Space Station Seventh Grade

  It was a big relief when I thought about all that. It still might look to some people like I was losing to a girl. But inside I knew the truth. You can’t lose if you’re not racing.

  After the mile the coach called to me. “Herkimer? You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I was still jogging. I was hardly puffing. I thought I’d do another couple laps around the grass. Really get in shape.

  “Hold it,” he said. He came over. “Nothing wrong? Muscle pull? Dizzy?”

  “Nah,” I told him. “I’m okay.”

  He looked at me funny. “So why were you taking it so easy?”

  I told him the whole thing, which to be fair I probably should have done the first day of practice. I told him about the baseball coach. About being groomed for next year. About wanting to be a major league shortstop.

  He was nodding his head while I said these things. When I finished, he still kept nodding, looking at me. Then he stopped. He bent over so his face was right opposite mine. He didn’t blink. His voice was hoarse. Almost a whisper.

  “What’s your first name?”

  “Jason.”

  “Jason? Jason, when you’re on my team, you run. And you run as well as you can. I don’t care if you’re slower than a turtle, you’ll try your best when you’re on my team. You will run as hard as you can. Every step of the way. Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “And next time I see you dogging it, you are no longer on my team. Understood?”

  I understood.

  So much for taking it easy.

  So I did my calisthenics and ran my five times around the school and did my intervals and I tried harder.

  In the second meet I brought my time down to 6:30. I was still last. McAllister’s time was 6:15.

  In the next couple meets I kept improving. But so did she. Our best miler, Floatmeier, a ninth-grader, only talked to me once. He said, “When you gonna beat that girl?” I tried. But by the middle of the season she was still a good ten seconds faster.

  Ham kept asking about the meets. I kept telling him they were away. After a while he got the idea and stopped asking.

  Then something happened that made me try even harder. We were racing Shelbourne, and they had a girl miler too—and she beat me.

  The next day at practice I ran around the school six times. I did my calisthenics perfectly. Even after fifteen intervals I dared that whistle to blow again.

  Next meet, for the first time, I didn’t come in last. I beat somebody. A kid on the other team.

  Peter saw I was trying harder. He started running with me at practice. (He takes track seriously, like I take baseball.) During my races he would stand at the last turn with a stopwatch, and at each lap he would call out my time and yell, “Go, Jason! Go! Go!” And on the last lap, coming off the final turn, he would yell at me, “Sprint! Now! All out! Sprint! Now! Now!” And he would be sprinting along on the grass with me.

  My times got better. I broke the six-minute barrier with a 5:58. (In the meantime Floatmeier was running in the 4:50’s.) McAllister kept getting better too. I was closing the gap on her, but the closer I got, the harder it got.

  Then, on the next-to-last meet of the season, going down the backstretch, I got closer to McAllister than ever before. I was so close I could feel little cinder specks that her spikes were flipping back. Her hands were tight fists. Her hair was flapping like mad from side to side and slapping her in the neck. I could hear her breathing. She was kind of wheezing. Grunting. And all of a sudden, right there on the backstretch, it came to me: Marceline McAllister wasn’t faster than me. Not really. She was just trying harder. She was trying so hard it scared me.

  After practice one day, one of the ninth-graders—a slow ninth-grader—grabbed me outside the girls locker room and dragged me inside. He wouldn’t let me out till I read what was on the wall: “McAllister sucks trombones.”

  “See?” he sneered. “Even the girls don’t like her.”

  I practiced hard in the days before the final meet. But not super hard. The problem wasn’t in my legs. It was in my head. I knew I could beat her now, but I didn’t know if I wanted to pay the price. And the price was pain. I found that out following her down the backstretch that day. I was really hurting. My legs felt like they were dragging iron hooks through the cinders. My head was flashing and thundering. But the worst part of all was my chest. It felt like somebody opened me up and laid two iron shotputs inside me, one on top of each lung, and each time I breathed out, the shotputs flattened the lungs a little more. By the last one hundred yards there was only about a thimbleful of air to suck from.

  When I remembered all that pain, and realized it would have to get even worse for me to go faster, I wasn’t sure beating her was worth it. I felt like somebody, somewhere, double-crossed me. I couldn’t believe I would have to try so hard just to beat a girl.

  The day before the meet, Floatmeier gave me a little punch in the shoulder. “Last chance,” he said.

  When they called the milers to the start, me and McAllister, as usual, being seventh-graders and the slowest, lined up at the back of the pack. Only this time somebody else lined up with us. It was Pain. He was grinning. O-h-h-h shit, I thought. I swore right there this would be the last race I ever ran in my life.

  In all my other races, what I did was stay pretty far behind McAllister for the first two or three laps. That way I could save my energy and sprint after her on the last lap. But this time I stuck with her right from the start. Like a wart.

  By the end of the first lap I was already blowing hard. My legs were getting a little heavy. Pain didn’t touch me yet, but he was right beside me, still grinning. We were really smoking.

  We kept it up the second lap. Didn’t slow down at all. Her spikes were practically nicking my knees. Our breathings had the same rhythm.

  At the half-mile mark things started to get a little scary. Never before, this far into the race, were we this close to the leaders. I was almost as tired already as I usually was at the end of a whole mile. Something had to give. Pain was right there, stride for stride, grinning away. Something was going to happen.

  It did. Coming off the first turn into the backstretch of the third lap. The leaders started to go faster. McAllister speeded up too. She was trying to stay with them. Jesus! I thought. She’s crazy!

  I had no choice. I had to go too. I stepped on it, and all of a sudden Pain wasn’t alongside me anymore. He was on me. He was beating up on my head. He was pulling on my legs. He speared a cramp into my side. He opened up my chest and dumped in those two iron shotputs.

  Little by little McAllister pulled away: three yards… five yards… ten yards.… When she leaned into the far turn I got a side view of her. She was running great. Long strides. Arms pumping. Leaning just a little forward. Keeping her form. Everything the coach told us.

  A feeling I never expected in a million years came over me: I admired her. I was proud of her. I knew she was hurting too, maybe even as bad as me, but there she was, gaining on the guy in front of her. I wanted to be like her.

  The gun went off: last lap. Four hundred forty more yards and my racing career would be over.

  I reached out, like my own breath was a twisted rope, and pulled myself along. My lungs sagged under the shotputs. I tried to forget that. I shook my arms to relax. Stride long. Head steady. Keep your form.…

  I don’t know whether she slowed down or I got faster, but the gap between us closed: ten yards… five yards… three yards.… We were on the final backstretch, and I was where I started, nipping at her heels. Now! I thought. I pulled alongside her. Floatmeier and some others were already sprinting for the tape, but we were in our own private race, crunching down the cinders, gasping like asthmatics, side by side. We never turned to look at each other.

  Then, going into the final turn, she started to edge ahead. A couple inches. A couple feet. I went after her. My lungs disappeared. Only the shotputs now. And now they were doing something. They were get
ting warm. They were getting hot. They were burning.

  I caught her coming off the final turn. Side by side again. There was no form now. No nice fresh strides. With every step we staggered and knocked into each other like cattle coming down a chute. I wished I had the shotputs back, because in my chest now was something worse: two balls of white-hot gas. Stars! A pair of stars in my chest. A billion degrees Centigrade. And they were expanding. Exploding. Searing hot star gas scalding into my stomach and arms and legs, into my head. My eyes were star gas. Faces on the side lurched and swayed. The track wobbled under my feet. Elbows, shoulders, hips colliding. If Peter was running with me I didn’t know it. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t breathe. I was dying.

  I don’t know when I crossed the finish line. I only know they stopped me and held me up and dragged me around with my arms draped over their shouders.

  Somebody came over and slapped me on the back. “Way to go!”

  It was Floatmeier’s voice.

  “Why?” I gasped.

  “You beat her, man!”

  I opened my eyes. Floatmeier was grinning and holding out his hand. I was too weak to slap it. I sort of petted it.

  Then there were hands coming down from everywhere. I did my best to hit them all. “Way to go, Herk,” they kept saying. “Way to gut it… Way to run… Good race… Good race… Good race…”

  Finally I plopped to the ground. Little by little I got my shoes off. My chest was returning to normal. The star gas must have gone out through my eyes: they were burning.

  Another hand, palm up, in front of me. I slapped it. I looked from the hand to the face. It was McAllister. She looked sick. Her lips were bluish and wet and her mouth was crooked. But then it smiled.

  “Good race,” she said.

  FREEDOM, BASEBALL, BUGS, LINT

  SCHOOL’S OUT!

  No more seventh-grader. Let the ninth-graders wipe their feet somewhere else. Now I’m somebody.

  When I come out of school on the last day, I always run smack into the same problem. It’s the problem people have at a smorgasbord, where there’s a million things to eat and they don’t know where to start. Or sitting in front of a pile of Christmas presents, and you don’t know which one to open first. So every year I step out into that warm sunshine, with moosecalls all around and the summer vacation stretching out of sight, and there in front of me are all these goodies, all these things to do, places to go, all the stuff I dreamed about and wished for during the last long nine months of school and winter and homework.

  So what do I do? Nothing. I don’t know where to start. I go home and sit around. I have a little black-and-white TV in my room. I lie there on my bed and watch it. Game shows. Soap operas even. I close my eyes and go to sleep. I get something to eat. In the first couple days of vacation I don’t use much of the world. Or even the house. Mainly I live at two points: the refrigerator and my bed.

  Of course that doesn’t make Ham too happy—the refrigerator part, that is. He starts to notice the food going faster than during the winter. He notices the refrigerator seems warmer and the motor runs more because the door is open so much.

  What gets him madder than anything is finding somebody’s been into his ice cream. He has this favorite flavor. Dutch chocolate almond. It doesn’t seem fair that he gets a half-gallon all to himself, while the rest of us just get one to split. And we let him know about it. He always says: “Look at all the things you kids get that I don’t. Look at all the things that I like that Mom can’t make me for dinner because you kids don’t like them. I’m forty-one years old. I work hard. I support my family. I’ve been getting this ice cream for the last twenty years. Long before you kids were born. I do not believe that when I decided to marry your mother I gave up my right to have my ice cream. It costs two dollars and seventy-nine cents, and that’s the only money I spend on myself all week. I’m forty-one years old.”

  I’m not saying I don’t agree. It’s just that sometimes I like to hang around him when he’s eating his Dutch chocolate almond and he knows our half-gallon has been gone for days. I kind of put on my hungry-dog face and try to make him feel guilty. Just so he’ll give the speech.

  Even then, sometimes his ice cream still disappears when he’s not around. Not much of it. Maybe just a spoonful. But he must memorize the exact shape of his ice cream each day, because he says he can tell if any’s missing. Then he hollers. But nobody confesses. It’s a mystery.

  But this year—no hollering, no speech. Not the usual speech anyway. A different one. On freedom.

  He comes into my room about noon (his summer-school teaching didn’t start yet) and he sees me on the bed, leaning on the pillow, eating a raspberry licorice stick, the fan next to the TV blowing in my face (he doesn’t know it, but I’m daydreaming about me and Debbie Breen), and he goes, “The Grand Inquisitor was right.”

  I said, “Huh?”

  “The Grand Inquisitor,” he says. “A character in a book. Know what he says?”

  “Nope.” As if I cared.

  “He says too much freedom is bad for people. Most people don’t even want to be free. Not totally free. We just think we do. If anybody ever gave us total freedom, we’d give it right back to him and say, ‘Here, take it. I don’t want it. I can’t handle it.’”

  “So?” I said

  He chuckled. “So”—he tore a piece off my licorice—“just seeing you there made me think about that. Guess I’m going batty, huh?”

  “Guess so,” I agreed.

  He left. I called. “Hey, Ham.”

  “What?” He stayed in the hallway, out of sight.

  “How come you’re not hollering at me about your ice cream anymore?”

  “Why should I? You never take it, right?”

  “I know. But you used to holler anyway.”

  His head swung into my doorway. Grinning. “Maybe my throat’s sore.”

  I smelled a rat.

  Next day Ham was out in the yard, playing with his vegetables and dried cow poop. He planted tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. None of them amount to anything yet. The tomatoes are just some puny yellow blossoms and a couple tiny green nubs. But whenever he sees something new he goes screaming into the house and drags my mother out to see. He’s convinced we’re going to be eating our own vegetables all winter long because of three bags of dried cow poop.

  Anyway, I made the mistake of being in the yard at the same time as him. And sure enough, he looks up from a tomato stalk and says, “ ’Bout ready to mow that grass, ol’ boy?”

  In less than two seconds I was on my bike, my glove swinging on the handlebars. That’s when I finally shoved off into summer.

  We got our baseball games going at the park. Dugan (you could tell it was officially summer because he had his tie off), who never brings anything of his own—ball, bat, or glove—showed up this year with a ball. A brand-new one. We all crowded around it, gawking at it in his hand.

  “Man!” I said. “Look at it!”

  “It’s white as a bone,” said Calvin.

  Peter said, “Look at the writing on it. I didn’t know they had writing on them.”

  “Sure they do,” I told him. “When they’re new.”

  “Can I hold it?” Richie said.

  “Where’d you get it?” I said.

  Dugan handed it to Richie. “I found it.”

  Which was probably true. Things happen to Dugan that don’t happen to regular people. Like, Dugan is always just showing up, right? Well, it sort of works the other way too: things are always showing up on Dugan. Money. Food. Bicycles. Now a new baseball.

  I don’t mean he steals. Things just come to him. Like at the baseball games, he uses our gloves and bats. His bicycles are jalopies. None of the rest of us would ever touch the things he rides. But you got to give him credit: he gets them for nothing. He sees one that somebody’s throwing out in the trash—he’ll take it. Even if it’s only got one pedal, or the wheel’s bent, or it’s a girl’s. He gets three
or four a year that way.

  As usual, Ham had his own weird and half-funny way of putting it: “Your friend Dugan just rolls down the hill of life, and when he reaches the bottom he gets up and picks from his clothes and pockets everything that stuck to him on the way down.”

  I took the baseball off Richie. It was beautiful, all right. You could see every little red stitch. There wasn’t a single nick in the hide. Perfectly smooth. Gleaming white. I put it to my nose. It was so new it hardly had a smell.

  “Why don’t we keep it like this for a while,” I said. “For something important.” I had a black-tape ball with me.

  “Just for lookin’ at,” said Calvin.

  Dugan nodded. He held his hand out. I gave him the ball, and before anybody could stop him, he wound up and fired it with all his might. It went skipping and scraping along the infield, smacked off the side of a dugout, and rolled into the trees toward the creek. We took off after it. We found it in the muddy rocks. It wasn’t a new ball, not anymore. Dugan was still there grinning when we carried it back.

  I had a pretty good day at the plate: seven singles, fourteen doubles, five triples, and eleven homeruns. Pretty good day in the field too: only two errors. I missed a couple other grounders, but they were bad hops. It’s not my fault if the field is full of stones.

  But I didn’t have a pretty good day at the nose or the raccoon.

  This was the day I started one of my summer projects: to learn to blow my nose like Ricky Mains. Ricky Mains was a great shortstop last year for the Avon Oaks High School team. He played in the America Legion all-star game in the city, and he was signed up by the Milwaukee Brewers. He’s playing on their AA minor league team right now. Well, I saw him do it once at a Legion game. He pressed the side of one nostril with his fingertip—like pressing a button—then he blew, and—pow!—out the other nostril it shot to the ground. Like a bullet. Must have left a regular crater in the dust. Then he switched nostrils.