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Authors: Rich Wallace

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BOOK: War and Watermelon
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I was in the bathroom when Neil Armstrong actually stepped onto the lunar surface. Diarrhea.
“They've landed!” my mom yelled.
“I know!” I yelled back.
“He's coming out of the rocket ship!”
I can't move from this spot,
I thought. Maybe I actually said it, but not loud enough that anybody but me could have heard. Especially through the bathroom door.
“This is a once-in-a-
life
time thing, Brody!”
So is this food poisoning, I hope
. Mom had made chicken salad for the occasion. It sat on the picnic table all afternoon before I ate it.
“In here?” Tony asks, jutting his thumb toward the doorway at Fisher's. We usually grab a can of soda on the long walk home from practice. Plus it's air-conditioned in there, so we get to cool off for a minute.
I set my helmet on the sidewalk and wriggle a finger into my sneaker, but I can't reach the two quarters I stashed there. So I step on the heel with my other sneaker and pry my foot out. The quarters are wedged up by the toes.
“Those'll be real pleasant to handle,” Tony says.
“That's why I took them out here. They probably wouldn't accept them if they saw where I kept 'em.”
Tony smirks. “You might as well store 'em in your cup.”
We grab drinks and stare at the magazine rack for a few seconds. Tony looks around, then carefully peels back the upper corner of a
Playboy
cover, trying to get a peek inside.
“Hey!” says the guy behind the counter.
“Just looking,” says Tony, quickly stepping away. He gives me an embarrassed grin. We've seen pictures like that before.
Just looking. That's been the story of our lives.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13:
Misunderstanding All You See
R
yan knocks on my door, which is open, then steps in. “You wanna hear something cool?” he asks. He's wearing a baggy Giants jersey with the sleeves torn off, so you can see his entire bony arms.
“Sure.” I reach over and turn off my radio. “What?”
“In my room. This is really freaky.”
We go in and shut his door tight. The black light is on; the Day-Glo posters are shimmering. Skippy is sitting on Ryan's desk with the window wide open, looking squirrely and blowing smoke out through the screen. I can see lightning bugs hovering over the yard in the darkness.
Jenny gives me a big smile. She dyed her hair blonde this summer, and it's pulled back in a long ponytail. I get the impression that she was one of the cool ones back in junior high school, but she's really nice now. She graduated from high school with Ryan a couple of months ago.
Ryan holds up a Beatles album cover—
Magical Mystery Tour
. “Hello Goodbye” is playing on the record player.
The next song comes on. “Just listen,” Ryan says.
“They say Paul McCartney is dead,” Skippy says, flicking some ashes into a Coke bottle. You can tell he hasn't spent five seconds in the sun this summer; his skin is as pale as an eggshell.
“Who says?”
“People. They're trying to hide it, but there's like a million clues in this record.”
It's a hundred degrees in here, but Skippy is still wearing his black leather jacket.
“Who's trying to hide it?”
“The Beatles,” he says. “But they gave it away.”
Ryan puts up his hand for quiet. We listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” until that weird instrumental ending comes on. Ryan turns it to full volume and says, “Everybody shut up.”
When the song has nearly faded to silence, you hear this faint, moany voice saying something like “Ah bwuwy bawwwww.”
“You hear that?” Ryan says.
“I heard something,” I reply.
“He said, ‘I buried Paul.' That was John Lennon.”
“He couldn't hold the secret any longer,” Skippy says.
“Oh.” I look at Ryan. I think he can tell I'm doubtful.
“There's lots of other clues,” Ryan says.
“Like what?”
“If you play some of these songs backwards there's all sorts of stuff that comes through,” he says excitedly.
“Can you do that?” I ask, my interest rising.
Ryan stares at the record player for a few seconds. He shrugs. “I guess not,” he says. “But somebody did it. They have proof.”
I nod. “Oh.”
“Look at the names of these songs,” Skippy says, pointing to the album cover. “ ‘I Am the Walrus.' You know what being a walrus means?”
“No.”
“It's a symbol for death in some Eskimo language or something. So Paul's basically saying, ‘I am dead.'”
“Why would he say that?”
“Because he
is
.”
Ryan tries to clarify things. “He sang it before he was dead.”
Skippy gets a smug look on his face and points at me with his cigarette. “But now he is. Dead, I mean.”
I go back to my room and listen to the last inning of the Mets game, then sit through nine songs on WMCA before “Get Together” finally comes on. (“Come on people now . . .”)
The Mets lost again. Third straight to the Astros. I don't know why I bother listening. They just kill you. I can't sleep, so I go downstairs around midnight to get a drink and find Ryan in the kitchen with the bottles of food coloring on the counter.
“You making Easter eggs?” I ask. I'm serious; that's the only thing we've ever used that stuff for.
“Watch this,” he says. He holds up a white T-shirt and spreads it over the sink. Then he picks up the red bottle and squeezes a few drops onto the shirt. He takes the green one and holds it a bit higher. “Got to make it splash a little.”
When he's finished with the yellow and blue bottles, he holds up the shirt. “Tie-dye,” he says. “At least it looks like tie-dye . . . kind of.”
He takes the shirt into the cellar and I follow him. We've got a clothesline down there, reaching from above my dad's workbench to a hook above the washing machine. He hangs the shirt there, and a few drops of blue and red drip onto the cement floor.
“Should be good to go for the concert,” he says. “You been hearing who's gonna be there? Canned Heat. The frickin' Grateful Dead. They even think Dylan might show up, but you can never count on him.”
Bob Dylan I've heard of, but not most of the other groups Ryan's been going on about the past few days. Still, I am definitely looking forward to this. Just hanging out with Ryan at a thing like that will be awesome.
“Total peacefest,” he says. “Music and revolution.”
He picks up a green rubber ball—maybe half the size of a basketball—bounces it once, then shoots it at the hoop we've got nailed to the wall. The ceiling is only six and a half feet high, so it's tough to do anything but dunk the ball. We used to play one-on-one basketball down here for hours at a time.
The thing is, as far as I can remember, Ryan was just as much of a dweeb as I am. He didn't get cool until recently. I think he knows where I'm at in life, because he's been there. So he includes me in a lot of things, but it's never just me and him anymore.
The hoop is a miniature, half as wide as a real one. It's got a bell attached beneath the rim that's supposed to ring anytime a basket is made. The bell works maybe 10 percent of the time.
We've got a piece of electrical tape on the floor about two feet from the opposite wall, for the backcourt, so there's about a nine-by-nine area for game action. Fouls are legal, unless you actually grab your opponent or draw blood. That happens a lot.
It's also legal to pass to yourself by bouncing the ball off any wall.
Ryan beats me two straight: 20–12 and 20–16. We're laughing and making quite a bit of noise with the passes off the wall and the dribbling and the grunting.
We hear the cellar door being yanked open, then Dad's voice. “Creepin' Jeebus! What is going on down there?”
“Playing basketball,” I reply.
“It's one o'clock in the morning!”
“I'm not tired.”
“Is Ryan down there with you?”
We look at each other. Ryan breaks into a grin and says, “Yeah.”
“You're both out of your minds,” Dad says. “Get some sleep. So
I
can.” He shuts the door hard.
Ryan hands me the ball. “Game point,” he says. “For the title.”
I take two dribbles, make a big step to the left, then dodge under his arm and leap for the basket. He gets a hand on the ball and knocks it toward the furnace. “That's out,” I say.
I grab the ball, make a juke to the right, and send a line drive over the clothesline and directly into the basket. The bell rings. Ryan puts his hands on his hips and stares at the ceiling. I raise my fists and say, “Yes!”
I carefully move past the shirt—it looks more like polka dots than tie-dye—and smack hands with him. “Champion,” I say, patting myself on the chest.
“Mr. Clutch,” he says. “Best in the basement, for sure.”
THURSDAY, AUGUST 14:
Sugar and Speed
T
he cheerleaders are practicing at the same time we are today, so we keep looking over at them. Most of them have boyfriends on the team.
“We should sleep out soon,” says Tony, standing behind me. We're in line for a pass-catching drill.
We do that a few times every summer, pitching a tent in the yard and stuffing our faces with candy all night. Last time, he brought a cigar from his father's stash, and we both nearly puked after taking a few puffs.
“No more smokes,” I say.
“No. Maybe a bucket of chicken, though.”
The cheerleaders are doing their basic introductory cheer, going through the names of the players. I know they do a cheer for every guy on the team, and that the names come up alphabetically, but I still get kind of a chill when I hear Stephie Jungerman doing my name. Tony smacks me on the arm and I blush, listening to Stephie.
“Rah Brody Winslow!”
“Hey hey!”
“Rah
Brody
, rah
Winslow
, rah rah Brody Winslow!”
As it turns out, it's my turn to run a pass route the second the cheer ends. I take four quick steps, make a juke to the left, then turn to the right for the ball.
Ferrante's thrown it way inside, and I reach back for it. It smacks off my shoulder pad and rolls to the dirt.
I go to pick it up and I knock it with my foot, and it wobbles about five yards away.
“Nice coordination!” somebody yells.
I pick up the ball and toss it back, then trot to the end of the line.
“She got to ya, huh?” Tony says as he gets in place behind me. He made a great catch, tipping an overthrow and diving for it.
“No way,” I say. I glance over at Stephie, sixty yards away. “Like she even knows who I am.”
“She's got your name,” he says.
“Yeah, and about fifty other ones. Including Gary.”
“Nice math,” Tony says. “They only have four or five names each.”
I give him a shove. “Alphabetical,” I say.
“Fate!” he replies. “That's why Marianne got
my
name.”
“Don't hold your breath, man. You wouldn't make her top twenty.”
“Oh, like you would?”
“Not likely.”
It's true that none of the cheerleaders would even know who I am. I don't even know if
I
know who I am.
I finally get a chance to play some offense near the end of the scrimmage session, going in at tailback. Tony's at fullback. Joey Salinardi is taking the snaps; he's a year younger and probably won't play much in the games unless Ferrante gets hurt or we have some blowouts.
Coach Epstein is calling the plays. He drives a delivery truck for Wonder Bread, so he starts his days even earlier than my dad, which makes him available for our practices at three thirty.
“Okay, mini-backs, let's move the ball,” Coach says, hands on his knees and froth in the corners of his mouth. “Forty-two on two.”
We clap our hands, break the huddle, and line up. Forty-two means a handoff to me between the center and the right guard. I'll be following Tony through the hole, if there is one.
I try to stay steady, not looking toward the hole. Joey takes the snap and immediately drops the ball. It takes an odd bounce right off its tip. Tony dives on it and covers it up.
Coach shakes his head as we huddle up. “You gotta have the ball before you try to give it away, Joey. Run it again. On three.”
I'm less tense already. Somebody else screwed up before I got the chance to.
Joey fakes to Tony and I come charging up, head down, wrapping my arms around the ball. Tony gets knocked backward and I dodge so he'll miss me. There's no place to run. I cut to my right and am met head-on by Magrini. I hug the ball as I go down.
Loss of two yards, at least.
“Where's my blockers?” Coach says. Brian Finken is at right guard, and he got swamped. “Thirty-one this time.” That's Tony to the other side.
Tony gets to the line of scrimmage and no farther.
“Let's open it up a little,” Coach says.
“Can I pass?” Joey asks.
“I don't know. Can you?” Coach smiles. “Let's keep it on the ground. Forty-six pitch.” He looks at me and nods, wiping his mouth with his wrist, then turns to Joey. “Fake it to Tony going off the other guard first.”
The fake to Tony pulls the defense in that direction, and Joey flips the ball to me on the run. Magrini's already in the backfield, but I dodge inside him and sprint past the line of scrimmage. The only guy in front of me is Kenny Esposito, playing cornerback.
BOOK: War and Watermelon
13.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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