The Stones of Summer  by Dow Mossman
Excerpt Part I

Sitting on the living-room floor, playing the latest chic game-composed mostly of a single wooden frame and some Newtonian steelies swinging together on strings -- flown in from New York with Mrs. Harrison Rawlings, Sr., Dawes Williams suddenly felt if he ever wanted to describe the perfect circle of Ratshit's life, he would need an example. And sitting there, watching the steel balls describe perfectly inert actions against one another as they spun perfectly retraced parabolas in the air, Dawes Wil­liams suddenly figured it this way: Ratshit Rawlings idolized, much too openly, the older athletes; and the side that Ratshit idolized was the blatant fuck-up side. In the eyes of Ratshit Rawlings, to be an all-American, clean-cut, crew-cut fuck-up was a sophisticated thing. Throwing it all away in the end was the epitome of style. And, still sitting there watching the steel balls rebound against one another with a perfect, repeating, waning symmetry, Dawes Williams felt even that he had found the example to prove it all:

One night they had all sat in the gym that was also the auditorium watching the varsity practice. A stage set for Booth Tarkington's Seventeen was set against the far wall like a pink summer cloud, nature-given; an archaic vision of near innocence the moment it was painted, a hollow log of a stage just waiting for the players, waiting for the sophisticated kid from Chicago to come rolling into town in his gay, hopelessly affluent yet somehow rustic, yellow, open-air roadster meant for stopping at illicit roadhouses just over the county line. The basketball court lay its naked four-square reality in front.

The late, gray winter shadows had come from the chicken-wire windows leaving only cages of shade to overlay a painted-on-cardboard summer gazebo. Dawes Williams thought he had been sitting there, trapped only in his skin, in Iowa which was really the same as Indiana, in the exact middle of the twentieth century. Coach Orville Boggs watched, whistle-mouthed, the late practice like a Florentine prince who was unaware except for the fact that he was vaguely conscious of being asleep. Everyone was tense, because the team was miraculously in the finals of the sectionals. Willis Skokes began a slow, deliberate, rhythmic dribble down the floor. He was bringing the ball down, right hand raised in signal, a screaming banshee without a sound, the middle finger extended, and the yellow-shirted second string eyed him with the stare of a single animal. The gym hushed itself and became a closed box. Dawes Williams thought the tension was terrific. Willis Skokes was approaching midcourt. The stars came out. What would he do? Drive it? Fade softly as night into the lane, past a screen, and jump-shoot it? Drive in like a furious cat and then, at the last moment, with great grace and magnanimity, bounce-pass it off? The sun wavered in the west; then decided to fall in again. Suddenly -- with feeling -- Willis Skokes merely tucked the ball under his arm like a movie of Goose Tatum, did a small bunny-hop, a Chaplin walk three times round the center circle, he swiveled his butt in two cutely contradictory movements and he ... he fired the ball from midcourt. Good God, Dawes Williams thought, sitting there, there is no precedent for this. Good God, Dawes Williams thought, it rose, rises, in a speechless arc and then falls against the back wall of the gym with the sound of a small fish being hammered to death on a flat, dry rock.

HE HAD DRAWN NO IRON.

He had drawn no iron, and Coach Orville Boggs slumped to the floor, his life over. A life once dedicated quietly to example and youth, the American way, was now over and lost in the deep winter shadows of an unpretentious gym. He was finished. He had failed. With nearly his last breath he ordered Skokes from the gym, the entire building. Orville Boggs' arm extended baroquely toward the door, offering nothing, saying simply:

"Willis, leave us please," with some last dignity.

And with that, Willis Skokes turned on his heel, like a French clown, to an audience deathly shocked with pity and adoration that approached self-recognition and horror, he bowed, smiled like a faggot, and walked to the door on his hands.

When Ratshit Rawlings saw that happen, he knew there was God.