Free The Obstacle Course by JF Freedman Page A

they were with their dads. These professional-quality models take too much time for a kid, plus they cost real money, a kid would have to be pretty rich to be able to afford them. I’ve tried to get a conversation going with a couple of these kids but we don’t talk the same language. Like I said, I’m a serious builder.
    “Now that is a ship.” Bill, a man about my dad’s age who’s one of the owners of the shop, came over and looked at the plans with me. “You’re going to have your hands full with that one, Roy.” Bill’s a really neat guy, we talk about models all the time, he doesn’t talk to me like I’m some dumb kid, like my teachers do. If some of my teachers could see me in here with these complicated models they’d be pretty impressed.
    “I know,” I said. “I’ve never built one this big.”
    “I guess your dad’ll be helping you, huh?”
    What guys like Bill don’t know won’t hurt them.
    “He likes ’em, but I do most of the work. He just kind of tells me how great they are. He’s real proud of me.”
    My old man’s never seen one of my models, not up close. The times he’s looked in my room he was usually drunk and ragging on me, he wouldn’t know if there was a full-size boat in there, the shape he’s in those times. If he ever did check them out for real he’d think they were junk I’d wasted my money on.
    “I want to try a new kind of glue,” I told Bill, moving the conversation off my family, “that kind you were telling me about that dries slower but holds better.”
    “These are what the old pros use,” Bill told me, reaching up on the shelf for a handful of bottles. “You have to be very careful with them. I usually don’t recommend them to fellows your age but I think you can handle these, the sophistication level of models you’ve been building.”
    He glanced up at a man who was waiting to pay for some brushes.
    “What do you think, Admiral,” Bill asked, “isn’t this the brand you like?”
    I turned around. This older man was standing behind me. He picked up one of the bottles and examined it with a practiced eye.
    The man had salt-and-pepper hair, wore these old-fashioned rimless glasses, and stood erect, like he had a coat hanger in his shirt, except he was relaxed, too, like the way the midshipmen at the Academy stand. I felt myself standing up straighter without thinking about it. He was an old guy, definitely older than my old man, maybe as old as fifty, the kind of man you felt you had to respect just because of the way he looked, like Admiral Halsey, who I’ve seen in the old war newsreels they show at the movies, or MacArthur. MacArthur’s in the Army, not the Navy, but he’s a neat-looking guy, with the aviator sunglasses and the corncob pipe you always see between his teeth. I’ve got this corncob pipe which I hooked from the dime store after I saw this movie about Huckleberry Finn, the one with Mickey Rooney. Once in a while me and my friends go out in this abandoned field near our houses and lie on top of the tall grass and smoke cigarette tobacco in our corncob pipes. It’s nice out there in the fields, it’s like we’re not in Ravensburg at all.
    “Yes, I use this brand,” the old guy said, turning to me. “What model are you planning to build?”
    “This one,” I said, showing him the battleship kit.
    “That’s a large undertaking. You must be an experienced model builder.”
    “Roy’s as capable as any of my adult customers,” Bill told him, gushing all over me. Usually I hate it when people do shit like that but when Bill does it it’s okay, because he means it, he isn’t trying to snow me like my teachers do when they’re talking about my so-called wasted potential.
    “You should see some of the frigates and cutters he’s completed,” he went on. “He brought one in last month, I swear you would have thought it was crafted by someone who’s been building these things for a lifetime.”
    This was getting to be too