End of the Tiger (9 page)

I was looking at Dave when it was announced that seven had won. I saw the life come back into him, saw his shoulders straighten and his color come back. He gave us all a big wide grin. One hundred down at twenty to one would clear up the shortage and give him eight hundred gravy.

A half hour later I stood in the shadows of the stand on the parking lot side and waited for Joe Stack. I had seen Dave drive out with Joanne. I had heard her laughter, like clear silver in the night. I felt abused and tired and shabby. I leaned against a pillar and smoked and waited for Joe. The lights were out, the fountains still.

Joe came walking heavily out. “Oh, there you are. Wait long?”

“Not too long.”

We walked to his car. We got in and he put the key in the ignition but he didn’t turn it on. He turned toward me. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness. “Don’t let it get you, kid.”

“What do you mean?”

“It didn’t happen this time. It didn’t happen tonight. It might not happen next time, but it’s going to happen. You can bank on that. It’s as sure as sunrise. Don’t play dumb with me, either. I mean Dave. Like with Henny Penny, the sky is going to fall on his head. Tonight he has the money and the girl and everything.”

“I guess he does.”

“You don’t have to see it happen, do you? I mean you don’t have to have it driven into your skull.”

“No, I don’t, Joe.”

“And when it happens, will it teach him anything?”

“It might.”

“Don’t kid yourself. He’s had the smell of it. He’s had the fever in him. They don’t ever get over it. I’ve been waiting for a word from you, and you haven’t given it. Maybe I like that. Anyway, I’m firing him.”

I couldn’t even feel good about that. “That’s too bad,” I said.

“I think we’ll see a lot of him. On the other side of the windows.”

“But not for very long.”

“No, Johnny. Not for very long. Now you can take your innings with blondie. That make you feel good?”

I sat and thought it over. He was waiting for an answer. I remembered the sound of her laugh in the night. I had kissed her twice, and I remembered both those times.

“I guess it doesn’t make me feel good, Joe.”

“You off blondes?”

“I … I guess I’m off that one. I guess she’s more than I can afford. Maybe I can find one that looks like that sometime—but a girl who’ll settle for a hamburger and a bus ride.”

He laughed and he started the car. We didn’t talk on the way back. When he let me off he said, “I do a little betting myself. I bet on you, Johnny. And I think I’ve won—all the way across the board.”

He let me off on the usual corner, and I walked back through the campus to my room. I thought about Dave and Joanne, and I found that I didn’t feel bad at all. I’d dropped a strange weight off my shoulders. I didn’t feel tired, abused, or shabby. I felt pretty good. There seemed to be some likelihood I was growing up.

I remember how it promised to be a terrible summer. I had squeaked through the fifth grade and I was going to be eleven in July and I had hoped that on my eleventh birthday my parents would come up to visit me at Camp Wah-Na-Hoo, bearing gifts.

It was our third year in the big house twelve miles from town. Dad called it “a nice commuting distance” in summer and “too rugged for a dog team” in winter.

One of the main reasons for wanting to go to Wah-Na-Hoo was on account of the Branton twins, Kim and Cam, who lived a couple of hundred yards down the road. I knew that if they went for two months and I didn’t go at all, they’d make my life miserable all winter yapping about the good old days at Camp. They are twelve years old, and Dad says that he can’t ever look at them without wondering when they’ll be the right size for a harness and bit.

The second reason was that if I stayed home all summer, Looie, the five-year-old kid sister, would tag around after me all day with her hand in her mouth.

The big discussion came in May. I was called into the living room and told to sit down for “a little talk.” While Dad took off his glasses and stowed them in his coat pocket I made a quick review of recent misdemeanors and couldn’t decide which one to think up a defense for.

“Jimmy, your mother and I have been discussing the question of camp for you this summer.”

I dropped defensive plans and went on the offensive. “I can hardly wait to go,” I said.

Dad coughed and looked appealingly at Mother. “The fact of the matter is, Jimmy, we feel you’re a little young. We think you should wait one more year.”

Then they told me that I would have fun during the two weeks at the shore and I made low-voiced comments about a hotel full of old ladies and besides the Branton twins were going and I played with them and how did that make me too young.

And so after I lost the discussion, I had nothing to look forward to but mooching around our childless neighborhood all summer with the clop clop of Looie’s feet behind me. My parents had been mysterious about something nice that was going to happen during the summer, but I had a heavy suspicion about things they called ‘nice.’ They even called sending me to Syracuse to visit Aunt Kate ‘nice.’

And I was prepared to resist going to Aunt Kate’s to my dying breath.

The mysterious ‘nice’ thing arrived on the fifth of July. Its name was Johnny Wotnack from New York City. It climbed out of Mrs. Turner’s blue sedan and it stood in our driveway and stared suspiciously around at the big yard, the oaks, the orchard on the hill behind the house.

Dad had stayed home from the office that day. He started outdoors, and so did I, but just as I got to the door, Mother grabbed my arm and hauled me back and said, “Now wait a minute, Jimmy. That little boy is going to stay with us for a few weeks. You are going to share everything with him. He’s a Fresh Air Child and we agreed to take him in here for a while and make him feel at home. So you be nice to him. Understand?”

“Why did he come here?”

“For fresh air and sunshine and good food so he can be healthy.”

“He looks plenty rugged to me.”

Johnny Wotnack had a small black shiny suitcase. Dad spoke to Mrs. Turner, and she waved to Mother and drove off. Dad picked up the suitcase and said, “Glad you could come, Johnny. This is my son, Jimmy. And his mother. And the little girl is Looie.”

“Please to meet you,” Johnny said politely enough. But there was an air of cold disdain about him, a superior condescension. He was almost thin, and his face had a seamed grayish look like that of a midget I saw once at the sideshow. His hands were huge, with big blocky knuckles.

Johnny gave me one cool glance. “Hi, kid,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

His hair was cropped short, and he wore blue jeans and a white sweat shirt. Dad took him upstairs right to
my room, went inside and pointed to the extra twin bed, and said, “You’ll bunk in here with Jimmy, Johnny.”

I suddenly realized that the pictures I had cut out and taped to my walls looked sort of childish. I wished I had known about him so I could have taken them down. Johnny slowly surveyed the room. “This’ll do okay,” he said.

Mother went over to him and gently pulled his ear forward as though she were lifting a rock under which she expected to find a bug.

Johnny snatched his head away. “What’s the gag?” he demanded.

Mother gave her telephone laugh. “Why I just wondered how dirty you got on the trip. Those trains are a fright. I’ll start hot water running in the tub.”

She hurried out of the room. Johnny said weakly, “Wait a minute, lady.” But she was already gone. In a few seconds we could hear the heavy roar of water filling the tub.

The three of us stood there, uneasy.

Dad said, “Well, Johnny. Make yourself at home.” He went on downstairs, leaving me there with him. Looie was with her mother.

Johnny sat on the edge of his bed. He kicked at the suitcase with his sneaker. I looked at him with fascination. There were two deep scars on the back of his right hand, and one finger was crooked. To me he was a perfect example of urbanity and sophistication. It seemed an enormous indignity that Mother should shove him into a bathtub the first minute.

I said, “It happens to me too. The baths I mean. Until they’d drive you nuts.”

He looked at me without interest. “Yeah?”

“I’m going to be eleven in July. July fourteenth,” I said. “How old are you?”

“About twelve, I guess.”

I was horrified. “Don’t you know for certain?”

“No.”

That was further proof of sophistication. It was a miraculous detachment to be able to forget your own birthday, to be indifferent to it. I determined right then and there to forget my own.

When he came downstairs for lunch, his hair was damp. But his face still had that grayish, underground look. He sat silently at the table while Mother and Dad made a lot of gay conversation about how nice it was in the country.

He pushed his glass of milk aside. Mother said, “Don’t you like milk?”

“Never could get used to the taste of the stuff.”

“In this family,” Mother said in her don’t-cross-me voice, “the children eat what is placed before them. Without question. We hope you’ll do the same, Johnny.”

He raised one eyebrow and grinned at her almost as though humoring her. He drank the milk down and wiped his mouth on the back of the scarred hand. “I still don’t like it,” he said.

Dad quickly changed the subject. After lunch he said, “Now you kids run out and play.”

Johnny headed for the garage. Once upon a time it was a barn. He went around it, then dug a cigarette butt out of his pocket along with a kitchen match. He lit it carefully after striking the match with his thumbnail. He took one long deep drag, huffed out the smoke, butted the cigarette, and put it back in his pocket just as Looie came around the corner of the barn, her face screwed up ready to cry if we were out of sight. She came toward us with a wide happy smile.

“ ’Fraid she’d snitch,” Johnny said.

“She would,” I agreed.

“I’m going to get sick of this Johnny, Johnny business,” he said. “The name’s Stoney. Stoney Wotnack.”

“Ha! Stoney!” Looie said. “Stoney, Stoney, Stoney.”

“That’s right, doll,” he said.

I couldn’t think of what to say to him. It was almost like trying to talk to Auntie Kate. He said. “What’s to do around this dump, Jim?”

I said eagerly, “Well, we can climb the apple trees, and there’s a crick the other side of the hill to fish in, and I’m making a cave in the crick bank and …”

My voice trailed off. He hadn’t changed expression. There hadn’t been the tiniest gleam of interest in his eyes. “What do you like to do?” I asked weakly.

He shrugged. “Depends. I get a charge out of
heisting candy from the five and dime. You can sell the stuff for enough to go to the movies. You can smoke in the balcony. Or you tell a guy you watch his car he’ll give you two bits. And let him know that maybe you don’t get the two bits first, he gets a hole in a tire. Or at night you can go hunting in the alleys for drunks. Roll ’em for everything but their clothes.”

I couldn’t follow him very clearly. And I didn’t want to display my ignorance by asking questions. But he had opened up new and exciting vistas of experience. I saw myself sitting debonairly in a movie balcony puffing on a cigar.

He sighed. “But you can’t do that stuff here. This place is … empty. No noises except bugs and birds. My old man was on a prison farm once. He didn’t like it.”

I said, “Want to look around?”

He shrugged. All the things that had looked pretty good to me turned out to be as childish as the pictures on the walls of my room. I had been proud of our six acres, the same as Dad, but under Stoney’s cold stare everything dwindled away to a horrible, insipid emptiness.

At one place he came to life. The Branton twins and I had gotten hold of a feed sack, stuffed it with sawdust, and hung it by a long rope from one of the rafters in the barn. When Stoney saw it, his shoulders went back and he strutted up to it. He went into a crouch, jabbed at it lightly and expertly with a flicking left, and thumped his right fist deep into it. He bounced around on his toes, jabbing, hooking, snuffing hard through his nose. The thump of his fist into the sawdust gave me a horridly vivid picture of how that fist would feel in my stomach.

He finished and said, “Little workout’s a good thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, consciously imitating his cold tone.

“Another couple years and I try the geegees.”

“The what?” I said.

“Golden Gloves, kid. Golden Gloves. That’s a life. Win in your division and turn pro and play it smart and you’re all set. Better than lugging a shine box around in front a the Forty-Second Street Library, kid. I watch ’em work out at the gym. Look, we got to get a
bigger bag and fasten it more solid. It swings too much.”

“Yeah,” I said coldly.

“Got any funny books?” he asked. “I feel like reading. The crime kind.”

“They’ll only let me have cowboy ones,” I said apologetically.

“Them big fairies in the pink shirts give me the itch.”

“I like Roy Rogers,” I said defensively.

He stared at me and chuckled coldly. “Roy Rogers! Ha!”

We walked aimlessly around for a time. I suggested weakly, “We could pretend something.”

He didn’t even bother to answer that one. I went moodily back to the house alone. Looie was trudging around on the pointless walk, following Stoney. I didn’t like her following me usually, but this sudden shift of allegiance annoyed me. I sat in a chair on the porch. Dad came out and said, “Where’s Johnny?”

“Walking,” I said.

“Can’t you think up a game or something?”

“He doesn’t like games.”

Mother came out and heard that last part. She said to Dad, “It’s quite an adjustment for the boy. I think we ought to leave him alone for a little while. Polite, isn’t he?”

Stoney did not come out of his mood of chill disdain. Within three days he had settled into a pattern. He fixed the sawdust bag and spent two hours every morning ‘working out.’ Dad lined up some chores for him, and after his workout he did his chores quickly and expertly. He was silent at the table, speaking when spoken to. In the afternoon he wandered around and around, tagged by Looie. She talked to him constantly, and I never heard him say anything to her that was longer than one word.