War and Watermelon Page 2

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 12:

  Taylor Ham

  My dad is up every morning by five thirty, eating stale cake and strong coffee and using the bathroom in the cellar three or four times. He listens to Rambling with Gambling on the radio and reads the New York Times before heading out the door to catch the 6:25 bus at the corner.

  For eleven and a half years I was basically unaware of his early morning routine, but midway through the last school year I began spending a couple of minutes with him before he left for the city. Right after his father died. It’s important to spend that time together, just the two of us, even though we hardly say a thing.

  Today the radio’s going on about the war.

  “Gideon?” Dad says as I walk into the kitchen, pretending that he’s surprised to see me. (He calls me a different name every morning.) He’s got his dress shoes and pants on, but up top he’s just wearing a guinea T. There’s a tiny square of bloody toilet paper on his jaw where he nicked himself shaving.

  “Hey,” I say, opening the refrigerator.

  “Mets lost last night.”

  “I heard it. They’re like eight games behind already.” They suck again, like every year.

  Two weeks ago it looked like the Mets would be taking over first place. Nobody thought they’d do anything this season, but they stayed close to the Cubs for most of the summer. Now they’re falling apart.

  “They made a good run,” he says. “Maybe next year.”

  “Maybe.” Maybe next century.

  Dad nods slowly, chewing. “Eat something?” he asks.

  I shrug. There’s a box of doughnuts on the counter, but they’re those white powdered ones that I can’t stand. “Maybe toast,” I say.

  “How’s Ferrante’s arm looking?” he asks. Tommy Ferrante is our quarterback. We know him from when I was in Cub Scouts, but he quit that in fourth grade and became a borderline crook. The only real use of his arm that I know of is when he and Magrini got caught throwing rocks off the cliff to bust windows at a warehouse.

  “It’s okay, I guess. We never pass anyway. Ninety-nine plays out of a hundred are handoffs.”

  “You getting any of them?”

  “Nah. They mostly put me at linebacker.” I’ve carried twice in scrimmages so far. Both times I got nailed for lost yardage.

  Dad pours another cup of coffee, looks at the clock, and chugs it. The empty cup is still steaming when he sets it down.

  He told me once that he drinks at least twenty-five cups of coffee a day, virtually nonstop, at the office.

  He goes upstairs to finish dressing and I move into his seat at the counter. The Times headline says, “Enemy Attacks 100 Vietnam Sites.”

  I’m eating a doughnut anyway when he comes back in his suit jacket and a blue tie. He combed his hair, basically pasting the few long strands from one side over his scalp with Vitalis. He kisses the top of my head, then hesitates. “Make sure your brother sees that Vietnam headline,” he says. “This isn’t Little League. He can’t just take the pitch and hope for the best.”

  He picks up his briefcase and heads out the door. I go to the window and watch him walk very upright and swiftly along the sidewalk. I feel sad for a minute every morning when he slips out of sight for the next twelve hours. Mom says his health has never been too good, that he might need a pacemaker in a few years.

  I can’t believe he brought up the Little League thing again. Ryan swears Dad’s obituary will read that his only regret was that his son struck out looking.

  Here’s how I’ve heard it explained over the years. I was three when it happened, so I have no recollection.

  Dad’s coaching. Ryan is up to bat in an important game. It’s the classic baseball situation: bottom of the last inning, two outs, bases loaded, his team down by a run. A single wins the game, but even a walk brings in a run and sets things up for the next guy.

  So the count is three balls and two strikes, or maybe two balls and two strikes. Either way, you have to swing at a strike, no matter how hard you’re praying it’ll be called a ball. The pitch is straight over the plate, waist-high, but Ryan freezes. He doesn’t swing.

  Strike three.

  Allegedly, the bitter aftermath of all that is why Mom wouldn’t let Dad coach my Little League teams. And why Ryan opted out of every sport except basketball, with the stipulation that Dad not attend any of the games.

  In my first baseball game, I struck out three times. But I swung at all nine pitches. Dad made a big point of saying how proud he was that I went down swinging. That I “showed some heart out there.”

  He said that in front of Ryan, of course. He still brings it up every once in a while, thinking he’s being subtle.

  I watch a Bugs Bunny cartoon—the one where Elmer Fudd’s uncle Louie died—then a Daffy Duck and another Bugs. When my mother wakes up, she fries some Taylor Ham, and I eat that and a bowl of Cocoa Krispies.

  “Brody, you don’t have to go to this concert with your brother on Friday if you don’t want to,” she says. “We’ll let him use the car even if you stay home.”

  “I want to go.”

  “All right. But you don’t have to.”

  “I know, but it’ll be a blast.”

  “Well,” she says, pouring coffee into Dad’s cup for herself, “you do get carsick.”

  “Ryan says it isn’t far.”

  “Ryan says a lot of things.” She sips the coffee, then sets down the cup and sweeps powdered sugar off the counter with one hand, catching it in the other. “He’s a sweet boy, but he’s as naive as they come. And they don’t give you any breaks for being sweet in the army.”

  My knee’s bleeding, just a trickle below the cap where it jabbed into a stone as I tried to tackle Kenny Esposito. I was on my knees at the time, not exactly the best tackling posture, and when I reached for him I twisted sideways and was knocked farther back by his knee hitting my shoulder.

  “You gotta put your weight into that tackle,” an assistant coach said to me with a snarl. “You can’t do that from your knees, man.”

  “I got knocked down.”

  “Don’t get knocked down,” he said, spraying out the words.

  My weight: 87 pounds. Esposito weighs at least 120. He scored on the next play, barreling through the line and virtually carrying Tony and another guy with him as they tried to bring him down.

  That was an hour ago, before I made a couple of actual tackles and before the wind sprints and the long laps around the field at the end of practice.

  That coach acted like a jerk, but it stung.

  Despite all that, I made the team. First time trying out, too. They sent Johnny Rivera home for good, which surprised the heck out of me. He’s fast and he played hard, but he’s new in town and Puerto Rican, so in the coaches’ eyes he’s suspect.

  The rest of the cuts were eleven-year-olds.

  So I’m in. I don’t think I’ll get a lot of playing time, but the point is that I made it. I’m basically lost in that crowd, hanging on as one of the least important players.

  Now me and Tony are walking home, carrying our helmets by the face masks with our cleats stuffed inside.

  “That field is a killer,” Tony says, examining the bloody spot on his elbow. He’s no bigger than I am.

  “It’s like the Sea of Tranquility,” I say. The astronauts landed on that area of the moon a couple of weeks ago. We watched it in the family room with all the shades drawn and the air conditioner on high. “One small step for man . . .”

  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-lifetime thing, Brody!”

  So is this food po
isoning, 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

  Ryan 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 t
he 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

  The 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.