"Can you get out after dinner?"
"I think so. Why?"
"I know a place we can go to."
"Oh," said Serena. "Good."
Their eyes were used to the dark by the time they reached the yard. Brian went ahead, talking firmly in the voice till the growling stopped. It was Loki, wagging his tail and jumping with delight when he recognized Brian. Brian had the dog sniff Serena thoroughly and she gave it some brownies she had made. The door to the watch shack came open with a kick.
There was a small black wood-stove, a hot plate, a cot and some rough blankets, a few canvas folding chairs. The yard workers used it to warm up between shunts in the winter. The cot was left over from the old man.
Brian unfolded the cot and dusted everything off and shook the blankets out while Serena sat and watched him with her hands clamped between her knees. It was freezing inside. Serena undressed beneath the blankets, the cot creaking and rattling, while Brian turned his back and tried to think himself stiff so he could get the damn thing on.
It went okay. Nothing got stuck. There wasn't room to lie side by side on the cot so Brian pulled up a chair and sat holding Serena's hand. He wasn't sure he remembered what any of it felt like. From time to time he lifted the blanket and looked under at Serena's body and they'd smile at each other. Understanding smiles. She was all goose-pimply from the cold and her breasts weren't half the size of Knockers Nieman's, who everybody laughed at in the showers after gym. Of course, Knockers was all fat, he even had fat toes and fingers. Serena's ribs and hipbones showed.
"Will you come in again?" she said. "I'm cold."
This time Brian did what he could to make it last, he took note of how everything felt, how it smelled and sounded and tasted, so he wouldn't wake the next day and feel like he was still a virgin.
The woman who owned Boo decided he would come along quicker if he were boarded at Bad Dogs and trained daily. He became Brian's main responsibility.
"If you can't teach him to attack," said Mr. Pettit, "at least get him to quit wagging his damn tail at everybody."
The idea was that Brian would train the dog to obey him and that obedience would then be transferred to his owner. It was the lady's idea, not Mr. Pettit's.
"Sit," Brian would say, and rap the dog on the croup. Boo would sit.
"Good dog, Boo," Brian would say, and Boo would jump up and wag his tail with pleasure.
"No, sit, Boo," he would say, and rap again, and Boo would sit again, looking up at Brian with his head slightly lowered, yawning nervously. "That's right, Boo, good dog."
Boo would whuff and jump up against him.
"No, Boo, sit. Sit."
They went to the shack together on nights when there was a football game or dance Serena could tell her parents she was going to. They liked to know where she was.
"I'm going out, Ma," Brian would say halfway down the stairs to the front door, and she would say okay from wherever she was and when he got home she would make noises from her bedroom so he'd know she heard him come in.
They'd meet in front of old St. Patrick's school. The only hassle was if they were using Wotan on guard that night. Brian would have to lay the voice on him full force and if necessary threaten to hit him. The dog would stand aside, anger humming deep in its chest.
Serena would hurry her clothes off and get under the covers and shiver till Brian was ready. They didn't talk much in between, Brian could never think of anything that didn't sound obvious or cornball. If he didn't feel a certain way about her he wouldn't be there, would he? She understood that, he could tell.
They tried a couple different ways he had heard of but the cot was too small and too shaky so mostly it was the regular way. It always got them warm. Once he asked if he was big enough for her and she said she would fit whatever size he was, that's how women were. Brian wondered if it was true or if it was just Serena.
When basketball tryouts started he cut Boo down to one hour a day, after practice. It was a drag, but the insurance for the old man was still hung up and they needed the money. The railroad and the insurance company were claiming it was suicide, that passing out drunk in a boxcar headed for Michigan and freezing to death could be nothing but an intentional act. The caseworker said they were just trying to bully his mother into accepting a lower, out-of-court settlement. They were doing a pretty good job of it.
It was Barry Feingold, the manager, who clued Brian in. Brian was always the last one out of the locker room, and Feingold would sit by him while he dressed to talk about the team and things. Brian figured it was cause he didn't throw towels at Barry or call him names or because he was afraid to sit by the black kids on the team.
Feingold could never sit still on the locker bench, he rocked and squirmed and straddled, checked his watch to make sure it was still ticking and his wallet to make sure it was still there, pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose and ran his hand through his curly yellow hair. He looked like a third-base coach giving steal signals.
"Do you know what I saw," Barry would say kicking his pile of wet towels, "in Coach's practice book?"
"What?" Brian would say in the disinterested style he was working on.
"I saw the first cut list," Barry would say and pause a second. "You're all right. You made it."
Brian would grunt and pull on a sock.
"Do you know," Barry would say playing with his clipboard, "what I heard Coach tell Mr. Fuqua today?"
"Nope."
"He told him you'd probably be one of his starters."
Brian would grunt and tuck in his shirt.,
"Do you know," said Barry, staring at the ceiling because Brian was powdering his balls with Desenex, "what I heard in homeroom today?"
"Nope."
"I heard that Ditty Stack likes you."
Brian grunted. He slipped on his underpants. He shook some powder under his arms.
"Who said that?"
Barry got up and spun the dial on a combination lock. "Barbara Fazzone and this other girl were talking about who liked who and they said it. They said she likes you. And Barbara is her best friend, just about."
Brian grunted and pulled his pants on.
Brian didn't know Ditty Stack or any of her friends. She was one of the ones who planned the dances and pep rallies, who were cheerleaders, who had parties at their homes, who rode down Central Avenue honking horns after football victories, who sat at the showcase table for lunch, the first table at the bottom of the cafeteria stairs, where nobody coming or going could miss them. Ditty had straight blond hair and real grown-up woman's breasts that swung and bounced and bobbled when she led the "Let's Go Offense" cheer.
"No cotton there," Russ Palumbo would say to the kid across the aisle in study hall, "those babies are the real McCoy. McCoys."
Russ Palumbo said a lot of other things about her, but with somebody as popular and hard to get close to as Ditty Stack you knew it was just guessing.
The last Brian had heard she was going with this guy who played fullback and who was an All-State wrestler. Though wrestling wasn't a popular sport.
In the cafeteria one day he heard giggling as he passed the showcase, and a voice whispered, "That's him. That's the one."
In study hall Russ Palumbo said, "McNeil, I heard Ditty Stack has the hots for you. You fart."
In the hall one day she passed him with some of her friends and smiled and said hi.
He had only been to the shack with Serena twice since basketball had started. There wasn't any football or dances for an excuse to get out and he was tired. Practice tired him out, and work. It was too cold to walk to school together, they caught different buses.
He wished he was Russ Palumbo and knew which girls would do what without having to go with them to find out.