When I got through it, she said, “Oh, Skimmer, I knew it, I knew it. I knew you were just all hurt and twisted up inside like a little boy,” and she said it in this chokey voice, and I looked at her close, and damned if she wasn’t really bawling. She was so damn intense and nutty about it altogether that I began to get a little uncomfortable, to tell the truth, and I was just thinking maybe I’d better get the hell out of it when she turned and threw her arms around me and kissed me about sixteen times. Well, that wasn’t any time to be leaving, as you can see, so I started to give her as good as I got, and she kept saying things about how I was good and noble underneath and she’d known it all the time, and she was shaking and running her hands over me and things like that, and what she was, she was one of these dolls who ordinarily keep themselves all corked up tight, and then a guy comes along at the right time and just touches them and they blow the cork and fizz all over the place. We sort of got out of control and kept going from one thing to another, and the short of it is, I got to her there on the bench, and afterward she started to cry again and say over and over, “Say you love me, Skimmer, say you love me,” and finally I had to say it to get her to shut up about it.
Well, I might as well tell all of it while I’m at it, and that wasn’t the last time, one place or another, and mostly she acted pretty sensible about it, and I didn’t think too much about it when it wasn’t happening, but then one night when I was with her she said, “Skimmer, I’m worried,” and I said, “What about,” and she said, “I’m three days late,” and I said, “Late for what,” and she said, “Late, Skimmer. You know,” and then I did all of a sudden, and it scared the hell out of me. I don’t mind admitting I was in a sweat about it, and I got to thinking about a movie I’d seen about a guy who got a girl that way and took her out in a boat to drown her but lost his nerve and wasn’t going to do it but then did it accidentally, anyhow. I wasn’t really so damn dumb as to think of trying anything like that myself, but I was trying hard enough to think of some other way out of it that wouldn’t ruin everything, all that the basketball was bringing and everything, and then after I’d sweated myself into a God-damn blue funk, damned if she didn’t show up one night a little later and say, “It’s all right after all, Skimmer,” and I’d had plenty by then and said, “The hell it is. It may be all right with you, but it’s not all right with me, and I wouldn’t touch you with a ten foot pole if I flunked a dozen God-damn rhetoric classes.”
I didn’t go for any more rhetoric lessons, and I worried about it some because I knew sure as hell that old Boxer would give me the ax, but then something happened that just shows you how these things work out, and there just isn’t any damn use worrying about them at all. I was telling old Micky Spicer about Sylvia one night in the room at the frat house, about how nutty she was and everything, and he said, “What the hell were you studying rhetoric with her for,” and I said, “Why the hell would I be doing it? Because I was flunking the damn course, naturally,” and he said, “You mean you’re having trouble with that stuff? Man, it’s duck soup,” and I said, “It may be duck soup to you, but it’s not duck soup to me, and if you’re so God-damn good at it, maybe you can give me a lift,” and he said, “Sure. Why not?” and damned if he wasn’t as good as he claimed, and after that he always did my work for me in no time.
I didn’t see old Sylvia any more, except now and then at a distance on the campus, having quit the rhetoric lessons, and just to show you how nutty she really was, she started letting herself go to hell like one of these dames carrying a torch in a corny movie, and there just wasn’t any damn sense in it whatever that I could see. Mainly it was just the way she looked, the way she drooped around and had shadows under her eyes and acted like there wasn’t anyone else in the lousy world, and about a month after I broke off the lessons she went away from Pipskill and didn’t come back, and I learned later that she’d had a nervous breakdown and been sent to a rest home, which is just another way of saying she’d flipped her lid and been packed off to a fancy booby hatch. Another thing I learned, I learned that she’d had these nervous breakdowns before and was the kind of doll who’d go along all right for a while until some damn little thing triggered her off, and then she’d go through one of these nutty periods until she finally came out of it again, and I thought it was about the dirtiest damn trick I’d ever heard of for old Boxer to shove someone like that off on me, and it’s just another score I’ve got to settle with the son of a bitch if I ever get the chance.
All this time I kept on practicing basketball under Dilky in the old gym, and old Micky and I got to be just what he’d said we’d be, a real one-two punch, and as a matter of fact we got so sharp and good that Dilky got together with Barker Umplett and decided to change the kind of offense they’d been planning for the team. The way they’d planned it, they’d planned to use old Carboy under the bucket as the big scoring gun, but he was such a lousy shot, like I told, that they decided to use him there to get the ball and feed out to Micky and me for jump shots instead, and as a matter of fact it was something like Tizzy Davis and I had done it under old buller Mulloy, only a damn sight better. In December we started playing freshman teams from other schools, and we cleaned up everything around and looked plenty sharp, and it was a damn good thing old Umplett had something coming, if you want to know it, because as a matter of fact the varsity team wasn’t so hot, and it was the first time in years old Umplett had had a lousy team. First of December, they made a tour through the East and played five games and lost three of them, and old Umplett could feel his throat bleeding and was sour and mean and hard to get along with.
Well, in spite of old Sylvia and a few other things I won’t mention, the first year at Pipskill was pretty dull, as you can see, and after the freshman team got through beating all the other freshman teams around, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of use hanging on, except that the living was pretty good, a hell of a lot better than anywhere else as a matter of fact, and besides, I had to finish out the term if I wanted to come back and play basketball in the fall, so I did.
The varsity team wasn’t so hot, like I said, but old Umplett really worked the hell out of them when they got back from the eastern swing, and it looked for a while like he was going to bring them out of it, and the truth is, he damn near did, and after Christmas, when conference play started, they went into a winning streak and went right on winning all their games up to the last three, and damned if they didn’t drop all of those in a row. That knocked them right out of the conference championship and the right to play in the national tournaments that came afterward, and old Umplett just blew his God-damn stack, because a coach at Pipskill that didn’t win the conference and get in the national tournaments afterward was damn well liable not to be around long. It made it tough on us guys on the freshman team, because next season we’d be on the varsity, and old Umplett had blood in his eye and would be expecting us to save his God-damn hide for him, and just before we knocked off practice in the old gym, Dilky got us all together and told us that was the way it was and that we damn well better produce if we knew what was good for us.
That was in March, and I hung on a couple of months or so, a little longer, until school quit in June, and then I went home for the summer. The old man was at work when I got there, and the old lady said, “Well, I see you’ve come back to sponge off your old man some more. What’s the matter? They quit feeding you up there at the college?” and I said, “That’s a hell of a God-damn welcome to get when you’ve been gone damn near a whole year,” and she said, “Welcome! Look who the hell’s yakking about welcome. You never wrote to us or sent us a dime all that time you were up there and the minute your belly gets empty you come running home yelling welcome. You expect me to fall on your neck or something?” and I said, “The only place I expect you to fall is on your God-damn face from always swilling that lousy beer,” and she said, “You wouldn’t talk to me like that if only Eddy was here,” and right away we were off on that crummy routine, and she started to bawl, and I wished to hell I hadn’t come home at all, and to tell the truth, I wouldn’t have if the hundred clams a month had kept on during the summer, but they didn’t.