Эд Макбейн - Barking at Butterflies and other stories

“Come here, sit down,” I said. He came over and sat on the bunk steps with me. I knew better than to talk about the marbles he had lost. I talked about the baseball game that afternoon and about the volleyball tournament, and all the while I was thinking of those hundred marbles I had got for my eighth birthday, and the leather pouch, and the look on my mother’s face when I climbed to the third floor and told her I’d lost them all. It was getting on about dusk, and I said to Max, “Something very important is going to happen in just a few minutes, Max. Do you know what it is?”

“No,” Max said.

“Well, can you guess?”

“I don’t know. Is it the boxing matches tonight?” he asked.

“No, this is before the boxing matches.”

“Well, what is it?” he asked.

“It happens every day at about this time,” I said, “and we hardly ever stop to look at it.” Max turned his puzzled face up to mine. “Look out there, Max,” I said. “Look out there over the lake.”

Together, Max and I sat and serenely watched the sunset.

The madness started the next day.

It started when Uncle Emil, the gym teacher from Benjamin Franklin, decided that marbles was essentially a game of athletic skill. Being a gym teacher and also being in charge of the camp’s entire sports program, he naturally decided that in order to uphold his honor and his title, he would have to defeat Uncle Jimbo. He didn’t declare a formal match or anything like that. He simply wandered up to Jimbo during the noon rest hour and said, “Hey, Jimbo, want to shoot some marbles?”

Jimbo looked at him with the slow steady gaze of a renowned gunslick and then said, “Sure. Why not?” Lazily he went back to his own bunk. In a few minutes he returned with a cigar box containing his winnings of the night before. They drew a circle in the dust, and each put twelve marbles in the circle. I was only sitting there writing a letter to Becky, and I guess they decided I wasn’t doing anything important, so they made me referee. Jimbo was wearing a yellow short-sleeved sports shirt and his sawed-off dungarees. Emil was wearing spotless white shorts and a spotless white T shirt, as if he were about to settle the Davis Cup at Wimbledon or someplace. They flipped a coin to see who would shoot first. Emil won the toss.

Standing behind the line they had drawn in the dust some ten feet from the ring, Emil held his shooter out and sighted along the length of his arm. Jimbo stood watching him with a faintly amused look on his face. I looked up from my letter because I was supposed to be referee, even though I’d been in the middle of telling Becky I loved her, which I always seemed to be in the middle of doing whenever I got the chance. Emil licked his lips with his tongue, cocked his thumb against the big marble in his fist, and then triggered his shot. The marble leaped from his hand, spinning across the open air in a direct, unwavering, deadly accurate line toward the middle of the circle. It collided with one of the marbles in the ring, which richocheted off onto another marble, which struck two more marbles, which knocked out yet another marble for a total of five marbles knocked out of the circle on the first shot. I must admit I felt a slight thrill of pleasure. I can remember thinking, All right, Jimbo, this time you’re not playing with kids. But I can also remember looking over at Jimbo and noticing that he didn’t seem at all disturbed, that he was still wearing that same faintly amused expression on his long face.

Emil walked to the ring and, grinning, turned to Jimbo and said, “Want to forfeit?”

“Shoot,” Jimbo said.

Emil grinned again, crouched in the dust, picked up his big marble, and shot. He knocked two more marbles out of the ring in succession and then missed the third by a hair, and that was the end of the game. I say that was the end of the game only because Jimbo then shot and knocked out all the remaining marbles in the circle. And then, because he had won this round, it was his turn to shoot first in the next round. He shot first, and he knocked four marbles out with his opening blast, and then proceeded to clean up the ring again. And then, because he’d won this round as well, he shot first again, and again cleaned up the ring, and he kept doing that all through the rest period until he’d won seventy-five marbles from Uncle Emil.

Uncle Emil muttered something about having a little rheumatism in his fingers, throwing his game off, and Jimbo listened sympathetically while he added the seventy-five marbles to the collection in his bulging cigar box. That afternoon Emil came back with a hundred marbles he had scrounged from the kids, and Jimbo won them all in a matter of a half hour. That evening Jimbo went to the mess hall to pick up a cardboard carton for his marble winnings. And, also that evening, he became a celebrity.

I guess I was the only person, man or boy, in that camp who didn’t want to try beating Uncle Jimbo in the hectic weeks that followed. To begin with, I am not a very competitive fellow, and besides, I only knew how to play immies, not marbles. Marbles required a strong thumb and a fast eye, Jimbo explained to me. My thumbs were pretty weak and my eyes were tired from staring across the lake trying to catch a glimpse of a distant figure I could identify as Becky. But everyone else in camp seemed to possess powerful thumbs and 20/20 vision, and they were all anxious to pit these assets against the champion. When you come to think of it, I suppose, champions exist only to be challenged, anyway. The challengers in this case included everybody, and all for different reasons.

Uncle Ronnie was a counselor whom everyone, including the kids, called Horizontal Ronnie because his two favorite pursuits both required a bed and a horizontal position. He wanted to beat Jimbo because the quarantine had deprived him of the satisfying company of a girl named Laura in Camp Lydia. Jimbo won two hundred marbles from Ronnie in an hour of play.

Uncle Dave taught mathematics at Evander Childs High School, and he thought he had figured out a foolproof system that he wanted to try in practice. The system worked for fifteen minutes, at the end of which time Jimbo blasted the game from its hinges and then barged on through to win a hundred and fifty marbles.

Uncle Marvin, too, had his own reason for wanting to beat Jimbo. Before the season had begun, when Marvin was still hiring counselors, he had offered Jimbo twelve hundred dollars for the job. Jimbo had held out for thirteen hundred, which Marvin eventually and grudgingly paid him. But the extra hundred dollars rankled, and Marvin was determined to get it back somehow.

You may think it odd that he decided to get back his hundred dollars by winning marbles from Jimbo. After all, marbles are marbles, and money is money. But a very strange thing had happened in the second week of the madness. Marbles, which up to that time had only been round pieces of colored glass, suddenly became the hottest item of currency in the camp’s vast and complicated trading system. Before then, dimes were very hot property because the Coke machine in the counselors’ shack took only dimes. The kids weren’t allowed to enter the counselors’ shack, nor were they allowed to drink Cokes, all of which made it absolutely necessary for them to have dimes so they could sneak into the counselors’ shack and drink Cokes. Almost every letter home, before the marble madness began, started with the words, “Dear Mom and Dad, I am fine. Please send me some dimes.” But suddenly, because Jimbo kept winning marbles with such frequency, there was a shortage of marbles in the camp. Marbles became a precious commodity, like gold or silver, and the basis of the camp economy. If you had marbles, you could trade them for all the dimes you needed. You could, in fact, get almost anything you wanted, if you only had marbles. Uncle Jimbo had a lot of marbles. Uncle Jimbo had a whole damn suitcase full of them, which he kept locked and on a shelf over his bed. He was surely the richest man in camp.