The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
David was shocked and bewildered. He had guessed much of what Mr. Stone was saying, but he had not known, for sure. When the icy lecture ended he was badly confused. He wanted to believe that sex was the solemn, grandiose thing Old Daniel had said. But he also knew from what he had seen beneath the Coal Mine—especially from things Nora started to say but couldn’t—that sex was also the brutal, retributive thing that Mr. Stone claimed. David never entirely reconciled these two views of life, in which respect he was exactly like most men who live, including Old Daniel and Mr. Stone.
As a reward for the boy’s honesty, Mr. Stone taught him the master tricks of short-changing. “Some men like talcum powder best, but I prefer pumice,” the precise, gray cashier explained. “Run your hand over my board. Smooth as glass, eh? Now watch!” With his left middle finger Mr. Stone deftly slid a dime across the polished change board. The coin came to rest exactly where a customer could not see it. “That’s what pumice does!”
“Wouldn’t talcum do as well?” David inquired.
“Better, sometimes, but you’ll notice that we’re close to the lake. The humidity makes talcum gum up. Always stick to pumice.” He produced a cotton bag filled with dust and patiently polished his board. Then he flipped a few nickels and dimes across it, laying them where they could not be seen.
“There’s one idea to master,” he continued. “A customer is a hand, and a voice, and an eye. He lays his money down. That’s the hand. He says, ‘Two,’ and that’s the voice. But it’s his eye that you have to work on. So here’s how to do it. As soon as he speaks, have the tickets out there for him. Put them so he’ll have to move forward to get them, and that carries him past his change.”
Mr. Stone stopped and looked at David. “How tough are you, kid?” he asked.
“I’m pretty tough,” David replied.
“Short-changing is a test of whether you’re tougher than the customer. Because you’ve got to judge the next second. Is the yokel going to leave? If you make a single move, he’ll remember his change. So you watch his coat sleeve like a hawk, and that’s when you’ve got to be tough. Outlast him. Out-brazen him. But you’ve got to do it in the flash of a second, because the minute he hesitates, you shove part of his change at him, in the direction he’s moving. The part you want to keep you shove way back over here.”
With beautiful gestures Mr. Stone showed David exactly how to work: “Tickets way over here. The pause. Then a quarter and some dimes right beside the tickets. A quarter and a nickel way back here.” David could not detect a single variation in the cashier’s movements.
“You certainly do it smoothly,” David said admiringly.
“Some cashiers don’t like that left-hand trick of mine,” Mr. Stone explained.
“I see why,” David agreed. “Your left hand slides the money you want to keep right into the face of the next person in line. Then it’s the next guy who messes up the deal by shouting, ‘Mister! You forgot your change.’ That’s what happened to me at the loganberry stand.”
“There’s a way to beat that,” Mr. Stone explained. “See that sign?” David left the booth and studied the traditional Park sign that ran across the front of the bars: COUNT YOUR CHANGE. In front of the word COUNT Mr. Stone had erected an immense sign with the single word PLEASE. He had placed it so precisely that people waiting to buy tickets could not see the spot on his change board where the errant coins lay hidden.
“It cuts off people’s faces,” David said. “How can you see them?”
“Ah!” Mr. Stone cried, “that’s the beauty of it. If you really go into this business, you never look at people’s faces. Remember what I said: a hand, a voice, an eye. That’s all. You short-change everybody. You don’t try to guess who you can ream and who you can’t. You ream them all. Then you’re in the big time.”
“How about women?” David asked.
“They’re people, aren’t they?” Mr. Stone countered.
The day finally came when David was permitted to sit in Mr. Stone’s chair and try his skill; but he was most maladroit, and soon he had a line of customers arguing about their change, and in his confusion he slid out more coins than he should have. Mr. Stone watched in amusement for some time and then took over. “You can’t expect to be a champion in one day. Tell you what! You come to work early and practice on my board. But remember! Never look at a sucker’s face. You felt sorry for those yokels and lost your shirt.”
Frequently thereafter Mr. Stone allowed David to try his hand. In time the boy became fairly skilled at the dirty business, and to his great surprise he was informed one morning that he would henceforth be cashier at the third largest concession in the Park, the Coal Mine! He erected his sign, PLEASE COUNT YOUR CHANGE, and polished his board with pumice. He spent hours each day flipping coins idly, speedily, purposefully across his shimmering board and discovered one evening that he had become psychologically tough enough to outbrazen the yokels. He tried to cheat every customer, never looked at their faces, was icily undisturbed when they insisted on their right change, and made at least $50.00 a week.
“You’ve learned a lot this summer,” Mr. Stone said admiringly on the last night. “But the biggest thing you learned was to play the game honestly. Don’t ever fool around with men like Max Volo.” Side by side, in warm friendship, David and Mr. Stone left the Park. It was a cold night in September, and the lights went out for the last time that year. The wind was midnight chill, and there was a grand loneliness in the air.
“You were very kind to me,” David said impulsively as they reached the trolley line.
“See you next summer, kid!” Mr. Stone said impassively. “You’re all right, kid. You got a good head on your shoulders.” He waved goodbye and disappeared. Funny, but David did not know where Mr. Stone lived. Somewhere near Philadelphia. He didn’t work in the winter but went down to Florida for a rest.
David stood thinking of Mr. Stone when he felt a soft push in the middle of his back. “Guess who?” a thin voice teased. It was Nora!
“I was wondering about you,” he said.
“Don’t you worry about me,” she replied.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“There’s a man wants to take me down to Florida,” she replied.
“Are you getting married?” David asked, his voice betraying his disappointment.
“Oh, no!” the thin girl explained. “This guy’s in his fifties. He came to arrange it with Max.”
“Are you going?” David asked.
“I guess so,” she said. She pulled a very thin coat about her shoulders, and David was perplexed as to what he should say next. He was glad she wasn’t getting married, and at the same time he was unhappy about her going to Florida with a man of fifty. Yet he liked the idea of her going south for the winter.
“I don’t know what to say!” he admitted. Nora smiled at him and clasped his hand. His blood began to circulate furiously.
“Don’t you say anything,” she whispered. “I know what you’re thinking.”
But he did say something. He said a very foolish thing. “That’s the only coat you have, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, here!” Impulsively he handed her fifty dollars which that night would have been hidden in the poorhouse barn. She pushed the money back at him.
“If I go to Florida my man’ll buy me all the clothes I want,” she explained.
“All right,” David said. “Then you take this for yourself.” He thrust the money into the ragged pocket of her thin coat, and as he did so she clutched him by the arm and they stepped back among the shadows that now possessed the Park. She held her warm lips up to his and placed his hands upon her body.
“Oh, kid!” she whispered. “Let’s just stand here for a minute.” She pressed herself against him and moved her body slowly. “Does that feel good?” she whispered hoarsely. David could only mumble and she gripped him by the shoulders, pushing him away. She spoke very quick
Nora kissed him one last long time and then disappeared toward the Philadelphia trolleys. He watched the strange manner in which darkness folds about the body of a retreating woman, and long after she had gone that darkness seemed still to contain her. She was the first of the nameless people he was to know. She had no family, and no one cared where she went or when she lay down to sleep. A succession of cheap rooms formed her home, and she had a mind that no one had ever cared to cultivate. Sometimes in the winter when she was sick, she lay for days in dirty sheets until the fever wore itself out, and in the warmer summers she slept with many men. She was nobody, and she had no nationality. She was not French nor Polish nor Italian … some indiscriminate race that retained long names which people in America could not pronounce. David did not know her name, nor where she lived, nor could he write to her; yet this strange, nameless thing was David’s first girl, and her departing promise of a great time next summer haunted him for seven months.
In that first summer at Paradise Park David had every opportunity to become a cheap thief, a hanger-on, a whoremonger, or a bum; but at every deciding point an inner voice of conscience kept him clear of the vilest entanglements.
This voice was a very real thing! It actually spoke to him, and he could hear its stern command: “Come on, Harper! Get going!” It was not the voice of his aunt, nor of Old Daniel, nor of any minister, nor of his own inner light. It was the very solid voice of Bobby Creighton crying, “Come on Harper!” and it was by all odds the most imperative voice David would ever hear.
Bobby Creighton had come to Doylestown some years before. He was a dumpy, round, quick-eyed man and looked completely unlike any other teacher David had known. He was the basketball coach and while David was still in grammar school Bobby Creighton had spotted him. “You got a fine natural shot,” the coach had said. David could remember the precise inflection of Bobby’s voice. There was hope in it, for the coach saw that with quick, rangy kids like David coming along, Doylestown would have more championship teams. He had smiled at David and added, “How would you like to scrimmage against the varsity some afternoon?” David had swallowed hard and said he’d like it. That night he lay in bed and held his breath for two-minute spells so as to get his lungs in training. He could not sleep and imagined himself slipping under Fred Baker’s arms for shot after shot.
Three days later Bobby had stopped by the grammar school and asked, in an off-hand way, “Why don’t you drop down tonight?” and David had twisted his shoulders indifferently and replied, “OK, I may do that.” He stayed in after school and cleaned the blackboards. He did tomorrow’s arithmetic, dusted the desks and finally could think of nothing else to waste time. Slowly he sauntered down to the gym.
“You fellows know Dave Harper,” Bobby said, standing with his pudgy arm on David’s shoulder. “He’s small, like the Hatboro forwards. I asked him to drop down.” David nodded at the big men on Doylestown’s championship team and loafed into the dressing room. When he returned in uniform Bobby studied his strong legs and long arms. “How’s about stepping in at forward?” he asked.
“Now?” David inquired.
“Sure!” Bobby said, but suddenly David was attacked with the athlete’s urge. He felt that his kidneys must burst—that very minute—if he didn’t run to the urinal. He got red in the face.
“Excuse me?” he asked. “Just for a second?” The big men laughed and waited. He was furious and muttered to himself, “You wait! You wait!”
The scrimmage started, and it was very rough. The big men passed far too swiftly for him to handle, and he looked bad. Bobby took him out. “You’re pretty nervous, kid.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Sure you will!” Bobby said. He threw his arm about David’s shoulder and whispered, “Now watch how Gulick leaves that spot open. Hang there and then cut like mad. Think you can do it?”
“Sure,” David replied, and Bobby had sent him back in. He hung back toward the open spot and suddenly caught the ball winging toward him. With two fast dribbles he swivel-hipped his way into the goal and laid the ball up mechanically, his left elbow jabbing a guard in the face, his right leg pushing high in the air.
“Come on, Harper!” Bobby Creighton yelled, and that afternoon David hung up three more goals.
“You’re all right!” Gulick and the big men said in the dressing room, but it was Bobby Creighton’s comment that David would never forget. “Practice, practice, practice!” Bobby said. “I’ll be waitin’ for you.”
More than religion or school or all that his friends had taught him, basketball kept David hard and clean. The game was sheer magic. Many words are wasted about high-school athletics: body-building, character formation, sportsmanship. Rarely do sports achieve those flowery ends; but what they do achieve is something even finer. They help boys find a place in society, especially boys who might otherwise live on the fringes of the world. In games, such boys can be momentary heroes and win the wild approval of their community. Young fellows who wear ill-fitting clothes, whose fathers lie drunk in the town gutters, or whose mothers rouse whispers on street corners, boys whose entire future is nothingness can have their day of glory; and some of them like the taste of that glory and determine that the town gutters are not for them.
Fortunately for David, Doylestown was basketball crazy. There was a tradition that its teams, playing against those of much larger schools, should win most of the championships. As early as David could remember he had known that he would be on the championship teams. Toothless Tom had built him a basket in the poorhouse barn. The truck driver had found him an old basketball. He learned to dribble with either hand, pivot, pass from the chest, and fake break. But most of all he learned to shoot baskets. Some Saturday mornings he would practice a single shot four or five hundred times. He became a master of english and a precisionist from any spot within the foul circle.
But most of all he liked to hang around with Bobby Creighton. The fat coach seemed to know what boys were interested in. More than a hundred times David listened to Bobby as the pudgy man stood with his right leg on a bench and told some new gang of kids about the Dedham-Swarthmore game. “It was the big game of the season! Swarthmore won about eighteen games that year. We were the underdogs. Coach said before the game, ‘Bobby? Are you hot tonight?’ I said, ‘Yes, Coach, I am.’ ‘Well,’ Coach said, ‘Bobby, we’re goin’ to start you at guard. We’ll let Lemons run wild. If he can score, let him. Don’t worry about him. You, Bobby, keep down the floor and shoot.’ That’s what Coach said. So at half time I had six baskets, we were only two points behind, and the crowd was crazy wild. Second half, Swarthmore kept two points ahead. All the way. It was truly heart-breakin’. Right down to the last minute, two points ahead. On a jump we got the ball. They passed back court to me. I was goin’ to dribble and shoot when I saw the pistol go up in the air. So I just twisted to one side and let ’er ride.”
At such moments there would be a solemn hush among the listening boys. “How did you shoot it, Bobby?” someone would always ask.
“Well,” Bobby would reply, “I figured I was too far away to make the basket, so I leaned way down and shot it from between my legs, underhand. Just in chance it might get that far.” At this point some boy would toss Bobby a basketball. Bouncing it once or twice the chunky fellow would blush and apologize.
“Of course, I’m out of practice,” he would say. Then he would pat his belly and add, “And now I got a spare tire, too.” Holding the ball low, he would shoot it underhand. Once in ten the ball would spin through the air and pass accurately through the hoop, the way it had done that night long ago in t
“So the score was tied! 41-41,” Bobby would say, his eyes aglow. “You know, they had to get the police to clear the floor so we could play an extra period. Swarthmore got the lead. They held it till right at the end, then I busted loose with another long shot. This time everybody really did go wild. So the police came out again and we waited till the ropes were stretched tight. In the second extra period it was murder. I made three baskets. Swarthmore none!”
It was part of the mythology of Doylestown, that Dedham-Swarthmore game. Moerman’s barbershop had a framed clipping from the Philadelphia North American and a picture from the Press: “Dedham Miracle Man Topples Swarthmore.” Bobby got his hair cut at Moerman’s, and once or twice a month he would tell the older men of the town about that fabulous game. The story never grew tedious, for when fat, unpretentious Bobby started to talk, old men and young enjoyed his eager words, as if they were part of a beautiful world far, far away in space.
It was in the fall after David’s first year at Paradise that Bobby announced in the barbershop that whether the kids were young or not he was starting David Harper and Harry Moomaugh at forward that year! “This kid Harper’s got an absolute lust for the basket!” Bobby explained. “And Moomaugh’s a big, tough guy. Good in a roughhouse. Confidentially,” Bobby said in a whisper which the barber relayed to David, also confidentially, “if those two kids can stand up, we’ve got another championship!”
The word sped about Doylestown that Bobby Creighton thought his team was in. And then David experienced the sweet subtle thrill of athletics! Men watched him as he walked to school. Important men like the policeman and the head of the National Guard would stop him and chat idly with him, slipping in hints here and there: “Hoagey always shoots from the right corner. Watch Smoot! He’s got a fake start. Moyer’s good, but keep jabbing your elbow in his belly.” And the young fellows—in the fifth and sixth grades—who imagined themselves as stars one day began to mimic the way David walked with his right arm crooked as if waiting for a fast cut to the basket. So in a town where education and religion and every other possible aspect of society had failed to make David Harper feel that he was important—that he belonged—basketball succeeded; and it was this sense of belonging that David defended when he turned his back on Max Volo. Going to jail as a crook would be evil. David could see that in the terror the cashiers showed when they were finally caught; but to bring disgrace upon the shaded streets of Doylestown, to humiliate a team of one’s own friends—that would be terrible indeed!