War and Watermelon Read online

  “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.

  I cut toward the sideline, running as hard as I can, and race upfield. Esposito’s got an angle on me and brings me down hard, but I pop right up and jog back to the huddle.

  “Twelve yards!” Tony says, smacking my hands.

  My breath is coming in short little bursts, and my heart is beating like crazy. Salinardi whacks my helmet and says, “Nice run!”

  Coach calls another handoff to Tony. As we break the huddle, I hear Tony whispering, “Rah rah Brody Winslow!”

  “Honky Tonk Women” has taken over the number-one spot on the charts, so they’re playing it at least twice an hour. I can agree with that, but here’s my own top five for the week:• “Get Together” (meaningful)

  • “A Boy Named Sue” (hilarious)

  • “Honky Tonk Women” (rocking)

  • “Sweet Caroline” (mellow)

  • “In the Year 2525” (eeeerie)

  These are the worst:• “Crystal Blue Persuasion” (nauseating)

  • “Sugar, Sugar” (I hate chewing bubblegum and I hate listening to it.)

  • “Little Woman” (Don’t even ask.)

  I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to. It’s humid, but that’s not it. I keep thinking about that run, the way the hole opened up and I saw the entire field in front of me. How I raced past the defenders and would have scored if Esposito hadn’t had the perfect angle.

  It feels like my whole life’s about to change. Moving into junior high is like stepping out of childhood, whether you want to or not. And I keep worrying about how much longer my brother will be around, and maybe my father, too, and wondering why they can’t see eye to eye about anything this summer.

  There’s enough light coming in from the streetlight that I can study the cracks on my ceiling. It’s like looking at cloud formations. There’s one pattern that looks like a baby alligator sitting on the back of a bigger alligator. You have to use some imagination to see it, but it’s there.

  There’s another spot that looks like a football player stretching to catch the ball. That one’s a lot more abstract than the alligators. It never dawned on me that it looked like a football player until I saw some paintings in a magazine a few years ago.

  See, Ryan has always been a huge Giants fan. He and my father watch every away game on TV and listen to the home games on the radio. Ryan has kept a Giants scrapbook for years. It’s mostly clippings from sports magazines, but he also has some old stuff like game programs from the 1940s that belonged to my father’s father.

  Anyway, one day when I was seven, I found a magazine on the counter and it had paintings of some of the Giants. It wasn’t a sports magazine; it was Time or Life or something like that. The paintings weren’t very detailed—just bright colors and wide strokes—but they looked so active.

  I figured Ryan would love to have them for his scrapbook, so I cut them out. I did a very crappy job of it, too.

  A while later I’m in my room and I hear Ryan yell, “Who cut up my magazine?”

  I brought the pictures downstairs and said, “I cut out the Giants for you.”

  “Oh,” he said. I could tell he was fighting back something—tears or anger, maybe—but he stayed quiet for a minute. Then he took the pictures and went up to his room.

  Later he called me over and showed me how he’d retrimmed the pictures and carefully pasted them in the scrapbook. “They look even better here than they did in the magazine,” he said.

  They didn’t, and we both knew it. But the thing is, he didn’t get mad at me. At least, he didn’t show me that he was mad. He’s never said a harsh word to me. Not once in my entire life.

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 15:

  Town’s End

  The concert is scheduled to start at four. Ryan’s so psyched for it that he yells up the stairs right after lunch.

  “Brody! We should split.”

  He’s wearing his homemade tie-dye shirt and a red headband.

  I look in my dresser and find my old blue and yellow Cub Scout neckerchief. I tie it around my head. Freaky!

  “You fellas make sure you put on plenty of suntan lotion,” Mom says.

  “Have you looked outside?” Ryan asks. “Nothing but clouds.”

  “Well, it won’t hurt to bring some with you. I packed sandwiches and oranges. Do you want to take this watermelon?”

  The watermelon is huge; it probably weighs twenty-five pounds.

  Ryan laughs. “Why would we bring a watermelon?”

  “It can be very refreshing. I bet you’ll be glad you brought it.”

  Ryan rolls his eyes. “Okay.”

  Mom is filling the red and white Coleman juice dispenser with Tang and ice cubes.

  “Mom, we’re not lugging that thing to the concert.”

  She gives Ryan a look that says she knows better. “You’ll thank me later. It isn’t heavy—two gallons. Brody can carry it.”

  By the time we pick up Jen
ny and Skippy it’s nearly two o’clock. The thing is, we have to drop off an apple pie at Aunt Lizzie’s house in Port Jervis, New York, which is out of the way but in the general direction of the concert. So we’ll be going on back roads instead of taking Route 17 and the New York Thruway. I think the only reason we’re dropping off the pie is so Aunt Lizzie can give us directions and report back to Mom that we’re halfway to our destination.

  Lizzie is my grandmother’s sister. “She knows every road in that area,” Mom says. “She’ll send you to White Lake the safest way, and she’ll also know where you can stop to go to the bathroom.”

  Skippy smokes eight cigarettes before we even get to Port Jervis. I’m in the backseat with him, in my family’s red Plymouth station wagon. No air conditioner and a radio that gets only AM.

  Jenny spends most of the time turned toward us, talking about how exciting this trip is and how her all-time favorite, Joan Baez, is supposed to be performing tonight. Jenny’s wearing a silver chain with a small peace sign hanging from it, and she wove some tiny reddish flowers into her hair. “This is wild,” she says. “We probably won’t get home until one o’clock in the morning!”

  “I heard there’s gonna be sixty thousand people at this thing,” Ryan says, drumming his fingers on the dashboard. “Sly and the Family Stone tonight!”

  I’ve only vaguely heard of these performers, but I’m excited. We catch bits and pieces of news on the radio, but the reception is terrible. Lots of concert-related traffic up ahead, they’re saying, but so far we haven’t hit any.

  “Rolling Stones gonna be at this thing?” I ask when “Honky Tonk Women” comes on the radio.

  “Doubt it,” Ryan says.

  “How ’bout the Archies?”

  Everybody laughs at that one.

  That’s another thing about Ryan and Jenny: They laugh when I try to be funny. Tony’s the only other person who ever laughs at my jokes, especially if they’re about snot or farting.

  “It’s not just the music,” Ryan says. “The way they’ve been talking about this on the radio stations, you just know it’s going to change the way things are in this country. You get sixty thousand people protesting about Vietnam—and doing it with peace and brotherhood—then those idiots in Washington will know they’d better start listening to our generation. That’s what this is all about: bringing down the establishment.”

  That’s not what Dad said. He told me to stick within an arm’s length of Ryan every second and expect to see a crowd “full of damn fools getting stoned.”

  Aunt Lizzie has made a huge pot roast. She lives alone and we see her only once or twice a year. No way she could finish all that meat herself, so we sit at her dining room table for an hour and a half, eating beef and potatoes and most of the pie that my mother sent.

  “You’ll turn onto Route 55 in a few miles, and that’ll take you all the way to White Lake,” she says for the tenth time as we’re leaving. “You can’t miss it.”

  It’s 5:07 when we get under way again, but Aunt Lizzie assures us we’ll be there in less than an hour.

  We pass lots of cows and barns and pine trees. Traffic starts to build. After an hour Ryan picks up four hitchhikers—two guys and two girls around his age with backpacks. One of the guys has a guitar. They’ve got a handmade sign that says WOODSTOCK in big red letters.

  The two guys get in the third seat by the watermelon—the seat that faces backward—and the girls squeeze between me and Skippy.

  The one next to me says her name is Annie. She’s skinny and smells strongly of armpit. She has long, straight brown hair and keeps giggling. The other girl is even skinnier and has a woven headband with a hand-rolled cigarette stuck in it over her ear.

  They say they started out on Tuesday from Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Haven’t brushed our teeth since then,” says one of the guys with a laugh.

  “I have,” says Annie. She shows me her teeth. “Yesterday.”

  “Okay if we light up?” says the girl next to Skippy.

  “Sure,” says Ryan. “Just keep the windows open.”

  The cigarette she lights is obviously not tobacco. I’ve never smelled it before, but I’m not stupid. It’s pot. Skippy and Jenny take drags on it, but Ryan says not while he’s driving.

  Skippy reaches across the girls and tries to hand it to me, but I shake my head. I catch Ryan’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “No way,” he says to Skippy. “Keep that thing away from him.”

  Not like I was tempted. “Anybody want Tang?” I ask.

  “Absolutely,” says Annie.

  I realize right away that we don’t have any cups. So I hold the cooler up, stick my mouth under the nozzle, and push the button to get a direct squirt. It’s basically orange-colored sugar water—fortified with Vitamin C! We pass the dispenser around the car, and everybody takes hits from it.

  Traffic continues to build, and the reports on the radio say that the concert crowd is already way bigger than anyone expected. We figured we’d get tickets at the gate, but I’m starting to wonder if we’ll get in at all. The people running the show actually issued a radio alert telling anybody still on the road to turn back, but no way we’re stopping. I mean, these hitchhikers have been on the road for three days to get to this thing. The van ahead of us is from Maryland, and the car behind us has Ohio plates and is packed to the gills with hippies. Everybody’s moving in one direction, but very slowly now.

  I feel a surge of nervous energy thinking about it. Hippies and dancing and rock music and me! Biggest event of my life, for sure. Let’s get there!

  After another hour the car is moving only about twenty feet a minute because of the traffic. As we come to the top of a hill we can see an endless stream of vehicles ahead of us. Most of the cars are parked along the shoulders, and there are people walking on both sides of the road.

  “Are we there?” I ask.

  “Doubt it,” Ryan says. “We must be getting close, though.”

  We inch forward for another few minutes, and then we’re at a standstill. Ryan keeps the car running, but we all get out. The male hitchhikers step into the woods to take a leak. Jenny and the two girls stand near the back of the car and start laughing at them, because they’re barely off the road. I follow Ryan as he walks toward a group standing by another car.

  “We close?” he asks.

  “It’s probably two miles to 17B,” a fat guy with a huge beard says. “Most people are hoofing it from here.”

  “How far when we get to 17B?”

  The guy shrugs. “Not much. Maybe another mile.”

  Ryan looks at me. “Up for a three-mile walk?”

  “What?” I say, like it’s no big deal. “You’re talking to a football player here. I can take anything.”

  We walk back to the car and Ryan pulls it off the road, lining it up behind a brown van with Pennsylvania plates and a STOP THIS IMMORAL WAR bumper sticker. “Good a place as any,” he says.

  I glance at Ryan’s watch. It’s five minutes to eight. We’re a long way from Bergen County, New Jersey, that’s for sure.

  We all start walking. I carry the jug of Tang and Ryan takes the bag of sandwiches. Skippy and Jenny grab the flashlights.

  Soon the four of us are a hundred yards ahead of the hitchhikers. Skippy keeps looking back. “Neither one of them was wearing a bra,” he says.

  “They’re totally stoned,” Ryan says. He glances at Jenny and smiles. “Don’t get any ideas about taking yours off,” he says. “I don’t want nobody looking at you but me.”

  There are lots of people to look at. I haven’t seen anybody near my age; most of them are older than Ryan. There’s gotta be five hundred people within sight, all walking in the same direction. The sun isn’t down yet, but it’s definitely getting darker. The woods on both sides of the road are full of tall, thick evergreens. We walk between the stopped cars right down the middle of the road, which is a two-laner. I feel important just being here; this event will be huge.

  We take a br
eak around nine fifteen, leaning against a red Mustang from Ontario and eating oranges from the bag. We’ve walked way more than the two miles that fat guy said it’d be. I’m already thinking about how late we’re going to get home tonight.

  Skippy says his feet are sore. “Any of you know how much farther?” he calls to a group of three guys walking with cans of Schaefer beer.

  One guy in a leather cowboy hat puts his hand to his ear and says, “I think I hear Jimi wailing.” Then he laughs. He points forward with his beer can. “Right around the bend, I believe.”

  It’s dark now, so we walk closer together and shine the flashlights at the road. The guy was almost right—we reach 17B in about thirty more minutes.

  Cars are everywhere; not just in the road and on the shoulders, but up in cornfields and down in ditches. “How many people are going to this thing?” Ryan asks, shaking his head.

  “Millions,” Skippy says. “We must have walked fifty miles. I’m out of cigarettes.”

  “Now that’s an emergency,” Jenny says. “Skippy without a butt. Think you’ll survive?”

  “I’ll bum some at the concert,” he says. “Where is it?”

  “We ain’t there yet,” says a woman walking behind us. She’s wearing a peace-sign necklace and a long skirt. She waves up the road. “It’s another couple of miles.”

  “This is insane,” Skippy says.

  We walk along the edge of 17B. At least it’s mostly flat here. After ten more minutes I say to hold up. That Tang’s made its way through me. I take a flashlight from Jenny and duck into a gate, where a sign says EVERGREEN CEMETERY.

  I decide I’ve carried the cooler long enough and I’ll just pick it up on the way back. So I ditch it behind the gravestone of Johnny Townsend. It says he died on May 26, 1889. I like that name—Town’s End. I feel like I’ve walked through the world’s longest town.

  “Does this concert go all night?” I ask Ryan when I get back to the road.

  “I don’t know. It goes late. We’ll catch a ride back to the car when it’s over.”