I wasn’t really sorry to be going. I was rested up and didn’t mind going down the road to the Florida Market.
“Don’t call me any of your mother’s pet names,” I said to Teddy.
“Eeee-eee-eeee, what a fuckin wet you are, Lachance.”
“Go on, Gordie,” Chris said. “We’ll wait over by the tracks.”
“You guys better not go without me,” I said.
Vern laughed. “Goin without you’d be like goin with Slitz instead of Budweiser’s, Gordie.”
“Ah, shut up.”
They chanted together: “I don’t shut up, I
grow
up. And when I look at you I
throw
up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner and licks it up,” I said, and hauled ass out of there, giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went. I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?
12
Different strokes for different folks,
they say now, and that’s cool. So if I say
summer
to you, you get one set of private, personal images that are all the way different from mine. That’s cool. But for me,
summer
is always going to mean running down the road to the Florida Market with change jingling in my pockets, the temperature in the gay nineties, my feet dressed in Keds. The word conjures an image of the GS&WM railroad tracks running into a perspective-point in the distance, burnished so white under the sun that when you closed your eyes you could still see them there in the dark, only blue instead of white.
But there was more to that summer than our trip across the river to look for Ray Brower, although that looms the largest. Sounds of The Fleetwoods singing, “Come Softly to Me” and Robin Luke singing “Susie Darlin” and Little Anthony popping the vocal on “I Ran All the Way Home.” Were they all hits in that summer of 1960? Yes and no. Mostly yes. In the long purple evenings when rock and roll from WLAM blurred into night baseball from WCOU, time shifted. I think it was all 1960 and that the summer went on for a space of years, held magically intact in a web of sounds: the sweet hum of crickets, the machine-gun roar of playing-cards riffling against the spokes of some kid’s bicycle as he pedaled home for a late supper of cold cuts and iced tea, the flat Texas voice of Buddy Knox singing “Come along and be my party doll, and I’ll make love to you, to you,” and the baseball announcer’s voice mingling with the song and with the smell of freshly cut grass: “Count’s three and two now. Whitey Ford leans over ... shakes off the sign ... now he’s got it ... Ford pauses ... pitches ...
and there it goes! Williams got all of that one! Kiss it goodbye! RED SOX LEAD, THREE TO ONE!”
Was Ted Williams still playing for the Red Sox in 1960? You bet your ass he was—.316 for my man Ted. I remember that very clearly. Baseball had become important to me in the last couple of years, ever since I’d had to face the knowledge that baseball players were as much flesh and blood as I was. That knowledge came when Roy Campanella’s car overturned and the papers screamed mortal news from the front pages: his career was done, he was going to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. How that came back to me, with that same sickening mortal thud, when I sat down to this typewriter one morning two years ago, turned on the radio, and heard that Thurman Munson had died while trying to land his airplane.
There were movies to go see at the Gem, which has long since been torn down; science fiction movies like
Gog
with Richard Egan and westerns with Audie Murphy (Teddy saw every movie Audie Murphy made at least three times; he believed Murphy was almost a god) and war movies with John Wayne. There were games and endless bolted meals, lawns to mow, places to run to, walls to pitch pennies against, people to clap you on the back. And now I sit here trying to look through an IBM keyboard and see that time, trying to recall the best and the worst of that green and brown summer, and I can almost feel the skinny, scabbed boy still buried in this advancing body and hear those sounds. But the apotheosis of the memory and the time is Gordon Lachance running down the road to the Florida Market with change in his pockets and sweat running down his back.
I asked for three pounds of hamburger and got some hamburger rolls, four bottles of Coke and a two-cent churchkey to open them with. The owner, a man named George Dusset, got the meat and then leaned by his cash register, one hammy hand planted on the counter by the big bottle of hardcooked eggs, a toothpick in his mouth, his huge beer belly rounding his white tee-shirt like a sail filled with a good wind. He stood right there as I shopped, making sure I didn’t try to hawk anything. He didn’t say a word until he was weighing up the hamburger.
“I know you. You’re Denny Lachance’s brother. Ain’t you?” The toothpick journeyed from one comer of his mouth to the other, as if on ball bearings. He reached behind the cash register, picked up a bottle of S’OK cream soda, and chugged it.
“Yes, sir. But Denny, he—”
“Yeah, I know. That’s a sad thing, kid. The Bible says: ‘In the midst of life, we are in death.’ Did you know that? Yuh. I lost a brother in Korea. You look just like Denny, people ever tell you that? Yuh. Spitting image.”
“Yes, sir, sometimes,” I said glumly.
“I remember the year he was All-Conference. Halfback, he played. Yuh. Could he run? Father God and Sonny Jesus! You’re probably too young to remember.” He was looking over my head, out through the screen door and into the blasting heat, as if he were having a beautiful vision of my brother.
“I remember. Uh, Mr. Dusset?”
“What, kid?” His eyes were still misty with memory; the toothpick trembled a little between his lips.
“Your thumb is on that scales.”
“What?”
He looked down, astounded, to where the ball of his thumb was pressed firmly on the white enamel. If I hadn’t moved away from him a little bit when he started talking about Dennis, the ground meat would have hidden it. “Why, so it is. Yuh. I guess I just got thinkin about your brother, God love him.” George Dusset signed a cross on himself. When he took his thumb off the scales, the needle sprang back six ounces. He patted a little more meat on top and then did the package up with white butcher’s paper.
“Okay,” he said past the toothpick. “Let’s see what we got here. Three pounds of hamburg, that’s a dollar forty-four. Hamburg rolls, that’s twenty-seven. Four sodas, forty cents. One churchkey, two pence. Comes to ...” He added it up on the bag he was going to put the stuff in. “Two-twenty-nine.”
“Thirteen,” I said.
He looked up at me very slowly, frowning. “Huh?”
“Two-thirteen. You added it wrong.”
“Kid, are you—”
“You added it wrong,” I said. “First you put your thumb on the scales and then you overcharged on the groceries, Mr. Dusset. I was gonna throw some Hostess Twinkies on top of that order but now I guess I won’t.” I spanged two dollars and thirteen cents down on the Schlitz placemat in front of him.
He looked at the money, then at me. The frown was now tremendous, the lines on his face as deep as fissures. “What are you, kid?” he said in a low voice that was ominously confidential. “Are you some kind of smartass?”
“No, sir,” I said. “But you ain’t gonna jap me and get away with it. What would your mother say if she knew you was japping little kids?”
He thrust our stuff into the paper bag with quick stiff movements, making the Coke bottles clink together. He thrust the bag at me roughly, not caring if I dropped it and broke the sodas or not. His swarthy face was flushed and dull, the frown now frozen in place. “Okay, kid. Here you go. Now what you do is you get the Christ out of my store. I see you in here again and I going to throw you out, me. Yuh. Smartass little sonofawhore.”
“I won’t come in again,” I said, walking over to the screen door and pushing it open. The hot afternoon buzzed somnolently along its appointed course outside, sounding green and brown and full of silent light. “Neither will none of my friends. I guess I got fifty or so.”
“Your brother wasn’t no smartass!” George Dusset yelled.
“Fuck you!”
I yelled, and ran like hell down the road.
I heard the screen door bang open like a gunshot and his bull roar came after me:
“If you ever come in here again I’ll fat your lip for you, you little punk!”
I ran until I was over the first hill, scared and laughing to myself, my heart beating out a triphammer pulse in my chest. Then I slowed to a fast walk, looking back over my shoulder every now and then to make sure he wasn’t going to take after me in his car, or anything.
He didn‘t, and pretty soon I got to the dump gate. I put the bag inside my shirt, climbed the gate, and monkeyed down the other side. I was halfway across the dump area when I saw something I didn’t like—Milo Pressman’s portholed ’56 Buick was parked behind his tarpaper shack. If Milo saw me I was going to be in a world of hurt. As yet there was no sign of either him or the infamous Chopper, but all at once the chain-link fence at the back of the dump seemed very far away. I found myself wishing I’d gone around the outside, but I was now too far into the dump to want to turn around and go back. If Milo saw me climbing the dump fence, I’d probably be in dutch when I got home, but that didn’t scare me as much as Milo yelling for Chopper to sic would.
Scary violin music started to play in my head. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, trying to look casual, trying to look as if I belonged here with a paper grocery sack poking out of my shirt, heading for the fence between the dump and the railroad tracks.
I was about fifty feet from the fence and just beginning to think that everything was going to be all right after all when I heard Milo shout: “Hey! Hey, you! Kid! Get away f’n that fence! Get outta here!”
The smart thing to have done would have been to just agree with the guy and go around, but by then I was so keyed that instead of doing the smart thing I just broke for the fence with a wild yell, my sneakers kicking up dirt. Vem, Teddy, and Chris came out of the underbrush on the other side of the fence and stared anxiously through the chain-link.
“You come back here!”
Milo bawled.
“Come back here or I’ll sic my dawg on you, goddammit!”
I did not exactly find that to be the voice of sanity and conciliation, and I ran even faster for the fence, my arms pumping, the brown grocery bag crackling against my skin. Teddy started to laugh his idiotic chortling laugh,
eee-eee-eeee
into the air like some reed instrument being played by a lunatic.
“Go, Gordie! Go!” Vern screamed.
And Milo yelled: “Sic ‘im, Chopper! Go get ’im, boy!”
I threw the bag over the fence and Vem elbowed Teddy out of the way to catch it. Behind me I could hear Chopper coming, shaking the earth, blurting fire out of one distended nostril and ice out of the other, dripping sulphur from his champing jaws. I threw myself halfway up the fence with one leap, screaming. I made it to the top in no more than three seconds and simply leaped—I never thought about it, never even looked down to see what I might land on. What I
almost
landed on was Teddy, who was doubled over and laughing like crazy. His glasses had fallen off and tears were streaming out of his eyes. I missed him by inches and hit the clay-gravel embankment just to his left. At the same instant, Chopper hit the chain-link fence behind me and let out a howl of mingled pain and disappointment. I turned around, holding one skinned knee, and got my first look at the famous Chopper—and my first lesson in the vast difference between myth and reality.
Instead of some huge hellhound with red, savage eyes and teeth jutting out of his mouth like straight-pipes from a hotrod, I was looking at a medium-sized mongrel dog that was a perfectly common black and white. He was yapping and jumping fruitlessly, going up on his back legs to paw the fence.
Teddy was now strutting up and down in front of the fence, twiddling his glasses in one hand, and inciting Chopper to ever greater rage.
“Kiss my ass, Choppie!” Teddy invited, spittle flying from his lips. “Kiss my ass! Bite shit!”
He bumped his fanny against the chain-link fence and Chopper did his level best to take Teddy up on his invitation. He got nothing for his pains but a good healthy nose-bump. He began to bark crazily, foam flying from his snout. Teddy kept bumping his rump against the fence and Chopper kept lunging at it, always missing, doing nothing but racking out his nose, which was now bleeding. Teddy kept exhorting him, calling him by the somehow grisly diminutive “Choppie,” and Chris and Vern were lying weakly on the embankment, laughing so hard that they could now do little more than wheeze.
And here came Milo Pressman, dressed in sweat-stained fatigues and a New York Giants baseball cap, his mouth drawn down in distracted anger.
“Here, here!” he was yelling. “You boys stop a-teasing that dawg! You hear me?
Stop it right now!”
“Bite it, Choppie!” Teddy yelled, strutting up and down on our side of the fence like a mad Prussian reviewing his troops. “Come on and sic me! Sic me!”
Chopper went nuts. I mean it sincerely. He ran around in a big circle, yelping and barking and foaming, rear feet spewing up tough little dry clods. He went around about three times, getting his courage up, I guess, and then he launched himself straight at the security fence. He must have been going thirty miles an hour when he hit it, I kid you not—his doggy lips were stretched back from his teeth and his ears were flying in the slipstream. The whole fence made a low, musical sound as the chain-link was not just driven back against the posts but sort of
stretched
back. It was like a zither note—
yimmmmmmmm.
A strangled yawp came out of Chopper’s mouth, both eyes came up blank and he did a totally amazing reverse snap-roll, landing on his back with a solid thump that sent dust puffing up around him. He just lay there for a moment and then he crawled off with his tongue hanging crookedly from the left side of his mouth.