Thinking, God, what you going to do about it? I'm waiting.
Slow at first, then fast, like a rock slide gaining momentum as it falls, accelerating as it gets heavier, Jinx Fairchild's life starts to unravel.
So much pressure on the boy with the state tournament games coming up, all the publicity of Hammond Central's first undefeated basketball season in fourteen years, and these scholarships he's being offered or the rumor is, he's being offered from Cornell, Syracuse, Penn State, Ohio State, Indiana. no wonder Jinx Fair child is becoming nervous, edgy, short tempered, strange, not like himself.
If not like himself, then like who?
Ceci, who saw the movie with her girlfriends, says, Jinx getting' like three faces of Eve' nobody ever know which face is comin' up.
* *
He's partying, too. Which he'd never had time for, before.
Drinking, trying a little reefer
A late night party one weekend, at somebody's house on Peach Tree Street where there's no adult to interfere, music turned up so high you couldn't hardly hear what it is Jerry Lee Lewis, maybe, singing Great Balls of Fire, closest thing to black any white music can get and suddenly Sissy Weaver who's so crazy for Jinx Fair child, and crazy drunk tonight, throws herself on Louise Thornton who's been hanging on Jinx, and the two girls fight over him while Jinx stares stricken in embarrassment.
You get your fuckin' hands off him cunt!
You stand off, girl you crazy!
Sissy Weaver with her smoky skin and hot eyes and Louise Thornton with the re d haired glamour wig, the black sequined jersey dress: two good looking girls fighting over Jinx Fairchild, there's screaming, there's fists, there's kicking. the red haired wig flying!. glasses and chairs crashing!. the two girls rolling on the floor cursing and punching trying to kill each other while Jinx Fairchild scrambles over them trying to pull them apart but fearful of touching them, not knowing what in hell to do.
Jerry Lee Lewis bawling Great Balls of Fire so it's coming out of your ears, not going in.
Next day, and the next, when the story of the Fight Over Jinx Fairchild goes around the neighborhood, it's generally said that Sissy Weaver won. Leastways, she's the girl Jinx Fairchild went home with.
These weeks, the end of basketball season and the start of the state tournament, Minnie Fairchild understands that things are drifting out of her control but doesn't know why or how to stop them.
She's frightened at the change in her boy, the way his natural sweetness is going sour, she hears the neighborhood stories, she knows, but her fearfulness gets twisted around and comes out loud and accusing and mock enraged. like she's a TV mother saying her words bright and sassy and exaggerated, hoping to make light of the very fearfulness behind them. Saying to Jinx, storming after im while he shields his head, Some slutty little gal's going to catch you sure enough, smart ass, and, Don't pay your momma any mind, huh? Don't think I know what's going oncan smell it on you? and, Who you think you are, boy, the King of Siam?
King Farouk?
One day, Minnie traps Jinx in his bedroom, confronting him with things she's heard things her women friends delight in telling her and Jinx hunches up like a little boy, his face suddenly crinkling, his eyes wet with tears, and he says, You tell me, Momma; you know all the answers, and it isn't even sass as he says it, but straight from the heart.
And Minnie Fairchild just stands there, blinking.
Performing monkey.
S'pose you decide to stop performing.
Jinx Fairchild has cut the morning's classes, probably he'll cut the afternoon's too but show up at three fifteen for practice. if mister Breuer knows he's been truant, mister Breuer won't say a word.
Clapping his hand on Jinx Fairchild's back as he did Friday night after he Lebanon game, giving off his brassy sweaty smell that's the smell of pride.
Take your hand off a me, white mothafucker, Jinx Fairchild doesn't think, cause Jinx Fairchild's not the kind of black boy to think such thoughts.
Naw. Jinx Fairchild the kind of black boy, anybody wanted to be integrated they'd want to be integrated with him.
Jinx is leaning out over the railing of the Main Street bridge, drops a glob of phlegmy spit twenty feet down into the river. The current's rough, flecked with white; the color of the water is steely thousands of thinnesses of steel wire. There's a harsh metallic smell too, a harshness to the April air that goes directly to the bone and the marrow inside the bone.
He shivers, feels something rough and fiery at the back of his throat.
Phlegm in hot coin sided globs keeps wanting to come up, rack him in coughing.
He's facing east. To his left is the raggedy shore bordering
Diamond Chemicals; to his right, the railroad yards, the ware houses, the wharfs, docked freighters and trucks loading and un loading, and the waterfront saloons and the crazy steep hills of Gowanda, Pitt.
Coming straight at him, bound for the lake, is a freighter, head on, slicing the choppy waves, appearing foreshortened like a bulldog.
Jinx is just staring out, not thinking. If he were thinking.
if he goes to the police now, this morning, and confesses his crime, his life will be interrupted yet it will be complete. There's a pleasure in that. There's a satisfaction.
He tries to re call how old he'll be, his next birthday. The date falls on the far side of an abyss wide as the Cassadaga.
At the police station, they'll take him into an interrogation room.
They'll ask questions; he'll answer. His voice slow and hollow sounding as it has been lately, in school. As if his voice isn't inside him but being thrown across a distance. As if he's a ventriloquist 's dummy.
But he isn't thinking these things, exactly. His eyes are misting over in the wind. He's flexing and straining his arm muscles, leaning out over the railing. Jinx Fairchild has got good, solid muscles.
maybe a little tight. the kind of muscles that can tear
Muscles, tendons, bones. He's re ad that the perfect athlete is a machine made of flesh. Doesn't need to think cause his body thinks for him.
Jinx Fairchild has been taping his ankles carelessly these days, preparing for games.
Doesn't like to be touched, these days.
I would like to confess to.
That boy who was found in the river, two years ago.
My name is Verlyn Fairchild and I am the killer of Then he won't be playing with the team this Saturday in the semifinal game of the New York State High School Basketball Tournament, won't ever be playing basketball again. Won't hear the cheers and whistles and stamping like a Niagara Falls of happiness washing over him. Rising up to drown him.
Performing monkey.
Jinx squints at the river. So much winking, glittering, like chips of mica or flashes of thought. More powerfully than Peach Tree Creek this river forces the mind to unmoor itself and rush forward, a sick helpless feeling rising from his toes. My name is. I am the killer of. Twenty feet below, his re flection is dark and shimmering; beneath it, pushing through, is the face of the other: the broad cheeks, the close set malicious eyes, the teeth bared in a wide white smile.
Jinx stares in horror: hair lifting from the head in tufts like clumps of baby snakes.
Jinx is paralyzed in horror: feeling the fingers close around his ankle. Tugging down, down, down.
How long he's there, leaning precariously out, his fingers slipping on the rusted railing and his eyes dilated as if the pupils have begun to bleed into the iraicees, Jinx Fairchild doesn't know. He has very nearly lost his balance. He has forgotten where he is and why. The river is no longer the Cassadaga River but a churning rushing living thing, a region of spirits; the me, me, me in Jinx Fairchild's brain has been drowned out by their deafening murmur.
But he doesn't fall. Doesn't drown.
He wakes from his trance to see to his shame that someone has been watching him. waiting for him to fall? to jump? It's a pasty faced man squatting below the bridge on a slab of concrete amid a jagged peninsula of similar slabs of concrete near shore, fishermen's perches, though the man peering up at him, amused, waiting, is not a fisherman.
A man Jinx has never seen before, in a railroad cap, soiled trousers.
Not young, not old, a stranger, grin rung and gaping up at Jinx Fairchild in expectation of seeing him plunge into the river.
Jinx feels his face pound with sudden heat as if he'd been slapped.
The man below isn't embarrassed in the slightest; he cups his hands to his mouth and calls out, Hey boy, whatcha doin' up there? in mock solicitude, and Jinx backs off, giving him an obscene gesture: Go fuck yourself, whitey.
Jinx re treats. The spell is broken. Below the bridge, idiot laughter echoes and reverberates amid the rusted girders.
Hey boy boy boy.
There's a single Courtney listed in the Hammond telephone directory Courtney, Leslie, photographs , and when Jinx Fairchild dials that number a man answers, friendly sounding, explains that Graice Court they is his niece, would Jinx like her number? And Jinx mumbles yes, thanks. And dials that number. And the phone there rings and rings.
And he's about to hang up when a man answers, his voice gravelly and intimate, as if lifting from a pillow, and again Jinx asks for Graice, says he's a classmate of hers, and the man says, OK, kid hang on, and there's a wait, a considerable wait, during which time Jinx hears muffled voices and music, radio noises; then the phone is taken up again with a thud and again the man's voice is close in Jinx's ear, slurred as if the speaker is mildly drunk. Looks like the girl isn't here right now. and the mother can't come to the phone.
Jinx hangs up. Never tries another time.
Ten minutes into the final quarter of the game against Troy, the Hammond team with a slim, chancy lead, Jinx Fairchild's basket ball career ends.
One minute he's leaping straight up into the air. then he's falling, falling.
Amid the deafening cheers and screams: Jinx. Jinx. Jinx.
Since the start of the game the Troy guard has been hot breathing in his face. Stepping on his toes. Using elbows, shoulders. He's a white boy with a Polish sounding name, Baranczak, six feet three inches tall, eyes glaring as new minted marbles, a fair flushed skin, blond hair trimmed in a brutal crew cut; Baranczak is a strong defensive player, not quite so fast on his feet as Jinx Fairchild, but fast.
and tricky, and mean. In the first quarter when Jinx spins to throw a hook shot Baranczak is there to surprise him. fouls him with an elbow in the ribs that nearly knocks him to the floor.
That look of fanatic hatred! Muttering over the referee's whis the, Slow down, you black prick, this ain't Harlem.
Not once, though, does Jinx Fairchild look Baranczak in the face.
Plays his game so deadpan cool it's like the fucker isn't even there.
That drives them wild.
Never lock eyes with your man, only observe him at mid chest. Seeing is he there, and where. and where's his momentum going to take him.
As, at the foul line, feeling the grain of the ball against his fingertips, Jinx Fairchild takes care never to glance to the right or the left, at the crowd. He'll furrow his forehead up like an old man's but his expression is still deadpan; can't nobody in this place guess is he praying God don't let me miss, please God don't A thousand times he has positioned himself here, at the foul line. Never knowing why.
Asshole boys' game, but if you're in it, asshole, got to play it out.
Jinx Fairchild snaps the ball from him. sees it arc, strike the rim wrong, and ricochet back out.
So he misses. And the crowd responds as the crowd always does: groans of disappointment, screams of jubilation.
It's an off night for Hammond; maybe they've been anticipating this game for too long. Their team rhythm is off, their rapport is off, it's one of those nights, even championship teams have those nights, who can say why? Jinx Fairchild the star forward is playing harder than he usually plays, isn't able to pass the ball cause his teammates are so closely guarded, and his own guard, Baranczak, is always in his face. if the big bullish flush faced kid is intimidated by guarding Jinx Fairchild it comes out not in nervousness but in aggression and rude words.
Smart ass nigger who won't acknowledge he's there. he exists.
For Jinx Fairchild, though, as the minutes pass, the game is becoming re mote, like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
Hammond is behind by eight points, then by twelve he doesn't glance at the scoreboard or the clock. but he knows.
God don't let me fail. Please God don't let mefuck up.