In the gym there was an uproar of screams and squeals. Somebody pulled down the big red heart, and now all the curlicued red and white crepe paper was floating down from the ceiling all over everybody.
SPRING
THE AIR FEELS LIKE BASEBALL.
It’s light out after dinner.
It rains and the worms come out onto the sidewalks to be squashed by the millions.
The cops caught a guy running naked down some street.
I don’t hate Debbie Breen anymore. I write letters to her that I never mail. They say, “I will keep on loving you even though you like other guys. I will love you forever. Someday you will cry and remember and you will reach out and claw some furniture and cry out, My God! Why didn’t I marry Jason Herkimer?”
I don’t feel like sitting in school.
There’s a lot of new stuff in the gutters and sewer grates.
The Rocksalt Lady is carrying her shopping bag now.
The ground is spongy. Sometimes it smells like onions.
As the leaves come out, the birds’ nests disappear.
Ham bought three bags of dried cow dung for the vegetable garden. He’s all excited about it.
The little kids are back out on the corner. They had paper ready for me to make them airplanes.
I opened a window and didn’t get hollered at.
My mother moved the geranium from the dining room to the porch and hung her bathing suit outside.
I washed my bicycle. A bird pooped on it.
I peed in a parking lot.
MOTHERS
I COULDN’T FIND MY BASEBALL GLOVE. AND THAT WAS impossible. Every year in the fall I put my glove on the shelf in my bedroom closet, and in the spring I take it out. That’s just the way it is. It snows in the winter, the leaves turn colors in the fall, and in the spring I reach up to the shelf and pull down my baseball glove.
Only it wasn’t there.
“It’s always there,” I told Calvin. “Always.”
I kept feeling around with my hand. I got up on a chair and looked. No glove.
“Timmy stole it,” I said. I yelled: “Timmy!”
“Stop yelling like that. He’s out,” came my mother’s voice from downstairs.
“I’ll kill him,” I said.
Calvin said, “Why would he take it?”
“Who knows?” I growled. “Maybe he’s tired of stealing my dinosaurs.” I kicked the chair across the room. It rammed into the bureau.
“Jason!” from downstairs.
“Your mother’s gonna kill you before you kill your brother,” Calvin informed me.
“Funny,” I said.
“It’s around someplace,” he said. “Why’s it so important anyway?”
How could I answer that? If I told the whole truth I’d have to say: It’s important because I wanted to show off, Calvin. I wanted to show you that I’m serious about baseball. Not like you guys. I want to show you how I rub oil into it after the baseball season; and it’s gotta be olive oil. Because that keeps the glove from drying out and cracking, and it keeps the leather tender so it can feel the ground balls just right. And then—see?—after I oil it I put a baseball into it and curl the fingers over it. That’s for the pocket. A glove’s nothing without a good pocket. It’s gotta be deep. Then see how I wedge it into this small shoe box so it’ll stay curled. And that’s how it stays all winter long. There’s a lot to keeping a glove. And I can’t tell you about it. I have to show you.
How could I say all that? So I just said, “It’s important, that’s all.”
He asked me if I was going out for the school team this year.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
“Think you’ll make it?”
“I got a chance.”
“What’re you goin’ out for?”
I snarled at him. “Waddaya think?”
That’s the kind of thing that makes me mad. Calvin knows I’m a shortstop. Everybody knows I’m a shortstop. I played it in Little League. Even in our pickup games at the park, it’s the only position I ever play.
“It’s not Little League, y’know,” he tells me.
“Yeah, Calvin, so I heard. Say, Calvin, anyway, wha’d you hit in Little League last year?” My batting average was almost .330. Calvin hit a blockbuster .265.
“Who cares?” he goes. “I ended my baseball career last year. I’m retired.”
“You didn’t retire, Calvin. You gave up.”
“You still gonna be a major leaguer?” His eyes were snickering.
“I never said I was. I said I might try.”
“Well?”
“I toldja. I might. Might.”
To myself I was thinking, I will. Will. I didn’t want to be a major league shortstop all the time. But in the spring, when I felt the air and took my glove out of the box and slipped my fingers into it and took a deep whiff of that soft brown leather, it was the only thing I wanted to be.
While we’re doing all this talking, I’m charging from room to room upstairs, jerking out drawers, looking under beds, searching closets. The more I didn’t find it the more desperate I got. I was a madman. I didn’t bother to put things back. One thing I grabbed (it looked like an old, brown, crinkly Christmas wreath) I sent sailing into a wall like a Frisbee.
Everywhere I looked: no glove.
We went downstairs. Started looking there.
Suddenly I heard my mother shriek upstairs. I heard her stomping overhead, then on the steps. “Jason!” I was surprised she let herself yell like that with somebody else in the house.
I went into the living room. She was stopped halfway down the stairs. She was holding the ratty old wreath in her hand.
“Huh?” I said.
“What were you doing up there?” she goes.
“I was looking for my glove. I can’t find it. I always keep it on the shelf in my closet.”
“Why were you in my closet?” She was still yelling. Her nostrils were red.
“I said. For my glove.”
“Why my closet?”
“I don’t know. I just looked everywhere.”
“Looked?” she howled. “You didn’t just look! You bashed things around!”
I told her I was sorry. I didn’t tell her she was overreacting a little.
“Sorry doesn’t do it,” she said. “You don’t go treating other people’s things like your own junk.” She shoved out her hand. “You know what this is?”
I said, “A Christmas wreath.”
She screeched. “Christmas wreath!”
“Antique Christmas wreath?”
“It’s my crown,” she said.
“Crown? For what?”
“It’s what I wore when I was queen of the ninth-grade prom.”
We just stared at each other for a while. Eyes wide. Mouths open. Like we were a couple of goldfish gaping at each other from separate bowls.
When she talked again her voice was almost a whisper. She looked confused. “Why did you throw it against the wall?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t know what it was.”
We both sort of looked at it. She turned it over, and one of the little brown flaky leaves came loose and fell to the living room rug. I couldn’t imagine my mother a queen. She stood on stairways, like now, with a long old shirt of Ham’s on and jeans and bare feet. That was my mother.
After a while she turned slow and went up the stairs. I think she was saying, “Please don’t throw it against the wall anymore.”
Calvin made me go over to his house. He said his glove was all beat up and flat and dried out and he wanted me to fix it up for him.
“I thought you retired from baseball,” I reminded him.
“Organized ball,” he said. “I’m still gonna be an amateur.”
So I went. He was probably trying to patch up what just happened. I was really embarrassed he had to hear all that.
On the way over he said, “My mother was a queen too.”
“Yeah?” I sa
id. “What of?” He didn’t know. “She got a crown?” He didn’t know that either.
When we got to his house his mother was in the kitchen. She was stirring something on the stove with a wooden spoon. It smelled like chili, which I love. I asked her what it was.
“Chili,” she said. “I make it for Calvin. He loves it.”
“Everybody but me loves it,” Calvin scowled. “I hate it.”
Counting that night for hot chocolate, this was the second time I was in Calvin’s kitchen, and I hadn’t seen any soul food yet. Being there reminded me of one of the oldest questions in my head: What are chitlins, anyway?
I kept watching Mrs. Lemaine at the stove. She had gold hoop earrings on. Her fingernails and toenails were painted the same color. She was good-looking. Darn good-looking, actually.
Calvin got his glove. He was right about how bad it was. It’s a crime to treat a glove that way.
I asked for olive oil.
“How about vegetable oil?” Mrs. Lemaine said.
I told her it had to be olive.
She looked into her cabinet. “Peanut oil?”
“Nope.”
“Well,” she sighed, “that’s all we have. Unless you two want to stomp on these olives.”
I thought it over and decided to forget my pride and do it as a favor for Calvin. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll try the peanut.” Besides, Calvin wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Or care.
I worked on the glove, and we both munched on crackers. All of a sudden Calvin goes, “You were a queen, weren’t you, Mom?”
“Still am,” she said, stirring.
Calvin shook his head and shuffled, “C’mon. You know what I mean. What was that thing you were queen of? School, was it?”
She nodded slow. “M-hm.”
“What? High school?”
“M-hm.”
“The prom?”
She shook her head no. The gold hoops swayed in the steam from the pot.
“What then?”
“The May.”
“The May?” goes Calvin, scowling over at me. “What’s that?”
“Queen of the May,” she said, stirring slow.
“May Queen,” I said.
Calvin whispered, “See? Toldja.” He turned back to his mom. “Jason’s mother was a queen too.”
“Oh?” she said.
I was getting a little nervous.
“Yeah,” he said. “She was a prom queen.”
“I see.”
“Hey, Mom, do you still have your crown?”
She stopped stirring. “Nope, ’fraid not.” She came toward us. “Okay now, clear out, you guys. I have to set up for dinner. You staying, Jason?”
I told her no thanks, I had to go home. I finished Calvin’s glove and left. For some reason I was glad the conversation ended there.
It turned out my glove was at the shoemaker’s. One of the seams in the thumb was coming apart, and Ham said a long time ago that when baseball was ready to start again he would take it to a shoemaker to get it repaired. I forgot all that.
It was almost a week later when Calvin told me what happened after I left that day. He said he kept pestering his mom about being May Queen and all—you could tell how proud he was—and so finally she took him into her bedroom and opened up a drawer and took out a rock and handed it to him. He said she told him there were a lot of blacks at her school, but even more whites. He said after she got picked queen there were some bad letters and phone calls. He said they had this little parade, and she was sitting up on the back of a convertible waving away at the people, when somebody threw this rock and it hit her in the head. Knocked her crown off. The rock fell onto the seat. The rock and the crown were both sitting there. She saved the rock. She said she wished now she saved the crown too. Calvin said it was a pretty big rock.
I used to think being a queen was something great.
MILES
I DIDN’T MAKE THE BASEBALL TEAM.
The coach said he already had a ninth-grader for shortstop, and an eighth-grade second-stringer, and I wasn’t quite good enough to beat them out. I said I’d be willing to play another position. He said he had veteran ninth-graders at all the positions. I told him I wanted to be a major leaguer someday. I told him I hit almost .330 in Little League last year. He looked impressed. He said that’s the kind of spirit he likes to see. He said it’s not that I don’t have the talent, it’s just that I need another year to grow. To mature. In the meantime, he said, he wants me to stay in shape. He said he’d like to see me go out for track. It’d be good for me, he said, and nobody gets cut from track.
I tried out for the sprints. I figured that would help me be a better base-stealer. But I was too slow for the sprints.
I tried the half mile. It was too long to run full speed, and too short to run slow. I couldn’t figure it out.
That’s how I became a miler.
At first I wasn’t too excited about it. I didn’t see how running the mile was going to help me be a better shortstop. I was only doing it because the baseball coach was grooming me for next year.
Then I saw a mile race on TV. Some great miler from England was running, and as he finished each lap the announcer was screaming: “He’s on a record pace! He’s on a record pace!” Each lap the people in the stands went crazier. On one side of the screen they showed the world record time, and on the other side they showed the runner’s time. The whole stadium was standing and screaming, like they were pushing him with their voices, and even though it was the last lap, instead of going slower he was going faster. I couldn’t believe it. The stadium was going bananas, and he was flying and the world record time and his time were getting closer and closer and he broke the world record by 3/10 of a second. And even then he didn’t collapse, or even stop. He just kept jogging another lap around the track, holding his arms up and smiling and waving to the cheering crowd.
Even though it was Saturday, I went outside and ran ten times around the block.
I turned out to be a pretty rotten miler. We had our first time trails, and I came in dead last. My time was 6 minutes and 47 seconds. The guy that broke the world record did it in less than 3 minutes and 50 seconds.
To top it off, I threw up afterward.
And to top that off, the place where I threw up happened to be the long-jump pit. Which didn’t make the long jumpers too happy, but which the coach thought was just fine. He said now they had a good reason to jump farther than ever.
But all that, it was nothing. It was all just peaches and cream compared to the worst part, the really, really bad thing: one of the people that beat me was named Marceline McAllister. The girl.
“I’m quittin’,” I told Peter Kim, who was on the track team too. A half-miler.
“Why?” he said.
“Why? You see who I lost to in the time trails?”
“I wasn’t watching.”
“The girl.”
“Which one?” he said. There’re other ones on the team too, but she’s the only miler one.
“McAllister,” I said.
“Marceline?”
“Yeah. Her.”
“The one that plays the trombone?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged. “So?”
“So?” I hollered. “Waddaya mean, so? She’s a girl, man! You ever lose to a girl?”
He said maybe I had a cramp.
“I didn’t have no cramp.”
“Maybe you just had a bad day.”
“So what?” I screeched. “How bad could it be? She’s still a girl. I got beat by a girl. I’m quittin’.”
Then he started talking to me. He reminded me that some of the other girls on the team were doing better than last too. In fact, one of them was the second-fastest sprinter in the one-hundred-pound class. He said he heard that at our age a lot of girls are better than boys, because they mature faster. He said in another couple years I’d probably beat her easy. And he reminded me that the baseball coach had his eye on me.<
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“Yeah,” I said, “he’s really gonna be impressed, watching me lose to a girl.”
“He didn’t tell you to beat anybody,” Peter said. “He just said to keep in shape.”
I tried to explain. “Peter, all that stuff doesn’t make any difference. The thing is, she’s a girl. And a girl’s a girl. You know what I’m saying? A girl. G-I-R-L. You understand me?”
Peter’s expression changed. “No,” he said, “I don’t understand. I’m Korean, remember? Do what you want.” He turned and left.
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t quit.” He kept walking. I called, “Just don’t tell Dugan! Peter? Hear? Don’t tell anybody!”
It was a long, long track season.
Every day we started with calisthenics. Then most days we ran around the whole school grounds. Five times. Some other days we did intervals. That’s where you run real fast as hard as you can for a while, then walk for a while (a littler while), then run fast again. Run-walk-run-walk. You just listen for the whistle to tell your legs when to start or stop. You’ll never know how cruel a whistle is until you’re walking after your tenth interval, and you hear it blow again.
As much as I hated practice, there was one good thing about it: you weren’t running against anybody. There were no places. No first. No last.
That’s why I dreaded the first meet. Ham wanted to know when it was.
“Why?” I asked him.
“Mom and I thought we’d like to come see it.”
“See me lose?” I said. I didn’t tell them about the girl. “I toldja I’m just running to keep in shape for baseball.”
“We just like to come and see you, that’s all,” he said. “We came to all your Little League games, didn’t we?”
“That was different. I’m good at baseball.”
“We don’t care,” he said. “We don’t come to see you be a star. Just to play.”
“Well, anyway,” I said, “the meet’s away.”
Which was true. It was at Mill Township. I came in last. By a lot. But the thing was, it didn’t really bother me. That’s because on the bus over to the meet I all of a sudden realized something: even though I was running, I wasn’t really in the race. If all I was supposed to be doing was staying in shape for baseball, there was no use getting all uptight about where I finished. I was actually running for the baseball coach, not the track coach. I was a baseball player disguised as a track runner. I didn’t really want to break the world’s record. I was no miler. I was a shortstop.