“His coat pockets are full of picks—those little fingernail-like things?” She bent and tried to scoop up a tennis ball with her racquet.
“What?” The other girl had her hands on her hips, her head cocked prettily, a bell of hair falling to her shoulder.
“Picks,” came the answer. “Those things he plinks with. Plink! Plink! Plink!” She began strumming her racquet, her feet shuffling on the court. “He has hundreds.”
I stood and watched them. It was quiet in the pine grove. And then an odd sound drifted up from the distant practice field, invisible behind the barriers of trees. I could see in my mind’s eye what was going on—the coaches’ whistles going, and the players beginning to congregate from the reaches of that enormous field. Then one of them, as he trotted in, offered up a despairing croak, as if he had run too far, or belted the tackling dummies too hard, or his uniform felt soggy and itchy from sweat. With hours more of physical discomfort to come, the anguish erupted from him, and as if empathetic, his yell was caught up by the others, and repeated, so that a chorus rose up through the pine grove—a medley of despair, boredom, frustration, exhaustion—a sound I’d never heard before at Cranbrook. They were the same loud grunts of resentment that went up along the line when troops were called up out of the comfortable roadside grass after a break in a long dusty march. The coaches’ whistles began shrilling very loudly, as if to drown out the resentment. I wondered what had happened. Perhaps the players knew that the coaches were going to order the grass drills.
I often thought about the sound, wondering about it. It was an inhuman, melancholy noise. Then it died out abruptly. The players had apparently grouped around the coaches. The hum of insects rose up out of the hot pines. One of the girls began bouncing a tennis ball against the court; the sound was pleasant and summery. “Jiminy, d’ja hear that?” she called across the net. “That’s the craziest…”
The other girl was still turned, her head tilted, as if the sound would come again, and she could diagnose it this time—her face puzzled and vacant as she waited, her mouth half open. Then, quite abruptly, she seemed to shake herself, a shiver of movement that tossed the hair at her shoulders, and she turned and called: “Who’s serving? Who’s serving? I’ll serve!”—and dismissing the past in a quick rush of breath, she threw the ball so high in the air that she had to maneuver under it, her racquet poised.