By Whitney Collins
Wendell is picked up every morning at 7:42 by Mrs. Lavalier Pierre-Bertrand. She does not pull into the Murphys’ driveway, for that would add 150 feet to her car’s odometer (75 to pull in and 75 to back out), not to mention gas. The Pierre-Bertrands’ Renault 18i Sportswagon, that Lavalier’s husband, Hugh, had shipped down from an Ottawa scrapyard in exchange for a blind Thoroughbred with a decent bloodline (the blinding was an injury), averages an impressive 25 mpg combined city and highway, which means pulling in and out of the Murphy driveway would total 0.142045 miles and burn 0.7272704 ounces of gas in a five-day school week.
Wendell has been told: the cheapest fuel Mrs. Pierre-Bertrand can find is over at the old Texaco in the industrial part of town, on the corner next to Grubb Drywall and across from Squeaky’s Glass & Mirror. She’s made it her job to get to know Dermott who runs the Texaco. He’s a decent fellow who’ll wash her windows and fill her tank and check the oil for free—nearly unheard of in 1981 when everyone everywhere is nickel-and-diming everyone. Right now, Dermott’s only charging $1.03 a gallon at the Texaco. But all over town, gas is through the roof, with prices as high as $1.11 at the Shell station near the children’s school, which is a total travesty if you ask her. Anyway, for what she’s paying for Dermott’s gas, a trip down and back the Murphy driveway would cost her approximately 58.5% of a penny per week or just over 21 cents a year, with the school year being 36 weeks. Twenty-one cents is the cost of a modest grapefruit. She is not insane.
Wendell knows the truth: the Pierre-Bertrands are billionaires—Pierre as in Pierre Sparkling Wines of Mendocino and Bertrand as in steel, coal, and oil, the Bellicott family of hotels including the Lullaby Motor Lodges, Gnapp tennis balls and racquets, Farleigh railroad and transport, and Bark-lee Industries (specializing in dog, cat, bird, rabbit, ferret, guinea pig—you name the pet—foods and treats and shredded beddings). Mr. Pierre-Betrand brought the hyphenated name to the marriage from both his mother’s and father’s sides, so Wendell is not to think Lavalier insisted on her surname being dashed up with his, because really, how gauche. No, her maiden name was simply Cox, as in the Daniel Bruce Coxes from outside Baltimore. No billionaires, that’s for sure, but her great-great grandfather did invent a patented bit of machinery for pitting olives, so it wasn’t like she came from beans. Lavalier brought a tidy million to the matrimony table with her percentage from elder Bruce’s doohickey, so in all, as a pair, the Pierre-Bertrands are pretty well set, but to know them is not to know that.
*
Wendell’s father has agreed to pay for tennis lessons if Wendell can bring home a B in math. This has filled Wendell with a great deal of motivation (he’s been angling for lessons since second grade), as well as terror (math is the bane of his existence). It’s also caused a periodic fluttering in his chest, a butterfly sensation he hasn’t mentioned to anyone, that is hopefully anxiety and not a recurrence of his unsolved cardiac conundrum. This year, math has become exponentially more difficult—Wendell isn’t even sure what exponentially means—and the problems read like convoluted essays: If sister-and-brother duo, Jane and Jason, live 40 miles east of the rodeo, and sister- and-brother duo, Betsy and Brad, live 17 miles west of the rodeo, at what speed must their parents drive their cars so that both sets of siblings reach the rodeo in the time for the barrel racing segment at 6:18 p.m., assuming they leave their homes at 5:59 p.m.?
Wendell can sometimes figure out the answers to these stumpers, but not in the way his teacher requires. Mrs. Callum wants him to use specific formulas and employ As and Bs and Cs and Xs and Ys. Wendell prefers to forgo the alphabet and spend three times the amount allotted on these questions, sometimes with his head on his desk, wondering when he will ever use math in the real world, other times counting on his fingers and scratching down tally marks and drawing out 45 tiny oranges or 68 head of cattle (depending on the question’s specifics). The start of the new tennis season begins in ten days, directly after the 12 & Under Junior State Tournament is concluded. That’s also when the semester ends. If Wendell can nail down a minimum of an 84 in math, he could begin taking tennis lessons in just over a week.
“Wendell,” Mrs. Callum inquired after class one day. “I know there’s a lot riding on this final test for you.” Wendell nodded. “And right now, you have an 81 in the class.” Wendell nodded again. “If the final exam is 25% of your grade, do you know what you need to get on the test to bring your final grade up to an 84?” Wendell said nothing. He needed about thirty minutes for that one. “You need to get a 93, Wendell,” Mrs. Callum explained. “That’s a tall order.”
Wendell sighed. How could he possibly need a whopping 93% to move an 81 up just three notches to an 84? He just didn’t get it. Mrs. Callum placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m going to help you out, Wendell. I’m going to give you a sample question to work on these next few days at home. It’s not the exact story problem on the test, but it’s similar. If you can solve this problem, Wendell, you can solve the other one. They’re basically one and the same.”
That afternoon after school, Wendell sat at the kitchen table and read Mrs. Callum’s sample problem:
John has a leaky faucet in his bathroom. At night he looks at his watch and counts the drips. The faucet drips at a rate of 3 drips per second. How many drips is this per minute? If one drip of water equals .005 ounces, how many ounces of water will be wasted in a minute? In an hour? In a day? In 30 days? In 365 days? If a gallon of water costs $.004, how much money will John have spent on wasted water in a year? Do this problem a second time using the metric system, with one drop equaling .1479 milliliters.
Wendell felt like crying. The gap between him and tennis lessons had suddenly widened. In that moment, he had remembered last year’s episode of That’s Incredible, when stuntman Dar Robinson drove his Bradley GT off a ramp over the Grand Canyon. Dar jumped from the vehicle as it began to plummet and parachuted safely to the ground. Impressive, Wendell had thought at the time, but not as impressive as landing on a ramp on the other side. Now that Wendell thought about it, Dar Robinson’s stunt was like a 92%. Just under what he needed to really shine.
*
On Wendell’s daily ride to school, Mrs. P-B turns the ignition off at stoplights (again: gas) and refuses to run either the heater or A/C (because, again: gas). She has been known to employ the defroster in cases of extreme icing and the wipers in downpours, but most of the time, she hunches over the wheel and squints through mild to moderate conditions all in the name of economics. In the winter, Wendell arrives at school with blue lips, while the Pierre-Bertrand offspring (Thurston, 11, Thora, 9, and Freddy, 7) are still warm and clammy from their 45-degree bedrooms. Their parents’ frugality has rendered them impervious to the seasons, as well as hunger, thirst, disease and illness (excepting carsickness), and ignominy.
Mrs. P-B has reminded Wendell many times that she reluctantly agreed to carpool. A child of his average weight (77 pounds) would surely add to the burden of her vehicle (and again: gas), but she was desperate to get out of the afternoon drive from and to the inherited family estate in the country. Wendell’s mother acquiesced driving afternoons as she works the early morning shift as a nurse (how pitiful!) and her husband is often out of town to places like Pittsburgh selling tubes and clamps and valves used in operating rooms (how humorous!). In the end, Mrs. P-B figured it was the best transportation scenario she could manage without having to sell another Picasso sketch for gasoline, and the Murphys were the only ones willing to drive out of their way to the countryside, much less consort with such eccentrics.
Wendell enjoys nothing about this arrangement. While fellow sixth grader Thurston sits smugly in the front passenger seat, Wendell is relegated to the back-center, crammed between Thora and Freddy who Mrs. P-B insist need window access in case they toss their breakfasts. Their breakfasts are complimentary ones from the Lullaby Motor Lodge’s buffet, where their mother stops every morning off the interstate before they pick up Wendell. The Pierre-Bertrands’ days begin with lukewarm powdered eggs, gray sausage links, packaged honey buns, black instant coffee, and warm cans of Donald Duck orange juice, all consumed in the car. Wendell knows this because there are Styrofoam containers on the floor mats when he gets in. Some are empty (from breakfast), others are filled (for dinner). There are also cardboard boxes marked Pierre Sparkling Wine that have been repurposed and loaded with miniature motel soaps and shampoos, flimsy disposable razors with one blade, rolls of cut-rate diaphanous toilet paper, cellophane-wrapped plastic cups, and sometimes a shoehorn or ice bucket. Wendell has twice seen a stained rayon bedspread salvaged from the Motor Lodge dumpster and rolled up in the front seat between Mrs. P-B and Thurston. Morning carpool is a lesson in transcendence for Wendell. Mrs. P-B enjoys discussing Mrs. Murphy’s country of origin—Portugal, Portugal. I always think it’s Nicaragua—while Thurston inexplicably sneers at Wendell in the rearview mirror. On top of that, Thora and Fred reliably reek of pork by-product, latherless soap, and something peculiar that Wendell can never place—maybe earwax, maybe mushrooms.
*
Wendell has been saving for six months for a pair of mint condition, never-worn, men’s size eight, 1979 Bear Lang sneakers, the ones with the cyan stripe on the sides and grizzly silhouette on the tongues, manufactured to commemorate the 1978 win of Austrian Bernard “The Bear” Lang over German Albrecht “The Fuhrer” Fuchs, in a tennis match that lasted seven hours and forty-eight minutes. The Bear died a day later of heart failure, and Wendell nearly did, as well. Coincidentally, or maybe quite relatedly, Wendell collapsed in his third-grade gym class at the same moment Lang’s death was broadcast on a midday news bulletin. Mrs. Murphy had just come home from her nursing shift to eat a tuna sandwich and watch Ryan’s Hope when Harry Reasoner broke in with news of The Bear’s demise. Almost instantaneously, her kitchen phone rang. It was the school, letting Mrs. Murphy know that Wendell was en route to the hospital in an ambulance and she needed to get back to Lockbridge Memorial immediately.
The shoes have been nearly impossible to find. Locating a pair of Bear Langs has cost Wendell more than forty hours of his after-school and weekend time, $78.29 in long distance phone calls, and $8.62 in postage. The collector’s item is valued at $92.93, including insured shipping. Once the shoes arrive, Wendell will have a total investment of $179.84, most of which he’s earned cleaning up after the men at Lockbridge Racquet Club on Saturdays and Sundays. It’s not a “real” job per se, as the club can’t officially hire an 11-year-old, but Wendell is allowed to pocket any earned tips and eat weekend lunches for free.
Wealthy men, Wendell has determined over the past half-year, are among the most hygienically vile individuals. He routinely wipes the locker room sinks of dried Barbasol and whiskers, globs of residual toothpaste flecked with parsley and pepper, and bits of blood-dotted tissue that have been discarded after shaving nicks—foul confetti left expressly for him. The men also toss black disposable combs, slick with tonic and stray hairs, on the changing benches, on the kelly green carpet, and on the backs of toilets sweaty from humidity. The locker room is a presto change-o cesspool, where the men enter as athletes, behave as beasts within, and exit under the guise of gentlemen, when Wendell knows they are nothing of the sort. He has collected rolled and wrinkled Penthouses from bathroom stalls and wiped semen from the sauna walls. The men of Lockbridge Racquet Club have even thrice defecated in the communal shower. Regardless, Wendell is tipped mostly in quarters. Only once, when he found a Rolex in the linen hamper, was he given a big bill—five bucks from Dr. Gus Westfield, an oral surgeon who had the gall to ask for three dollars back.
Yet of all the Lockbridge members, Mr. Hugh Pierre-Bertrand and son Thurston are the worst. Their memberships are complimentary (as would be expected for Gnapp tennis heirs) and Wendell has come to learn that anything that isn’t glued down, ends up in the trunk of the Renault 18i Sportswagon—sun visors, cocoa butter, V-neck sweaters, gold chains, aviator glasses, steel thermoses, half-used deodorants, pagers, tube socks, shrimp salad sandwiches, New York Times-es. He’s watched them from behind the green curtains of the indoor courts. The stealth P-B duo collects anything left behind, in the guise of depositing it into the lost and found, only to claim it as their own. One Sunday, Wendell saw Thurston hustle a Gucci briefcase to the car during a match bathroom break—a briefcase that belonged to Mr. Pierre-Bertrand’s best friend, Dr. Gus Westfield, and likely contained dental records, the salvaged Rolex, and three of Wendell’s crumpled ones.
But back to the shoes: Wendell has been waiting for six weeks (out of six to eight) for them to arrive. When they do, he will remove them from their box, lace them up if they are not already laced, remove the wadded tissue paper from their toes, and wear them, just once to school on a non-phys-ed day to show Davey and Kip. That day he will not only skip recess and forgo chocolate milk but also urinate sitting down to spare the shoes of any calamity. Then he will bring them home, wipe them with a dampened dust rag, and place them inside an acrylic display box—a box that he also had difficulty locating but finally found through an art dealer who knew one of the tennis pros who is friendly with the Lockbridge pool guy who is nice enough to Wendell considering his status. Now that he thinks about it, the display box set him back an additional $23.87, so really, he is into this whole sneaker thing for $203.71. A lot of wiped whiskers, to be sure, but he knew that getting into it. Bear Lang is worth it. He always has been.
As for Wendell’s heart, they never did find anything wrong with him, which was simultaneously terrific and unsettling. Since then, it’s like everyone who loves him has been silently on edge, as if they’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.
*
In the mornings, between Thora and Freddy, Wendell reads Bear Lang’s biography, Griz the Whiz. One Tuesday, Freddy thinks to ask what it’s about, but Wendell insists it’s not appropriate for a second grader.
“It is pornographic?” Mrs. Pierre-Bertrand demands. “Are you reading pornographic material in my car, Wendell?” Thurston glowers at Wendell in the rearview mirror.
“No, ma’am,” Wendell exhales. “It’s about the Holocaust.”
Mrs. P-B claps the top of the steering wheel with both hands. “A riveting segment of history!” she declares. “Read it aloud, Wendell. Loud enough so that we all may enjoy it.”
Freddy and Thora lean in close—nearly snuggling Wendell on either side. His eyes water from their unnamed pungency. “‘Bear’s father was a Viennese professor,’” he mumbles, monotone, in the hopes of the P-Bs losing interest. “‘He was highly esteemed in the university and wrote several applauded treatises on socialism. After Anschluss, or the annexation of Austria by the Nazi party in 1938, the Nazis not only sought to capture and remove Jews from Vienna, but also any political or intellectual adversary. Since Eloy Lang fell into the latter category, he was eventually captured and sent away in 1939 to Mauthausen, one of the Nazi’s harshest labor camps.’”
Mrs. Pierre-Bertrand sighs softly. Wendell thinks it sounds like the sort of coo a woman releases when presented with a corsage or valentine. He continues. “‘Mauthausen was known for its rock quarry, which sat at the bottom of the infamous Stairs of Death. Prisoners were required to carry 100-pound blocks up the 186 stairs, often collapsing and falling backward, causing a tragic display of human dominoes. Other times, prisoners were taken to The Parachutists Wall, which was nothing more than a tall cliff. There they were forced to choose between being shot in the head or pushing a fellow prisoner to his death. Meanwhile, outside of the hellacious walls of Mauthausen, Bear and his mother Angela were forced to flee Vienna and escape to a farming village outside of Graz, where Angela’s second cousin gave them shelter in an abandoned chicken coop.’”
“Wait,” Freddy breaks in. “I thought this was about a tennis player.”
“Yeah,” frowns Thora. “This is boring.”
Thurston glares at Wendell in the mirror. “You know,” he says. “Bear Lang was no tennis player.”
Wendell glows hot from within. Thurston’s face is like a bowling ball, inhumanly round, with two eyes and a nose squeezed tight in the middle—three holes Wendell could poke his fingers into and throw down a greased alley.
“Children,” Mrs. P-B interrupts. “Wendell is reading us some of history’s more entertaining moments. Please continue.”
Wendell closes his book. “Actually, I think I’d better stop,” he says. “I’m feeling carsick.” At this, and to Wendell’s relief, Thora and Freddy move away from his sides. Wendell closes his book and closes his eyes and imagines Thurston’s detestable head rolling and rolling and rolling until it cracks into a set of tenpins. Strike, thinks Wendell.
*
The Pierre-Bertrands pride themselves on spending their money on four things only: gasoline, private tuition, capital gains, and duct tape. They dress in hand-me-downs from deceased relatives—Brooks Brothers pants with stapled hems, Lacostes mended with yarn pulled from cashmere socks, threadbare corduroy blazers, women’s golfing knickers, ascots, touring caps. When the children require something for school that the Pierre-Bertrands cannot construct from their “wardrobe of the dead,” Mrs. P-B visits one of her go-to lost-and-founds. The best by far is the ice-skating rink, known for its copious amounts of forgotten children’s shoes and outerwear, followed by the monstrous Christian church out by the highway.
All of the Pierre-Bertrands’ sustenance comes from the Lullaby Motor Lodge buffet and vending machines and what the children bring home from their cafeteria lunches. Occasionally Thora, who is good at throwing knives, will return from the back forty with a groundhog which she will gut and cook in one of the mansion’s six fireplaces—the only source of heat the P-Bs rely on. The P-Bs have a well, which may or may not be contaminated, but from which they drink when tired of Donald Duck orange juice.
The Pierre-Bertrands’ way with money is endlessly fascinating to those of average means. At Lockbridge potlucks and school book fairs, and in the supermarket and faculty lounge, the P-Bs are often dissected by the community, with delight and disgust. The regular folks trade stories of Hugh stealing Girl Scout cookies for dinner, and Lavalier hawking Renoirs for private school tuition, and that time Thora showed up at a slumber party with a Hudson Bay blanket in lieu of a sleeping bag and a tarnished silver spoon wrapped in newspaper as a birthday present. They marvel that the Pierre-Bertrands do not invest in movie tickets, steak dinners, cosmetics, fashion trends, toys, appliances, school supplies, magazine subscriptions, or wrapping paper. They judge them for their refusal to go to doctors or dentists. They discuss their generator that runs on firewood, whether they bathe, how they manage without Band-Aids and roast chicken and a television. Did you know, they whisper, that Freddy wore cloth diapers made of cut up Lilly Pulitzer skirts? Have you heard, they murmur, that Thurston has never owned a pair of shoes he didn’t steal?
*
Thurston Pierre-Bertrand is ranked number two in the state, heading into the Junior State Tournament. Wendell knows this because it’s posted at the Lockbridge Racquet Club, both in the main lobby and in the men’s locker room. He also knows it because Thurston won’t stop mentioning it, especially in the next morning’s carpool, when Wendell tries to immerse himself in the final chapters of Griz the Whiz.
“Are you still reading that book?” Thurston jeers at Wendell in the rearview mirror. “Not to spoil things, but we all know the guy dies.” Wendell says nothing. “See, the key to being a champion is not just not-choking,” Thurston explains. “It’s also about not being a flash-in-the-pan. I know these things as number two in the state, Wendell. It takes a lifetime of dedication. Not just one fluke game.”
Wendell shuts his book. Thora and Freddy are particularly close and ripe this morning. He decides that when the Bear Langs arrive, he will not subject them to the innards of the Pierre-Bertrands’ vehicle. Instead, he will take them out of his backpack at school and put them on in the quiet art wing, on the bench by the theater. “Second,” Wendell replies. “That’s what Albrecht Fuchs was. Bear Lang was first, and Albrecht Fuchs was second.”
Thurston’s terrible face glowers back at Wendell. It’s as doughy as an unbaked pie, sallow from years of powdered eggs and 6-packs of miniature chocolate donuts pillaged from motel vending. This rare form of malnutrition has clearly invaded Thurston’s soul, glazing over any glimmer of integrity. Wendell and Thurston engage in an abbreviated version of a stare-off, before Mrs. P-B—who has missed the tension due to rain and an unwillingness to employ the windshield wipers—pipes up about gasoline.
“Thurston,” she says. “The next time you’re at the club, have your father fill the car at the Texaco. Dermott’s lowering gas on Saturday down to $1.01. Have him fill it all the way, and we’ll see if we can make twelve gallons last an entire month.”
Wendell widens his eyes at Thurston who responds by slamming his fist on the dashboard. “What is it?” Mrs. P-B declares, hitting the brakes. “A whitetail?” Thurston throws a final scowl Wendell’s way, but Wendell is busy finding the chapter where Bear Lang teaches himself to play tennis on his cousin’s farm by hitting pinecones over the clothesline with a rug beater, or more technically a mattenklopper.
*
The Bear Langs arrive on Thursday after school. They’re everything Wendell imagined they’d be. They’re pristine and unlaced, crammed with thick moving paper—the kind crystal is wrapped in for shipping—and they smell like factory rubber and car leather. Wendell takes them upstairs, to the ivory carpet of the guest room to try them on. They fit on his feet the same way his own hands clasp together in prayer. Yes, he smiles to himself. Yes, yes, yes. He puts them back into their box, which he takes to his room and places next to the acrylic display cube. Tomorrow, after school, he will put the Bear Langs in their final resting place. But first, they must be shown to Davey and Kip. And second, he must pass his math exam.
Wendell has gotten far enough with Mrs. Cullum’s problem to determine that three drops of water per second equal 180 drips per minute, and that if one drop equals .005 ounces, you have to multiply it by 180 to get .9 ounces per minute. As he works, Wendell realizes the problem isn’t half as hard as he originally thought. In fact, it’s easier than any on last month’s exam. Maybe Mrs. Cullum is going soft on him. She did ask about his health one afternoon at recess when he was unusually winded. Wendell refocuses and continues; if nine-tenths of an ounce per minute equals 54 ounces per hour, John will ultimately waste 3695.625 gallons a year. At $.004 per gallon, according to Wendell’s calculations, John is only out $14.7825 in 365 days. Less than fifteen bucks? Wendell frowns. This seems cheap, extraordinarily so, but then again, he’s no Pierre-Bertrand.
*
Wendell rises early Friday morning, as if packing his shoes will take an hour off his routine. He dresses in record time, then sets about the day’s logistics. First, he removes the Bear Langs from their box and tucks them in his backpack alongside his schoolbooks, only to discover the sneakers appear horrifically innocent and endangered this way—like two infant harp seals wedged in a tackle box. Wendell momentarily panics and changes his mind, placing only his books inside his backpack and the shoes back inside their box. He practices carrying the shoebox back and forth across his room while he wears his backpack but has the precarious sensation of transporting a tray of glassware over a gravel road. Finally, in a fit of perspiration, Wendell places the entire shoebox into his backpack and decides his books must be carried. This feels better, but unfinished. The shoes must not be worn at all, he eventually decides; the risk for damage is too high. Once at school, he will simply lift the shoebox lid at morning break to show Davey and Kip the Bear Langs. He might let them touch them—the way schoolchildren visiting the aquarium are allowed to touch the sea urchins—with one finger only. But even that is up for debate.
“Is your math exam today?” Wendell’s father asks over breakfast.
“Yes,” Wendell says. “I think I’ll do well.”
His father smiles. “I think you will, too.”
“Do you want to see my Bear Langs again?” Wendell asks.
“Let me get my sunglasses first,” his father jokes.
*
Mrs. P-B arrives in front of the Murphys’ at 7:42 a.m. and turns off the car. From the kitchen window, even in the dark blue shadows of pre-dawn, Wendell can clearly make out Thurston staring at the house with soulless intent. His white spheric head bobs like a balloon brought home from the store. His shrewd black eyes, bits of coal punched into snow, are discernible from 150 feet away. It’s the relentless gaze of a scavenger. A possum on the curb.
It occurs to Wendell that perhaps there was a time when Thurston knew what it was he longed for, before he just grabbed whatever he could from benches and courts and coatracks. Maybe four or five years ago, when Thurston paused in front of a stranger’s home and watched the silhouettes moving to and fro in the window, maybe he was still able to name the things he craved—central heat, a new pair of Levis, a farm egg with a hot yolk, the hypnotic, silver glow of a TV. Maybe he made birthday and Christmas lists. Maybe he earned money of his own, though Wendell can’t imagine how or where, and maybe at night, in his 45-degree bedroom, he crawled under his Hudson Bay blanket and stained Lullaby Motor Lodge bedspread and dreamed of going to the Lockbridge Mall to buy a Todd Rundgren album and a pack of Jockey shorts like a regular kid. Wendell tries to remember when he first met Thurston, but it seems as if he’s always been around—sometimes on the periphery, sometimes in Wendell’s face. Elusive and everywhere. Like a rusted paring knife in a kitchen drawer that no one can seem to lose or use but always must fumble past.
In the car, Wendell climbs over Freddy to the middle seat. Thurston turns to lean over the front seat and stares at Wendell’s lap where his books are curiously stacked. “What’s in the backpack?” he asks. “What’s going on, Wendell?”
Wendell opens up Griz the Whiz. Today he has decided to read to Thora and Freddy on the way to school. He has chosen the most uplifting chapter. The one where Bear Lang and his mother are able to move out of the chicken coop and escape to a small alpine village in Switzerland where Bear’s first tennis lessons are paid for by a wealthy couple. A couple who also provides Angela with a job as a seamstress, and Bear with knee socks and boots and chocolates and colored pencils. In this noteworthy chapter, young Bear rises to fame for his tennis savior faire, not just in the village, but in the surrounding towns as well. Sometimes his presence is requested in the main square, and Bear, accompanied by his beaming mother, good-naturedly obliges, illustrating to admirers his self-taught aptitude. In these instances, to the delight of onlookers, Bear demonstrates his proficiency with the mattenklopper and wows throngs with his ability to serve a pinecone, using only a carpet beater, more than forty meters.
“That’s over a hundred feet,” Wendell says to Freddy.
“What’s in the backpack?” Thurston asks again, still leaning and tenacious.
“A mattenklopper is only made of wicker, Freddy,” Wendell continues. “It’s a testament to Bear’s unique type of strength that he didn’t destroy it in the process.”
Thurston’s face is glowing now, like a deceptive white coal. “I SAID,” he seethes. “What’s…in…the…backpack.”
Wendell looks up at Thurston and stares into his black eyes like he might answer him. “A single pinecone.” He whistles and shakes his head. “Forty meters.”
Thurston raises a fist, Wendell braces for a punch. But just then, Mrs. Pierre-Bertrand unexpectedly pipes up and yanks her oldest back by his vintage collar. “Thurston,” she says. “Turn around and face forward while I drive. You’re negatively affecting the gas mileage.”
*
Wendell remembers locking the padlock. When he arrived at school, he’d taken the shoebox of Bear Langs out of his backpack and placed it on the top shelf of his locker. Then he’d stacked the books he didn’t need for first and second periods on the bottom shelf and removed the ones for French and English. He’d slammed the door shut. He’d yanked down hard on the padlock to see that it was secure. He’d even twirled the combination around as a safety precaution. But now, here he is at morning break with Davey and Kip on either side of him, and the three of them are staring into a locker that is, most certainly, without a shoebox. Wendell can hardly form a sentence. “This is impossible,” he stammers. “I put the Bear Langs right here,” he points a feeble finger at the shelf. “They’ve been stolen. That’s the only explanation. Someone has taken them.”
Davey and Kip are sympathetic, but only as sympathetic as sixth grade boys can publicly be, especially ones who haven’t even heard of Bear Lang.
“That stinks,” says Davey.
“Yeah,” Kip agrees. “Let us know if you find them.”
Wendell searches the locker until his heart begins to trouble him. He can only rummage through a tiny locker for a large shoebox so many times before he begins to feel not just faint and unhinged, but on the verge of another trip to Lockbridge Memorial. Wendell’s breath eludes him. He turns cold and nauseated. He might be hyperventilating. He must sit down, so he does just that, right on the cold floor with his back against the lockers and his face in his hands. He sits like this amid morning break, the hallway’s background noise a tuneless symphony of shouting, slamming, and sneakers squeaking across wet winter tiles. How is this happening?
At six hours into Bear Lang’s epic 1978 match versus Albrecht Fuchs, Bear briefly collapsed at mid-court after an impressive overhead ace that put Fuchs and Bear at their twenty-eighth deuce of the game. Bear was helped to his feet by his coach and offered a medical timeout, but he refused it in exchange for a superstitious shot of elderberry juice and a paper-thin slice of Emmental. Bear went on to break the interminable 40-all after thirty-nine additional minutes. Fuchs blamed his inability to get past “ad in” on his tennis strings; he had requested mule gut but had obviously been duped with sheep’s. Bear, on the other hand, gave partial credit to his deuce-buster on his good-luck snack, but most commendation went to his father and the last words he'd ever spoken to Bear. Right before the Nazis had come for Eloy Lang, he’d smiled calmly at his son and said: “Bernard. Remember. The body is only a costume. Before you know it, the play ends and the cast party begins. There’s no time to waste on stage fright.”
In an instant, it is clear to Wendell that Thurston is the culprit. His doggedness about discerning the backpack’s contents, his knack for pilfering, his probable knowledge of lock-picking all combine in the only rational answer. Wendell regains a modicum of energy, fueled mostly by rage, and rises from the hallway floor. He clearly sees what he is to do. His math exam begins in five minutes. The final round of Thurston’s tennis tournament begins tomorrow morning. And if Wendell can handle one, he can handle the other. It’s like Mrs. Callum plainly decreed: “If you can solve this problem, Wendell, you can solve the other one. They’re basically one and the same.”
*
On Saturday at 8:00 a.m., Wendell’s father drops him off at the Lockbridge Racquet Club. He has brought what he usually brings to work—rubber custodial gloves and a Walkman—along with something new and concealed: his father’s cordless drill. Wendell is not assigned to work the tournament until tomorrow, but he has shown up anyway, because he has things to ascertain and accomplish; it’s the bottom of the third set, so to speak.
Fifteen minutes after Wendell’s arrival, Mr. Pierre-Bertrand pulls in with Thurston. Wendell can see, from his vantage point behind the club’s dense gathering of hemlocks, that Thurston exits the Renault 18i Sportswagon in a 1960’s-era Lacoste shirt and a pair of short white shorts that may have belonged to a great uncle, possibly even an aunt. He carries two Styrofoam containers from the Lullaby Motor Lodge and a Gnapp tennis bag that holds at least four complimentary rackets and six cans of Donald Duck orange juice. Most notably, the Bear Langs are not on Thurston’s feet, which is equal parts relief and mystery.
Both Wendell’s and Thurston’s days go as planned. Thurston wins his first of two matches in something of a blowout and does not shake hands with his opponent at the end. During an extended break before his second match, Thurston is able to jimmy into the basement vending machine when no one is around and procure four Snickers, three bags of Fritos, and five packs of Lance peanut butter crackers. During the semifinal match, a well-fueled Thurston defeats the state’s number four seed handily. Once again, Thurston does not congratulate his opponent, instead, after he has packed his rackets, he enjoys a comprehensive round of public gloating, before he and his father proceed to the Renault 18i Sportswagon to head home at 8:00 p.m. Their plan is to return in the morning at 7:30 a.m. for the finals, where Thurston will face off with the state’s number one player in the championship round at precisely 8:00.
Wendell’s day proceeds a bit differently. To begin with, he avoids Thurston at all costs, only freely venturing about when Thurston is on the court. It is Wendell’s estimation that if he remains unseen, the higher the probability the Bear Langs will see the light of day. So, while Thurston plays, Wendell wanders about the club, sometimes doing occasional janitorial duties so as not to appear dubious, sometimes browsing the pro shop, sometimes even pausing, in the back of the mezzanine crowd, to watch Thurston serve, despite the fact that it unfailingly fills Wendell will an initial sense of awe, followed by sadness, envy, and wrath. Conversely, when Thurston is not on the court, Wendell sees to it that he’s inside the locker room’s third bathroom stall, because from there (Wendell has checked, time and again all morning), he has the best vantage point for seeing into Thurston’s locker when it’s open.
After Thurston’s first match, he pays his fourth visit to the locker room, finally sitting in such a way on the changing bench, that Wendell has the view he’s been waiting for. There, on the top shelf of Thurston’s locker, just as it had been on the top shelf of Wendell’s locker, is the shoebox of Bear Langs. The box appears unharmed, not crushed or discolored, and it’s partially wrapped in a hooded sweatshirt that Wendell feels certain he saw, just yesterday, on classmate Ralph Danderson. Wendell’s heart leaps with relief, in a way that feels both invigorating and medically suspicious. Wendell feels confident that, after the tournament is over and the players clear out, he can remove the top panel of the wooden locker system—which was installed for its beauty, not its inviolability—and reach down into Thurston’s stolen stash to rescue the sneakers, maybe even Danderson’s sweatshirt. A good use for his father’s cordless drill, yes, but it’s not the reason Wendell has brought it with him.
Last night, even though it was a Friday, Wendell stayed up late to complete a final math problem that went something like this:
If a car’s gas tank holds 12 gallons of fuel, what size hole must be drilled into the gas tank for it to be completely emptied of all of its gasoline within nine hours?
Wendell did not work the problem out on paper using formulas as Mrs. Callum would have preferred; instead, he did it his way, by finding an old plastic milk jug in the basement and filling it with water. He’d hung the jug above the laundry sink before locating his father’s drill and boring a hole into the plastic. The goal was for the gallon to empty itself in 45 minutes—because at that rate, a 12-gallon gas tank would be depleted in nine hours. Nine hours was enough time for the Pierre-Bertrands to make it home from the Lockbridge Racquet Club on Saturday night without noticing a substantial dip on their fuel gauge (if say, the hole was drilled at 7:00 p.m. and they began driving at 8:00 p.m.), but short enough for the tank to be depleted while they slept, even if they rose early for a Lullaby Motor Lodge breakfast, even as early as 4:00 a.m., which sounds like something Hugh Pierre-Bertrand might call a good idea. Wendell invests a good two hours on his milk jug project, before finally determining that a quarter-inch hole (made with a 0.635-millimeter drill bit) is the answer to his problem.
While Thurston is in the middle of his second match’s third set and showing no signs of an arduous finish or a prolonged 40-all, Wendell heads out to the parking lot at 6:55 p.m. to do what he came to do. It is cold and dark and thankfully desolate, and Wendell is relieved to see that the Renault 18i Sportswagon is still parked by the dense assembly of hemlocks, throwing off the illusion of protection. Wendell stands for a moment, wavering, with the drill at his side, but drops to the pavement when he realizes how exposed he is. The pavement is as hard and frigid as a frozen pond, but regardless, Wendell slides on his back to the rear tire below the gas cap with the drill on his chest and tries to think only of the problem: A 12-gallon tank, a quarter-inch hole, a 0.635 drill bit, nine hours in total. If someone asks him what he’s doing, he’ll pretend he’s at work on a loose hubcap. Mr. Pierre-Bertrand asked me to look at it. I carpool with them—Wendell practices. I ride in this car every day—he tries another one—We’ve been talking about me taking a look at this tire for quite some time now.
Wendell feels up under the car until his hand finds a flat metal expanse that he’s sure is the fuel tank. His adrenaline soars, and his heart responds in kind. Wendell does not feel equipped for such behavior; he has not been groomed in this way. But his heart thuds against his chest and up into his throat, like a falcon suddenly caged, and he feels compelled to continue. He thinks of the Bear Lang in the chicken coop, of his Bear Langs roosting in Thurston’s locker. He remembers the Penthouses and the Barbasol and the foul confetti left expressly for him, and momentarily Wendell’s conviction is renewed. While he has it, he begins to drill, madly and terrified.
It soon becomes apparent to Wendell that this is no plastic milk jug, that he must press with all his weight to break into the metal with the drill bit he’s brought. After thirty seconds, Wendell stops to let both the drill and tank cool off. The indent he’s made is searing to the touch, and he’s afraid of setting off a spark. On his back, on the cold pavement, Wendell is unsure if the water dripping away from his face and into his ears is tears or sweat; he’s never felt so petrified. He’s unnerved that the time it takes for the metal of the tank and drill to cool corresponds with the time it takes his uncertainty to return. After a minute, Wendell resumes with the drilling, but he must stop again after fifteen seconds for the bit to cool because he’s on the verge of shredding it. This game of start-and-stop goes on for almost four minutes, until, at last, the drill breaks through and gas begins to leak out. The hole looks smaller than the one on the milk jug but seems to be dripping more quickly. Wendell is too nervous to count the drops; he tries to keep track of both the fuel and the seconds simultaneously, but the fear of being discovered scrambles the numbers in his mind, and he’s back in another math exam. At the sound of a distant voice, Wendell bolts up from the car and into the hemlocks where he crouches, breathless and shivering. He can see the Pierre-Bertrands on the stairs of the Lockbridge Racquet Club. Thurston and his father descend like royalty into the lot.
From afar, Thurston’s head seems rounder and lighter than ever before, an orb gliding into the night, nearly disembodied except for his feet, which also glow, white and bright as if lit from within. As he approaches, Wendell sees: Thurston’s feet are illuminated with the virgin Bear Langs. Were he not so depleted from fear and shame, Wendell might jump from the trees and confront Thurston about the shoes. Were he himself blameless, he might drop the drill on the hemlock needles and march right up to Thurston’s coruscating mug and demand to know where, exactly, he procured such footwear. But Wendell is doing well to merely stay conscious.
Mr. Pierre-Bertrand pauses by the car and frowns as Thurston loads his equipment. “Say,” he inhales. “Do you smell gasoline?”
Thurston and his father stand on either side of the Renault, their noses pointed toward the heavens, sniffing at the winter air, their nostrils searching the cobalt sky. “No,” says Thurston. “I smell firewood.”
His father raises his shoulders and opens the driver’s side door. “Ah well,” he says.
Wendell watches as they start up the car and pull out of the parking lot. Before he knows it, the P-Bs are a dot heading away from him, and his father is a dot pulling toward him. Wendell walks down to the parking lot with his bag. He has ruined his father’s drill bit. He has lost the Bear Langs. He has committed a crime. He wonders if it’s a felony.
“Have a good day?” his father smiles broadly. Wendell sighs and looks out the window so his father cannot see his face.
“I’m beat,” is all he can manage.
*
The Pierre-Bertrands’ three-story mansion is made of creek stones that were once carried on the backs of slaves and donkeys and Irishmen. The stones were pulled from the silty bottom of Stony Creek (which meanders through the horse meadows a mile downhill from the house) and brought up to dry in the sun before they were sorted by size and color (small, medium, large and gray, bread, butter). The house took eight years to complete, and when it was finished in 1850, it boasted six fireplaces, a spiral staircase, wormy chestnut floors, a dumbwaiter, a butler’s pantry, and a miniature ballroom.
The Pierre-Bertrands’ ancestors were horse racers and art collectors, and when they finally died of consumption and mania, the house sat vacant for a generation until Hugh was bequeathed the land and buildings by a great aunt. Hugh and Lavalier did little to restore the property, other than shooing away the vermin and installing a wood-burning generator (one Matisse) and a complicated drilled well (one Cassatt). Previously, they had lived in a rustic family cottage on a private island outside of the Carolinas, so all they brought with them to the estate, in terms of knowledge and possessions, was a sack of olive-sized pearls and how to survive on lobster eaten in the dark.
When Wendell was in third grade he’d spent the night at the Pierre-Bertrands’. Thurston had shown him around the house—the butler’s pantry stacked with floor-to-ceiling tarnished sterling, his father’s drafty office adorned with a mangy African giraffe head and six unplugged rotary phones, his and Freddy’s bedroom with its duct-taped windows and ship’s hammocks and closet full of loose hamsters that had been shipped to the boys in a crate marked LIVE from Bark-lee Industries. On his seemingly endless overnight, Wendell had subsisted solely on packaged vending food—Cheez-Its and unshelled sunflower seeds and Trident. He played Monopoly with Thora and Thurston by the light of a greased torch that Mr. P-B rammed into a gravel-filled flowerpot. The Monopoly board was dotted with mildew, a first edition, Wendell guessed, and instead of real properties, the P-B children had written in ink what they were in the market for. A trip to Disney World instead of Marvin Gardens. A Wilson football over B&O Railroad. New Adidas sneakers in lieu of Boardwalk. At one point during the game, Wendell brought a real dollar bill out of his pocket as a joke and Thurston and Thora went silent. Wendell might as well have tossed a live snake onto the board. “Is that real?” Thora asked. “It can’t be,” Thurston whispered. But Wendell, confused, assured them it was. “Geez,” he said. “It’s just a dollar.” Thora and Thurston took turns touching it, as if it were a baby chipmunk brought in by the cat.
When the torch gave out, they all went to bed, and while Thurston and Freddy slept, Wendell stayed up, listening to the nocturnal scramble of loose hamsters, shivering as he ate the last of the Cheez-Its, replaying on loop how Thurston had held the dollar bill. In the morning, Wendell woke to the pock-pock of a tennis ball being hit. Through the warped glass of a second story window, he could see Thurston in the backyard. At his feet was a small wooden board, perhaps a 2’x2’ square of plywood. Thurston was able to hit the ball against the sole flat creek stone on the back of the mansion and have it return to the small wooden square, over and over and over again. Wendell had never seen precision of the sort. He watched for forty-five minutes, waiting for Thurston to hit an angled creek stone on the house or have his shot return to the grass beside the plywood, but to no avail. It was a display of hypnotic excellence. When Wendell’s mother had finally come to retrieve him, he’d ridden home dumbstruck and hungry, so cold he’d had to take a hot bath to regain his senses. When he’d taken off his jeans to get into the tub, he’d noticed his dollar was missing.
*
The next morning, at 7:45, Wendell is dropped off at the Lockbridge Racquet Club by his father. The landscape is bony against the white March day; the trees are no longer bold and black like they were in November but have now faded to an unassertive pewter. The indoor courts rise from the bald earth like a nuclear warehouse, a hangar for UFOs. There is no sign of the Sportswagon in the parking lot, only a patch of iridescent fuel where it sat last night. Wendell feels nearly indisposed, but here he is, back at the scene and limp with guilt. He cannot look his father in the eyes.
“Don’t you work the scorecards today?” his father asks. “Isn’t your friend Thurston playing?”
Wendell cringes at the word friend. “I’ll be done early,” he tells his father. “It won’t last long.”
Inside, Wendell dresses in his commissioned white jumpsuit. He notices Thurston is not in the locker room. The usual trail of garbage he leaves for the janitors is noticeably absent. There are no Styrofoam containers on the floor, no pyramid of orange juice cans teetering on the changing bench. Wendell proceeds to the championship court where he’s been assigned to turn the numbers. Thurston’s opponent is already there. He’s warming up on the adjacent court with his coach. He is lean and loose and relaxed, and the ball ticks back and forth with the precision of a metronome. Wendell sees that the opponent can return the fastest of shots as if swatting a moth. He’s even able to glance at his large white watch and hit one-handed backhands without looking up, which he does several times without stutter, his bullets just grazing the top of the net. Wendell is struck with a sudden self-disgust; he no longer feels a desire to play tennis. He hopes Mrs. Cullum is grading his math test right now, with a red wax pencil that cannot be erased, and that he has received a 60. He hopes he will get a mark so low that his father is unable to justify even an inexpensive clinic.
“Where is he?” Wendell hears the opponent ask his coach. “Aren’t we close to a default?”
Wendell slumps in his short white chair under the umpire’s towering one. The crowd that has gathered in the mezzanine is large. They have gone from silently waiting to murmuring and rustling about; they are no doubt discussing Thurston’s absence.
“Have you heard from Thurston?” the umpire asks Wendell. “Aren’t you two classmates?”
Wendell shakes his head. It is now 8:15, fifteen minutes past game time. If Thurston does not arrive in the next five minutes, the game will go to the opponent as an automatic win. Just as Wendell had envisioned. The umpire climbs down from his roost to stretch his back. The opponent stops warming up to lean against a pole and eat a granola bar. Wendell watches the club’s giant clock at the end of the courts; its sweeping second hand moves like a red bird shot from the sky. Why doesn’t it tick? thinks Wendell. It’s moving faster than a clock that ticks.
But then, at 8:19, here is Thurston, bolting onto the court. He is so winded he cannot speak. His face is the color of chalk. His shirt is soaked with sweat. Thurston’s clammy and colorless state appears so precarious and infirmed that the crowd regains its hush. Even the opponent looks away. Thurston waves to the umpire, before bending over to clutch his chest and continue panting. The umpire frowns, unsure. Wendell can tell he is afraid to let Thurston play in his condition. Thurston puts his left hand on his left knee and raises his right hand in a thumbs up. “I’m good,” he gasps to the umpire. “I’m good to go.”
The umpire and opponent look at one another and shrug. “Give him five minutes,” the opponent says, to which Thurston shakes his head. “No,” he says. “Not a chance. I’m playing. Right now.”
In the final set of the legendary Lang/Fuchs match, Bear and Albrecht stop for a mutual water break. During this pause, Bear discovers a photograph inside his tennis duffel, a photograph he’s never seen before but that is placed right on top of a towel he’d used during the previous break. It’s a picture of his father inside the gates of what appears to be the Mauthausen labor camp. At least, Bear thinks it is his father. Before him is a man of such meager mass, made up of what appear to be sparrow bones and lambskin, that Bear can hardly identify the figure as human. But then he sees the smile, the birthmark like a stain below the collarbone, the eyes still flickering something distinctive from their hollows, two familiar candles in a cave. It is, Bear thinks. It is him.
It is said that Bear did not look across the court to Albrecht, who was most certainly looking at him, but that Bear took the photograph and placed it in his rear pocket and rallied back from Love-40 to win the final game. The entire match came down to a single stroke, and Bear later claimed it was the photograph that helped him win, when he knew it had been planted to help him lose.
“When you grow up with nothing,” Bear once said in an interview. “You figure out a way to get everything.”
Thurston and his opponent shake hands over the net. The umpire spins a neutral racket to see who will serve; Thurston will. Wendell takes his seat by the flip cards and within seconds the game has begun. Wendell looks on in astonishment as Thurston rises to the challenge. He’s the boy who has everything but has never had anything. There he is, unafraid, on the stage, returning the opponent’s shots the same way he returned the shots off the creek stone. He wears a pair of white shorts that have yellowed with age and a dated white shirt that’s too small and Wendell’s radiant Bear Langs. At times he appears on the verge of collapse, but he is playing better than Wendell’s ever seen him play.
At one point, Wendell pauses to do the math again. He goes over the size of the gas tank and thinks perhaps it was larger than twelve gallons. He thinks maybe the hole was drilled too small or that Mr. Pierre-Bertrand repaired the tank or that even without a working telephone the P-Bs were able to somehow summon a taxi or hitch a tractor ride in just the nick of time. Wendell considers a variety of scenarios, while Thurston stumbles and rallies, falls and rises, but eventually Wendell stops. He knows that none of the scenarios he envisions are the reasons Thurston is here. Thurston is here because he is a bear. He is a bear of everyone’s making—his mother’s, his father’s, his sister’s, his brother’s, and especially of Wendell’s. Before long, Wendell feels himself rooting for him. At first silently and then vocally. By the end of the match, Wendell is cheering unabashed, because he knows. He has read the book. And tomorrow may be the beginning of something big for Thurston. Or, if history is any indication, it will be the end.