Staggerford (17 page)

I had heard all that, and more. I had heard every man and boy in Minneapolis roamed the streets at tournament time, picking and choosing among the high school girls coming into the city—maidens from Middle River, from International Falls, from Hermantown. I had heard if you didn’t have a strong hold on your girl you could lose her in the blink of an eye. My hold had never been weaker. The cars pulled away from the curb as the first-hour bell rang
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“Come on,” said Harvey, “we ‘re late for class.”

I said, “Harvey, let’s you and me go to the state tournament. We’ll go in your car. I’ll buy the gas. We’ll go home and we’ll pack and we’ll tell our folks we’ve been excused from school to go with the team. We’ll say Staggerford High got two extra tickets, and you and I got first chance to buy them because we tried out for the team four years in a row and the coach was impressed with how we never gave up. Always in there, giving it all we had. Always good sports.”

We sneaked out the boiler-room door and got to Minneapolis at noon. The downtown streets were jammed with traffic and Harvey inched his way around looking for a place to put his car. Flocks of boys moved along the sidewalks, each boy in the plumage of his letter jacket. At Seventh and Hennepin, as Henry began a left turn, a cop came running toward us blowing his whistle and waving a revolver. People crowded to the curb and stood in the rain to watch. Harvey rolled down his window and the cop pointed the revolver at him and said he was turning into a one-way street the wrong way
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The cop was obviously a man out of control, driven mad by traffic and teen-agers and dreary weather He asked Harvey if he could read signs. In a shaky voice Harvey said he could, and he slouched down in the seat, trying to move his head away from the muzzle of the gun
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“It will be like this three days and three nights,” said the cop. “You hayseed sons of bitches bring us nothing but trouble. The best thing for you hayseed sons of bitches to do is to stay home and take care of the livestock.” He was interrupted by the honking of drivers backed up in four directions. “Don’t let me catch you in Minneapolis again as long as you live.” He put his revolver into its holster and waved us away
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We drove off under a cloud of gloom. The cop’s outburst reminded me of Mrs. Carpenter’s in her living room, but this time I couldn’t seem to lift my spirits above it. I wasn’t full of capon. I wasn’t with Carla. My hands, like Harvey’s, shook. The seat springs in Harvey’s car were shot and we sat very low, with our eyes barely up to window level. We seemed to be viewing the city from the gutter. Harvey said if he didn’t find a parking place in two minutes he was going home. He didn’t find one, and he headed out of the city, muttering. In a suburb I got out of the car with my bag and took a bus back downtown. I couldn’t stand leaving the city Carla was in
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I went to the hotel where the team was staying and asked the desk clerk where I could find the Staggerford cheerleaders. The clerk said the cheerleaders were in Room 746 but only registered guests were allowed above the first floor
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“I’m with the Staggerford team,” I told him
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“Sorry, the team checked in an hour ago. All twelve of them.” He showed me a card with the names of the players. “Your name isn’t one of these, is it?”

I hesitated
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“What’s your name?”

“Pruitt.”

“Pruitt. Well, why didn’t you say so? Let’s see. Yes, here we are. Dale Pruitt, Room 420, a single. Sign here please. Here’s your key. I’ll have to ask you to carry your own bag. We’re short-handed this afternoon.”

D
ALE
P
RUITT
,
he said. I signed my brother’s name
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“Sorry for the mix-up. We get so many freeloaders at tournament time. There’s the elevator. Up you go.”

I got off on the fourth floor and let myself into 420, a small room with a rusty radiator, a double bed, and a picture of Hong Kong over the desk. The closet had been converted into a half bath. What was my brother doing with a hotel room in Minneapolis in the middle of the week? He was no basketball fan. He was a scholar. I couldn’t figure it out, but whatever the reason, it was a stroke of luck. I would make 420 my headquarters and split the cost with him. I unpacked my bag and changed my shirt, preparing to go up to the seventh floor and announce myself to Carla. As I waxed my butch, someone knocked on the door and a voice called, “Dale, are you in there?” A girl’s voice. Carla’s voice
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I didn’t go to the door. It was wise of me not to, of course, but I doubt if I knew that at the time. I was simply paralyzed by shock. “Dale,” she called once more, and then she went away. It was a while before my power of locomotion returned and I began to pack my bag
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Sad to say, a certain other power never did return. I’m talking about the ability to see life as simple and cohesive. Up to that moment in my life, everything had been running according to plan. Even my humiliation in Carla’s garage had been predictable, for in the garage Carla had acted according to my expectations—exceeded them, in fact. But her knocking on my brother’s door fit absolutely no plan I knew. Like the ravings of her mother and the traffic cop, it was nonsense. That was when I began to see that everything in life was subject to change—without notice
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I called the lobby and told the desk clerk I was not Dale Pruitt after all; I was really somebody else and I had registered as Dale Pruitt only to get upstairs and now that I was up on the seventh floor where all the action was I wouldn’t be needing Room 420. The real Dale Pruitt could have it. The clerk said that if I wasn’t out on the street in two minutes he was coming to look for me and he would bring the house detective along I hung up
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I stepped into the corridor and locked the door and put the key on the elevator and sent it down to the lobby. I walked to the end of the corridor where some chairs were arranged around a low table. I slipped my bag under the table and picked up a newspaper and settled into a chair, and whenever the elevator opened I peeked over the paper to see who it was. Sometime later Carla stepped out of the elevator in a dress I had never seen before, not the kind a girl wears to a game. She knocked on 420, waited a moment, and left
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About three o’clock my brother arrived with a suitcase and a bag of groceries. He let himself into 420 and in less than a minute Carla showed up again, this time with a suitcase and a heavy garment bag. She stood outside the room and called my brother’s name. The door opened. She went in. The door closed
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What is truer than a platitude? “Because of woman’s beauty,” my brother had said, “for passion burns like fire.” I hitchhiked home from Minneapolis that afternoon and my eyes burned with tears. My brother, too, got burned when Carla, about graduation time, discovered herself pregnant. They were married in June, with me as best man (I was tempted to wear my shredded suit; my resentment was that strong) and they left immediately for California, where Dale got a job driving a tour bus around Hollywood and wrote verses for a greeting-card company on the side. In a few years they had a second baby, another daughter, and my brother went to work for the greeting-card company full time
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“Girls turn out to be just like their mothers,” was another thing my brother used to say. When he and Carla walked into our ten-year class reunion, I couldn’t believe my eyes. (This was their first trip back to Minnesota together. Dale had come alone when Mother died, and some years later Carla had come alone when her mother died.) At the reunion Harvey Polk said Carla would go 200 pounds if she’d go an ounce. I doubted that. Maybe 180. She was wearing a long fur coat over a scarlet pants suit. She said that Minnesota in her memory was always cold and, August or not, she wasn’t leaving California without her fur coat. There was a large rip in the fur under one sleeve, and with the red
showing through when she raised her arm she looked like a kodiak with afresh wound. The skin of her face was coarse. All evening we had to keep calling her back to the conversation from wherever her mind was slipping off to. If my brother was aware of how Carla had gone to hell, he didn’t show it. He talked only about his work
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He cornered Harvey and me at the bar and described his house in Los Angeles—how he had converted his garage into a den, and that was where he spent his evenings writing verse. He had a bed out there and sometimes he spent the night. In the daytime he was an editor for this greeting-card company. He edited anniversary cards, birthday cards, sympathy cards, and a new card he said was coming on strong—the love card
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“It’s a nonoccasional card,” he said, pointing his chin at Harvey and me. “It’s catching on like wildfire because love knows no season and lovers need no reason. That’s the line we use on our displays: ‘Love knows no season and lovers need no reason. ‘ I wrote it.”

Was this the same man who once wrote scholarly articles and lectured to me about love? Everything the monks told him about love he was now turning into money. He said young people in love thought nothing of spending a dollar for a love card that cost eight cents to manufacture. They sold like wildfire. Was it for this the monks instructed him in the fiery nature of passion?

And Carla. Was this the same girl I once loved? When the reunion banquet was served, my brother and I and Carla shared a table. Chicken was brought in on large platters, and, as we ate, the emcee came around and asked each of us to describe one experience from our high school days. I told the story of how my suit was cut to pieces in Carlo’s garage. I had had several screwdrivers and I got carried away. I stood up and moved to an open area to reconstruct the layout of the garage. I brought in every detail I could remember, and I demonstrated how to dismantle a bandsaw. Carla didn’t laugh. That surprised me. Everybody else laughed, at least a little—even my brother, who was never much of a laugher. When I returned to my place at the table, I told my brother how I had once considered
wearing the shredded suit to his wedding. The thought tickled him
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“And believe it or not, I still have the suit,” I said. “I’ve kept it all these years. At first it was a matter of never getting around to throwing it out, and then after Mother died and we sold the house and I moved into Miss McGee’s I kept it. I thought it might come in handy some day as a joke.”

“What kind of joke?” asked Carla, glaring at me
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“I don’t know, but it just seemed to want another wearing.”

“I’d love to see you in that suit,” said my brother. “If we come over to Miss McGee’s tomorrow, will you put it on for us?”

“You Pruitt brothers make my ass tired!” said Carla. She was wrenching apart a chicken joint and glaring at us across the table. She was loud enough to be heard all over the room, and most of the talk and laughter died away. “Every time you Pruitt brothers get together you make my ass tired!” It was our first time together in years. You could hear the clink of silverware for the rest of the meal. Others took their turns at the microphone, but nothing was funny. When Carla finished her chicken and my brother told her it was time to leave, she followed him out the door, wiping her greasy hands on her fur coat and scowling back at me
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They did not come to Miss McGee’s house the next day. If they had, I might have put on the suit at their request. But today I wouldn’t do it. I’ve had the suit around since the days that used to follow one another in simple and perfect order, and if some day I bring it out of the closet and take it out of the box, it will not be as a joke
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