She snorted. “You have more respect for that grinning Irishman than I do. Tell me, does he ever get his hair cut?”
We didn’t become lovers, but we became friends. Sometimes she tripped over things (including her own feet, which were large), and on two occasions I steadied her, but there were no catches as memorable as the first one. Sometimes she’d declare she justhadto have a cigarette, and I’d accompany her out to the student smoking area behind the metal shop.
“I’ll be sorry not to be able to come out here and sprawl on the bench in my old blue jeans,” she said one day. This was less than a week before school was scheduled to start. “There’s always such afugin teachers’ rooms.”
“Someday that’ll all change. Smoking will be banned on school grounds. For teachers as well as students.”
She smiled. It was a good one, because her lips were rich and full. And the jeans, I must say, looked good on her. She had long,longlegs. Not to mention just enough junk in her trunk. “A cigarette-free society… Negro children and white children studying side by side in perfect harmony… no wonder you’re writing a novel, you’ve got one hell of an imagination. What else do you see in your crystal ball, George? Rockets to the moon?”
“Sure, but it’ll probably take a little longer than integration. Who told you I was writing a novel?”
“Miz Mimi,” she said, and butted her cigarette in one of the half a dozen sand-urn ashtrays. “She said it was good. And speaking of Miz Mimi, I suppose we ought to get back to work. I think we’re almost there with the photographs, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And are you sure playing thatWest Side Storysong over the slide show isn’t going to be too corny?”
I thought “Somewhere” was cornier than Iowa and Nebraskaput together, but according to Ellen Dockerty it had been Mimi’s favorite song.
I told Sadie this, and she laughed doubtfully. “I didn’t know her all that well, but it sure doesn’t seem like her. Maybe it’sEllie’sfavorite song.”
“Now that I think about it, that seems all too likely. Listen, Sadie, do you want to go to the football game with me on Friday? Kind of show the kids that you’re here before school starts on Monday?”
“I’d love to.” Then she paused, looking a little uncomfortable. “As long as you don’t, you know, get any ideas. I’m not ready to date just yet. Maybe not for a long time.”
“Neither am I.” She was probably thinking about her ex, but I was thinking about Lee Oswald. Soon he’d have his American passport back. Then it would only be a matter of wangling a Soviet exit visa for his wife. “But friends sometimes go to the game together.”
“That’s right, they do. And I like going places with you, George.”
“Because I’m taller.”
She punched my arm playfully—a big-sister kind of punch. “That’s right, podna. You’re the kind of man I can look up to.”
9
At the game, practicallyeverybodylooked up to us, and with faint awe—as though we were representatives of a slightly different race of humans. I thought it was kind of nice, and for once Sadie didn’t have to slouch to fit in. She wore a Lion Pride sweater and her faded jeans. With her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked like a high school senior herself. A tall one, probably the center on the girls’ basketball team.
We sat in Faculty Row and cheered as Jim LaDue riddled the Arnette Bears’ defense with half a dozen short passes and then asixty-yard bomb that brought the crowd to its feet. At halftime the score was Denholm 31, Arnette 6. As the players ran off the field and the Denholm band marched onto it with their tubas and trombones wagging, I asked Sadie if she wanted a hotdog and a Coke.
“You bet I do, but right now the line’ll be all the way out to the parking lot. Wait until there’s a time-out in the third quarter or something. We have to roar like lions and do the Jim Cheer.”
“I think you can manage those things on your own.”
She smiled at me and gripped my arm. “No, I need you to help me. I’m new here, remember?”
At her touch, I felt a warm little shiver I did not associate with friendship. And why not? Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were sparkling; under the lights and the greeny-blue sky of a deepening Texas dusk, she was way beyond pretty. Things between us might have progressed faster than they did, except for what happened during that halftime.
The band marched around the way high school bands do, in step but not completely in tune, blaring a medley you couldn’t quite figure out. When they finished, the cheerleaders trotted to the fifty-yard line, dropped their pompoms in front of their feet, and put their hands on their hips.“Give us anL!”
We gave them what they required, and when further importuned, we obliged with anI,anO,anN,and anS.
“What’s that spell?”
“LIONS!” Everybody on the home bleachers up and clapping.
“Who’s gonna win?”
“LIONS!” Given the halftime score, there wasn’t much doubt about it.
