Bad Haircut. Tom Perrotta
what was happening, he was out of his chair. He grabbed a handful of my T-shirt and yanked me to my feet. We danced awkwardly across the linoleum floor until my back slammed into the humming refrigerator.
“I oughta knock your teeth out,” he said softly. “She's just a little girl.”
His face was so close to mine I could feel hot bursts of air coming from his nostrils. A muscle in his cheek began to twitch. I watched his hand form itself into a fist. “What kind of rubbers did you buy, smart guy? Why don't you take them out of your wallet and show me?”
This isn't happening to me, I told myself, but the formula had lost its magic. All at once I was terribly frightened, not just for me but for Kevin too.
“Come on, big man. Show me your rubbers.”
“I don't have any,” I told him. “I don't even know what they look like.”
“I oughta knock your teeth out,” he said again, drawing back his fist until it was level with his ear. His knuckles were coated with thick black hair. “What do you say to that, big man?”
I had spent the past several years learning not to cry, but I hadn't forgotten how. My bottom lip trembled. My eyes felt like they were growing inside my head. The first few sobs came from somewhere deep in my stomach. A jet of warm snot exploded from my nose.
“I'm a kid,” I blubbered. “I'm just a kid.” Mr. Farrone lowered his fist and let go of my shirt. He stepped back and looked at the floor, as though he were ashamed for both of us.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, then went and got me a Kleenex.
My father wheeled the bicycle into the living room. My mother stood behind him, smiling nervously.
“Happy birthday,” they said.
This was definitely not the bike I wanted. It was a Schwinn three-speed, clunky and old-fashioned, with a chain guard, lots of chrome, and a two-tone seat straight out of Happy Days.
“Thanks,” I said, forcing a smile.
“It'll be much easier to do your papers,” my mother said hopefully.
My father slapped the seat. “She's a beauty. Why don't you take her for a spin.”
“It's getting dark,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
A wounded look flashed across my mother's face. My father gave me the raspberry.
“Hey,” he said, “if you won't, I will.”
My mother held open the front door as he lugged the bike outside. I got out of the recliner and followed them down the front steps to the edge of the driveway. My father straddled the crossbar.
“Here goes nothing,” he said.
“Be careful,” my mother called out.
He got off to a shaky start. The handlebars swiveled from side to side, and the bike followed an invisible slalom course down the sidewalk.
“He fell in love with that bike the moment he saw it,” my mother said. “I hope you like it.”
“I do,” I said. “It's really nice.”
My father turned around at the corner and headed back in the street, looking much steadier on his return. He was grinning and breathing hard when he dismounted.
“Give ‘er a whirl,” he told me. “She's got some pep.”
As much as I hated to admit it, he was right. The fat tires hummed, and the bike, heavy as it was, floated luxuriously on the blacktop. I could go as fast as I wanted.
The sky darkened as I pedaled past houses, stores, and factories, shifting through my three new gears. If Kevin had been home, I would've gone straight to his house to show him my birthday present. He would've laughed and taken it for a test ride. Instead he was sitting on a log in the woods, listening to the spooky night.
Somehow I ended up in front of his house anyway. It was as if the bike had taken me there of its own accord. My legs felt hollow as I climbed the front steps. The doorbell button was glowing orange, like a lit cigarette.
* * *
I had been gone for a long time, but my father was still waiting for me on the front stoop when I got back.
“How'd you like it?” he asked.
“It's great. I didn't want to get off”
“Man,” he said, “what I wouldn't have given for a bike like that when I was your age.”
We each took a handlebar and wheeled my new bike up the driveway. My father had cleared a place for it inside the toolshed.
“I looked at the ten-speeds,” he told me, “but they cost an arm and a leg. Besides, what do you need ten speeds for?”
“I don't know,” I said.
Before we went inside, we stood for a few minutes in the backyard, gazing up at the stars. It was a clear, moonless night. The Big Dipper, one of the few constellations I knew, was blazing in the sky like an upside-down question mark.
I had just ratted on my best friend. At that very moment, Kevin was probably walking out of the woods between his mother and Paul, and I didn't know if he was going to hate me or thank me. My father put his hand on my shoulder.
“Thirteen,” he said, as if that explained everything.
The way I heard it, these two black guys crashed the teen dance in the Little League parking lot. One of them had a funny hat, a red sailor's cap pulled down over his eyes. The other was tall and skinny. At first they just hung out near the band, jiving and nodding their heads to the music.
In 1975 Darwin was still an all-white town, a place where blacks were not welcome after dark. It must have taken a certain amount of courage for the two guys just to thread their way through the crowd, knowing they were being watched and whispered about, maybe even pointed at. The focus of the dance shifted with their arrival, until the whole event came to revolve around the mystery of their presence. Did they like the music? Were they looking for trouble?
Nobody really minded until they started bugging Margie and Lorraine. Later Margie said it was no big deal, they just wanted to dance. But she was wearing these incredible cutoffs, and Sammy Rizzo and some of the other football players didn't like the way the black guys were staring at her ass. There would have been trouble right then, but a cop stepped in when it was still a shouting match and sent the brothers home.
I'd left the dance early with Tina, so I didn't see any of this happen. I didn't even hear about it until Tuesday afternoon, when Sammy Rizzo slapped me on the back and asked if I was ready to rumble.
“Rumble?” I said. The word sounded old-fashioned and vaguely goofy to me, like “jitterbug” or “Daddy-o,” something the Fonz might say on Happy Days.
“Yeah,” he said. “Tonight at eight. Better bring a weapon.”
I didn't own any weapons except for a Swiss army knife that seemed completely unsuitable for a rumble, so I had to improvise from a selection of garden tools hanging in my parents’ toolshed. My choice—a short, three-pronged fork used for weeding—was a big hit at the Little League.
“Jesus Christ,” said Sammy. “That looks like something outta James Bond.”
“Yeah,” Mike Caravello observed. “You could probably rip someone's balls off with that.”
We were sitting on picnic tables inside the pavilion, waiting for the baseball game to end. Caravello sat next to me, twisting his class ring around and around his finger. He made a fist and the ring's red jewel jutted up from his hand, a freak knuckle.