August came and went. In the middle of September Price took a job as a bartender in a Manhattan hotel where he’d worked several off-seasons. But as the World Series approached, he became increasingly morose, and in the end he refused to watch. They spoke no more about marriage, and each seemed to fear that the other would bring the subject up, if only to clear the air. Their work schedules didn’t mesh and they spent fewer evenings together. At times Price seemed more interested in the boy.
In February he got a call from the Met organization. They wanted to know if he’d thought about the possibility of becoming an advance scout. He said he’d get back to them.
“Why not?” Anne said.
“Because I’ve got another year in me, maybe two. I wasn’t in shape last spring, thanks to all the screwing around. I’ll be ready this time. I feel good.”
He was running and was up to two hundred situps a day. There was blood on his shorts from the floor’s friction on his tailbone. He’d made some calls and two teams had promised him a look. “Jesus Christ,” somebody said. “I thought you’d hung it up.”
Then something happened. The morning before he was supposed to go to Florida, he came by early to take Anne out to breakfast. The “Today Show” was on, and Price stopped to watch a segment on spring training. A nice-looking young black boy, all of seventeen, was interviewed at length. Price watched it all, then suggested to hell with breakfast. They made love and right from the bed Price called the front office and accepted the scouting job.
Then he was gone. Perhaps because she didn’t see him for weeks at a time, Anne noticed the change each time he came home. He put on weight, especially in the face, and his hard, battlescarred body began to look soft. When he was in New York, he worked with Randall every day. The boy was determined to try out for Little League. He seemed not to have extraordinary talent, but Price said talent wasn’t the issue, was never the issue. One afternoon he brought Randall back to Anne’s apartment with a broken nose that had swollen so badly that his eyes were mere slits. Price himself was white-faced, but he pushed the boy roughly toward the sink. “Stop crying,” he said. “It was just a bad hop. Life is full of ’em.”
Anne wet a washcloth and gently bathed Randall’s bloddy chin and lips. Both eyes would blacken, that much she could tell. In a few minutes the boy was quiet, the pain reduced to throbbing numbness. Price poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down as if he would have gone right to the floor if the chair hadn’t been there. “What happened?” Anne said finally.
Price needed only to look at her to know that the question was an accusation. “Like I said, a bad hop.” He looked down at the linoleum.
“You hit it too hard,” Randall said dully.
“Is that what you’re going to tell the batter,” Price asked. “Don’t be a baby.”
The baseball lay on the table between them. Randall picked it up and hurled it as hard as he could. Though he was only ten years old, they were within six feet of each other and the ball caught Price below the cheekbone. The surprise sent him over backwards in the chair and onto the kitchen floor. He started to rub the throbbing spot on his cheek, then caught himself. Before Anne could get between them, Price, his face distorted, dragged the boy from where he sat and pounced, his knees pinning Randall to the kitchen tile. For an instant Anne thought he was actually going to hit the boy with his raised fist. But then the fist went to his cheek and he rolled off Randall as if someone had snatched him from behind. He crawled all the way to the corner on his hands and knees and began to sob. Randall stood up his hands clenched as if he expected another attack. Anne went to him, but he pushed her away. This was between him and Price, and the expression of hopeless defiance on the boy’s face terrified her—so black, so unconscious of pain, so unwilling to be consoled.
He never entirely lost that expression, it occurred to her. There was traffic now as she neared Albany, and the idea of driving all the way to New York for a fancy breakfast had lost most of its appeal. She turned off at the Northway Exit, then missed a turn that would have put her back on the Thruway heading home. To hell with it, she thought. The road she was on had to lead somewhere. They all went somewhere.
She had seen Price only once after the day he broke Randall’s nose. He’d gone back on the road the next day and never called. Someone told her a few months later that he wasn’t living in New York any more. In a way she had lost both of them at once. Randall had not wanted her to protect him, and even when the boy was healed, he never again encouraged her to hug or kiss him. She sometimes thought that perhaps he had seen her as a woman for the first time that day. Or as just a woman. Or maybe as the cause of it all, because she was a woman. He looked at her strangely, almost as if he had walked in and caught her and Price in the act of love. She didn’t think he stopped caring for her. He just seemed embarrassed to.
Two years later, she saw Price again. In the meantime Dan’s accident had occurred, and she used her father’s illness as an excuse to return to Mohawk. One Saturday afternoon shortly after her visit, she came home from work to find the television on and Randall slipping into his room. And there was Price. The show was “Speaking of Sports.” He looked trimmer than the last time she had seen him, and he acquitted himself well, far better than the other men, most of whom were clearly afraid of the camera. Price said some funny things, and when he laughed it was in response to the funny thing, not to himself for having said it. Anne was happy to see him again, so well, but was surprised to discover how little she’d missed him.
Now the rain was hard. The windshield wipers could hardly keep up, and Anne had no idea where she was. She was on two-lane black-top, and the occasional neon signs along either side advertised businesses that were dark and deserted. She could only guess that she was heading in the general direction of Mohawk. Finally the rain was so severe that she didn’t dare to stay on the road, so she pulled off into the half-deserted parking lot of a shabby motel. She sat there for nearly ten minutes, feeling odd and hopeless until she recognized this as the motel where she and Dan had come some twenty years before. There was a new sign out front, but she was certain. The road was busier then, and the buildings that lined it more prosperous. One needed no crystal ball to see into their future now. There were only twelve units, and when Anne could not remember which one she and Dan had taken she began to cry and couldn’t stop. When she awoke, though the light was gray in the east and she was very cold, Anne felt better. For some time she couldn’t shake the conviction that if she just sat there long enough, Dan would drive up, get out of the car—the same one he’d been driving twenty years ago—and take her by the hand. He would know which room was theirs, or perhaps it wouldn’t matter.
37
Officer Gaffney’s brother Rory lives in the last house on Division Street, a dead end on the other side of the highway. Technically he’s outside city limits, and Officer Gaffney isn’t supposed to take the cruiser into the county unless he’s in pursuit. Still, it’s only a matter of a few hundred yards and no one around to report him. So he drives on up the hill, switching the headlights and ignition off and coasting to a stop. A light’s on in the rear of the trailer.
The policeman closes the door quietly and puffs up the drive. Never trim, he has lately put on considerable weight, confident that no one will give him grief in his last year before retirement. He stops at the house to peer into the living room. His brother is stretched out on the Lazy Boy, watching television and wriggling his fat toes in the glow from the screen, the only light in the house. After catching his breath, the policeman takes the path through the trees to the trailer, making more noise than he’d like and cursing under his breath. The bedroom window curtain doesn’t quite reach the sill. Inside, the girl is fully clothed. The air tonight is chill, especially for late April. Officer Gaffney watches for a few minutes, hoping, then retraces his steps through the trees, fearful his brother will see the car and wonder.
Rory Gaffney looks up when his brother comes in but stays in
the Lazy Boy, apparently indifferent to company. The policeman, at fifty-nine, is nearly ten years his brother’s junior, but if anything looks older. “Thought I heard a car.”
Officer Gaffney flips on the black police band radio before sitting down. Nothing but static, and with luck he’ll get to relax an hour or so.
“Turn that down,” his brother says.
“I don’t want to miss anything,” the policeman says.
“Sit in the car and you won’t.”
Officer Gaffney gets up and turns the radio down, a little, then returns to his seat. They watch television for a while, neither man reacting to anything on the screen. “I like that show,” the policeman says when it’s over.
Rory Gaffney says, “Well?”
“He’s back,”
“That’s what I heard.”
“Harry give him a job at the grill washing dishes.”
Rory Gaffney’s eyes grow small, but he says nothing.
“Got this big new machine, Harry does. Showed me today.”
“Then what’s he need with my boy?”
“Takes somebody to stack the dishes and push the buttons. Harry figures Billy can handle that much. I bet he can, too.”
“It ever occur to Harry maybe I could use some help around here?”
Officer Gaffney finds himself stumped. “That girl’s husband ever come home?”
Rory Gaffney looks at his brother until he gets up and turns off the police band. It’s time the policeman returned to work anyway. It occurs to him that the girl’s husband must be a crazy son-of-a-bitch to run off, but something stops him from saying so. He himself has never married, and lately he has begun to wish he had. Maybe he’d have been a better husband and father than the ones he ends up chauffeuring home after the bars close. He’d have treated a wife right, and the kids too. He didn’t blame his brother’s wife for taking off. There was a time when he’d also felt like it, and Rory was only his brother. Sometimes, he still felt like running away, but there was nowhere to go. “Harry’ll be good to him,” he ventures. “Harry likes him.”
His brother switches off the set with the remote control, leaving them in the dark. “You got something on your mind, Walt?”
“Me?” His voice in the dark sounds strange. A couple seconds of silence and he can’t stand it any more. “I just figure you should leave the boy alone, that’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“Yeah, that’s about it.”
Officer Gaffney backs out and closes the door. He’s been afraid of his brother all his life. He wishes he weren’t, but after so many years, there doesn’t seem to be anything he can do about it. Inside the trailer, the girl is now wearing a robe and has a towel wrapped around her head like a turban. Though the cold has grown even sharper, Officer Gaffney, crouching outside the trailer, begins to sweat. From the direction of the house comes a sound and he backs deeper into the shadows. Heavy footsteps approach through last fall’s brittle leaves. The policeman is about to stand and face his brother, admit his transgression and beg forgiveness, when Rory Gaffney knocks on the door. Inside the girl gathers her loose terrycloth robe tight to her chest. She leaves the bedroom, but he can still see her down the hallway and her voice is audible through the thin trailer walls. His brother’s low voice is lost in the outside air. “I’m fine,” she’s saying. “You go on home.”
His brother says something.
“It’s locked,” the girl says. “And that’s the way it’s staying.”
The trailer jiggles.
“You’re gonna wake the baby.”
Officer Gaffney feels weak and sits down on the cold ground. For a long time he stares at nothing, and comes out of it only when the door up at the house slams shut. Again the woods are still. He gets to his feet with exaggerated caution, as quietly as he can. The girl has taken off the terricloth robe. She is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen and he is crying quietly, wanting to tell her so. He watches the girl brush her long straight hair in front of the small dresser mirror. He would like to believe in reincarnation, would like to live all over again.
The wind changes direction, and the policeman hears the car radio crackling angrily way down the road. Friday night in Mohawk.
38
Summer had never been Mrs. Grouse’s favorite season. Though she never complained, the heat made her flushed and irritable. Even as a child she couldn’t understand summer’s appeal. In mid-July, tar shimmering on the roads, her mother would add to the pulsing heat with oven-cooked dinners. The kitchen would throb and glow red while Mrs. Grouse wondered if it might not be the center of all the world’s heat. The kitchen could not contain it all, and the upstairs bedroom where she and two of her sisters slept would remain stifling, undisturbed by any cooling breeze, until well after midnight. Mrs. Grouse’s mother was not the kind of woman to surrender to weather; in fact, she taught her daughters that the righteous surrendered to God alone. And so, in the middle of August when the mercury climbed into the nineties and dogs fought viciously in the dust—and did worse than fighting, the hair standing straight up on the backs of their necks—her mother’s oven would give birth to steaming casseroles.
Mrs. Grouse always remembered her mother fondly, especially since that good woman’s final righteous surrender, and constantly wished she had been able to impress her mother’s virtues on her own daughter Anne, whose habits of premature surrender were, to a woman like Mrs. Grouse, alarming. During the summer, Anne simply refused to cook a real meal, subsisting on salads and fruit. Mrs. Grouse failed to see how a person could give so much ground and still have the necessary strength to wage life’s urgent battles.
Summer was full of horrors. Mrs. Grouse hated everything that crawled or flew. For a woman in her seventies, she was lethal with a flyswatter and her vigilance, where summer’s insects were concerned, unsurpassed. Every spring, when the markets ran specials on Raid, Mrs. Grouse bought a brace of large cans, and soaked the baseboards daily. Consequently Anne refused to enter the downstairs flat unless all the windows were thrown open, an inference Mrs. Grouse resented deeply.
One afternoon in late June, Mrs. Grouse was sweeping the front porch when she noticed something that greatly attracted her interest. For two days it had rained, and the narrow strip of lawn between the house and the sidewalk was moist and green. When Mrs. Grouse examined it closely, however, she noticed thousands of small holes, as if some demented child with a pointed stick had spent the entire night systematically poking the ground until it was uniformly perforated. That’s what they were, all right. Holes. She was on her hands and knees studying them when Mr. Murphy, who lived two doors down, discovered her. “Nightcrawlers,” he said, peering over his spectacles.
Mrs. Grouse frowned up at him.
“Rain brings them up,” he explained. “Worms.”
39
There is a new sign above the Mohawk Grill. It is much larger than the old one and this, the new, sports fancy calligraphy. The Grotto, it reads. Beneath, in smaller script, Beverly and Harold Saunders, Your Hosts. The lunch counter hasn’t changed, except that the cash register has been moved near the front door, where it is guarded by Harry’s wife, who has the reddest hair Officer Gaffney has ever seen. She reminds him of a bulldog that suspects you have a bone—its bone. A redheaded bulldog.
The policeman has never been in the new restaurant, which is separate from the old room and dimly lit. He prefers the lunch counter, where the lighting is good and men can talk to one another over the tops of their racing forms, should they feel the need. Next door is mostly for women who like to eat salads in what the redhead calls “an intimate setting.” The girl is a waitress in the next room, but she’s in and out of the grill to pick up orders. When she leans in front of him, Officer Gaffney can smell her and see the outline of her brassiere through the fabric of her uniform. Some days she doesn’t even wear a brassiere, and he then feels a hollow longing that makes him reconsider his life and wonder about many things. Sometimes he
even envies Harry, who at least has The Bulldog.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he says when the girl comes over to collect a burger and side order of fries. He tries to make the “sweetheart” sound casual; after all, they’re related. But somehow he always sounds a little like a beggar. “How’s the little one?”—though he knows the baby is fine, remembers it tugging at her breast. “Hear from that no-’count of yours?”
But she’s gone again. If the girl was aware of him, she didn’t think him important enough to answer. Or perhaps she’s just too busy. Officer Gaffney orders a hamburger deluxe, and tells Harry to hold the onions. “Two more weeks, Harry,” he observes. “Don’t seem possible.”
John, the lawyer, seated two stools down, looks up from his soup. “Somebody’ll steal the traffic light for sure.”
“You figure you’ll write your memoirs, Gaff?” somebody says. “Like the Blue Knight?”
“The Blue Whale,” someone suggests.
The lawyer’s smiling. “You figure you’ll get out of shape with nothing to do?”
“I’ll have plenty to do,” the policeman says. “Don’t you worry about me.”
“I won’t, Gaff,” the lawyer says.
“Like what?” somebody calls from the end of the counter.
“Like plenty.”
“You could drive the getaway car for your brother,” John says.
“Or for you,” Harry observes.
“No tip today,” John says, “Harold.”
“Today, my ass,” snaps Harry, alias Harold Your Host.
“Har-ry!” scolds The Bulldog from the cash register.
“Yeah, Harold,” John says. “I’m shocked.”
“Kiss my—”
“Har-ry?”
The door to the kitchen swings open and the Younger boy emerges. He draws two cokes and disappears with them. Officer Gaffney catches a glimpse of Wild Bill stacking glasses in a green plastic tray on the stainless steel Hobart runway. To keep from thinking, he says, “You ought to have that kid wear a hair net or something.”
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