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nonexistent hips: she was in full take-no-prisoners mode that day. “And it pays.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I checked that out with Deke. Fifty bucks. I’ll be living large in the hood.”
“In the what?”
“Never mind, Mimi. For the time being, I’m doing all right for cash. Can’t we leave it at that?”
No. We couldn’t. Miz Mimi was a human bulldozer, and when she met a seemingly immovable
object, she just lowered her blade and revved her engine higher. Without me, she said, there would be
no junior-senior play for the first time in the high school’s history. The parents would be
disappointed. The schoolboard would be disappointed. “And,” she added, drawing her brows together,
“I will be bereft.”
“God forbid you should be bereft, Miz Mimi,” I’d said. “Tell you what. If you let me pick the play
—something not too controversial, I promise—I’ll do it.”
Her frown had disappeared into the brilliant Mimi Corcoran smile that always turned Deke
Simmons into a simmering bowl of oatmeal (which, temperamentally speaking, was not a huge
transformation). “Excellent! Who knows, you may find a brilliant thespian lurking in our halls.”
“Yes,” I said. “And pigs may whistle.”
But—life is such a joke—I had found a brilliant thesp. A natural. And now he sat in my living
room on the night before our show opened for the first of four performances, taking up almost the
entire couch (which bowed humbly beneath his two hundred and seventy pounds), bawling his
freaking head off. Mike Coslaw. Also known as Lennie Small in George Amberson’s okay-for-highschool
adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
If, that was, I could talk him into showing up tomorrow.
3
I thought about handing him some Kleenex and decided they weren’t up to the job. I fetched a dish
wiper from the kitchen drawer instead. He scrubbed his face with it, got himself under some kind of
control, then looked at me desolately. His eyes were red and raw. He hadn’t started crying as he
approached my door; this looked like it had been going on all afternoon.
“Okay, Mike. Make me understand.”
“Everybody on the team’s makin fun of me, Mr. Amberson. Coach started callin me Clark Gable—
this was at the Lion Pride Spring Picnic—and now everybody’s doin it. Even Jimmy’s doin it.” Meaning
Jim LaDue, the team’s hot-rod quarterback and Mike’s best friend.
I wasn’t surprised about Coach Borman; he was a thud who preached the gospel of gung-ho and
didn’t like anyone poaching on his territory either in season or out. And Mike had been called far
worse; while hall-monitoring, I’d heard him called Bohunk Mike, George of the Jungle, and Godzilla.
He laughed the nicknames off. That amused, even absentminded reaction to slurs and japes may be
the greatest gift height and size conveys on large boys, and at six-seven and two-seventy, Mike made
me look like Mickey Rooney.
There was only one star on the Lions’ football team, and that was Jim LaDue—didn’t he have his
own billboard, at the intersection of Highway 77 and Route 109? But if there was any player who
made it possible for Jim to star, it was Mike Coslaw, who planned to sign with Texas A&M as soon as
his senior high school season was over. LaDue would be rolling with the ’Bama Crimson Tide (as both
he and his father would be happy to tell you), but if someone had asked me to pick the one most likely
to go pro, I would have put my money on Mike. I liked Jim, but to me he looked like a knee injury or
shoulder separation waiting to happen. Mike, on the other hand, seemed built for the long haul.
“What does Bobbi Jill say?” Mike and Bobbi Jill Allnut were practically joined at the hip.