On that Friday night, Clip and I walked to the playground. He brought his soccer ball and we passed it back and forth across the width of the street as we walked. It was 8 o’clock, but dark as midnight. “Think you’re going to try out for the high-school team next year?” Clip asked. “Probably,” I said, but I had already made up my mind that I wouldn’t. Clip dug his toe under the ball and lifted it across the street. I trapped it perfectly under my foot and kept walking. Coach had told us to never be away from a ball, to kick it everywhere, sleep with it, know every bounce it could possibly take. His advice worked. Clip and I could pass the ball all night between us without even thinking or ever having to chase it down. I could put that ball in Clip’s pocket if I wanted to. The lights of the playground rose above the row homes as we got closer, as if God himself was turning a crank and raising our destiny. We slowed our pace a little. “I say, we check it out, see what’s going on,” Clip said. “But I bet there’s no girls. No beer.” “Probably not. Roger’s full of shit.” We walked through the parking lot at St. Cecilia’s, and our saint, lit from below, was looking old and unmusical. Memory now puts a frown on her face, twists it into Sister Thomas’, my mother’s, sister’s even, saying, Don’t go. But instead we smirked at her, thinking of singing practice, and Clip started again with his own lyrics, “I am many parts! She is all one body! And the gifts we have! We are given to share!” He thrust his hips out with each downbeat of the song. Had she not been stone, our saint maybe would have shaken her head at us, knowing we were scared but too cocky to ask for help. She had been neither. Clip pointed to the rectory and the convent, the home of the parish’s priests and nuns, our conscience. “Think they’ll come over and break it up?” “Nah,” I said, “They can’t see anything. That tree’s in the way.” This was true: a large dogwood grew in front of the convent door, and the rectory’s view of the playground was blocked by the church. As we crossed Rhawn Street towards the playground, a carload of kids sped past and screamed, “Fags!” Clip gave them the finger, and I wished that he hadn’t. Walking up the driveway, I could see a crowd on the basketball court, but in the dark I couldn’t make out any of their faces, just the orange tips of cigarettes and the flash of red Dixie cups. I tried to walk like I belonged there, like I was a regular in the Friday crowd, whatever that might look like. Clip picked up his ball. The kids stared back at us, eyes hidden under low baseball caps and hoods. They stopped talking as we approached, and there was a tense moment before Roger finally burst from the crowd toward us. “Hey, you fags came!” Clip looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I was unsettled at being called that name twice already. “Get a beer,” Roger said and pointed to a green Explorer with its trunk open. We walked over and a kid with a goatee said, “A buck for the cup. A buck for the beer.” I gave him a five, and he handed me a cup, saying, “I don’t got change.” “Okay,” I said, “I’ll buy his too.” The kid with the goatee chuckled. “You two on a date?” A group of girls I had never seen before stood nearby, most wearing high-school jackets from different parishes. They were staring at us. I suddenly felt silly in my soccer jacket. It was just a kid’s game and we weren’t even the champs anymore. I noticed Roger wasn’t wearing his, but he bounced comfortably between packs of kids I didn’t know. Finally, he came back to Clip and me. “See that girl over there in the St. Hubert’s jacket?” he asked and poked Clip in the chest. “She likes you.” The girl in question had long blonde hair, frosted and crimped. She lit a cigarette. She was somewhat pretty, though not the prettiest of the bunch, and maybe even a little taller than Clip. He took a big, ambitious mouthful of his beer—his first beer ever. “So what do I do?” he finally asked, looking back over his shoulder towards the traffic on Rhawn Street, away from the party, as if only half-interested. The group of girls was staring and giggling. These were not the girls of St. Cecilia’s elementary. Where was freckled Erin McManus, or cute and chubby Anne Marie Gerelli with the slight mustache, or even poor Cathy Ranster who still had to go to speech therapy to say her R’s right? Those girls I could handle. I could even flirt with them in a limp, eighth-grade kind of way. But this was different. “Go talk to her!” Roger said. “Ask her to take a walk. Do something.” Then Clip did something amazing. Something that may have even saved his life that night. He suddenly adjusted his head and his grip on his beer like a seasoned cocktail party-goer, and walked over to that crowd of girls. Roger and I were shocked. We watched as if waiting for an anvil to fall on him at any minute, but nothing happened. He made the long journey across the basketball court, crossed line after line, and began to speak. My beer was going flat in my hand. The foam had bubbled off and I realized that I had gotten only half a cupful for my dollar. I didn’t care. Now Roger turned to me. “There might be some trouble tonight,” he said. “You down to fight?” “Trouble?” I asked as I took a sip of beer. I was expecting at any moment to be drunk, having no idea how much or how long it took. “Yeah, some girl from Abington is saying Warren raped her up here last Friday. And someone said they saw a car of Abington kids riding around the neighborhood earlier. It’s probably nothing, but …” He dug in his pocket and pulled out a black glove with quarters duct taped to the knuckles. “What is that?” I asked. “Just in case.” He put it on and pretended to punch me in the jaw. This was ridiculous. “Rape” was a word I’d only heard spoken on the news. And Warren was just another skinny kid like me, but with black hair hanging into his eyes. Was he capable of something like this? Would he even know how to do it if he wanted to? All signs pointed to no. I scanned the crowd and found him finally, standing between two parked cars holding a beer, his eyes shifting back and forth, and his face more serious than I’d ever seen it. I waved to him, but he didn’t look at me. But Roger was calm. He pointed to the pack of strange girls, whose numbers were thinning out as the night wore on. “So are you gonna talk to someone, or just get drunk?” Clip and his girl had disappeared, though his soccer ball was resting right there on the playground’s concrete, begging to be kicked. Perhaps, I thought, he was being given a blowjob, and all I could picture was a good-sized present wrapped in a big bow being handed over by a Christmas elf. I finished my beer and bought another from the snickering kid with the goatee. Then Roger pulled me over to the girls. I took my glasses off as if I only wore them at times that necessitated great scrutiny. I tried to appear relaxed, but the girls were now just a blurry net of frizzy hair. I thought there might be either three or four of them. A voice spoke up and I tried to rely on my ears for guidance. “You play soccer?” one of them said. “Yeah,” I replied, and took another sip of my beer. I was desperate to say more, could feel Roger’s eyes boring into me—Now’s your chance!—but all I could come up with was, “Do you?” The girls giggled. I felt silly, but it was not a ridiculous question. Allison Michener, in my grade, was getting a scholarship to high school for soccer. Plenty of girls played. “No,” the same girl’s voice replied. “Are you any good?” “I’m OK,” I said, but Roger stuck up for me. “City All Star two years in a row!” He punched me in the arm. The girls murmured a little, not much impressed. Finally, one of them spoke up. “Can I try on your glasses?” Anyone who wears glasses knows this is a bad thing to do. You are completely at the mercy of the borrower and your blind litany of “c’mon, give them back, c’mon” never works as fast as you’d like. But she touched my arm and I handed them over. “Wow! You’re blind!” She passed them to the girl next to her while I dumbly held my hand out, hoping to get them back soon. Roger had disappeared. “So are you here for the fight?” the first girl asked. “No. I’m just hanging out,” I said, getting more nervous about what was going to happen that night. “Good. I don’t like fighting. It’s stupid.” I nodded. She was right, though I wondered if something else was being said beneath the surface that I didn’t quite understand. “Well, you want to take a walk, Four Eyes?” “Sure.” She took my arm. Up close, I could tell she had gotten my glasses back from her friends, but I knew I couldn’t walk for long without them. She pulled me away from the group, the other girls still giggling, and I was thinking, “This is it! Clip and me on the same night!” when, because I was so blind, it suddenly looked like a fleet of UFOs were landing in the playground parking lot. The halos around the headlights of the cars were huge, and the noise of the engines and the screeching of tires suggested something awful had just arrived. I snatched at my glasses and the girl let me take them back, herself mesmerized by these new arrivals. “We should get out of here,” she said. Kids were piling out of four cars like clowns and the guys from our playground approached them, cursing and telling them to get out. The girl pulled me harder, deeper into the playground, back towards the soccer fields. When I looked back, I saw one of the kids pull a baseball bat and smash one of our guys’ headlights. Out of habit, I picked up Clip’s soccer ball—an Adidas Tango, hand-stitched, a Christmas present, the envy of any field. Even fully inflated, the ball was soft in my arms, and I held it to my chest until the girl took my hand. “Run,” the girl said, and I did.
♦◊♦
—photo by MOMJODH/flickr
Continued on the next page …
Great story Sean. Wonderfully written!
It read like a story from my own childhood in the 40-50s in Fox Chase. Excellent!
Awesome story, Sean E! I remember this one.
Excellent story, brilliantly told. This was a great way to kick off the fiction series. Fiction was once traditionally the heart of every magazine produced and edited for me, and the fact that the Good Men Project magazine has embraced this idea is deserving of praise.