Little Little (8 page)

I’d think again of the Sadistic Oracle sweeping down on him as he was bent over the sheet of blue stationery that letter was written on.

“You want to know what it’s really going to be like, Larry? You’ll flunk your bar exam and go into the boot business. She’ll write doggerel for the local paper.”

I said to Cowboy, “The perfect couple about to live the perfect life. Then I came along.”

“It hasn’t got anything to do with you,” Cowboy said. “It’s growing up. If you could grow up and become something besides an adult, it wouldn’t be so bad. Nothing good begins with ‘adult.’ There’s adult, adulterate, adultery—”

And we’d laugh, but I was never totally convinced I hadn’t ruined their life.

“Well, look at it this way, then,” Cowboy would argue. “They ruined yours. It was the combination of the two of them that made you what you are, wasn’t it? If you’d had other parents you might not be what you are.” Then she’d always rush to add, “Not that what you are is bad.”

My mother finally found her poem in
The Examiner,
across from an editorial urging that the city dump be cleared and made into an airport.

“Honey!” she said. “Turn the sound down a little on the TV so I can read you my poem. They printed the one about autumn!”

I went across and stood on the stool to turn the sound down.

Then I sat on the stool and waited for her to read me her poem.

“Here goes, Little Little,” she said, and her face was flushed with pleasure.

She said, “Are you ready?”

AUTUMN

God takes his paintbrush to the leaves,

Splashing them like an artist painting

Rich reds and browns and oranges across the green,

I catch them falling in my hands another year,

My senses suffused with beauty.

—Ava Hancock La Belle

“It’s good, Mommy,” I told her. I liked it all right, but it didn’t make me jealous the way anything Calpurnia Dove wrote did.

“Now, don’t exaggerate. Just tell me if it’s good, as one would-be writer to another.”

“It is good. I like it.”

“Is it
really
good?”

“Very good.”

She jumped up and ran across to me. “Oh, honey, they printed it!”

It didn’t do any good, it never did, to say please put me down.

She held me, dancing around the solarium with me, planting wet kisses across my cheeks, both of us laughing, finally, me squirming, though. I smelled the mint on her breath and knew she’d had a few from the crème de menthe bottle she kept at the bottom of her white wicker yarn basket.

“We’ll have a good time at the game!” she said. Then she began to sing: “We’re the Boots! Toodle toot! We’re the Boots of La Belle fame! We’re the Boots who win the game! Toodle toot! Feel our boot!”

She danced faster, with me in her arms, jiggling me up and down the way I sometimes danced with our cat. “Toodle toot! Feel our boot!”

She put me down and knelt to be face to face with me.

“Did you like my poem, honey? Oh, I know I’m not the greatest poet in the world, but it’s a nice little poem, do you really think so, Little Little?”

“I like it, Mommy.”

She wiped a tear away. “Oh, why am I bawling like a baby, hmmm? I guess I’m just so happy!” That sounded so insincere, even to her, that she rushed on to babble something truer. “I’m tired, too, I guess. All these plans for your big birthday! I can’t believe you’ll be eighteen, honey. I was married the year after I was eighteen. I was a young bride. And we waited. Purposely. We waited to have you because we were so young and we wanted some years together, just your daddy and me. And what years they were! All the midnight sails from the yacht club ended right at our dock! Everyone came here, everyone!”

She hugged me hard.

Over her shoulder, I saw Eloise Ficklin dance across the television screen dressed as a lettuce leaf. Even with the sound turned down, I knew what she was singing:
“I’m dancing to the melody, Oh happy happy days, When I lie down I’ll have a coat of golden mayonnaise.”

A
SISTER OF ONE
of the Bombers’ cheerleaders babysat for Digger and Laura Gwen while they went to the game.

About an hour before game time, they picked me up in front of The Stardust Inn, in a taxi I’d offered to pay for.

“Your shell needs dusting, Sydney,” Laura Gwen said, pushing it in front with the driver.

I sat between them and Digger said, “Did you know the man who owns the La Belle Boot and Shoe factory has a midget daughter?”

“I know,” I said.

“Which is the reason Little Lion is coming here on Sunday,” said Laura Gwen. “There’s going to be a whole convention of people like you, Sydney, coming in from all over. The driver just told us.”

“It’s a birthday party for Little Little La Belle,” I said.

“Are you going?”

“I’m the entertainment.”

“Are they paying you?” Digger asked.

“I’ll get something for it.”

“Well, that shell needs dusting, Sydney.”

“So dust it!” Digger said. “While I’m suiting up, you get a rag and dust it for him!”

“I can dust it myself,” I said.

“I’ll dust it for you, Sydney,” she said.

“Roach,” Digger said, “me and Laura Gwen was remembering the first time we ever seen you, that Halloween at the game. You’d just started going to Wilton High, and you came to the game with some of them from Twin Oaks, remember?”

“I remember,” I said. I wasn’t likely to forget it. A group of us from Mistakes had gone to the high school stadium in costume. It was my first try at getting myself up as The Roach. Bighead Langhorn had put a white sheet over his body and gone as the explosion of the atom bomb, and Cloud had gone as God, his body wrapped in cellophane. Wheels had rigged himself up as a Volkswagen convertible, and Wires Kaplan went as Reddy Kilowatt.

“I remember I said you’d be a helluva mascot that day,” said Digger. “You remember my saying that to you?” He reached for the can of beer between his legs and took a swallow.

“I remember,” I said.

“Sydney, why don’t you stand on the seat, to see,” Laura Gwen said.

“Stand up here on the seat,” Digger said, patting the seat.

“I can see enough.”

“You can see the rate card is all you can see. Stand up here.”

He gave the seat another pat and I stood up on it.

“That’s better,” said Digger. “I remember it was the first season The Bombers played after that year of austerity. That year was what ruined me.”

“That year wasn’t what ruined you,” Laura Gwen said. “What you’re swallowing down right now was what ruined you.”

“Oh yeah? How’s a scout going to recruit you if he can’t see you in action?”

“No scout was recruiting
you,”
Laura Gwen said.

“What about that day?” I said, trying to steer them away from another argument.

“I remember I told you you’d be a helluva mascot, and the school needed something like that to put it on the map,” Digger said.

“I remember that,” Laura Gwen said. “It was Digger’s idea.”

“Well, the band struck up ‘La Cucaracha’ and I just went into my dance,” I said.

“And you were good,” Digger said. “I said you’d be a helluva mascot.”

“I know,” I said.

“Just as long as you know that.” Digger took a pull of his beer. He said, “What I’m getting at is we’re pals, buddy. We pals?” He held up the can as though he was making a toast.

“Pals,” I agreed.

“So I was thinking, Roach, old pal—”

“Sydney,
old pal,” Laura Gwen said.

“I was thinking this is my last year at Wilton High, and I could make myself available to you, if you ever need something like a manager.”

“Or an agent,” said Laura Gwen. “Someone to book you into jobs.”

“Fight your battles for you, buddy.”

“You’re part of the family, Sydney,” Laura Gwen said.

“Thanks anyway,” I said. “So far I’m getting along.”

“But you want to do more than get along, buddy,” Digger said.

“I’ll think about it, thanks,” I said.

“We’d see that nobody takes advantage of you, Sydney,” said Laura Gwen.

“A little guy like you,” said Digger, “needs a big guy to look out for him.”

“You think about it, Sydney,” said Laura Gwen.

“Just think about it, buddy,” said Digger.

Laura Gwen said, “I’ll dust your shell when we get there.”

I left them by the locker room and walked over to the field. The teams were doing loosening-up drills, wind sprints, and light practice.

Coach Korn was still with the Bombers, his old self, barking out insults and orders.

I sat in the front row and watched for a while, then I took out the book about Mongo, the dwarf detective.

I read while the action went on around me.

The coach was yelling, “That pass was too soft! Zip it! Zip that ball!”

Mongo was about to rent a car while I tried to figure out how his feet were going to work the pedals of a rental car.

“You broke your pattern! You broke your pattern!” Coach Korn was barking.

The sun was that same hot one from the day before, and there was not much breeze from the lake.

The two school bands were arriving, taking their places on opposite sides of the field, tuning up.

Right around then I heard a girl’s voice, “I see you got the book,” and swung around and looked at her.

“Hello there,” I said.

Little Little La Belle was dressed in the Boots’ colors, a white skirt and a green sweater, with her sun-colored hair spilling past her shoulders.

I had to smile looking at her, sorry because I had a front tooth bigger than the others, with a filling out besides.

“I finally figured out who you are,” she said. “You’re The Roach.”

I tried not to smile too wide. “I know who you are, too.”

“Everyone knows me around here.”

I looked down at her tiny feet, which were in tan boots with stiletto heels. I used to wear boots that high myself when I was at Mistakes, but my legs were bad, and boots like that gave me backaches, too.

“Thanks for the book,” I remembered to say. “I’m still reading it.”

“I see.”

I got to my feet to see if even with those boots of hers I’d be taller. My hump made me look shorter, which was another reason I stood, and I found us eye to eye.

A tall man down on the cinder path, wearing a green sweater, called to her. “Little Little!”

“My father,” she said.

I shot him a look that could kill because I didn’t want her to go.

“How did you know I was The Roach?”

“I finally figured it out. I’ve seen your commercial. ‘You’ll be the death of me.’ … Does being a roach get to you?”

“It gets to my bank account,” I said, and we both laughed, and then I said, “I like it, besides,” I made up my mind then and there to get that tooth capped.

“What’s there to like about being a roach, besides the money?” she said.

Her father called her again and she shouted back that she was coming, so I began to talk fast. “I’m my own invention. I invented myself. All I know about myself is that I woke up one day over at Twin Oaks and they said my name was Sydney Cinnamon, which could or couldn’t be my real name, and that’s all I know. When I found out I was out of the ordinary, a ball in a world of blocks, I decided even if they don’t roll, I do. I decided to roll away, be whatever I wanted to be.”

“But a roach!” and she made a face.

“Well, I decided to be something people don’t like instinctively and make them like it. Something bizarre, like me.” I stole a look over my shoulder at her father to gauge how long I could hold her attention. “If I’d have been something besides a roach, I’d have been an alligator or a snake. Something people look at and go ‘Yeck!’ just because of how it looks and not for any other reasons. If I’d been a vegetable, I’d have been a piece of slimy okra.”

She laughed and said, “Hey!”

“I’d have been crabgrass if I’d been a plant, or a dandelion. If I’d been a piece of mail, I’d have been a circular addressed to Occupant.”

She said, “If you were a musical instrument, you’d be that tuba,” as a tuba tuned up across the field from us.

“Not me, I’d be bagpipes. Bagpipes tuning up are the worst noise I know.”

I was trying to think of other things to be, to keep it going, but half a dozen people were now standing near us, watching.

I gave a self-conscious pull to my sweater in back, and felt my tooth with my tongue.

“If you were a member of the weasel family, you’d be a skunk,” she said.

One of the women watching us said something that ended in “just darling together,” and Little Little’s father called her more insistently, and much louder. It sounded like LIT-TOE! LIT-TOE!

“I have to go,” she said.

My mind raced with a plethora of answers to that one: naw, hang in here; were you planning to go over to Stardustburger after? Can we talk more later?—and when I couldn’t seem to get any of them out, my mouth opened and out came, “Are you sure skunks are weasels?” … My face went red because that had issued forth, like a few soft raindrops squeezed out of a black thundering sky, when hard pellets of hail were called for.

She only laughed and lifted her hand to wave good-bye, while I felt a sharp sock of disappointment, watching her go.

When I went back to the locker room, I met Laura Gwen on her way out.

“Hey, Sydney?” she called over at me. “I went over your entire shell with Endust!”

T
HE DAY AFTER I
met Knox Lionel, at one of my mother’s summer parties for the TADpoles, he called me at seven in the morning from the Howard Johnson’s motel.

“Little Little,” he said, “I have to see you right away!”

“It’s dawn,” I said. “It’s too early.”

“In Genesis it’s written that Abraham rose early to stand before the Lord,” he began, “and it is written there that Jacob rose early to worship the Lord. In Exodus it is written that Moses rose early to give God’s message to Pharaoh, and—”

“I’m not awake, Little Lion!” I complained.