Jubilee Hitchhiker by William Hjortsberg Page B

in celebration, his body grew eleven inches during his twelfth year.
    â€œHe towered over everybody.” Melvin Corbin, another kid living “out in the country,” on Eighteenth Street, remembered Dick Porterfield from the fifth grade at Lincoln. “All of a sudden, he was just there. I didn’t think he belonged and asked the teacher, ‘How come this big kid is in grammar school?’ She told me that he was just exceptionally big. That he was a genius. I didn’t know what a genius was at the time.” Corbin’s teacher claimed young Porterfield read at an eleventh-grade level.
    â€œI looked older than I actually was—” Dick described himself at thirteen. “I was tall for my age, so that I could easily be mistaken for fifteen—” Porterfield’s rapid growth caused scoliosis, a permanent lateral curvature of the spine. His chest developed asymmetrically and gave his upper back a slight hump, forcing his right shoulder higher than the left. “He could not hold his neck up straight,” Mary Lou remembered dispassionately. “He had therapy and everything.”
    Melvin Corbin recalled a skinny kid with a sunken chest, an undernourished genius allowed to go through the cafeteria lunch line again and again because he was poor and his family received some kind of assistance. Their fifth-grade teacher was much impressed with Dick Porterfield’s photographic memory. “Whatever he read, he remembered.” Dick’s reading consisted mainly of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books his mother kept around the house. Mary Lou said her son could “flash read” any book and, when given the page number, repeat what was printed there. “I checked him out on it, and it was incredible.”
    Sixth grade marked a period of ambition and enterprise. Dick and Gary went into the worm business. A lot of kids gathered worms, selling them to filling stations for a penny apiece. The retail price for night crawlers was twenty-five cents per dozen. Dick and Gary figured they could make a profit undercutting the competition by a dime. They searched damp lawns at night with flashlights and stored their catch in a box of dirt down in Gary’s cool dark basement. “We’d put a sign out in front of my house because I was on a busier street closer to town,” Gary said. “When somebody would want some, we’d go down and dig them up and put them in takeout boxes like you get at a Chinese restaurant. We sold them for fifteen cents.”
    Both Barbara and Sandi remembered their big brother taking them hunting worms at night with a flashlight. They pulled on their rubber boots and went out into the pitch dark around eleven o’clock. Dick taught B.J. to feel in the wet grass of a freshly watered lawn. “When you see a worm you have to be fast,” he said. Night crawlers stretched like Plastic Man over six inches through the grass. “They keep one end in the ground,” Dick instructed. “If you miss, they snap back inside.”
    Delivering newspapers became another Horatio Alger enterprise for Dick Porterfield. Melvin Corbin had an Oregonian route that went out Chambers Street, down Eighteenth, and up River Road into the hills. He had been assigned a different route and gave the old one to Dick, who was
suddenly in need of a bicycle. Melvin just got a new bike and offered to sell his old one. Dick had never owned a bicycle. During the war, they were almost unobtainable. The price was $25.
    Dick made a deal with Melvin to pay him back monthly with the proceeds from the paper route and took immediate possession of a bicycle that “always looked shitty.” Barbara remembered Dick’s “old broken-down bicycle.” B.J. never had a bicycle either and was “always taking off” on her brother’s. “Seemed like every time he came back to ride it, it had a flat tire. Thanks to me.” Barbara never