• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 9230 0

just a kid, I never paid any attention to her. But then one time a couple of months before I came into the Army, I went over to his house and he wasn't in, and I noticed her. You know, she'd sort of grown up. So I asked her to go for a walk with me, and we sat in the park and talked, and. . ." Wyman broke off. "I could talk to her about a lot of things, and I don't know, we just sat there on a park bench, and I told her I wanted to be a sports writer, and she said she wanted to design dresses, and I started laughing until I realized she was serious, and we talked a long time about what we wanted to do with ourselves." He swallowed his beer.

"A lot of people were walking past us," Wyman said, "and we started playing a game, you know guessing how old they were and what they did for a living, and she would try to guess whether they were happy or not. And then we started analyzing all our friends, and we talked a lot."

Red grinned. "And then you asked her, 'What do ya think of me?' "

Wyman looked at him with surprise. "How'd you know?"

"Ah, I just guessed." Red was remembering the park at the end of the main street in the company town. For a moment, he could see Agnes's face again, and the sound of his voice, "You know I don't believe in God." He felt wistful, and then smiled to himself. That evening had had a beauty which he had never felt in exactly the same way again. "What was it, summer time?" he asked Wyman.

"Yeah, early in the summer."

Red smiled again. It happens to all the fuggin kids, he thought, and they all think it's something special. Wyman probably had been a shy kid, and he could see him talking in the park, telling a girl things he had never been able to say to anyone else. And of course the girl would have been like him. "I know what you mean, kid," he said.

"You know she told me she loved me," Wyman said defiantly, as if he expected Red to laugh. "We were really going steady after that night."

"Wha'd your mother say?"

"Aw, she didn't like the idea, but I wasn't worried about that. I knew I could bring her around."

"Sometimes it's hard," Red said. "You don't know what you would have been running into."

Wyman shook his head. "Red, listen, this sounds stupid, but Claire really made me feel like I could be something. After a date I'd leave her, and walk around for a while by myself, and I don't know, I just knew I was gonna be a big guy someday. I was sure of it." He stopped for a moment, absorbed in what he had said.

Red wondered what to answer. "You know a lot of people feel that way, kid."

"Aw, it was different with us, Red. It was really something special."

Red winced. "I don't know," he muttered. "Lots of people feel like that, and then for some reason they bust up, or they go sour on each other."

"We wouldn't have busted up, Red. I'm telling ya, she loved me." He thought about this, and his face became tense. He wrapped his blanket around him and then said, "She couldn't have been lying, Red, she's not that kind of girl. She's not cheap." He was silent, and then blurted out suddenly, "You don't think she coulda been lying to me, do ya?"

"Naw, she wasn't," Red said. He felt a pang. "Naw, she didn't lie, but people change, you know."

"Not her," Wyman said. "It was different with us." His voice expressed the frustration he felt at being unable to put his feeling into words.

Red thought of the mother Wyman would have to support if he married his girl, and he had a quick elliptic knowledge of everything that would contain- -- the arguments, the worries over money, the grinding extinction of their youth until they would look like the people who walked by them in the park -- it was all clear to Red. It would not be this girl for Wyman but it would be some other, and it did not matter because both girls would look the same in thirty years and Wyman would never amount to very much. He saw a future vista of Wyman's life, and rebelled. He wanted to be able to tell Wyman something more comforting than the fact that it didn't matter. But he could think of nothing, and he settled back in his blankets.