Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories (9 page)

I was ready to hit the sack. Or was I? No, there was something I had to do. What was it? I felt a peculiar, unnamable yearning from deep within me, a gnawing emptiness. I smacked my lips, and suddenly I knew. Marching purposefully to the front closet, I threw on my coat and headed out the front door into the empty streets on a lonely quest. I had to have a taffy apple.

“I'm going to throw this wagon out, George. You don't play with it anymore, you're a general now. It's just gathering dust in the cellar. And if you don't want that little hatchet you got for your birthday, I'll get rid of that, too. I don't want it just banging around the house. It's liable to cause more trouble.”

I am hearing George Washington's mother speaking in a quavery, old-timy voice, filtering through the hazy mists of past ages. There in the case right in front of my eyes was a stylish, archaic, hunched-up kind of cart with big spoked wheels. You could even see vestigial flecks of ancient red paint. The card read:

George Washington's little red wagon! My mind boggled at the thought of the Father of Our Country tugging his high-spoked wooden toy through the boondocks, his 18th Century overalls faintly damp, his 18th Century kidshoes trailing laces in the sand, on his way to becoming the most successful revolutionist in all history.

I moved among the museum exhibits, now deep in a maelstrom of contemplation, mining a new vein of thought that had never occurred to me. In the next case, resting on a chaste velvet-covered podium, lay a chewed and worn wooden top of the type commonly known among the wooden-top set of my day as a spikesie. For the unfortunates unfamiliar with this maddening device, which over the centuries has separated the men from the boys among kids, a spikesie is a highly functional top-shaped wooden toy, beautifully, malevolently tapered down to a glittering steel spikelike spinning surface.

I stopped dead in my tracks, unable to believe my eyes. I looked long and hard, peering intently into the shiny glass case at the squat toy that was displayed there. There was no doubt about it. This was no ordinary spikesie, but identical with a sinister breed of top that I myself had once encountered. Bending low over the exhibit, I examined the inscription:

My God! Thomas Jefferson! The elegant, consummate product of the age of reason; architect, statesman,
Utopian, man of letters. I wondered modestly whether I could have shown Tom a thing or two about top spinning. After all, a Declaration of Independence is one thing; a split top is another. The top rested quietly on its podium, mute and mysterious. It was a dark, rich, worn russet color. I wondered what its name was and what battles it had fought for the framer of the American way of life, what battles it had fought in the distant past and perhaps would fight again.

As I gazed at the top, old spike wounds itched vaguely beneath my tapered Italian slacks—old wounds I had sustained in hand-to-hand spikesie combat with antagonists of my dim past Well did I remember Junior
Kissel's
economical, slicing sidearm movement, his green top string snapping curtly as he laid his yellow spikesie down right on a dime with a hissing whir. Flick, on the other hand—more erratic, more flamboyant—had a tendency to loft his spikesie, releasing it after a showy, looping overhand motion a good two feet above the surface of the playing field. His top spun with an exhibitionistic, wobbling playfulness and usually bounced hesitantly two or three times before settling into the groove. I myself preferred a sneaky, snakelike, underhand movement, beginning at the hip, swinging down to around the knees, upward slightly, and then the quick release after a fast, whiplike follow-through. Flick was great to watch; Kissel, methodical and clean. I was deadly.

In my day, there were two types of top spinners: those who merely
played
with a top—dilettantes, haphazard, sloppy, beneath notice; and those to whom a
top was a weapon in the purest sense, an extension of the will, an instrument of talent and aggression. Anything
but
a toy. I was one of that lonely breed. In combat, the top was used for only one thing: destruction. A top in the sweaty, tense hand of a real artist was capable of splitting his rival's top down the middle in the flickering of an eyelash.

I remember all too well the sinking sensation of total defeat when my first top skittered into the gutter, wobbling crazily like a drunken thing, in two distinct and irrevocable halves; and Scut Farkas, pocketing his sleek, ugly, black spikesie, strode away without so much as a backward glance. Then and there, the course of the next few years of my festering life was uncompromisingly set. In the secrecy of the basement, hour after hour, I clandestinely practiced every known motion, ranging from the rarely seen, difficult-to-master whiplash to the effete, delicate sidearm slice. Slowly my own true personal form began to emerge—until one spring day, in five minutes. I had halved the prized possessions of three of my closest friends. I knew then that I was ready for the big time.

Not quite. True, as a performer I felt fairly confident. It was the top itself that I lacked. To the untutored eye, I suppose, a top is a top—some red, some green, some blue. I find this hard to believe, but no doubt this is so to some. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also pitiable. To the uninformed, all bats used by ballplayers look alike. This could not be further from the truth. Major-leaguers make annual treks to Louisville, Kentucky, for the sole and express purpose of selecting the seasoned
lumber, the delicate taper, the precise finish and exquisitely calculated weight of the one thing that stands between them and anonymity. They guard their personal weapons with a fierce and unremitting jealousy. Long winter evenings are spent by internationally known sluggers resting before the fireside, carefully, endlessly rubbing next seasons lumber with oily pork-chop bones, until finally, by opening day, the cleanup man steps to the plate, whipping through the ambient air a personal and completely assimilated fusion of man and device. Boog Powell's bat is as different from, say, Tony Conigliaro's as twilight is from dawn. They may look a little alike, but they don't feel the same.

Scut Farkas' top, known throughout the neighborhood as Mariah, had at least 50 or more confirmed kills to its credit, as well as half a dozen probables and God knows how many disabling gashes and wounds. Rumor held that this top had been owned by Farkas' father before him, a silent, steely-eyed, blue-jawed man who spoke with a thick, guttural accent He ran a junk yard piled high with rotting hulks of deceased automobiles and rusting railroad-train wheels. Some said that it was not a top at all, but some kind of foreign knife, and not large, as tops go, being of a peculiar squat shape, a kind of small, stunted, pitch-black mushroom, wider above than most and sloping off quickly to a dark-blue, casehardened, glittering saber tip. Not only was the top strange in appearance; it spun with a mean, low humming—a truly distinctive, ominous note, a note that rose
and fell, deep and rumbling, like the sound of an approaching squadron of distant Fokkers bent on death and destruction. Farkas, like all true professionals, rarely showed his top unless in anger. Skulking about the playground, his back pocket bulging meaningfully, just the trace of top string showing, Farkas was a continual, walking, living, surly challenge.

As a marble player, he had long since been barred from civilized games. His persistent use of blue-steel ball bearings, lightly polished with 3-In-One Oil, had reduced our heisty and spitsie games to a shambles, leaving the playground strewn with the wreckage of shattered comsies, precious aggies—and blasted hopes. Farkas played for keeps, in the truest sense of the word. An aggie belted by one of Farkas' cannonballs ceased to exist, dissolving in a quick puff of pulverized ash.

Farkas' secret was not in his choice of weapons alone. He had the evil eye. We all have seen this eye at one time or another in our lives, glimpsed fleetingly, perhaps, for a terrifying, paralyzing moment on the subway, among a jostling throng on the sidewalk in the midst of a riotous Saturday night, peering from the gloom through the bars of a deathhouse cell in a B movie at the Orpheum, or through the steamy, aromatic air of the reptile house. It is not easy to describe the effect that Farkas' eye had on the playground of the Warren G. Harding School. I know that such a thing is anatomically not possible, but Farkas' eye seemed to be of the purest silver-gray, totally unblinking and glowing from within with a kind of gemlike hardness. These eyes, set
in his narrow, high-cheekboned weasel face above a sharp, runny nose, have scarred forever the tender psyches of countless preadolescents. Many's the kid who awakened screaming, drenched with cold sweat in the dead of night, dreaming wild nightmares of being chased over fences, under porches, through garages by that remorseless weasel face. The closest thing I have ever seen to the general quality, both physical and spiritual, of Scut Farkas was when, on a sunny afternoon on a Florida dock, I came face to face with a not-quite-deceased, eight-foot mako shark. Scut Farkas, at ten, was a man not to be trifled with.

He was the only kid I had ever heard of who rarely smoked cigars, cigarettes or corn silk. Farkas chewed apple-cured Red Mule Cut Plug, In class and out. As a spitter, Farkas unquestionably stands among the all-time greats. During class he generally used his inkwell as a target, while on the playground he usually preferred someone else's hair. Few dared to protest, and those who did lived to regret it. Farkas' glance boring gun-hard across the classroom carried a message to every male in the class, save one, at one time or another. It read: “I'll get you after school.” The kid, knowing he was doomed, often wet his pants right there and then.

He had never been known to refer to
any
of his classmates by other than their last name only. The use of the first name somehow would have been a sign of camaraderie or weakness, and would have undermined his position as an unbending belligerent. The victim's
last name was always followed by the same phrase: “Ya chicken bastard!”

His only known rival in pure thuggishness was the equally infamous Grover Dill. The two had formed an unspoken alliance, each recognizing the other as extremely dangerous—an alliance that held the rest of the kids in total subjugation.

As a competitive top spinner, Farkas was universally recognized as unbeatable. The combination of Mariah and Farkas' short, whistling three-quarter-lash movement was devastating. He sacrificed accuracy for sheer power, like a fast-ball pitcher with a streak of wildness. When Mariah hit, there was no return.

Occasionally a challenger, getting wind of Farkas' overpowering reputation at Warren G. Harding, would show up at recess from some foreign school. A ripple of excitement would move quickly through the motley throng as the two battlers squared off. There was a strong streak of chauvinism among the Warren G. Harding students. It could be said that we felt, “Warren G. Harding, right or wrong”—except when Scut Farkas was facing down a challenger from, say, St. Peter's parochial school, or George Rogers Clark. Farkas did not carry the colors of Warren G. Harding on his back. Like all true outlaws, the only color he recognized was blood-red. The other guy's, of course.

Week after week, month after month, we stood by helplessly as Scut Farkas and Mariah made wreckage of the best tops in Hohman, Indiana. Not only that; we were forced by a single scythelike sweep of his evil eye
to applaud his victories. This was the unkindest cut of all. I remember the hated words rattling in my throat as I banged Flick on the back: “Old Farkas sure did it.” Flick hollowly answering: “… Yeah.”

Pocketing Mariah and hawking fiercely, Farkas would swagger sideways into the gloom of the boys' bathroom to look for somebody to hit. Another notch was added to his already well-notched belt.