Sticks (10 page)

I kick at the floor because I just won and I’m used to grown-ups falling all over themselves about how good I play. He throws the balls back on the table.

“Shoot something,” he says.

I bend over to hit the three ball.

“Shoulders and neck can’t move when you stroke,” he says. “It messes up your aim. Try again.”

I freeze my neck and shoulders, bend over—

“No.” Joseph Alvarez gives me a light push against my shoulders and I crash forward. “Tighter,” he says. I squeeze my shoulder blades until they hurt. “Tighter.”

“I can’t breathe!”

“You’ve got to break those bad habits before they become a part of you. Shoot.”

I shoot and miss the three.

“Follow through,” he says. “Don’t hurry it, just let it come natural.”

I’m standing here suffocating, pinching my shoulder blades together, and he says be natural. I try it again, follow through, and nick the three.

“Better. Do it again.”

I do it again and again and again.

“Feel the difference?” he asks.

I’m rubbing my neck and shoulders. I feel the difference—
pain
.

Joseph Alvarez turns to me and puts a quarter on the rail of the table. “On bank shots,” he says, “you’re getting the angles pretty well. You’ve got to focus on hitting the ball clean. Shoot the quarter.”

“What?”

“Aim at it. Shoot it medium hard. Like this.” He rams the cue ball into the rail and the quarter jumps off.

I try. The quarter doesn’t move.

“You’ll get it.”

I try harder and don’t get it.

“Focus on exactly where you want the cue ball to hit,” he says. “Your dad had the best focus of any pool player I’ve ever seen.”

“Really?”

Joseph Alvarez sticks quarters up and down the rail and starts shooting the cue ball at them, making them jump. “Charlie could block out anything and anybody that was trying to throw his game.”

“How’d he do it?”

“I asked him once. He said he just closed the
blinds in his mind and played.” He makes the last quarter jump and hands it to me.

“Time for homework.” It’s Mom. Her voice is flat. She’s standing at the table looking like she’d rather be anywhere, including the North Pole.

Joseph Alvarez shoves his hands in his pockets. “How are you, Ruthie?”

She holds the mega-flashlight they use on citizens’ patrol. “Tired.”

Joseph Alvarez looks lost.

“You want to play some nine ball, Ruthie? I mean, you used to have a serious break. I remember that time when we were all—”

Mom shakes her head and motions me toward the stairs. I put my stick on the wall.

“Here.” Joseph Alvarez hands me one of the quarters. “You ace that homework. Okay?”

My fist closes around it. “Okay.”

I’m thinking we should invite him up for something to eat.

But being ten, I’m powerless.

I tell him thanks for everything, really, and follow my mother up the stairs.

*   *   *

I’m standing in the kitchen holding a banana. Mom just announced that she has homework,
important
homework—she’s writing a paper called “Educating the Reluctant Thinker.” It’s about how kids don’t always want to learn and what teachers can do about it.

Give them a day off, if you ask me.

Then she storms out of the room yelling at me to do
my
homework and she isn’t going to tell me again. I do my genuine karate kick that T. R. Dobbs taught me and eat the banana.

Dad’s favorite fruit was bananas. Poppy said when I was small I used to leave a banana out for him at night, in case he wasn’t getting enough food in heaven.

I sit at the kitchen counter and open my vocabulary book to lesson thirty-four. The first word is
confound:
“To cause to become confused or bewildered.”

I’ve got to use it in a sentence. I write:

“The mother’s strange actions confound the world champion pool player.”

You hardly ever see something in vocabulary that applies to real life.

School isn’t going so well.

We have a substitute teacher because Mrs. Riggles has to go to the doctor to get her pregnant stomach checked—not the good kind of substitute that knows how to teach, either, the bad kind that thinks we’re babies. She makes the whole fifth grade sit on the floor in a circle for “Self-esteem.” We have to imagine we have a box in our laps with something inside that will make us happy. Arlen asks how big the box can be and can his have holes because without them his tarantula is going to suffocate. Everyone starts laughing and Petie Pencastle asks if his box can have meat in it to feed the twelve-foot man-eating crocodile. The substitute’s face gets red and she makes us sit quietly for ten minutes while she stares at us. I imagine the red championship shirt is in my box, but I don’t tell anyone.

Lesson three with Joseph Alvarez isn’t going so well either. He starts by telling me to brush my hair even though I brushed it this morning already to go to school. Then he says to tuck in my shirt and wash my hands.

“You’re a pool player, Mickey. That’s something to be proud of.”

We’re at table nine. It’s hard to feel proud when you’re playing like dirt.

“Slow, disciplined, focused,” he says. “Nope, you’ve got too much swing on your stroke.”

He stands behind me and shows me how to hold a cue stick like I’ve never held one before in my life.

“You hold it like it’s a butterfly you’ve got in your hand that you don’t want to escape,” he says. “You’re gripping too tight.”

“That’s how I’ve always held it.”

“I know. But it’s going to mess you up later on. Look.” He shows me how he does it.

I’m gripping the thing, feeling my muscles twingeing.

“Relax, it’ll come,” he says.

I tense.

We move into the second hour of our practice and Joseph Alvarez is racking the balls, telling me that learning a new way of playing is going to be hard. “In the beginning, Mickey, you’re going to play worse.”

Worse!

“I haven’t got time to be worse!” I look over at Buck Pender, who’s smirking and nailing long shots, and here I am back in kindergarten.

Joseph Alvarez is saying how I’ve got to not focus on winning.

“You said if I can figure out why I’m losing, I can figure out how to win.”

“Yes I did, and I want you to tuck winning behind your brain for now. We’ll bring it out when it’s time. You concentrate on getting better. Be satisfied with that.”

Is he kidding?

“You can’t find the fun in playing if you’re always hung up about winning,” he says. “See, Mickey, you’ve got to learn to relax. People who are coming down hard on themselves about each shot, each thing they did wrong, each missed ball, are tense. Tense people make mistakes.”

I’m working hard to untense and it’s giving me a headache.

I’m doing everything wrong.

I can’t grip the stick right.

I can’t shoot the balls right.

I feel like I’ve never played this stupid game.

“I’ll tell you something about your dad, Mickey. He had fun when he competed. He played just as hard when he was winning as when he was losing.”

I lean over the table and miss an easy corner shot. I can’t believe it. The tournament’s six weeks away and everybody in the hall’s watching me and thinking how skunky I’m playing!

“Let’s stop for now,” he says.

“No, I can do it.”

“Man’s got to know when his horse is beat for the
day. Sit down.” Joseph Alvarez points to table seven, where Buck’s just started playing Big Earl’s son, Perry, who is fourteen years old and won the tournament last year.

“
Watch
,” he says.

Perry gets one in on the break and Buck tries sneering, but Perry doesn’t pay attention, gets five more in and misses. Buck swaggers to the table saying how winning is going to be a cinch.

Perry says, “Then do it, man.”

Buck snorts, gets the seven ball in and misses the eight.

Perry smiles—drops the eight and nine in easy for a win.

Buck says, “You got lucky.”

Perry’s racking the balls. “Think so?” He rams the cue ball on the break and gets one in.

Buck’s face is getting pale. I could watch this all day. Perry’s got a tough shot that he misses, but he doesn’t leave Buck much either.

Joseph Alvarez says just loud enough for me to hear, “That’s how you play Buck Pender. Nice and cool. You don’t say much. You don’t leave him much. The cooler you get, the hotter he gets.”

Buck hits the five, six, seven balls in. Buck’s gotten better, I can definitely see this, but he can’t throw Perry and that’s throwing him. He blows the bank on the eight. Perry knocks the eight and nine together like nothing.

“You handle Buck like that next time,” says Joseph Alvarez softly.

I’m thinking this is a pretty stupid way to spend my time, waiting around until Joseph Alvarez comes back on Saturday from his trip to Texas with a truckload of canned tuna fish, which he said will make him popular with every cat in America. He told me to practice what he’s taught me, especially the quarter-jumping exercise, which he says is the best he knows for focus.

I’ve been aiming at quarters for three days and not connecting like Joseph Alvarez said I should.

Julian Meister slaps me on the back and hands me a Coke. He and Mom went out on a date once; Mom said once was enough. I’m not sure if he’s being nice to me to get to my mom. Some men do this when you’ve got a pretty mom, but kids always find out in the end. Mom’s old boyfriend Kevin took Arlen and me to Dr. Death’s Haunted House on Halloween. We were walking through it scared
because something was making noises weirder than Mangler. We stepped in glop and Dr. Death came out of the shadows and grabbed us. Kevin, who’d been through twice before said, “There. That’s the end.” But it wasn’t, and Kevin knew it. This blood-soaked guy comes out in a mask covered with chains, howling, and we tore out like bats with Kevin laughing behind us. I never trusted him after that. Mom didn’t either even though he sent her roses to apologize. Mom kept the roses and told Kevin to take a hike. Mom’s not dating anyone now, which is okay by me.

I put another quarter on the rail as Francine and Arlen walk into the hall. Francine’s face is all sparkly, which means she’s got a secret.

“Sister Immaculata was right,” she whispers. “We will reap what we sow.”

“What?”

“Buck Pender got the Good Citizen Award of the Week at school yesterday in assembly.” She waits for me to sit down hard. “He supposedly collected more canned food for the hunger drive than anyone, but then Sister Immaculata found Theresa Raster’s initials on twelve Chunky Soup cans that Buck said were his and she made him give back the award and apologize to the whole school in assembly. You had to be a lip-reader to get that apology. It just goes to show that nuns have power.” Francine takes a pad and pencil from her pocket. “Watch your back, Mickey. He’ll do anything to win.”

I look over at Buck on table three. He doesn’t look like he’s ever apologized for anything. He
stares back at me with cold, mean eyes. I chalk my stick, lean over table sixteen, and shiver.

It would be nice if Arlen and Francine were cheering for me, but that’s not how it’s going. Arlen’s reading his memory book for the third time. He’s seeing wood everywhere—toothpicks, Popsicle sticks. He’s only forgotten one thing in two weeks—his homework—and his father says, “Well, well,” now when he comes home for dinner. Last Saturday we actually heard the sound of a hammer and nails.

Francine is making the list for her parents on why she needs a rabbit. She draws a line through her first point, IF I DON’T GET A RABBIT I’LL ABSOLUTELY DIE.

“How ’bout, if I don’t get a rabbit, I’ll be unfulfilled?”

Arlen nods. “Your creativity will dry up, too.”

“Yes!” Francine writes furiously. “And it could stunt my growth. Hidden anger does that, you know.”

I aim at the quarter, miss for the zillionth time, and stomp my foot.

“Rabbits are clean and quiet,” she says, writing madly. “They don’t bark, they don’t bother anyone, they require less care than other kinds of animals. Their droppings can be used to fertilize gardens. I read that in a book. That one’s for my mother.”