Edenville Owls
- Автор: Паркер Роберт Браун
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Sleuth Philomel
- ISBN: 978-0-399-24656-2
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Edenville Owls». Краткое содержание книги:
“But what if I did?” I said.
“Are you getting serious?” Joanie said.
“No.”
I stopped watching the seagull and looked at her.
“But what if I did?” I said.
Joanie smiled.
“We’ll see what happens when you do.”
There was something in her face that made her seem completely grown-up.
Chapter 34
We played a bunch of preppies from the Phillips Country Day School. They were pretty slick. At the end of the first half they were beating us by ten points. They had a center as tall as Russell, and Russell wasn’t so good against people his size. Both their guards were better than I was. But they were all sucking air when the first half ended.
“Okay,” I said before the second half. “They’re probably better than us. But they’re in lousy shape. And we’re not.”
“So we run them,” Nick said.
“Every time we get the ball,” I said. “Run like hell. We throw the ball away some, we can live with that.”
“Defense?” Manny asked.
“Press,” I said. “All over the court. We’re in shape. They’re not. We give up a couple layups, we can live with that.”
“Besides,” Billy added, “it’s the only chance we got.”
“My man can’t keep up with me now,” Russell said. “By the time the game’s over, he’ll be puking on the floor.”
They won the tip to start the second half, and we surprised them with our press. So much so that one of their guards lost the ball out of bounds. We brought it in from the side and surprised them again. The whole first half we’d brought the ball up at a normal pace, looking to set up our weave, trying to set up some screens, trying to get Russell free of his man on a roll to the basket. This time Manny threw the ball in to me and I went full tilt up the court, running as hard as I could, in only about half control of my dribble. But it worked. I blew by everyone and laid the ball in. Then they took it in from the end line, and we stayed right up there with them. Face-to-face. Fighting them on every pass. Bothering them on every dribble. When we got the ball, all of us ran for their basket like a Chinese fire drill.
Occasionally we did lose the ball. I lost my dribble a couple of times. Nick threw it away once, trying to hit Russell. Manny got a rebound and threw it the length of the court to Billy but overthrew it. On defense sometimes, one of their guys would break past one of us and go in to score.
But as the half moved on, we also began to get layups, and they began to lose the ball more and more. Hurried passes. Double dribbles. Bad shots. Russell was getting to the basket ahead of his man and getting layups. Phillips took all their time-outs, and when they came back, we were right up against them again. We’d played with only five guys the whole season. All of us were tired. But none of us were exhausted. The Phillips guys looked like all they wanted to do was go sit down.
With two minutes left in the game, we were tied and they ran out of gas. We scored the last eight points while they sort of walked up the floor after us. When the buzzer sounded, they all did go right to the bench and sat on it, heads hanging, gasping for breath, too tired even to shake hands or tell us we were just lucky.
We weren’t lucky. We were in shape.
Chapter 35
I was with Joanie in the bowling alley, sitting in the back row of benches, having a Coke, watching them bowl.
“I went to see Miss Delaney,” she said.
“You did?”
“After school,” Joanie said. “The day after we found out about that guy Richard Krauss.”
“You didn’t say anything did you?”
“Nothing bad,” she said. “I told her I was starting to think about college.”
“College?” I said. “We’re in the eighth grade.”
Joanie ignored me.
“And she said that was wise, it was never too early.”
“Okay,” I said.
“So I told her I was wondering where she went,” Joanie said.
“Miss Delaney?”
“Yes, and she told me Colby College.”
“Where’s that?” I said.
“In Maine someplace,” Joanie said.
“Who wants to go to college in Maine?” I said.
“And I said did she have a yearbook or something I could look at, and she gave me hers. She brought it in the next day.”
“Her college yearbook?” I said.
Joanie reached into her book bag and pulled the yearbook out. It was white. On the cover in blue letters it said “ORACLE,” and down lower the year, 1942. We sat together on the leatherette bench in the bowling alley and read it. The student photographs were alphabetical, and there she was, Claudia Delaney. There was a list of things she’d been in, and some phrases that were probably funny if you knew, but didn’t mean anything to us.
“She looks the same,” I said.
“Yes,” Joanie said. “Except her hair’s different.”
“She would have been what, twenty-one, I guess.”
“Now look at this,” Joanie said, and turned to the K listings. There, between Kantor and Kroll, was Richard Krauss.
“It’s Tupper,” I said.
“Yes.”
“He’s from Lynn.”
“Yes.”
“Where’s Miss Delaney from?” I asked.
Joanie flipped back to Miss Delaney’s page and said without looking, “Marblehead.”
“They must have met in college,” I said.
Joanie flipped back to Krauss.
“He played football,” she said.
I nodded.
“If they graduated in June 1942,” Joanie said, “the war started during their senior year.”
“He probably went in the army after he graduated,” I said.
“And they probably got married before he went,” Joanie said.
“So the kid could be like three years old,” I said.
The alley bowled duck pins. Sometimes when I was broke I used to set pins in the alley. Sit on a little shelf behind the pins. Jump down, step on the pedal to raise the spikes. Set the pins on the spikes. Take your foot off the pedal, and jump back up on the shelf. Sometimes some jerk would bowl while you were still setting the pins, but if you kept your foot on the pedal, the ball just ran into the pins and stopped. Sometimes the pins would get bent and they’d have to close the alley, but that wasn’t my fault, and it was better than getting a bowling ball in the face.
There were mostly men in the bowling alley. Some grown-up women. Some guys our age. Not many girls. But Joanie didn’t seem to mind. She always seemed comfortable wherever she was.
“So why did he take somebody else’s name?” Joanie asked.
“Maybe he did something wrong,” I offered. “Maybe he knew the guy who died and he had done something bad, so he pretended to be him instead of who he was.”
“How would you do that?” Joanie said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was probably pretty confusing during the war.”
“What do you think he did?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It would have to be pretty bad.”
“How are we going to know?”
“We’ll figure it out,” I said.
Every Friday night during the school year, we went to dancing class in the Grange Hall. It was a big old building with some sort of churchlike tower on it. I wasn’t really sure what a grange was, but I knew it had something to do with farmers.
The class was taught by a single lady named Miss Miller who played music on a piano in the corner, and would count for us as we glomped around the floor.
None of us exactly liked dancing class. But they insisted we go, and it was a chance to hang with your friends and dance close with girls. Miss Miller insisted we dress up for class, so the girls mostly wore big skirts and white socks and loafers. On top they usually had sweaters, sometimes with a little dickey under the sweater, and sometimes they’d wear a blouse, usually white, instead of a sweater. When you danced with them, you could feel the sharp push of their bra against your chest. The bras were very hard.