The Facts of Life and The Dancer - Patrick Sean Lee (books to read fiction .TXT) 📗

I healed rapidly, that is to say my insides rebounded back to a state of something near to normal in no time at all. Within a day the craving for water diminished, and I was able to see clearly again, although it was through eyes belonging more to the face of Petey, the dog in The Little Rascals. My consumption of food at the dinner table began to rival that of Pop’s, too. Defying all logic, he became a regular Cicero for some strange reason after the melee next door, expounding on a variety of subjects as various as the stars in our galaxy. I had no idea he was such a Renaissance man.
“You know, Skippy,” he ventured one evening during a commercial as we sat in the living room watching TV. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about for some time, now.” He had thirty seconds before Lawrence Welk came back on.
“What is it, Pop?”
“Well, it’s this business of where baby’s come from. You might have heard by now that storks don’t really drop them down chimneys.”
“I figured as much. Seeing as how we don’t have a fireplace, that is. I mean, I’d never have gotten here…”
“Yes, true.” He stood up and began to pace back and forth across the floor like Sister Mary Constance—“the runner”, we called her, in Math class at school. Unlike that kindly nun, who’d probably never even heard the word sex, Pop looked peculiarly nervous, anticipating how to call forth the precise words to describe my conception. It wasn’t a simple matter like multiplying or dividing twenty digit-long numbers, or finding the square root of a gazillion and three, and somehow I knew he was going to botch the effort. But once he’d opened the door and stepped into the room, not even the king of polka music could pull him back out. Or rescue him. He was on his own.
“Ahem,” he said taking a deep breath and not daring to look at me, “you see, it begins like this…”

Lawrence bid the TV audience goodnight half an hour later in a burst of phony champagne bubbles, and poor old Pop was still stammering, doing his best to paint an oral picture of how I’d gotten made. His version was considerably different than Jimmy’s, but in essence their renditions matched up pretty well. I sat through the entire uncomfortable episode without saying a word, but when it was over, I spoke.
“Yes, Pop, I know all that. Jimmy already told me, and besides, my bedroom is right below yours and Mom’s.”
Which was greater, his embarrassment at having done what no father probably relishes doing, or his shock at my having actually heard their bedsprings singing away? Well, I couldn’t be sure, but he turned redder than Mom had when I busted in on them a few weeks back. He sat down again, and we watched Gunsmoke together in complete silence.

Pop schooled me in other areas, too, none as difficult for him as sex education, however. Basketball was one of them.
Somehow he’d squeezed enough money out of the pot to buy a backboard and rim a day or two after the sex thing, and although we had no concrete in the backyard, save the crumbling sidewalks, he mounted it onto the gable end of the garage anyway. We were going to play “lawn basketball”.
“They play tennis in England on grass, you know,” he informed me as he tried to bounce the ball on the moon-like surface below his feet. “Tennis is a much faster game, too. Go fetch that ball, would ya’ Skippy?”
I ran after the ball wondering how the Brits could possibly manage playing any real games over there. It was no wonder they’d had to call us up to bail them out of the last war.
“Thanks, son. Now, the idea is to fake the person guarding you—here, you stand over there between me and the basket—the idea is to do this.” He dribbled the ball with both hands, as it was impossible for him to control it with one, or make it to go straight up and down like it did for the Harlem Globetrotters. Between bounces, he’d glance up at me. I crouched forward a little, the way I’d seen Bob Cousy do it many times, and I sneered at him just a little for effect. Suddenly he stopped dribbling, shifted left, then right, and then lit out around me as though I’d been completely fooled by his brilliant deception. I let him go by. One more pitiful dribble and then he was airborne. The artist of the court on wings. While in the air, both hands lifting the ball upward with something less than gracefulness, his eyes became fixed on the hoop like a hawk’s on a chicken, and the reality of the building standing less than a foot away disappeared entirely to his painful detriment. He hit the tin wall of the garage with a mighty crash.
I rushed to his prostrate figure, wishing I’d blocked him, or at least screamed, “Look out!”. He lay there dazed for a minute, then rolled over and looked up at me with a smile.
“Guess we’ll have to buy a big pole to mount that thing on instead, eh, Skippy?”
“I dunno’, Pop. Think of the damage you could do to yourself running into solid steel.”
“Yes, you’re probably right.”
He asked me to help him to his feet, and then had me fetch the ball once again. “You stay out here and practice dribbling and faking. I think I’ll go lie down for a bit, okay, Skippy?”
“Sure, Pop.”
He limped into the house. I looked at the rutted ground again, and then I tossed the ball into the bushes next to the fence and went next door to see what Jimmy was up to.
I found him in his bedroom. He was still a mess. Inky had nearly succeeded in making his face a candidate for the plastic surgeon’s knife. The bandages and stitches had all been removed, but he was still black and blue from ear to ear, and his nose, I swear, had been repositioned about an inch to the left. It’d been flattened, too, so that he looked like a third-rate boxer, long overdue for retirement.
It was a Tuesday, a holiday, mid-morning, and the only thing worth a damn to watch on TV was…there was nothing worth a damn on TV at that time of day. So, he was amusing himself by throwing darts at a rough sketch of Inky pinned on the wall between his bed and dresser. He turned to greet me when I walked through the open door, and smiled, showing off a missing incisor, one of Inky’s last gifts to him before my dad arrived. He pointed at it with his free hand.
“The dentist Mother took me to said it wouldn’t grow back. After I get older he can put a fake one in, though. Till then, every time I look in the mirror I’ll be reminded of how that bastard an’ his brother snuck up on me and Mick. Good thing you went home when ya’ did.”
I laughed. “I got my part of it, too, you know.”
Jimmy turned without bothering to answer and threw the dart. He’d been practicing, I could see. It stuck in the picture of Inky, right in the mouth alongside a hundred or so other holes.
“What do you think we oughta’ do?” I asked as he walked across the room to retrieve the dart.
“’Bout what?”
“About getting our butts kicked every time we leave the yard.”
“I dunno’ about you, but I’m gonna’ start carryin’ a knife.” He pointed to the end of his bed. I have no idea where he found it, but there on the top of the covers lay a two foot-long sword…a machete. I wondered how he thought he’d be able to conceal something that big, or worse, how he thought he could possibly use it in a fight with Inky or Butch. It hit me that the missing tooth and scarred face, the perforated picture of Inky on the wall—all of it pointed to a real hatred for the older kid up the street. He meant to kill him next time they met.
“I don’t think it’d be a good idea to carry that thing around,” I said.
“I don’t think it’d be a good idea to let him kick my ass ever again,” he replied, pitching the dart at Inky once again. “Hey, you hear from Mick lately?”
“Not since he phoned last week.”
“Oh. Me neither. Wonder how he’s doin’? Butch wailed on him pretty good, but somehow he musta’ blocked most of the punches and kicks. I din’t see much blood on his face after we got up.”
“Me neither, but everything was such a mess. All I really remember seeing was you all beat…you know, with all the blood on your face.” I wished I hadn’t said that. I knew that even though Jimmy was not in Inky’s class in a street brawl, he wasn’t a coward when he was cornered in a fair fight. I’m certain the words I’d chosen had only added another wound.
“Skip! Skippy!” The shrill voice of my mom coming through the open window broke the uncomfortable silence after my remark. I took the opportunity to exit the conversation with Jimmy, and ran to the window.
“Yeah, Mom, what is it?”
“Could ya’ come home? I need to send ya’ down to the drugstore.”
“Sure, Mom. Be right there.” I turned and saw Jimmy looking down at the machete lying on the end of the bed, tapping the darts in his hand on the other opened palm. “Gotta’ go. I’ll check