THESE are the war years or the postwar years or the interwar years or the intrawar years or the antiwar years or the nonwar years, depending on what you read, what you watch, what you listen to, where you live, who you know, who you knew. This is Kaliyuga. The Iron Age. The eternal war is here.
IN proud-pied April, the principal threw a changeup, calling J.'s uncle into his office instead of J. He returned to the diner frothing over J.'s grades, truancy, and alleged larceny in the third degree of certain athletics department equipment. (Skip as much as J. did and you could've found worse ways to occupy yourself than—let's say hypothetically, in deference to the State of Connecticut's statute of limitations—popping a couple hundred fly balls into the lake.)
What gave J.'s uncle the fantods? The damn Yankees, hospitals, the town selectman, cell phones, and his nephew dropping out of school (following, he feared, in his footsteps). Still, he was not a stupid man; he knew the futility—even as he attempted it—of a frontal assault. After the brief skirmish above that concluded with J. beating a strategic retreat, his uncle opened a second front by conscripting J.'s one ally to the cause (asking Blue to come over that evening to tutor J.). Classic Sun Tzu, or at least J. assumed, having never read him.
The hard part should have been convincing J., but he agreed so readily to the proposal that his uncle was startled into a long, silent squint in lieu of delivering some prepared remarks on the Importance of Education. A Potemkin study hall built of textbooks and notepads in the middle of the diner (the perfect spot to learn) would hopefully assuage his uncle's carking cares and clear him out of J.'s airspace. If the particular choice of tutor mattered one way or the other to J., let daws go hungry, he wore nothing on his sleeve.
Her mother's daughter, a trooper through and through, Blue attempted to assay J.'s knowledge of the Marshall Plan (Truman's $12 billion crowbar to prize open post-WWII markets for Uncle Sam) and Othello (Shakespeare's race-baiting rip-off of Cinthio's "Un Capitano Moro"). J., adolescens imprimis gravis et doctus, responded with a pop quiz of his own:
Q: "Shot down on the pavement/Waiting in death row/His game was survivin'/As in heaven, as in hell" are lyrics from which Clash song?
a. "Brand New Cadillac"
b. "Spanish Bombs"
c. "The Right Profile"
d. "Guns of Brixton"
J. whistled "Conjunction Junction" and practiced his overhand shuffles, injogs, undercuts. Come delusion, come confusion, pick a card, any card.
Blue saw straight through him. Did she want him to change? Would time change him? He wouldn't let her down (oh yes, he would).
Where was Tallboy all the while? Blustering about the City of the Big Shoulders on a trip to grandma's house. Parked outside the diner, J. spotted the pumpkin Blue rolled in on, rebuilt by her beau as a gift, a '61 glacier-hued four-door Dodge Lancer, expression of his love, testament to his will. Did Tallboy know the difference? Did he know there was a difference?
The son of an absconded hot rod angel, J. imagined cars and rode them in his dreams, roaring off nightblack cliffs unafraid into a nuclear dawn.
"I've got an idea," J. said. "Let's go outside."
A Cooperation Act was negotiated between Blue and J. as follows: The two Parties would exit the diner jointly for the purpose of procurement of ice cream as a result of the deficiency of the resource of cones in the diner: Provided, That said ice cream be consumed in cones and not bowls to the extent such vessels were available at market rates, the procurement and consumption of such dessert determined to be essential for the stated purpose of the evening, i.e., studying, by alleviating conditions of hunger as it related to ice cream, cones. Approved, Eve of May, 20__.
