Aces High Page 0,86

when they could afford it, late dinners in Chinatown and Little Italy. The more he was with her, the more he found himself unable to be without her.

They both liked red wine, and pizza, and rock 'n' roll. She had marched on Washington the year before, to get the troops out of Vietnam, and he'd been there too (inside his shell, floating over the mall with peace symbols painted on his armor and a gorgeous blonde in a halter top and jeans sitting on top, singing along to the antiwar songs that blared from his speakers, but he couldn't tell her that part). She loved Gina and Joey, and her parents seemed to approve of him. She was a baseball fan, brought up to abominate the Yankees and love the Brooklyn Dodgers, just like him. Come October, she sat beside him in the Ebbetts Field bleachers, when Tom Seaver pitched the Dodgers to victory over the Oakland A's in the seventh and deciding game of the Series. A month later, he was there to share her anguish at McGovern's landslide defeat. They had so much in common.

Just how much he did not realize until the week after Thanksgiving, when she came to his place for dinner. He'd gone to the kitchen, to open the wine and check his spaghetti sauce, and when he came back he found her standing by his bookcase, leafing through a paperback copy of Jim Bishop's Day of the Wild Card. "You must be interested in this stuff," she said, nodding toward the books. His wild card collection took up almost three shelves. He had everything; all the biographies of Jetboy, Earl Sanderson's collected speeches and Archibald Holmes's memoirs, Tom Wolfe's Wild Card Chic, the autobiography of Cyclone as told to Robin Moore, the Information Please Almanac of Aces, and so much more. Including, of course, everything that had ever been published about the Turtle.

"Yeah," he said, "it's, uh, always interested me. Those people. I'd love to meet a wild card one day."

"You have," she said, smiling, sliding the book back on the shelf next to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

"I have?" He was confused, and a bit taken aback. Had he given himself away, somehow? Had Joey told her? "Who?"

"Me," Barbara said. He must have looked incredulous. "No, really," she said. "I know, it doesn't show. I'm not an ace or anything. It didn't do anything to me, as far as anyone can tell. But I did get it. I was only two, so I don't remember anything. My mother said I almost died. The symptoms-I must have been quite a sight. Our doctor thought it was the mumps at first, but my face just kept on swelling, until I looked like a basketball. Then he transferred me to Mt. Sinai. That's where Dr. Tachyon was working at the time."

"Yeah," Tom said.

"Anyway, I pulled through. The swelling only lasted a couple of days, but they kept me for a month, running tests. It was the wild card all right, but it might as well have been the chicken pox, for all the difference it made to me." She grinned. "Still, it was our deep, dark family secret. Dad quit his job and moved us to Bayonne, where nobody knew. People were funny about the wild card back then. I didn't even know myself until I was in college. Mom was afraid I'd tell."

"Did you?"

"No," Barbara said. She looked strangely solemn. "No one. Not until tonight, anyway."

"So why did you tell me?" Tom asked her. "Because I trust you," she said quietly.

He almost told her then, right there in his living room. He wanted to. Afterward, whenever he thought about that evening, he found himself wishing that he had, and wondering what would have happened.

But when he opened his mouth to say the words, to speak to her of teke and Turtles and junkyard secrets, it was as though the years had rolled back and he was in high school again, standing with her in that corridor, wanting so desperately to ask her to the prom and somehow unable to. He'd kept his secrets for so long. The words would not come. He tried, for a long moment he tried. Then, defeated, he had hugged her and mumbled "I'm glad you told me," before retreating to the kitchen to gather his wits. He looked at the spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove, and suddenly reached out and turned off the burner.

"Get your coat," he said when he