TCKeller: How many times did his knee touch yours under the table when he came over for dinner?
AugieHwong: 18. But when we were alone in my room, he didn’t try to kiss me. Instead, he says he’s joining the swim team because I’m on it and he’s going to audition for the chorus of Kiss Me, Kate if I get cast as Bill. That means we’d be together for at least two hours a day in Speedos, tights, or both. Oh, God. I’m being tested.
TCKeller: Aug, if you were 6 and deaf, do you think I could turn out to be your role model?
AugieHwong: Yeah, but only after you learned how to dress better. I got you 4 more Buck Weaver signatures. Is that enough?
TCKeller: No. You owe me 10 for telling Alé about the “um,” you lowlife. You set me back 3 weeks with her. Hey, Aunt Babe is taking you and me shopping the day after Thanksgiving for our entry-level Xmas presents. I’m going for the Red Sox DVD. What about you?
AugieHwong: Black contact lenses so I won’t have to look at Andy in Speedos or tights.
Dear Mama,
I may not know how to do the sign language thing, but I’ve definitely figured out how to tell when this deaf kid is cheesed off at me. This afternoon I struck out four times by swinging on what he told me to swing on. And he did it on purpose too. In the army they call it giving false information to the enemy.
It was my own damn fault. Nehi and I got to the park an hour early so I could warm up with Glen Brunswick, who nobody told me threw up during fifth period and had to be sent home. Hucky was already there too, racing around the bases by himself (from third to first, by the way)—but as soon as he saw me, he stopped in his tracks and ran back to the bleachers to sit in the top row with Mrs. Jordan. I don’t get it. Do I smell or something?!
I guess that would have been the end of it if there hadn’t been a carnival on the south side of the park. Mrs. Jordan had this “great idea” that we should walk the kid to the midway for an ice cream cone. (She may not be deaf, but if she hadn’t noticed by then that Hucky had about as much use for me as another spleen, then “dumb” and “blind” were still up for grabs.)
So we made our way across the football-sized field between the bleachers and the red-and-white-striped booths, with me holding Hucky’s left hand (Mrs. Jordan’s idea, not mine) and Nehi hugging close to his right one. But because he can’t hear, nobody was saying anything (not that Hucky would have been shooting off his mouth anyway), and I really didn’t see much point in kicking off a bonding experience with Mrs. Jordan. But you know how it gets after a while—when the silence amps up so loud you’re afraid you’re going to break it by farting? So what kind of a choice did I have??
“Uh—how come he likes to watch me play but other times he runs away from me?” I asked Mrs. Jordan, who had bent down to re-tie Hucky’s sneaks.
“Because he’s not used to grown-ups who talk to him the way they’d talk to anybody else,” she answered back, standing up and steering us toward the midway. “He hasn’t figured you out yet.” It was the “grown-up” part I couldn’t wrap my mind around. I’m not even fifteen. What’s the “adult” cutoff for a six-year-old? Nine? Meanwhile, Hucky had turned around to make sure Mrs. Jordan wasn’t watching and then he yanked his hand out of mine. Which actually added to my short list of deaf gestures that I know now. Up until then, there was only one kind of Hucky talk I’d learned so far:
Pulling on his hair
and looking in the
other direction
“I don’t need anybody
to take care of me” and
“Why are you still here?”
The carnival was like a total bust. He hated the mime, he wouldn’t go anywhere near the petting zoo, the ten-foot-high roller coaster freaked him out, and when I volunteered to pop for his ice cream cone and he thumbed it down for a Häagen-Dazs bar (for $3.99!), it turned out he didn’t like the chocolate coating after all, so I had to peel it off before he’d eat it. And that was just for starters. Because before Mrs. Jordan told us it was time to leave, I noticed one booth that we hadn’t seen before. Balloons. Ten feet ahead of us. Balloons.
Oh Mama, why did I even go there? Remembering you and me, I bought him a purple one and tied the string around his wrist so he wouldn’t lose it like I did—but instead he spent the next ten minutes trying to get it off, the same way people usually do when they have gum stuck to their shoes. By then I already knew it was going to turn out that way. It’s like baseball. When you’re on a losing streak, you can always tell what’s coming next. Proof? As we were walking back across the field with Mrs. Jordan toward the bleachers and I was figuring that this whole experiment had been a bigger bust than the National Recovery Act, I decided that maybe I could teach him a history lesson he’d never forget. Even if my fingers didn’t have much of a clue yet, at least we’d be talking about something. And nobody fits that bill better than Carlton Fisk.
OCTOBER 22, 1975
The most important date in New England. Ever. And the reason is Carlton Fisk. It was Game 6 of the World Series at Fenway Park, and the Sox couldn’t afford to lose it because that would have been the end of everything. So they hung on for 12 innings with a 6–6 tie until Fisk came to the plate with no one on and nobody out. Then Pat Darcy threw a sinker and Fisk sent it over the wall to New Hampshire.
“You should have seen the fans,” I said, dropping to the grass and pulling him down beside me. “Holy crap, they couldn’t believe it! Want me to show you what they saw?” Figuring I’d better not wait for a “no,” I hopped up onto my feet and crouched over a make-believe home plate—just the way Fisk used to crouch over the real thing at Fenway. Then I took some pretend practice chops just to get Hucky ready, and when I was positive I had him holding his breath, I let loose with a swing that even Fisk would have been proud of. I bounced along the first-base line waving my hands like I was yelling “Stay fair! Stay fair!” to the ball—and as soon as it cleared the Green Monster, I jumped in the air with a “Yes!” and circled the imaginary bases with a victory fist spinning around over my head. Since Nehi’s seen me do my Fisk routine 100 times before, he knew enough to be waiting for me back at the make-believe plate so he could jump all over me. That’s when I checked over my shoulder to see if Hucky had been impressed. Some impressed. While he wasn’t watching, he’d found a sharp rock that he used to cut the string off his wrist, and then just for good measure he killed the purple balloon with it. You could hear the pop in Salem.
By the time we got back to the bleachers we weren’t speaking to each other. Mrs. Jordan went up into the stands to talk to Pop, I picked up my glove and lit out to second base, and Hucky took his usual seat by the on-deck circle. For some like totally clueless reason, I thought this meant we were back on track again. Instead he made me strike out four times.
AND I STILL DON’T KNOW HOW HE DOES IT!
I love you,
T.C.
P.S. Hucky sort of reminds me of the day I first came back to school after you were gone and how I suddenly noticed the way Augie was always by himself. It wasn’t that nobody liked him, but that he always kept his distance—probably because he knew already that he lived in a whole other world from everybody else. That’s why I wonder if Hucky ever feels the same way. Did people treat him like a regular kid or just a deaf one? And why would anybody think it makes a difference?
STUDENT/ADVISER CONFERENCE
Lori Mahoney/Anthony C. Keller
T.C.:
I need to learn sign language.
LORI:
What?!
T.C.:
I mean it. This is really important.
LORI:
What about French?
T.C.:
J’ai besoin de, tu as besoin de, il a besoin de. Please?
LORI:
I don’t know if I can get you credit for it.
T.C.:
I don’t need credit. I need to learn sign language.
LORI:
Maybe next semester.
T.C.:
No, now. You told me to apply myself, so I’m applying.
LORI:
Anthony—
T.C.:
Look, I just want to know the alphabet and how to say “How did you know what pitches I should swing on?”
LORI:
That’s all?
T.C.:
Until next week. So you have a small window.
LORI:
Thank you. Incidentally, how’s Hannah working out?
T.C.:
Who?
LORI:
Your father’s girlfriend.
T.C.:
Oh. She’s history. The new one is Amber. We think she used to model for Playboy.
LORI:
Isn’t that lucky?
Dear Mama,
We have a science teacher at Laurents named Mr. Landey, and since his father is deaf he knows American Sign Language (they call it ASL). So I’ve been learning it from him every day after sixth period. I’ve already nailed the whole alphabet, even though I still get D and F mixed up (which isn’t really a problem as long as I stay away from “duck”). I also learned how to say “My name is T.C.,” “I live near the park,” and “How did you know what pitches they were going to throw me?” When I asked Hucky the last one, it took me two hours to get an answer from him—but he finally spilled out a whole mess of hand signals that I didn’t understand, so I copied them down and showed them to Mr. Landey the next afternoon. Once he’d watched me repeat them, he said, “He’s telling you that he can read lips and steal signs.”
Hucky Harper might not play well with others yet, but maybe I can get the Red Sox to hire him as a really short batboy anyway. Whatever works.
I love you,
T.C.
From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Whenever you decide to start speaking to me again, you’re going to have to learn sign language. I can teach you myself if you want.
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From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Is there a sign for “um”?
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From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Oh, give it up. It’s just a syllable. You liked dancing with me almost as much as I liked dancing with you. What difference does it make how we got there?
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From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] You’re not really learning sign language, are you?
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From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] I have to. Hucky is Augie 8 years ago, only without the bok choy sandwich. I know I can get through to this kid.
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From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Are you manipulating me again?
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From:
[email protected] To:
[email protected] Yeah. Try not to fall for it. I dare you.
Dear Mama,
Alé’s thrown me a breaking curve that I don’t know how to handle. The more time I spend with her, the more I want to be with her and the less I think about kissing her. Pop says he knows why, but that I have to figure it out for myself or it won’t mean anything. (Glinda said the same thing to Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz about the red shoes, and it pissed me off then too.) Did you and Pop like each other first? Or did you fall in love first? Or did they both happen at the same time? Or did Bucky F. Dent’s home run screw up the usual batting order?
Before the game today, I gave Hucky one of my Carlton Fisk rookie cards—worth $22.50 on eBay—and reminded him who Fisk was by jumping up and down and circling a fist over my head. (When Grid Tarbell saw me do it, he thought I was on meds that I’d forgotten to take.) Hucky’s eyes popped wide open and he asked me how to finger-spell “F-I-S-K.” Then “C-A-R-L-T-O-N.” Then “P-U-D-G-E,” after I told him that Pudge was Fisk’s nickname. But I decided to quit before he turned the card over to read the back. If I’d had to spell “Born in Bellows Falls, Vermont,” I’d have missed my next at-bat.
Our last game of the fall is usually just before Thanksgiving, since after that it’s too cold to play baseball anymore, even in sweatshirts. Carlton Fisk must have put Hucky in a really good mood, because from his new seat in our dugout he flashed me the whole menu of pitches ahead of time so I could have my pick of the litter: Fastball, fastball, curve, fastball, slider. (I even got to decide after ball two that the next one was going over the fence. And which part of the fence.) But I couldn’t help wondering about Hucky. Even for a spooky little deaf kid, he has more on the ball than Augie and I did at that age—and after three weeks, I’ve finally gotten him to talk (sort of). It was a good start, but now our season was over, and chances were that I wasn’t going to be to running into him again. And what would have happened to me and Augie if one of us had moved away before we’d had a chance to play Galaxy Fighters on the ceiling?
It turned out that Pop and Mrs. Jordan were having the same conversation up in the bleachers, but with a game plan of their own. So before the last “2-4-6-8, who do we appreciate?” was even half-finished, I was holding Hucky’s hand in the parking lot while Mrs. Jordan was trying to unsqueeze her maroon Mazda SUV out of a space that said “Compact Only.” (If I’d pulled something like that, I’d have been grounded for two days.)
I guess I thought that the Children’s Residence Home at the Deaf Institute was going to be like in that movie Oliver! with kids wearing rags and sleeping on wooden mattresses and eating slop and getting their knuckles rapped by wide men in triangle hats when they asked for more. So I wasn’t ready for the four-floor house on Beals Street with yellow pillars on the front porch and dark green shingles. It looks like something that belongs in either a garden magazine or on the History Channel. Mrs. Jordan said there were six bedrooms for eight kids and four adults. That’s almost a hotel.
Hucky was his usual leave-me-alone self in the van, and by the time we’d walked up the porch steps (also yellow) and through the front door, the way he was glaring at me gave me the feeling I was about to be arrested for trespassing. So it was Mrs. Jordan who conducted the guided tour—starting in the backyard with the swings and the hanging tire and the log cabin and the trampoline. (I SO wanted to get out of my sneaks and show off my jumping somersault, but Mrs. Jordan didn’t look like the type who’d appreciate it. Think of Luke Skywalker’s aunt Beruh. Not exactly a barrel of laughs.) She ended the first part of the itinerary with the living room and fireplace so big that you could practically imagine one of Augie’s singing Christmastime movies happening in it.
Once Hucky realized we were heading toward the stairs that led to his room, he raced up the steps ahead of us, ducked inside, and locked the door. What a shock. Not. Mrs. Jordan looked a little embarrassed while she was fishing a key out of her pocket.
“He has trouble trusting new people,” she warned me. Duh. You think?
Hucky shares his room with Mateo, a six-year-old with dark hair and eyes who looks enough like Alé to be her baby brother. (Hucky was nowhere to be found, but Mrs. Jordan tried to make me feel better by telling me he was probably hiding in the sheet cabinet again. Like this is supposed to come off as normal.) So between Mateo and Mrs. J, I got the whole inventory:
Hucky’s bed by the window (Mateo says that Hucky likes watching it rain and snow at night)
His Luke Skywalker sheets (Mateo showed me how to say “The Force is with you” in sign language)
Hucky’s brown stuffed puppy (named Shut-the-Door)
His sock and underpants drawer
His p
ajama drawer
His shirt drawer
His pants drawer
His closet and his shoes
The little TV/VCR that his last foster parents gave him (before they sent him back)
His bulletin board with his baseball drawings on them (is that me at the plate??)
His desk and his pens and pencils
The Pawtucket Red Sox pennant on his wall
His glove with a baseball in it (he’s a lefty??)
Mrs. Jordan left us alone by promising that Hucky would come out sooner or later, because he usually did. (If the “usually” was supposed to make me feel confident, it didn’t.) For some reason it reminded me of getting Nehi to come out from under the couch at bath time by leaving Snicker Snax on the floor—but this probably wasn’t going to work with Hucky. Not that I had to worry. Since he figured that I’d be leaving with Mrs. Jordan, he waited until he could feel the door close, and then he stuck his head out from the sheet cabinet just long enough to catch my eye and freeze in his tracks. Busted! Meanwhile, I was preoccupied with Mateo and an obnoxious walking-talking plastic toy called Penguin Pat that somebody really should have melted before it ever got put on the market. But I made sure that Hucky saw that I wasn’t paying any attention to him at all, which really began burning his six-year-old ass. (You know this routine, Mama. You invented it. Remember how you got me to come out of the drainpipe?)
Now that I had the home field advantage, he didn’t know what he was supposed to do—so he climbed up onto his bed and left an open spot next to him for me to sit down too. I pretended not to notice. Don’t like the ’tude, dude. Finally, he banged on the night table to get me to turn around, which I did eventually—but not before Mateo and I wrapped up our last round of Penguin Pat. Take your time, kid. This is working. So I got up to stretch like I had nothing better to do and wound up plopping down on the bed next to Hucky. By then he was so pissed, his arms were folded, his scowl went up past his nose, and his ears looked like they were going to blow off. But he still wouldn’t connect eyes with me. Instead, he pulled open his night table drawer, took out a videotape, and popped it into the VCR. Mary Poppins. We watched it twice and his attention stayed glued to the screen. Even during Rewind. (Mateo lasted twenty minutes and then went to swing on the tire in the backyard. I got the feeling he’s seen this movie a lot more than he’s wanted to.) Shut-the-Door was in Hucky’s lap, his head was almost-but-not-quite resting on my arm, and he was tugging on his favorite piece of hair—but nothing could have pulled him away from those two English kids and their nanny. So halfway through the second run-through of “A Spoonful of Sugar,” I pointed to Julie Andrews and said “You like her, huh?” When Hucky answered back with more hand signals I didn’t understand, I knew I was going to have to copy them down and run them by Mr. Landey again.