April
The next week, Mrs. Sidman read the names of the seven members of the Camillo Junior High School varsity cross-country team during Morning Announcements. "We are very glad to have these seven students represent our school," said Mrs. Sidman, "most especially Holling Hoodhood, who will represent the seventh grade. Holling came in with the fastest time during tryouts—almost a minute faster than any of the eighth graders on the team. We wish you all luck, boys!"
This was frightening. It was the kind of stuff that makes you hope that you are never alone in the locker room with the other guys on your team.
And there wasn't much help from anyone in Mrs. Baker's class.
"I wonder why Holling had the fastest time," said Danny after the announcements—a whole lot louder than he had to. "Could it be because he was running away from two rats who were trying to eat him?"
"That might have had a little to do with it," I said.
"A little!" said Danny.
"A little!" said Meryl Lee.
"A little!" said Mai Thi.
"A very little," I said, and everyone in the class ripped out a piece of paper from their notebooks, scrunched it up, and threw it at me—which was unfair, since you can't stop twenty-two pieces of scrunched-up paper at the same time.
You pretty much know from what I just told you that Mrs. Baker wasn't in the room. She'd been called down to the office for a phone call before Morning Announcements, and she'd had Mr. Vendleri stay with us while she was gone.
Which was why balls of scrunched-up paper surrounded my desk by the time Mrs. Baker came back, and since generally the person who is surrounded by balls of scrunched-up paper will be the person blamed for all the balls of scrunched-up paper, I figured I would be the one who had to pick them all up. That's how it is in the world.
But not this time.
Because the phone call in the office was from the United States Army. The Vietcong had abandoned Khesanh, and 20,000 American troops were marching to relieve the marines—and to find missing American soldiers. Like Lieutenant Baker. "It will be called," Mrs. Baker told us, "Operation Pegasus. Now, someone tell me the meaning of the classical allusion."
She never did say anything about all the balls of scrunched-up paper around my desk.
You may have noticed, too, that it was Mrs. Sidman who read the Morning Announcements over the P.A. instead of Mr. Guareschi. That was because Mr. Guareschi was gone. Mrs. Baker had told us he had "received an administrative reassignment," but that only meant that he was gone. And Mrs. Sidman was our new principal. Really. I suppose the school board figured that if Mrs. Sidman could pick up two huge rats by the scruff of their necks and carry them through the halls, she could certainly handle middle schoolers. Which was probably true.
No one saw Mr. Guareschi leave, still looking for a small country to be dictator of.
But everyone saw Mrs. Sidman on the first day she was principal. She stood in the main lobby and watched us come in. She already knew almost all of our names, and she must have said "Good morning" three hundred times. She stood straight, with her arms folded across her chest—which, as any teacher coach will tell you, isn't good for teachers but probably isn't bad for principals.
I heard that she even stared down Doug Swieteck's brother.
While Mrs. Sidman was starting up her new job at Camillo Junior High, President Lyndon B. Johnson was giving up his old one at the White House. Walter Cronkite carried the announcement the last day of March: President Johnson said that he did not want to be distracted by partisan politics "with America's sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home." He had decided that he would not run for the presidency again. His whole face seemed to sag down as he said this.
"He doesn't want to be humiliated," said my sister at the first commercial that night. "He knows he can't win against Bobby Kennedy."
"He knows he can't win against Richard Nixon," said my father. "Not with the whole war on his back."
"Either way, he's getting out because he doesn't want to lose, not because he cares about America's future."
My father sighed a loud sigh. "So is that how all flower children make their judgments—so quick and easy?"
"When they're quick and easy to make," said my sister.
Only the end of the commercial stopped what could have gotten a whole lot louder.
I seemed to see President Johnson's sagging face through the rest of the news. Banquo's face probably looked a whole lot like that just before Macbeth had him killed, when he suddenly realized that everything that he had hoped for was crashing down.
And then, on top of that, we found out after the CBS Evening News that President Johnson wasn't the only one giving up his job.
"Kowalski's finished, too," said my father.
We all looked at him.
"What do you mean?" said my mother.
"Finished," said my father. "Done. Over. Washed up. Kaput. I told you he couldn't play for keeps. They'll announce it in a couple of weeks or so. No more Kowalski and Associates. We'll be the only architectural firm in town that matters." He looked at me. "I told you we'd be going places if we got the junior high job, didn't I?"
I nodded. He had told me.
"What about the Kowalskis?" I asked.
My father shrugged. "Architecture is a blood sport," he said.
So at lunch recess the next day, Meryl Lee and I spent a lot of time not saying anything—until Meryl Lee said it for us.
"I might be moving," she said.
I looked at her.
"I'll probably be moving."
"Where?" I said.
"To my grandmother's house. In Kingston."
I nodded.
Another minute or so of not saying anything went by.
I knew I should say something. I guess after reading all that Shakespeare I should know what to say. But I didn't have a single word.
So Meryl Lee said it for us again.
"Toads, beetles, bats," she said. And that was exactly right.
Meryl Lee didn't know how long she had left. Maybe just two or three weeks. So we decided to pretend that it was forever, and we didn't talk about it, and we tried not to think about it. But there were those moments when one of us would look at the other, and we knew what we were thinking, even though we wouldn't say it. Probably sort of how it was between Romeo and Juliet.
It helped to run hard, so hard that you can't think about much of anything else because your arteries are all opened out as far as they can be, looking for some oxygen, any oxygen, because you can't pull enough air into your lungs and there's this coach who has invented an entirely new vocabulary to wrap around the word "faster," a vocabulary that even Caliban would have blushed at. We ran for more miles a day than most commuters drive. We ran through neighborhoods that I don't think are even in Nassau County. We ran past other junior high schools and got jeered at by baseball players who warmed up with a couple of sprints and then shagged balls the rest of the afternoon. We ran past the red tulips in front of Saint Adelbert's and the white lilacs in front of Temple Beth-El. We ran past Goldman's Best Bakery and smelled the latest batch of cream puffs sending their scent through the open windows. One day we ran all the way to Jones Beach, and if Mrs. Sidman hadn't sent a bus after us, I think we would have collapsed on the boardwalk and died.
But I was getting faster. Really. Even though I stayed at the back of the pack of eighth graders.
Let me tell you, when you're in the seventh grade, it isn't healthy to run at the front of a pack of eighth graders. I did it once, and they pulled my shorts down to my ankles in midstride.
You don't let something like that happen twice.
You stay at the back of the pack. And you learn the telltale signs of someone ahead of you who is about to spit off to the side.
Danny understood this, too, since he ran behind the eighth graders on the junior varsity team, and they were angry eighth graders. Angry eighth graders with plenty of spit.
Mrs. Baker did not understand why I was running behind anyone. She decided to give me a month off Shakespeare to coach me, since developing the body as well as the mind, she said, was a humane and educational activity. Every Wednesday, she timed a three-mile run, and I was dropping a couple of minutes with each one. (This didn't include the time I made when Sycorax and Caliban were chasing me, when I think I might have beaten Jesse Owens.) My lean was better, Mrs. Baker said, and my arms a lot looser. But she still wanted to work on my breathing, and so after the three miles we did wind sprints until I almost threw up—which makes you want to get your breathing better in a hurry.
Mrs. Baker didn't care that I had regular practice on Wednesday afternoons, after school, with Coach Quatrini. "If you want to get better, you run," she said. "You can't possibly run too much"—which I do not think is true but probably is some sort of teacher strategy.
Meryl Lee didn't understand why I was running at all, since it meant I wasn't working on the "California Gold Rush and You" project, and she'd already written all the notes for our report and started on the contour map.
"Don't think a rose and a Coke are going to get you out of this," she said.
Which I already knew. Remember, I'm not a jerk like Romeo.
And that was why one afternoon I was in Meryl Lee's kitchen, working on making the California Gold Rush relevant to You, when Mr. Kowalski came home and told us what he had heard on the car radio: that Martin Luther King, Jr., who was in Memphis helping striking sanitation workers, had been shot and killed. He died, Mr. Kowalski said, just after he had asked a friend to play "Precious Lord, Take My Hand."
Meryl Lee took my hand and we went into the living room, where Walter Cronkite was just finishing the news. He told us that it was all horribly true. I thought he was shaking.
"Nothing will ever be the same," said Mr. Kowalski.
Meryl Lee squeezed my hand. Hard.
That night, my sister would not come down to supper. And my father did not call her down. He sat with a face as grim as President Johnson's. Every so often he would look up the stairs to my sister's room, then back down at his lima beans. "How could this happen?" he said.
The next day, there were riots in Chicago, in Savannah, in Washington, in Toledo, in Detroit, in Pittsburgh, and in New York. "We are coming apart," my father said.
And on Tuesday, while everyone at Camillo Junior High watched on a television in the gym, my father stayed home from Hoodhood and Associates to watch on our television two Georgia mules draw the old green farm wagon that carried the body of Martin Luther King, Jr., through the streets of Atlanta. He didn't say a thing at supper. Neither did my sister.
Just before I went to bed that night, I reminded my father that the next day was Opening Day at Yankee Stadium—you probably remember how we got the tickets—and he had promised to drive me there to meet Danny and his father, and Doug and his father, and to write a note to get me out of Coach Quatrini's cross-country practice for that day and to let me leave before school ended.
"Isn't there enough happening in the world that you shouldn't have to go into the city for a baseball game?" he said.
"It's Opening Day," I said.
He shook his head. He never did write the note. So I wrote it myself and got him to sign it in the morning. I told him that he needed to pick me up at 12:00 noon sharp since the game began at 2:00. "Sure, sure," he said—which were the same words that Coach Quatrini used when I showed him the note.
"You expect me to believe that your father wrote this?" he said.
"I wrote the note. He signed it," I said.
"Did he read it before he signed it?"
No, you pied ninny, you blind mole, I wanted to say. He didn't read it. He just signs whatever I ask him to sign. Like blank checks with lots of numbers to the left of the decimal point.
"Yes," I said.
Coach Quatrini scrunched the paper in a ball and threw it at me. "I won't go easy on you at the next practice," he said.
As if this was something I hadn't already counted on.
Mrs. Baker figured that since I was leaving early, I should do the whole day's work in the morning. When I pointed out that neither Danny nor Doug was even in class and that they were probably taking the whole day off and maybe they were sitting in Yankee Stadium already, watching batting practice with Horace Clarke and Joe Pepitone hitting them out a mile, Mrs. Baker pointed out that run-on sentences were improper and I would do well to get started on the nonrestrictive-clauses worksheet. Which I did, since the prospect of Opening Day at Yankee Stadium made even nonrestrictive clauses bearable. (And it probably helped that Danny and Doug would have to do all the work the next day anyway.)
By the time noon came, my hands were blue with the fresh ditto ink, but I had finished every nonrestrictive-clause exercise, and done the reading comprehension, and even done more to make the California Gold Rush relevant to You by pointing out the perils of the love of money in a brilliantly worded argument for Mr. Petrelli, which I handed Mrs. Baker while everyone went out to lunch recess.
"Why don't you take this down to his room?" she said. "By that time, your father will be here." So I did, and Mr. Pertrelli made me stand there by his desk as he read it over, as he pointed out the powerful use of nonrestrictive clauses, as he advised against the use of clichés, and as he identified more than one historical inaccuracy, and as I squirmed, imagining my father standing in his three-piece suit by Mrs. Baker's desk, large and important, the Chamber of Commerce Businessman of 1967—and probably 1968, too.
When Mr. Petrelli finished, I hurried back to Mrs. Baker's room, since I wasn't sure that I wanted my father to be standing there being large and important.
But I didn't need to hurry, since when I got to the room, my father wasn't standing by Mrs. Baker's desk.
We both looked up at the clock.
12:11.
Eleven lousy minutes after 12:00, and he wasn't here yet.
I ran down to the Main Administrative Office and called Hoodhood and Associates. "I'm sorry," said his secretary. "Mr. Hoodhood has been out at the site of the new junior high school all day, and he isn't expected back until two thirty."
"He has a baseball game at two o'clock," I said.
"No, he has an important meeting with the Chamber of Commerce scheduled for four thirty. He wouldn't miss a Chamber of Commerce meeting for a baseball game."
She was right. He wouldn't.
I hung up the phone and went back to the classroom.
Mrs. Baker was reading in her Shakespeare book when I came back. "Oh," she said when she saw me. She looked up at the clock. "Oh," she said again.
Meryl Lee came back into the room. She stood at the door when she saw me. "Aren't you—" and then she stopped. Because apparently I wasn't.
One by one, everyone came back from lunch recess. One by one, they looked at me and knew what had happened. And what was there to say?
I sat down at my desk, as humiliated as President Johnson would have been if he had lost to Bobby Kennedy. My heart beat against my chest. I was surprised that no one else could hear it.
I suppose there may have been a more miserable hour sometime in my life, but I couldn't think of what it might have been.
Until 1:55, when everyone had left for Temple Beth-El or Saint Adelbert's, and Mrs. Baker said, "Mr. Hoodhood, I think I could get you there for some of the game."
The sweetest words e'er spoken. I almost cried.
I took the two tickets out of my shirt pocket and held them up. "Have you ever been to a Yankee game, Mrs. Baker?"
"Never intentionally," she said. "Call your mother and see if it's all right."
Which I did, except she wasn't home. So I called my sister at high school. "You're calling me at school for that? Why should I care what time you'll be back?" she said, which I figured was good enough.
And that was how Mrs. Baker and I found ourselves on the Long Island Expressway driving toward New York City, me looking at my watch every three minutes or so, and Mrs. Baker moving along at a steady forty-five miles per hour in a sixty-mile-per-hour zone.
"You can go up to sixty-five without getting a ticket," I pointed out.
"I tend not to want to see how far I can break the law before I'm caught."
"You drove a lot faster than this to the hospital."
"Much faster. But I was going to the hospital. Today I am driving to a baseball game."
"On Opening Day, it's just as important," I said. "And I just saw you roll your eyes."
"I never roll my eyes," said Mrs. Baker. "But if I did roll my eyes, that would have been an appropriate time to do so."
The whole way, she never passed forty-five. She fussed at the Whitestone Bridge toll to get the right change. And she fussed at the parking lot, because she wanted to find a space with no cars on either side, which there weren't any of within three miles, and that was about how far away we parked. And we didn't run to Yankee Stadium in seven-minute miles, let me tell you.
So it was the bottom of the third inning by the time that Mrs. Baker and I reached our box seats, which were on the first-base line, right next to the Yankee dugout. You could make out every pinstripe on every uniform, we were that close. Mr. Hupfer got up and let me sit in front with Danny and Doug, and he sat behind us with Mrs. Baker and Mr. Swieteck, and Danny never asked about Mrs. Baker being there, even though I knew he wanted to. But I didn't care anymore because it was April, and it was Opening Day at Yankee Stadium, and the California Angels were out in the field, and the Yankees were up at bat.
The game was everything it was supposed to be. Horace Clarke turned a double play off his heel and Joe Pepitone caught a pop fly over his shoulder. Frank Fernandez had hit the only home run in the second inning, so we'd missed it—which was a big deal since it won the game. And Mel Stottlemyre threw a four-hit shutout. Mickey Mantle had two singles, so Danny and I couldn't boo him like we wanted to. And when Horace Clarke came out of the dugout for the seventh-inning stretch, he tossed three balls to us, and we almost had another one off a Mickey Mantle foul ball except it hit the bar along the box seats and skipped over us. And Mr. Hupfer and Mr. Swieteck bought us all—even Mrs. Baker—hot dogs with sauerkraut and more hot dogs with sauerkraut and Cokes in bottles with the ice still frozen to them and pretzels as big as both your hands together and then another hot dog with sauerkraut for each of us. And we shouted and hollered when the bum ump made a lousy call on Joe Pepitone that made him strike out and everybody, even Mrs. Baker, stood and cheered when Mel Stottlemyre retired ten batters in a row.
It was just swell.
But what happened afterward—that was just swell, too.
Joe Pepitone and Horace Clarke yelled up to our box at the end of the game! "Hey Danny, Holling, Doug," they called. Just like that. "Hey Danny, Holling, Doug." There wasn't a kid within earshot that didn't wish that they were us.
"Hey!" we called back.
"You want to come down on the field?" asked Horace Clarke, which we didn't need to answer, because we were already climbing over the railing.
That was when Joe Pepitone saw Mrs. Baker.
"You're that dame that got us to come out to that school last December," he said.
Let me tell you, I wasn't sure Mrs. Baker had ever been called "that dame" before, and I was sure she wasn't all that happy about it now.
Mrs. Baker crossed her arms over her chest—even though I had coached her against that. "Yes," she said. "Though it was my brother-in-law who contacted you." She said it in this frozen voice that would have quieted any seventh-grade class in half a second.
But Joe Pepitone didn't notice. He took a step closer. "Aren't you that dame that ran in Melbourne? The women's four-by-one hundred. You anchored, right?"
I was really sure that Mrs. Baker had never been called "that dame" twice in two sentences that came one after the other.
"Yes," she said.
"I saw that race. You were in fifth place when you got the baton, and you almost made it all up in the last hundred. You came in something like three-tenths of a second behind."
"Two-tenths," said Mrs. Baker.
"Hey, Horace," said Joe Pepitone, "do you know who this is? Get Houk over here and see if he remembers that dame we saw anchor the four-by-one hundred relay in Melbourne. And get Cox over here, too."
And that was why when the photographers came to take pictures after the game, they found most of the Yankees around that dame with the legs that almost made up five places in the Melbourne Olympic Games in just one hundred meters. And after she ran the race with them again five times over, she asked the Yankees to show us around the Stadium and they did! Really. Joe and Horace took us up in the bleachers and to the sky-high seats and then down beneath to the locker rooms (which Mrs. Baker did not go in) and around to the offices and then through the dugout and back onto the field. The people who were still up in the stands saw me and Danny pitch to Joe Pepitone, with Jake Gibbs catching. And I don't think Mrs. Baker rolled her eyes once.
And afterward, I ran around all the bases, from home to first to second to third and back to home. And then I ran to the outfield and sprinted from right to left and then back again. And all the while the green grass and the yellow diamond dust were in my nose, and the sun lowering over Yankee Stadium shone down on me, Holling Hoodhood, playing center field for the New York Yankees and waiting for the crack of the bat.
When you have the chance to run the outfield of Yankee Stadium and you're not exactly sure if you'll ever have another chance, you have to take things as they come.
I ran back to pitch my last pitches. The sun was getting low by the time Joe Pepitone had smacked them out, and Mrs. Baker stood at home plate, surveying the place like she was considering buying it. "What is all that scaffolding up there for?" she asked.
Maybe she was considering buying it.
"Repairs," said Joe. "Lots of places in the Stadium need repairs. They're waiting on the boss finding an architect."
"An architect?" said Mrs. Baker.
"Someone classical, the boss says. Real classical."
"I'd like to meet him," said Mrs. Baker.
"If you can hit my fastball," said Mel Stottlemyre, "I'll take you up to meet him."
Mrs. Baker looked at me and rolled her eyes. "Get me a bat, Mr. Hoodhood," she said.
It turned out that Mr. Hupfer drove me and Danny home that night. Mrs. Baker stayed to meet the boss.
Mrs. Baker's picture was in the Home Town Chronicle two days later, standing next to Danny and Doug and me, and all of us surrounded by smiling Yankee players. I wore Joe Pepitone's jacket to school, and Danny wore his hat, and Doug wore Horace Clarke's hat. Three sixth graders asked for my autograph on a baseball, which I gave them.
Coach Quatrini, however, did not ask for an autograph. He kept his promise, and the next cross-country practice was about as hard as two practices put together. And since he believed in democracy, he said, he figured that everyone should have the same cross-country practice, and so all seven of the varsity runners ran like Brutus and Cassius were after them with long and pointy knives.
The eighth graders loved me after that. They threw all of my clothes in the showers, and I walked home leaving puddles at every step.
So when spring break finally came, it dropped as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. Spring break! Were there any two words ever put together that make a more beautiful sound?
Spring break. Let me tell you, the days were warm and green. Danny, Mai Thi, Meryl Lee, and I met at Woolworth's in the afternoons. We ordered Cokes and hamburgers for as long as our allowances held out.
Spring break. The high school was out, too, and so my sister was always in a happy, happy mood. She had a new friend named Chit—that really was his name—and he drove a yellow VW bug with bright pink and orange flower decals. He was mostly legs and arms and hair, and he came over every afternoon and would go down into the basement with my sister and they would listen to her transistor radio and then come upstairs singing about yellow submarines very loudly and laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world. Afterward, Chit would fold himself into his yellow bug and my sister would go driving around with him.
Spring break. Warm and green days. You know they aren't going to last, but when you start in on them, they're like a week of summer plunked down as a gift in the middle of junior high school. They mean the smell of dust and grass on a baseball diamond, the first fresh sea breezes that come all the way inland from Long Island Sound, all the maples decked out in green-gold leaves. They mean checking the tennis rackets to see if winter has warped them while they hung in the garage, and watching the first rabbit running across the lawn, and neighbors putting the first "Free Kittens" signs up on their stoops.
That's spring break. You come back to school thinking that it's no longer just the end of winter; it's almost the beginning of summer, and you figure that you can hang on until the end of June, because the warm breezes are coming in the window like quiet happiness.
Coach Quatrini had made us swear on the lives of our firstborn children that we would run hard during spring break. He promised he would find out if we missed one day—just one day!—and that we would pay dearly.
So when we got back to school, he began the first practice with this announcement: Every runner on the varsity team was going to have to better my tryout time with the rats by thirty-five seconds. No exceptions.
And no rats to help.
Let me tell you, the eighth graders were not happy. Once we got started on our run, there was a whole lot of spitting to the side, timed with the wind, which I had to keep watch for. And I kept well to the back of the pack, since we ran through neighborhoods where there were kids from school who knew me and I didn't want to find myself in front of their houses with my shorts pulled down to my ankles.
I was glad that Doug Swieteck's brother wasn't a varsity runner. Who knew what would have happened then?
It was when we were all back from the run that first day and standing around the gym doors trying not to die that Coach Quatrini gave his second announcement: There was going to be a Long Island Junior High School Cross-Country Meet this spring, just to work up excitement for the fall season.
"It's this Saturday, so you're all going to have to get up early and miss your cartoons," he said. "I feel really badly about that. So badly, I could cry. Boo-hoo. Be here by seven. Bus leaves at seven oh-one. We run at Salisbury Park. Three miles at race pace. Winner gets a hundred-dollar savings bond. Not that I expect any of you ladies to win."
Toads, beetles, bats.
That night at supper, I mentioned the race.
"That will be nice," said my mother.
"Just swell," I said.
"Who's the coach?" said my father.
"Coach Quatrini," I said.
My father considered this a moment. "What's his first name?"
I shook my head. "Everyone just calls him Coach Quatrini."
My father shrugged and went back to eating.
"How far do you have to run?" said my sister.
I told her.
"You'll die," she said.
"I won't die."
"You'll get run over and crushed."
"It's almost happened before," I said. "With a bus."
She smirked at me. "Holling Hoodhood, the local town hero. Do you want a parade?"
"How long is it until you go to college?" I said.
She smirked again. "Not soon enough."
"She's not going to college," said my father.
Silence, since that is one of those lines that gets everyone's attention.
"What?" said my sister.
"You're not going to college," said my father again. "You've got a good job, and you're not going anywhere."
A long pause.
"Did you know that Roy White is batting .429?" I said.
"I am going to Columbia University," said my sister.
My father pressed his fork onto his plate and crushed a lima bean. "Columbia?" he said. "Columbia. Let me think a moment. Isn't that the school that's on strike to protest the war, so there aren't any classes?"
"It's the school where students are striking against the war and against racism."
"The whole world is going crazy," my father said, "and no place is crazier than college. You'll stay at your job and be safe."
"Safe from what? Thinking?"
"You're staying home," said my father.
My sister focused on her meatloaf.
By the way, Roy White really was hitting .429, which was .205 points over his last season's average, which seems to me to be important enough to talk about at supper.
They were all asleep when I left for the cross-country meet on Saturday morning. Actually, I was almost asleep, too, when I left for the cross-country meet on Saturday morning. I think I got to Camillo Junior High only by instinct. It was cold and a little foggy—the kind of foggy that goes all through you, so that everything feels wet, and the cold starts to seep under your skin, and all you can think about is the warm bed that you left to do this to yourself, and you're wishing you had on your thermal underwear, and you're wondering why anyone would want to do this to themselves, and you see Coach Quatrini standing by the bus and shouting at everyone he can see and you wonder even more why anyone would want to do this to themselves.
Neither the fog nor the cold lifted when we got to Salisbury Park. The grass was long and wet, and the fog dripped down from the still fresh green leaves on all the trees. You could see your breath. You could especially see Coach Quatrini's breath, because he was using it a lot, telling us where to leave our stuff, where to wait, where to stop waiting, where to loosen up, where to line up. I guess that was how he stayed warm.
There were something like twenty Long Island junior high schools here, and some of them even had uniforms. Most of us just had the numbers the coaches gave us, pinned to our shirts. My number was 113, which is not a particularly lucky number. Danny Hupfer's was 25—which, as you know, is Joe Pepitone's number. I asked him to change with me.
"Would you change with me if I had 113 and you had 25?" he said.
"In a second," I said.
"Liar," he said.
But when the JV boys' race started, I cheered him on anyway, standing on the sidelines between Mr. and Mrs. Hupfer and a whole bunch of little Hupfers, and Mr. Kowalski and Meryl Lee, who had come out to watch us run on an early Saturday morning.
That's Meryl Lee for you.
It wasn't easy to pick Danny out when they started, since there were about three hundred runners on the line and most of them had on white T-shirts. But after they left and headed into the deep woods of Salisbury Park and the thudding of six hundred feet faded, we all ran to where the trail comes out for a bend and waited for him to pass. He ran through in a clump of runners mostly bigger than him. Eighth graders.
"Keep your arms loose!" I hollered.
"Okay, coach," he called, heading back into the woods.
"And don't talk," I yelled after him. He probably didn't hear me.
We ran to the next bend. When he came past, he was out in front of the clump and running well. He shook his loose arms at me.
"Go, Danny!" yelled Meryl Lee.
"Faster, you dang slug!" I yelled.
And he obeyed. He was sprinting when we saw his back disappear.
Then we rushed back to the starting line, and we all screamed like crazy when he ran past in the top ten and set off for the woods again, the second lap.
There were three more after that.
We ran all over the field to catch him whenever he came in sight—me, all the Hupfers, and Mr. Kowalski and Meryl Lee.
On the fourth lap, he came across the starting line first.
We went berserk. Even Coach Quatrini went berserk—jumping up and down on the sidelines just like one of the little Hupfers.
When Danny disappeared into the woods, followed by the clump of eighth-grade runners pretty far behind him, we ran back to the first bend—for the fifth time—and waited for the sight of Danny.
But it was the clump of eighth-grade runners that came out first.
And then a whole line of other runners, all red and sweating in the cold, foggy air.
"Did we miss him?" asked Meryl Lee.
But we hadn't. Way more than half of the runners had gone by before we saw Danny limping past the first bend. Both of his knees were bloody. He did not look at us.
Mr. and Mrs. Hupfer had their hands over their mouths. And all the little Hupfers asked, "What happened to Danny's knees?"
"I guess he must have tripped," said Mrs. Hupfer.
She didn't know what might happen if a clump of eighth graders caught a seventh grader in the lead.
We ran to the next two bends, and waited. Danny was falling farther and farther behind.
When he finally crossed the finish line, he wasn't last. But almost.
His parents were waiting right there. His father took one arm, and his mother the other. Meryl Lee and I stood back, and we could see that Danny was almost crying. And probably not just because his knees were hurting. He didn't look at us when Mr. and Mrs. Hupfer took him back to the car, followed by the pack of little Hupfers. Some of them were crying. "Are Danny's knees going to get better?"
I guess cross-country is also a blood sport.
The varsity race was next, and I lined up behind the eighth graders. Way behind the eighth graders. "Get up to the line," hollered Coach Quatrini. I moved up about half an inch.
And probably that was why, among the one hundred and forty runners waiting at the starting line, Mr. Hupfer was able to find me so easily. "I have a message for you," he said, "from Danny. I'm not sure you'll understand it."
"I'll try," I said.
"He said, 'Beat the pied ninnies.' Do you know what he means?"
I nodded.
"Then here's a message from me," he said. He leaned closer. "Run them into the ground."
But it's hard to run one hundred and thirty-nine runners into the ground, especially when the gun goes off and the thunder of all those feet takes over from the thunder in your heart. For a minute, I thought that my sister was right: I was going to get run over and crushed. So I drifted off to the side and sprinted to move ahead before the trail narrowed. By the time I reached the first bend out of the trees, I was just behind the clump of eighth graders from Camillo Junior High. By the time I hit the second bend, we'd passed most of the other runners. By the time we reached the starting line again, the seven of us were out front—actually the six of them were out front, and I was running behind them.
And at the starting line, this is what I saw:
Mr. and Mrs. Hupfer and all the little Hupfers were behind Danny, who had not gone home but was standing there on his bloody knees and hollering as loudly as he could and waving his white shirt high up in the air.
Coach Quatrini was going berserk again, and seemed to be trying to levitate himself off the ground.
Meryl Lee was standing quietly, Mr. Kowalski behind her, and she held up a dried rose with a ribbon as I went by.
And Mrs. Baker was standing next to her, wearing her white sneakers.
So we ran again into the deep woods of Salisbury Park, the damp smell of pine thick in the air.
It was as if we were running alone, the seven varsity runners of Camillo Junior High. When I looked back over my shoulder, I could see only a few runners behind us, and by the time we were on the third lap, we were starting to pass runners still on their second. The fog had lifted, the day had warmed, and at times I could almost close my eyes and let my feet move along the still-dampened grass.
And then I would find that I had come up right behind the pack of eighth graders, and they were looking back at me, and I slowed down.
When we reached the starting line to begin the last lap, Coach Quatrini looked like he was having some sort of fit. I'm not sure that he knew what he was hollering, or if it was even English. Let me tell you, whatever it was, it wasn't Shakespeare. All the little Hupfers were jumping up and down, too, and Danny was still waving his shirt, and Meryl Lee was waving her rose—which was losing its petals—and Mrs. Baker was screaming. Really.
We headed into the deep woods for the last time. In the cool shade of the trees, I came up close behind the eighth-grade pack.
And on the first bend coming out, Mrs. Baker was waiting. Alone.
"Holling," she called.
I looked at her.
"Pass those boys," she said.
And that was all it took.
I glided as we went into the woods again, and stayed close while the trail narrowed and skittered through some thick underbrush. When it widened through a stand of old pines, the eighth graders looked behind and saw me, and they strung out to cover the whole path.
So I went around them, off the trail and through the pines, the needles thick and soft beneath my feet, the dead branches sharp and brittle against my face—and when I hit the trail again I was ahead of them, and we were all sprinting, but they were sprinting on a cross-country trail in Salisbury Park and I was sprinting through the cool grass of the outfield in Yankee Stadium, running down a ball that Joe Pepitone had just hit to right. And I was covering the ground so fast that my feet were hardly touching, and Ralph Houk was shaking his head. "The kid's good," he was saying.
And then everyone in Yankee Stadium was on their feet, and they were screaming and screaming, because now the California Angels were trying to get to a ball I had just hit to deep left, and I was rounding first, and then second, and then third, and Danny Hupfer was waving me home with his shirt, and when I got there, the cheering erupted so loudly that I could hardly hear Mrs. Baker when she picked me up and told me to keep walking, and I could hardly hold the thorny stem that Meryl Lee handed me.
But I sure could feel it when she leaned close to my face and...
Well, I don't have to tell you everything.