MLH HYPE PROSE 4: Anne then Joe Shippey

-- He was back with the girl she used to be, daydreaming I guess you’d call it, when he heard Steve-or-Other apologizing for bothering him over something so stupid, and Dickie thought: She’s there.  It’s a few minutes of conversation on a porch at a poker game, but it was snapping neatly into place under this portrait of Anne the platelet engraved: Unhappy Girl Wants a Push.  These hicks saw something.  Opportunity.
-- As a girl she wore barrettes in her long brown hair every school day.  She was how Dick LeDeau first learned he was the poor kid.  She had friends, pretty little girls with little ponies and neon green pants and crimped hair.  Girls who protested Anne picking Dick on her team for the kickball game.  He could kick the ball out to where the school’s playground sloped down to an old stone property marker and the pine woods beyond, a forbidden place to them.  He could get the ball there without really trying, but the kids wouldn’t pick him.  
-- Some times he’d dive bomb the slow roll of the kickball, and take it hostage, daring them to stand up to him.  When they would go to the teacher he’d pinball it to the pine trees.  But Anne picked him.  It seems such a small thing.  Like her barrettes.  The Ostrich Lady taught them about the Indians and Thanksgiving she wore yellow and brown barrettes  for corn.  She wore blue to match the shirt Columbus wore in their social studies book.  And the day after Dick won the kickball game with four homeruns she wore dark orange for the paper tickets he carried to get breakfast at the cafeteria.  These fascinated her; she thought he ate twice: when he explained to her he did not eat breakfast at home she did not understand what that meant.  She didn’t believe his house didn’t have cereal.
-- He never was her boyfriend in that he kissed her, but he liked to think that beating up the ones that did got him close.  Elementary, Junior High, High, even after he dropped out he kept most guys away from her, and then one day she was gone off to that first attempt at college, and Dickie had some thinking to do on what purpose could he serve now.  Rockland weren’t much without her in it.  And all he had were memories of how she never seemed to mind that much that he cockblocked her boyfriends with his jab. 
-- There was a day she came back having quit university, but before that day Dickie was taken on the Roland to fish lobster for Ellis Winthrop -- an old drunk who usually was too weak from his cancer to work; it was a boat for lost, unlearned, washed up; you couldn’t call them fisherman, they were leftover hands by the season.  Dickie had been recruited out of the bars having beaten the previously mentioned Spilly and Cousins, who had been thought tough fishermen.  Dickie was nineteen, and to the Roland crew, his best use was back on land, back in those bars; they made him their bodyguard.  He called himself a fisherman -- who would challenge it?  For Dickie, with a father who never worked a job long enough to take that work as his title in town -- carpenter, mechanic, construction worker -- just old Jim LeDeau, trailer seventeen, who could be seen riding a cavitied ten-speed to the convenience store every day for his Miller beer, this job was status.
-- The truth was, whatever that ladies’ book claimed, Dickie, to quote him: weren’t ever a real lobsterman.  However he were a legbreaker, and it were the Roland crew he ran with when he first met the guaranteed first ballot hall of fame, soon to be King of Rockland, Mr. Joseph Paul Shippey the Third.
-- Shippey had come down from so far north that, like a wrestling heel, he hailed from points unknown.  He used to say the name of his hometown was a number.  He walked into the Toddy one night looking for work, ended up breaking a pool cue on the head of that same Captain Winthrop’s doper son, Ellis Jr, so that by the time Dickie got a hold of him, Joe was famous.  Dickie caught him hiding out in Camden with the tourists, got him cornered in the bathroom of a chowder house, while old Massholes drooled clam.  Joe Shippey was no coward, but there were weight classes between them, and he knew about Dickie.  So Joe asked for mercy in his way, and Dickie, for whatever reason, let him out of that bathroom.  A weekend of partying later Dickie brought Joe in front of the Rolanders, Ellis, Junior, and the rest, and Joe did what Joe always did: aligned the stars.