Turn Signal by Howard Owen

waiting tables up on Nantucket in the summers.”
    â€œI wasn’t around those summers, either.”
    â€œOh, right. The Navy, right?”
    Gerald looks up at Jack, who is staring off into the distance. He lowers his voice. Maybe, Jack thinks, he doesn’t want his wife to know that he was class weenie a million years ago. How, though, could that matter now?
    â€œNo offense. I mean, I’m sure you and Cully and Milo and all the guys are happy as clams down here. But you guys were jocks. You owned the place. There wasn’t any Speakeasy Code for little Jerry Prince. There was just the Jerry Prince code, which was to try to get out of Buster Gladden High alive. I looked at my junior class yearbook the other day, just to bone up.
    â€œYou know how many people signed it? Six. And three of them were kids, like ninth- and tenth-graders. I made a point that spring of not asking anybody to sign my yearbook until they asked me to sign theirs. I got tired of that look, like, ‘Oh, God, if I sign Jerry Prince’s yearbook, I’ll have to ask him to sign mine. And then people will think I’m queer or something.’”
    â€œI signed it.” Jack surprises himself by remembering this.
    Gerald Prince smiles. “Yeah, you did, bless your heart.” His mouth twists a little as he adds, “I don’t think I even had to ask you.”
    Jack can recall the day the yearbooks came their junior year, although he’s not sure who won the last Super Bowl. He finds, more and more, that memory is a brimfull jar in which each new drop of liquid displaces not the old, fermented slop at the bottom but instead something off the top, something new and fresh that landed there itself only recently and might be worth keeping.
    He was the cock of the walk his junior year, no clouds, no whispers. Everyone wanted him to sign their yearbooks, even the seniors. And then he saw Jerry Prince standing over by his locker, just staring, nobody near him, waiting to be picked on. And for some reason, he went through the crowd and asked the boy who lived down the road, the one to whom he hardly ever spoke any more, if he’d sign his yearbook. Hell of a thing to remember.
    â€œTell me,” Gerald says, “can you even remember what the goddamn Speakeasy Code is any more? I mean, do you all talk about it all the time? Has it been your Ten Commandments, the light unto your path?”
    Jack surprises himself by ticking them off from memory: no lies; no bullshit (a whole different thing from lies); no backing down; no quitting (a whole other thing from backing down); no shortcuts; no stop ’til we hit the top.
    It was a club within a club. The seven town boys who would be senior starters on the football team—Jack, Milo, Cully, Mack, Ray Bain, Puffer Sensibaugh and Bobby Witt—had come up with it when they were in ninth grade. They were sure they were something special. They’d always been able to beat the older boys in whatever sport was in season. They wanted something that would define and seal their specialness.
    They swore each other to secrecy. They would give the sign when they passed in the hall, index finger and middle finger curved to form a rough ‘S’ The next year, when they were all 16, they went together to a tattoo parlor on the Jeff Davis Highway down in Richmond and each got a small red ‘S’ burned into their upper arms. Jack’s parents grounded him for two weeks when they finally saw it.
    Their senior year, when the football team was attracting attention all over the area, unbeaten through nine games, it was Milo, of course, who let it slip. A reporter from The Times-Dispatch asked him about the tattoo, and he spilled the whole code. Mack McLamb didn’t speak to him for a month.
    Somebody put it in the yearbook that year, on the page with the team picture. It was a bad joke by then to Jack.
    â€œSo,” Gerald Prince says, smirking,