The Game Player (7 page)

“Now shall I call your daddy?” Brian yelled, but with enough diffidence so that it seemed more ironic than furious. I only half listened to the protests and peacemaking remarks the others spoke; I was waiting for Danny's reaction of outrage. I watched his dusty, red head move slowly about and I almost felt sorry for him when his face came into view. A pebble had made a jagged scratch across his left cheek and his right knee was exposed, showing a purplish square of skin. He sat up and pressed the flap of pant leg against it. I winced just as he did and thought of how much the iodine was going to hurt.

“Listen, you fuck,” Danny said. “You want to put on gloves and we'll go a few in the basement? Or do you only fight like a little faggot girl?”

Brian listened as if there were no urgency in this situation. He showed neither amusement or defensiveness. “How touching of you to want a fair fight, Dan. Don't feel you have to waste our time pretending you need revenge.” I thought he was finished, but he suddenly said, “Put on gloves! What kind of shit is that?”

“I'm talking about a real fight where you can't kick and scratch like a little girlie.”

“Girlie?” Brian opened his eyes in such a funny way that the rest of us laughed. I knew then that there wasn't going to be any more fighting. “Look, Dan,” Brian said earnestly, “I'm sorry I did that. I'm a sore loser, okay? You want to punch me? Go ahead.” He paused and looked so inoffensively sincere that it was almost embarrassing.

“You tore my fuckin pants,” Danny whined. Someone giggled. “What's so funny about that? You think it's funny, you tell my mother about it.” Everybody laughed with him on that.

“If you like,” Brian said. “I'll explain to your mom. You know, I'll tell her I went crazy cause we lost and I'll pay for your pants.”

There was much demurring and manly apologies and swapping of mother stories. After a few minutes, Adam, whose upset had been completely forgotten, was busy talking about a fight he had had with his parents that morning. It seemed miraculous, our sudden peace, and only Brian's apology seemed to have been a calculated act, but later he told me he knew when he rushed Danny that that would be the eventual result. “We're the captains,” he said seriously. “We're the ones who have to do the fighting.”

“But how did you know that Danny wouldn't make it a real brawl? Then things would have been worse.”

“They wouldn't have been worse. Even if the two of us had fuckin stood there and slugged it out, the rest of you would have cooled down and enjoyed the fight. Anyway, I knew that Danny wouldn't fight. When I first moved here, he and I had a big fight. I kicked the shit out of him.”

I stared, rethinking Danny's reactions with this new knowledge.

Brian misunderstood my blank look. “I did. Really. I know my apology seemed cowardly. It's just that if I didn't, his pride would have forced him to fight me and if you beat somebody up twice, all you end up with is a permanent enemy, or, at best, a slave. I don't want either of those.”

“Why did Danny keep accusing you of fighting like a faggot?”

“Oh, cause when I beat him up, he kept trying to make it into a boxing match or something. I just kept tripping him up or kneeing him. You know.”

I was offended by this explanation. It didn't sound like an honorable way of fighting. My cowboy heroes hadn't yet begun to fight that way.

Brian noticed, of course. “Well, he's taken boxing lessons and he's also stronger. I wanted to win, right? So I fought to win.”

“Yeah, that's all right,” I said, unconvinced.

“Anyway, our team's been playing tight baseball and this'll loosen us up. You'll see, everybody will forget about winning and just play ball. We'll win big tomorrow.”

It took longer than usual to get the next day's game started. There was a lot of talk and fooling until Brian ran about ordering people to be serious. And even when we started, my team joked more and were less attentive. Instead of focusing on each pitch and play, the bench talked among themselves, and from my outfield position I was envious of the camaraderie of the infielders—one of them always seemed to be making the wittiest comment possible about our opposition's batting styles.

Brian led off our first inning with typical concentration and success: he singled to right field and stole second on the first pitch to me. I kept trying to punch a hit through the right side, and, after the count went to three balls and two strikes, I fouled off five straight pitches. My bench thought this hilarious and yelled out to their pitcher, “Give up. Walk him already.” Adam came up with their favorite line: “No, no, he doesn't want a walk. Howard's trying to figure out a way to bunt Brian home.”

And when the sixth full-count pitch came in high and out of the strike zone, my bench stood up and gave me a standing ovation while I trotted to first. We only got one run out of this beginning and I glanced at Brian but he seemed satisfied. In the third inning Adam made a great play to save a run when he ran hard from shortstop into shallow left field to catch a ball just in the webbing of his glove, somersaulting and holding onto it.

We got another run in the third, when somebody on their team misplayed a deep fly ball into a triple and the run came home on a ground out. In the fourth, we loaded the bases and Adam, his whole body powering into a nice visible pitch, hit the longest line drive I had ever seen into left center. The ball was there so fast that their outfielders couldn't cut it off and while I watched their shrinking backs tremble in the sunlight as they chased the ball, everybody crossed the plate, and Adam ran and ran furiously, his face full of excitement and triumph. By the time Adam rounded third, though they had reached the ball, it was obvious that he would score and he began to slow down, in great rearing motions like a horse. He crossed the plate with his feet making loud smacking sounds on the hard dirt.

We won seven to two.

It was a pleasant, easy victory and my teammates were proud of themselves. They crowded around Brian as he and I walked home, reminding him of the good things they had done. I was conscious of the privilege everyone now recognized that I had: the confidence of Brian's friendship. There were no attempts to move between him and me on the way home and whenever I was outside alone, they would question me about his plans with the hopeful tone of underdeveloped countries speaking to the ambassador of a great power.

When the summer season ended, we had played Danny's team forty-five times. Our record was thirty wins and fifteen losses. The next summer, because of this overwhelming dominance, the teams were divided differently, though I was still, was always to be, a member of Brian's team. We played a mere forty times that year because Danny said, after we had won twenty-nine and lost only eleven, that it was too boring to go on. Our last season again involved a new division of talent: but we stopped after thirty-eight games this time, since we had won thirty-one of them, and it had become boring even for the winners.

Brian once told me that Danny's best team was the first I had played against. He spent an hour comparing the statistics of the players Danny had that year against when they played for Brian in later years. They had played better for Brian.

We were older when he told me this and I remember how it irritated me even then, though I should have grown used to it, that such a terrifying competitor, hell-bent on personal triumph, could make such good use of people.

4

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.

—John Locke

M
Y INTENSE STUDY
of Brian ended once school began. There was too much going on independent of him for me to continue perceiving him as an authority, a god whose whimsical displeasure might ruin me. My attitude that summer was an oddity, because I regarded him the way I was accustomed to feeling about my father or my teachers in school.

He was still the most important boy in our junior high. He was captain of both our baseball and basketball teams as well as being a straight-A student in every subject except art. He only got a B in that and I think it was looked on by others as a further mark of his genius. Only drips got an A in art, unless, of course, you were a pretty girl.

I liked that school a lot. I got along very well with the girls because their sexuality hadn't deepened into adolescence, when I could feel the swing in interest from boys like me to boys like Brian. My marks were good: A's in English, history, and—yes—art; B's in science and math, except for the year we took biology. I hated dissection and loathed the teacher, a Dostoevsky character whose ill-fitting jacket exposed his reddish wrists and hands. But I loved one of my English teachers, Mr. Lindon, whom all the students thought eccentric because of his outbursts about the misuse of language. He introduced me to the Oxford English Dictionary, Fowler's Modern English Usage, and the twenty-ninth sonnet of Shakespeare, which he demanded we memorize. I had the best of both worlds: the friendship of girls because of my early realization that being tough was regarded by them as childishness; and the respect of both intellectuals (meaning good English students) and jocks, because of my friendship with Brian.

I have discovered that almost everyone else hated those three years. They begin with the shock of puberty and end with the beginnings of the first throes of adolescence. Indeed, the last few months of ninth were scary. There was the complicated and frightening problem of choosing high schools. During the last month of junior high, Brian told me his father wanted him to go to Staunton, an exclusive private boarding school. Brian had taken the test and done the interview—and, of course, they wanted him.

I was sitting at my desk when he told me. In front of me was a copy of Macbeth, the subject of our test tomorrow. I looked at the drawing of Shakespeare on the cover and felt my stomach give into the nervousness of not having Brian, that great ocean liner in whose tow I had been sweetly cradled through the aggressiveness of male competition, to usher me through the next four years of what I already knew would be an agony of sexual pursuit. I heard a slight tremble in my voice when I asked where it was and other details, as if I were resigned to his going. He answered them without any hint as to his attitude. His voice, as always, had that hard, precise tone, absolutely neutral about its intentions.

“It sounds like a great school,” I said after hearing a description of its graduates' accomplishments.

“Yeah, but if you're a top student at Hills,” Brian said, referring to the fairly elegant public school of our area, “you can get into any university.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

I was pleased at this news. It took a moment before I realized with shock that my pleasure was not sensible (that I had a good chance of getting into a fine university) but irrational—it might persuade Brian to go to Hills. “Well,” I said, “I'd rather go to a school here, as long as it won't hurt me academically.”

He smiled. “It might hurt you academically. You have to be a straight-A student at Hills. You wouldn't at Staunton.” His eyes danced with pleasure as he measured his effect. “Besides, Staunton's a better school, so it follows that you're taught more.”

“I'd still rather stay here. Besides, there are no girls at Staunton.”

He made a scornful sound that was only barely a laugh. “You'd really be missing a lot, huh?”

My mind worked frantically to determine what he was about to insult me with. “Wouldn't you miss girls?” I asked, my voice hesitating.

“I didn't mean that.” His eyes pushed at me. “Do you expect to screw a lot at Hills?”

“Well—I don't—Yeah, I hope to!”

He laughed for real now, rocking slowly back and forth, in time with his chuckles.

“You don't think so, huh?”

“You know, you're a Jew. Do you know that?” He stopped when he saw my look of genuine horror. “I'm not calling you a Jew, you idiot. Stop looking like that. I mean you are Jewish. None of the non-Jewish girls will go out with you and the Jewish girls will only take you if they can't get a Wasp.”

“What!”

“Yes, what! Anyway, the best anyone will do is get laid once. Four years to get laid once. That's idiocy, that's not a reason for choosing a school.” He had been irritated and, catching himself at it, he suddenly relaxed and looked at me. I was speechless. “What's the matter?”

“You really don't know?”

“Oh. I wasn't calling you a name. I meant: you are Jewish.”

“There's nothing insulting about calling me a Jew! Goddamit, that wasn't it. I am a Jew. That's perfectly—” I searched for the word and remembered Fowler—“proper.”

Brian was embarrassed. A novelty. “That's what I thought, but you acted so funny that I thought I was wrong.”

“Oh, my God. I was upset by what you said about girls and me being Jewish.”

“Of course.” Brian straightened his back and nodded wisely. His confidence had returned. “You didn't know that's the way it would be.”

“Who the hell says it's going to be like that? Your fucking father?”

Brian turned his head suddenly in my direction and, for a moment, he appeared ready to argue, but he just looked and said nothing.

I was frightened by his look and so made my next comment in a tone I hoped was disarming. “I know somebody must have told you that. What do you know about Jews? About Jewish girls?”

“I thought it was the ambition of every Jewish girl to marry—”

“To marry, yes!” I interrupted. “But if they're supposed to marry anyone, it's a Jew.”

Brian stood up. His movements were always instantaneous. He would seem utterly settled into a spot and then he would move from it with startling energy. “I have to go,” he said, not moving.