I went up across the porch and back through the house to the kitchen, and the old man and the old lady were still bellied up to the table, and the old man said, “Where the hell you been?”
I said, “I been playing basketball, if you want to know, that’s where I’ve been,” and he said, “Basketball? What the hell you mean, basketball?” and I said, “I mean basketball, that’s what I mean. Didn’t you ever hear of basketball?”
He laid his knife down on the table and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at me like he was stupid, which he was. “By God, I can’t believe I heard right,” he said, and I said, “You dig the muck out of your ears, maybe you could hear better.”
He glared at me across the table and said, “Don’t mouth off at me, you smart little bastard, and I’ll tell you something else too. No kid of mine is going to play any God-damn silly games, and you get home for your supper on time after this or I’ll damn well go up the side of your head.”
“I’ll play any games I like, and I won’t ask you a damn thing about it before I do,” I said, but I said it too close, and the old man jumped up and clobbered me on the side of the head before I could duck. He was pretty strong in spite of being a beer-soaked slob, and he slammed me up against the wall and damn near knocked my brains out. That set the old lady to bawling, and she went into the old routine about how I was a bad boy, and it was all because I’d lost the big brother I needed to look after me and teach me what I needed to know, but that was a lot of bull because my big brother, whose name was Eddie, hadn’t ever loked after me any at all, and the only things he ever taught me were some dirty stories and limericks and how to shoot pool. He’d been in the war and off in some stinking place like New Guinea or somewhere, and he’d written me this letter once that said pretty plain between the lines that he was damn sick of it and was going to pull out and desert the first chance he got, but damned if he didn’t get killed before he could go. That made the old lady a gold star war mother or something corny like that, and she sure as hell got her kicks out of it, especially when she was drunk.
After my head quit ringing, I eased into my chair at the table and began to eat, and the chow was pretty damn lousy, besides being cold, and the only reason I bothered to eat at all was because I’d worked up this big appetite. Pretty soon the old man got up and said he was going up the street to the tavern to watch the fights, and I said if he’d quit blowing all his money for beer in the lousy tavern he’d have enough to buy a television set, and we could all watch the God-damn fights. He looked like he was figuring to clobber me again, but he hardly ever bothered to clobber me more than once a day, and so he just belched and rubbed his fat gut and went on out. I finished eating and went in the living room and sat down and tried to think of something to do with the damn night. There wasn’t any use going back uptown, because I didn’t have any money, and I’d had plenty of Bugs for one day, a little of Bugs going a hell of a long way, and finally I decided I might as well go over and see if I could stir up something with Mopsy, so I went.
The whole damn sky was lousy with stars, and the moon was floating around big and yellow up there among them, and when you walked under a tree and looked up you could see the moon and a big mess of the stars through the bare branches of the tree, and it was like seeing it all through a God-damn black filigree or something, and it was a pretty good eyeful if you cared for that kind of crap. The wind was blowing pretty strong in the street, stirring up the dead leaves in the yards and along the gutter, and it was damn cold, and I got to thinking that it was too cold to sit outside with Mopsy, and what the hell could you do with Mopsy inside with her old man and her old lady hanging around, and I was about to turn around and go home and to hell with it when it occurred to me that there was an outside chance that the old man and the old lady had gone out to a movie or somewhere, and so I took the chance and went on, and that’s just the way it turned out, as luck would have it.
Mopsy opened the door when I knocked, and I said, “Hi, Mopsy,” and I could tell by the way she looked half glad and half scared, like she knew damn well she was going to do something she wasn’t supposed to do, that no one was home but her.
“Hi, Skimmer,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
I said, “I just came over to do a little diddling,” and she said, “Don’t you talk like that, Skimmer. Besides, you can’t come in. Mom and Pop are gone to the movies, and I can’t have boys in the house when they’re gone.”
“Nuts,” I said. ‘Who’s going to know besides us? I’ll get the hell out before they come back.”
“Well,” she said, “they’ll be back around nine, so you’ll have to leave by eight-thirty.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be gone like Callahan,” and I went in.
She had her goggles off and her hair pushed up on top of her head and pinned there, and the fact was, she looked pretty good, sort of sophisticated, if you know what I mean, except she was too heavy, not really fat but damn plump, and she was wearing these crummy saddleshoes and white sox instead of high heels and nylons like any smart doll wears when she wants to send a guy. She was stacked up good, though, even if she did pack a little too much altogether, and her tail had a nice little wobble to it when she walked. I sat down on the sofa and watched her wobble it over to the radio-phonograph, and she said, “You want to hear some music?” and I said, “Sure. Put on a stack.”
She started the first platter spinning and came back and sat down beside me on the sofa, and I began to think that she was just the soft-headed kind that would be impressed all to hell by something like a guy playing on the school basketball team, so I said, “I’ll bet you can’t guess what I’ve been doing,” and she said, “No, what?”
“Playing basketball,” I said.
“Basketball?” she said.
“Hell, yes, basketball,” I said. “Can’t you understand anything?”
“Where you been playing basketball?” she said, and I said, “I been playing at school. Where the hell else is there to play basketball?”
“On the team?” she said.
“God Almighty, yes, on the team,” I said. “You think you play basketball all by yourself or something?”
By that time her eyes were sort of shining, and her mouth was hanging open a little like she was in heat, and she said, “Oh, Skimmer, that’s wonderful,” and I could see that she was already thinking about me being a school big shot, maybe, and dragging her around to dances and places with me, and I thought, Fat chance, sister, if everything old Bugs said about the classy dolls turns out to be true. Meantime, though, I was making a hell of a lot of points, and old Mopsy wasn’t too damn bad while I was waiting for something better, and as a matter of fact, we wound up doing a lot of kissing and having a pretty hot tussle there on the sofa, and if I hadn’t had to clear out at eight-thirty — except it was almost nine before I left — I got an idea I might even have got past that holy and precious stuff she always came up with at the last minute. Anyhow, on the way home I decided that if it worked like that on Mopsy there wasn’t any reason why it shouldn’t work on a lot of others, and I made up my mind right then and there to give this basketball crap the big try, and I didn’t worry any about the old man’s guff about no kid of his playing, either, because he didn’t really give a damn what the hell I did, or if I ever came home for supper on time or any other time, and he’d only stirred up a brawl over it tonight because he was handy and felt like raising hell.