Maniac Magee: Before the Story–Part I

And sometimes the girl holding one end of the rope is from the West side of Hector, and the girl on the other end is from the East side; and if you’re looking for Maniac Magee’s legacy, or monument, that’s as good as any — even if it wasn’t really a bull.

But that’s okay, because the history of a kid is one part fact, two parts legend, and three parts snowball.

Of course, to be accurate, he wasn’t really Maniac then. He was Jeffrey. Jeffrey Lionel Magee.

Then the giggling stopped, and eyes started to shift and heads started to turn, because now everybody could see that this wasn’t part of the show at all, that little Jeffrey Magee wasn’t supposed to be up there on the risers, pointing to his aunt and uncle, bellowing out from the midst of the chorus: “Talk! Talk, will ya! Talk! Talk! Talk!”

Three springy steps down from the risers — girls in pastel dresses screaming, the music director lunging — a leap from the stage, out the side door and into the starry, sweet, onion-grass-smelling night.

And some say he only intended to pause here but that he stayed because he was so happy to make a friend.

If you listen to everybody who claims to have seen Jeffrey-Maniac Magee that first day, there must have been ten thousand people and a parade of fire trucks waiting for him at the town limits.

A couple of people truly remember, and here’s what they saw: a scraggly little kid jogging toward them, the soles of both sneakers hanging by their hinges and flopping open like dog tongues each time they came up from the pavement.

She tore a book from the suitcase, hurled it at him — “Here!” — and dashed into school.

It sailed back over the up-looking gym-classers, spiraling more perfectly than anything Brian Denehy had ever thrown, and landed in the outstretched hands of still stunned Hands Down.

Later on that first day, there was a commotion in the West End.

So, there’s Arnold Jones, held up by all these hands, flopping and kicking and shrieking like some poor Aztec human sacrifice about to be tossed off a pyramid.

Another swears it was a mirage, some sort of hallucination, possibly caused by evil emanations surrounding 803 Oriole Street.

The phantom Samaritan stuck the book between his teeth, crouched down, hoisted Arnold Jones’s limp carcass over his shoulder, and hauled him out of there like a sack of flour.

As the stupefied high-schoolers were leaving the scene, they looked back.

They saw the kid, cool times ten, stretch out on the forbidden steps and open his book to read.

Pandemonium on the sidelines.

The kid was trying for an inside-the-park home-run bunt — the rarest feat in baseball, something that had hardly ever been done with a ball, and never with a frog — and to be the pitcher who let such a thing happen — well, McNab could already feel his strikeout record fading to a mere grain in the sandlot of history.

But now the frog shot through his legs, over to the mound, and now toward shortstop and now toward second, and McNab was lurching and lunging, throwing his hat at the frog, throwing his glove, and everybody was screaming, and the kid was rounding third and digging for home, and — unbe-froggable! — the “ball” was heading back home too!

Buzzing about the new kid in town. The stranger kid. Scraggly. Carrying a book. Flap-soled sneakers.
The kid who intercepted Brian Denehy’s pass to Hands Down and punted it back longer than Denehy himself ever threw it.

Ordinarily, he would have returned it immediately, but he was so fascinated by the story of the Children’s Crusade that he kept it and read it the next day.

yells behind him now, war whoops, stones pelting the water, stinging his back ...

The Cobras were laughing because they figured the dumb, scraggly runt would get out of the East End in about as good shape as a bare big toe in a convention of snapping turtles.

Maniac was befuddled. “I don’t know. One minute you’re yelling at me, the next minute you’re giving me a bite of your candy bar.”

And when Mars Bar stepped off a curb and combined the glare with his super-slow dip-stride slumpshuffle, well, it was said he could back up traffic all the way to Bridgeport while he took ten minutes to cross the street.

Suddenly his world was very small and very simple: a brick wall behind him, a row of scowling faces in front of him.

In less than five minutes, while Mrs. Beale and Amanda cleaned up the floor, Hester and Lester and their dog Bow Wow were in the backyard wrestling and tickling and jumping and just generally going wild with their new buddy — and victim — Maniac Magee.

Mr. Beale knew what his passenger apparently didn’t: East End was East End and West End was West End, and the house this white lad was pointing to was filled with black people, just like every other house on up to Hector Street.

Maniac’s lip started to quiver, and right there, with the car idling in the middle of the street, Maniac told him that he didn’t really have a home, unless you counted the deer shed at the zoo.

He loved the Fourth of July block party, when the whole East End converged for a day and night of games and music and grilled chicken and ribs and sweet-potato pie and dancing until the last firecracker, and then some.

He looked himself over pretty hard and came up with at least seven different shades and colors right on his own skin, not one of them being what he would call white (except for his eyeballs, which weren’t any whiter than the eyeballs of the kids in the East End).
Which was all a big relief to Maniac, finding out he wasn’t really white, because the way he figured, white was about the most boring color of all.

He learned how to jump in front of the gusher and let it propel him halfway across the street.

He drenched himself in all the wet and warm and happy.

And the man was croaking, ranting, not to Maniac now but to the people. “What happens when we go over there? Black is black! White is white! The sheep lie not with the lion! The sheep knows his own! His own kind!”

This was driving Amanda bonkers. He was acting so different, all glum, and wiseacre answers.

If anybody could survive on the loose, it would be this kid who showed up from Hollidaysburg. Who slept on floors. Who outran dogs.

It was made of string, but it had more contortions, ins and outs, twists and turns and dips and doodles than the brain of Albert Einstein himself.

Others say his mouth was more grim than grin, that his eyes lit up like flashbulbs, because he knew he was finally facing a knot that would stand up and fight, a worthy opponent.

The rest of the spectators watched Maniac poke and tug and pick at the knot.

But nobody stepped off a curb, everybody kept moving north, an ugly, snarling black-and-white escort for the kid in the middle.