<SPAN name="toc11" id="toc11"></SPAN>
<SPAN name="pdf12" id="pdf12"></SPAN>
<h1><span style="font-size: 173%">6</span></h1>
<div class="tei-figure"><ANTIMG src="images/image06.png" width-obs="459" height-obs="450" alt="Illustration: Dave wheeling his bike across Belt Parkway." /></div>
<p>You can’t really stay sore at a guy you’ve known
all your life, especially if he lives right around
the corner and goes to the same school. Anyhow,
one hot Saturday morning Nick turns up
at my house as if nothing had ever happened
and says do I want to go swimming, because the
Twenty-third Street pool’s open weekends now.</p>
<p>After that we go back to playing ball on the
street in the evenings and swimming sometimes
on weekends. One Saturday his mother tells me
he went to Coney Island. He didn’t ask me to go
along, which is just as well, because I wouldn’t
have. I don’t hang around his house after school
much anymore, either. School lets out, and
there’s the Fourth of July weekend, when we
go up to Connecticut, and pretty soon after that
Nick goes off to a camp his church runs. Pop
asks me if I want to go to a camp a few weeks,
but I don’t. Life is pretty slow at home, but I
don’t feel like all that organization.</p>
<p>I think Tom must have forgotten about me
and found a gang his own age when I get a
postcard from him: “Dear Dave, The guy I work
for is a creep, and all the guys who buy gas
from him are creeps, so it’s great to be alive in
Beautiful Brooklyn! Wish you were here, but
you’re lucky you’re not. Best, Tom.”</p>
<p>It’s hard to figure what he means when he
says a thing. However, I got nothing to do, so
I might as well go see. He said he was going to
work in a filling station on the Belt Parkway,
and there can’t be a million of them.</p>
<p>I don’t say anything too exact to Mom about
where I’m going, because she gets worried about
me going too far, and besides I don’t really know
where I’m going.</p>
<p>Brooklyn, what a layout. It’s not like Manhattan,
which runs pretty regularly north and
south, with decent square blocks. You could lose
a million friends in Brooklyn, with the streets
all running in circles and angles, and the people
all giving you cockeyed directions. What with
no bikes allowed on parkways, and skirting
around crumby looking neighborhoods, it takes
me at least a week of expeditions to find the
right part of the Belt Parkway to start checking
the filling stations.</p>
<p>I wheel my bike across the parkway, but even
so some cop yells at me. You’d think a cop could
find a crime to get busy with.</p>
<p>On a real sticky day in July I wheel across
to a station at Thirty-fourth Street, and nobody
yells at me, and I go over to the air pump and
fiddle with my tires. A car pulls out after it gets
gas, and there’s Tom.</p>
<p>“Hi!” I say.</p>
<p>Tom half frowns and quick looks over his
shoulder to see if his boss is around, I guess,
and then comes over to the air pump.</p>
<p>“How’d you get way out here?” he says.</p>
<p>“On the bike. I got your postcard, and I
figured I could find the filling station.”</p>
<p>He relaxes and grins. I feel better. He says,
“You’re a crazy kid. How’s Cat?”</p>
<p>But just then the boss has to come steaming
up. “What d’ya want, kid? No bikes allowed on
the parkway.”</p>
<p>I start to say I’m just getting air, but Tom
speaks up. “It’s all right. I know him.”</p>
<p>“Yeah? I told you, keep kids out of here!” The
guy manages to suggest that kids Tom knows
are probably worse than any other kind. He
motions me off like a stray dog. I don’t want to
get Tom in any trouble, so I get going. At the
edge of the parkway I wave. “So long. Write me
another postcard.”</p>
<p>Tom raises a hand briefly, but his face looks
closed, like nothing was going to get in or out.</p>
<p>I pedal slowly and hotly back through the
tangle of Brooklyn and figure, well, that’s a
week’s research wasted. I still don’t know where
Tom lives, so I don’t know how I can get a hold
of him again. Anyway, how do I know he wants
to be bothered with me? He looked pretty fed
up with everything.</p>
<p>So long as I got nothing else to do, the next
week I figure I’ll get public-spirited at home: I
paint the kitchen for Mom, which isn’t so bad,
but moving all those silly dishes and pots and
scrumy little spice cans can drive you wild. I
only break one good vase and a bottle of salad
oil. Salad oil and broken glass are great. In the
afternoons I go to the swimming pool and learn
to do a jackknife and a backflip, so Pop will think
I am growing up to be a Real American Boy.
Also, you practically have to learn to dive so you
can use the diving pool, because the swimming
pool is so jam-packed with screaming sardines
you can’t move in it.</p>
<p>Evenings Cat and I play records, or we go to
see Aunt Kate and drink iced tea. One weekend
my real aunt comes to visit and sleeps in my
room, so I go to stay with Aunt Kate, and I pretty
near turn into cottage cheese.</p>
<p>I’ve about settled into this dull routine when
Mom surprises me by handing me a postcard
one morning. It’s from Tom: “Day off next
Tuesday. If you feel like it, meet me near the
aquarium at Coney Island about nine in the
morning, before it’s crowded.”</p>
<p>So that week drags by till Tuesday, and there
I am at Coney Island bright and early. Tom is
easy enough to find, pacing up and down the
boardwalk like a tiger. We say “Hi” and so forth,
and I’m all ready to take a run for the water,
but he keeps snapping his fingers and looking
up and down the boardwalk.</p>
<p>Finally he says, “There’s a girl I used to know
pretty well. I didn’t see her for a while till last
week, and we got in an argument, and I guess
she’s mad. I wrote and asked her to come swimming
today, but maybe she’s not coming.”</p>
<p>I figure it out that I’m there as insurance
against the girl not showing up, but I don’t
mind. Anyhow, she does show up. It can’t have
been too much of an argument they had, because
she acts pretty friendly.</p>
<p>Tom introduces us. Her name is Hilda and a
last name that’d be hard to spell—Swedish maybe—and
she’s got a wide, laughing kind of mouth
and a big coil of yellow hair in a bun on top of
her head, and a mighty good figure. She asks me
where I ran into Tom, and we tell her all about
Cat and the cellar at Number Forty-six, and I
tell them both about my Ivy-League haircut,
which I had never explained to anyone before.
They get a laugh out of that, and then she asks
him about the filling-station job, and he says it
stinks.</p>
<p>I figure they could get along without me for
a while, so I go for a swim and wander down
the beach a ways and eat a hot dog and swim
some more. When I come back, I see Tom and
Hilda just coming out of the water, so I join
them. Hilda says, “Come have a coke. Tom says
he’s got to try swimming to France just once
more.”</p>
<p>I don’t know just what she means, but we go
get cokes and come back and stretch out in the
sun. She asks me do I want a smoke, and I say
No. It’s nice to be asked, though. We watch
Tom, who is swimming out past all the other
people. I wish I’d gone with him. I say, “Lifeguard’s
going to whistle him in pretty soon. He’s
out past all the others.”</p>
<p>Hilda lets out a breath and snorts, “He’ll always
go till they blow the whistle. Always got
to go farther than anyone else.”</p>
<p>I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say
anything.</p>
<p>Hilda goes on: “I used to wait tables in a
restaurant down near Washington Square. Tom
and a lot of the boys from NYU came in there.
Sometimes the day before an exam he’d be
sitting around for hours, buying people cokes
and acting as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
Some other times, for no reason anyone could
tell, he’d sit in a corner and stir his coffee like
he was going to make a hole in the cup.”</p>
<p>“Tom was at NYU?” I ask. I don’t know
where I thought he’d been before he turned up
in the cellar. I guess I never thought.</p>
<p>“Sure,” Hilda says. “He was in the Washington
Square College for about a year and a half.
He lived in a dormitory uptown, but I used to
see him in the restaurant, and then fairly often
we had dates after I got off work. He has people
out in the Midwest somewhere—a father and
a stepmother. He was always sour and close-mouthed
about them, even before he got thrown
out of NYU. Now he won’t even write them.”</p>
<p>This is a lot of information to take in all at
once and leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
The first one that comes into my head is this:
“How come he got thrown out of NYU?”</p>
<p>“Well, it makes Tom so sore, he’s never
really told me a plain, straight story. It’s all
mixed up with his father. I think his father wrote
him not to come home at Christmas vacation,
for some reason. Tom and a couple of other boys
who were left in the dormitory over the holidays
got horsing around and had a water fight. The
college got huffy and wrote the parents, telling
them to pay up for damages. The other parents
were pretty angry, but they stuck behind their
kids and paid up. Tom just never heard from
his father. Not a line.</p>
<p>“That was when Tom began coming into the
restaurant looking like thunder. The college began
needling him for the water-fight damages, as
well as second-semester tuition. He took his first
exam, physics, and got an A on it. He’s pretty
smart.</p>
<p>“He still didn’t hear anything from home.
He took the second exam, French, and thought
he flunked it. That same afternoon he went into
the office and told the dean he was quitting,
and he packed his stuff and left. I didn’t see him
again till a week ago. I didn’t know if he’d got
sick of me, or left town, or what.</p>
<p>“He says he wrote his father that he had a
good job, and they could forget about him.
Then he broke into that cellar on a dare or for
kicks.</p>
<p>“So here we are. What do we do next?”</p>
<p>Hilda looks at me—me, age fourteen—as if I
might actually know, and it’s kind of unnerving.
Everyone I know, their life goes along in set
periods: grade school, junior high, high school,
college, and maybe getting married. They don’t
really have to think what comes next.</p>
<p>I say cautiously, “My pop says a kid’s got to go
to college now to get anywhere. Maybe he ought
to go back to school.”</p>
<p>“You’re so right, Grandpa,” she says, and I
would have felt silly, but she has a nice friendly
laugh. “I wish I could persuade him to go back.
But it’s not so easy. I guess he’s got to get a job
and go to night school, if they’ll accept him. He
won’t ask his father for money.”</p>
<p>“You two got my life figured out?” Tom has
come up behind us while we were lying in the
sand on our stomachs. “I just hope that sour
grape at the filling station gives me a good recommendation
so I can get another job. The way he
watches his cash register, you’d think I was Al
Capone.”</p>
<p>We talk a bit, and then Hilda gets up and says
she’s going to the ladies’ room. She doesn’t act
coy about it, the way most girls do when they’re
sitting with guys. She just leaves.</p>
<p>“How do you like Hilda?” Tom asks, and
again I’m sort of surprised, because he acts like
he really wants my opinion.</p>
<p>“She’s nice,” I say.</p>
<p>“Yeah.” Tom suddenly glowers, as if I’d said
I <span class="tei tei-hi"><span style="font-style: italic">didn’t</span></span> like her. “I don’t know why she wastes
her time on me. I’ll never be any use to her.
When her family hears about me, I’ll get the
boot.”</p>
<p>“I could ask my pop. You know, I told you
he’s a lawyer. Maybe he’d know how you go
about getting back into college or getting a job
or something.”</p>
<p>Tom laughs, an unamused bark. “Maybe he’ll
tell you to quit hanging around with jerks that
get in trouble with the cops.”</p>
<p>This is a point, all right. Come to think, I
don’t know why I said I’d ask Pop anyway. I
usually make a point of not letting his nose into
my personal affairs, because I figure he’ll just
start bossing me around. However, I certainly
can’t do anything for Tom on my own.</p>
<p>I say, “I’ll chance it. The worst he ever does
is talk. One time he made a federal case out of
me buying a Belafonte record he didn’t like.
Another time playing ball I cracked a window in
a guy’s Cadillac, and Pop acted like he was going
to sue the guy for owning a Cadillac. You just
never know.”</p>
<p>Tom says, “With my dad, you <span class="tei tei-hi"><span style="font-style: italic">know</span></span>: I’m
wrong.”</p>
<p>Hilda comes back just then. She snaps, “If he’s
such a drug on the market, why don’t you shut
up and forget about him?”</p>
<p>“O.K., O.K.,” says Tom.</p>
<p>The beach is getting filled up by now, so we
pull on our clothes and head for the subway.
Tom and Hilda get off in Brooklyn, and I go
on to Union Square.</p>
<p>After dinner that night Mom is washing the
dishes and Pop is reading the paper, and I figure
I might as well dive in.</p>
<p>“Pop,” I say, “there’s this guy I met at the
beach. Well, really I mean I met him this spring
when I was hunting for Cat, and this guy was
in the cellar at Forty-six Gramercy, and he got
caught and....”</p>
<p>“Wha-a-a-t?” Pop puts down his paper and
takes off his glasses. “Begin again.”</p>
<p>So I give it to him again, slow, and with
explanations. I go through the whole business
about the filling station and Hilda and NYU,
and I’ll say one thing for Pop, when he finally
settles down to listen, he listens. I get through,
and he puts on his reading glasses and goes to
look out the window.</p>
<p>“Do you have this young man’s name and
address, or is he just Tom from The Cellar?”</p>
<p>I’d just got it from Tom when we were at the
beach. He’s at a Y in Brooklyn, so I tell Pop this.</p>
<p>Pop says, “Tell him to call my office and come
in to see me on his next day off. Meanwhile,
I’ll bone up on City educational policies in regard
to juvenile delinquents.”</p>
<p>He says this perfectly straight, as if there’d be
a book on the subject. Then he goes back to
his newspaper, so I guess that closes the subject
for now.</p>
<p>“Thanks, Pop,” I say and start to go out.</p>
<p>“Entirely welcome,” says Pop. As I get to the
door, he adds, “If that cat of yours makes a
practice of introducing you to the underworld
in other people’s cellars, we can do without him.
We probably can anyway.”</p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />