“Big time,” Miranda said.
“I am at the top of my game,” Raylynn said.
“That might be a short climb,” I said.
“Proof is in the pudding,” Gay said. Then: “Sorry, that just popped out. I’m not even really sure what that means. My mother says it.”
“It means that you can talk a good pudding,” Raylynn said, “but that the proof is in the pudding itself.”
“So I’m a pudding now,” I said.
“No,” Miranda said. “You’re our jammer.”
(36)
The girls and Elbert piled into the van, and me and Herb rode in his car. We followed the van. It came to the skating rink. Or what used to be the skating rink. It was closed as of recent.
When we got out of the van and car, the girls all had their skates thrown over their shoulders. I had mine with me. Before we left I took them off and put on my tennis shoes. I said, “Why here?”
“It’s a skating rink, isn’t it,” Elbert said, then looked at me in a nervous way. I wasn’t sure how mad I still was at him. Truth was I kind of missed him being out there in the yard in his lawn chair.
“This isn’t some kind of criminal thing,” I said. “I mean, we’re not breaking into this place on your word, and later we’re all in the Big House, or busting rocks while wearing striped suits.”
“Bob got permission for us,” Raylynn said, as we moved toward the door. “He knew somebody that knew somebody.
Elbert took out a key and unlocked the door to the rink. Inside the place smelled of dust, and the dust moved in the air like insects. There was another smell too. One I can’t describe. But it smelled like when I was younger and learning to skate here. It smelled like when my Dad brought me here and held me up while I skated. It smelled like the times Raylynn and I had skated here together, and it smelled like the time we got in a fist fight over cotton candy. I won the fight. But the pink wisp of candy in a cone fell on the floor and neither one of us ate it. Dad refused to buy us another.
Inside there was a bench row where you could sit and put on your skates. The girls sat and put on their skates. I put on mine too.
Herb said, “Don’t overdo that ankle.”
Elbert put on his skates. There was a little bar of a door that led to the rink. He pushed it back and went out on his skates and started skating. He went forward awhile, then in reverse. I figured long as he didn’t try to jump something backwards, he was okay.
The girls went out on their skates. I sat where I was, tying mine into place.
“You just wait here,” Raylynn said. “Let us show you what we got.”
She nearly slipped down going through the gate, but I pretended not to notice.
When she and the other girls were out on the rink, they started skating, all of them very fast. They did this for awhile, and then they banded together and started to skate. They were really moving, and they were moving well.
“Did you know about all this all the time, Herb?”
“No,” he said. “I found out about it lately.”
“But you’re in on this?”
“You started something you need to finish. I don’t want to meddle, but from what you’ve told me, and forgive me for saying it, the big problem with your family is no one gets the chance to finish something, or they chose not to finish it. You finish this, you can finish other things.”
“That rich boy advice?” I said.
His face twisted, and I was sorry I had said it. My mouth sometimes writes checks it hates to cash.
“Before you jump on me, I’m using your own concerns to say if you finish this, you can finish other things. A high school education. Going to college. And while I’m catching flak from you, I’m going to throw this out there too. Elbert might be a whole lot more all right than you give him credit for. Come to think of, you don’t give anyone credit for much. Not even yourself.”
“All right,” I said, “that’s going to hold me today as far as philosophy goes.”
I got up and cautiously moved across the wooden floor to the gate.
“Break a leg,” Herb said.
I put my hand on the gate and turned to look at Herbert. “I already have a sprained ankle, thank you very much,” I said.
“It’s a theater term for do well,” he said.
“This isn’t the theater,” I said.
“All right, then,” he said. “Skate pretty.”
I grinned at him and went through the gate and onto the rink. As soon as I started to roll out there, I felt like a different person, way I had felt earlier. I didn’t feel any pain in my ankle. I wasn’t even aware of my legs. They worked without me thinking about it. On wheels I was not of this earth.
I turned and skated backwards the way Elbert had, the way he had taught me. I skated past him, going the opposite direction. He smiled at me. I smiled back.
(37)
Bob wanted his skaters to win. I think it wasn’t just because he liked roller derby. I think he saw it as advertisement. He said he was going to get us shirts that said DAIRY BOB on the back. We told him no. We wanted them to say FENDER LIZARDS.
“All right,” Bob said. We were all inside the Dairy Bob, sitting in customer booths, except Bob, who was leaning on the counter. “I can live with that, but somehow we have to tie it into the Dairy Bob. I’m going to have to work for you girls, me and the manager, which, face it, is my cousin and not that good a worker, then I’ve got to get some kind of advertisement.”
“We’ll figure something out,” Raylynn said.
We talked about it some more, and then Elbert took us to the rink and we trained. Afterwards, we went to the Dairy Bob and did short shifts, went home to dinner and rested up, started all over the next day.
We usually trained mornings. Sometimes all of the girls couldn’t be there, but mostly we were all together. After a time, Elbert quit concentrating on how to skate, and started concentrating on the game of roller derby itself. He started to act and sound like a coach. He even got himself a whistle on a chain to wear around his neck. He wore shorts and tennis shoes when he didn’t have on his skates.
One morning he had us all out on the rink in our skates. He said, “Okay, you’re skating good. All of you. Now you need to really know how to play the game. What I’m going to do is I’m going to assign positions. Dot, we all know you’re our jammer.”
“Is there a reason you chose me for that job?” I said.
“Yes,” Miranda said, “you beat a guy up with a board.”
“That’s it?” I said.
“It was the only thing we could think up as a requirement,” Sue said. “We thought maybe dolling down the catwalk, but that would have been Gay. It didn’t seem to go with roller derby. We needed someone with Neanderthal blood.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’ve had your fun. I’m the jammer.”
“Good,” Elbert said. “Now everyone else is a blocker. We don’t have backup, so if one of you gets a leg broke or dies, that just leaves four, and so on. I figure we get down to three we have to forfeit. It also makes it hard to train, because we don’t have a team to play against. I’ll try and figure something for that in the next day or two. Way we’ll work it for now is three of you will be the opposing team, and two of you will be our team.”
“That sucks,” Sue said.
“It does,” Elbert said, “but there you have it. Okay, we can do this. I’ll also be on a team. So we got three and three. I’ll mainly just show you the ropes as I go. I won’t be hitting.”
“Hitting?” Gay said.
“There’s some contact,” Elbert said.
“How much contact?” Gay said.
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” Elbert said.
So we ran plays. My job was pretty simple. I was the jammer. I ran against the other team’s jammer. Jammers were put in the back. It was simply a game of the jammer passing the other team’s players without being stopped, and your players keeping them from stopping you.
We
played tag at first, because that’s the way Elbert showed us. It was polite. We tagged each other as we passed by patting the other girls on the shoulder as we went. After awhile Elbert had us try to skate in such a way we couldn’t be tagged.
Then he explained we could use our hips and shoulders to bump our opponents out of the way. We did that for awhile. Then he told us the other team might do a little more than that.
He was explaining all this as he skated with us.
Gay squealed her skates to a stop when he said that part about what the other team might do. She said, “How much are they going to hit?”
“Well, they might use their elbows,” he said. “They’re not supposed to do that in a really bad way, but they will. So you have to do it back.”
“Are we talking to the face?” Gay said.
“They could get disqualified for that,” Elbert said.
“But they might do it anyway?” Gay asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“We could get hurt,” Gay said.
“Yes, you could,” Elbert said. “So you have to skate a lot faster and you have to hit a lot harder. Mostly I’d advise skating faster and using avoidance maneuvers.”
“Is it too late to back out?” Gay said.
“We’re not going to,” Raylynn said. “Or at least I’m not.”
“One for one,” I said, “and one for all.”
I stuck out my hand.
“What’s that mean?” Gay said.
“It means we’re all on the same side, and that we’re all for each other,” Raylynn said. She put her hand on top of mine.
Then Sue and Miranda put theirs on the pile.
Gay said, “My Mama says y’all are bad influences.”
“She may be right,” I said.
Gay chewed her bottom lip a moment, then moved forward and placed her hand on top. Her nails were perfect.
Elbert placed his on top of ours.
“One for one,” he said, and then we all said, “and one for all.”
(38)
Next day we went to the skating rink. Elbert was already there with his skates on and a clown costume. There were a number of cub scouts in their uniforms with skates on. I guess they were nine or ten. There was a fat man in a scout uniform with a cap that fit him the way a thimble would fit a bear’s head. He looked nervous. He didn’t have on skates.
Elbert skated over to me. “I talked the local Cub Scout Master into having his kids come skate for fun, and to be kind of your opponents.”
“They’re children,” Raylynn said.
“That will make you look better,” Elbert said. “Besides, it’s what we got.”
“Why are you wearing a clown suit,” I asked.
“I don’t get many chances to wear it,” he said. “The Cub Scouts love it.”
I looked out at them. They didn’t seem all that loving. In fact, for nine and ten year olds they looked kind of surly.
“It’s going to be hard to take orders from a clown with a whistle,” I said.
“You’ll manage,” he said.
Way it worked was Elbert had the Scouts skate, we tried to pass between them, and they tried to get in front of us. Every time they blocked us or kept me from passing one of them, Elbert would mark on a wash-and erase board he was carrying. Their prize at the end of the day was drinks, fries and hamburgers supplied by the Dairy Bob.
This was our training.
It was kind of like learning to ride broncos by using a stick horse. By the middle of the day there were a lot of marks on that board against us, but by the end of the day, we were doing better.
Finished up, I went home and wrote out a couple of invitations.
One was to High Top. It read:
Miss High Top. I hope you remember me. My name is Dot. I helped take care of the dogs because I was briefly a criminal. I also came out and took care of them just because I wanted to. But that’s not what this note is about. I’m skating in a roller derby, and I’d like to invite you to come see me. I won’t cry if you don’t come, but I’ll be sad a little, and inwardly I will be crushed and never be quite the same again. It would be great if you could be there. The dogs are invited, but I think it best they don’t come. I don’t think there are enough seats. If I don’t get killed at the derby, then maybe you could start helping me study for the GED like you offered.
I put the date and location on it, sealed it up and put a stamp on it. I wrote another.
Mr. Sherman: You may remember me because I saw you just the other day. I am your daughter. You have two more children and a wife you need to divorce. I am skating in a roller derby. I am a jammer. I guess I’m inviting you to come see me. You don’t need to, and if you do, you don’t need to make anything out of it. But I think I should invite you because that’s what daughters do. If you plan to smoke, please buy smokes before you come, as I know how easy it is for you to get lost if you go shopping. As an added note, Bonnie and your new child are not invited. I’m not ready for that yet. Here’s a tip I thought I’d provide, because it’s obvious you don’t know it. Don’t try and mow wet grass. It bunches up on the mower blade and causes the thing to jam up.
I gave him the time and location.
I carried both letters out to the mailbox and put up the flag. I went in the house, hung around awhile, and considered removing the letter to my dad. By the time I decided that’s what I was going to do, the mail lady had come and the mail was gone.
(39)
Day before the derby, me and Elbert went to the carnival. It was set up and was already doing business. It was pretty small and had a desperate feel about it. We went over and found the guy who owned it. He was a big fellow that had a trailer on the lot where the carnival was. It was a little trailer, fastened to the back of a large, blue truck with big tires.
We knocked on the trailer door. A man in a light blue cowboy suit, kind of thing with upside down triangles stitched above the pockets, opened the door. He was also wearing a big white cowboy hat, and boots that had toes so thin and long and sharp, he could have kicked a cockroach to death in the corner of a room. He had a belly like a watermelon under his shirt.
“Yeah,” he said.
Elbert stuck out his hand. “Elbert.”
The cowboy looked at Elbert’s hand, took it as if he might be shaking the tail of a mackerel.
“What can I do for you?” the cowboy said.
“You’re Mr. Wilkin?”
“Yeah.”
“We want to sign up for the roller derby.”
“Ah,” said Wilkin. “Come inside.”
It was small inside, but it was well arranged. There was a table that fastened to the wall and could be pushed up and locked into place. Mr. Wilkin unfastened it and lowered it. There was a booth on one side of it. He had a stool too. I could see through an open door at the back that there was a bed. There were carnival posters on the wall.
“Sit down right there,” he said. He looked at me. “This one of your roller girls?”
“Yes,” said Elbert. “She’s our jammer.”
“Looks a little puny,” he said.
“She’ll stand up to it all right,” Elbert said.
“Well,” said Mr. Wilkin, “I got a contract here. Way it works, your team skates against ours, we’ll give them five thousand dollars if they win.”
“The poster says ten,” Elbert said.
“Yeah, well, I exaggerated because they’re hardly any towns that have roller derby teams.”
“It says ten,” Elbert said, “and we want ten.”
“I’m giving five,” Mr. Wilkin said.
“Here’s the thing,” Elbert said. “The sheriff in this town is a good friend of mine. What you’re offering on your poster is false advertising. You look like a man might have spent some time in jail, so do you want to spend more?”
This was going ugly quick. And Elbert was lying through his teeth, though he might be able to recognize jail birds from personal experience.
 
; “I could just cancel the whole event,” Mr. Wilkin said. “Say one of the girls got a sprained ankle. Maybe it’s going around.”
“A sprained ankle?” I said.
“Make it measles then,” Mr. Wilkin said.
“I could also spread around you chickened out of the challenge, and that sheriff I know might not mind closing you down for some kind of violation. I thought one of those wires grounding the tilt-a-whirl looked a little loose.”
“Hasn’t broken in months,” Mr. Wilkin said.
“Look,” Elbert said. “We come here to sign up, like your poster says. That’s it. Play fair.”
“Life ain’t fair,” Mr. Wilkin said.
“Today it can be,” Elbert said.
Mr. Wilkin pursed his lips, placed his hands on his watermelon belly. “All right,” he said. “Tell you what. We normally have our own team that plays the other. That way we always got a challenger. We sometimes say they’re from the town next to the one where we are, just to make things a little more local. Give the rubes someone to root for, then our team wins.”
“Because it’s rigged,” Elbert said.
“Because it’s a game, not a sport; it’s like professional wrestling. But the thing is I don’t have a spare team anymore. This roller derby thing, it’s not the big event it used to be. So, if you want to be the hometown team, that’s all right, but if you’re the hometown team, how about you play the best you can, and then throw it a little?”
“Fake a loss?” Elbert said.
“That’s right,” Mr. Wilkin said.
“You fake a loss, I give you two thousand dollars for your team,” Mr. Wilkin said. “And I’ll throw in fifty dollars for you personally as manager, and free tickets for everyone to the carnival. That way you all make some money, and I’m not out so much. Course, if you go straight, play us and lose, well, you get nothing.”
“But if we win?” I said.
“You won’t,” he said. “I got the best team there is.”