The Fires of Spring

  Sometimes after practice Bobby would hold Dave and Harry Moomaugh back. “You’re my two sleeping tablets,” he’d joke, but they knew what he meant. Doylestown forged ahead in the race and maintained a substantial lead. “Dave,” he argued one night, holding David’s shoulder as if he were still a kid in grammar school, “tomorrow night I want you to drive for the basket like you never did before. Because if you can ring up three baskets in the first quarter …”

  The stratagems of basketball quite took David’s mind off the murky summer and he became a healthy young animal replenishing itself at the springs of strength. For every evil trick Max Volo had taught him, Bobby Creighton taught him one of the American virtues. “No matter if they knee your crotch loose, my team don’t play dirty!” Bobby shouted at his center when the big man kneed an opponent. For every snide approach to life that Mr. Stone inculcated in the boy, Bobby Creighton taught him the fundamental optimism that governs most American thinking. “Unless your arm is cut off above the elbow, I want to see you keep fightin’. I want it said everywhere in Pennsylvania: A Doylestown team don’t quit.” And to the murky Coal Mine, or the forbidden palaces of Venice, Bobby opposed an attitude toward girls that was almost sacrosanct. “A man who will defile the name of a girl,” he said with deep seriousness, “well, he’d quit or do anything.” It was an open-and-shut world that Bobby preached, a world in which goodness reigned, strong men were clean, and Doylestown won more than half its games.

  David had almost forgotten Nora when her postcard arrived from Denver. It showed a picture of the mountains and bore only three words: “Some place Nora.”

  The message reached him after an exhilarating victory over Souderton and he was about to crush the card into his pocket when he looked at it again, and he forgot the game and began to wonder where the thin girl was. He read the message at least fifty times, but he could not even determine whether Nora’s reaction to Denver was delight or disgust. “Some place!” Poignantly, he wished he were with Nora. He thought of Max’s suggestion: “Take a job in my theatre. You could have a nest somewheres with the girl.” The vision of such a place came to him. Nora waited for him and when they went to bed she curled up inside his arms and legs. He closed his eyes and thought of her warm body, and like fire in a country barn he flamed into wanting her. But the next day Bobby Creighton had a bright idea about stopping Perkasie, and he said, “Dave? Do you think you’re man enough to count three before you shoot your long ones?”

  David said he thought he could, but in the game he trembled like a child, and tossed the ball quickly toward the basket as he had always done. At intermission Bobby looked at him with disgust and said, “You make a lot of promises, kid.”

  “I get excited,” David explained.

  “Sure you do!” Bobby stormed. “Everyone does. But a real ball player learns. Now are you a man or just a kid?”

  In the second half David proved he was fifty-fifty. He couldn’t count to three, but he did get up to two. Creighton said, “That’s better!” and David said, “Those guards look so damned big …” Bobby stopped him short. “Who gave you permission to say damn?” he asked. “Apologize!” David blushed and said he was sorry. “You better be!” Bobby said. “If you’re so eager to grow up, do it on the floor. Stick your face right in the guard’s and outwait him. But don’t try to be a man by sayin’ tough words. It don’t fit you!”

  There was another aspect of basketball that made David feel he was still a boy. After the games, and the drinks at the soda fountain, and the recounted glories, David drove back to the poorhouse in some car. The young drivers loved to whirl around the circle and deposit him before the men’s building. Then gears would grind and the car would spurt off through the night. A window would rise, Toothless Tom’s, and David would look up to his ultimate audience. If his team had won, he would raise his thumb, and he would hear Tom cry along the hall: “We win! We win!” But if Doylestown had lost, David would wave his hand low above the earth, like an umpire signaling safe. Then Tom would glumly report: “We lose. Tonight we lose.”

  And then, no matter what the hour, when he got to Door 8 the old men of the poorhouse would troop by in the darkness to congratulate or console him. “I hear we win, Dave!” they would say. They were proud of their player, but not even their congratulations could quite equal the dumb warmth of Luther Detwiler’s comment on defeat. He always said the same thing: “You can’t win ’em all!” Then he would chuckle as if he had made a very clever remark.

  Only a healthy young boy could have lived in David’s multiple schizophrenic worlds; an adult would have been destroyed mentally by the process of jumping back and forth. In winters David was a clean athlete, a diligent student, an official in school government. In summers he was a professional short-change artist, a music student, the lover of a young prostitute, and an art fancier. He thought none of these things mutually contradictory, and at the beginning of his third year at Paradise he bought a vellum edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets and memorized some thirty of them, for they came close to representing what he believed to be beautiful and good. Like a book of many sonnets, his life was cut up into neat octets and sestets with terminal couplets at the end of each experience. He gloried in each passing day and was like a grub delving in carrion, certain that one time in the future he would be a soaring, winged creature. In other words, he was young.

  He was not disturbed, therefore, when the Park, in desperation, did away with tickets and installed foolproof turnstiles. A customer paid his money, went through a narrow space, and an impersonal cogwheel registered a number. At night the cashier paid ten cents for each click, and there would be no more stealing!

  It took Mr. Stone one day to figure out a way to beat the stile honestly. “Suppose,” he whispered to David, “a woman with a lot of kids comes up. They always do. You hold the stile back and the woman gets mad. They always do. She pushes the kids, thinks it’s their fault. So the kids squeeze in, two or three to a stile. It’s going to be easy!” The Park caught on quickly and changed the spaces so that children couldn’t double up.

  Max Volo solved that dilemma promptly. He appeared with a loud clicking device, so that when a woman appeared with children the cashier could make a click and say patiently, “I’m sorry, madam, but your son turned the stile. That’ll be ten cents extra.” When the woman exploded the cashier said, “If you don’t want to pay, you’ll have to lift the child over.”

  The Park caught on to this, too, and made it an offense to lift children over any stile for any reason. Then Max produced his masterpiece. “This is truly terrific!” he whispered to David one hot afternoon.

  “Beat it!” David said.

  “You’ll be very sorry,” Max said sorrowfully. “This makes everything else prehistoric.”

  A few days later the Canals of Venice sprang its yearly leak, and David was sent to another ride. Before he left he saw the Sheik hauling great chunks of lumber from a distant pile, working like an animal under the direction of men who stood about in the shade. David was in his new booth only a few minutes when a sandy-haired boy hurried up with a letter and said, “Tommy gave me this for you. For his sake don’t do nothin’.”

  Tommy was the regular cashier and his note read, “Whoever relieves me. I’m sick. You can have all the dough but for God’s sake, protect me.” David could make nothing of the message until time for evening meal. When he made his routine check of money he found he had $66 more than the stile called for! He refused to leave for food and had a sandwich sent in. At nine he checked again, and now he had over a hundred dollars. He wiped his face.

  Suddenly, from the crowd, Max Volo darted into his booth and lay upon the floor. “That’s the trouble with this new racket. You got to cover up for people.” He began to take the turnstile apart.

  “What are you doing?” David demanded.

  “You keep on makin’ change, kid,” Max ordered. With a pair of pliers he noiselessly disassembled the lower part of the stile. From his poc
ket he produced the legitimate cog that had turned the tally numbers. It contained four spurs. From the defrauded stile he withdrew a spurious cog with only three spurs. “Wonderful, ain’t it?” he beamed. “With this we make twenty-five per cent each and every day!”

  “How many machines are you working?” David asked, quite dry in the mouth.

  “Some here, some there,” the little man evaded. “Now about that money, kid. You keep it.”

  “Max,” David said firmly, “I don’t want it and you don’t get it. As soon as you leave, I’m going to call the office and report a screwy stile. Let them figure it out.”

  “Hey, kid!” Max cried, grabbing him by the leg. “You can’t do that!”

  “Watch me.”

  “I’m tellin’ you, Dave. Don’t do it.”

  “You don’t scare me, Max,” David replied. “You run along, because they’ll catch you sooner or later if you keep up this racket.”

  “You’re makin’ a big mistake!” Max warned, but David’s mind was made up. Later, when Max was a bigshot Philadelphia crook, David could say, “Once I took a hundred bucks from Volo, and he didn’t do a thing about it!”

  The Company officials were in a turmoil when the extra hundred dollars was reported They deduced what must have happened, so they put special locks on all the stiles. This stopped Volo for more than a month. Then one day he appeared all smiles and winked at David. “Thanks for helping me go straight!” he joked. “Because now I got something that nobody can stop!”

  He had found a crooked engineer in the company that made the turnstiles and together the two men had devised a magnet that would cause the ten’s digit to jump backward. Every time this was accomplished the cashier made an even dollar. Max paid the crooked engineer two hundred dollars for the magnets and installed six of them in the biggest rides. Now cashiers who had been stealing seventy dollars a week on tickets started to carry black lunch boxes like railroad laborers, for they were making so much money they had to have a way to smuggle it out.

  Ultimately the officials found a way to make their cogwheels magnetic proof, but before they did a clever cashier had whittled out for himself a piece of wood which could be substituted opposite the turnstile so that thin people could slip through without clicking the stile.

  In this way the never-ending fight went on. Precautionary measures which the Park introduced one week were circumvented the next. There was no job too high, none too low to attract the racketeers. Even the boy who unloaded mustard stole it in gallon lots, and the spotters had spotters who spotted on them, and Max Volo paid everyone he could contaminate a few dollars for special information.

  “Don’t worry about it!” Mr. Stone said. “Every business is run this way. You should see politics in Philadelphia!”

  “But why doesn’t the Park arrest Max Volo?” David insisted.

  “Because they know what kind of crook he is,” Mr. Stone replied. “They know his limits, you might say, so in self-protection they keep him on the payroll. There are good crooks and bad ones. We’re all lucky that Max is a good one.”

  “I don’t understand,” David confessed.

  “Why does Philadelphia have such rotten politics?” Mr. Stone countered. “Because the citizens can trust that particular bunch of thieves. Why don’t you read about the accidents here at Paradise? Because people don’t want to know anything that’s bad for business. It’s like the famous case up your way,” Mr. Stone continued. “What was his name? Crouthamel? Took over $200,000. Got away clean. Don’t tell me people didn’t know what was going on! But it’s easier to let things slide than to start a mess. Why, if you had whispered that this fellow Crouthamel was a crook … I’ll bet even the churches would have been on your neck. Bad for business, so you always hold onto crooks you know rather than flee to those you know not of.”

  “I don’t think Doylestown is like that,” David said. “On our basketball team …”

  Mr. Stone interrupted. “All people are suckers,” he said. “In crowds they’re even bigger suckers. Take this turnstile! They put it here to keep us honest cashiers honester. But it helps my business fifteen per cent.”

  “What do you mean?” David asked.

  “Well, it’s a trade secret, but I work my stile this way. When a fellow and a girl come up for a ride, I see to it that the girl gets in first. Then I make a false start with the stile. Like this. The girl moves forward and I stop her with a bang. The yokel slams into her bottom, and it feels real nice. The girl is maybe a little bit pleased herself and turns back to smile. Then I release twice, real fast, and the boob is so hot to chase his girl he don’t know if he gave me one dollar or fifty.”

  “Does it work very often?” David inquired professionally.

  “Like I said,” Mr. Stone reasoned. “You got to study people till you find what their weakness is. Then you give them a tiny shove in that direction. Every business is run that way. So I wouldn’t be surprised if maybe you couldn’t even give the President of the United States a nudge now and then.” He adjusted the hung coins in his change machine. “That is, if you knew how Mr. Harding was leaning.”

  In July Nora came back. David had no warning of her return, and he was shocked when he saw her walking along a gravel path toward the Coal Mine. “Nora!” he called, and the thin girl stopped in great embarrassment. She seemed taller, but then David noticed she was wearing high-heeled shoes. She was thinner and her eyes were much brighter. She moved with increased nervousness, but her slim body was more desirable than before, for it was set off by clothes that better fitted her enticing bosom and hips.

  “Hello, Dave,” she said dryly. David noticed that she was wearing more lipstick than before.

  “Aren’t you glad to see me?” he asked.

  “Sure I am,” she said without much enthusiasm. He took her by the arm, and she pulled away slightly. He drew her to him, and after another attempt to pull her arm loose, she pressed it against his body.

  “How was Denver?” he asked.

  “That’s some place,” she said without betraying her feelings.

  “That must be some place!” David repeated. “Anyway, it made you look lots better,” he lied. She walked with her shoulders more bent in toward her chest.

  “Denver’s all right,” she said.

  “I’ve been saving a lot of money for you,” David confided. He reached into his pocket for a roll of bills he had kept for this moment.

  “I don’t want it Dave!” she protested quickly. “I did all right in Denver.”

  “This is for you,” he insisted, thrusting the bills into her hand.

  “I don’t want it!” she cried, shoving them back. “I had a good job.”

  “You get many tips, waiting?” he asked, holding the bills until he could find a chance to make Nora take them.

  “So-so,” she replied.

  “You come back by bus?” he continued. There would never be enough time to talk with her about the winter. “We lost the championship this year,” he said. “Perkasie was too big.”

  “Were they?” Nora asked dully. Then quickly she gripped David by the arm and asked, “Did you fall in love with some nice girl? Does that Marcia … Is she your girl?”

  “She doesn’t go to my school,” he said. “She goes to New Hope,” he explained patiently. “Of course, lots of kids from New Hope sometimes come to Doylestown …”

  Nora held his arm warmly against her body. “Let’s sit by the lake,” she suggested. “I’m sorry your team lost this year.”

  David laughed nervously. “We have a Dutchman who always says, ’Well, you can’t win ’em all.’ ” He repeated the sentence and grinned at Nora.

  “Did you get my card?” she asked.

  “Yes! I guess I read it till the ink came off.” He had to fight his hands to keep them from clasping the knees that were pressed against his. “Nora, Nora!” he whispered. “I’ve thought about you. I’ve just been waiting until we could go somewhere. I …”

  “Ssssh!
” she protested, pressing her warm hand upon his lips. She looked away and started twice to speak, but her own words were too confused to share. Finally she said lamely, “Don’t talk that way, kid.”

  “But Nora!” he confessed, words welling up within him as if they were a penny a dozen, “I could see you in the palace. I could feel you sleeping against me. I wished I were in Denver so that I could buy you things you might need. But I didn’t have any money and I didn’t know your address. Let’s go right over to the palace?”

  The thin girl shivered, as if a wind had blown upon her that hot July day. “I can’t go to the palace,” she said abruptly. “I’m staying with Betty at the Coal Mine.”

  It took some moments for the import of these words to strike David and then he said, “But Betty isn’t your friend, Nora. I am. Why didn’t you ask me for help?”

  “I don’t need help!” the confused girl protested. “And I don’t need you! Now get the hell away from me!” She rose and started to hurry along the gravel paths. David ran after her, unashamed of the scene he made, a long-legged boy running after a very thin girl in high heels and a dress that was just a bit too tight.

  “Nora!” he cried, grabbing her by the arm. “If you’re in trouble, don’t go to Max Volo. Take this!” He jammed the bills into her dress pocket so forcefully as to tear the pocket.

  “Oh, look!” she mumbled. She stopped running and looked at her torn dress as if a terrible thing had happened. “Oh, David!” she repeated several times, her thin hand pressed to her lips and tears splashing upon her cheeks.

  Tenderly David led the bewildered girl away from the Coal Mine and back toward Venice. “No!” she objected, pulling away from him so violently that he was afraid she would begin to run again. He allowed her to choose the way and finally they paused beneath the lilac bushes under the Hurricane. Overhead the cars whizzed by, but they were not so dizzy with the dusk as David.