A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [16]
An unmentionable thing drew Darnell to the yard: stacks of old Playboy magazines. Darnell got a whooping when Ruby found one under her son’s mattress, but that didn’t deter him. He thought there was something strange about the magazine—strange as well as invigorating. All the women in the photographs were white women, and none of them had pubic hair. Darnell long believed that this was normal. Years later at a midnight skinny-dipping party, he realized that all women, black and white, had pubic hair. That was about the time the magazine took a courageous position and flat-out showed it.
Darnell Jefferson was a born point guard and remained one: quick, graceful, deceptive, and cool, momma, cool. He had a face full of sunshine and was blessed with a silk tongue.
Thornton Tomtree grew gangly like his father, with a permanent aura of nerdiness about him, although he was wiry and very strong from slinging bales of newsprint and handling scrap metal. It seemed early that shaping Thornton’s personality—or lack of it—would become a lifetime mission for Darnell.
They went their separate ways to school and were pushed into different social circles, but always they rushed to return to the yard where their joint kingdom lay.
Then came the training of Thornton Tomtree, unlikely basketball player. Darnell ran hours of films, depicting how the great centers of the game operated as a hub.
Darnell snapped the ball to him a hundred times a day until his reflexes and coordination were brought to their limits.
“Catch the ball! Pass to the open man!”
“How about me getting some shooting time?”
“You ain’t no shooter, Thornton. Them that can, does. You are a trench warrior. You’re a white maypole with guys hanging all over you. But you are junkyard strong. Plant your ass under the basket and disembowel anyone who tries to get your rebound.”
Thornton Tomtree was awkward, not dumb. Once he understood the niche Darnell was creating for him, he studied the complexity and possibilities of the game and his particular value.
Darnell invited kids into the yard for pickup games which were nonstop verbal assaults on his student, to move his feet, leap, dunk.
By the end of the summer Darnell had created a player out of bits and pieces. His strength was under the basket, elbow and knee land. Only one problem. The two were going to different high schools.
Thornton changed his address from his home to the junkyard, which allowed him to transfer to Pawtucket High.
There were only two white boys trying out for the team, and they became the target of bad intent. At six foot three, Thornton was a nice-sized center for a small school. He closed his ears to the jiving. His physical strength tested and proved, Thornton became a legitimate second-string player. Darnell Jefferson’s “Frankenstein.”
Competence on the basketball court was a hard earned grace. Less difficult was Thornton’s quick mastery of all the school’s curriculum in math and science.
Darnell drilled him in social skills, particularly girls. In time he joined Darnell in reading old Playboy s in the yard.
“How come white women don’t have pussies?” Darnell wondered.
“I never saw a pussy,” Thornton said. “Do your women?”
“Oh, hell yes, but they’ve never had a picture of a black lady in Playboy.”
These sessions ended more quickly than Darnell wished. Thornton would always end with a sigh and a shake of his head and make for his workbench.
Without saying it aloud, or even knowing it, Darnell was becoming an intricate part of Thornton’s ability to function in the outside world. Darnell preferred shooting baskets, Playboy, fishing and pussyspeak, but Thornton’s enormous devotion to the workbench lured Darnell in. An electronic ding dong of some sort was explained as a Rube Goldberg-type invention. As he learned enough just through proximity and contact, his large vocabulary became punctuated with scientific terms.
A new day of science wizardry was arriving, and Thornton Tomtree was at home with it. Thornton’s