Date: Sun, 4 Jun 1995 20:51:30 -0400 Message-Id: <199506050051.UAA21285@freenet.buffalo.edu> From: ah329@freenet.Buffalo.EDU (Barbara E. Walton) Subject: ruthie-and-al This is Al's POV of "Ruthie's Story." All the events, etc, are the same. Both appear in "The Return," a post-"Mirror Image" story available from Jim Rondeau. I used the birthdate for Al implied by the 1958 plebe year at Annapolis mentioned in "Rebel Without a Clue," instead of the date given in "A Leap for Lisa," which had him as an ensign in 1957. Since both are canon and they are irreconcilable, I had to choose one or the other, and I chose the one that would make Al's age in 2000 closer to Dean Stockwell's age in 1993, when, in a sane world, QL would have filmed its sixth season. ******************** Chicago, Illinois. 1954. The priests at St. Joe's had tried to hold classes on Saturdays for awhile, but even the orphanage kids, who were presumably under their direct control, had been truant most of the time. They'd held on grimly through the last Saturday in March, then announced that Saturday classes were officially over. Albert Calavicci, who was under no one's control, direct or otherwise, and who had lost count of the number of times he'd been hit with a ruler for truancy, blasphemy, and a thousand other charges, thought that the old bastards had just decided they had better things to do, now that the sun was out. This was fine by Albert. He didn't have much use for school. He did most of his learning on his own, in the public library (he always told the guys he was meeting with some girl or other when he was planning to go there), at his chessboard (an inheritance from Father Brusero, the only one of the witch-doctors who'd been worth a damn), and, especially, on the streets of the Lower West Side. There was no lesson that those streets didn't teach. He was in none of those places on the first Saturday in April. Even rebels needed some time off now and then, and that Saturday he was playing basketball with a few of the guys from the ward. he wouldn't exactly have called them his friends -- he couldn't think of anyone offhand who he would have called a friend, except for his sister Trudy, and he hadn't seen her since their father had died four years ago -- but they were okay. Tony Locarro had called a foul on Johnny Beck, and they were fighting over it, so the game had come to a stop when the blonde girl came around the corner. All of them had turned to look at her for a split second. It wouldn't occur to Al how strange that had been until many years later, staring out across the New Mexico desert. No one had pointed her out, they had been involved in their fight, and yet, without exception, they had turned their heads and glanced quickly at the newcomer. She had obviously come from the Jewish neighborhood a few blocks away. She was dressed in a long sleeved dusty pink dress that looked like it had started its life on an adult's frame and been clumsily sized down. She was tugging absently at the sleeves, which shifted from side to side from the oversized shoulders, and the waist hung somewhere around her hips. Her long, shockingly blonde hair had been pulled into a braid so tight it nearly screamed. Albert thought she was beautiful. Not very bright -- this neighborhood was none too friendly to strangers (or, for that matter, to its own) -- but beautiful. Then the fight about the foul started up again, and Albert was called on to make a decision. Just when he'd become referee was unclear, but he took the job anyway. He decided in Johnny's favor, and Tony went along with it. They started the game again. He had just intercepted a pass and was turning to drive down the court when he caught sight of the blonde girl for the second time. Frankie Marchetti, a St. Joe's bully two classes under Albert's, and his good-for-nothing pal Carlo Something-or-other had ganged up on her. Carlo was holding her by the shoulders, and as Albert looked up, Frankie punched her in the stomach. Without thinking about what he was doing, he handed the ball off to a member of the other team, ran to the chain-link fence, and started climbing it. When he reached the top, he jumped. His feet hit the sidewalk just as Frankie hit the spring-button on his switchblade and started moving toward the girl. He grabbed Frankie's wirst with his left arm, and brought his right in low to punch the nozzle in the gut, just so he'd have a clue what the girl had felt. Albert didn't hold with men hitting women, and he figured any guy who tried it ought to get back what he'd given, and then some. He pulled the knife out of Frankie's hand and reached back to put it in the girl's. He didn't have time to see if she took it, because Frankie had decided to put of a fight. He was two years younger than Albert, but he was big for his age, and a mean fighter. Albert had taken him on once before, in the schoolyard, for picking on a little girl with a harelip. Suddenly, Carlo cried out and ran off, his arm dripping blood from a gash under the elbow. Frankie was distracted, and Albert took the opportunity to punch him in the gut again, then in the jaw. The second punch sent Frankie into the sidewalk. He started to get up, then saw something that made him scramble to his feet and follow Carlo. Albert turned briefly, and saw the girl crouched in a fighting posture, holding the switchblade out like a dagger. There was something strong and good about her; she reminded him of the French chick in the Church windows. _Not bad_, he thought. Feeling like he out to end the fight properly, he shouted after Frankie and Carlo, "Go pick on someone your own size!" When he turned back to the girl, the fighting posture had disappeared. She ahd stood up and lowered her arm, and her eyes were wide and confused. She looked like she was about to faint, althought Albert would have believed that impossible when he'd seen her a moment ago. "Are you okay?" he asked. He heard the knife fall out of her hand and hit the sidewalk as she nodded slowly. "You sure?" Her eyes, which were an incredible shade of blue, turned up to meet his. A feeling something like an electric shock when through Albert's head. It wasn't sexual attraction, although that was present as well (it was present, to be fair, with just about every girl who'd crossed his path since he was about nine). It was a sense of recognition, a feeling that somewhere behind those alien blue eyes was a mind that Albert knew as well as he knew his own. Then the feeling passed, and she was only a frightened girl. He extended his hand to her. "I'm Albert," he said. Inexplicably, she backed away from him. "I -- I have to leave," she stammered, then turned and ran. Albert watched her until she had disappeared around the corner. When he turned back to St. Joe's, the guys were lined against the other side of the fence. Tony Locarro was smirking. He blinked his eyes rapidly and clasped his hands together. "My _hero_!" he swooned, and the rest of them laughed. "Imagine that," Tommy Mahaney said from the back. "Calavicci's still playing knights." Albert felt hot blood rise into his cheeks. He wasn't a goddam knight; he was just doing what anyone would have done. "Shut up," he growled, and started to climb the fence. Tony gestured for the others to bow when he landed on the court side. "Clear the way for Sir Albert of the Pick!" Albert grabbed Tony by the lapels of his jacket and pushed him into the fence. "You got a problem, Locarro?" Tony shook his head rapidly. Albert threw him aside. "How about the rest of you?" No one had any comment. Albert turned up his collar, gave them his best j.d. glare -- which was pretty goddam intimidating, if he did say so himself -- and went inside. By Wednesday, they had forgotten the incident. Albert had given them something new to talk about by sneaking Myra Boychik out of Mass Sunday evening, and not showing up agian until Monday morning. The fact that he had actually slept in the alley behind Aiello's restaurant was irrelevant; the rest of their assumptions were right. There had been no mroe ribbing about being a knight. Albert, however, had not forgotten. After leaving Myra on Sunday, he followed the night streets into the Jewish neighborhood, trying to look nonchalant while he galnced into lit window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the blonde girl. He wasn't sure why he felt compelled to do this, but he did it anyway. One house after another, window by window, but he didn't see her. Finally, a middle-aged man with a full beard and long curls beside his face ran out of one of those houses and chased him out of the neighborhood. He sat down in Aiello's alley to wait for the man to go back inside, and wound up falling asleep there. He'd spent Monday and Tuesday scrubbing the floors of the wards, which was a punishment not for sneaking out but for refusing to go to confession about it. He had to do this every time he ran away, and he usually had to do it with open cuts on his hands from the ruler they had hit him with. His thoughts kept returning to the blonde girl, and to the electric shock feeling he'd gotten when she looked up at him. He kept pushing those thoughts away -- not because he resented them, but because he could do nothing about them at the moment -- but they would sneak back in a few minutes later. On Wednesday, the day she came back, the floors were done, and Albert was allowed to go back to his life on the ward. Normally, that would have included swapping stories and stealing smokes with the guys, but Albert had not forgotten about Saturday, even if they had. Instead, he set up his chess board in the back corner of the pitiful play lounge and worked on a rook-centered offense he was trying to build. It was difficult to do without an opponent, but he hadn't had one since Father Brusero died in December, and he'd gotten accustomed to it. Brusero had been an inveterate gamer, and he had found in eleven-year-old Albert a kindred spirit. Albert (who was now almost fourteen) had always loved games, any games -- the objective was clear-cut, and the rules, once learned, were not subject to sudden changes. After twenty minutes, he was completely focused on his strategy, which was good after two days of unfocused thinking. He hear the others start heckling someone, but it was far away, and he paid no attention. He moved the rook on his experimental side (which he thought of as "the Good Guys") four spaces forward to knock out his fictional opponent's bishop; so far, so good. He crossed to the other side of the board, and reviewed the position from the "Bad Guys"' viewpoint. "Albert?" one of the priests interrupted him. Albert waved an impatient hand at him and continued his perusal of the opponent's perspective. The queen was no threat. He had pinned her on an early move. The other bishop was out of play. Neither rook could reach him in a single move. The Good Guys looked to be in pretty good shape. Unless... _Damn_, he thought. The rook, which occupied a key space, was directly in the path of the Bad Guys' knight. It was the same mistake he had been making since his first game; Father Brusero had told him to check the knights every time, even if they weren't anywhere near him, but he never did, and when he lost, that was almost always why. Albert sighed inwardly and captured his own rook. So much for the Calavicci offense. He looked up at the priest. He was one of the younger ones, and Albert wasn't sure what his name was. "Sorry, Father," he said generically. "Are you winning?" the priest asked, with a smile that was supposed to be jovial, but looked mroe than a little condescending. "You have a visitor," he said, and walked away, revealing the blonde girl, who had been standing beside him. Albert looked at her for a long moment. In all of his thinking about her over the past few days, it had not occurred to him that she would come here. She had obviously been badly frightened on Saturday, and girls stayed away from things that frightened them. Besides that, girls didn't follow boys without being prodded into it. But here she stood, and Albert found himself with nothing to say. _Oh, hell_, he thought. _Since when do girls play by the rules anyway_? He smiled and said the only thing that came into his mind, trying to make it sound as easygoing as possible. "Hey. I didn't think we'd see you around here again after Saturday. You're pretty tough, for a girl." It must have sounded alright, because the girl visibly relaxed. "I wanted to say thank you," she said. Albert shrugged, and slipped into a more familiar way of talking to a girl. "What was I gonna do? Let that nozzle cut up your pretty face?" She didn't blossom at the flattery, which was what Albert had expected, and that made him uncomfortable again. Instead, she looked around the room at the other St. Joe's kids, who, Albert realized, had almost all been outside with him the day she had been attacked. "The rest of them would have." A vision of Tony Locarro clasping his hands together and saying "My hero!" went through Albert's mind, and he pushed it away. He had just been doing what anyone would have. Hadn't he? Of course he had. He'd just happened to see the trouble first, that was all. "Aw, they're good guys," he said, to get past her accusation. She did not have the good grace to agree and let the subject drop, but was nervous enough to not say anything more. Albert racked his brain from something to say to her. He was usually good with girls, and the situation was unnerving him. Finally, he said, "Do you have a name?" What he heard, at first, was "It's Trudy," and his sister's face, wide open and innocent, surfaced in his mind. He missed her suddenly and acutely. Then the blonde girl spoke again, as if clarifying: "Ruthie Minkin." "Ruthie," he repeated. Not Trudy, then. And what was he doing thinking about Trudy, anyway? He never thought about Trudy. There was nothing he could do for her. This girl was Ruthie, Ruthie Minkin, and she was not his sister, and he didn't want her to be. He nodded emphatically at the sentiment. To confirm it, he asked a question which neither he nor anyone else would have ever asked poor, slow Trudy: "Do you play chess?" It turned out that she didn't, but Albert was able to teach her the game in considerably less time than it had taken Brusero to teach him. Whether it was because he was a better teacher or she was a better student was irrelevant. He beat her soundly on the first game, guessing that she would respond to an honest loss better than she would to a well-intentioned win handed to her on a silver platter. His guess was correct; she demanded a re-match immediately, and her playing improved at what Albert considered a fairly alarming rate. Her first few moves, she mimicked his intense concentration, but she quickly developed her own style. She began talking as soon as his move was complete, then, seemingly at random, moved a piece a space or two, often doing serious damage to Albert's strategy. During one of these interludes, she asked him how old she was, and he told her he would be fourteen in June. She looked about eleven, but he knew it was sometimes hard to tell a person's age. Figuring it was always better to guess older (people often thought he was younger than he was, and he hated it), he asked, "What are you, about twelve?" "Yes," she said without hesitation. She moved her queen six spaces, knocked out his bishop, and smiled cheerfully. Albert stopped answering her when she talked after that. It took him fifteen more minutes to win. ************* Ruthie, BTW, lied about her age. She is ten in this scene. Al is, to put it mildly, unthrilled to learn the truth two years later when she tells him after they've gone too far to bother turning back. -- Barbara E. Walton | "If fiction and politics ever really do 315 Sterling Avenue | become interchangeable, I'm going to kill Buffalo, NY 14216 | myself... You see, politics always change; ah329@freenet.buffalo.edu| stories never do." --Stephen King, IT -- Barbara E. Walton