“Wait a minute,” I said. “I’d better pay the check,” but Tizzy said, “Oh, never mind, I’ve already paid it,” and I said, “You didn’t have to do that,” and he said, “That’s all right,” and the truth is, I’d seen him pay it, and that’s why I’d come back to the booth.
Outside on the street, old Tizzy said, “Sorry I don’t have the old man’s car tonight, Scaggs, or I’d drive you home.”
I said, “Oh, that’s all right,” and it was too, because to tell the truth, I didn’t much want them to see the crummy dump I lived in, and besides, if the old man and the old lady happened to be in one of their brawls, you could hear them all over the God-damn neighborhood, even with all the doors and windows closed. Anyhow, Marsha spoke up and said, “It’s a wonderful night for walking. You go on with Marion, Tizzy, and Skimmer will see I get home. You wouldn’t object to walking me home, would you, Skimmer?” She said it with this sly look through her lashes and the kind of little laugh in her voice, like she knew God-damn well no guy with all his marbles would object to walking her home, and I wondered for a second what she’d say if I said Hell, yes, I’d object to taking her shank’s mare clear the hell across the lousy town, but you can bet I didn’t say it, but said instead, “It would be my pleasure,” which was pretty damn corny, I admit, but true, nevertheless.
Old Tizzy said all right and went off with his girl Marion, who wasn’t a bad piece herself, except she had the kind of teeth you could use to eat roasting ears through a picket fence, and I started off with Marsha across town, not east toward the crummy section where I lived, but north toward the section where the people lived who were lousy with dough, and she held onto my arm and kept running her hand up and down the inside of it like she did before on the way to Tompkins’. She said again she simply couldn’t understand how she’d missed me so long around school and asked me to tell her all about myself, because she simply had to know every little detail about a guy who was bound to be a big basketball star and famous as all hell, and I thought, Anytime you think I’m going to louse up the works by telling you about my crummy family, baby, you’re a hell of a lot crazier than I think you are, so instead I told her a lot of God-damn lies about how my old man was pretty poor, even though he’d once been on the way to becoming a damn millionaire or something, and this was because he had a very bad disease of some kind that he never talked about and the doctors couldn’t do anything about, and it was just a damn crying shame all around. I told her, besides, that my older brother had been killed in the war, which was the only true thing I told her, and that my old lady had been heart-broken ever since and just seemed to keep on wasting away over the grief of it, but as a matter of fact, my old lady never felt any grief in her life that she couldn’t cure with a few cans of beer. Anyhow, I got warmed up to it pretty well and laid it on pretty thick, and she kept hanging onto my arm tighter and tighter and rubbing harder and harder on the inside, and every once in a while she’d make this little cooing sound that was like a doll makes when she’s working up to a tumble, and by the time I’d finished, damned if we hadn’t walked all the way across to her neighborhood and down to her house on the very street she lived on.
It was a big God-damn place, built like one of these old colonial mansions you see in pictures about the Civil War and stuff, and it was set back of a big front yard with a lot of trees and bushes growing around and a curved driveway going up one side and around in front of the house. We stopped along the drive under a tree, and she said, “I’m sorry I can’t ask you to come in tonight. You understand, don’t you?” and I thought, Sure, I understand. I understand your old man would probably throw me out on my butt if you did, but I said, “That’s all right. It’s getting pretty late, anyhow, and I’d better be getting home.” Then she turned and put her arms up around my God-damn neck and said, “Here’s a kiss for the hero, anyhow,” and that’s when I found out for sure what I’d been suspecting already, that this little old Marsha was a real worker, and that it didn’t make any God-damn difference which side of town you were on when you got down to business, it was the same wherever you were, only a little better some places than others, depending on who you were doing business with. I don’t mind telling you that kiss would have blistered the paint on a new automobile, and she may have been pretty good at it and all that, but no doll is that good naturally, and the only way she gets that good is by a hell of a lot of experience. I sneaked in a feel or two upstairs, and she didn’t seem to mind, but pretty soon she pulled away and skipped up the driveway laughing and said over her shoulder, “Goodnight, Skimmer. See you at school.” I watched her go up between the big columns on the porch and through the door, and then I turned and started shank’s mare for home, and as you can see, there hadn’t really been much to it, just a kiss and a couple of feels where they didn’t count much, and that’s the way she worked on me.
I went on home and to bed, and I lay there listening to the old man snoring like a hog in the next room, and I thought, Hell’s fire and save matches, was old Bugs right! Was old Bugs ever right! Then I began to think that one thing was sure as hell-fire, that I couldn’t be running around with my God-damn pockets empty if I was going to get anywhere with a classy doll like Marsha Davis, and what the hell would have happened if I hadn’t been able to jockey old Tizzy into picking up the check at Tompkins’, and I tried like hell to think of some way to pick up some easy dough, but I couldn’t think of any, except shooting rotation at Beegie’s, and I didn’t have time for Beegie’s any more, now that I was on the basketball team, and besides, rotation Beegie’s was just for crummy nickels that wouldn’t get you to first base with a classy doll whose old man was president of a bank unless you had a God-damn barrel of them.
The next day at school everyone kept coming up to me and slapping me on the back and saying things like, “Boy, what a game, Scaggs! Man, were you hot!” and a lot of other crap like that, and it wasn’t bad at first, being different from anything that had ever happened to me at school before, but after a while it got to giving me a pain and that’s no lie. I kept on looking out for Marsha, but I didn’t see her at all until school was almost over in the afternoon, and then it was in the hall with a lot of jerks between us, and she just waved and yelled, “Hi, Skimmer,” over their heads, and that’s all there was to it. I went to practice feeling pretty sore, and I thought more than once that just as soon as basketball season was over I was going to poke old buller Mulloy right in his fat mouth. Jesus, that guy was a pain. He was a pain up to here if I ever saw one.
Well, as it turned out I didn’t see Marsha at school again that week, and I got to thinking it was just a God-damn one-night stand, and not much of a stand at that, and I told myself that I was a damn fool, anyhow, to think a snotty bitch like her would have any time for a guy like me who came from the wrong side of town and didn’t have a cent but then I got to thinking about that kiss under the tree by the drive, and it sure as hell didn’t seem like the kind of kiss a girl would give a guy if she didn’t figure on having some time for him afterward, but of course some girls will kiss anyone who’s handy, and that’s just a cheap way to get their kicks. I got to thinking to hell with her, she wasn’t the only pebble on the lousy beach, and to hell with basketball, the God-damn crazy game, you ran your guts out and threw a damn silly ball around for no damn reason except so a lot of clowns could jump up and down and yell fifteen rahs for this and that, and I was going to turn in my suit at the end of the week, and the last thing I was going to do was poke old Mulloy in the mouth and slap the b’jeesus out of Tizzy Davis. Then, would you believe it, on Friday, the day I was going to do it, old Tizzy came up to me in the locker room and said, “Oh, by the way, Scaggs, Marsha told me to tell you that she had to go out of town with Mother for a few days, in case you might wonder where she was, and I forgot all about it until right now.” He said it just like that, the skinny bastard, just as calm and cool as a Goddamn prince or something, and the worst part was, it changed everything again, and I couldn’t afford to hit him.