Knuckleheads

by Jeff Kass

  “Whatever happened to Jonathan Van Runig?” I say. “I know he never made it with the Yankees.”

  Bassoli’s puzzled. Pats a hand against his chest as if he’s having a heart attack, then makes another dismissive fanning motion in the air. “You knew Johnny Giant?”

  “I grew up around here. Everybody knew who he was.”

  Bassoli stares at me and I think something might be clicking. There’s a spark of anger in his eyes, a twitch of facial fat around his mouth. “He’s upstate now,” he says, his voice thin. “Corrections officer. Busts heads with a nightstick.”

  “Ronald scares people,” I say, leaning in so my face is closer to Bassoli’s. “He intimidates other students and he behaves disrespectfully toward me.”

  “Ronnie’s a good kid.”

  “I’m not saying he isn’t. Just that he needs to control himself in class. Needs to respect the learning environment. Can you talk to him about it?”

  “I came here to talk to you.”

  His finger jabs at me like Malcolm X’s and he angles forward. Our faces, separated by two desks, do all they can to push to about a foot apart. It’s one thing to think about beating on his son, but this man is a whale. A whale with a fish tattooed on his dented chest. “I took off work,” he says. “Had to pay overtime to my assistant dispatcher.”

  “You want to hit me?” I say.

  “I hit you already,” he says, tapping a fat thumb against his left temple. “Right here.”

  I remember this about the pitch. Even though it flew at me too fast to avoid, everything still slowed. There was the smirk, the giggle, the wind-up and then the release. I was focused on his hand, my eyes like zoom lenses on the ball as it left his fingertips. I could feel my weight shifting, first slightly back, then the gathering and push forward, the whole force of my body mustered to strike.

  The standard way people teach hitting is to coach the batter to watch the bat hit the ball, to keep your eyes locked on the pitch until the moment of impact. But it doesn’t really happen like that. The bat and ball intersect too quickly for the human eye to follow. What happens is the ball starts off small when it’s released some fifty-five feet away. It appears to grow bigger until it reaches the point along its arc where it’s most visible to the batter. At that moment, the hitter estimates what trajectory the rest of the ball’s flight will travel and tries to time his swing to intersect with that trajectory, while the ball simultaneously passes that maximum field of vision and appears to diminish in size. Hence, when balls dip or curve with late breaks, they’re extremely difficult to hit.

  A batter knows the ball is headed to his face when it never shrinks, when it appears to keep growing until a massive blur slams his skull. That’s what I remember most, the spherical avalanche overwhelming my entire sense of sight just before the smack.

  Anthony Bassoli, on the other hand, has been crippled by a fish he never saw coming. “This is stupid,” I say. “All that was twenty years ago.”

  “So why are you still taking it out on my son?”

  Unlike his pitches, particularly the one aimed at my head, this assessment is not accurate. Ronald Bassoli is a behavior problem. Not just in my classroom either. Other teachers have told me about his drawing pictures of rifles on desks, about his throwing books at the whiteboard and cursing at authority figures that confront him. “I lost my lucky bat that day,” I say. “I never hit consistently after that.”

  “Not my kid’s fault.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  We’re stuck in mud. Two tough dump-trucks with rusted under-carriages and noxious diesel fuel and our front bumpers too close to each other to maneuver, our wheels useless. I watch him and wonder if he’ll admit his kid’s a screw-up. I could end this right now, tell him all right, it’s just a misunderstanding, tomorrow’s a new day. As long as Ronnie comes to class smiling and prepared, and I’ll give him another chance. But I don’t tell Bassoli anything, I just sit there, behind my bulky teacher’s desk with the box of tissues on it, and the stapler and the grade book, and I watch him. I just sit there and wait.

  “You had too much mouth,” he says. “That’s why we hated you. All your yapping from the outfield.”

  I don’t respond. In teacher school, the technique is called wait time. Give the student enough room to figure out what he wants to say. Don’t interrupt and try to guide the conversation.

  “It was respect, you know. We hit you because you were the only guy on your team who could threaten us.”

  I hold back and wait some more. It’s difficult. I think of Rupert, how he disappeared into the woods. How two weeks later, at prom, we teased him without rest and he got drunk and we kicked him out of the limo and left him passed out on his front lawn. When his brother tried to drag him into the shower, Rupert punched him and broke his glasses. Kid showed up to his ninth grade English class the next day with a gauze bandage roofing one eye like a pirate.

  “Everything I’ve done bad in my life I’ve paid for,” Bassoli says. “My wife left me. A sturgeon beat my lungs to shit. I’m not apologizing for anything.”

  Is that what I’m after? An apology? I doubt it. I spent too many years shoving noses into the mat to care whether people are sorry for what they do. “Show me your tattoo,” I say. “I want to see your tattoo again.”

  He’s not nearly as proud this time. Pushes up from his desk as if I’d just asked him to read a passage of Shakespeare aloud, as if he’d like to run me over with one of his cabs. His undress is quicker, less dramatic. Some facial fat twitches. When his chest is bare though, this time he can’t help but smirk. He knows what he’s got.

  The fish is a luminous spire in full breach. A dazzling aquatic angel ascending, propelling itself skyward by the torque of its own magnificent thrust. I try to imagine what it saw as it leapt, how big Bassoli’s chest grew in its eyes. I try to imagine the incalculable timing that led to the collision of sturgeon and father, the collision that left a dent.

  “Lift your arms,” I say.

  “Make it jump,” I say.

  He does.

  ON THE CASE

  YOU TELL DANIEL YOU THINK SOMEBODY STOLE A BOX OF POP TARTS from your backseat because, well, who else are you gonna tell?

  Not your wife. You don’t want her to know you bought Pop Tarts from the Safeway, or that you ever buy them, not with your stomach starting to push like a soccer ball against the skin of your shirt. You can’t tell your kids either because you don’t want them thinking buying Pop Tarts is a legitimate way to spend money after you refused them the Pokemon treasure chest and the GameCube. So who else can you tell? The cops? You’re gonna report a Grand Theft Pop Tart?

  You tell Daniel at work because you know he’ll think it’s funny, he’ll laugh with you, but he’ll take it seriously too.

  “Are you telling me someone jacked Pop Tarts from your car?” he says.

  “Yeah, man a double-box. Sixteen pastries.”

  “What flavor?”

  “Strawberry.”

  “Frosted?”

  “Dude, of course.”

  “That’s messed up, man,” Daniel says. “People are messed up. What are you gonna do?”

  “I’m not gonna do anything. It’s Pop Tarts. Should I, like, red alert the FBI?”

  “You could call Safeway and complain. Say they need more security in the parking lot. Demand they replace the box for you.”

  This is what you love about Daniel. He always finds a weasel third way to deal with problems. That’s why the two of you are the best sales team at the network, why you’ve won a free cruise every year for hitting your quotas. You were about to close a huge deal last week with Cypress Mineral Water when some stuck-up budget skank in their conference room started tapping her pen on the leather-bound proposal and whining about how it’s not enough primetime spots, and the Q-factor of the Thursday night sitcom is too low to generate the viewership of twenty-something females they want buying their bullshit over-priced fake water, and you
were ready to reach over and smack her designer granny glasses straight through her eyeballs when Daniel said, Hold on, what if we talk to the writers? What if we have them write in a new love interest for our tragicomic hero and she’s this totally buffed rock climber with arms like lithe muscular snakes and we’ll do some product placement and every time he talks to her, she’ll zing hip witty comments and show off her guns and her beautiful flowing hair and she’ll be holding a cold dewy bottle of Cypress? How’s that sound?

  And now you’re making reservations for expensive berths on the boat going from San Juan to Porlamar, and it’ll be just like it’s been for the past three years. The kids will eat their heads off and attend day-camps starring Midwestern undergrads as warm and welcoming counselors, and Emily will play suntan and volleyball, and you and Daniel will do what you always do—beer, beer, and additional beer except there will be more of it, and better potato skins with grease that’s creamier and more luxurious and then the best part, the chugging forward through ocean as if you’re riding a grand carving knife splitting the watery seam of the world, and even though the waves will re-fold and heal themselves you will have made a cut in something so much bigger than you, something that could swallow you and not even taste you in its spit.

  “Listen,” you say to Daniel, “I think I know who did it.”

  You tell him how when you parked, there was a woman pulling garbage bags filled with cans and bottles out of what looked like a thirty-year-old Lincoln. It was rusted around the tire-wells and inside her trunk a large spool of yellow nylon rope lay on its side, surrounded by a half-dozen bruised and misshapen bleach-jugs that looked like they’d been used to pummel someone’s skull. She was maybe five-foot-four with brittle grey hair, blue jeans with oil stains and a lumpy lime-green sweatshirt with an ironed-on portrait of Dora the Explorer. Her face looked red and pissed-off as if she’d just lost a fight.

  Shit, you thought, maybe I should lock the car, but you didn’t because you hate locking your car and it was your second trip to Safeway that morning. You bought the Pop Tarts on the first trip and you forgot to pick up the toothpaste and tofu you were supposed to get, so now you had to stop back there, and you were irritated because who wants to go to the supermarket twice in one day, and why does your wife apparently believe tofu is the answer to every damn thing wrong with the world, and so, screw it, you didn’t lock the car.

  But you did open the rear passenger door and reach in to shoulder your computer bag, and the woman saw you, and she knew damn well you only grabbed your laptop because you thought she might steal it and she looked at you like she would like to batter you with one of those bleach bottles, so when you returned to your car and the Pop Tarts had vanished from the back seat, you figured she just took them out of spite.

  “Dude,” Daniel says, “I think we can catch her.”

  What would you do if you caught her? Beat her ass? Demand restitution? But you let Daniel spill his idea because he seems excited about it, rotating back and forth on his spinning desk-chair as if he’s a kid at an ice cream parlor, and when he’s finished he flips you his smirk which says damn right I closed the deal, and you realize his plan actually makes sense.

  Later, after the staff meeting and a bout of unsuccessful cold-calling, and lunch with the people from the discount furniture chain which looks like it might lead to something promising even though you hate their revolting cheerleader jingle—couches, coffee-tables, touch-lamps more/ let us decorate your living-room floor—you give Daniel the thumbs-up and you can see him giggling as he jots down notes from the city’s web site that will tell you which neighborhoods will be flaunting their recyclable materials curbside tonight.

  The two of you lean over your desk like a couple of hardcore analysts from the slaughter-all-the-terrorists weekly drama that’s the network’s highest rated Sunday night hour, and you glance to the corner of your office and try to channel the steely gaze of the life-sized plastic model of John Benson, the show’s twice-divorced, sometimes coke-addicted hero. The thing is essentially a six-foot-tall doll, and he stands before you, arms crossed beneath his train-car pectorals, with a silver pistol poking from his waistband like a gleaming erection. You stare down Benson’s empty eyes and his hyper-masculine carriage reenergizes something vital in your chin-cleft and you and Daniel huddle over the map he downloaded. You participate in several minutes of squinting and nodding, plot makeshift parabolas and hypotenuses, then decide, yes, it’s got to be the area known as Lower Edgar Park. That’s the closest neighborhood to the Safeway, the neighborhood with the most houses with the most children who drink the most soda and the most bottled water—and the most dads, like you, with beer-fridges in their garages—and that’s where she’ll be tonight.

  “I’ll come by your place at midnight,” Daniel says. “She won’t be out before that. Recycling pirates wait until everybody’s asleep, then they creep out and lurk. Then they skulk around and plunder the bins.”

  You like that Daniel called them pirates. Skulkers instead of scavengers. As if they’re committing a despicable unlawful act, not just trying to survive by sifting through other people’s garbage. The pirate label makes you feel better about trying to apprehend one of them, as if, well, if you don’t draw the line here, what will she do next? Cans and bottles to Pop Tarts. Pop Tarts to wallets and jewelry and firearms. This is a nation of laws and nobody’s above them. Daniel’s getting way too excited though, speaking in a near-whisper about how he’s going to ride up on his bike and how you should have your bike ready too, how the night will be a slow cruise, kind of a mobile stake-out from block to block, and how it would never work with a car because you’d make too much noise and spook her.

  “Dude, hold on,” you say, thinking how Daniel’s got no wife or children so he shouldn’t just make assumptions about your availability for this kind of adventure, even though Emily and the kids will already be asleep so it won’t be a problem for you to sneak out. “Listen,” you tell him, “I’m up for this, but if you show up in a black turtleneck and a watch-cap, I’m gonna beat you with a bucket.”

  He doesn’t. Just a navy windbreaker and a backward Dodgers hat, and some eye-black under his eyes as if the streetlights might blind him, but you don’t say anything because you’re excited too. You even spent twenty minutes in the garage spraying WD-40 on your gears and chain to minimize squeaking, and you set your phone to vibrate on the off-chance your father with the emphysemic wheeze will die and somebody will call to tell you at two in the morning. When you swing your legs over your bike like the Caped Crusader hopping into the Batmobile, Daniel has to reach out and grab your arm. “It’s a slow cruise, remember?” he says. “We need to sneak up on her while she’s in the midst of her thievery. We need to swoop like silent owls. She looks up and, wow, where’d those guys come from? Got it?”

  You’re not much of a swooper. You are line-backer beefy, a bulldozer. Yet you nod at Daniel in a manner that’s serious because, yes, tonight, you will lance the night with silent grace.

  For the first hour, you see nothing. Not the lady. Not any other recycling pirates. Just two teenagers having the kind of forty-five-minute break-up fight that should take thirty seconds, one inside the car brooding, the other outside on her driveway with numerous violent-looking gestures and a loud fuck you that resonates like a church bell off the high roofs of the surrounding cul-de-sac.

  What you’re doing feels spiritual. You’re riding bikes like two tactical assassins, cruising slow and quiet through the dark, all senses on high alert. The night is warm and calm, there’s the faint echo of hip hop beats from the basement of a house with a glowing silver ball like a miniature moon shining amidst a driveway’s leafy hedge. Large screen TVs push purple and blue specters through picture windows and you glide right through them. You feel the air streaming around you as you pedal. You are swooping. You have been designed aerodynamically, not for sales, not for beer, not for husbandry or parenting, but for this slow cruise astride your bicycle.
You bless that woman for stealing your Pop Tarts. She has given you this night, this liquid panther-stalk through your city. People are not messed up. People just need to get out more, need to lube their chains and glide.

  Both you and Daniel are surprised when you see her. You have long trusted Daniel’s genius, but this is something different. Predicting human behavior when you’re sitting across the table from someone in a conference room is one thing. Knowing what a woman he’s never seen will be doing past one in the morning, and where she’ll be doing it, approaches the level of prophet. “Holy shit,” Daniel says, as if he’s scared too. “There she is.”

  She’s half a block away, across the street, shuffling beneath a streetlight. You and Daniel stop pedaling and roll a little closer, angling behind a large SUV to stow your bikes. You crouch down near the front bumper so you can watch her, and as long as you’re quiet, she won’t spot you. Daniel moves into position behind you and you could be two dudes at a Bar Mitzvah in a conga line, except his hands aren’t on your hips and you’d punch him in the eye if they were.

  The woman has replaced her Dora sweatshirt with a maroon raincoat, but it looks like she’s wearing the same grease-stained jeans. There’s a rhythm to her pushing, a right-left shove forward, a pause, a hover of dead space, a right-left shove forward, a pause. She’s got three shopping carts strung together with her nylon cord, and the bottles of bleach are knotted along the rope too, situated as buffers between the carts to muffle the jangle when she shoves forward and they smack against each other. The cart she’s pushing is full and the one in front of it almost full, the lead cart empty. She’s close to two-thirds of the way through her mission.

  What do you want to call what she’s pushing? A makeshift junk-jalopy vacuum? A recycling freight-train? Performance art? She’s pilfering trash bins, but she’s also a kind of social engineer. The cardiovascular architect of Lower Edgar Park. She’s a sieve, thinning the neighborhood’s refuse, siphoning glass, aluminum and plastic nickel-nuggets, and re-injecting the discarded wealth into the blood of the city. She’s guiding a mobile laboratory, a shopping cart IV drip, and she halts it expertly with the mostly filled middle cart parallel to the next bin she investigates. Most bottles and cans she shuttles quickly from bin to cart, but when she encounters a product she’s unfamiliar with, she raises it to the streetlight and examines it like a jeweler, searching for the hieroglyph that will reveal its value. It’s when she lifts a bottle that you recognize as being from Cypress’ newest line of fruit-flavored water—which tastes mostly like sugared sewage—that something else nags at her attention. She gazes back at the house she just passed, where she didn’t stop her junk-lab because whoever ferries the trash out—probably an overworked new father who’ll wake up at four to schlep it to the curb—hasn’t done the job yet.