Any Other Place

by Michael Croley

  The cumulative effect of all those beatings, though, had left Eddie believing he was only the one thing. A future that didn’t include baseball had become, in his mind, not a future at all. In those last waning days of our senior year, when the world had seemed alive with nothing but possibility for so many of us, Eddie Jackson’s future was extinguished somehow. And though we knew how important the game was to Eddie, how hard he tried to prevent our losses, it wasn’t until our final game when we came to know how much he had always needed us.

  What had begun in the sixth grade continued through the last game of our lives when we were beat out in the finals of the region for the third straight year. Eddie is still the only person, as far as anyone knows, to be named the regional tournament MVP from a losing team. He hit over six hundred in three games with five homers and twenty RBIs. He threw a two-hitter in the final. The only run of that game was when our catcher let a sinker ball slip through his legs and roll to the backstop. The runner on third came home and didn’t even slide. But unlike that Little League game six years before, when we were separated by different teams, the entire town felt the despair when Eddie scorched a double down the line and one after another of us came up and could not advance him home. While the Harlan Green Dragons ran out to the pitcher’s mound, Eddie Jackson stayed on second base, squatting with his hands on his head. His forearms were rippled with veins and his long, boyish black hair snuck out from under the flaps of his batting helmet. School was already over for the year. Our graduation had been the week before, and with the final out of that game, nothing was left to tie us to Fordyce High School anymore. Eddie’s uniform showed traces of the crushed red brick that made up the ballpark’s dirt. In front of him the boys from Harlan tossed their hats and gloves in the air, they piled onto their pitcher, and our coaches exchanged quick handshakes at home plate. But Eddie refused to move, as if doing so meant the final out of his life.

  Tripp Jackson moved away from his spot on the fence. The stands emptied. The litter of stray peanut shells and aluminum foil that once held hot dogs was lifted by the breeze. In the parking lot, boys much younger than us, boys we had once been, played a game with wadded up paper cups serving as a ball and their hands as bats. In their own makeshift diamond they ran circles, left ghost men behind to run their bases and dreamed of the day when they too would be on the big field with the green grass, the chalked lines, and their own dirty uniforms.

  They did not know disappointment in the way we did, but that would come. They too would learn to accept it or live with it, and like us they would go on to lead lives that were predictable and, in many ways, ordinary and full. There was not an Eddie Jackson among them that we knew of, but there almost always is, we came to find out, just as there is almost certainly a Tripp Jackson too, who was pulling away from the park at the moment his son finally stepped off second base, relegating himself to defeat.

  Across that field I still see Eddie’s eighteen-year-old figure in the way our minds sometimes refuse to let a person be more than what they once were. When I see him around town I don’t see the man he is now with two little boys of his own, to whom he’s never so much as raised his voice in public when angry with them. I see the kid who I grew up with on second rising from his squatted position. Eddie was our star, our bright boy. It may seem strange, but I know what we all felt in those six years we were teenagers and even now that we are adults. But because we did so little to ease the weight he carried, how can I believe that any of us who really look at him can’t see the boy he was, walking alone, past a celebration that he—that we—had always dreamed would involve him? Later that night, after the trophies were handed out and the lights from the ballpark were off, we were not surprised to see Eddie walking through downtown in his jeans and tee shirt, his ball cap pulled low on the front of his forehead. He wasn’t headed home, though, like the rest of us. He was going in a different direction that we could not follow or ask about, which did not carry the burden of unmet expectations, and where we could never fail him again.

  THE WORLD’S FAIR

  THEY’D TRAVELLED TOO far to turn around. That’s all Maggie could tell herself as she saw the cars ahead of her pulling into the median for U-turns and heading back north. She looked to the backseat, where her children slept, the slightest bit of sweat on their foreheads. They were only thirty minutes from Knoxville but had been stopped on I-75 for more than two hours because of a crash, and she had been reluctant to give up on the day, especially after everything that had happened in the last month with Jake’s leaving and the uncertainty about their future.

  Her patience was waning when, almost by wishing it were so, the cluster of cars she’d been stuck behind began to creep forward around the bend. Then the lead car burst forth, the wreck having been cleared, and the anticipation of being able to move all-out on the freeway after being still for so long made her feel hopeful. She looked in the rearview mirror, just in time to see the children waking from the movement of the car.

  “Sleepyheads,” she said.

  The boy and the girl were twelve and seven. Bobby was a miniature version of Jake with the same sandy blond hair and green eyes. He was the oldest and had been asking so many questions about what was going on between his parents in the last week that Maggie, out of desperation—out of her own fears and loneliness—had given him Jake’s number at the little motel across town and told him to call his father and ask him. She had immediately regretted it, but she didn’t know how many more lies she could tell the boy.

  “Where are we?” Bobby asked.

  “Almost there,” Maggie said. “How was your nap?”

  Both kids yawned and stretched. Remained silent to her question. She’d had no one to talk to about anything that was going on, her family lost to her. Her existence now seemed confined only to her mind and her actions, to these children she was sure she was losing.

  They came around a big curve, and the tall buildings of downtown Knoxville rose up around them.

  “There it is,” Maggie said and pointed ahead. In the distance, the Sunsphere shone against the blue sky. Its gold-colored glass reflected and shimmered in the light, resembling an oversized disco ball resting on a radio tower. The children craned their necks to get a better look but were only momentarily impressed.

  “That’s all it is?” Pam said.

  “I guess so,” Maggie said and bit her lip. “C’mon, though. That’s something.”

  “It was bigger on television,” Bobby said. “Do you think the president is still here?”

  “No, he was only here on opening day,” Maggie said.

  “I have to pee,” Pam said.

  “We’ll be there soon,” Maggie said. “You two wait and see. This is going to be a good day.”

  THE 1982 WORLD’S Fair, inexplicably to Maggie, had ended up in east Tennessee. Two weeks before the fair opened on May first, she had turned thirty, which was followed by Jake’s departure into the cold spring night. He hadn’t gone far, just to the Cardinal Motel by the drive-in theater, but she felt his leaving in the night, after they had celebrated her birthday with the children, meant he might never return. They had been restless with each other for some time, ever since Jake had been hired on at the railroad and was working second shift in addition to constantly being on call. “It’s how they break you in,” he told her those first few weeks. “You have to work your way up.”

  “You never see the kids anymore. Anytime they call you have to leave us and go there. It’s too much.”

  “We can’t walk away from this kind of money. You know that. A year from now I’ll be a yardmaster and get a normal schedule.”

  Lately, there had just been one fight after another conducted in the darkness of their bedroom. They weren’t so much fights as constant flare-ups over the smallest things. Cracker crumbs on the floor, a curling iron left on in the bathroom, forgetting to change the oil in the car at precisely three thousand miles. They were these maddeningly little tics in the behavior of each tha
t spoke only to the surface of what troubled them.

  The night of Maggie’s birthday he had come home late from work and was eating supper when the fight broke out about the kitchen sink and its slow drain.

  “Call the plumber,” he had instructed.

  “I have,” she told him. “He doesn’t want to listen to a woman.”

  “He gets paid either way. You’re just imagining things.”

  “It’s not my imagination when I’ve called him every day this week and he still won’t come out.”

  “Then call another one,” he said.

  “You told me to call Mills. You said he’s the best.” They were alone in the kitchen, and Maggie was covering her birthday cake with plastic wrap. Jake raised his head from his plate. A single candle that Bobby insisted on putting in before he was shuffled back to bed stuck up from the slice.

  Calm and deliberate, Jake put his fork down and got up from the table. He walked to the shed behind the house, grabbed his toolbox, and came inside and started pulling everything out from under the sink, setting bottles of detergent and S.O.S. pads against the cabinets.

  Maggie stood over him, not believing how he was behaving. He moved under the sink, holding a small flashlight in his mouth. She stared at his torso and legs. “Why do you act this way?”

  “ ’Cause I get tired of listening to your mouth,” he said. The wrench he was using slipped, and he cracked a knuckle against the pipe. He cussed and pulled himself out from under the sink. He rubbed his hand and looked to her.

  “I just want it fixed,” she said. “I don’t see why that’s such a big deal.”

  “You never let up. You never cut anybody any slack.”

  She had left and gone to the bedroom at that, and when he came in the room, hours later, they lay still in the dark, not saying a word. Jake turned on his side to face her, and before he could speak, she cut him off. “What?” she said.

  “You’re not asleep?”

  “No,” she said. “And you haven’t been, either.”

  “It’s not working,” he said.

  “I’ll call Mills again in the morning, even though it won’t do any good.”

  “That’s why it’s not working,” he said and sat up. “I’m not talking about the sink. I’m talking about you. You’re a grown woman and you ain’t got enough sense to call somebody else to fix the damn thing? So what if I said call Mills? Son of a bitch won’t come out here to fix it and you act like that’s my fault. As if he doesn’t fix it then nobody can.”

  “I was just trying to do what you said. I thought that’s what you wanted me to do.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean? You act like you don’t have a mind of your own. Jesus Christ. I think you want to fight. I think you wait for an opportunity to jump down my throat.”

  They were trying to keep their voices down. “I don’t know who to call—”

  “The Yellow Pages are full of plumbers. You know how to use a phone book, don’t you? If you want I can go get one right now and show you how to use it. It’s real simple because they’re all in alphabetical—”

  “Go to hell,” she said.

  Jake flipped on the light and both of them squinted from the brightness. He went to the closet. “What’re you doing?”

  “Getting the hell out of here.” He grabbed a duffel bag off the top shelf and stuffed it with a pair of jeans and some shirts.

  Her eyes adjusted and she said, “Where are you going to go?”

  “What do you care?” he said and pulled on his clothes from earlier and started out of the bedroom.

  She got up from the bed and followed him down the hall, past the kitchen and into the living room. He put his hand on the front door and turned to her.

  “I’m just tired of it,” he said. “If work calls, I’ll be at the Cardinal.” He opened the door and cold wind hit her in the face. She watched him walk across the yard to his truck and get inside. The wind blew over her body and tightened her skin as Jake drove off.

  MAGGIE WONDERED IF the fair was as big a deal to the rest of the country as it was around here. She’d seen Reagan’s opening-day speech play on the national news but doubted anyone beyond the people in and around Knoxville cared what was happening. Bobby and Pam walked in front of her. They looked around at the exhibits on their left and right. It was a warm day, and she wished now she had worn shorts instead of jeans. A man on stilts was walking through the crowds. He had on an Uncle Sam costume and was twisting balloon animals for children. Pam looked back at her, excited for the first time since they left Fordyce, and Maggie nodded. “Bobby, go with her and hold her hand,” she said. “I’m going to stay over in the shade.”

  They moved toward the man, and Maggie wiped her forehead with a napkin. She bought a lemonade from the vendor and looked at the children through the crowd. Pam was next in line. Maggie smiled at the sight of them, but the worry she had since Jake’s leaving was with her. It lived on the edges of her brain. She could not keep it at bay. Even when she was at the store, rearranging the clothes displays or refolding the items on the clearance tables, it worked its way toward her thoughts. Only two weeks, she thought. It had to get better. She’d be able to live with this.

  The man shaped a yellow balloon into a dog for Pam, and she took it with delight and came running toward Maggie.

  “What do you have there?”

  “It’s a puppy,” Pam said and pulled it close to her chest.

  “What about you?” Maggie said to Bobby. “Too big for a balloon animal?”

  The boy nodded.

  They began walking again. The fair’s theme was energy of the past, present, and future, and as such, it was, essentially, an energy expo. Most of the exhibits were scientific, and though they looked simple, they still seemed more complicated than Maggie could grasp. They ducked into a large exhibit hall that offered relief with shade and the cool wave of air-conditioning. Bobby, Maggie found, was becoming more and more interested in science, and she let him walk ahead of them and examine each exhibit in the hall for as long as he wanted. A large silver ball was set up in the middle of the room with long blue limbs of static electricity shooting out of it in jagged lines whenever someone touched it. It was called a Van de Graaff generator. Bobby crowded around it along with the other children and parents. The man in the middle of the exhibition wore a white lab coat and glasses.

  He was picking out children and letting them come up and touch the sphere while everyone watched the small strikes extend and bend toward each child’s hand. Bobby was edging closer to the front, and the man’s eyes settled on him. Maggie picked up Pam and put her on her shoulders so she could see her brother step forward and reach out for the swirling charges. Maggie knew nothing could go wrong, but her heart beat faster in her chest. The people around her little boy were closer than she was, and she had a need to reach out for him just as Bobby placed his hand on the ball. She gripped Pam’s ankles tighter and tried to slow her breathing. Bobby smiled as he held one tentative finger up to the domed silver, and seeing it would not shock him, he placed his entire hand on the ball and his hair stood up on its ends. Maggie rose on her tiptoes and caught his eyes, and she saw that he fought back a smile.

  Even before Jake left, she had thought about how much bigger her baby boy had gotten. She often found herself thinking about his delivery, how he’d come premature and was small enough for her to hold in one hand. When she’d looked at him as a newborn, she never thought there’d be a day when he’d be healthy and strong and able to get along without her and Jake’s care. Seeing him in the middle of the crowd, moving away from the man in the lab coat as another child approached, she saw he was still just a little boy, a child. But he was also a boy old enough to recognize what was happening to her and his father. She sensed it that morning when she told the children she was bringing them to the fair instead of Jake—a promise he had made to them before he left.

  He had been called into the railroad the night before at three in the
morning and was probably still there now. When he phoned Maggie, she had just woken up and the kids were getting ready, waiting on him to show up. “Can you take them?” he said. She pictured him on the other end of the phone with the trains in the rail yard behind him.

  “I have work,” she said. “You know that.”

  “It’s just one day. The World’s Fair doesn’t happen every year. Call in sick. I’ll call Shelia and tell her for you, if you want.”

  “No. I’ll do it,” she said and sat up in bed, his empty spot beside her. They had not spoken as much as she thought they would since he left, and she didn’t like the feeling that she was giving in, even if they were talking about something that had to do with their children.

  “You’ll be okay getting down there by yourself?” Jake asked before they got off the phone.

  “Should be,” she told him.

  “Call me when you get back home,” he said. “I want to know y’all are safe.”

  Now, Maggie lowered Pam down to the ground, and the little girl ran to put her arms around Bobby. To Maggie’s relief, he let his sister dote on him and he even bent down to let her pat his head where it seemed the electricity had lived moments before.

  “Was that fun?” Maggie asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, unable to hide the smile on his face.

  “Were you scared?” Pam asked.

  “No,” he replied, but Maggie knew better.

  “You guys hungry?” she said.

  The children nodded and they went outside to the food pavilion for burgers and fries and sat down at a picnic table.

  A big Ferris wheel was above them, and they looked up at the different colored cars moving in a circle. Next to it was a roller coaster, and they heard the occasional screams as it rushed around the rails.

  “Can I ride the roller coaster?” Bobby asked.

  “Not for a while,” she said. “I don’t want you to get sick on it.”

  “I won’t get sick. I promise.”