6
I DID MANAGE to get the manual organized before the next meeting, and with my mother’s help I even managed to get it typed. After I eliminated all the repetitions and notes that seemed too sketchy to include it didn’t amount to much: six-and-a-half pages.
“Maybe we should have used wider margins,” said my mother. “I’ll type up a cover for it, and we’ll add a back cover too. That should thicken it up some.”
The covers helped, but the manual still seemed a skimpy thing, and I hoped that Mr. Summers wouldn’t be too disappointed by it.
The Tars meetings were held on Thursday evenings, in the gymnasium of the school known as “the old school,” because it was the oldest school building in Babbington. When I arrived at the gym, Mr. Summers and Robby Haskins were standing in the circle painted on the floor. Mr. Summers was holding a toy gun. I recognized it at once because I had one myself. It was a model of a bazooka. It fired Ping-Pong balls. An involuntary shudder ran through me at the sight of it, prompted by memories of the nasty game my friends and I played with mine, standing one another against a wall, facing the wall, as targets, and teasing the target to make him flinch in fear between the firing of the gun, whoomp, and the impact, smack, of the Ping-Pong ball, feeble and harmless though the impact was. At those who flinched, we laughed, and the laughter was mortifying. This toy bazooka seemed an odd thing for Mr. Summers to have, and I wanted to ask him why he had it, but I said nothing. The rest of the Tars were in the bleachers, hanging around, waiting for the meeting to begin. I walked onto the floor, carrying the manual and the box of notes.
“Ah,” said Mr. Summers when he spotted me, “here comes Commodore Leroy with the manual.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I corrected myself: “I mean, ‘Aye, sir.’”
“‘Aye, sir’?” asked Robby.
“Aye, sir,” I said. “A Tar is supposed to say ‘Aye, sir,’ when answering a Tar of superior rank—to indicate agreement, that is.”
“Was that in my notes?” asked Mr. Summers.
“Aye, sir,” I said.
“Well, good,” he said, surprised again by one of his own ideas. “I’d forgotten that. It’s good. Very good. It’s nautical.”
“Aye, sir,” I said.
“Is that the manual you have there?” he asked. His eyes lit up.
“Aye, sir,” I said.
I handed it to him.
“Is this all of it?” he asked.
“Aye, sir,” I said. “My mother and I added covers to make it thicker.”
Mr. Summers looked at me with his eyes narrowed, as if trying to decide whether I was making a nasty joke.
“I should have used wider margins when I typed it,” I said. “It would have been longer.”
“Well, that’s all right,” he said. “This is just a beginning. ‘Onward, ever onward,’ remember that. I’ve got some more notes for you. Commodore of the First Water Haskins, get that bag of notes, will you?”
“Okay,” said Robby.
I corrected him: “‘Aye, sir.’”
“That’s right, Haskins,” said Mr. Summers. “We’ve got to start doing things by the—”
He looked at the pages he held in his hand and thought better of using the word bookfor them.
“—by the manual,” he said.
In Topical Guide 215, Mark Dorset considers Foreshadowing and Jargon; Technical Terminology from this episode.
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