He took the short yellow pencil from behind his ear and examined the point of it as though seeing it for the first time. He glanced quickly into her eyes and then away.
“You folks are up at the veteran’s village, aren’t you?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Mrs. Lamar, I’m a businessman. I made the mistake of extending credit to some of you people up there and you left school without settling. I had to take my loss. Now the grocery business has a pretty tight margin these days, and I can’t afford to do business with people that are going to do me that way. I’m sorry, Mrs. Lamar, but—”
His voice dwindled as she walked rapidly away, half dragging Tommy, her face crimson and her lips compressed.
She lifted Tommy, plumped him into the stroller and wheeled it rapidly away. Tears of bitter anger filled her eyes. It was not so much anger at being refused as it was at being thought a sort of... of second-class person, with less moral responsibility than the average.
She went to another store two blocks further on, and spent the little money she had with great care, for the cheapest and most filling food she could find.
When Tom came back from the practice session, she thought she had removed all traces. But he looked at her carefully and said, “What happened, pun-kin?”
She went into his arms as the quick tears came again and after a little time he had it all. His jaw set and his nostrils flared with anger.
He sat in the big chair with her curled in his lap and he said, “Tomorrow I’ll pay Endry a little visit.”
“No, Tom. Please! That won’t do any good at all.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“Your check ought to come the day after tomorrow. We can get through tomorrow and I can borrow a couple of things from Janet next door. We’ll make out all right. Honestly. It just made me feel mad, the way he talked so loudly that people nearby turned and looked at him, and at me. It made me feel like — like a cheat or something.”
He tried to laugh. “They talk about rough times building character. Nuts! I wonder how good all this is for us. I wonder what effect it’s having on us. I feel like it’s making marks that don’t show, but pretty deep marks for all that.”
She tilted her head up and kissed the angle of his jaw. “Woof! Philosophy yet! Break it up, soldier.”
2
A Buck for a Buck
Tom Lamar knew that his showing in the Blaight game was due mostly to a perfect meshing of his performance with that of Tide Wallinger, left wing, a perfect blocking back.
In the Blaight game they had reached that peak of partnership performance which immeasurably increased the chances of breaking into the clear. He got the glory and Tide Wallinger did half the work.
Tide was a Florida boy, a lean, knobbly character with a wide reckless mouth, a hot glow in his faded blue eyes, and a lust for physical contact, for dumping the opposition as hard and as often as possible.
Yet he didn’t throw away blocks. Cutting out ahead of Tom, he was able to gauge when Tom could avoid tacklers on his own steam. He saved his slamming, rolling-block for the boy who would have a perfect shot at Lamar.
As a ball carrier, Tide was average. When cutting back to avoid a tackle made sense, Tide preferred to try to run down the tackier, run over him, smash him back.
Saturday was open, and as injuries in the Blaight game had been fairly heavy, Gunner Robertson canceled the planned game with the freshman team and instead ran the first teams through the faster-breaking offensive plays, then ran a long session on the perennially important fundamentals.
Finally the call came to break it up as the last daylight faded. Tom, depressed with the worry he had concealed from Carol Ann, found himself walking beside Tide back to the docker rooms and showers.
“I want to talk to you. Private-like,” Tide said.
“The only bills I’ve got are bills due, friend.”
“This isn’t the gouge, son. This is a little piece of heaven. And I don’t want to be seen leaving with you. One of the back booths at Hogan’s?”
“Okay. What are you now? International spy, perhaps?”
“No. I’ve just stopped being an international chump. Maybe you can stop too.”
When Tom arrived at Hogan’s, Tide was already there. He grinned up at Tom and said, “Sit down and listen, Big Tom.”
Tom sat across the table from him. “Babble on, Florida.”
“Whether you know it or not, my boy, we are hot this year. Steaming nicely. With your muscles and my brains, we are a ground-eating combo, as the man says.”
“So you asked me to stop by so we could admire each other?”
“You and I have two-bit jobs and heavy schedules, and change jingling in our pants is a novelty. Check me if I’m wrong. We, my boy, are potential beef for the big time. And they have noted us well.”
“Which big time?”
“Southern Idaho University. Conference champs. Bowl material. A fine, fat country-club life, with bills rustling in your pocket. A special course for the football wonders, including such skull-busters as Appreciation of Music, Current Events, Philosophy of the Italian Renaissance. In the final test on the music course, they play three ten-second recordings. You have to tell which is a flute, which is a snare drum which is a cello.”
“They fit you for life, hey?”
“Don’t be so dewy-eyed, mate. It isn’t what you know, it’s what you look like you might know.”
“You could take other courses?”
“Nope. No choice for the muscle-bound. Besides, the football work is too tough and too long to permit the idle fantasy of home work and term papers.”
“I take it you’ve been propositioned.”
“But right. Last Saturday they had a citizen in the stands. He wants both of us or either of us. Here’s the pitch. We both find we have too heavy a schedule and we are forced to drop out. This week. We take a short vacation and then we move to the thriving college town of Barton where the little men find us an occupation not too tiring. They admit us for the spring session, provide summer employment, and we are on the squad in the fall. The eligibility rules will give us two full seasons with them, even though this is the beginning of our second competitive year. Get it?”
“Take a short vacation, the man says. On what, friend? You are full of single bliss. I have a small family. Remember?”
Tide grinned widely. “There is a special fund for travel expenses. They have paid me my travel expenses in advance. Look closely, Big Tom.” He reached into an inside pocket, took out a flat packet of bills, riffled the corner. “Here you see ten, fat, beautiful fifty-dollar bills.”
Tom stared at the money and thought of how much that five hundred dollars would mean to him and Carol Ann.
“Of course,” Tide said, “it costs you more to travel. The little man told me to tell you that they would double the travel allowance in your case.”
Tom stared down at his clenched fists, saw that his knuckles were white with the pressure. “You’ve decided, then?”
“What other way could I decide, Big Tom? Do you hear any fall winds whining through the holes in my head? In the spring I take up my interrupted education. Books, tuition, living expenses are laid on. Plus forty a week out of a special fund to take care of — incidentals. You would get that too, right on top of the hundred and twenty from Uncle Sugar. A shade over two eighty a month. Pretties for the missus and a chrome-plated bike for the young ’un.”
Tom’s smile felt tight. “I hadn’t exactly intended to start playing pro ball.”
“It’s all in the way you look at it. In pro ball your efforts are going to enrich a group of little men who wear hand-painted neckties. In this deal, your efforts buy nice new buildings and nice new scholarships so that the deserving intelligentsia can study how to be geniuses in the best of modern surroundings. What loyalty have you got to dear, dear old Carvel?”