By J. B. Hogan

The boy emptied the hot silverware from the big dishwasher tray into tall, fluted metal cups, jamming each cup until it was completely full. He set the cups of silverware next to several stacks of dishes off to one side of his cleaning area, then rinsed out the two deep tubs where he had already done the odious chore of cleaning the pots and pans. Watching the last of the soapy water swirl down the drain of the rusty tubs, the boy sighed and did his best to dry his hands on a mostly wet towel.

The boy, now fourteen, had been washing dishes since he was twelve. On his twelfth birthday his mother marched him uptown to the social security office where he was issued his very own number and card. His first job was at the bus station. For twenty-five cents an hour he cleaned the glasses, dishes and smaller pans for the travelers who strayed through town on their way to bigger, unknown places. The boy hated the restaurant boss, disliked the travelers, and loathed the hot humid job of dishwasher. But it was his job, his only skill.

After the bus station, he worked for his mother at thirty-five cents an hour in a restaurant she ran herself down on Dickson Street near the university. When the restaurant didn’t go, he and his mother both went to work for Garland’s Drive-In, a hot college spot a block and half back up Dickson. Here the boy made fifty cents an hour. His standard hours were four to midnight on Friday and Saturday nights, four to eight on Sunday. Twenty hours a week, netting him ten dollars.

Both at his mother’s restaurant and at Garland’s the boy, to his considerable surprise, was the occasional object of female desire – which confused, terrorized, and excited him. One of his mother’s waitresses, a sweet-faced gentle girl with a lovely if somewhat stolid figure, one slow evening had impulsively grabbed the boy and hugged him. In shock and dismay, the boy pulled away and ran out the back of the restaurant to the safety of the alley behind it. He didn’t know why he had run, the girl had been the object of many of his endless sexual fantasies; but he had, and he was so embarrassed he hardly ever spoke to or even looked at the girl again while the restaurant was open. It was a humiliating experience.

But he repeated it at Garland’s, even worse. At Garland’s, a young carhop, recently divorced and maybe all of twenty-four years old, took a liking to the boy. Like the younger girl had at his mother’s restaurant, the carhop finally cornered the boy; caught him off guard down in the basement of Garland’s, where the beer, meat, and vegetable coolers and the big trash barrels were. The woman grabbed the boy and hugged him, giving him a little kiss. Like before the boy panicked, ran away, ran upstairs to the safety of his dishwashing tubs. And like before he felt like an absolute fool. He was such a coward with women. He didn’t know what to do with, or about, them.

*

Sometimes on Sunday nights, when he got off at a reasonable hour, the boy liked to clear his head from the accumulated hubbub of Garland’s by taking a short walk in the evening air up through the university and then loop back around to go home, back to the small house where he and his mother lived just a couple of short blocks behind Garland’s.

One cold Sunday evening in January with a light wind blowing a light snow around, the boy headed down Dickson Street after work. He walked along slowly, his shoes making a squeaking sound in the accumulating snow. He saw himself in the windows of the newsstand where he read all the sports magazines and, surreptitiously, the girlie mags. He pulled the collar of his old coat tighter against his neck and with one hand tried to push up his slightly fallen flat top hair cut.

Walking on, he went past the railroad station, now out of use, and over the tracks he so often took in getting around town. He climbed up Dickson then, past the drug store with the candy and cigar machine out front where he and his buddies had bought the nausea-producing smokes they experimented with off and on. Further up there was the Piggly Wiggly store set well back off the street and then the old bowling alley and across from it the UArk theatre where he had seen Winchester 73 with Jimmy Stewart when he, the boy, was just a kid.

He turned right on Arkansas Avenue just below the elevated grounds of the university campus that he loved so much and where he went as often as he could to walk its sidewalks filled with the engraved names of all its graduates from all its years. The campus was always beautiful to him with its huge oak and maple trees, its well kept grounds, and its wonderful centerpiece, Old Main, the two-towered brick building that housed the boy’s favorite place almost in the whole world – the museum, with its reconstructed Mastodon skeleton, its Civil War exhibits and its room full of intoxicating, multi-colored glass bottles and vases.

Near the center of the campus grounds off Arkansas Avenue were a set of steps leading up to Old Main and the boy headed for those. The wind had nearly died down for the moment and the snow fell softly though steadily. There was a street lamp near the steps and it shone down out of the dark night onto the sidewalk like a cool white spotlight. The boy paused at the curb on his side of the street to check for cars and then walked out to the tree-lined median that divided the street. He had to wait a moment on the median as a southbound car drove slowly by, its tires crunching the snow beneath them.

When the car passed, its glaring lights no longer blocking the boy’s vision, he stepped out into the street and slowly made his way to the opposite curb. As he reached the other sidewalk, the boy looked over at the stairs beneath the street lamp and there she was. There she was, standing on the sidewalk in front of the steps in the snow under the light. The boy had not seen where she came from. She was just suddenly there. A young, pretty coed framed in the halo-light of the street lamp. The boy stopped dead in his tracks.

In that brief moment, as the young woman adjusted her gloves in the night air, looking up Arkansas Avenue away from the boy, he saw her in a lustrous, motionless still life. A pretty young woman in a pretty winter coat. Her hair appeared to be light brown and her face, in profile, was smooth and finely shaped with lovely high cheekbones and a soft, rounded chin. The boy absorbed her grace and beauty in stunned awe.

From the scarf she wore around her neck to her stylish winter boots, to the boy she was – though probably no more than 21 years old – the essence of a grown, mature woman, beautiful and in her prime. Her face glowing in the light – her cheeks flushed with cold and youthful vigor – her lips a soft red, her skin so white in the light, so soft and smooth looking, her expression of pleasant calmness, of self-assuredness; all of this, at that moment to the boy, in that cold, bright moment under the street light, made the girl the most wonderful thing he had ever seen in his life. She was — in a flash of powerful feeling, one that stirred within the boy a simultaneous mixture of emotional longing, lust, purity of motive, and love — a vision of ultimate desire, a desire of great depth, a desire unobtainable.

The boy ached with a melancholy and an exhilaration that commingled in his mind and heart. He wanted the girl, loved her without knowing her, wanted to know about her – where she came from, where she would go, what her life would be like. And then, after waiting for another car to go by, she crossed the street. He passed less than ten feet below her on the sidewalk but she never saw him. He paused at the base of the steps leading up to the campus and looked back, watched her until she disappeared in the dark of the night.

She was gone. Gone back to whatever world in which she lived, a world perhaps of sororities and fraternities, of money and nice homes, of comfort and ease. The boy, unfamiliar with such a world, huddled in his light jacket against the cold night air and without looking back again headed across campus and then doubled back towards the dark little house where he lived. The snow began to fall heavier then and the boy hurried on, hurried away from the bright beauty of the campus there on the hill above town, on the hill that seemed now far above him, far from where he lived just a few short blocks away, far from his own small home.