Finding the Worm Read online

  “You’re not going to forget about them, right?” he said.

  “No.”

  “You can wait until you have more time. Just don’t forget about them.”

  “I won’t forget them, Quent. I’ll give them a hundred and ten percent.”

  That cracked both of us up, because it sounded like Jerry Manche. Quentin was still laughing as I shut the door to his room, said goodbye to his mom and dad, and left.

  January 31, 1970

  Shlomo and the Machine

  Thirty-Fourth Avenue is starting to feel like Thirty-Fourth Avenue again. It’s like the time Quentin was in the hospital was a bad dream, and the entire block is waking up from it. I mean, it wasn’t a dream. For one thing, Quentin’s got a pinball machine in his bedroom. For another, he’s not back to how he was. He gets winded real fast, so there’s a lot of stuff we used to do—even just walking-around kind of stuff, let alone playing wolf tag—that we can’t do for now.

  To be truthful, it would be easier if he’d let us push him in the wheelchair. But he shot down that idea the first time I suggested it, and no one’s brought it up since. So we’ve been hanging out mostly in Quentin’s room, and the few times we did get him out of the house, we had to take it real slow and stop for him to catch his breath every couple of minutes. He’s getting stronger, though. The plan is still for him to go back to school on Monday, but I’ll believe that when I see it. I don’t know how it’s going to work.

  As for the pinball machine, it was fun for maybe three days, but after that we got pretty sick of it. That sounds ungrateful, for sure, but … well, it’s a pinball machine. It gets old fast. You want to know the weird part? The fact that it’s free, that we don’t have to drop in a dime to start a new game, makes it less fun. Lonnie shakes the thing until it tilts every time. I’m not sure he’s ever actually finished a game. It’s like a joke with him. He starts up a new game and then tilts just for the heck of it.

  The last time I took a turn was on Thursday, after school. I don’t even know why I bothered. After the first five minutes, I got bored, but I kept hitting the bonus flag, which kept making the center post come up between the flippers, which meant the ball couldn’t roll down the center chute to end the game. It just went on and on. I tripled my highest score, but I felt like a prisoner. Finally, I just waited for the post to go down and let the ball slide between the flippers on purpose.

  The only one who stuck with it was Shlomo Shlomo. Mr. Selkirk, my sixth-grade teacher, used to say that writing was my “thing.” Turns out pinball is Shlomo’s “thing.” What I mean is he took to that machine like a woodpecker to a tall tree. (Or like Beverly Segal to a tall tree.) The look on his face when he turned and noticed the pinball machine was love at first sight. Like one of those cartoons where the boy cat sees the girl cat, and his eyeballs go boi-yoing-yoing. It was comical to watch.

  Except how can you hold it against him? Challenge the Yankees is the first thing Shlomo’s been better at than the rest of us.

  Lonnie’s always had basketball. The guy can dribble between his legs like it’s nothing. Eric’s got baseball, on account of his dad coached Little League and taught him to switch-hit, even though Eric’s still afraid of getting beaned. Howie’s got football, or at least defense in football, because he loves to tackle people. He’ll tackle you even if you’re just playing tag. Not in a mean way, he just gets carried away.

  On the other hand, Quentin, before he got sick, was a great wide receiver, because he had soft hands. I don’t think I ever saw that guy drop a pass. Plus, he even started to get faster in the last year. Before he got sick, I mean. It used to be that the only guy he could catch in tag was Shlomo. But then he started to catch Eric, and once he even caught Howie. So I guess, in a way, he was Quick Quentin, or at least he was getting to be Quick Quentin before he got sick. So let’s say Quentin gets the edge on offense in football, and Howie gets the edge on defense. Plus, you should see Quentin with a yo-yo! It might not count as a sport, but he can make that thing walk the dog and rock the cradle and go ’round the world.

  Challenge the Yankees isn’t a real sport either, of course. But it’s Shlomo’s thing, so you’ve got to respect it. That doesn’t mean it’s not annoying. The rest of us will be yakking it up at one end of Quentin’s room, but we can’t even hear one another because Shlomo’s at the other end grunting and moaning, and meanwhile the machine is buzzing and dinging and clacking. He’s in his own world … challenging the Yankees. Lonnie joked that from now on, when Shlomo rings the doorbell, he should forget about Quentin and ask Mrs. Selig if the pinball machine is home.

  You want to know how carried away Shlomo got with Challenge the Yankees? On Friday afternoon, he almost forgot about Sabbath! He did forget, actually. It was Lonnie who remembered. He slid up behind Shlomo just as the sun was going down, and tapped him on the shoulder. Shlomo hunched over the machine as if he was protecting his lunch. “C’mon, lay off!”

  Lonnie said, “I just thought—”

  “I got a good score going!”

  “Yeah, it looks like you do.”

  Shlomo still hadn’t taken his eyes off the game. “What do you want?”

  “Isn’t there something you’re supposed to be doing?”

  “No …”

  “All right, let me put it another way,” Lonnie said. “Isn’t there something you’re supposed to be … Jew-ing?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know what today is?”

  “Of course I know what today is. Today is—”

  That was when it hit him, the fact that the sun was going down. It was like all of a sudden, he could feel the shadow across his face. His neck got real stiff, and his shoulders went up. He took a half step backward, but even then he couldn’t quite let go of the flippers. I don’t know what would’ve happened if, right at that moment, the telephone hadn’t rung. Even before Mrs. Selig picked it up in the kitchen, Shlomo knew it was his mom.

  We all knew.

  Shlomo let go of the flippers, grabbed his coat, and ran home.

  The one other thing that happened last week was that my autographed picture of Bobby Murcer came in the mail, just like Jerry Manche had promised. It was signed, “For Julian. Looking forward to meeting you in April. Sincerely, Bobby Murcer.” As soon as I read that, I started to feel bad. What I mean is I feel bad the guy’s going to make a trip out to Flushing even though he’s not Quentin’s favorite player. (He sure as heck wouldn’t be making the trip just because he’s my favorite player.) But whose fault is that? Quentin was only trying to do something nice for me. He had no way of knowing that the Yankees would do what they did, that he’d wind up with a pinball machine and a visit from Bobby Murcer.

  What makes it worse is that Murcer seems like such a nice guy. Last year, he got into a fight with Ray Oyler of the Seattle Pilots because of a hard slide at second base, which caused both teams to run out onto the field and start fighting, but the Post said that at the bottom of the pile, Murcer was already apologizing to Oyler for slugging him. That’s the kind of guy he is. So you just know he’s going to come out here and be real sincere and make a big deal out of Quentin—not realizing that Quentin’s favorite player is Willie Mays. The whole thing just feels wrong.

  But what can you do?

  February 2, 1970

  The King of Egypt

  Well, I was wrong. Quentin did wind up going back to McMasters today. How it worked was his dad told him he had to go back to school, and he had to go in the wheelchair. End of discussion. It never crossed my mind that he’d go in the wheelchair, that he’d bring the wheelchair on the bus.

  I decided, right off, that getting Quentin on and off the school bus was more important than rushing to Principal Salvatore’s office first thing in the morning and turning in another stupid essay on good citizenship. If you think about it, getting Quentin on and off the bus, and back to school, is good citizenship. So I decided to skip a week and see what happened. If Principal Salvatore w
anted to punish me for doing the right thing, let him. It made as much sense as him punishing me for not doing the wrong thing.

  Shlomo and I headed over to Quentin’s house at seven-thirty to help out with the wheelchair. Lonnie was supposed to lend a hand too, but as usual he overslept. Except it didn’t matter, since there wasn’t much for us to do except stand around and wait for Quentin to get ready. Shlomo killed time with a couple of games of Challenge the Yankees—which, come to think of it, might’ve been the main reason he was so quick to volunteer.

  It was kind of weird, how Quentin was hustling around the apartment, yanking his clothes out of the closet, chugging a glass of orange juice in the kitchen, doing what he had to do in the bathroom … and then, after all that rushing back and forth, putting on his overcoat and settling down into the wheelchair so Shlomo and I could push him out the door. He kept saying how sorry he was to make us do it. But it was nothing to us. Really, we were glad to do it.

  The hard part turned out to be getting Quentin on the school bus. Actually, getting him on the bus was no problem. He just got out of the wheelchair and walked up the three steps. Getting the chair folded and then hoisting it up the steps—that was a problem. The bus driver, who’s like ninety years old, didn’t lift a finger to help. He just sat behind the wheel and watched Lonnie, Howie, Eric, Shlomo, and me wrestle with the thing until we got it on board. It was only half folded, but we held it in place in the center aisle for the ride to McMasters.

  Getting the wheelchair off the bus was just as hard, which was bad because a crowd of kids gathered to watch us. They saw Quentin climb down the steps and stand on the sidewalk as we got the chair unfolded again. They were pointing at it, wondering who it was for … and then, when Quentin sat down in it, there was like a group moan.

  “Hey, that guy’s not crippled!” someone called out.

  Lonnie yelled, “Shut up!”

  The rest of us glanced around to see who’d said it, but no one stepped forward.

  The crowd followed us as we started to push Quentin toward the main entrance of McMasters. Except there were three stairs that led up to the double doors. I’d never even noticed the stairs. It’s the kind of thing you don’t notice—how many stairs you climb in a regular day. You don’t notice it because you don’t have to notice it. But with Quentin in the chair, now we noticed it. Quentin had to hop out of the chair, again, to let us carry it up the stairs. Then he had to sit down again.

  The kids behind us roared with laughter when he stood up and laughed even louder when he sat back down.

  “Who made him the king of Egypt?”

  It was the same voice as before. Except this time, I recognized who said it: Devlin. I wanted to tell him to shut up, but I knew if he hadn’t listened to Lonnie, he sure wasn’t going to listen to me.

  We rushed Quentin through the front door and rolled him to the elevator. Since the school only has four floors, students aren’t allowed to use the elevator unless they’ve got broken legs, or at least sprained ankles, but we figured a wheelchair was better than crutches, so we rang for the elevator and waited. Three teachers got off the elevator when it came, and none of them said a word.

  Lonnie and Howie were in the same homeroom as Quentin, so the two of them took him up in the elevator. I knew I wouldn’t see them again until three o’clock, because their lunch period was an hour later than mine, so I forced myself to smile. But it was real sad, watching the elevator doors close. Quentin didn’t even look up. You could tell it was killing him, sitting in that chair. But what could he do? His dad had laid down the law, and Quentin wasn’t the kind of guy who’d shrug that off.

  After the elevator was gone, Shlomo, Eric, and I went our separate ways.

  I was maybe ten feet from my homeroom when I heard, “Hey, Twerp-ski!”

  I turned around.

  Devlin was standing behind me, grinning. Until you’re looking right at him, you forget how bony the guy is. It’s almost painful. It’s not just his arms and legs—it’s even his face. His jaw and cheekbones jut out. You could make a portrait of him out of origami.

  “Yeah?”

  “How come your friend’s in that chair?”

  “I don’t know, Devlin.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “He just is,” I said. “That’s all I know.”

  He stepped forward and grabbed me by the chin. He turned my head to the left and then to the right. He didn’t do it fast. He wanted to see if I’d make a big deal out of it. I just relaxed my neck and went with it. He turned my face forward and looked me in the eye. “What you mean is, you know why he’s in that chair, but you’re not going to tell me. Is that it?”

  I tried to smile, even though he still had a pretty tight grip on my face. “I guess so.”

  “You want to fight?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re bigger than me, and you’ll beat me up.”

  He let go of my chin. “You’re not as stupid as you look, Twerp-ski.”

  After that, he turned and walked off. There were maybe a half dozen kids who saw what had happened, who stuck around to see if there would be a fight. Now they were looking at me as if I’d ruined their fun. I just shrugged at them. Really, I didn’t know what else to do.

  There’s a guy named Hector who sits in the back row of homeroom and plays a trick on old Mrs. Griff a couple of times a week. He does it at the end of the day, when she’s writing her afternoon announcements on the board and the class is sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the three o’clock bell. Hector’s got a miniature Chinese gong that sounds just like the classroom bell. He says he got it in Chinatown, but I think that’s baloney—like his parents would let him go into Manhattan alone! More likely, he bought the thing at Gertz department store on Main Street. It’s not as loud as the actual classroom bell, of course, but Mrs. Griff’s hearing is so bad that she can’t tell the difference. So a couple of times a week, Hector hits the gong a minute or so before three o’clock, and Mrs. Griff lets the class go home.

  He’s been doing it for a month now, and Mrs. Griff still hasn’t caught on—which amazes me, since she must hear the actual bell go off a minute or so later. Maybe she hasn’t figured it out because she doesn’t want to figure it out. At her age, she’s got to be pretty tired by three o’clock.

  During lunch, I asked Hector to hit the gong extra early, and I even gave him my peach cobbler (which is pretty awful, but he loves it) so he’d do it. Sure enough, the gong sounded at 2:56. I grabbed my books, snatched my jacket from the hook on the wall, flew out of homeroom, and ran down the two flights of stairs. I wanted to be right outside the main entrance when Lonnie and Howie wheeled Quentin through the double doors.

  I was standing outside in the cold air, catching my breath and pulling my jacket tighter—I mean, the air was ice cold—when someone grabbed my elbow from behind. For a split second, I thought it might be Devlin, but then I spun around and saw Beverly Segal.

  She smiled at me. “What kept you?”

  “How’d you get down here so fast?” I asked.

  “Race me and find out,” she said.

  “You went out the side door.”

  “Bingo.”

  She stood with her hands on her hips, as if she’d made her point.

  “What?” I said.

  “I went out the side door, which means I had to go farther than you did. Plus, you got out of homeroom before I did. I was still packing up my books when Hector hit the gong. I saw you running out the door. You had a head start, and I went farther, and I still got here first.”

  “I’m not going to race you, Beverly.”

  “Bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk!”

  “If that makes me a chicken, fine.”

  “C’mon, it doesn’t have to be in front of lots of people. We can do it back on the block. It’ll just be the two of us by ourselves.”

  “Then what’s the point?” I sai
d.

  “To find out who’s faster.”

  “But I know who’s faster—and if you don’t know, it’s because you don’t want to know.”

  “But I do want to know,” she said. “Maybe it’s you who doesn’t want to know.”

  “Can we just drop it? It’s freezing out here.”

  Right then, the actual three o’clock bell sounded. Seconds later, there was a sound, a low rumble, that came from inside the double doors. It got closer and closer until the doors crashed open and kids started to pour out. You don’t realize how loud that is, the rush of kids going through the double doors, down the stairs, and out onto the sidewalk, until you’re standing on the outside and not part of it. I mean, it’s like a tidal wave of noise.

  Meanwhile, the cold was starting to get to me. Every gust of wind felt like needles against my face. I began rocking back and forth on my heels, trying to stay warm. It was a dumb thing to do, running outside like I did. Watching the kids pour out of McMasters, I realized it was going to take a while before Lonnie and Howie came out with Quentin. They were smart enough to wait until the rush was over. I turned back to Beverly. The look on her face was different than before, more serious. “Why didn’t you tell me that today was Quent’s first day back?”

  “I didn’t not tell you,” I said. “It wasn’t a secret.”

  “I wouldn’t have walked. I would’ve ridden the bus with the rest of you. I would’ve helped.”

  “We had enough—”

  “I know you had enough help, Julian. You’re missing the point.”

  “Then what is the point?”

  “The point is you don’t think of me as one of your friends.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I think of you as my friend.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t think of me as part of your group.”

  “C’mon, you’re part of the group. You live on the block.”

  “You know exactly what I mean,” she said.

  “I would’ve told you about Quentin if I knew it meant so much to you.”