Hokey Pokey (11 page)

He watches LaJo trace the final letter in the dust:
K
. Dusty feels his heart borne off on an irresistible zephyr as he whispers the name of his friend, his Amigo—“Jack”—and from the far horizon of his soul, his heart calls back: … 
is not himself
.

I
S THERE WIND
in a whistle?

Jack feels himself nudged along like tumbleweed across the dusty flats of Hokey Pokey. Until today Jack has steered his own way through this life. Each day has been a parade of decisions.
Now I’ll saddle up and go riding with my Amigos. Now I’ll give Kiki a baseball lesson. Now I’ll skip stones across the creek
. Suddenly, today,
now
is out of his hands. He’s at the mercy of some unseen force blowing him from moment to moment. He no longer
goes
to a place; he simply, helplessly,
finds himself
there. Tumbleweed.

Behind him he hears the familiar tick and whir of Scramjet’s wheels. Then her voice: “Hey, Jacko! Jacko!” He keeps walking. There are things he must do, though he’s not sure what. She circles him, leaning, carving tracks in the dust, squawking: “Jacko! Jacko!” He plods on. She circles, circles, closer with each pass. Each time she passes before him, he notices the ponytail flying from the hole in the back of her baseball cap. This is not new. He’s noticed it before. And the yellow ribbon that bunches her toasted honeywheat hair as it streams from the cap—that’s not new either. What’s new is his eyes—he can’t take them off the ribbon. They see how it’s bowed like a shoelace. But not like a shoelace too, because the ribbon is so wide. He didn’t know ribbon could be so wide, so … 
ribbony
. And yellow! He’s seen bananas and he’s seen lemons, but he doesn’t think he’s ever seen yellow as yellow as the yellow of that ribbon. It’s like the sun painted itself into a knot around her streaming hair. These new eyes of his, so used to watching the flight of a ball, now follow the fluttering tails of the golden bow.

Now, passing closer than ever, she reaches out and clips his cap—“Jacko!”—and it spins to the ground. He stops, picks it up, resumes his trek. She pulls up ten feet
away, directly in his path, her eyes flashing, her grin wicked, waiting, daring, mocking, her foot on the pedal, poised to bolt. She passes from his sight as he detours around her. He feels a thump between his shoulder blades. “Chick-
ken
! Ba-
bawlllk
! Ba-
bawlllk
!” He walks on. Silence behind him. He discovers that his face is smiling.

A
NA
M
AE
, who has been watching from a distance, rides up. “What happened?”

Jubilee’s puzzled eyes follow the retreating boy. “I don’t know.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“Not even when you knocked his cap off?”

“Nope.”

“Didn’t even call you a name? He always calls you names.”

Jubilee shakes her head.

Ana Mae looks upward, giggles with fond remembrance. “The way he calls you
girl
? Makes it sound like a badword.”

“Not this time.”

Ana Mae fingerjabs. “At least he gave you a dirty look, right? Or spit at you? Remember that one time?”

Jubilee shakes her head. “Nuh. Thing.”

Ana Mae joins her friend staring after the boy. Her voice, even as it speaks, gropes for a handhold. “You took his bike. Ace … you
took his bike
.”

“Not really
took
,” says Jubilee. Time to tell the truth. “I woke up this morning and it was just”—she shakes her head, still not believing—“
there
.”

Ana Mae thinks on it, throws up her hands. “OK, fine, it was
there
. But you didn’t exactly give it
back
, did you?” She pokes Jubilee. “
Did
you?”

Jubilee’s stare is no longer puzzled, just empty. “No.”

Ana Mae walks her bike off a ways, stands and stares, loops back. She lightly bumps her front tire into Jubilee’s. “Ace?”

Jubilee is staring beyond the boy now, to the way things were. “Huh?” she says absently.

“Maybe he doesn’t hate you anymore.”

Jubilee does not seem to have heard. She blinks, turns to Ana Mae, stares, turns away, says nothing.

Ana Mae follows Jubilee’s gaze to the horizon. Thunder rumbles beyond the Mountains. Panic lays a cold finger on the back of her neck. “Jubilee? … Ace? …” She smooths out the shake in her voice. “
You
still hate
him
”—she swallows—“don’t you?”

She waits one eternity. Two. No answer. “Ace, you’re creeping me out. You still hate him, don’t you?”

The distant tootle of Hippodrome tints the silence. At last Jubilee’s lips slide into their famously wicked grin. “He’s a boy, ain’t he?”

J
ACK IS SCARED
. He doesn’t know what of.

Jack is thrilled. He doesn’t know why.

He tumbles on. He drains the last of his root beer hokey pokey. He crumples the paper cone.

He is here and he must do things but he doesn’t know what. He is here and he is going somewhere but he doesn’t know where.

Sayonara, kid
.

He doesn’t know what and he doesn’t know where and he doesn’t know why, but that’s OK because he doesn’t need to know, just move, move. The force he
has felt behind him now seems within, driving him: a second, tumbledown heart.

Kids call. “Hey, Jack! … Hey, Jack!”

He waves.

Tumbles.

Comes to Kiki.

Kiki is at The Wall. The Wall, about five spits long and a spit high, is made of brick. It is for bouncing things off of (tennis balls, soccer balls, junked tires, tin cans, dolls’ heads) or crashing things into (trucks, model airplanes, jawbreakers, cantaloupes, cantaloupe-filled wagons). Today, like most days, Kiki is bouncing a moldy green tennis ball off The Wall, catching it with his cheap scrap of a fielder’s glove. As soon as he spots Jack, he drops the tennis ball, grabs his black-taped baseball, tosses it. “Hey, Jack!”

Jack is already pulling Mr. Shortstop from his belt. They move away from The Wall. They take their positions, fall silently into the routine. The kid readies himself: tilted forward, balanced, fingers spread and twitching, ready for anything. Jack goes through the progression: ground balls, pop flies. And finally into the long windup for the skyscraper—and suddenly, not even thinking about it, Jack finds his right arm snapping
a surprise ground ball at the kid. Only this time it’s no ordinary grounder. It’s an evil, hissing dust ripper that catches the kid totally off guard, caroms off the heel of his mitt, slams into his shoulder and skitters away.

The kid drops his glove, grabs his shoulder, squeals in pain. He looks at Jack, eyes brimming, lip trembling. Clearly he expects something from Jack: a comforting word, a gentle hand, an explanation. But all he gets is a single, dry question: “Surprised?”

The kid doesn’t trust his voice. He sniffles, nods.

“Why surprised?” Jack’s voice is calm, steady. “You’re supposed to be ready for anything, right? Didn’t I tell you a thousand times to be ready for anything?”

The kid nods, kneads his shoulder, winces.

“So you weren’t ready for anything, were you?”

The kid shakes his head.

“OK. So what’s the next thing you did wrong?”

The kid bleats: “I missed it.”

Jack smiles. “Wrong.”

Confusion piles onto shock and hurt. “Wrong?”

Jack wags his head. “You’re allowed to miss. Did I ever tell you you’re not allowed to miss?”

The kid thinks about it. He’s wondering if this is a trick question. His answer sounds like a question: “No?”

“No. Right. Nobody’s perfect. So, let’s try again—what did you do wrong?”

The kid is feeling better now. But he’s still stumped. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll give you a hint,” says Jack. “You’re still doing it.”

The kid is flummoxed. He’s ready to cry again.

“OK,” says Jack, taking pity, “look around you.” The kid looks around. “What do you see?”

He sees weeds and scraggly bushes and of course The Wall, but he knows none of these is the answer. Now he sees it. “The ball?” It’s sitting in the dust a spit and a half away.

Jack nods. “The ball. Right. And what’s it doing over there?”

The kid blinks, gropes. “I missed it?”

Jack nods. “You missed it. And what did you do after you missed it?”

Another tricky question. “Uh … nothing?”

“You
gave up
!” Jack says it so sharply the kid jumps. “You missed it and the ball rolled over there and you did not go running after it … did you?”

“No.”

“No. You gave up. You stood there like a big baby
looking at your empty glove and crying like a baby—
Oh boo-hoo boo-hoo I missed it
—and while you’re feeling all sorry for your baby self because the big bad baseball didn’t bounce like you thought it would, the ball’s sitting over there in the dirt and the other team’s players are circling the bases and your team is now losing. Why? Because … 
You. Gave. Up
.”

Jack wonders if he’s gone too far. Maybe. But these things need to be said—now.

The kid’s lip is trembling. He stares at Jack, silently pleading for more words, softer words. But Jack looks away. It’s in the kid’s hands now. In his heart. Suddenly the kid darts for the ball, snatches it, fires him a strike.

Jack rolls the dusty black-taped ball in his fingers. “So, let’s try again. What did you do wrong?”

“I didn’t chase it.” The kid’s voice is steady.

“You just stood there going
boo-hoo
. You gave up.”

The kid barks: “I gave up!”

“You quit.”

“I quit!”

“From now on, when you make a mistake, you’re gonna chase the ball down—right? You’re gonna clean up your mess and not be a big
boo-hoo
baby—right?”

“Right!”

Jack cups his ear. “What?”

“Right!”

Jack whips another grounder at the kid, harder even than the last. It takes a bad hop and bounces off the kid’s chest, but this time the kid scrambles after it, plucks it, fires it back, the ball shedding yellow dust. He peppers the kid with more hard ones. He knows the kid won’t catch them. Heck, Jack himself probably couldn’t catch them. The kid is scared. Who wouldn’t be, ball coming at you that fast, badhopping off stones? But that’s not the thing. The thing is, the kid hangs in there. Frog-eyed terrified as he is of taking one in the chops, he holds his ground, he chases down every miss. No quitting. No
boo-hoo
ing.

Finally he rewards the kid with the skyscraper. The moment he slings it into the air, he knows it’s different from all the others. It rises majestically into the blue, arcing toward the sun. The kid just stands there gaping, glove at his side, as the ball dwindles to the size of a peppercorn before vanishing, a pupil in the golden eye that looks down on Hokey Pokey’s days. The kid shades his eyes, squints, readies himself for the catch. A posse of Snotsippers on trikes has stopped, gaping upward, scanning the sky for the ball, the ball that is
not coming down. Jack wonders,
What’s going on?
But not for long, for he senses that whatever is going on, it’s just another strange thing in this strangest of all days.

He’s done now. He’s said the words to the kid, all of them. There’s only one thing left to do. He gazes fondly at the glove that cradles his left hand. He smells for one last time the sweet oiled leather. He kisses it. Gently he slips the disgraceful rag from the kid’s dangling hand. The kid, staring skyward in stupefied wonder, never notices. Jack slips Mr. Shortstop onto the kid’s hand, gives the kid a light rumptap and moves on.

F
EELS GOOD
. Maybe better than good. Maybe even the best ever. But he doesn’t know why—and now suddenly he does. It’s movement. The sheer, raw exhilaration of
movement
. Movement unlike any he’s ever experienced. Not the familiar movement of his own legs, or Scramjet’s spinning wheels. It’s more. The force that seemed inside him a few minutes ago now seems to be outside him again, beneath him, a current carrying him down some unseen stream, a current that’s moving faster and faster, toward … 
what?

He looks back. The crowd of little kids is growing,
twenty, thirty upturned faces, searching the sky, poised, mitts twitching, waiting for the ball that is not coming down.

And now here she comes again. The girl, shucking dust over the flats, aiming straight at him. He takes his cap off—at least deny her that. She circles him as she did before, cutting a rolling hoop in the dust as he continues to walk. But this time she says nothing. No squawking. No insults. Just the soft crinkle of Scramjet’s tires.

He wonders if she’s trying to provoke him, daring him to reach out, start something. He remembers when they first met, both of them Snotsippers. She crashed her trike into his, not far from the
DON’T
sign, knocked both of them off their seats. It was an accident—to this day he’s still sure of that—but for her it quickly became something else. As he picked himself up and stood there mooning over his dented trike, debating whether to cry or not, she climbed into the saddle, backed up, and rammed his trike again. And—as he gaped like a moronic cow—again! She was a shark. A lion. She had just gotten a taste of human blood—in particular,
his
blood—and now there was no stopping her.

Even at that age Jack knew he had two choices: run
away bawling or strike back. He struck back. He climbed onto his trike, and the two of them had their own little demolition derby. Half of Hokey Pokey came to hoot and cheer. In the end both trikes were wrecked, left in the dust, mangled wheels retching one last turn like the final flip of a dying lizard’s tail. Jack and the girl both swaggered into the howling mob, pumping arms, claiming victory.

That was the beginning, the start of a war without a cease-fire. Oh they had their bikes and their high-noon hokey pokeys and their friends—but as much as anything, they had each other. Every morning Jack awoke knowing
she
was somewhere out there, ready to trade him hate for hate, mock for mock. They might appear to others to ignore each other, but in fact, Jack knew, each was always acutely aware of the other, as the wary eyes of the antelope track the jackal.