Continued from Marble Season 1

Cedric was older than the rest of us, but small for his age and he had such a high-pitched voice, we treated him as if he were younger. He wore steel-framed eyeglasses, had braces on his teeth and was always retying his shoelaces.

His mother was a widow and afraid Cedric would trip and break his glasses, which back then were actually made of glass. He’d retie his laces at the start of a game and again after every time he ran the bases or out for a pass. Instead of stooping like other guys, he bent at the waist, legs straight and reached down. His mother made him take piano lessons too, so he had to put on winter gloves the first of October–tan woolen ones with leather patches on the fingers.

He was the fastest kid on the block, which made him great at punch ball and my favorite receiver in association football. But he had asthma, hay fever and other allergies and after retying his laces, had to pull out a little bottle of eucalyptus oil, unscrew the top and sniff the fumes to help him get his breath back.

I’d throw him buttonhooks till we got the defensive man leaning in, then I’d loft a high spiral up the center of 88th. I can still see his gloved hands, palms up, defensive man falling another step behind with every step, and Cedric catching the ball, touching it down, then bending at the waist, retying his sneakers, pulling out the little cloth bag in which he kept his eucalyptus oil.

It was year the German offensive in Southern Russia took Sebastopol and was on the verge of capturing Stalingrad, cutting off Russia’s Caspian oil and seizing it for themselves, but we didn’t worry about any of that. All our heroes were in the service--Joe Louis, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Hank Greenberg. We knew nobody could beat them.

Guys would tell Cedric he tied his shoes like a girl, but no matter what anyone said or did, the expression on Cedric’s face never changed. During marble season he’d sit on the curb, upside down cigar box between his shoes, picking up marbles with his tan gloves and dropping them into the side pocket of his mackinaw. It had an open zipper and was always bulging with marbles.

A new guy by the name of Barry Bogardus had moved into the neighborhood and he and his friend Kenny Nails would come round, hands in the pockets of their camel’s hair overcoats, sneering at us for shooting marbles and for the way we looked and dressed. They were especially hard on Cedric.

“Tell your shoes to have a party and invite your pants down,” they’d say, or call him ‘Seedric,’ and dig their hands into their overcoat pockets, bend their knees and rotate their hips side to side like windshield wipers to show how hard they were laughing.

Cedric just stood there, mouth half-open, looking stunned. But his mouth was always half-open; he always looked stunned. We’d  noticed that his face never changed.

We figured it was because he didn’t want to make his mother more nervous about him than she already was and never mentioned it. It got on Bogardus’s nerves, though anything that bothered Barry bothered Kenny Nails.

Barry had moved into the modernistic new apartment house on 87th and West End. He was fourteen, big, strong, with a spike haircut on top and long hair on the sides slicked back into a ‘duck’s-ass.’ None of us had seen a haircut like that before, or teen-aged boys wearing camel’s hair overcoats, pegged gray flannel trousers and black loafers with shiny quarters stuck in the straps. Barry and Kenny Nails were a new experience for the neighborhood.

Kenny had a tough face, a cigarette dangling from his mouth movie gangster-style, and spoke without moving his lips, but nobody was afraid of him. Barry was on the football team at Horace Mann, had already beaten up two guys from Columbus Avenue and his father was a bookmaker. Everyone was afraid of Barry, including me.

One day he and Kenny Nails were watching Cedric pick up marbles and stick them into his side pocket as they bounced off his cigar box. I saw Barry whisper something. Kenny Nails nodded, did his windshield wiper laugh, and Bogardus moved to where Cedric was sitting on the curb and kicked the toe of his black loafer into Cedric’s bulging marble pocket. The whole big bulge erupted forth and marbles went bouncing all across 88th Street.

“Hock scramble!” a kid named Red called and the shooters snatched up Cedric’s marbles. If nobody called “hock scramble” you were supposed to give them back, but once somebody called it you were allowed to keep whatever you picked up. It was a rule meant for when kids dropped a few marbles accidentally. Nobody had intentionally kicked a kid’s pocket before and no previous hock scramble had been on anything like that scale.

The way Bogardus and Kenny Nails shoved their hands into their overcoat pockets and rotated their hips to laugh at the blank expression on Cedric’s face as he watched kids dive for his marbles made me hate them as much as I hated the Japs and Germans. A guy Barry’s size and age wasn’t supposed to kick the pocket of a kid Cedric’s size. But he was too big. I was afraid to say anything. I just picked up as many as I could and gave them back to Cedric.

He didn’t protest and the blank expression on his face didn’t change. From then on, he kept his pocket zipped, picked up marbles as they bounced off and held them in his tan woolen glove, and looked round for Bogardus, Kenny Nails and any other potential pocket-kicker. If the coast was clear, he unzipped his pocket, put in the marbles and zipped it up again.

It reminded me of what Blue Book had said about kids with cigar boxes turning into bankers. I couldn’t see Cedric as a banker, but I could see him as the proprietor of a drug store in a bad neighborhood. If he got held up, he wouldn’t protest; the expression on his face wouldn’t change. He’d just lock the door, and from then on, open it only for customers he recognized.

To be concluded in Marble Season--Part 3

Article Source: http://www.discoveryarticles.com/authors/8714/herb-lobsenz

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