Ham On Rye

10

Lila Jane was a girl my age who lived next door. I still wasn't allowed to play with the children in the neighborhood, but sitting in the bedroom often got dull. I would go out and walk around in the backyard, looking at things, bugs mostly. Or I would sit on the grass and imagine things. One thing I imagined was that I was a great baseball player, so great that I could get a hit every time at bat, or a home run anytime I wanted to. But I would deliberately make outs just to trick the other team. I got my hits when I felt like it. One season, going into July, I was hitting only. 139 with one home run. HENRY CHINASKI IS FINISHED, the newspapers said. Then I began to hit. And how I hit! At one time I allowed myself 16 home runs in a row. Another time I batted in 24 runs in one game. By the end of the season I was hitting.523.

Lila Jane was one of the pretty girls I'd seen at school. She was one of the nicest, and she was living right next door. One day when I was in the yard she came up to the fence and stood there looking at me.

"You don't play with the other boys, do you?"

I looked at her. She had long red-brown hair and dark brown eyes.

"No," I said, "no, I don't."

"Why not?"

"I see them enough at school."

"I'm Lila Jane," she said.

"I'm Henry."

She kept looking at me and I sat there on the grass and looked at her. Then she said, "Do you want to see my panties?"

"Sure," I said.

She lifted her dress. The panties were pink and clean. They looked good. She kept holding her dress up and then turned around so that I could see her behind. Her behind looked nice. Then she pulled her dress down. "Goodbye," she said and walked off.

"Goodbye," I said.

It happened each afternoon. "Do you want to see my panties?"

"Sure."

The panties were nearly always a different color and each time they looked better.

One afternoon after Lila Jane showed me her panties I said,

"Let's go for a walk."

"All right," she said.

I met her in front and we walked down the street together. She was really pretty. We walked along without saying anything until we came to a vacant lot. The weeds were tall and green.

"Let's go into the vacant lot," I said.

"All right," said Lila Jane. We walked out into the tall weeds.

"Show me your panties again."

She lifted her dress. Blue panties.

"Let's stretch out here," I said.

We got down in the weeds and I grabbed her by the hair and kissed her. Then I pulled up her dress and looked at her panties. I put my hand on her behind and kissed her again. I kept kissing her and grabbing at her behind. I did this for quite a long time. Then I said, "Let's do it." I wasn't sure what there was to do but I felt there was more.

"No, I can't," she said.

"Why not?"

"Those men will see."

"What men?"

"There!" she pointed. I looked between the weeds. Maybe half a block away some men were working repairing the street.

"They can't see us!"

"Yes, they can!"

I got up. "God damn it!" I said and I walked out of the lot and went back home.

I didn't see Lila Jane again for a while in the afternoons. It didn't matter. It was football season and I was - in my imagination - a great quarterback. I could throw the ball 90 yards and kick it 80. But we seldom had to kick, not when I carried the ball. I was best running into grown men. I crushed them. It took five or six men to tackle me. Sometimes, like in baseball, I felt sorry for everybody and I allowed myself to be tackled after only gaining 8 or 10 yards. Then I usually got injured, badly, and they had to carry me off the field. My team would fall behind, say 40 to 17, and with 3 or 4 minutes left to play I'd return, angry that I had been injured. Every time I got the ball I ran all the way to a touchdown. How the crowd screamed! And on defense I made every tackle, intercepted every pass. I was everywhere. Chinaski, the Fury! With the gun ready to go off I took the kickoff deep in my own end zone. I ran forward, sideways, backwards. I broke tackle after tackle, I leaped over fallen tacklers. I wasn't getting any blocking. My team was a bunch of sissies. Finally, with five men hanging on to me I refused to fall and dragged them over the goal line for the winning touchdown.

I looked up one afternoon as a big guy entered our yard through the back gate. He walked in and just stood there looking at me. He was a year or so older than I was and he wasn't from my grammar school. "I'm from Marmount Grammar School," he said.

"You better get out of here," I told him. "My father will be coming home soon,"

"Is that right?" he asked. I stood up. "What are you doing here?"

"I hear you guys from Delsey Grammar think you're tough."

"We win all the inter-school games."

"That's because you cheat. We don't like cheaters at Marmount."

He had on an old blue shirt, half unbuttoned in front. He had a leather thong on his left wrist.

"You think you're tough?" he asked me.

"No."

"What do you have in your garage? I think I'll take something from your garage."

"Stay out of there."

The garage doors were open and he walked past me. There wasn't much in there. He found an old deflated beach ball and picked it up.

"I think I'll take this."

"Put it down."

"Down your throat!" he said and then he threw it at my head. I ducked. He came out of the garage toward me. I backed up.

He followed me into the yard. "Cheaters never prosper!" he said. He swung at me. I ducked. I could feel the wind from his swing. I closed my eyes, rushed him and started punching. I was hitting something, sometimes. I could feel myself getting hit but it didn't hurt. Mostly I was scared. Therewas nothing to do but to keep punching. Then I heard a voice: "Stop it!" It was Lila Jane. She was in my backyard. We both stopped fighting. She took an old tin can and threw it. It hit the boy from Marmount in the middle of the forehead and bounced off. He stood there a moment and then ran off, crying and howling. He ran out the rear gate and down the alley and was gone. A little tin can. I was surprised, a big guy like him crying like that. At Delsey we had a code. We never made a sound. Even the sissies took their beatings silently. Those guys from Marmount weren't much.

"You didn't have to help me," I told Lila Jane.

"He was hitting you!"

"He wasn't hurting me."

Lila Jane ran off through the yard, out the rear gate, then into her yard and into her house. Lila Jane still likes me, I thought.