Finding the Worm (26 page)

Lonnie and Beverly and Shlomo and Howie and Eric and Quentin started chanting, “Go! Go! Go!”

You know what? Right then, as the ball soared high into the air, at that moment, despite what I knew, despite everything, I changed my mind: I wanted it to be a home run.

“That’s going …,” the announcer said.

“Go!”

“That’s going …”

“Go!”

“That’s gone!”

As the ball sailed over the right-field wall, the seven of us let out a yell. It was
one
yell. You couldn’t tell where anyone’s voice stopped and anyone else’s started. I glanced over at Quentin, and he was yelling along with the rest of us, and his voice blended right in, and it felt like his voice was coming out of my mouth, and my voice was coming out of his mouth, and there was no difference.

I glanced back at the TV: Bobby Murcer was trotting around the bases. The Red Sox manager was walking out to the mound, signaling for a relief pitcher, and Ray Culp was walking back to the Red Sox dugout. Curt Blefary had come back out to the on-deck circle and was waiting to shake Murcer’s hand.

Mrs. Selig came running into the room to see what the commotion was about. When she saw Quentin sitting up in bed, pumping his fist in the air, she got a huge smile on her face.

Then the announcer said, “That’s a very special home run, folks. Not just because it puts the Yankees back in the lead. No, that home run had a lot more than a baseball game riding on it. You see, Bobby Murcer promised to hit a home run in today’s game. He made that promise to a dying boy who lives in Flushing, Queens. Bobby spent the afternoon yesterday with him and his friends—”

I think that was as much as any of us heard. The announcer’s voice became background noise at that point, and we turned to Quentin. He was kind of smiling, and his eyes were darting around the room. He didn’t get why we were suddenly staring at him. But a couple of seconds later, you could see him working it through in his mind, replaying what the announcer had said, and then you could see the meaning start to sink in. He brought his hands up to the back of his neck and rocked back and
forth. He took three loud breaths through his nose. It was maybe another second before tears started rolling out of his eyes and down his cheeks.

He looked up and cried, “Mom?”

Mrs. Selig ran into the room and knocked over both tray tables. Potato chips and peanuts went flying in every direction. Quentin was reaching for her as she got to the edge of the mattress, squeezing and unsqueezing his hands. She threw herself onto the bed and hugged him, and he buried his face in her shoulder. She was whispering, “No one knows for sure what’s going to happen, Quent. Not even the doctors know for sure. Your father will be home in a few minutes. You can ask him.” But she turned her head and said under her breath, “Oh God …”

By then, there were tears rolling down her cheeks too.

Lonnie stood up and said to the rest of us, “Let’s go!”

Shlomo said, “Shouldn’t we clean up—”

But Lonnie cut him off. “Let’s go!
Now
!”

That’s what we did. We grabbed our jackets and left. We left Quentin’s bedroom with the Yankees game still playing on the TV, and with peanuts and chips scattered on the floor, and with Quentin hugging his mom, and with the two of them bawling their eyes out.

Bobby Murcer felt real lousy about
what had happened. He called Quentin’s parents from the locker room after the game. I’m guessing one of the newspaper guys asked him about the “dying boy,” and he put two and two together. Otherwise, how would he have known?

It was Mr. Selig who told me and Lonnie about the call when we went over to pick up Quentin in the morning. He told us how decent Murcer was on the phone, and how he said he’d do whatever he could to make things right. I was glad to hear that. I didn’t want to think Murcer had blabbed about the nice thing he’d done for Quentin.

What happened was Jerry Manche had mentioned it
to a few guys who worked for the Yankees, and then one of them mentioned it to a couple of newspaper reporters, and then of course they started yakking about it. By the time the story got to the announcer, he didn’t know it was supposed to be a secret.

So Lonnie knocked over the first domino, when he asked Murcer to hit the home run, and after that it was just one domino falling into the next domino. It was no one’s fault.

We were still standing at the front door while Mr. Selig was telling us that. Lonnie waited for him to finish and asked if Quentin was going to school, and Mr. Selig shook his head. He told us that Quentin was back in the hospital, that he kept waking up during the night because he couldn’t breathe. “I think maybe it’s just his nerves,” Mr. Selig said. “His mother’s with him.…”

Then he started to sob and waved us away.

As Lonnie and I were walking back toward the bus stop, he turned to me and said, “You knew, didn’t you?”

“How could you tell?”

“The way you were walking home afterwards,” he said. “The rest of the guys were staring down, thinking about stuff. But you were staring straight ahead, like there was nothing to think about. Plus,
something’s
been eating at you these last couple of weeks. I figure it must’ve been that. Magoo told you, right?”

“Lonnie—”

“That’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to say it. I figure it’s got to be him. Who else from the block would know except Quentin’s mom and dad? I figure they must’ve told him, because he’s their rabbi, and because that’s the kind of thing you tell a rabbi, and I figure he must’ve told you. I don’t know why he’d do that—”

“Neither do I,” I said.

Lonnie looked at me, and I looked back at him, but we kept walking.

“How long do you think he’s got?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You
really
don’t know, or you know and you’re not supposed to tell anyone?”

“I really and truly don’t know. I swear on my mother’s life.”

Those words kind of hung between us for a couple of seconds.

“Anyway,” Lonnie said, “it’s a good thing the truth came out.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Because we can treat him like a king.” Lonnie swallowed hard. “I mean, as soon as he gets out of the hospital …”

“Yeah.”

“I doubt he’s going to go back to school.”

“Why wouldn’t he go back to school?” I said.

“Because what’s the point? I mean, why does it matter anymore if Quentin can change fractions to percents? What good is it going to do him?”

“What else is he going to do?” I said. “Going to school has got to be better than sitting around and waiting.”

“Here’s what I was thinking. What if, as soon as he gets home from the hospital, the rest of us just skip school until the summer?”

“C’mon, Lonnie!”

“Think about it, Jules. It’s only a few months. We can just hang out at his house and get him whatever he wants. He wants a vanilla milk shake,
bam
, one of us can run downstairs to Vera’s and get him a vanilla milk shake. He’ll never be alone. It’s the right thing to do.”

“Lonnie, it’s not going to happen. It’s not realistic.”

“Why isn’t it realistic? My mom will write me a note. She knows what it’s like to lose people.”

“Even if she does, it’s just a note from your mom. Who says Principal Salvatore will go for it?”

“Then we’ll go to the newspapers,” Lonnie said. “We’ll tell them how we just want to spend time with our dying friend, and how our school principal won’t let us. Let’s see what Salvatore says with an office full of reporters.”

“You just want to skip school.”

“I never denied it, Jules. But I want to skip school
for
a good reason
. That makes a big difference. Don’t you want to spend as much time as you can with Quentin? You said yourself you don’t know how much time he’s got left. He could die next year, or he could die next month.”

“Lonnie, we can’t talk about it like this. It’s not right. It’s just … not right.”

“You’re the one who says we should be realistic. I’m trying to be realistic.”

“How about if we wait until Quentin gets out of the hospital and then figure out the rest of it?”

“That’s fine with me,” he said.

Quentin died last night. Friday night.
April 17, 1970. Eight days after the Yankees announcer messed up and said the thing he said. I want to remember that date, April 17, 1970. He never came home from the hospital. The last time I saw him, he was hugging his mom.

He was twelve years old.

I mean, he was
twelve
.

TWELVE!!!

Why do people get philosophical at
times like this? Why do they have to go on and on about the meaning of it? I mean, you expect that kind of thing from your parents, and maybe even your sister. But the stuff comes at you wherever you turn. Your teachers. Your mailman. Even the guy who picks up and drops off your laundry. They’ve all just got to get in their two cents about how things will be all right no matter how much it hurts right now.

Yeah, Quentin died. Yeah, it’s real sad. End of story. I mean, did we
really
need another trip to Miss Medina’s office this morning? She’s a real nice lady, but I doubt she could’ve picked Quentin out of a lineup. Do I need her
to tell me time heals all wounds? I felt like saying, “That’s it? That’s the best you’ve got?” But I sat there in her office and didn’t talk. None of us did. Not even Lonnie. He could have let her have it. But he didn’t. My point is, why is it the guidance counselor’s business? What’s she going to tell me that I couldn’t have figured out on my own?

You know what old Mrs. Griff did? She nodded as I came into homeroom. That’s it. Just a quick nod, as if to say,
Sorry about your friend
. She made more sense than the rest of them put together.

It was hot out this morning, like middle-of-summer
hot. I think it was maybe seventy-five degrees, but it felt even hotter because we had to wear blazers to Quentin’s funeral.

The cemetery was way out on Long Island. The ride was pretty bad. I was sitting in the backseat of the car, next to Amelia, and she kept reaching across and squeezing my hand. I let her do it because it seemed to mean a lot to her. But it just made me hotter. The sun was glaring through the windows, and my mom and dad were whispering back and forth in the front seat, and I was staring down at the buttons on my blazer, and the back of my neck was sweaty, and the middle of my back
was sweaty, and it was the wrongest, sweatiest feeling I’d ever had.

We parked in a lot next to the chapel, which was a large beige building in front of the cemetery. There were a half dozen cars there already. The first person I noticed was Beverly. She was standing at the front door of the chapel. She took a step forward when she saw us drive up, but she held back and waited for my parents and Amelia to get out of the car and walk into the chapel. Then she ran up to me and hugged me, which would’ve been all right, except for how hot and sweaty I was.

She was weepy, of course. But she managed to get out, “It’s so bad.…”

“Yeah,” I said.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I kissed her on the cheek. That seemed to work. She wiped her eyes and smiled at me and told me she’d see me later. Then she went into the chapel to sit with her family.

I waited outside for the rest of the guys to show up, which they did over the next ten minutes. We didn’t talk much. Howie razzed Shlomo a couple of times about how shiny his shoes were, how he could see his reflection in them. He didn’t mean anything by it. You couldn’t blame him for doing it because it filled up the silence. The only good thing about standing there was that it was shady, and there was a breeze blowing, and I started to cool off.

Lonnie was the last guy to arrive. His mom and dad were walking in front of him, and I expected Mrs. Fine to be crying her eyes out, but she had this stiff look on her face. Her eyes were flat. Her mouth was straight. It was like she had no expression at all. What was even weirder was that she didn’t stop to hug us, and she’s the biggest hugger I know. But she and Mr. Fine had their arms locked together, and they were looking straight ahead, and they walked right past us as if we weren’t there.

Lonnie came over and said, “You’re going to say something, right, Jules?”

“What do you mean?”

“After the service, when we go out to the grave, Magoo is going to ask people to come forward and say stuff. That’s how funerals work.”

“How do you know?”

“My mom told me. She asked me if I was going to do it.”

“Then why don’t
you
do it?”

“Because I’m not the word guy. You’re the word guy.”

That was as far as we’d gotten when a blue limousine pulled into the parking lot. I thought at first it was a funeral car. But then I noticed the pinstripes and Yankees logo. The limousine rolled to a stop, and out stepped Bobby Murcer and Jerry Manche. They were wearing dark suits and sunglasses. They walked around to the trunk, popped it open, and pulled out a huge horseshoe of
flowers. I mean, the thing was just enormous—at least six feet tall. It wasn’t heavy, though. Jerry Manche was carrying it by himself as he and Murcer walked toward us.

Murcer took off his sunglasses and slid them into his pocket. Then he put out his hand and shook each of our hands. “How’re you fellas holding up?”

“We’re doing all right,” Lonnie said. “Nice home run.”

“Thanks.”

“I didn’t think that guy would ever throw you a strike.”

Murcer smiled. “Neither did I.”

Jerry Manche said, “Hey, Bobby, I’m going to bring the flowers inside. You take your time.”

Murcer nodded and then walked over to me. I was looking off to the side because I didn’t want to have another conversation, but he ducked down and made me look him in the eye. “How are you doing, young man?”