Mimi Corcoran really did run Denholm Consolidated High School, and it was she who coaxed me into taking over the junior-senior play when Alfie Norton, the math teacher who had been doing it for years, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and moved to Houston for treatments. I tried to refuse on the grounds that I was still doing research in Dallas, but I wasn't going there very much in the winter and early spring of 1961. Mimi knew it, because whenever Deke needed an English sub during that half of the school year, I was usually available. When it came to Dallas, I was basically marking time. Lee was still in Minsk, soon to marry Marina Prusakova, the girl in the red dress and white shoes.
"You've got plenty of time on your hands," Mimi had said. Her own hands were fisted on her nonexistent hips: she was in full take-no-prisoners mode that day. "And it pays."
"Oh, yeah," I said. "I checked that out with Deke. Fifty bucks. I'll be living large in the hood."
"In the what?"
"Never mind, Mimi. For the time being, I'm doing all right for cash. Can't we leave it at that?"
No. We couldn't. Miz Mimi was a human bulldozer, and when she met a seemingly immovable object, she just lowered her blade and revved her engine higher. Without me, she said, there would be no junior-senior play for the first time in the high school's history. The parents would be disappointed. The schoolboard would be disappointed. "And," she added, drawing her brows together, "I will be bereft."
"God forbid you should be bereft, Miz Mimi," I'd said. "Tell you what. If you let me pick the play--something not too controversial, I promise--I'll do it."
Her frown had disappeared into the brilliant Mimi Corcoran smile that always turned Deke Simmons into a simmering bowl of oatmeal (which, temperamentally speaking, was not a huge transformation). "Excellent! Who knows, you may find a brilliant thespian lurking in our halls."
"Yes," I said. "And pigs may whistle."
But--life is such a joke--I had found a brilliant thesp. A natural. And now he sat in my living room on the night before our show opened for the first of four performances, taking up almost the entire couch (which bowed humbly beneath his two hundred and seventy pounds), bawling his freaking head off. Mike Coslaw. Also known as Lennie Small in George Amberson's okay-for-high-school adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.
If, that was, I could talk him into showing up tomorrow.
3
I thought about handing him some Kleenex and decided they weren't up to the job. I fetched a dish wiper from the kitchen drawer instead. He scrubbed his face with it, got himself under some kind of control, then looked at me desolately. His eyes were red and raw. He hadn't started crying as he approached my door; this looked like it had been going on all afternoon.
"Okay, Mike. Make me understand."
"Everybody on the team's makin fun of me, Mr. Amberson. Coach started callin me Clark Gable--this was at the Lion Pride Spring Picnic--and now everybody's doin it. Even Jimmy's doin it." Meaning Jim LaDue, the team's hot-rod quarterback and Mike's best friend.
I wasn't surprised about Coach Borman; he was a thud who preached the gospel of gung-ho and didn't like anyone poaching on his territory either in season or out. And Mike had been called far worse; while hall-monitoring, I'd heard him called Bohunk Mike, George of the Jungle, and Godzilla. He laughed the nicknames off. That amused, even absentminded reaction to slurs and japes may be the greatest gift height and size conveys on large boys, and at six-seven and two-seventy, Mike made me look like Mickey Rooney.
There was only one star on the Lions' football team, and that was Jim LaDue--didn't he have his own billboard, at the intersection of Highway 77 and Route 109? But if there was any player who made it possible for Jim to star, it was Mike Coslaw, who planned to sign with Texas A&M as soon as his senior high school season was over. LaDue would be rolling with the 'Bama Crimson Tide (as both he and his father would be happy to tell you), but if someone had asked me to pick the one most likely to go pro, I would have put my money on Mike. I liked Jim, but to me he looked like a knee injury or shoulder separation waiting to happen. Mike, on the other hand, seemed built for the long haul.
"What does Bobbi Jill say?" Mike and Bobbi Jill Allnut were practically joined at the hip. Gorgeous girl? Check. Blonde? Check. Cheerleader? Why even ask?
He grinned. "Bobbi Jill's behind me a thousand percent. Says to man up and stop letting those other guys get my goat."
"Sounds like a sensible young lady."
"Yeah, she's the absolute best."
"Anyway, I suspect a little name-calling isn't what's really on your mind." And when he didn't reply: "Mike? Talk to me."
"I'm gonna get up there in front of all those people and make a fool of myself. Jimmy told me so."
"Jimmy's a helluva quarterback, and I know the two of you are pals, but when it comes to acting, he doesn't know jack shit." Mike blinked. In 1961 you usually didn't hear the word shit from teachers, even if they had a mouthful. But of course I was only a substitute, and that freed me up some. "I think you know that. As they say in these parts, you may stagger, but you ain't stupid."
"People think I am," he said in a low voice. "And I'm strictly a C student. Maybe you don't know that, maybe subs don't get to see the records, but I am."
"I made it a point to see yours after the second week of rehearsals, when I saw what you could do onstage. You're a C student because, as a football player, you're supposed to be a C student. It's part of the ethos."
"The what?"
"Figure it out from the context and save the dumb act for your friends. Not to mention Coach Borman, who probably has to tie a string on his whistle so he can remember which end to blow."
Mike snickered at that, red eyes and all.
"Listen to me. People automatically think anyone as big as you is stupid. Tell me different if you want to; according to what I hear, you've been walking around in that body since you were twelve, so you should know."
He didn't tell me different. What he said was, "Everybody on the team tried out for Lennie. It was a joke. A goof." He added hastily. "Nothin against you, Mr. A. Everybody on the team likes you. Even Coach likes you."
A bunch of players had crashed the tryouts, intimidating the more scholarly aspirants into silence and all claiming they wanted to read for the part of George Milton's big dumb friend. Of course it had been a joke, but Mike's reading of Lennie had been the farthest thing in the world from funny. What it had been was a goddam revelation. I would have used an electric cattle prod to keep him in the room, if that's what it took, but of course there was no need of such extreme measures. Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There's no feeling on earth like it. Mike knew his teammates would make fun of him, but he took the part anyway.
And of course Coach Borman didn't like it. The Coach Bormans of the world never do. In this case, however, there wasn't much he could do about it, especially with Mimi Corcoran on my side. He certainly couldn't claim he needed Mike for football practice in April and May. So he was reduced to calling his best lineman Clark Gable. There are guys who can't rid themselves of the idea that acting is for girls and queers who sort of wish they were girls. Gavin Borman was that kind of guy. At Don Haggarty's annual April Fool's keg-party, he had whined to me about "putting ideas in that big galoot's head."
I told him he was certainly welcome to his opinion; like assholes, everybody had one. Then I walked away, leaving him with a paper cup in his hand and a perplexed look on his face. The Coach Bormans of the world are also used to getting their way through a kind of jocular intimidation, and he couldn't understand why it wasn't working on the lowly sub who'd stepped into Alfie Norton's director's shoes at the last minute. I could hardly tell Borman that shooting a guy to keep him from killing his wife and kids has a way of changing a man.
Basically, Coach never had a chance. I cast some of the other football players as townspeople, but I meant to have Mike as Lennie from the moment he opened h
is mouth and said, "I remember about the rabbits, George!"
He became Lennie. He hijacked not just your eyes--because he was so damn big--but the heart in your chest. You forgot everything else, the way people forgot their everyday cares when Jim LaDue faded back to throw a pass. Mike might have been built to crash the opposing line in humble obscurity, but he had been made--by God, if there is such a deity; by a roll of the genetic dice if there is not--to stand on a stage and disappear into someone else.
"It was a goof for everyone but you," I said.
"Me, too. At first."
"Because at first you didn't know."
"No. I dint." Husky. Almost whispering. He lowered his head because the tears were coming again and he didn't want me to see them. The coach had called him Clark Gable, and if I called the man on it, he'd claim it was just a joke. A goof. A yuk. As if he didn't know the rest of the squad would pick up on it and pile on. As if he didn't know that shit would hurt Mike in a way being called Bohunk Mike never could. Why do people do that to gifted people? Is it jealousy? Fear? Both, maybe. But this kid had the advantage of knowing how good he was. And we both knew Coach Borman wasn't really the problem. The only person who could stop Mike from going onstage tomorrow night was Mike.
"You've played football in front of crowds nine times bigger than the one that'll be in that auditorium. Hell, when you boys went down to Dallas for the regionals last November, you played in front of ten or twelve thousand. And they were not friendly."
"Football's different. When we hit the field, we're all wearing the same uniform and helmets. Folks can only tell us apart by our numbers. Everybody's on the same side--"
"There are nine other people in this show with you, Mike, and that's not counting the townspeople I wrote in to give your football buddies something to do. They're a team, too."
"It's not the same."
"Maybe not quite. But one thing is the same--if you let them down, the shit falls apart and everybody loses. The actors, the crew, the Pep Club girls who did the publicity, and all the people who are planning to come in for the show, some of them from ranches fifty miles out. Not to mention me. I lose, too."
"I guess that's so," he said. He was looking at his feet, and mighty big feet they were.
"I could stand to lose Slim or Curley; I'd just send someone out with the book to read the part. I guess I could even stand to lose Curley's Wife--"
"I wish Sandy was a little better," Mike said. "She's pretty as hell, but if she ever hits her mark, it's an accident."
I allowed myself a cautious inward smile. I was starting to think this was going to be all right. "What I couldn't stand--what the show couldn't stand--is to lose you or Vince Knowles."
Vince was playing Lennie's road-buddy George, and actually, we could have stood the loss if he'd gotten the flu or broken his neck in a road accident (always a possibility, given the way he drove his daddy's farm truck). I would have gone on in Vince's place, if push came to shove, even though I was much too big for the part, and I wouldn't need just to read, either. After six weeks of rehearsals, I was as off-the-book as any of my actors. More than some. But I couldn't replace Mike. No one could replace him, with his unique combination of size and actual talent. He was the linchpin.
"What if I fuck up?" he asked, then heard what he'd said and clapped a hand to his mouth.
I sat down beside him on the couch. There wasn't much room, but I managed. Right then I wasn't thinking of John Kennedy, Al Templeton, Frank Dunning, or the world I'd come from. Right then I was thinking of nothing but this big boy . . . and my show. Because at some point it had become mine, just as this earlier time with its party-line telephones and cheap gas had become mine. At that moment I cared more about Of Mice and Men than I did about Lee Harvey Oswald.
But I cared even more about Mike.
I took his hand off his mouth. Put it on one huge thigh. Put my hands on his shoulders. Looked into his eyes. "Listen to me," I said. "Are you listening?"
"Yessir."
"You are not going to fuck up. Say it."
"I . . ."
"Say it."
"I'm not going to fuck up."
"What you're going to do is amaze them. I promise you that, Mike." Gripping his shoulders tighter. It was like trying to sink my fingers into stones. He could have picked me up and broken me over his knee, but he only sat there looking at me from a pair of eyes that were humble, hopeful, and still rimmed with tears. "Do you hear me? I promise."
4
The stage was a beachhead of light. Beyond it was a lake of darkness where the audience sat. George and Lennie stood on the bank of an imaginary river. The other men had been sent away, but they wouldn't be gone long; if the big, vaguely smiling hulk of a man in the overalls were to die with any dignity, George would have to see to it himself.
"George? Where them guys goin?"
Mimi Corcoran was sitting on my right. At some point she had taken my hand and was gripping it. Hard, hard, hard. We were in the first row. Next to her on her other side, Deke Simmons was staring up at the stage with his mouth slightly hung open. It was the expression of a farmer who sees dinosaur cropping grass in his north forty.
"Huntin. They're goin huntin. Siddown, Lennie."
Vince Knowles was never going to be an actor--what he was going to be, most likely, was a salesman at Jodie Chrysler-Dodge, like his father--but a great performance can lift all the actors in a production, and that had happened tonight. Vince, who in rehearsals had only once or twice achieved even low levels of believability (mostly because his ratty, intelligent little face was Steinbeck's George Milton), had caught something from Mike. All at once, about halfway through Act I, he finally seemed to realize what it meant to go rambling through life with a Lennie as your only friend, and he had fallen into the part. Now, watching him push an old felt hat from props back on his head, I thought that Vince looked like Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath.
"George!"
"Yeah?"
"Ain't you gonna give me hell?"
"What do you mean?"
"You know, George." Smiling. The kind of smile that says Yeah, I know I'm a dope, but we both know I can't help it. Sitting down beside George on the imaginary riverbank. Taking off his own hat, tossing it aside, rumpling his short blond hair. Imitating George's voice. Mike had nailed this with eerie ease in the very first rehearsal, with no help from me. "'If I was alone, I could live so easy. I could get a job and not have no more mess.'" Resuming his own voice . . . or Lennie's, rather. "I can go away. I can go right up in the hills and find a cave, if you don't want me."
Vince Knowles lowered his head, and when he raised it and spoke his next line, his voice was thick and hitching. It was a simulacrum of sorrow he'd never approached in even his best rehearsals. "No, Lennie, I want you to stay here with me."
"Then tell me like you done before! Bout other guys, and about us!"
That was when I heard the first low sob from the audience. It was followed by another. Then a third. This I had not expected, not in my wildest dreams. A chill raced up my back, and I stole a glance at Mimi. She wasn't crying yet, but the liquid sheen in her eyes told me that she soon would be. Yes, even her--hard old baby that she was.
George hesitated, then took hold of Lennie's hand, a thing Vince never would have done in rehearsals. That's queerboy stuff, he would have said.
"Guys like us . . . Lennie, guys like us got no families. They got nobody that gives a hoot in hell about them." Touching the prop gun hidden under his coat with his other hand. Taking it partway out. Putting it back. Then steeling himself and taking it all the way out. Laying it along his leg.
"But not us, George! Not us! Idn't that right?"
Mike was gone. The stage was gone. Now it was only the two of them, and by the time Lennie was asking George to tell him about the little ranch, and the rabbits, and living off the fat of the land, half the audience was weeping audibly. Vince was crying so hard he could hardly deliver his final lines, telling
poor stupid Lennie to look over there, the ranch they were going to live on was over there. If he looked hard enough, he could see it.
The stage lensed slowly to full dark, Cindy McComas for once running the lights perfectly. Birdie Jamieson, the school janitor, fired a blank cartridge. Some woman in the audience gave a little scream. That sort of reaction is usually followed by nervous laughter, but tonight there was only the sound of people weeping in their seats. Otherwise, silence. It went on for ten seconds. Or maybe it was only five. Whatever it was, to me it seemed forever. Then the applause broke. It was the best thunder I ever heard in my life. The house lights went up. The entire audience was on its feet. The front two rows were reserved for faculty, and I happened to glance at Coach Borman. Damned if he wasn't crying, too.
Two rows back, where all the school jocks were sitting together, Jim LaDue leaped to his feet. "You rock, Coslaw!" he shouted. This elicited cheers and laughter.
The cast came out to take their bows: first the football-player townspeople, then Curley and Curley's Wife, then Candy and Slim and the rest of the farmhands. The applause started to die a little and then Vince came out, flushed and happy, his own cheeks still wet. Mike Coslaw came last, shuffling as if embarrassed, then looking out in comical amazement as Mimi shouted "Bravo!"
Others echoed it, and soon the auditorium resounded with it: Bravo, Bravo, Bravo. Mike bowed, sweeping his hat so low it brushed the stage. When he stood again, he was smiling. But it was more than a smile; his face was transformed with the happiness that's reserved for those who are finally allowed to reach all the way up.
Then he shouted, "Mr. Amberson! Come up here, Mr. Amberson!"
The cast took up the chant of "Director! Director!"