“I don’t believe you.”
“It goes: ‘Dear Gipper, I liked that film you and Errol Flynn played Nazis in. I was one myself. I’d like to get together with you and have a chat about the Russians and those UFOs that have been flying around the White House.’”
“You did that?”
“The feds will go through his life with a garden rake. And wait till he tries to explain some of the phone calls he made today.”
“You really did that?”
“You don’t need to believe me, Amanda. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing Klaus around New Iberia for a while. In the meantime your mainline daddy’s meter is running.”
I slipped my arms under her cowboy shirt, up her back, and leaned my face close to hers. Her blue eyes, like a schoolgirl’s, looked unblinkingly into mine. Then I felt her slender fingers slide across my shoulders and rest on my neck.
We made love on the bed, on the floor, in the porch hammock behind the bamboo shades while the rain sluiced off the roof and danced on the bayou. I started to go to the icebox for the Cold Duck.
“Don’t you dare move, you bad ole alligator man,” she said.
And I lay with my head on her breast, her heart beating under the tattooed flag of my reclaimed country.
TAKING A SECOND LOOK
He looked out the bar window at the lighted baseball diamond in the park across the street while he waited for the bartender to bring him another manhattan. He didn’t know if it was the alcohol working in his head or his present mood of reverie that made him see for the first time the similarity between this baseball field and Cherryhurst Park, where he had played ball as a boy in Fort Worth. Just a minute ago he had been telling the bartender about the Cheerio and Duncan yo-yo contests that were held on street corners all over the country during the 1940s. He hadn’t thought about them in years. Why now? The bartender was old enough to remember them but said he didn’t. However, that wasn’t surprising. Few people today invested much in memory.
In fact, he often felt that he was the only person he knew who cared about remembering things. It was a self-indulgent attitude, he realized, but then again sometimes there were instances when he truly knew that he was an anachronism, alone, and surrounded by people who had no conception of history, even the most casual form of it. That afternoon at the English department meeting he had done a stupid thing: broken his own rule, yielded to his vitriol, confusing the younger members of the faculty and boring the others. The discussion had gone on interminably about “meeting the needs of the community” until finally he had said, “The people who would let the community plan a college curriculum probably would also think that the finest form of government in world history was the French general assembly under Robespierre.”
Then he had left the meeting early and had gone to the bar, disgusted with his cynical vanity. The bar was his Friday-afternoon place, but it was no longer afternoon and he had been there two other nights during the week, each time sifting out his anger and discontent, chasing each thought down like a snapping dog that he had to bludgeon to death. Yet he wondered if his unhappiness with his job at the city college, his tilting with the educational behaviorists and the administration, wasn’t just a means to avoid the feeling of loss that would overcome him suddenly and leave him so weak that he couldn’t put sentences together, focus on the change of a light at an intersection, or remember what he was reading on an examination paper.
He had devised several ways of disguising or explaining those moments when they happened in front of other people, but sometimes the numbness was so thick, so devastating to his mind, that he didn’t care whether he appeared the fool or not. His son had been killed at Khe Sanh three years ago, and although he knew that his loss was not unique, the grief that it brought seemed to be, because it did not obey its own nature and cauterize itself with time, and he was not sure that it ever would. He thought possibly he had come to understand the axiom You just live with it. Yes, he thought, you don’t confront and overcome it; you don’t accept it stoically; you just carry it around like a tumor and ignore the black lines that spread along the veins.
“Oh, here, Doc, I’ll fix you another one. I shouldn’t have set the glass so close to the edge,” the bartender said.
“That’s all right, Harold. I’ll take you up on it the next time in.”
He left the bar and cut across the park toward his apartment building. The field lights were off now, but the moon was full over the mountains, and the rounded details of the ball diamond had the soft half-lighted quality of memory. It was just like Cherryhurst Park: the chicken-wire backstop, the thin infield grass, the wood bleachers that were weathered gray and sagging in the center. The trees on the edge of the field were elms and maples instead of pin oaks, but the dusty black-green leaves moved with the same summer breeze, made the same cove of shadow where high school girls once waited to be held and kissed after a game.
He tapped the leather sole of his shoe on home plate, then began running toward first base, his necktie and starched collar like a metal band around his throat. He pivoted on the bag and turned away from the infield, breathing deeply and pulling off his coat. That was a single, he thought. Now for the steal against an overconfident left-handed pitcher. He led off the bag, one arm pointed deceptively back to it, then dug out for second, his head low, his thighs pumping, while the ball sped from the catcher’s extended-crouch throw and came in too high for the tag. He stood up from the slide in an explosion of dust and headed for third. The infield was in a panic and the throw to the third baseman was in the dirt. He never slowed down. He rounded the bag, the coach’s arm swinging in a circle in the corner of his vision, and sprinted for home. Why not? Jackie Robinson had done it and won the pennant. His leather sole clacked across the rubber plate, and he collided into the chicken-wire backstop, his chest heaving, his head thundering with whiskey and his own blood.
His heart was clicking inside him and his breath rasped uncontrollably in his throat as he walked over to pick up his coat. He thought he was going to throw up. His pants knee was torn, and he flinched when he touched the dirty red scrape through the cloth. He wondered if forty-six was a sufficient age for one to pare away the confines of reason from his life.
The next morning he made breakfast, which he had enjoyed doing on Saturday mornings even when he was married, and put on a pair of old slacks, a sweatshirt, and his tennis shoes, and headed for the park. The spring weather was wonderful. The mountains were blue west of town and the air was clear and bright and every detail of the park seemed etched in the sunlight. He jogged around the circumference of the park, breaking his stride when he went through the trees by the ball diamond, and watched a junior high team in gold-and-green shirts taking batting practice. His wind wasn’t as bad as he had thought it would be. He made two laps before he had to sit for a moment on the bleachers, the sweat drying on his face in the cool air. Then he started around the backstop again, increasing his speed all the way around the park until finally each breath came like a sliver of glass in the lungs and he had to walk with his head held back as though he had a bloody nose. But that’s all right, he thought. Each gasp is a piece of smoke gone from the chest and some measure of converted alcohol out of the liver and brain. In two weeks it could all be gone. Why not? The body of his youth was buried in him somewhere. It was only a matter of burning away the softness until he found it.
He sat on the grass behind third base and watched the batting practice. The kids on the team were Mexican, black, and working-class white, and they talked and played rough and broke up double plays with elbows and knees. Pete Rose wouldn’t have anything on this bunch, he thought. When the regular pitcher went in to take his turn at bat, a crippled boy took his place on the mound. The boy’s left leg was wasted as though he had had polio, and although he had a strong arm he threw flat-footed from the rubber like an infielder. Come over with your arm and put your weight into it, the professor thought. Get it down, too. Don’t float them by the
letters. Oh, good Lord, duck!
The batter crashed a high outside pitch behind the first-base line and made the professor tumble over backward in the grass. As he sat up laughing he saw a police car pull to the curb under the shade of an elm tree. An enormous policeman in sunglasses, with a freshly lit cigar, filled the driver’s window.
With no warning the first baseman casually turned toward the squad car, shot the finger, and said, “Hey, Pork Butt. Stuff this.”
The policeman opened the door and raised his massive weight out of the car. The butt of his revolver and the brass bullets on his belt glinted in the sun as he walked toward the diamond. The first baseman had turned back to the game and was hitting his glove as though nothing had happened.
“Get your ass in the car, Gomez.”
“I’m busy.”
“You’ll either get your ass in the car or I’ll put it in there with my foot.”
“You’re just going to look like a dumb shit running in a kid again.”
“That’s it.” The policeman pulled the boy off his feet by his arm and walked him to the car as though he were a crippled bird. He closed the back door on him, made a call on his radio, and then turned out into the traffic.
“What’s he going to do with him?” the professor said to the boy who had walked over to play first.
“Take him down to juvie and call his old man so he’ll get a whipping.”
“Why did he shoot the cop the finger?”
“Everybody gives Pork Butt the finger. He’s a turd. He runs in guys all the time.”
Twenty minutes later the policeman drove down the street again, alone, and parked in the same shady spot under the elm. On the window rested a fat arm with a cigar between two thick fingers. His mouth was partly opened, but because of the dark green sunglasses the professor couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not. Incredible, he thought, a grown man investing his day in monitoring the public morality of fifteen-year-olds. Ah, there’s nothing like the moral vision of a nation that can send a whole generation to Vietnam and then worry about an upraised middle finger.
He crossed the street to the hardware store and bought an ice pick with a cork stuck on the tip. He put the ice pick in his pocket and walked down the street toward the park house, then circled back through the trees and approached the police car.
“Excuse me, Officer. The rec director in the park house is having trouble with a kid and would like for you to walk over there.”
“Is it a big colored kid?”
“I think so.”
“All right.” The policeman put on his cap and walked across the diamond toward the park house, oblivious to the pitch he interrupted.
The professor sat on the curb by the squad car’s front tire, unscrewed the valve cap, and picked up a rock from the gutter. He inserted the ice pick into the valve and hammered the point deep into the tire. The kids on the diamond had stopped playing and were staring at his back, dumbfounded. The air rushed out instantly. How’s that for meeting community need, he thought, and rose to his feet, the wind cool on his face, his mouth grinning in the roar of applause from the field. Then he jogged with a high step down the tree-shaded sidewalk toward his apartment building.
. . .
The boys were playing a practice game when he went back to the park the next morning and began his laps. As he jogged through the trees behind the backstop, he saw the crippled boy sitting alone in the bleachers, his fielder’s glove strapped through his belt.
“Why aren’t you playing?” the professor said.
“I just play in the work-up games and help out at batting practice.” The boy looked away from the professor when he spoke. Then he smiled. “Say, that was great yesterday. You should have seen Pork Butt when he saw his tire. I thought he was going to brown his pants. Then he broke a lug off trying to change the tire. When he left we all gave him the bird.”
“Forget about that. Let’s talk about pitching. You’ve got a good arm, but you’re not using your leg right.”
“Oh yeah. What am I supposed to do with it?”
“You’ve got a bad leg there, so you don’t pretend it’s a good one. You take what’s wrong with it and make it work for you. See, a pitcher’s left leg isn’t good for anything except weight. You throw it out in front of you, and then bring your arm and hip over with your delivery. Let me tell you about a guy who used to pitch in the old Texas League when I was a kid. His name was Monty Stratton, and he threw nothing but gas, then he went rabbit hunting one day and blew his left leg off with a shotgun. So he was finished, right? Well, wrong, because he learned to pitch with an artificial leg, throwing it out in front of him and swinging his weight around with his arm.”
“What happened to this guy?”
“He had to hang it up eventually, but not before he went to the Dixie Series. My point is that the best thing on a pitcher’s side is his intelligence. He knows what pitch he’s going to throw and the batter doesn’t. So you give them the whole buffet: curves, sliders, fastballs, spitters, inshoots, and then a forkball at the head in the interest of batter humility.”
“Why don’t you get your glove and play with us?”
“I don’t have one.” The professor formed a pocket of air in his jaw and looked at the diamond. “But I’m going to get one. I’ll be back before the inning is over.”
But the sporting-goods store on the corner was closed Sundays, and he had to jog almost a mile to the shopping center to find a store that sold gloves. He bought a catcher’s mitt and a fielder’s glove, a green-and-gold cap, a ball in a cardboard box, and a can of Neatsfoot oil. He wore the cap low over his eyes as he jogged back to the park. Tonight he would fold the crown down into a crease and cup the bill with tape to give the cap the only proper shape for a ballplayer. There were a lot of things he could teach the boys. For example, it was no accident that Sandy Koufax didn’t shave before he pitched and wore his cap darkly on his brow. And what oil and pocket shape meant to a glove and a fielder’s ability with it. Tonight he would work the oil deep into the leather and then fold the fingers and thumb over the ball and tie them down with thick twine. There were all the illegal things he could teach the boys, too: how to hide Vaseline under the belt buckle or the bill of the cap, wetting down the ball with a sponge the second baseman kept inside his perforated glove, blocking the bag with a folded knee that left the runner senseless.
When he got back to the park the boys were gone and the diamond was startlingly empty, as though it had been vacated by elves in a dream. He sat for a half hour in the empty bleachers, watching the dust blow in the wind, and then walked home just as the rain broke over the mountains.
But at three-thirty the next afternoon they were back, whipping the ball around the diamond, their faces electric with energy in the spring air. These boys weren’t made for schoolrooms, he thought, or leather shoes when the days turned warm or new clothes still stiff from the box. They were intended for wash-faded blue jeans and dusty elbows and knees and hands grimed with rosin from the bat. They were heroic in a way that no school could teach them to be. The catcher stole the ball out from under the batter’s swing, the third baseman played so far in on the grass that a line drive would take his head off, the base runners sanded their faces off on a slide.
He crouched on his knees in the bullpen and caught for the crippled boy. Every third or fourth pitch he reminded the boy to throw his leg out and come over with his arm, and after a half hour he had the boy burning them into the mitt, one delivery after another, hard, low, and inside.
“Those are real smokers, partner,” the professor said. “And now we’re going to teach you the change of pace. All you got to do is hold it in the back of your palm and pull the string on it and you’ll make a batter’s scrotum come out his mouth.”
“You really think I’ll get good enough to start in a game?”
“You’re good enough now, pal.”
When the boy’s arm tired they joined a pepper game, and the professor bunted the
ball across the grass to a row of five boys, all of whom knew him only as the guy who had flattened Pork Butt’s tire. As he threw the ball up and knocked it shorthanded into a fielder’s glove, he felt a pleasure that he hadn’t known in years. What was more natural, he thought, than playing baseball with boys?
But what was more unnatural, he also thought, than his Tuesday-morning general-literature class? The students had changed and he didn’t understand them anymore. Or maybe the problem was that there wasn’t much out there to understand. They were bored with the material, bored with him, bored with themselves. If they had a common facial expression, it was a remoteness in the eyes and a yawn that not even the apocalypse could disturb. They wanted to be court reporters, cops, and computer programmers, but few of them could explain why. On some mornings when it was obvious that no one had read the material, he tried to talk about other things: trout fishing, baseball, folk music, clean air, mental health. But there was no way to violate that encompassing yawn.
On this morning he was discussing “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” He wanted to be fair to Tennyson, but this particular poem always bothered him because its content had nothing to do with the reality of war, and it was this kind of romantic blather that replaced memory and provided the delusions that the manipulators used so well. But he contained his feelings and simply said, “Tennyson was a great craftsman, and actually a great poet, but the sentiment in this poem is what made some critics accuse him of intellectual poverty.”
Then the hand went up from one of the three boys in class who wore ROTC uniforms.
“If he was a great poet, how could he be intellectually poor at the same time?” the boy said.
“Sometimes Tennyson wrote for newspaper publication, and he didn’t invest a lot of thought in what he said.”
“What is intellectually poor about this poem?”
“Namely that there’s nothing grand in sending hundreds of men to die in an artillery barrage.”