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Charlotte’s eyes misted over. She wanted to throw her arms around this big, gruff woman’s neck, but she didn’t. What if Momma happened to come back around the corner and see her?
Daddy, Momma, Charlotte, Buddy, and Sam, just the five of them, had supper at the picnic table, which Daddy and Doogie had managed to move back into the house. It weighed a ton. It was a pretty morose suppertime, since Daddy, Momma, and Charlotte couldn’t forget what had happened earlier, and the boys sensed their mood.
As soon as they finished eating, while they were all still sitting on the picnic table’s plank benches, Daddy turned on the TV. The evening news was on, and so Buddy and Sam ran off to play outside. Some correspondent or other wearing a safari jacket had a microphone in his hand out in front of a hut, talking about something that was going on in the Sudan. Charlotte was too depressed to care, and she got up and went back to her room, which was in fact nothing but a five-foot-wide enclosure that had been partitioned off from one of the house’s two bedrooms when Buddy was born. She propped herself up on the bed and started reading about Florence Nightingale in a book called Eminent Victorians she had taken out from the library on Miss Pe
Just then Daddy called from the front room, “Hey, Charlotte, come here. You wa
With a groan Charlotte got herself up off the bed and returned to the front room.
Daddy, still sitting at the picnic table, gestured toward the TV set. “Dupont,” he said, smiling at her in a way that was obviously intended to dispel the gloom.
So Charlotte stood by the picnic table and looked at the TV. Yes, it was Dupont, a fact she noted with an empty feeling. A long shot of the Great Yard with the breathtaking library tower at one end and a mass of people in the center. Charlotte had been there only once, for the official tour during the application process, but it wasn’t hard to recognize the famous Yard and the stupendous Gothic buildings around it.
“…in his appearance today at his alma mater amid the pomp and ceremony of the university’s one hundred and fifteenth commencement,” the voice on the TV was saying. A much closer shot of a vast audience. Up a broad center aisle a procession of mauve robes and mauve velvet academic hats was marching toward a stage erected in front of the Charles Dupont Memorial Library, a structure as grand as a cathedral, with a soaring tower and a three-story-high compound arch over its main entrance. At the head of the procession a figure in mauve carried a large golden mace. The pageantry of it made Charlotte blink with wonder, despite her conviction that all was surely ruined. A closer shot…the stage…mauve robes from one side to the other against a backdrop of gaudy medieval ba
The evening news switched to the accidental beheading of two workers in a sheet metal factory in Akron, but Charlotte was still forty miles southeast of Philadelphia, in Chester, Pe
“Just think, Charlotte,” said Momma with a smile as earnestly encouraging as Daddy’s, “Dupont University. Three months from now, that’s where you’ll be.”
“I know, Momma. I was thinking the exact same thing. I can hardly believe it.”
She was smiling, too. To everybody’s relief, including her own, the face she had on was genuine.
2. The Whole Black Player Thing
Three men in polo shirts and khakis were sitting high up in the cliffs of seats, so high that from down here on the court their faces looked like three white te
Only a few were students. The fall semester didn’t officially begin for another two weeks. Biggie-fried fatties wearing baseball caps and mustaches that drooped down below their lip lines at the corners and work shirts with their first names in script on the breast pockets were making themselves at home in seats that cost $30,000 apiece for Dupont’s fifteen home games during the season. They could scarcely believe their good fortune…dream seats in the Buster Bowl…and you could come walking right on in.
On the court, lit up by the LumeNex floodlights right above it, all that was going on was nothing but ten young men, eight of them black and two white, playing a “Shirts and Skins” pickup basketball game. All five Shirts were wearing shorts and T-shirts, but no two shirts or shorts were identical. The only thing uniform about this bunch was their size. They were all well over six feet tall, and two, one black and one white, were seven feet tall or close to it. Anybody could see that. The upper arms and shoulders of all ten players were pumped up bodybuilder-style. The trapezius muscles ru
During an out of bounds in which the ball got away and had to be retrieved, one of the white players on the court, a Shirt, came over to the other white player, a Skin, and said: “Hey, Jojo, what’s going on? Maybe I’m blind, but it looks like that kid’s pounding the shit outta you.”