Paperboy (21 page)

We each put a newspaper bag across a shoulder. I gave Rat the route money for the last week and we went over his collection book as we walked. I wanted to make sure he knew where everybody stood on their newspaper bill. When we got to Mr. Spiro’s house I told Rat that he was paid up and that Mr. Spiro didn’t want a newspaper delivered again until the autumnal equinox.

When the hell is that?

Rat always cussed a lot when he got back from being with his farm cousins but he would stop right quick the first time his father heard him.

September twenty-second.

He scrunched his nose at me.

s-s-s-s-Looked it up.

When we reached Mrs. Worthington’s house I told Rat that the address was paid up but that she wanted the paper stopped.

Why?

s-s-s-s-Don’t s-s-s-s-know s-s-s-s-but I got a tip.

Good. I never got anything from those cheapos.

s-s-s-s-Lucky me.

I looked back at 1396 Harbert with the overgrown privet around the porch and wondered if I would ever be able to tell Rat about Mrs. Worthington. I don’t know what I would tell him. I didn’t understand it myself except I thought Mrs. Worthington was the prettiest woman I had ever seen. And the saddest.

When we finished the route Rat asked if I wanted to throw ball but I told him that my mother always expected me to take a bath before they got home from a trip.

I wanted to tell Rat all that had happened to me and how his paper route had changed me but the parts of the story I could tell didn’t make sense without the parts I couldn’t tell.

When my parents came home later that afternoon I was on my bed reading the
Press-Scimitar
about the Yankees beating the White Sox 3 to 1 with Ryne Duren getting the save. A picture in the paper showed my favorite pitcher lighting a cigar for Casey Stengel the
manager who was having a party on his sixty-ninth birthday. Ryne Duren was having a good summer on the mound.

My mother came upstairs first. She handed me a small box with see-through plastic on top.

I brought you your favorite. Pralines with pecans.

She always made a big deal about buying me pralines even though I didn’t like them. I guess she thought if she liked them then I must like them too.

She asked how my last week on the route had gone and I told her the heat had been pretty bad. She said the heat in New Orleans had been Unrepenting. I guessed she meant Unrelenting.

She went on about how their hotel in New Orleans was air-conditioned and said that she and my father had been talking about having someone build us a new house way out in East Memphis with air-conditioning. She said it would be near a private school that I would like and that the house might have a swimming pool.

I told her the attic fan suited me just fine so she said we’d talk about it later. That was the code for We Won’t Talk About It Later.

I had made up my mind to crumble up the pralines and throw them on the roof for the pigeons to eat but when she was about to leave I handed her the box.

s-s-s-s-Thanks … but … don’t like s-s-s-s-pralines.

But I always thought …

s-s-s-s-Never have liked s-s-s-s-pralines.

She gave me a strange look. I was expecting her to say Everybody Likes Pralines and I was going to say I’m Not Everybody. But she took the box and left the room.

My father came up the stairs carrying his heavy suitcases with Mam behind him carrying my mother’s. My father never let Mam tote his suitcases even though she probably could have lifted more than he could. My mother told Mam to come in the bathroom and help her sort dirty clothes. Mam would be washing and ironing for the next two days. I walked down the hall a ways.

What’s gotten into that boy of mine, Nellie?

What you mean?

He seemed upset that I brought him pralines. I thought he liked them.

He just be growing up, Mrs. V. Don’t worry ’bout him. He’s gonna be fine.

My father came into my room after he had finished unpacking. His right hand dug into the front pocket of his suit pants.

Is the bank open on Saturdays?

I opened my desk drawer and watched him dump in a week’s worth of loose change.

How did your week go, son?

s-s-s-s-Hot. s-s-s-s-But okay.

How about the collecting?

He didn’t ask the question just to be talking. I could hear the real question in his voice.

s-s-s-s-Everything worked out okay.

Hard work deserves a bonus … and I believe you have a birthday soon.

He pulled some folded paper money out of his front pocket and took a twenty-dollar bill from the top. He stuffed the bill into my billfold. He didn’t see Mr. Spiro’s taped-together dollar in the secret compartment.

Wow. s-s-s-s-Thanks.

I started thinking Ara T had missed a pretty good payday by just a day. Twenty bucks would probably have kept Ara T in whiskey and Vienna sausages and red onions for a good long time. Then I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about Ara T.

My father picked up my ball glove from my bed.

Rain’s about stopped. How about some pitch and catch before dark?

I knew the last thing my father wanted to do after flying his plane all day was pitch and catch with me. I wasn’t much interested in throwing ball either. I still felt empty with all my tears gone. But I pretended that pitching ball was just what I wanted. So both of us ended up doing something we didn’t really want to so we could make the other feel good.

We put on our ball gloves and started throwing in the back driveway trying to keep off the wet grass.

I had been coming around to a new way of thinking about the man playing pitch with me.

If he had been the man that made me with my mother then he would have had to be a father to me no matter what. Even if I stuttered or looked like the Lizard Boy on the midway at the Mid-South Fair. But since my father wasn’t the one who made me with my mother he could have said I wasn’t of his doing and he wouldn’t have had to raise me or make time for me. It seemed I owed him a lot more than I owed somebody who I didn’t even know. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to learn anything about the other man because he didn’t want to know anything about me as far as I could tell. I figured there was a good chance that he didn’t even know he had a part in making me.

My father on the birth certificate might have been Unknown but the tall man throwing ball with me in his white shirt with his necktie stuffed between the buttons was my father as far as I was concerned. He got his shiny dress shoes muddy when he stepped in the flower beds to get a ball. He always tried to do about everything in the world for me and he didn’t even have to if you wanted to be official about it.

The speech teacher my parents hired had told me that stuttering was what happened when a person tried extra hard not to stutter. I wondered if that was why I stuttered around my father more than anybody. I could tell he worried about me and I wished I could get over my stutter for him as much as for me.

I picked through a couple of words that started with an easy
H
so I wouldn’t have to hiss out a bunch of Gentle Air.

Handle some hard ones?

You bet, son. Let me have ’em.

Then I did something strange. Even for me. I threw my father four good pitches without him even having to move his glove so much as an inch. With each throw I called out one of Mr. Spiro’s four words.

My father put his hand to his ear after I made the last throw.

What’s that?

s-s-s-s-Just some s-s-s-s-good words.

Looking back I guess I was trying to tell my father about the four special words in the best way I could think of. If Mr. Spiro’s words were going to help me to figure out things that I needed to do then maybe the words would help me pay back my father for being so good to me. I had it in my mind that if I put each word on a ball and sent it flying straight to him that my father would have them forever the same way I would have them in my billfold.

I know it sounds stupid but I’m glad I did it.

The best thing about junior high school is that I get to change classrooms for every subject.

My math teacher told us on the first day that we’d be working with Unknowns. It doesn’t seem fair to pile more Unknowns on top of all the Unknowns I already have. But that’s the seventh grade for you.

On the second day of school Rat was in the cafeteria line with me when I saw the meat was Vienna sausages wrapped in bread. The menu on the blackboard called them Pigs in a Blanket. I told Rat I wasn’t about to eat one.

Why?

Just s-s-s-s-can’t eat s-s-s-s-those things.

Why not?

s-s-s-s-They look like s-s-s-s-dog turds in a s-s-s-s-blanket.

Rat told another guy at our table what I said and the guy sneaked up to the blackboard and erased Pigs and wrote in Dog Turds. Soon every guy in the lunchroom was laughing and woofing like a dog. Not me. I didn’t want to think about Vienna sausages anymore.

I’ve only walked down the alley behind Harbert one time since school started. The door to the secret shed was leaning up against the fence and everything was cleaned out down to the smallest piece of junk. I wondered if the rats ate the red onions.

I didn’t go to the Mid-South Fair even though Rat and Freda wanted me to win a big stuffed animal for them on the midway by knocking over milk bottles with my throws. Rat has started dating Freda except he calls it Going With Her. I think that’s funny because Rat’s father has to take them everywhere they go.

Rat thinks Freda is some kind of a hot tamale even though she’s lived three doors up from him all his life and he never paid much attention to her before. Rat said Freda wanted me to start calling him Art and she wants him to get rid of his crew cut and start growing his hair long like Elvis did before he left Memphis last year and went into the Army. Rat said I should grow my hair long too and I told him I would keep my crew cut because I had plenty of things to think about instead of combing my hair all day.

I’ve started spending time with TV Boy in the afternoons when he gets home from his special school. His mother taught me how to say a few words with my hands but TV Boy and I don’t really need to talk when we’re around each other. We like to look at baseball cards and play Pick-Up Sticks since we’re both pretty good with our hands.

I found out the reason that TV Boy watches so much television is because he’s learning how to read lips. He even tries to read my lips which is probably extra-hard practice for him.

TV Boy’s real name is Paul.
P
is easy to make with your hands because all you do is point with your index finger and touch your middle finger with your thumb. No Gentle Air needed.

I’ve only seen Mrs. Worthington once since school started.

Walking home from Paul’s house late one afternoon I turned the corner and there were Mr. and Mrs. Worthington walking ahead of me on Melrose. They were holding hands and swinging them like girls on a playground. They were acting happy but whether they really were or not I couldn’t say. I kept watching as they walked away from me. Mrs. Worthington had cut her hair. I could still see her in my mind on the couch peeking at me with one eye from behind that pretty red hair. But it was gone now.

Mam and I have been talking more now about things ahead of us instead of things behind us.

She saw me reading the sports pages in the
Press-Scimitar
last week and asked me what I was going to do to earn a living when I got older. When I was a kid I thought I would grow up to be a pitcher for the Yankees but something tells me I’m not going to end up in the big leagues. I’ve decided that throwing a baseball is what I like to do only because it’s important for me to be good at something.

Mam asked me who wrote all those words in the newspaper and I told her it was the people who had their names at the beginning of the stories. She told me I should work at a newspaper because I can write well. I think she was talking about my handwriting and how much I liked to type and not about how the words are put together but I think working at a newspaper is something I might like to do. Since I can’t get words out of my mouth the right way maybe the thing for me to do is to learn how to put them down on paper. The only bad thing is that I would have to start using commas.

Most nights before I go to bed I pull out my billfold with Mam’s goofy-hat picture in it and Mr. Spiro’s special dollar bill. I’ve started carrying my billfold in my back pocket along with some paper money but I make sure Mr. Spiro’s taped-together dollar stays hidden. I won’t ever spend it or give up trying to understand what the four words mean just like I won’t give up on trying to get rid of my stutter.

My parents talk a lot more about the new house in East Memphis that they’re going to have somebody start building for them. They show me wide pieces of rolled-up paper and explain how the garage will be Attached and how Convenient the new washing machine and clothes dryer will be. My mother goes on about how she wants one of those new central vacuum systems that’s built into the walls of the house. When I asked my mother where Mam was going to live she said that We Would Talk About It Later.