The swastika, though, was different, and one Saturday right out of the blue we almost got into a serious fight. I said it was a Navaho friendship sign, our social studies master said so, but last winter the chiefs had met in council out in New Mexico and banned the swastika. Al said that was a stack of shit, maybe pirates used it — who knows! — but it was a Nazi insignia, and I said for God’s sake that was the whole point, and he said balls and walked around the other side of our house where the big gray stone heart was that the Dutch people who built the house had made right in with the red brick, which was why my mother had originally wanted to rent it.
Dom, if you can hear me, have you ever thought that maybe you’re simply a subconscious and that you belong to some unknown person far around you? Or in that unknown being a small central empty space.
The first time we ever let Gail come to the quarry was a Friday. Up on Al’s diving level I measured them back to back to settle an argument. Al seemed to do an unusual number of dives, one after the other in almost a hurry; anyway he was bushed when we got home and instead of grabbing his mitt and going outside snapping his American League ball into the pocket, he sat on the couch and looked at Child Life. After a while he threw it at me and we were about to fall off the couch trying to get hammerlocks when Gail and her mother stopped their bickering about the peas that were already shelled when Gail got home. Al’s father came in and took up the Hour from his armchair’s antimacassar when I’d had my eye on it. Al joined us for the whole puzzle and he even kibitzed and his father told him to keep his shirt on. That Friday it was a whale spouting a fine symmetrical umbrella, there was an unnecessary cluster of points for his eye, an uncertain series for the water line, and long grooves in his side like the whale at the Museum of Natural History. The final Friday of my stay that summer, the dots were the contour of The United States with one state singled out inside. Al correctly identified it as Utah, though one point remained a problem; Al’s father tried one or two impatient radii, but I said the the point was not to be connected to anything, it marked the state capital, and I proved it in their atlas.
It had been a satisfying summer. Al followed the Red Sox but we both followed Joe Dimaggio’s hitting streak. I had told Al about going to Yankee Stadium and the view down over center field from the IRT elevated platform, but it all may have been a jumble to him and I doubt if he cared about the fans advancing on the ticket booths or then the long stone ramps inside that you raced up faster than your father wanted to go and with an expectation that exploded as you came up into that old stadium so much bigger than the city it was in. But Al would listen anyway. And with her sister waiting on at the Major Talcott, Gail had been around more that summer; and if I didn’t know just how to treat her I figured she didn’t know how I should either. At least, I was much taller than she. Al caught up on me during the winter, but the next summer when I turned twelve the bridge of Gail’s nose still came just to my mouth.
You know — like some ideal listener, Dom — that I could describe her if I chose, locate exactly the two raisin moles dropped as if on caressing perpendiculars each side of her collar-bone about halfway to each hidden bud; you know I could find on your shelves behind your tripod and its cased screen a dust-jacket the same cherry magenta as her toenail polish that summer, or in one of these books the words to hit off the prim coördination with which she slid her strong narrow hands ahead into the water, fingers always (unlike Al’s) tight together in a plane whose grace seemed to deceive the water into — well, with or without the interruption a second ago of four feet stepping climactically past your door then on down the hall in the direction of the nervous woman’s apartment (among others), I could capture all that early time if I chose, as easily as tell to the tenth of a mile the distance clocked by Al’s much consulted speedometer from his driveway to the beginning of the quarry path.
Cora’s a good listener, curled up among her pre-Columbian treasures.
The summer I was twelve my father said he didn’t feel like paying for me to go to camp, I’d been there two years running and probably wouldn’t get much out of it. Secretly I was glad, for camp would have been at least as dull as the village, and of course newly impossible. Yes, as if between that summer’s static banks, the current of my fall toward Gail rushed and returned and silently slowed and then in private throbs rushed toward nothing but restless return. I think that even during the summer before, I’d hardly thought of Perpetua Pound.
During this twelfth summer I typed long letters to Bob reporting how I rose “from me downy couch” at dawn to bike “through the dew with Alvin, my rustic guide who seriously you must meet”; later mowed our lawn, caught a green snake in my mother’s flower bed “coiled perfectly” (I lied) “about a tulip stem,” and “as an appetizer for my meridian repast and with the canny aid of Al’s ancient lore, skinned said unsuspecting ophidian concentric e’er ‘twas e’en well waked from its sun-drenched dream.” Bob at last wrote back that he had read my letters to the gang at the beach and everyone agreed they were side-splitting; when, exactly, I wrote them during that dry summer I don’t know. The morning of an incredibly long round-trip to Boston to see Tex Hughson pitch, I found myself almost physically unable to go. My mother said I’d be all right when Al and I and his school friend Tony and Tony’s dad the Heatsburg druggist got on the road, and I was. But sitting through the smoky afternoon back of first in Section 15 of Fenway — whose single deck seemed to give the crowd a small-town sound — I kept wondering pitch by pitch if Gail had gone up to swim without us, and in my lap my fingers on my scorecard typed an anonymous note warning her she was in danger; and Al got mad when Tony’s father had to ask three times if I wanted more popcorn, and leaving Boston Al and I got into a dispute which, if I’d only cared, was worse than a fist-fight, about who was the best hitter, Ted Williams or Babe Ruth, and after our closing silence of some seconds Tony’s father inadvertently slowed down as he tried to ease things, observing that this would be Ted’s last season till after the War. Friday of that week coming back from the Hillsdale station my father, in his gabardine suit that made me feel so palpable in my bare brown arms and legs and my sneakers, asked me about that game and I gave back information automatically, most of which he’d noted in the Tribune, and he said Boston and New York were almost equally far from where we were right now. My mother took her right hand off the wheel to pat his leg, and said, “Equidistant, dear.”
Gail scooped ice cream three days a week, Al often didn’t want to go to the quarry, he’d come pedaling hard up our curving road after lunch with his mitt in his basket, his mask already on, and strapped above his rear wheel his new chest-protector without the old-fashioned crotch-tongue. He talked about a pitcher in Heatsburg, the policeman’s nephew, for whom the Legion had wangled a tryout with the A’s even though he was about to be drafted. At the quarry I’d tried and discarded goggles; I’d been able to see only that as you descended the quarry pool its sides seemed to funnel in, but my inner eye spiraled clear down to a tiny circular floor.
Sounds trivial next to those two or was it three oceanographic jaunts you got onto last year, Dom: you in sunglasses at the rail of a small vessel, and a briny beard which in the U.P. shot seemed to grow a hair less thickly on one cheek than the other — the papers weren’t clear whether or not you’d dived, but you found a lot to say about nitrate concentrations in Friday Harbor, Washington, and one late February you were off the Peruvian coast observing the dreaded El Niño (Christ-child) Effect that comes with the equatorial counter-current displacing the cold Peru current soon after Christmas killing everything from plankton on up, and later in print you told grimly how a ship’s paint can turn black overnight in this area from the mixture of seafog and the foul hydrogen sulfide stewed up by fish rotting on the beaches. Oh yes.