As in:
It kind of happened this way. Well not kind of. It did happen this way, only in Pierce’s memory he softened the focus, with vaseline in the synapses and on the lenses of his neurotransmitters, because otherwise it made him look kind of stupid. Well, not kind of stupid. Just stupid.
Coach Sweeney, a man who taught history and always asked himself, why not? organized a mixed doubles tennis match. It had actually never been done before in the Balboa-Cristobal rivalry.
Mixed doubles.
To sweeten the deal he agreed they would play on the other side, by this I mean the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, on the Cristobal High School courts. The courts were presentable, but the surfacing was terrible because it had been poured with huge grains and seashells in the concrete. Pierce hated it. He was a serve and volleyer with a terrific sliding cutter of a serve that the Cristobal courts grabbed like velcro. Even a nifty 110 mile an hour cutter would screech to a halt in the back corner of the deuce service court and pop up in the air like a damn jack in the box. After just two games the new tennis balls looked like they were wearing yellowish afros, and two games later, troll hair, just really chunks of fluorescent material being hit across the net.
Oh that was fun. He’d lost his only two singles matches in Cristobal because the courts were such great equalizers. So he almost didn’t go to Cristobal at all. But then Beth Ann pleaded with him to make the trip and he relented, without having the slightest idea, really, that Beth Ann and Meg were close, and that Meg would come to watch Beth Ann.
And so that’s how they wound up on the train together, in the one car near the back, where he sat behind the two of them, covertly reading a copy of Playboy he’d picked up at the newsstand at the Balboa station. His mind drifted as the train roared through the jungle between Paraiso and Gamboa. It emerged into a clearing by the Canal where he saw the Chikuma Maru idling up toward the Pacific side locks. He wondered about what Japanese merchant mariners ate, and whether they visited prostitutes in Panama City. This is what teenage boys think about on trains, just food and sex, interrupted occasionally by unanswered questions about how the brakes on the trains work and what would happen if you left a mango on the tracks. Right. Stuff like that.
“Jesus Pierce,” he heard, “gimme that.”
With that Coach Sweeney snatched the Playboy from the brown wrapper he thought it was hiding in.
The girls both turned and looked back over their seats, curious as to what Pierce had been up to.
They saw him blushing, and so they looked to Sweeney for some more clues, but he’d already buried the magazine in his travel bag.
“Ya don’t wanna know,” he told them. “Ya don’t.”
So Meg looked back at Pierce to see if any guilt was showing within his embarrassment. He only flapped his eyes wide, like a new-born ostrich.
She squinted and smiled as if she knew. Meg was one of those girls who could really look like she knew, even when she didn’t know, even when she didn’t have a clue. And this helped her mystique.
This was only Pierce’s first mis-step. The day wasn’t young, but it was hardly near over.
No comments yet.