Spotty loosened his hold but made no move to get up. Their fights usually ended this way.
“Let me. Up. You’re. Prince.”
“Hold your breath.”
Bub held his breath while Spotty floundered off him and picked up his bike. The woman with the two big bows walked on, losing interest, but the Chow Chow kept glancing back.
“Okay, let it out,” Spotty said, starting to worry. “Careful.”
Bub let out his breath, the center of his chest pinching coldly, and remained sitting on the frame of his bike, gradually slowing his breathing down.
“Where’s your inhaler?”
“The freakin thing. Doesn’t help.”
“Is it better?” Spotty said, breathing heavily himself.
“I need to get. A little more. Rhythm,” Bub said. “Like. A train. Just starting. To go. Like. In the movies. Listen. To the train. Go. That’s just. How it is.”
“What about when it speeds up?” Spotty said, getting interested.
“The train? Or me?”
“The train.”
“Then,” said Bub, “I can’t hear it. Anymore.”
“Oh,” said Spotty, confused. He puzzled over Bub’s answer a few seconds. “You’re a freakin queer.”
Bub continued to wheeze. He righted their bicycles and gathered the papers back into the bags while Spotty surveyed the damage.
“Two torn papers. One shirttail out. Your chain’s off. Grease all over your pants.”
“We’d better. Get going,” Bub said.
“Hang on. I scratched your neck a little. A stone in my pocket. Three dimes on the ground. One penny. An asthma attack. And a partridge in a pair of trees.”
Spotty grinned at Bub comfortably. He was his elder, his conquerer, his paper partner, his pal.
Silent, Bub slipped his chain back over the sprocket and wiped the grease from his fingers onto his paperbag, almost obliterating the “1” in “Hilton.”
“You got an ink smear. On your chin,” Bub said.
“Thanks,” said Spotty, wetting his palm with his tongue and wiping it under his mouth.
“Hey, are we still Bubs?” Spotty asked, holding out his hand for Bub to slap.
“Still Bubs,” Bub said, lifting his leg over his bike seat.
“Hey Spotty—” Bub said quietly, slapping the outstretched palm with a crack. “Go.”
Bub pedalled off, hooting and kicking stones behind him, while Spotty struggled onto his own bike and sputtered. “Aw, no freakin freakin fair. Bubblebutt. Bowser. Sheet you. Pussy willow. Pussy.”
Bub ground the words out with his straining legs as he sped towards his half of the route, while Spotty puffed his way along in the opposite direction, vaguely curious as to how the asthma had gone away so fast. Bub’s half of the route had four big hills and Spotty’s had only one, but Spotty had more traffic to dodge and there was a donut shop on Front Street. He usually got a chocolate eclair, and sometimes a Tahitian Treat. Bub made no stops, and usually finished passing first. The winner got to hard-knuckle the loser one time for each minute the loser was behind him. Sometimes Bub waited twenty-five minutes behind Spotty’s house before he showed up. He would practice hard-knuckling on the leaves of a small Maple tree in Spotty’s backyard.
As Spotty stood looking through the glass case, puzzling between Bavarian cream and white cream, Bub hummed his way down Pike Street, completely unaware of how numbers and words were continuing to form a higher, more meaningful heap in his life. His paper route and recent aspirations and asthma competed for his mental space: Corders. Kleins. Be a freakin rock star. Littles. What a stupid name. Klines. Wheeze in. On the porch over the rail into the freakin wall. Goldy. Definitely. Named Goldy. On Monday. Across the street. Wilsons. Phoney company. Over the stone hill. Bam. And bam. Knuckle the hell out of him. Four in a row. Sky hook. The freakin old bag in the ugly green house. Kimmels. Tuttles. Freakin mailbox. Goldy.
Forty minutes later, Bub got to give Spotty twelve hard-knuckles. The last one took a little bit of skin. Spotty shook the sting from his hand, excitedly telling Bub the news.
“I’m quittin too Bub. I’ll quit with ya. Screw the flute. I don’t give a flying frick about the flute. I’ll tell Bailey Boy I got a disease.”
“AIDS!” said Bub.
“Yeah, yeah, AIDS. That’ll scare him off. He won’t touch me. He’ll throw the flute in the freakin garbage. Freakin AIDS. He’ll have a fricking frog. Outright.”
“Wait, wait, wait. I got it,” said Bub, holding up one finger profoundly. “Tell him he can blow the flute himself.”
“Yeah, yeah! You’re a genius, Boo-Boo. You can freakin blow it freakin yourself Bailey Boy. Freakin-A.”
“You can Saran Wrap it for all I care,” Bub said.
They chortled together for awhile, Bub theatrically falling off his bike with laughter, then they made more specific plans. Both boys agreed that they should quit separately on Monday so that Mr. Bailey couldn’t try to talk them out of it. Somehow, they figured, he would be much more stunned by two separate quittings on the same day, and would probably be left in a comical state of speechlessness.
Swelling with dreams of band-freedom and a docile Mr. Bailey, Bub and Spotty split like two jets behind Spotty’s house—not knowing that the real reason two such able pilots couldn’t face quitting the band together was because each one would be waiting for the other to do the talking—not knowing that the real reason they wanted to quit was because of the odd quivering in their shoulders when the instruments got heavy, and the blank look that Mr. Bailey gave them as if they were large potatoes propped in their chairs, and the strange scariness alive within that wide stretch of noise when the whole bandroom tuned up all at once.
3
They’re All Odd Numbers
Mrs. Lilly’s first name was Lillian. She had no middle name. In the beginning, she had toyed seriously with the notion of refusing to marry John because of the last-name issue.
“If only it was the other way around or something,” she had said quietly when she was twenty-three. “Lilly Lillian sounds better than Lillian Lilly at least. It’s all backwards.”
“So you go by Lill,” John said, shrugging and twiddling one end of his moustache, an hourly habit in those days. “And nobody notices. Not backwards at all. Perfectly natural. Lill Lilly. Sounds very sure of itself. Confident. Like a President’s wife.”
He chuckled lazily and cuddled closer to her on the couch, but she wasn’t quite convinced. Nothing was wrong with her own last name, she supposed out loud, and maybe it wouldn’t be so strange if they both took on her name instead of his. It was 1969, she argued—people were ready for radical things to happen. But John pointed out again that her current last name—Smith—would end up being silly and embarrassing for them both, especially at the wedding.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” John said, standing up in front of the couch and blessing the congregation in imitation of a priest, “it gives me great pleasure to present to you, for the first time in history, Mr. and Mrs. John Smith. Applause, applause.”
Lillian didn’t clap along, but managed a grin.
“Then,” John said, “they’d give us enough bus fare to explore Virginia on our honeymoon. Someone would slip me a little pickax and a compass and a condom at the reception, and you’d turn into a fat old prairie-wife.”