by Chris Lynch
And then zing, Nicky pulls it tight and straight again as if somebody’d yanked both ends of the spinal cord like a taut rope.
This time I don’t even look around to see if anyone else has witnessed. I know this show is for me alone.
I don’t take Communion in my palm because my hand is shaking too hard. I take it on my tongue, turn and go back. I try not to, but it’s useless now, so I peek again as I pass Nick again and the neck is broken again.
Again. The neck is broken again.
I want to reach in and fix it. I want it not to be broken, and I want to be the one to fix it. But I can’t because I know as sure as I know anything that if I reach in there that Nick is going to grab me by the wrists and pull me in with him. That’s what he wants, is to pull me in with him. It’s what he’s been waiting for.
It’s okay mostly when I don’t have to see him. He leaves me alone mostly when I’m not seeing him. I don’t sleep so well at night yet, but that’s not Nick’s doing exactly, not directly, and I expect that problem to get better. As soon as I don’t have to see him at all.
They close the top half of the box now as I stand beside it getting ready for the procession out of the church. That should be it, has to be it. There will be no more viewings of Nick. Nick, there will be no more viewings of you. Wake’s done, funeral’s done. The box will not be opened again, so you’re done, too, Nicky. You’re done.
I walk alongside the box to the hearse. I do my small part to lift the box into the back. I ride in the motorcade two black cars back from Nick’s body, a nice distance, and we’re almost there.
We stop at the site. Everyone gets out. A short walk now, over to the hole, lay him down. And it’ll be over, it can be over. I do my small part again, and I think I’m the only one nervous. Nick’s uncles aren’t nervous, the teacher isn’t nervous. My hand slips twice with the sweat, the brass handle sliding right out of my hand. No one even seems to notice as I regrip.
One small problem, the dip in the terrain. A short little hill we have to walk down before we reach the plot. The guys in front, like me, we go down, go down, while the rear guys are up high still.
Bump. Bu-bump. Twice. Inside the box Nicky shifts two times as we’re coming down the hill. Like he slid down onto his feet—unless I’m holding his head end—inside the casket. Did he fall on his head again? Did his neck bend, did it break, again? It happened twice in there, and it was hard and loud and unmistakable, like he crashed his head, pushed himself off, then crashed again. Did he break his neck again and again?
Does it hurt, Nicky? Can it hurt, again and again?
I look around me now, and nobody seems to notice a thing. I’m no longer touching the brass handle I’m supposed to be carrying. I let my hand hang there over the handle, but I’m not touching it as we set the casket down at the grave.
He’s going in there. Nicky you’re going in there. He’s in there. Throw your handfuls of dirt, people, because I’m going now. And when I’m gone whoever does it is going to come and cover that hole with a half ton of dirt and it’s going to stay there and you’re going to stay there, too, Nick.
Good-bye, Nicky. I’m sorry. I told you that already, and I don’t have to tell you that anymore. But I am. Sorry.
Good-bye is good-bye, Nicky.
And whoever it is is going to have that hole packed tight before I try to sleep tonight. The earth covers you, the night covers me, and good-bye is good-bye, Nicky.
It’s ten o’clock and I go to bed but I don’t sleep. It was supposed to be done by now, but it doesn’t feel like it’s done.
It’s eleven o’clock and I’m still in bed but I still don’t sleep.
It’s twelve o’clock and maybe I slept for a few minutes but not now.
It’s two A.M. and I’m not sleeping for good, because Nick is here, which isn’t supposed to be.
“Good-bye is good-bye, Nick,” I say, moving nothing but my eyes.
“Get up,” he says.
“Good-bye is good-bye, Nick. It’s done now.”
“Good-bye is good-bye, but it ain’t done yet. Get up.”
“No, Nicky, I won’t get up. I won’t move from here. You have to be gone now.”
“I ain’t never going to be gone if you don’t get up.”
I get up. Because whatever it is he’s going to do to me, it cannot be worse than his never going away.
“Put your suit on,” he says. “But you won’t need a towel.”
The cliff above the quarry is about seventy feet high. I don’t feel cold, standing there, even though the wind is pushing at me steadily. There is room on this ledge for the two of us and a few empty beer bottles, but not much else. Below, the water looks calm and still, looks deep, even, in its blackness. A sharp granite boulder pokes its crest out of the water here and there, so that you might think you know where the bad spots are. You might.
Nick is standing with his toes hanging over the edge of the cliff, his back to me.
“What am I doing?” I ask.
“You know what you’re doing,” he says.
“No, Nicky, I don’t.”
“You’re finishing,” he says.
“What finishing? I’m not finished with anything.”
“I ain’t the school guidance counselor. I know you ain’t done.”
“Well I say I’m done.”
Nick does not turn to me. He stares and stares straight down at the quarry that he knows now better than anyone knows it.
“Remember you said it yourself. The movement. You get it when things aren’t right. And things aren’t right, are they?”
“No,” I say almost down in a whisper. “They’re not.”
For a moment, there is a relief there. That I can say it finally.
“And the movement ain’t going to stop, as long as it ain’t right. No matter how many tons of dirt they put on me.”
Then, Nick turns to me. Just his head, turning way, way around while his shoulders remain squared the other way. “I was trying to tell you before. Didn’t you hear me knocking for you today?”
He smiles at me in a way that makes me want to jump, to fly past him and away. Then he looks back toward the water.
“So now all you have to do is finish. Jump, like you were supposed to when I jumped. Which you forgot to do.”
“I’m not jumping.”
“Okay. Let’s go home, then.”
There is a long silence as Nick stands on the edge looking down, and I stand looking at his back.
“No, Nicky, you can’t go home with me. I can’t take any more of that.”
“Finish it, then. You’ll probably come through it fine. Me, I just made a mistake. You won’t do that, because you’re smart. You were always smarter than me, weren’t you? You always did the smarter thing.”
He still doesn’t look at me. He is right there in front of me, so close that if I reach out I can place my hand flat on his back.
“So if I jump, it’s done?”
“So if you do, it is.”
He knows I can’t do it. If I could, I would have done it the first time. He also knows I can’t bear one more day of what he’s doing to me. Every way I turn, I find me a coward.
Without a second of reflection, I explode on him, driving with my legs, reaching out with both hands to shove Nick off the cliff.
And I’m airborne. Out eight, ten feet from the face of the cliff, I’m falling, my hands are out in front of me, my ears pounding with the whistling wind. I stare at the biggest jagged granite chunk, growing before my eyes, and I blow out my lungs in a scream that makes no sound.
They know, the dead folks do. Nick said that would end it, and it ended it. I lie in bed, staring up at the ceiling, my hands folded gently across my chest, and I am rested for the first time in a week. Nick doesn’t come and see me anymore, even though whole crowds of other people file by.
Good-bye is good-bye, Nicky.
THE HOBBYIST
YOU WERE NOT BORN into physical greatne
ss and all the love and worship and happiness that are guaranteed with it. But fortunately you were born American. So you can buy into it.
You have Paul Molitor’s special rookie card from 1978. Who knew he’d be such a monster when he got to be thirty-seven years old? Alan Trammell’s on the same card. Again, who knew? Those two could just as easily have wound up like the other two rookie shortstops on the card, U. L. Washington and Mickey Klutts. Mickey Klutts? Was he a decoy? A you-can-do-it-too inspiration for the world’s millions of Mickey Kluttses.
So nobody knew, which is good for you. You got it at a yard sale along with a thousand other cards that some scary old lady was dumping. Her scary old man died. As far as she was concerned, he took all the cards’ value with him. She didn’t know. Bet there was a lot more she didn’t know.
You have complete sets of National Hockey League cards from everybody for the last three seasons. Fleer, Topps, O-Pee-Chee, Pinnacle, Leaf, and Upper Deck. Two sets of each, in fact, one that you open and look at, one that stays sealed in the closet to retain its value because you’re not stupid. You’re a lot of things, but you’re not stupid. Hockey, understand, is the wave. That’s where it’s at for the future, collectibles-wise.
Anything that has Eric Lindros’s picture on it, or his signature, or his footprint, you own it. Big ol’ Eric Lindros. You own him.
Ditto Frank Thomas. Big ol’ Frank Thomas. You own him.
You just don’t own you. Because you’re not going to be on any card. Because you have to be on a team first, and you’re not going to be on any team, are you? Six inches. You were so close. “You’re a good kid, boy, and you busted your ass harder than anybody who’s ever tried out for me, no lie. If you were just six inches taller, you’d have made that final cut for the J.V.”
You’re six feet six inches tall. Thanks, Coach.
When you’re six feet six inches tall, everybody asks you. “You playin’ any ball, kid?” If you cannot answer yes to that question, looking the way you do, then you let everybody down. It’s like asking an old man, “So how’ve you been?” and he answers, “No good. Prostate’s blown to hell. Incontinent. Impotent. Death’s door.” You bring everybody down.
You can’t do that. Bring everybody down. Because even though they don’t know it, when you bring them down, you bring you down. Only lower. You always go lower down than everybody else. Where no one else goes, where no one else knows. So you learn. You go around the whole thing.
“So, you playing any hoops?” your uncle asks when he comes by to take his brother, your father, to the Celtics-Knicks game. You don’t answer yes, you don’t answer no. You smile sagely, nod, and hold up a wait-right-here finger to your uncle with the beer and the electric green satin Celtics jacket. You go to your room and come back with a ball. The ball is a regular twenty-dollar basketball with a two-hundred-ninety-five-dollar Bill Russell autograph on it.
“Holy smokes,” your uncle marvels. “That bastard? You actually went to that card show for this, huh?” He pretends, like a lot of people in Boston, to hate, or at least not care about, Bill Russell, who is famous for hating, or not caring much for, Boston. “I heard they had to pay him two million damn dollars just to come back here for two lousy card shows,” he says with obvious disgust. But he doesn’t let go of the ball. He stares and stares into it, turning it around in his hands, as if he’s reading his future or his past in there. He shakes his head and mutters something about watching, as a kid, Russell eating Chamberlain alive. Then he offers you one hundred dollars for the ball.
You take your ball back with a silent knowing smile. You feel the power and satisfaction, exactly the same rush as blocking a shot, swatting it ten rows up into the stands, you are sure. You get a little crazy with cockiness and attempt a dribble on the kitchen tiles as you head out. You bounce it off your instep then chase it down the hall feeling stupid, tall and stupid.
Your father does not get the autographed picture of Patrick Ewing you ask him to get at the game, even though his brother, your uncle, explains the whole Russell-Ewing historical continuum. Your father just doesn’t get it. Oh, he gets Russell, and he gets Ewing. What he doesn’t get is the whole “autograph thing,” the “collectibles thing,” the thing where a big healthy kid can reach over the protective fence around the players’ parking lot at Fenway Park to get a hat signed by Mo Vaughn, but that same kid could not learn to grab a rebound. Couldn’t even rebound. “Even Manute Bol catches a rebound once in a while, for god’s sake,” he points out.
You have two jobs to pay for your hobby. That’s what they call it in Beckett’s magazines, the Hobby. You are a Hobbyist, or a collector. Football isn’t a sport, it’s a Hobby. There are two slants to every article—what a player’s achievement means to the game, and what it means to the Hobby. You, you are a most dedicated Hobbyist, paying for it all by shoveling snow and cutting grass, and by working in, of course, a card shop. You long ago lost contact with the other stuff, the game.
Vic owns the shop, the Grand Slam. “Listen, kid,” he says after sizing you up in about thirty seconds. He always calls you something diminutive—kid, boy, junior—as he looks straight up at you. “Listen kid, the shop, it don’t mean nothin’, understand? It’s a front. I mean, it ain’t illegal or nothin’, but it ain’t a real store, neither. The real business goes on back there,” he points to his little cubbyhole computer setup in back. “That’s where I work on the sports net. I’m hooked up to every desperate memorabilia-minded loser in all of North America, Europe, and Japan. But you gotta run a store to belong to the on-line. So this,” he points to the glass counter he’s leaning on, like a bakery case only filled with cards, “is where you will work. All you gotta do is look big, look kinda like an athlete, cause my customers like that, they like to feel like they’re dealing with a honest-to-god washed-up old pro or somebody who almost coulda been somebody. You can do that.”
You assure him that you can.
“Talk a good game, boy,” Vic said that first day and many days since. “Talk a good game and the whole world’ll buy in.”
Buy in. You know buy in. You’re in, way in. Your dad hasn’t been in your bedroom, not once, in three years, so he doesn’t know about your achievements. Your mother has, so she does. She’s the only one who does.
She does the cleaning, and all that polishing. The caretaking and the secret keeping.
“Check it out, kid,” Vic calls from the back of the store. “The Hockey News. Classifieds. Ken Dryden, okay? The Ken Dryden. Probably the best money goalie of all time. He’s in here begging for a mint-condition Bobby Orr 1966 rookie card. Says he has to have it. Practically he’s cryin’ right here in the Hockey News. Look, you can see his little tears ….”
Vic is at the safe now. The squat safe he keeps under his desk. He keeps all the really big items, his personal stock, in the safe. Whenever he has a chance, Vic cracks open the safe to show what he has that somebody else wants.
Ken Dryden. 1970–71 O-Pee-Chee rookie card, three hundred dollars.
“There,” Vic says, placing the tissue-wrapped, wax-paper-folded card on the counter. He slides it out of the wrapping. It is pristine, like it’s fresh out of a pack. “Poor Kenny Dryden has to have this. He’s offering ten thousand dollars for this. Kid, you know what I say to Ken Dryden? I say get a life, Ken Dryden, or get yourself another ten grand. Cause I ain’t even picking up the damn phone on this card for less than twenty thousand dollars.”
You’ve seen this all before. You’ve seen the card, seen the posturing, heard the patter. It is the closest Vic ever gets to emotional. Bobby Orr is the only thing that does it.
“I was gonna be Bobby Orr, y’know, kid. You have no idea what it was like, growin’ up around here in them days. It was crazy. The guy meant so much to me … so much to everybody. I just swore, you just swore, that he could do absolutely anything. Final game of the playoffs, Bruins down 4–0 with a minute to go. I just knew, you just knew, that Orr was gonna pot those five goals in that la
st minute and make my life so perfect ….”
And you’ve seen the daze before, too. Vic gently wraps up his precious card and mumbles. “Musta spent five solid years pretending I was him …”
“So what happened?” you ask, trying to get him back.
“What happened. What happened was I grew up. Orr didn’t score the five goals, and I grew up.”
“Card means a lot to you, huh?” you ask.
He doesn’t look back at you as he returns to the safe. He holds the card daintily between thumb and middle finger, raising it over his head. “Ya, it means a hell of a lot. It means a nice new car for Vic. Some loser’s gonna come up on the computer one day and pay the bill.”
You hear that a lot, too. Vic talking back to the computer. Loser. Chump. Fool. Rube. “There are exactly two types of people in this game,” he said. “Businessmen and fools. The businessmen sell memories to the fools who don’t have nothin’ else.”
He is explaining this, adding one more coat of shellac to your shell, when she comes in.
“Manon Rheaume,” is all she says. You don’t exactly hear her because Vic is ranting and you are staring.
“Manon Rheaume, she repeats. “Do you have her card?”
“Uh … how ’bout some Gretzky? We have a rare …”
You go into your spiel, pushing the stock of Wayne Gretzky items like Vic said to: “That guy hasn’t done anything for years. What’s he win lately, the Lady Byng trophy? Ohhh, please. Only us Hobbyists keepin’ his career alive. He’s like a bug with his head pulled off, he keeps wigglin’, but it ain’t exactly life.”
“I don’t want any Gretzky,” she says. “I want Manon Rheaume, and only Manon Rheaume. If you don’t have her, just say so and I’ll go someplace else.”
“No, no, wait,” you say, finally registering. You don’t want her to leave. You don’t get that many customers in the store during the week. You don’t get many girls. You don’t get many beautiful girls who are six feet two.
“Sure we have Manon,” you say, pulling out a drawer. “Manon is hot.” You meant it in more ways than one. Manon Rheaume is the first woman to play in the NHL, a goalie. She’s much prettier than the average hockey player and one card even has her lying belly-down in a come-on picture pose that has never before appeared on a sports card to your knowledge. You prayed no one would come in and buy it.
