A few moments of affected limp, and then Dean is at full speed, calling for the ball. Swish, swish, flick, smack—
JUST WIDE!!!
Good shot, though. Good shot. Dean is the man. He is obviously the talent. It makes Evan so happy to watch him. How clever he is skating through the other boys, dodging, head-faking. Feint, feint, spin move, he sends the ball to another boy, wide open, swack—
Misses completely. Whiffle Ball City.
Matthew’s father wings around, skates up beside Dean and grabs him affectionately around the neck.
Ssshhhheeeeeee!
“ROTATE!” Matthew’s father bellows, releasing Dean and preparing for a face-off.
Dean is still in. He’s a ball magnet. The other kids look for him. They send it to him. Everyone wants the ball on Dean’s stick. He directs. He motions. He’s setting something up. Off he goes, up the left sideline.
Whack!
The big kid—the Rangers kid, the one who nearly broke Dean’s shin—whacks at the ball and catches Dean’s skate. Dean flies forward, face first, and lands hard, skinning his forearm on the asphalt. This time there’s blood. Road rash.
Matthew’s father skates over.
“Tripping, ” Dean complains.
“He was going for the ball, ” Matthew’s dad says.
“He did it on purpose. Tripping.”
“I didn’t see it that way, Smith. You want out?”
“No.”
“Take a breather, Smith. Settle down. You just got back, you’re getting tired. Rotate out, Smith.”
“No.”
Ssshhhheeeeeee!
Another face-off. This time Ranger wins the battle. He has the ball. Dean skates over to him. Bumps him. Ranger bumps back. They skate up the sideline, jostling. But Ranger is much bigger. He’s shoving Dean around. Dean is quicker and dodges for the ball. There’s confusion. Who has control? An elbow. Dean is caught in the mouth. He hesitates momentarily, feeling his bloodied lip, then wheels around, his stick at shoulder height, and slashes at Ranger, cracking down on Ranger’s forearms with such force Ranger screams horribly and falls. Dean stands over him.
“Don’t fuck with me, Matthew!” Dean yells. “Don’t fuck with me! Quit with the cheap shots, Matthew! I’ll take you out!”
Matthew’s father is there in a second, shoving Dean out of the way. He attends to his son. (His son!)
“You’re out, Smith!” Matthew’s father shouts. “You’re out. Misconduct! Ejection and two-game suspension. Think about that, Smith. You’re better than that.”
“He tripped me, ” Dean says in his defense.
“He was going for the ball, Smith. Game misconduct. You’re outta here.”
Evan can’t take it any more. He rushes the playing field.
“I saw the whole thing, ” Evan yells.“Your son tripped my son because he scored.”
Silence hits the cul-de-sac like a tornado, swift and sudden. All faces turn, small faces tucked into hard plastic shells; smooth, round faces with dark circles under their eyes, the first signs of sleep deprivation and sugar addiction showing. Evan realizes that they’ve been expecting him.
“You’re Dean’s father?” Matthew’s father asks, rising. He is the first to regain his composure. He voices the question they all want answered. He is the Lord of the Flies. He puts the pig’s head on the stick.
“Yes, ” Evan confirms.
There is no response. Evan is not sure where this is going. He turns to see Dean, his equipment in hand, slowly skating off. Evan starts after him.
“Hey, ” Matthew’s father barks, leaving his son, Matthew, writhing on the street, still in agony. He follows Evan.“Hey.”
Evan doesn’t stop.
“Hey, ” Matthew’s father says again, skating up to and catching Evan, laying a thick hand on Evan’s shoulder.“You probably know Dean better than I do, but he doesn’t play like that.”
He waits for a response from Evan. None is forthcoming.
“He’s the best kid out here. He’s too good to take cheap shots like that.”
“Your son took a cheap shot first, ” Evan complains.
“Look, if he gets his wrist broken because he’s an asshole, that only hurts him. He’s quarterback of JV. He should be more careful than that. I’ll deal with him later.”
Evan, settles down a bit, turns away.
“Hey.”
Evan looks back.
“I’m sorry about your . . .”
His what? Wife? Ex-wife? Girlfriend? What? Evan nods.
“But this is a place for everyone to have fun. You tell Dean that if he wants to appeal the suspension, he can come to me. I’ll listen to him. But Dean doesn’t play like that. I don’t allow that.”
Evan nods and walks away.
“Nice to meet you, ” Matthew’s father calls out. “My name is Brian.”
Evan turns.“Evan.”
“Nice to meet you, Evan. I wish we could have met under better circumstances.”
They look at each other, Evan and Brian, for a moment, as fathers look at each other, imagining themselves in each other’s shoes, wondering what it would be like to be father to a different child. Or are children all the same? Just different names and hair colors and sizes, but all the same on the inside, nascent souls fighting against the terms of their confinement: a lifetime imprisoned in a fleshy container.
“I have to get back to the game, ” Brian says.
“I hope your son is all right, ” Evan offers.
“I hope your son is all right, ” Brian says.
Ssshhhheeeeeee!
The whistle blows. The game is on.
EVAN WALKS QUICKLY, hoping to overtake Dean, but he’s too far ahead and Evan can’t see him.
He feels something like a father now, having stood up for Dean in a pinch. Having experienced irrational defensiveness, he thinks that must be what separates real parents from pretend parents: the ability to set aside reason in order to protect your kin. Something with which he has had prior experience, having run in front of a car to protect his brother, though his brother was in no imminent danger at the time. Still, he responded in a visceral way to the possibility of Charlie getting hurt and acted by throwing himself in front of the bullet. In this hockey incident, too, the danger wasn’t imminent, but if it had been, Evan would have been there for Dean.
He sees him up the block, skating slowly—more slowly than he needs to. Evan picks up his pace and catches up to him.
“Wait up.”
“Why, so you can yell at me?”
Evan doesn’t take the bait; they continue along in silence. Dusk is creeping into the neighborhood, the trees are dark.
“So, start yelling, ” Dean says after a block or so.
“Why do you want me to yell at you?”
“I don’t want you to yell at me.”
“So?”
“So, ” Dean says, considering. “You’re supposed to yell at me. You’re a father now. Fathers yell.”
“Ah. Well, I’m not very good at it, apparently. Maybe I should get some Oprah tapes. Study up.”
Dean cracks a smile.
“I don’t get it, ” he says.“Did you read a book on how to come to terms with the child you abandoned at birth or some thing?”
“No.”
“No, you’re not a reader. An audio book.”
“No.”
“No. That would take too long. You read an article in Newsweek, one of the little sidebar things that’s in the gray box?”
“No.”
“Saw it on 20/20?”
“No.”
“I give.”
“I just don’t feel like yelling at you, ” Evan says.
“You’re going to yell later?”
“I’m not going to yell at all, Dean. You didn’t do anything that deserves yelling.”
“But I slashed Matthew. I did it on purpose.”
“He took two or three shots at you first.”
“But I shou
ldn’t have retaliated. I should have turned the other cheek.”
“Sometimes you run out of cheeks to turn, Dean. I understand that.”
“But I lost.”
“You lost because you’re still a kid, Dean. For some reason you think that because Matthew’s father saw it all and knew what was going on he was going to be fair. But the fact is, you slashed his kid. He’s not going to be fair. He told me his kid deserved it. He said that to my face. But it’s his kid. You can’t fight that kind of power structure. You shouldn’t fight it. You’ll lose every time.”
“So you are yelling at me.”
“I’m not yelling. I’m just pointing out that things aren’t always fair, and things are often loaded up in someone else’s favor, and when that happens, you have to decide how you’re going to handle it. I mean, what did you get? You got beat up and suspended for two games. Do you think Matthew got suspended? No. So you lost.”
“My mom didn’t lose, ” Dean says quickly.
Evan is taken off guard. So confident he was with his sociological assessment that he is nonplussed.
“I don’t know . . .” he stumbles.
“When she worked for the union, she fought and won, ” Dean challenges, sensing Evan’s confusion, pushing on.
“What union?”
“She was a lawyer for the Pickers and she beat the Growers down so hard they had to hire her just to stop her.”
“I didn’t know—”
“They used to slash her tires in the parking lot when we went out to dinner. One time they sent a guy to beat her up.”
“What? What did she do?”
“Mace.”
“Well—”
“I saw it. She sprayed him right in the face.”
“That’s—”
“If someone’s gonna try to bully me down, I’m gonna fight him. I’m gonna fight.”
“That’s okay, ” Evan says warily.“You just have to be careful.”
“Mom said there are some things you can’t let go. You can’t let them back you down. She never backed down.”
And now she’s dead, Evan thinks. Maybe the car accident was a fix. Maybe she was taken out by the Growers. No. Not even the best hit man in the world could orchestrate that. But maybe Tracy had become so used to trouble that she could find it wherever she went. Maybe that’s why it was her car that ended up face-to-face with that truck.
“I didn’t know your mother like you did, ” Evan says, “but if she was fighting for a cause, that’s one thing. You were playing hockey. It’s not worth fighting over a bad call in street hockey, Dean. Not when the referee is the other kid’s father.”
Dean sucks in his cheek and looks away.
“Yeah, ” he says.“That’s what my mom would have said.”
Inside, Evan gives himself a high five. Scored a goal on that one.
“Would she have said anything else? I don’t want to miss anything.”
“She would have told me the sport was too rough and that I was smaller than everyone else so I shouldn’t be playing it at all. Maybe I should try out for the swim team. Then I’d be competing against myself.”
“Really?”
“Probably.”
“Is it okay if I skip that part?”
“Yeah.”
They round the corner onto their street. Perfect timing.
EVAN WAITS UNTIL Dean is long asleep before he sneaks down the hallway and into Tracy’s office. He closes the door quietly and takes a moment to orient himself. The fold-out bed is against one wall, opposite a desk with a computer on it. Next to the desk is a large file cabinet, on which sits a printer/fax/copier/waffle iron. The sliding doors of the closet reveal winter clothes hanging in dry cleaner bags, winter boots on the floor, and file boxes on the shelf above.
Evan doesn’t know what he’s looking for. Clues, maybe. Evidence of a life lived. Something that will lead him somewhere, tell him something, show him a side of Tracy that he can use to solidify his burgeoning relationship with Dean.
He opens the file cabinet; her files are orderly. Her life is neatly chronicled in individual, alphabetized, color-coded folders. One by one, he removes them and examines their contents. He checks each piece of paper for clues, each invoice that is marked PAID with a little red stamp and a check number and date written in ballpoint pen, each mortgage statement, each brokerage report. He learns everything about her. Her mortgage originated two years ago: a five-year ARM. She has an investment portfolio with thirty-thousand dollars in it, half in mutual funds, a quarter in the money market, a quarter in stocks. (Why so much in the money market?) She has an IRA with eighteen-thousand dollars in it, a custodial account for Dean with five-thousand, probably planning ahead for college. There are bank statements, medical insurance bills, charitable giving—she gave a thousand dollars to a home for battered women, bought a hundred-dollar ticket to a Cancer Society fundraising dinner, donated $225 worth of old clothes and furniture to a church thrift shop.
He gives up on the file cabinet and turns to the closet. He takes down the banker’s boxes on the top shelf. They are filled with papers, files, literature, photos from trips to the Columbia River Gorge, tape recordings of lectures from college. (But not from Reed. From Central Washington University. Interesting . . .)
The desk drawers are crammed with paper-clips, pencils, envelopes, stationery, deposit slips, certified mail receipts from tax returns sent to Los Angeles half a decade ago, dried-up Sharpies, an old cell phone, emery boards with nail tracks on them, an old New York magazine that proudly proclaims “Where To Eat Now” on its cover, catalogs from a million different catalog stores, a transcript from high school, clear laser labels of different sizes, more boxes of staples, Post-its, a bottle of Scotch (from which Evan thinks hard about having a pull), a disposable camera with three exposures left . . .
. . . an old Rolodex.
He takes the Rolodex and flips through it. The cards are dog-eared and yellowed. He finds himself. He’s in there. She has his address listed as his parents’ house, but his parents’ phone number is crossed out and his apartment phone is written below it. Next to the number is a date: the month and year Evan moved into his grandfather’s apartment. He still finds it hard to believe that he owned the place for eight years before he finally wrestled free of his parents’ insistence that he live at home.
Who else? Other names, none of which he knows. SMITH, FRANK AND ELLEN. A Yakima address. A second card with their Walla Walla address. Interesting. SMITH, BRAD. COOS BAY, OREGON.
Coos Bay. So that’s where Brad is. Evan picks up the phone and calls Coos Bay Information. The woman gives him the same number that’s on the Rolodex. And then, before Evan knows it, the computer connects the number. And before Evan can stop it, the phone is ringing. He quickly glances at the clock. Two A. M. Welcome to the Thunderdome.
“This better be good, ” Brad answers. “I’ll count to three: one, two—”
“Evan Wallace.”
Long pause.
“Evan. What took you so long?”
“Screwing up my courage.”
“Ah, yeah, ” Brad groans. He’s sitting up in bed and rubbing his eyes, Evan can hear it.
“Coos Bay, ” Evan says.
“Coos Bay.”
“What are you doing in Coos Bay, Brad?”
“Why are you calling me at two A. M., Evan?”
“I asked first.”
The line goes dead. Evan was just joking around and he hangs up? Short enough fuse? He dials again.
“What do you want, Evan?”
“Sorry, I was just—”
“What do you want, Evan?”
“I want to know what happened, ” Evan says. He’s got the oracle on the phone, now he has to get the prophecy.
“You’re a smart kid, Evan, ” Brad says. “You know what happened. You tell me.”
“Tracy got pregnant. She had the baby. Your father moved you guys away. That’s all I know. That’s what happened.”
r /> Silence. As if Brad is waiting for more.“Okay, Evan, ” Brad finally chuckles, “if that’s the way you see it. Okay.”
“What, then?”
“Nothing, man. It is what it is. So why are you calling me, then?”
“I need to know about Tracy. I don’t know anything about her. What did she do? Who was she?”
“She was Tracy. That’s all. The thing about Tracy was that she was always Tracy. Nobody could ever make her be anyone else.”
“I don’t—”
“She was a lawyer, Evan. Is that what you want to know? She was a lawyer. After high school, she moved with my parents to Yakima. I left when they all moved. That was my chance; I took off. She moved with them. How could she not? She had a baby. After a couple of years of dealing with the kid, she went to college. CWU, in Ellensburg, not far from Yakima.”
“She wanted to go to Reed, ” Evan says.
“We all wanted to go to Reed, Evan. How many of us went?”
“So?”
“So after college she started working with single mothers in Yakima. She got really involved; she was a social worker for a year or two, until she got fed up with everything and got into law school at Washington State. She wanted to change the world. Our mother raised Dean while she was away. She came back, changed the world, did good things, everyone lived happily ever after. Right?”
“You skipped something, ” Evan says.
“What did I skip, Evan? Tell me.”
Evan thinks hard. There’s something wrong with the time line. She left high school. Took care of Dean for a couple of years. Went to college. Worked for a couple of years. Went to law school . . . That’s about eleven years. Dean is only fourteen years old. Dean hasn’t seen Frank for five years. At some point—
“Where’s the flaw, Evan? Tell me.”
“Dean hasn’t seen his grandparents for five years.”
“That’s good, Evan.”
“There’s not enough time for her to have finished law school while your parents were looking after Dean. She never could have finished.”
“You’re smart, Evan. That’s right. There was a small problem, wasn’t there?”
“What was it?”
“You tell me, ” Brad says.
“Frank, ” Evan says.
“What about Frank?”