Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories (17 page)

ME: “NO
. Somebody else moved in.” (I
paused dramatically, with impeccable timing.)
“A girl.”

FLICK
: “A what?”

SCHWARTZ
: “That crummy hound waited for me every day and … a girl?”

ME
(
nonchalantly sipping my Coke, milking the suspense):
“Yep, A girl.” (I
bit off the end of a French fry.)
“She's Polish.”

The effect was galvanic. Flick looked up from his malt, something he rarely did, face blank with wonder. Schwartz, his hand palsied, slopped Coke on the counter.

ME
: “From
East Chicago.”

SCHWARTZ
: “A Polish girl? From East Chicago? Next door to
you?”

FLICK
: “What's her name?”

ME
: “Josephine. Josephine Cosnowski.”

The three of us sat silently for a long moment, each lost in his private thoughts. Already, schemes and fantasies were rushing through our respective skulls.

HALFBACK
: “Did you say Cosnowski, kid?”
(Obviously he had overheard our entire conversation.)

ME:
(warily):
“Yeah.”

HALFBACK
: “That's what I thought you said.”
(He took a huge swig of root beer, burped menacingly, hitched up his pants and swaggered out.)

SCHWARTZ
: “What was that all about?”

ME
: “Search me.”

FLICK
: “You never can figure what them jocks are thinking. If anything.”

That night after school, Flick, Schwartz, Kissel and I sauntered casually past the Bumpus house—as casually as we could with the temperature five below and the wind howling through the telephone wires like the sound effects on
I Love a Mystery.
We slogged along in our overshoes, pretending there was nothing at all unusual in the fact that we had paraded up and down in front of the Bumpus house 12 times in the last ten minutes.

“I'll bet she's fat,” said Flick his breath swirling in the arctic air.

“You sure are lucky, living right next door. You can probably look right in her
bedroom,”
muttered Schwartz bitterly.

I peered up at the house, hoping for a glimpse. I could still see the scuff marks on the front door where Floyd Bumpus had kicked it in the night he and old Emil, his father, had the fistfight that Emil won by hitting him with a tire iron. The place looked the same,
but it was different, somehow. Now it was a
girl
house. It kind of radiated femaleness. The steady thump of polka records shook the frozen ground beneath our feet, and the seductive aroma of stuffed cabbage filled our nostrils. It was almost dark and the streetlights were coming on up and down the block when Junior Kissel made the first score.

Flick had just picked up a chunk of rock-ice and was about to throw it at a shivering sparrow huddled on top of a garage. I was busily trying to scratch my left shoulder blade because my sheepskin coat always itched through my shirt. Schwartz was bent over hooking his galoshes.

“There she is!”

We stood poised in the icy air, like some diorama of
Ancient Man at His Daily Tasks
in the Museum of Natural History. The side door of the Bumpus house had opened and two figures emerged into the gloom: a short, lumpy lady with a shawl over her head, and behind her, barely visible in the darkness—a girl! She had on a parka with those rope hooks which were very big that year. The lady picked up something next to the basement stairs, and together the two of them disappeared back into the house.

For a half-minute or so, nobody said a thing. Finally Flick tossed his ice chunk in the general direction of a streetlight and Schwartz whistled a low, quavering note.

“Well, I saw her first,” said Kissel.

I didn't say anything. But I knew what I had to do. There was no turning back.

Every night before I did anything else, I had one chore to perform. I was supposed to go to Pulaski's store to buy whatever my mother put down on a list. It wasn't really every night: just whenever she didn't feel like doing the shopping herself in the afternoon; but it was often enough to be irritating. Tonight was a store night. On the way through the darkness, as I cut across a vacant lot, I imagined how I would meet Josie. She'd fall off a ladder and I'd catch her. I'd dribble a basketball in the gym and crash into the stands—right into her lap. Or a bus would run up on the sidewalk with a crazed driver at the wheel, and I'd scoop her up just as the wheels were about to…. Men think these things.

I went into Pulaski's store, still in a misty daze. The usual mob of steelworkers crowded the joint. Pulaski sold a lot of chewing tobacco and work gloves. Pulaski himself toiled behind the glass meat counter, his apron stained with grease and blood. Howie, his current clerk, a guy who used to work at the Esso station, glared at me from behind the grocery counter. Grubby kids huddled around the penny-candy case, as I had done in my long-gone youth. I had played softball with Howie before he had become permanently angry working at the gas station and Pulaski's. He didn't go to school anymore, just worked and drove around in Pulaski's panel truck, delivering potatoes and sacks of groceries.

“Whaddaya want? And be quick about it, fer Crissake.”

He worked 19 hours a day, and everyone thought he
was lucky because he didn't have to go to school anymore. He had a thin, red, hawklike face. His hair was a kind of mustard yellow, and it stuck up all over his head like worn-out paint brushes. He was famous because he'd had to quit school over a girl. He had just made the basketball team in the middle of his sophomore year and then suddenly he had dropped out and gotten married. After that, he was always mad.

“Gimme a loaf of Silvercup.” Pulaski's was not a self-service store. He kept everything safely out of everybody's reach.

“Large or small?”

“Large.”

I read off the rest of the list and Howie packed everything into a paper sack as the crowd eddied around me.

“Oh, yeah. And a Mr. Goodbar.” At that stage of the game, I was completely hooked on Mr. Goodbars. There was something about the way the chocolate mixed with the peanuts when you crunched your teeth down on it that got me where I lived.

Howie shoved the candy bar toward me. He knew I usually ate it on the way home, and it didn't go into the sack. I handed him the money and he savagely hit the keys on Pulaski's cash register.

“Goin to the game Thursday?” I asked, passing the time of day.

“Are you kiddin'?” That was his standard answer to almost everything. I guess he felt that the world kidded him a lot.

My frozen feet propelled me unsteadily back toward
home. I had made this trip so many times that my body moved totally on its own. The street lamps were festooned with the plastic wreaths and electric candles that the town put up every year. Sometimes they didn't take them down until April. A giant semi boomed past, cascading gray slush up over the sidewalk.

I slogged across the street and began to cut through the vacant lot, thinking of the basketball game on Thursday, only four days away. Basketball is Indiana's true religion. Nobody thinks of anything else from the opening game of the season through the state finals, and then they argue about it all summer long. This was the big game with our hated rivals, the Whiting Oilers, a well-named team. They came from a school buried amid a jumble of refinery tanks and fumes. Understandably, they played a hard, vindictive game. I already had my ticket in my wallet. It was the big game of the year.

I was about halfway across the vacant lot, crunching contentedly and clumping along the well-worn path, when I saw something ahead of me in the darkness. I hardly ever met anybody on the path, so I stopped for a second. It looked like some kind of bear, a low dark blob in the gloom. I'd always felt that one day I'd meet a bear someplace, but I never thought it would be here in this vacant lot. I couldn't make out what the hell it was. It seemed to be sort of lunging around, making sounds. I was about 20 or 30 yards away from it, maybe a little less. Deep in my sheepskin pocket, I felt for my Scout knife and edged forward.

For a couple of seconds I had a powerful urge to turn
and run like hell, and then I saw what it was. It was somebody picking things up off the ground. I walked forward warily, because Grover Dill used this path, too, and he was dangerous in the winter because the cold made his teeth hurt.

It was a girl. It was Josie! It
had
to be. No girl in our neighborhood looked like
that
She was bent over picking up cans and packages from the path and trying to stuff them into a torn paper bag. She looked up. The light from the neon sign at the Bluebird Tavern illuminated her face in a flickering radiance. I almost fainted. These moments are known to all men: the electric instant of manifest destiny: Ahab sighting Moby Dick, Tristan meeting Isolde, John meeting Yoko! She stuck a can into the tattered bag, and it rolled out into a snowdrift.

“Hi.” It was all I could think of to say. She said nothing, just continued to scrabble among the weeds.

“I guess your bag broke,” I said observantly. Still nothing. She struggled on in the snow.

“Here. I'll help you.” It was the first coherent thought I'd had.

And then she spoke, her rich, sensual, vibrant voice coming from deep within her well-filled corduroy coat, from amid the mufflers and the red stocking cap; a voice which to this day I have never forgotten: “T'anks.”

Together we packed the torn bag. Her groceries ran heavily to sausages and what smelled like sauerkraut. I could feel a surge of erotic tension warming my longjohns.
Together we marched on through the darkness, occasionally dropping a can or a bottle.

“Uh … what's your name?” I didn't want to tip my hand and let her know I had been stalking her relentlessly for days.

“Josephine.” She didn't ask mine—a bad sign.

“Where do you live?” She didn't answer, being busy at the moment retrieving a turnip that had rolled among a collection of beer cans.

“You want a piece of candy?” I asked, hoping to soften her up for the kill.

“What kind?”

“Mr. Goodbar. It's got peanuts.”

“They stick in my teeth,” she said, her breath making a misty, fragrant cloud.

I kept looking at her sideways, and every time the streetlight hit her I couldn't believe that such a girl had moved into our neighborhood. Her high, chiseled cheekbones, the dark hair trickling from under the stocking cap, the rounded slopes and valleys of her corduroy coat, the faint scent of cabbage—all were beginning to tell on my addled senses. But my mind was alert and sharp, guarding against a false move. I could sense that this voluptuous creature must be carefully handled. She could fly into the wilderness forever if I so much as struck a wrong note. With Esther Jane Alberry, it was a hit here, a kick there, a hurled snowball and nothing more. But I sensed something in Josephine that opened up pores in my soul I never knew I had.

“Boy, it sure is cold,” I said finally. I figured I was
on safe ground. Somehow I knew I had to keep her talking.

“Yeah. I'm sure glad we don't have to go far,” she answered, sniffing in the cold air. I saw my opening.

“Where do you live?” I tried to sound totally uninterested.

“Right down the street. Third house from the corner.”

“Oh.…” I struck, hurling the harpoon with all my might. “Well, well. That sure is funny. I live in the second house from the corner. How come I never saw you before?” I lied adroitly.

“We just moved in from East Chicago.”

“That's a nice town. What school do you go to?”

“All Saints.”

“I go to Harding.”

She didn't comment. We were nearing her house. I knew I had to make my move or all would be lost. I couldn't ask her to the basketball game, since I only had one ticket and they had been sold out for over 12 years for the Whiting game. How about the Orpheum? No, I was almost totally broke because of Christmas. I had bought a catcher's mitt for my kid brother.

I started to drag my feet and suddenly I became aware that she was giving me a long, intense stare, her magnificent crystal blue eyes catching the gleam of a passing headlight. I felt silly.

“Would you like to go to a party?” she said suddenly.

Good God! No girl ever asked
me to a
party before, except Helen Weathers once, and that didn't count because she was fat.

“A party? A party? Why, why, yes, sure, uh … Josie.”

“I don't know anybody around here,” she said. “I hope you don't get the wrong idea because I asked you.

“Heh-heh-heh. Why, of course not!”

I couldn't believe it. Polish girls really
were
everything I'd heard! Here I didn't even know her five minutes and she was asking me to a party. At last life had begun. This was it!

We trudged up the front steps of the Bumpus house to the sagging porch where the Bumpus hounds had howled and raged on many an afternoon of summers past and old Emil had fallen through the railing one night when he had a snootful. But I wasn't thinking about that now. She opened the front door and a great wave of warm air redolent with strange aromas—along with the rumble of recorded polkas—came flooding out onto the wintry porch.

“Don't forget the party,” she said, holding the door partly closed with her free hand.

“Oh, I won't! I go to a lot of parties. When is it?”

“Thursday. Pick me up about eight.”

“Why, I just happen to have Thursday open. Yessir, and….”

She was gone. The door closed. It wasn't until I got back home with the groceries that I realized that she had said Thursday. THURSDAY! There were at least 12,000 people who would have given anything to have a ticket for the Whiting game, but suddenly basketball
and the Oilers didn't seem as important as they had before. Sex will do that to you.