Kathleen Ann Goonan - Solitaire

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Solitaire

by Kathleen Ann Goonan

Stumblebum was not his real name, but Norman had taken early to playing lots

of solitaire and not paying much attention to his surroundings or anything

else except cards. Early means seven years old and understandably this warped

his thinking. When other kids were playing Cowboys and Indians, a popular

pursuit in 1956, SB was making sure his playing surface was clean and dry so

as not to gum up the cards, and took care to avoid windy places which meant

that he was usually inside with the windows shut.

As for his name, SB's father could be cruel at times or at least rather

short-tempered, and it was he who took to yelling "You idiotic card-sharp

stumblebum, I told you to bring me that jar of screws from down in the

basement ten minutes ago now where is it? I'll show you to waste your time

with those stupid cards" loud enough for the neighbors to hear, in the summer,

anyway. The other kids, by rights SB's natural playmates, heard this epithet

wafting out the windows often enough and it struck them as just right. The

Stumble, or SB, as it finally boiled down to, did have a penchant for

clumsiness, and once had committed the atrocity of yelling, panicked, for some

kid's dad to get him down out of a tree. His real name was Norman and he told

them for awhile, then gave up.

SB's mother was not your normal fifties Lassie type mom, and though she did

wear an apron when she cooked it was usually spattered with last week's

dinner. She was sharp-faced with stringy blonde hair she kept in a pony tail

at the nape of her neck, smoked all the time, and complained that SB (even she

took to calling him that) had tied her down--right to his face--so often that

after awhile it ceased to bother him. He wasn't sure why it was supposed to

bother him, actually, but he was pretty certain that it was meant to.

Their house was a big white house. It sat on a corner lot, and had peeling

paint and a dirt-packed yard where the grass grew in raggedy patches which his

dad complained bitterly about having to mow with the metal push mower that

went clip clip clip on Saturday mornings. SB had friends, sort of, for awhile,

two neighbor boys. They were brothers, one his age the other a year younger,

both with limpid brown eyes and freckles. But then a doctor did something

wrong--so SB's mom told him--and the big brother died suddenly and the family

moved away real fast. Jim, the dead one, had been all right. At least he'd

play war, or fish. Boring, but at least you had cards in your hand.

SB kind of liked his new name, eventually, so that in school even the

teachers called him that except Miss Gaymond, his second grade teacher. She

called him Norman which always made everyone snicker until she made them write

sentences on the board and then they stopped. As for the other things the kids

did, SB did not mind baseball too much--not to play, of course, since he was

taunted for his clumsy throws and never picked till last to be on a team. But

he liked it when on Saturday afternoons his dad sat opening one can of Hamm's

after another with an opener he kept next to him on the tv table, and watched

the tiny men shift places like cards in a solitaire game on the small black

and white Crosley which sat in a corner of the living room. SB absorbed the

rules; he liked rules, and this was one of the main reasons he lacked interest

in playing with the other kids--somebody was always changing the rules. He had

no objection to sitting down and making up the rules to a game such as Indians

could die twice but no more or that when you ran out of lovely sharp-sounding

acrid-smelling caps which unreeled through your gun in a papery red tape you

changed from a Cowboy to an Indian. But you just couldn't depend on the other

kids to stick to those rules. The players on the gray diamond watching,

waiting, while the crowd sat, then stood and roared, reminded him of cards. It

could be anyone there on third but when they were there they took on special

characteristics depending on how the other parts of the game were going. There

was chance like when he shuffled the cards and his uncle had taught him some

pretty fancy shuffles, a bridge where he bent the cards in an arc which forced

them to cascade together and so on, but once that was over it was up to his

wits to see every opening, and up to his judgment to decide whether or not to

move a card or wait for a better one and up to the sharpness of his memory to

recall the position of a formerly turned up card.

You might have thought SB was lonely but he was not, particularly. He had a

large blue Huffy bike which his dad had bought so big that he could barely

reach the pedals even with the seat down as low as it would go. One nice thing

he always remembered about the old man was that he told SB that training

wheels were for sissies, even though everyone else in the neighborhood had

them and SB had pleaded for them, thinking that it was impossible to learn to

ride without them. SB learned to ride his bike in just a day, his dad said

he'd damned well better because the method was that his dad would run along

behind the bike holding it up by the rear fender. SB was forbidden to look

back to see if he was being held onto, and when he did of course he crashed,

which cured him of looking back. The first time he got to the end of the block

he got confused and crashed anyway, scraping his arm pretty bad. He looked

back and there was his dad standing way back at the other end of the block,

and SB realized that he could ride his bike just fine. His dad was good in

those ways, and seemed to come in for his share of the blame for tying mom

down so SB felt a kind of kinship with him.

But mostly SB studied his solitaire game. He learned many new and esoteric

games from various sources including a book from the library, where his

teacher took them all once a week in second grade. At that time he thought

"The Cat In The Hat" was what fiction was all about, and was amazed that other

people could stand reading such junk. It bored him silly. His aunt Ethyl

brought him a whole slew of books like that one day, and it frightened him so

to see the awful stack of them he pried open the screen of his bedroom window

and shoved them out, one after another. As luck would have it his mom and

Ethyl were sitting on the porch smoking and saw the books fly past and he got

a spanking and his cards taken away from him. He didn't mind, though, because

hidden in his closet he had four Bee decks he'd bought from Al's corner

grocery by trading in pop bottles. He slit open a new pack and laid out a

rather successful game of eight-up, pleased to win because though eight-up was

an easier game than the one he usually played, he usually lost because he

didn't know what to expect.

One day, about midday on a summer's morning, when most of the kids were

building a tree fort, SB's mom threw him out of the house, so he jumped on his

Huffy and sped away.

He rode down the smooth mica-sparkled sidewalk for two blocks, swerving onto

the street down driveways to avoid curbs, and cut a sharp left a few blocks

past the ballfield. His street had houses on one side, and across from his

house was the ballfield, with damp concrete steps leading down to it through

the woods, and then past the ballfield, facing the houses for a mile or so,

were just woods and fields, mysterious and free.

This was a dirt road where he was forbidden to go by his mother, but the only

reason he was out on his bike, a deck of Bee cards bouncing around in the

basket in front of the handlebars, was that his mom had yelled at him and told

him to go outside and get some fresh air. Besides, she had messed up a

particularly promising game and acted more than a little nuts. Somehow this

sequence of events combined in his mind to mean that no matter what he did it

would be all right just as long as he stayed outside.

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