Black Evening Page 18

  Sure, we heard rumors, but we could never prove that the other team had taken it. We even heard that stealing the statue had been the rival coach's idea, a practical joke on his good old friend Coach Hayes.

  Scoop put all this in the school newspaper Monday morning. Don't ask me how he found out. He must have been a better reporter than any of us gave him credit for. He even had a drawing of the statue, so accurate that whoever had stolen it must have shown it to him. Or maybe Scoop was the one who stole it.

  Whoever. I feel partly responsible for the story he wrote. I must have made him curious when I went to see him and asked to look at the former issues of the paper. Maybe he checked and found out I'd handed him a line about a reunion game.

  For whatever reason, he seems to have gone through the same issues I did — because he came up with the same pattern I'd noticed. Two losing seasons, then all of a sudden an unbroken string of winners. Because of Mumbo Jumbo? He didn't come right out and link the statue with the team's success, but you could tell he was trying to raise the issue. In every winning season, we'd lost only one game, and our score was always zero. In our winning games, however, we'd always had a lopsided spread in our favor, but the other team had always somehow managed to gain a few points. Coincidence, Scoop asked, or was there a better explanation? For evidence, he quoted from an interview he'd had with Price. He didn't bother mentioning that he had no witness for what had happened in the locker room in the years when Price wasn't on the team. His whole story was like that, making guesses seem like facts. Then he talked about Friday's game and how in the years since Coach Hayes had been showing the statue this was the first time we'd lost two games in one season. Perhaps because somebody stole the statue Friday night? Scoop repeated the rumor that the rival team had been responsible for the theft. We'd probably never know the truth, he said. He'd already described the few tiny holes in the statue, "the size of a pin, one of them over the statue's heart." Now several paragraphs later, he ended the story by mourning the rival coach who'd died from a heart attack on his way home from the game.

  I wanted to get my hands on Scoop and strangle the little shit. All everybody in the lunch room talked about was how creepy it would be if the statue had really caused that coach's death, if someone had stuck a pin in Mumbo Jumbo's chest.

  I don't know if Coach Hayes wanted to strangle Scoop, but for sure he wanted Scoop expelled. Every kid at school soon heard about the argument Coach Hayes had in the principal's office, his shouts booming down the hall, "Irresponsible! Libelous!" Scoop was smart enough to stay home sick all week.

  By next Friday's game, though, Scoop was the least of our problems. The churches in town got worked up over Mumbo Jumbo. I read in the local paper how the school had received at least a dozen letters from local ministers, priests, and rabbis. One of the letters was quoted: "… superstition… unwholesome atmosphere… Satanism… counterproductive to education." My parents were so upset that they didn't want me to play in the game that night. I told them I couldn't let the other guys down, and as far as education was concerned, what about the B's and A's I'd been bringing home? If anything, the team had been good for me.

  But this superstition crap was beginning to get to me, maybe because I still felt bothered by the weird things I'd been seeing on the field, things that seemed to happen before they happened. Could the statue really… ? Or was Joey right, and I was only caught up in the speed and excitement of the game?

  Enough already, I thought. Mumbo Jumbo. That describes it all right. It's a lot of bullshit. I had no way to know, of course, that this would be the last time Coach Hayes was allowed to bring out the statue. I did know this — I was sick of touching that creepy thing, and if I needed it to make me a good football player, I didn't belong in the game.

  So after we dressed in the locker room and Coach Hayes insulted us and brought out the statue, I didn't touch it as the other guys did when we went out to play.

  My right arm still aches when the temperature drops below freezing. The cast stayed on for almost three months. I hadn't been on the field more than thirty seconds, my first play of the game. I got the ball and pulled my arm back to throw, but I couldn't find an opening. And I never saw the four guys who hit me, all together at once, really plowing into me, knocking my wind out, taking me down, my arm cocked behind my shoulder, all that weight on it. I fainted. But not before I heard the cracks.

  Saturday morning, Joey came to visit me in the hospital. He'd scored three touchdowns, he said. Through a swirl of pain, I tried to seem excited for him.

  "Did we win?" I asked.

  "Does the Pope live in Italy?" His grin dissolved. "About your arm…"

  He said he was really sorry. I told him thanks.

  He fidgeted. "How long are they going to keep you here?"

  "Till tomorrow afternoon."

  "Well, look, I'll visit you at home."

  I nodded, feeling sleepy from the painkiller a nurse had given me. Rebecca came in, and Joey left.

  ***

  He and I drifted farther apart after that. He had the team, and I had my broken arm. After the football season, he got a big role in a murder mystery the drama club put on, Ten Little Indians. Everybody said he was wonderful in it. I have to admit he was.

  And me? I guess I let things slide. I couldn't take notes or do class assignments with my writing arm in a cast. Rebecca helped as much as she could, but she had to do her own work, too. I started getting C's again. I also got back in the habit of going down to the Chicken Nest, with Rebecca this time instead of Joey. Those cherry Cokes and fries with ketchup can really put weight on you, especially if you're not exercising.

  The city newspaper reported on the meeting between the school board and Coach Hayes. They asked him to explain. He found the statue at a rummage sale, he said. Its owner claimed it was a fertility symbol that the Mayans or the Polynesians or whoever (the name of the tribe kept changing) had used in secret rituals. Coach Hayes said he hadn't believed that — not when its price was fifteen dollars. But he'd been looking for a gimmick, he said, something to work up team spirit, especially after two horrible seasons. A kind of mascot. If the team believed the statue brought them good luck, if the statue gave them confidence, so what? No harm was done. Besides, he said, he sometimes didn't bring the statue out — to teach the players to depend on themselves. The team had lost on those occasions, true, but as a consequence they'd tried harder next time. There was nothing mysterious about it. A dramatic gimmick, that's all. The point was, it had worked. The team had been winning championships ever since. School spirit had never been better.

  "What about the statue's name?" a school board member asked.

  "That came later. In the third winning season. One of the players made a joke. I forget what it was. Something about good luck and all that mumbo jumbo. The phrase sort of stuck."

  The school board heard him out. They held up the stacks of letters from angry parents and clergy. Their decision was final.

  To show that they were willing to compromise, they let him put the statue in the glass case with the trophies the team had won in the school's front lobby.

  ***

  The rest of the season was brutal. We lost every game. Sitting with Rebecca on the sidelines, trying to show enthusiasm for the team, I felt terrible for Joey. You could see how depressed he was, not being a winner.

  West High won the championship. Monday, the big news was that over the weekend somebody had smashed the glass in the trophy case and stolen Mumbo Jumbo. Nobody knew who had it, although all of us suspected Coach Hayes. He resigned that spring. I'm told he teaches now in upstate New York. I think about him often.

  Joey's grades were good enough that Yale accepted him on a scholarship. With my C's, I won't even tell you what college accepted me. I didn't go anyhow. Rebecca got pregnant that summer. In those days, abortions weren't easy to arrange. I'm not sure I'd have wanted her to have one anyhow. The child, a daughter, breaks my heart with love every time I look at
her. Rebecca and I got married that Halloween. Both sets of parents were good about it. We couldn't have made a go without their help.

  We have three children now, two girls and a boy. It's tough to pay the rent and feed and dress and give them everything we want to. Both Rebecca and I have jobs. She's a secretary at our high school. I work at the chemical plant in town.

  And Joey? You know him as Joseph "Footwork" Summers. He played receiver for Yale and was picked up by the NFL. You saw him play twice in the Superbowl. For sure, you saw him in plenty of beer commercials. The one where he beats up five motorcycle guys, then walks to the bar and demands a beer is famous.

  "What kind?" the bartender asks. "What those guys were drinking?"

  And Joey says, "That stuff's for losers. When I say I want a beer, I mean the best."

  And you know what brand he means. The commercial got him into the movies. I saw DEAD HEAT last week and loved it. The action was great. His acting gets better and better.

  But a part of me…

  I'll try to explain. Three years ago, Joey came back to town to see his folks. Imagine how surprised I was when he called me up. I mean he hadn't exactly been keeping in touch. He asked me over to his parents' house for a beer, he really drinks the brand he advertises, and while I was there, he took me up to his old bedroom. A lot of good memories. He gestured toward his battered dresser. I was so busy looking at him (hell, he's a movie star, after all) that I didn't know what he meant at first.

  Then I really looked.

  And there it was. In his open suitcase. Mumbo Jumbo. As ugly and shitty and creepy as ever. I felt spooked the way I'd used to.

  And abruptly realized. "No. You don't mean… You're the one who stole it?"

  He just grinned.

  "But I thought it was Coach Hayes. I thought…"

  He shook his head. "No, me."

  My stomach felt hollow. I don't remember what we talked about after that. To tell you the truth, the conversation was kind of awkward. I finished my beer and went home. And Joey returned to Hollywood.

  But this is what I think. The other night, my son and I were watching a movie on television. David Copperfield. I never watch that kind of stuff, but my son had a book report due, and he hadn't read the book, so he was cheating, sort of, watching the movie. And I was helping him.

  At the end, after David Copperfield becomes a success and all his friends have turned out losers, there's a part in this movie where you hear what he's thinking. "It isn't enough to have the luck," he says. "Or the talent. You've got to have the character."

  Maybe so. But I keep thinking about Mumbo Jumbo and how, when I didn't touch the statue, I got my arm broken in the game. That was a turning point. If I'd stayed on the team and kept my grades up, could I have gone to Yale like Joey? Could I have been a winner too?

  I keep thinking about Coach Hayes and his winning streak. Was that streak caused by the statue? I can't believe it.

  But…

  I remember Joey — the movie star — pointing at the statue he stole from the glass case in the school's front lobby. In his senior year. And everything kept getting better for him after that.

  Then I think about myself. I love my kids and my wife.

  But I felt so tired tonight when I got home from work… The bills… My son needs braces on his teeth, and…

  Maybe Joey understood. Maybe David Copperfield was wrong.

  Maybe it doesn't take talent. Or character.

  Maybe all it takes is Mumbo Jumbo.

  The Road to Damascus

  « ^ »

  In my introduction to this collection, I told you about Philip Klass and the influence he had on my fiction. I also mentioned a second writer who made a difference. In fact, if not for him, I would never have become a writer at all. Stirling Silliphant.

  A little background. Earlier, I explained that my father died in World War II and that my mother, unable to work and simultaneously look after me, put me in an orphanage when I was around four. Part of me wonders if the woman who finally came to get me was in fact the woman who had left me. But let's assume she was. Still unable to watch me at home while earning a living, she arranged for me to live on a Mennonite farm. There, my confusion about where I belonged intensified. Seasons passed. Every Friday, I was put on a bus into town where my mother waited for me at the terminal. Every Sunday, I got on a bus to go back to the farm. When a child boarding on a different farm was killed by a car as he walked along the highway, my mother decided to keep me with her.

  By now, she had remarried — to give me a father, she later said. But I was desperate for the affection of a male authority figure, and her new husband wasn't prepared to fill the role. He looked visibly uncomfortable if I called him "Father." In the years that followed, I thought of him as a stranger. The marriage itself wasn't a success. My mother and my stepfather argued so much that my memories of my youth are mostly about fear. Many nights, the arguments were so loud that I worried about my safety. Imitating scenes in movies, I stuffed pillows under my blankets in my bed, making them look as if I slept there. Then I crawled under my bed and dozed fitfully in what I hoped was a protected space.

  We lived above a bar and later a hamburger joint. There wasn't enough money for a television or a phone. For entertainment on a Saturday night, I listened to Gunsmoke and Tarzan on the radio while watching drunks fight in the alley below me. On one occasion, my mother went out to use the pay phone in the alley, only to have a stray bullet shatter the booth's glass.

  But as I grew older, I discovered movies. In those days, theatres were palaces, and audiences didn't jabber endlessly. To earn the money to see a film, I would set up pins in bowling alleys. Or if I couldn't get the work, I would stand at a crowded bus stop and pretend that I'd lost my bus fare. Someone was always kind enough to give me the fifteen cents, which I immediately spent getting into a movie theater.

  And there I sat, hour after hour, in the silvery darkness, watching film after film (they had double features in those days), sometimes staying to see the movies twice. It didn't matter to me what kind of movies they were, although I confess I wasn't crazy about the ones with a lot of kissing. What did matter was that I was distracted from reality.

  In retrospect, it seems logical that I would have wanted to become a storyteller, to distract others from their reality. But at the time, I was too confused to know what I wanted. I ran with a street gang. I treated grade school as an interruption of my spare time. High school was a little better. Our finances improved. We moved to a small house in the suburbs. The family arguments were less. Still, by the time I entered grade eleven, I was going nowhere.

  That fall of 1960, with little interest in anything except pool halls and eight hours of television a day, I found myself (like a minor-league Saul on his way to Damascus) struck by a bolt of light that changed my life. Even now, I can be specific about the time and date — 8:30 p.m., Friday, October 7. The light was from my television and the first episode of a series called Route 66.

  The show was about two young men who, in Jack Kerouac fashion, drove a Corvette across the United States in search of America and themselves. One of them was Tod, a rich kid from New York whose father had recently died, leaving such massive debts that, when the creditors finished, the only thing left was Tod's sports car. His partner, Buz, was a tough street kid from Hell's Kitchen, who had worked for Tod's father on the New York docks and had become friends with Tod. Because Route 66 was then the principal highway across the United States, its name was perfect as a title for the series. And because the series was as much about America as it was about Tod and Buz, the producers decided to film each episode on the locations that the characters were supposed to be visiting, although many were far from Route 66: Boston, Philadelphia, Biloxi, Santa Fe, Oregon City…

  The first episode, "Black November," involved a small Southern town haunted by a grisly secret from years earlier — the ax murder of a German prisoner-of-war and the minister who tried to protect him. I
'd never seen a story like it, not merely the mystery, suspense, and action (a scene involving a power saw remains vivid in my mind) but the appeal of the characters and the reality conveyed by the writing. I discovered that I was waiting eagerly for Friday night to come around again — and the next Friday night — and the next. There was something about the way the characters talked, the emotions they expressed, the values they believed in, that affected me deeply and woke my mind.

  For the first time in my life, I began to study credits. Who on earth was responsible for this wonderful experience? One episode would be about shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico, with a plot that paralleled Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Another would be about street gangs in Los Angeles, with poetical dialogue amid the squalor. Still another would be about cropdusting in Phoenix, with tragic overtones of Greek myth. Back then, I didn't know anything about Sartre or existentialism or the philosophy of the Beat generation. But even if I couldn't put a name to what I was experiencing, it made me feel emotionally and intellectually alive. Martin Milner and George Maharis were the stars. Still, despite their considerable acting talents, I felt uncharacteristically attracted to the minds behind the scenes, to the creative forces that invented the dramatic situations and put the words (sometimes spellbinding speeches that lasted five minutes) in the actors' mouths. Herbert B. Leonard was the producer. Sam Manners was the production chief. Okay. But still… Then I realized that one other name appeared prominently in the credits of almost every episode. Stirling Silliphant. Writer. My, my. A new thought.

  That grade-eleven student, who formerly had no ambition whatsoever, managed to find the address of Screen Gems, the company listed at the end of the credits. Unable to type, I sent a handwritten letter ("scrawled" would be more accurate) to Stirling Silliphant and asked how I could learn to do the wonderful things that he was doing. One week later (I still recall my amazement), I received an answer from him — two densely typed pages that began with an apology for having taken so long to get back to me. He'd have written to me sooner, he explained, but when my letter arrived, he'd been out at sea in a boat. He revealed no secrets and indeed refused to look at anything I might write (partly because of my inexperience and partly for legal reasons), but he did tell me this. The way to be a writer is to write and write and write and…