The Moth

2

My first friend was a boy named Glendenning Deets, and I met him in the park. He was a little older than I was, so instead of a tricycle, like I was riding, he was on a bike. We stopped, and he passed some remarks about the gocart, as he called it, then said that for five cents he’d let me ride the bike. I said all right. But when he got off the bike, I grabbed it and tried to run off with it without paying the five cents. He mauled me up pretty bad. But then something happened that gave me the bulge on him from there on in. I went down, from the hook he hung on my jaw, and as I got up I stumbled into the tricycle and went down again. That hit him funny, and he began making a speech about it to the nursemaids that were looking on. That made me sore, though until then I had felt like a few uppercuts were coming to me for what I had done. So I piled into him. But all he did was wrestle me off and back away and duck. And I smelled it that knocking me down and making a speech about it was all the fight he had in him that day, and he was my potato if I wanted him. I let him have it. Somebody pulled me off him and made us shake hands. I took the bike over to some grass, but when I tried to ride I couldn’t.

When I got tired of trying he said we ought to get ourselves some peaches. “Where?”

“From the orchard.”

“What orchard?”

“... On Park Avenue.”

“Just steal them, hey?”

“What do you mean steal them? They’re prematures.”

They were a few trees in a backyard, what was left of an orchard, and like all old trees they produced prematures, fruit that ripens ahead of the regular crop. It was the first I knew about that, but he got it off with quite an air, like it was inside stuff you had to get wise to before you had it straight what was stealing and what was not. He said the prematures were no good to sell, “and they’ll thank you for taking them away.” But by the time we had eaten four or five white clings, something in overalls came through the fence and we got out of there quick. He was pretty sore. “The dumb buzzard, with not even enough sense to know we’re doing him a favor.”

People with not enough sense to know you were doing them a favor by taking whatever they had seemed to be quite numerous whenever he was around.

Denny lived in Frederick, but he spent his summer in town with an aunt, Miss Eunice Deets, who lived on Linden Avenue, while his father and mother went to Europe. The summer after we hooked the peaches he said we should have a job, to make some money. That was all right with me, but what job I had no idea. One night, though, he was over after dinner, and got to talking with my father about the garage, and how he’d been noticing things there, specially the time the men took going for wrenches, jacks, and stuff, so why couldn’t he and I be hired on to do that running, and save a lot of time? What he was doing at the garage, which was half a mile from his house, he didn’t bother to say. But he made my father laugh. When he was asked how much we wanted, he said ten cents an hour apiece. So my father said a buck a week, for five hours’ work on Saturday, wouldn’t break him, and we could consider ourselves hired. It was still only eight o’clock, so he drove us to an Army-Navy store near Richmond Market, and got us a jumper suit apiece, visor hats, brogan shoes, lunch buckets, and cotton gloves. I don’t say we didn’t earn our money, because the men ran us ragged, though if it was for the time it saved or the fun of seeing us trot I wouldn’t like to say. But one day, around twelve thirty, when everybody was out back sitting against the fence eating lunch, a guy came in with his car boiling. We took him back to Ed Kratzer, the foreman, who said leave it and he’d see what he could do. The guy got loud about how he had to get to Germantown, Pa., by six o’clock that night. “Then in that case take it somewhere else. If you want us to fix it, leave it and we’ll see what we can do. Just now we’re eating, and if you ask me that’s what you could be doing, and you’ll get there just as quick.”

“... Where do I eat?”

“There’s a drugstore across the street.”

So after he swallowed three times that’s where he went. But of course, when he was gone I had to look big, so I lifted the hood of the car, which was standing in the middle of the garage floor, with nobody around it but us. But when I opened the door I noticed the hand brake was on, hard. It should have been, of course, but it came to me I hadn’t noticed him set it, and you generally did notice it in those days because the ratchet sounded like somebody winding an alarm clock. Then something else came to me. It was a Ford and I don’t know if you remember the old Model T. It had low and high gear on the left, reverse gear center, foot brake on the right, and hand brake straight up the middle. You set the hand brake when you stopped, but in low gear, the car could still go, and I had a hunch. As soon as I cranked it I got in and let off the brake. Sure enough, when I pushed in low gear the car went, and when I dropped the pedal back into high it still went. I stopped and tried reverse and it was all right. I cut my motor and got out. “Well, now, there’s a dumbbell for you.”

“How do you mean, Jack?”

“Driving with his brake on. You can’t do it.”

“And that’s all that was wrong with it?”

“That’s all.”

I got a can, put some water in, and that helped with the temp. He kept studying me. “What we going to charge him, Jack?”

“We got nothing to do with that.”

“Why not?”

“The men attend to charges.”

“When they do the work, they do. But for crying out loud, we did the work. We made it run. We—”

“I thought that was me.”

“Oh, pardon me.”

“We, my eye.”

“Then it’s all yours — for whatever you get.”

What I would get was nothing, as I very well knew. Pretty soon I said: “What do you think we ought to charge him?”

“Who ought to charge him, Jack?”

“We ought to.”

“That’s better. That’s a whole lot better. Gee, that’s a pain in the neck for you, a guy too dumb even to see chances to make dough, and then when somebody else kicks in with a little brains—”

“What do you think we ought to—”

“Two dollars.”

“For just taking off his brake?”

“I thought you put in a new bearing.”

“I don’t like to crook anybody.”

“Who you crooking? Not your old man, that’s a cinch, because we haven’t even used a handful of his waste. And not Kratzer, because he was too lazy even to get in here and see what was wrong. And not the guy. He’ll thank you for getting him out of here on time. He’ll want to pay you. He’ll—”

But my face must have told him, because he shut up and slid over to the back door to check on the situation out back. Then he had me roll the car out front. Then he raced across to the drugstore.

I drove the car up the street, took a U-turn, and had hardly run back before there the guy was, so excited he could hardly talk. I played it just like Denny said, with a whole lot of stuff about how I didn’t want to see him wait while the men finished their lunch, and some more about how he should be careful to let the brake off, “as that’s generally the answer when you burn out a bearing.” He hardly heard me. It turned out he had had the car two days, and probably didn’t know what the hand brake was until somebody set it for him the night before in the garage where he stored it in Washington. He paid the two dollars without a whimper, and even gave me a half dollar extra for helping him out. Soon as he drove off that was divided, in the drug store. Denny saw to that. “All you need is a little brains, Jack. In the garage business it’s like everything else. It’s initiative that counts, every time.”

It was Denny, that summer or maybe the next, that got me started on my singing career, though all it amounted to, at first, was some more of the Deets initiative. They had had a mixed choir at St. Anne’s with four paid soloists and I guess maybe fifteen to twenty volunteers like Nancy. But when Dr. Grant came in, after Dr. Struthers died, he was very High-Church, and pretty soon there was a fight, but he had his way. The soloists were out and the mixed choir was out. The men stayed, to sing the tenor and bass parts, but the sopranos and altos were to be boys. I’d hate to tell you what Denny and I did to them. We chased them up alleys and yelled at them and beat them up. One night a couple called, the man with a buggy whip. He wanted to dust me off for something that had happened, and my father had to get tough.

But then one day Denny found out that the cutie pies got eighty cents a Sunday for doing it. He almost set Nancy, Sheila, my father, and his aunt, Miss Eunice, crazy, that he and I should get a shot at the sugar. Finally it turned out two places had become vacant, and we would be given a trial after rehearsal one afternoon. We waited quite a while, sitting in the rear of the church, while they went through Te Deums and anthems and Gregorian chants, or plain songs as they’re called. They seemed to be the main reason Dr. Grant wanted boys, as it was dry, gray music, some of it sung without accompaniment, and women would have ruined it. But the director was a woman, Miss Eleanor Grant, Dr. Grant’s cousin. She had sung with the Century Opera, but after we got in the war married a French officer, and when he got killed she didn’t go back on the stage right away, but stayed on in Baltimore and taught. She was small and dark and pretty, and even watching her from the back of the church, where I was sitting with Nancy and Sheila and Denny and Miss Eunice, I fell for her hard.

We had been told, when our turn came, not to sing anything religious, but whatever we happened to know and like, so Denny sang A Perfect Day, with Anderson playing for him, and I sang The Rosary, with Sheila. Denny got as far as “when you sit alone with your thoughts,” when Miss Eleanor stopped him and said it was very nice of him to sing for her, but he needn’t bother to finish it, and later, maybe when he was older, she hoped he’d come back. The cutie pies, who were hanging around, all began to laugh, and for once I didn’t blame them. Because Denny sang it in the same gashouse bark he used on Over There, which was his favorite tune at the time, and maybe it sounded funny but it didn’t sound good. Me, I only got as far as “The hours I spend with thee, dear heart.” Because Sheila, as soon as she got spread out on the organ bench, and got the stops pulled open, and got a heel-and-toe grip on the pedals, unfortunately let her music go sliding to the floor. However, she started anyhow, and that was how I came to be thrown out at first base. Because of course her fingers would start it in the key she knew it in, which was two flats, but when Anderson put the music back, her eyes would read it in the key they saw it in, which was six flats. That was how it happened that the first chord and I were in one key, and the second chord and Sheila were in another key, and it sounded like a lunatic asylum.

Next thing I knew, there was Sheila, as usual, giving out with the gushy alibi, like she was a real virtuoso or something, and small chores like this were quite beneath her, and Miss Eleanor was smiling and nodding and patting me. By that time I had somehow swallowed that string of pearls and maybe a couple of tonsils, but I got the surprise of my life. Miss Eleanor put her arm around me, and said there wouldn’t really be any need to go on, as she thought I was a boy they wanted, and would I report next Wednesday to rehearse?

Walking home I never heard three women have so much to say about another woman in all my life. Miss Eunice was burned up at the way Denny had been cut off, though how much he had sounded like a crow with the croup she didn’t mention. Sheila said no wonder I was flustered, the highhanded way things were done around there, and as for that draft, that practically blew the hair off your head, to say nothing of the music in front of you, well! Nancy, who was still sore about being fired, criticized Miss Eleanor’s “method.” Denny had nothing to say, until he and I were alone together, out in his front yard. Then he hauled off and hit me. Then he hit me again. By that time I had got to know him fairly well, so I just waited. Pretty soon he began to blow and backed off, and I stepped up and let him have it, but with the flat of my hand, a slap on the cheeks that sounded like a seal clapping for himself in the circus. “Now do I beat you up or do you cut this out?”

He burst out crying and plumped down on the bench beside the front walk. I sat down beside him and let him bawl. Until then he’d been the smart guy, but when I got the job and he didn’t, he hated me for it. Not that he let it interfere with our beautiful friendship, or kept him from figuring what we would do with the money, once I began collecting my eighty cents. Or, as we could truthfully say, our eighty cents.