Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [63]
cross-eyed, which somehow made him handsome, or Julian thought so. In the nights preceding Hallowe en it was Walt who remembered the various Nights: one night was Gate Night, when you took people s gates off the fences; another night was Tick-Tack Night, when you held a button through which string had been run and wound up, against window panes, making a very effective sound until the string ran down: another night was Paint Night, when you painted sidewalks and people s houses. On Hallowe en you dressed up as ghosts and cowboys and Indians and women and men, and rang doorbells, and said: Anything for Hallowe en? If the people gave you pennies or cakes, all right. If they didn t, you stuck a pin in the doorbell and threw the doormat out in the street and carried away the porch furniture and poured buckets of water on the porch so it would freeze in the night. Walt knew which Night was which; he got the information from his father. The leader of the gang was Butch Doerflinger. He was fat and strong and brave. He had killed more copperheads than anyone else and was a better swimmer than anyone else and knew all about older people because he had watched his father and mother. They didn’t mind, either. They thought it was funny. Julian was afraid of Butch, because Julian s mother had threatened to report Butch s father for beating his horse. Nothing ever came of it, and every year or two Butch s father would get a new horse. There were things not to talk about in the gang: you did not talk about jail, because of Walt s father; nor about drunken men, because there was a saloonkeeper s son; nor about the Catholics, because the motorman s son and one bookkeeper s son were Catholic. Julian also was not allowed to mention the name of any doctor. These things did come up and were discussed pretty thoroughly, but usually in the absence of the boy whom the talk would embarrass. There was enough to talk about: girls; changes in boys which occurred at fourteen; parades; which would you rather have; if you had a million dollars what would you do; what were you going to be when you got big; is a horse better than a dog; what was the longest you d ever been on a train; what was the best car; who had the biggest house; who was the dirtiest kid in school; could a policeman be arrested; were you going to college when you got big; what girl were you going to marry and how many children were you going to have; what was the most important instrument in the band; what position was most important on a baseball team; were all the Confederates dead; was the Reading better than the Pennsylvania railroad; could a blacksnake kill you. & There were all sorts of things to be done. There was marbles, and there was a game of marbles called Dobbers, played with marbles the size of lemons. You played it in the gutter on the way home from school, throwing your Dobber at the other fellow s and he would throw his at yours. It wasn’t much of a game except it made the way home from school seem short. Some days the gang would hop a wagon preferably a packing-house wagon or a wholesale grocery wagon; coal wagons were too slow and ride out to the state police barracks and watch the staties drill and shoot. The gang would go out on the mountain and play Tarzan of the Apes, jumping around from tree to tree and skinning their behinds on the bark. You had to be careful on the mountains, careful of airholes, which were treacherous, or supposed to be treacherous, places where the ground was undermined and liable to cave in. In the memory of the oldest citizen no life had been lost in Gibbsville as a result of a mine cave-in, but the danger was there. There was a game called Run, Sheepie, Run, and sometimes the gang would play Ku-Klux Klan, after having seen The Birth of a Nation. Games that had their source in a movie would be played and played for days and then dropped and forgotten, to be revived months later, unsuccessfully. The gang had a Fisk Bicycle Club for a while. You were supposed to have Fisk tires on your bike, and that made you eligible to send away to the