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Rumors

For me, this author’s name on the cover is good enough. You see, Robert Holland is my favorite author and Rumors only adds to that. It has action and excitement and this kid named ... Snake ... who has a mean reputation. Even if you don’t consider the dead bodies turning up everywhere, this is one you won’t forget!

--Sean Copeland, age 14

Rumors is a phenomenal addition to Robert Holland’s long list of novels. He really knows how to relate to the teenage nation that reads his books. The main characters are always portrayed as ordinary people that I could easily see walking through my town.

I really enjoyed the way he used the first person narrative with the main character, Harley. It added another dimension to the novel by allowing the reader to experience the mystery through Harley’s eyes, thoughts, and feelings.

In Rumors Robert Holland also shows that rumors are just a kind of cov- ering over the truth beneath the surface.

--Ryan Swilling, age 13

Chapter One

New In Town

When you're new in town and it's summer, most kids end up looking for things to do, places to go where they have a chance to meet people. And that's fine if you're pushy, which I am decidedly not. I look at it the same way I look at sports. You let the game come to you.

What that comes down to is simply putting yourself in the way of other people and because most kids are curious about somebody new, sooner or later a conversation starts.

And in as much as this is my fourth high school in four years, I've gotten pretty good at making friends in this sort of backhanded way.

But the other towns we had lived in did not have a pool hall, and I had ended up at public basketball courts and the local town beach, which was usually a pond. In Yellow Springs, which is on the coast, the town beach is a true beach. It even has a big recreation area with a full soccer field and excellent basketball courts.

But once I found out about the pool room, for nearly a month I hardly ever went to the beach. I've been playing pool for five years and I've got a great teacher. Dad. He used to win all kinds of tournaments and when I was twelve he bought a pool table, a regulation-sized Brunswick, and it has traveled with us from house to house, four houses, four towns in different parts of the country in four years.

But everybody needs competition and I decided to check out the local pool parlor.

Yellow Springs is about five towns away from the small city of Old Port where Dad works. He's now a vice president in the company and that means we're through moving unless he gets an offer with a different company. He says that won't happen because he's finally got the job he wanted, with the company he wanted to work for, but I'll believe it when we don't start packing.

The center of town is a single main street lined with old brick buildings and it's a pretty upscale, spiffy-looking sort of place. Shorty's Pool Parlor is down near the waterfront and it's connected to a bar called The Trawl Net, in an area of town that has resisted change.

The fishing boats still tie up at the docks a block away and there's a small restaurant, The Docks, where the fishermen go in the morning, and where I stop on the way to Shorty's. I'm addicted to coffee and The Docks has the best coffee in town, including the yuppie places.

It was a tough neighborhood and the clientele at Shorty's was, by any measure, rough around the edges. It's not a place I'd want to spend any time once it's dark. But it was lunch time and except for the fishermen, the place was pretty much deserted.

Still, as I turned the corner and spotted the four Harleys in the small parking lot in front of Shorty's, I felt my system jump to alert status. I always notice Harleys because that's my name, Harley Keene.

But when there's a group of them ... well, you want to watch your step because some of those biker dudes can be pretty nasty.

And though I'd been playing there for nearly three weeks, I was still the new guy, and in a local pool hall that meant I was walking on thin ice. Sooner or later, somebody was bound to step forward and challenge me. But from moving around all the time I'd learned how to deflect those challenges and how to make people laugh because when people are laughing or crying, they aren't fighting. You can take that to the bank.

It also helps that though I'm only seventeen, I'm six-foot-three and a hundred and eighty-five, and most guys don't want to get into it with me.

On the outside the building looks like a hangout for the worst, ugliest guys in town. On the inside, it's like something you see in ads for pool tables: all Brunswicks, all new, not a damaged felt in the place and there were galleries near the front four tables, which were only for tournaments. Over the door that led to the bar a sign said you had to be twenty-one to enter. But there was also a counter where you could buy food and soft drinks.

A guy about my age sat by himself at the counter with his back to the room. He wore black leathers and on the back of his jacket was a big coiled up rattlesnake. I guessed one of the bikes out front belonged to him. He also had his black hair pulled into a short pony tail and he gave you the feeling that he was looking for trouble.

I got a rack and balls and I opened my case and put my stick together. It's a heck of a stick, graphite and perfectly balanced, eighteen ounces of dynamite ... in the right hands. I racked the balls, broke and began shooting, setting myself up to run the table.

Naturally, when you come into a pool hall with your own stick everybody notices. It's a sure sign that you can shoot and the only question is how well. I never play a game until I've warmed up to the point where I can run the table three times. And when I shoot pool, I focus. No choice. You have to get your stroke smoothed out until your back hand works as consistently as a machine, bringing the stick through perfectly each time.

I really get into it because you can't play the game well any other way. It's a lot like golf and in both games the ball is always still when you hit it. The only accidents on a pool table are when you miss. Every shot goes where it should and the cue ball gets left in position for not only the next shot but for the following two or three shots.

Well, that's the way you're supposed to do it, but I gotta tell you, nobody ever does it that way all the time. You can't. Not even the pros make all their shots and leave the ball perfectly set up. They just do it more often than the rest of us.

It takes a lot to break my concentration, but danger does it every time and suddenly I looked up and three guys were standing behind the guy with the snake on his jacket.

The guy wearing jeans and Nikes and a wife-beater shirt that left a lot of muscle showing, spoke first. "I hear you're supposed to be the toughest guy in this town."

The snake guy swiveled around on the counter stool and smiled. "You hear a lot of rumors," he said.

"We came to find out about you," the guy in the leathers said. The third guy, the biggest of the three, stood to the snake guy's right, his arms folded over his chest.

The snake guy shook his head. "Go home," he said, "if Jack comes in here you're gonna be in a world of hurt."

I figured Jack must be the bouncer.

"Maybe we better go outside," the big guy said.

"Won't work," the snake guy said. "Jack knows how to use doors too."

"Sounds like a wise guy," the one wearing leathers said.

They had their backs to me and I couldn't tell how old they were, but they had to be over twenty-one because they'd come from the bar. More stupid macho crap.

The thing was, they looked big and tough, but I couldn't see their faces. All I could see was the snake guy and he had these strange gray eyes and I've been around enough to know that there are some guys whose cage you don't rattle.

Guys like that aren't interested in winning a fight so much as really hurting whoever they fight. Pool players do not get into fights. It's the hands. It's all about the hands.

"We came here to settle something," the shorter guy said. "We're tired of hearing about The Snake and how tough he is and how nobody has ever beat him in a fight."

Snake shook his head. "Rumors," he said, "all rumors."

The big guy swore at him and made some nasty comment about his mother and the Snake's eyes changed. They narrowed and the smile disappeared and yet he sat on the stool, his body relaxed, while the guys in front of him had gone tense and rigid, their muscles contracting.

Here's how you play a sport. I know this because at my last two schools I've started at point guard on the basketball team and left field in baseball. You stay loose. Tighten up and you can't react fast enough.

Those guys might not have known it, but I knew they were in trouble. And then they proved it. The big one threw a punch and Snake slipped it, grabbed the guy's arm, spun him around and forced his hand almost to the base of his neck.

For the first time, I could see the big guy's face and, man, he was hurting.

"It's over," Snake said.

I think the leathers guy was inclined to agree, but the wife beater guy, who had a face like a weasel, hadn't voted yet.

"We're walking to the door," Snake said. "Slowly. If you try anything I break his arm and pull his shoulder out of joint. And to tell you the truth, I'm hoping you'll try something, because I'm looking forward to hurting somebody. Business has been kinda slow lately."

They went out into the parking lot and I dashed to the front of the room and looked out the window, watching the guys climb onto their bikes and drive off. Then the Snake zipped up his jacket, climbed onto his black Harley Fat Boy and with a great Harley roar drove away, leaving a cloud of dust hanging over the parking lot.

And that was my introduction to the guy that everyone in school called Snake. I played at the pool hall nearly every day over the rest of the summer and my reputation grew rapidly. I was the guy to beat and though I preferred straight pool, calling each shot and running rack after rack, I was also unbeatable at nine ball.

The one thing I didn't do was play for money. Dad's rule. You only played for money in a tournament. That way you stayed out of trouble because the guys who played for money were mostly hustlers and dudes who thought they were hustlers and those guys were always on the edge of getting their fingers broken.

Shorty did not allow gambling because it always led to trouble, but some of the guys there still gambled, settling up in the parking lot outside. Most of that stuff went on at night. I played during the day. Another of Dad's rules. Trouble comes with the dark. I understood.

Even so, you meet a lot of hard cases in pool halls. I even got to know some of them, guys like Blacky Gorman, who people said was a hit man for the Mafia, and Red Dog Warren, who was supposed to have served time in prison for manslaughter after he killed a guy in a fight. And there were other guys too, guys with less desperate reputations, guys like Mike the Trapper, a big white-bearded guy who got rid of animal pests for people, and Frenchy Livernois who captained a seventy-foot stern trawler called the Cracker Jackie, and Wolf Wetzel, who stayed something of a mystery. These were guys who turned up during the day or I'd never have seen them. And they all had fierce reputations. Rumors. I wrote it all off as rumors. They were never anything but nice to me and they even acted as my protectors if anyone got too pushy.

I never saw Snake at Shorty's again that summer.

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