Joe went over to the girl and whispered to her, thinking she’d be pleased to hear it: “It’s all right. I don’t want your sack. I’m not in this race.”
“Sisterrr!”
Sister Martina came. “Now what?”
Joe got in first. “Sister, it’s all right. I don’t want her sack. I’m not in this race.”
“Sister, he has to be!”
“I don’t!”
“Father said!”
Joe reeled back. “Father didn’t!”
“No,” said Sister Martina, “but Father expects it.”
Joe could’ve cried, but didn’t. “Sister, I don’t want to.”
“Sister, he has to!”
“Nobody has to, but one of you should.” Sister Martina moved away from them, calling to the other contestants to line up.
“You know you’re the one,” the girl said to Joe, stuck her tongue out at him, threw down the sack, and walked on it. “Thanks for taking my place. Half-Pint.”
“Four Eyes.”
Joe knew, when he picked up the sack, why the girl hadn’t got into it — it was dusty, which he didn’t mind so much, but damp at the bottom, which he did, and said BIG BOY POTATOES on it.
Joe went over to the starting line, carrying his sack to save energy, which other contestants were wasting by hopping around and falling down in theirs, but he also wanted to put off the moment when it would clearly be seen that he was one of them. When the moment came, he was laughed at by guys who knew he was the fastest runner in the fifth grade (and probably in the whole school), and by some of the girls, including one who’d been in love with him last year, and by Frances and her friends. Frances held up the Kewpie doll and said to it (really to her friends), “See Daddy!” Joe just smiled at Frances and everybody, so they couldn’t tell how he really felt about being in the sack race, so he wouldn’t get mad and cry and fight and maybe lose if he fought the guy he wanted to fight — Delbert Freeman, who was stumbling around, making believe his orange pop was whiskey, looking cross-eyed, and saying, “Hic!”
“Piss Pants!”
Delbert Freeman didn’t hear it, but Sister Martina did and yelled:
“On your mark, get set, go!”
Joe broke fast and — he’d been in sack races before — watched out for early fallers. When he was clear, he eased up some to save himself for the stretch, concentrated on his sack, jockeying it, grabbing it up when he jumped, letting it out when he came down. (The noises from the crowd, the screams and groans, were not for him.) Lying third, breezing, gaining on the big seventh-grade girl who looked like Powerful Katinka in Toonerville Folks whose movements were erratic and might bring her (and him) down, he gave her more room, lost a little ground, gained it back, drew even, passed her. (Now the noises from the crowd were for him, cheering him on.) Closing on the leader, a big eighth-grade guy who smoked Wings (ten cents a pack) in the boys’ washroom during recess and might not stay, Joe drew even, and was going ahead in the stretch, driving, when he fell.
“His old man’s a bootlegger!” Delbert Freeman.
“His uncle!” Catfish.
Joe jumped up and out of his sack. He was heading not for Catfish but Delbert Freeman when, seeing and hearing Sister Agatha (“Joe, don’t!”), he changed directions… and ran away… all the way home, where he went up to the little tower and did what he’d wanted to do all that day, cried.
3. LOOKING UP SKIRTS
AT THE LAST meet that spring, Joe won his events, the hundred and the two-twenty dashes, and ran anchor in the four-forty relay, won by the team. But then, because the team’s second best distance man had twisted an ankle in the broad jump, Joe — against the conscience of his coach, Father “Germany” Zahn, an old dash man — was entered in the mile. After setting a pace intended to tempt and kill off the opposition, he faded as expected, but miraculously came again and got up for a third, a point, which proved to be the margin of Immaculata’s victory over hated Cathedral.
Joe was a hero to the faculty and student body for what remained of the school year — not much, summer vacation depriving the track star, as it didn’t the football and basketball star, of his admirers all too soon. But Joe had lettered in a major sport as a sophomore, something seldom done at Immaculata, where standards were high, and he made the most of it, wearing his sweater of pale blue with its snow white I as long as the weather permitted, or a little longer — he was hoping for an unseasonably cool summer. And was looking forward to fall and football because, though he didn’t care for the game and was small for it, Immaculata could use his blazing speed in the backfield — the head football coach, Father “On” Wisconski, present at the last meet, had been heard to remark (by the student manager of the track team, one of Joe’s admirers), “I’d like to turn that little fart loose on Cathedral.”
With that in mind, Joe was in training that summer. Instead of sharpening pencils and practicing his typing at Hackett’s, he stayed home and cut the grass, about two acres of it, with a hand mower, weeded the flower beds, practiced fast starts and broken field running, did push-ups, chinned himself on the apple tree, and ate a lot.
By July, though, it had become one of those summers that melt the streets, and Joe was spending more time in the cool of the cellarway. Here, in a deck chair, he read the Sporting News regularly, keeping track of players he’d seen before they went up to the majors, or after they came down; also read Anthony Adverse, a very long book, regularly; and occasionally dipped into Butler’s Lives of the Saints and Rumble and Carty’s Radio Replies, this (a gift from Sister Agatha, now stationed in Green Bay) answering questions he might be asked by the laity or enemies of the Church if he became a priest, which he wasn’t sure about that summer.
Early in July, when the heat had reached into the bricks of the cellarway and was wilting the moss, he said good-bye to the horseflies and moved the deck chair inside, into the cellar, and shut the door. Here, sitting under a dusty lightbulb, he smoked (English Ovals, exhaling into the open furnace to avoid detection) and drank (beer and ale, there being, or having been, a good supply in the cellar). Here he discovered what, until that summer, had been a mystery to him, why some stars stay out all night, experienced himself the special pleasure, the thrill, there is for the athlete in dissipation, in tempting fate — imagined himself in the fall (“Fumble!”) being taken out, hooted at.
And while smoking and drinking away these days in the cellar, abusing his body, he also abused his mind and spirit with the little magazines he bought with embarrassment at a downtown cigar store, to which he’d return for more of the same, he knew, though regularly disappointed by the art (“Pensive,” “Nocturne”) and the fiction (“Concealed from the other merrymakers by a potted palm while the band played on, Randy cupped one of Diane’s creamy cherry-tipped orbs”).
He couldn’t trust himself these days.
If he suddenly shoved his reading matter into the furnace and rushed out into the heat of the day, it might appear that he’d suddenly resolved to amend his life and that he just happened to be occupied in the front yard, moving the sprinklers, raking the gravel driveway, for a brief period in the morning and afternoon. The truth was, his reading matter could be retrieved from the cold furnace and he’d availed himself of the trial offer made to adults only for a limited time only by Seemore Products of Hollywood, to be dispatched to addressee in a plain brown envelope posthaste. Weeks had passed since addressee enclosed a dollar and signed himself J. Hackett — not such a good idea as he’d thought, since it meant meeting the mailman twice a day if the uncensored poses (“Kind Men Like! Nuff Sed!!”) weren’t to fall into the hands of the other J. Hackett at that address. Write and say that Seemore should cancel his order and give the money to the poor? Or that he’d moved to a nonexistent address in a distant city? Or that he’d recently married and was no longer interested? Or that he’d recently passed away, yours truly, Mrs J. Hackett?