Sticks (2 page)

“It’s about measurements,” Arlen said, “and how points, lines, and angles go together. I’m studying it with Mr. Blodgett!”

Now, I’d grown up in a pool hall and no one had ever mentioned geometry to me. But Arlen had been in gifted math programs since he was in first grade, so I figured I was getting the inside track. Arlen pointed at the eight ball lying close to the rail of the table. “How are you going to shoot that, Mickey?”

“I’m going to hit it hard and hope it bounces into the corner.”

“But why are you going to do that?”

I look around. “Because this is a pool hall and I’m not playing checkers.”

“But
why
does it work?”

I was about to say it works because that’s how you play pool.

“It
works
,” said Arlen, “because bank shots use geometric angles. When you hit the eight ball at a certain angle to the rail, it will bounce off the rail at the same angle.”

Arlen called it the angle of incidence always equaling the angle of reflection. He took out a notepad and drew this picture. I saved it for studying.

“So when you make a bank shot, you’re using geometry to do it!” Arlen sat back like he’d just invented chocolate.

We drew a lot more diagrams and I kept trying shots and measuring the angles. After a few weeks, my bank shots were better. After a few months, my whole game was cleaner.

Arlen won’t let me forget it. Like now.

“Math,” he’s shouting, waving his protractor, which he takes everywhere, “will never fail you! You think Buck’s got a secret weapon?”

“Skill,” I say.

“
That’s not a winning attitude!
”

The bearded man on table eight makes an unbelievable triple bank and runs the rest of the balls like an absolute ace. I rub the Band-Aids covering the blisters I’ve got on both hands from practicing so hard. The guy puts down his stick and says, “Listen, son, you could have won that game.”

Is he kidding? If I could have won, I would have.

The man racks the balls on table eight, pulls back his right arm, and
pow
like a rifle, three balls go in on the break. He picks the rest of the balls off like nothing, piles them in the rack, slaps a cowboy hat on his head, and tucks his thumb in his fat leather belt, which has a silver buckle shaped like a wild horse.

“I’d watch that focus of yours, son,” the man says. “You’re missing more shots than you need to.”

What’s he talking about?

The man looks over at Poppy, who’s dusting her Hall of Fame photographs of the pool greats of the world, which line the wall by the odd-numbered tables. She’s giving Allen Hopkins, Willie Mosconi, and Machine Gun Lou Butera an extra go with the cloth. Poppy takes everything about pool serious. When Hanrahan’s House of Pool opened across town with its cheap tables, bad sticks, and discount coupons, Poppy stuck a poster in our window:

Hanrahan’s closed in two years. Poppy says there’s no substituting for quality.

Poppy’s wearing her gray Vernon’s sweatshirt. She wears one every day, except in the summer and for church on Sunday. She sells them behind the counter—red, blue, and gray;
VERNON’S
is spelled out big on the front and back so people can see where you’ve been whether you’re coming or going.

Poppy’s run Vernon’s ever since Grandpa died (which was long before I was born), even though everyone told her it was no job for a woman. She’s kept it like Grandpa would have, too, except for the time three years ago when she put in the snack bar and had to take it out because guys were getting Cheez Whiz on the tables. We’ve got vending machines in the back now by the storage closet.

Poppy raises her dustcloth and smacks a fly dead that landed on her sign:

The man with the beard laughs a little when she does it. “Well . . .,” he says, drawing the word out slow, “I’d best be going.”

He walks to the counter to turn in his rack. He stands there a minute, looking at the pool trophies
my dad won lining the shelves of the glass case behind the counter.

Poppy and my mom have fights sometimes about whether the trophies should stay up or get put away. Poppy says if Mom wants them down, she’ll do it, and Mom says she can’t make the decision herself. I can’t imagine that case without Dad being part of it.

The man puts his money down and tips his hat to Poppy, who watches him strange and keeps on watching as he walks out of the hall through the big oak door like a sheriff going to clean up a town.

Arlen and I turn like one kid and head out the door too, just as the man crosses Flax Street. He walks straight and fast, past Mrs. Cassetti’s bakery and the big wedding cake she keeps in the window; past the fix-it shop, where Mr. Kopchnik sits outside in his chair, taking apart a blender, listening to opera; past Crystal’s Launderette, where he opens the door for Mrs. Merman and her granddaughter Samantha, who’s carrying the laundry basket. Then he climbs into the cab of a huge green truck.

The April wind picks up.

The man revs the engine.

It’s the shiniest truck I’ve ever seen: a Peterbilt—the ultimate. He pulls her out easy—the truck’s
shining like an emerald—and moves down Flax Street past the old gray buildings and boarded-up stores, leaving thunder in his path.

Arlen and I stand there feeling the rumble.

“Who was that guy?” we whisper.

The whole next day, I wonder if I really could have won that game.

I think about it during music appreciation class and get in trouble when Ms. Weisenberg, in that singing voice of hers, asks me who is the youngest classical composer of all time and I say Minnesota Fats.

I think about it during gym and mess up guarding the soccer goal and don’t even notice when T.R. kicks the ball right past me into the net. Coach Crow blows his whistle loud and asks me if I enjoyed my nap.

I think about it when Mrs. Riggles, everybody’s favorite teacher at Grover Cleveland Elementary School, floats a plastic boat stuffed with Lipton tea bags in a tub of water and starts throwing the tea off the boat, angry, like they did at the Boston Tea
Party. I stop thinking about it then because things are getting interesting.

Mrs. Riggles shakes back her long black hair, puts a hand on her pregnant stomach, and says, “Okay, colonists, get mad!”

The class starts shouting how we’ve had it with the British and we’re sick of being taxed. T. R. Dobbs and Petie Pencastle yell about being free; Sally Costner screams she isn’t going to take it anymore. Arlen gets up on a chair and cries that no ships bringing tea from England will be allowed to land in our ports. We all shout, “Yeah!” and Mrs. Riggles throws the last tea bag in the tub as the water turns brown.

We just started studying the American Revolution. We’ve been decorating our room with maps we made of the thirteen colonies. We wrote down famous quotes like Patrick Henry’s, “Give me liberty or give me death,” and hung them from the ceiling with string. History is my favorite subject. Mrs. Riggles says to understand where we’re going we’ve got to know where we’ve been.

*   *   *

It’s three-thirty. Arlen and I are walking the eight blocks from school to his house. We only take the school bus when the weather’s bad; the bus fumes make Arlen carsick. A blast of wind shoots down Mariah Boulevard and rattles a trash can. Arlen stops dead in front of Suds’ Diner and looks at his reflection in the window with the cartoon drawing of a bathtub with suds flowing out of it. He starts
feeling behind his back. He’s lost his bookbag again—the fourth time in two weeks.

“My father,” he shouts, “is going to
explode
. You’re supposed to help me remember!”

“I forgot.”

“I’m the one who forgets stuff,” Arlen screams, “not you! I’ll never get my tree house built!”

Arlen wants a tree house almost as much as I want to cream Buck. His parents are using this to solve his problem: forgetting his bookbag, forgetting his hat, forgetting his coat, boots, gloves, and sweaters all over town. If Arlen remembers to bring everything home for a week, his parents work on the tree house for an hour on Saturday. If he forgets, even once in a week, nothing happens. Silence.

There’s been a lot of silence this month.

“Do you think that cowboy was right yesterday?” I ask him. “Do you think I could have won that game?”

A whiff of frying onions comes from Suds’ as Arlen’s shoulders slump. “There’s not enough data to give an informed opinion.”

“I don’t think I’m missing more shots than I need to!”

Arlen shakes his head and moves slowly toward home. “Don’t worry about something you can’t prove, Mickey. Let’s worry about something
factual
—like how my father is going to kill me!”

*   *   *

All the lights are out again in Arlen Pepper’s kitchen. His mother is standing on a ladder holding a drill. Another blown fuse.

Arlen fiddles with his Red Sox cap and listens. “The stereo is on, the TV is off, no air-conditioning.” He’s adding the watts of the stuff plugged into each circuit breaker and dividing by the volts to solve the problem. “Too many amps for the kitchen circuit breaker, Mom.”

“I forgot about the stereo.”

Mrs. Pepper climbs down the ladder fast with one hand on her carpenter’s belt. She steps over the pile of cabinet doors on the floor, hops over paint cans. Mr. and Mrs. Pepper own Pepper Construction Company, so their house always looks like a construction site. Mrs. Pepper is the tallest mother in the fifth grade and Mr. Pepper is the shortest father. Arlen used to measure them when he was younger; he kept a wall chart to see if his father had grown. Mrs. Pepper stayed at five-eleven. Mr. Pepper never moved past five-five.

Arlen is the math whiz of the entire fifth grade. Put a pool cue in his hands and he falls apart. Arlen says that with math it’s absolutely certain that when you finish a problem, you have an answer. Grownups can tell you all sorts of things that you might find out later are wrong, but if they tell you there are only a hundred square yards of grass on a football field, all it takes is a pencil and a piece of paper to prove them wrong. So many things don’t work without math—that’s why it’s the language of science. Arlen and I are doing a demonstration project for the science fair on the mathematics and physics of shooting pool and we’re going to win first prize—unless Rory Magellan comes up with something better.

Rory is nine years old and only in fourth grade, but he’s already got an award from the
Mr. Science
TV show for the photographs he sent in showing the weather station he built in his tree house. Mr. Science called him “a young scientist to watch” right on the show. This really killed Arlen because Mr. Science is Arlen’s only hero who’s still alive—Albert Einstein and Galileo are dead. It doesn’t help that Rory has a tree house.

Arlen scribbles a note about his lost bookbag—I’M TOO YOUNG TO DIE—and puts it on his father’s chair. The TOO YOUNG is underlined three times.

“He’ll see it when he gets home from work,” Arlen says. “Maybe he’ll be merciful.”

We head outside with Mangler, Arlen’s black-and-white pet potbellied pig. “Jump,” Arlen says, and Mangler jumps right over a small piece of pipe in the backyard. “Good pig,” Arlen says as Mangler snorts. Mangler is a miniature pig and only weighs sixty-one pounds. He’s the coolest animal in New Jersey.

Arlen sits at the base of the oak tree where his tree house is slowly getting built and touches the sign he made with his wood-burning kit to scare off bad guys.

Mangler likes the sign. He rears back his head and makes his loud squeal like something from beyond the grave. Not everyone knows this is typical pig behavior. Once Arlen and I were walking him on his leash when these older boys started shoving us around, going “Piggy, piggy” at Mangler. This is never a good idea because Mangler’s real sensitive.