“No, I don’t, Joe.”
“And when it happens, will it teach him anything?”
“It might.”
“Don’t kid yourself. He’s had the smell of it. He’s had the fever in him. They don’t ever get over it. I’ve been waiting for a word from you, and you haven’t given it. Maybe I like that. Anyway, I’m firing him.”
I couldn’t even feel good about that. “That’s too bad,” I said.
“I think we’ll see a lot of him. On the other side of the windows.”
“But not for very long.”
“No, Johnny. Not for very long. Now you can take your innings with blondie. That make you feel good?”
I sat and thought it over. He was waiting for an answer. I remembered the sound of her laugh in the night. I had kissed her twice, and I remembered both those times.
“I guess it doesn’t make me feel good, Joe.”
“You off blondes?”
“I... I guess I’m off that one. I guess she’s more than I can afford. Maybe I can find one that looks like that sometime — but a girl who’ll settle for a hamburger and a bus ride.”
He laughed and he started the car. We didn’t talk on the way back. When he let me off he said, “I do a little betting myself. I bet on you, Johnny. And I think I’ve won — all the way across the board.”
He let me off on the usual corner, and I walked back through the campus to my room. I thought about Dave and Joanne, and I found that I didn’t feel bad at all. I’d dropped a strange weight off my shoulders. I didn’t feel tired, abused, or shabby. I felt pretty good. There seemed to be some likelihood I was growing up.
Looie Follows Me
I remember how it promised to be a terrible summer. I had squeaked through the fifth grade and I was going to be eleven in July and I had hoped that on my eleventh birthday my parents would come up to visit me at Camp Wah-Na-Hoo, bearing gifts.
It was our third year in the big house twelve miles from town. Dad called it “a nice commuting distance” in summer and “too rugged for a dog team” in winter.
One of the main reasons for wanting to go to Wah-Na-Hoo was on account of the Branton twins, Kim and Cam, who lived a couple of hundred yards down the road. I knew that if they went for two months and I didn’t go at all, they’d make my life miserable all winter yapping about the good old days at Camp. They are twelve years old, and Dad says that he can’t ever look at them without wondering when they’ll be the right size for a harness and bit.
The second reason was that if I stayed home all summer, Looie, the five-year-old kid sister, would tag around after me all day with her hand in her mouth.
The big discussion came in May. I was called into the living room and told to sit down for “a little talk.” While Dad took off his glasses and stowed them in his coat pocket I made a quick review of recent misdemeanors and couldn’t decide which one to think up a defense for.
“Jimmy, your mother and I have been discussing the question of camp for you this summer.”
I dropped defensive plans and went on the offensive. “I can hardly wait to go,” I said.
Dad coughed and looked appealingly at Mother. “The fact of the matter is, Jimmy, we feel you’re a little young. We think you should wait one more year.”
Then they told me that I would have fun during the two weeks at the shore and I made low-voiced comments about a hotel full of old ladies and besides the Branton twins were going and I played with them and how did that make me too young.
And so after I lost the discussion, I had nothing to look forward to but mooching around our childless neighborhood all summer with the clop clop of Looie’s feet behind me. My parents had been mysterious about something nice that was going to happen during the summer, but I had a heavy suspicion about things they called ‘nice.’ They even called sending me to Syracuse to visit Aunt Kate ‘nice.’
And I was prepared to resist going to Aunt Kate’s to my dying breath.
The mysterious ‘nice’ thing arrived on the fifth of July. Its name was Johnny Wotnack from New York City. It climbed out of Mrs. Turner’s blue sedan and it stood in our driveway and stared suspiciously around at the big yard, the oaks, the orchard on the hill behind the house.
Dad had stayed home from the office that day. He started outdoors, and so did I, but just as I got to the door, Mother grabbed my arm and hauled me back and said, “Now wait a minute, Jimmy. That little boy is going to stay with us for a few weeks. You are going to share everything with him. He’s a Fresh Air Child and we agreed to take him in here for a while and make him feel at home. So you be nice to him. Understand?”
“Why did he come here?”
“For fresh air and sunshine and good food so he can be healthy.”
“He looks plenty rugged to me.”
Johnny Wotnack had a small black shiny suitcase. Dad spoke to Mrs. Turner, and she waved to Mother and drove off. Dad picked up the suitcase and said, “Glad you could come, Johnny. This is my son, Jimmy. And his mother. And the little girl is Looie.”
“Please to meet you,” Johnny said politely enough. But there was an air of cold disdain about him, a superior condescension. He was almost thin, and his face had a seamed grayish look like that of a midget I saw once at the sideshow. His hands were huge, with big blocky knuckles.
Johnny gave me one cool glance. “Hi, kid,” he said.
“Hi,” I said.
His hair was cropped short, and he wore blue jeans and a white sweat shirt. Dad took him upstairs right to my room, went inside and pointed to the extra twin bed, and said, “You’ll bunk in here with Jimmy, Johnny.”
I suddenly realized that the pictures I had cut out and taped to my walls looked sort of childish. I wished I had known about him so I could have taken them down. Johnny slowly surveyed the room. “This’ll do okay,” he said.
Mother went over to him and gently pulled his ear forward as though she were lifting a rock under which she expected to find a bug.
Johnny snatched his head away. “What’s the gag?” he demanded.
Mother gave her telephone laugh. “Why I just wondered how dirty you got on the trip. Those trains are a fright. I’ll start hot water running in the tub.”
She hurried out of the room. Johnny said weakly, “Wait a minute, lady.” But she was already gone. In a few seconds we could hear the heavy roar of water filling the tub.
The three of us stood there, uneasy.
Dad said, “Well, Johnny. Make yourself at home.” He went on downstairs, leaving me there with him. Looie was with her mother.
Johnny sat on the edge of his bed. He kicked at the suitcase with his sneaker. I looked at him with fascination. There were two deep scars on the back of his right hand, and one finger was crooked. To me he was a perfect example of urbanity and sophistication. It seemed an enormous indignity that Mother should shove him into a bathtub the first minute.
I said, “It happens to me too. The baths I mean. Until they’d drive you nuts.”
He looked at me without interest. “Yeah?”
“I’m going to be eleven in July. July fourteenth,” I said. “How old are you?”
“About twelve, I guess.”
I was horrified. “Don’t you know for certain?”
“No.”
That was further proof of sophistication. It was a miraculous detachment to be able to forget your own birthday, to be indifferent to it. I determined right then and there to forget my own.
When he came downstairs for lunch, his hair was damp. But his face still had that grayish, underground look. He sat silently at the table while Mother and Dad made a lot of gay conversation about how nice it was in the country.
He pushed his glass of milk aside. Mother said, “Don’t you like milk?”