Phoebe pulled me away from the presidential divan. We stalked along the pond, under the long banana-green fingers of a weeping willow, and through a hand-grenade scatter of cones from a magnolia tree farther up the bank. A quartet of Hellbenders-Sosebee, Dunnagin, Hay, and Parris-crooned “The Music Goes Round and Round,” “If I Didn’t Care,” and “Making Whoopee,” among other corny numbers, a capella. The clang of horseshoes in a pair of facing pits near the buggy house echoed like anchors bumping a ship’s hull.
“Bravo!” the President cried after one of the quartet’s songs. “Splendid, gentlemen!”
“I guess he’s all right,” Phoebe said, nodding downslope at the President’s tent. “For a New York swank.”
He seemed all right to me. I didn’t know you could, or even should, try to find fault with the President. Which was why Sloan’s snotty poem aboard the Bomber had made such an impression on me. To me, FDR was like a king. For the biggest part of my life, no one else had held his office.
“I know where you went the other night when you didn’t show up for dinner,” Phoebe said. “Penticuff Strip.”
I looked at my shoes. Her great-uncle knew where I’d spent Friday evening. So did most of my teammates. At a picnic, you just naturally overheard allegations, brags, gossip.
“Actually, it uz worse than that,” Phoebe said. “The Wing and Thigh, a chicken place n chippy house.”
The quartet crooning for FDR had just eased in to “Making Whoopee,” a wink-and-slink version with lots of eye rolling and so on. I turned red from Phoebe’s remark and from the risqué gist of the song. What’d Phoebe know about a chippy house, for God’s sake? For that matter, what did I?
“You lose your cherry?”
I looked at her like she’d asked me if I’d been conceived and delivered a bastard.
“I ast, Did some low woman on the Strip git yore cherry?”
The urge hit me to walk away. But a sudden and ripening hunch that walking away would cut me off from Phoebe forever reversed it. I had to answer her, and answer straight, so I shook my head, thankful my dummyhood spared me the mess-and also the tail-tucking-of going into detail.
“You swear?”
I nodded. Curriden’s money’d bought me nothing but a knot on the head and a broken chain of shameful memories.
“If that’s true, Daniel Boles, you better kiss me.”
It’d been true my whole acne-plagued adolescence, but no young female’d ever hinted that my intact cherry entitled me to a Public Display of Affection. Well, semipublic: the branches of that magnolia half-hid us from the merrymakers by the pond.
Phoebe put her hands on my skinny flanks and reached up on her toes to give me a kiss. I bent to get it. It tasted a little like barbecue sauce and Nehi creme soda, but more like the kitten breath and the dreamful hunger of a fifteen-year-old girl with more heart than slickness. I liked that kiss. It fed, or seemed to feed, almost all of Phoebe into me, the fizzy soda of her hunger, her mouth, her eyes, her breast buds, her armpits, even the commonplace mystery of her sex. I grabbed her and drove the kiss on-harder, more acrid-sweet, ever more puzzlesome to us both.
Tiptoe to keep it going, Phoebe snapped off a blue-darter of a fart. The kickback shoved her teeth into mine with a lightninglike click. The kiss ended then, but I’d lived years since it began, and that little poot, instead of rendering our kiss vile or comical, opened the moment out for me in a funny way. It was like Phoebe’d handed me her diary or walked into my bedroom without a stitch of clothing. I felt singled out, honored, and it befuddled me-expelled me back into the numbing hurly-burly of my Hellbender teammates-when she broke free and hugged herself.
“What you gonna do? That goopy Brunswick stew. I eat two spoonfuls and that happens.”
I moved to comfort her-not that she needed comforting, more like distracting-and to thieve another kiss. But Mister JayMac, or somebody else with a gale-force pucker, whistled, and Phoebe dragged me by the hand out from under the magnolia’s brittle awning into the spread-out bruise of a Fourth of July sunset.
“Yall get down here!” Mister JayMac called. “Pronto!”
The President’s flunkies, and some ballplayers, had packed his touring car, reinstalling the back seat so he and his party could return to Warm Springs for the night. Next day, he’d fly to Washington to jump back into harness as commander-in-chief; then, the coming Friday, while the Hellbenders played the first of a four-game set against the Linenmakers, U.S. and British paratroopers would jump into Sicily to lay the groundwork for an Allied invasion of Italy.
Side by side-but not hand in hand-Phoebe and I ambled downslope to the President’s open-topped car. Motorcycles straddled by MPs already flanked it, and soldiers in helmets and battle fatigues-right out of a March of Time newsreel-held sentinel posts all along a snaky line from the pond to McKissic House to Angus Road. The Elshtains, Miss LaRaina, and the McKissics stood beside the car speaking their good-byes.
Below one of the tents, near the water, a fistfight broke out. Ballplayers and MPs rushed toward the mayhem. Grown men shouted like hooligans. Kids on the grounds hurried to find a sane adult to shield them from whatever’d begun to happen. The two men fighting locked each other around the neck and bent at the waist like recruits doing a peculiar type of calisthenics. They grappled, they fell down, they thrashed like freshly dug earthworms.
“Bust his lip for him, Muscles!”
“Come on, Reese!”
“Hit him! Hit him! Hit him!”
The grapplers-Musselwhite and Curriden-got to their feet again, staggered to the pond’s verge, toppled, rolled into the water, came back up streaming and sputtering and wrestling, a pair of our best players-fellas right up there with Snow and Clerval-acting like infantile yahoos. The splashing and cursing continued so long and loud it even began to embarrass the President’s security people, who’d positioned themselves around his touring car like bank guards around a Wells Fargo wagon. At last, four MPs slogged into the water to put an end to the fracas. One of them, for his trouble, caught a knee in the groin, and the rest went into a domino drop that prompted even some of their buddies to hoohah.
“Hey!” Turkey Sloan shouted. “You’re scaring the fish!”
Henry appeared in the hullabaloo near the water. Chinese lanterns strung among the tents flickered in a breeze-blown dance behind him. He elbowed his way to the pond’s edge, waded in like Gulliver, and collared Muscles and Curriden without getting pulled to his knees himself. He dragged the lummoxes to shore, one to a hand, like a fisher bringing in a pair of salmon-freighted nets. He kept coming in with them until, side by side on their hands and knees, they gasped on the grass just below the farthest tent.
“There are combats enough about this planet,” Henry said. “Doesn’t the significance of this occasion”-gesturing toward FDR-“inspire you to at least a mean civility? I am shamed for every Hellbender here.”
Curriden and Muscles gasped and sputtered.
Beside FDR’s car, Mister JayMac said, “Sir, he speaks for me too. I hope you’ll forgive-”
“Forget it, Jay,” Mr Roosevelt said. “Boys will be boys. High spirits and high stakes are a volatile mix, eh? We’re all susceptible to a bout of intemperance these days.”
“They’re out of Wednesday’s game against Cottonton,” Mister JayMac said.
“Not on my account, I hope. I’m inclined to believe their infra-dig donnybrook reflects a long and vexing day. Go easy. Roll out the velvet.”
“They’re suspended. You wouldn’t hang a medal around an erring battle captain’s neck either, sir.”
“Hear, hear,” Colonel Elshtain said.
FDR laughed. Surprisingly, he caught sight of Phoebe and me. “Ah, Miss Pharram, Mr Boles, fine evening for a stroll. I bid you a pleasant farewell.”