The Stones of Summer

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When August came, thick as a dream of falling timbers, Dawes Williams and his mother would pick Simpson up at his office, and then they would all drive west, all evening, the sun before them dying like the insides of a stone melon, split and watery, halving with blood. August was always an endless day, he felt, white as wood, slow as light. Dawes shifted about in his seat, uncomfortable, watching the land slide past. It was late, a steady progression of night; the conversations inside the car were like great wood eyes and, driving west over Iowa, the evening was always air vague with towns, blue fences, and crossroads vacant of cars. He watched the deserted country porches slide by like lonely pickets guarding the gray, outbreaking storm of sky; like juts of rock.

They were going to the farm again, like all those other summers, he thought. He grew restless, like something stuck to his seat in a movie theatre; like something being made only to watch everything at once, and his mother, Leone, Arthur's daughter, would feed him crackers and Coke and tell him they couldn't possibly stop at another service station because her parents, Arthur and especially Gin, were growing older now so they must reach the farm before midnight. The new '50 Chevy was silent and green, smelling almost of iron linen, as they rode down the last of day, and the boy would ask about the greyhounds again, and why his grandfather didn't simply raise corn like the other farmers. Simpson would take the cold cigar from his mouth and say:

"Yes sir, old boy. Art still grows some corn for the science of it, but Arthur's a smart man for a farmer, and knows that greyhounds are the best crop that can be taken from Iowa."

. . . .

Sitting on the living-room floor, playing the latest chic game -- composed mostly of a single wooden frame and some Newtonian steelies swinging together on strings -- flown in from New York with Mrs. Harrison Rawlings, Sr., Dawes Williams suddenly felt if he ever wanted to describe the perfect circle of Ratshit's life, he would need an example. And sitting there, watching the steel balls describe perfectly inert actions against one another as they spun perfectly retraced parabolas in the air, Dawes Wil­liams suddenly figured it this way: Ratshit Rawlings idolized, much too openly, the older athletes; and the side that Ratshit idolized was the blatant fuck-up side. In the eyes of Ratshit Rawlings, to be an all-American, clean-cut, crew-cut fuck-up was a sophisticated thing. Throwing it all away in the end was the epitome of style. And, still sitting there watching the steel balls rebound against one another with a perfect, repeating, waning symmetry, Dawes Williams felt even that he had found the example to prove it all:

One night they had all sat in the gym that was also the auditorium watching the varsity practice. A stage set for Booth Tarkington's Seventeen was set against the far wall like a pink summer cloud, nature-given; an archaic vision of near innocence the moment it was painted, a hollow log of a stage just waiting for the players, waiting for the sophisticated kid from Chicago to come rolling into town in his gay, hopelessly affluent yet somehow rustic, yellow, open-air roadster meant for stopping at illicit roadhouses just over the county line. The basketball court lay its naked four-square reality in front.

The late, gray winter shadows had come from the chicken-wire windows leaving only cages of shade to overlay a painted-on-cardboard summer gazebo. Dawes Williams thought he had been sitting there, trapped only in his skin, in Iowa which was really the same as Indiana, in the exact middle of the twentieth century. Coach Orville Boggs watched, whistle-mouthed, the late practice like a Florentine prince who was unaware except for the fact that he was vaguely conscious of being asleep. Everyone was tense, because the team was miraculously in the finals of the sectionals. Willis Skokes began a slow, deliberate, rhythmic dribble down the floor. He was bringing the ball down, right hand raised in signal, a screaming banshee without a sound, the middle finger extended, and the yellow-shirted second string eyed him with the stare of a single animal. The gym hushed itself and became a closed box. Dawes Williams thought the tension was terrific. Willis Skokes was approaching midcourt. The stars came out. What would he do? Drive it? Fade softly as night into the lane, past a screen, and jump-shoot it? Drive in like a furious cat and then, at the last moment, with great grace and magnanimity, bounce-pass it off? The sun wavered in the west; then decided to fall in again. Suddenly -- with feeling -- Willis Skokes merely tucked the ball under his arm like a movie of Goose Tatum, did a small bunny-hop, a Chaplin walk three times round the center circle, he swiveled his butt in two cutely contradictory movements and he ... he fired the ball from midcourt. Good God, Dawes Williams thought, sitting there, there is no precedent for this. Good God, Dawes Williams thought, it rose, rises, in a speechless arc and then falls against the back wall of the gym with the sound of a small fish being hammered to death on a flat, dry rock.

HE HAD DRAWN NO IRON.

He had drawn no iron, and Coach Orville Boggs slumped to the floor, his life over. A life once dedicated quietly to example and youth, the American way, was now over and lost in the deep winter shadows of an unpretentious gym. He was finished. He had failed. With nearly his last breath he ordered Skokes from the gym, the entire building. Orville Boggs' arm extended baroquely toward the door, offering nothing, saying simply:

"Willis, leave us please," with some last dignity.

And with that, Willis Skokes turned on his heel, like a French clown, to an audience deathly shocked with pity and adoration that approached self-recognition and horror, he bowed, smiled like a faggot, and walked to the door on his hands.

When Ratshit Rawlings saw that happen, he knew there was God.

. . . .

Willis Skokes would never play again, but then it didn't matter: he had become a legend and, besides, Eddie said he would probably be banging his girl Dixie Kakes again in a mere matter of hours anyway.

Only Ratshit died. He never recovered. He lay broken-backed over two auditorium chairs and laughed a high, echoing rill for nearly an hour. In the end, Dawes Williams carried him home and left him on his mother's stoop, like carrying a drunk with one separated arm and shoulder. He didn't come to school; and he didn't eat. He just lay in his room and became periodically hysterical. From the day he arose, Ratshit Rawlings believed firmly in Willis Skokes. He emulated him; studied him in the halls; talked about him incessantly. Finally, Ratshit even analyzed him. He discussed him, frankly, some years later, in terms of Christ-like salvation. It grew. It became mythic; and at the center remained always the image of Willis Skokes; Willis T. Skokes as the personification of -- "I could have done it all right, if I had so chosen: but fortunately for me and my being I did not so choose."

Because you weren't a fuck-off if you chose to become one. Anyone in Rapid Cedar could tell you that. Even Travis Thomas almost understood that. And so, from an early age, Ratshit Rawlings had chosen an unclassi­cal variation on a court-jester theme in which, by merely choosing to play the fool, he thought he would be able eventually to mock, enlighten, finally even rise above the king; the entire system of the king, his father, Mr. Harrison "Ratshit" Rawlings, Sr. Dawes Williams understood it. He watched it grow; he watched it all flower like a manure-headed weed until finally, breaking through, festering into a field of only sun after all of those years of rising through soil, it became suddenly self-conscious and merely eccentric. And that was ironic, or maybe it wasn't, because Ratshit Rawl­ings claimed some obscure New England Transcendentalist as ancestor and because, Dawes Williams thought finally, Ratshit must have inherited Willis Skokes like some brilliant seed of a gene that never quite bloomed; that refused to hatch back over in this dreaming, more technical air; that had somehow got choked, blackened, inverted and reversed somewhere along the way. In the end, Dawes Williams could remember Ratshit Rawl­ings talking of Willis Skokes in terms of being some kind of a secular oversoul.

Soon Dawes Williams, who was not really playing with Mrs. Rawlings' Newtonian steelies anyway, roused himself from his dreaming and began to watch Eddie, who was sitting over in the corner, watching him back. Eddie was looking back over at him, and they were beginning to watch each other think. Eddie, Dawes Williams knew without asking, was sitting over there thinking that Dawes Williams was dreaming up another of about the biggest batches of crap he had ever heard. Eddie knew that Dawes Williams liked to distort things, to make them complicated for the hell of it. He knew that Ratshit Rawlings was often a whipped-out bastard that couldn't cut it. He knew that there was just a lot of Ratshit Rawlings in Dawes Williams too, by God. He knew mostly that Ratshit Rawlings was only good for games when things got dull. And that he, Eddie himself, had a Welshman's liver and a limited explanation for things; and that although Dawes Williams was one of his best friends, he hated his guts....

It was still Saturday afternoon, and everyone was waiting, waiting for the Rawlingses to leave for Iowa City. Just then, however, everyone was watching as Mr. Harrison Rawlings, Sr., busily and drunkenly threw Rat­shit's entire allowance, a crisp ten-dollar bill, on the exact center of the carpet. Then Mr. Rawlings sat back, into the bemused distance of his chair, and watched as Harrison, Jr., went over, bent down, and picked it up.

Coming back into the circle of Newtonian steelies, sitting down Indian-style, Dawes could see Ratshit's face was bright red, glassy and stoned over. But soon even that passed because it was a football afternoon, the Evashevski era, and because everything was filtering into the grander design of stealing the car. Around twelve-thirty the Country Club set began coming past, and drifting in. They stopped in small, select caravans of Cadillacs, Lincolns and an occasional Mercedes convertible. There was a quiet parade of tasteful straw baskets with neatly checkered cloths, tweed coats and sleeveless V-necked sweaters, brown wing tips and an occasional lawyer's pipe. Silver flasks flashed in the Midwestern sun. The sun sank beyond noon, the fighting Hawkeyes had already kicked off, and everyone who was fourteen wished suddenly that the whole world would get its ass on the road.

. . . .

But Dawes Williams thought Ratshit's mother, who was sitting in a chair near the window, who was obviously not leaving for anywhere at the moment, was one of the most striking older women he'd ever seen. The dense fall light fell through her premature platinum hair. Dawes remembered talking to her one Saturday about Martin Luther. He had sat back, judg­ing her ideas about Martin Luther, becoming the real snob in the piece by deciding she was really quite intelligent, but in the middle she had destroyed the whole mood anyway by pausing and intoning:

"Dawes, you sound like such a nice, reasonable boy. Is there any way you could...that is, is there any way you could use your influence to see that Harrison is not called Rat's...Rat's shit any more do you suppose?"

Dawes Williams promised he would try his best, but nothing had come of it.

Later, after stealing the car and making long circles through the town and returning, reparking the whole thing on its chalk marks in the driveway long after the Rawlingses had left, they sat in the kitchen and drank straight warm bourbon from wine glasses and tried not to wince. Travis and Dunker took theirs down in two large gulps and then looked out of the window for a long time. When they looked back, their eyes were still slightly flushed. They all drank two apiece and sat on the kitchen floor talking in the late, drifting shadows. Dawes Williams said:

"By God, I think I'm drunk," and they all began laughing, and looking at each other closely as if they were supposed to see something they had never seen before. The early fall evening began wafting the walls of Mrs. Rawlings' kitchen without even a voice. The Rawlingses would be home soon. It was time to roll the underground up and call it a day. They got up and headed for the porch. They hung around for awhile and said goodby to Ratshit. Travis turned the other way. Eddie, Dunker and Dawes walked to the corner. They turned. The pale light grayed in the bare trees, drifted off like a boat in the cold autumn limbs. Travis was already down the block.

"Hey, Travis," they said, "we'll be seeing ya."

"That's right, you will," he said, turning. "Damn right. I'll be seeing ya. And don't let your meat loaf," he called after them down the quiet street.

It had been a good day, a day already slipping into memory, gone down the long edges of boulevards full as houses with dark elm and white cedar.

"What's up tonight?" Dunker was saying.

"I'm taking Georgia down by the hedges on Ben Franklin Field and wrestlin' her for it," Eddie said.

"Wrestle her for what?" Dawes Williams said, turning off, calling behind himself, moving up the hill for home, drunk on the air.