At the Jim Bridger: Stories Read online

  Mr. Morrow turned the lights on, and the scene may as well have been turned inside out, light to shadow, shadow to light, a dozen blinking teenagers scrambling up in the blooming confusion. “Did you see that?” Benjamin Putnam said. “What was that?” But before he’d finished, two things happened that I witnessed close hand. Evil Eye, stock still and looking surprised for the first time I knew him, locked eyes with Janey Morrow. She had her sweater, that mystery, back on. Their look was as serious as looks get, and I could never read such things, but this one said something like: Something ends here, something begins.

  What literally happened next is that Mr. Morrow crossed the room in two steps, pushed me aside and, lifting Evil Eye to his toes in the raw light, struck him in the face. It was this act that closed the party down. Suddenly there was a lot of scurrying, hauling one another up and out, and we were in the car.

  I remember that drive well. Evil Eye was silent, driving the car with one hand over his eye. He turned to me a couple of times as if checking my face for some understanding: Did I see what just happened? Finally, after he’d driven me home, he said to me, “We’ll have to get the table next week. Remember, Rick, we’ve got the Fergusons tomorrow. Four o’clock. Be there.” I wanted to ask him what he’d seen in Janey’s eyes. I wanted to ask him what about our candles and the Mysterious Objects. And somewhere inside of me I wanted to ask him if he’d planned the whole thing, if he’d been in control the entire time. There was something about him that day, something different, beyond the wacky act he’d been doing. I wanted to think it was power, but it might have been sadness.

  We did the Fergusons, of course, and after that we were in utter demand and we raised our rates again and worked steadily. He’d appeared there with his left eye swollen shut, a purple thing that made your own eyes water to look at. To peek at it made your eyes water. Evil Eye indeed, Mr. Ferguson said. Everyone said. I wanted people to call me Igor, regardless of Mr. Trachtenberg’s wrath, but no one did. The name appeared in our programs, but everyone just called me Rick. We worked all over the state. Before I left for college we had earned almost nine thousand dollars.

  What happened to me that spring is only part mystery to me now. The week of graduation, Mr. Trachtenberg asked for his trig book back, and I thought certainly it was the termination of my hopes for passing, for graduating on time, and I thought I would be six weeks in summer school. He’d given me no clue as to my ranking, my mark, how I was doing. When I brought it in, he thanked me and set it on his desk beside something I’d seen before: a pair of brass doorknobs. Seeing them gave me a strange feeling that was confirmed on my report card: Trigonometry—A. It is now part of my permanent record, as is the look that Janey Morrow gave me when I returned to my seat. Her face had changed, or so I’ll say, and I looked right at her and asked, “What did you do?”

  She smiled and I could see it there in the second smile I’d ever seen on her face, a face I’d barely seen, a face new in the world and held high. “Mr. Trachtenberg must not believe you’re the devil’s assistant any longer,” she said. Her confidence was overwhelming.

  That spring I came to know that she and Evil Eye were quietly dating, though I never saw them together. Things swim under the surface of our lives and there are times when you can sense the rhythms and other times when you can’t. Janey sat next to me in trig, and I might as well have been sitting by Evil Eye; all the vibrations came through. When he and I went to our shows, her presence was in the car. He had entered her perimeter. When student body elections came along, Janey ran for student body president. The list was published, and you could hear people in the hallways reading her name and saying, “Why is the snob doing that?” She had been apart from or above everything, and now here she was entering the fray.

  Evil Eye and I went to the gym for the election assembly, where each of the kids running for office got to say a little something for two minutes. His eye was better, but he got a reception everywhere he went, signals from boys and girls, odd waves, recognition of his talents. It was almost as if, when we ascended the rows of bleachers, everyone acknowledged him because not to would be to invite harm. Some kids just tugged his shirttail or bumped his leg in passing; everybody touched the Evil Eye.

  Onstage were twelve well-scrubbed students acting like little senators or comedians and sometimes both, telling a joke and then saying, “But seriously, we citizens of Orkney High…” When they called Janey’s name, she stood and came forward on the polished hardwood floor. She was wearing a slim maroon business suit, the skirt a lesson in rectitude, the shoulders of her short jacket flared in a lift that framed her face in a heartbreaking curve. Her speech was one sentence: “I’m asking you to remember that we’re all human.” Then she bowed her head slightly and pulled a red handkerchief from her bodice and waved it twice. Janey walked back to her seat in the loudest ovation ever created in that fine and ancient edifice. I looked at Evil Eye, his grin, the tears rimming his eyes.

  It was the first assembly we’d ever attended, and it would also be the last. Our custom was to spend assembly time alone in the middle of the football bleachers. Evil Eye would stretch out over three or four seats and set his hand out as if to hold the gymnasium and all of its occupants, and he would say, “Did I tell you about growing up in Orkney, about going to high school in America?”

  “You did,” I’d always say. “We’re still here.”

  His face would roll to mine and he’d smile as if at a child and say, “My dear Rick, that would be the wrong answer.” And then he’d begin what I see now was a kind of rambling poem about being seventeen, a word he said was a central part of the code of the unknown, and he would invert himself so his head was far below and his magnificent feet were in my face, and he would go on and offer me all the advice I would need if I was going to be a writer.

  AT COPPER VIEW

  ON A WARM, BLOND OCTOBER afternoon years ago, Daniel Hamblin jogged around the cinder track of his high school. His football practice uniform was stained with dirt and grass and soaked with sweat, and the heavy costume felt nothing but good on his young body as he worked through his third of four after-practice laps. He was a boy with words for things, and in the rhythm of his run, he thought, I’m seventeen and I’m in love. Many things will happen this year to me for the first time. When he spoke this way, his buddy Qualls would say, “Right, boss.” Around the oval track his teammates were strung at intervals, their cleats crunching the fine red cinders as they ran. All the forty red helmets were scattered in the end zone where these young men had tossed them, as was their custom before last laps. Daniel Hamblin loved this, the long shadows of the gymnasium falling across the track, the strength he felt in his lungs and legs, his sense of everything happening as he commented on it. “You old building,” he said aloud.

  It was always four laps, no stopping, and Daniel Hamblin ran four laps, always finishing among the first few players, picking up his helmet and going into the gym. There was a group of boys on the team who were always last, who shuffled so slowly around the track that they were inevitably lapped and lost to the sequence of things, purposefully really, and they picked up their helmets after three laps, joining the file into the gym. One of these boys was the center of the football team, a wry and popular guy named Deke Overby, who was also co-captain. He was a roughneck with a good head of red hair and a face of freckles that looked manly on him, and he was admired, as certain athletes are in the fall of the year, for strength and confidence and his wide-open sense of humor. As the boys stripped off their soaked uniforms and hung their pads on the drying hangers and peeled off their jockstraps, Deke Overby kind of ran the room, calling questions to the various players about what they had done just now during practice or what was the deal with some girl they were seeing, and these were good things, not unwholesome, and it made the guys smile as they stood soaping in the steamy shower, and each boy was hoping Deke would pick him out and say, “If you tackle that hard in practice, two things are going to happe
n: you’re going to hurt old Qualls here, and we’re going to kick butt on Saturday at Highland,” or some such.

  Daniel Hamblin loved the locker room. He liked having his gear stowed and he favored pulling on his oxford cloth school shirts and standing there on his discarded towel in his boxer shorts, his thick black hair in wet disarray, buttoning the shirt. It would be dark by the time they departed the gymnasium, and he loved riding home with his longtime neighbor Qualls, who also played defensive end and who was quiet and tough. They rode home with the windows down even as the nights had cooled, watching the lighted storefronts of their town pass by, not talking.

  Daniel felt a new waking, a special distance from his life that made him feel part of a story, a character. It all felt like an amazing backdrop. “We’re teenage boys involved in American high-school football, driving home from practice.” Qualls would shake his head and say, “Right, boss.”

  Tonight as Daniel Hamblin pushed open the heavy gym doors and felt the October air come at his neck, he heard his name. It was Deke Overby, one sleeve in his letter jacket, hustling up the locker-room steps. “Dan,” Overby said. “Listen, do you think you could do me a favor?” Daniel waved at Qualls across the street opening the doors of his Pontiac; he’d be right there. He was a little stunned that Deke Overby even knew his name, and now they were talking. “My girlfriend goes to Copper View. Do you know Holly?”

  “I don’t think so,” Daniel said. Everyone knew Deke had a very steady girl who went somewhere else to school. Copper View was out beneath the copper mine, clear across the valley.

  “Holly’s girlfriend Jackie is queen of their homecoming this Saturday and she doesn’t have a date.” Deke had squared his jacket and now zipped the front and thrust his hands into the pockets. “You’re a nice guy. We gotta do the right thing. Think we could double? As a favor? I’ll drive.”

  Daniel smiled; he wasn’t sure what was being asked. “Sure,” Daniel said “Sounds good.”

  “Great,” Overby said. “It is. She’s the queen of the damn thing.” He tapped Daniel’s head. “So be sure to comb your hair. We’ll be the only two Cougars there.”

  Daniel Hamblin’s friend Laura Sumner understood the arrangement. “It’s a favor,” she told him. “You’re good to do it.” They were sitting on the side steps of the old main building in the weak fall sun, having their lunch. Laura’s mother made tomato sandwiches on homemade wheat bread, and she traded these for his own bologna and mustard white-bread creations. When she unwrapped them, she had to peel them apart and realign the bread. “A homecoming queen cannot go unattended.”

  “I guess,” Daniel said. They had been meeting for lunch for three weeks, exchanging notes for two, and they had kissed on these old stone steps one week ago and every day since.

  And. There had been a tussle. Three days before at Laura’s house in front of the television, half on the rug and half on the couch, they’d had a moment. They had been to the school play, which had been Gidget, a bright thing to behold, full of their classmates with thick makeup tans. Laura was reviewing the play for the school paper and she’d asked Daniel along. After a bottle of 7Up and twenty minutes of The Late Show, their embrace closed out the world, and they slid down, gracefully and awkwardly, until at one juncture when they had to shift, Laura said, “We’re acting a lot like we’re about to have sex.” This took a moment to register in Daniel, and when it did he was hurt, and started to apologize. She put her hand on his mouth. “Stop,” she whispered. “We are.” Her eyes were bright. “I hope.” She kissed him. “But not here. My parents are right down there.” She pointed to the hall. “Getting caught would spoil it for me.” Her smile against his face caused him to smile, and they sat like that for a long moment, not exactly laughing, but close to it, happy to have this dear understanding between them.

  Now on the old school steps, Daniel asked, “Is it going to make me something? Besides her date, I mean.”

  “Like king?” Laura Sumner said. “You can’t step in at the last minute as a blind date and be king. There’ll be a king, but he’ll have been elected, too, and with his own date.”

  Daniel fished in his lunch sack for the Baggie of crushed potato chips, offering it to Laura. “They elect the king. It should be president or chairman.”

  “Czar,” she said.

  They sat on the old side steps because they could be alone and look across the street at the little Favorite Pharmacy, a throwback edifice, its windows plastered with specials and discounts years old. Most days they talked about the people coming and going, what they were after and why, and when a person came out with the little white Favorite bag, Laura or Daniel would comment about how much better everything was going to be for that person very soon. “He’s warts from neck to toe,” Daniel said about a man all in khaki. “He’s all bumps, can’t sleep. Contracted a wicked case of wartarama in the jungles of Arkansas.”

  “He’s talking to the pharmacist right now,” Laura picked it up. “Saying he’s got a friend that is worried he might have a touch of wartsomething, like…a…wartarama!”

  “Don’t give me that,” Daniel said in the voice of the pharmacist. “You don’t have a friend now and you never will until you get rid of those warts. I can see them poking out of your clothing.”

  “You need this!” Laura mocked a commercial and held up her little lunch sack. “Wart-All-Gone! One treatment and you’ll be smooth as a baby’s bottom.”

  “And then maybe I could get some sleep,” Daniel said.

  “Oh, you’ll need something else for sleep.”

  When the man came out a moment later, they laughed because he was carrying a huge cardboard box of something they could not read. “That man is taking the big cure!” Laura said. “He feels better already!” Laughing, their heads fell together in a way that Daniel Hamblin loved, and their faces were close when they turned and looked at each other, and with their eyes open, they kissed. Then they closed their eyes and they kissed again. They stayed close and he could smell the dry, clean scent off her face. He loved that it was so clear that they were both willing to kiss again. Finally, Laura sat up and took a few of the crumbly potato chips.

  “At the dance, what should I call her?” he said. “Your majesty?”

  “What’s her name?” Laura said. “This girl, your queen?”

  “Overby said her name is Jackie.”

  Laura Sumner, who usually was very funny about Daniel’s hurriedly made sandwiches, stopped eating then and began to put her lunch away. Daniel watched her and said simply, “I’ll call her Jackie.”

  It was a strange week for Daniel, the first strange week in his life really, because he realized that the feelings that pulled him this way and that were his feelings now, his responsibility, and this thought, which he had on Monday as he sat on the old steps on the side of the high school and Laura Sumner did not show up, made him feel terrified and powerful. Deke Overby buddied up to him at practice, pulling him into the first circle of guys there, hauling at his shoulder pads and talking to him as if they were old friends, good friends, and this made him feel elevated and unreal; he liked it. He’d come into the coach’s view somehow and his name was called more frequently. Laura Sumner did not show up Tuesday either, and he ate his stupid sandwiches and crushed chips alone, watching the people file in and out of Favorite Pharmacy He pointed at each as they emerged and said quietly, “You’re cured. You’re cured.” He missed Laura, a feeling primarily in his stomach, a hurt. She was in his Biology II class right before lunch, and the fact that he saw her there, knew where she was every minute, and then that she didn’t join him on the steps, made him sorry and proud. The cool north shadow of the big building was a lonely place now.

  He rode home from practice every night with Qualls and they stopped at the Blue Bird and ate the forty-nine-cent cheeseburgers, three or four of them with the vanilla shake, fries, and icy Cokes, sitting on the old wooden picnic tables under the Blue Bird’s buzzing fluorescent lights. Quails had a system
: he unwrapped his burgers, unfolding the yellow paper and peeling the top bun off to remove the four pickle slices and stacking them on the paper. He didn’t like the pickles. The boys ate and watched Qualls’s pickles stack up. Daniel’s hair dried. When they talked, they talked with their mouths full, and if Quails was through removing the pickles from his sandwich, he gestured with it when he spoke.

  “So, you going with your buddy Overby this weekend?”

  “I’m escorting the queen of Copper View’s homecoming.”

  “That’s where his wife goes.”

  “That’s what he said,” Daniel replied. “Why does everybody say that?”

  “That’s what he calls her. They’re way into it. He stays out there some weekends. There’s a ring. He hasn’t told you this stuff? I thought you’d know the color of her underpants by now, you guys are such good buddies.”

  “Come on, Jeff. I’m just doing him a favor.”

  Qualls balled the yellow burger paper tightly in his fist. “Well,” he said, standing up now and stepping out of the picnic table, “it hasn’t hurt you in practice.”

  “Jeff…”

  “Hey.” Qualls plucked his paper shake cup from the table and drew on the straw. “If you start against Fairmont Friday night, you and Overby will be way even.”

  On Saturday, Deke Overby picked Daniel up at six and they drove across the valley toward Copper View. Deke was driving his father’s Oldsmobile, a huge car featuring plenty of chrome; he’d washed it up and the heavy car shined in the new evening. Deke smelled of aftershave. His hair was combed over severely and his sport coat was folded over the front seat-back. The radio was playing on KNAK, the cool station. Daniel liked this and he could feel the world pulling at him.