Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

“No never, or just no this year?”

  “Ball four. He lost him. Lead-off walk’ll make a manager lose his hair.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I quit.”

  “Quit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shut up. Stop it. Come on.”

  “No more.”

  “Why?”

  “Exactly.”

  Marco shakes his head and eats more ice cream.

  “Want popcorn or a soda or something?”

  “No thanks.”

  The first baseman is having a friendly chat with the guy who’s just walked. The runner takes off his batting gloves, hands them to the first-base coach, and puts on his sliding gloves. Both he and the first baseman are serious now. I almost say something about it, but I don’t. I’ve killed the game for me, but there’s no need to kill it for him.

  I turn to Marco.

  “Is your dad a fan?”

  “Bit of a jam the young southpaw finds himself in here. Two on, nobody out.”

  “Not so much. I think he’s always appreciated the sport, the competition, but baseball’s hard to get to know late in life.”

  “Would like a double-play ball here.”

  “But he’s not a ground ball pitcher. Everything he’s throwing seems to be hard and up in the zone. I’m sure he’ll take a pop-up or a strikeout.”

  “He was in his early thirties when he came here. I went to games with my friends and their families. What about you?”

  “My father did this to me.” He laughs and nods as though he knows what I mean, although we both know he doesn’t. “I started out as an A’s fan. I was little, and there was something about those guys—the green and gold uniforms, white cleats, the mustaches. Reggie, Campy, Rudi, Vida Blue, Blue Moon, Catfish. But, you know, you go to Fenway. You watch Yaz swinging a bat on deck . . .”

  “Fastball. Got the corner. Strike one.”

  “Nice pitch.”

  “Painted the corner.”

  “You guys had box seats?”

  “The first time we did. He’d always try to get them if he could. You know, to be close enough to hear the sizzle and pop of the pitches.”

  “El Tiante!”

  “Yeah, Tiant. I met him in a supermarket once. He was smoking a cigar.”

  “Good old days, man.”

  “I suppose.”

  “He’s got good stuff. Big-league stuff.”

  Marco skims the last of the melted cream and sauce from his bowl while shaking his head.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Curve ball. Pulled the string. Strike two.”

  “Yeah, he was sitting dead-red on a fastball and he got Uncle Charlie.”

  “What’s your dad doing now?”

  “Drinking beers. Watching games.”

  “Is he retired?”

  “Steps off the mound.”

  “You could say that.”

  “He’s just trying to slow things down a bit.”

  “Yours?”

  “No. He won’t. He thinks he’s still broke.”

  “Still welding?”

  “Still a steel man. Butchered another finger last month.”

  “Fuck.”

  “They managed to save it.”

  “Looks in. Doesn’t like it. Shakes him off.”

  “How many has he lost?”

  “Two.”

  “How?”

  “He got a W-28 dropped on them—his left pinkie and ring finger.”

  “That’s a lot of steel.”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  “Now he’s ready.”

  “What happened?”

  “I did it.”

  “That’s a ball.”

  Marco looks at the screen as though it will conjure the image, the memory for us both. It doesn’t. He looks into the empty bowl, spins it on the coffee table, and looks in again. He frowns. Whatever’s in there is a disappointment, as well.

  “It was summer. I was twelve. I was working for him. We were hoisting the beam into place, but I hadn’t secured the chain properly. His fingers got caught between the steel and concrete. And at the hospital—his English wasn’t so great, neither was mine—they told him it wasn’t worth sending him to Mass General, so they amputated. We both must have been in shock. It was over before we knew what to do.”

  “Three straight balls.”

  “What did he say afterward?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. He’s never mentioned it.”

  “How’s your guilt?”

  He pats the brief. “I mastered English and became a lawyer.” He flings the paper off the table. It tries to do a loop on the way down but runs out of time and lands splayed open on the sisal. “What’s a steelworker need fingers for anyway?” He leans back. “A wop one anyway.”

  “He can’t lose him here—the A.L. RBI leader’s on deck.”

  Marco looks back into the bowl—ashamed. “Sorry.”

  “Hey, man. It’s all right. What would Romulus say?”

  He snorts a laugh. “Just call me Lucan. Fuck.”

  The screen has gone blank. A message appears in the bottom left-hand corner: “Searching for satellite signal. Please stand by.”

  “Fuck. I forgot to tighten the nuts. The dish probably moved.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “No. Sit. Stay.”

  “I need to go upstairs. I want to change. I’m going to run.”

  Marco starts to get up. He doesn’t like for me to do things, as though helping out around the house is beneath me. In his head he calculates which will be worse, stopping me or letting me go. He concedes.

  “I left the wrench and compass up there. Take my cell phone. I’ll tell you what’s happening.”

  Thomas Strawberry is at the bottom of the bowl—still alive, fishily breathing, in fish sleep or a fish torpor. The room is too warm for him. I think it promotes algae growth, and makes him lazy. The overhead light must be like a sun to him. It must be confusing to be forever directed to, for whatever reason, a false point of origin, but I can’t tell Thomas anything. He arrived one wintry afternoon in a baggie, and now he lives on a desk. He’d been the last thing I moved from the old place. Marta had put on a sad face for me when I gave her the keys. She’d given Thomas a little pout, as well. He used to swim more at the old place. Perhaps the trip here stunned him, aged him, or stunted him. No. He was well into his gravy years before I walked with him down Court Street in the early evening. People had briefcases and shopping bags and strollers. I carried a fishbowl. And I thought I did well to keep the water still. Maybe he’d been a magic fish and I’d not realized it—that he came with instructions that I hadn’t followed or a pact that I’d unknowingly broken. Thomas is dying. I can tell. I lost his magic for him. I tap the bowl. He doesn’t notice.

  I start changing to go run, but I get caught up while sitting on the floor changing my shoes. I kind of silently spit-curse my helplessness. It comes out as a hiss. I yawn, deeply, as though I’d forgotten for a while about breathing. And then I kind of drift for a moment, wondering if there’s anything to be done for the fish, wondering if I’ll sleep tonight, how long, caffeine and anxiety considered, I can stay awake.

  “This is my son,” my father had said to the doctor with a sudden shot of energy. His loose teeth had rattled in his mouth from the sudden rush of breath.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “He’s an artist,” he said with a wink to her and a thumb to me.

  “Do you paint?”

  “No.” She seemed startled by my terseness next to her chatty patient. He tried to do some damage control.

  “No. He’s a poet and he’s a musician.”

  She picked up his chart and studied it. “What instrument do you play?”

  “He plays guitar and piano and saxophone—and a few others, right? Never could make up his mind.”

  “That’s impressive. Do you play around here?”

  “He just moved to New York.�
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  “Well, good luck.” She rehung the chart. “I’ll be back later.” She went to the door. “Nice to meet you,” she said without turning.

  My father watched her go and continued to look out the door as though he could see her in the hallway and then the elevator.

  “She’s something, huh?”

  Marco is waiting. I have to go through his bedroom to get to the roof. Even though the lights are on, I pause in the doorway as though he and his wife are sleeping inside. It’s a big room with a master bath hidden behind a wall of paneling. Marco’s left it open. They have a tiled shower, a separate bathtub, and two sinks. On the south wall there’s more glass and a cedar deck beyond. There’s a concrete planter built into it. It leaks. You can follow the water stains all the way down the east wall to the cellar.

  I slide along the wall to the walk-in closet. I’ve always wondered how many suits one needs to have if one has a job. My father had two—both brown—both, though I hadn’t known it at the time, polyester. I remember smelling him in them—his smoke, his rotting-gums breath. He’d hang them on the bathroom doorknob. Marco’s suits and jackets and shirts and slacks take up an entire wall, then meet his belts and shoes and three pairs of suspenders on the adjacent wall. She has dresses and jackets and pants, all of similar fabric and dark hued. They’re here for good—not running—Marco is present for his wife, for his son, his parents, his neighbors. His memory drives him. It’s fuel for ambition; two fingers on a concrete slab, gangster movies, and acetylene torches. I’ve heard other parents at school functions butcher his name, “Maar-coh!” as though they were proclaiming to him his perceived exoticism. Marco is driven, his memory neatly apportioned and in support of his plan. A plan. That’s all she asked me to do, make a plan. I should’ve been honest. I should’ve asked her, what—suicide or flight? I pull the ladder down and go up the hatch.

  The moon has shrunk, risen, and dimmed to a cool yellow. The sky has lost its depth of blue. It’s gone whitish, tinted by the clouds, once thick and heavy, now stretched and almost sheer, making the night lilac and yellow with pink highlights—the source of which I can’t discern—maybe natural, maybe not. The Manhattan skyline is obscured by the taller buildings on Court Street, but in the northeast I can see the Chase Building, odd in its aloneness, too big for lower Flatbush and its car washes and bodegas.

  It’s about twenty feet to the parapet, but the roof is pitched back, away from the street. It would be difficult to make it seem as though I stumbled uphill and fell. Marco’s building is only thirty-five feet to the top of the cornice—perhaps not a lethal height. There’s a good chance that things wouldn’t work out. Or, have they not worked out already. I may have reached my terminus—an unknown destination. I have a million-dollar term life insurance policy. I don’t think it’s lapsed. I don’t remember what the policy says, who the carrier is.

  Claire and I decided that the two of us needed to be covered after C was born, because while looking at our newborn lying between us on the bed, we both considered our deaths. A nurse came to visit us at home and took various samples. Claire had been preeclamptic in the last two weeks of her pregnancy and her pressure hadn’t gone down. “Relax, hon,” the nurse had said. “This ain’t nothing.” Claire was nervous. “I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “Nothing to be sorry about.”

  I pressed our agent as to what a preexisting condition was, but in the end, Claire’s premium was too much. He suggested that we double mine—because I was the man. At the time his idea made sense. Because I was making money—at least what we thought to be money. I was in school and it seemed that I was destined to make more.

  And it seemed to make sense now, to me at least, to have paid out all that money in premiums. The transition had occurred, quick and silent—savings turned into debt. Claire and I sat at the kitchen table one night this past spring with the credit card statements and Marta’s new lease and the boys’ tuition bills. Over the course of an hour she went from pragmatic to desperate—pushing the papers around the table as though rearranging them would make them read benevolent and new—then from desperate to sorrowful. She tried to stop her tears by curling her long lips in, but that made her look angry, which made me defensive, which made me angry.

  “What?”

  “What yourself?”

  “We need to make more money.”

  “You mean I need to make some money.”

  She stood up, frustrated, angry, but Claire’s never been good with anger. She’s never known what to do with it. She cries.

  “So I’ll work, too.”

  “Doing what? Can you make more than a full-time sitter?”

  She fumbled.”

  “It shouldn’t be so hard. You’re smart. You’re talented . . .”

  “Assuming what you say is true, that’s still a long way from money, honey.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t make the rules.”

  “Why don’t you? She slammed the table with her hand and went to kick it, too, but she stopped. I fingered my sternum.”

  “I’m the problem, right?”

  “You’re not a problem.”

  “The problem. Look, I figure, to deal with all this, we have two choices. I leave and you can marry someone rich. Or I die and then you’ll be rich and can do whatever you want.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Fuck me?”

  “You just think I’m some greedy, shallow, spoiled . . .”

  “I didn’t say anything about you. I’m just saying that I’m probably worth a lot more dead.”

  She slapped me. I could see it coming. She had to get around the table, line me up, and then decide whether or not she really wanted to do it. And when she finally did let go, it was the most noncommittal blow I’d ever received. It wasn’t like my mother’s eighty-foot iron tentacle slap. Her wrist folded and her hand went limp on impact. We were in trouble because I knew she could never make me do anything I didn’t want to do.

  Then the debate returns: private or public, New York or elsewhere, and can we afford to live in a town that has good public schools. Then she looks at me and considers herself and can’t come up with anyplace else. And then I tell her something about my past, that there weren’t any ski trips or beaches or whatever people do to luxuriate and that the only thing I came out of those years with intact was the dim notion that I wasn’t quite ready to resign myself to any fate prescribed for me because of melanin or money—that I’d put off death for a while and dream. So back to the school debate: “Imagine if you and Gavin had gone to private school . . .” Claire has always loved what she’s perceived as my high mindedness, until, of course, it’s turned on her. Then it’s just scary and mean. And I had many responses—from “I would’ve hated those people” to “I do, all the time.” And even that light cuff drew tears. I can’t stand it when she cries, when that mouth turns down into an exaggerated frown. I used to do anything to stop it.

  Marco’s phone rings. I answer. He speaks before I can.

  “Hey, you up there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you see the numbers on the side? Shit, is there a flashlight there?”

  “I’m good.”

  “All right, it should be tilted at a thirty-five-degree angle—is it?”

  “No. It’s about thirty-seven.”

  “Okay, so make sure the arrow is pointing to thirty-five.”

  I do it.

  “Great. It’s in. Lock it down.”

  I do and make sure all the bolts are tight.

  “Fuck. It’s three-nothing already. What the fuck happened? All right. Come down.”

  His command annoys me so I sit. Then I lie down on the silver-topped roof. It’s still warm from the day, soft, almost tacky, but the sun sank before the rubber began to melt. No stars tonight, just the pale sky and the pink. I don’t want the memory of Claire’s frightened face. I’d rather it be calm, at least, that long mouth like the stretched clouds above. It doesn’t come. The night won’t c
onform; it whispers a memory, instead: “No one can touch your immortal soul.” My mother used to say, sometimes before walking out the door for the day, sometimes before drifting into sleep, “You are the light of the world . . . you are the salt of the earth . . . and when the world has lost its taste for you . . . ,” in such a way, with such conviction and good timing, that I thought she’d made it up on her own. My father, although he was an atheist, seemed to agree. Whatever my soul’s nature, they both believed it needed edification. They took advantage of my early reading skills and comprehension and had me memorize things: he, song lyrics, poems, long prosaic passages, and sports stats along with band and team rosters; she, important civil rights events and the dates of assassinations.

  They met over a tray of Salisbury steak in the main Boston University cafeteria. She was rearranging the meat. He was waiting with his tray. Neither one of them ever went much deeper than that—how the senior class president and the semiliterate drifter went on to get married and have me. I suppose it would be simple to say that he was on his way up and she was gorgeous, and they were both unlike anyone the other had previously met.

  I hear the brakes of a car down on the street, followed by a string of curses uttered by a young person. They’re more plaintive than aggressive. Someone else giggles. “We weren’t bad,” I say out loud. We were never bad. Alcoholic? Yes. Damaged? Certainly. Lost? Perhaps. But never bad. And, I mean, they got us early, the next greatest generation. They got us—the Harvard sociologists, PhDs, Eds, swarming out of Cambridge to the bedroom communities west of Boston; the aspiring and lapsed Jesuit priests, the transcendental remnants, the hippie holdouts, the civil rights holdovers, the art freaks, no-nukes and Greenpeace, the pacifists, the liberal Jewish intellectuals with their intoxicating gravitas.

  I tried to stop smoking weed before I was seventeen—came up sober for a breath—but, but what?—I, we, went back down for the cool air of sleep, the wind through a summer day’s screen: ill-advised runs to New York to the head shops on Macdougal for canisters of nitrous, the stop in Washington Square for the squirrelly brown buds of shit weed sold by a guy named Willie, who looked black, save for the eyes and the violent Spanish flourishes thrown at the impatient junkies trying to cut in. Then back to Boston. We graduated from whippets to whole tanks of gas. We rode around in Brian’s father’s car, filled balloons, put on Jimi Hendrix, and were slapped to other realms of being.