Hot Shot (10 page)

The first day of the class he walked in like this, and he put his crummy old beat-up brief case on the desk and stood there looking at each one of us in his turn without saying anything, and then after a while he said in this God-damn deep voice, “Maybe you’re wondering why I’m teaching this class instead of someone else, and I must tell you now that it’s in punishment for my sins, and how bad those sins are I’ll leave you to surmise from the degree of the punishment.” Well, even a guy in Rhetoric Zero knows when he’s being called a God-damn boob, and I didn’t like it, and I’d have clobbered the bastard if he’d ever said it again, but he didn’t. As a matter of fact, though, what he did was worse, but it wasn’t anything you could clobber him for and explain it afterward.

What he did, he’d talk to you like he was reading out of a primer to a kid, and when you didn’t know something about the damn crummy rhetoric that you were supposed to know, he’d just look at you with these mournful eyes that were like a mule’s and let out this long sigh and say, “Now, Mr. Scaggs, let’s go over it once more,” and he’d bear down on the Mr. like it was a God-damn honorary title or something. His name was Boxer, and I don’t mind admitting I got to hating the son of a bitch, and the longer I was in the class the more I hated him, and I finally got to hating him even more than I hated Gravy Dummke, in spite of the fact that Gravy hired two guys to beat the hell out of me. What made it worse, I just couldn’t put my mind to that rhetoric bull, and I never seemed to know any answers to what he asked me. They had a whole God-damn file of questions and answers on most subjects at the frat house, and generally these got me by pretty well in the other classes I took, but nothing seemed to do any good in rhetoric.

Meantime, I went back to the gym and saw old Dilky again and asked him about my job. He looked down at me with a blank look on his face like maybe I’d asked him who was the second king of Peru or some God-damn place like that, and he said, “What job?” and I said, “The job I’m supposed to do for the hundred clams a month I’m supposed to get,” and for a minute, the way he looked, I began think it had been a lot of bull he’d fed me just to get me up to Pipskill and that there wasn’t really any job or any hundred clams a month, but then he laughed and said, “Oh,
that
job. Well, we’ll think of something after a while, maybe. Right now, you just come in and sharpen up your eye and don’t worry about it.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s not the God-damn job I’m worried about, it’s the hundred clams,” and he laughed again and said, “Oh, you’ll get the hundred, all right, regular as clockwork the first of every month,” and sure enough, the first of the next month I got the hundred, and I got it on the nose every month after that, too, but old Dilky never got around to thinking up a job for me to do to earn it, which was all right with me, if that was the way he wanted it, and I damn sure wasn’t going to make any issue of it. I kept going in every afternoon to sharpen my eye and get in condition, and there were some other first year guys who came in, too, including old Micky Spicer, and old Dilky got to making us run around and around the God-damn gym for our wind and our legs, and as a matter of fact it wasn’t much fun, but mostly a lot of work, and after a while I began to figure that I was earning my lousy century and then some.

There was one guy who came in whose name was Carboy, and this guy was damn near seven feet tall and still growing, and Barker Umplett, the head coach, had snaked him in off the prairie somewhere to play center for him. He was pretty good in lots of ways and got around on the floor pretty good in spite of being so damn tall and awkward, and he was great stuff for reaching up and snatching rebounds off the board, which is pretty damn important in itself because it keeps the other team from getting more than one shot at the bucket at a time and helps you to keep on shooting yourself until you finally hit it, but the worst thing about him was that he couldn’t hit a bull with a spade. It damn near drove old Dilky nuts. He worked with this Carboy all the time, trying to teach him how to hook over and hit the bucket, but when he hit one now and then it was mostly just an accident, and the truth is, you just couldn’t tell where in hell the God-damn ball was going once he let loose of it. Honest to God, it might go sailing clear up over the lousy backboard or anywhere.

About the middle of October we really got into it in earnest, and I soon found out then that playing basketball in high school wasn’t anything to playing it in college, even on a crummy freshman team, and this Dilky had been pretty easygoing up to then, but afterward he wasn’t easygoing at all, and as a matter of fact old buller Mulloy had been a stinking piker by comparison. He didn’t run up and down and yell, “Go, go, go!” all the time like old Mulloy, but he let you know pretty quick that he
expected
you to go, and if you didn’t do it, or even let down a little once in a while, the slop really hit the fan, and once when old Carboy slowed down to about eighty miles an hour Dilky stopped the action and walked out on the floor and got the ball and stood there real quiet and polite and smiling at Carboy a little, and he said in this soft voice, “Run, Mr. Carboy, run, God-damn you.” And then damned if he didn’t haul off with the God-damn ball and knock old Carboy ass over elbows, all seven feet of him.

Every now and then, after we got started good, Barker Umplett would come over from the field house to watch us work, and he’d stand there and look us over and not say anything at all, and after a while he’d go away, and all in all he was about the creepiest bastard I ever saw, and maybe it’s time I told you a little about him, but not much, because I didn’t see a hell of a lot of him that first year, him being busy with the first team over in the field house, and I can tell about him better when he comes in more.

He wasn’t very tall, only about five feet seven or eight, but he was damn near as wide as he was tall, and he probably weighed around two hundred pounds without any flab to his belly like there’d been to old Mulloy’s, and altogether he looked like he’d been hacked out of a chunk of rock. He had these bushy eyebrows and hair growing out of his God-damn nose and all over his chest like a bramble patch, and as a matter of fact he was about as hairy as a guy could get, except on his head where a guy usually wants a little hair, and on his head there wasn’t any at all, not a God-damn spear, and it was just as naked as the palm of your hand. Under those bushy eyebrows that stuck out in all directions, his eyes were about the color of cold dishwater, and when you looked in them you were liable to get the impression that the bastard was blind, because they had this empty kind of look that blind guys have, and if you did get that impression, it was your God-damn mistake, and as a matter of fact he saw a hell of a lot more than you ever thought he did or wanted him to. He wasn’t the old buddy-buddy type at all, like old Mulloy all the time and old Dilky some of the time, and all the years I played for him at Pipskill he never gave me a good word or a pat on the back, nor to anyone else, either. This was because of the way he looked at things, and I’ll tell you later how it was he looked at them.

Well, everything kept going along pretty good and about as expected, the basketball team shaping up for a good season and the lousy football team losing all their God-damn games, and after a while it got to be close to Thanksgiving, and it was about then I got called in for a consultation with this spook Boxer I told you about, and I knew damn well in advance what it was for, because I’ll have to admit things hadn’t picked up any in the rhetoric class. He was sitting behind his desk when I got there, and this doll was sitting in another chair in front of the desk, and I didn’t pay much attention to her at first, except to notice that she wore goggles that were pointed up at the corners where the handles fastened on and had little sets in them that were supposed to look like diamonds or something and were really glass.

Old Boxer looked at me like he was about to break out bawling from the general sadness of things, and he said in this fancy way he had, “Sit down, Mr. Scaggs. I know your time is infinitely precious, and I won’t claim any more of it than is absolutely necessary,” and I could tell he didn’t mean it the way it sounded, but just the opposite, the snotty bastard, and I sat down and said, “I got all day,” and he said, “Unfortunately, I haven’t, so I’ll come right to the point. I am aware, of course, that you are a shining, ascending star in the heavens of basketball enthusiasts, and this places me in a precarious position because you have demonstrated beyond doubt over a period of time that it is utterly futile to expect you to make a passing mark in Rhetoric Zero, and nothing sets a shining basketball star any quicker than a flunk in rhetoric, and nothing sets the star of a simple teacher in this school any quicker than setting one of the stars of Coach Umplett. If all this is making you see stars, Mr. Scaggs, you have my sympathy, because I’m seeing them, too, and it has indeed been my misfortune to see far too many of them for much too long.”

That’s about the way he said it, as near as I can put it down, and you could tell he thought it was clever as hell to break it off in me that way, but the truth is, he had me a little confused from trying to follow him, and before I could make up my mind to clobber him or at least say something back he went on. “In other words, Mr. Scaggs, as a man named Cellini once put it, my guts are in the sauce pan, and consequently, in order to salvage then, I’m prepared to compromise my integrity still another time, to sell another little bit of my soul. This young lady sitting here is Miss Sylvia Pruet. Miss Pruet has brains. Miss Pruet takes to rhetoric like a duck to water. Being myself too great a coward to undertake the odious task, I’ve prevailed upon Miss Pruet to tutor you. I’ll insist upon calling it tutoring, even though I really know better, and I have no doubt in the world that it will be largely a matter of your simply turning in her work, because while I have utter faith in Miss Pruet’s brains, I have none whatever in her ability to withstand the corruption of an ascending star. All I ask is that you support me in my pitiable delusion by disguising the work, by copying it in your own hand, and for Christ’s sake, be certain to make plenty of errors short of failure, because any reasonably accurate paper from you would be evidence of cheating that even I couldn’t ignore.”

Well, I didn’t know who the hell this guy Cellini was, and still don’t for that matter, but I could tell easy enough when someone had spit in my eye, and I was about to tell him what he could do with his Miss Pruet, but then I thought what the hell was the use of fouling my own nest because of this spook, and I didn’t tell him because I knew he was just the kind of unreasonable bastard who would really flunk me if I pushed him to it. I started thinking about the hundred clams a month and the soft life at the frat house with old Mickey and the other guys and all the other things that might develop from this God-damn game that I didn’t even know about yet, so I finally stood up and said, “Well, it’s all right with me, if it’s all right with her,” meaning this Pruet doll, and she stood up and said, “I’ll be happy to help you all I can,” and I looked at her good for the first time then, and I was glad I’d gone along with it after all, because to tell the truth, she wasn’t a bad looking doll whatever. She wore these fancy goggles, like I said, but they didn’t seem to hurt her much, and she had a lot of good stuff wrapped up in a sweater and skirt, and her face wouldn’t have stopped any clocks, either, in spite of being kind of sappy and dewey in the way you’d expect in any doll who went in for rhetoric and literature and crap like that. Besides, to tell all of it, I had this thought that she ought to be a pushover for a guy like me who played basketball and got to live in a frat house without being voted in and everything like that, and as a matter of fact she was.

We went outside and started walking across the campus together, and she said, “When do you want to begin your lessons, Mr. Scaggs?” and I said, “Call me Skimmer,” and she said, “Very well, you may call me Sylvia, then,” and I said, “Sylvia’s a pretty name. I always wanted to meet someone named Sylvia. You ever get a name in your mind and just go on for a long time wishing you could meet someone with that name?” which was a lot of bull, of course, because I’d never thought about meeting anyone named Sylvia and didn’t even think it was such a hot name at all, as a matter of fact, and I guess she didn’t swallow too much of it, anyhow, because she just looked at me and said, “When do you want to begin your lessons, Skimmer?” and I said, “You’re the teacher.”

“Very well,” she said. “I suggest that we meet three evenings a week and that you come over this evening to make a beginning,” and I said, “Over where?” and she said, “Drayton Hall,” which was a place the dolls lived who weren’t in sororities and stuff, and I said, “What time?” and she said, “Around seven,” and I said I’d be there.

We’d come along to the old gym by that time, and I had to go in, so I said, “I got to go in and practice basketball now, and as it is I’m late, and old Dilky will be blowing his stack,” and she said, “Don’t let me detain you,” and it sounded pretty snotty the way she said it, and I made up my mind right then to have her talking out the other side of her God-damn face before I was through, and I said, “Well, I’ll see you around seven,” and she said, “Very well,” and I found out later that she was always using that crummy expression, very well, and when she walked off I could see that her skirt fit pretty tight and had a nice wobble to it.

I practiced and went back to the frat and ate and got my Goddamn rhetoric book and went over to Drayton Hall, which was a big stack they’d built with money that had been left to Pipskill by some old doll name of Drayton and was called Mother Drayton’s Fun House by the guys at the frat and others. There was a desk in the hall with a doll behind it, and she said, “Whom are you calling for?” and I said, “Sylvia Pruet,” and she said, “If you’ll just have a seat in there, I’ll call her,” and what she meant by in there was a big room with sofas and chairs scattered around, and quite a few of the girls who lived there were doing this and that with guys who had come to see them, and I went in and sat, and pretty soon old Sylvia came down. She looked pretty damn slick, if you want to know it, and I got to thinking that what had looked like a damn dull year at Pipskill, what with having to play on the crummy freshman team and no one paying much attention or anything, might pick up after all and turn into something pretty good, and the truth is, I was damn glad I had trouble with the lousy rhetoric and needed a tutor.