Leon Uris - A God In Ruins

Throughout grammar school Thornton’s attraction to the yard increased. He’d pillage everything before it went to the crusher or was shipped out: instrument panels, washing machine motors, boat props, lawn mowers, and more used fan belts than GM would need in a year.

In the inner-inner area of the yard stood a warehouse where the good stuff was stored: stained-glass windows from derelict mansions, statuary, copper hardware, scrolled woods, once gleaming banister rails.

Inch by inch Thornton and his little helper, Darnell,

pushed things around in this warehouse, so he was able to establish a work bench.

When Thornton was eleven and Darnell merely nine, Moses and Henry put up a basketball hoop. In the beginning the two daddies had a notion they were more skilled than their sons. The notion was quickly dispelled by Darnell, and there was a swift return to their checkers.

An unmentionable thing drew Darnell to the yard: stacks of old Playboy magazines. Darnell got a whooping when Ruby found one under her son’s mattress, but that didn’t deter him. He thought there was something strange about the magazine-strange as well as invigorating. All the women in the photographs were white women, and none of them had pubic hair. Darnell long believed that this was normal. Years later at a midnight skinny-dipping party, he realized that all women, black and white, had pubic hair. That was about the time the magazine took a courageous position and flat-out showed it.

Darnell Jefferson was a born point guard and remained one: quick, graceful, deceptive, and cool, momma, cool. He had a face full of sunshine and was blessed with a silk tongue.

Thornton Tomtree grew gangly like his father, with a permanent aura of nerdiness about him, although he was wiry and very strong from slinging bales of newsprint and handling scrap metal. It seemed early that shaping Thornton’s personality—or lack of it—would become a lifetime mission for Darnell.

They went their separate ways to school and were pushed into different social circles, but always they rushed to return to the yard where their joint kingdom lay.

Then came the training of Thornton Tomtree, unlikely basketball player. Darnell ran hours of films, depicting how the great centers of the game operated as a hub.

Darnell snapped the ball to him a hundred times a day until his reflexes and coordination were brought to their limits.

“Catch the ball! Pass to the open man!”

“How about me getting some shooting time?”

“You ain’t no shooter, Thornton. Them that can, does. You are a trench warrior. You’re a white maypole with guys hanging all over you. But you are junkyard strong. Plant your ass under the basket and disembowel anyone who tries to get your rebound.”

Thornton Tomtree was awkward, not dumb. Once he understood the niche Darnell was creating for him, he studied the complexity and possibilities of the game and his particular value.

Darnell invited kids into the yard for pickup games which were nonstop verbal assaults on his student, to move his feet, leap, dunk.

By the end of the summer Darnell had created a player out of bits and pieces. His strength was under the basket, elbow and knee land. Only one problem. The two were going to different high schools.

Thornton changed his address from his home to the junkyard, which allowed him to transfer to Pawtucket High.

There were only two white boys trying out for the team, and they became the target of bad intent. At six foot three, Thorn ton was a nice-sized center for a small school. He closed his ears to the jiving. His physical strength tested and proved, Thornton became a legitimate second-string player. Darnell Jefferson’s “Frankenstein.”

Competence on the basketball court was a hard-earned grace. Less difficult was Thornton’s quick mastery of all the school’s curriculum in math and science.

Darnell drilled him in social skills, particularly girls. In time he joined Darnell in reading old Playboys in the yard.

“How come white women don’t have pussies?” Darnell wondered.

“I never saw a pussy,” Thornton said. “Do your women?”

“Oh, hell yes, but they’ve never had a picture of a black lady in Playboy.”

These sessions ended more quickly than Darnell wished.

Thornton would always end with a sigh and a shake of his head and make for his workbench.

Without saying it aloud, or even knowing it, Darnell was becoming an intricate part of Thornton’s ability to function in the outside world. Darnell preferred shooting baskets, Playboy, fishing and pussy-speak, but Thornton’s enormous devotion to the workbench lured Darnell in. An electronic ding-dong of some sort was explained as a Rube Goldberg-type invention. As he learned enough just through proximity and contact, his large vocabulary became punctuated with scientific terms.

A new day of science wizardry was arriving, and Thornton Tomtree was at home with it. Thornton’s ding-dong invention was a kind of computer which he called the Bulldog. He never shared the secret of Bulldog City with Darnell, or anyone.

Thornton tweaked the curiosity of the technical colleges that loomed large in the region. He established contact with MIT and played complex physics games. Whatever the Bulldog could do, it seemed to mop up the opposition of renowned institutions.

When Thornton Tomtree graduated Pawtucket High, they named a science medal after him. But it was a bad day for the odd couple. Thornton would leave for college, and Darnell had two more years to go at Pawtucket High.

For a time it was feared he would be drafted for Vietnam, but he was given an exemption as an only son.

On a late summer’s night in Newport, a thousand and one tourists strolled up the street looking at curios, and another thousand and one across the road strolled down the street looking at curios. Macho sailors, who manned the yachts of the rich, partied. Petitioners looked over Brown University, which had an open night for applicants. In the drawing rooms of the great mansions, string quartets played for charity at a thousand dollars a pop.

Thornton parked the junkyard pickup truck in Darnell’s driveway and waited on the porch swing for him to come home from a date.

“Darnell.”

“Yo, Thornton?”

“Yeah, how’d you make out?”

“Not too bad, I guess but those Jamaican girls have an agenda that has something to do with American passports. So, what’s going on?”

“You haven’t been in the shop most of the summer,” Thorn ton said.

“All right,” Darnell said, seating himself opposite on a rocker. “I mean, you’re going your own way. I hear my daddy talk about all the schools after you. MIT, Harvard, Carnegie Tech. How many scholarships have you been offered? They’ve got you mistaken for a quarterback.”

“Well, what’s that got to do with our friendship?”

“Everything,” Darnell said. “Man, you’re in solo land. A couple of years of college and we’ll need a translator to be able to speak to each other. Hey, man, you’re going to take off like a rocket. You and I just ran out of time and space. I mean, we can always be friends. Good friends, but you’re going north and south and I’m heading east and west.”

“I’ve made a decision,” Thornton said. “I’m not taking a scholarship. I’m not going to college. Why should I spend four years learning something I already know? My time would be better spent continuing to develop the Bulldog.”

“What the fuck you talking about?”

“I’m not going to college.”

“Your daddy know?”

“My daddy’s smart,” Thornton said. “He looked me over like he was bidding on ten tons of metal and asked me if I knew what I was doing. He trusts my judgment.”