“I’m an Advanced Intermediate,” Foderman said.
“You’re a notch above a Beginner,” I said. “And those are expert trails over there.”
“If you don’t mind, Peter,” Foderman said, “I’ll make my own decision, thank you.”
“Bravo,” Mary Margaret said.
“Mary Margaret,” I said, “I think you ought to keep out of this. He can hurt himself badly over there.”
“He can hurt himself crossing the street, too.”
“That’s not the same thing, and you know it.”
“I got to tell you,” Bryan said, “this is beginning to bore the ass off of me. I don’t care whether Seymour skis the north face or the Matterhorn. I’m interested in doing a little serious drinking and having a little fun. Now, whyn’t you just let him make up his own damn mind?”
“Right,” Mary Margaret said. “If he’s afraid of the...”
“I’m not afraid,” Foderman said.
“Then what are we arguing about?”
“I have no idea,” Foderman said. “The matter is settled.”
“Sandy?” I said.
Sandy, who had been mostly silent until now, looked first at Foderman, and then at Mary Margaret. Shrugging, she said, “It’s his funeral.”
“Exactly,” Mary Margaret said, and smiled.
It had stopped snowing by a quarter to one, when we came out of The Tiger Pit and headed up the street for Maury’s West, a joint allegedly owned and operated by a former Yale man who’d apparently lost his way. The wind had almost died, and the sky was streaked with scudding clouds, the tattered remnants of the storm. Hollis looked up, took a deep breath, and said, “This’s what it’s like out there in the open Sandy. All them zillions of stars dripping their shine on you. It’s just about more’n a man can...”
A snowball smashed into the back of his head before he could finish the sentence, knocking his Stetson into the street. He whirled with fists clenched, saw no one, said, “Now, what the hell?”, put his hands on his hips, and then heard muffled laughter behind one of the snowbanks. He went directly up over the top of the bank, digging in the toes of his boots, disappeared for a moment, and then came back into the street dragging two giggling girls whom I recognized instantly as the teeny-boppers whose table we’d usurped. “Look what I got here, Bryan,” he said, and Bryan turned from Mary Margaret and said, “Throw ’em back in the pond, Hollis. They’re too little.”
“We’re eighteen,” one of the girls said.
“Almost nineteen,” the other one said.
“Like hell you are,” Mary Margaret said.
“They look plenty big enough to me,” Hollis said.
“Where you looking, cowboy?” the first girl said, and grinned.
“All over, honey,” Hollis answered. “What’s your name?”
“Taffy,” she said.
“Mmm-mmm,” Hollis said. “And yours?”
“Annabelle.”
“Well, well,” Hollis said.
“That’s jail bait, Hollis,” Duke advised.
“Girls said they were eighteen, didn’t they?”
“They’re scarcely out of puberty,” Foderman remarked drily.
“Let ’em go, Hollis,” Bryan said. “Their mothers’ll be out looking for them.”
“We’re here alone,” Annabelle said.
“Our mothers are in San Francisco,” Taffy said.
“Well, well,” Hollis said.
“And we’ve got I.D. cards,” Annabelle said.
“Whose?” Mary Margaret asked.
“What difference does it make? We’ve got ’em, that’s all that counts.”
“I’m going back to the hotel,” Foderman said. “I’ll see you fellows in San Quentin.”
“Hey, come on, Seymour,” Mary Margaret said. “You’re my date.”
“I thought I was your date,” Bryan said.
“First come, first served.”
“I voluntarily relinquish all claims,” Foderman said. “Besides, if we’re going to ski the north face tomorrow...”
“Seymour, I absolutely refuse to let you go,” Mary Margaret said.
“Where’re we going?” Taffy asked.
“Just up the street here, honey.”
“To play jacks,” Foderman said, which was the second such zinger he’d hurled in the past few minutes. I was beginning to think it was possible he possessed a sense of humor.
“Seymour,” Mary Margaret said warningly, and walked directly up to him, and put her face close to his, and said, “If you leave me alone with this big ape here...”
“Listen to the ungrateful bitch,” Bryan said, and laughed.
“I’ll never forgive you as long as I live.”
“Taught her everything she knows,” Bryan said, still laughing.
“Is anybody holding?” Annabelle asked.
“Holding what?” Duke said.
“Grass,” Annabelle said.
“Oh, Jesus,” Sandy said, and shook her head. “If nobody minds, I think I’ll go to sleep, too. Come on, Seymour.”
“Grass?” Duke said. “Did she say grass?”
“Grass, Duke,” Mary Margaret said. “What the cows eat.”
“Grass?”
“Forget it, Duke.”
“Well, is anybody holding?” Annabelle asked.
Taffy, apparently bored with the conversation, decided to lift the proceedings to a higher level by making another snowball and hurling it directly at Hollis’s head. Hollis ducked the throw, and then scampered after her up the side of a twelve-foot-high snowbank left by the plows. Taffy whirled, put both hands on Hollis’s chest, and gave him a push that sent him sliding back down the side of the bank.
“King of the mountain!” she shouted. “Try to get me off!”
“Who’re your friends, Peter?” Sandy whispered.
“I thought they were with you,” I whispered back.
“When do we start finger painting?” David asked.
Bryan was running up the side of the bank, eager to answer this challenge to his manhood. No mere little slip of a thing was going to stand on top of that hill while Bryan the Breaker was there to knock her off. Bellowing the way he probably did at recalcitrant ponies, he seized her wrist, swung her around, and sent her flying head over teacups to the bottom. Taffy shrieked in ecstasy and fear. Annabelle, who’d apparently forgotten how sophisticated it was to ask if anyone was in possession of marijuana, danced a little excited jig in the snow. Bryan pounded his chest like King Kong on top of the Empire State, and bellowed, “Come on, you chicken flickers!”, and Hollis and Duke, responding predictably, raced up the hill to engage him in combat. There ensued one of those brief homosexual (goddamn that Dr. Crackers!) displays of masculine grunting, groaning, and grappling usually confined to the locker room and accompanied by buttocks-flicking whips of a wet towel, but here enacted on a high hill in the open air, thereby dignifying it as a contest of physical endurance. Boys will be boys. Bryan grabbed Hollis by the seat of his swimming trunks and the collar of his parka and tossed him down the hill summarily, Hollis laughing all the way to the bottom. Duke wrestled briefly with Bryan, caught him in a headlock, yanked him off his feet, twisted him around, and sent him tripping backwards, arms flailing, toward the plowed street, where the rest of us greeted his arrival without ceremony.
“Go get him, Seymour!” Mary Margaret said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Foderman answered.
“King of the mountain, king of the mountain!” Duke shouted.
“You afraid of him?” Mary Margaret said.
“No.”
“Then, go knock him off that hill!”
“Why?”
“Why not?” Mary Margaret said.
I thought Foderman would have at his fingertips at least a thousand good reasons for not going up that hill. But instead of replying, possibly confusing the hill with a boxcar and remembering the earlier image of an S.S. man holding a machine gun on a herd of submissive Jews, he merely shrugged and started up toward where Duke, legs spread, arms hanging at his sides like a gun-slick ready to draw, was waiting for him. Foderman’s technique for going up a hill was the same one he used for coming down a hill. He merely moved on a straight line, like a tank heading for a distant objective. Chomp, chomp, chomp, he chewed the hill level, grabbed for Duke’s ankles, pulled him over even as he himself rolled aside to avoid the falling timber, and then scrambled to his feet and claimed the summit before Duke rolled to a snow-spitting stop at the bottom. As Duke climbed to his feet again and stared up in disbelief at Foderman, Mary Margaret took Bryan aside and whispered something in his ear. Bryan nodded, grinned, and then went into an old-fashioned football huddle with his cowboy chums, arms intertwined, heads close together. At the top of the hill, Foderman waited apprehensively.