Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! (2 page)

If it would make his father feel better, he was willing to remember to add Heights to Brooklyn when he said where he lived. If it would make his father feel better, he was willing to say his mother’s temporary job was at Arrow Publications, never mentioning the crummy magazine which employed her. He was willing, in life, to be discreet, diplomatic, subtle, gentle, and forgiving; but there were times when this behavior was wrong.

Tucker Woolf marched across Pierrepont past the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court, down Henry Street past the Church of Our Lady of Lebanon, and across and down Remsen Street almost to the river. He thought of how he had forced himself to concentrate in Dinky Hocker’s presence, so he would never even say something accidental like “fat chance” or “fathead” or “the fat’s in the fire.” He had handled the whole enormous problem with kid gloves and kindness; but there were times when this behavior was wrong.

He stopped before a red brownstone with a yellow door, went up the stone steps, and lifted the brass knocker.

Dinky herself answered.

Dinky had dusty blond hair, and her cheeks flushed from the slightest exertion. She favored ersatz articles of clothing, like her father’s tweed-suit vest worn over a T-shirt, with green cotton pajama bottoms and old white tennis socks.

That was the way she was dressed as she answered the door.

“I thought you weren’t going to exercise your visiting rights anymore,” she said. Dinky’s father was a lawyer, and her conversation was sometimes peppered with legal jargon.

“I just dropped by to tell you I doubt that Nader’s happy having a weight problem,” Tucker said. “I doubt that you are, either. But you’ve given her your problem and it isn’t fair.”

“She’s given me a problem, too,” Dinky said, undaunted by this sudden pronouncement. “She’s scratched her claws on our Hide-A-Bed and ruined it, just when we need it.”

“You didn’t even listen,” Tucker said, walking into the foyer and setting down his book bag. “I’m going to stay until it sinks in, Dinky! Nader doesn’t deserve your problems.”

“
No one
deserves my problems,” Dinky said.

“Why do you have to feed her so much?”

“Don’t worry,” Dinky said. “We’ve got another mouth to feed, suddenly. We’ll be lucky if there’s enough to go around.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about my cousin.”

Then suddenly from behind Dinky this girl appeared.

The first thing Tucker noticed was her eyes. They were very bright, and Tucker found himself wanting to smile at the girl, as though they both had some sort of mischief as a secret between them, maybe on Dinky, maybe not. But there was a definite vibration, an exchange, and Tucker almost did smile, except Tucker rarely smiled. He smiled to himself, usually; no one could tell. But he had an idea this girl could tell. Her own smile grew all the broader.

“This is the other mouth,” Dinky said, her hand sweeping grandly and cynically toward the girl. There was something old-fashioned-looking about the girl. She was wearing a navy-blue jumper and a white blouse with long, billowing sleeves. She was wearing a string of pearls, white stockings, and black shoes. The girl was how old? Older than Tucker? Younger? The same age? He wasn’t sure. Her hair was black and it spilled down past her shoulders. Her eyes were green like Nader’s, and her skin was very smooth and very white.

“I’m Tucker Woolf,” Tucker said, because Dinky forgot to introduce them beyond announcing that the girl was the other mouth.

“I’m Natalia Line.”

“Fine,” Tucker said, embarrassed because it rhymed.

“Natalia has a fine line,” the girl laughed. “Natalia has a fine, divine line,” she continued, laughing all the harder, “a fine divine line, that’s mine,” and her eyes were flashing.

Tucker didn’t laugh easily. He didn’t like silly girls. He wouldn’t have liked the whole scene at any other time, but somehow it was different because of this girl. He smiled at her. Then he laughed out loud.

Tucker’s mother often used to say whenever he laughed, “Oh, don’t tell me you’re going to choke up some youthful laughter, Tucker!” because he was usually so solemn.

Dinky Hocker was the only one who wasn’t amused. “We have a walking, talking, rhyming dictionary living with us,” she said very sarcastically, “and I can tell you I’m thrilled about
that
.”

I
T WAS LATE IN
the morning, the day after Thanksgiving.

“Four times this week.” Tucker woke up to hear his mother’s voice coming from the kitchen, where she was breakfasting with his father. He remembered that his mother had the day off, too.

“To see the cat?” his father’s voice asked.

“No.”

“Oh?”

“This niece of Helen Hocker is staying with them now.”

“He goes to see her?”

“Yes. With the excuse he’s visiting the cat.”

“Ah!”

“Cal, I think he’s—”

“In love?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Why not? He’s fifteen.”

“Just barely.”

“Nevertheless.”

Tucker sat up in bed and shouted, “Now that you’ve got that all settled, can I have some breakfast?”

“
May
I have some breakfast,” his mother called back, “and it isn’t polite to eavesdrop, Tucker.”

“Then try to remember I sleep practically in the kitchen,” said Tucker.

“That was your idea, Mister,” his father answered. “Give me that room for a study, and you can have my study upstairs for a bedroom.”

“Never mind,” Tucker said. He was in his robe, making his way down the hall toward them.

His mother was still sitting at the kitchen table.

“May I have some breakfast?” Tucker asked. “Please.”

“Yes, you may, dear.” She got up and went across to the stove and Tucker’s father poured himself more coffee and said, “There’s an old Chinese saying: Man is what man hears he is, at keyhole.”

“What you hear is what you get,” said Tucker, pulling out a chair.

“That expression’s practically an anachronism now,” his mother said.

His mother prided herself on being up on everything, including the youth scene. Last month for
Stirring Romances
she had helped write a confession story called “I Lost My Son at a Pot Party.” It wasn’t what it sounded like; confession stories never were. It was about a woman whose little boy had wandered away from a party where a demonstrator was showing housewives how to cook with new nonstick pots. The title was supposed to pull in younger readers.

“Anyway, I’m not in love,” Tucker said.

“Good. Then you’ll be able to eat,” his mother said. “I’m fixing you three eggs and some sausage.”

“When I was fourteen,” his father said, “I was in love with a girl named Marcia Spriggs. Our song was something about stars on high, winking why.”

“It sounds really moving,” Tucker said.

“In those days you could still make out the words to songs,” his father said.

“Some words,” Tucker answered. “Really passionate.”

“No, you’re not in love,” Tucker’s mother said. “Love makes you sweeter, and you sound pretty sour to me this morning.”

“‘Stars on high, winking why,’” Tucker’s father sang, “‘in the sky, why O why.’”

“What does Natalia Line look like?” Tucker’s mother said, cracking eggs into the frying pan.

“That’s hard to say,” Tucker said. “There’s something old-fashioned about her.”

Tucker’s father sang, “I saw an old-fashioned moon’—Hey, that song was popular circa Marcia Spriggs, too. I saw an old-fashioned moon; I heard an old-fashioned tune,’” he sang.

So much for communication, with Tucker’s father in a mood to make an old song out of anything anyone said.

Tucker finished his breakfast while his mother and father swapped hit songs from the dark ages. Then he dressed, changing his clothes three times until he decided on jeans and a blue workman’s shirt, and his eight-inch lineman’s boots with the bright yellow laces.

After that he called the Hockers and learned that Natalia was still wherever she’d gone for Thanksgiving, and Dinky was down at Woerner’s Restaurant, picking up pies for Mrs. Hocker’s Encounter Group that evening.

Mrs. Hocker was a do-gooder. She was lately concentrating on young people who used to be dope addicts.

She once told Tucker, “In a way, my young people are all strays, just like your Nader was, only they aren’t cute and cuddly like Nader, and no one wants to take them in.”

“On the other hand,” Dinky had butted in, “Nader wouldn’t punch you in the face and grab your purse, either.”

“Neither would any of them anymore,” Mrs. Hocker had retaliated, “and you should be a little kinder toward people who don’t have the chance in life you have.”

Tucker put on his wool-plaid-lined blue-denim utility jacket and prepared to head down toward Woerner’s, in search of Dinky.

“Don’t forget to be back by five o’clock,” his mother said. “At five o’clock your father and your uncle are going to unfold their new business scheme.”

Tucker should have known that Dinky would still be at Woerner’s, eating. To ask someone like Dinky to go into Woerner’s Restaurant just to pick up pies for her mother was to ask a wino to drop in at a vineyard just to watch the bottling process.

Woerner’s had the best food in Brooklyn Heights. All the lawyers from the courthouse and the Supreme Court building ate there at noon, and the restaurant had little sections called things like “The Caucus Room” to make the lawyers feel right at home. The talk in Woerner’s was all about writs and judges and defenses and adjournments, while the lawyers wolfed down big plates of beef stroganoff, goulash with noodles, Königsberger klops, and sauerbraten.

Dinky was sitting at the counter finishing a plate of hot roast beef with home fries and fresh peas. She acknowledged Tucker’s presence with little more than a raised eyebrow, and went right on eating and reading a book. Tucker waited five minutes for a place beside her at the counter. He ordered a piece of chocolate pie with whipped cream when he sat down, and Dinky told Agnes, the waitress, “Make that two, with a side of chocolate ice cream on mine.”

Then she said to Tucker, “What are you doing here? If you’re looking for Natalia Rhyme, she’s still away for the holidays.”

“Where does she go for the holidays?” Tucker asked.

Dinky shrugged. “Who cares?”

Tucker didn’t want to say that he cared, because Dinky was an unpredictable scenemaker. If Tucker had said, “Well, I care,” Dinky would be just as liable to yell out, “OH, I SUPPOSE NOW YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH NATALIA LINE,” and Tucker had had his fill of that kind of talk already.

Tucker decided to just hang around Dinky for a while and hope she would drop something into the conversation about when Natalia was returning. Or where Natalia had come from … or how long Natalia was going to stay with the Hockers … or anything about her, because Tucker really knew nothing about her.

“What are you reading?” he said.

“A book for a book report,” she told him. “It’s a book about John Merrick. I bet you’ve never even heard of him.”

“I haven’t.”

“I knew it,” she said. “No one’s heard about him. He was grotesque. Whenever he went out he had to wear a black cloak and a cap the size of a basket, with a curtain falling to his shoulders, showing nothing but eyeholes.”

“You’re right. I never heard of him,” Tucker said.

“He lived in Victorian England,” Dinky said. “He had so much bone on his face and head that it pulled his mouth out of line and he couldn’t make human sounds. He only had one eye, and his whole head was covered with these big cauliflower sacs which gave off a really putrid odor, and he didn’t have hands.”

“How can you read that and eat?” Tucker said.

“They wouldn’t even take him in the circus,” Dinky said. “He had to go everywhere in a carriage with drawn blinds.”

She slammed the book shut. It was called
The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity
by Ashley Montagu.

“I’m going to the library after this to find out more about him,” Dinky said, as the waitress served them their pie. “He wasn’t even bitter about it.”

“He was probably psycho,” Tucker said.

“Psychos aren’t happy,” Dinky said. “This guy was happy. He once said, ‘I am happy every hour of the day.’”

“Then he had to be psycho,” Tucker said. “No one’s that happy.”

“What you know about psychos would fill an ant’s mouth,” Dinky said, and then she began yelling at Agnes, the waitress, because she had forgotten to put the chocolate ice cream on the pie.

Earlier in the week, when Tucker had been over at the Hockers’, Natalia had pinched his elbow to get his attention, and whispered, “Want to know a secret?” The three of them were sitting in Dinky’s room watching color T.V., and Dinky was petting Nader and talking to her about Tucker and Natalia.

She was saying things like, “Well, Nader, Tucker says he’s here to see you, but I don’t think he’s here to see you at all, do you think he’s here to see you, Nader?” and things like, “I’ll tell you something, Nader. When Tucker leaves, it seems Natalia doesn’t have much to say to us. I guess we bore Natalia, Nader. Dinky Dull and Nader Nowhere—that’s us, all right.”

Tucker leaned toward Natalia to hear the secret.

“There’s nothing wrong with Dinky’s glands,” Natalia said. “She’s fat because every afternoon she goes to every restaurant in the Heights and eats something in each one. No one ever sees all she eats, because she never eats
all
she eats in one place.”

“She’s not supposed to eat out,” Tucker said. He had heard Dinky’s mother say that often enough.

“She does all her eating out,” Natalia said. “She’s sly. I like that.”

Natalia was always surprising Tucker with tag endings like that. He’d go along thinking Natalia was just gossiping like any other catty female, and then it would turn out that she was secretly admiring the very behavior Tucker thought she was criticizing.

Once when she was telling Tucker about this boy in Mrs. Hocker’s Friday night Encounter Group, she said, “And do you know what Mrs. Hocker found out about him? He’s a recidivist.”

“What’s that?” Tucker had asked.