Эд Макбейн - Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories

It would have been all right if the craze had restricted itself to the kids. But you have to remember that we were quarantined, which meant that we worked with the kids all day long, and then were not permitted to leave the grounds at night, on our time off. Children are very nice and all that, and someday I hope to have a dozen of my own, but that summer it was important to get away from them every now and then. I mean, physically and geographically away from them. It was important to have other interests. It was important to have an emotional and mental respite. What it was important to do, in fact, was to hold Becky in my arms and kiss her, but Marvin of course had made that impossible with his stupid quarantine. The funny thing was he didn’t seem to miss his wife Lydia at all. Maybe that’s because they’d been married for fourteen years. But most of the rest of us began to feel the strain of the quarantine by the end of the second week, and I think it was then that Uncle Jimbo ventured into his first game of marbles.

Jimbo, like the rest of us, was beginning to crave a little action. He was a very tall man who taught science at a high school someplace in Brooklyn. His real name was James McFarland, but in the family structure of Camp Marvin he immediately became Uncle Jim. And then, because it is fatal to have a name like Jim at any camp, he was naturally renamed Jimbo. He seemed like a very serious fellow, this Jimbo, about thirty-eight years old, with a wife and two kids at home. He wore eyeglasses, and he had sandy-colored hair that was always falling onto his forehead. The forehead itself bore a perpetual frown, even when he was playing marbles, as if he were constantly trying to figure out one of Einstein’s theories. He always wore sneakers and Bermuda shorts that had been made by cutting down a pair of dungarees. When the quarantine started, one of the kids in his bunk painted a big PW on Jimbo’s dungaree Bermuda shorts, the PW standing for prisoner of war — a joke Jimbo didn’t think was very comical. I knew how he felt. I wasn’t married, of course, but I knew what it was like to be separated from someone you loved, and Jimbo’s wife and kids were away the hell out there in Brooklyn while we were locked up in Stockbridge.

I happened to be there the day he joined one of the games, thereby starting the madness that followed. He had found a single marble near the tennis courts and then had gone foraging on his free time until he’d come up with half a dozen more. It was just after dinner, and three kids were playing in front of my bunk when Jimbo strolled over and asked if he could get in the game. If there’s one thing a kid can spot at fifty paces, it’s a sucker. They took one look at the tall science teacher from Brooklyn and fairly leaped on him in their anxiety to get him in the game. Well, that was the last leaping any of them did for the rest of the evening. Jimbo had seven marbles. He put six of them in the ring, and he kept the biggest one for his shooter. The kids, bowing graciously to their guest, allowed him to shoot first. Standing ten feet from the circle in the dust, Jimbo took careful aim and let his shooter go. It sprang out of his hand with the speed of sound, almost cracking a marble in the dead center of the ring and sending it flying out onto the surrounding dirt.

The kids weren’t terribly impressed because they were very hip and knew all about beginner’s luck. They didn’t begin to realize they were playing with a pro until they saw Jimbo squat down on one knee and proceed to knock every single marble out of the ring without missing a shot. Then, because there’s no sucker like a sucker who thinks he knows one, the kids decided they could take Jimbo anyway, and they spent the rest of the evening disproving the theory by losing marble after marble to him. Jimbo told me later that he’d been raised in Plainfield, New Jersey, and had played marbles practically every day of his childhood. But the kids didn’t know that at the time, and by the end of that first evening Jimbo had won perhaps two hundred marbles.

I wasn’t sure I liked what Jimbo had done. He was, after all, a grown man, and he was playing with kids, and one of the kids he’d beaten happened to be a kid in my bunk. I watched that kid walk away from the game after Jimbo collected all the marbles. His name was Max, which is a funny name for a kid anyway, and he was walking with his head bent, his hands in the pockets of his shorts, his sneakers scuffing the ground.

“What’s the matter, Max?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“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.