Quentin left the wheelchair home on Monday, after his dad said he could, and the rest of us were grateful for that. He really and truly is getting back to normal, except that we have to take things extra slow because he gets tired and can’t catch his breath. But compared with folding and unfolding that chair, and hauling it up and down stairs, that’s nothing.
Quentin’s biggest headache this week turned out to be Shlomo. Him and that stupid pinball game. Remember how I said it was love at first sight? That was kind of a joke when I said it, but it got less and less humorous. I mean, the way he hunched forward and leaned over the machine while he was playing, it looked like he was about to kiss the thing. Like Romeo and Juliet, except Romeo had horn-rimmed glasses and a yarmulke, and Juliet dinged and buzzed and clacked instead of saying, “Wherefore art thou?”
The reason it got to be a headache for Quentin was that he couldn’t get Shlomo out of his room. Shlomo came over before breakfast every morning, faking like he was there to walk Quentin to the bus stop, and he played pinball while Quentin got dressed. Then he walked Quentin home after school, and it was the same thing. It was like Howie Wartnose and his crush on Beverly Segal, except it was even worse, because Challenge the Yankees liked Shlomo back. What I mean is he got real good at it. No, he got great at it. He had the five highest scores on the machine. Lonnie started calling him Pinball Wizard Pinball Wizard instead of Shlomo Shlomo.
You want an idea of how crazy it got? After school on Wednesday, the six of us were hanging out in Quentin’s room, and Shlomo was bent over the pinball machine, and Howie decided to pull a prank on him. He strolled over to the machine like nothing was going on, and then, without warning, he kicked out the plug.
Shlomo didn’t even realize what had happened at first. He kept hitting the flippers and staring down at the game, trying to figure out why it went dark. Then he mumbled, maybe to himself, or maybe to the machine, but definitely not to any of us, “C’mon, I didn’t tilt!”
It was only after he heard the rest of us cracking up that he noticed Howie standing next to the plug, and then he noticed the plug hanging out of the wall socket. We figured he’d crack up too at that point. But instead his eyes got real wide, and his head started to shake, and then he charged at Howie.
It was scary. I mean, Howie could take Shlomo no problem in a normal wrestling kind of fight, but the way Shlomo charged at him was different. It was like he wasn’t even Shlomo. He was a bull charging at a red cape.
Howie seemed as scared as the rest of us. He jumped out of Shlomo’s way, and Shlomo hit the wall so hard you could hear the windows rattle. But he bounced off the wall and came after Howie again. Except he tripped over one of Quentin’s model planes and fell forward onto the bed. His glasses went flying, but his yarmulke stuck to his head—it was kind of a miracle how it stuck there. Then Lonnie jumped on Shlomo’s back, and Eric and Howie grabbed his arms, and the three of them held him down. That was when Mrs. Selig poked her head into the room and said, “No roughhousing, all right?”
You’d think the sound of her voice would’ve snapped Shlomo out of it, but even after she slid the door shut, he was still twisting and straining to get off the bed. His eyes were bugging out, and you could see the veins in his neck bulging and pulsing. That was what scared me the most, the veins. I thought the guy was going to have a stroke right on the bed. It took the three of them to keep him there. I don’t think Lonnie could’ve done it on his own. Lonnie, meanwhile, was talking to him in a soft voice, almost a whisper, telling him to calm down.
Quentin got Shlomo’s glasses off the floor and put them back on his head. They were crooked, but Shlomo’s eyes at least started to focus. It was the glasses, maybe, that started to bring him back. He took deep breaths. Lonnie leaned down and said into his ear, “C’mon, buddy, you’re all right.”
“I’m real sorry,” Howie said, also in a soft voice. “I didn’t know …”
After another half minute, Shlomo had simmered down. His eyes were back to where it was Shlomo looking out from behind them, and his breaths were normal speed, and you couldn’t see the veins in his neck anymore. Lonnie let him roll over onto his side, but he didn’t quite let go of him, and the rest of us waited to see how Shlomo would react.
We got our answer a couple of seconds later, when Shlomo started to laugh. It was a quiet laugh at first, but it kept getting louder. He wound up hysterical, which made the rest of us start to laugh too. Lonnie let go of him, but by then it didn’t matter. All Shlomo could do was curl up like a baby, with his hands holding his stomach, and laugh.
Then, at last, Lonnie said, “What the heck was that?”
“I don’t know,” Shlomo said, coughing out the words more than saying them.
“Never mess with a guy’s pinball,” Lonnie said, but in a deep, grown-up voice, as if that was the lesson we were supposed to learn. That cracked up Shlomo again, and by then, the rest of us were hysterical too.
But we didn’t talk about it afterward.
Still, as weird as that was, it was nowhere near as weird as what happened today. I was lying on my bed around five o’clock, not sleeping, not even shutting my eyes, just resting up and thinking about the weekend, when the phone rang. I thought for sure the call was for Amelia, since it’s Friday, and she gets like a dozen calls every Friday, but then my mom picked up the phone and yelled that it was for me. I figured it had to be Lonnie—maybe he was lying around thinking about the weekend too.
I hustled into the kitchen and took the phone. But it was Quentin on the other end, not Lonnie. He was talking, except his voice was more like a whisper, before I got the thing to my ear. “… you got to help me. You got to get this guy out of here.”
“Who?”
“Shlomo,” he whispered.
“He’s still there?”
“He’s been going at it for like two hours. I think he broke the machine, but he’s still playing.”
“How could he be playing if he broke the machine?”
“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “But he won’t leave.”
“Well, he has to leave soon. It’s almost sundown. He has to go home for Sabbath.”
“I’m telling you, Jules, the guy’s not going to leave.”
“Why don’t you get your dad to kick him out?” I said.
“He’s not home yet. Plus, I don’t want to do that to him.”
“You don’t want to do it to Shlomo or to your dad?”
“Either one,” he said.
“What about your mom?”
“I don’t want to kick him out. He can’t help himself.”
“Then what do you want?” I asked.
“I want him to go home,” he said.
“Should I call Lonnie?”
“No, Lonnie’s just going to kick him out.”
“Then tell me what you want me to do,” I said.
“Maybe you can talk to him.”
“What can I say to him that you can’t?”
“If I knew that, I’d say it to him. C’mon, Jules. I’m really tired.”
That got to me, the fact that Shlomo wasn’t letting Quentin rest. So I said goodbye and hung up the phone and headed over to Quentin’s house. I had to walk past Shlomo’s house on the way, and I could see through the front window. There was no sign of anything unusual. Mrs. Zizner was setting the table for Sabbath dinner. Mr. Zizner was already sitting at the head of the table, flipping through the pages of the newspaper. Shlomo’s older brother, Hiram, was sitting on the couch, getting in a last half hour of TV before sundown. I’m sure they were expecting Shlomo to walk through the front door any second.
I kept going until I got to the Hampshire House, and Quentin must’ve been watching out the window, because he buzzed me in about a second after I rang the bell. He was standing at the front door when the elevator opened on the fifth floor, and he led me back to his room. Mrs. Selig had a sour look on her face as I walked past her. The last thing she wanted, you could tell, was another guy in Quentin’s room.
“Look who’s here, Shlomo,” Quentin said, opening the door to his room.
Shlomo didn’t even turn around. He just said, suspiciously, “Who is it?”
“Julian?” Shlomo asked.
“Yeah.”
“It’s just you?”
“It’s just me.”
“Lonnie’s not with you?”
“No, it’s just me.”
“That’s good,” Shlomo said. “You’ve got to see this.”
“See what?”
“I got the most amazing game going.” His voice was so high it sounded like a girl’s, and I could see trickles of sweat behind his ears. “You won’t believe this game. No one’s going to believe it, so I need witnesses. Look at the score!”
I glanced at the score in the top right corner of the machine. It was ninety thousand and change.
“What’s the big deal, Shlomo?” I said. “Heck, I got a hundred thousand the last time I played—”
“You don’t get it!”
“What don’t I get?”
“It’s the third time around. It’s gone back to zero twice.”
“C’mon!”
“I swear to God!”
“It goes up to a million, Shlomo. That’s not possible.”
He hit the flippers and smashed the pinball up toward the bumpers again. “Look at the post!”
The center post had come up between the flippers.
“So you hit the bonus flag.”
“You’re still not getting it,” he said. “It’s stuck like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“The post. It came up, and it didn’t go down. It’s stuck.”
“Then why don’t you stop playing?” I said.
“Because I’m at two million ninety thousand!”
“But the machine’s broken!”
“It’s not broken!” he said. “It’s still working!”
“But the post is stuck—”
“Because I hit the bonus flag over and over!”
“What difference does that make?”
“I earned it,” he said. “It’s like as if I broke the bank in Las Vegas!”
“Then you admit it’s broken,” I said.
“It’s not broken broken,” he said. “Look, the score’s still going up!”
“Shlomo, the ball can’t go down the chute while the post is up. If the post is stuck, that means the game can’t end. You can’t lose.”
“So what’s your point?”
“If you can’t lose, the score doesn’t matter,” I said. “It could be a million times a million, and it wouldn’t matter, because you have to be able to lose. That’s how you know you’re still playing.”
“If the ball can’t go down the chute, it’s not even a game anymore. Think about it. Right now, what’s the difference between Shlomo Zizner playing Challenge the Yankees and a chimpanzee playing Challenge the Yankees?”
“The chimp wouldn’t know when to hit the flippers.”
“Shlomo, you have to be able to lose, or else there’s no challenge. Get it? You’re not really challenging the Yankees if you can’t lose. You play the game to test your skill. But it’s not a test if you can’t …”
“If I can’t what?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Look, Shlomo, the sun’s going down. It’s Sabbath. You’re going to get in trouble if you don’t go home. You know that as well as I do. What if you just walk away from the machine, and we’ll leave it exactly how it is until Sunday night? No one will touch it—”
“No!”
“Shlomo, it’s the only way. Your mom’s going to call any minute.”
“What if the post goes down?” he said.
“But it’s stuck. You said so yourself.”
He shook his head. “What if it gets unstuck?”
“Shlomo!”
“I’ve got to finish it, Jules.”
“But you can’t finish it. That’s the point.”
The phone rang in the kitchen. The sound came just after Shlomo rocketed the ball through the left tunnel and up into the cluster of bumpers—it was like clack-whoosh-bibidi-bang-bang-bang, and then the sound of the phone. Shlomo reacted to it like he’d been punched in the jaw. His head rocked backward and then rolled to the right. But he recovered and focused again on the game.
Half a minute later, Mrs. Selig knocked on the door. “Shlomo, your mom’s on the phone. She says the dinner table is set.”
“Tell her I’m on my way,” Shlomo called back to her.
Quentin and I watched him keep going for another half minute. We were expecting him to step away from the machine—or at least I was. But he kept playing. His head was bowed, and his shoulders were loose, but he kept hitting the flippers and sending the ball back up toward the bumpers.
“Shlomo …”
He heard me say his name, but he didn’t turn around. Instead, he let go of the right flipper button, reached up, and took off his yarmulke. He folded it around his thumb and pushed it into the back pocket of his pants. Then he brought his hand back to the flipper button.
“C’mon, Shlomo …”
He let out a loud sob, just one, and he kept playing.
Then, at last, Quentin said, “Why don’t you tilt it?”
Shlomo choked down a second sob. “What?”
“You could tilt it, and the game would be over.”
Shlomo glanced over his shoulder, and I nodded at him.
“There’s no other way,” I said. “You have to go home.”
He turned back to the machine and gave it a quick shove. Nothing happened. Then he hit the left flipper and sent the ball up through the tunnel again. He was still playing, even though he was also trying to tilt.
“You have to do it harder,” Quentin said.
Shlomo gave the machine another shove, slightly harder. Again, it didn’t tilt—and, again, he kept playing.
“C’mon, Shlomo,” I said. “Just tilt it.”
He took a deep breath and slammed into the machine with his hips. He hit it so hard that it actually moved an inch closer to the wall.
But it still didn’t tilt.
He moaned and let out a deep sob. Then, suddenly, he bent over and smashed his forehead against the glass top of the machine. It was ferocious. I thought for a second he was going to put his head right through the glass. But he came back up with no damage to his head or to the glass. He looked down at the machine and hit the right flipper, which sent the ball back up to the bumpers. As soon as the ball hit the first bumper, the machine went dark.
The tilt sign came up, and the center post slipped down.
Shlomo snatched the yarmulke out of his back pocket and slapped it back onto his head. He was still holding it there as he grabbed his coat from the chair and ran out of the room.
Quentin and I just kind of stared at the door for a couple of seconds after he was gone.
“You think he’ll get home by sundown?” he said.
“Not unless he invents a time machine.”
“You think his dad will kill him?”
“I doubt it. He’s not allowed to kill him on the Sabbath.”
“I figured out another word, Jules.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, are you writing them down?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Did you figure out the meanings yet?”
“Not yet. But I’ll get to it. I promise.”
“You’re not going to forget, are you?”
“C’mon, Quentin. I’m not going to forget. What’s your new word?”
“Addleeoonee.”
“How do you spell it?”
“I’m not sure. I just know how to say it: ah-duh-lee-oon-ee.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll figure out how to spell it.”
“And you’ll figure out what it means?”
“I promise, Quent. I’ll figure out what it means.”