Hokey Pokey Read Online Free Page B

powder.
    “Hey, Jack! Hey, Jack!”
    Kiki comes running. He’s waving something—Jack’s baseball glove. The devil girl must have flung it from the handlebar. Kiki is gasping.
    “Jack … Jack … look … Ifound … yourglove.”
    Jack takes it, holds it by the thumb, shakes it. Adesert of dust pours from the fingers. He wants to cry. He spits on the humped, leathery heel. As he wipes the dust away, the signature in silvery handwriting comes back into view: MR. SHORTSTOP .
    Kiki gulps air, stares up at him in wide-eyed bafflement. “I found it out there”—he points—“on the ground. I knew it was yours. What”—he glances about—“where’s your bike? Where’s Scramjet? Huh, Jack? Dusty riding it? LaJo? Huh?”
    Jack turns his back on Kiki’s babble, walks.
    “Jack, hey, look—I taped up my ball.” He pounds it into his own glove, a cheap, thin imitation. Kiki’s laces are plastic; Jack’s are prime rawhide. “C’mon, Jack, throw me a coupla grounders, OK? Just a couple, huh, Jack?”
    The black-taped ball comes rolling alongside, passes him as if it’s going his way. It stops in the yellow dust ahead. “C’mon, Jack! C’mon!” Jack hears the slap of Kiki’s fist in cheap leather. When he reaches the ball, he kicks it as hard as he can. It skitters across the prairie, coming to rest in a gray tangle of tumbleweed. The silence behind him is the purest he’s ever heard. He hates himself. He knows if he turns he’ll see the kid’s lip aquiver, the eyes gleaming. Add one more crapslapto the worst day of his life. He strings the glove onto his belt. He walks on … and suddenly Kiki is yelling: “Jacklookout!”
    His cap is gone! His head smacked and his cap gone! Gone with the devil girl’s yell:
    “Hi-yo, Hazel!”

JUBILEE
    H OW COULD SHE RESIST ? There he was, walking ahead of her. So tempting. So easy. She waves the cap grandly, flings it across the Plains as she flung the glove, races on.
    She happens upon girls playing football. As soon as they spot her, they abandon the game and come running.
    “Jubilee! Wow!”
    “Hey! Is that what I think it is?”
    “It
is
! It’s Jack’s!”
    “Scramjet!”
    “Omygod, Ace! How’d you get it?”
    “Omygod omygod—look at her face! She
stole
it!”
    “You da chick!”
    She lets the fuss wash over her. When it subsides and they’re all fish-eyed waiting for her to speak, she gives her patented little sniff and grin and says primly, “It’s Hazel now.”
    Pandemonium. If somebody had a chisel and stone, they’d make a statue of her right here and now.
    The girls circle, bend to huddle, cheer:
    A—B—C—D—E—F—
G
!
    Get these boy germs off of
me
!
    As the huddle breaks and the din peters out, a voice calls: “C’mon, Ace, park it. We need a quarterback.” A ball comes flying. She catches it and, as always, feels the loving seduction of the pigskin. Her fingers inch-worm over the pebbled surface to the Chiclet-y laces. “Go!” she barks, and a dozen girls take off, looking back over their shoulders, calling her name, pleading. She picks one out, throws, leads her by a good twenty yards because she’s arcing it high and is already peeling out before it comes down. It’s not these girls she most has to see. It’s someone else.

DESTROYER
    T HE FUN COMES TO AN END when the Big Kid rescue squad shows up. They throw the life preserver to the mortified victim, Henry. It’s just an inner tube on a rope. The kid grabs it for dear life, and they drag him across the dust to safety and a riot of cheers—you’d think the kid had just hit four home runs in a row. The little kids begin to disperse, some of them, the boys, back to their war games.
    Destroyer grins. Other kids play war. To them it’s a game. Not to Destroyer. He’s never fired a fake bullet, never dropped a bogus bomb. His weapon is differentfrom all the others: it’s real. Even though you can’t see it, even though you can’t touch it. But you sure can feel