bout a nice red one?” He reached into the case, trying to hurry the sale.

“Ya got any black ones?”

“Aw, for Chrissake, black tops! Come on, kid, I ain't got no time to fool around!”

“Scut Farkas got one.”

“I told Scut Farkas if he ever came in again I'd kick his behind. He didn't get no black top here.”

“Well, he's got one.”

“Ask
him
where he got it.” He roared off back to the meat counter.

Obviously, that was out of the question. Asking Farkas where he got Mariah was about like asking King Kong where he got his fangs. So I began methodically to visit candy store, dime store, toy store—any kind of store where they might conceivably have tops. Every day on my paper route I sniffed and hunted. From time to time I even bought what looked like a promising challenger, but I knew deep down in my heart that none of them came close to Mariah. Some were better than Pulaski's, some worse. I even discovered all sorts of tricky, effete, frilly tops I had never before seen or heard of. This went on well through spring. Then, late one balmy day, slowly pedaling home on my Elgin bicycle—the pride of my life—its foxtails hanging limply in the soft air, my mind a good five light-years away, I came unexpectedly to the end of my search.

I was at least four miles beyond my usual range, in a run-down, rickety tenement section of town, near the roundhouse. The steady crash and roar of switch engines,
the shrieking and booming of Monon freight cars went on 24 hours a day, seven days a week in this country. Even when the sun was out brightly, the skies here were gray. I rarely got over this far. It was foreign territory. I pedaled aimlessly along the dingy, dark street, the curbs lined with elderly, disreputable automobiles, reading signs as I went. For the first few years after you really learn to read, you read everything in sight carefully.

Wait a minute. TOTAL VICTORY NEWSSTAND AND NOTIONS. It was a tiny, dark sliver of a shop, wedged in between two gloomy red-brick buildings, about the size of those places where a man sells celluloid combs and hunches over a lathe making keys. I swung over to the curb, squeaked on the brakes and dropped the bike in back of a derelict Hudson Terraplane. In front of the Total Victory, a faded-red-metal slotted newspaper display case leaned against a locked Coca-Cola icebox. The window of the store was impenetrable by human gaze, covered with a rich, dank patina of locomotive smoke, blast-furnace dust and the fine essence of Sinclair Oil from the nearby refineries. Faded posters hawking Copenhagen
Snuff, Sweet Orr work gloves and Lava Soap, the mechanic's friend, completed the job. For a second or two, once inside, I couldn't see a thing, it was so dark and dingy.

“What d'ya want, sonny?” I peered around the high glass case containing stacks of snuffboxes and tablets, looking for the speaker.

“What d'ya want?” An ancient lady wearing a black shawl over her head, the way most Polish ladies did in our neighborhood, stared piercingly at me.

“Uh …”

“D'ya want some orange pop, sonny?” She spoke with the slightest trace of a European accent

“You got any tops?”

“Why, yes, sonny.”

She disappeared behind the counter for a long moment. The shop's air was heavy with the scent of cabbage, garlic, tobacco juice and old clothes. Outside, a diesel engine blatted its horn thunderingly, rumbling off into the middle distance.

“How about these, sonny?”

She hoisted a cardboard box of tops onto the counter. I might have known it. She must have got these tops from the same place Pulaski got his—weak-kneed trifles that you saw everywhere.

“Uh … is that all you got?”

“How ‘bout a red one, sonny?”

“Uh … you got any other kind?”

“Other kind? These are good tops, sonny.”

“Naw, I got one a them. ‘Bye.”

I started to leave, as I had done so many times in the past, from every dinky candy store in town. Just as I got to the door:

“Hey, sonny, come back here.”

Vaguely uneasy, I turned, one foot out on the sidewalk, the other on the greasy floor, my Keds ready to spring for the Elgin. She had disappeared into the back of the store behind a beaded curtain. She re-emerged into the murky gloom, carrying a cardboard Quaker Oats box. She set it down on the counter and began fishing in it with a withered claw. I waited, figuring she was going to spring a yo-yo on me, a toy for boobs and idiots, a sop for the untalented.

She pulled out a tangled mass of rubber bands, string, a couple of old clothespins and what looked like a dead mouse. A switch engine breathed asthmatically in the ambient air outside—followed by muffled curses from the brakemen.

“Aha! Here she is!” She fished scratchingly, unable to grab whatever it was.

“I wouldn't sell this top to everybody, sonny.”

“Yeah?” I was ready to jump.

“But I can tell you need a top, sonny.” She cackled, her faint white beard glinting dully. Her hand snaked out of the can, clutching something round.

Great Scott! Cradled in her talons lay a malevolent duplicate of Scut Farkas' evil Mariah. A duplicate in everything—spirit, conformation, size, everything—except color. It was a dull, burnished, scuffed silvery-pewter,
“color I had never seen on a top before. But then, except for Mariah, I had never seen a black one, either.

“It's been used, so it won't cost you much, sonny.”

“How much?” I was almost afraid to ask.

Id say ten cents, sonny. It's imported. She's a Gypsy top.”

I was In. It was one of those few moments when I was well-heeled, carrying a full 12 cents in my jeans. I forked over my two nickels as calmly as I could and took possession of what was to prove to be a historic find. I had at last come together with the greatest fighting top I had ever seen. It had an oily, heavy, solid feel, a nice comfortable heft like, say, a Colt snub .38 Special feels to the hand. I had already decided to call it Wolf.

“Good luck, sonny. Careful, she's a mean one.”

Outside, the switchyard mumbled and muttered as a long, clanking string of flat beds rumbled toward the steel mill. With Wolf safely in my hip pocket, I pedaled furiously through the twilight toward Cleveland Street. The showdown had begun. I knew it. And somewhere in his lair, Scut Farkas must have known it, too.

That night after supper, under a dim yellow light bulb in the basement, next to the looming furnace that dominated the underworld below our house, I carefully wound my best top string around Wolf for the first time, pulling each loop hard and tight so that it lay flat against the preceding one, until finally Wolf was cocked and ready for action.

The string itself is highly important to a genuine expert. I preferred the hard, green, twisted cord that knotted
“solidly” and got a good bite on the side of the top. This type of string was not easy to use, but once the technique was mastered, nothing could come near it. I had long since outgrown the standard wooden button for the end of the string, using instead a thin, one-inch mother-of-pearl button stolen from my mother's sewing basket. There were three extras stashed away in my dresser drawer for emergencies.

As the dim bulb illuminated a faint circle on the gray concrete floor, I scratched out a mark in the exact center of the pool of light for a target and stepped back into almost full darkness. I could smell the moldering old tires that my father kept hanging on the walls just in case someday he might pick up another Hupmobile, and the mildewed Sunday papers of years back that lay piled against the concrete-block walls, and the scent of countless generations of field mice who had lived out their lives in this basement, and the dusty Mason jars filled with grape jelly and strawberry preserves that lined the plank shelves under the steps, and the sharp rubber smell—bitter and strong—of the coiled garden hose under the workbench, and the more subtle but pervasive aroma of a half ton of damp soft coal in the pitchblack bin, all held together with the soapy dankness of the drains, covered with perforated iron lids, that every week carried the family's used wash water back into Lake Michigan.

Deliberately and meticulously, I set Wolf down on the concrete floor for the first time. We were made for each other, just the way Mariah was made for Scut. The personality of tops is an odd thing. Mariah spun with
an angry ferocity, a carnivorous drive that was despised and feared by everyone who had the bad luck to see it in action. Wolf, on the other hand, was steadier, giving off a note higher in pitch than Mariah but in some ways even more deadly. Mariah was a hot-blooded animal; Wolf, cold-blooded, snakelike. It would be an interesting meeting.

Again I laid the top precisely on the mark I had made, getting the feel of it, gradually letting myself out, feeling the full flush of rising excitement and mounting confidence as I gradually mastered the sinister Wolf. Even from the start, however, I had the sneaky, uneasy feeling that somehow I didn't really
own
this top. At first I felt that it was just because I was not used to it, little suspecting how right I was.

For two weeks, every night, Wolf and I practiced together in the basement. I had decided not to show him to anyone until we could take on Farkas. No telling what might have happened if Farkas had heard of the existence of Wolf, and my plans, before I was ready to really give him a battle. Even at that, I knew very well that my chances of breaking even with Farkas, let alone defeating him, were as slim as the chances of that proverbial snowball in hell-In public I began throwing my weight around with second-string tops, until the word slowly began to spread throughout the gym, the auditorium, the homerooms; till at recess time I could always draw a small claque of fans goading me on to belt some poor kid's top into the boondocks.

Since the day Farkas had publicly humiliated me, he no longer even deigned to note my topwork. Once, however, he paused briefly, while twisting Jack Robertsons arm behind him and belting him in the ribs with his free hand, to spit a thin spray of tobacco juice over my orange top, which had just landed neatly beside Delbert Bumpus' yellow ball-bearing spinner. He might have taken me on right then and there, but he was busy giving Robertson his refresher course. Periodically, Farkas treated every kid in the class to a good, brisk, tendon-snapping arm twist. He shoved the victim's wrist up between his shoulder blades, pushing up and twisting out, until the supplicant's face turned ashen, his eyes bugged out and his tongue lolled in agony, Farkas yelling: “C'mon, you son of a bitch. Say it!”

“… Graaahhhkkk!”

“C'mon, say it! You son of a bitch.” Farkas gives him two more degrees of twist and brings his knee smartly into contact with the tailbone of the sufferer.

“I said SAY it!”

The victim, looking piteously at the ring of silent, scornful watchers, including, no doubt, his ex-girlfriend, finally squeaked out: “I'm a chicken bastard.”

“Say it again, louder.”

“I'M A CHICKEN BASTARD.” With that, Farkas hurled the pain-wracked body violently into the stickers. “Gimme a cigarette, Dill.”

And the two of them would go skulking off toward the poolroom. He gave this refresher course about every
six months, to all of us. We figure he kept a list and checked us off when our time came.

It was Friday. I knew that today would be the day. Somehow you know those things. It had rained all night, a hard, driving, Midwestern drenching downpour. Now, as I toyed with my Wheaties, I could feel the edge of danger mounting within me.

“Will you listen to me? I'm talking to you.”

“Ah … what?”

“When I'm talking to you, I want you to listen. You sit there like you've got potatoes in your ears!”

My mother always had a thing about my not listening; also dragging my feet. That drove her crazy. She always yelled that I didn't walk straight, either.

“How many times have I told you not to slump like that while you're eating? It isn't good for your stomach.”

I scrunched around in my chair, pretending I was listening to her.

“You'd better be home early this afternoon, because you've got to go to the store. I don't want to have to tell you again.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“How many times have I told you not to say ‘Yeah'?”

“… Yeah.”

This went on for about three hours or so, until I finally got out of the house, with Wolf stuck down deep in my hip pocket, with two other, lesser, tops in my front right-side pocket. I was loaded for bear.

It looked like rain as I walked through the alleys, over the fences, through the vacant lots on my way to the
playground, kicking sheets of water up from muddy puddles, skipping bottle caps into new lakes as I moved toward the battlefield. A few other kids drifted in the same direction from the next block. The trees dripped warm water under the low, gray, ragged clouds. Off to the north, toward Lake Michigan, even though it was full daytime, the steel mills glowed dark red against the low-hanging overcast.