The Boys Who Woke Up Early

Also by A.D. Hopkins

The First 100: Portraits of the Men and Women Who Shaped Las Vegas

IMBRIFEX BOOKS

Published by Flattop Productions, Inc.

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Las Vegas, NV 89123

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The Boys Who Woke Up Early

Copyright ©2019 by A.D. Hopkins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

IMBRIFEX® is a registered trademark of Flattop Productions, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hopkins, A. D., author.

Title: The boys who woke up early / A.D. Hopkins.

Description: First edition. | Las Vegas, NV : Flattop Productions, Inc.,

2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018028706 (print) | LCCN 2018029333 (ebook) | ISBN 9781945501296 (EPub) | ISBN 9781945501272 (hard back : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781945501289 (trade paper : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781945501302 (audio book)

Classification: LCC PS3608.O638 (ebook) | LCC PS3608.O638 B69 2019 (print) |

DDC 813/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028706

Jacket designed by Jennifer Heuer

Book Designed by Sue Campbell

Typeset in Adobe Caslon

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

First Edition: March 2019

This book is dedicated to Robert Nichols: poet, novelist, essayist, and loyal friend for five decades, who showed me the value, to any art and any artist, of perseverance.

Chapter 1

In September 1959, a week or two after school opened for the year, boys were loitering in the morning sun on the front steps of Jubal Early High School, putting off going inside until the opening bell rang. We had already established our seats for the year. On the north side of the steps, the right side going in the door, sat guys wearing black T-shirts, engineer boots, and peg-leg jeans with switchblades in the hip pockets. Because they generally wore their hair long and combed into ducktails held in place by gobs of Butch Wax, we called them greases. I sat on the south side, wearing a flattop crew cut, brown oxford shoes, a plaid short-sleeved sports shirt, and khaki pants. I had a knife too—every boy or man I knew carried a knife—but mine was an Official Boy Scout Pocket Model, which was as much about screwdriver and bottle opener as about its cutting blade. The greases didn’t like me much, nor I them, but I had paid a price to sit on the same steps as those guys and be left alone. So I sat there every morning, always alone.

A boy I didn’t know came up the walk that morning. From a distance I could see he walked funny, with an unhurried swagger, as you sometimes saw young black men do in Charleston, West Virginia, or Richmond or Baltimore. This guy was white, like everybody who went to Jubal Early High School, but he had the walk. There was a rhythm to it, a little extra swing in each step, as if he were keeping time to music the rest of us couldn’t hear. At first I thought he had black hair, then as he drew closer I saw he was wearing one of those round French caps with no brim. I didn’t even know what to call a beret, then; I had never seen one before, except in the movies. The stranger also wore sunglasses, which nobody from Early did except when going to the beach once a year.

I don’t believe this, said Todd Powell to the rest of the greases.

The newcomer looked close to six feet tall, and skinny. Everything he wore was Continental style, fitted close to the body. His pants were rust colored and cuffless, and he wore a burgundy plaid sports coat. Only the principal and the few male teachers wore sports coats at Jubal Early High, but this was a teenager. Under the sports coat he wore a black turtleneck sweater. His shoes were black with elastic panels in the sides, pointed toes, and hard heels that rang on the concrete.

As he drew closer, Todd called out to him, Hey, boy! You get those clothes off a dead nigger?

The stranger didn’t look at Todd. Didn’t look away, either, nor did his slight smile disappear at the insult. As he came right past us you could see reddish-brown hair under the beret, and a hopeful attempt at a goatee on the pale skin of his face. The guy carried a case under his arm containing, we later learned, a clarinet, although Early High School had no band.

The school’s electric bell rang the one-minute warning, but nobody moved; neither did the stranger quicken his pace. When the bell fell silent, we could hear only his leather heels striking the concrete like an unhurried drummer building a platform for some fellow musician to launch a solo. As the newcomer put his hand on the door to open it, one of the greases broke the silence.

Flaming asshole! a grease said.

It was said low yet loud enough for the stranger to hear it. But the stranger didn’t acknowledge the insult, just sauntered on down to the principal’s office and enrolled himself as a junior. Jack Newcomb, I would later learn, was his name. He would be my classmate.

My first class was American literature and English, as it was for all juniors. I took my seat near the front of the room. Gina DeLancey sat across the aisle on my immediate right. She worked occasionally as a model, when a good clothing store in Roanoke or some women’s charity put on a fashion show. She was very tall for a girl, and everything about her was graceful; she had slender, tapered legs, yet she could jump higher than any other girl in our high school and was center on the girls basketball team. Her breasts were small enough not to get in her way when she was running or jumping, but big enough to be on a guy’s mind. Gina had clear skin that needed no makeup, full lips, and hair the color of a new gold bracelet; it reached to her shoulders, but that day she wore it done up in a French twist. Blond hair was a great asset in 1959. That day she was wearing a sleeveless light blue shirtdress that matched her big blue eyes.

Gina’s best friend, Ernestine Thomas, sat immediately in front of her, and they were chattering happily about something or another. Ernestine was a curly-haired brunette with a well-scrubbed look and a Mouseketeer smile; slightly over average height, she was wearing a colorful peasant skirt and a white flower-embroidered blouse that exposed most of her shoulders. It was cut just low enough to emphasize her big bosom without getting her scolded by a teacher. Ernestine was a straight-A student and a good soprano who sang solos in church; she was more popular even than Gina. But the two went together like knife and fork, to their mutual benefit. Ernestine was pretty by anybody’s standards, but because a person fell into thinking about her at the same time as the lovely Gina, he tended to stow thoughts of both in the mental drawer labeled Beautiful. Gina was fairly smart herself, but people thought she was a true brain, like her pal.

I had known Ernestine nearly all my life, all the way back to when we were in the Sunday school nursery at Early Southern Baptist Church. I had known Gina even longer; she was to me what people sometimes called a kissing cousin. That meant she was related, but distantly enough that it would have been all right to kiss, marry, fondle, or fornicate with her once she reached the age of consent, assuming she consented. But I had never so much as kissed her. As toddlers playing in the creek at a farm belonging to Ernestine’s grandmother, we had all three seen each other naked. Yet in our first two years of high school, I had barely spoken to either girl, and I was too intimidated by their beauty and popularity to join their conversation now.

Mrs. Weber called the class to order and reminded us that each student was supposed to recite some poem that day, from memory. Gina made the open-mouthed face of sudden and panicky recollection, leafed through her literature book to a page of poetry, and started moving her lips as she silently read the shortest poem. Mrs. Weber asked for a volunteer to recite, and Mary Lou Martin raised her hand.

Mary Lou was tall and wiry, the substitute center on the girls team, able to jump nearly as high as Gina. I thought she was just as pretty, but I had never heard anyone else say so. Mary Lou had a high forehead and very dark arched eyebrows over big hazel eyes, in a heart-shaped face with a narrow chin. Her neck was a little longer than most girls’, her nose straight and narrow. Her mouth was wide, with the upper lip straight but turned up at the corners, the lower one pouty, which created a slightly amused expression whether she felt that way or not. She didn’t have the blond hair associated with glamour; hers was very dark brown and shiny, and hung halfway down her back in an old-fashioned style. She wore a straight brown polished-cotton sheath skirt and a simple yellow sleeveless blouse, and she didn’t wiggle-walk to the front of the classroom, but just strode, all business.

She turned around and immediately started reciting. I guess everyone in the classroom had heard the words, or some version of them, sung as a song, but few of us actually knew them. In a town that believed it was named for a Confederate hero, this Union song was thought to be vaguely subversive. Now, hearing it recited with the pace, expression, and diction of poetry, was the first time I considered what the words actually meant.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:

Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!

Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

I knew, as soon as I heard the poem, I too would memorize those powerful words and remember them all my life. But not everybody reacted the same way I did.

What the hell was that about? said Todd Powell, loud enough that most of us could hear it but soft enough that Mrs. Weber could pretend she hadn’t. Everybody knew Todd kind of liked Mary Lou, but she didn’t encourage him, so I guess that was reason enough to make an audible wisecrack about her. Did I mention that I really didn’t like that son of a bitch? He was sitting in the back of the room with a couple of other hard cases, slumped forward over his desk with his legs wrapped around the chair legs under him, his jeans riding up and showing his black engineer boots.

That’s not in the textbook, Mrs. Weber said to Mary Lou. Why did you choose it?

I wanted to learn a poem that had made something happen, said Mary Lou. I didn’t think a poem had to come out of the textbook.

Mrs. Weber cracked a smile, which was a rare event. It doesn’t, and I’m glad you realized that, she said. That’s worth an A. She made a note in her grade book.

Mary Lou smiled at her success and strode back to her seat. I wished she would sit near me, but that just about couldn’t happen. Nobody sat in our corner except people who lived in town. Mary Lou sat in the far corner with the rest of the country girls and the overalls-clad mountain boys who rode to school on the bus. For all the chance I would ever strike up a conversation with her, she might as well have sat in France.

Just as Mary Lou sat down Jack Newcomb came in, having finished up his late registration in the school office. He gave a note to Mrs. Weber, who glanced at it and said, Take any seat. Jack saw immediately that our corner had the higher status and took the seat directly in front of Ernestine. He set the clarinet case and beret on the desk in front of him but continued to wear the sunglasses and the slight smile.

Gina waited until class was nearly over before raising her hand to recite. She had memorized a poem on the spot and did it properly, with feeling. It was The Pasture, by Robert Frost, only eight lines, but very pretty. Ernestine recited something very academic and challenging, and I did Kipling’s When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted.

Jack just sat at his desk. He didn’t have to recite because he hadn’t been in class when the assignment was made.

Nothing else interesting happened all day. Rarely did.

= = =

At 2:30 p.m. I packed most of my books into my locker and took with me the couple I would need for homework. In the parking lot I saw Mary Lou, tall, dignified, and silent, among the giggling and jostling country boys and girls lining up to board the school buses that would carry them up the creeks and hollows. I watched her till she stepped into her bus and I could see her no more. There was no school bus service in town because even the most distant homes, in town, were barely a mile from school. Mine was one of the distant ones, so I did a lot of walking. By my age, almost seventeen, most kids in Early had been driving for months, but I didn’t yet have a license. Several of my peers drove past in their parents’ cars, but nobody offered me a ride. Gina blew past in her family’s new, black Ford Galaxie; it was packed front and back with Ernestine and several other girls. Gina waved but she didn’t slow down.

I didn’t stop at the drugstore for an ice cream soda, nor at the hardware store to covet fishing or camping gear, so it took me less than half an hour to get home, cutting across the wide front yard instead of bothering to use the brick walk. I felt grateful for the time of year: too late for me to have to mow the better part of an acre, but too early for the big maple trees to be dropping their leaves for me to rake. My parents had grown up on mountain farms, and when they moved to town they bought the biggest lot they could find, so there was plenty of room for a big vegetable garden, flower beds, and a chicken house. But our family had outgrown the dwelling, and they never got around to buying a bigger one. It was a four-bedroom brick bungalow, and after one bedroom was allotted to our parents, and one as a company room for frequent visits from their extended families, there were only two left for three children of two genders and significant differences in age and interests.

I stepped over three bicycles lying in front of the porch steps. None of my brother’s friends ever used the kickstands. When I came in the front door to the living room, Randy and his two buddies were lying on the carpet watching old Popeye cartoons. I’d been told that Randy, the youngest in my family, was a little more spoiled than other kids his age, but I wouldn’t have traded him. Yet these three boys seemed interchangeable to me. They were all nine years old and all had the blond hair that would soon go dark; they all wore pullover shirts without buttons and jeans with dirty knees, the jeans held up by web belts from their Cub Scout uniforms. They all wanted the same baseball cards and all expected to play for the Yankees someday. At nine, they hadn’t yet made the choices, good and bad, that would make them different from one another. They had their shoes kicked off and were so mesmerized by the TV they didn’t acknowledge me when I walked through the room.

I carried my schoolbooks into the little room that was set up as a home office for my dad and everybody else. My mother was sitting at the drop-leaf desk, typing on the big black Underwood. She looked like the schoolteacher she was, wearing a practical dark cotton print dress, low heels, reading glasses, and no jewelry except a wristwatch and her wedding and engagement rings. Her hair was dark brown and bobbed short in a permanent wave. She was one of the few mountain girls of her generation to finish college, and was ahead of her time in her attempts to cook healthy and get exercise, which to her meant gardening. It made her look younger than her forty-eight years. She appeared to be preparing a written assignment for her fifth-grade class.

She looked up and said, Hello, Stony. Then she waited.

I remembered there had been a time when she smiled when she greeted me. It was a long time ago. Now she just waited for news, prepared to deal with a principal’s conference, a week’s detention, or whatever other bad news I brought home.

Are you going to be using the typewriter much longer? I asked. I have to practice for my typing class.

You’ll have to do it later, she said. I have to finish this work before I can start fixing supper. This time she did smile, an apology for the realities of balancing home life and teaching.

I went up to the room I shared with Randy. There were twin beds on opposite sides of the room and a desk in between for doing homework and building model planes. To put my books on it, I had to step carefully over my brother’s toy cars and racetrack, which were littering the floor. All the toys were made of cheap plastic—so cheap that kids had too damn many of them.

I was hoping to practice the guitar. I was trying to learn a ballad. The verse I liked best went,

They hadn’t stood there but a minute or two,

When out of his knapsack a fiddle he drew.

The song that he played made the wild valleys ring.

Made me see waters gliding, hear the nightingale sing!

I wanted to play songs that could make somebody hear the nightingale sing. But my twelve-year-old sister and her friends were playing pop records in her room, and the walls were thin, so the words that actually went through my brain were about tan shoes and pink shoelaces. I won’t risk repeating them, because they might stick in your head and you’d blame me for putting them there. The song coming through the wall had at least four verses, and I hated each one more than the last.

I gave up the idea of practicing guitar, went downstairs to the kitchen, and took my father’s .22 rifle, a pump-action Winchester, from the nails where it hung over the back door. Then I took a box of fifty cartridges out of the dish cabinet. I closed the back door behind me and walked down the back streets and out of town, climbing the hills into the groves of oak, hickory, and maple. There was little game so close to town, but squirrel season gave me an excuse to be in the woods where it was quiet.

Some trees were just beginning to turn red or gold, but most were still green. Their shade made it cold in the woods for that time of year. I came into a power line right-of-way, cut clean of trees but full of tall grass. I lay down in the grass, which was high enough to cut any wind, and let the bright sun warm me. There were birds singing, and I fell asleep wondering if Mary Lou Martin, living up a mountain hollow among the trees, had ever heard a nightingale.

There was still plenty of daylight left when I got back to town. I had bagged no squirrels, and had unloaded the rifle and was carrying it with the action open, the butt resting over my shoulder like a baseball bat. This was a clumsy way to carry a rifle, but I hoped it would reassure people that I wouldn’t blaze away at a squirrel in their front yard and maybe shoot some family member by accident.

A red Chevrolet Impala pulled up to the curb beside me. It was one of the new ones with an engine in it big enough for an airplane. Jack Newcomb was driving it, and he offered me a ride home. I had pegged Jack as a pretty odd duck, but it was rude to decline a ride, so I got in. The car smelled of wax outside, and inside it smelled of new car. It was his father’s car, of course.

Jack asked why I was carrying the rifle, and I explained.

Are you a good shot? he asked.

I told him I was. I thought it was true at the time, but that was before I knew