The Moves Make the Man
Read The Moves Make the Man Online
Authors: Bruce Brooks
The Moves Make the Man
For Penelope and Alexander
and the clans of Brooks, Collins, and Hunt
Now, Bix Rivers has disappeared, and who do you thinkâ¦
Something else is, I have Bix's notebook.
The first time I saw Bix was about exactly oneâ¦
I was there because my brother Maurice was making hisâ¦
The whole game pretty much followed the way the firstâ¦
In the top half of the last inning a bigâ¦
Sometime in the middle of all the excitement I rememberedâ¦
You cut through the backyards first, all of them noâ¦
That court in the woods was where I spent lastâ¦
My momma was the first person to notice, and theâ¦
A week before school started, my momma got a letterâ¦
Chestnut and all those white people turned out to beâ¦
You probably wonder why the first thing I did wasn'tâ¦
Classes went along okay those first few weeks, no fuss,â¦
I was out in the hall already walking back toâ¦
The first day in Home Economics was trying on aprons.
Over that weekend at home we ate mostly corn breadâ¦
There you go. That's the ticket. Mix it all together,â¦
We flew on the pie. Miss Pimton was popeyed whenâ¦
Bix was not in school for the whole next week.
So I started slipping out for some hoops. But itâ¦
The next night I was all set. Now I couldâ¦
It took six weeks.
So for about two months I did not see Bix.
The next night came and I did not eat muchâ¦
There was one more thing to be done in theâ¦
I waited out on the street for them to pickâ¦
There is nothing more for certain about Bix. Nobody sawâ¦
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Now, Bix Rivers has disappeared, and who do you think is going to tell his story but me? Maybe his stepfather? Man, that dude does not know Bix deep and now he never will, will he? Only thing he could say is he's probably secretly happy Bix ran away and got out of his life, but he won't tell you even that on account of he's busy getting sympathy dumped on him all over town as the poor deserted guardian.
How about Bix's momma? Can she tell you? I reckon notâshe is crazy in the hospital. And you can believe, they don't let crazies have anything sharp like a pencil, else she poke out her eye or worse. So she won't be writing any stories for a long time. But meâI have plenty of pencils, number threes all sharp and dark green enamel on the outside, and I have four black and white marble composition books. Plus I can tell you some things, like Bix was thirteen last birthday (same as me), Bix was a shortstop (supreme), Bix gets red spots the size of a quarter on his cheekbones when angry and a splotch looks like a cardinal smack in the middle of his forehead when he is ashamed. I can tell a lot more besides, including why Bix ran away. You just listen
to me and you'll be getting the story, all you want. You don't pay any mind to all this creepy jive that is going around town and school now about how Bix was bad and crazy like his momma and deserted her when she was sick and his stepfather too. Didn't I hear that old snooty preacher at the white First Baptist saying so last Sunday, moaning about children full of sin, with everybody in the church mooning with sympathy and staring all mushy over at the poor stepfather sitting in the third row?
I went by there to talk to that man after church, thinking to catch him all softened up and ask had he got any word of Bix. But when I heard that sin-child chatter, I gave it over. Fact I almost jumped right into their high service mumbo and told them what they were aboutâthat would have been a sight, this skinny kid black as a clarinet wailing out a licorice tune right there on the light blue carpet aisle cutting off that organ with the fake pipes just as it wheezed into one of their wavery old hymns. But it would not have done ary bit of good. When people are set to hear bad things, that is what they will hear. Listen, that is just about all white people go to church for, to have some soft old duck moan at them about all the sins ever been committed and all going to keep right on being committed so we might just as well give up on getting good, and settle for getting a nasty thrill watching the sins go on. You don't hear that kind of giving up at the colored churches around here, I can tell you. People mostly go there to sing, which is different from moaning any day.
When I came home from that church I was angry at the lies being told. Not just that they told that Bix was bad and a runawayâbecause there was some bad growing in Bix, and he did run away and that is that. But those people did not understand worth a penny.
That is when and why I decided to write this story of Bix. Of Bix and me, mostly, I guess it has to be. I may not understand it all yet myself, but I got all summer ahead of me, and a room to myself, cool up under the eaves, because my brother Henri is off to camp. My momma wanted to send me first, but I told her I wouldn't go on account of I knew I could use the summer better writing this out. So it's Henri gets to make the wallets and lanyards and sing the national anthem while the flag is raised every morning and swim in a lake warm as blood.
It's me gets to tell the truth.
Something else is, I have Bix's notebook.
Now, Bix was not a great writer like me. I got seven straight grades of all A in English, six in black schools that were harder than the white one, which nobody believes. The lunches were better at the colored schools too, but nobody buys that either. Anyway, Bix is about B- in English and bad handwriting to boot. But he did keep a notebook.
Mostly the book is full of study on how to play the position of shortstop in baseball. Bix wrote down all kinds of things he heard or thought about playing double-s, including fourteen pages all the way to the margin written fast as fire, taking down word for word a special radio show where Phil Rizzuto talked for half an hour straight on the fine points of the job. Looks like that Rizzuto can motor the mouth, because he left Bix in the dust several times and there is nothing to show but these dots(â¦) for these spots. There is one other funny thing. One of the fine points Rizzuto allows is that A shortstop has to spin light. This is nothing hard to figure, since the shortstop turns the pivot on double plays, though it is a pretty phrase. But it went straight to Bix's
head and spun HIM, because the next page after the Rizzuto interview is covered with nothing but repetitions of the words SPIN LIGHT SPIN LIGHT SPIN LIGHT SPIN LIGHT. Then at the bottom is one sentence: I WILL PLAY MY GAME BENEATH THE SPIN LIGHT.
The rest of the notebook is recipes and notes for taking care of your baseball glove. Really, recipes. There are three pages telling how to make homemade hickory ash ointment for heel flex, and a chart showing the seven places where you just got to stick balsam paste if you want your glove to do something called HOLD MAXIMAL HINGE LINE. I knew this stuff was in the book, for Bix told me about it a few weeks ago when I watched him fix his glove with these very things.
As soon as I decided to write this story I knew I had to have this notebook. Bix had told me he kept it in his comic collection, between GREEN LANTERN and the JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA.
I knew his stepfather would not give it to me if I asked. And anyway it was between Bix and me. So last night I got out of bed at midnight and snuck off my roof, which I could never have done if Henri was still here because he sleeps like a dog with one eye open. I had on my high black Chucks for grip, and a black sweater and blue jeans.
I snuck on over to Bix's old house. It was dark. I knew his stepfather slept downstairs in the back of the house, so I was not worried about him. I also knew Bix's room was on the second floor, right in front. So I climbed the porch railing and up onto the ridge of the decoration above the door, and then grabbed the sill of Bix's old window and pulled myself up, tennies gripping the brick just fine. I picked the window open pretty quietly with a grapefruit knife and
raised it and climbed right on in.
For a minute I just stood there getting sad. That room had a smell that was like Bix, something like leaves on the ground but like fresh dough too. In the moonlight that came in slanty through the window I could see Bix's baseball cap on the post of a chair and a pair of his tennies, one of them in the seat of that chair and the other on its side underneath. There were newspaper clippings on the walls and I could read the big black letters of one of them where the moon hit: McCOVEY SMASH CAUGHTâYANKS TAKE SERIES. I could even barely smell Bix's old baseball glove somewhere nearby. As I say, I watched him oil it up this spring and he explained you could smell if a glove was oiled the right way and made me sniff it before and after he worked it in.
Even though I had never seen it when it was his I could tell it was not Bix's room any longer. The sheets were stripped off the mattress, and the big flat ugly thing looked weird and like it had never touched a human in all its days, with these aqua stripes and a couple of large labels sewn on and this roping around the edges. A bed without sheets is one of the ugliest things you ever see. Also there were some boxes piled inside the door, and I knew they were for Bix's stuff to get piled into. I found the comics collection, in a large old box under the back window. I looked up the GREEN LANTERNs and there was the notebook. It is a red spiral one. Personally I hate the spiral kind. Bix liked it because he could keep his pencil inside the spiral. I keep my pencil behind my ear. You may want to write something down and not always have the notebook handy, but Bix of course was not a writer and probably never did.
I tucked the notebook inside my shirt and walked back
over to the window to leave. But then I saw Bix's glove, tossed in the front corner of the room, and you know I had to pick it up and sniff it and then I couldn't help it but started to cry, first time I ever cried about Bix, feeling like I had lost something and then feeling like I did not know if I ever had it. Bix was gone and worse the Bix I used to dig was gone even before he went and I didn't know where either of them was but he left his glove behind, which he must be unhappy without regardless of being the old Bix or the new. When I smelled the glove I could tell it was oiled the right way. I chucked it back in the corner and climbed out.
I came down much as I went up, only jumping all the way from the decoration over the door instead of climbing onto the railing. That wooden thing in the middle of the decoration is a pineapple, which I never could tell before. Why put a wooden pineapple up over a door?
I got back to my room okay. I stayed up pretty late reading the whole notebook, reading every single repetition of SPIN LIGHT SPIN LIGHT SPIN LIGHT until it meant all these different things to me and I thought to myself that wherever he is I hope Bix is spinning light.
Maybe I ought not to have taken the notebook. I did break into a house, I picked a window, I stole something. But I am sure Bix would rather I had it to use even a little in my book than let it sit in amongst the GREEN LANTERNs when his stepfather burns them.
I am not a trespasser. I am not a thief either. I am Jerome Foxworthy, and that's it, jack.