Home of the Braves

by David Klass

  Dining room. Oak table-and-chair set that had been around longer than I had. My mother had eaten meals with my father at this table when they were a happy couple, back before recorded history. Even the grease stains in the wood bespoke a lack of manners, a growing disorder, a mounting chaos.

  Up the stairs. Second-floor hallway. One bulb. Just enough light to distort faded patterns on yellowing wallpaper.

  My bedroom. Sports trophies that mocked the defeated soccer team captain from their high shelves. A stereo and lots of CDs. Two of them from Kris—presents from last Christmas. Classical. Piano concertos. “I thought it was time you listened to something that actually sounds nice.” Gifts from a friend? Teasing? Harmless banter? Flirting?

  My computer. Send her an e-mail? And say what? “Don’t trust the Phenom. He’s a jerk. Even though I don’t know him, I know that. Trust what you know, Kris. Be home. Be in bed. Be safe. Be mine.”

  Fish tanks along one wall. More than a dozen of them. Big ones, small ones. Freshwater and saltwater tanks. Tropical fish. Common fish. Angelfish. Red-tailed black sharks. I like the way they slide through water, as easily as we move through air; the way their eyes look back at you when you turn down the lights, and you can imagine them thinking that your room is part of their pond or lake or ocean. On this night all those fish seemed to watch me as I paced, to stare at me in my misery, to mock me because I was as trapped as they were.

  Hidden things in my small bedroom. A few Playboy and Penthouse magazines. Why had I bothered to hide them? Dad would probably just have laughed. Which is, of course, why they were hidden. Cigarettes. Unsmoked because I was always in training. Truth be told, I wouldn’t have wanted to smoke them. I just liked having them because I wasn’t supposed to. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Swiped from a liquor store on a dare. My one and only experience with shoplifting. Hidden away, not because it was a bottle of liquor, but because I was ashamed I had stolen it.

  A photo of Mom, wrapped in a piece of cloth.

  Why was it necessary to hide a photo of my own mother with contraband and assorted items of shame? It was a tough question that I could answer only with other questions. Was it because I knew it would hurt Dad to see that I cherished a photo of the woman who had left him? Was I concerned that if I displayed the photo openly, on my desk or night table, I would have to look at her all the time, and she would be looking back at me? And if we established that level of intimacy through daily eye contact, was I worried that I couldn’t keep myself from thinking about her, and why she wasn’t around? Mom was a secret, infuriating, gnawing presence in my life, so it felt like the right thing to stash her away at the bottom of a drawer with cigarettes and dirty magazines, and other items I was ashamed to possess but reluctant to throw away.

  I unwrapped the cloth. She must have been twenty-three when this image was frozen in time. Just before they got married. Photo taken at the beach. Probably the Jersey shore. Boardwalk in the background. Seaside Heights, if I had to hazard a guess. Beautiful young woman. Amazing body displayed by tiny bikini bathing suit. Dad has always been good with the ladies, and this was the one he tried to keep. Jet black hair and eyes. Mischievous, sophisticated European smile. What was a lady like her doing with my father in Seaside Heights? Slumming?

  Mom. Wrap her up. Hide her away.

  Back down stairs—two at a time.

  Basement. I had built a little workout room down there. Chin-up bar. I did ten. Good for the upper body. Great for the back. Perfect form. Didn’t help. Curling bar. Did twenty curls, sideways to the mirror, back straight, isolating the biceps. Upper arms pumping like pistons. Didn’t help.

  Phone. I ignored it. One good thing about phones—you don’t have to answer them. It stopped ringing. Then it rang again. I didn’t answer it. Another good thing about phones is that even if some persistent jerk calls you back, you still don’t have to give in to him. You are the one in control. Then it rang a third time. I picked it up. “Yeah?”

  “Didn’t anyone ever teach you to say ‘Hello’ or ‘Brickman residence’?” It was Ed the Mouse.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone. You sound weird.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You stuck on ‘yeah’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, it was just a stupid soccer game.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen, Joe, no offense, but I’ve had better conversations with a hair dryer.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “So, what are you up to tonight?”

  “Just … watching some sports,” I mumbled.

  “You sound like you need some fun. Charley the Fish and I are gonna climb the fence and play a little night golf. Why don’t you come with?”

  The only golf course in Lawndale is private, and they lock the gates when the sun goes down. But, for years, kids from the high school have been scaling the fence after hours and hanging out in the lush fairways. Drinking and partying in the shadowy sand traps. This will give you an idea about Lawndale—the golf course at night is the most romantic and mysterious spot within town limits.

  Night golf was a relatively new innovation. Ed the Mouse’s father is a research chemist, and Ed has picked up a lot of knowledge from him, not to mention access to chemicals. About a year ago, Ed came up with a treatment that would make regular golf balls highly fluorescent, so they glowed bright orange in the dark. Ever since then, once a week or so, a bunch of us would scale the fence with a dozen balls, and try to play as far as we could before we lost them all.

  Sometimes we didn’t finish a single hole. Once we almost made it all the way around. We had two precious balls left, at the seventeenth tee, when Charley Geller, our team’s goalie, drove both of them into the lake, one after the other, splash, splash. Same spot. We picked Charley up and threw him in the lake after the balls.

  That’s how he became Charley the Fish.

  “Can’t do it,” I told the Mouse.

  “Why?”

  “Sore from the game.”

  “Since when has that stopped you?”

  “Can’t move.”

  “Brickhead, what gives?”

  Of course, my name is Brickman, not Brickhead, but the Mouse was taking liberties based on years of friendship.

  “Have a good time,” I told him. “I have to take care of some things.”

  “What things? What are you … ?”

  “Bye.” I hung up. But of course there were no things to take care of.

  So I paced.

  Kris’s house was directly across the street. I could see a light on downstairs. Probably her parents reading and listening to music. Their house was full of books, and they always seemed to be going off to concerts and recitals in New York at places like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. Kris played first flute in our school band, and she’d also been taking piano lessons for as long as I could remember. Recently she’d taken up guitar.

  And she sang. Pop. Folk. Country. You name it, she’d try to sing it. Even opera. Sometimes, on warm summer nights, I cracked open my window and could hear her singing as she sat on her second-floor balcony and played her guitar past midnight.

  I’ll be honest. Kristine didn’t have the best voice in the world. But there were a lot worse ways to fall asleep on a sweltering Jersey night than listening to her sing.

  She wasn’t singing now.

  Now the street was dark and quiet.

  The best view of Kris’s room was from the roof above my dad’s bedroom. I turned out the lights so she wouldn’t see me if she was home, opened the window in Dad’s bedroom, reached up for the edge of the roof, and slowly pulled my body up. Seconds later I was standing on the roof. Unobstructed view. Kris’s room looked dark. The shade was down almost all the way. Either she was asleep or downstairs with her parents. Or, the final possibility, she was out and about.

  A Saturday night. A pretty girl. A Phenom with a nifty car.

  By about ten o’clock I couldn’t take it
anymore. I was pumped from all the lifting, wound up like an alarm clock from all the pacing.

  Ready to go off.

  Ready to explode!

  My house was a cage that could no longer hold me. I burst out, through the back door, and began to run.

  6

  It’s better to run than to pace.

  I flew down the long hill from my home toward the center of Lawndale, the stiffening night wind blowing around me, quick breaths rasping in and out of my lungs, my legs churning. Every time I felt like slowing down I speeded up, harnessing gravity, using the steepness of the incline to shoot myself forward.

  Lawndale is a quiet town, and even on a Saturday night many adults go to bed before ten o’clock. I raced past dark houses where all signs of life had already been extinguished, TVs switched off, front and back doors locked, owners upstairs in their warm beds, reading books as their eyelids got heavy, putting down cups of tea on night tables, switching off bedside lamps, dreaming their safe, suburban dreams.

  Most of the time I liked living in Lawndale. It was a safe, healthy place to grow up. But on this night, as I raced along, it seemed insufferable, boring, small, and confining. The whole town felt like a trap, on a larger scale than the house I had just escaped from.

  An empty bench hunched in front of the bus stop on the corner of Broad Avenue—every hour a bus would pass by here, offering a forty-minute ride over the Palisades cliffs and across the Hudson River to Manhattan. I had taken that bus many times, with my dad, or with groups of friends, going into the city for a Yankee or Knick game, or a meal, or to buy something you couldn’t get in Lawndale, or just to be there.

  On a Saturday night like this, Times Square and the theater district would be hopping—thousands of people out and about, juiced up on noise and neon, living life to the fullest. Tourists from all over the world calling to one another in twenty different languages, trying desperately to keep family members close. Packs of young guys and girls hanging out, prowling Broadway for action, flirting and laughing and hurling curses at cabdrivers who considered red lights to be invitations to screech around corners. Old elegant couples and hip young lovers arm in arm, leaving Broadway plays for late night suppers.

  And here I was, less than twenty miles from all that excitement, and the main street of Lawndale was as quiet and empty as a leafy path through an old graveyard. I hurdled the empty bus stop bench and turned right on Broad Avenue. A dog barked at me and I barked back. It was six blocks to the center of town. I broke into a full sprint.

  Five, four, three, two, one.

  I raced past the Empress Theater, where my father and Dianne Hutchings were no doubt sitting side by side, sharing a large popcorn and watching some stupid action movie. What could she see in him? He was almost twice her age, full of bad jokes on the surface and bitterness down deep over what my mom had done to him nearly two decades ago. Was there really such a shortage of stable, solvent men in the world? Did Dad have some charm that I couldn’t discern? Or did Dianne just want to get her car washed for free for a while?

  The center of Lawndale wasn’t exactly Times Square, but at least there were people visible. Two bars were open less than a block apart. These were not “happening” night clubs with live music and beautiful people sipping exotic drinks and exchanging smart banter. These were sad little Jersey bars, where regulars sat on their appointed stools downing their customary drinks, a TV on a shelf above the bar playing ball games without sound, a pool table with rutted felt in the corner by the rest rooms and the back door.

  A bunch of twelve- and thirteen-year-old punk wannabes were hanging out by the 7-Eleven. They spotted me run past, and one of them called out something that was swallowed by the night wind. I didn’t have to hear him to know that he was asking me to buy him beer.

  At the financial hub of Lawndale, two branches of different banks glared at each other across the main street, in head-to-head competition for Lawndale’s inhabitants’ hard-earned bucks. A travel agency and a funeral home stood side by side, capable of accommodating short-term or permanent trips. Mario’s Brick Oven Pizza was still open for business, selling slices from the pies Mario baked for lunch and piled beneath the counter. By now the crust would have hardened, the cheese congealed, but two minutes in that brick oven would make them eatable once more.

  I passed the grocery where I had worked for two summers as a bagger. Bagging groceries is one of the few jobs that’s even more mindless than drying cars in a car wash. The drugstore that had sponsored my Little League team proudly displayed half a dozen large trophies in the window. Lawndale Hardware didn’t have any trophies to show off, but it did have a window display of rakes, with a few colored paper leaves scattered around for artistic effect. Soon they would be replaced by snow shovels and fake snowflakes.

  And that was it. The sights of Lawndale.

  Four blocks of stores and shops.

  No sign of Dad. No sign of Dianne Hutchings.

  No sign of a blue Mustang with a Phenom behind the wheel and a cute girl with sandy brown hair mesmerized by his blue eyes.

  Now I was moving away from the hub, toward dark and open spaces. I ran past the American Legion post and Memorial Park with its statue memorializing Lawndale’s war dead going back all the way to the American Revolution. This was an old town, and there were families here living in three-hundred-year-old houses their ancestors had built. I passed the high school. The athletic fields were well-known nighttime makeout spots, but they were empty. Either people were not in a loving mood on this autumn night, or they were being discreet.

  As the houses became farther and farther apart, I speeded up, racing through the silent darkness. Every fifty feet or so I would reach a pool of light spilling down from a streetlight, dive through the golden glow with quick strides, and within ten steps the light would dwindle behind me and the blackness would take hold again.

  Memories of Kristine. At a concert in Memorial Park, just last summer. I am sitting on the grass. Watching her walk forward in a light cotton dress to play a solo. It’s mid-July and the temperature has been hovering above a hundred all day, and now the night wind gusts around her, picks up her long hair and blows it across her face so that she has to brush it back. Just as she starts to play there is a rumble of thunder, and then a flash of lightning, and then the deluge begins. It is as if a spigot has been opened right above the concert. Rain comes down in sheets, hitting the dry earth with enough force to make a hissing sound. All around me parents gather up blankets and stray children and run to find shelter.

  Kris goes on playing, and I go on watching.

  Her fingers fly across the golden flute, but the thunder and the rain soon drown out her music. Her cotton summer dress is slicked down by the torrential rain so that it clings to the curves of her body.

  Lightning flashes out over the roof of the American Legion post and seems to touch the war memorial. The bronze soldiers come to life for a moment—they appear to be leading a retreat. The grassy park empties out at double march. The other musicians decide enough is enough and walk quickly out of the band shell, heading for shelter. BOOM, thunder rips, so loud the sky seems in danger of cracking open. The arc lights go out. The spotlight goes off. And still Kris goes on playing, and I can see her bathed in moonlight and strobed by lightning.

  She finishes her piece. Takes the flute from her lips. And only then does she look around at the dark and empty field where two hundred music fans sat just a few minutes ago. Only a dozen or so remain—the die-hard music buffs, who have disappeared beneath their umbrellas like so many weasels into burrows.

  I am sitting there, without an umbrella, soaking wet, and I start clapping. Kris spots me and laughs, and I laugh, too, and then she walks right out of the concert and into my arms. Well, not quite into my arms, but when she walks over to me she is shaking, and so I take off my shirt, and wring it dry, and drape it over her, and rub her shoulders to warm her.

  “Ummm, that feels good,” she says. The downpour
has lessened to a drizzle, and I can smell her wet hair and I can feel her shoulder blades.

  “I got to hand it to you,” I tell her. “You really know how to get an audience reaction.”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” Kris says. “I’m soaked.”

  So we walk out of the park together, with the drizzle falling on my head and running down my neck and bare back, and with my hands still rubbing her shoulders, and we get some hot chocolate at the Broad Avenue Diner, and then when the rain lets up we walk home.

  When we reach her house there’s a moment when she stops, and thanks me for the hot chocolate, and I thank her for the great concert, and she giggles, and we’re looking into each other’s eyes, and all the long years we’ve lived next door to each other as teasing playmates and goofy childhood buddies suddenly twist up tightly into three long heartbeats—ba-BOOM, ba-BOOM, ba-BOOM—and we’re looking right into each other’s eyes and the moment is there and I know it’s there and Kris knows it, too, and she is waiting.

  All I have to do is kiss her. All I have to do is find the courage to reach through those years of being just friends and touch her cheek or lightly twist one of the curls of wet brown hair with my fingers, and suddenly, magically, everything will be changed.

  But I do nothing. I let it pass. And then Kris is on her way up the steps to get warm and dry and I am on my way home, where I also get warm and dry, and then watch out my window as the light in her bedroom blinks off.

  That night I lie awake for hours trying to figure out how a guy who can seek out and even enjoy a teeth-rattling collision in a soccer game, or step onto a mat in front of five hundred screaming people to wrestle one-on-one with the strongest guy at a rival school, can be such a complete and utter coward with someone who would never hurt him in a hundred years.

  But, I consoled myself that night, I had time. Kris would be there, right across the street, just as she always had been. The moment would come again. And again. Till eventually I got it right.

  And now I was in a full sprint through the autumn darkness, legs churning, arms pumping, and the security lights around the golf course fence were swimming quickly toward me through the murk. The lights were closest together near the clubhouse, so when I reached the fence I headed east, following the wall of wire, to the great expanse of the third fairway, where the fence disappeared into a shadowy forest of bushes and trees.