The Centaur (28 page)

The players, exulting in all the space reserved for them, gallop back and forth on their plain of varnished boards. The ball arches high but not so high as the caged bulbs burning on the auditorium ceiling. A whistle blows. The clock stops. The cheerleaders rush out, the maroon O’s on their yellow sweaters bobbling, and form a locomotive.
“O,”
they call, seven brazen sirens, their linked forearms forming a single piston.

“Ohh,” moans back Echo, stricken.

“L.”

“Hell,” is the answer, deliberately aitched, a school tradition.

“I.”

“Aaiii,” a cry from the depths. Peter’s scalp goes cold and under the cover of a certain actual ecstasy he grips his girl’s arm.

“Hi,” she says, pleased, her skin still chilly from the out-of-doors.

“N.”

The response comes faster, “Enn,” and the cheer whirls faster and faster, a vortex between the crowd and the cheerleaders, until at its climax it seems they are all sucked down into another kingdom, “Olinger!
Olinger!
OLINGER!” The girls scamper back, play resumes, and the auditorium, big as it is, subsides into a living-room where everybody knows everybody else. Peter and Penny chat.

“I’m so glad you came,” he says. “It surprises me, how glad I am.”

“Why thank you,” Penny says dryly. “How’s your father?”

“Frantic. We didn’t even get home last night. The car broke down.”

“Poor Peter.”

“No, I kind of enjoyed it.”

“Do you shave?”

“No. Should I? Am I ready?”

“No; but it looks like a bit of dried shaving cream in your ear.”

“You know what that is?”

“What? Is it something?”

“It’s my secret. You didn’t know I had a secret.”

“Everybody has secrets.”

“But mine is very special.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you. I’ll have to show you.”

“Peter, aren’t you funny?”

“Would you rather I didn’t? Are you frightened?”

“No. You don’t frighten me.”

“Good. You don’t frighten me, either.”

She laughs. “Nobody frightens you.”

“Now there you’re wrong. Everybody frightens me.”

“Your father even?”

“Oh, he’s very frightening.”

“When will you show me your secret?”

“Maybe I won’t. It’s too horrible.”

“Peter, please do. Please.”

“Listen.”

“What?”

“I like you.” He cannot quite say “love”; it might prove unfair.

“I like you.”

“You won’t.”

“Yes I will. Are you just being silly?”

“Partly. I’ll show you at the break. If I keep my nerve.”

“You
do
frighten me now.”

“Don’t let me. Hey. You have such beautiful skin.”

“You always say that. Why? It’s just skin.” He can’t answer and she pulls her arm away from being stroked. “Let’s watch the game. Who’s ahead?”

He looks up at the new combination clock and electric scoreboard, Gift of the Class of 1946. “They are.”

She shouts, a regular lipsticked little fury suddenly, “Come
on
.” The JVs, five in Olinger’s maroon and gold and five in West Alton’s blue and white, looked dazed and alert at once, glued by the soles of their sneakers to tinted echoes of themselves inverted in floorshine. Every shoelace, every hair, every grimace of concentration seems unnaturally sharp, like the details of stuffed animals in a large lit case. Indeed there is a psychological pane of glass between the basketball floor and the ramp of seats; though a player can look up and spot in the crowd a girl he entered last night (her whimper, the dryness in the mouth afterwards), she is infinitely remote from him, and the event in the parked car quite possibly was imagined. Mark Youngerman with his fuzzy forearm blots sweat from his eyebrows, sees the ball sailing toward him, lifts cupped hands and cushions the tense seamed globe against his chest, flicks his head deceptively, drives in past the West Alton defender, and in a rapt moment of flight drops the peeper. The score is tied. Such a shout goes up as suggests every soul here hangs on the edge of terror.

Caldwell is tidying up the ticket receipts as Phillips tiptoes to him and says, “George. You mentioned a missing strip.”

“One eight oh oh one to one eight one four five.”

“I think I’ve placed their whereabouts.”

“Jesus, that would be a load off my mind if you had.”

“I believe Louis has them.”

“Zimmerman? What in hell is he stealing tickets for?”

“Shh.” Phillips glances with an eloquent twist of his mouth in the direction of the supervising principal’s office. In him, conspiracy becomes a species of dandyism. “You know he’s the older boys’ teacher up at the Reformed Sunday School.”

“Sure. They swear by him up there.”

“And did you notice Reverend March coming in tonight?”

“Yeah, I waved him through. I wouldn’t take his money.”

“That was right. The reason he’s here, about forty of the Sunday School were given free tickets and came to the game in a group. I went up to him and suggested he sit on the stage, but he said no he thought he’d be better off standing at the rear of the auditorium and keep an eye out; about half the boys come from up in Ely, where they don’t have a Reformed Church.”

Vera Hummel, hey, comes through the entrance. Her long yellow coat swings unbuttoned, her bun of red hair is breaking loose from its pins; has she been running? She smiles at Caldwell and nods at Phillips; Phillips is one little biddy she could never warm to. Caldwell is another matter; he brings out what might be, for all she knows, her maternal instinct. Any tall man is automatically on her good side; she is that simple. Contrariwise a man shorter than herself seems to her to be offensive. Caldwell amiably lifts one of his wart-freckled hands in greeting; the sight of her does him no harm. As long as Mrs. Hummel is on the premises he feels the school is not entirely given over to animals. She has a mature tomboy’s figure: shallow-breasted, long-legged, with something expressive and even anxious about the narrow length of her freckled wrists and forearms. The primeval female massiveness is limited to her
hips and thighs; these thighs, swinging oval and alabaster from a blue gym-suit, show to fair advantage among her girls. There is a bloom that succeeds the first bloom, and then a bloom upon that. Human biology, up to a point, is not impatient. Still she remains childless. The small triangular forehead framed between two copper wings seems vexed; her nose is a fraction long and a touch pointed; there is a bit of the ferret about her face, and when she grins, gums engagingly slip into sight.

Caldwell calls to her, “Did you have a game today?” She coaches the girls’ basketball team.

“Just got back,” she says, not entirely halting. “We were humiliated. I just gave Al his supper and I thought I’d come see what the boys could do.”

She is gone up the hall, toward the rear of the auditorium. “That woman certainly loves basketball,” Caldwell says.

“Al works too long hours,” Phillips says, more darkly. “She gets bored.”

“She’s cheerful-looking, though, and when you get to my state, that’s all that matters.”

“George, your health worries me.”

“The Lord loves a cheerful corpse,” Caldwell says, rudely exuberant, and asks boldly, “Now what’s the secret about these tickets?”

“It’s not an actual secret. Reverend March told me that Louis suggested that as an incentive to regular Sunday-school attendance a half-way prize be given, for perfect attendance up to the first of the year.”

“So he sneaks in and swipes my basketball tickets.”

“Not so loud. They’re not your tickets, George. They’re the school’s tickets.”

“Well I’m the poor horse’s neck who has to account for them.”

“It’s just paper, look at it that way. Mark it ‘Charity’ in your books. I’ll back you up if it’s ever questioned.”

“Did you ask Zimmerman what happened to the other hundred? You said forty kids came. He can’t give away the other hundred, next thing every four-year-old in the Reformed nursery will come crawling through that door with a free ticket.”

“George, I know you’re upset. But there’s nothing to be gained in exaggeration. I haven’t spoken to him and I don’t see that anything would be gained. Make a note for charity and we’ll consider the matter closed. Louis tends to be highhanded, I know; but it’s for a good cause.”

Secure in his knowledge that his friend’s prudent advice must be taken, Caldwell indulges in a final verbal expenditure. “Those tickets represent ninety dollars of theoretical money; I resent like hell handing them over to the dear old Reformed Sunday School.” He means it. Olinger is, except for a few marginal sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Baptists and the Roman Catholics, divided in friendly rivalry between the Lutherans and the Reformeds, the Lutherans having an advantage of numbers and the Reformeds an advantage of wealth. Born a Presbyterian, Caldwell became in the Depression a Lutheran like his wife, and, surprisingly in one so tolerant, sincerely distrusts the Reformeds, whom he associates with Zimmerman and Calvin, whom he associates with everything murky and oppressive and arbitrary in the universal kingdom.

Vera enters the back of the auditorium by one of the broad doors that are propped open on little rubber-footed legs which unhinge at a kick from snug brass fittings. She sees that
Reverend March is over toward the corner, leaning against the stack of folding chairs that for assemblies and stage plays and P. T. A. meetings are unfolded and arranged on the flat area which is now the basketball court. Several boys, legs dangling in dungarees, perch illegally on top of this stack, and through this back area men and boys and one or two girls are standing, craning to see over one another’s shoulders, some standing on chairs set between the open doors. Two men in their middle twenties greet Vera shyly and stand aside to make room for her. She is known to them but they are forgotten by her. They are ex-heroes of the type who, for many years, until a wife or ritual drunkenness or distant employment carries them off, continue to appear at high school athletic events, like dogs tormented by a site where they imagine they have buried something precious. Increasingly old and slack, the apparition of them persists, conjured by that phantasmal procession—indoors and outdoors, fall, winter, and spring—of increasingly young and unknown high school athletes who themselves, imperceptibly, filter in behind them to watch also. Their bearing, hushed and hurt, contrasts decisively with that of the students in the slope of seats; here skins and hair and ribbons and flashy clothes make a single fabric, a billowing, twinkling human pennant. Vera squints and the crowd dissolves into oscillating atoms of color. Apparently polarized by the jiggling event before them, in fact these dots agitate sideways, toward one another, aimed by secret arrow-shaped seeds. Sensing this makes Vera proud and serene and competent. For a long time she does not deign a hint of a sideways glance in the direction of Reverend March, who for his part has been rendered rapt by the gold and copper bits of her that glitter through the intervening jostle of bodies and arrive, chinking, at his eyes.

This minister is a tall and handsome man with a bony brown face and a crisp black mustache fastidiously shaped. The war made him. In 1939 he was a tender, small-boned graduate, not quite twenty-five, of a coal regions seminary. He felt effeminate and enfeebled by doubts. Theology had given his doubts shape and depth. In retrospect the religiosity that had prompted his vocation seemed, insofar as it was not sheerly his mother’s will, a sickly phosphorescence exuded by sexual uncertainty. His tinny voice mocked his prevaricating sermons with squeakings. He feared his deacons and despised his message. In 1941 war rescued him. He enlisted, not as a chaplain but as a fighting man. By this path he hoped to escape questions he could not answer. So it proved. He crossed water and the furies could not follow. They made him a lieutenant. In North Africa he kept himself and five others alive on three canteens of water for seven days. At Anzio a shell blasted a crater eight feet wide on the spot he had darted from thirty seconds before. In the hills above Rome, they made him a captain. Peace found him unscratched. His voice alone had resisted tempering. He returned, absurdly, to his mild vocation. Was it absurd? No! He discovered, scraping away the rubble, his mother’s faith, baked by the heat to an enduring hardness, strange of shape but undeniable, like a splash of cooled slag. He was alive. Life is a hell but a glorious hell. Give God this glory. Though March’s voice is still small his silences are grand. His eyes are black as coals set in the sharp brown cheekbones; he carries like a scar the mustache which he left of the beard of battle. With his sense of uniform he retains the Roman collar whenever he appears in public. To Vera, approaching secretly through the hall beyond the open doors, his backwards collar seems so romantic her breath is suspended: a knife of pure white, a slice of the absolute is dangerously poised at his throat.

“Your prayers were not with me this afternoon,” she breathes, breathless.

“Hello! Were your girls beaten?”

“Mm.” Already she pretends, and indeed slightly feels, some boredom. She gazes toward the game and makes the golden leaves of her coat swirl with her hands in the pockets.

“Do you always attend boys’ games?”

“Shouldn’t I? To learn things? Did you play basketball?”

“No, I was extremely inept as an adolescent. I was always picked last.”

“It’s hard to believe.”

“That’s the mark of a great truth.”

She winces at this edge of evangelism in him, and sighs heavily, explaining, as if in response to an impatient insistence of his, “The fact is, if you teach here a while you get so you can’t stay out of the building. It’s an occupational disease. If the school is lit, you wander over.”

“You live so close.”

“Mm.” His voice disappoints her. She wonders if it is a natural law, that men the proper size must have inadequate voices. Must she always, in some tiny facet of every encounter, be disappointed? In revenge, she teases him with, “You’ve changed since you were always picked last.”

He laughs curtly, baring his quick tobaccoish teeth in an instant, as if a longer laugh would betray his position: a captain’s laugh. “The last shall be first,” he says.