About the middle of October we really got into it in earnest, and I soon found out then that playing basketball in high school wasn’t anything to playing it in college, even on a crummy freshman team, and this Dilky had been pretty easygoing up to then, but afterward he wasn’t easygoing at all, and as a matter of fact old buller Mulloy had been a stinking piker by comparison. He didn’t run up and down and yell, “Go, go, go!” all the time like old Mulloy, but he let you know pretty quick that he expected you to go, and if you didn’t do it, or even let down a little once in a while, the slop really hit the fan, and once when old Carboy slowed down to about eighty miles an hour Dilky stopped the action and walked out on the floor and got the ball and stood there real quiet and polite and smiling at Carboy a little, and he said in this soft voice, “Run, Mr. Carboy, run, God-damn you.” And then damned if he didn’t haul off with the God-damn ball and knock old Carboy ass over elbows, all seven feet of him.
Every now and then, after we got started good, Barker Umplett would come over from the field house to watch us work, and he’d stand there and look us over and not say anything at all, and after a while he’d go away, and all in all he was about the creepiest bastard I ever saw, and maybe it’s time I told you a little about him, but not much, because I didn’t see a hell of a lot of him that first year, him being busy with the first team over in the field house, and I can tell about him better when he comes in more.
He wasn’t very tall, only about five feet seven or eight, but he was damn near as wide as he was tall, and he probably weighed around two hundred pounds without any flab to his belly like there’d been to old Mulloy’s, and altogether he looked like he’d been hacked out of a chunk of rock. He had these bushy eyebrows and hair growing out of his God-damn nose and all over his chest like a bramble patch, and as a matter of fact he was about as hairy as a guy could get, except on his head where a guy usually wants a little hair, and on his head there wasn’t any at all, not a God-damn spear, and it was just as naked as the palm of your hand. Under those bushy eyebrows that stuck out in all directions, his eyes were about the color of cold dishwater, and when you looked in them you were liable to get the impression that the bastard was blind, because they had this empty kind of look that blind guys have, and if you did get that impression, it was your God-damn mistake, and as a matter of fact he saw a hell of a lot more than you ever thought he did or wanted him to. He wasn’t the old buddy-buddy type at all, like old Mulloy all the time and old Dilky some of the time, and all the years I played for him at Pipskill he never gave me a good word or a pat on the back, nor to anyone else, either. This was because of the way he looked at things, and I’ll tell you later how it was he looked at them.
Well, everything kept going along pretty good and about as expected, the basketball team shaping up for a good season and the lousy football team losing all their God-damn games, and after a while it got to be close to Thanksgiving, and it was about then I got called in for a consultation with this spook Boxer I told you about, and I knew damn well in advance what it was for, because I’ll have to admit things hadn’t picked up any in the rhetoric class. He was sitting behind his desk when I got there, and this doll was sitting in another chair in front of the desk, and I didn’t pay much attention to her at first, except to notice that she wore goggles that were pointed up at the corners where the handles fastened on and had little sets in them that were supposed to look like diamonds or something and were really glass.
Old Boxer looked at me like he was about to break out bawling from the general sadness of things, and he said in this fancy way he had, “Sit down, Mr. Scaggs. I know your time is infinitely precious, and I won’t claim any more of it than is absolutely necessary,” and I could tell he didn’t mean it the way it sounded, but just the opposite, the snotty bastard, and I sat down and said, “I got all day,” and he said, “Unfortunately, I haven’t, so I’ll come right to the point. I am aware, of course, that you are a shining, ascending star in the heavens of basketball enthusiasts, and this places me in a precarious position because you have demonstrated beyond doubt over a period of time that it is utterly futile to expect you to make a passing mark in Rhetoric Zero, and nothing sets a shining basketball star any quicker than a flunk in rhetoric, and nothing sets the star of a simple teacher in this school any quicker than setting one of the stars of Coach Umplett. If all this is making you see stars, Mr. Scaggs, you have my sympathy, because I’m seeing them, too, and it has indeed been my misfortune to see far too many of them for much too long.”
That’s about the way he said it, as near as I can put it down, and you could tell he thought it was clever as hell to break it off in me that way, but the truth is, he had me a little confused from trying to follow him, and before I could make up my mind to clobber him or at least say something back he went on. “In other words, Mr. Scaggs, as a man named Cellini once put it, my guts are in the sauce pan, and consequently, in order to salvage then, I’m prepared to compromise my integrity still another time, to sell another little bit of my soul. This young lady sitting here is Miss Sylvia Pruet. Miss Pruet has brains. Miss Pruet takes to rhetoric like a duck to water. Being myself too great a coward to undertake the odious task, I’ve prevailed upon Miss Pruet to tutor you. I’ll insist upon calling it tutoring, even though I really know better, and I have no doubt in the world that it will be largely a matter of your simply turning in her work, because while I have utter faith in Miss Pruet’s brains, I have none whatever in her ability to withstand the corruption of an ascending star. All I ask is that you support me in my pitiable delusion by disguising the work, by copying it in your own hand, and for Christ’s sake, be certain to make plenty of errors short of failure, because any reasonably accurate paper from you would be evidence of cheating that even I couldn’t ignore.”
Well, I didn’t know who the hell this guy Cellini was, and still don’t for that matter, but I could tell easy enough when someone had spit in my eye, and I was about to tell him what he could do with his Miss Pruet, but then I thought what the hell was the use of fouling my own nest because of this spook, and I didn’t tell him because I knew he was just the kind of unreasonable bastard who would really flunk me if I pushed him to it. I started thinking about the hundred clams a month and the soft life at the frat house with old Mickey and the other guys and all the other things that might develop from this God-damn game that I didn’t even know about yet, so I finally stood up and said, “Well, it’s all right with me, if it’s all right with her,” meaning this Pruet doll, and she stood up and said, “I’ll be happy to help you all I can,” and I looked at her good for the first time then, and I was glad I’d gone along with it after all, because to tell the truth, she wasn’t a bad looking doll whatever. She wore these fancy goggles, like I said, but they didn’t seem to hurt her much, and she had a lot of good stuff wrapped up in a sweater and skirt, and her face wouldn’t have stopped any clocks, either, in spite of being kind of sappy and dewey in the way you’d expect in any doll who went in for rhetoric and literature and crap like that. Besides, to tell all of it, I had this thought that she ought to be a pushover for a guy like me who played basketball and got to live in a frat house without being voted in and everything like that, and as a matter of fact she was.