The Last Romantics(9)
Caroline lifted her eyes from the book and studied Nathan. They were both long-legged and skinny, both dirty blond, both bronzed and squint-eyed in the sun. Nathan wore gold glasses that matched his hair. His gaze was careful and serious.
During the Pause, Caroline was the one who missed our parents the most. She cried easily, silently, at the kitchen table while we ate breakfast or later in the living room when we played Monopoly, even if she was winning. Her bad dreams raged for nights, then subsided, then took hold again without any apparent pattern or cause. She’d awake screaming and crying, and none of us could comfort her, not even Renee.
Now she coolly returned Nathan’s gaze and shrugged her shoulders. “Hardy Boys are okay,” she replied. “But Nancy is braver.”
Nathan tilted his head, considering. With his long, careful fingers, he picked at the edge of our quilt and at a collection of small, warm pebbles I had gathered and placed on a leaf.
“Wanna swim?” he said suddenly. He moved quick as a darting minnow, jumping away from us, running along the bank, from one side of the pond to the other, in and out of the water, atop the dam (although it was slippery and Angela yelled at him to come off), up a tree and down. At last he returned to Caroline. He shook his wet head at her, and she angrily slammed her book shut and stalked off to sit on the sand. But she looked back at him. I saw the glance, her interest in this pale, quick boy clear on her face.
It wasn’t long before we learned all about Nathan. He had a mother named Jeanette, a father named Cyrus, and five siblings who became known to us as a single unit: DouglasTerryMaddyEmilyJen. We called them the Goats, because their last name was Duffy, which reminded us of the Billy Goats Gruff from the fairy tale, and also because there was something goatlike about them, with their long, curious faces and all that shaggy hair. Each of them appeared strong-willed, utterly confident, fighting loudly with the others over questions of Eggo preparation and volcanic eruptions and Michael Jackson song lyrics.
The day after we first met Nathan Duffy, we met Ace McAllister. Ace came crashing down the path to the pond wearing head-to-toe camouflage and holding a BB gun.
“Bang, bang, bang!” he yelled, startling us from our games and books.
“That’s Ace,” Nathan declared without emotion as Ace pretended to shoot him again and again.
Ace was short and thick in the torso, with heavy limbs and broad features. He had an abundance of dark, shiny hair that fell into his eyes. He and Nathan were not friends, but they were neighbors and only one year apart in age, and so their mothers had thrust them together since their earliest days of playground visits and birthday parties.
“Angela, gotcha!” Ace yelled, and directed his attention toward the babysitter. Angela flapped a hand at him but did not lift her eyes from her magazine. Once she’d been his babysitter, too, and brought him on summer afternoons to the pond, but she’d quit to work for the Duffys. Now Ace’s parents left him alone with a ten-dollar bill, a house key, and instructions to keep out of trouble.
Within days it became clear that Ace was the wildest of us all. He cannonballed off the dam into the pond and whooped so loudly that even Nathan’s big brother Terry told him to quiet down. Nathan was in sixth grade, Ace in fifth at a private day school in Greenwich called Pierpont Academy. We all went to public school, and the idea of Pierpont—with its uniforms and lacrosse fields—struck me as impressively mature and intellectual, but Ace went there only because his parents had money and they didn’t know what else to do with him. He boasted that he’d been kicked out of a fancy boarding school in New Hampshire, suspended at public school, and Pierpont Academy was the only place that would take him. He talked of fights won, beers drunk, cigarettes smoked. We doubted the truth of these claims but listened nonetheless to the stories. He often brought his BB gun to the pond, or a loud boom box he claimed to have stolen. He captured frogs and crickets and once a small green garter snake, keeping each for a spell in a shoe box. I suspected he longed to poke these animals, or hurt them, but he didn’t dare with us there.
When Ace learned that Joe played baseball, he began to treat him with more interest and more aggression. He began to say things like, “Look, here comes Joe DiMaaaaggio,” drawing out the ah as a croak. But there was also the slightest hint of deference, of awe. Joe was one year younger than Ace but taller, stronger, with an athlete’s calm.
Joe regarded Ace cautiously. They were friendly, but, I believed at the time, they would never be friends. Ace was an unwanted but unavoidable summer accessory, and we accepted him as we accepted the humidity and the mosquitoes, with only mild complaint.
The six of us—me and Joe, Nathan and Ace, Caroline and Renee—formed a gang of sorts. We weren’t always together, not every day, but most days we swam at the pond or played Twenty Questions on the grass or watched TV at Nathan’s house while the Goats milled around and slammed doors and talked on the phone in loud, amused voices. In the early evening, once the sun began to drop, we would play baseball at the park. We always handicapped Joe—Only your left hand! No mitt! Close your eyes!—because otherwise the games were short and humiliating. We also wanted to see what Joe could do, and so we pushed him to perform in wilder, more ridiculous scenarios. He did so gamely, laughing, always succeeding at the trials we set. Sometimes we sat in the stands and watched as Ace pitched ball after ball and Joe hit each long and high, a dreamy, lazy smile on his face. An effortless look, as though hitting the ball like that required only the smallest piece of himself.