You can’t really stay sore at a guy you’ve known all your life, especially
if he lives right around the corner and goes to the same school. Anyhow,
one hot Saturday morning Nick turns up at my house as if nothing had ever
happened and says do I want to go swimming, because the Twenty-third
Street pool’s open weekends now.
After that we go back to playing ball on the street in the evenings and
swimming sometimes on weekends. One Saturday his mother tells me he went
to Coney Island. He didn’t ask me to go along, which is just as well,
because I wouldn’t have. I don’t hang around his house after school much
anymore, either. School lets out, and there’s the Fourth of July weekend,
when we go up to Connecticut, and pretty soon after that Nick goes off to
a camp his church runs. Pop asks me if I want to go to a camp a few weeks,
but I don’t. Life is pretty slow at home, but I don’t feel like all that
organization.
I think Tom must have forgotten about me and found a gang his own age when
I get a postcard from him: “Dear Dave, The guy I work for is a creep, and
all the guys who buy gas from him are creeps, so it’s great to be alive in
Beautiful Brooklyn! Wish you were here, but you’re lucky you’re not. Best,
Tom.”
It’s hard to figure what he means when he says a thing. However, I got
nothing to do, so I might as well go see. He said he was going to work in
a filling station on the Belt Parkway, and there can’t be a million of
them.
I don’t say anything too exact to Mom about where I’m going, because she
gets worried about me going too far, and besides I don’t really know where
I’m going.
Brooklyn, what a layout. It’s not like Manhattan, which runs pretty
regularly north and south, with decent square blocks. You could lose a
million friends in Brooklyn, with the streets all running in circles and
angles, and the people all giving you cockeyed directions. What with no
bikes allowed on parkways, and skirting around crumby looking
neighborhoods, it takes me at least a week of expeditions to find the
right part of the Belt Parkway to start checking the filling stations.
I wheel my bike across the parkway, but even so some cop yells at me.
You’d think a cop could find a crime to get busy with.
On a real sticky day in July I wheel across to a station at Thirty-fourth
Street, and nobody yells at me, and I go over to the air pump and fiddle
with my tires. A car pulls out after it gets gas, and there’s Tom.
“Hi!” I say.
Tom half frowns and quick looks over his shoulder to see if his boss is
around, I guess, and then comes over to the air pump.
“How’d you get way out here?” he says.
“On the bike. I got your postcard, and I figured I could find the filling
station.”
He relaxes and grins. I feel better. He says, “You’re a crazy kid. How’s
Cat?”
But just then the boss has to come steaming up. “What d’ya want, kid? No
bikes allowed on the parkway.”
I start to say I’m just getting air, but Tom speaks up. “It’s all right. I
know him.”
“Yeah? I told you, keep kids out of here!” The guy manages to suggest that
kids Tom knows are probably worse than any other kind. He motions me off
like a stray dog. I don’t want to get Tom in any trouble, so I get going.
At the edge of the parkway I wave. “So long. Write me another postcard.”
Tom raises a hand briefly, but his face looks closed, like nothing was
going to get in or out.
I pedal slowly and hotly back through the tangle of Brooklyn and figure,
well, that’s a week’s research wasted. I still don’t know where Tom lives,
so I don’t know how I can get a hold of him again. Anyway, how do I know
he wants to be bothered with me? He looked pretty fed up with everything.
So long as I got nothing else to do, the next week I figure I’ll get
public-spirited at home: I paint the kitchen for Mom, which isn’t so bad,
but moving all those silly dishes and pots and scrumy little spice cans
can drive you wild. I only break one good vase and a bottle of salad oil.
Salad oil and broken glass are great. In the afternoons I go to the
swimming pool and learn to do a jackknife and a backflip, so Pop will
think I am growing up to be a Real American Boy. Also, you practically
have to learn to dive so you can use the diving pool, because the swimming
pool is so jam-packed with screaming sardines you can’t move in it.
Evenings Cat and I play records, or we go to see Aunt Kate and drink iced
tea. One weekend my real aunt comes to visit and sleeps in my room, so I
go to stay with Aunt Kate, and I pretty near turn into cottage cheese.
I’ve about settled into this dull routine when Mom surprises me by handing
me a postcard one morning. It’s from Tom: “Day off next Tuesday. If you
feel like it, meet me near the aquarium at Coney Island about nine in the
morning, before it’s crowded.”
So that week drags by till Tuesday, and there I am at Coney Island bright
and early. Tom is easy enough to find, pacing up and down the boardwalk
like a tiger. We say “Hi” and so forth, and I’m all ready to take a run
for the water, but he keeps snapping his fingers and looking up and down
the boardwalk.
Finally he says, “There’s a girl I used to know pretty well. I didn’t see
her for a while till last week, and we got in an argument, and I guess
she’s mad. I wrote and asked her to come swimming today, but maybe she’s
not coming.”
I figure it out that I’m there as insurance against the girl not showing
up, but I don’t mind. Anyhow, she does show up. It can’t have been too
much of an argument they had, because she acts pretty friendly.
Tom introduces us. Her name is Hilda and a last name that’d be hard to
spell—Swedish maybe—and she’s got a wide, laughing kind of mouth and a big
coil of yellow hair in a bun on top of her head, and a mighty good figure.
She asks me where I ran into Tom, and we tell her all about Cat and the
cellar at Number Forty-six, and I tell them both about my Ivy-League
haircut, which I had never explained to anyone before. They get a laugh
out of that, and then she asks him about the filling-station job, and he
says it stinks.
I figure they could get along without me for a while, so I go for a swim
and wander down the beach a ways and eat a hot dog and swim some more.
When I come back, I see Tom and Hilda just coming out of the water, so I
join them. Hilda says, “Come have a coke. Tom says he’s got to try
swimming to France just once more.”
I don’t know just what she means, but we go get cokes and come back and
stretch out in the sun. She asks me do I want a smoke, and I say No. It’s
nice to be asked, though. We watch Tom, who is swimming out past all the
other people. I wish I’d gone with him. I say, “Lifeguard’s going to
whistle him in pretty soon. He’s out past all the others.”
Hilda lets out a breath and snorts, “He’ll always go till they blow the
whistle. Always got to go farther than anyone else.”